Children's Children

by Jan Carson

  I watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote. The scissors are winking at me from the coffee table by the window. ‘Snip,’ they say, ‘Snip, snip, snip and then tomorrow morning the postman, the girls for coffee, part-time jobs and cruise ships – no strings attached.’

  ‘Snip, snip, snip.’ They make it sound so easy.

  I fix pancakes for your lunch, pancakes and chocolate-chip ice cream. ‘What’s wrong, Mama?’ you shout down to me (you are more than accustomed to your five portions of fruit and veg daily). ‘Is it my birthday again?’

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ I say, fingering the scissors in my apron pocket. ‘We’re having ice cream for lunch because I love you.’

  ‘Oh. Can I come down now?’

  I feel terrible. I try to trip over your ribbon, hoping it might be an accident. I tug vigorously on the blessed thing but it simply won’t snap. Finally, I resort to the scissors. It is remarkably easy to let you go.

  At first nothing changes. Your feet hover momentarily fifteen feet above the azaleas. I focus on the bottoms of your sneakers, which from this distance are white blobs, roughly the size and shape of two aspirin tablets. The remains of the purple ribbon wrap round the garden fence and prepare to weather the next ten years alone. The ice-cream dish drops suddenly, falling to earth with a clumsy thud. Then, as if gravity has finally given up, the sky sucks you home.

  You are a six-year-old girl. You are an oversized doll. You are a bird, a balloon and finally a small, red fleck on the afternoon sky.

  I strain my eyes for the very last seconds of you, running inside for the binoculars.

  There is a lightness inside me now, a warm spacious feeling, like a greenhouse but colder. Most likely, by the time you hit the sky’s ceiling, instantly turning to clouds and rain, I will have forgotten you. By the time you pass God and go racing after the planets I will have myself a brand new baby with ordinary feet.

  I expect you understand – you’ve always been a very understanding little girl – but if, in the instant before evaporation, your very last thought is anger, do not blame me. Do not blame yourself. Blame the airplane bathroom and your father, who was only there for the easy part.

  11.

  How They Were Sitting When Their Wings Fell Off

  When they returned from the hospital there was a bouquet of flowers on the doorstep. It was unusually warm for September. The heat had caused the chrysanthemums to wilt so they leant against the door like elderly men folding over their walking sticks. ‘From the Wilsons, with deepest sympathy,’ Steven read, without fully understanding, and slipped the card into his back pocket. He opened the door with one hand and helped his wife into the apartment. Leaving her on the living-room couch, he returned for her overnight bag and returned again to gaze up and down the corridor, convinced they’d left something behind. Closing the door behind him, he forgot all about the flowers.

  The lights inside the apartment were just as loud as they’d left them. There had not been time to consider the lights or other practicalities such as the cat, the central heating or even coats. ‘Now,’ his wife had said, ‘we need to go now.’ She’d been in the bathroom, and he, installed as was his usual custom, in the kitchen fixing dinner. He’d caught her face reflected in the glass sheen of the microwave door and, turning with a casserole dish in hand, knew that it was already too late. She had not been crying then. Neither had she cried on the way to the hospital, but she’d held his hand like an emergency exit, all nails and tight urgency. She’d left her mark on Steven’s wrist: four half-moon crescents and a single penny-sized bruise where her thumb had pressed into his pulse. Thus attached, it was almost impossible to change gears, but he’d managed, dragging her hand sharply this way and that as they navigated the town’s roundabouts and stoplights.

  He’d parked outside the hospital in the spot reserved for ambulances. In ordinary circumstances Steven was the sort of man who could not break rules, who returned library books two days early and grew anxious eating shop-bought snacks in the cinema. Yet some sharper authority had seized him today and he’d understood himself capable of theft and violence and loud, loud shouting, should the need arise. ‘Let me,’ he said as his wife struggled to remove the seatbelt and lever her mountainous belly out of the car. He’d wondered then if he had the audacity to carry her, like an old-fashioned hero, across the parking lot and into the hospital’s foyer. She was heavier now than he was, and it would have been a tremendous struggle. But, in the moment, he’d understood that it was not practicality which bound him so much as propriety and the fear of drawing attention to himself.

  Once his wife had eased herself out of the car and stood, bracing her weight against its open door, Steven noticed that a dark pool had crept out of her, covering the passenger seat like a lost continent. Leaning into the car, he drew the stench of her into his lungs: rust, brine and the shrill pinch of ammonia. This was a language his wife had never spoken before. He closed the door upon it quickly. All that wetness, the sensation of being emptied in waves: surely she must have known, and yet she hadn’t cried out, had only sunk her fingernails further into his wrist and said, over and over, her words keeping time with the fleeting streetlamps, ‘It’ll be all right, Steven. It will be all right.’ Locking the car, he’d turned her face towards the hospital door, blocked her from behind, made sure she could not look back. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. And everything would be all right if only they could look down the side of their sadness, keep themselves from staring at it directly, like roadkill, or war on the television news.

  In the rush, Steven hadn’t thought to turn the lights off and, hours later, sitting on a chair outside the operating theatre, would wonder if he’d even locked the apartment door. It was strange what the human mind could fixate upon in a crisis. Once, in the A & E at Antrim Area Hospital, he’d sat opposite a man who’d cut his own arm off with a chainsaw, accidentally whilst trimming the hedges. It was possible, the man explained, that the arm could still be reattached. It sat next to his feet in a picnic cooler packed full of frozen peas and potato waffles. The man kept his good hand resting like a guard dog on the lid of the cooler, his missing hand bandaged and elevated above his head. Every few minutes or so, as if all this, even the blood, was no more remarkable than a long bath, he’d stopped a passing nurse or doctor to enquire after the evening’s football results.

  It was strange what the human mind would fixate upon in a crisis. There was a poster pinned to the wall outside the operating theatre: ‘Breast is best for your child.’ Steven had read every word on this poster, even the phone numbers. He made anagrams from the longer words, all the time wondering why his mind could not catch on the thought of his wife’s belly, split and peeled back like an open-mouthed whale. There would be blood and machines, he reminded himself, various cutting knives. Afterwards there would be a child and there would also be the space left behind a child. Yet, these truths were not in the moment as believable as the poster in front of him or the uncomfortable plastic chair driving its mean ridges into the undersides of his thighs.

  The doctor had told him everything in the corridor, standing up, shaking hands so their arms met in the middle like rafters, or two men holding each other at a terrible distance. At the far end of the corridor a porter appeared pushing an older man slowly towards them in a wheelchair. Though Steven could not explain the urgency, it felt imperative that they finish their conversation and part before the porter could draw close enough to overhear. He’d tightened his grip on the doctor’s hand, leant in as if intending to kiss or bring his forehead suddenly down upon the other man’s nose. A coffee stain, no bigger than a common grape, was blooming across the lapel of the doctor’s coat. Steven could smell the caffeine still furring on his breath and pictured him downing his espresso neat in the staff canteen, settling his nerves for this very moment. ‘Thank you,’ he’d said, his hand still cuffing the doctor’s, and wondered exactly what he was thankful for. He was older than this doctor, as was his wife.

 
; Five minutes later, the nurse had also told him everything in the relatives’ room, sitting down with sweet tea and a saucer full of biscuits. He counted the biscuits for something to focus upon: three rich teas and a pair of Bourbon creams, rectangling over the saucer’s edge like trouser legs, kicking. ‘I don’t take sugar in my tea,’ he said sharply, and she blushed, apologised and scurried off to replace his cup with something more bitter. Sweet tea for the shock, he’d thought. He knew this from books and also movies, but the very thought of it was bile in his mouth. He should have apologised to the nurse. None of the hospital had been her fault, even the tea. And yet, when she’d returned with a mug and a separate jug of milk, he’d been overcome by the desire to spit in her smiling, smiling face and it was all he could manage to take the mug and hold it between his hands until, at last, it grew too cold to drink.

  In the end it had not been like television and in the end it had been just like television. All those on-screen losses, both British and American, and very occasionally foreign, had prepared him well. He’d known what to say, when to stand, how to hold his hands like an absent father. He’d felt himself folding along familiar lines: an actor catching his own shadow on an advertisement for toothpaste or expensive yogurt. ‘Can I see my wife now?’ he asked. Under the circumstances, he would be expected to see her. He had not wanted to see her. Without the baby she would not look the same. And she would see herself different in the way he looked at her and later held her, like an egg already fractured.

  There was nothing to say on the way back from the hospital. They were no more or less than they had been on the previous day, but the car seemed to be struggling to contain them and he’d rolled down the window on both sides, hoping this would give their sadness room enough to breathe. His wife began crying before they left the car park, turning away from him so he could only see her tears in profile. She had not bothered to reach for his hand or even ask for a tissue. Drawing the sun visor down to check her make-up, she’d caught sight of the child’s car seat, marooned as it now was, in the back seat. ‘Sorry,’ he’d said, and even this, the simplest of sentiments, had sounded exactly like a shotgun emptying into a quiet room.

  It had been Steven’s job to deal with the details, and here he was stumbling at the first, small funeral. At the next set of traffic lights he stopped, unhooked the seat and left it leaning against a lamppost. It would remain there for a week, apologising for itself every time he drove to the garage or the twenty-four-hour Tesco at the end of their road. He would have liked to have burnt it – watched the polyester lining blacken and curl into itself like unconfessed sin – but it would be months before he had the stomach for such blasphemy.

  ‘It’s gone now, love,’ he’d said as he returned to their car. He meant the car seat, but could not be sure that she’d understood him correctly.

  The apartment was just where they’d left it, in a west-side apartment block, cut and coloured the unremarkable shade of corrugated card. It was still bordered, to the left and right, by similar apartments. Their neighbours were young couples, recently married or cohabitating. Many, if not all, kept dogs: smaller, indoor breeds which would, when the time arrived, do well with babies and children. Their neighbours had ‘Welcome’ mats outside their doors, holly wreaths at Christmas and occasionally a pumpkin for Halloween. They were, in this and other crucial aspects, as close to American as Belfast would permit. Several of their neighbours were also called Steven, though most, when in the company of friends or work colleagues, preferred Steve.

  More than half had opted for black patent doors. ‘Classy,’ they said, when asked why they’d chosen this colour over the more traditional browns, greens and fireman-reds. ‘Postmodern, urban, industrial.’ Sometimes, late at night, when he had the strong drink on him, Steven would misplace his own apartment in this sea of shallow steps and identical front doors. He would only realise his mistake when the key refused to turn and the mirrored black of his neighbour’s door revealed him fumbling at the lock like a first-time lover.

  Their apartment was not as he’d remembered it from a distance. Parking his car on the street outside their door, Steven stared at his own home. He noted the windows, the security light and, mounted on the wall next to the door, the aluminium plate which housed all twenty-six apartments’ buzzers. Someone on the first floor had filled a planter with late-flowering nasturtiums and placed it on their windowsill. The flaming yellows and oranges roared at him like tiny, trumpet-faced lions. He allowed his eye to drift upwards and, on the third floor next to the spouting, found the square interruption of their bathroom window, the faint outline of shampoo bottles and shower gels ghosting behind its frosted glass.

  This was their home. They had only ever lived here together, and while there were other houses in his past – squalid, student flats off the Lisburn Road and the three generous bungalows which housed all his childhood memories – this was the only place he’d ever felt permanent. However, their apartment was not as Steven had remembered it all night, on a hospital chair, when the taste of his own bed and bathroom sink had risen to taunt him like breakfast hunger. The difference was not in the detail, but something more elemental – distance perhaps, or maybe perspective.

  ‘We’re home,’ he said to his wife, and it did not feel like home. He viewed the apartment through the car’s windscreen as a grown man might view a hotel or foreign guest house frequented during childhood. There the trees; there the steps they’d once sat upon eating ice cream; there the postbox and the place where she’d tripped and, in falling, scattered the weekend’s groceries across the pavement, muddling eggs and orange juice, milk and ketchup like a spilt sunset. All was familiar and at the same time faded, as if the previous day’s events had drawn the colour out of their memories. He could no longer be certain that they’d ever been happy here.

  Steven helped her out of the car.

  ‘Can you manage the stairs?’ he asked, and his wife dipped her chin and raised it once, a gesture as slight and remarkable as the optimistic incline on a French ‘e’.

  They took the stairs gently, placing both feet on each step before progressing to the next. She was still wearing the slippers they’d loaned her at the hospital, and her feet slipped backwards and forwards like loose fish. She wore his left arm as a belt, pitching her weight against his ribcage. Each careful step threw them up against each other and they were two blind things colliding in a darkened room. Though it was no time for pride or anything so upright, Steven was proud of her and also proud of himself, the pride increasing as they ascended towards the first floor, the second and, finally, the third. All along their corridor he prayed that the neighbours would keep their doors shut, and they did. He counted the doors down in colours rather than numbers – black, black, green – and on the third black, arrived at his own door with the chrysanthemums.

  The apartment still smelt like their apartment. They had only been absent for forty-eight hours. The curtains remained drawn in every curtained room. The table was still set for dinner. Their everyday plates circled the cutlery and condiments like disappointed satellites, awaiting a meal which would never make the four-foot journey from oven to dining table. In the centre of the table, the salad had shrivelled into itself. The bread, on the breadboard, had crusted, and the Parmesan had returned to oil and milky whey. Only the individual waters, clear and impartial in their half-pint glasses, remained unaffected by the previous day’s events.

  Steven dropped his keys instinctively on the telephone table. Falling, they made the sound of coins settling. He chose to ignore the urgent, red light pulsing on their answering machine. Later he would press the delete button, but in the first instance even this small gesture felt too deliberate, too much like a certainty. He went to hang his coat up in the cloakroom and remembered he was not wearing a coat and had not changed his pullover or jeans in almost two days. He thought about taking a shower and this was enough to provoke a hunger in him for ordinary things such as freshly brushed teeth and sleep a
nd toast with butter and jam. Perhaps, he thought, my wife might be hungry in all the same ways.

  ‘Cup of tea, pet?’ he shouted into the living room, but his wife did not hear him or perhaps did not want tea or have the energy to answer him with actual speaking words. He would make tea anyway, present it to her on a tray with toast and hope this was not too much to ask of her, or too soon.

  He slipped his shoes off and left them by the doormat. All the carpets in their apartment were the sand-blond colour of shortbread biscuits, and though they did not expect guests to remove their outdoor shoes, they had always been careful to do so themselves, preferring sock soles to slippers, and finding bare feet best of all. ‘You’ll not keep those clean for long when the baby arrives,’ her mother had said. And she had meant the carpets and also the Chesterfield suite, which was cream, and the towels, which were white, and even their curtains, which trailed along the skirting boards like ghost tails, gathering the dust. Steven stared down at his socked toes and the carpet puckering beneath his weight and wondered if things might have been different with a blue carpet. Perhaps they had not wanted a baby enough. They were selfish people, unwilling to place their pale, uncluttered lives on the block. A dozen or more beige and oatmeal scatter cushions rose before him now, testament to the fact that they could not, or would not, compromise.

  The post had piled up on the doormat next to his feet. He nudged it with the toe of his sock so the individual envelopes separated and slid across the carpet like a deck of cards, clumsily split. Their postman seemed unaware that today was not subject to the same rules as an ordinary Saturday. He’d forced the usual handful of bills and promotional fliers through their letter box. Steven stood on the edge of the pile, considering discount coupons for the Chinese takeaway and an advertisement for Gospel meetings at the local leisure centre. There was also an electricity bill and what appeared to be a wedding invitation. It was impossible to believe in any of these so he lifted them from the mat and, balling them into a glossy, paper fist, dropped them into the recycling bin.