The Good Mother / In The Wake Of The Raftsmen

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  I’d been trying to call Mark all day with no answer. After I saw the film Lantana, where the husband doesn’t return his wife’s calls, because she’s just too hard to deal with, and then she’s dead, I wondered if Mark did that too sometimes, simply didn’t answer my calls. I wouldn’t have blamed him. But Mark said he’d been at a conference. ‘I thought I mentioned it.’ I shook my head. He shrugged.

  We left Declan playing in his room and I walked with Mark out to the front verandah, where there were still no interior wall coverings. It was the space in the house I hated most but Declan couldn’t hear us out there. We sat in the two chairs that would look over the sea if the verandah was opened back up. I told Mark about the police coming. ‘Do you want to go and stay somewhere else?’ he said.

  ‘You know we can’t leave her.’

  He looked at me. ‘You have to stop this,’ he said, kneeling down in front of my chair and grabbing my arms. ‘You mustn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  He stood and pushed his fingers into his closed eyes, as if clearing a pain there. ‘We’re going to be all right,’ he said. ‘We are.’

  ‘Are we?’ I said. ‘It’s been such a long time now. I can’t imagine being all right.’

  He nodded, leaned over and took me in his arms. At first I froze against him but finally let him hold me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘We’re...’

  Declan came in. ‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’

  ‘Just sad,’ Mark said. ‘Mummy’s just sad.’

  ‘Okay. Can you play Lego with me?’

  ‘In a minute, mate.’

  * * *

  That night, I dreamed of something that happened two years ago. We’d been out for ice-cream with Mark’s sister who was going away. Declan had coated his shirt in chocolate and mango and I’d rolled it up so he wouldn’t feel cold and wet. I strapped him into his stroller and he screamed. At first I thought he was objecting to the restraint and so I started to be stern. Then I saw I had caught him in the stroller clip. I could see the pinch of skin from his belly in the clip. I undid the strap and picked him up and held him. He cried for half an hour. It left a claret-coloured bruise that lasted for two months.

  In the dream though, it hadn’t hurt Declan. He looked up and smiled and put his little hand in mine and said, ‘It’s all right, Mummy. It’s really truly all right.’ And when I woke, I thought that was a good thing. Because that day, the real day, when I hurt Declan, that was the start really, although I didn’t know it at the time. So soon after that, you arrived and everything changed. Until then Declan had been a perfect child to whom I was the perfect mother. And then, I hurt him and you came. We came home in the car. I couldn’t speak. I shut myself in the bathroom and fell on the floor and cried, trembling, for no reason I understood. Thank God Mark was home and could care for Declan.

  The counsellor Mark found, who has a rat phobia, said it was only to be expected after what I’d been through.

  * * *

  The first builder to come through told us he was up to half a million for renovations and he hadn’t even climbed the stairs. When I mentioned our green building ideas – how to be poison-free and energy-conserving – he smiled but not kindly. He could build us a new house for less, he said, addressing Mark. The second builder couldn’t do anything for at least a year. He thought I was joking when I mentioned green building. In its first year the average new house gives off enough formaldehyde to induce respiratory difficulty in children, I told him. Tell me about it, he said, producing an asthma puffer.

  And then Dave. He’s in the wrong profession, Mark said later. But he’s the perfect builder for us as he’s so kindly with little Declan and so considerate of our constant changes of plan. He and Mark understand one another. And when I said to him that I wanted to avoid poisons, he smiled and said he’d do whatever we needed. When he smiles, his eyes light up and you think of the sea. After Dave left, I asked Mark, did he think he could work with Dave. Mark said he could work with anyone. ‘But are you all right, love?’ he said.

  * * *

  Men in spacesuits came to remove the asbestos sheets before we moved in but when they pulled the walls off the kitchen, they found termites in the back half of the house. They’d eaten out most of the external wall on that side which we’d have to replace when we removed the aluminium cladding. I came home in the middle of the day to find Dave and his carpenter knocking on the walls. ‘I’ll need to have a good look at the rest of the place,’ Dave said. Afterwards, he said the house was still safe. ‘You’re lucky termites don’t much like hardwood. But we’ll have to spray.’

  Dave put up plasterboard, leaving exposed wall studs on the verandah and other rooms we didn’t need ahead of the renovation. The house looked like a bomb had hit it.

  Just before Christmas, we spent a weekend as a family working in the house. It had been a long time since we’d done anything together. On the first morning, we walked down to the village and bought giant doughnuts and had them with a glass of milk out on the verandah and I thought we might be all right. The house might work.

  We decided to steam the wallpaper off in the living room and expose the plaster which we could paint. We’d bought a special tool to score the wallpaper before applying the steam. I let Declan do the scoring because it was a job he could do. I started the steamer and worked behind Declan. As I peeled off the paper, I noticed there was something else under the paper, an olive green that had a powdery look I’d seen before. ‘Is that paint or wallpaper?’ I said to Mark.

  He looked and said he thought it was wallpaper but then I exposed a larger patch. ‘It’s powdery,’ I said. Declan was happily scoring the wallpaper, and now there was dust everywhere. ‘It’s powdery, Mark, like lead paint gets powdery.’ Mark put his hand on my back and said he’d do a test, just to make sure, but he thought it would be all right.

  Mark did the test and it wasn’t all right. Although we didn’t know it at the time, lead was used in wallpaper as well as paint. The wallpaper underneath was full of lead. Declan had been playing in it all day.

  Children take up heavy metals at twice the rate of adults. A ten-cent-piece-sized piece of lead paint would kill Declan. Smaller amounts would affect his growth and brain development. We stopped immediately. I didn’t know if I should get Declan tested. I took him back to the apartment. Mark stayed on at the house and did his best to clean up, masking the remaining wallpaper so that we could move in.

  After Declan went to sleep that night, I took out a razor and cut my arms.

  * * *

  It was midwinter and the house was a refrigerator. There were holes in the walls, in the floor, and no insulation in the roof. I was still swimming. It was so cold I would shiver uncontrollably after I got out. In those months of midwinter, my swimming was something akin to ice bath treatment in a nineteenth-century Scottish mental hospital. When I was this cold, I forgot what I was upset about.

  Some mornings I arrived at the house and as I climbed the stairs felt heavier with each step until I reached the threshold. I wanted neither to go nor stay, just remain there forever in the morning sun. It was the strangest feeling, and I was sure now it was something to do with the house we’d bought as well as the house of my addled mind.

  I asked the woman who lived over the back, who’d lived there her whole life, if it was possible that ours had been an unhappy house. Yes, she said, it has. But she wouldn’t say more, despite my questions. The next door neighbour told me they’d been a big family: the five children, and two uncles living on the verandah. Nice people, she said, in the way you describe someone who isn’t. Declan was happy, oblivious to the dangers and relieved he was able to draw on the walls to his heart’s content since they were coming down in the renovation, but I feared for Mark. He became more inward-looking, worried about money. Dave told me that many renovations end in divorce.

  One morning, I came out to find a half-chewed apple on the floor. The next night and the next, I heard them gnawin
g the wood inside the kitchen cupboards. They are habitual gnawers, to keep their teeth a length that suits them. They were living in the roof cavity, I worked out, coming down in the night through the places where there were still no walls and ceilings. Tens of them. Soon it would be hundreds.

  My counsellor, the one who has a rat phobia, told me they’ll attack children. I started sleeping in Declan’s bed.

  We set traps, baited with bread and peanut butter sprinkled with chocolate. We heard the traps snap but the rats wouldn’t die; they’d thump around the kitchen with the traps on their backs. Mark had to go out and use a shovel to send them on to a better place. I bought poison then, something I thought I would never do, and threw it into the ceiling cavity. We didn’t see another rat.

  I called the men in spacesuits to come back because Declan kept finding pieces of asbestos when he dug in the back yard. I told them that the terminal diseases caused by asbestos take thirty years to manifest themselves and while for Mark and me it was less important, for Declan it would be a huge burden. He is three, I said. He will die a young man if you don’t find all the asbestos. They stared at me and didn’t say anything.

  You must understand I am not a believer, not even an agnostic. I would call spirits nonsense to their faces, would walk out on a séance, ignore a psychic. But there was something in the house, I felt sure now. Something in the house that was calling my name.

  In the back yard there was a patch where nothing grew, not even weeds, not ever.

  * * *

  The police came back to tell us they were still conducting tests on the bones they took away. We could resume the building, they said, but we were not to go anywhere without telling them. Why not? Mark said, a little belligerently. I shook my head at him. He shouldn’t talk like that. He’d stayed home from work to be there when the police arrived – I promise I won’t leave you alone with them again, he’d said – and he’d told me to keep calm because we had nothing to hide. But now he was the one who wasn’t calm. You need to understand... he started to say and then looked at me and stopped. Declan was sitting on my lap and wriggling, almost as if saying to the police, you leave her alone. How a three-year-old would protect I don’t really know but I’d give him odds against most people if it came to protecting his mother.

  The questions were just routine, Poole said to Mark, as his black eyes drove into my soul. They ignored Mark largely after that, focused their interest on me. How long had we owned the house? When did we decide to renovate? Did we know the people who lived here before well? Questions they knew the answers to. My heart was racing.

  * * *

  It was in the spring that I started hearing voices in the night, or one voice, a child’s voice, crying, softly enough to be wind through a window crack on the front verandah. It wasn’t Declan. He was at the other end of the house and the voice was older, sadder. Seven, I would have said, if I were forced to testify, the child is seven and alone in suffering. If I sat up or got out of bed, the cries receded to nothing. I had to focus on something else and they returned.

  Mark said I was overwrought but didn’t argue when I suggested we move from the front bedroom. I told him I couldn’t sleep near the verandah. He didn’t even ask why not.

  I took Declan to our doctor in the city because he’d stopped growing. She smiled and said this was nothing I should worry about, part of the ebb and flow of child development. She looked at me kindly after she’d sent him outside to get a lollipop with the nurse, asked: ‘And you. How are you doing?’

  Chronic as opposed to acute lead poisoning can retard physical growth and brain development. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just great.’

  * * *

  I wonder if you saw the story last week about the woman, a runner, whose baby drowned in a stroller. All she did was stop along a riverside track when her phone rang. Who was she talking to? Her husband? His mother? Let’s say it was his mother, about the arrangements for the weekend, their first away since the baby was born five months before. Moments only but the stroller had plans. It eased its way down a gentle slope and into the dark water.

  When the woman got off the phone and turned, her baby was gone. She searched frantically the track, the road above, the park and then called the police, ‘My baby has been taken!’ she screamed into the phone. The police arrived, took time to get sense from the poor woman. They found the child and the stroller in the river twenty minutes later. The child was dead.

  Many of the mothers at Declan’s kindergarten were critical of the woman. I heard them talking one day at pickup. ‘She didn’t put on the brake, you know,’ one said, with anger in her eyes. ‘How could you walk away from a stroller?’ another said. The woman is famous, apparently. She thought someone had taken her baby. Another woman said: ‘Oh, please. The first thing you’d do would be to check the stroller hadn’t slipped; you wouldn’t think that someone had stolen your baby.’

  I was floored by their hatred, their damnation of the woman, which was total. I understood it too. We all wished we had a foot on that stroller brake, a hand on the strap, an arm around the child. We see him slip away into the river and think, No no, this must not be. I understand these women wanted to save a child.

  But I am not with them. I think of the mother with sadness, for whatever she says on national television afterwards, I know her life will not be the life it would have been. It will not resemble that other life in any way. She is already someone new. She has grown a different skin.

  * * *

  I decided that if I met someone and we became serious, I would tell them the truth. But otherwise, I would say nothing. So until I met Mark, the only people I’d told were the priest who gave me absolution and the lawyer the court gave me, an older woman who wanted very badly that I not be punished. She had a voice like a smoker and kind black eyes. She told me: ‘Stop talking to the police, that’s the first thing.’ And then she sent me to a psychiatrist, and another and another. They have conflated with time to become a tall, slim, middle-aged man with large sad dark eyes and an Irish accent. And what happened then? he says, and time becomes so slow I can hear both ends of the tick of his clock. And what happened then?

  What happened then is that you were born and died. It’s my body that knows and my body that tells the truth. I am on the floor crying. My teeth begin to chatter. I shake. This is fear, my body says, you are frightened. I cry. There is a hole inside you, my body says. It can never be filled.

  I remember the police sat me in a room, a very plain room with two chairs and no table. I was still in pain but not so much as I’d been. They’d let me shower by then, I think. First there were two male police officers, who asked questions for hours. I was so tired. And then it was a woman police officer, on her own. She told me I knew what I was doing, didn’t I? Of course I did, she said. You knew you were pregnant, she said. ‘Smart kids like you, you’ve got it all.’ Did you kill your baby? she asked me.

  I was in first year university, medicine. I was going to be a doctor. My mother was so proud of that. She’d never had a chance to be anything. We were seventeen, your father and I. When I found out I was pregnant, my plan was to finish my first semester and then go away without telling anyone. I found an adoption agency in another city. They told me how right the decision was, how good I was not to terminate the pregnancy. It all seemed simple, to be honest, easy. But when the pain started, I found I did not go to the hospital after all. I stayed where I was in my room. It was a nice little room, looking over a small garden of purple flowers that bloomed the entire two months I was there. When I see jacarandas now, I think of that room.

  At the inquest the police made much of the fact that I’d been to the hospital for my checkups. They said it meant I knew I was pregnant. And in one sense, I did. But I never thought of a baby, I never thought of fingers, eyes. I’m sorry, but my body would not take me away from that garden to a hospital where I had agreed to give you up. I once believed I killed you, as the police thought, but now I think the cor
oner was right. You were choked not by me but by a tricky umbilicus. You came through me with your own journey clearly before you just as my journey is before me still.

  I’m sorry to share such awful things, dear one. I wonder about your next life. Will you have learned what you came through me to learn?

  * * *

  When Mark asked me to marry him, I said I had to tell him about a terrible thing and give him a choice. But when you’ve stayed silent about the truth for so long, the truth closes up behind you, almost as if it’s just a story, not the truth at all. When I told Mark, although I didn’t know it, I was summoning the truth with dread. ‘Is that all?’ he said at the end. ‘I thought you’d done something bad.’ Perhaps I thought that would be the end of it.

  * * *

  Last night I saw a star and I had the strangest feeling it was you. I looked down and when I looked up again it had disappeared behind a thick cloud and while I saw other stars, one particularly bright that winked it seemed right at me, I did not see that first star again.

  This morning a hot air balloon drifted across the sky in front of me. I watched it make its slow path along the horizon. Where do they go, those people who rent hot air balloons?

  I try not to dwell on the past especially on the life that might have been. I keep moving forward. I do not look back. And sometimes I am blessed with the conversation of a small child, or a hand that finds its way into mine and rests there, or pieces of sunlight that fracture over the water.

  We are selling the house. It was me who decided but Mark didn’t object. We are selling the house to a couple who renovate old houses to make them look like old houses but work like new ones. The police have been back. They’ve dated the bones, Poole told Mark. A child was buried here some fifty years ago, bludgeoned about the head. Chances are, Poole said, whoever did it is already dead. But we’ll see what we can find.