by Alex Miller
In the thick of night the migraine hits. The black tarantula. Creeping with sure footing up the back of her neck. Creeping over the crest of her skull while she sleeps. When it finally chooses its moment and digs its fangs into the delicate flesh of her left eyelid, she awakes within a paralytic darkness. A mute scream.
Next to Anna, H is cradled in the quiet rhythm of sleep. His breath is constant and dependable. She imagines the childish rise and fall of his chest and wonders how deep this betrayal is. This betrayal of being released to the vortex of pain. It is complete and her happiness is pure.
The pain is hers and hers alone. It etches out a private space of dark liberty. Distance, time and depth are now irrelevant. Space is reduced to an irreducible instant and there is freedom right there.
When Anna wakes, H is having his morning shower—the steam billowing under the closed door. With her usual confidence she makes the bed. She picks up the clothes left in a sloppy pile on the floor and hangs them in the cupboard before tucking his slippers into their place.
Still wearing her thin night-slip, with her robe loosely draped over the top, she walks to the window and pulls the curtains open. The sunlight stings her eyes and her head pulsates deeply from the night’s pain. Ignoring the discomfort, she steps up to the glass, resting her forehead on its warm surface, and looks down to the busy street below. The intersection of streets is teeming with life. At 7am the tight city is already filling with frantic cars and fast people. The movement of it all! A composition. Decomposition.
She silently quells her desire to open the windows and let the outside in. To give in to her impulse would fill the room with an intense heat, determined to infuse walls, furniture and bodies with its inescapable madness. She looks out one last time to the churning world before snapping the heavy curtains closed with a short burst of energy.
With the noise from the shower as a background she dresses, tidies her hair, sprays two dashes of perfume on her chest before pinching her cheeks for colour. She walks the narrow hall to the kitchen to begin work. Her children, all three of them, are still asleep. She flicks on the light and opens the single window and swings the shutters closed, hooking them in place. The heat of the morning is fierce and the deep green walls are already warm. The kitchen is suspended in the melancholy of artificial lighting, and she strikes a match and lights the burner.
On the large wooden table that stamps the middle of the kitchen, Anna prepares the children’s lunches. Three sandwiches of ham, cheese and tomato, one with crusts off. She places each one on its own square of waxed paper and wraps them with her meticulous hands. Neat little parcels. Each sandwich is put in its own lunch box, accompanied by a bright red apple and little packaged cake. She is lost to the moment and the moment is pure goodness.
She enjoys having things done before the children wake—she thinks it important to present the day as something that one can have command of. The stove interrupts her thoughts with one of its unpredictable little explosions. The kettle performs a series of short jumps, splattering hot water here and there. Without delay she soaks up the water with a cloth and sets the table for breakfast.
In that instant, the shower stops, the kettle whistles and the children wake. Just like that, as certain as ever, the day snaps into its rhythm.
The littlest and quickest feet are the first to run down the hall, continuing past the kitchen doorway to the toilet. Anna listens for the predicable sounds. The toilet lid being lifted—the clink of porcelain on porcelain, the careless slamming of the lid back down on its bowl. Anna suspends the moment and waits. With the sound of the tap turning on and then off again she smiles and resumes work. Tobi runs back down the hall to the kitchen, abruptly halting in the doorway. Wearing his perplexed morning face, he stands awkwardly for a moment, waiting for his five-year old brain to catch up to his body and place him in the context of the morning.
Anna takes a moment to reflect on the simplicity of early mornings with her children. There is certainty in little feet and the rubbing of sleepy eyes by chubby little fingers poking out of oversized hand-me-down pyjamas. This is the life Anna has chosen and if she can just ignore the dark elation that reverberates from the back of her neck, then she can accept that today is just the same as every other day.
She tells him he’s a little tiger and that he slept well. She tells him to have a good strong breakfast. The gentle waft of her perfume lulls into the gentle tone of her voice. He nods as he sits down at the table and snaps up the cereal, milk, and bowl and begins to pour his breakfast. Soon he is joined by his older brother, Rueben, and then by the eldest child, Jessica. Finally, H joins the family at the table. The four of them sit at the table together, talking in stuttered, half-complete sentences. Although there is room at the large table for Anna too, she stands beside them in her neatly pressed gingham shirtdress, drinking her black coffee, bitter and strong, from her grandmother’s teacup.
They leave the apartment together. Trekking down the two flights of stairs in a hurry, Anna carrying the youngest along with their bags. H, probably feeling as though the child ought to walk down himself, refuses to assist and seeing as she does not care to be lectured, she struggles on in silence. Once on the busy street, H goes one way and Anna and her children go the other. There are rushed kisses and hugs, and among it all, a promise not to be home late.
Anna rides the tram with her children to school—the smallest on her lap and the older two standing beside her. They speak briefly about the difficult maths problem Jessica brought home the night before and about Rueben’s gymnastic practice later in the day. He will be trying for a perfect crucifix.
While Anna listens to Tobi’s words she finds it difficult to keep attention. She diverts her eyes and feasts on a fleeting scene as the tram negotiates the arteries of the city. The outside presents itself like a torturous peep show, framed by hot aluminium. In fleeting bursts she snatches a single shot of the street. The hint of an image that she completes herself. Always outrageous, grotesque and sordid: an obese man shovelling his face full of pastry; a woman with black hair, chalk white face, applying the reddest of red lipstick; a baby suckling noisily at its mother’s breast, stopping, in delight, to burp up a splattering of warm milk; a man smoking, his only front tooth protruding in its horizontal rot.
Anna knows if she can just keep her eyes firmly fixed on the three of her children without losing herself to the peripheral, then she can labour away with the same quiet perseverance as Tobi—in need of nothing but the instant.
In between stops there is an unexpected delay and the tram comes to a standstill. A woman seated opposite checks her watch, flicking and twisting her wrist in an agitated manner and a man lowers his newspaper and looks over his reading glasses to assess the situation. Impatient gestures are made across the tram as people sigh at the unruly behaviour of trams that just decide to stop. A tram coming in the opposite direction is forced to a standstill as well and a man responds to his wife’s questioning glare by murmuring I don’t know, a cat on the tracks? Maybe a suicide. Random passengers open the windows and doors to let in some air. Most people have found something to fan themselves with.
Anna is the only passenger not irritated by the abrupt and clinical shut down of electrics. She closes her eyes and rocks from side to side to the rhythm of the quiet, feeling the soft skin of Tobi’s forearm brush against her own.
When she opens her eyes and refocuses, she sees that in the tram opposite is one of her work colleagues that she had worked with before Tobi was born. She is looking straight at the woman’s profile, they form a perfect geometry. Was her name Candice? Or Jacinta? How could Anna have forgotten? Adjacent worlds, moving in opposite directions. Anna could probably do something to grab her attention, it would be nice to justify the coincidence. But she doesn’t. Does she always have to make the most out of everything? She lets the coincidence disintegrate into itself.
After what is a shorter time than it seems, the electricity is cranked up again.
/> With the lunge into movement, Anna is jerked back into the race. She attempts a conversation with Jessica, snipping away at her restlessness with a chain of banal words. Jessica looks down at her mother and for a moment, because they are woman and woman becoming, Anna is exposed. The heat of the day is strangely accentuated with the return of the powerful air conditioner. It reverberates off the hot plastic and aluminium of the tram and it diffuses into her flesh. The tram is relentless in its disjointed journey. It pulls her along, stopping and starting, shuttering and rocking on and on and on, and her body—desperate to stop. shutdown. breathe—cannot rest. With every movement she is sickly disturbed, assaulted, pulled out of herself. At the mercy of another arbitrary delay.
All around her, bodies are relaxed, surrendered to the tram’s movements. A wave of nausea grips her but she fights it off with a silent and motionless scream. Beads of sweat sprout between her breasts and a moment later a salty bead runs a crooked course down the inside of her leg.
She holds herself steady—‘hold it, hold it’ she breathes into herself, looking everywhere, looking nowhere. Outside, the canopy of street trees are in their midsummer thickness, keeping the world of the street a dark and hot secret. People appear to be suffering, entangled in some sordid madness. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. Each person, spiralling inward, into the knot of their existence, and together, separate, they present a collective figure of the city. Mania and banality, taking one another’s hands. And in every shot from the hot aluminium frame, there is rubbish. Always rubbish and bodies in motion, abundance and waste.
Anna has spoken little to her children throughout the short journey. Her performance has been less than brilliant. Finally, when she stands with her children at the school gate, she kisses each one and hugs them more tightly than usual to steady her shaking hands. She has learned to take them in within an instant—the softness of their skin, the smell of their hair and the speed of their breath. She will carry this with her all day. Despite the restlessness and boredom, she will return to this moment, all day, and remember them just like this. As she lets go, a breeze billows the skirt line of her dress and cools her legs. Things will calm down, they always do. She waves goodbye to her children, one last time, before joining the calamity of the street.
The apartment is dark and hot when Anna returns home. With the door shut, the kitchen is nearly pitch black. She places the string bag that holds the morning’s groceries on the kitchen table and washes her hands in the sink. In the darkness, all that an onlooker would be given of the moment is the possibility of Anna’s silhouette and a collection of typical sounds. Taps, cupboards, a chair scratched across the floorboards. A sigh.
After flicking on the light she begins to prepare the evening’s meal. Cold chicken and couscous with bean salad. Quickly unwrapping the parcel from the butcher, she exposes the dead bird and slaps it onto the wooden board. She cuts off its head, the knife knuckling through cartilage, and puts it in a bowl and then out onto the balcony for the cat. No one has seen the filthy stray for weeks, but the chicken heads keep disappearing so the ritual continues.
She takes two firm onions and quarters them, awkwardly stuffing the bird before scanning its landscape of inflamed pores for any feathers the butcher has missed. Anna’s husband likes his chicken skin crisp and salty and without any evidence of murder. With a confident hand, she expels two glugs from the oil canister, before smothering its flesh. Fresh herbs are rubbed onto its skin. Thyme, rosemary and bay fill the air as individual membranes explode and release their potent oils.
Anna’s hands work the cold damp of the chicken—rubbing and loosening, bruising its clammy flesh. Eating this dead bird will bring her family joy. In several hours’ time Anna will stand at the head of the table and joint the chicken, and then arrange each piece on the large bed of couscous. From there, hands will take pieces and bite into the juicy, sticky skin, lips shimmering with fat and salt. They will pull the limbs apart at the bone, eating meat, gnawing cartilage. Skin, flesh and nerves will be devoured. Mouths will be wiped with napkins, the youngest will use the back of his hand. Labouring happily through this task, the family will sink into conversation and laughter; such ceremony ensures it. The sun will be beginning to set outside and a pink hue will illuminate the room, calming the deep green walls. When the meal is over, the table will be spent. A predictable equation: empty plates, abandoned knives and forks, scrunched napkins—thrown carelessly down in happy satisfaction, the apartment heavy with the relentless smell of chicken fat.
With capable hands, Anna places the bird, headless and stuffed, in the oven, breathes deeply and dusts her hands clean of matter. The routine of their days, the love—that generous space between—is not only filled with barbarism, it feeds on it.
Switching off the kitchen light and returning it to darkness, Anna walks to the bathroom. She does not use the ensuite, rather she prefers to share the children’s bathroom. She unbuttons her dress, letting it slide off her arms and fall to the floor. Pastel gingham on black and white tiles. Without touching the collapsed dress at her feet she steps out of it, and then, with a great circular movement, she picks it up with her big toe and swings it around, high up in a controlled half-moon. Her slimness straight and elegant. Up, over, down—foot arched, toes pointed. She was once an amateur ballerina. She undoes her bra, rubs the heat out from under her small breasts then steps out of her damp cotton underwear and puts everything in the laundry basket.
It is her first shower of the day. The cold water drenches her body, which in turn contracts under the coolness. Her thoughts wash into metallic blue. Looking up to the waterfall, the cold tunnels various paths through wet hair.
Skin icy and taut, she leans her body forward, the cold water, noisy and absolute, drills its rhapsody into her back, face, legs and arms. The cold beads rupture the silk film spread across her cunt. Desire diffuses throughout her body. Flesh! A landscape of sensation, the cold etches a definite silhouette around her. Her nerves, an electric fissure system humming with activity under the surface of her skin. Being and the space around being. Definite opposition—but for a moment ( . ) until the taps are turned off and the two instantly begin to diffuse into one another (eachother) and the precise points of her body are lost to the possibility of extension.
She sits naked and still on the bed. The fabric of her grandmother’s quilt, worn thin with history, is smooth against her moon skin. When she closes her eyes, the darkness fills with the orchestra of outside. In a neighbouring apartment a couple is having loud sex. It is a combination of awkward knocking of the bed against the wall and the strenuous, muffled grunts of the woman and her lover, fighting though the heat. The traffic below is hot and angry, dulled by layers of glass and distance, slicing through each other. Arching above all of it is a chopper. The muted heartbeat of the tight city reverberates around her apartment. Her apartment and the hours nestled in the day are held in a limp parenthesis (that tepid punctuation reserved for the by-the-ways). All the while she is aware of her breath—constant, loud.
In a moment of weakness she lies down, sinking into the softness of the bed. Lethargy. Her limbs welcome it with a heaviness that fights against the current of her domestic routine. It is the enemy. It makes women grow fat and undisciplined and in that dead space of time that abandons duration, it holds her in its clutch. It gnaws away at her limbs, turning them from agile willing springs to dark mass. The height of its intensity had struck years earlier, when Rueben and Jessica were baby and toddler. They would sit on the rug, whose pattern still decorates the living room floor. Gorgeous motherhood, gaunt motherhood. She responded only when necessary. At such times she would draw energy from somewhere, anywhere, and quickly get up and walk them to the park. She has always been surprised at how her legs managed the journey, in their skinny heaviness. One foot in front of the other. One nappy after the other. One cooing song after the other. One jacket awkwardly put on after the next. One moment handed over to the next. One day hard up ag
ainst the next. One season, collapsing onto the next. Everything—holding out for the next.
But there were times when her steps would move beyond the momentum of a distinct purpose. Suspended from the monotonous task of pushing forward, she would feel herself gliding on. Hands lightly steering the pram through oceans of warm air, she would lose time. She would go anywhere on foot and in her head, giving in to entanglement, her mind flowing free, extended to its limit, like streamers in the wind—seaweed in a clean ocean, beautifully victim to the currents. She was a brilliant bloom, pushing through her own bloom. Full spread, transcending limits, exploring an extension beyond reach. Then, just as she was loose within the tepid waters of freedom, the piercing cry of one of her children would snap the vortex of imagination shut, a coiled spring.
Paralysed on her bed, she wills her right hand to rise and encourages the rest of her body to follow. But there is no movement. It is lodged in its lethargy of surrender. Falling, falling, falling into a sleep with a desire of its own to consume the day.
Next to her is the quilted pillow she had made during her first pregnancy. In those days, years ago now, her disciplined foot would press on the pedal of the sewing machine, drilling a line of stitching while her womb cradled the promise of Jessica. Toes formed, head like a bean, heart beat strong. It was the pillow that she would later place on her lap while breastfeeding each of her children to encourage the right positioning. Every night since Tobi’s final feed, she has worked the pillow into the hollow of her stomach, contoured to the space left behind.