by Lucy Atkins
I am going to have to go through childbirth again. It was nearly twenty-four hours with Finn: being sent home from hospital twice, four hours in agony in the hospital corridor, before finally a room – a drip, ventouse, stitches. And then the midwife said, ‘Well, that was good – for a first birth.’ Doug was there, all the time, holding my hand, stroking my face, not saying much, but we were somehow connected throughout the birth – even in the wildest part of it, when I hardly knew where or who I was any more. He left the delivery room twice and both times the contractions just stopped. It made the midwife laugh.
I look for shampoo. There is none. I can’t bring myself to move. I can’t even lift a hand to open the shower door and look for the shampoo. It is as if all the worrying has sapped me now. When I saw those texts, I panicked – and in some way, I’ve not stopped panicking since then. I thought I’d shaken off the mistrust from my childhood, but it turns out it’s not as simple as just deciding to be strong. You have to know your demon – examine it up close, become familiar with every boil on its twisted face, with the peculiar stink of its breath, and then grow strong because of – not in spite of – it. For eight years I have been looking to Doug for reassurance instead of finding the strength in myself.
But I do feel weak – physically weak. I realize I’ve been in the shower for ages – not even thinking about Finn in the bedroom – ‘Finn?’ I shout. My own voice wakes me up. I open my eyes. ‘Love?’ I wrench the lever and step out, grabbing a towel. As I leap into the bedroom, the walls of the room seem to sway in, then out again.
*
He is fine. Still squatting on the rug, running his cars in circles and chatting happily to himself.
‘You OK?’
He doesn’t even look up. The hair on the crown of his head is sticking up crazily with static and sleep knots. I should brush it. I don’t think I’ve brushed my son’s hair in days.
I dry myself off; my hands feel slightly disconnected from my brain. I have to stop being so panicky all the time. Not everything is a catastrophe. Susannah has got to me – it’s this house, and the wind wailing constantly around it – and all the expensive ceramics and breakables; this place has made me nervous. I have to calm down. It’s fine. We are leaving.
I dry my feet and, as I bend, my head spins again. – At some point in the next six months I won’t be able to reach these feet any more. There will be that awful moment when I look down and my stomach will be so vast and then it will hit me – the physical reality of what has to happen in order to get this baby out. I remember last time, when I was huge and getting scared and I made the mistake of asking my mother what giving birth was like.
I was maybe seven or eight months pregnant. There was debris from a meal, I remember that – maybe it was my father’s birthday; we were in Sussex. But my father wasn’t there. Alice wasn’t either. I’m not even sure where Doug was. It was just the two of us at the kitchen table.
I saw panic flicker across her face when I asked her, as if I’d caught her in some massive lie. For a crazed moment, I thought she might be about to tell me I was adopted. She stared at her hands.
‘I’ve read that first births can be bad.’
The colour had drained from her cheeks. She couldn’t look up at me.
‘So – it was really bad, wasn’t it?’
‘No. No. It wasn’t bad at all.’ Her voice was hoarse. ‘I always gave birth very fast. They even have a name for it – “precipitous labour”. You should look it up – it might be genetic.’ We both looked at her fingers, always with the lines of dirt beneath the fingernails – soil from the garden, paint. They were such straight, strong fingers. The landscape of nicks and creases on her hands was still so familiar to me, despite the distance between us, they might have been my own hands.
‘What does it feel like?’
She looked up and what I saw behind her eyes wasn’t fear; it was something much more awful and disturbing – a sort of haunted panic; a mess of frantic emotions.
‘Mum?’
‘Completely overwhelming.’ She put her hand over her mouth, pressing her lips shut, sealing it all inside. She closed her eyes.
‘Oh – look. It’s OK.’ I leaped up. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s not go there. Forget I asked. God, it’s late. I really should get going. The M25 will be awful … ’
I don’t remember anything about what was said after that. I suppose I must have gone and I am not sure, now, if I ran away because I didn’t want to hear her birthing horror story, or if I just couldn’t cope with the fact that the memory of giving birth to me apparently caused her nothing but anguish.
I asked my father about my birth once, years before, when I was not even a teenager. I remember asking him if he was there when I was born. He was silent for a long time. I began to worry that he was angry. When he was angry, he tended to go frighteningly quiet. He never shouted, but there was something about that white-hot silence that was much more alarming than shouting. Eventually he said, stiffly, ‘In those days, Kali, men had absolutely nothing to do with childbirth.’
But I knew this wasn’t true because he was there when Alice was born, in the Royal Sussex, only six years later. Each year on Alice’s birthday my mother told the story of how the midwife turned away at the crucial moment and my father scooted round the bed, and caught Alice himself.
A gust of wind thumps the window and I remember where I am – perched on the rim of a rock, high above an unfathomable ocean, teetering on the westernmost edge of a tiny crumb that has wrenched itself free of the vast coastline. Sitting here, so tired and lethargic, I feel as if I am not quite in my body. I turn to face the window and lock eyes with my wavering reflection – and then it’s as if I’m out there, with my nose pressed to the wet glass, looking in on this crop-haired person slumped there in a towel, unmoving, and at her feet a beautiful boy, crouched over his ambulance and crashing cars.
Inside me the cells are busy dividing, over and over. No wonder I feel so vague and out of it. Finn will not be an only child. By next summer, I could have a two-year-old and a newborn. I find that I can only imagine another little boy. I am suddenly certain that I will have sons. I will be able to say ‘my boys’ and they will grow up to tower over me and make me proud, terrified – both. It’s ridiculous that I didn’t realize that I was pregnant. Could my terror and paranoia – my flight – this whole, lunatic, unreal journey be down to something as mundane as hormones? I suddenly think of the big fish in Susannah’s gallery, the one with the egg in its belly. This state I am in seems simultaneously breakable, and transcendent.
I need to wake up. The tea Susannah made me is on the bedside table; I haven’t even drunk half of it. It’s lukewarm now and revoltingly sweet, and the maple syrup gives it a slightly grainy texture, but I make myself slug it down – and I feel better, almost immediately. I need to drink more and eat regularly. I have to think about this baby now. I have to do my best for this baby too.
I dig around in the bottom of the bag in the hope that I’ll locate something clean to put on. My skull suddenly feels very full, as if someone has pumped air into it, rather than blood. My fingers close around my mother’s old jewellery box. I pull it out and sit up. The pressure inside my head lessens. I open the soft lid.
At my feet, Finn crashes two cars together then makes ‘wee-owww’ ambulance noises. I hold the carving up to eye level and look at the leering face inside the belly of this fish thing. Maybe it’s the angle of my head, or bending down and sitting up, but I feel woozy. I need to eat. I haven’t eaten at all today.
I wobble to my feet and drag on my shabby grey jumper and jeans again. They smell damp and stale. I need to wash things, urgently. Vancouver – I’ll wash things there.
‘Shall we go and find Susannah?’ I say to Finn.
He glances up at me. Then looks back at his cars. ‘No.’
‘How about we take your cars with us?’ I kneel next to him, so slowly. It’s like moving through water. ‘We can show them to S
usannah. Here, let’s put them in the bag.’
‘No.’ He pushes the bag away. ‘No.’
‘OK. You hold them then. Which one would Susannah like best?’
He thinks about this.
‘Shall we put the best ones in the bag and ask her?’
He tries to shove the ambulance into the small chest pocket of his dungarees. I try to help him. ‘Not like dat,’ he says. ‘Like dis.’ He has never said this before, and I grin at him: his first proper sentence. I must remember to tell Doug. Doug is missing things already.
‘Like dis,’ he is saying, thrusting the car at his dungaree pocket, making the dinosaur picture bulge. But of course it won’t fit. I sit on my heels, unable to muster the energy to help him. Eventually, we make our way back down the corridor with the cars stuffed in the back pockets of my jeans.
As we walk, the walls of the corridor press in, then pull out again. I give my head a little shake and glance down at Finn. His hair is shiny and messy. The crown of his head seems a long way away.
On the shelf in the living room the glass bowl glimmers under the overhead lights. It is a raw red in this light and seems to vibrate at me, insisting on my attention. I steer Finn carefully around it, and for a moment I imagine it opening up like a huge mouth – becoming jaws that bite.
Susannah is kneeling by the cupboard under the sink, poking among cleaning products. There is a big cardboard box on the countertop. The French window behind her is open and the air is freezing. I can smell the sea. The dogs are huddled in their basket, noses under their tails. I can hear waves thudding on the rocks below the cliff. She’s wearing the brown fleece, the big grey scarf and her boots. Her head snaps up as she hears me come in. A bitter gust whooshes through the doors and I feel so light – as if it could blow me down. She peels her lips into another smile. The smiling is odd. But at least we are going to part on good terms.
‘So.’ My voice, too, feels strangely far off. ‘We’ll head off soon, and leave you to work.’
‘Oh no. The ferry doesn’t go till later.’
‘But I thought there was one at three?’
She hauls her mouth back into that smile. ‘Winter schedule.’ Her teeth look vulpine, surprisingly white. I hadn’t noticed them before, probably because she hasn’t smiled much. I feel as if I’m staring at her mouth, but can’t quite move my eyes to look away.
I don’t care about the ferry times; I have to get out of here now.
‘We’ll head off now anyway.’ Again – the far-off, almost whispery sound of my own voice surprises me. ‘We’ll let you work, we’ve disturbed you enough.’ Then I remember the carving. ‘Can I just show you something before I go?’
She stands up and wipes her hands down her legs. ‘What is it?’
‘I found this in my mother’s things.’ I hold it out. The room sways away from me, then back again. I know I should sit down. Or eat. Or both.
She looks at it and the crease between her brows deepens. She doesn’t move or speak.
I have to think carefully to form words. ‘Do you know what it is?’ I say.
‘It’s a First People’s carving.’
‘Like Native Americans?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘An old woman gave it to her.’
‘Is it,’ I say, ‘a fish?’
‘No, of course not – it’s an orca, look, see the markings. That’s the saddlebag. See those, the white patches. Right there. It’s carved out of whalebone.’
I peer at it, trying to focus – and I can see now that of course it’s a whale.
‘She lived in a little shack. She talked to your mother for a long time, about the orcas mainly. Then she went into her shack and brought this out and gave it to Elena.’
I need to sit down. My shoulders feel too heavy for my torso.
She stretches out her hand. I put the carving onto it. She points at the grinning beast inside the belly of the whale. ‘That’s the demon, Scana.’
‘Scana?’
‘In some First People’s legends the killer whale is the demon of the sea and also the guardian of it – there’s good and evil in one body. This probably belongs in a museum.’ She shoves it back into my hand, almost pushing me over. ‘You should take it to someone, take it to the museum of anthropology in Vancouver.’ She looks at me closely. ‘You find anything else in your mother’s things?’
‘Just a few bits and pieces in a jewellery box.’
‘Bits and pieces of what?’
‘Oh, nothing … a bit of my baby blanket … old study notebook … little … this little … heart-shaped rock. Susannah.’ My mouth feels dry and my tongue has thickened so it’s hard to get the words out. I need to drink water. I swallow. ‘Maggie, from the bakery, she recognized me.’
‘What?’ Her head snaps up.
‘She said you’d done some sculptures of my mother’s face. She said you and my mother travelled the world together.’
Susannah stops moving. She looks like an animal in the path of a predator. The cotton-wool feeling in my ears thickens. I have to stay upright. I know she’s going to tell me something.
‘Oh, Maggie’s been on anti-anxiety medication for years.’ She waves a hand in the air and turns away. ‘She gets terribly confused, poor thing.’ She laughs, an odd, tinkling, off-kilter sound.
‘Your “Elenas”. Are they here?’
‘They’re in storage, I’m afraid,’ she snaps.
I step backwards and sit, heavily, on a stool. I should ask her about the postcards, but I’m just too tired. I can’t think any more. I can’t do this. She’s going to give me nothing. My arms feel as if I’ve been doing press-ups. The back of my neck is oddly tight. I rub it, but can’t quite feel my own fingers. Finn squats at my feet, running his car up the cupboard door. He might scratch the paint, but I can’t move to stop him. Susannah is watching him. She doesn’t seem worried about the paintwork. I close my eyes. The world spins again, more violently this time. If I’m going to get ill, I need to get ill away from here. I can’t let go – not here. I have to leave.
I have to call Doug. Doug needs to know. I need him to know.
‘Kali?’ Susannah’s voice is very far away, as if she’s standing in a cave, out of sight. ‘Kali? Kali? Are you OK?’
My eyelids are sealed, and my throat feels as if someone has stuffed a small sock inside it. I try to swallow, but then I feel hands on my elbows. ‘Kali?’
I try to tell her I need to go – but I am not sure if the words actually come out of my mouth. I manage to open my eyes a crack as she helps me through to the living room – Finn toddles behind us – and onto the sofa.
‘It’s OK, love, I’m just really tired.’ My voice slurs – and I try to hold out a hand to him, but Susannah’s legs are in the way and my arm feels so heavy.
Finn is next to me now, his new duck cup in one hand, his ambulance in the other. His eyes are so big. I can see he is worried.
I feel my eyelids close and I can’t get them open. ‘Everything’s fine, love.’ I am not sure if I say it out loud.
I feel a soft hand pat the top of my head and Finn’s voice, close by, so clear. ‘Night night, Mama.’
Then I hear Susannah’s voice, calm but chilly. ‘Let Mommy sleep now.’
Chapter twelve
When I wake up I am freezing cold, and stiff as an eighty-year-old. The light has changed – the room looks blurry and washed out.
I haul myself off the sofa. There is mist inside my head and I feel deeply sick. What time is it?
‘Finn?’ I croak. ‘Where are you, love?’
I walk, unsteadily, through to the kitchen. The clock says 1.15. But it can’t possibly be right. If that’s the time then I’ve somehow slept for three hours again. Why didn’t she wake me? Where are they? I lean back against the sink. My legs are unreliable, like the stalks of a young plant. ‘Susannah?’ I rasp. ‘Is Finn OK? Are you there?’
I turn and gulp water straight from the tap. I wipe my mouth with
the back of one hand. My head feels as if it’s been stuffed with a wet cloth. I splash water on my face. I’m aware of it on my skin, but I can’t quite feel it. It is as if I’m wrapped in an anaesthetizing blanket.
Her boots aren’t by the French windows and the dogs are gone. They must be outside looking at squirrels again. But it’s raining steadily. The deck railing is hardly visible, let alone the path to the studio. The house is so cold. I touch my belly with both hands. Droplets run down the glass like tears. A chill spreads from my stomach, up towards my heart.
I look around the kitchen for a Post-it. My eyes move slower than they should, as if the muscles that anchor them in my skull are weakened too. I can’t see any Post-it. But I remember last time. She’ll have left one somewhere. Maybe there’s a note by the sofa where I was sleeping.
I walk unsteadily back into the living room. There is nothing on the coffee table or the sofa. I move across to the large windows and press my nose to the cold glass – I can see the deck, slicked with rain, and the pines crowding towards the house, but no sign of them. It’s too wet to be outside. She must have taken him down to her studio.
I suddenly have to pee. I walk towards the bedroom and push open the door.
Finn’s cars are still scattered on the rug. The sight is reassuring, as if he is bound to come back for them at any moment. I go the loo, pee, splash more cold water on my face, gulp at it – I am intensely thirsty. It is freezing in here too. I grab Doug’s navy jumper and haul it on as I come back out to the corridor. The overhead light buzzes faintly as if it contains a trapped wasp.
‘Susannah?’ My voice echoes back at me. All I can hear is the distant moan of the wind, rain drumming on the roof, the gurgle of the toilet cistern and the persistent buzz of the light bulb.
Then I hear something, down towards the front door, a faint thud.
There they are! Finn will need a nappy change if she hasn’t done it. Lunch too. I am impatient to hold him, now, to feel his warm body snuggled against me again and hear what he’s seen this morning while I’ve been crashed out on the sofa. There’s still plenty of time till the ferry. I hurry unsteadily through the living room. The corridor is empty and grey. The front door is shut. I sway, gently, by the sofa.