by Ajay Close
By the fourth birth she’s relaxed, by the eleventh she feels like an old hand. They come at regular intervals, head first, tail first, turn and turn about, the seventh arriving so hard on the heels of the sixth that both are straining to outrun their umbilical cords simultaneously, like dancers attached to a maypole. Her palms are stained with blood and brown slime but she doesn’t care. She’s as shivery as the piglets, carried along on a racing tide, eager for the next slippery birth, the next squealing handful of flesh. Later, remembering, she will dwell on the white velvet nap on each rosy back, the miniature trotters, the pinned-back ears, but right now she’s indifferent to their sweetness. It’s the repetition she craves, the careless abundance of new life.
Until her luck runs out.
The twelfth piglet lies where it landed on expulsion from the birth canal, its tiny wrinkled body small as a child’s fist and pale as tripe, the eye a blueish shadow under closed lids. She touches it again, less tentatively this time, more of a prod. Nothing. It seems cooler than its siblings, less definitely formed. Revulsion thickens in her throat, like the feeling she gets when she cracks open an under-boiled egg. She thinks of the thing she nearly did, so nearly that her second thoughts count for nothing. In her heart, the deed was done.
Jake brings the smell of tobacco with him into the shed. The nicotine has woken him up. He nods approvingly at the pink huddle in the tub before glancing over the side of the pen at the runt.
‘It’s dead,’ she says.
He gives her a sideways look. ‘Better that way—’
She keeps her eyes on the floor.
‘See the colour?’
Still she says nothing. Perhaps he reads her thoughts. He passes a hand over his groin.
‘It’s not meant to live,’ he insists. But now, with a sharp tug, he frees the umbilical cord. Picking up the runt by its back legs, he swings the lifeless body in an arc, head first, slack jaws open to the air, then – to her horror – he slaps it. Another swing, another slap. He brings the lardy corpse up to his mouth.
‘Wake up, wee man,’ he croons, blowing into its snout.
Hooking his pinkie inside the unresisting jaws, he dislodges a little viscous fluid, then repeats the swinging and slapping routine. The tender brutality of it seems a sort of madness, but now the impossible happens. A bubble of amniotic fluid emerges from the side of the open mouth. Weakly, the piglet coughs.
Lili looks at Jake in wonder.
He tosses the scrap of precarious life into her hands and returns the other piglets to the sow. They nudge and butt and climb over one another, rooting at the mountainous belly. Finding a teat, they suckle fervently, as if this is what they were born for. The pig cradled between her palms remains motionless, translucently pale, its eyes seamed shut, but she can just detect the rhythmic rise and fall of its breathing.
Loan
So many things tasted better at the farm. The strong tea Margo mixed half-and-half with full-cream milk to blunt its bitter edge, her home-made crab apple jelly, even toast, which was done on the Aga using a contraption like two tennis rackets soldered together. The food, the air, the light, the way I slept all through the night, the complete freedom from responsibility. All I had to do was pay my daily visit to the clinic.
Now I was off the carousel, I saw my enviable life with Frankie rather differently. All those opening nights and gallery private views, the witty haggis canapés and champagne flutes (filled with cava), the semi-famous faces I knew, if not to speak to then to smile hello. It was all so tiring. The newspaper skimmed and recycled every day, the YouTube clips watched, the Facebook posts liked, the trending tweet retweeted, the rave-reviewed restaurant tried, the Booker-shortlisted novel read, the season’s fashion diktat obeyed. There was hardly time to pick up the latest slang before it became obsolete, but we had to do it, along with everything else we had to cram into the day: the two litres of water we had to drink, the five portions of veg to keep cancer at bay, the six miles on the treadmill I ran to stand still, the eight hours we were advised to sleep, the love we made three times a week – well, I admit I did miss that.
But then, there was another advantage to living at the farm.
I was sitting on the back step with a dog-eared copy of Women in Love I’d found in Margo’s bookcase when a shadow fell across my shirt.
‘Have you got five minutes?’
Kit was standing over me. I lowered my sunglasses and saw his lips plump in a furtive smirk.
‘I need to sound like a guy you’d lend ten grand to.’
‘Is that “you” as in someone – or “you” as in me?’
‘What a woman! Thanks very much…’
‘Because if you mean me, two thousand quid a minute seems a bit steep.’
He unsheathed his slow grin. ‘How long do you want?’
We talked like this all the time. While Margo was around we were her paying guest and grown-up son, but the minute she left we slipped into a routine of teasing insults and wide-eyed innuendo. Then, once in a while, he’d surprise me by treating me as a friend.
He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and handed me a wad of paper which, unfolded, turned out to be a bank manager’s letter. Addressed to him, not Margo or the farm. The money wasn’t for the business.
‘What do you think?’
I made an equivocal face. (No chance would have been my honest answer.) ‘I thought you were funded by the NHS.’
‘They gave us two free shots at it. After that it’s pay-up or piss off.’
‘And you can’t ask anyone else?’
‘Who do I know with a spare ten grand? Anyway, you and Frankie got a loan—’
I could have told him we’d paid it ourselves, but there was something so middle-aged about having savings.
‘You can teach me the magic words.’
In a professional voice, I said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Oliphant…’
‘I need you to be a man.’ He saw my reaction. ‘If it’s a woman I’ll be fine.’
‘She’ll take one look at you and hand over the keys to the safe?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
He stood there looking down at me, the tall shape of him against the sky, with this feeling coming off him, a sort of brightness, and I was struck, as I was often struck in those months, by the doubleness of bodies: their dandruff and sebum, the prosaic fact of flesh, and the one-in-a-million miracle of its fascination. It was then I had the idea. A well-meaning thought that turned in my mind, becoming something more anarchic.
‘There’s no point rehearsing what you’re going to say until we’ve done some work on the way you look.’
‘What’s wrong with the way I look?’
Now it was my turn to smile.
It was four years since Kit had moved into the cottage with Nikki, and at least another five since anything had been changed in his teenage bedroom. Christopher Eccleston as Doctor Who stood guard over the single bed, along with Franz Ferdinand, Green Day, Destiny’s Child and a Big Brother winner I could no longer name. The CDs on the shelf (along with several Neil Gaimans and a full set of Harry Potter) were as precious to him as the twelve-inch singles I had stashed away in Glasgow. Aztec Camera, Hue and Cry: music that, for a long hot adolescent summer, had told me everything I needed to know about the world.
I checked the chest of drawers and the press beside the boarded-up fireplace. There was nothing I could use.
‘I don’t suppose you own a suit?’
His eyes bulged at the very idea.
‘You can’t turn up in that tweed jacket you wore to the bull sale.’
‘Why not?’
‘It makes you look like a packing crate.’
For a moment he was disconcerted. Teasing insults were one thing, to suggest he’d made a fool of himself in public quite another. ‘That’s my dad’s wardrobe off to Oxfam tomorrow morning.’
‘How much has she kept?’
He crooked his finger to lead me out of the room.
; The clothes were stored in the attic bedroom next to mine, where he slept the odd night when he fell out with Nikki. I sorted through the wardrobe, breathing in the smell of old tobacco and dry-cleaning fluid. Padded shoulders, slim lapels, a double-breasted power suit, an off-white linen jacket. I didn’t need a photograph to tell me the owner of these garments had been a looker, which solved the riddle of how a woman as functionally put-together as Margo had managed to produce a son like Kit. I envied him this treasure trove, and at the same time I could see how the company of so many things his father had had no use for might hurt. I wondered when he had grown too big to burrow between the hangers and pull the door shut after him.
‘I’ll be staying here tonight,’ he said.
Sometimes I varied the game by blocking his attempts to flirt.
‘“Ovary madness”?’
Was that a flicker of shame in his glance?
‘Are you sure…’ it’s the only way? That you and Nikki will last? That it wouldn’t be easier to wait till you split up and try again with somebody else? I managed not to say any of this, but perhaps he heard it anyway.
‘Am I sure what?’
‘Arms out,’ I said.
I loaded him up with his father’s clothes and sent him downstairs.
He laughed at the bundle I brought down.
‘There are vintage shops in Glasgow that’d kill for this stuff,’ I said.
‘So let me get this straight. There’s this bank manager in Perth. Next suit, Volkswagen Bora. I walk in there looking like Roger Moore, the Octopussy years, and he hands over ten grand?’
‘Octopussy was the early eighties,’ I said. ‘These are Timothy Dalton, maybe even Pierce Brosnan.’ For a moment the unmentionable reared its head. I had been out with men who dressed like this, Frankie among them. We had had our first snog under the mirrorball before Kit was born.
‘You’re the boss.’ He hauled his T-shirt over his head.
I went to get my make-up bag.
When I got back he was dressed. The leg length was right, and the pinstriped cloth fine enough to be gathered in graceful folds by his belt. The jacket could have doubled as a tent. He took it off, and I was startled by how much less boyish he looked in a crisp white shirt.
I pointed to the tuft on his chin. ‘That has to go.’
To my surprise, he did as he was told.
I sat him in a chair facing away from the mirror. ‘No keeking before I’m finished.’
He closed his eyes. ‘I’m in your hands.’
He looked wrong clean-shaven, his face larger, like a room cleared of furniture, until I worked a little green into the base I applied to take off his youthful bloom. I flattened his cheeks, added five years around his eyes, thinned the provocation of his lower lip, wetted and tamed the hair back from his face. It was odd, having this licence to lay hands on him, touching his soft skin, breathing in the faint acridity of his scalp and a meaty whiff of armpit and that indefinable scent I recognised from Ruth’s children, wholesome as newly baked bread. Of course we flirted, how could it be otherwise: a boy barely out of adolescence, brain and balls on the same seven-second loop? Even he must have known he couldn’t have us all. But he could play with the idea, and where was the harm in that?
‘D’you do this for Frankie?’
‘No, they do it at the studios.’
‘And you’re not jealous?’
‘Of what?’
‘Other women touching him. Like you’re touching me.’ He opened his eyes to gauge the effect of this.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Is it unbearably exciting?’
‘I can take it. If you can.’
We were silent for a minute or two while I reapplied the fine brush to his lower lip.
‘Are you two getting on?’
I looked at him. He wasn’t joking.
‘I thought you might be splitting up.’
Frankie had yet to set foot on the farm. Problems at work, he said. It was a battle of wills now: if he couldn’t make the effort to come up here, why should I go home?
‘We’ll be spending the rest of our lives together. We can survive a few weeks without seeing each other.’
‘Or shagging.’
Or waking up together, or cooking Sunday brunch, or taking a picnic into the hills, or just sitting on the sofa talking about nothing. He said he missed me, when we spoke on the phone, but obviously not enough to drive seventy miles to see me.
‘Is that what it’s like, being married ten years?’
‘Nine years.’ I reached for the eyebrow pencil.
‘You can’t be arsed being jealous any more?’
‘Not when there’s nothing to be jealous of.’
‘He’s not that bad. A wee bit Gerard Butler, but some women must go for that.’
A good fifty per cent of Kit’s taunts ricocheted off Frankie. If he expected me to take a swipe at Nikki, I never obliged. I liked her, in so far as liking was compatible with forgetting she existed much of the time.
‘You grow up,’ I told him. ‘You don’t sleep with other people, but you accept you’re not the beginning and end of your partner’s interest in the world.’
‘And that’s monogamy? Doing it with each other when you’re thinking about somebody else?’
‘You can’t control their libido any more than you can control anything else that goes on in their head. The sooner you realise that the less unhappy you’re going to be.’
‘You don’t need to control them, if they love you.’ He smiled to himself. ‘I get it—’
I began working on the sleepless night I’d sketched under his eyes.
‘He loves you more than you love him. That’s why you’re not jealous. You’re the one with the libido he can’t control.’ He caught my hand. ‘You’re blushing, Mrs MacKewon.’
He was stronger than Frankie. Or at least, it had been a long time since Frankie had demonstrated his strength to me.
He let go. ‘Are you done?’
‘Nearly.’
I thumb-smudged the frown lines I’d drawn between his eyebrows, then let him out of the chair.
‘Fuck’s sake.’
For a moment I thought he was upset. He approached the mirror as if a stranger were trapped behind the glass. Outside, a cloud slid over the sun, cutting the golden reflections on the wall, turning the light in the room a sombre grey. He turned towards me. He looked like a man with make-up on, of course. But the effect, at a distance, was very different from when I’d fussed over him at close range.
He said, ‘How long have you known—?’
The hairs lifted on my arms.
‘Did she show you a picture?’
I laughed, a brief nervous cough.
‘Did she?’
‘It’s fluke,’ I said, ‘coincidence.’
I had given him the intelligent, ironic face of my imaginary father.
He turned back to the mirror. ‘How did you do it?’
‘I’ve spent a lot of time in theatre dressing rooms.’
He shook his head as if I were wilfully misunderstanding. ‘Have you met him?’
I knew we were talking at cross purposes, we couldn’t be reminded of the same man, but the conversation was unnerving all the same. ‘I’ll clean it off.’
‘No.’ He took out his phone. ‘I want a photo.’
I collected my bits and pieces while he pored over the screen. I was about to leave him to it when he spoke.
‘She burned all his pictures. I remember sitting on my grandad’s knee, and being pushed around in my buggy, and my first day at school, but my dad’s the invisible man. Four years in the same house – nothing. Till now.’ He touched the screen to enlarge the image. ‘It’s weird. All these years thinking I couldn’t remember him, and he was in here,’ he tapped his head, ‘all the time.’
I walked over to the window and pushed the sash up as high as it would go. The turbulent air held the smell of approaching rain. Gulls wheeled and cried, white against the grey, whi
le just beyond the sill, close enough to touch, a net of flies traced careering figures of eight.
‘Why’d you leave it so late?’ he asked.
I could have said so late for what, but really we’d been talking about it all along. Fatherlessness and childlessness were two sides of the same coin for him, as they were for me.
‘I suppose I never felt old enough to do it.’
‘But if you don’t do it…’
‘…you never grow up.’
He spoke with sudden vehemence. ‘I hate that fucking place. Frankenstein’s lab. Raking in the cash, no promises. And what if it happens, what’re we meant to tell him? Mummy and Daddy had you manufactured. What’s that going to do to the little fucker’s head?’
Such a relief to hear it said, to abandon the relentless positivity I had to show with Frankie. The day before, they had transferred an embryo to my womb. It would be another fortnight before I could take the test, but I was absolutely sure it hadn’t worked. However desolate I felt (and what was I doing with Kit if not trying to distract myself from the misery?) there was one consolation. I hated the idea of having a child by unnatural means, my body made over by the pharmaceutical industry, the spark of life kindled by strangers in an empty room. I wanted magic, the original everyday miracle: a new person created from the secret power inside me. Frankie was right, for as long as I could remember I had considered myself a technocrat. But I turned out to be someone else.