by Elske Rahill
Joanna’s hair is the same colour as Valerie’s once was. On the hairdresser’s colour chart it is called Caramel 06.
Down in the kitchen Valerie puts a new black sack in the bin. The bin is clean, but something about it makes her think of maggots – the white chubbiness of them; the way they can materialize from any kind of filth; the way they are almost certainly there, at the bottom of the outside-bin, writhing blindly against the plastic; and the way they work diligently on things that are dead, curling out of eye-sockets and nostrils... She puts Dolores’s mug in the dishwasher and slices a wedge out of a lime, ignoring the drips of juice on the granite. She puts three ice cubes into a glass, squeezes the lime over the ice, and drops the wedge in on top. Now the gin, and now the spit of fresh tonic from a chilled can. Valerie has a silver stirrer that she uses to swirl the drink. She sits at the kitchen table. Now she can turn her attention to today’s shopping. She has brought it all in from the car, and she removes the cleanser and the free gift from the bag and sets them out before her. She will enjoy this as she sips the drink; she will enjoy unwrapping the generous sheets of crepe, swivelling the top of the cleanser until it pops up, ready to pump, and discovering the treats in the free gift bag. Her ankle twitches, and forgetting herself for a moment Valerie scratches along the bone. It is a comfort to know she has the bug bomb. She will wait until Monday to light it – Monday after Martin has left for work and before she takes Joanna to crèche.
She’s left the porch light on, and it is glowing now, an orange cube against the dark outside.
In White Ink
ALREADY I AM losing the shapes for you. You are not face or hands or voice, but only sensation – breast-brim and skin-yearn and the cell-crave of our division. The ink I have used to set you down – the marks that make the letters, that make the words to make a story stick – I think it is the kind that will not smear, but swim cleanly from the page like a shoal of sated minnows.
There is a sign recommending that passengers with seasickness stay on deck and look out at the horizon, but closed eyes and closed-up limbs seem the only way to wait the nausea out. I keep low, crouched down with the cradling of the boat, knees drawn in, face tucked down, hands clinging barnacle-still to myself. In the little dark this makes, I try for your smile your foot your ear, but there are only the words that pull away, and then even the lines where they were perched begin to scramble. Already, the ages and stages you are made from bunch and cross, so that when I look for your age I cannot find a number. But there you are, I see you now, the lines all ajumble – here, sleeping in your buggy with buttery thighs and feet like handkerchief knots; here a map of Ireland in a sonograph of my insides; and here – but no that is not you yet – the mossy chin, the widening shoulders, the snarl – not yet, no. It is your parting smell that will lead me to you – the sweet, moist liveness of your skin – Oh now I have you – there you are opening your eyes at first light.
*
You wake too early – a ravenous mouth; a need; a wild, snorting, pulling thing, ferociously rooting for survival. Sleepily we lump you from his hands to my arms to milk, and there you mew and smack and, frantic for it, you miss and miss and catch and miss and latch. The lock and pull of you sends a rush through the other breast and three white arcs cross the bedroom – elegant, confident shapes, and shocking for their reach – leaving a sprinkling of tiny blots on the mirror of our wardrobe and we laugh and sigh and stay it with a cloth and promise each other we’ll change the sheets after breakfast.
Ready to smile, you keep the nipple within suckle-clamp, two palms suckered to the swell-and-wobble globe that is now your touchstone. Your mouth is a stretch of red-sharp gum, a serrated streak of tooth cutting through, and your smile curves open like all sorts of understanding. Waste of cream on your lips, you look me in the eye for the first time this morning and say something – you laugh, suckle some more. A satisfied little puke and I promise your daddy again about the sheets.
Seven a.m. is your happiest and most demanding hour. Daddy makes a play of changing your nappy, pretending surprise and horror, as though he has not known these smells each day since you came, and you chuckle because his face is twisting and opening and making great noises and maybe you feel big, like your shit is a powerful thing. Maybe you feel like a monster and a lord.
Back in bed we babble and laugh because we see why everything is so funny for you, and you rub Daddy’s beard until you get bored and I read to you – a story about a prince and a tower and a golden-haired woman whose tears can heal, but you are not concerned with that, only with my voice now, the way it moves up and down, faster and slower and is still the same voice; the way that contrasts make shapes; the way the pages can rise and turn and new ones appear beneath. Then I eat your toes and, holding your fat balls of hands, I walk you up and down my tummy where you used to grow, folded into yourself in a wordless complicity only us, and play airplanes and congratulate you loudly when you move the beads up the abacus and I tell myself to cherish it now; your baby scent.
Because I know these are the things for forgetting.
We play Mozart and lay you back in your crib under the mobile with a clumsy elephant and a bright zebra that pivots, twirls, and creakily slides, and you sleep while we make love quietly under the covers, laughing a little because just for now in the fractured rise of light, before the words begin and the witnesses come, before my mind gathers these colours into the white of day, we know the heart is made of flesh.
*
Now you can speak, and I don’t know what sounds to make for you. Mothers are supposed to sing to their children, but I have a terrible voice. They should tell stories too. That is something I think I can do. But what can I say?
I could tell you about this time last year, when you were a bump – still so miraculously neat that I could conceal you with a princess-line or a baggy jumper. If I lay on my back the whole shape of you raised under my skin; we saw your head already; blades of your bottom; thick of your thighs.
This time last year your father blindfolded me and walked me onto the Luas – I could hear the bell and the doors shushing closed, and I could feel the tracks beneath us as the tram rolled on. The scarf he had tied around my head kept slipping down over my nose. It scratched my eyes and made my cheeks twitch. It smelled of him. I kissed him just under his ear, breathed his skin, and he kissed my mouth. He said it was a surprise but I knew where we were going.
When we got to Smithfield I gave up on the blindfold, which disappointed him, and we walked from the station to the square, where they were selling Christmas trees and wreaths. It was very cold. The tips of our fingers were numb and our breath made clouds. His nose was red – the whole bulk of it from the nostrils up the hump, inflated and glowing with cold. Without meaning to, I knew how easy it would be not to love him. A moment is all it would take; a moment to trip myself up and let fall a thing that could never be gathered up again; spilled milk. He wrapped his scarf snug around my throat, tucking in the ends.
We picked a nice, symmetrical tree that smelled of Christmas, the kind of Christmas that happy families had, the kind – please believe me – the kind we wanted to make for you. We asked the man to lop the bottom off the tree, to make it small enough to fit in our flat, and spent ten euros on a tree-stand. Your daddy hadn’t budgeted for the stand at all, but we agreed that this was an investment – we would use it for years to come. I remember that because I wondered if we believed it.
On the tram a sign said: ‘Happy Christmas! Please do not bring trees onto the tram. To do so is a crime. Offenders will be prosecuted.’ There was a picture of a Christmas tree under the print; white gaps in a green triangle. We had no money for the fare on account of the tree-stand. When the conductor came around your father stood me in front of the Christmas tree. The branches stuck out either side of me and the needles poked my back. I laughed and so did he. The man looked at us and raised his eyebrows. ‘Come on, man, you can’t throw us off. We’re pregnant,’ said your f
ather, and my skin pickled.
You haven’t tasted pickles yet – they are not like the foods you eat now, which are tepid and mildly sweet. Pickles are cold, sharp-tasting foods preserved in clear and bitter liquid. I cannot know what you will think of pickled onions or pickled gherkins or pickled eggs, but when you taste them, you will know the kind of thing that happened all over my skin when he said, ‘We’re pregnant.’
The conductor turned away. It was a look like disgust, only kinder. Young love, he thought. I could see it in the way he shook his head, knowingly. Young love. He didn’t know anything.
I rubbed my tummy, making circles on your back with my hands, my skin taut against your growth. Your father bent over, catching his breath between his guffaws. We laughed into each other’s necks. I laughed against his chest, he laughed into my hair.
You stretched your shape and kicked and I wondered what the bony judder of my ribcage meant to you, shuddering over your capsule like strange weather, but I hoped I was keeping the cold on my surface, outside you.
*
I could tell you that when you were born the morning sun lit the white walls of the delivery room as though it was summer, and there wasn’t as much blood as people would like you to think. Your head was crumpled like a passion fruit as it came out. Then you opened into a baby, drinking the light with your new skin, your gasp. Your fingers splayed and curled, exploring the air like tentacles.
You smiled the moment you emerged, and you opened your eyes, though people don’t believe that. A thousand expressions moved across your face – O of wonder, scrunch of disgust, all the full curves of joy – a flicker-book of everything you would feel between now and the close of your life. People don’t believe that either.
For the birth, they wanted to numb me up. They said it again and again, in a tone warning and urgent, as though something would happen soon that would be too much. The pain was fine, though, more fine than anyone would like you to think, and not really what people usually mean by pain. When I told them you were coming they insisted your birth was hours away and told me not to push. ‘Trust me,’ said the midwife with a smile, ‘you’d know all about it if it was coming.’ But you and I knew. We laboured in secret towards our separation, me nodding obediently at the professional grimaces. ‘Don’t push yet,’ said the midwife, and ‘Close your mouth.’ She said I would scare the other women with my sounds – not the tearing cries she wanted but noises darker and dirtier than a scream. Your father rubbed my back and said, ‘Shhhh. Listen to the doctor, baby.’
The sight of your head shocked them.
‘Oh,’ said the midwife, turning to the trainee, ‘no warning that time.’
To me she said, ‘Alright, you can push now. Come on, push now, push.’
She called your father ‘Dad’, and told him to put a vest on the heater. She was trying to distract him, I thought, for he was eager to put the mask of laughing gas over my face and the more I said no, the more his eagerness grew. The vest was striped white and blue with poppers between the legs, and I knew that it measured from my belly button to just under my breasts.
You had hardly left my inside when your daddy cut the cord, and you and I were two. I didn’t recognize your face. They asked your name but I couldn’t do that, not yet. I could only call you ‘baby’. ‘Hello baby.’
They taught me how to swaddle you, but you hated to be swaddled. You hated to be folded up again, tucked in and stuffed over yourself and made to fit. You liked to stretch your arms, your legs and toes and scrawny neck. Silently you moved like that in your glass box, extending into the world with tiny extremities and glad, glad of it all.
For three days I could not sleep but only look at you. The joy that came was an engulfing kind; a terrifying, snatching kind full of claws and wool and feathers, and the shapeless terror of silence, and I knew already it was not the right kind for a thing like you, that needed to stretch and open.
For three days I tempered it, tempered it down into the practical chores I could make from it: nappies and feeding and biting your nails blunt so you could not nick your cheeks and scalp; the appallingly delicate skin you came in.
When you were three days old, a respectable shade of milk replaced the garish colostrum, and I had soothed it down enough for words. I told you something true then. I whispered it close to your skin that smelled like coconuts. ‘I love you,’ I said, but thought, I have no idea though, baby. I have no idea who you are. He named you then, but I still have no idea. Your life is a journey out of me, a one-way street.
*
When you were four months old and I was sitting my exams, I didn’t go back to sleep one night after your 4 a.m. feed. I couldn’t rest. You snored a baby snore in your crib at my back. Your daddy slept beside me. I tried to tuck myself into the hot curl of his body and his breath but his presence played a cool fever on my bones. I got up and went into the other room of our flat.
The window was silver from the steam of the drying laundry, and the street lamps glittering through. It was cold outside, but when I opened the window, the air hung still. I remember that because it sent a surge of fear and giddiness through me, the way the night refused to move into the warm, as though some law had been suspended here in the unpatrolled hours. There was just the sound of night traffic. Trucks, mostly, lumbering through, rumbling the tarmac, casting their gaze over our walls, our floor, our table, our buggy. Sitting on the couch I tried to study, some Greek myth about punishing gods, hubris, jealous women – but by the time I reached a full stop I had forgotten the beginning of the sentence. I didn’t understand anything.
I took the scissors out from the drawer under the hob, and the Pritt-stick from under the television, and I gathered all our photographs around me.
By the time you woke for your seven o’clock feed, I had made you a book. The book told our story. It began when your father and I met. It chronicled our holidays together, the drunken karaoke, the kisses in the kitchenette while we waited for the coffee to splurt up through the funnel of that aluminium espresso pot your daddy had back then. That was before we heard that aluminium leaks into the brain, making you confused as you grow old, making you forget the references you are made from: your car keys; your phone number; names.
I found the notebook this morning. The photographs have been hurriedly glued. In all the pictures, we are smiling. There is a narrative scrawled beside them in baby language. I have written you a story that is simple and not a lie. I say how in love we were, how happy, and the photos seem to prove it. I do not tell you that the morning-after pill was too expensive, and ‘risk of pregnancy’ a thing inconceivable. Anyway, that might have been a different time. I am no good on dates. I do not say that you were planned, but nor do I tell you what my eyes might have meant, shut into the pillow in the moment of your conception. I do not explain the tedium of slumber-rape, the horror of daily sniping, the way these things wear and wear until the fabric is too thin to handle.
I write that your daddy was happy when I said ‘We are going to have a little baby.’ That is not exactly how I put it, but I think it is what he heard. I tell you we both laughed and were happy. I tell you that he kissed my tummy. I do not tell you what happened then, lips to skin, faces, eyelids, shoulders, looking at each other in the twilight under bedsheets. I do not mention the glaze that sometimes crept into my eyes, or how I resolved that with forgetting I would make it good. It would be to betray you, to tell the words he used, his hand wrapped from behind around my neck, and pushing, pushing: ‘Mine now. You are mine now.’
There are pictures of Halloween, when we tied an orange silk scarf around the bump, and your daddy drew triangle eyes, triangle nostrils, and a smile of triangle-teeth to make you a pumpkin. ‘Bump-kin’, we called you all night. We went out and had dinner with many people I did not know. The girl opposite me was dressed as Catwoman. She had a sultry sweep of eyeliner across each heavy lid, and a way I could not read, of gliding her eyes over you, and when asked if she would one day like
children she looked your father in the face and said, ‘I am just back from an abortion. I flew back this morning.’
She left halfway through the main course, and the host smacked his forehead. ‘How stupid,’ he said, ‘to have seated her opposite you pair after what she’s been through. Silly Jules – I just didn’t think...’ I don’t tell you that part, or the desire that happened as we looked at each other, me in my witch costume and she dressed as Catwoman, weak smiles wavering across the black tablecloth and ‘ghoulish goulash’. Perhaps I seemed smug, moving my hand over and over you like a crystal ball; as if I thought I knew something she did not. That was not what I meant by it, though. Not at all. I don’t tell you because I know it is easy to misunderstand, and I know I have a terrible voice.
In any case, she slipped off without a scene and all night he introduced my belly with a joke accent, ‘This is Bumpkin, and this be ma witch...’
I was dressed in black; the top had enough room for you at the front, and the back was bare except for a web of black ribbons laced over my skin. He had lifted a long silver wig from the pound shop, which made me look glamorous and gothic. In the photograph we are beautiful and extravagant, grinning with our dark, painted mouths. My eyes are frilled with fake lashes of purple and silver. There is an envelope stuck to the page opposite, with the orange scarf tucked into it.
The next page is a picture of the two of us with the Christmas tree. We are standing on either side of it, holding the bark, chins raised, goofy smiles, green sprigs flecking our arms. My face is pale from vomiting – it didn’t stop after three months like they said. My nose and eyes are pink. ‘They waited and waited and waited,’ says my handwriting, ‘for their baby to come out and meet them.’ This must have been close to the birth because you are a tight mound under that big sweater of your daddy’s.