In White Ink

by Elske Rahill

  There is a photo of me an hour after you were born, my mouth touching your furred head, the hospital sheets pulled up over my breasts. There is one of you under the Christmas tree, asleep on a big toy sheep. You arrived on Christmas Eve and the tree was still up when we brought you home. The needles were a little dry, but still green, and I think they still smelled like Christmas. I have written: ‘At last Mammy and Daddy could take their baby home. They had never ever been happier than when the three of them went to bed that night.’

  That is true. I want you to know that. Neither of us had ever been happier.

  *

  In sleep I am dark and hairy all over. The hair I have is wiry, humid, kinked and disparate like the crunching scraggleweed found at the root of a penis. My mouth is slimy, hot, fanged and chomping, and with my many arms I can reach far on either side. My many arms – or are they legs? – are for reaching and for moving. One by one, the arm-legs move slowly on a tightrope of spun silk. My many eyes show a disco-ball vision of our little room – the damp-mottled ceiling and the lino floor and the curtain-hooks. I cannot see you at first, only flashes of our room: the hinge of the door; the cracked twirl of wicker on our laundry basket, but then there you are, right in front of me, twirling like a suckling on a spit, but you are smiling in a serene daze, smiling with love at my many eyes and my many legs and the fangs in my hot and dirty mouth, and I am turning you before me, swaddling you around and around in reams of white muslin, leaving only your lovely face exposed. What will happen next? What will happen to your lovely face?

  *

  There are many parts to the story, but it would not be right to share my dreams with you. That would be to tug at the fraying cord between us. That would not be fair. Like I said, it’s a one-way street.

  I could tell you that when you were a bump, and we walked through crowds, your daddy stretched out his arm in front of me so that no one could bang into you.

  In one of your books there is a picture of a man throwing his coat over the puddle, and his lady is smiling sweetly with cheeks that are apple-red and apple-round, gathering her skirts over her foot and tilting her ankle like a pony, so I think it would make sense to you, if I could say how his gesture made me blush. ‘Bloody ignorant,’ he said to the crowds. ‘Bloody ignorant! Foreigners taking up the street. Excuse me – my girlfriend’s pregnant!’ I could say how wonderful it was to be protected like that, because you will not know what I mean if I tell you how my face burned and my eyes stung, how I tried to like it.

  I think I could blame him, though. I think if I tried, I could make a good case, but there are so many parts to the whole that telling it is always wrong.

  After the birth he said ‘All over,’ and ‘That’s my girl,’ and ‘My son. My son.’ I wanted some other words. I was exhausted and in shock, my body shuddering back to the shape of me; nothing he said could have been right. It was his voice that felt like a fist, thrusting in at the space between me and you – ‘All over,’ he said, ‘it’s all over now.’

  *

  In the pub your daddy’s friend smiles; ‘Your fella said something so beautiful just now.’

  ‘Oh? What did he say?’

  I watch her pretty lips part and touch.

  ‘He said watching you feed the baby makes him wish he had breasts.’

  I try to giggle but a cackle comes out. ‘Oh. Boob-envy,’ I say. The words sound bitter. I buy us both another drink.

  *

  For your first Halloween we make a little pixie of you. You have a felt bonnet that ties with a ribbon under your chin. It has a purple, peaked tip and pointed green ears. I dress you in a soft green babygrow and purple booties with curling toes and bells on the ends. Your daddy wants to put green face-paint on you and take a photo but I say no – not your face. I don’t want anything on your cheeks, soaking through to the magnificent complexity of blood and flesh that your skin protects. He says, ‘What makes you think you know better than me, what’s okay for him and what’s not? It says hypoallergenic. He’s my son too...’

  When you are all-dressed-up, you feed rhythmically. Your eyes roll back, lids close and flutter and shut. ‘There,’ I say, ‘there now my little pixie, my pixie baby.’ Your daddy leans over you and, mimicking my tone, he says, ‘There now, your mother is a bossy bitch, isn’t she, little pixie? Yes she is. But soon you will be a big boy and we will do what we want. Soon you will be my big man,’ and I frown, and he laughs and kisses my cheek and I smile.

  You fall asleep on the breast and I use a finger to release the vacuum between your lips and my skin, pry you carefully out of the pocket of heat between us, and lay you in your crib. Your daddy is watching something on TV and I am still in my nightdress with the nursing straps and the milk stains, so I take a shower.

  When I come out of the bathroom, you are not in your crib and your daddy is gone. Your buggy is here and you are not. You are not in your rocker or your playpen and your daddy is gone. I phone him on his mobile and he answers. ‘Look out the window,’ he says. He is across the road, on the street outside the chipper, looking up at me where I am standing by the window in my towel. There is water trickling from my hair down my neck, and a pool is forming at my feet, but he is too far away to see that so it doesn’t matter. On the road between us, the cars swash him in and out of view. ‘You don’t trust me,’ he says, ‘I can hear it. What do you think I have done?’

  My voice is wobbling and rising to a terrible shriek; ‘Where is the baby?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Where is the baby? Tell me now. Tell me now.’

  ‘Use your mother-instinct,’ he says. ‘What do you think I have done?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Say please,’ he says. ‘Don’t be so rude.’

  ‘Where is the baby please.’

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘Please tell me where the baby is.’

  ‘He’s safe. If you trusted me you wouldn’t be such a psycho about it.’

  Then there is a tinkling – your bootie bells, and then your cry and I know where you are. In the boiler closet, strapped into your car seat with the straps that are growing too tight – there you are, disgruntled from a nap you didn’t mean to take, a creased little goblin mewling in the dark. When I lift you out something shifts across your face; for a moment this is a changeling child and in a dizzy pause I listen like an animal for your cry – out in the corridor, perhaps, or down on the street. I bend to smell you. There is green paint daubed like camouflage on your cheeks.

  That night I take your book from where I keep it in the drawer beneath the oven. I use a hole-punch to make a pair of eyelets on a blank page. Then I thread the purple ribbon through one hole, and hang a little bell on it. I put the ribbon out through the other hole, and knot the ends at the other side. The book does not close properly now, but I don’t mind.

  *

  I can’t find the thing to say. Looking through your book I can’t trace it to the moment when tedium turned to torment. I can’t explain why it became less possible day by day: baking him meatloaf, sitting on his knee, dragging running jokes to death, flinching when he spoke to his mates, his voice changing into someone else’s, his laugh a spray of bullets – huh huh, huh huh, huh – giving you suck, giving him head, cleaning the toilet.

  They called in a lot, the mates. One afternoon they sat on the couch. They were just back from a trip to Thailand.

  ‘They like us Irish lads,’ said one, ‘cause we’re nice to them – the English guys abuse them an’ all. Terrible.’

  You were nestled in the crook of your daddy’s elbow, sleeping. ‘Do they, yeah?’ he said. ‘Fuck’s sake. Terrible.’

  Then they told him about one girl in particular, and it must have been a funny story because he laughed that laugh, and you woke up. I wanted to take you out for a walk but he wanted to keep you and show you to his friends. You cried and clawed my T-shirt but I had to leave you. Please understand. My milk would have tasted like metal, like boiled bl
ood.

  *

  The sequence of the book is all wrong; I can see that now. After the bell there is another page with your passport photo stapled to the corner. You look startled and are wearing a tiny Hawaiian shirt. That was the spring. Halloween came after. The passport was for our holiday in Spain.

  You were only three months old then, four months at most. Getting the photo right was tricky, because no hands are allowed in shot and you could not sit yet.

  His aunt said we could use her timeshare house and we left the day the exams finished. I remember warm evenings, you burbling in your buggy, eating out of doors, children running in and out of houses in the dusk, parched fields, white houses.

  At night you slept on a double bed, couch cushions penning you in, and we sat by the pool with candles lit and talked and drank wine and dangled our feet in the water.

  While he was putting you down one evening I stood by the water in a new white dress. We had bought a bottle of bubbles that day to entertain you. I blew some up into the air; big, slow, wobbly ones at first, then streams of little ones that petered into dots. I could not stop then; I blew more and more, dreading the bottle ending. I watched the bubbles turn slowly like glass planets, and they caught the light of our candles, vibrating with invisible colour, bouncing on the surface of the pool, trembling before they popped. I knew it was beautiful. I knew how happy I could have felt.

  Your daddy came out of the house. He had been watching me. He had the camera in his hand. ‘You look so beautiful,’ he said. ‘In that white dress. I tried to take a photo, but the memory was full.’ My chest hurt like a tightening screw and all I knew burst into ribbons of solitary sounds.

  *

  He wants you for your first Christmas. He puts his foot in the door and says he will keep it there until I talk to him and when I push him he grabs my wrist and asks if I am trying to make him hit me. ‘You’d love that,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t you? I’d never hear the end of it.’ I am not doing myself any favours, he says, or the baby either. If I co-operate with him, then he will co-operate with me and my neurotic demands, he says, he will feed you whatever hippy shit I want and put you down for the regimented nap, and he will not call unexpectedly at night to take you. I remember the mediator saying that co-operation is key. I am not sure I know how to co-operate. I think what she really meant, was bargain.

  His big sister phones me to ask, and then his father and they both take the same line: They were expecting you for Christmas. Why should they pay for what I have done? Why should their Christmas be ruined? They didn’t have me down for a sexist. Your grandma has bought you a stocking saying ‘Baby’s First Christmas’ and everything.

  So it was me who said yes. But you see it doesn’t matter that it is Christmas – you don’t yet know the difference. This time is the worst, though, because this time it is three whole days and nights he takes you for. He collects you on the morning of Christmas Eve, an hour earlier than planned. A pallor falls over your face when the buzzer sounds. We listen for the heave of the lift, and I open the door for him before he knocks. You cry a lot and squirm when he pulls you off me. He stations you behind his head, hanging a hand at each of his shoulders, to bunch one of your wrists and one of your ankles tight in each of his knotty fists. I think he is hurting you. Your eyes widen at me but what can I say that will not make it worse? I give him a cooler bag with bottles of breast milk, and tubs of cubed avocado and chickpeas and butternut squash. ‘Butternut posh,’ he says. He struggles to take it and to restrain you at the same time. You scream so loudly that I think he might give you back, but he just juts his lower jaw, as if to make it bigger, delving ridges along his collar bone. He holds you firm and you do your worst – mah maaaah mahmahhhhh.

  The mediator said to ignore such performances. She said that even very young children can be manipulative. I should try to be rational, she said, and remember that two parents are better than one. You will thank me for it in the future, she said. But I can hear you wailing all the way down in the lift and out on the street and long after and I lie in bed for some time, looking at the wall instead of your cot and trying to remember what the mediator said; trying to be rational.

  I will stay here until you are back. My parents think I am with ‘the father’s side’ for Christmas. My mother makes sure to say it, whenever she is seen with us, ‘She is with the father, of course.’ They don’t know what I have gone and done now.

  In the evening I text to ask if you have calmed down, if you have some colour back. He doesn’t answer so I wait an hour and phone and he doesn’t answer so I call his sister’s house, where he is staying, but it is a wrong number, so I call her mobile and call and call and text and call and no one answers.

  That night I have to pump your milk with a squawking machine, and I think I feel blank but maybe not because I make a sound too like squawking; a terrible sound like braying and squawking at once; nothing as pretty as a weep.

  To steady myself I look through the book I bought with thick, matt pages that I will read to you when you are back with me. It is an edition of ‘The Night before Christmas’ – the kind of book with illustrations that tell lots of stories, not just the one in the poem. Hidden tiny on one page is a family of mice hanging mini stockings by their arch in the skirting board. On another, a reindeer munches illicitly on a mince pie meant for Santa. They are the kind of scenes a child might look at over and over, discovering new details every time. Every year, I think, you will find new things. Every year. Because I still think that maybe I can read this book for you every Christmastime, even if it is a few days before or after; that such things have wiggle-room.

  They do not answer, they do not call, and then on Stephen’s Day your daddy sends a message:

  He wants you to leave us alone. Your harassment is making me angry. I cannot be a good father when I am angry. What are you trying to make me do?

  I read the Christmas book and look for all the secret tales. Every six hours I pump a bottle of milk and put it in the freezer. Then I drink a glass of water, to keep hydrated.

  The next day he brings you back. You are wax-faced, blue-lipped, and your eyes are so big. You do not cry, but your big eyes grow bigger and you open your palms to me and before I can stop it my voice has betrayed us. ‘My baby,’ I say. ‘Oh my baby.’

  He swings you out of reach. You do not cry, even weakly. You say mah mah mah very quietly and you put out your arms as he holds you away. ‘He doesn’t want you,’ he says, ‘you know that, don’t you? Just your tits,’ and oh, your eyes – oh no your eyes, big, round, pink-rimmed – sorry oh sorry it was me who said yes, it was me who bargained you away, and so I say, ‘Sorry, yes I know. Sorry sorry sorry please let me feed him now please I am sorry,’ and he lets me take you. His lip curls as I take out my breast and he says in a babying voice he thinks is mine, ‘Your mummy is a bitch, isn’t she? Yes. You don’t know that yet, do you?’ Then he moves his eyes up my neck to my face, and with a flat voice he says, ‘Someday he will hear about this and he will know what you are.’ This sets a bitter thing coursing through my veins. How is it you don’t taste it?

  While he is there you stay limpet-locked into me, feeding, but when he is gone your hands dangle, and then your head. You splutter and vomit something lumpy and lurid blue, and your eyes roll blind and your neck won’t hold—

  The ambulance men make me go back in to put on my shoes. They make me give you to them and put on my shoes and coat and I say, ‘But look but look but look at his lips please look at him—’ and one of them puts his hand on my elbow and walks me back to the lift. ‘It will only take a minute,’ he says, ‘to put on your shoes. Come on now and get a coat. We have him. We will get him in the ambulance and you get your shoes now, love.’

  On the way to the hospital I phone him to ask what you have eaten. He threw out the bottles of breast milk, he said. He could not touch it because of what I am. A stinking bitch is what I am with stinky little paps – a tit-Nazi, he says. ‘My mates call yo
u the tit-Nazi.’ I didn’t want him to let off steam this Christmas with the lads, he says, he can see it now – I didn’t want him meeting girls and so I let him have you so that his big sister would make him stay in and listen to you cry. I ask again what you have eaten and he says you had formula and baby biscuits, like his sister’s baby. It doesn’t do his sister’s baby any harm. He is hanging up now, he says. He is having a pint and I am to stop looking for attention.

  ‘He had formula and baby biscuits,’ I tell the ambulance man, and he writes it down. ‘What brand of formula? Do you have the box?’ I shake my head. ‘When was the last dirty nappy?’ I can’t speak; just a terrible breath rushing in too deep and fast, wringing my voice to a gasp. He offers me a sedative and I shake my head.

  You are curling soundlessly into your pain, and it takes two of us to hold you out straight so they can do the scan. A nurse holds your feet and I press your shoulders flat, your eyes grow wide in focus and roll back, and you don’t make a whimper. I whisper all kinds of things about Holy God. I ask them to give you something for the pain and they say they can’t, not yet. I chant good boy good boy, with my face at your cheek. The radiographer rings someone and says a word I haven’t heard before but will always know now – intussusception – and a doctor arrives very quickly, and then they say the word again and they tell me it is urgent. A nurse explains it to me slowly, like I am foreign or very stupid, and I am grateful for that because words are starting to slide for me and I am struggling to understand. She says your guts have folded into themselves and they are just getting the operating room ready and they will do their best but I should stay here and let her take you. There isn’t time to put you under for it and it is not a nice procedure but it is usually a success. I will not want to see, she says, and my distress will make it worse for you. I can wait here in the corridor. Now your father is here and I don’t know how he found us. His back is straight and his eyes brilliant with rage and he wants to go and watch them through the glass while they do it and they say okay but the nurse says, ‘Please wait here, Mum. No good can come from watching.’ I sit on the floor beside an arch containing a statue of the Virgin. She is cream-coloured and her robes are freshly painted blue. The nurse brings me a plastic cup of very cold water before she is paged away. Oh Virgin Mother, I will do anything. I will do anything. I will do anything—