by Elske Rahill
When it is over, they say you have to stay in hospital. You are in a cot with high bars and cannot eat but only take glucose from a drip at first, and then blackberry-flavoured glucose-water from squat glass bottles with disposable teats. They have inflated your guts to straighten them out and it was very painful for you but it is over now. ‘It’s over now, my pixie,’ I say, ‘we’re alright now. It’s over.’ I wonder can I blame him, but the nurse says no, there is no known cause for the thing that happened. It sometimes occurs, especially in boys under two, and no one knows why. They will keep you in for three days in case it happens again.
There is a chair beside the cot and the nurse says I can stay with you. She will get a blanket and she might be able to get me a mattress for tomorrow night. Your father says, ‘Why should she be the one to stay? I want to stay.’
And the nurse says, ‘Go home. He needs his mother. Go home please, sir. Have some sense.’
He says, ‘There is no law that says she gets to stay... This is sexism. I am calling a lawyer.’
And she says, ‘Have some sense and some respect.’ She is a lovely hulk of starched pink, taupe French plait, great red-scrubbed hands clasped before her. She stands beside me until he leaves and then she moves us to another ward.
We stay for three days. There are lights on all the time, fizzing in strips along the corridor, boxes holding quiet little creatures with tubes in their noses and lumps of hard plastic bandaged to their hands, their machines yipping. I cannot tease out the promises I made while they were hurting you, delivering you back to me from the pain and the blue lips. All I can say is thank you to the nurses. Every time I see one, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ The nurses scurry back and forth, swishing curtains, speaking to babies in a tired, panicked hush. The other babies slide in and out of my periphery; a bony one in a sling, its face crooked, smeared as though someone has tried to erase it. The nurse coos and kisses its head. ‘Contact is good for him,’ she says, ‘they heal quicker with contact,’ and I tell her thank you thank you, because the other babies are all possibilities of you.
You want to feed but I peel your fingers off my buttons. ‘No, no. Be a big boy now. Have some water.’
There is a playroom with coloured beads on lines of meandering wire, and plastic trucks, and thin Ladybird Classics with careful watercolour pictures, their card covers held on wonkily by loose hoops of thread. The one you want is Rumpelstiltskin; a story of a little man who gets a maiden released from a dungeon cell by spinning gold from straw. ‘Not that story,’ I say.
You nod. ‘Jes, Mama. Jes.’ The price for the gold is to be the maiden’s first child. It is a promise she soon forgets, beaming at the newborn in her arms. The mother’s mouth opens in horror when the little man comes through the bedroom window to claim the child. You like the picture of the baby. ‘Bebe,’ you say, ‘bebe.’
It all comes right in the end, because the mother ventures into the wood on a dark night and learns the name of the little man. Her face can be seen peeking through the branches, and on her smile the yellow glow of the little man’s fire. There he is in the clearing, a terrifying creature no bigger than a toddler. He prances around the fire, back bent, crooked fingers, leering mouth. ‘Rumpelstiltskin is my name.’ Once she speaks his name she is free from her promise. She gets her baby back, and it looks just the same as it did on page three.
Even so, I do not like reading you that book. I hide it on a high windowsill in the playroom, so that you do not keep pushing it at my hands, opening the cover. ‘’Gain Mama, ’gain.’
For three days I cannot sleep but only look at you and listen for your breath when you doze, and when you wake from the sugar and the beeping and the insectile buzz of the lights, I give you each of my forefingers to hold in your fists and I walk you up and down the corridors and lift you to look at the big fish tank. I say, ‘Look! Fish. Pretty.’
And you say, ‘yook. Ish. IpwEee.’ My breasts swell hot and sore at first, but I will not poison you again with all my braying rage. By the third day, your milk is gone.
*
‘Just be decent,’ is what they said at the legal aid office.
I looked through the rails in Oxfam but there was nothing suitable there. I looked in the discount rail in Penney’s too, but the blazers were all too big and in any case I don’t know if a blazer is what they meant.
Your daddy has borrowed a suit, I think, because it is too broad on the shoulders and too long on the arms and he keeps shrugging himself and shifting, as though by doing so he might make himself big enough to fit it. He clears his throat a lot, bobbing the mealy bulge of his Adam’s apple, and he won’t stop looking at me while we stand in the lobby. There are plastic orange chairs fixed in rows along the walls, but I can’t bring myself to sit. If I turn my back he will see my bum and the back of my knees, so I stand with my profile to him – the most anonymous angle I can find. I can feel his eyes on my cheek. He cannot do anything with his looking, he cannot change anything with looking. I try to remember that but still I cannot turn my back. His friend is with him – the one who thought he said something so beautiful. She is trying not to look at me. His sister is there too, and his father. They both nod frantically at me with straight lips, and mutter something. All of them are dressed up for a day out, dressed decently, but I hadn’t the sense or the wherewithal to borrow something.
The legal aid person told me she would meet me at nine thirty in the lobby. She turns up ten minutes late but it feels like a long time because of your daddy looking and looking and clearing his throat. She is a pear-shaped woman in a tight woollen trouser suit. She has a small, avian head and very fine, close-cut hair dyed canary yellow. She looks at my knees, and winces, and I know that I am all wrong. I am wearing a pale blue dress pilled from too much washing and a little stretched around the neckline from a year of your tugging. It is too short and shows my too-skinny arms, but I thought the blue dress was better than the red one.
‘Hi,’ she says, and shakes my hand briskly. She has a gravelly, smoker’s voice. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘How are you? Are you alright? You’ll be fine, just stay calm.’ She ushers me into a stairwell, and sits on a step. ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘Now, it’s not brilliant news because Friel is on today – he’s known as The Bull. He drinks and he’s not a big fan of young mothers, but he’s usually fair. Gruff, but he doesn’t make outrageous orders. Just don’t be crying or speaking out of turn. He doesn’t like hysterics. Make sure to show respect – that’s the main thing. Brush your hair before we go in. Brush it now while I’m speaking to you and put it up – here, I have a bobbin – my daughter’s. Right, so the father is taking you for custody and access, is it? Don’t mind the custody, we’ll contest that. We should put in for maintenance. I see you haven’t done that. Did no one tell you to do that? Not to worry. You just relax now. But you’re giving him guardianship I assume? There’s no point refusing, he’ll get it anyway. If his name is on the birth cert he’ll get it. This child has the father’s name – yes?’
She opens a briefcase on her lap and there is nothing in it but the court summons, and an A4 pad, and a biro. She puts the case on the floor, pulls a foot onto her thigh, and rests the pad on her bent leg – ‘Okay, so tell me quickly – what’s the story?’
I begin with Christmas, and she says, ‘No, go back. Go back.’ I go back to your birth and she says, ‘No, go back to the beginning. Where did you meet the father?’ I go back to Freshers’ week. I didn’t like him, to be honest, but he was persistent. I had forgotten that. I am telling her about missing one of my exams – waiting for him outside the door of the exam hall with you pulling at my earrings, waiting and waiting because he said he would look after you while I sat the exam, but his phone was off, and he did not show. I am telling her the way he sneered when he came in that night, when a voice comes over the intercom. I can’t understand what it is saying. My solicitor holds up a finger to silence me – ‘Hang on,’ she says, ‘wait there. It’s the callover. I’ll be
back. Wait there.’
I am alone in the stairwell and I am afraid he will come in so I stay standing with my back against the wall. After a few minutes my solicitor comes back all a-fluster, tilting forward on the axis of her hips and tucking the briefcase under her arm. ‘Quick quick,’ she says, ‘we’re up.’
Your daddy is representing himself. This means he can interrogate me on the stand: he will put questions to me and I will have to answer him. Even though he put in the order, he asks to go first, and my solicitor concedes. Because he is representing himself, the judge must hear him out.
Until I threw him out, he says, he was your primary carer. I was in college. I was enrolled full time, and the college records to prove it. He says I gave you to him until he started seeing someone else and now I won’t let him take you. Before he began to see someone, I didn’t even want to have you for Christmas, he says, I made him take you for Christmas. He has a letter here to prove it, with twenty signatures at the end – people who saw him at Christmas, with his son.
‘She looks all innocent,’ says your daddy, ‘but your honour I can assure you the girl before you is—’ Judge Friel waves his hands to stop the pelt of rehearsed words. He assures your daddy that he is well aware that this country is crawling with black widows. Well aware, he says – it’s because of the constitution. He tells your daddy to save his breath, he is no eejit, he says, and he wasn’t born yesterday. He has seen enough in these rooms to know that they come in all shapes and sizes. He shouts then, tells me to stop making faces for him to see out of the corner of his eye and stop the crying; that it won’t do me any good.
Your daddy has a box of letters with him – letters I wrote to him apologising for being difficult, saying that I love him. ‘She admits to being irrational,’ he says, ‘on three occasions.’ ‘In one,’ he says, ‘in one of the letters she even admits to being depressed.’ He says I am unwell. He hopes I can get the help I need, he says, holding a shoe box towards the judge.
‘I’m not looking at these,’ says the judge. But he has heard.
‘And she wanted an abortion,’ your daddy says, ‘she didn’t want him. She wanted to kill him.’
When it is my turn on the stand your daddy says, ‘I put it to you that you are irrational,’ and ‘I put it to you that our son wants us to be together.’
I open my mouth to speak but I have a terrible voice, stuttering and strangled and unsure because I am afraid I might shriek. My solicitor makes eyes that I can’t read. The judge tells her to please deal with her client.
‘She is very nervous, your honour.’
‘I can see that. If she is old enough to be a mother then she is old enough to speak up. She will have to speak up if she expects me to listen to her. I am losing patience, I’ll tell you that now, counsel. As I’m sure you can appreciate, I have a lot of cases to get through before lunch.’
I once felt like a warm and powerful thing, because I am your mother, but now I know I am weak, my account all patchy and nuanced, my story a box of handwritten concessions and unspoken protests, and things I can’t recognize; things misshapen, discoloured, forgotten. I am not sure enough to find the words. I have not made lists of dates and I have no signatures.
That night I get a text message:
Are you happy now that you have cut our son in two? Someday he will know it is you who did this.
An hour later he sends another:
Someday he will see what you are.
Easter Sunday the springlight wakes you, and you smile and watch your hands above your face, catching hot geometries of sun as it slices through the gaps that frame and cleave our bedroom curtain.
I suppose to you our flat is a whole world, but to me it is a box. Sometimes it is such a small box and I need to get out. I can’t wait, so I change your nappy quickly, and dress you, and for breakfast I give you a flapjack in the buggy, instead of porridge. ‘Special treat my Pixie-Poddle,’ I say, ‘today is Easter.’ I put on a dress I haven’t worn since before you – pale yellow for spring. It brushes softly against my hips. I am pretty again.
‘Pwatty,’ you say. I don’t feel guilty about the flapjacks. I have put dried apricots in them, for the iron, and desiccated coconut instead of sugar. And in any case, I have to leave.
Once you are finished eating you writhe out of your buggy and we walk very slowly in the shadowy streets between tall buildings and out to the broad roads, the dormant water fountain, the light and sky of College Green. Grafton Street is almost empty; just some morning-after couples and the melancholy twang of a busker wrapping himself in his own low, clear sounds; stopping and starting; closing his eyes to locate the note where it is staggering somewhere in his voice, his fingers lax and effortlessly strumming, strumming regardless while you stand and watch him; your feet turned outwards and your belly pushing full sail before you. You tilt your head, your hands perched at your chest.
I am bewildered by the busker; I can’t understand how he can go on strumming, how he does not stop to marvel at you as you stand like that – how he is not struck by the miraculous detail with which you are made – the shocking blue of your eyes, your dimples – one in each cheek and one by your chin – and the funny way you clasp one finger now with all of your other hand – how he pretends not to notice it at all; refuses to be flattered by your rapture. I call, ‘Poddle on now, Baby, come on,’ and you start towards me and then stop. You turn and wave bye-bye to the busker by showing him your palm and opening and closing your fist.
Then you waddle up and demand to be carried, ‘Cawy Mama, cawy.’
It is slow, carrying you with one hand, and steering the buggy with the other, but there are no crowds to obstruct us as we make our way to the park.
For the ducks we have brought a batch of flapjacks that didn’t work out – too tough and dry for you – and you squeal and grin and stomp, press your sticky splayed fingers hard together, giddy with delight to see the mother duck dip and dive for the crumby lumps, her mustard-coloured babies twirling abstractedly about her, sniping occasionally at the water’s surface. We stay for a long time, even after the ducks have lost interest and I allow you to squat unnervingly close to the water and murk it with hard, dry oatflakes.
Afterwards we do a circuit of the park. You strap your car into the buggy, tucking him in cluckily. You push him slowly, the buggy tilted on its hind wheels, his two front tyres peering over the blanket, his headlights facing the sky. You put a finger up to your lips because your car has fallen asleep.
I let you throw ten one-cent coins into the fountain, and coax you back into your buggy with a carton of grape juice and your car, who wants a cuddle.
As we leave the park a man in a very crisp suit jacket, very tight, clean pants, spits at us. It lands on the back of my neck and when I turn to look at him, I see tight lips shrinking up off his teeth like they are melting from the sight of us. ‘Is that your kid?’ the man says, and for a moment I am going to answer. ‘Little slut, what age are you? A bastard isn’t it?’ he says. ‘It’s the likes of you that’s the problem. Fucking scrounger whores!’ As I walk away he shouts after us, ‘Dressed like a slut it’s no wonder you get knocked up at fifteen! Laundries were the right idea! At least you’d be of some use there!’
It doesn’t matter. I have wet-wipes under the buggy and I use one to clean his phlegm from my neck.
You fall asleep on the way home and are still asleep when we take the slow, smelly lift up to our flat. Hidden around our flat – on our bookshelf, in your box of blocks, under the mugs and behind the spider plant – are twenty tiny chocolate eggs wrapped in brightly coloured foil. When you wake we will hunt for them together. We can have ten each.
I unlock the door, push it with my back, heaving the buggy in after me. While you sleep I try to read but can’t sit still. I walk around the small space with bleach-spray and a cloth and check on all the glinting little eggs. I cannot look at you. I cannot bear the lovely rhythm of your sleep, the smooth and shallow lift and sigh and
the bigger, rutted inhalation then, followed by the long, easy current of your breath: your wet, slack lips; your eyelashes casting dark wings on the curves of your cheeks. I can’t look because I know it is still here – the debt – lurking in the too-clean light and the dustless corners, waiting.
*
Every weekend I file documents in a warehouse. I file them alphabetically. I earn just the right amount – low enough to keep the single mother’s allowance; high enough to buy you the leather first shoes instead of the polyester ones. The warehouse is high-ceilinged and unheated and there are two other temps there, boys my age, filing in different parts of the building. The stuff on the floor is like brushed card and worn felt and it burns if I move around on my knees between the boxes. One of the boys fancies me, I think, even though I have you and I have said so. But I suppose he cannot understand what that means; how silly things like sex are now, how beside-the-point, and cinema dates, and banter, and how it is a relief not to feel hands on my throat at night and tendrils winding around my tongue.
We file all day and with each hour that passes, I calculate what I have earned and what I will use it for: the gas bill; that jigsaw; free-range eggs. The boy gazes at me a lot over his filing cabinet. He is bored, but also he has notions. He has rust-coloured hair and sweet, rust-coloured eyes and when he looks I am aware of the way my face moves as I file; I am afraid that my thoughts move over my face, and I wish he would not look. From his eyes I think he sees a girl who is fragile, closed and fidgety, but that’s not how I feel at all. I feel dangerous, tentacled, with blurring edges.