by Elske Rahill
*
I carry the book in my rucksack. I know I have to burn or drown it but that is hard. Even if the story is all askew, there are bits of you in there all the same, and bits of me.
*
His access ends at six o’clock every Sunday evening. I wait outside his door and at exactly six he opens it and pushes you through in a buggy with huge tyres like an SUV. He watches me unstrap you and lift you into the hammockish buggy I have brought. Then he hands me an envelope with this week’s maintenance. On the back he has written:
€30.00 as decreed by the powers that be. To be spent on my son not on nail polish or coffee with friends.
You are always blank-faced at the handover; eyes staring steadily at your knees. I kiss you as I strap you in. I won’t expect you to speak until the morning. The mediator said it’s normal – some children even get pains in their tummies and cramps in their legs and so on but it’s all psychosomatic, she said; parents should not be manipulated by such performances. ‘Kids are very adaptable, they grow out of it.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘I only wish the mothers would do the same.’
You are wearing the clothes I dressed you in on Friday morning – everything down to your socks. Last week he sent me a text message explaining why this is. It is because the first thing he does when I hand you over is strip you down and put ‘Daddy clothes’ on you instead; the last thing he does is put the ‘Stinky mummy clothes’ back on you. He says they smell like council flat.
We take the bus home. Your buggy folds against my knee like an umbrella, and you sit quietly beside me, holding one finger with the fist of your other hand. I look out the window, knitting. I am trying to give you space, like the mediator said. It’s a hat for you for the winter. I can knit without looking because this bit is all the same – just round and round and round for four inches.
You pull yourself up, standing on the seat with one arm hugging the headrest, wobbling with the bus. You put the other hand on my chin and pull my face around to look at you.
‘Smile to me Mama,’ you say. ‘I am your little boy, smile to me.’
You use both hands now to mould my face into a smile, pushing up the corners of my mouth. ‘Like that,’ you say. ‘Keep like that.’
*
My college tutor calls me in to discuss the exam results. You are asleep in the buggy and I park you in the hall and leave his office door ajar in case you wake or someone tries to steal you.
He has a long, tea-coloured face with such kind lines on it that I feel ashamed for failing him after all he did for me during the morning sickness months. He even gave me ginger nuts from his wife.
Yes, he says, they are disappointing results – maybe it was too soon to come back? I explain about missing two papers. I could repeat but I don’t think the grant will cover it; I would have to pay and I don’t know if it is possible. He has spoken to his wife about me, he says; his wife thinks the college has failed me.
‘Oh no,’ I say. I mean it, and oh, it is good to hear my own voice again, honest and reassuring. ‘The college has been very nice; very patient. I don’t know what else they could have done. You have been so supportive, really.’
‘Well look, let’s appeal,’ he says. ‘Go to the college counsellor, say you were depressed or overwhelmed – whatever – you might have to exaggerate. Get me a psych report and I’ll make them waive repeat fees. Sorry, I think it’s the only way. Then take a year to figure things out; do try to come back. My wife is very adamant.’
*
Your second Halloween falls on a Wednesday and your daddy wants you for the day. I say okay, the day but not the night. I arrive to collect you at 5 p.m. and it is already dark outside. He opens the door, wiping his hands on a tea towel. He steps back. ‘You will have to come in if you want him.’
There is music playing; a man with a guitar and a lovesick voice. There is a big bowl of marshmallow skulls on the coffee table, and another of bright jellies shaped like witch’s hats. A sheet of beads closes his kitchen from his living room, but they are tangled into a clump, so I can see through to the worktop where there is a single beer bottle with a wedge of lime stuffed into the neck, and a pumpkin with spilled guts.
‘I’m just carving the pumpkin,’ he says. ‘Would you like a drink?’
I shake my head and scan for you. Your daddy nods at one of two closed doors. ‘You will have to go and get him, if you want him.’
You are at the other side of the door. It must be your daddy’s bedroom, because the other room has a plaque on it saying ‘Bathroom’. There are other children in there with you. I can hear their voices, ‘Pow pow... Hoiyyyy–ya!’ but I can’t pick yours out.
The bedroom is warm. It smells of his sex, and of sleep and cologne and damp. The headboard is all curling black bars, and there is a leather belt fastened casually to it. The belt makes my throat taste of acid.
You are standing on the bed dressed in a Spider-Man costume. The costume has padding for muscles – a strap-on six-pack running up your torso, and big foam biceps. You are holding a balloon sword, standing with your feet splayed. There is a big lozenge of black painted across each eye and your cheeks are red with a fading mesh of webs over them.
Your cousins are there. One of them is hurling himself into a wall, falling, getting up and hurling himself at the wall again; ‘Hoiy-ya!’ he says, ‘Hoiy-ya!’
The smaller one is running in a circle saying, ‘Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw.’
You look at me, and then you turn your back, revealing a flimsy polyester sag, the heartbreaking flatness of your tiny bottom.
I say, ‘Hello my Pixie,’ and I cannot stop the smile, for any moment now I will hold you. Your cousins continue to run and crash and maybe you don’t hear me.
Your daddy is standing too close behind me. At my neck I can feel the cold beer on his breath.
‘He wants to stay with me for Halloween,’ he says. ‘He told me. Why don’t you come back for him tomorrow?’ He has a second beer in his hand. ‘Have a drink with me,’ he says, ‘before you go.’
I take the beer, but I don’t drink.
‘Do you want lime?’
I shake my head and I open my mouth again to say your name but no sound comes – my mouth tastes of soil, as though my tongue is stuffed back with clay and sand and even breathing is impossible.
‘He had his dinner.’
I close my mouth and nod. I am not sure what expression my face makes but it causes him to roll his eyes.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a proper dinner... he had peas and carrots and potato.’ Then, as if he has just remembered, ‘Oh, by the way, you can expect a summons in the post. I’m appealing the order. I’m going for custody. I’m not sure you’re fit, to be honest. You can’t really look after him, can you? Temping part-time and living in that shithole? I’m asking for a psychiatrist’s report on you. I’ll be subpoenaing the college counsellors. It’s time I stood up for myself. I won’t be paying you any more either, for the privilege of seeing my son. I have a new solicitor. She thinks it’ll be easy enough to sort out.’
You are standing on the bed now, looking at me with all that facepaint blackening your eye sockets. Your daddy nods at the cousins, ‘How’re you girls?’ and the bigger one lunges at him like a little rhino, his shoulder bouldering forward.
‘I’m not a girl I’m not a girl I’m not a girl...’
Your daddy laughs, bending to protect his groin from the child’s fists. ‘Alright pal, okay.’
‘You’re a girl.’ The boy pummels his knees. ‘You’re a girl!’
You look at me, the sword hanging down at your side. I try to smile and I take a breath. I am going to say, ‘You want to stay with Daddy, Poddle?’ I am going to say it gently; no pressure. But your face is so dirty with that paint, your eyes so pale in the alien crescents that I don’t know what shape my face makes, and my voice – there is too much bubbling for too long in my chest, too much that is ugly and hateful, blood simmered to a thick and pungent me
tal, and when it comes my voice is a scratching sound, about to break into a fury shriek and so I swallow some beer and you keep looking at me.
Beside me, your daddy is looking too and smiling.
‘He’s two and a half,’ he says.
I nod.
‘It’s time you let go.’ His smile is tight and curling. He makes a little laugh sound – ‘Huh. Weird, isn’t it? Not even three years ago, I watched you give birth.’
I shrug and sip the beer. I think he has rehearsed this. I think that because of the stiff, unnatural little smile, the Hollywood twang in his voice, and the pretend laugh, like a cough – huh.
‘Do you know you shat yourself?’
I shake my head. ‘I think I would remember, if that had happened.’
His mouth lifts now into a big gleeful grin. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘Women forget. Once it’s all over, they forget. It’s proven. Science.’
Then there is a hissing sound; something cold and light on my face. I look up and it’s you, stern-faced stretching your little hand towards me in the Spider-Man hex – the two middle fingers folded down, pinkie and forefinger pointing. Fastened to your arm in a web-patterned wrist strap is a silver can. Streams of white silly-string come shooting from the can, but they slow as they approach, landing silently on my hair and tumbling into little squiggles on the carpet.
‘Mammy has boobies,’ you say. ‘Mammy has boobies.’
Your daddy laughs. ‘Ahhhhhh!’ he says. ‘Web fluid! No Spider-man, noooo!’
To me he says, ‘Lighten up, sourpuss. Is it a wonder he wants to stay with me?’
*
The arms are spinning you around and around. They are awkward, stiff, ungraceful arms, spindly and blank and efficient instruments. I cannot stop them but now I need to because – how did I never see it before? They are not wrapping you, but winding you back, peeling off the days and hours and moments that you are made from, undoing you down to where you started, and I know then. I remember then, the hinge of your conception, the pragmatic surrender-route that made you, the dull and shameful choice to hurry a thing to its conclusion, rather than resist the knuckle and thrust and neck-clamp of him. I still know it though I have tried to slide out of it, avoid the reckoning, spin a yarn and knit a tale.
Now my arms are still but nothing can stop the spindle, nothing but waking, and there is no name that will chase away the debt. It’s you, my darling. I see it now; the bargained chip, the straw of gold, the thing set going, the milk once spilled.
*
Now you are almost three and you have his words in your mouth and his name sewn into the collar of your coat. It is a one-way street; I never thought otherwise. Friday is when his weekend access starts. We meet in the park. I hold your hand as we cross the road, but when we get inside the park gates I let you run on alone.
Your daddy gets down on a knee and opens his arms, the way of returning fathers in family movies. You play your part – great baby grin between the dimpling cheeks – perhaps you have watched these movies together.
You stop and turn to wave, opening and closing your palm at me, before tottering on into his arms. You have a little knapsack on your back. Usually it contains only your favourite car, maybe some medicine, if you are ill, and your animal-shaped vitamins. This time I have put your vaccination book in too, and your passport.
Your life is a journey out of me.
I am sorry, please believe me my darling, I am sorry that I have added no explanation for you to read. I could not make the marks on the page for you. I could not set the letters out. I tried. All night I tried but I could not manage even to put your name down. There is nothing I can say, no language I can speak but screech and claw.
He has you now. A concept sprung cleanly from his voice; a man-born son. I have left no mark on you but a neat scar hidden in the dimple of your navel.
*
Up on deck there are dogs growing restless in their cages; barking and whimpering and howling in the sharp sea spray. A sign says to sit upright and look at the horizon, but by now it is too dark to see that fine discrepancy between water and sky, and up here the smell of diesel and the hound-cries make it worse. I prefer, anyway, to hunker down into the dark and sickly swell, down there in the belly-heave beneath the sea-line.
Through the heavy doors and into a toilet cubicle I lurch to kneel and vomit over and over. The toilets are clean, bleach-white, filled with a saccharine peach-scent smog that clings to the tongue with the burn and the bitter hurl from the dirty inside. I rest here, face to the porcelain seat; bleach and peach and pale vomit and bright bile.
I was never sick like this until you began, and so I almost like it – the endless stir and wrench, the acid weakness and, with every wave of nausea, some awe at the force of it, the crippling pull and retch. It is a keepsake from my time of making you.
I know I have slept because as I wake I am fantasizing about rocking home to death, drowning in a plunge of sea. It is only the cold that frightens me; the way it would trickle under the clothes and then spread through the tissue to the hot and blood-dark places as my heart slowed to a stop. Apart from the cold I think I might like it; the slosh and crash of water, the great to and fro, the pulse of the ocean fighting this ship like a parasite. I wonder what it was like for you; what you heard and what you knew as you stemmed out to flesh in the liquid crannies of me and if it sounded something as comforting and frightening and as mighty as this.
Now I will add the last of that story here. When I can stand and walk, I will bring this to the deck and toss it away into the sea; the bell that heralded your first change, your bracelet from the hospital, your sand-dull curl tied with a ribbon, and all my threadbare yarns.
In the ferry giftshop I bought another book for you. It is blank with a hard cover, powder blue to match your sex and lines for keeping my letters straight.
I will begin at the beginning and I will be clear this time. I will put your story in; dates and weights, perhaps, and your first word. Your first word. What was it? Will I put the ma ma ma of hunger? Was that a word? Or look? Or mine?
A Wife
After ‘A Mother’ (Dubliners), by James Joyce
GER, CHAIRPERSON OF the Gaelscoil na Cnoic Naofa Parents’ Committee, had been bustling about the clós and corridors for almost a month now, her head swivelling about doorways and her expansive round haunches stuck out behind her like an ostrich’s plumage. She held a clipboard and made vague enquiries and vague requests, pulling the laminated photograph out of her bum-bag and telling anyone who would listen about the Brides Again evening.
But at the end of the day, it was Kathleen who arranged things.
‘If you’re going to do it,’ Kathleen’s mother used to say, ‘do it right,’ and, to elaborate, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’ These, Kathleen thought, were the best pieces of advice her mother had ever given. She tried to teach her daughters the same thing, to drill it into them, so that they would come to expect it of themselves, so that they would be ashamed to be late or to only half do their homework.
When she was twenty-nine, Kathleen had married urgently out of practical good sense. She had spent her secondary school years at a convent boarding school. (She would have sent her own girls there too, only it was closing down next year.) Despite being a prefect, sporty, slim in her youth, despite having the resources and the taste to dress well and behave properly, and despite going to the races with the more popular crowd at school, Kathleen had never made any lasting friends there, and when the Leaving Cert was over and all the girls dispersed, she found herself alone. Some of the girls went to UCD, but Kathleen had taken an events management course at a private college. She was a good-looking girl back then, with champagne-blonde streaks through her copper hair and a high ponytail. She worked out twice a week at the gym and went for a swim every other day. The worst her enemies might say of her was that she could look a little insipid, if she didn’t highlight her hair regularly and colour her face in with ma
ke-up. But the few boys enrolled on the course were scrawny and unambitious, and she graduated at the age of twenty-two with only a handful of disappointing cinema dates behind her.
Still, she did not lose heart. Even if she could be pale sometimes, and her lips not very full, she was quite presentable. She knew how to dress and how to walk, she was never caught without well-manicured nails – things like that mattered in her line of work. Straight after college she found herself a good position at Party Pro, managing the corporate gigs. She was good at the job, and was given ever greater responsibilities. She liked the big events. She enjoyed wearing the name card around her neck, using the walkie-talkies, and co-ordinating people. She enjoyed her own fierce efficiency, and liked to say ‘imperative’. ‘It is imperative that everyone be in their places for seven...’ she would say, and ‘It is imperative that we have a team we can rely on!’ She began to make an effort with the men she met at work, but none of them was very impressive. Many tried to start something with her, but never with the sort of passion or adoration she had hoped for from a lover.
She began to worry that there was not, as she had been led to believe, someone for everyone. She soothed her bouts of panic by walking for a long time on the treadmill in the gym, her ponytail swishing reassuringly to the beat, and sometimes by eating large amounts of Turkish Delight in bed while watching TV. The intense romance she had once imagined looked less and less likely, as the fat began to gather at her hips and under her chin.
But, as her mother would say, Kathleen always had great get-up-and-go. When she heard that three of the girls from school were getting married that year – and had not invited her – Kathleen took great joy in surprising them all by sending out generous wedding invitations. She would marry Graham, an accountant at her father’s firm.