by Alex Pheby
He leans across her, preceded by an invisible wave of clean eau de toilette, and beside the flowers he places her cigar, assuming, wrongly, that she will not smoke it if she has the boy with her. She picks it up and puts it between her teeth and he laughs because if she thinks she’s going to smoke it like that she’s got another think… it’s no cheap muck, this. He leans forward again, as if all this is a ruse to facilitate the bearing down on her when she has only a tissue’s thickness of cotton between them, and he takes it from her mouth.
From the same pocket out of which the cigars were drawn, he brings a tiny guillotine – the sort that, in the wrong hands, and with a dull rap from a mallet, can sever the little finger of a debtor – and he uses it for its sanctioned purpose: the removal of the end of a cigar. Then he passes it back to her, and even unlit when it is between her lips it tastes acrid. But isn’t that right? Things that are innocuous and pallid and pleasant are things of the old regime. She will burn out that world and fill it with white, billowing, pungent, purifying smoke.
—No, signor! No, signora!
The midwife. With the hand that is not under the returning daughter’s back and around, right-angled to hold a bottle to the mouth – sucked as if this is what was wanted all along – she takes the cigars from them: one, two.
He speaks in a stream of sounds both beautiful and indecipherable, and the midwife smiles at the end of it and passes the cigars back to him. She turns her attention to the mother, who must now stop her nonsense and minister earnestly to the daughter. There are mimes for drinking, and for burping, and then the midwife remembers that she has an ally and directs her instructions to him in words. He translates in an accent so broad that only his countrymen and countrywomen would understand him:
—The old sow wants to teach you to suck eggs. Smile at her and nod, and when she fucks off we can light up without any more bother.
So she smiles and nods and the woman does indeed disappear, as if he is now the magician: one with superior powers.
But, as they draw the cigars to their lips again, the boy is nagging and pulling and tugging at a bag she hasn’t seen as yet, and drawing the uncle’s attention away. Alright, little man, alright – there’s no point in tugging it by the ears, it’ll never come out of that little gap. You’ll need to unclasp the clasp, as it were.
He cannot do it with his pudgy fingers, but to the uncle it is the work of a second, and here is the boy, short at the side of the bed, and he reaches up, and in his hands is a pale, grey, stuffed rabbit. Its ears are unusually long and its whiskers are sewn to its face, but he is determined that she have it.
—For baby.
The mother takes it, and she lays it beside his sister who is in her arms and is making quick work of the contents of the bottle, draining past the marks etched into the glass: fluid drams, fluid ounces.
The gift delivered, the mother puts the cigar into her mouth and the uncle leans in once more, in his hand a lit match passes across the face of the son, and hovers above the face of the daughter.
When her mother breathes in, it lights the daughter’s face red in the glow.
No good, try again.
Her fists are balled, and she punches and kicks open-mouthed and wideeyed. Her attention is on you: all on you.
You must take the flannel like this and wet it. It is better if the water is warm – not hot – but cold will do. Ring it out – it is surprising how much water a flannel can contain.
Twisted, water flows – pints of it. If it is too cold, she will cry; if it is too hot, she will scald. The flannel should be damp and warm.
Begin with the feet; they will be only a little dirty, if dirty at all, but take care to clean between the toes.
She likes it.
And then the ankles… gently, gently!
There are folds at the knee – be careful of these: germs may gather – there you go. Also they can become sore if left wet, so perhaps consider a towel.
Return the flannel to the bowl. See? Very little dirt.
Now to this area, past the thighs and up. Gently. Between us, you must part the lips, especially when the diaper has been soiled. Infection can be transmitted internally. No need to shy away; we’re all girls together.
When that’s clean, back to the bowl and rinse.
Attend to the folds where flesh presses flesh – that is where pain begins, and invisible sores are the cause of most tears. A stitch in time… and mother can get her beauty sleep. Under the arms and across her neck, and behind the little ears.
Never put anything inside. The body has its ways, and you will damage soft tissues.
Very well. Yes.
We understand.
Yes.
Will she ever go to sleep? From the kitchen comes the muted sound of muted pleasure – doors closed, hands over mouths, laughing choked off. It’s no good though; laughter can’t be stifled like that. It just makes it worse. Better. They’re having a wonderful time, and this child is staring unblinking into the unlit room.
There are two choices. The first – anger – feels preferable, feels inevitable, but the mind knows it is counterproductive: no child was ever made to sleep through viciousness, and she’s too young to be intimidated into silence. So it has to be the second choice – love. Only, it’s hard to fake, and the clock is ticking. How long has it been? Half an hour?
The mother picks up the child, rests it against her chest so that its chin nestles into the crook of her neck and she supports it under the buttocks.
—Most terribly cold it was…
Can she understand the story, or is she still too little? She’ll understand something of it: the structure, the tone. She’ll understand that her mother is speaking to her. That will lull her, won’t it?
Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t, but in the other cot the boy is stirring. The mother moves back towards the door, away from him.
—Most terribly cold… She says it softly into her daughter’s ear, so softly that she isn’t quite sure she’s making the sounds, or that the sounds are louder than the child’s breathing, or that the clinking and snorting from the kitchen aren’t drowning them out. She shifts the girl up a little which prompts her thin warm hand to rest on the opposite shoulder for support.
— … it was…
The boy is waking. A mother knows when a child is waking, and this child is waking. When he sleeps, his mouth is open and the pillow is wet in the morning, but now he has brought his lips together and he has swallowed. Sleeping children do not swallow. They moan a little, sometimes whine, they can turn over in their beds, they can slip to the ground entirely and sleep on the floorboards, but they never swallow.
—Mamma…
A child can speak in his sleep, and it is important not to engage with him if you ever want him to go down. She moves back towards him silently, and makes to stroke his hair, but in doing so the daughter shifts a little and then sits up at the waist, unlocking her face from its place on the shoulder. As if she is replying to her brother, she makes a sound that he then recognises, and now his eyes are open and that’s it, the whole thing has gone to fuck.
The temptation to rage is very strong. If the place was bigger she’d give them both a slap, lock them at the top of the house, take the key, and let them cry it out until morning, but the place is not bigger. The place is cheap and claustrophobically small and filled with the sounds of men enjoying themselves while she has to do the fucking donkey work, and, though it would give her great satisfaction to make these two little shites understand how things are in the world, she bites it back. It’s the only way there will ever be an end to it.
—Come on now, you two, it’s time for sleep.
From the kitchen comes the sound of smashing glass and then, as if they are in a bar, a cheer. Both children turn to look, the little one suspiciously and the older one as if there is a party in the offing that he might be able to attend.
Are they taking the piss now? Are they trying to wind her up? Isn’t it
difficult enough without those idiots making it impossible?
—You stay here, the mother says. She puts the girl down so that she’s standing by the bed of the boy who is sitting up beneath his sheets, rubbing at his ear.
When she closes the door, it is suddenly very dark. They thought it was dark before, but the light had been coming in from the doorway, and their sleepy eyes had adjusted to it. Now it is dark properly and the girl starts to keen. The boy cannot see her, or can only see a patch of darkness that must be her, and when he reaches out she cannot see that he is reaching for her, and when his hand touches her waist she squeaks and jumps.
—It’s only me! he says.
She cannot speak, but she hears him, and grabs his arm. As if it is a rope thrown out to someone drowning, she pulls herself along until she reaches the bed, and then his other arm is there, and he grabs her and pulls her beneath the covers. She crushes him to her, as if he is her mother now.
—Mamma will be back soon, he says. She lies beside him, and though they can’t see a thing, they look towards where the door was.
Gradually, as they wait and watch, a rectangle appears there. At first they blink, as if it is an illusion brought on by their wishful thinking, but then, slowly, it becomes edged in pale yellow light, like the dawn arriving on the horizon.
—Shall I tell you a story? he says, but by that time she is asleep.
The box is tied with red ribbon, and though it once contained her shoes there’s no way she would recognise it with its small neat bow. Whatever labels it once had have been carefully steamed off and the stock marks from the warehouse erased with a rubber. The box is not the important part anyway, it’s what the box contains. Beneath the lid, wrapped in crumpled crepe paper, is a carved wooden doll, about six inches in length. It’s not noticeable, because it is so beautifully done, but it was originally a piece of broom handle, quite thick and varnished and scuffed, and the paints used were the kind that come in tiny tins. Enamels.
Her uncle had found the broom, broken in the street, and it had come to him then and there. He borrowed a saw from the concierge, and took his knife and began whittling that afternoon.
At first it didn’t seem as if it would work – some woods are good for carving, and some are too hard, or too brittle, and this didn’t seem like good wood since it kept splintering – but once he’d carved through to the pale core beneath the varnish it was softer, easier.
The image that had come to him was of a girl, her hands clasped in front of her waist, her legs together, standing on tiptoes. She had long hair that stopped halfway down her back and a dress to her knees, and all of this could be done within the confines of the handle since there was nothing in the design that stuck out. It was beyond his skills to join pieces of wood together, but, in all honesty, that didn’t occur to him anyway – to have her arms extended, or legs in a plié – sometimes an idea is fully formed, suggested by the materials available.
Once the basic shape was carved out – and this took several days – he realised his skills with the knife were limited and that he risked ruining what he had already done if he tried for too much detail, so he took what money he could spare and bought paints and a brush from a toy shop, thinking that he’d make up for any roughness with colour. If he’d had more experience, he would have known that he could mix red, green, blue and white to achieve most shades, but instead he picked a pink for the flesh, black for the hair and blue for the dress.
The painting was more difficult than he’d hoped, because it was hard to hold the doll and apply the brush without getting finger marks and smears over everything. He painted and removed the colours three or four times for this reason, which meant buying turpentine, which made his hands smell, and they all asked him what the odd odour was whenever he went in for his meals.
The solution came to him as Christmas was nearly on them, and he had almost given up – a scruffy piece of broom handle was not going to do the job at all, worse than useless – so when he thought of it he ran out and begged a nail from the concierge. Because the toes were pointed, he couldn’t put it in there and though it seemed wrong somehow, he hammered the nail into the top of the doll’s head. By holding the nail and turning it, the doll rotated so that he could paint the dress and the face and the hair without his fingers smudging his work.
It dried on the day before Christmas, and he pencilled in the face and the fingers and the pleats in the dress. Into the hole that was left in the head of the doll he glued a bunched up piece of the ribbon that he had bought to wrap the box with, making a flower for the doll to wear in its hair.
The doll looks wonderful now, beneath the crepe paper, inside the box secured with red ribbon, and when she opens the gift on Christmas morning, and hears the touching story that explains its making, and sees all the effort to which her wonderful uncle has gone to please her, won’t she be happy and grateful?
What could be more natural than to be naked in the grass?
There are areas not far from Paris that are reachable by Sunday train, but which are still almost untroubled by the weekend exodus of the bourgeoisie who fan out in search of authentic peasant life, authentic peasant food, authentic peasant wine, and stories to tell their workmates on Monday mornings.
Certainly, these quiet places are not the most fashionable or the most convenient – they are sandwiched between wide tracts of farmland, often, and one must walk along the drainage channels away from the road to find them. On either side there will be maize at shoulder height, at head height, reaching up and blocking out the sun for a very long time, but this also ensures privacy, does it not? As long as one keeps an eye on the time, and leaves enough to return to the station before the last train is scheduled, everything is fine.
She comes out into a place even the farmer will forget until harvest, and there is a patch of stony ground that has become overgrown with weeds, and then dandelions and reeds, and then trees lining a stream. Here she slips her dress off over her head and folds it neatly, laying her socks and knickers on top of it, and then places the whole pile on top of her shoes.
Last she takes off her wristwatch.
It looks as if she has evaporated away, leaving her clothes behind, and she feels that she has. While she toes her way to the bank the elastic marks on her hips and ankles fade to nothing, and she becomes the kind of animal that is not called upon to wear clothes at all, to cover herself up. Once – it was shortly before her birthday, not long ago – she saw on the other side of the stream a horse, or it saw her, and it seemed as if her nakedness put the creature at its ease. It carried on eating at least, grazing the stems of some plant her grandmother might have recognised, but which she didn’t know the name of in French, Italian, German or English. She crouched down, her hands on the red clay between her knees, her gaze resting on the creature’s flank, and it didn’t take any notice of her.
This lasted long enough for her to take in every detail, and because she was a romantic girl she felt a kind of sisterhood with this horse, something that lasted all the walk back through the farmland, back on the train, and all the way home.
Would it be so bad to be an animal like this? To live in the forest? To eat only grass?
The horse had left in the end, startled by the barking of a dog out of sight, but the girl lay in bed that night and imagined what it might be like never to be dressed again.
The garden is wet from the morning’s dew… or is dew from the night? The sun is scarcely risen, but these are the kind of things that you see now you have a child. An infant’s internal clock is unable to synchronise itself to the working day, and your daughter desires experience of the world; she is undiluted in her enthusiasms by the quotidian demands of adulthood. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is wide and her teeth glisten like the drops of water on the garden furniture, which bead and swell on the green plastic.
The French doors click shut against the dog: he has mistaken your little outing as an invitation for a walk, despite the fact that you h
aven’t dressed. Now he stares up at you, panting condensation against the glass. What does a dog know of betrayal? What does it know of anything, except balls and sticks and the arses of other dogs?
You turn the key, though the dog doesn’t understand door handles either.
Your daughter is teetering across the patio like a stilt walker, legs stiff at the knee, heaving forward from the hips. She pauses when she reaches the steps and stoops, her hands fat against the dark concrete, white against the grit, knuckles folded against the steps, and she supports herself down the three stage mountain that gives onto the lawn: Vatican steps, a spiral staircase fire exit, then her bare feet on the grass.
She squeals and you involuntarily take a step forward. The hems of her pyjama trousers leach water, vaguely reminiscent of a chemistry experiment – a greyscale chromatography with water, cloth and the absence of water. You stop yourself from attending to her. She is safe. She wants to explore, and she should be allowed this small independence, this manageable consequence. Two minutes in the tumble dryer.
As she haltingly becomes further away, you purge your lungs of her sleep smells: the sweetness of a night full nappy, the sourness of breastmilk on her skin, the dense impenetrable musk of interrupted dreams. Those things warm the indoor air, but here in the garden everything is fresh. Fresher.
She is kneeling, patterning the knees to match the hems, and she has in her hands an earthworm: long and fat, pink and segmented, narrowing to points that seek and squirm. It encircles her wrist and she giggles in a way that brings to mind a drunk, or a dement – someone straight-jacketed and rocking, preoccupied with ideas she does not share with her doctors.
The dog is clawing at the doorway. He is frantic with love and yearning in that way that only dogs can unselfconsciously be. Keening. He pauses as if to re-establish that he truly is behind the door and not on the proper side of it. He pants, reassessing, as you stare at him, and when you return to looking at your daughter, you hear that he has understood that he was right all along and has resumed his digging at the threshold.
