by Nicole Trope
‘One day, about two weeks after the screaming started, Keith’s mother came for a visit. She’s one of those women they call “earth mothers”. It’s like she was born to get pregnant and raise a large family. Keith has five siblings, three brothers and two sisters, and they all have kids. Nothing fazes Estelle. She bakes every day, just like she did when her kids were little, and when they were at school, she was always the class mother, and she helped with homework and sang while she did the dishes.’ Anna shakes her head. ‘It sounds ridiculous now when I say it, ridiculous that any mother could be so perfect, but it was the impression Keith gave me. He remembers this really idyllic childhood. According to him, his mother barely ever raised her voice. He and his siblings never fought, and the whole family just loved being with each other. They used to have game nights, where they all played Monopoly in teams, and they all went on holiday together for years and years, until the family was just too big. Like something out of a fucking sitcom . . . oops, I didn’t mean to swear.’
Anna can vividly remember her third date with Keith, where they trod the well-worn path of their childhoods. They were in an Italian restaurant, and still wanting to tell each other everything, still excited to share every thought and feeling they’d ever had. Anna had started talking about her mother; complaining, really. ‘It’s like I was never completely sure that she loved me,’ she told Keith. ‘Even now, I’ll call her to say hello and I’ll get the feeling that I’ve interrupted her doing something more important. Do you know what I mean?’ But Keith had no idea what she meant, and Anna could see that he was almost incredulous that she should ever question her mother’s love.
‘My mother calls me every day; sometimes twice a day,’ he said.
‘That’s sweet,’ said Anna because it had seemed sweet, and the more she learned about Keith’s family, the sweeter it became, and she had found herself imagining scenarios whereby she became part of this big, loving family, and she was surrounded by her own children and her nieces and nephews, and Christmas was always wonderful chaos. Marrying Keith, she realised years later, had been partly to facilitate her move into this big, perfect family.
‘Hope you’re ready for everything that comes with being part of this family,’ her sister-in-law Arla had said on the day of the wedding as she fussed over Anna’s veil.
‘Oh I am, I really am,’ Anna had replied and she was. It was what she wanted, what she had secretly dreamed of whenever she and her mother fought, whenever she was left wounded by something her mother said.
But Maya hadn’t fit into any of those happy-family scenarios. She was afraid of her cousins, or baffled by them, and they didn’t understand her screaming, or her spinning, or her monumental tantrums. Maya hit and kicked and bit into soft flesh.
‘You wouldn’t be the first person to swear in here, Anna,’ says Walt with a half-smile. Anna feels the urge to touch him again and wishes that she were Cynthia. She wishes that she could go home with Walt and just lie next to him.
‘I imagine not. This is such a strange little room. I wish there was a window we could open.’
‘Are you having trouble breathing?’ asks Walt.
‘No, I just feel . . . closed in. I suppose that’s the point of all of this but don’t you feel it as well?’
‘No, I’m used to it, I think.’
‘How long have you been a detective?’
‘Oh, about ten years now. I’ve seen and heard just about everything, so you can say whatever you want to say. Don’t worry about swearing or anything.’
‘Were you raised very differently to Keith, Anna?’ says Cynthia. ‘Sorry, Walt, I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
‘Different? Yes, it was different.’ Anna laughs a little, thinking about the word ‘different’. It wasn’t such a big word and it certainly didn’t seem big enough to describe the chasm that existed between her strained childhood and Keith’s idyllic one.
‘I think my mother found children a nuisance. My brother moved to Canada when he was eighteen and he’s still there today. It was only me and my brother but I always got the feeling that we were too much for her—that our noise and the mess we made, and the things we needed, were just too much.’
‘What made you think that?’ asks Walt. He leans back in his chair and puts his hands behind his head.
‘She made it pretty obvious. She would take to her bed for days sometimes. My father would come home from work, and my brother, Peter, and I would be sitting on the sofa in the dark, and I’d hear him sigh as he walked through the door because he knew it had been another one of those days.’
‘Why in the dark?’
‘Cynthia!’ says Walt and she bows her head a little. Anna knows that after this is over, she will be reprimanded for asking the wrong questions. Or maybe for asking too many questions.
‘Sorry, Walt. Sorry, Anna; you don’t have to answer.’
‘I don’t mind,’ says Anna and she finds that she really doesn’t. It’s been years since she has told anyone about herself, about her childhood, about her likes and dislikes. Nearly all her conversations with her husband, her few friends and her mother have revolved around Maya. Her needs have superseded every other thing in Anna’s life. ‘I haven’t told many people about my childhood,’ she says, trying to pinpoint the last time she talked about it. ‘Keith knows and Caro knows, but Keith never liked me to discuss it, especially after Maya was born, as though discussing my mother’s failures would somehow transfer them to me. I could never explain to him that becoming like my mother was my greatest fear and that I needed to talk about her all the time to avoid turning into her.’
‘If you hate her so much, if she was such a bad mother, then why do you still insist on seeing her? Cut her out of your life,’ Keith had said when Anna complained that her mother didn’t seem excited about her pregnancy.
‘I don’t want to cut her out of my life, Keith. I want her to be part of our lives, part of our child’s life. I want her to be a good grandmother.’
‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Keith. ‘You’ve said so yourself. She doesn’t like kids.’
‘Maybe she’ll like her grandkids.’
‘Please, Anna. We have my mother and she’s excited. Isn’t that enough?’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Anna. ‘It’s not.’
Anna realises that she’s trailed off again. She needs to concentrate.
‘Keith,’ she says now, ‘has a habit of hearing what he wants to hear. “That’s all in the past,” he would say whenever I brought it up, as though the past wasn’t something that needed to be discussed. Not my past, at least. His endless family camping stories are always on the agenda.’ Anna can hear the bitterness in her words and wonders if the detectives can hear it too.
‘My mother was a better grandmother than a mother,’ she continues,‘not that it took much for that to be the case. If I confronted her with something that happened when I was a child my mother would simply deny it rather than discuss it. Keith never wanted to talk about it and my mother pretended it hadn’t happened, so my childhood was something I tried not to think about, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. My mother was no advert for mothering but at least my brother and I are still alive. That’s not something I can claim as a mother.’
Anna stops talking, and looks up to see Walt and Cynthia staring at her. She has just rambled on and on without thinking. She hasn’t even answered the question.
‘It makes us seem weird, so I just don’t talk about it,’ Peter had said about their childhood, when Anna went to visit him before she and Keith got married.
‘It’s my last single-girl holiday,’ she had told him. ‘I’m meeting friends in Europe but I want to see you too.’
She had spent a week in Canada reconnecting with Peter. One night, over a few too many cocktails, they had started talking about their childhood and that was when he had told her that he never discussed it.
‘Lots of people have difficult childhoods, Pete; it’s not like
ours was the worst story you could imagine.’
‘I know,’ Peter had said, ‘but I always felt like she just wanted me gone, like she wanted me to be as far away as possible, because she could only love me when I didn’t need her.’
‘She does talk about you a lot now.’
‘Now she can love me the way she wants to—not the way I need, or needed, to be loved.’
Anna had always assumed that Peter had left for Canada because he yearned for adventure. She understood then that he could have lived in Australia and still been a ski instructor but had felt the need to place thousands of miles between him and his mother. It also explained his choice of a girlfriend—a loving, sweet girl named Judith, who taught kindergarten and gushed whenever she spoke about her students.
‘Um, sorry,’ she says. ‘I was talking about my mother. She used to rage at us before she went to her room. There would be days and weeks where everything was fine, just normal, and then one day she’d walk into one of our bedrooms, or into the living room, and she’d see a toy on the floor or—later—one of my books and she would just go . . . go insane. “You are monsters,” she’d scream, “you are blood-sucking monsters. You take and take and leave nothing for me. I tidy and I clean and for what? For what? I cannot stand the mess, the noise is too much. Every day I wish I’d never had you! Every day I regret it!” And then she would go to her room and lie down with the curtains closed, and Peter and I would just sit very still until my father came home. We thought that if we could be quiet enough when she was in one of her moods she would forget that she hated us, so we sat in the dark pretending that we weren’t there. It seemed to work because after a day or so she would come out of her bedroom and normal life would resume. If either Peter or I asked her if she was feeling better she would look at us like we were insane, ‘‘I haven’t been sick,’’ she would say.’
‘That must have been difficult,’ says Walt and Anna nods. She thinks that he must allow Cynthia to talk about everything to him. She can see him listening and empathising.
‘Yes, it was, but when I think about it now, I understand her frustration. Children take everything you have to give, don’t they?’
‘I . . . I guess some mothers feel that way,’ says Walt but he sounds like he doesn’t understand.
‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ thinks Anna. ‘Do you feel that way, Cynthia?’ she asks.
‘There are days when it feels like too much, but mostly that’s when I’m tired from work.’
‘Anna, I think we’re getting a little off topic here,’ says Walt.
‘Yes, you’re right. I’m . . . well, I’m not going to apologise again and I seem to have run out of tears at the moment. I was talking about Estelle. Keith had been telling her about Maya—well, complaining to her about Maya, I guess. He couldn’t cope with no sleep and then having to be at work all day long, which I understood, but I couldn’t cope either. I think that having Maya really freaked Keith out. She wasn’t what he had come to expect from his nieces and nephews. She wasn’t like anything we could even have imagined. The sleep deprivation got to both of us. It felt like we were slowly being annihilated, like everything we were was being destroyed. At least, I felt like that. All I thought about was sleep. I didn’t want to eat or go out or talk to anyone. I just wanted to sleep. I used to stand in the kitchen listening to Maya cry, and fantasise about cool sheets and a soft pillow.
‘At first, Keith didn’t even want to admit there was a problem and then he kept saying things like, “You know, Hannah’s kids slept through from six weeks,” and “Arla’s kids have never had sleep problems,” as though he could somehow shift the blame onto me. I think he didn’t want anyone messing with the picture in his head of what a family was like. I’m sure his family wasn’t really that perfect but Keith had a way of editing his own memories, so that it seemed like it was. Anyway, he must have asked Estelle to help because she was really good with babies. She’d kind of stayed away in the beginning, probably because she didn’t want to interfere.
‘One day she arrived at the house just as I had finally managed to get Maya to sleep and had actually managed to put her down as well. The bell woke her, obviously, and I opened the door to find Estelle. I had picked Maya up, and I was bouncing up and down like a lunatic, hoping that I could somehow get her to go back to sleep, and, of course, I was in tears already at nine in the morning. I spent a lot of time in tears those first few months.
‘“Well, this can’t go on,” she said, and took Maya from me and told me, “Go to your room and put a pair of earplugs in. Sleep, and I’ll hold her for as long as it takes.”
‘I wanted to tell her that I was fine, but I so clearly wasn’t. I handed Maya over, and went and lay down. Two hours later, Estelle woke me up. Maya was still screaming. I don’t know how I hadn’t heard her. I must have passed out, rather than just gone to sleep. “I can’t do anything with her,” she said and I could see that she was close to tears herself.
‘“It’s okay, I’ll take her now; thanks for trying,” I said and she left. She almost ran out of the door.’
‘Anna . . .’
‘No one could settle her,’ says Anna, ignoring the interruption as she remembers the look on Estelle’s face when she handed Maya back. It was a mixture of horror and confusion. Something spiteful in Anna had wanted to say, ‘welcome to my life! Not much time for baking and singing with this particular grandchild is there?’
While Anna had been able to quickly forget the pain of childbirth she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the exhaustion and despair of those early months with Maya. It feels like sleep deprivation has been written on her bones and she will never recover from it, like a person who has suffered from hypothermia and feels they will never truly be warm again.
Anna waits for Walt to interrupt her, but he doesn’t so she keeps talking. ‘The doctors could find nothing wrong. We had her tested for everything. We put her on medication for reflux, on sleep medication, on formula instead of breast milk and back again, but nothing worked. She reached all her milestones . . . you know, like sitting and crawling. She reached them right at the end of what doctors considered normal but she got there and, because of that, everyone thought it was just because she was a first child and I was a nervous mother. I think a lot of women get fobbed off like that because we have no idea. You can read every baby book on the planet and still be completely unprepared for actually having a baby.’
‘You are so right about that. I was a mess with my first one,’ says Cynthia, and Anna knows that she can stop now, that she should stop now. She’s explained it all sufficiently but she can’t seem to stop. The words keep pouring out of her mouth and she has no more control of them than if they were being said by someone else. Images of doctors’ offices appear in her mind, and she remembers that, after a while, the first thing she looked for was the magazines. Keith came with her to most appointments and if he was there, she could just sit and look at one. He loved being with Maya, despite the lack of sleep. When he held her, he seemed to tap into a reserve of strength and patience that Anna felt she had long been drained of. But then, he was at work all day and Anna was home, trapped in the house. Trapped with Maya.
‘Anyway, the screaming continued,’ she says, and a pained look flits briefly across Walt’s face but she goes on. ‘Some days it was worse—like the day it went for sixteen hours—and some days it was better, and she would sleep more and feed more and seem calmer, but it never really stopped. On good days, I’d be relieved that she had somehow managed to move out of her screaming phase, but then a day or two would pass and we’d have another bad day. She never slept for more than two or three hours at a time at night, even when she was six months old and all the books said she should be sleeping through. I thought I would never get a good night’s sleep ever again and then we got the present from America.’
‘From America?’ says Walt. He is doodling on the pad in front of him. ‘Pay attention,’ she wants to tell him. ‘This is my life we
’re talking about and you have to pay attention.’
‘Yes,’ she says aloud and then waits a moment until Walt looks up at her, ‘from one of Keith’s cousins. It was a late, late baby present and we had no idea what it was until Keith read the instructions. “What’s it for?” I said.
‘“I think it’s to help a baby sleep,” said Keith.
‘“Well, it won’t work on Maya,” I said. I was standing in the living room, bouncing Maya up and down. She was about seven months old then and getting quite heavy. She was screaming, just as she had been screaming all day long. I think she’d been awake for twelve hours straight and screaming for most of that time. I bounced, and jumped from leg to leg, and Keith and I shouted at each other to be heard above the noise. By then, we’d already had the police out once or twice. Oh God, I remember that . . . it was hilarious.’
‘Hilarious?’
‘Well, not really, but they ran away as fast as they could as well, once I explained and they saw Maya for themselves, they couldn’t get out of the house and away from the noise soon enough. I wanted to go with them . . . God, but I wanted to go with them. Everyone ran away from us then. So, Keith unwrapped this sleep machine and saw that it only had an American plug. “I’ve got a converter somewhere,” he yelled, and he spent the next twenty minutes looking for the thing, and then when he turned the machine on, it was on the loudest possible setting and this static noise screeched through the house. It was louder than Maya’s screams. “Sorry, sorry,” Keith said, “I’ll turn it down,” but as he went to do it, I realised why the noise was louder than Maya’s screams. She was quiet.
