If you’re going to get into Tantra, for instance, you have to consult a Tantric goddess, do seminars, read all the books, follow all the instructions, including those that make you hysterical.
Melancholy, I drove along Blues Point Road.
I suspected other people were better at living than me. Did others elbow their way through fog, rising out of it some days, relief blending with terror of its return?
Of course others did.
Maybe others fear silence, and absent punctuation too, for their own complicated reasons. Maybe, by a certain age, we have all encountered some impossible loss, or at least the accumulation of small sufferings.
During sad patches, you are expected to wrench, drag, extract, syphon, tweeze some happiness out. ‘Black dogs’ are what Winston Churchill called the sad patches, but dogs are too small. They’re elephants.
Oscar seemed pleased enough to see me.
As I signed him out, he began to tell me a funny story, and I drifted, half listening, aware that it was amusing only because he signalled this by interrupting himself to laugh.
‘And then Donatello fell down a pizza chute!’ he finished.
I laughed along. ‘So funny!’
Abruptly, he looked up at me: ‘Why?’
I decided to focus. Mindful parenting. Be in the moment with your child. It is not enough to murmur and chuckle: one must listen to the plot of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode that has been recited to my child by another child at day care.
‘How do you say the word bibblepop?’ he asked, as we drove home.
That was an easy one. ‘Bibblepop,’ I replied.
‘No, but how do you say it?’
‘Well, you just—you say it. It’s just . . . bibblepop.’
‘But how do you say it?’
‘Are you asking what it means?’
I hoped not. I had no clue.
‘No! How do you say it?’
We circled this for the rest of the trip.
Conversation, when done properly, is music.
Disjunctions, miscommunications, conversations at cross purposes, pretension, artifice, vicious jibes and, most especially, silence, all these things excoriate your soul.
At home, I considered dinner.
There were moths in the kitchen cupboards, in the pasta and the rice. Dead moths faced me, pressed flat against transparent plastic.
Meanwhile, ants crossed the kitchen sink. The smell of dead ants, the smell of dead moths, the sweet drops of Antkill that I dripped along the back of the sink. Intense excitement among the ants, a rush to these pools of deliciousness.
Remorseful, I tried to warn them: ‘Stay away! It’s poison!’
Oscar explained that, when you jump on a trampoline in the rain, you go higher.
‘You do?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘It’s because the rainwater bounces you up. It acts like a rocket booster.’
‘I see what you mean!’ I said, and then I saw why Oscar had misunderstood this phrase. I see what you mean is a phrase I use for: Interesting, darling, but you’re wrong.
My child won’t eat, my child refuses to bathe, my child is biting and hitting me, my child has been whining all day . . . But this pain doesn’t count—just you wait until the kid learns to drive and do drugs! You think one kid is hard? Try three! You brought this on yourself—like a hangover: you haven’t raised him properly, you haven’t used this technique, just say no, implement consequences, easy! Plus, they’ll grow out of it anyway.
As if the ‘real’ problems don’t have solutions too. Stop basing your decisions on profit margins. Stop selling guns. Stop flying your drones and your private jets. Stop stamping out your cigarettes on other people’s flesh. Let the lost and broken people into your big wealthy country. Let the children into their mother’s arms, stop with the shiny, plastic things. Toss these weapons into the garbage. Pop these frightened people into a warm house. It’s simple. Easy. Stop complaining.
I sliced up carrot and cucumber sticks, and sat down with Oscar to read him a story about a jester. ‘Move the couch so we can play Jester,’ Oscar commanded.
‘No, please . . .’ Because I really did not want to play Jester, it rolled through me, actual anguish, at the idea of playing Jester.
But I rallied: ‘Okay, yes, we can do it.’ I imagined that we would dance. And juggle!
But he wanted to be a jester-knight, it turned out, and fight with jousting sticks. He gave me the pink fairy wand as my jousting stick, and he used the candy cane.
Luckily, after a few minutes, he was ready to begin the story.
I looked down at his soft hair, soft cheeks and thought I could die of this exquisiteness.
The story got off to a good start. A young prince, it seemed, wanted to be a jester.
‘Have a carrot stick,’ I suggested, turning a page.
‘No thanks. Why did the prince want to be a jester?’
‘He just . . . it was his ambition.’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe he was funny?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t know. I’m speculating.’
‘Why was the prince funny?’
‘He just . . . some people are funny.’
‘Why?’
‘Some people are just—well, maybe he had a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous, a defiant turn of mind, a gift for physical comedy.’
‘How do you know?’
Partly, it’s the pointlessness. It’s imaginary! A story! There is no prince, no jester, no sense of humour!
Oscar was suddenly furious. But why? he shrieked. Why was the prince funny?
This small boy raging in my arms. Anger like a paintball pelted hard against a window, the multi-coloured paints streaking down the glass. Deep crimsons and purples streaking down the front of my mind, I can’t see for the—
I stood up.
‘Let’s go out for dinner!’ I said.
5.
It’s strange, isn’t it, how people love their children?
It’s a form of insanity. I was watching a mother at the table next to us in Maisy’s, as she gazed adoringly at her perfectly ordinary son, who looked to be about seven.
I feel sad for the mothers of seven-year-olds. Their generic children. No longer soft and sweet like my little five-year-old.
Yet this mother seemed so keen on her child! He was relishing his bolognaise and spilling some, and she was reaching over to dab it up, smiling at him as she did.
Does biology distort a mother’s vision, or clear her vision so she can truly see?
I mean, they’re a dime a dozen, children. I took Oscar to a Hi-5 concert once, children everywhere, like a generous sprinkling of ants in honey, and it struck me: children are a dime a dozen!
Nevertheless, Oscar swaying in time to the music (more or less), Oscar shout-whispering song names, pointing out ‘Kellie’ and ‘Kathleen’ (repeatedly, knowledgeably), Oscar was all the manna, all the treasure, the point to everything.
And I assume other parents see their children the same way. Mystifying.
We shared the nachos. Oscar had brought everyone along—a ping-pong ball, the digital watch again (new toys get frequent rotation), Optimus Prime, a pull-back-and-go Shrek on wheels—and everyone had Oscar’s attention.
This gave me time to draw conclusions.
*
Men speak in absolutes, women in uncertainties, and this often strikes us as a weakness in women, but it’s knowledge: a knowledge that we cannot know, not ever.
Oscar suggested that Shrek and the ping-pong ball could be my baddies, while the watch and Optimus Prime were his goodies.
‘No, no,’ I said, appalled, not physically capable of goodies and baddies. ‘Let’s eat our dinner.’
You hide behind a lamppost. You stand on a street corner: by the time we reach that lamppost, we’ll be warm. You hold his hand and run through winter streets in Montreal. You are all the blog posts, comments, status upda
tes, billboard posters, books, advice, lampposts you’ve ever read or seen. The swing flies through the air, and you are inside an orange, the juice and sticky pulp of it, the seeds.
Heaviness is only lightness in disguise, overdressed—
I looked across at Oscar, scooping up a corn chip, studying his toys. Clearing his throat quietly, and clearing it again. The watch lay on its face now, and the back had fallen off. Cheap trash.
But look at that beautiful face. How he picks up his water glass with both hands, his fingers curling around. Look at him studying his toys again, his little head a storm of images, of genies, lamps, Transformers, spaceships, robots, aeroplanes, fire at the end of a tunnel. Consider the wrench of the disconnect, the boredom, repetition, loneliness, the child not eating, the child not sleeping, the real despair, the real euphoria, both set firmly outside the real. The child is happiness inside a frame, framed happiness, but the weariness, the sweetness, his little nod—
The strangest expression crossed Oscar’s face.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
He stared at me. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Here,’ I said, suddenly needing to hold him, comfort him. ‘Let me pick you up.’ I stood, reached around the table, and he reached his hands to me. Then his arms fell to his side, and he gave a cry, such a curious cry, a dry, shrieking, furious cry. His face, now that I studied it, was white and crinkled with anger.
I gathered him up. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, calm and panic side by side.
I looked down at the table. The scattering of toys. The watch lying open.
‘What’s happened to the back of the watch?’ I asked. ‘Did you take it off, Oscar? With these little fingers?’ I curled his fingers open, and we both looked at his palms.
He cleared his throat, coughed, and scratched at his chest.
‘Oscar,’ I said.
I stared at the watch lying on the table. The watch burned my face.
‘Oscar,’ I said. ‘Where’s the watch battery?’
He started to cry. ‘Why are you mad at me?’
I looked on the floor. I lifted the plates, the glasses, the cutlery.
‘Oscar, the battery? Was the battery here? Did it fall out of the watch?’
‘What battery? What battery? Stop being mad at me!’
Had the back of the watch been missing this morning? When the watch came by to kill my rooftop baddie, had the watch been naked like this? I had no idea.
‘I’m not mad at you, darling. Was there a silver disc in the back of that watch?’
‘What’s a disc?’
‘A circle. Like a flat circle.’
‘Why are you mad at me?’
‘I’m not mad! It’s fine! Just tell me. Do you remember seeing it? Was it here right now?’
He cried again.
I made my voice bright. ‘I just need to know. I’m not mad at you. I just want to know if maybe you ate the battery! You didn’t eat it, did you? A little silver circle? Did you think to yourself: Yum! This must be chocolate!’
‘No.’
My face calmed. My heart slowed.
‘I didn’t think, This must be chocolate. I thinked, I’ll just eat this now.’
‘You ate the silver circle?’
‘Yes.’
‘When? Just now?’
‘On the other day.’
‘Do you mean this morning, Oscar? Did you eat it this morning at breakfast? Or do you mean yesterday? Which do you mean?’
‘Yes,’ he said. His nod.
part
15
1.
A complete memory presented itself: a paediatric ENT surgeon named Lera with a strange and careful stride, walking beside me on an island in Bass Strait: The button batteries. Kids swallow them. They stick them up their noses. They’ll burn a kid’s oesophagus irreparably.
I swooped everybody into my handbag. Everybody spilled and trailed behind me. Oscar, meanwhile, juddered in my arm, swinging with me this way and that as I negotiated chairs, tipped over a chair, left it lying, tossed a fifty-dollar note on the table, pushed open the door.
The waitress chased us up Military Road. ‘Your change!’
I was carrying Oscar on my hip. Striding. I ignored her.
‘Your change! Wait!’
‘That’s okay!’ I called back, grinning madly. ‘Keep it!’
Doggedly, she followed. ‘Excuse me! You’ve left way too much!’
‘Mummy!’ Oscar complained. People turned to stare. Me with the child in my arms. The waitress scurrying behind us.
Right away, they start burning through, those lithium batteries.
‘Your change!’ shouted the waitress.
There seemed nothing else to do. I stopped. She gave me the change.
The traffic lights opposite the post office are inconceivably slow. While we waited, a teenager beside me pulled the wrapping from a Magnum.
‘Can I have an ice-cream?’ Oscar suggested.
My arm was aching from the weight of him. I swivelled him around to my front, so both my arms could share his weight.
Did the button battery always get lodged in the oesophagus? Maybe it slid right down to his stomach? So then what? Was it floating around in there innocently? He probably didn’t even eat it. I probably just made him think he ate it, in my panic just now.
If he swallowed it yesterday, and nothing had happened, did that mean he was okay? Or was it slowly, steadily burning through his oesophagus, or his stomach, or his bowels?
I don’t understand chemistry, the human body, biology, life, or anything at all.
We crossed the road. I swung him onto my right hip.
‘I can walk,’ he said.
I clung to him more tightly.
My car was on Yeo Street. Here was my car.
Strange! It’s so strange, the fine film of life. You move around inside it then the horror burns a hole in the film.
You don’t believe it. You can stand at your car, searching for your car keys while the horror burns its hole. Fumble for your keys, transfixed by the burning, not believing it.
Vanished brothers, scowling husbands, and here it is again: my little boy has swallowed a lithium battery.
Or not. Or maybe not.
If we don’t get to them in time, the kid will die.
Was I supposed to call an ambulance?
I buckled him into his car seat. He wanted Shrek.
‘Not now,’ I said.
‘But I need him!’
Or never talk again. Never breathe on their own again.
But if he swallowed it yesterday, or even the day before, then time has already accumulated. Time is already here with us, sluggish and irrelevant, or rushing to a point.
And I’m rummaging in my handbag for Shrek.
‘Why are you smiling, Mummy?’
‘Shrek is not here, darling. I think we left Shrek at Maisy’s. Never mind!’
You still have to buckle your seatbelt. You still have to negotiate out of the tight car spot. Back a little, forward a little, back a little, forward a little, while your heart thrums faster than a glissando on the piano. You still have to indicate. Wait for cars to pass. You have to stop at red lights. Change lanes. You have to tackle the sudden blockage in your memory: How do I get to the Pacific Highway from here? Drag the geography of your neighbourhood into place again. Through Crows Nest. Drive through Crows Nest. The glissando smashes up and down your chest, a man’s large hands, knuckles over piano keys, flaring up, flaring down, while all the time, Oscar howls: ‘Go back for Shrek! Go back right now!’
I pulled up at emergency.
What were you supposed to do with your car?
I spilled myself out. Ordinary dusk here. Two orderlies chatting. A man with a briefcase hitched high beneath his arm.
A doctor walking through sliding doors, handbag over her shoulder.
Elegant posture, a curious gait.
I stood at Oscar’s open door, staring at the woman.
<
br /> Oscar cried quietly for Shrek. My child might be dying in the back seat of our car, or he might be perfectly all right. Meanwhile, I was staring at a woman with short, sharp hair, dark skin, reaching out each foot as she walked, as if to test the ground ahead of her. She walked right by me, I felt the breeze of her. She followed a path, around a curve, disappearing in shadows.
It wasn’t her, of course. I’d imagined her into being.
I pulled Oscar from his car seat. He was quiet now, listless after his tantrum, bored by it even, but perfectly well.
I would need my Medicare card. I would need . . . triage? I would need to convey the urgency of this situation without alarming Oscar, press through administration, despite Oscar seeming perfectly fine. Maybe he was perfectly fine. Maybe the battery was safely encased in some kind of harmless material? Maybe it was long gone. How much was I supposed to panic?
Somebody was approaching, a man in uniform, busy, efficient, grinning at Oscar, curious, detached, but with a kindly face.
And then a different kind of horror, more like astonishment.
Because it had been her. Or anyway, it could have been her.
‘She lives in Crows Nest,’ I said. ‘She could easily work here!’
The man smiled and tilted his head.
I was pointing at the corner. ‘Lera?’ I called. ‘Lera!’
The man rocked back, but I bellowed, ‘LERA!’
She was there again, the woman, coming back around the corner, peering at me.
‘Is it her?’ I said.
The air was full of patterns now. Oscar, in my arms, looked up at me, perplexed. His hair tickled my face. The air was clustered with crystals. I couldn’t see the woman’s face for the patterns. I reached out to scrape these away, the cobweb tracings, icicle networks, but my hands were scooping at nothing.
She walked towards me, pushing through the muddled strands. One foot, the next, one foot, the next, her handbag swinging. Keys in her hands, I saw now.
‘Abigail!’ she said.
It was Lera. She remembered me.
Gravity Is the Thing Page 34
