Some Girls' Mothers

by Anne Caldwell

  I started knitting little rainbow clothes for next door’s baby. I liked the way I could follow a secret code and bring something into being. A bright body, stripy arms, different coloured legs. All I needed was the head and the hands and the heart and the feet.

  Anna said, ‘It’s not yours, you know.’

  Anna said, ‘We hardly know them.’

  She said, ‘You’re making a fool of yourself.’

  When the baby was born I watched the mother secretly from an upstairs window; she walked up and down the garden in the stretched-out evening drinking sharp, clear water and holding a tiny, snuffling thing against her body. I thought about Anna and about my weakness, about my unfathomable capacity for suffering, about my endless reaching out to the blunt saw of Anna’s rage.

  I knew my daughter had a secret plan, a way to pull me out of sadness with her soft and willing body, with her helpless, needy urgency but I did not, I could not allow her to come. Instead, I went everywhere holding her imaginary hand. At night, I turned away from Anna so that I could hold my daughter against me. I slept in my clothes – I couldn’t bear to get undressed. I couldn’t look at that stomach, flat and hard as concrete, tiny, citrus breasts, everything sparse and unused.

  I bought magazines called Your Baby and Mother and Child and Pregnancy and Birth. I liked the conspiratorial smile of the shop assistants. I looked at the pictures, guiltily; there were women sailing up to heaven like hot air balloons, babies scoured clean wearing turquoise contact lenses smiling, smiling. The lists of instructions and equipment for the newborn appealed to the part of me that fills a rucksack with self-sufficiency and goes off into the wilds. I should have been a solitary pioneer, slinging my daughter on my back, sleeping in a hut on the side of a fell. I could shoot grouse and ford the rivers. We would be warm with unimaginable love on the cold ridges. My daughter would be like herself in form and spirit and no one would take her away.

  Eventually Anna said I could have a child. If I must.

  She said, ‘But I want nothing to do with it.’

  I couldn’t do it alone. I was afraid. What if she came, not as a baby, but as a three year old with my sister’s wild hair, strong and mouthy so that I was afraid of her – that soft, clean mouth really a chasm I would disappear into? What if her hands clutched and clung, her legs astride my back (more leg, more whip!) going around in circles in a small room whilst she threw back bottles of ink and vomited on my notebooks, ate the floorboards and windows, laughing through mouthfuls of splinters?

  Maybe I would want my daughter stuffed and upright, dressed in a replica Victorian dress, blinking from the shelf saying do it to me Mummy, shape me and when I looked at her face through my skin it was my mother’s. What if I pulled my own heart out through my mouth and there was no blood or milk or words left.

  I started to live in my dreams; there was my friend Sonia, waiting to meet me. I was still a child but about to give birth and she came towards me with a red blanket and a shopping trolley there there she said there there.

  I don’t know why she said it; after all it was her baby in the tiny white coffin, her city I travelled to, her motorway you could hear from the garden of remembrance. I remember the swollen river, the budding trees, a tightness to the air and the photo of the baby tiny and bruised as if it had been wrung out and flung into a corner.

  She tried to put the blanket around me, but I didn’t want to be touched, I wanted my body to consist only of the soles of my feet. I walked with her in the back alley and she touched my stomach and said I’ll take good care of her, I was a midwife in a past life and I agreed with her, I hated the baby, I wanted to hand it over, I wanted it gone.

  When I woke up I thought of my mother, hugely pregnant with my sister, keeping to the house and eating crates of oranges, putting her swollen feet up on the table. I remember sitting on the stairs in the night, under my father’s copy of Guernica, listening to her crying and the grassy breathing of my brother and sisters, wondering what was going to happen to her, what was going to come out and where from? The pregnancy did something to her; she thought in random words – plasticine, fist, animal, doorway. Would I recognise myself like that, brainless, wordless as if I’d covered myself in another’s flesh, would I recognise the head as it came from the darkness into the blazing red sunlight of my thighs?

  I gave up sleeping and wrote all night in the bathroom – the truth, I think, but as soon as the words were written down I forgot them. Every morning there was a vision in the garden – 5.23am every day; sometimes my daughter reaching for my hands, sometimes her body hanging from the washing line. I started to believe that she would come to me accidentally, if I concentrated hard enough – I would see the blue line, I would be like those other women who knew about love, who were miraculous. I wondered if I could fall for a man and practised it in writing.

  It was Anna who broke the spell. She went sneaking under my bed, scratching around with her crow’s claws, picking through my notebooks and magazines with her scraggy black beak, screeching at me later in the long, narrow kitchen as I was filling jam jars with cut flowers. I didn’t like the words she was throwing at me: sick, sad, mental, mad.

  All I wanted was some time to look for the truth, some truth, any kind of truth. I wanted to scrape off my skin and find another.

  Anna said, ‘You’ve got a week to find some sanity.’

  She said, ‘ You selfish, hard-faced cow.’

  I packed the car and I ran.

  *

  The youth hostel is an old farmhouse with no electricity. There is no one else there, no warden, you have to fend for yourself. Last night I built a fire and fetched a camp bed from the dormitory and lay awake in the firelight with darkness coming out of the walls. I thought of the darkness my daughter would have come from – my own fat, red, muscular darkness, blind and boneless, a lonely cavern in which she would have shaped herself, constantly dividing, constantly put back together, weird little water creature, strong as rubber. Outside it was light and misty, a bird was wheezing in the eaves like a sick child.

  Not a soul for five days! My mind recognises only circles the past has fallen through. I come scraping and sliding down the bank to the river following the blue promise of a kingfisher. There is no path here; I walk my boots along under water like a dipper, one foot singing of ecstasy, the other of despair. Look at my hands, one holding death, the other a cord. The trees meet overhead and tunnel me. I will never go back, never.

  I can wish my daughter well, now that she’s gone back to the wormhole, now that she’s gone running down to the foggy beach. We are perfect, she and I, for she has not insinuated her way into flesh, she does not have the cord around her neck or the placenta like a plate of meat before her, stopping up the tunnel of air. She has not been pushed out onto cheap carpet, her nose in the ash and dog hair. She doesn’t have to know me, she will not be put aside, handed around, thrown down, smacked on the back of the legs shouted at with false logic, clouted round the back of the head, made fun of, burdened with secrets.

  I walk to the edge of the gorge and heave out the great, pulsating emptiness in me; I had not expected it to be so bright, like a glass womb. I swing it backwards and forwards like a birthday child and over it goes down to the trees and bracken and moss to where it all begins. I am willing to step over the edge if that is what it takes but, instead, I think about daybreak, the time when the words come so fast I can hardly write them down, when I am giddy with the light. I walk away backwards. I walk away.

  I follow an ancient path to a church on the side of the hill, the rain blowing across like muslin. Out of the weather, a stone font, a floor of rushes and herbs where I sit with this barrenness, I am soaked and battered and still alive. I will not go to the leper’s window to stand tiptoed on the slab that holds the dead down; I know that my daughter could never be free of me, my heart full of incomprehensible pain, veins full of poison. I think she will forgive me.

  From the churchyard I go, up the slopes o
f Tal y Fan like a starved horse.

  I have a little stone, a smooth grey, egg-shaped stone I hold up to the sky as the wind knocks me over. I listen to the larks and a siren miles away on the coast road. There is a new, clear, singing space in my body; I will not be on the side of endings. I will retreat like a deer into the wood, lay down in the leaves and make little huffs of hot breath in the damp air, little scratches in the earth with a sharpened stick. I will wait for the wind to blow the door open, for something to come in like a bursting of heaven.

  Mother

  Clare Shaw

  I used to hide my head in her lap – the smell of nylon and warm herring – and listen to the foreign language of adult conversation, the coos and clucks and ooo Margarets. Sometimes she would stroke my head, her huge hands suddenly gentle. Each day began in the crumpled hollow of her bed, the rain like peas in a can, shaken. Each day ended with prayers sung in a voice as thin as a sharpened E-string. This is the way of life till the world be done. Aah-men.

  *

  I came out to my mother when I was seventeen. One Christmas, some unlucky person bought my father a board game called Taboo. This made a fun activity of presenting players with a series of moral dilemmas and evaluating their responses. My father had a violent reaction to the experience of being evaluated, so we took the game home. One of the dilemmas was, ‘Your sixteen-year-old daughter tells you that she is a lesbian. How do you react?’ I tried it out on my mother who stated that she would inform the daughter that she was simply going through a phase and would get better soon.

  By seventeen I’d been cutting myself for years. I’d stay up into the early hours watching Prisoner Cell Block H and slicing my wrists with a thin Bic razor. The same people who told me that fire was hot had told me that being gay was sinful, perverted, unacceptable. Of course I believed it to be true about myself.

  But my mother did not reject me. I did not go to school with bruises on my face. I lived at home and stayed up late painting pictures of Kate Bush on my bedroom walls and a mural reading I am what I am. I was the youngest of six and the last to move out. My father left and remarried when I was four, after which my mother raised me single-handedly. I preferred it that way. I liked the unobstructed access I had to my mother, when she wasn’t working. I loved her visibly, physically. I’d hold my hand inches from my mother’s face and beam love at her and she could feel it.

  My mother’s hands were glazed with hard work and smelt of onions, strong as a hinge. For each of my first fifteen summers, we picked bilberries near Chipping where the moors swang away from us in purple curves and water bubbled rustily from the peat. Where the sky was warm and massive and noisy with bracken and the smell of heather, with the far birds and the sheep calling. I slept with my head on my mother’s lap and I wandered and found broken bottles in ruins where families sat round old fireplaces now open to the electric sky, and I always came back to her and she was always there.

  Then one day after we’d been shopping I hugged her as we sat in the car outside the house and she said, ‘We’d better stop or people might think we’re lezzies.’

  By eighteen, the phase wasn’t going away. My girlfriend, Dawn, was allowed to stay over sometimes in the other bedroom. Mum didn’t like her. Not only was she a lesbian, she was also unemployed. Mum and I didn’t talk so much any more and we didn’t hug. I was offered a place at university and moved in with Dawn. Mum bought me a set of red towels.

  The summer I left, things weren’t good. Mum was angry with me for holding hands with Dawn in public. Me, I was just angry. We argued constantly about the absolute rightness or wrongness of property, apartheid, the stud in my nose. About the fact that gay people should never have children, because ‘just think how they’d be bullied at school’. Mum dropped me off at the university. I looked back at her standing alone by her car. When I visited two weeks later, she’d stripped my bedroom and painted over Kate Bush and the mural. It took six coats of white paint.

  *

  Five in the morning, my heart echoing loud in the mattress. Hotel room in Ronda, a smell of thorn and rosemary through the windows. Nearby is the gorge where the anarchists were pushed from the bridge and you can still imagine it if you are of the right character which I am, morbid as anything, and it’s five in the morning and I should wait. Should go back to sleep but I can’t because my blood is multiplying and pushing out from my brains and my heart is a crowded disco with the lights turned out and my stomach is the inside of a lawnmower. My pulse is hammering into the mattress as loud as the café downstairs and the regular rattling roar of the coffee machine which nobody minds because this is Spain, but now it’s five in the morning and silent and no one’s around except the nuns baking madeleines across the road and the caged birds in the small park crying.

  Five past five in the morning and my fingers are discoursing with each other on the nature of reality, on the texture of dust. I am spelling out my name repeatedly with my fingers, recalling car registrations, telephone numbers, making everything add up to integers of five, making everything neat. I should go back to sleep until the hour is more daytime and there’s coffee which I can’t drink because it reduces fertility which makes me think of trees and sacks of compost and apples and women in canvas hats and not of myself who is most likely made of dead wood and things gone sour. Last night I had four beers – there seemed little point refusing, my breasts already swollen and sore, my stomach rounded with fluid, the red-hot iron of my womb cramping and ready to wring itself out. I could do with a coffee but my heart is as quick as a squirrel’s and already it’s ten past five.

  I touch myself and draw my fingers over the white sheet and look for the stain but there isn’t any and my heart is hammering and I’m telling myself to be realistic for God’s sake, there’s a limit to what sperm can achieve especially when it’s left in a pot by the sink in a single hotel room in London at 9am and the morning telly’s on and the room smells of sweat and it’s the wrong date entirely but you might as well try. I’m telling myself there’s a limit to what a body can do when it’s been starved and unhappy and anyway I’m Catholic and once I’ve gone back to sleep and woken up again we can have breakfast and maybe visit a gallery. My girlfriend is soundly asleep beside me and her t-shirt is grey and thin and it’s five-fifteen by the light of my phone.

  I’ve done this before, I’ve crept to a toilet in the total absence of light and pissed on a stick that told me nothing good was ever going to happen. I’ve waited on stairs, in waiting rooms, I’ve talked to strangers I have absolutely nothing in common with and for three years I’ve tried not to hope. Instead there was disappointment so complete it was a deep wood where the sun does not reach, I got lost there. I could not find the way out. It’s twenty past five, I touch myself once more and again there is no stain.

  The peacocks keep calling and beyond the railings, the mountains where the rocks are cool, and the dew and the pine cones are dropping. Of course there is no life inside me, no cluster of cells like spawn, no spark, no ragged ball tumbling through dark tubes to a universe of deep red light. But still my heart keeps on hammering and my mind will not listen to itself talking sense but continues to insist.

  I pull back the sheet and creep to the bathroom over the floorboards, over the cool tiled floor. Helen sleeps on and it’s twenty-five past five and I’m doing it to prove there is nothing to believe in, I’m doing it so I can go back to sleep, I’m doing it to put an end to this and anyway I need a piss. Outside a car passes and a lorry sighs, somewhere a shutter rolls open; a room smells of wood, soap, sun. I close the bathroom door and turn the light on, look at myself hello stranger and sit down and piss and the stick comes up wet and I leave it and because it will tell me no in one minute, I pick up my book and read. Then I look at the stick and the one line tells me no.

  And something inside me sits down heavily, something inside me pulls on sensible clothes and looks at the weather and says ho hum. But now the ghost of a second line is shade by shade appear
ing and the room is beginning to swing, my hand is on the sink and my heart is a hundred people running fast on a hard road and the line is still getting darker.

  I think of texting my sister, how can I be alone for the next twenty seconds while the known world dissolves around me, while the bathroom walls peel back to landscapes I have never walked, where I am a different person entirely and my house falls down and all roads lead to somewhere new? I do not believe in God or in magic but this line is definitely getting darker and my heart is a riot, is crockery dropped, is every radio station speaking at once and by half past five the stick says maybe and I am watching planets spin off here in this small bathroom with the toothpaste and the shower cap. I am the first woman on this new earth, my feet on these first new mountains where the sun is breaking through red orange gold yes.

  It says yes it says yes it says yes.

  *

  You are the size of a large strawberry and around you, I am world. Quite literally. My belly is bedrock and all the night sky. And though you don’t know the feel of the breeze yet, I am rain and all of your weathers. What light you have is through my skin. Now you have ears, I am a country in progress around them. In me, strata are formed and exploded. I am river and the way all waters move.

  Soon, you will be the size of a lemon. And above you, I will be landscape where factories hum and small towns fume and votes are cast for the wrong kind of people. Small fruit, you are my mineral wealth and you will not be exploited. My heart is an industry that never shuts down. My bad knees are Atlas supporting the planet, and my hands are huge ships that will carry you sleeping, into the night, out into the starlit world.