thirty
You never went back for the exams. You were too sick. You emailed the department, and your tutor. They were very nice about it. You needed a letter from the doctor confirming that you were pregnant. They said you could sit the exams in September. You stay home and avoid your mammy, who loves the idea of herself as mother to an underage mother. Even though you are not underage. Even though she was this age when you were born. Things are just different now.
Your sisters mind you. They bring you soup and run tepid baths for you and guard you from your mammy. You vomit alone every morning into the toilet. At night you vomit into a ceramic mixing bowl with blue, hand-painted daisies on the rim. You turn off your mobile phone and do not contact anyone. In the afternoons you go for long walks. Your mother comes home every day with shopping bags full of baby clothes. She doesn’t know yet that your daddy has bought you a flat near college, and that this pregnancy does not bind you to her in the way she might think.
It doesn’t show for a long time. As long as it doesn’t show you see no need to call Oisín. You don’t break up with him. You just don’t call or take calls. You don’t reply to emails. It’s not his body that’s doing this, it’s not his body that knows this child. Until it becomes something he can know, something with words, there is no way of telling him. He has no way of understanding.
You know how he would put his hand on your body, like he owned you both now, the way he might press his fingers on your throat at night, driving into you, put his mouth over yours and drink the voice out of you.
Only you can feel the first movements. You feel them earlier than the books said you would, lying in bed with your hand on your abdomen. A life separate and the same, a body turning in your own.
Tumbling in the glow of its own beginnings, it doesn’t know where it is. It doesn’t know there is such a thing as a place or a body. It doesn’t know about the space between people, the lines that separate one mind from another, its body from yours. All it knows is the thrill of matter itself.
thirty-one
Now she says he can visit her in her new flat. By email she says it. He wants to remember her voice. It’s been six months since he’s heard her voice.
Hi. exams went all right, I think. Sorry I have been incommunicado. It’s all been a shock. Please don’t leave any more of those voicemails. I don’t need extra grief. I don’t want us to go out any more. Please respect that. Sorry. I just don’t. If we have a baby it means either forever or not at all, and I think not at all would be best. Would you like to come over though and see me and bump? We could talk about how we’re going to do this …
He presses the bell and she buzzes him in. It’s number sixteen, on the second floor. The door is on the latch and she’s already sitting down when he gets in.
The flat is very nice. Sunlight washes in through the big window making everything look clean and loving. She is very beautiful; it’s true about the glow. She glows. Light pumps up through her cheeks. Light plays on her hair, bounces in her eyes. She seems to have even more hair now: a big halo of blonde ringlets barely held up by something that looks like a chopstick.
And the bump is a firm oval that she rubs in circles. She is wearing a green ribbed T-shirt. Through the fabric he can see her belly button, which seems to have turned into an outie. Her nipples too, are huge, bigger than he remembers them, pushing dark through the material. She has no stretch marks yet, she tells him, smiling, maybe she won’t get any. She seems younger than she ever seemed before.
All he can think is the word love. Love, love, love. Maybe that’s what pregnant women emanate: love for a shapeless thing, for a blank. How can you love a blank? Or maybe it’s easier to love that way. She rubs it again. He has an impulse to do something violent. It’s the smug competence of her hands and her still, placid lips. She knows how to do this without ever doing it before, how to rub a baby in the womb. He doesn’t. He can barely understand how it could be real. He wants to ask someone how they breathe in there but he knows it’s stupid, that they don’t breathe, not really, only he can’t understand how that can be.
‘Yikes. It’s kicking. It kicks my ribs.’
‘Can I feel?’
‘It’s stopped.’
He loves her. The bump is their baby, their love. How can it exist if it wasn’t that he’d loved her? How can she be changed like this, her body turned into something else, and still look at him like that, as though nothing ever happened between them? He is getting through life now on the belief that this break-up is a phase, that they will resume things in time. Suddenly this pregnancy has offered an alternative life after another stale summer in Clonmel. He could be a completely different type of man. He could put bread on the table and chop wood for the winter.
Occasionally the recognition that she really doesn’t want to be with him again, that she might never kiss him again like that, or eat beans in bed with him, or try to tell him the truth about herself, that they might not spill coffee on the bed sheets in the morning with a baby propped between them, unfolds itself inside him, stretches, opens its yellow eyes like a waking wolf. This is when he becomes an inconvenience, calling her all the time, writing her letters, spitting hurt words onto her answering machine, radiating despair like a noise. Better for both of them if he allows himself the hope that makes him kinder and more pleasant for her to be around.
He wants to be involved, he says. That’s the expression, involved.
‘Of course.’
She smiles again. Pregnancy has put her into a sort of trance. He can’t want to shake her, can he? To hit her? To fuck her? Not a pregnant woman? He can’t want to, can he? To turn her over, to grip her hips, push her head down …
She rises from the couch easily, holding the bump as though it may topple, and starts to make tea in the neat kitchenette. She has not put on weight anywhere else. She still has a waist. From the back you wouldn’t guess she was pregnant.
The flat is very grown up. He gets up and walks to the door of the bedroom, peers in. He wants to own this space by leaving no corner unseen by him, by striding through it as though it were his right. Her CDs are in CD racks and her clothes are all in their drawers. The room has a sense of air, of being able to breathe. He tells her that.
‘Yeah,’ she says from the kitchenette, clanking the tea things. ‘I got an air purifier for when the baby comes. A medical one. It cost a fortune.’
It’s blank though, the room. No pictures. Nothing to disclose what kind of life she will live here, what kind of person she will be. No mess of graffiti, nothing that says ‘Helen’. Her duvet is cream and there are neat Venetian blinds on the large windows. Her father must be helping her out. Oisín wants to be the one to help her out. He will tell her so when she comes in with the tea. He will leave college and get a better job and save for her and their bump.
‘I’m making bread,’ she says, ‘It will be ready in ten minutes, but we’ll have to leave it to cool. I’m addicted to baking. They say that happens. You get broody. I keep making bread.’
He tries to love her in the pure way, in the way that would mean he would be happy that she was happy, but his heart opens into darkness and a thought strikes him over the face like a wet towel: she will be here with someone else. It will be beautiful to wake up with her in this room with the sunlight and the cream duvet. Someone else will make her happy and love her and be loved and spill coffee on the clean sheets. He could never afford this flat, not on a barman’s wages, not with a 2.2 in English studies. That is his baby. This should not be allowed. He thinks the word ‘man’ and his pelvis feels like it is collapsing. He wants to punch something.
As he leaves he hears her mutter about the bread. For the first time in months he hears her laugh as he closes the front door noiselessly behind him. Helen’s laugh is belly-real and girlish. He had forgotten the way she laughed.
Rather than wait for the lift, he takes the stairs quickly, one at a time, his runners shrieking rhythmically on the lino steps. He
can forget again. He will forget again.
thirty-two
Oisín never made it to the end-of-term drama party the night that Helen left for the holiday, the last time she had let him kiss her, the last time he had said ‘I love you’. At the time he planted that last kiss he half knew it, but only half. When he remembers watching her through the window of the bus, the limp wave she had given him, he knows that she had no intention of ever loving him again. He should have understood everything from that wave, that polite smile.
He walked around the walls of Trinity and back home, mouth parched, head whirling. He didn’t take off the dress immediately. He lay on the bed and thought about each part of his feminized body, his hair, his mouth, his shaven underarms. He laughed to the ceiling until he felt sick. Then he stripped it all off and took a long shower.
It was a different sort of thrill. Defiant. Sometimes he does it again in his flat and it feels like a wonderful fuck-you parody of womanhood. All that faking, all that pomp, how beautiful and perfect they think they are. It feels like a sort of knowledge, shaving his armpits the way they do, painting his lips. It’s almost sexy, it’s almost like conquering something.
He’s ready for the fancy-dress this time. He has improved the outfit over the months. He bought a better top for underneath, ordered a pair of transvestite shoes off the internet. He was terrified that they would arrive in a bright pink package with ‘Tranny’ or something written on it, but the package was wrapped discretely in brown paper. He had to pick it up from the post office because his mailbox was too small. The shoes are wonderfully gaudy. They are shiny pink crocodile skin with a big diamante jewel on the front of each one. They really make the outfit.
It is with a sense of failure that he stuffs the bra. Everything else about this feels defiant, except stuffing the bra. In fact, it only makes women’s breasts seem even more miraculous, the texture of them, soft and firm at the same time; nipples of varying sizes and colours that feed every nerve in a man’s fingertips with pure arousal. Nothing can replicate real breasts. Helen told him she was planning on breastfeeding. He wants her to bottle-feed, seeing as he’s to be involved and he’s the father and shouldn’t he make the decisions too and how is he supposed to breastfeed the baby, but she dismissed him by flinching as though his deep voice were hurting her in her delicate state of late pregnancy, rolling her eyes, and rubbing her bump. His bump too. That’s her way of controlling the situation, of making sure he knows there are things she can do and he can’t. Like carrying a baby. Like making milk come out of her tits.
Bitch.
He does the bra bit first to get it out of the way. The rest of it he enjoys. He hasn’t walked out like that since the night of the fancy-dress party. He wants to do it again. Just to walk down Grafton Street. It will be wonderful: pure terror.
* * *
Where did all her fear go? How can there be so much water? The floor is flooded with it. The water that was around your baby a few moments ago. The water that knows the shape of it, the colour of its hair. You sit down and wait. When you think the water has finished you walk to the bathroom but there it is again, a big warm gush of it down your legs and into a puddle on the floor. Water. What does it taste like? You want to know that. It looks so pure. It is absolutely colourless.
For a moment you think how lucky it is that you cleaned the flat today, how nice it will be to bring the baby back to a clean home. Then you feel it must be madness to think things like that at a time like this. You are relieved, also, because it’s late, the baby, and for the last few days you had started to feel as though this were all a joke, this pregnancy thing, as though it might not be in there at all. It seems so unrealistic that soon, any day now, any hour now, there will be another person, something grown from a spark in your own body.
On the toilet there’s more of it. Again you think it’s stopped but when you stand up another gush drops out. You had been planning to clean it up but you know suddenly that it won’t be possible. The pain is undeniable. You have to squat and swing your hips from side to side to try to relieve it. Then it’s gone. Still no fear. You know you can do this now. You think you could do it alone, squatting on the bathroom floor. But that must be madness, it must be some sort of hormonal thing, protecting you from fear. You wouldn’t know what to do about the cord. Who knows what happens now, how bad it gets? They say you forget. That’s how bad it is. So bad you forget. And they say women used to die all the time in childbirth. Who would look after the baby then? Oisín? Your mother? Another one comes; a shudder in your pelvis, an impossible wrenching – and then it eases.
You breathe out slowly, you rock your hips from side to side, bouncing on your shins until it subsides.
They are not wrong about how much pain there is, but what they didn’t tell you is the type of pain, the way it’s different to hurting your knee, to being tortured, to having an operation without anaesthetic, because nothing’s wrong, because your body welcomes it, because you don’t hate the pain. You want to be alone with it, with the pain and the birth. You feel you could do it. Surely there is someone you should tell, one of your sisters or someone. You can’t call an ambulance, there’s nothing wrong. You call a taxi. You are going to the Coombe you say, and the girl on the other end doesn’t panic so it must be fine. You waddle out of the lift with a wad of towels between your legs, another stack under your arm, your overnight bag on your back. There is a vest in it for the baby. It’s white. You held it up to the bump this morning. It measures from your breasts to your navel.
You put the towels on the back seat. It seems ridiculous to be embarrassed. Not now.
‘Where are you going, love?’
The operator mustn’t have told him. Surely he should know what a pregnant woman, sitting on a stack of towels in the back of his car, squeezing her eyes and exhaling slowly, means. It’s 8 PM. He drives in silence, and between contractions you gaze out the window at the swarm of people on the streets, drunk already in preparation for 2008. They do not know the importance of this night.
The taxi-driver clutches the steering wheel and filters a slow breath out through his teeth. He must be worried about his car. How much would he charge you if you got blood all over the seats? Would he really ask it of you, if you were giving birth, or would he turn up to the hospital the next day with a balloon and the bill? You ask him if he has any kids and he nods and makes a V with his fingers – the ‘fuck you’ sign that means ‘peace’ if you’re looking from the other side.
He has to help you in, and at the entrance a security guard, who sees women in labour every day and doesn’t think it’s such a big deal, directs you to the admissions office. You don’t make it. You have to squat in the hallway and rock your hips to ease the pain. There might be blood or water on their floor, you don’t know. You can’t see for the pain. The admissions woman comes out. There must be blood or something because she recoils with her hands up to indicate that she won’t touch you, ‘I’m not dealing with this. She’s in labour. I can’t deal with this. Can you get a doctor?’
A nurse passing by tells her to get you a wheelchair.
‘I’m not a nurse. I’m not dealing with this.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, we’re half-staffed. Just get the security guard to get her a wheelchair and take her up to the waiting room.’
You want to go home. They couldn’t stop you, could they? If you just said you’re going home. The taxi-driver is gone though. The security guard gets you into a chair. He has a thick Nigerian accent and the bouncing of it soothes you. He doesn’t think it’s such an awful thing, giving birth, he doesn’t think it is anything to panic about. He is not afraid to touch you.
‘You will be okay. My wife has seven. All very easy. You will be fine. You are young. When you are young it is easy.’
He looks at you like a father, and smiles – soft eyes, and love. You believe that now – that it is with love he smiles at you. He smoothes a hand over your hair and says something.
N
ow the terror. You want to go home. You can’t sit in a wheelchair. You need to squat. The nurse says stay in the wheelchair and the security guard says the woman knows what she wants, let her out, the body knows. Then he clutches the receptionist’s arm and says, ‘Never argue with a pregnant woman!’ and chuckles at a girlish pitch, and you don’t know if it’s mockery or mirth, or if the laugh is even genuine.
They brush him away from you and the nurse wheels you up to a waiting-room full of quiet, excited couples. When you have another contraction, bouncing on your shins with your mouth closed, spilling your waters all over their waiting-room, someone brings you into a small room with a bed and says you should call your fella or your mother or someone and that someone will be in to measure your cervix. There is a giant paper towel on the bed, insufficient to soak up all the stuff that is coming out of you. She puts machines on you, this person, all around your bump and makes you lie down. That is what’s excruciating, the lying down. You ask her for water and she says no, in case they have to operate. They won’t have to operate, you tell her. She goes out. You get up and squat for the next contraction, rocking from side to side. Hopefully they won’t give you an enema. That’s what your mum said they do. The way she said it: ‘They pump fairy liquid up your hole. Then they shave you.’ She loves saying things like that. The monitor comes off when you get up but you can’t stay still, not with the pain. The machine starts to beep wildly, alerting them all to the fact that you have disobeyed. No one comes to make you lie down. They’re half-staffed. It’s New Year’s Eve.
* * *
Between Dog and Wolf Page 25
