Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  ‘But Charlie brings home toys. And Hazel.’

  Henry, too, was telling the truth. It irked Nina that other parents didn’t follow the rules.

  It wasn’t only the pockets of his clothes that she had to search—the deep side-pockets of his parka, all five pockets of his overalls and the easy-to-forget knitted pockets on each end of his scarf—but all the zippered nooks of his bag, too. In these he had squirreled a squash ball, a tea-light candle, a spoon, a cotton reel, a padlock, some nail clippers. Also the thimble-sized bucket from his pirate ship set. Nina made a sad face.

  ‘How would you feel if you lost this at school?’

  It wasn’t school of course—he had only just turned two. The word was supposed to make him feel older and her less guilty.

  ‘Please?’ Henry asked, reaching out again for the toy bucket. ‘I bring it back. I promise.’

  But you won’t, but you don’t, but you just can’t be expected to, Nina whined to herself as she got to her feet. Henry looked mournfully at his robbed cache, now just a jumble of junk on the kitchen table.

  What were Henry’s plans? Might things have turned out differently, Nina now wonders, had she not daily emptied out his pockets before walking him to the car and driving a disorienting pattern of lefts and rights to the other side of the city, to the place where she would leave him? If only she had left herself a trail in moon-bright pebbles, or white-bread crumbs, she might have been able to find her way back through the months and weeks to find out.

  Nina had never imagined that Henry would go to childcare. She had never wanted any child of hers in one of those places. She disliked them the way she disliked old people’s homes, those other dumping grounds for the incontinent and inconvenient. Before Henry was even conceived, she had told Lucas how she felt. He had said he understood, and they had made a deal. Nina would stay at home and care for their child and Lucas would work to support them.

  Theirs was an old-fashioned arrangement and very strange to Nina’s friends. Even those who didn’t say ‘But, what about your career?’, or ‘How are you going to afford it?’, or ‘Won’t you be bored witless?’ were thinking it. Nina could tell by the looks on their faces, just as she could see the traces of unspoken offence she had caused them with her decision and its implications. She tried self-deprecation: ‘But you’re so amazing! If I tried to work and raise a baby at the same time, I’d just end up doing both things badly.’ But she was never quite sure how convincing she was. She supposed the truth was all over her face, too.

  Genevieve was the only friend with whom Nina felt she could be honest. Genevieve had made a pragmatic marriage to an older man who adored both her and his own very successful pursuit of riches. She didn’t need to work, but did so anyway in order to avoid her marriage becoming—as she called it—transactional.

  Genevieve was tall and androgynously slim with close-cropped hair and she made Nina feel small and voluptuous by comparison, although in isolation she wasn’t really either. Genevieve had large, strange eyes with pupils of normal size but vast expanses of white surrounding them. Her gaze could be fearsomely intense. Nina partly disliked the no-holds-barred conversations she had with Genevieve, however she suspected they were good for her. In this friendship there were periods of silence while Nina sulked, but once she was over the latest insult or slight, she would pick up the phone and pretend nothing had ever happened.

  ‘So you think full-time mothers do a better job then, do you?’ Genevieve said, the touch of South African in her accent coming to the fore as it often did when she was in the interrogative mode.

  She and Nina were sitting across from each other at the breakfast bar in Genevieve’s kitchen. Nina was near to full term.

  ‘Well, yes I do,’ Nina confessed.

  ‘I can tell you for certain that I’m a better mother because I’m away from them a bit each week.’

  Nina was listening, but also watching Genevieve’s three-year-old daughter tiptoeing in with the intention of swiping a fingerful of butter from the open dish on the bar. Nina couldn’t help it—she was pregnant and watching other people’s children carefully, as if for clues. Her gaze betrayed little Phoebe’s whereabouts.

  ‘If I were with them all the time, I think I’d . . . eat them all up!’ Genevieve made her eyes yet more terrifying, and Phoebe ran away, squealing joyfully.

  ‘She’s gorgeous,’ Nina said.

  ‘Yar. Childcare two days a week since she was one and no scars at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gen. We’re not going to agree on this one.’

  ‘Your baby won’t ever thank you for it, you know, Nina. And you can’t get an A+ for this—it isn’t school.’

  True, Nina was accustomed to reward for effort. She had worked for fifteen years in a sequence of high-pressure jobs in current affairs radio, and everyone said she was a brilliant producer. But she was longing for a change, even if it meant returning to the modest, inexpensive way of life she remembered, almost fondly now, from her student days. She planned to buy second-hand clothes for herself and the baby, take a Thermos of coffee to the park instead of going to cafés, cook at home rather than eat out, save on petrol by fitting a baby seat to the bicycle; maybe even sell her car and get by with only Lucas’s. She and the baby would entertain themselves by going to the museum and the library; they would walk on the foreshore and spend slow afternoons with their hands in the earth of their own backyard. And she’d make it worth Lucas’s while. She’d be relaxed and happy. And when he got home in the evenings, she’d have his dinner ready.

  For his part, Lucas—who ran his own sound engineering business—agreed that he would work longer hours if necessary, and take on the kind of corporate work that he normally considered a waste of his talent. He accepted that he’d have to put his songwriting on hold for a while, take a break from the band. Lucas said that up until the kid was three ought to be long enough but Nina insisted on school age, and Lucas said okay, so long as Nina promised not to push for a second child. They shook on it.

  There were so many ways in which it went wrong for them. The first casualty was dinner, which was never—not once, not ever—on the table when Lucas got home from work. Henry was a colicky baby and his management, especially in the early days, involved complicated sequences of feeding, swaddling, patting, rocking and swinging. Various medications were prescribed to combat his reflux, but each came with side effects that had their separate ways of preventing Henry from sleeping for longer than forty minutes at a stretch.

  Nina’s love for Henry was fierce, of course. That was a given, but from the very beginning it was also inflected with a fear born of her suspicion that she needed him more than he needed her, and that he had—or at least would grow to have—the capacity to reject her in the most primal and hurtful of ways. She sensed this in the way he fed: fitfully, frequently, taking tiny sips of breastmilk and then pursing his little mouth, straining away with all the strength he had in his dandelion-stalk of a neck. Once or twice Nina googled how early you could tell if your child was a sociopath, then erased her search history in shame.

  Henry was thin. He was prone to mysterious skin rashes and unexplained vomiting. He didn’t show up as allergic to anything in particular; he just seemed determined not to thrive. When the time came to add solid food to his diet, Nina spent hours at the food processor, trying out different combinations. Banana and raspberry. Spinach and sweet potato. Pumpkin, carrot and orange. Mango and pear. Blueberry and ricotta. She would try to tempt Henry with these mixtures, sometimes getting frustrated and forcing the food in by levering down his lower jaw with the bottom of the spoon, but even if she got a small quantity past his lips and teeth, he would only spit it out again. The bibs Nina left soaking in the laundry buckets were stained every colour of the fruit and vegetable rainbow.

  Each week, Nina took Henry to the child health clinic to be weighed. On a good week he gained a few grams, but, even so, he was struggling to keep up with the chart’s lowest percentile. About the
only thing he liked were Milk Arrowroot biscuits soaked in sugared milk, so Nina lowered her standards and fed them to him. Still, his growth was painfully slow, and when Nina pinched his little arms and legs they felt as thin and fragile as chicken bones.

  Nina fretted over Henry so much that her hair—her beautiful hair that was long and thick, the darkest of reds—began to fall out in handfuls. When it later came back, it was mottled with white in splotches above one eyebrow and behind both ears. Lucas did all that he could to help. He told Nina as little as possible about his company’s failing finances, and, so that she might capitulate for a few hours to her exhaustion, he would drive the streets by night, tracing Tetris patterns around the city blocks in his thrumming Valiant station wagon, while Henry griped and bawled from the capsule in the back seat. Sometimes when Lucas got sick of the noise he moved the capsule to the passenger side of the Val’s broad bench seat and drove with his right hand while Henry slurped on the pinkie of his left.

  When Henry turned one, he and Nina were yet to visit the library, or the museum. There had been no time to fit the bicycle seat, let alone put Nina’s car on the market. The earth in the garden was cracked and lifeless, the whereabouts of the Thermos unknown. The reflux had settled, but Henry had become accustomed to days on Nina’s hip and nights in Nina and Lucas’s bed. Nina and Lucas rarely had sex anymore and, if they did, it was of the ‘help yourself’ variety where Nina would remain half-asleep in the dark, while Lucas as quietly as possible did whatever he needed to do. It wasn’t that Nina believed the old wives’ tale about the contraceptive powers of frequent breastfeeding, nor did she forget to take the Pill one day, or even two in a row. It was only that she more or less forgot that there was such a thing as contraception or that she might need it.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she told Lucas, when Henry was just over a year old.

  ‘That wasn’t the deal,’ he said.

  ‘The deal was that I wouldn’t ask for another baby. And I didn’t.’

  ‘I suppose it’s too late.’

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.’

  ‘I thought you were on the Pill.’

  ‘Thought, but didn’t ask. Excuse me, what year is this?’

  So Gracie was born—easy little Gracie, who ate and slept and smiled and loved Nina effortlessly in all the ways Nina had expected Henry to, and Nina was grateful, as well as guilty for foisting upon Henry a little sister who was so clearly everything he was not. And Lucas read all the pamphlets about getting the snip, and everything that was already wrong became worse, and if Lucas thought that he was being starved of Nina’s undivided attention when they had only Henry, he soon learned that the universe had a whole other outer rim for him to inhabit. But he did get his wife’s attention, all of it, one night when Gracie was just eight weeks old and Henry almost two.

  Once the children were in bed he sat down with Nina and told her that the business was now insolvent and that their bank’s willingness to extend the mortgage on their home had reached its limit. A friend had offered him an entry-level job at a large sound company but the pay was meagre, only enough to service the now-inflated mortgage repayments. She stared at him.

  Lucas sat forward on the couch, his buttocks barely on the seat, his hands folded penitently together between his knees. She stared at the sinewy lengths of his calves and of his forearms, at the entire pale, freckled stretch of him. On a stage, with his chest bare and a shirt tangled around those hips, he was sexy in a rangy sort of way, but here and now he seemed to her only flimsy and vulnerable, as well as adolescent in an infuriating way that provoked sympathy he didn’t deserve. He’d looked much like this, and with this same shamed, defeated, defiant look on his face, six years ago when his boutique record booth had failed and they’d been unable to repay the start-up money loaned to them by Nina’s father. And again when he’d sat on the same couch—wearing those same brown leather sandals, now Nina comes to think of it—confessing to her that he had gambled away on the internet the nest egg—not huge, but not inconsiderable either—left to him by his mother.

  When Nina first saw Lucas, she was twenty years old and mistook his ungainly hopelessness for a sign that female interest in him would be limited, even exclusive, perhaps, to her. But she soon discovered that his dope-sleepy eyes and the careless harmonics picked out on a guitar perched on a speckled knee had actually quite a broad appeal. Lucas’s desirability to other women, and to Janey Cooper in particular, only intensified Nina’s attraction to him. While bubbly little Janey danced for him, front and centre at every gig, Nina had her own methods. She spent months of Friday and Saturday nights numbing her buttocks on bar stools and rejecting Lucas’s advances with just the perfect measures of come-hitherishness and disdain. At last she saw off her competition and had Lucas humming ‘Nina, Pretty Ballerina’ instead of ‘Lady Jane’ into the back-up mike between songs.

  That she had fought to win something she was no longer sure she should ever have wanted was not an easy admission to make, and it was only getting harder with every passing year. It wasn’t only the obvious things—marriage, Henry, Gracie—that had dug her in so deep, but also the many times she excused him, forgave him, apologised for him. Throwing good money after bad, her father would have said. Had said, although he was talking about actual cash and not the type of investment Nina had made.

  ‘We’ll have to sell the house,’ Nina said.

  The house. They had bought it as a down-at-heel workers’ cottage, left by generations of landlords and student tenants to flake and peel and rot on a small, rhomboid-shaped block on the fringe of the city. Nina and Lucas had gussied up the street frontage and borrowed money to build a new section out the back: a rustic timber and glass atrium that snared the sun and had a view over the last shrub-shrouded reach of the rivulet before the watercourse went underground to sieve itself through the foundations of the city and seep out to sea. There was barely an inch of the house, inside or out, that Nina and Lucas hadn’t sanded or polished or painted, but now Nina felt her love for the place slip off like a too-big glove. It took only a moment for her to imagine herself happy in a rental in the outer suburbs, to envision how they would cover the awful wallpaper with art and repaint the kitchen cupboards and find local parks where the kids could play on the swings. But it wasn’t that simple, Lucas told her: even if they sold the house, and for a good price, they would still have a sizeable debt, yet nowhere to live. Rent plus debt and they’d be no better off.

  Nina thought of Jane Carslake, who used to be Janey Cooper, but was now married to an orthopaedic surgeon and put her kids in childcare half a day a week, and that was only so she could go to the gym and keep her nails and hair in order. Even as she had this thought, Nina was ashamed for having it, as well as amazed by the capacity of financial reality to bring her shallows up out of her depths.

  ‘I did tell you each time I made a redraw,’ he said.

  ‘But you didn’t tell me it was serious.’

  ‘It turns out that it is.’

  Nina was quiet and careful, the way she always was when handling Lucas’s ego. It was almost like a pet to her, a creature she had milk-fed and hand-reared, and her abiding instinct was to shelter it. On the other occasions they had found themselves here—he on the couch, she sitting on one of the dining chairs nursing her fallen heart in her lap—she had said that it didn’t really matter, that accidents happened, that everything would be alright, that somehow they would work through it, together. Not this time. When at last she spoke, she kept her voice small, as if this might prevent it from betraying the dimensions of her unsurprised disappointment.

  ‘We had a deal.’

  ‘You? You want to bring up the deal?’

  ‘This is my only chance, the only one I will ever have, to be a mother and do it properly. You promised.’

  Nina already knew what it was that Lucas expected her to do, and it was clear to her that she was going to have to do it. And yet it seemed
to her important, in this instance, that he should be the one to say it out loud.

  ‘So, what are we going to do about it?’ she asked.

  ‘Other people do it,’ he said.

  ‘Do what, Lucas?’

  The rolling of the eyes was teenage, incendiary.

  ‘Do what, Lucas?’

  ‘Oh, come on. You know.’

  ‘Other people fuck their dogs. Is that what you mean?’

  And so, against Nina’s better judgement, they fought. They each dredged up the most forbidden of their ammunition out of deep storage. They said things they meant, and things they didn’t mean; Lucas shouting and swearing, Nina hissing and pointing at the door beyond which their children lay sleeping, until at last, she lost control.

  ‘Fine, then,’ she yelled. ‘I’ll go back to work and we’ll just dump our children in some awful fucking overcrowded childcare centre so they can get every cold and flu and rash known to humankind and be raised by doe-eyed, semi-educated, underpaid morons instead of by their own parents.’

  There came a sound from beyond the door. Perhaps a small hip knocking against a wall, perhaps a half-full bottle of milk falling onto the carpet.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Nina said.

  Lucas got to the door first. And there stood Henry in the centre of the hallway runner, pear-shaped in his onesie pyjamas, his fair hair riled with static. A corner of his sky-blue sucky blanket was balled into his mouth.

  ‘It’s alright, mate,’ Lucas said. ‘Mummy and I were just . . .’

  In Henry’s terrified eyes Nina saw the car smash, the five-storey fall, the irreversible, the incurable. Even as she felt her heart plunge into a place where it was already too late, the damage done, her mind leapt forward into the fixing of it.

  ‘Mummy’s here, Mummy’s here,’ Nina said, pushing past Lucas and scooping Henry, blanket and all, into her arms. She took him to his room, small and softly night-lit, and shut the door behind them. Nina held him tight within the four close walls that were painted in a shade of greenish blue that she had chosen when he had been still in her belly. She had hung that block-mounted poster of the cover of The Little Prince above his bed when the exact shape and form of Henry had been still a dream to her.