Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  In was late summer and the waterfront crowds had thinned; Liv decided to make use of the airfare that her grandmother had given her for her birthday. Babs no longer came to collect Liv from the airport. Liv knew her way on trains and buses through the city and out into the harbour-side suburb full of shrubs and trees and vines that ambushed all the fences, sprouting new shoots of life in every direction, studded with flowers in shades of pink, purple and magenta that would seem unthinkably crass back at home. Even the parrots here chirruped with more confidence. Although it was hotter, it didn’t matter: Liv felt the soft shelter of ozone, the smoothness of the damper air on her skin and in her lungs as she walked the last few blocks. In the uncultivated gardens by the wayside were disorganised vines hung with pods large enough to eat small children; at the entrance to Babs’s apartment block was a colossal, spiny cactus that Babs had told her flowered only once in a hundred years.

  On the smoky glass table on her balcony Babs had set out an orange poppyseed cake and two tumblers of iced water with slices of lemon and mint sprigs. Babs’s glassy apartment contained not a single extraneous thing. Already she had made a ruthless accounting of her needs and had thrown almost everything away. On the white walls were only the most beloved of her art works; her slimline shelves held only a few framed pictures, no ornaments, a single photograph album. She had started to read on a Kindle. All evidence of the baking of the orange poppyseed cake had been cleared away behind the spotless silvery surfaces of the kitchen, but Liv caught sight of the top corner of the packet mix cake box poking out of the bin.

  ‘You slack tart.’

  ‘Don’t tell June on me, will you?’

  ‘What’s it worth to you?’ Liv said, although she could already tell that their patter was falling short of its usual spiritedness. Babs seemed pensive; Liv wondered if she were unwell, or had got some bad news.

  They ate cake and shared harmless gossip, but when Liv reached out for the white Glomesh case of cigarettes on the veranda railing, Babs’s thin hand in its glove of fine, wrinkled skin landed on top of hers. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Babs said. ‘Do you?’

  What was that look on Babs’s face? It was knowingness, and sympathy, and perhaps just a touch of hurt. Liv thought of something that passed between them when she was very young. Although Babs too must have been much younger then, she had already seemed ancient on the day that Liv, wild with jealousy that Lauren was going out alone for lunch with Babs, had driven her small white teeth into the fragile, sunspotted skin of Babs’s hand. The bite had drawn blood. But Babs had only taken her hand back, looked at Liv with pained understanding and said, ‘I know, sweetheart, I know.’

  Now, she said, ‘Best be good, under the circumstances, hmm?’

  And Liv felt fall into alignment a series of lenses that she had been keeping quarantined in separate quarters of her mind. An uncompromising beam of light now shone on the equally uncompromising fact that she was expecting a child. She looked at her body and realised how much she had been trusting in the stories of women who had got away with it for the whole nine months and surprised everyone, at the last moment, by whipping a baby out from under their loose-fitting dresses. Or else bundled their suffocated babies in a bloodied tangle of sheets and shoved them deep in the laundry hamper. But slender and light-framed as she was, she now saw that at five months gone she was well beyond the point at which any trick of pleating or draping could actually hide her shape.

  ‘Are you terribly disappointed with me?’

  ‘Darling girl.’

  Babs shook the cigarettes from the Glomesh case into her hand, took them to the bin and crumbled them into uselessness. ‘It’s about time I gave up anyway,’ Babs said. ‘June always says so.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Liv. ‘June.’

  ‘I could be the one to tell her,’ Babs said. ‘If you think that would be best. If she has some time to think before you get home, it might, perhaps, soften the blow.’

  The bed in Babs’s white spare room ought to have been an oasis of sleep. Getting into it that night, clean from the bath, Liv felt the layers of feathered softness beneath her, on top of her, in the pillow upon which she lay her head. She waited for sleep, searched for it. She tried diving down into it, but she was too buoyant. Perhaps it was this new swollen stomach of hers anchoring her to the surface like a glass ball full of air. After a few hours, she got out of bed.

  Liv was as quiet as possible as she opened the bathroom door and closed it again behind her. The mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet opened with only the smallest of clicks. She was careful not to rattle the small white bottle of Temazepam that Babs kept there, but slipped her finger inside to capture two white pills, put her mouth to the tap before easing it on to the barest drizzle. And yet, somehow she had disturbed Babs, who was standing in sheeny white pyjamas in the hallway when Liv let herself back out of the bathroom.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ Babs said.

  ‘Not really.’

  Liv had not known she was close to tears, but now a small sob leapt up into her throat like a hiccup.

  ‘Darling. Why don’t you come in with me?’

  Babs tucked Liv into her own bed, climbed in beside her. And after a while sleep did come to Liv, but it was not the kind she was looking for. There were no pale hands reaching up, helping her down into the deep. This sleep was a decompression chamber, restrictive and dreamless, and she woke from it still tired, as if some shut-off part of her had remained awake all along.

  The Talk took place in the blue room. June pushed aside the rag dolls and perched on the wicker chair; Clive sat, arms folded, on the window seat. When Liv refused to name names, Liv could see that this infuriated Clive, who had obviously hoped to be able to share some of the disapprobation with another family. June, though, seemed content for the truth to remain where it was and Liv wondered what her mother feared more: that the baby’s father was some unsavoury musician type who Liv had picked up at the waterfront, or that he would turn out to be someone like, or even precisely, George.

  The lack of an identifiable father, however, altered few of the details that Clive and June had already worked out. Liv would move out of the house and into the bungalow and Clive—who could not afford to have a daughter of his sucking on the public teat—would give Liv an allowance that was precisely equal to the single parent benefit, minus a reasonable percentage for the rent that was already covered by the provision of the bungalow. Liv would be quite well set up, really, with a place to live and a modest income. When the baby was a year old, Clive would withdraw the allowance and Liv could get a job and support herself, either in the bungalow (he wouldn’t charge her the full market value, obviously) or somewhere else. Although the beginning of the academic year was upon them (Lauren had already returned for her final year at school), the Conservatorium was never mentioned.

  ‘Well?’ said June.

  It wasn’t a question, or even a dare, so much as it was a demand for Liv to argue, reject their benevolence, or in some other way crack the fragile seal of her mother’s pre-prepared fury. But Liv only nodded mutely. She was apprehending something greater, even, than her mother’s disappointment. She felt as if she had been walking backwards through a familiar world in which choices were between chocolate chip and peppermint, and consequences were two weeks without pocket money or a friend in a sulk; all the punishments she was familiar with were soon forgotten, or at the very least easily reversed by apologies and promises of reform. But now she had turned around and felt the cold wind of an entirely new landscape, lunar and forbidding, full of unimaginably large things, solid and irreversible.

  The bungalow had been built a little while after the big house, but the builders had made a good fist of matching up the dark red variegated bricks and of replicating the scrolled sandstone aprons beneath the windows. The scale of the buildings was so disparate, however, that the bungalow seemed related to the house in a cute and almost mocking way, as if the bungalow were the house’s lap
dog or novelty handbag.

  Guests had stayed in the bungalow in recent years, but only if June was putting up a great many people all at once. If there were just one or two couples, they would stay in the guest rooms on the first floor of the house: these had en suites and furnishings that had been kept up to date. The bungalow had been redecorated by Clive’s mother in a fit of modernity in the early 1980s and between that time and the time of Liv’s pregnancy was an interval of precisely the wrong duration; none of the fittings or furnishings—not the ceramic doorhandles painted with rosebuds, nor the gilt-embellished picture rails, nor the damask drapes—had been given enough time to come back into any sort of vogue, tongue-in-cheek or otherwise. The couches, their bosomy cushions upholstered in dusky pink velvet, bulged in the bungalow’s living room like two enormously fat naked women.

  In the house, June had got rid of all the evidence of Clive’s mother’s tendency to skimp, but had never quite made it to the bungalow, where the carpet was still acrylic and the crystal-plastic taps in the kitchen and bathroom tended to drip. From deep in the soft furnishings came a cold and unlived-in smell that was not alleviated by opening windows that had been placed without regard for the movement of the sun. On the walls closest to the riverbank the paintwork above the skirting boards bloomed grey, blue and green.

  Liv had not been clear that she was supposed to move in to the bungalow straight away, but on the day immediately following The Talk, she came downstairs just before midday to find her mother making neat stacks of towels and bed linen and napery on the kitchen table. Liv recognised these as the second-string supplies which June had downgraded to the back of the linen press around five years ago.

  ‘Come on, grab a pile,’ June said. ‘And then I’ll give you a hand with your clothes and things.’

  Liv followed, bewildered, wondering what use June expected she would have for Battenberg lace table napkins and the embroidered linen hand-towels which used to be laid out in the bathrooms for dinner parties.

  In the bungalow, Liv saw that June had been busy that morning populating the kitchen cupboards with crockery and cutlery, cooking utensils and a set of brand new pots. Liv’s culinary experience extended to cooking macaroni cheese once or twice, but June had thought of that and placed a spiral-bound copy of the Central Cookery Book on the bench near the kettle. In the pantry was plain and self-raising flour in labelled tubs, salt and pepper, brown and white sugar, vinegar and oil.

  ‘That’s just to get you started,’ June said. ‘Your father’s set up a direct deposit for you.’

  Liv went about opening and closing; there was dishwashing liquid beneath the sink, dishcloths and steel wool still in their plastic wrappings; the kitchen’s third drawer was neatly stacked with crisp, pressed tea-towels; there were apples and bananas in a wooden bowl at the end of the bench. Liv was almost afraid to touch these fruits. They gave off energy, radiated with the repressed rage that had put them there, and it was the same with the early flowering camellias that June had snipped from their bushes and set afloat in a wide-mouthed vase on the coffee table. In every cupboard, in every drawer, on every shelf and surface, Liv saw yet another expression of her mother’s meticulous, thorough and irreproachably generous severance.

  For all of Lauren’s life, the bungalow had been there in the view from the windows at the rear of the house. In summer the backdrop for its slate-tiled roof was the ballooning green of the cherry trees in leaf; in winter, it was bare branches and river water. During her days at school, Lauren was preoccupied with her own concerns: the incomprehensibility of chemistry equations, furtive observations of Nick Hanson, how best to deflect viola jokes during string ensemble, how to retouch make-up at lunchtime without getting ticked off for wearing make-up in the first place. She hardly thought of Liv at all. But when she was at home, the bungalow seemed forever in her peripheral vision and she could not help but notice its signs of life. Windows shadowed briefly with Liv’s swollen form, curtains opened and closed.

  June had talked to Lauren about Liv. There had been conversations on related topics, too: contraception, intimacy, responsibility. In these matters, Lauren knew exactly what was expected of her, but she didn’t know how she was supposed to behave towards Liv. She didn’t know whether to largely ignore her sister the way her parents seemed to be doing, or whether it had been inexplicitly left to her to bridge the house and the bungalow, to be the one who could convey slices of leftover cake and small pieces of news.

  She hovered between the two positions. For days at a time she would steer clear of the bungalow and of Liv, but then she would find that she could not really leave either of them alone—not the bungalow with its stale and unwelcoming smell, nor this new version of her sister, bloated and subdued, who ate all day and had let her violin warp out of tune in its case. So she would venture down there carrying two milkshakes, perhaps, or two plates of honeyed crumpets, and sit for a while with Liv. But it didn’t matter whether she went down there, or stayed away, she lived now with the vague, niggling sensation of having been disloyal.

  It was June who rang up to make Liv’s various appointments, who drove her to them, and paid for them with her credit card. She sat, self-contained, with Liv in the waiting room, and followed—without expressly having been asked—into the consulting room. The doctor anchored his measuring tape to Liv’s solar plexus with his thumb, towed it over the mountain of her stomach to the top of her pelvic bone. Liv felt his bare hands pushing on her tummy skin, although it was partly numb from the stretching. She also felt his gloved fingers cramming up inside of her, but not even this hurt or embarrassed her as much as the way her mother sat by the side of the doctor’s desk quietly suffering her own shame.

  Liv could almost have convinced herself that it was to save her mother and not to punish her that she decided to labour alone. On a morning in midwinter, in the dark before dawn, Liv walked quietly up the side of the house with her overnight bag—the pain stopping her now and then—to the taxi which waited for her in the street. Liv told herself that what she was about to do was nothing new, nothing new at all, and that girls younger than herself had managed it all alone.

  She found there was something reassuringly artificial about the hospital at this hour of the day. Perhaps it was only the slightly illicit feeling of being out-of-hours in a busy place; she might have felt the same at a school, or a library or department store. Or perhaps it came from the contrast between the almost-dawn dimness of the street and the bright fluorescent light within, the chemical smell of the denatured air that was being breathed by uniformed people who had clearly been awake all night. This didn’t seem to her like a place where anything bad could happen in real life. Waiting at the maternity reception desk, Liv could almost have been in an airport, a hotel, a cinema, a film.

  A midwife checked Liv’s blood pressure and pulse, timed her contractions with the electronic stopwatch she kept on a rope around her neck.

  ‘You’re certain there’s no-one we should call?’ the midwife asked, and then, when Liv said yes she was certain, left her alone in a room that was grey and white and almost entirely filled by a monstrous bed with thick, metal rails.

  Throughout the morning, the pain worsened. For all of her belly’s wrenching and squeezing, Liv’s body would not open up in the least. Her doctor came by to examine her.

  ‘This is not going quite the way I’d like,’ he said. ‘Olivia? Olivia? Can we call your mother? I really think it would be best. This is not going to be easy.’

  ‘I can do this,’ Liv insisted.

  More hours passed and the thumping pain continued with rhythmic regularity. The midwife who came on for the afternoon shift took away Liv’s vomit-stained hospital gown, laced her into a fresh one.

  ‘Honey, are you sure there’s not a friend, or an aunt, or anyone at all that we can call for you?’

  Liv shook her head, no, and she held steady to her course, all the way out to the furthest reaches of her endurance. By the time she began to s
cream for her mother, it was from deep in a pain that the gas she was sucking could not touch, and by then she had gone beyond her capacity to say the whole of June’s mobile number out loud. The telephone in the empty house by the river rang, and rang, and rang.

  The baby, too, began to panic, her tiny heart pumping much too fast, but Liv was past comprehension when the doctor explained to her that she would require an emergency caesarean, that there was no time, now, for a spinal block. Liv barely felt the needle as it pierced her skin. But she did feel—deeply, gratefully—the chemical quicksand of anaesthesia as it closed irresistibly over the top of her.

  The baby was very small, and very beautiful. Everyone who came to see her remarked on her fair downy hair, admired the contours of her petite nose, put their fingers into her tiny clutches. Everyone wanted to touch her and hold her, and for a few days her perfection was enough; the hospital room filled up with flowers. Liv had only to say the word, Cleo, and all of a sudden that was her baby’s name and other people were writing down it on hospital charts and forms.

  This, then, was a baby. Not a blank thing, after all, Liv discovered. Not an outline to be inked in by parents and teachers and other good influences—not like that at all, but a whole person, ready made. Liv felt Cleo’s frustration that she couldn’t make full use of it yet: the complete, intact personality that was inside of her, hidden like the mechanism of a music box, but there nevertheless. And this was unexpected, too: that Cleo seemed to Liv not a helpless thing, not at all, but a creature full of power.