Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  When Cleo was asleep, deactivated and inert, it was easy for Liv to love the sight of her. She loved her with a hunger that wanted to eat her, to lick her unreasonably perfect brand new skin, to bite her succulent little limbs. But Liv already suspected that in any game of cannibalism, Cleo would win. When Cleo was awake, Liv—sensing the ferocity of her baby’s desire to survive, and how impersonal that was—was afraid. Liv knew already that if it was what Cleo had to do, she would consume Liv’s identity whole, suck it out of her breasts and shit it into the nappies that Liv herself would fold, and bin, and consign to landfill.

  Once Liv and Cleo had come home, Lauren would decide each afternoon, as she walked back from school under the bare branches of the horse chestnuts that lined their street, whether she would go first to the house, or first to the bungalow to visit with her sister and her niece. She liked to think of having a niece. It felt responsible, special, as if she had been chosen to have more than most other girls of her age to deal with.

  This day was a Friday, and cold. As she walked, Lauren pushed up the sleeve of her itching school jumper for what must have been the eightieth time since double Chemistry when Nick Hanson had pinned her wrist to the laboratory bench and carved his telephone number in blue biro on the tender skin of her inner arm. The pen had left little clots of ink at the top and the tail of each numeral, but she had worn these down by now to smudges and streaks.

  Lauren touched her hand to the ink and there it was, still: the thudding pulse, the blood pooling in unfamiliar parts of her flesh and her skin. She flushed again at the memory of the painful, all-over blush she had experienced when Nick’s hand was holding down her wrist, his dark hair just under her nose and smelling of chlorine and conditioner. It was the first time he had come near her in nine days, the first interest of any kind that he had shown in her since early the previous week when they’d all been down on the bottom green and the bell had gone for the end of lunch. Everyone else headed up the hill, but he’d held her back, pulled her behind the southern wall of the art block and launched at her with a sloppy, hurried tongue kiss. Then he’d jogged away, backwards against the slope, still watching her with that smart-arse grin of his as she stood there with the back of her hand to her mouth, waiting for him to turn around so that she could wipe away the wetness.

  It wasn’t the fact of sex that surprised or confused Lauren. She understood that feelings like the ones she had when Nick touched her could easily flood all the way through you and short-circuit your everyday brain, make you want to do things that you would normally think were revolting and strange. She could even imagine, in the vaguest of ways, how her parents might couple together in their lofty king-sized bed. What she didn’t know was how people managed to get over the embarrassment and be calm and normal with each other afterwards, how you went from the stickiness and tongues and the aching between the legs to ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ and ‘Have you seen my striped shirt?’. She couldn’t even look at Nick Hanson, couldn’t catch sight of him lighting a Bunsen burner or tugging his bag out of his locker, without her cheeks throbbing at the thought of his tongue in her mouth, his spit on her lips.

  She knocked on the door of the bungalow, and Liv, in stretched layers of grey jersey, opened it with Cleo in her arms. Lauren asked right away if she could hold the baby, was overcautious as she took hold of Cleo about supporting her head, which felt surprisingly like a ripe grapefruit in her hand. There were video clips playing softly on the television and draped over the headrests of one of the fat lady couches was a pile of clear plastic drycleaning sleeves, each one protecting a garment for a baby or small child. The linen and muslin, the velvet and lace—Lauren recognised them from the photo albums and the occasional time she had insisted on her mother showing her through the wardrobe in one of the spare rooms of the house.

  ‘All our old things,’ Lauren said, although most of the things had originally been made for, or belonged to, Liv.

  ‘Mum brought them down. What do you think?’ Liv gestured in the manner of a hand model to a long gown with a smocked bodice, grub roses embroidered all around the hem. There was a matching cap with long pink ribbons that tied it, for now, to the neck of the coat hanger. ‘Is it perhaps a little over the top for a trip to Kmart?’

  ‘Gorgeous, though,’ Lauren said.

  Liv let it fall over the arm of the couch. ‘I guess you can never get enough of the things you don’t really need.’

  Cleo was squirming in a way that made Lauren feel unsatisfactory, and to want to hand her back. She had only wanted to hold her for a moment.

  ‘She’s hungry,’ Liv said, dispassionately. ‘She’s always hungry. Give her here.’

  Liv sat on the floor and lifted her layers of clothing, but the breast Lauren glimpsed before Cleo attached herself to it was not at all like one of her sister’s taut, rounded breasts. Instead the flesh looked to have been flattened out. The too-bright nipple was chapped and sticking out at an angle.

  For all of Lauren’s life, Liv had existed on a separate plane, a place eighteen months beyond her, where more things were permissible, possible, known. But now, she saw, Liv had gone further still. Although Lauren could see Liv, and touch her, the distance between them was now so great that they were barely in the same universe.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Lauren asked.

  Lauren herself didn’t know precisely what she meant.

  ‘I’m so scared,’ Liv said.

  Up in the house, Lauren found that her mother was entertaining. She would have known this from the kitchen alone, which had been left not in its usual state of spotless tidiness, but with a recipe book propped open on a stainless-steel holder, a jar of preserved lemons on the bench beside it, herbs clustered greenly on a chopping board, and a copy of the latest Notebook magazine angled artfully by the telephone along with a fabric-covered journal and pen. Lauren supposed that Hattie Bourke and Marion Clovelly, who sat with her mother at the kitchen table, must put on equivalent displays of leisured productivity when June Wishart came to visit them. Surely they no longer fooled each other. And, yet, they persisted.

  ‘How was school, missy?’ Hattie asked. ‘Did you see Toby about? Anything I should know?’

  ‘No confirmed sightings, Hat,’ Lauren said, although she wouldn’t have told Hattie a thing in any case. ‘Hi, Marion.’

  Hattie, Marion and her mother with three lipstick-stained wine glasses and a barely nibbled cake in front of them: the signs of debriefing in progress. Over the years, Lauren had inconspicuously listened as her mother, Hattie and Marion covered husbands, mothers, friends and acquaintances, catastrophes.

  Hattie was an athletic woman of about fifty with a no-nonsense bearing that Lauren associated with the fact of her being a mother of sons. She had once been a sportswoman of note and remained fit, but, even so, it could only be down to spectacular genes that she still had the smooth, taut calves and upper arms of a twenty-year-old. For best, she wore short and figure-hugging shift dresses which showed off her flat stomach, but most often she wore sporty clothes and sandshoes and put into her short hair some kind of product that made it look perpetually damp, as if she were always just coming, going, glowing, from the gym. There was nothing the gym could do, though, for the skin of her face, rutted as it was by sun and sauvignon blanc.

  ‘You have to set clear boundaries,’ she was saying to June. ‘Tell her that you’ll have the baby for a few hours every Tuesday morning, or whichever is best for you. If you’re not definite in the early days, you’ll end up a permanent free babysitting service and, God knows, we’ve done our time.’

  Marion looked and sounded an altogether gentler person. She had a prayer-soft voice and a cloud of fine hair, which she had controversially allowed to grow out into its bright, natural silver. But there was something in the watchful set of her face, the twists at the corners of her mouth, that hinted to Lauren of dangerous disappointments, resentments and judgements.

  ‘I don’t think you want to be settin
g regular days, actually,’ Marion said. ‘Then they come to expect it and you’re locked in. What about when you want to travel? I wouldn’t be committing to that sort of thing if I were you. Not at our stage of life.’

  Lauren filled the kettle at the kitchen sink. Through the window, she noticed the overflowing garbage bin at the back door of the bungalow and thought how her mother must hate that with company over. Rita Bunting at the top of her staircase was banging on a tin with a spoon, calling belligerently for her cats.

  ‘Julia and Geoff have put their house on the market,’ Marion said.

  This might have seemed apropos of nothing, but Lauren knew it was entirely relevant. Julia and Geoff had three adult children; the two eldest already had babies and their youngest was about to have her first.

  ‘They’re really going to do it?’ Hattie asked, impressed.

  ‘As soon as the baby’s born, they’re off, interstate,’ Marion continued. ‘Julia says she doesn’t care which city so long as none of her grandchildren live in it, and so long as they can find an apartment within walking distance of the GPO.’

  Lauren flicked through the pages of the Notebook magazine, saw advertisements with slim older women walking, powerfully and inspiringly alone, on beaches.

  ‘Well, good for them,’ said Hattie.

  The kettle boiled, Lauren poured. The sky was darkening. Down at the bottom of the garden a window of the bungalow shone suddenly, brilliantly, yellow.

  ‘You have to think about illness, too,’ Hattie pointed out.

  ‘We’re not getting any younger and bugs these days seem to be nastier,’ Marion said. ‘They can go on forever.’

  Lauren ventured to glance over at June. She tried to remember if it had ever before been her mother sitting in the receiving chair, but the only images she could summon showed her mother poised and immaculate, filling wine glasses, fetching tissues. It hurt Lauren to watch the way her mother grasped at every scrap of advice Hattie and Marion gave to her, making fervid, grateful little nods, as if she were now too impoverished to refuse anything that was offered. June looked as if she were in the dock, cowed and diminished, guilty. Lauren took her cup of tea to the table, nudged her mother to make room, wedged in beside her on the same chair, although there were plenty of others. Sitting so close, Lauren could feel the shudder in her mother’s breathing, see the tears inside her eyelids.

  ‘Don’t you ever do this to me, will you?’ June took Lauren’s hand and gave it a squeeze, and Lauren felt something inside of herself expand. She squeezed back. A promise. And later that night, in the bathroom on the top floor of the house that Lauren no longer had to share with anyone, she stood in the shower and scrubbed away Nick Hanson’s phone number with a nailbrush. She scrubbed and scrubbed until her skin was red and it hurt.

  In the first weeks of Cleo’s life, Liv learned why infants were put into Baby Björns: it was to keep mothers in their places. Cleo entered every room first, absorbed every first greeting, every first kiss, Liv trailing her as inevitably as a caboose. Liv knew that she had been eclipsed, perhaps forever, but it was strange to Liv how little she minded. Out of all the things Cleo had stolen from her, sleep was really the only one she resented. Cleo woke at night only about as much as a new baby should, but the hours between the night-time feeds tortured Liv.

  Sometimes she got up out of bed and squeezed herself into the corner of one of the fat lady couches as if hoping to be consumed by its folds and creases. Often, she would turn on the television, but rarely the light. This made her eyes feel gritty and she had a sense of the synthetic brightness of the screen sucking at the moisture in her skin. From her living room Liv could see the rear of the Bunting place and there were nights when she was sure Rita Bunting, her topstorey windows flickering with pulsing light, was watching the same channel.

  Liv knew she should at least try to sleep, and so there were nights when she didn’t get up, only lay there in the too-soft double bed with her eyes closed, fighting herself for comfort and release. She counted, imagined lying down in a warm meadow with sheep. She towed her mind, meditatively, through the muscles of her body from toes to scalp, but always her thoughts would crash through any fragile peace she could conjure, and the thoughts she had after midnight were the ugliest of all.

  There were snatches of sleep, though, and during these she would catch a glimpse of a dream, always the same one. It was of a hotel with limitless corridors and mirrored elevators but, although its plush burgundy arteries seemed infinite, there was never enough time for Liv to get anywhere inside of them before she woke in the dark to mewling sounds she was not even certain she had heard. She would lurch out of bed, trying not to bruise her thighs on the furniture or open the bedroom door into her face. Still half-lost in the hotel, she would think at first—wish and hope—that the small, crying baby in the next room was the illusion made of dream-stuff, and not those long, velvety corridors of promise.

  A few of Liv’s friends came to the bungalow to see her. She could tell they had enjoyed their time at a children’s wear boutique, picking out a small skirt with frills or a hat with ears, but she knew the real reason they had come was to safely observe the thing from which, by luck or good management, they themselves had been delivered. June’s friends came in greater numbers, bringing with them tubs of pumpkin soup and hand-me-downs, holding Cleo for a while and then handing her back without failing to tell Liv how wonderful it was to be able to do so. They had been through their garages and lofts and found books and puzzles and games, high chairs and portable cots. Hattie Bourke brought a stately pram with a broad navy-blue canopy and white wheels and tyres, which Hattie had taken to with a tube of sandshoe whitener.

  ‘It’s not really in,’ Hattie said. ‘But it was the best you could buy when the boys were little.’

  It wasn’t the sort of pram you could easily fold up and put in a car, but one for relaxed mothers who strolled around the streets of their own neighbourhoods. Fitted with a firm mattress, it would only do for a few months until Cleo was ready to sit up.

  ‘I’ll have it back when you’re done with it,’ Hattie said in her forthright way, and Liv understood that she was thinking of her own grandchildren, even as she held little Cleo in her arms.

  It was a boastful sort of pram, Liv thought, as unnecessarily showy and large as a Volvo station wagon. But even if she didn’t like it, she began to use it every day. Tucking Cleo under layers of blankets against the cold, Liv set out for her walks without destination or purpose. Soothed by the sense of forward momentum, she walked sometimes towards the city, sometimes away from it, taking shelter in cafés or under shade sails when it rained.

  ‘I am surprising people,’ Liv told Babs, on the phone.

  Babs planned to fly south to meet Cleo later in the year, towards the end of spring when the weather improved.

  ‘They say I am managing beautifully.’

  She knew they watched how she put the baby dextrously to her breast. Did it remind them of the way she once put her violin to her chin? They watched, too, the way she now swung the baby up out of her cot, instinctively nestling Cleo’s head into the crook of her arm. She was surprised, herself, to learn how swiftly the body memorised new actions.

  ‘I bet they go back up to the house and tell June that this baby just might be the making of me,’ Liv said.

  And if they did, Liv thought, it was only because they didn’t know what she thought about in the night when she wasn’t sleeping. They didn’t know about her plans, and that was because nobody could ever know. She wasn’t sure if she would ever go through with any one of the plans, but if she ever told the least thing, the door to all of them would be forever closed.

  She thought about drowning. Sitting Cleo up in the bath water in that inflatable chair that someone had given her, and then ducking out to answer the phone. Everyone would call her stupid, and negligent, but not evil, and surely intention was all? It might be easier just to drop her hairdryer in the water.

  Liv k
new her small city’s waterfront by heart, and in the dark of a sleepless night could map out all of the many places where one might reasonably trip. She would have to be sure to do up the single strap, the one that went around the baby’s middle and over the top of her blankets, or else the baby might float up and out of the sinking pram.

  And yet, in the light of the day, if she bumped Cleo’s head by accident on the doorframe, Liv would almost cry out of sorrow and remorse. On the day she took Cleo to the GP to be immunised, Liv watched her baby’s face crumple with the shock of the first needle, and then, as the GP readied the second one, Liv screamed out, ‘Don’t. Please don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt her any more.’

  More weeks passed. Cleo grew, and still Liv did not sleep. Or, to be truthful, she slept like a starving person ate, each day finding just enough to keep from dying, but nothing more. The sleeplessness left her shaky and nauseated, perpetually afraid. Although she tried to get out of the bungalow for a small part of each day, every aspect of journeying into the outside world cost energy she had not been able to store. Walking the streets with Cleo in the pram, Liv found she had developed a habit of walking close to walls, just in case she suddenly needed their support.

  But sleep, it turned out, was a tidal wave. All the sleepless days and weeks, and the months they had become: these were only the long, slow out-suck. When sleep came rushing back to Liv, it was with the kind of momentum that could uproot trees, move entire houses, tear an infant from its mother’s grip.

  She had been in town for most of the morning. She had visited the library, where she had sat with Cleo among the big, bright beanbags, letting her chew the corners of board books. She had also been to a café, where she ordered a cappuccino and sat in a booth seat, concealed from street view, to breastfeed her baby. The café was at the top end of a block in one of the city’s steeper thoroughfares, and Liv had just pushed the pram back out through the door onto the street. It was early spring: one of those gusty equinoctial days when the sky suddenly thickens, colours itself a dirty orange, violet and blue. She was standing on the pavement in a cold wind. Nobody would have been surprised if it had snowed that day. Some of the kinder people even suggested that maybe the weather had played a part.