Malarky

by Anakana Schofield

  She’s stuck.

  Our Woman is stuck.

  Her hand is on his wrist and his question is odd. Will it be even odder if she pulls it off. It would so she leaves it, but it’s no longer light, rather she’s clutching his arm nervously, uncomfortably.

  —How was it? he repeats.

  —It was childbirth, she replies. Uncomfortable, unpleasant, bloody and . . . would he like more tea? She lifts her hand away to go for the teapot. He does not want tea. He’s waiting on her, he wants to return to childbirth. It is pure madness, live and interactive on her sofa on a Sunday. And he takes her hand and puts it strangely on his belly, like there’s a baby in there. It’s uncanny. Perhaps he has children some other place. Perhaps he has children all over the place. Perhaps he wants to import them. Perhaps he wants her to help him import them. She only knows whatever he has and wherever it is, it is not her business. If it were to become her business, it may make it difficult for him to sit on her couch. A scenario that wouldn’t please her. She doesn’t wish for anything that would make him cease visiting. And this is the reason she attends to it.

  With her hand on his stomach and longing to oblige his request – was it, after all, so unreasonable – a man who came from a uterus having questions about what came from hers since he hadn’t one of his own?

  Well, she says, what exactly is it you want to know, I am happy to tell you if it really does interest you this much.

  All of it, he replies. All of it.

  Our Woman thinks back and commences. They lie against her couch and she talks into the space between them and the fireplace. Neither looks at the other as she soliloquizes and the fire handily cracks a bit to cover up the odd word.

  Remember, she begins, I have had three children and so each birth was different. For starters they were all born in a different season and we’d different problems around the farm as each arrived. I delivered every one of them alone in a room except for a doctor or nurse who called in occasionally to ask how I was getting on and then took over at the end. In those days your husband was not allowed in the room while you gave birth. When my son was born my husband did not know he’d arrived for two days because there was a lot of problems with a sick cow at the time and he was out day and night tending to it and I had gone to Castlebar and stayed there and word had been sent, but we’d no phone then and well you don’t want to know this. The worst birth was the first my eldest daughter, it was an indicator of what was to come for she’s a difficult and obstinate girl and pardon my vulgarity, but she has a very big head. I was offered a handful of blue and pink pills, which at first I refused, then seeing how awkward this creature was I requested they hand them to me again. They didn’t make a difference, but my waters, which had insisted on not breaking then dropped out of me and my distant memory of her birth is that my feet were as wet as a penguin’s.

  He laughs.

  Great, he’s still alive, she thinks.

  —I can only say to you that it was an inhumane experience that I vowed so help me God I would never repeat as long as I was in the full control of my senses.

  —You felt no joy? No elation? He asks. You had no moment of completeness?

  —I was stitched from my arse to my elbow. I was tired, I was resentful and I wanted to cut my own hands off.

  —And then?

  —Then I had a cup of tea and six weeks later, I felt better.

  My second daughter flew out of me with so little warning she nearly landed head first in a bucket. That’s all I can say about it. To this day I am still confused by everything she says and she speaks in a terrible hurry and gives you no real information about anything that has happened or is likely to happen to her. If, though, you were to ask me which daughter you should marry, I would say my son, but failing that this daughter, for the older one has a vicious streak I’d be keen you avoid.

  My son, Jimmy, was the last one obviously and since I knew I would not be doing it again I minded it less. It was not an easy birth but the hospital was better and I’ll tell you the truth a strange peace came over me where I could have surrendered and died. I couldn’t explain it to you if I tried. But when I didn’t die and found I had a baby I felt not joy but certainly more contentment than with the previous two. And he was a very easy baby.

  But Halim’s not satisfied with this, he wants to know about the birth. Does it hurt? And if so how? Explain this pain to him. Explain how the stomach contracts. And how the body pushes out the baby. And could she tell when she became pregnant? He’s pressing her for minute details, and yet here they are the two of them sat so peaceful.

  She walks to the back door and puts the bolt on it. She scans the windows and closes the curtains. She turns off the light and leaves on a small lamp.

  The best way to explain it is if you try it yourself. Here up you go. Lift your hips.

  —No, no, he resists, no, no. He starts giggling.

  —Really it’ll be easier than explaining it. I’ll demonstrate it to you.

  —Back you go, she pushes him playfully.

  —Lift your backside, she sticks two cushions under him.

  —Now she says politely . . . I’ll need your leg. She elevates his left leg at the thigh and calf and pushes it up and gently back so his knee is heading towards his ear. He cranes his head up to see what she’s doing.

  —No, no lie back there now or you’ll ruin it. Your trousers might be a bit tight but sure we’ll give it a try. Right. She pushes his leg back to give him the idea. Then lifts his other leg up to the back of the couch.

  —Leave your leg up there, she instructs.

  Then resumes with the left leg pulsing it backwards until his tendons begin to protest. Once it is as far as it will go and the seams of his trousers look endangered, she says lift your head and breathe. Then with her spare hand she presses down on his belly gently. This is where your womb would be and then her hand skirts the air in a circle below at his groin, this, she indicates is where you feel dreadful pressure like the most bulging constipation you could ever imagine, like your hips will blow off and a giant concrete ball replace them.

  He erupts in laughter, leg collapsing from the top of the couch.

  —Let me up, he squeals, please let me up. She retreats politely and the two of them laugh in a different way.

  —You asked.

  —I did.

  —And so now you know.

  He reaches across for her. You are funny. He kisses her cheek, it’s thankful more than presumptive.

  —You are funny, he repeats.

  —Have you a child somewhere?

  —No, he says, I haven’t.

  Sacred Heart he’s still curious.

  How long she was married before she became pregnant? Tell him did it happen the first month? How many times did she do it with her husband before she became pregnant? Did her husband do it in a special way each time she found herself pregnant?

  It is time to excuse herself to the toilet. On the seat she allowed the run of urine extra time to give her space to think. What might possess a man to be overflowing with such concerns. He must be looking desperately for a woman to reproduce with. Do they teach the menopause in Syria? There are a lot of rumours about that country.

  When she returned he has an even stranger proposal for her.

  —You have sexed with a man who gave you three children.

  —I have?

  —I want you to sex with me and tell me do you find any difference between him and me?

  She is perplexed.

  —What? What are you saying?

  —There must be a difference between the man that gives children and the man that does not. I want you to try to tell me what it is. I must know. He unbuttons his shirt.

  —But I wouldn’t be qualified to tell you a thing like that, she’s distracted by his lovely sleek arms. She cannot get away from his youth and when she sees a hint of it, she wants it. She calculates which is left and right, and before he can say another word, leans over the way she
saw Jimmy lean over the watery fella, and plants a long kiss on his nipple, as though all that stands between a man who makes a baby and who doesn’t is such a missed kiss. He murmurs something in his language and drops his hands around her back. He cannot do very much else, since she has the monopoly on his chest, so patiently he waits ’til she’s lifted her head.

  —A woman has never done that to me before, he says pleased. It’s precisely the kind of compliment she’s received about her baking. They are on the right track. Hurriedly she queues up all the images she caught of Jimmy and his men and tries to choose which one should be next. She has no desire to sleep with him in the traditional sense. She only wants to experience that which her son gave and received.

  Halim had his own ideas and they’re nice traditional, pleasant ones too, unwrapping the various layers of her clothing, discarding them like onion skins, he’s particularly attentive to the inside and outside of her thighs, but she will not give herself up to be flattened and submissive underneath him, so allows a bit of time at that malarky before she moves to the main thrust of her plan. Let’s go out to the barn, she suggests, rising. He’s startled. Semi-naked and startled. Barn? Barn?

  In the barn she’s not sure this is such a grand idea because she’s anxious vermin might scamper over her feet. It’s dark, very dark, once the door is shut, stinky, and not even a shaft of light between the two of them, they can barely find each other. It’s cold, she regrets not bringing a blanket and there are objects to negotiate that she’s forgotten about, but she’s a plan. She must know what her son experienced that day and here is the man to show her.

  —Like this, she pushes on his shoulders, encouraging him down to her hips, and he commences precisely what she has come up here for. Biology somewhat absent from the original equation. She dragged his hands to the back of her, but he began to wobble on one knee.

  Technically speaking, it did not work as well for her as it had for Jimmy that day. She’d never had a man’s tongue, her husband’s, between her legs that way and though she found plenty to recommend it, with the bale of straw scratching her backside and the tickling out front, it required an extreme balance and itching concentration act, with an increasing number of goose pimples on both their shivering flesh. She never stands still in a barn, she is in, out and about to the animals. She has a moving purpose entering the barn. Plus she’s aware of the sounds outside and realizes this is an utterly lunatic arrangement. Is that a tractor passing along the road? A wheelbarrow coming up the path?

  She’d inverted the positioning: she should have had him receive her sucking, since it was that sucking action that had bothered her the most. The hungry gobble of that young fella pulling at her son.

  She’d ruined a recipe.

  His awkward attempt within this arrangement to penetrate her failed. She’d resisted saying it’s all wrong, not this way, and he complained of the uncomfortable prickle at the top of his thighs from the hay, which was lacerating her lower back. He suggested a return to the house to reunite with the comfort of a bed, but on exit Halim tripped on a spade and fell rather badly.

  Back in the kitchen the bloody graze his elbow took on falling led to medical repair and since she did a good nursing act, which he lapped up, that led to the kettle rather than further flesh and they sat drinking tea together as though nothing had ever happened between them. In the harsh light of the bulb, she was terrified to touch him, for this table was where she sat with her husband watched him sigh over the salt pot and where she recorded the deaths of soldiers and civilians. Another problem was whenever Halim sat down with no purpose, he began complaining vociferously about all aspects of his life.

  The strangest things happened when men sat down around her.

  That night she doesn’t sleep well. All Halim’s questions about childbirth confuse her as to their purpose. And she must stop this nonsense. When she looks in the bathroom mirror, she sees only how worn out her own face is, and how age has ravaged her and suddenly he looks tauter and younger and newer and polished, more elastic than he is. She doesn’t smile when she thinks of him tonight. When she looks at her husband in bed, his nose just above the covers, she belongs here beside this relic, where they’re drooping in unison.

  By Sunday her mind is made up. She will not ask his age. She’s more to do with him and she must get on with it, that’s a fact.

  As a matter of fact I must carry on.

  Sunday and Halim’s low. He’s awful down.

  —I can’t stay in this country, it’s too hard, they treat me very bad in my work. They think I am stupid but I am from a good family, I study hard and yet these people treat me stupid.

  —Don’t mind them, she tries to cheer him up, but he won’t be cheered.

  —My life is awful. I have disappointed my family. They had big hopes for me you know. I am from a very good family, he repeats.

  —I’m sure you haven’t disappointed them. And you’re young, young and studying. I wish my son was still here studying.

  He is briefly interested in her son, but wails further on his disappointment.

  He repeats that he has disappointed them and he cannot tell her why.

  —Nonsense, she says brightly. Go way outta that.

  —You don’t know anything. Nothing at all. You think I’m stupid. All these Irish are the same. They seem like they like you but actually they hate you. They think I’m not capable.

  He’s morose in this state, so she whisks herself away with the kettle’s boiling.

  On her return from the kitchen she brings a tray of tea.

  —Sometime I will tell you about my wedding, he says.

  Please God save me from it, Our Woman thinks. Offering him a Kimberly biscuit as consolation.

  After that visit she settled on a pony, a Connemara pony. A lovely one with an overgrown fringe she could attend to and be shut of these morose, immodest men in her ears.

  But first she’d another thing to do with him.

  Episode 11

  —Are you still having the visions?

  —I am.

  —And how are you managing them?

  —I am doing what you suggested. My kitchen floor is ever so clean.

  We laughed. It is important to reassure Grief, to let her know that I am behaving in my widowhood.

  Everything else we discussed faded into the nice room, the nice floral lamp, and the cosy beige chairs we sat on. We could have been exchanging bingo numbers. All I knew was I was sat here for my reputation and for the Blue House. The Blue House with the gaping big hole in it.

  —Kathleen, she told me warmly at the end of that session, you are doing very well. Much better than before.

  I was not talking about the naked men. I was behaving. Progress had been made. For some reason I was Kathleen instead of Phil. I think she had confused me with someone who was doing better than I am. When I phoned to book my next appointment I called myself Kathleen. Whoever she was, she was doing better than me.

  People assume a mother to be protective over who marries her daughter, not me, any man who wanted them could have either of mine, if he’d a clean face and a warm hand. I never worried about my girls. Especially the eldest, I knew she’d be grand. I raised them that way. I raised them strong and indifferent and they knew they’d only have my attention when they practiced it and neither of them let me down.

  When the girls were sick they’d push me away and take to the pillow, not Jimmy, he’d cling to me like a clawing rabbit, he’d sit on me, hang off me, drop around my ankles if I stopped still. I could see him physically hurt if I had to go out to the kitchen to turn on the kettle. I never slept a night that boy had any illness. I sat in the bed, hand on his piping hot head, I talked him through the chicken pox, the measles, there wasn’t a thought or fear that child didn’t share with me.

  Jimmy’s the only person in my life who ever gave me a fright. No one could give me a fright the way Jimmy could. I had a terrible pain worrying about Jimmy serving himself up to the w
rong man, yawning his way to the beyond.

  —I have days where I can’t remember whether I have buried my son or not.

  Am I forgetting things? Grief asks, perky today because I talked first.

  —Yes. I am.

  Can I remember that I buried my husband? Grief asks.

  —My husband is always dead, I never forget the day I buried him but I am very confused about Jimmy.

  Grief wants the full extent of the confusion.

  I’m too exhausted to explain it.

  Take your time. She sits back, waits. Would that she were just a little more impatient.

  Everything about widowhood is exhausting because you’re trying to recall, unable to recall and then expected to explain why you cannot recall. It is not as simple as living. It is not as simple as being irritated. Being alive and married is like sanding a windowsill. Maybe it is dusty, it may get in your eyes or knick your fingers but you can look at it and see there’s a windowsill. You can look at your husband and feel no need to say anything to him.

  The curse of the widow is the non-stop chatter outside and around your head. Like a television talk show where you loathe the questions, but cannot turn it off. Miriam, Miriam, Miriam go away with your nice gentle questions.

  I walked to find some peace.

  They thought I was walking for madness.

  I was walking from madness.