Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘See his eyelids fluttering? You can make him interested if you just slowly wake him up. He’s got to have this colostrum.’ Stacking the rustling pillows behind Michelle’s head and sitting back to watch.

  There’s stuff like condensed milk that the midwives reach over to squeeze confidently from her breasts. She can’t believe it. Two days ago she would have been mortified that any stranger was touching her like that, but now, after going through the birth, this minor manhandling just doesn’t bother her anymore. Let them poke and probe and pump her — she couldn’t care less. It’s like this big loose body, slack and sore, belongs to someone else.

  Her baby’s face looks squashed and red, startling in its strangeness. The photo on the baby-oil bottle looks more like what Michelle had expected to give birth to: a chubby little baby with bright rosy cheeks clapping its hands together, a cute wisp of hair curled up on top. When Des had taken a look at his son, that first afternoon, he’d seemed perplexed. The same startled, faintly incredulous look she’d seen on his face when she’d turned and glimpsed him during the labour.

  ‘Do you want to hold him?’ Michelle had said, trying to manoeuvre herself up in bed a bit. She was getting good at holding him, not so scared. The way they wrapped him, it was like holding a big parcel of hot chips. Jason’s face peered out of the cotton blankets; a tiny old man exhausted after a long and arduous journey.

  ‘Nah,’ Des had said. ‘That’s alright.’ He’d wiped his hands nervously down his jeans — a gesture that had almost made her feel sorry for him again. ‘How about I go and get a disposable camera?’ It was the closest he’d come to apologising for taking hers down to Cash Converters.

  ‘No,’ she’d said, stroking Jason’s fingers. ‘I’ll sort something out.’ Deliberately not looking at Des, already wanting him to go.

  In the middle of the night, when she hears the midwives go down the hall to the nursery or their staffroom, she levers herself off the bed quietly and takes Jason out of the plastic crib even though they’ve expressly instructed her not to, and lays him in bed with her, wriggling back down beside him. The light in the hospital is cold, and everything hums. Michelle hates the way her narrow bed crackles, the plastic lining inside her pillow that keeps her awake when she knows she should be trying to sleep. She’s not tired now, though. She’s burning with bright energy, like someone’s flicked a light switch on.

  ‘You’ve got little hands, I’ve got big hands, let’s put our hands together,’ she sings to him in a whisper. She invents heaps of songs, in the middle of the night, songs that definitely sound as good as The Wiggles. She lies curled with her tiny oblivious son, hearing his moth breaths, singing softly to him until she has to put him back in the crib before the midwife does her rounds again. They’ve tried to be strict about it, but she bets they wouldn’t push their luck if she told them to mind their own business. Her wakefulness seems tinged, now, with a private, freshly minted exhilaration.

  ‘Any milk yet?’ the staff keep asking her the next morning as they stride in and out of her room. ‘Your milk come in yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she says.

  ‘Keep at it, won’t you? Because it stimulates your pituitary gland to release the oxytocin. That’s the let-down reflex.’

  ‘Right.’ She nods, chewing her lip. If only that nice one would come back, and sit down in her room for a while and explain it properly.

  ‘He’s hardly had anything since he was born,’ she tells one, worried. ‘And he hasn’t even woken up properly yet. He won’t starve, will he?’

  ‘Well, it’s only day two. Just keep going with the colostrum. That’s the best thing for him. Just wait another couple of days, and we’ll see.’

  Jason nuzzles up to her breast, licks it. His tiny mouth feels like a goldfish nibbling at her. Her heart thumps with nervousness.

  ‘Well, that’s a start,’ says the midwife. ‘You have to try to develop his sucking reflex. But there you go, see? He’s getting some now.’

  Is he? She can’t tell what’s going on anymore. The girl in the next room, who’s up and on her feet and sashaying out to the courtyard for a sneaked cigarette puts her head in Michelle’s room on the way back and smiles grimly. She says she’s got the opposite problem, her baby feeds too vigorously. That’s what the midwives call it, at least.

  ‘He’s like a shark,’ is how the girl puts it. ‘I’m telling you, there’s this huge crack in the skin, it’s bloody agony.’

  Michelle nods sympathetically. She can hear the girl’s baby crying at night; the strong, confident wail of an alert child with a big appetite.

  ‘When I get home,’ says the girl in a conspiratorial whisper, glancing round before she speaks, ‘I’m putting him straight onto formula. I don’t care what any of these nipple Nazis say. Stuff this for a joke.’

  Michelle sees the poster on the Monday afternoon when they let her briefly get up, and she walks slowly down to the courtyard herself for some fresh air.

  $5 FAMILY PORTRAIT. Let a PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER do a studio portrait of you both with your new baby. TUESDAYS from 10 a.m.

  It’s in the mall; just across the main road, really, from the hospital. They could walk there tomorrow, have the photo taken, be back in time to sit up and try the lunchtime feed.

  ‘Do many mothers go and have the family photo taken?’ she asks one of the nurses.

  ‘They do, but it’s only on Tuesdays, I think,’ she answers. ‘So you couldn’t go until next week. The doctor says you’re to stay in bed till Thursday, at least. And you need the rest. But don’t worry, they’re there every week.’

  ‘I’m fine. I reckon I’m nearly ready to go home.’ Even as Michelle speaks, the ache in her is like someone has hooked bricks to her insides and left them to hang suspended. She shifts on her legs as the midwife looks at her sceptically.

  ‘You look a bit pale to me.’

  ‘I’m feeling fine, really. I could go tomorrow.’ She feels sweat sliding down her spine, the stitches pulling. Just along the hall and into bed. Then later, after a sleep, they will bring her dinner on that little tray, dessert and everything, and painkillers if she asks for them. And every time she turns her head towards the plastic crib she will feel the same aghast realisation jolting her, the same rush of disbelief, terror and happiness.

  ‘Let Baby find his own way there,’ says the midwife when it’s time for the next feed, watching Michelle closely as she tries to get the nipple into Jason’s mouth. Baby. She hates the way they call him that, like he hasn’t even got a name. And the way they talk about you as if you weren’t there in the room, like the obstetrician who called the trainee midwife over after the birth, when they were weighing and measuring her baby and Michelle was lying there stunned, like a casualty thrown against a wall after a bomb blast, like someone tipped out of a wheelchair.

  ‘There, see that?’ he’d said briskly, somewhere down between her legs. ‘That’s a second-degree tear.’ And the two of them had studied her like a bus timetable for a few seconds before he said, ‘OK, thread me a needle.’

  She’d steeled herself afterwards, during the night, and put her hand down to finally feel the stitches there. Jagged as a barbed-wire fence, just about, the flesh swollen and unrecognisable as her own. Numb on the surface, and a burning ache inside. They keep asking her to sit up in her visitor’s chair to feed Jason, but she can’t sit up. She can hardly get herself out of the bed without stopping for deep breaths while pulling herself up on the handle thing over the bed.

  ‘What’s that … what’s that bucket of salt for?’ she’d mumbled when they first wheeled her into the recovery room, bloody and trembling, and walked her into the shower cubicle.

  ‘Perineal trauma,’ they’d said.

  She hadn’t understood what they meant at the time but, jeez, she’s got a fair idea now.

  Michelle continues tr
ying to feed her baby, seeing his mouth open sleepily and keep missing. She wants to cry with frustration but she’s scared to. The midwives and nurses are watching her too keenly, trained to keep an eye out for the new mothers who dissolve into weeping.

  ‘Feeling teary?’ one had asked her as she watched Michelle tentatively wash Jason in his bath. ‘Like it’s all a bit overwhelming? Is Baby attaching OK?’

  She’d hesitated and answered, ‘Well, no. He’s only had that colostrum stuff since he was born, that’s the only thing that’s worrying me.’

  ‘What about you, though? Got the baby blues?’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Well, crying all the time for no reason, say.’

  Michelle, concentrating on supporting Jason’s fragile head, had glanced over at the midwife. ‘No,’ she’d said, truthfully. Before the birth, maybe. But not anymore.

  The person she’d been before the birth, in fact, seems like a dopey, thickheaded version of who she’s become now. So optimistic it was all going to change somehow, with Des at the birth. She’d browse mistily through those cards at the newsagent that showed guys with their shirts off holding little vulnerable babies, expressions of adoration on their faces; guys who looked like models, but still. All the time she was pregnant, she thought that that adoration would kick in once Des saw the baby and she saw Des with the baby. She’d had some vague idea that she’d be able to rest and Des would take over and look after them both, hold his son unashamedly in the crook of his arm like the men on the cards.

  When labour began and she’d been admitted into hospital, he’d started off being just like he always was, and she’d been so glad he was there at first, just his usual familiar self in the strange room. She’d sensed him pacing around restlessly, grabbing the remote control beside the bed to surf through the channels on the TV up on the wall as she kneeled on the bed, nodding and shaking her head to the midwives’ questions. But once the surf of real pain began rolling in, once she started moaning and swearing when people spoke to her, she’d sensed him, in her peripheral vision, getting jumpy. She’d glanced over at him and seen him caught out, with that expression of startled distaste. God knows what she’d hoped he’d do — rub her back like on the video in the antenatal class, maybe, or sponge her forehead with a face washer; she couldn’t put her finger on what she’d expected, but whatever it was, this wasn’t it. Not this wordless hanging back like it was all beyond him, folding and unfolding his arms. Not switching off the TV just when things were starting to get really rough, and going to get himself a drink.

  They kept telling her to listen to her body, which was embarrassing, like doing those neck massages at the antenatal classes. But in a rush, to her distant, pinpointed surprise, she realised they were right. It was like something she’d known once and then forgotten. She just needed a minute or two to gather her strength, unhook the heavy monitoring belt from around her belly, get off the bed and kneel on the floor. Grab one of those towels. Then she’d know exactly what to do.

  But they’d started reading the slip of paper that was spooling out of the monitoring machine like a long, slow shopping docket, and more people were hurrying into the room with a trolley and fitting together forceps like giant soup spoons, and it all happened too quickly at the end, after all that work and going so slowly, and Des wasn’t even next to her when she turned her head to look for him.

  When they handed her Jason, though, it was like she finally stopped thinking about Des. Stopped worrying about him. She leaned over and smelled her son’s head, fresh as newly turned earth, then glanced over at her boyfriend, who was back now, bashing an empty Gatorade bottle mindlessly against his thigh and jiggling his leg in his stretched tracksuit pants as he sprawled in the chair in the corner, so freaked out he couldn’t even meet her eye. Useless, she’d thought, feeling a startling surge of impatient, adrenaline-fuelled scorn. She was suddenly way beyond him now. She couldn’t believe she’d ever needed him for anything.

  You find one thing, then you piece together another thing, thinks Michelle in the blue-lit middle of the night, holding her son in the bed. Des has never been the type to let her in on what was happening, kept big segments of his life closed off from her, and she’s remembering how someone showed up at the door for him eight weeks ago with a court summons, and how afterwards he’d just banged back inside and sat down again in front of the TV.

  She thinks now about how she just sat there with her mouth shut and how guilty and nervous she’d felt checking his wallet for the piece of paper later, to find out what the charge was.

  Aggravated assault. She recalled the night it must have happened: Des coming home and wrapping up his bleeding hand rather than go down to Casualty to get stitches, muttering about how it had only been an after-footy argument at the pub.

  If it had been his first offence, it might have been different, but she’s not stupid. He’s got three priors for similar offences and that means no more probations.

  He’s said nothing to her about it. Not a thing. Even though the court date is this Thursday, and even though he’s got a girlfriend with a newborn baby. That’ll be the first thing he’ll mention, though, you can bet on that. He’ll get his solicitor to stand up there and use her and Jason to try and duck the sentence. But no more probations means he’ll go straight to the jail from court. Not a word to her. It’s like he thinks that if he ignores it it’s all going to go away.

  Michelle strokes Jason’s ear, flat and perfect against his head. First one thing, and then another thing, and the click when it happens, like a door opening. When none of her own clothes had fitted her four weeks ago and she felt so bloated and huge, she’d pulled on one of Des’s shirts over her stretched t-shirt. Out doing the shopping, she’d had to fill up the car, and stooping there uncomfortably at the bowser, trying not to breathe in the petrol fumes, she’d come across a folded-up supermarket docket in the breast pocket of the shirt, a discount petrol voucher at the bottom.

  As she was waiting in the queue to pay for the gas, she’d glanced at the list of items on the docket, idly working out the computerised abbreviations for Pepsi and peanut butter. TEABGS50PACK, she read. BBQDIP250GRAM. Then, a little further down the list her eyes took in: CNDOMS8PACK.

  Her hand swam out and clutched the counter, and the baby seemed to somersault inside her.

  ‘Steady on, love!’ the man behind the counter called jovially when he saw her face. ‘You’re not going to have it here, are you?’

  The thing she couldn’t get over, after she got back in the car and sat staring at the steering wheel and feeling the baby settling again, was that she remembered that night too, the way he’d bought those chips and dip to take home to his eight-months-pregnant girlfriend, then gone out alone. And how she’d believed he’d been thoughtful that night, buying snacks and renting her those DVDs to shut her up and keep her fat and dumb and happy. Thoughtful.

  ‘You have to come in tomorrow morning, alright?’ she says to him on Monday night. ‘At 9.30. We’re taking Jason to have our photo taken.’

  ‘What day are you allowed home?’

  ‘Maybe Thursday.’ She waits, watches to see how he’ll handle this. Pushes him. ‘Did you get that capsule from the council like I asked you? Otherwise we’re not allowed to put him in the car.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ There is a long pause. He scratches the back of his head, then his hand moves around to his jaw. ‘I’ve got this court thing in the morning on Thursday.’ He mutters it from behind his hand.

  Jesus, does he think she doesn’t get what’s going to happen?

  ‘You’ll have to get your mum to come and get us then, won’t you?’

  ‘You reckon?’ His face is a flinching mess of blotchy discomfort.

  ‘You’ll have to put the capsule in her car,’ she says, gritted and deliberate, eyeing him, ‘and get her to pick us up.’

 
When Michelle had first met Des’s parents, they’d been sitting in the backyard having a barbeque, Des and his younger brother Kyle slouched in the deckchairs while his mum ran around bringing them food and cans of beer.

  ‘Look at your jeans,’ she’d clucked at Des. ‘White paint all over them. What have they got you doing down there at the centre?’

  As if he was working on a real job, not a community service order.

  ‘Painting the lines on the basketball courts,’ Des answered, and his father had given an explosive laugh, coughing through his mouthful of beer and chips.

  ‘Not a bad wicket, eh?’ he’d said after they’d finished laughing, shaking his head with something like admiration. ‘Not a bad gig, instead of doing the time.’ And he’d leaned over to Michelle. ‘You’ll have to watch this one, love,’ he said, smiling. ‘He can be a bit of a naughty boy.’

  She’d smiled back at the time, she remembers. Felt herself as indulgent and forgiving and tolerant as his mother, like it was a club women belonged to. Staring at Des now, Michelle thinks that’s exactly what he looks like: a naughty boy. She pauses to make him look at her, refusing to smile.

  ‘Or you could come in and get us, Des, after the court thing, and take us home.’

  ‘Well,’ he gulps, caught out, ‘it’s all gunna depend, you know —’

  Michelle cuts him off. ‘That’s why it has to be tomorrow,’ she says. She hears Jason sighing in his sleep in the crib.

  Des gets up without arguing, and she feels the power that comes with coldness.

  ‘Bring something for the baby to wear,’ she adds flatly as he goes to leave. ‘Buy something. I want him to look really good.’

  She knows the doctor will say no if she asks him, so when he comes on his rounds the next morning, she just doesn’t ask.

  ‘Milk come in yet?’ says the midwife who helps her bath and wrap Jason, and she shakes her head with a bright smile.

  ‘Is he sucking, though?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, he’s starting to.’ Nodding until the midwife writes it down on her card and goes out.