Rocks in the Belly

by Jon Bauer

  Then everyone but Mum says Amen.

  29

  I wake up in the shed and run outside to pee, last night’s bad dreams still affecting my innards even if they’re already hazy in my mind.

  I risk a visit indoors and Alfie is sprawled on the lounge floor, her breathing sluggish and laboured, her gurgling and snoring sounding louder than ever.

  I gather her up and she whimpers in pain.

  I’m glad to be out of the house, low cloud covering the whole sky and the cat warming my chest. Nothing on my feet, my hair probably sticking up in angry spikes.

  Alfie feels good against me but her breathing’s laboured and frail, reminding me of Reg.

  Suddenly the whole world seems fragile to me. People inside those moving cars, seatbelts on, windscreens reflecting grey sky, the car tyres gripping on and everyone’s heart going, for now. Everything held together only by the faint beating of our hearts.

  I cut across Malfour Park, talking to Alfie, my bare feet content on the cool grass. I pass the craters that are concreted over now, skaters lingering with long hair and limp postures — taking their turn on the slopes. Everest. Round The World.

  Beyond the park I cross the road, the cars giving us more space than usual in deference to Alfie’s obvious sickness. A sign outside a newsagent’s with the local paper’s brand on it and the headline.

  Chemical Plant Burns — 11 Dead.

  I head into the shop and a harsh buzzer goes, an old shopkeeper staring at the state of me. Beyond the condolence cards and the wrapping paper and the glistening packets of chocolate is the stationery. I bend to grab a thick permanent marker pen, Alfie mewing out in pain.

  I throw a banknote onto the counter and walk out, the door buzzer drilling again and the shopkeeper shouting after me about my change.

  My knees crack as I crouch down, crossing out the 11 in the poster’s headline and writing 12.

  I have to meander up the busy high street because of everybody going about their business, stopping to chat to one another about their kids, the fire, what they’re spending their time and money on. People giving me Ah cute looks when they see Alfie in my arms.

  I walk on with the pen nib under my nose, the toxic smell percolating my teenage years back into me. Memories of ducking out of school, wedging myself in behind bus stops. My graffiti all over the town like a coded distress signal.

  I pass another shop and am making 11 read 12 again, people stopping to watch, one of them asking me if another person has died overnight. I stand and they stay paused and open-mouthed in front of me. Suddenly they’re keen to talk to this messy man because there’s something in it for them — some juicy fact. They’re prepared to make me an authority if it means drama.

  ‘My mum died.’

  One of them asks her husband or boyfriend what I said. I’m standing right here and she asks him what I said, like I’m on the TV and she can’t interact with me. I’m the act. And in replying, he doesn’t look away from my face, just turns his mouth to her and says, ‘He says his mum died in it too.’

  I walk into the vet’s, hard-wearing lino on the floor, the smell of disinfectant. I twist a foot but since I’m barefoot there’s no lino squeak.

  A nurse behind the counter sizes up the scene in an instant and gives me a sympathetic smile.

  I sit and wait, Alfie’s head lolling down over my thigh if I don’t hold it up — her fur coming out all over my clothes. Her chest going up and down. A little dog whimpering from behind the caged door of a wicker basket, its owner reading a magazine while I sit here trying to focus on a diamond of sunshine brightening on the floor because the clouds are clearing outside. Another sunny day.

  Zero millimetres.

  I stroke her and there’s that feeling I get when I stroke an animal — a softness like a hug in my chest. I stay here in that feeling, gently comforting her, my face right down close.

  ‘The vet will see her now.’ The nurse comes over to say that, rather than calling out from her desk. I follow her through to a small room with a high table and a stronger smell of disinfectant. She leaves and the vet appears. He looks like he should be on a magazine cover, all smooth skin and cheekbones.

  ‘Hello,’ he says and shakes my hand, then gives her a light stroke in my arms. ‘I remember her well. Lovely girl, aren’t you, yesh. I’m guessing it’s your mum I met on the other appointments?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He takes her from me, both of us working to hand her over gently. Still she lets out a sound.

  Cheekbones makes a show of examining her but in his arms, her wheezing quickening. He and I both know what’s happening but he makes a pretence of thoroughness, even though the nurse might be firing up the incinerator next door. Chucking another log on.

  ‘Look,’ he says eventually, softly, ‘your mum always wanted to carry on with Alfie. And back then I understood. But now we’re at a stage in her illness where she’s suffering more than necessary. She’s in a lot of pain, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. The cancer has almost certainly metastasised.’

  I take her back, focus on stroking her, give a nod. She looks so beautiful in her frail state. Animals have an innocence humans could never aspire to. Who are we to take that away with our needles. Besides, I can see a glimpse of Mum’s innocence in her face.

  ‘Ok.’

  Cheekbones nods. ‘Would you like to call your mum first?’

  ‘It’d be long distance.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘No, it’s ok.’

  ‘I’ll give you and Alfie a moment then,’ and he pats my shoulder and slips away, part of me wanting to trip him up as he goes. He slides the door shut and there’s a glimpse of the rubber boots he’s wearing at the bottom of his white coat.

  I look round at the posters about worming and tagging your pet, an array of animals assembled and looking at the camera.

  Goodbye isn’t for the dying but for the end of an evening or the start of a week apart. It’s See you soon. Goodbye isn’t for I’ll never see you again. We need a bigger word.

  I stick my face in among her fur and she smells of home — of all the good things that happened too, not just the bad. The laughs. The moments of understanding. The positive times that happened when you weren’t expecting them. Not necessarily at birthdays or Christmas, but when Dad’s car was in for a service so all of us had to drive him to work together on the way to school. Or when I was ill or there was a storm and I could climb in between them in bed, soaking up adult warmth in stereo.

  Or driving off to visit family friends in Mum’s home town and being carried out their house after dark in my sleeping bag. Tucked up and cosy in the back of a car on a night drive, the interior lights like magic, then pretending to be asleep so I could be carried up to bed still in my sleeping bag.

  There’s a miniature knock at the door and Cheekbones comes in carrying a kidney dish with a small towel covering it. He puts it down out of sight and we get her onto the sterile examination table.

  ‘Do you think she knows?’ I say to him, my knee up to its usual trick.

  ‘That she’s ill?’

  ‘What we’re going to do. D’you think she’s ok with it?’

  He leans on the table while he thinks, gives her a stroke. ‘Animals are very instinctual. I think she understands why, if she does know. I think she forgives.’

  Then his face is withering at what’s happening to mine. I’m wiping and wiping at my eyes, subtly as I can for her. The vet making himself busy, talking sweet nothings.

  ‘Can I hold her as she goes?’

  He looks at me and nods. ‘I just need to finish getting her ready first.’

  I smile at him but my whole body is doing its own thing. And I’m thinking about the original Alfie with his ears down, the hot shower water, paws scrabbling at the shower screen. The way he still let me stroke him at night. Forgiving me over and over again — opening up to hurt again and again.

  Like Robert. He’d finally fou
nd the love he needed in my mum and I couldn’t share her with him, not even for a few months, just while he waited for his life to get back on its feet.

  Robert McCloud, innocent as an animal.

  The vet unveils a portion of the kidney dish, takes out a cannula, holds her leg, shooshing her as the needle slips idly under the skin. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t pity herself the way I have.

  ‘Ok, if you take her in your arms, and we’d best get you seated — that chair.’

  I gather her up, struggling to get all of her. She’s so warm against me, her mouth open, struggling for air. ‘On the floor. I need us to do it on the lino.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please.’ I lower myself down between the table and the door. ‘Down here, like this. Please.’

  He looks at me then sighs a heavy sigh. I smile up at him, my eyes underwater again.

  Cheekbones has the needle full of death now. He doesn’t squirt it to get rid of air, no need. He keeps it out of sight but my eyes are hungry for it.

  ‘You’re squeezing her too tight, just try and relax.’

  He kneels, turning to the side table to bring everything else to our level. Then he says ‘Ok?’ but brings the needle in anyway, holding the cannula with his other hand and inserting the long, thin point and we’re armed and ready to go, her eyes looking up at me, losing focus but she’s still with me. So pure in her opened-up vulnerability. Her mouth gasping for air. Struggling for purchase.

  His thumb coerces the plunger along the one-inch journey that’ll take her an infinite distance away. My shaking stopping like Robert did when he was perched on that edge, the man strapped to him. My eyes wide to every drop of this — the moment I missed.

  Her body deflates as if the plunger isn’t pushing death in but pulling life out. Her tongue sliding out the side of her mouth, the light in her eyes dimming. Robert with the clouds in his eyes. The room quiet now without the sound of her clogged and difficult breathing. Without her suffering. My body going up and down with its own silent unravelling. Cheekbones working quickly, getting his stethoscope and putting it against her, his eyes looking at a listening point on the wall. My breathing stopped again, watching his face, waiting.

  He takes the scope away and removes it from his ears, nods at me without making eye contact.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nods again, taking out the cannula, a cotton ball ready and pressed on to stop any intrusive details of the death that has so obviously occurred.

  He puts everything in the kidney dish and says an almost inaudible sorry as he closes the door, leaving me on the floor of this little box room with sorrow in my arms.

  30

  I’m sat here barefoot on the bench looking across the park to Patricia’s front door. Alfie’s collar is with me, some of her fur still clinging to the inside of it, my head turning occasionally to see if Reg is going to come along, Rocket’s tail in the air.

  I’ve got my sleeve rolled up and the marker pen colouring my arm black, my tongue out in concentration. Progress halted occasionally by having to stand and wander over to a tree beside me and wipe the built-up skin and sweat from the pen nib — several of the leaves with black, chemical lines defacing their green purity.

  The picture’s gone from Patricia’s front doorstep and a part of me wants to go and peek in through her window to see if it’s on her wall.

  I called her last night, left a message, apologised for a visit from the police, if she had one. Telling her about the funeral, if it happens. Asking her to call, if she wants to.

  I had the same nightmare again last night — Mum laid out in the old pirate-chest freezer she put me in. A strip light above the freezer blinking on and off, making that sound they do like the fluttering of glass eyelashes. Mum all hollowed out and blue behind make-up applied the way a twelve-year-old girl would, or a transvestite.

  In death she looked like she would if I’d just met her. The way Robert would have first seen her. The way she probably looked to the checkout girl at the supermarket or the surgeon operating on her brain. The way a face looks before you love it. Before all those feelings and history and familiarity are laid over it. So that even after years of loving them you can still sometimes conjure what their face first looked like, when they were a stranger.

  That’s the uniqueness of your parents though, isn’t it, that you’re never haunted by that other face from before they were yours. Your parents are supposed to have always been yours.

  In the dream I reached out an uncertain hand and unbuttoned her blouse, the mark from an autopsy running thick and raw up the centre of her, ragged and unnecessary. Her body dressed in some standard-issue garment rather than the clothes I chose for her.

  I took one of her eyelids between shaky finger and thumb, lifting it up, her eye shocking me — the pupil unmoved. Dilated.

  I dragged her into the kitchen to measure the size of her pupils in the light of the TV, a cricket match being played.

  Then I was on the stairs with her again, both of us screaming as I tugged her up one step at a time and put her back in the bath, green peas and chicken kievs in there with us.

  And I tried to measure her pupils in that light too, so I could know where she was when her eyes stopped reacting to the light. So I could know where she was when she died.

  So I could know if I’m still bad.

  Sat here now on this park bench, my heart beating away at the memory of the dream, I can’t get the back of my arm coloured in so I start on the other, a little nausea building in me and I hope it’s the chemicals in the pen. The nib turning my arm black and my head imagining that Reg does show up — invites me back to his and it turns out he’s lost a son like I’ve lost a dad. Our particular wounds matching up.

  I’ve read Mum’s attempted letter countless times already. It’s not so much a letter, more a series of false starts and segments.

  You are a wanderer now and I blame myself. You blame me too and I accept that. Having children means accepting responsibility.

  Being a mother feels like this permanent act of repentance for unforgivable sins. For those things I did to you in simple human moments. Except those little moments shape lives. If anything is unfair it is that. How we’re supposed to endure parenting with such precariousness is hard to believe.

  Michael is the little moment that shaped lives. That and my front wheel on a ladder. And Robert’s inability to land on his feet. His mother’s pain. Her mother’s pain. And hers before her. It’s hurt people that hurt people.

  Sometimes the pain in you threatens to stop my heart.

  I lift up my top and start colouring in my chest. The light is dimming, the streetlights coming on but Patricia’s windows still in darkness.

  This loneliness in me isn’t just about being alone. It’s about what I’m alone with when I’m alone. And I don’t know how to be alone with all the things I’m alone with.

  I always asked myself if a child is born good and I know you were. I believe in the goodness in you now. I will never stop believing. I am just sorry I wasn’t always enough to keep it feeling alive in you.

  There’s the vibrating of my phone, my eyes darting to Patricia’s house — my hair standing up and adrenalin firing like it has every time any phone has rung these last few days.

  I answer the call, my body ceasing all movement at the sound of the police detective on the other end of the line. He doesn’t make me wait.

  ‘You’re in the clear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The coroner gave it the red light. No prosecution. You’re ok.’

  I tilt my head back and look at the tree canopies above me. ‘Does this mean you can’t prove it or that she didn’t drown? What about the autopsy?’

  There’s a pause, silence, the phone heating up my ear.

  ‘If we’re satisfied I think you can be,’ he says.

  Just like that. As if all my ugliness can empty out at the stroke of a coroner’s pen. Abracadabra.

&nbs
p; ‘But I need to know.’

  There’s a sigh down the phone. ‘I told you these things rarely go all the way. No need to dig into it further. We’re saying you’re ok.’

  I fold forward and lower myself onto the grass and it’s still warm from the sunny afternoon, the phone pressed to my ear while the detective apologises in the softest of voices for the inconvenience, and for the other day — tells me he’ll fax and call the undertakers so we can still hit our original funeral slot. He says he’ll do it the moment he hangs up. Then he can’t resist mentioning procedure again, that he hopes I understand. But I’m hating him for opening up a new wound. My face gazing up at the sky and the drifting cloud shapes looking back at me.

  The Loch Ness monster came by once.

  It’s not long until the light starts to change. I can’t wait for them anymore. I walk out onto the path that Reg and Rocket take each day. I get down and try to write on the tarmac in marker pen but the nib can’t cope. I look around, finding a piece of rock which does leave a white scratch on the path.

  Over near a lamppost so my message will be lit up, I get down on my knees and scratch and scratch at the path — giant letters.

  Then I cross the little park, shoeless, like last time, and get down on my knees with the rock in front of Patricia’s place.

  31

  The spire pokes up in the distance and I park the car close to a hedge to hide the broken window and damaged door, still a ten-minute walk away from St Margaret’s. Buttoning up my dad’s oversized suit, I sit here for a second in the safe cocoon of a parked car, the quiet suburban streets around me, my eyes trying to discern shapes out of Robert’s biro scribbles on the roof interior.

  Perhaps today’s the last moment in which I have to hold myself together, my mind calculating how many witnesses I’ll have to show my sadness to.

  Auntie D’s been ringing the whole world, I know that from the condolence cards that have been arriving.