Sweet Home

by Carys Bray

  Midnight.

  The chimes of the dining-room clock carry up the stairs. If there had been time I would have changed the bed. There is nothing like sliding into sheets that have been dried on the line, soaked in the season, fragrant and fresh. Perhaps tomorrow. The darkness presses me flat to the sheet. I breathe softly. I listen.

  Morning.

  Morning perforates the darkness. He has been. He has been and the stench of him fills the space where the darkness was. The sheet is moist. Perhaps it was still damp when I changed the bed last night. I clean the teeth that are mine, insert the teeth that aren’t and stare into the bathroom mirror at the bloodshot eyes and furrowed face reflected there.

  My locket.

  I check the bed. Pull off the sheet. Perhaps it came off in the night. But no, the clasp was far too tight. Oh, the smell. He has been here, in my room while I slept. He has fumbled sweaty fingers around my neck, removed my locket and stolen it.

  In the kitchen the water tinkles into the kettle. I watch it boil. I make tea and dial my daughter’s number. Her name is Charlotte. She lives in Ireland.

  The countdown

  He kills the baby by accident.

  He carries her in one arm, cradling her head between chest and bicep. His hand palms her tiny backside. He can feel her malleable skeleton under the slack of her grow-into-me skin as her legs shrimp toward her middle.

  He braves the slate floor tiles one step at a time in the non-slip, sticky-soled socks he has begun to hoard. He concentrates on the careful pad of his feet, the stick and rip of the plastic knobbles as they find the floor. He leans over the deep, farmhouse sink to retrieve something from the windowsill: a bottle of antibacterial hand wash, a scouring pad. Then he drops her. She splinters into slivers of bone and rivulets of connective tissue. He hears his wife’s footfall on the stairs. His wife is coming. His wife is coming and he can’t jigsaw the fragments in the sink into anything that resembles a baby …

  He indicates and pulls over. He peels gluey hands from the steering wheel, rubs them over his forehead and into the fuzz of his hair. It’s worse when he kills her while driving because he can’t do anything about it. When he’s at home he checks the child-locked cupboard, matches its contents to the alphabetised list. But it’s harder in the car.

  He switches the radio on. The FM frequency runs from 87.7 Bailrigg FM to 107.9 Dune FM. He searches for the middle, like the Grand Old Duke of York, hunting for the line of symmetry that will leave him neither up, nor down. The centre of the frequency is 97.8 FM, Radio One, but he is too far from the Burnley and Colne Valley transmitter to hear past the crackle. He edges the dial to 98.9 to pick up the North West transmitter. Although 98.9 is not in the middle of the FM frequency, the eight is flanked by nines in a way that is quite reassuring. He turns the volume up to eighteen. He indicates and pulls back into the rush-hour traffic.

  The radio raps a chorus advising him to let it go. He is safe, bubbled by the number eight. He has sliced himself right through the middle of its circles. But when the verse shouts, ‘It don’t make me happy to watch you suffer,’ he topples back into imagination.

  He kills the baby by accident.

  He puts her to bed in the brand-new cot which conforms to BS EN716. The bars are the correct distance apart and the mattress fits snugly. There are no corner-post extensions and no decorative cutouts in the headboard or footboard which could trap her limbs. The blinds and their dangling, strangulating cords have been replaced with curtains. He places a blanket over the fling of her sleepy limbs and whispers goodnight.

  When he returns, the baby’s room is bursting with held breath. The blanket conceals her so respectfully that he almost apologises as he lifts a fear-confirming corner. She is stock-still, flooded with violet and lilac. She has stalled, he tells himself. This is an adjournment, not an ending. He hears the bed creak in the next room as his wife gets up. He blows through the baby’s cold lips, but the air puffs back at him. His wife is coming. His wife is coming and he can’t breathe the baby back to life …

  He indicates and pulls over. He switches the radio to Medium Wave. Medium Wave stretches from 198 to 1602, but he can only receive up to 1557 in the car; a spiky number and Radio Lancashire, besides. Radio Merseyside is almost in the middle of the frequency and the DJ’s surname is Hoban, which is good because ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet. He pictures himself looped inside the lower circle of the number eight as he indicates and pulls back into the rush-hour traffic. The radio plays ‘In my Life’ as he approaches Switch Island. His mum loved this song. ‘Who’d believe that John was only twenty-five when he wrote it,’ she used to say.

  Mum must have been about twenty-five when he began to count himself calm. One night he’d been chased out of sleep by a dream of a masked man in a dark cloak. He found his way to Mum’s bed, but it was empty and there was something about the sound and feel of the air that told him he was alone in the house. He hid underneath Mum’s duvet. His hot breath puffed into its thickness, dewing his face. Eventually he heard the soft click of the front door. When Mum climbed into bed she said she’d only been downstairs, but he didn’t believe her. He was seven, not stupid.

  The following night Mum came up to check on him at about nine o’clock. She smelt of perfume and he realised that she was going out again.

  ‘I can’t get to sleep,’ he said.

  ‘Try counting,’ she’d replied. ‘When I was little and I couldn’t sleep, Nanna used to tell me to count sheep.’

  A while later he heard the soft click of the front door. His ears hummed with the clank of pipes, the settling of the floorboards, his own heart beat and other sounds that he was perhaps imagining, although he couldn’t be sure. The slither of a giant python as it wriggled up the stairs, the furry pitter-patter of eight enormous spider legs, the breezy blow of a ghost’s robe. He began to count. He hurled numbers at his out-of-order imagination until the front door clicked again. It was the first time he’d counted past ten thousand.

  He learned his times tables up to twelve before everyone else in his class and he was the only child to learn them up to fifty. He knew that it was sixty-three steps from the Year Two classroom to the school hall, and twenty-four steps to the boys’ toilets. He made his mum move the wardrobe so it was exactly in the middle of the back wall of his bedroom which meant, he sensed, that monsters would not be able to climb out of it during the night. Mum joked that he was obsessed with numbers. She was wrong. Numbers weren’t the problem; they were the antidote to his increasingly unmanageable imagination.

  He exits the M57 at the first junction and the Radio Merseyside DJ starts to talk about the Liverpool game. ‘If current form’s anything to go by, we’re gonna get hammered.’

  He kills the baby by accident.

  He places her in the bouncy chair. He fastens the safety belt around the crescent of her milk-filled belly. He sits on the sofa and watches as she frogs her legs and blinks her hands in response to the light and sound of the television. His slate Celtic Knot wall plaque, a criss-cross of five squares and twenty triangles, hangs on the wall above her. He used 6mm wall plugs when he hung the plaque. Perhaps he should have used the 8mm plugs. The doubt-trickle swamps him as the plaque begins its slide down the wall toward the baby’s head.

  There is a sound like the crack of an egg. A wet, zigzag split of skin and skull.

  His wife calls, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ She calls again and then her footsteps follow the question. His wife is coming. His wife is coming and he can’t uncover the command that will lift his legs from the sofa …

  He indicates and pulls into his driveway. He finds neutral and lifts the handbrake up two notches. He swivels every dial and lever to either midway or twelve o’clock. He switches off the engine. He counts to eight, eight times. He counts up to sixty-four then down from sixty-four in an orbit of eights.

  It’s five fifty-nine. When it’s six o’clock he will get out of the car. He will walk seven steps to the house
and open the front door. He will wipe his feet four times. He will go straight to the lounge and remove the slate plaque from the wall. He will place it in the child-locked cupboard with the other hazardous objects that his imagination has identified. He will write Celtic Knot wall plaque between candles and corkscrew on the alphabetised list.

  His wife will ask what he is doing. He will tell her that he has removed the plaque because he is hoping to paint the lounge. She will ask him to decorate the kitchen first because she wants to put the kettle and the knives back on the worktop. She will say that she can’t understand why the apple corer, the frying pan and the potato peeler are in the cupboard. She will take a deep breath, gulp her irritation away and ask what she can do to make him feel better. She will ask if he would like her to disinfect the things that he has hidden in the cupboard.

  He will close the distance between them. Will stand behind her and nudge his face into the hollow between her ear and the right angle of her jaw. He will smooth his hands over the hemisphere of her belly.

  She will say, ‘Not long to go now. I can’t wait, can you?’

  He will hum agreement into the warmth of her neck. And he will trace a finger pattern of assuring eights over the elastic stretch of skin that presently shelters their baby.

  Bed rest

  We’re just pulling the curtains around so as not to frighten the other parents.

  That’s not what the nurse says. But it is what she means. What she actually says is, ‘We’re just pulling the curtains around for privacy.’

  The curtains go shush as they horseshoe around, hiding us in a thick pocket. I stare at the curtains, rather than the incubator. They are criss-crossed with local landmarks in green and beige. They must have been made specially. It costs so much to watch television in hospital nowadays. In Exeter you can watch the curtains instead. I trace the fabric map of the city with gritty eyes: the Cricklepit Suspension Bridge, the cathedral, the clock tower and the river as it bends and curls around and in-between them all. Right at eye level is a picture of the hand-operated cable ferry that runs across the river about a mile away from my parents’ house.

  The summer I was seven it was hot, and the weeks spread out in a buttery stretch of yellow. Our small garden buzzed and twitched with thousands of wriggly, crawly things. What was left of the grass was brick-warm and dust crusted, and lying on it had me in big trouble with Dad for making more washing. The bright evenings were fraught with leg ache and sleeplessness, occasionally broken by the manic chimes of the ice-cream van.

  ‘Stupid van,’ Dad used to say. ‘Waste of money. I’ll kill him if he wakes your mother up.’

  The ice-cream van came round during the day, too. It stopped almost directly outside our house, and all along Burnthouse Lane children burst out of front doors, like the rats in the Pied Piper. They swarmed around the van, pushing each other to be first. And when the ice-cream man drove away, they chased him off the estate. Emily and I used to watch from behind the garden gates. We weren’t allowed to play out with the other children.

  ‘I’ve got more than enough to worry about, without you two disappearing,’ Dad said.

  Sometimes children came and chatted to us through the bars of the gate. ‘Why don’t you just come out?’ they said. ‘Just open these up.’

  But we didn’t dare. We didn’t want to make things worse. Neither Emily nor I mentioned Mum to anyone. We barely mentioned her to each other. The agreement to keep quiet was unspoken but nonetheless binding. Mum had been in bed all summer. She was having bed rest. There was talk of pre-eclampsia, pre-eclamsia, I thought at the time, and I imagined her stomach eventually opening like an enormous white shell to reveal the baby hiding under her stretched skin. She was confined to the master bedroom where she lay in a passive, swollen pile. We weren’t allowed in the room unless Dad said so. When we did go in she would graft a smile on, but it was temporary and usually peeled away within minutes. It smelt bad in there. It occurred to me that Dad didn’t like the smell either because he was sleeping on the sofa. I thought that he shared my disgust of her as she lay sweating on the bed, full of my brother. But I was wrong. Whenever I tried to ally myself with his repulsion he flattened me. ‘What smell? What are you talking about? Don’t be so rude.’

  It seemed as if my brother was expanding into Mum’s arms and legs, growing furiously in the heat like the ponderous, baby-headed sunflowers we’d planted in the early spring. Her lack of restraint was frightening. What if she grew and grew like the enormous turnip or the dog called Digby who was the biggest dog in the world?

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Dad. ‘It’s natural, it’s just biology. Everything will get back to normal.’

  Dad’s high-school biology class might have found his confidence reassuring, but I didn’t. Mum used to be small and neat. She was ugly spread out all over the place. And she just kept on growing.

  While it was my prerogative to imagine the worst, it was Emily’s to act as if it had already happened. ‘Your sister is sensitive,’ Dad would say, as if it was something wonderful.

  Emily was delicate, easily hurt. She sucked up emotion like a vacuum cleaner. At times she was puffed with it. ‘What’s wrong?’ we would ask. Sometimes she would share her sadness, but it was carefully rationed. ‘What’s the matter, darling? Come on, tell us,’ Mum and Dad cajoled. They spent many enjoyable moments engaged in this form of alchemy, searching for the correct combination of reassurance and placation to heal Emily’s wounds.

  In the early days of bed rest, Emily and I used to sneak upstairs and crawl into bed with Mum. She listened to us chatter and sometimes read us stories. But as it got hotter, she grew fatter and more tired, and Dad said enough was enough and we weren’t to bother her. Emily continued to sneak upstairs on her own. Sometimes Mum didn’t mind and Emily would be gone for a while. Other times Mum rang the bell on her bedside table and Dad stomped upstairs to remove Emily. ‘It’s too hot,’ he’d say to her. ‘Mummy’s uncomfortable and she’s sore from the injections. You’re five. A big girl now.’

  The nurse came every day to inject iron. She was due to arrive on the day near the end of the holidays when Emily made a final attempt to invade Mum’s rest. Dad was emptying the washing machine with seething irritation, dragging the tangled intestine twist of clothes into the basket. He lacked Mum’s patience. He cooked the meals and vacuumed aggressively. He chuntered as he ironed, remonstrating with the creases. When Mum’s bell rang, Dad huffed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He returned with Emily in his arms and planted her on the floor next to the washing machine. Immobilised by hurt, she lingered like a little ghost. I gave her a push, then a pull, into the garden.

  She wouldn’t play explorers or collect brown-tipped rose petals to make perfume. She wouldn’t come and look when I started turning over stones to check for beetles and woodlice. Even the frenzied chimes of the ice-cream van failed to elicit a response. She was stiff with misery. So when the ice-cream van pulled up, I snuck through the garden gate, crossed the road, and stood in the wriggling swarm of children. Eventually it was my turn.

  ‘I’d like an ice cream, please,’ I said.

  ‘Do you have any money?’

  I’d forgotten about that. ‘No. But if you just wait here, I’ll go and get some.’ I ran back across the road, through the gate, past the catatonic Emily and into the kitchen, colliding with Dad who was on his way outside with the basket of washing. ‘The ice-cream man’s waiting.’ I said. ‘I told him to wait while I get some money. It’s not for me, it’s for—’

  He dropped the washing basket. Maybe the blood rushed to my head as he lifted me in the air and flung me over his knee. Perhaps I was looking at the geometric pattern on the linoleum as he hit me. When I remember it though, I am standing next to Emily, my mouth a big O of surprise, watching myself flail and shout as the ice-cream van tinkles into the distance and Dad expels five weeks of bed-rest frustration on my backside.

  Emily cheered up after that. The nurse came t
o give Mum her injection and after lunch Dad produced a doll that was probably meant to be a present from my baby brother when he eventually made his appearance. ‘It’s been a rotten holiday,’ he said by way of apology as he handed the doll to me.

  The doll was clearly a bribe, offered in exchange for my forgetfulness. But I was determined to exact revenge by remembering. Seven is old enough to bear a grudge. The doll had a soft body, and plastic hands and feet. Her head was also plastic and her hair poked out in waving, ash-blonde tufts. Her eyes opened when she was upright and closed when she was horizontal. She was wearing a pair of blue corduroy trousers and a knitted sweater.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Dad said. ‘Just down to the river.’

  And that’s the trip I remember as I stare at the cable ferry, suspended on the hospital curtain in front of me.

  My baby is in the transparent incubator that already resembles a coffin. Apparently, it’s for the best. It’s just a matter of time, and it’s no longer a case of if, but when. That explains the curtains: no dying in public, please.

  Emily is murmuring into the incubator’s half-open porthole. I can’t hear what she’s saying, and I’m glad. Andrew called her when I went into labour. I caught snatches of his ‘Far too early,’ his ‘What are we going to do?’ and his ‘Please come,’ in between contractions.

  As I scrutinise the curtains, Emily sits in what has become her chair. She has soaked up all the grief around us like a piece of blotting paper. If she jumped on the spot I bet I would hear it sloshing around inside her. Andrew is exhausted. He is napping in the parents’ room. But I can’t sleep. ‘Just go and have a rest,’ one of the nurses likes to say, and I nod until she leaves me alone.

  We are tucked away on the top floor of the hospital. This ward hides at the end of a bare corridor like a terrible secret. Visitors need permission to step past the double doors, yet Mum and Dad popped by three times yesterday. They tried to make it sound like they happened to be passing.