Go to Sleep

by Helen Walsh

  I sit at the kitchen table with the lights off and the curtains ajar, a bar of amber streetlight striking the patch of floor by my feet. I flick the radio on; some late night phone-in casting crumbs of hope to the unlovely, the unloved. A passing car lights up the room for a split second – long enough for me to spy a patch of sticky filth on the floor. I haul myself up, all sighs and whys, wrench the tap on and prepare a stinking hot Dettol mix spiked with an extra slug of bleach. I scrub and scrub, get right down on my knees and scour the corners of the kitchen, under the fridge, everywhere. The effort seems to work loose some of the knots in my head so I continue, blitzing all the kitchen surfaces, the door handles, the fridge, the bin, the microwave, till everything is pristine and perfect. As though Joe didn’t exist.

  Hopeful I’ll sleep now, I make my way to the bathroom, avoid myself in the mirror, give my teeth a cursory brush. I can’t keep my eyes open. It feels like I could fall into the deepest, loveliest sleep, right where I am now. I head for the bedroom, forgetting the loose floorboard. I freeze for an instant, bite hard on my lip, promise I’ll nail it down first thing tomorrow and lower myself into the bed. Please sleep, Joe. Please sleep for Mamma. The headboard creaks as my head hits the pillow. I hold my breath.

  He snorts.

  I lie dead still, scared to exhale; afraid to blink.

  Please, Joe. Please sleep. Please don’t wake.

  I see his hand reach up. A little fist reaching out for me. I want to smack it away. Not now, Joe. Let me sleep. Let me sleep.

  * * *

  Joe is not hungry, not interested in my breast. He just wants me. That’s what this boils down to. On some basic, primal level he’s worked out that my role is to nurture, his is to take. He doesn’t need me for anything right now, he’s taking because he can. I leave him on the bed, watch him a while. Thrashing. Outraged. Sobbing so hard his larynx starts to vibrate. I catch sight of myself in the bedroom mirror and I cave. I’m scared. I’m really scared. Cope, Rachel, just fucking cope.

  I hold him close, make a big effort to deal with this, to just be better at all this entails. My baby is suffering here, and I must not hide. It’s up to me to make things work; to make Joe better. His face seems unnaturally red; he’s in pain. I check his temperature – fine. Then I check his nappy, find it bogged down with a caramel, almost sandy-coloured excrement. My heart soars with relief – there was something wrong and I sourced it out. Me. Now I can fix it.

  I fill a little bowl and bathe his chafed bottom – that seems to calm him – and I smear it in Sudocrem. His lip ceases trembling and, as I rotate my thumb around his delicate back, his hiccuping sobs abate and his breathing begins to regulate. I pat him dry, kiss his forehead.

  ‘Let’s get you into a nice new nappy, shall we?’

  And he seems to respond. I’d swear he smiled, there. But my sense of bravado is swept away when I find we’re down to his last clean nappy. I stand there, staring at the empty packet. There were dozens of them! Where did they go? Whether I do it now, or later, I’m going to have to face up to it and get myself out for supplies. I take a deep breath. Cope. Joe starts up a fresh stream of wailing. I’ll kill two birds here; get Joe out in his pushchair, out into the fresh air, and hope that that knocks him out. We’ll walk down to the twenty-four-hour Tesco like every other mum does and we’ll stock up on everything. I can do it. I can.

  I struggle to get Joe into the all-in-one, Eskimo-style suit I bought to insulate him against the impending winter’s chill. I end up near forcing his right leg inside the thermal legging, so wilfully does he resist me. Once I’ve got him down the stairs my spirits start to lift a bit. I’m doing it. I’m actually doing this thing. I’m coping. With Joe tucked under my arm like a koala bear, I grapple with his baby buggy with my free hand. I jerk it and wiggle it and throw it forward, expecting it simply to unfold, like it did when Mothercare sold it to me. I thrash and throw, but Joe’s pushchair refuses to open. On the verge of a fit, I place him down carefully on the hallway’s threadbare carpet and hack the buggy into shape. There! Stupid thing.

  The smell of the shit overpowers me, knocks me sick, as I bin the laden nappy. I drop it in the wheelie bin and, head down, march my newborn boy into the big bad world. Joe is wailing louder now and I have the eerie sensation that everyone’s looking at me from behind their curtains as we march down Belvidere. I pop my head over his canopy every few minutes and find myself making self-consciously jaunty remarks:

  ‘Do you like it down there, little fella? Do you? Yes, you do!’

  ‘Ragghhhh! Ragghhhh!’

  A late-night runner flits past, laughing, turning round and jogging backwards to quip:

  ‘Someone’s hungry!’

  And no sooner has he said it than my breasts start to throb and solidify. Joe’s cries are frenzied.

  I park myself on the nearest bench, unzip my jacket. He almost snatches my nipple off. ‘Be nice!’ I shout in his face, and a passing woman shakes her head and spins round repeatedly to stare and draw conclusions and condemn. And, looking at him now, I’m racked with sheer guilt at his smallness, his brand newness, his absolute neediness.

  ‘I’m sorry, little man. Do you forgive me? Do you?’

  He gives me this twisted, evil smile and takes his fill of me, gulping and biting and gulping. I sit back and let it happen. This is me, now. This is what has become of me – what I am. A monster is eating away at me, devouring me by the nibbling, needling mouthful. I close my eyes to it all, and all I see is black birds. Ravens, or crows, their beady eyes appraising me before they come closer to nip and peck, peck away at my throbbing eyeballs. I slide further down the bench. I don’t try to stop them.

  Blackbirds. An army of them, not tweeting or bickering, but screaming, shrieking. I clap my hands but they circle my head, coarse black feathers whirring past my ear, buzzing, drilling into me. I scream out loud, but no sound comes.

  I’m jerked wide awake by the sensation of Joe slipping from my grip. I feel out for him. He’s here. He’s here, but for the moment I don’t know where here is. The sky glows with an ambient, pre-dawn darkness and a throb of birds scream out from the treetops. I sit up, start to remember. Joe is sleeping, content, in the morning chill. I’m shot through with an overwhelming satisfaction; something close to pride that we’ve made it through Night One, Joe and I. We did it – just the two of us.

  But we still need goodies. We need nappies. The cold hardens around us. Joe is dead to the world in his Eskimo suit but my teeth and my knees start to rattle now. I place him back in his buggy and push on, and the city skyline rinses to nothing.

  Some inner magnet instinctively pulls me left at the bottom of the road but I push through it, turn right. And now I see why. There, across the road, wheeling a pram with one hand, the other swinging gaily down by his side, thoroughly at ease with his place in the world, is Nick Adams – the nicest man you could meet, and the one I least want to see, right now.

  He takes a moment to recognise me. While his initial reaction is one of confusion and shock at my washed-out, hollow face, mine is one of fear and embarrassment. The foul mossy tang of my squalor rises up like a fog. I cannot let him any closer; Nick Adams cannot see me this way. I hold my hand up, flat and firm, a hello-goodbye salute and I pinch my nose and gesture to the pram that Joe’s nappy needs changing – I have to push on. But either he doesn’t take the hint or he chooses not to; he’s coming over regardless. He grins broadly, gesticulates for me to wait and starts to edge his pram into the traffic.

  There are no lingering regrets where Nick is concerned. There is nothing – yet the lightning bolt of remorse that strikes every time I run into him always takes me by surprise. I haven’t seen him for months now, and not since becoming pregnant with Joe. I had no idea Nick was seeing anyone, let alone had become a father. He’s still a beautiful-looking man with those ridiculous, thick, long eyelashes – I can see them from this side of the road.

  On paper, Nick and I should have worked well.
We loved the same things and our first few months of courtship were given over to long meandering drunken conversations about books and films. Somehow, without either of us really noticing things had got that serious, we started talking about the kids we’d have together; what they’d look like, what we’d call them. He teaches English at Hillside, and we met when The Gordon joined forces with the school and Kick Racism Out in organising a five-a-side tournament at The Pitz. Nick never knew it, but some of his serial truants were clients of mine.

  To all and sundry, and especially to Faye, Nick and I were two peas in a pod. We had everything going on. And yet we had nothing. He just didn’t set me on fire; never came close. Nick was incapable of triggering that violent, raging, gut-sucking nausea that I yearned for. I knew it was out there, and knew it was in me. I’d had it once, and that was it for me. I wish I hadn’t.

  I confided in Faye. I told her – or came as close as I could do without making her blush – that Nick didn’t make me come. She went mad with me.

  ‘Jesus, girl! You’re a woman now, and you’re chasing butterflies in your stomach? Men like that Nick, they only knock once at your door.’

  We’d lie there in bed, planning trips to remote far-off places, and it was nice. Yet I’d be full of pity and sadness, too. I felt horrible. I felt awful for Nick – who had no idea. And I’d ask myself, repeatedly, is it really so important? He’s such a beautiful person; so fresh and innocent and wanting to do good. Take Faye’s advice, Rachel. Take it from a woman who knows, take what’s in front of you and cherish it and never let it go.

  I broke it off when Nick proposed. At the time, I thought I’d broken his heart. He couldn’t comprehend it – didn’t enter his head that I might say no. Yet whenever I’ve seen him since – which I do, every now and then, working around Kirkdale, in the line of work I do – he’s seemed fine. The last time we spoke, Nick apologised for asking me to marry him; laughed at himself for being such an idiot. I didn’t know how to take that. Yet, to have connected with Ruben again and experienced one last time that explosive, ravenous vehemence . . . it was worth it. All of this now, it was worth it.

  Dear old Nick, a daddy.

  By the time there’s a break in the traffic, I’ve already turned the corner and gone.

  21

  My heart is banging as I step inside the supermarket. The clamour and bustle and bright lights bouncing off the harsh gleaming floors only add to my sense of disorientation. It’s what? under a week since I was last in here, lugging my massive frame around, but the vastness of the place swallows me up in one rude gulp. Joe is sound asleep, but in spite of the sudden calm I’m nervous as hell. I feel exposed, on trial, as if everyone is watching me and my guts are already strangling in anticipation of the baby waking up.

  Yet running somewhere between the panic and the disconnect is the peculiar thrill of the attention Joe draws. There’s a steady flow of pensioners, insomniacs and early-starters meandering through the store. Every few minutes someone makes the ‘aaah’ face or pops their head into Joe’s buggy, makes eyes at him and tells me how beautiful he is. Even the grim-faced security guard can’t help but marvel at this minuscule little human, all the more tragicute in his cosy ski-suit.

  So I know what I’ve come for. I know exactly which end of which aisle that they’re kept, yet on impulse I head straight to the shelf where the baby formulas are stored.

  The soft-focus, gurgling infants on the tins and readymade cartons are both alert and content. They are babies who settle. They are babies who sleep. I reach out and select a packet. It doesn’t look harmful; this one is even organic! I find myself talking out loud – talking the yummy potion up to Joe.

  A happy mummy makes a happy baby and your mummy needs her sleep, darling.

  He gurgles in his sleep. He agrees!

  Now you know that your mummy wants to give you the very best, darling – but Mummy thinks you might need something more to fill you up at night and help settle that little tum.

  I become aware of a woman standing behind me. She gives me a look. Embarrassed, shocked and deeply ashamed by how close I came, I put back the tin of formula and scurry off down the aisle.

  I browse the baby clothes; pick out a winter coat for Joe, a little blue duffle coat with toggles. I select some matching fur-lined boots and a teeny camel-coloured beanie hat, smiling as I place it in the basket. I catch my face in a strip of mirror and poke fun at myself for relishing something as trivial and girly as this! Me, who was going to dress her child in hand-me-downs till he was old enough to kick up a fuss. I get myself a second basket and continue picking out stuff, loving this reckless, profligate self who’s taking over. And guess what? I’m not going to stop till both baskets are brim full! And then I’m going to splurge what’s left of my very first child benefit payment on a taxi back home.

  Just as I’m starting to relax into it, just as I allow myself to think that maybe this is the turning point, the start of our real life together, Joe begins to stir. His face gets lost inside his hood, and he’s starting to upset himself. The chirpy melody I’ve been whistling dies on my lips. I try to ignore him, stay calm, but he’s awake now and agitated, and immediately I panic. It’s not the kind of guilty polite panic of the ward, this is different; it’s a dreadful, anxious inner sweat that I can actually feel breaking out all over me. I begin to talk to Joe as I did before in that unnatural sing-song voice as I walk up and down the aisle, stumbling as his crying gathers force and peals out high above us. People are staring, some feigning sympathy, others tutting at me for daring to bring something so delicate as a newborn into a supermarket. And in trying to withstand their judgement I find myself questioning my logic. Joe is barely days old. The ringing tills, the scouring lights, all those alien fingers prodding, touching, and overloading his senses. What on earth was I thinking? His mouth stretches wide open and he screams and screams.

  I make a dash for the toilets. The mother and baby room is occupied so I do a U-turn and, panicked, find myself instinctively heading for the café, Joe’s screams picking out our path through the room. I take a seat in the furthest corner, my hands shaking as I struggle to free him from his pushchair, and then struggling some more as I try to tug up my top, drag down my bra and release my breast. The empty table only hammers home my absolute incompetence. Too nervous to join the queue for a cup of tea or even grab myself a paper, I’m now consigned to the spotlight of our embarrassing sideshow. Joe won’t latch on and I don’t have the fallback of a bottle, so I have to keep heaving my chump of breast out further from the snare of the elastic, moulding it for him, stretching his mouth across the expanse of nipple, pinching a painful trickle with my fingers as he fails to take it, and then starting all over again. It’s awful and undignified. A gang of road menders in donkey jackets is about to sit down at the next table, but they just keep walking, too shocked, too disgusted for even the coarsest quip.

  ‘He’s a baby, for fuck’s sake!’ I want to shout. ‘He’s hungry – just like you lot!’

  But my anger turns in on itself, on the two of us. I feel it singeing through me, a burning resentment towards Joe for crying so much, for sucking so rampantly. For reducing me to this. A breast. A nipple.

  Two priggish pensioners announce their revulsion by scraping their chairs noisily as they get up to leave. The woman’s face is set as stiff as her hair, her mouth fixed in a permanent tight circle of disgust. Poles, students, Muslims, young men in hooded tops – she’s disgusted by everything, and now she’s disgusted by me. Her husband looks straight ahead, his stupid tweed cap balanced on his hairy, disgusting red ears. He’s bridling with ire; what, oh what, has the world come to? Doing that, in public! Is there no decency left? As she passes, the crone goes to say something, chokes and turns away from us, her face dancing with disdain.

  ‘There’s chairs in the Ladies’ for that,’ she mutters to her husband – and that’s enough for me. I’ve had enough. I’m burning up with anger and I’m not letting this dried-
up old bitch get away with it. I pack Joe back into his pushchair and don’t strap him in to chase after them.

  ‘Hey!’

  They don’t turn round; try to quicken their pace. The husband bends his face to his wife and I see irritation. I see spittle as he barks at her ‘Are you happy now?’, or words to that effect. ‘We’ve got a nutter on our case, now!’

  Too fucking right you have – and you’re too fucking slow to get away from her, you decrepit pair of bastards. I catch up with them, clip the man’s pristine, shiny black shoes with the buggy’s wheel as I get alongside them and slow myself and Joe to their pace.

  ‘I’m talking to you, missus!’ They stare straight ahead as though there’s no one there. ‘Hey! Emily Pankhurst! Would you feed your child in the toilet?’ I spit. She looks scared now. Her husband hooks a protective arm around her.

  ‘Come on, Joan.’

  Implicit in his clipped tone is a sense that he thanks God they’re as old as they are. They won’t have to put up with this decadent, broken-down world for too much longer. And I’m instantly shot through with sorrow for them. Is this what it all comes to? Is that what it’s all about? He guides her away down another aisle, away from the wild-eyed harridan with the fuzzy red hair and I sigh out hard and bristle out of the supermarket, daring anyone to so much as look at me.

  As we draw closer and closer to home my lungs begin to well up with dread; a swollen, panic-laden pressure that squeezes out and out against my ribcage. Out here in the open Joe and I are fine, I can handle him. But the very thought of setting foot inside that front door and trudging up all those stairs makes me feel volatile, vulnerable. I stand at the foot of the path, scared that once it’s just me and Joe, in there, those strange, searing thoughts will come seething through again, and the windows will shrink and the ceiling will lower and the furniture will close in on me. I’m frightened. I don’t want to be alone with Joe. I don’t know what I might do, to him. To me.