Children's Children

by Jan Carson

  Last December, when the water pipes froze and all the other statues stayed home for fear of exposure, Karen wouldn’t let me out of the house without gloves.

  ‘Napoleon didn’t wear gloves,’ I argued, and she snapped back like stretched rubber, insisting health and safety came before historical accuracy. In the end, I took the gloves just to please her, and kept them tucked inside my back pocket where the punters couldn’t see them. Some things are better kept from Karen: things such as the gloves and the drunken football fan, who, mistaking me for a real statue, pissed against my shins, souring the leather on my handmade boots.

  The stillness has also served me well in marriage. I am capable of holding my temper like a perfectly plumb line. I am capable of holding a secret for as long as it seems necessary. Karen does not know how lucky she is.

  I am perfectly built for Napoleon: five-foot-six in my shoes, five-foot-ten if I stand on the plinth. The plinth brings me up to eye level with Sherlock Holmes and the moon-bellied Henry VIII, who share my High Street pitch, but I don’t always carry it with me. The plinth is a nightmare to manage on the bus. It is roughly finished in plywood and catches on the sheer tights and stockings of those ladies busing to their office jobs on the other side of town. They glare at me through heavily lacquered fringes and roll their bruisey eyes as if to say, ‘Do not touch me, do not look at me, do not think about the laddered plucks, delicate as spiders’ steps, climbing the naked wall of my thigh.’ They do not speak to me, and I cannot speak to them. The human statue must remain silent at all times, even on the bus home. But I think about them sometimes while standing still. I imagine them crossing and uncrossing their legs in air-conditioned offices, the ladders creeping up their shins, as slow and deliberate as the evening tide. I think about these stripe-suited ladies, and the thought of them is a warm fug catching between my costume and my white winter skin.

  During the two warm weeks of summer, I am Julius Caesar, splendidly robed. It is good to feel the hot city air burrowing up my sleeves, the thin hairs on my arms rising and falling in fragile rebellion. The rest of me holds its silence like a state secret. I am proud on my plinth, and the punters cast their devotion around my feet in circling coppers and five-pence pieces. Even Karen says I look good with my grey flesh on show and my silvery hair pointed and prickling around my laurel wreath like uncooked meringue.

  During the summer we make love in the evenings. I am Julius Caesar just off the bus, and Karen lays a dust sheet across the living room so my make-up doesn’t come off on the carpet.

  It is during one of these sessions, when I am balanced above her, barely moving, that we make the baby. I feel nothing. I am a cloud of myself, almost entirely removed from the situation. When we make love, I cast a still, grey shadow over my wife as if predicting the imminent possibility of rain. Karen immediately understands that everything has changed. When you are married to a human statue, the slightest movement is monumental.

  ‘Things will have to be different now,’ she announces, sliding away from me, reaching for the make-up remover she uses every time we touch. I watch her from the floor. I am high on the acetone. It is a comfort to me, as all routine sensations are. It is a religion of sorts. Karen is swiping at her naked belly, removing my greyness with cotton wool. She leaves snail-slick trails in her skin like the ghosts of old tears, already passed. She is telling me there will soon be a child. She is not using words. She is telling me this, along with other fears, in the particularly urgent way she cleans her belly, exposing the peachy skin beneath. She misses the spot on her cheek where I have chanced to kiss her with my grey statue lips. I wish I had the energy to reach out and bandage her in my arms, but even the smallest movement is problematic.

  ‘Things will have to change round here,’ she repeats. ‘Everything’s different since the baby.’

  I lie very still on the carpet. My left sandal has come asunder, and the toe of it is winking at me from under the armchair. My naked foot makes me feel oddly unbalanced. I have always been a stickler for symmetry, as most statues are.

  ‘You can’t be selfish any more,’ she continues. ‘I need a husband I can lean on.’

  ‘You can lean on me, Karen,’ I say, ever so reassuringly, all the time wishing I had both sandals on. This makes my wife happy like a Christmas kid, for she reads the space behind my words and hears the very things she’s always wanted to hear: ‘I will be your proper husband now. I will get a real job, in a call centre if necessary. When the baby arrives I will also be a proper father and wear ordinary clothes such as jeans and sports shoes as I push my child around the shopping centre in a pram or buggy. I will no longer be an embarrassment to you in front of your friends.’

  When I say, ‘You can lean on me,’ I am actually thinking about all the seagulls and individual passers-by who lean on me every day, pausing for one calm moment in the midst of all this hurtled living to catch their breath and settle. I remind myself that there is no man more solid, none more capable of being leant upon, than a statue. I am glad then for Karen and the baby just becoming inside her. There are luckier than they can possibly know or imagine, to be furnished with so much stillness.

  My wife sees things from a different perspective. As one month trundles into the next and she stretches forwards and sideways to hold the baby in, Karen becomes more and more angry, occasionally throwing small items of furniture when she can no longer keep her loathing still.

  ‘You’re useless, so you are!’ she shouts, as she flings the television remote at my forehead. ‘Just sitting there, taking up space on the sofa.’

  I do not move in time. Even the smallest movements require enormous amounts of planning now. The television remote clocks me squarely in the spot where my eyebrows meet. The next morning, I will have to apply an extra layer of pancake grey, to ensure that the bruise is not apparent.

  ‘You can lean on me,’ I remind Karen. ‘I am not going anywhere.’

  Dependability is a much underrated virtue. My wife, no doubt stirred to discontent by television chat shows and snippety friends and articles she’s read on Facebook, does not think she wants a dependable husband. She thinks she wants someone faster, flightier, more active. Nothing I say will convince her otherwise.

  In the final week before the baby arrives we barely talk.

  ‘You will be there when it comes?’ she asks over breakfast on Tuesday, the first words she’s uttered in twenty-four hours. ‘I’ll phone when the labour starts.’

  I smile at her across the table. It takes me almost an hour to eat a piece of toast these days. The coffee has long since gone frigid in my cup.

  ‘Of course, I’ll be there,’ I reply. ‘If the baby comes in the evening, or on a Sunday. You know I can’t answer my phone when I’m statue-ing. I have to keep perfectly still.’

  This is not what Karen wants to hear, so she doesn’t listen. When I come home that evening, she is gone and the house is still as a glass tumbler. I stand in the corner for an hour before taking off my make-up. It is cold in the house, as if the outside has come indoors, and I can hear every individual thought writing itself inside my head:

  I could get a personal driver to drive me to and from work so the bus is no longer an issue.

  What about rolling out Beckett for the tourists this summer?

  It’s about time I took my sword to the cleaners. Or could I do it myself with polish?

  And finally, the loudest of all thoughts: the cold thought that I am trying not to think about Karen and the baby, the way they grate against my stillness. No part of me is moving now, not even my heart. I might as well be a wall, I think, or a solid oak staircase. I am happy as I have never been in transit.

  4.

  Den and Estie Do Not Remember the Good Times

  ‘There’s something in my teeth,’ says Estie.

  ‘There’s nothing in your teeth,’ replies Den.

  ‘How can you be sure, Denise? You’re not inside my mouth.’

  ‘Let me see then.’
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  Estie opens her mouth and leans across the kitchen table. Wide-eyed and jawing, she is like a baby bird stretched out for a worm. Den leans across the table to meet her mother, and for a moment, through the window, it must look as if they are going to kiss. They don’t. There is a bitter-milk smell on Estie’s breath. This comes from drinking too much tea and only brushing her teeth before bed. The taste of it gags at the back of Den’s throat. She draws back sharply, pressing against the ribs of her chair.

  ‘Look at my teeth,’ commands Estie. Her mouth is still stretched open. Without lips, her words are soft and missing their angles. She lifts a stick finger, taps furiously at her front teeth and draws her lips back into a grotesque, donkey smile.

  ‘OK, OK, stop that. I’ll look at your teeth.’

  Den lifts the mobile phone from her cardigan pocket and switches the screen light on. She takes a quick glance inside her mother’s mouth. The inside of Estie’s mouth is the colour of stored meat. Her tongue is furred white and lardy yellow in dots along the spine. Den can see the wired lines where her dentures are fixed to the front of her gums. She counts the gunmetal dips of one, two, three fillings crowning her backmost molars. There are bread-paste triangles between Estie’s front teeth. They have been there since breakfast. They could be easily hoaked out with the edge of a thumbnail, but Estie does not like to have her teeth touched. She hasn’t been to the dentist in years.

  Den cannot see anything particularly sinister in her mother’s mouth.

  ‘There’s nothing in your teeth, Mum,’ she says. ‘It was probably just a bit of toast that’s shifted now.’

  Estie clamps her mouth shut. She stands up, leaning her full weight against the table.

  ‘You only looked, Denise,’ she howls. ‘You never listened.’

  ‘You can’t hear teeth, Mum,’ Den replies, though once, late at night on local radio, she’d heard about a woman whose metal fillings could pick up the signals from taxi cabs and police-car radios. She is sure this is not happening to her mother. It is likely that the story was part of a radio play and not intended to be taken seriously.

  ‘You’re not listening hard enough, Denise. You’ve never been good at listening.’

  ‘I’m listening to you now, Mum. I don’t listen to anyone else these days.’

  ‘If you were listening properly, you’d be hearing the thing in my teeth.’

  Den humours her mother. She turns her head to face the kitchen door so her right ear is inclined towards Estie’s open mouth. She braces herself against the table edge, ready to duck back at the first sharp movement. These days there is every possibility that she may be bitten. She listens with her eyes closed, as if she is listening very intently or perhaps praying.

  She hears the foggy purr of her mother’s breath, the fridge mumbling in the corner, the rain and possibly the wind, but not the slightest hint of teeth.

  ‘What am I listening for?’ she asks. ‘What is it you think’s in your teeth?’

  ‘God,’ says Estie.

  Den is relieved to hear this. God, she can manage. Yesterday it was Samuel talking out of her mother’s teeth. Samuel is Den’s father; or rather, was Den’s father. Samuel is dead now and this, for some reason, is a concept more difficult to explain to Estie than the possibility of a live man in her mouth, speaking.

  ‘God, indeed,’ Den repeats patiently. ‘And what is God saying inside your mouth?’

  ‘Oh, this and that, and some singing. He says you’re an awful good wee girl not to be leaving your mammy by herself.’

  ‘Really? Well, it sounds like God’s the most sensible thing to come out of your mouth this week, Mum.’

  Den smiles, and tries to laugh. It sticks in her.

  Estie doesn’t laugh. Humour with words is beyond her. She only laughs at people falling over now and things being dropped and other unplanned acts of clumsiness. In the past, she had a wit as sharp as a piece of paper folded and folded again. Everything about her is blunt now, except the hitting.

  Den takes her mother’s face in both hands and presses gently so that the old lady’s lips purse open like a clamshell. She peers into the black space of her mouth and says, in a pedantic, childly voice, ‘It’s so good to finally meet you, God. Will you be sticking around for lunch?’ She makes herself feel clever inside when she says this. These funny moments would be more enjoyable if she had a sane person to catch by the eye and wink, but Den must still grab them when she can. Sometimes she imagines recounting them as humorous anecdotes to friends or work colleagues – a husband, ideally. This never happens. There is only Estie now and occasionally the social worker. The social worker has approximately twelve minutes per visit. She measures out the minutes on her phone and when she is done an alarm goes off like baby birds cheeping. The social worker has too little time to waste any on hearing funny things which have happened during the previous week.

  For a moment, Den holds her mother’s face between her hands. She sees herself reflected in the black parts of Estie’s eyes and wonders who the old lady is seeing.

  Estie lifts her arms from her lap. She places her hands on top of Den’s hands, so they are a vice holding her own jaw together. There is a game which children play that is like this, with hands on top of other hands and rhyming. Estie is not playing this game, though sometimes she is more of a child than a full-grown adult. She digs her fingernails into the flesh of Den’s wrists, leaves ten pink crescents in her skin, like the marks from an ill-fitting bracelet.

  ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ she hisses. She peels Den’s hands away from her face. ‘Don’t you dare laugh at me!’

  She could be talking to Den. She could be talking to God. She could possibly be addressing both of them and also the condiment bottles soldiering themselves against the wall. There is always the ghost of a conversation, like a one-way street, running out of Estie. People are inside her head, or she is inside her own head, or there is nothing inside her head but the echo of a conversation from yesterday or the day before. No matter how many books Den reads on the subject, she can never be quite sure what her mother is hearing in the silence. Then, Estie is crying and thumping at her own face with the fist of her curled right hand. She reaches inside her mouth and runs her fingernails down her tongue, like a small child, trying to scrape the bad taste out.

  ‘There is something in my teeth!’ she screams.

  Den and Estie have been here five times already this week. This is the first time with God. Den has learnt what to do next. Lately, Den has been learning more quickly. She rarely resorts to the on-call doctor now.

  ‘Take your teeth out, Mum,’ she says quite calmly. ‘It’s time for bed.’

  She pulls the curtains across the kitchen window to disguise the morning. The sun is too strong for the thin, floral fabric. It makes the curtains glow. It is unlikely that Estie will notice this and if she does Den will make up some lie about full moons or streetlamps. Den is getting better and better at telling lies. She fills a clean glass of water from the tap and sets it in front of her mother. She is smiling, smiling, smiling as if she is the parent and Estie is the child and this is something they do every night before bed.

  ‘Is it bedtime?’ Estie asks. Den is relieved to see that the distraction has taken.

  ‘Yes, Mum, it’s time for bed. Do you want a hot-water bottle?’

  The old lady nods knowingly and removes her dentures. A string of saliva comes with them and, for a moment, Estie is joined to her teeth by a thin yard of spider thread. She stares at the dentures briefly, as if trying to see God hiding between the cracks in her teeth, then she drops them into the water. The teeth drown. God falls silent. Things return to normal, or what they have lately come to mistake for normal.

  Den makes a cup of tea. Every time she feels like crying she puts the kettle on instead; so many cups of tea. The paint is beginning to peel off where the kettle steam condenses beneath the kitchen units. She boils the kettle fifteen times a day at least. Den likes to hold a tea mug until it
goes cold. The burn of it in her palms reminds her that there are other ways to feel pain. She rarely bothers drinking the tea.

  Sometime later it is lunch. Estie has forgotten about God and put her teeth back in. She has done television and climbing the stairs and is caught in a new loop now. Her mind is taking her out for the night, for dinner or perhaps dancing. Though it’s over a month since she last left the house, she is obsessing over the details of her outfit. She is worrying about how she will appear in the eyes of other women. Insecurity is a new language for Estie, but Den suspects there has always been this third eye inside her mother, quietly judging.

  ‘Do you think I can get away with this dress?’ Estie asks. ‘Pink hasn’t always been the easiest colour for me.’ She is wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms today and a cardigan layered over a pullover.

  ‘Too much lipstick?’

  ‘Hair up or hair down?’

  Estie reaches over her shoulder to the place where her hair once hung and scoops the air into an imaginary ponytail. She holds the absence of hair one-handed at the base of her skull as if it were the first taut throb of a headache, or a hat twitching in the wind.

  ‘What do you think, Denise? Hair up or hair down?’

  Den turns from the tinned soup gargling on the stove. They will have this soup for lunch with bread and then again, with boiled potatoes, for tea. She sees her mother framed in the kitchen doorway, moving her head stiffly from left to right, all chin and sucked-in cheekbones, like a young girl posturing in the bathroom mirror. In the soft margarine light, the veins on Estie’s neck are pale grey, the colour of common pigeons, and just about visible beneath her skin.