Children's Children

by Jan Carson

  ‘It’s not like Bill,’ she was saying and her hands were cradled around a cooling tea cup.

  And Maureen was not saying anything, though they both knew she wanted to.

  Bill looked at the yard brush. It felt good in his hands. He wondered if other men might feel the same way about guns. I could do another hour, he thought, if the light holds. It was a pleasant evening and could still be considered summer. There was nothing in particular stopping Bill. There was more than enough dirt in East Belfast to keep him from June for as long as he wished.

  10.

  Floater

  Your father was an open door. Your mother, a thumb-nosed fool. And you, for your sins – insignificant though they may be – were conceived in an airplane bathroom.

  Don’t get the wrong idea, kiddo. It was a pleasant-enough bathroom, generously proportioned and fitted with not one but two conveniently located life vests. There was a small sink, barely large enough to squeeze both hands beneath the tap, and, mounted on the back of this sink, two dispensers: the first for soap and the second for hand lotion. Both smelt soundly of pear drops. The paper towels descended in frisky cotton wads from beneath the mirror. The bin was a trapdoor. The toilet, when it flushed, was furious, suckering every last teaspoonful of excrement into outer space as if determined to sever all association with freshly laid shit. The door folded in upon itself, like the wings of a paper airplane pinching in anticipation of flight. When closed, there was barely enough space for two full-grown adults to stand. Your father was forced to sit on me as he manoeuvred himself out the door. We were strangers again, and his trousered buttocks advancing towards my groin seemed an oddly, intimate epitaph.

  Everything was neat, everything was useful; your father and I were the only deviations in an otherwise faultless space. I’d have preferred a hotel.

  At the point of your conception I was a nineteen-year-old girl with average-sized feet. I say ‘average’, though in all honesty ‘generous’, or even ‘enormous’, might be more fitting descriptions.

  I was very well grounded. I can only assume your father to have been similarly blessed.

  Your father’s feet, as I last remember them, backing through the bathroom door, were of average length and breadth for a middle-aged man. Save for the normal squirming and repositioning, the sort of behaviour to be expected given the cramped conditions, all our feet remained reassuringly attached to the bathroom floor for the duration of our encounter.

  Your father said many wise and witty things, none of which broke air in my presence.

  ‘Goodness,’ your father once said (the only thing I can clearly remember), ‘this soap reeks of something I can’t quite place.’

  ‘Pear drops,’ I mumbled, bent double, arranging the tails of my skirt. But your father had already unfolded the door.

  Surely we should not blame the airplane bathroom for everything that followed.

  *

  I keep you anchored to the backyard fence by a single piece of purple ribbon. It crucifies me on a daily basis.

  I am scared to give you more than fifteen feet. After fifteen feet, it looks like you are disappearing. Your head begins to scrape the lower clouds. Your hands are doll’s hands. Your feet shrink to two small commas, caught up in a pair of ballet pumps. I can see right up your skirt. I should buy you tracksuit bottoms.

  After fifteen feet, you no longer seem like yourself. We can’t even have a proper conversation without yelling.

  ‘Mama!’ you shout, cupping both hands to form a question mark. ‘Can I come down yet?’

  In the kitchen, where I am washing the breakfast dishes, I can see the lower half of your heels dangling in the window: red shoes today, with black, block heels. I can barely hear you over the dishes.

  ‘What’s that you say, sweetheart?’ I ask, walking outside with the dishcloth still damp in my hands.

  You repeat the question (more loudly this time for the benefit of our neighbours, who are judgmental to the right of our fence, and nosy as sin to the left). ‘Mama, can I come down yet?’

  You’ve been asking the same question every morning for the past four years. I have yet to arrive at a satisfactory answer.

  At first you could not manage words. You spoke spit and tantrums, heavy sentiments which fell into my flowerbeds, suffocating all but the hardiest perennials. Now you simply ask. You are polite, respectful and, lately, hesitant, as if finally coming to terms with a life spent floating fifteen feet off the ground.

  You have come to understand the importance of restraint. You smile constantly, though from down here, no one can see your teeth.

  ‘Mama,’ you ask on the hour, every hour since I bought you that digital watch last Christmas, ‘can I come down yet?’

  ‘Not just yet, sweetheart,’ I holler from the back patio.

  ‘But there’s nothing to do up here. There’s no one to talk to.’

  I find myself catching the tears in a wad of kitchen roll as I remind you of birds and flying insects and the ever-present possibility of a passing hot-air balloon. ‘God’s probably up there somewhere,’ I add. ‘He loves it when you talk to him.’

  I can hear you smiling all the way down the ribbon. You’ve trained yourself to keep smiling. You’re a clever kid. You already know how the world works. Social Services will take you away if, for even a second, you look like you aren’t enjoying the view.

  Social Services are a constant drag. Having nothing to measure me against, they use hitters and kickers and people who do ruinous things to small children. They throw questions like answers and seem to think you’d fare better with a different mother. ‘It’s not normal,’ they say, eyebrows arching over their plastic-backed clipboards. Yet they cannot find an official excuse to remove you. They say I am a distant mother. They say we need to spend more time together, with other people, in other places, and I say it’s not for lack of trying. Social Services visit once a week, twice if one of the neighbours has reported us again.

  The neighbours are abysmal.

  The church folk are even worse.

  They are ‘concerned’, approaching our doorstep under cover of holy prayer and casserole. They are just as nosy as the unconcerned people who peer through our living-room window, hoping for a good dinner party anecdote. They take notes on your dervish hair, the bruise where the ribbon bites your ankle, and your skirt, which is more often than not circling your shoulders like a Superman cape. They are very much concerned. They return with further casseroles and tracksuit bottoms, as if we could not afford to buy our own. When I say, ‘No thank you, I’d prefer if you didn’t pray in my living room,’ they say, ‘Fine,’ and ‘No problem,’ and, ‘Can I get my casserole dish back when you’re finished with it?’ Their concern curdles quicker than left-out milk.

  The last thing we need is a room full of concerned strangers. Our situation is complicated in a way strangers can never quite comprehend. ‘All she needs is a pair of scissors,’ they say, fishing through their handbags for a quick solution. ‘That child needs bringing down to earth right this instant.’

  It’s not like we haven’t tried scissors. It’s not like we haven’t tried magnets and lead weights, Velcro shoes and anchors. Nothing works. It is impossible to keep you down.

  It bears repeating kiddo; the last thing we need is a room full of strangers armed with nail scissors and good intentions.

  ‘Mama,’ you say, barely audible now, ‘why do I have to stay here?’

  And, though I have no good answer, no answer at all, I still smile and shout, ‘It’s only for a little while longer, sweetheart. Just a little while longer.’

  *

  Your father wore a suit jacket for the duration of our encounter. If I’m entirely honest, I noticed the suit jacket long before I noticed your father, sweating inside it. Your father had a face like a blunt doorknob. I did not find him attractive at first. I did not find him attractive after the event, but something about the suit jacket caught kindly at the back of my throat.

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nbsp; I offered him a stick of gum. He accepted. We were old acquaintances by this stage, fifteen minutes at least: exactly the time it takes for an average-sized commercial airplane to trundle down the runway, take off and tuck its wheels, like retiring genitals, back inside its undercarriage.

  I’d chosen my seat for its proximity to the emergency exit. In those days, I still feared an ill-defined worst. Your father slipped into the seat once removed from mine just minutes before departure and, while I have always preferred an empty row, something about his presence made my lungs feel looser. As the wheels left the ground I glanced to my right, past the empty seat and the airplane magazines, and straight into your father’s open face. I read a benediction in the furrowed lines stitching his right eyebrow to his left. All previous plans flew out the window.

  Somewhere above the Isle of Man, our fingers fought loose, hovering over the empty seat belt until eventually they found each other and locked soundly. For thirty-five minutes, we were incendiary, your father and I, like two young things tottering on the edge of unbelief. I commented on his reading material: the French writer, not the obvious one. He complimented my hair, my eyes, my legs and – twenty minutes later, with the back of my head reflected in the bathroom mirror – the diamond-shaped cluster of freckles at the base of my neck.

  You’re old enough to know it wasn’t love or even alcohol. I have wondered, over the years, about the altitude, the in-flight peanuts, the piped airline music, hardly the best preamble to romance. I have blamed the suit jacket and the way your father clasped my hand deliberately, our fingers forming a cantilever bridge across the empty seat. I have reached no satisfactory conclusion, and can only claim, for justification, the sensation of hovering beyond gravity’s pinch, suspended between one world of ordinary and the next. Stranger things have happened in the empty space between up and down.

  God only knows how we found our way to the bathroom. The soap dispenser had more sense than your father and I combined.

  He said the knee socks, puddling drunkenly around my ankles, made him feel like a teenager again.

  He said I was good-looking for a bigger girl.

  He said my feet reminded him of shipyard barges, and stood lightly on the tips of my shoes, flattening the space where my toes ran out. ‘No chance of you floating away, love,’ he said, and I could not tell if he meant this as a compliment or not.

  He said, ‘I’m old enough to be your da,’ and I expect he was, and this realisation neither thrilled nor turned me. Perhaps I am to blame for everything that followed.

  In the bathroom, by the soap dispenser, with the smell of pear drops sickly in my throat, I was little more than a notion of myself. I watched my face, profiled in the mirror. I could see the back of your father’s head going at me like a blunt instrument. He was balding at the back, his hair parted to reveal a sausage-pink swirl exactly the shape and size of a fried egg. I wondered what other calamities I might be capable of.

  About twenty seconds before you fizzled onto the scene, your father offered me his name – both names – formally, accompanied by a handshake of sorts. By this stage, it was too late to stop you. A familiar fist clenched in the pit of my belly. The plane lurched under us as if nodding consent, and when your father finally slid free, fastening his suit jacket sharply, I found myself fat with the knowledge of you: a coy and furious creature, pounding your presence like a caged burp.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what sort of thing did you leave inside me?’ but your father had already found the door handle.

  I sat on the toilet lid, pulled both knees to my chin and cried one moderate tear, bell-shaped like an old-fashioned pear drop. Denouncing gravity, the tear floated up to meet the ceiling.

  I lingered on the airplane toilet for the rest of the flight. No one seemed to notice my empty seat. When the wheels hit the runway, I glanced upwards, only to find that the small circle of tear water had vanished. The sad certainty of you had already burrowed through the ceiling, through the walls and wires of the airplane and ever upwards, keeping faith with the water cycle.

  Even then, exactly thirteen minutes thicker with the love of you, I knew that nothing would be ordinary again.

  *

  When it rains, as it often does in our street, I reel you in, one foot of florist’s ribbon at a time. I keep you in the attic. In the centre section, where the house is highly pitched, you can get a good six feet of air. It’s barely sufficient, but better than the cloakroom closet.

  Your head scrapes constantly against the ceiling, so I’ve stapled pillows across the rafters. Even so, winters are hard. The hair begins to wear thin on the crown of your head. Your elbows throb for the open sky. Your head aches from lack of elevation. At night, in your sleep, smile firmly fixed, you hum love songs to the higher clouds, the thin places which coast above the rain. Perhaps you think I can’t hear, but the walls in this house are exceptionally thin.

  I love you.

  I tell you this. ‘I love you,’ I say, speaking firmly over the hissing water, each and every time I wrestle you under the showerhead. It takes both arms and a safety harness to hold you down. ‘I love you,’ I say and kiss the space where you should be: eating breakfast at the kitchen table like a normal six-year-old, tucked under the blankets which cannot keep you down, hanging from the monkey bars in the People’s Park. ‘I love you,’ I say, tugging on the end of your purple ribbon to make a point, ‘but I’m not quite sure how to make this work.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ you shout, turning upside down to look me in the eye, ‘I’m going to pray that God gives you wings so you can come up here too.’

  I would like to agree, to scream ‘Amen!’ at the top of my twenty-six-year-old lungs and join you somewhere above the telephone wires, but I have to be honest. On days like today, when my legs look longer than even yesterday, and the attractive postman has grown his beard out, and I, for all my backyard problems, do not feel a day over twenty-three – on most days, if I’m absolutely honest – I want to forget about the little girl tied to my garden fence.

  ‘Surely,’ I think to myself, ‘God cannot still be upset about the airplane bathroom.’

  *

  You were not like other unborns. You did not sleep. You twitched constantly, like a trapped sneeze.

  Fists up from the very first second, you were grazing the roof of my belly for a skylight. After twenty weeks, the outlines of your tiny hands – already poised for flight – appeared like second and third belly buttons, just above my belt.

  I was ashamed, on account of the airplane bathroom and your father, the only open door on our street. I wore a potato sack and told no one, until finally the potato sack could no longer hide the cut of your wrists and elbows, protruding through my stretch marks.

  ‘Good Lord,’ the lady at the hospital said, holding to the light your ultrasound slides, ‘it looks like you’re giving birth to Superman … or Supergirl,’ she quickly corrected herself, the space between your legs still a mystery to me.

  ‘Should I be worried?’ I asked, propping myself up for a better view. ‘It doesn’t feel like a baby. It feels more like a balloon. Could it possibly be the airplane bathroom?’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense. You can’t go blaming airplane bathrooms. It’s probably just indigestion or the way you slept last night. Get some rest. Place a sandbag on your belly. Everything will be just fine.’

  Things were far from textbook. You swelled daily, inflating with every breath I took. By the third trimester I was one part baby and six parts space. The doctor had nothing new to say. I asked for a second opinion and this doctor was equally dumbstruck. ‘I’ll look it up on the Internet,’ she said. I could just as easily have done this at home.

  I was unsure where you’d belong in a world so taken with gravity.

  At the local swimming pool – enormous now, a double-decker bus swathed in a floral bathing suit – I tried to drown you. Down at the diving end, where it’s nine feet deep and difficult to see, I pinched my nose and sank.
It did not work. The air in you was much, much larger than me. You rose. I, reluctantly wrapped around you, also rose belly first to meet the water’s surface. When the point of my chin pierced the pool’s skin I opened my mouth and howled to the overhead lights for all the stupid things I had lately done in airplane bathrooms and other, more obvious rooms.

  In the very last week, full term now and more than ready to deflate, I could no longer keep my feet on the ground. At night I bound myself with ribbons and belts to the foot of the bed and still woke to a good half-foot of air between the mattress and my back. Thick with shame I could not even tell the midwife, and next evening tied the knots tighter, hoping to delay your very first flight.

  ‘God,’ I prayed, to the curtains and the duvet cover, but most of all the carpet, which remained reassuringly underfoot, ‘do not let me be a single day overdue. Not a single day, you hear me. I don’t want this special thing inside me one minute longer than necessary.’ And just like that, Jesus wept, my waters broke and you came floating out to meet the world, six pounds thick and lighter than air.

  If it wasn’t for the cord – a good invention on God’s part – I might have lost you instantly.

  *

  This morning I wake to find the scissors already waiting.

  ‘It isn’t cruel. It’s for the best,’ I tell myself. ‘It’s the most natural thing in the world.’

  I take a long shower. I wash my hair twice. I fix breakfast and float it up to you attached to a helium-filled balloon. I don’t, for a second, let the scissors out of my sight.