The single-engine plane skips raggedly over a dirt runway and then pulls up, ballerina crisp, at a terminal resembling a bus shelter. Its tin roof basks under a godless blue sweep of sky. An elderly man tends the flowers in pots by the door; he’s keeping the incongruous colours alive with all the zeal of a pub owner in an English summer. He examines the single suitcase of the lone passenger who alights, the city clothes, the face. All you give him is a nod.
The smell of his hose on wet concrete plunges you back to childhood and you lift your chin to the sky. This is your kind of air, as dry as your grandmother’s tissue paper skin and you can feel your body straightening within it. Your mother swerves into the car park in a four-wheel drive from the dig’s sponsors. You haven’t seen her for so long. It’s a shock, the ageing. The old man waves a one-toothed grin in farewell; all’s right with the world now, you’re placed.
As you’re driven to your mother’s tinny little prefab house you know you’ll outstay your welcome. You wonder how long it’ll last, if you’ll have time to unwind.
Her clothes spill across the rooms, pushing anyone else out. There are suitcases half unpacked and piles of unsorted washing. She can’t find a spare towel among the rolls of bubble wrap and bags of plaster of Paris and fine chisels and brushes, and she apologises for not cleaning up. She’s been alone too long.
But it doesn’t matter. You want this to work.
The first night you cackle together as your gift of fresh Belgian chocolates explode like soft clouds in your mouths. Tonight’s fine, for a couple of days it’ll be fine and if you’re lucky, a week. The plan is to sleep greedily by night and by day to relax and reclaim a simpler life. It begins well: the nuggety people in the few, spare shops beam at your belly. Well, isn’t that something, say their smiles, as if this is what life is all about. You visit the dig site in your hiking boots and hat, and the team leader insists on you taking his fold-up seat. But soon you’re walking the dusty streets churning and damaged and hot, rubbing at the old wrinkle between your eyebrows. Your mother’s house seems to collect the warmth and contain it: the toothpaste’s warm, and the deodorant when you roll it on. You’d always craved the heat but now, for the first time in your life, you buckle under it. The baby’s changing you so much.
But not enough.
For even here Gabriel follows, even while you’re swimming in the town’s pool. You do laps every day, pushing away hard from the edge and stretching the limbs as far as you can and feeling the curve of the muscles as you try to swim him out. But every morning you snap awake to a day that’s raw, with an unexplained panic churning in your gut. Your bones rise tired from your mother’s spare bed as if they’ve been struggling with its softness all night, tensing against it, resisting it. And after six days your mother makes it known that she loves her alone too much. It’s always the pattern, the sudden tightness in her voice and then the explosion from you both, and you turn into the woman who’s rarely allowed out. This time, over a name for the child.
You could never use your father’s, your mother says. You’d never want a reminder of someone as useless as that.
There’s still so much bottled-up bitterness over him, after all these years, and you can only guess it’s because they were once, consumingly, in love. Your father’s often the reason for a fight, you’re thoroughly sick of this cul-de-sac you both, always, end up in, it’s been going on for twenty-five years. Your mother’s jealous of your love for him, still, she feels your devotion was blinded and foolish, and she’s spent a lifetime, as a consequence, trying to convince you of his flaws. He was always drunk, useless, pathetic, never did a thing with his life, didn’t love you because he never gave me enough money for you, made it so hard for me, the words are always the same, ever since you were ten, and they’ve only succeeded in turning you from her.
Why do you always go on like this, you ask now, I’m so tired of it. Then, very quiet: If you don’t watch out you’ll have no one left in your life.
You’re just like him, she attacks. Hopeless, hopeless, the lot of you. It’s always daddy daddy daddy, and she impersonates the tone of your adoring childhood voice. You never say you love me, you never say thank you to me, you never think I was the best thing since sliced bread. You have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world.
Your mother’s words mean nothing to you now, they’re the same phrases over and over again and they lost, years ago, the capacity for any sting. Of course you’ve said I love you to her in the past, but she never seems convinced.
She will not listen to you now, pleading with her to stop. You don’t know why you thought that being pregnant would represent a huge, healing turning in every aspect of your life. You fear you’ll have this situation with your mother until one of you dies, this feeling that you’re engaged in combat with her, you’re not allies. You have to get away from the viciousness in her voice, the jab of her finger in the air, the fury in her face. You walk out the front door, past the spoil heaps from the dig, the crosses on the shoreline like the haphazard masts of ghost ships, the curious faces of the locals; you walk without knowing where you’re walking.
You end up at the settlement’s only public phone.
Change your flight.
Leave without saying goodbye. It’s not the first time you’ve done this.
Lesson 101
it is never too late to practise the habit of self-control
You unclench your jaw as the plane takes off. Stare out at what looks like a desert of sand stretching as far as you can see but it’s cloud, endless cloud. You have a black hole in your life, four days where you could disappear, anywhere, do whatever you want. Four secret days. If you were more reckless and courageous you’d call Gabriel, you’d curl up with him and not leave his flat.
You arrive back in London and go straight home, not knowing what to do with your freedom and not having the boldness to seize it. There’s sand in crescent moons beneath your nails and in the folds of your clothes and your hair; it’s scoured away nothing of course.
Lesson 102
the new mother enters, at the end of the first three months, one of the most delightful periods of her life
But over the coming days all the exhilaration at the pregnancy crowds back, it will not be stopped. You’re enveloped by people’s joy as you begin telling them the news, it’s lovely to share the wonder of a baby with a much wider circle than just Cole and yourself. Old hands cluck and swamp you with advice: see as many old friends as you can during pregnancy for there’ll be little time afterwards, use disposable nappies because life is too short, don’t fight sleep, chant silently in labour my vagina is a slippery dip, that it’ll feel like you’re doing a very big shit, that there’s absolutely nothing elegant about it and you laugh and laugh for it all seems so fresh and strange and unique. And yet this is so many women’s story, since time began, the most universal of all.
There’s no love like it, says a girlfriend with three children, it’s like a drug; you’d die for your kids, you know.
You can’t imagine volunteering your own life for someone else, having a love as big and selfless as that.
For the first time in your life you’re gazing, naked, in front of a full-length mirror and not just registering your body’s faults; for the first time in your life you’re loving the way you look. Everything’s growing and changing. The baby’s darkening your nipples, it’s making them silky, widening them. It’s spreading your pubic hair and strangely greying it. It’s softening and swelling your genitals, ripening them. It’s splashing your skin with pigment, there are sun spots on your face and hands and a dark stripe running bold down your stomach.
Deep into the nights Cole and you joke about what music the baby will like and what its accent will be and its name. All you can settle on is Grain, then Bean, then Mango, following the growth charts in the books. You’ve heard of men who vomit in sympathy with their partners, who put on weight and get sick and are wrung out. There’s none of that with Co
le, although he sometimes pushes out his stomach with his hand on the small of his back and demands sympathy and loving and rest.
And is hit on the head with a cushion.
You’re laughing a lot with him again, feel cocooned in your close little world. It’s the baby, the shared dream, it’s thrilling you both. You feel fortunate to have him so close. What could be more lonely than having a child by yourself in hospital?
Than loving someone too much?
Lesson 103
virgin honey is the purest and sweetest of all
A message on your answering machine after a routine doctor’s check. A silence, you know it’s him. Your name is all he says. Just as he was softening into memory, as you were getting your life back.
The phone rings again and you snatch it up.
Hey, he says.
Your breath catches in your throat.
How are you, he says.
I’m good. I’m great.
I’m just checking in, he says, wondering how you are and there’s a laugh. What do you want from me, you ask, what do you want, and Gabriel tells you that you were becoming something else, you were like a Sleeping Beauty waking up, you were blooming, in your prime and it was fantastic to watch and there’s a silence and then you tut, in annoyance, and he says OK, I’m going: take care, huh, and there’s a click.
You pace the flat, rubbing your hands over your belly, gently rubbing and rubbing as if you’re trying to rub something out.
Lesson 104
screaming, tossing and wilfulness of all kinds are unworthy of a woman
You vomit up to twelve times a day, especially when you’re tired, and you wonder if it’s right for this to happen so often: for some women, yes, your GP says.
Cole holds back the hair from your face as you crouch over the toilet bowl and swishes out the bucket by the bed and wipes your mouth and puts his lips to your stomach, telling the baby not to make mummy sick and after it your palms hold his head for a very long time, and you kiss him, gently, on his crown, in thanks, for you’ve never appreciated him so much.
You wonder what the baby will look like, if it’ll be a Chinese whisper of you both. If its two middle toes will be fused, slingshotted, like your own. You wish for it your left-handedness, your mother’s smile, Cole’s eyesight, his calm.
But still you vomit, as if you’re trying to expel the guilt.
Lesson 105
young wives are among the most important members of the community upon whose health and intelligence depend the welfare of the husband, children and servants
The baby’s turning you from your favourite radio station, you can’t bear the dance beat thumps any more, it’s pulling you to Bach. Slowing you, trying to still you, to sail you into quietness. What’s to become of you now you’re on the path to motherhood? Will you disappear, even more, from the arena of action to become a spectator in life, will you live by reflected happiness? It’s the way of old people, isn’t it, and mothers. You’d always had a niggling disdain for them, those disappearing women, weak, faded, blended in, you’d always thought they’d given up. Now, there’s a disdain for what you were: the career woman determined to cram her living in first, who looked down on young mothers so much.
At night there’s the three of you with your belly pressed into Cole’s lower back and the baby between you and your breathing. Cole worries for the child when your belly fills with laughter, which is often, and when you carry bags of groceries up the stairs and pick up dirty washing from the floor.
Well, maybe you should be helping me a bit more, you tease, tossing his dirty underpants across at him.
And he does, to some extent. Takes more responsibility with the grocery shopping and the cooking, surprises you with dishes you never knew were in him.
I was single for a long time, too, you know: after an astonishing stir fry he’s never done for you before.
You clap your hands with glee. You are doing all the cooking from now on, mate, you laugh.
Hang on, hang on, he chuckles, this only lasts until the baby comes.
Your love is knitting, like a broken bone.
But then the early hours, the lounge room, alone.
A city flat, spare and neat, like a monk’s. Naked on your back, on Gabriel’s rug. Your head rammed against the wall. Your fingers threaded through his hair as you push him further into you and you’re beginning to move under him, your hips are opening out and you’re thrusting, soft, it’s coming up from somewhere deep within you, you’re pushing his head deeper into you and deeper still until you’re fucking his tongue and you want him to swallow you up, to never stop.
Pregnancy has altered the tone of your fantasies. It is not, now, a woman you barely recognise in your head, it is not some fantastical experience you’d never want dragged into real life: it is you, now, it is what you’ve done.
Lesson 106
the mother ought to secure the services of a competent nurse and skilful doctor as early as possible
The hospital where you go for the first prenatal visit lies in London’s outskirts, it’s grimly Victorian with windows grubby and tall. In the corridors pigeons flutter through bands of dirty light and there’s blood on the toilet floor. Cole’s rattled that there’ll just be a midwife at the birth and no one else. This overstretched country, he rants, it’s the twenty-first century and it still feels like the days of Thomas Hardy. He wants the best; you feel the umbrella of his ownership and protection opening over you and you feel a wave of guilt, again, and you cannot respond, you just squeeze his arm in gratitude.
But then at the first scan all the laughter returns for the baby keeps on veering wildly from the screen, it’s playing tricks, tumbling and dancing and then there it is, with its little pod-hands and its strange fierce face staring, it seems, straight at you both.
Tears at this visual confirmation: no, you’re not making it all up.
But when will you feel the little astronaut flutter in your belly? At eighteen weeks you feel impatient with its stillness, and it still pulls you into that deep, deep tired where you wake up weary and never find a firm footing with the day. You wonder if that will ever pass, if you’ll ever feel normal again. Perhaps it’s worth it never again to have the panicky loneliness of those Christmas seasons of singledom when your heart seemed crazed with cracks. A child, surely, is an insurance policy against that.
You ring your mother. You’ve chosen to apologise. You’re so sick of the tension between you, the weight of it in your life; you want it sorted out. You must swallow your pride and say sorry. Even if you don’t know what for.
She’s so relieved you’ve called. There’s such a sadness in her voice, it’s as if she’s been sad for the entire time you haven’t talked and there’s just a want, like you, to be friends. Neither of you mentions the leaving of the dig site, not wanting to pick at old wounds.
I just can’t wait for this baby, you tell her. I want it to be my little mate. I feel like I’ll never be lonely again in my life.
Ah, but you could be more lonely as a mother than you’ve ever been, she says. I’m not sure if I should tell you that, but there’s nothing like heartache in the love that a mother can have for a child. A pause. Especially if that child rejects them. A pause. After all that’s been done for them.
So, she can’t resist slipping back, she will always slip back, she will never let up. And what of a parent rejecting a child, you want to say but don’t. You tell your mother you love her, and repeat that you’re sorry, and you’ll call again soon. Trying to keep as much of your life under control as you can, like Sylvia Plath’s beautiful handwriting that was so neat and contained no matter how wild her world got.
Lesson 107
good drainage is one of the first necessities of a healthy house
At twenty weeks, you feel the quickening.
That’s what your mother calls it and how you love the term: the child stretches and wheels within you and you can feel it for the first time, its lovely da
nce. Little seismic tremors shoot across your belly and you smooth your hands over your ripple baby yawling and scrabbling and butting.
Often, in the evenings, a sudden jolt knocks against your hand – the prodder! – and if he’s close Cole will hurry across the room but the baby will have shifted and won’t oblige a second time; it has a mind of its own already and then it’ll scrabble with glee like a kitten with a ball of wool and now, you’ll say to Cole, quick, and his hand will cup your skin and spread stillness through the child, it will quieten, as if it’s listening to his touch. How he loves this child so fiercely already.
You kiss your husband, tenderly, on the softness of his lips. You feel sexy and womanly and want a man close but Cole can’t be talked into making love; he fears ramming it, fears the child’s resting too close to where he’d want to go. You can’t convince him that it’s not the case, that the baby’s not the encumbrance you’d expected. So many people think of you now as just one thing: the carrier of a new life. You’re not meant to be sexual, you’re a mother.
Cole whispers into your sleep that you’re going to make a lovely mummy and you smile in your dreaming.
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 16
