Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  * * *

  —

  Standing in the museum, surrounded by the relics of John Hunter’s quest for understanding, his attempts to enumerate what a person is, how we are made, our solid, ordinary parts assembled into something greater, a whole which can be neither contained nor comprehended—I watched Johannes walk from case to case, past the fish, the fossils, the cockerel’s head with a human tooth rising from its comb like a jaunty hat, and I felt familiarity drift from him like dust until he too was nothing but parts, unidentifiable amongst so many. He paused by the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the Irish giant whose body Hunter kept against his wishes, stealing the corpse from its lead coffin as it was transported by cart to the Kent coast for burial at sea, and I saw the hunch of Johannes’ shoulders, the slight tip of his head which indicated silent disapproval, and although I knew these things as well as the feeling of my own breath rising in my lungs, for a moment I recognised him not as the complicated, sprawling pattern memory makes from faces, the words uttered and unuttered, the promises preserved, revoked, this mess of accord and arguments—that intangible nexus of thought, our own and others’, which makes us who we are—but only as mechanism. There is nothing more horrible than this: a world elucidated and all that is seen, understood. Johannes turned and, catching my look, came back to where I stood and said

  —Shall we go home?

  and

  —Yes,

  I answered, and felt better at last, having found my way to this defeat.

  * * *

  —

  Then there are these other moments, the ones it is so easy to forget: an evening, unremarkable. Light pooling on the ceiling from the lamps, the curtains closed. I surface from a doze to find Johannes sat beside me on the bed, reading, and half-turning towards him I reach out my hand; he takes it without looking, his fingers as they always are, dry and warm, their familiarity like the kinder obverse to desire. We do not speak but, less apart, we settle back into ourselves. I close my eyes—this moment comes again and then again, our children sleeping or unborn: the mute reiteration of the certainty that all is well, and we are as we ought to be.

  * * *

  —

  John Hunter died on 16 October 1793 and it is hard, at times, to find quite what it was that he left us, beyond the macabre and serried rows of jars that made up his collection. So many of his experiments, taken all in all, were failures—the transplanted teeth, the Caesarean, the operations after which his patients, lacking the advantages of antiseptics, died. Perhaps, after all, it was only this: the understanding that we are objects and that we might be learned—that there is no mystery, but that we might look and see ourselves. Three years after his death, Edward Jenner, who had been his first pupil and lifelong friend, would inoculate an eight-year-old boy against smallpox. This boy would be one of twenty-three subjects on whom Jenner performed the experiment; subsequently he exposed the boy to smallpox and found that he was immune; and this was Jenner’s contribution: not that he should have used cowpox as a vaccine—a practice which had been standard in Britain since the 1720s but in use elsewhere for centuries—but that he should have proved that it worked. To him, in one of the first of the letters between them, Hunter had written, “But why do you ask me a question, by the way of solving it. I think your solution is just; but why think, why not trie the Expt.”

  * * *

  —

  This another moment of clarity: sent to hospital by a midwife because, with the Doppler receiver set against the smooth dome of my rising abdomen, something hadn’t sounded right. I lay on the sofa with my clothes disarranged while she went about the business of folding her things away, putting on her coat, and I tried to gauge from her movements how urgent this was.

  —Do I need to go right now?

  I asked, and she replied

  —You might as well,

  so I stood up and found a jumper, socks, and called out to Johannes, who asked

  —Should I come with you?

  but though I wanted him to, and though I wanted him to know it without it being said, still it seemed absurd to drag him to sit for hours in a hospital when he might be at home and comfortable. I said

  —I’ll be okay,

  and so he contented himself with packing a bag for me, filling a bottle with water, finding my keys; and then as I put on my shoes he stood in the middle of the room, his own feet bare against the floorboards, this tiny detail of our difference prompting me to go to him and put my arms around him, to comfort him, because while in this sudden situation, which was not yet an emergency but which might turn out, later on, looking backwards, to be the start of one, we were both incapable of altering the outcome, I at least was necessary while he, no less concerned, was left behind.

  Later, behind a curtain, I sat next to a foetal heartbeat monitor, its sensors attached to me by long belts whose buckles were held in place with ratty knots. A midwife had spent some time adjusting them and now I was able to move only slightly, an arm or leg shifted by millimetres, in case they slipped and the monitor could no longer get a reading. Every now and then the baby moved, turning this way or that, so that the machine could no longer detect a heartbeat and an alarm went off, and then I would sit there, waiting, listening to its dull beeping until the midwife came back again to readjust the straps. Next to me, across an unspooling sheet of paper, a thin line traced the pattern of the baby’s heart, its peaks and troughs a litany of all that was—and although at first I could think only how uncomfortable I was, how afraid, after a while it seemed that watching this line, the steady pace it kept, its spitting progress up and down, something which had long occluded fell away at last and certainty was left behind. This was fear’s gift, perhaps, this sharpened vision, and in the transcription of my own child’s fragile heart I could read at last not quite love, not connection nor communion, but rather the understanding that what was important was only the way we stood to one another, protected and protector, and that we had gone beyond argument and must get on with things.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks ago, looking in the bottom of a drawer for something else, I found a photo of my mother—saved, somehow, when so much else has been thrown away. In it, she is standing in front of a wall up which sunflowers grow, their circular faces higher than her head. She wears a short-sleeved Fair Isle jumper, a denim skirt, bare legs. She looks very young, and in her arms she holds her newborn child. I have pinned the picture up above my desk, between the two foetal scans and the newspaper clipping of Saturn’s moon, and, looking at it, I find that when I think of my mother now it is not of that version of herself which she became when ill, nor of how she was when, throughout my childhood, compromise forced her into unspectacular unhappiness, but rather it is of this woman whom I never knew, whose face bends down to meet her child’s, whose hands enclose, who smiles. I feel such tenderness towards her. She must have known so little, then, of what it is to have a child, but had to learn it all from scratch, and did—as I have done, and all the rest of us, learning from the moment we are born how to be one single version of ourselves with all the losses that entails. I am so used to thinking of my mother as someone who is complete, her life concluded, that to imagine her at this moment, caught during those few weeks when everything was, briefly and for both of us, possibility, is to feel her startlingly close, her death unwound. She is not shut and done with but persists, and I am glad.

  * * *

  —

  In the end there was nothing obviously wrong with the baby except that one of the midwives, her hand pressing hard into the flesh of my belly, suspected she was breech. A scan confirmed it, the baby’s feet crossed over in my pelvis, her head tucked in beneath my ribs, turned to one side with her hands held up in front of her face, their fingers flexing, as though she were examining their tiny nails for dirt. I was sent to the waiting room until a doctor had time to see me; an
d it seems to me now, looking back, that from this point onwards pregnancy became for me a series of waits on uncomfortable chairs, so that very soon I became accustomed to it, to the boredom and the occasional startling kindnesses, to the opening hours of the cafe in the hospital foyer and the smell in the corridors, the doors which opened and shut and the women behind them, crying on their knees, these just-caught glimpses of female agony, and to the way they looked afterwards, this cohort of which I was not yet a part, to their exhausted faces lit up with surprise above their freshly minted children as though at the sudden comprehension of a lesson it had taken them nine months to learn; but this first time it was new. I sat very upright and wished that Johannes was there. After a while I asked the receptionist if there would be time for me to go to the cafe and get something to eat; she said she didn’t know but would see what she could do. Ten more minutes passed and she brought me an egg sandwich which was fridge cold and tasted strongly of margarine but I was grateful for it anyway and felt better afterwards. At last the doctor came and called me and, stiffly, I followed him into a tiny office. He told me his name and I forgot it instantly. I sat down. He shuffled some pieces of paper and said

  —Baby’s breech, I see.

  I felt a kind of anxious shame, as though it were a dereliction of duty that had brought me here, my own failure to marshal my flesh and control my unborn child. I was afraid that, seeing inside me, he would find the means to judge what I hadn’t even known existed and couldn’t recognise although I too had seen it on the screen, that pattern of dark and light which the inside of my own body made.

  —We can book you in for an ECV and try to turn the baby manually. It’s a bit uncomfortable and there is a small risk of—

  I tried hard to focus on what was being said but my mind wandered. I already knew that I would do what this man told me and there was a comfort in the acceptance of my surrender. It seemed that what was being talked of was not my body but only an object in the space between us, predictable and mundane, and of which he, having more experience, was the better judge—all I did was carry it about.

  —These leaflets will explain—

  My grandmother and I had sat like this, facing one another. It was, I thought, the same time of day, although this doctor and I were deep inside the hospital and there was no window, no sound but the footsteps of the nurses and the bleeping of machines, and in place of sweating glasses there were two plastic cups from the water fountain in the corner of the waiting room. I held mine in my hands.

  —You will need to sign—

  My grandmother too had tried this: to make me explicit to myself in order that I might better be able to decide how to act; and although hers was another kind of explanation it held the same promise: the resolution of a complicated pattern into one that could be understood, her voice that of the radiologist—there are the feet, the hands, there is the head. Here is want, desire, and here is fear, here anger, love. At times my grandmother’s promise of transparency has seemed to me like a gift and at others like an act of violence; but always it has seemed to me that something important was left out of it, the understanding which she searched for missed, lost in that gap between an object and its name. Even so I felt the power of it and do so still: how simple things would be if only I could know myself or others; if, stepping in between a light source and a screen, I could see the way that I was constituted, those hidden structures, the bones, the joints that give the rest its shape—and then I might know something for certain, that I was alive or that I would be dead, these two differently slanted articulations of the same fundamental understanding; but instead there is only this excavation, a digging in the dark: precarious, uncertain, impossible to complete.

  * * *

  —

  All these same anxieties I feel again now. I am worried about the distance between Johannes and myself, between us both and our daughter. I am worried that the particular circumstances pregnancy forces on us will not retreat with its ending. I am worried that I will fail to be an adequate mother; that I will neither recognise nor love my child. I am worried that I have failed already, somehow; that failure has been written into my genetics or my history and will be passed on, crossing over that fragile barrier the placenta makes to infect this unknown person for whom I ought to be a shield. I am afraid of all that which, unseen, remains unknown: my own insides, the thoughts of others, the future. This baby has turned already, head downwards, waiting to be born. My daughter draws pictures of it, the three of us with our feet on a flat green line of ground and the baby floating in the air. Sometimes it is tethered to me or to Johannes by a drawn-on string and at others it only drifts, there in the empty space above us. Johannes’ mother is coming for Christmas. She will stay until after the baby is born.

  * * *

  —

  I lay on another bed in another room while a consultant obstetrician pushed my unborn daughter round through the skin of my stomach, forcing her to turn by 180 degrees. I tried not to scream with the pain of it. Afterwards I sat for another hour attached to the monitor; the baby was fine but, someone else said, seemed rather small. They would do another scan. I lost track, then, of whom the people were who came and went about me, of the appointments attended, the waiting rooms inhabited. It ceased to seem important. My blood pressure was taken often; it rose a little and then came down again but each rise took it higher than the last. I was warned about vision changes, headaches, swelling of the hands or feet. At home I lay on the sofa and read or slept. Johannes tried to work. Late each afternoon we walked around the park, our steps slow, and stopped afterwards at a pub where Johannes drank cider and I a pint of lime and soda, the cordial making viscous swirls inside the glass. We said very little. It seemed that without our noticing it, without anything having been said or done, intimacy had returned, and we stood together, waiting, for what was both our end and our beginning. I had bought a Moses basket, several packs of Babygros, a swaddling blanket; there was nothing left to do. I no longer felt the need to talk. We went to Johannes’ mother’s for the weekend and I read detective novels in the garden. I couldn’t sleep at night but no longer felt tired, only rather empty: an end might come at any moment but while inevitable it remained out of reach, since how is it ever possible to imagine in advance how one might get from there to here. There were more scans, more machines; the baby was still small but no one seemed to know what it meant, and it seemed at times that we might stay this way forever, autumn never coming, nor the baby; and then at thirty-seven weeks I sat again in a doctor’s office. Johannes was at home, his own life a thread less frayed than mine, his hours contiguous while mine drifted apart.

  —Your blood pressure is very high.

  I told the doctor that hospitals always made me anxious and she smiled. There was another scan, so many now that I had stopped trying to see the screen. She said

  —I need to speak to the consultant,

  and while she was gone I sat alone in the room and thought of nothing at all. When she came back she looked brisk, her face betraying anxiety with a slightly too-stiff brightness, and I remembered the sonographer, and how she had seemed to disappear behind efficiency.

  —We’d like you to come back tomorrow to be induced.

  I don’t know what I had expected but it wasn’t this: a bag packed ready in the hall and a bus ride to the hospital in the morning, two days spent walking round and round the hospital car park in the hope that labour might begin and then a doctor breaking my waters with a kind of pin; an oxytocin drip; the feeling that my body was turning itself inside out. I remember it only in snatches: a radio playing in the corner and Johannes’ hand on my forehead, the gas which made me feel dizzy and the throwing up of half a tuna sandwich into a paper bowl, and how I lay and begged, calling out for something to be done—

  then this, the moment all else falls away from. The pain stops and someone hands my daughter to me, her tiny body beat
ing at the air, and for an instant we are nothing but a single surface, joined, laid out beneath the light, and everything is perfect, clear: I know her absolutely and all her history is mine for I have seen it all—

  then time, then growth obscures. The cord is cut; our separation starts. She is taken from me, weighed, dressed. I close my eyes in relief that it is over and a first part of her life is lost to me. Johannes holds her. She starts to cry, a newborn’s wail of bleak surprise, and we do not know the reason but must try, somehow, to find it out.

  Acknowledgements

  That this book was written at all is due in large part to the support, encouragement and deadlines I received from both my agent, Jack Ramm, and my editor at John Murray, Mark Richards. All good bits should be considered to their credit. Bad bits are mine alone.

  Thanks are also due to Ed Lake, for a certain amount of drink and conversation, and to Lyn Curthoys, whose fortnightly journeys along the Metropolitan Line gave me time.