by Ajay Close
‘Why?’
His eyes flickered. ‘You’ll need to ask her that.’
‘I’ve done nothing but ask, all my life. Everything she ever told me was a lie – till the other day, when she let slip you were a farmer.’
‘Farmhand was more like it.’
‘Blimey,’ I said.
It was eerie how smiling stripped the years from his face. ‘I think she surprised herself.’
Suddenly there was a whiff of sex in the room. Good sex, and lots of it. Jealousy flared through me.
He put down his mug of tea. ‘Will she see me, if you ask her?’
‘Ask her yourself,’ I said. ‘You know where she is.’
His eyes turned hard as marbles behind those bifocal lenses. ‘What else did you find up there?’
‘What there was to be found.’
Those silent seconds we sat facing each other across the fire were as terrible to me as the preceding hour had been wonderful.
‘I could ask her,’ I said, ‘but it wouldn’t make any difference. She hates you.’ I fortified myself with a mouthful of sugary tea. ‘I thought you might tell me why.’
‘Dinnae mess with me, lassie.’
I noted the strengthening of his accent, the extra layer it put between us.
‘I’m not.’ My voice shook. ‘I’m not.’
One of the dogs woke and looked at me.
The moment passed. He took off his glasses to rub his eyes. ‘Are you hungry?’
I was, but I knew how little he had in the fridge. I could have eaten it all and still not been satisfied. I felt the same way about him. I was too old to call him Daddy, too old to be sat on his knee and tickled and tossed up in the air, but I needed something. I knelt on the fleece in front of the hearth and peeled off my Aran jumper, pulling the T-shirt underneath tight over my bump.
His shock jumped the air between us. If it wasn’t exactly tenderness, I had no doubt that he was stirred.
‘I thought you might want to see your grandchild,’ I said.
Bandage
Every lunchtime now I visited Lilias in hospital. Frankie had sweet-talked the senior nurse into giving her a single room. It’s possible she would have been put there anyway. Her presence wasn’t great for patient morale. I had never seen her so inert, stranded without a role. Or rather, refusing to play the only role available to her. I was the actress by then, with my bedside equanimity, while my thoughts skipped ahead to the afternoon I would spend at Shepherd’s Cottage.
The day after her operation I arrived to find her sleeping, that stink I’d noticed lately diluted to a top note in the animal fug of slumber. I had seen through her deceptions so long ago, spent so many years calibrating the shortfall between illusion and reality. I was so sure I had her measure, but I was wrong. In the merciless midday light I could see what she had concealed from me. She was an old woman. At temple and nape that white-gold hair was ashy. Her head was thrown back, exposing the lizardlike creases of her throat. How sparse her eyelashes were, their sore-looking roots in those swollen lids. Her mouth was open, her recessed gums, the metal rims of her crowns, the yellow nap on her tongue: all of it in full view. Her snoring was a percussive gurgle mid-throat. Swiftly as I pushed it away, the word ‘rattle’ came to me.
‘Ma.’
I said it quite loudly but she did not wake.
I knew how to rouse a sleeper – the cooing voice, fingers smoothed along the forearm (never the face) – but even unconscious, she seemed to forbid my touch. I leaned closer until my head hung just above hers. I saw the mushroomy tint to her skin, the dried saliva at the corners of her mouth, the quiver in her nostrils as her breath came and went. All at once, I understood: I had entered the world from between her legs. I could have fitted two Liliases into me, and had room for more, but she had carried me in her long-vanished belly. I had been formed in the hot wet dark inside her as my daughter was now forming within me. What could have been more obvious? What more strange?
She stirred. The eyes that opened to mine were full of terror.
‘It’s all right, Ma. It’s me, it’s Freya.’
She looked up at me like a creature too young to be reached through reason.
‘Ssshhh, Ma, it’s OK.’
At last she recognised me.
And so the child becomes the parent. The channel from the outside world, sharer of funny things that happened on the way to the hospital. I filleted the newspapers for her, reading out reviews of the latest stage productions. She listened, but with a part of her mind elsewhere. Her wound? The pain? Or larger regrets? I didn’t ask, keeping my questions anodyne. Was she sleeping through the night? What did she fancy for lunch? I had always been so hung up on talk as the only route to the heart of things. I knew better now. What mattered was being there day after day, the affirmation of a bond stronger than my feelings. Blood, I suppose.
As the days passed, I registered the changing faces in the ward. She should have been recovering at home. At the very least, sitting up in the green vinyl chair beside her hospital bed. I could have ambushed the consultant when she did her rounds, but my appetite for truth was much reduced by then. It was Lilias who breached the protocol between us, one day when I had exhausted the arts pages and the comic possibilities of the M8.
‘It’s true, you know, that thing about it all coming back at the end. People I haven’t thought about for years.’
‘Like Xavier?’ He phoned me every evening asking if he could visit, but she wouldn’t relent.
‘Him too,’ she said.
‘Who else?’
She made a breathy sound that might have been amusement. ‘Who do you think?’
Who else but my father? And yet it felt like a trick question: get it wrong and she’d return to her hundred-year sleep.
‘You, for one,’ she said.
‘Me?’ I couldn’t have been more surprised.
She brought a hand up to her chest and began to dig at the dressing under her nightdress.
‘Ma,’ I cautioned.
Her hand dropped to the mattress. ‘When I found out I was pregnant I thought my life was over. I was a very average actress then. I had my looks, but not much else. They weren’t going to cast me with a baby in tow.’
‘I was a burden,’ I said. ‘You’ve only told me ten thousand times.’
‘I did something,’ she corrected herself, ‘tried to do something I would have lived to regret. Or perhaps I wouldn’t. How do you know, really? Anyway, I was glad later. But because I didn’t do it, I did something else. Oh, I wasn’t a saint, I knew I was setting the cat among the pigeons, but I had no idea it would end like that. How could I possibly have known?’ Her voice rose as she became more agitated. ‘I was young and stupid – it’s not a crime. We all make mistakes. Most of us get older without…’ She rubbed the heel of one hand across her mouth, removing a gluey strand of saliva and looking, just for a moment, as if she were trying to gag the flow of words. ‘Is this making any sense?’
I groped for the gist of what she’d said. ‘You were too young to know any better.’
‘I should have known.’ She wiped her hand on the sheet, her voice flat. ‘After all, I had you, my little object lesson in consequences.’
Silently I absorbed this.
Her mood seemed to switch. ‘But it taught me about life − about people. I had no idea they were so… all or nothing. It was the making of me, professionally.’ She looked up to see how I was taking this. ‘It’s bad taste to say so, and I’m not saying it was worth the price, but I was a better actress afterwards.’
I had to ask, ‘Are you talking about my father?’
She held my eye for a moment before her gaze slid away. ‘You’re not making this very easy, darling.’
‘You’re talking in riddles. If you want my best guess, you slept with somebody else, one or several, and he took it badly, and your pride was hurt because he cleared off, so you showed him the door when he came back.’
I knew th
at frozen expression of old.
‘Or maybe I’m wrong.’
Her hand moved towards the dressing on her chest, then, anticipating my rebuke, fell back. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘It does to me,’ I said.
I had never seen her look so bleak, on or off stage. ‘Believe me, you’re better off not knowing.’
Yes, she was ill, but I wasn’t letting her away with this. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea what’s best for me.’
‘I’m your mother.’
The force she put into these words thrilled me, but the next moment she sank back against the pillows, exhausted. ‘I did my best with you. I know it wasn’t ideal, but it could have been a good deal worse. And you turned out all right.’
‘You think so?’
‘Of course.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, darling,’ she said to the ceiling.
Then the nurses arrived to change her dressing and I had to go.
1972
It seems to Lili she has been carrying the incubus half her life, groaning with its hunger, gagging with its fastidious palate, despairing at the seal it draws across her throat the instant she sits down to eat. Every day it gets bigger. On what, God knows, unless it’s sucking the marrow from her bones. She wonders if it is normal for pregnant women to see themselves as food. After all, that’s what she is: meat and drink, and weatherproofing. She has spent years despising pillowy, thick-waisted women, and now she is one of them. She opens the jar of cold cream and moves her hands across her breasts, then down, smoothing her belly, skirting the protruding bolt of navel, telling herself she’ll be glad she did this, afterwards. Not that she believes in after any more than she remembers before.
Footsteps in the corridor. Her heart skips a beat at the thought of someone the other side of the wall, inches from her nakedness, but there’s no real risk. The office is out of bounds to the hired hands, Mrs S won’t be back till late, and even if Lili were to be discovered, who could blame her? They’ve all noticed the sweaty sheen on her skin. It’s like living in a different climate from the people around her. The office is cool as a cave, with its stone walls, and the metal shelves stacked with account ledgers and sheaves of receipts. The window is so high that, even on tiptoe, a peeping Tom would only see a stretch of the opposite wall. And as a bonus, there’s the smell of desiccated paper to distract her from the odour that is never far away. Vaguely meaty, and yet fishy, with a hint of putrefaction. A symptom of her condition? Or have the sharpened senses of pregnancy finally made it possible to smell her essential self?
The door opens. Jake’s eyes widen at the sprawl of her across the old oak desk. The damp tendrils of hair, the discarded towel, her marshmallow flesh. She gasps as the dollop of cream hits her belly, so much colder than a fingertip dab. The dirt on his palms turns it beige before it vanishes into her skin.
‘I saw your girlfriend in the village,’ she says, waiting to see if he corrects her. Ex-girlfriend.
He grunts, without looking up.
‘She had a black eye.’
His fingers knead her flesh. She feels the mysterious world within her resisting the pressure of his touch.
‘D’you know how she got it?’
It’s strange, the connection she feels with the girl. A cowhand’s daughter with a greasy face and vulgar, abundant body. Last night, undressing for bed, Lili glimpsed the same tumid breasts reflected in the darkened window.
‘How am I going to know?’ he says.
‘I thought everyone round here knew everything about everybody else’s business.’
He scoops more cream from the jar. ‘Would it turn you on, if I’d done it?’
‘Did you?’ She sounds breathless.
‘I asked first.’ He presses harder, putting his body weight into the strokes.
‘I think she’s suffered enough, don’t you?’ Lili says.
His eyes give off their old hostile glitter.
He desires her, she has daily proof of that, but it’s a matter-of-fact lust, no more or less than he might feel for any number of women. With Brod, lovemaking was as much verbal as physical. He took pride in his bedside manners, as he did in his silk ties and handmade shoes. Every inch of her was lavished with praise, from the thousand carats of gold in her hair to the elegant arch of her foot. With Jake, it’s all so much less personal, a wordless pleasure that takes her by stealth, blurring her edges, reducing her to anonymous flesh.
When he takes the massage down to her pelvis, she releases an involuntary groan. His hands work her over, deep rhythmic strokes that would not have to be so very much deeper to hurt. She wonders if he feels the incubus through the taut shell of her belly, and if so, does the incubus feel him? Just how much does it intuit in its blindness? Can it sense her shameful thoughts? (If it died through no fault of her own, if she woke on sodden sheets in the middle of the night…?) No one wants it to be born. Not its father, or its grandparents (not that they’ve been told), certainly not herself. Would it not be the perfect solution: no straightened wire coat hanger, no gin, no scalding bath – the whole problem taken out of her hands?
She groans again. He bears down on her as if he would pierce through the skin. She pushes him away. ‘No.’
‘No?’ he echoes mockingly as his hands return.
‘No.’
This time, he takes her at her word.
He leans against the wall. ‘What’s that?’
She moves a hand to cover the brown line running down from her navel. ‘Just something that happens.’
‘How come?’
‘I don’t know.’
He pulls her hand away. ‘Is it permanent?’
A question that has been troubling her. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
He seems more fascinated than repelled. ‘Does it feel different?’
‘Different?’
He nods at her pelvis. ‘Inside.’
In bed, he means.
‘Do I feel different to you?’
‘Oh aye.’
‘How?’
He grins. ‘More desperate for it.’
‘While you’re not bothered one way or the other?’
‘Have I ever said no?’
They laugh.
He asks her, ‘Do you have forty quid?’
‘For what?’
‘The deposit on a cottage. I’m fed up with listening out for my mother every time I fancy it.’
‘A bit extravagant, isn’t it,’ she says, ‘renting a house for screwing in?’
He looks shifty. ‘We’ll be doing other things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Cooking, eating.’ He shrugs, ‘Sleeping.’
He wants to live with her! Is he crazy? Doesn’t he know she’s having a baby – a baby like the one he had aborted six months ago? They have sex, yes, but they’re not lovers.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.
‘You made your choice.’ He reaches across and tweaks her nipple. ‘There are compensations.’
‘Will you still think that when I need a crane to get me out of bed in the mornings?’
‘You’ll need to bide somewhere. My mother’s not going to share the house with a screaming bairn.’
‘They take it away as soon as it’s born.’
He clears his throat. ‘Aye, well, we’ll need to talk about that.’
‘Are you going to make an honest woman of me?’ she says mockingly.
‘You don’t want him thinking he’s a wee bastard, do you?’
She stares at him, dumbfounded. He doesn’t even like her, and now he’s offering to be a father to her child. All her life she has feared the jeering girls on the street corner, walking on stage to feel the audience close ranks against her. No one knows what it cost her, keeping people sweet. The relentless eye contact, all that smiling. She only reckoned the cost herself when she stopped. When she came here. Who would have guessed that meeting the walking embodiment of her fears would prove so liberat
ing? To know from the start that, whatever tricks she turned, he wouldn’t applaud. To do precisely nothing and discover it was enough: he detested everything about her, and still he couldn’t help himself.
‘Have I gone deaf?’ he says.
She can almost hear the laughter in the green room. A star-struck farm boy! Did he tumble you in the hayloft, darling? Flick might palp his bicep and Oliver appraise his codpiece, but neither would see him as anything more than a diverting hour on a rainy afternoon. Her ears burn as if she were already backstage gossip. The big man didn’t fancy becoming a daddy – surprise, surprise – and the silly cow took it to heart. Found herself a teuchter for some horny-handed houghmagandie.
God, she misses the theatre. Catty laughter. Lightning repartee. Words are nothing to him. Anyone else would have taken a little trouble over this proposal. For a moment she imagines it: the leading lady turned farmer’s wife, wiper of shitty bottoms and snottery noses.
‘Why on earth would you want to live with me?’
‘You’ve a lovely cunt.’
‘What about the rest of me?’
‘I can put up with it.’
‘I’m not your penance,’ she says.
This earns her another glittering look. ‘Your man in Edinburgh doesn’t want it – or you.’
A low blow, but he’s right. Child or no child, Brod is never going to take her back. When did they last speak on the phone? Weeks ago now. There’ll be plenty of girls only too glad to take her place. She’s just another ex. Unless something should happen to reawaken his proprietary interest.
‘I don’t have the money,’ she says, ‘but there’s someone I could tap for a loan.’
Bean
I sensed her first as an apple pip embedded in dark earth, putting out hair-like roots. Soon she was a butter bean, a fat white pod with a tentative pulsing heart. I swear I felt her climacteric, the face rising out of blankness, the loss of her primeval tail. Then the burgeoning: arms, hands, fingers reaching for the future. Her gills became ears, nudging into position either side of her swelling brain. Her sightless eyes made ready to look ahead. Next thing, she had eyelids, tooth buds, pursing lips, a wrinkling brow. On account of what? Was she having little hissy fits, practising for her terrible twos? Before I knew it she could grimace, too. She hiccupped. Her fingernails grew. Her retinae sensed light, her ears heard my song, her tongue woke to its lifelong love affair with taste. I saw none of this with my own eyes but it was as vivid to me as dreaming.
