I had lovely enlarged boobs which leaked milk every time she cried. The pull of the toothless infant mouth on one’s nipples is highly erotic, I discovered. It induces ecstasy. The little hand on one’s breast and the tiny piggy gruntings are a delight.
Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido
Kate sits with her feet up on the heater with the whole city to themselves. The nights are cooler now and the old ladies downstairs have retreated indoors. She sits alone with the soft slup slup slup of Hannah suckling. Her milk arcs from the unsuckled breast, leaving wet patches on her nightgown that smell of faintly of cheese. Hannah’s hands knead at her flesh rhythmically and she remembers the half-wild mother cats at Millerhill and their ecstatic purring as the row of blind kittens lined up at their bellies.
They spent that summer in Iceland, walking about in a landscape where geysers spouted simply from the middle of a green field, with no announcement, no information board, no guard-rail nor tourist hoopla. The blue bubble rose as regular as breathing, and swelled to an enormous globe straining within the meniscus before its extravagant feathery release. Children played in huts on lava fields barely covered by stunted trees and had to be called in by their mothers to sleep, and men mowed their lawns, stripped to the waist in the creamy light of 3am. Steve saw the hills and valleys with their knee-high forests and steaming lakes covered with stories: this was where Snorri had bathed, this was where the man had written to his beloved that she was a tree of ribbons, she was a white ship upon the ocean. Rock and scoria were overlaid with tendrils of language. Words burst from the ground with the exuberance of wildflowers.
Inflation was also exuberant. When they got home after that summer they were broke. So Kate got a job at a publisher’s, working on a new children’s reading series. The system was phonic. She was employed to write little stories with lots of words including clusters such as ‘au’ and ‘aw’: The awful dragon was caught by the paw.
For six months Kate commuted to a cubicle an hour and a half away by subway and bus, in an office park filled with white buildings arranged like so many toasters or shiny appliances, along roads where provincial officials had made a bid for glorious posterity: Walter. G. Obscure Dignitary Drive. Arthur B. Manager Place. The partitions beween the cubicles were flimsy and reached to head height so that every conversation, every phone call, every sniff or giggle or sneeze fluttered over the top and landed on the surrounding desks. Maggie, who occupied the cubicle next door, had conducted a survey.
‘Hey,’ she called from her desk, ‘would you believe it: ninety-five per cent of the characters in these stories are males, and that includes four dogs and three donkeys and maybe a cat, though it’s a bit indeterminate. The females are all princesses or mothers. And not a single one of them, whether male or female, is identifiably Canadian. So what do you make of that, eh?’
‘Rubbish!’ called Murray from Marketing who was passing. But somewhere in the celestial hierarchies that governed this Canadian subsidiary of an American branch of a global conglomerate, someone agreed with Maggie. Now the stories not only required vowel clusters, but heroines and a Canadian setting. Jean sees the beavers among the trees by the stream …
Kate coped: baby, job, thesis, reviewing two nights a week. Other people coped. Toba had babies and did her painting. Donna Da Silva had a baby and a job in a downtown law firm. She had given in and gone out with the son of one of her mother’s friends, someone she had avoided for years as the man who was ‘just right’ for her: aspiring surgeon; handsome according to her mother; great sense of humour.
‘Okay!’ she had said. ‘Okay! I’ll go out with him!’
And he was nice. He wasn’t good-looking — but then he’d been told she was beautiful too, so that was a relief. They were married within the year and she’d become pregnant (not entirely by accident) a month later. Donna coped: her waters broke during finals. She acted it out for them one night at dinner: the surprise, the recoiling of students seated within splashing distance, herself as the resolute student answering every last question before departing for the hospital. She had a job and a nanny who arrived at 8am to a row of bottles filled with expressed breast milk keeping cool in the fridge.
She coped.
Eva, who was their doctor, coped. She worked full time with two children whose photos, mounted in silver frames, stood among the prescriptions and note-pads on her cluttered desk.
Maggie at work coped. She had worked full time since her son was six months old. She was single too.
But Kate, standing one morning on the platform at Bloor and Bay waiting for the train and the commute out to the phonic clusters, was overcome by panic. The wind rushed from the mouth of the tunnel. The train was roaring toward her, and for no particular reason she could understand, she thought, ‘I could jump’. The edge of the platform was a clear line: on this side stood the usual people unconcernedly reading their papers or consulting their watches. On the other side of the line sat death. She had read about the people who jumped and how their deaths caused delays in the system. She felt her back break out in a sweat at the sheer possibility.
Of course she wouldn’t jump. Who would care for Hannah? But once the thought had arrived, it had her in its clammy grip. She pushed her way back to the rear of the platform so that the other commuters made a wall of bodies between her and oblivion and pain and terror, and the train came as it always did and she climbed on and sat in a corner, trembling. From that morning on she dawdled in the corridor until the train was in the station, then emerged to join in the rush for the doors. But when she left the bus to walk along the verge of John C. Councillor Cul-de-sac to the office, the terror was lurking there too, like the wolf in the fairy tale, behind every tree trunk, at the corner of every blank building. The earth became unsteady, tipping about like water beneath her feet, the sounds of cars and air conditioners and her own hurried breathing amplified and she had to run — awkwardly, on wedge-heeled sandals — for the relative safety of the office.
Then the terror spread. It seeped out to flood the supermarket on Saturday mornings. The aisles became narrow canyons of tins and cartons; the front doors were unbearably distant; the sound of the music that was supposed to soothe her into letting down her money, to indulge in some frenzy of purchase, as a cow is persuaded by country music’s greatest hits to let down its milk, that same selection of easy listening became amplified, distorted, and she had to leave the trolley where it stood in the middle of the cereal section and walk as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself, to the exit. She bought from then on at a Macs Milk where the mark-up was astronomical but the doors were less remote.
Something made her panic, something was breathing down her back, making her want to run. But where? Eventually even the apartment became unsafe. The terror could come upon her as easily as she made the bed or cleaned the bath. She closed her eyes then, tried to breathe steadily, hoped that it would pass. She told no one, not even Steve.
‘Are you looking after yourself?’ said her mother on one of those trans-Pacific collisions that were their phone calls. ‘You sound tired.’ Even from several thousand miles away her antennae were attuned. ‘You’re not overdoing things, are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ Kate said, then changed the subject. ‘How’s Maura?’
Maura was living in London. She was working in a costume-design department in the West End. She was married to a bass guitarist. She had sent a wedding photo: she wore a loose cream satin pyjama suit and carried half-a-dozen arum lilies. She looked very cool and very elegant. Cat Stevens lived in the flat downstairs.
Kate sits in her cubicle composing stories like acrostics. The terror starts. The floor begins to tilt and she could slide right off into nothing, into chaos. She can hear Maggie speaking in the cubicle next door but none of the words make any sense. They are just birdsong, babble. She can feel her heart begin to accelerate to a bongo beat; sweat is breaking out along the line of her shoulders. She is going to scream.
‘So what do you think?’ says Maggie, looking over the cubicle wall. Then, seeing Kate’s face, she says, ‘Are you okay?’
‘No,’ says Kate. ‘I think I’m cracking up. I think I need to see a doctor.’
Maggie drives her into town to see Eva. Eva adjusts the photo of a little boy riding a merry-go-round elephant.
‘So, what are you going to give up?’ she says. Kate notices the tremor in her hand, the dark rings around her eyes. ‘It’s hopeless trying to do everything. Just hopeless.’
‘The job,’ says Kate. ‘That’s what I’m going to give up.’
She resigned that afternoon.
Maggie rang.
‘Murray’s ecstatic,’ she said. ‘He said he’d had a bet with someone in editorial — I don’t know who exactly — that you wouldn’t last. He said women with children never last.’
‘Sorry,’ said Kate. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’ She had just let down every woman on the planet. She had failed fifty-one per cent of the world’s population. She had dashed the hopes and ambitions of an entire generation. She wanted Maggie to forgive her, but Maggie said nothing. Hannah was dragging herself up onto the sofa and heading for the dials on the record player.
‘Look … I’ve got to go,’ said Kate. ‘I’m truly, truly sorry I’ve let you down.’ The record player suddenly boomed into life.
… TWINKLE LITTLE STAR …
Maggie was saying something but it was totally inaudible.
‘Bye!’ said Kate. And ‘Sorry!’ again, and that was that.
HOW I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE!
Hannah looked around at her, laughing.