‘I’M TOO TIRED. I’M sorry, Freya, I’m too tired to talk about it anymore.’
‘I’m just saying, if they do give him custody, I can just leave the country, can’t I? If they give him custody, I’ll just pick up Jem and go straight to the airport. I’ll just…’
Out of breath, Freya puts the back of her hand to her forehead. There’s onion juice drying to salt on her fingertips.
In the pot, the butter has melted to a clear, fragrant pool. Cara lowers the flame and throws in a palmful of thyme. ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Freya. They won’t give him custody. Guardianship, maybe. That’s what the solicitor said.’ The fat bubbles and fizzes. The tiny leaves jitter on its surface.
Freya picks up the knife again, presses it into an onion – the crackle of fine, dry skin, the crunch of the bulb. ‘No, of course they won’t. They won’t, will they?’
‘I’ve put in too much thyme. That’s too much, I think… shit, will I try and spoon it out?’
‘It’s fine… But they couldn’t, could they? Like that’s just not something they would do…’
‘Freya, I’m sick of listening to this. We don’t know what will happen. Your guess is as good as mine.’ Freya bites her lip, nodding. There are pools of mascara beneath her eyes. The onion is very fresh; white froth foams on the blade. She makes another slow incision.
‘We don’t know,’ continues Cara. ‘We’ll have to see. We’ll see how it goes and then we’ll decide what to do.’
Freya stops slicing. She puts a hand on her hip, points the knife as she speaks. ‘No, like it’s not even a reasonable concern, is it?’
The butter sizzles – brown specks at the edges; a smell of caramel ripening to rancidity. Cara kills the flame, adds sunflower oil. A flap of smoke leaps from the pan. The fire alarm starts to yelp. Cara throws open the kitchen windows. She runs into the hall and waves a tea towel.
‘Freya, please can you cut the onions? We need to get the dinner on. We need to eat and we need to get the kids to bed, okay? That’s what we need to do now.’
*
At nine o’clock – an hour after bedtime, and it’s a school night – they sit down to a thin risotto. Denise eats grimly, lips pulled back, scraping the fork with her teeth. Jem sits on his hands. He gives his mother a long, meaningful look.
‘What is it, Jem?’
‘Onions.’
‘You like onions.’
‘Not these onions.’
‘Oh God, Jem, please?’
‘If he’s hungry he’ll eat,’ mutters Cara. ‘Look, Jem, even baby Peggy is eating it.’
Sucking his lips, he shakes his head.
‘Fine,’ says Freya, sighing. ‘What will you have then? Will you have cereal?’
‘Not fair!’ says Megan. ‘I want cereal.’
‘Oh Freya, why do you do this? It’s hard enough to get Megan to eat well…’
‘There’s lots of cereal, Cara.’
‘Fine. Fine, give them cereal…’
‘It’s fortified.’
‘Oh, fortified, is it? Well then.’
Her own voice surprises her, the nasty inflection in it. She sees Freya flinch and her lip tremble.
*
Cara is bad.
There has always been something ugly in her, a steely core. It is when she should feel the most love, the most care, the hottest instinct to protect, that she knows it most keenly – the coolness in her; the bad, dead coolness right at the centre of her.
Her mother knew it, just as Cara knows her own children; Baby Peggy’s ferocity, the kaleidoscopic world of Denise. Megan, my God, what a handful.
Peig has fallen asleep in her high chair. Just as Cara lowers her into her cot, she wakes and pulls at Cara’s collar, making kisses with her lovely little mouth, ‘mama ma’.
‘Sleep, baby. Sleep, baby Peggy.’
But Peig hitches herself onto her mother with all four of her lovely limbs, the soft buttery fat on them, the strong fingers, the gravelly breath. Cara is tired. She pries the baby off, forcing her into her cot. The baby screams, pulls herself up, trips in the sleep-sack and hurts her shoulder and throws her toy dog out. ‘Sleeping time,’ says Cara, and she can hear the deadness in her own voice. ‘It’s sleeping time, baby.’
‘No.’ Slowly, and with great effort, baby Peig gathers the little baby-sized duvet and rolls it out over the bars.
‘Sleeping now, baby…’
‘No.’ She cries and coughs and the cough becomes a bark and the colour leaves her face, and Cara picks her up. The baby nuzzles her neck, drooling, coughs.
*
Pat’s lips are dry. There’s dust on them. He stands in the door of the children’s bedroom, and pulls a hand down his cheeks.
‘I’ll take her. Come here, baby girl.’
‘Oh. I didn’t hear you come in. How was work? There’s risotto on the stove…’
As he reaches for Peig, Cara kisses his shoulder; a smell of wood and oil and sweat – his sweat. He is beautiful – the straight slope of his jaw, the big gentle lips, the square hands: hair on them, callouses, blunt nails, round fingertips. Peig screams and splutters, stretching for her mother, but Pat kisses Cara’s mouth briskly.
‘You go read to the girls. I told Megan she can sleep with Denise tonight. She says she’s scared.’
His voice soothes her like a blanket, like stepping into warm water – how is he possible? But Cara is bad. Cara is cold. The way she shouted at Megan today – she recognised it.
*
It’s a rhyming story: a dinosaur hatches all alone in a forest; he spends six pages looking for his mother; he meets a frog, a bird, a large tree, but so far, not his mother. Cara can hear her voice trip on itself, crackle and strain, and under it a hoarse roar, like grief. She stops reading, listens – Peig is still screaming. Her cough is like the bark of a seal; she’s getting croup again. They’ll have to leave her window open.
Denise taps her shoulder, touches her chin with both hands, directing her face towards the book. ‘Yes, come on, Mammy, read.’ But Megan wails, ‘No Mammy, poow Baby Peig. Poow Baby Peggy.’
‘Daddy’s minding her. She’s okay, Megan.’
When the story is finished, Denise smiles at her triumphantly – she has been chosen over the baby tonight.
‘I love you, Mammy.’
‘I love you too, little lady.’
‘Are you going to go to Peggy now?’ asks Megan.
‘Yes, baby, I’ll go into her now. But you know she’s not really that sad. She just can’t talk so she cries.’
Megan raises an eyebrow: ‘I fink she is twite sad, Mammy.’
*
The baby stops crying as soon as Cara enters the room. She stretches her arms out, opening and closing her fists, a big breath juddering into her chest. As Pat offloads her into Cara’s arms, she gives a committed, congratulatory nod, as though they have all finally understood what she has been saying. ‘Yep,’ she says, ‘yep. Up.’
Cara uses a muslin square to clean the dribble and tears off Peggy’s face and neck, and lies her down in the cot. Her eyes stretch round as though she is drowning or choking, and she grapples for Cara, but Cara sits on the floor and holds her hand, and the baby sighs a rattly sigh and settles down onto her side, gazing through the bars at Cara’s face, holding Cara’s fingers – two to each of her hands.
‘There, baby girl. We’re okay, my baby. We’re okay, you and me.’
She switches on Peig’s mobile – Mozart – and sits cross-legged on the floor. It is peaceful in here, and very boring. She should read a book or something but she can’t these days. It’s always like this when she is pregnant. She thinks of food and warmth and drawing, and that is all.
She can hear Megan shouting at Pat: ‘I want Mammy to kiss me doodnight. Not! Woo!’
Cara bought that chickpea flour. Why has she never thought of chickpeas before? They’re not something Grandma ever made – she never used beans or pulses like that, perhaps that’s why. Tomorrow she’ll try that recipe. She’ll make it in the morning and send it in Megan’s lunch box. She might get some chickpeas into Megan that way. She might finally get something decent into her.
The baby’s face breaks into a big smile: dimples, gums, eight very white teeth still jagged from cutting through. ‘Hiya!’ A rush of tears comes up through Cara; she has been forgiven.
Out on the landing, Pat is talking calmly and steadily to Megan. He looked tired earlier, rubbing his face like that. Pat. What does she offer him, except to assemble his sandwiches in the morning, a thing he allows only to make her feel useful. Pat, whose body makes the oils of labour and sex, whose physical proximity still makes her wet and aching for him, whose armpit smell clings to her hair like a blessing, whose children break his heart just by being out in the world and subject to all the little blows it will throw them.
What has parenthood done to them? And why won’t she stop?
Every child takes Pat further from himself, from the things he used to want to make. ‘I’m happy making furniture now,’ he tells her. But the things he made – she remembers one sculpture, a woman’s face shrouded and her fingernails tearing through the film over her face, like a birth. She remembers that piece, and the way she could not stop looking, and the feeling it gave her of frustration and hope at once, and the way it made her know some parts of Pat that could not be known any other way. The piece was sold to someone who thought Pat was the next best thing. And he was – Pat was the next best thing then. Some of their mediocre classmates, who had even themselves given up believing in their talent, have careers now. People buy their work. They stuck it out. They have become ‘names’.
Peig blinks at her. She is a beautiful thing, all cheeks and eyelashes; the monkey darkness of her hair, impossibly plump lips, pudgy fingers that taper at the tips like the cartoon hands of a fat king. Cara realises she is crying. She is not right tonight; she is not right these days. Hormones, perhaps. Or is it just that she’s a slave to these little girls? Hanging on the curve of their lips, their cries driving panic deep into her, their tiniest discomfort like a thing tapping at her bones.
She feels sick. She didn’t say goodnight to Megan. Megan will be frowning in her sleep, her dreams sore with her sister’s crying and the absence of her mother. These children own her.
And tomorrow Freya has this court hearing. Pat has to take the afternoon off to bring Denise to her recital, because Freya is insisting Cara goes with her. Apparently, she won’t even be allowed into the hearing with her, but Freya wants her there anyway.
There is so much worry she could have. She has to quieten it all so that the day-to-day can go on; she has to ignore all the terrible beauty of her children and the quivering of her own heart, a fragile thing perched on every nuance of them, if she is to stay whole.
Peig is closing her eyes; another jagged little gasp. Her Peig, with the fat pout and tears beading her thick lashes. Peig, who wants only to hold Cara’s hand while she drifts to sleep.
Nothing can hurt you as much as your children. No one could hurt her, if it wasn’t for them. They are her weakness.
If there was – sometimes she can’t help thinking of it – if there was a war and they did that thing where they made her choose which of her children would die, what would she do? God, what would she do? The baby. She would let them take the baby. Because she would go stupidly, never for a moment believing she had been forsaken, all the while knowing that Cara was with her, that she would save her. Until she died, Peig would never know her mother had betrayed her, but the others would feel the hurt of her choice, so, yes, take the baby she would tell them.
The foetus turns – a thrill every time, the shape of it striving into being, striving to be a thing not her, and she puts her hand on the ripple it makes beneath her skin. Peig the already-baby opens her eyes, grasps for the hand, pushes her lips between the bars of the crib and kisses Cara’s fingertips, a sweet wet little kiss that she has learned from all the kisses she has been given.
*
Pat snores. Before he fell asleep, he muttered, ‘Your sister.’
‘Freya?’ Freya is beautiful. She really is. Cara was amazed she’d never thought of it before – that Pat might think about Freya that way.
‘Your sister takes the piss.’
‘Freya?’
‘Never puts her hand in her pocket.’
Now he turns towards her in the bed. He worries in his sleep. His brow crinkles and his fist rises, the thumb lifting. He builds things in his dreams – a house for them, a roof, a crib for the new baby – he bangs her hip with his dream-hammer. Cara shifts away from him. If she wakes him, he will only be frustrated that he didn’t finish. He will carry the unease with him all through tomorrow.
The landing light has been left on, but Cara is too tired to get up and turn it off. She can hear the fan whirring in the neighbour’s en suite. She feels sick. It’s the pregnancy, and all that burnt butter, and nostalgia for the long-haired, dark-eyed artist Pat was before, his hands running over the clay the way they ran over her shoulders and hips. Nostalgia for those shoulders and hips – how easy her body was then, how lean and singular.
She turns to face him; in his sleep he is scowling. He looks hurt. He looks bewildered. The nausea creeps into her throat. She turns onto her back. The baby shifts about, flipping Cara’s stomach, creaking her ribs. She is sick with – what? Gratitude. Gratitude for having someone to love her children and look after them like that, and sick with guilt, because it is not the same for her – she has to work. She wouldn’t love them if she didn’t draw. Stupid. Such a stupid, vain thing.
Pat’s arm twitches again. He lifts his hand, shakes his head, opens his mouth and makes a huge snore. His anxiety, his disappointment, is all her doing – her, and her pulsing, desiring uterus.
Pat puts his arm over her. She freezes.
She told Pat she had paid the tax bill, and she hasn’t. She has spent the money for the tax. She was going to pay it out of her advance for this job – she told him she was getting less than she was, so that she’d have the extra money to pay herself back with. She was going to pay Freya back out of that money too. It’s all her agent’s fault. She was supposed to send it into Cara’s private account but she sent it through to the joint one instead. Pat was pleasantly surprised. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘You thought you were only getting four grand for that job…’
She can’t tell him that she lied like that. She can’t tell him she overspent again. And on what? Pregnancy vitamins, omegas for the kids, Epsom salts, slippers for Megan – ridiculously expensive slippers made in Germany – the right one is a puppy, the left a kitten with a little pink tongue dangling from it. Megan hates them. She says they’re itchy.
Her children are pulling her thin. Each of them, as they left her body, tugged a part of her with them out into another life. She is divided by each of them. She will die like the mint plant at the end of the garden. Last spring, its babies sprouted out from its roots, and all through the summer, the mother plant remained, a bunch of dry yellow twigs. She never dug it out. It’s still there, gone black and slimy in the frost. It has divided and divided until it was gone. Is that what it’s like for Grandma? Is she in her children and they in her?
She looks at the screen of the baby monitor – baby Peig lying on her back in her sleep sack, so still, like a big doll. It’s a cheap, old monitor. The blue screen looks like something from a horror movie; the sound crackles like a wartime radio.
For now, Pat is bound to her. For now, they are surviving. But he has given up too much. When their children are grown there will be a reckoning.