IT WASN’T THE BIRTH OF HER BABY SO MUCH as what came after. At each stage she would think, Oh God, I’m so glad that part’s over. And then something unexpected – harder – would come along, and they would have to teach themselves the new language, the new techniques, the new ways to negotiate the old tricks.
It was the truisms that were so frustrating. Other parents had tried to tell her what it was like, but the distance between the concept and the experience was too great. You didn’t know what to do until you were in it. And by then it was too late. Joanna knew why parents sometimes shouted, “I hope you have children one day!” It was a blessing; it was a curse. The same idea that filled her with such delight also made her miserable: she would never be alone again.
Certainly, her teenage days of wandering the streets in the Kimberley dusk were well and truly over. She had grown out of it, or there was less wandering around in the evenings when you were nearly thirty and a freelance researcher and writer, when you had a two-year-old boy whose supper-bath-story-bed routine was paramount, when your husband made weak jokes and weak tea while he told them. There were some days when she had to choose between showering or checking her e-mail: the six-minute gap between when James was okay and when James was not-okay dictated a single activity. Joanna had forgotten what it was like to be outside at sunset. The mooted legislation that would ban alcohol on the beach – in Fish Hoek and everywhere else – didn’t bother her. Why would it? The most she drank these days was a tot of Rescue Remedy: the best part of her day was six a.m. and she could testify that there was nothing remotely magical about it.
But the nights, the true-blue nights and their bleeding mornings-after, those she knew a little better.
Like depression, insomnia was something Joanna had never understood, but by August she had done her share of the reading – mostly on Viola’s time – of the psychology sites. “Doctor Google,” said Jan with scorn. But he wasn’t the one who had to do the heavy lifting, was he? Jan was the sort of man who considered himself enlightened because he knew what menstruation was.
The sites said that inside your body there were a hundred clocks. The clocks of our breathing and metabolism and heart rate and blood-clotting were circadian, set to the twenty-four-hour clock. Ultradian rhythms happened more than once a cycle – eating, urinating, sleeping – the sorts of things that she had to bargain with Jan and James to do. Infradian cycles were longer, menstrual or hibernatory, the sort that made you fractious or sleepy or both, immovable feasts. Wherever she was, Joanna heard the incessant mechanical whirring of the clocks, the background music in her bones. She thought, I wish that someone would get behind my eyes and set things so that they ran right again, a hunchbacked watchmaker with a jeweller’s glass and a tiny golden screwdriver. I wish that it wasn’t just me.
When James was grown up, she would get into bed for a year. And then, very gradually, she would do a little light gardening, or stroll on the beach, or enjoy the bickering that comes with half a century with someone else in the same room. James would have studied something he loved and was good at (not acting or music, please God), and have children of his own. They would come to visit the more modest house she and Jan would buy when they downscaled, and the two of them – Ouma and Oupa! – would spoil the grandchildren at Christmastime, take time to play with them in the bath, not skip pages in the longer stories before bedtime. I’ll try harder when I’m older, said Joanna to herself. I’m too busy right now. Now I’m just surviving.
The things Joanna had thought were important when she was childless – Before James – slid rapidly down the list. It was exhilarating, this deprivation-stimulated epiphany that made people endure grapefruit diets, or suffer seven-days-of-silence retreats in the mountains. People pay good money to get to this place, said Doctor Renfield.
It wasn’t anything she could explain to people who had not had children – or even Jan, who had. She had had to give up being angry that she couldn’t read, or eat a meal in peace, or go out at night. Rage had no point. After her tears or sulking or screaming she would still have to minister to the baby, think ahead by a day at least, jog up and up and up on parenthood’s everlasting staircase. Joanna was being pared down to her essentials, peeled like an apple to the arsenic in its core.
And she knew she was. She felt an odd distance from the process: somewhere Doctor Renfield was watching events from the sidelines, making notes, his black bag solidly beside him. Joanna had to remember what it was all like, before her small and numbered days with James were lost to Big School and new beloveds. Devi had told her, hurt, horrified, amused, that her child’s Grade Zero teacher had asked them to list all the people they loved.
“Do you know where I was on the list? Fifth. After the neighbour and the waiter at the Spur.”
I won’t make the same mistakes, Joanna told herself. I won’t be one of those parents who say they never knew. She was keeping a diary for James so that he would be able to read it when he was older, when they understood each other less, and he would remember how much she loved him.
And also, whispered Doctor Renfield, you might be able to use all this one day. It’s material.
It wasn’t real writing, but it was keeping her limber for her book on Fish Hoek Man. Joanna was forever cocking an ear for Story. It was a terrible, useful talent, better than being able to make things move. People would tell her how they had lost their husbands – “I woke up and he was dead. There beside me, in the bed. They said it was his heart”. Or else it would be their hearts – “We’d known each other for years, and now he’s my husband!” Some part of her would be scribbling away in a corner, going, Don’t forget. Don’t forget. Don’t forget.
She wanted to share that with James, in a way that she couldn’t with Jan. “The world is a good and beautiful place, James,” she would whisper into his ear. “You’re going to love it here.” James would understand that the magic was in the small things, not the great and public miracles that found their way into the newspapers and onto the airwaves. James, with his clean slate, was her chance to start again, to make things the way they really ought to have been from the start.
Joanna would teach him those things. She really would. Just as soon as she got some sleep and started feeling like herself again.