THAT NIGHT WAS WORSE. HOW DID A THING that you had once done without thinking become impossible? Sleep was a trick that fooled her over and over, a Rubik’s Cube with too many squares, a muscle memory that she had forgotten. I’m-so-tired, she thought, as she walked slowly to the garage shop for milk, the baby strapped to her chest in his sling, because she couldn’t stand to be in the house as the wind rocketed through the phone lines outside. I’m-so-tired, she thought as she tried new positions for burping the hiccupping, sobbing James as he vomited in new spots in the house. I’m-so-tired, she thought as she stood in the shower, upright because she had one hand against the tiles while James screamed at her from his bouncy chair on the wet floor. I am so tired, and no one will let me sleep.
She stumbled through to James, called by the caterwauling that Jan slept through. It was the last – please, God – feed before daybreak. I hate this, she thought. I hate this so much. I am in hell. By five a.m., James had usually exhausted himself. When he was like this, he wouldn’t let her put him down, which was bad enough – but he also knew when she tried to seat herself in the armchair. He felt the change in angle, or his legs were pressed against her hips, or he felt the arrest of the motion, or, or, or. Joanna didn’t know: at the end of her vigil she was no nearer any insight into her baby than she had been at seven o’clock the previous evening when it started. Reflux, said the paediatrician. Later, she had figured out by herself that James was also lactose-sensitive. Your child really could be allergic to your breastmilk, no matter what the doctors said. “Oh,” Jan had said in surprise. “I was never breastfed either.” Joanna could have murdered him for not saying anything before. Allergies were passed down particularly on the father’s side. That XY! Weak, suggestible, divergent. All those months of sleeplessness and despair!
For the moment they were duly subduing James with Telament, and crushed other little white tablets with the back of a teaspoon, their reflections inverted; syringed it down his pink cat’s throat; angled the mattress in the cot up a little; let him sleep on his front, worrying all the while about the other figure looking over their shoulders. Joanna pictured cot death as a man white and cowled, with long fingers that stopped the air from reaching James’s mouth. They were like fish, babies – silvery, gilled, unused to dry land. Even breathing was a struggle.
But James survived. He survived, but he didn’t sleep. Other people’s children fed quickly and easily, slept through at two months, didn’t they? Joanna was tired of the long faces with their false concern, the relief she could read in the eyes of the mothers who asked her how she was. Joanna thought that people said it too casually: I didn’t sleep a wink! What they meant was that they had slept lightly or poorly, and that they had slept at least three hours more than she was getting every night. Parenthood, among other things, was an education in the literal. Someday Jan and I will look back at this and call it James’s Blue Period, or something like that, she thought. God, I can’t wait! I wish I could skip the next year. I wish this was over.
Her friend Bronwen had been hospitalised the week before because her baby only kipped in twenty-minute installments. Her husband Derek lay on the couch, offering suggestions as she cooked healthy vegetarian meals and humped the baby on her back, jigging from foot to foot and juggling the spatula and tongs. At least Bron had got one full night, thought Joanna. Bron had had a whole, unbroken night, all to herself. It was so tempting to just give up, but Joanna kept pressing down on the thought. It’s not that bad yet, she told herself. But that’s what the frog in the pot said.
She collapsed in the armchair that had seemed so perfect for breastfeeding but now just felt like a cage. She kept taking stock of her injuries as James clawed at her and sucked: the inventory stopped her from falling sideways onto the kelim.
It smells weird in here, she thought. Swampy. Damp. When will my nose go back to normal? Her sense of smell had only grown keener. She still couldn’t drink coffee; fish made her vomitous. She couldn’t go into the bathroom in the morning after Jan had used the toilet, his machine-gun farts ricocheting off the tiles. She had to wait, her bladder bursting, until he had pushed the window wide enough in its swollen woody casement, and the fresh, relieving air rushed in. More distantly at the mall, Joanna held James to her chest in his sling and held her breath as she passed people. We’re inhaling each other’s molecules, she thought. Little pieces of her – sis! – were conjoined forever with little pieces of them.
And the piles! She twisted to get more comfortable in the armchair. James had turned her inside out. Joanna thought of Saartjie and the famous Hottentot apron, the labia stretched down like earlobes, like the tongues of dogs. At least Joanna’s reversal was temporary – wasn’t it? The midwife had told her to eat lots of beetroot and flaxseed. Every morning Joanna chewed her way through a tablespoon full of the seeds, which crackled between her molars, sticky and glutinous. It was like eating beetles. But it worked. Her tongue shriveled at the memory. I won’t be impatient with people the way I was before I had a baby, Joanna promised herself. I will take their aches and pains more seriously.
Every single cell of hers was different, from the soles of her swollen feet to the top of her empty head. Joanna reached up in the dark and touched her hair with her free hand. Before James it had been smooth and reddish. Afterwards, her hair had shed itself in sheets. Her hairline had actually receded, the way a man’s did: there was a shining white patch on each side of her forehead, where her antennae would be if she had them. When the hair grew back out it was coarse, darker, as if the patterns of her follicles had shifted. The same thing could happen to cancer patients: it was the chemo. She had seen it with her mother. Something monstrous and invisible possessed you, and afterwards you were different.
Jan hadn’t noticed the mutations – surprise, surprise – and Joanna wasn’t going to point them out to him. She was afraid that if she told him where the rot was, he would start seeing all the other things that were wrong with her, beginning with her body and ending with her mind. Joanna was a whole other person when she lay in bed, baited and switched, beside him.
Jan hadn’t even clicked that she was avoiding him. A few months ago that thought would have been rough to the touch and she would have shied away from it, but Joanna was too tired to care. Joanna switched James to the other breast and thought that another hand grabbing at her chest would send her over the edge. So far she had managed – but only just – to avoid the temptation to throw the warm little body against the wall. She needed space. They needed to find another house, one where they wouldn’t rub up against one another all the time.
So far Joanna, blurry and sleep-diffused, could still find the reserves of love in her, as if they were a separate store from her person. Here she had spent the whole night awake with James again, staring at the mistake in the kelim, the red cross where another white cross ought to have been. Her roots grew down into the wool of the carpet, and she loved him. That error was deliberate, she supposed. You weren’t meant to challenge the perfection of God, or something like that. Somewhere, everything had a mistake in it. The Sacred Code of the Weavers. Now there was a title for her next book. She started to laugh, but sobered up almost immediately. If she roused James now, he’d get going again for another forty minutes.
His arm fell back. Out. Joanna levered herself out of the chair and shuffled over to the cot, tipping him at an angle onto the mattress. Hallelujah. Her left arm was in spasm.
At a quarter to six, Jan woke her properly when he turned on the light to check the time. Joanna, squint with fatigue, rolled sweatily away from him, into the hollow her body had made on the mattress, and burrowed under the pillow. She had soaked through to the undersheet again. And she had bought the waterproof mattress cover because of the baby!
Jan, after a full night’s rest, tried to jolly her along. “It wasn’t too bad last night, was it?”
“Mm,” said Joanna, from under the pillow.
“But you know, I didn’t sleep very well.”
“Really? I was fooled by the loud snoring.”
“Oh, okay. Well, it didn’t feel like I slept for very long. How many wake-ups did you have?”
“Eight. Or nine. I stopped counting. Keep your voice down. I’ve only just got him to sleep.” I can’t open my eyes, she thought. If I do, the light will burn through my retinas. It was like having the most thudding, nauseous hangover, without having done anything to deserve it. Maybe that’s what parenthood is, thought Joanna – waking up with the Morning After, only without the beautiful Night Before. The dry years stretched away from her into the matutinal distance. She wanted an icy, salty margherita. A Classic, not a Frozen. With lots of lime slices. The craving made the glands under her tongue squirt. Your mouth is most sterile first thing in the morning – who had told her that? But that’s because everything in it is dead, thought Joanna. I’m a mausoleum, a vault, smelly and damp as Peers Cave.
“You know,” said Jan thoughtfully, “you could just wean him.” Joanna gave up and hefted the pillow off her hard head. “Could I, Jan? Could I just wean him? Is that all it is? Well, thanks for clearing that up!”
He paused in his efforts to drag on a pair of tracksuit pants. “Jeez, you don’t have to be so sarcastic. I’m just trying to find solutions.” He turned his back on her, his deltoids injured. He had to hop up and down on one foot, and Joanna was glad.
I am not apologising, she told herself, and punched the pillow back into shape. Why had they ever bought feathers? And why hadn’t the books told her the only thing she really needed to know – that if there were any cracks in your relationship, it would be split wide open like rock struck by lightning?