ALREADY I AM losing the shapes for you. You are not face or hands or voice, but only sensation – breast-brim and skin-yearn and the cell-crave of our division. The ink I have used to set you down – the marks that make the letters, that make the words to make a story stick – I think it is the kind that will not smear, but swim cleanly from the page like a shoal of sated minnows.
There is a sign recommending that passengers with seasickness stay on deck and look out at the horizon, but closed eyes and closed-up limbs seem the only way to wait the nausea out. I keep low, crouched down with the cradling of the boat, knees drawn in, face tucked down, hands clinging barnacle-still to myself. In the little dark this makes, I try for your smile your foot your ear, but there are only the words that pull away, and then even the lines where they were perched begin to scramble. Already, the ages and stages you are made from bunch and cross, so that when I look for your age I cannot find a number. But there you are, I see you now, the lines all ajumble – here, sleeping in your buggy with buttery thighs and feet like handkerchief knots; here a map of Ireland in a sonograph of my insides; and here – but no that is not you yet – the mossy chin, the widening shoulders, the snarl – not yet, no. It is your parting smell that will lead me to you – the sweet, moist liveness of your skin – Oh now I have you – there you are opening your eyes at first light.
*
You wake too early – a ravenous mouth; a need; a wild, snorting, pulling thing, ferociously rooting for survival. Sleepily we lump you from his hands to my arms to milk, and there you mew and smack and, frantic for it, you miss and miss and catch and miss and latch. The lock and pull of you sends a rush through the other breast and three white arcs cross the bedroom – elegant, confident shapes, and shocking for their reach – leaving a sprinkling of tiny blots on the mirror of our wardrobe and we laugh and sigh and stay it with a cloth and promise each other we’ll change the sheets after breakfast.
Ready to smile, you keep the nipple within suckle-clamp, two palms suckered to the swell-and-wobble globe that is now your touchstone. Your mouth is a stretch of red-sharp gum, a serrated streak of tooth cutting through, and your smile curves open like all sorts of understanding. Waste of cream on your lips, you look me in the eye for the first time this morning and say something – you laugh, suckle some more. A satisfied little puke and I promise your daddy again about the sheets.
Seven a.m. is your happiest and most demanding hour. Daddy makes a play of changing your nappy, pretending surprise and horror, as though he has not known these smells each day since you came, and you chuckle because his face is twisting and opening and making great noises and maybe you feel big, like your shit is a powerful thing. Maybe you feel like a monster and a lord.
Back in bed we babble and laugh because we see why everything is so funny for you, and you rub Daddy’s beard until you get bored and I read to you – a story about a prince and a tower and a golden-haired woman whose tears can heal, but you are not concerned with that, only with my voice now, the way it moves up and down, faster and slower and is still the same voice; the way that contrasts make shapes; the way the pages can rise and turn and new ones appear beneath. Then I eat your toes and, holding your fat balls of hands, I walk you up and down my tummy where you used to grow, folded into yourself in a wordless complicity only us, and play airplanes and congratulate you loudly when you move the beads up the abacus and I tell myself to cherish it now; your baby scent.
Because I know these are the things for forgetting.
We play Mozart and lay you back in your crib under the mobile with a clumsy elephant and a bright zebra that pivots, twirls, and creakily slides, and you sleep while we make love quietly under the covers, laughing a little because just for now in the fractured rise of light, before the words begin and the witnesses come, before my mind gathers these colours into the white of day, we know the heart is made of flesh.
*
Now you can speak, and I don’t know what sounds to make for you. Mothers are supposed to sing to their children, but I have a terrible voice. They should tell stories too. That is something I think I can do. But what can I say?
I could tell you about this time last year, when you were a bump – still so miraculously neat that I could conceal you with a princess-line or a baggy jumper. If I lay on my back the whole shape of you raised under my skin; we saw your head already; blades of your bottom; thick of your thighs.
This time last year your father blindfolded me and walked me onto the Luas – I could hear the bell and the doors shushing closed, and I could feel the tracks beneath us as the tram rolled on. The scarf he had tied around my head kept slipping down over my nose. It scratched my eyes and made my cheeks twitch. It smelled of him. I kissed him just under his ear, breathed his skin, and he kissed my mouth. He said it was a surprise but I knew where we were going.
When we got to Smithfield I gave up on the blindfold, which disappointed him, and we walked from the station to the square, where they were selling Christmas trees and wreaths. It was very cold. The tips of our fingers were numb and our breath made clouds. His nose was red – the whole bulk of it from the nostrils up the hump, inflated and glowing with cold. Without meaning to, I knew how easy it would be not to love him. A moment is all it would take; a moment to trip myself up and let fall a thing that could never be gathered up again; spilled milk. He wrapped his scarf snug around my throat, tucking in the ends.
We picked a nice, symmetrical tree that smelled of Christmas, the kind of Christmas that happy families had, the kind – please believe me – the kind we wanted to make for you. We asked the man to lop the bottom off the tree, to make it small enough to fit in our flat, and spent ten euros on a tree-stand. Your daddy hadn’t budgeted for the stand at all, but we agreed that this was an investment – we would use it for years to come. I remember that because I wondered if we believed it.
On the tram a sign said: ‘Happy Christmas! Please do not bring trees onto the tram. To do so is a crime. Offenders will be prosecuted.’ There was a picture of a Christmas tree under the print; white gaps in a green triangle. We had no money for the fare on account of the tree-stand. When the conductor came around your father stood me in front of the Christmas tree. The branches stuck out either side of me and the needles poked my back. I laughed and so did he. The man looked at us and raised his eyebrows. ‘Come on, man, you can’t throw us off. We’re pregnant,’ said your father, and my skin pickled.
You haven’t tasted pickles yet – they are not like the foods you eat now, which are tepid and mildly sweet. Pickles are cold, sharp-tasting foods preserved in clear and bitter liquid. I cannot know what you will think of pickled onions or pickled gherkins or pickled eggs, but when you taste them, you will know the kind of thing that happened all over my skin when he said, ‘We’re pregnant.’
The conductor turned away. It was a look like disgust, only kinder. Young love, he thought. I could see it in the way he shook his head, knowingly. Young love. He didn’t know anything.
I rubbed my tummy, making circles on your back with my hands, my skin taut against your growth. Your father bent over, catching his breath between his guffaws. We laughed into each other’s necks. I laughed against his chest, he laughed into my hair.
You stretched your shape and kicked and I wondered what the bony judder of my ribcage meant to you, shuddering over your capsule like strange weather, but I hoped I was keeping the cold on my surface, outside you.
*
I could tell you that when you were born the morning sun lit the white walls of the delivery room as though it was summer, and there wasn’t as much blood as people would like you to think. Your head was crumpled like a passion fruit as it came out. Then you opened into a baby, drinking the light with your new skin, your gasp. Your fingers splayed and curled, exploring the air like tentacles.
You smiled the moment you emerged, and you opened your eyes, though people don’t believe that. A thousand expressions moved across your face – O of wonder, scrunch of disgust, all the full curves of joy – a flicker-book of everything you would feel between now and the close of your life. People don’t believe that either.
For the birth, they wanted to numb me up. They said it again and again, in a tone warning and urgent, as though something would happen soon that would be too much. The pain was fine, though, more fine than anyone would like you to think, and not really what people usually mean by pain. When I told them you were coming they insisted your birth was hours away and told me not to push. ‘Trust me,’ said the midwife with a smile, ‘you’d know all about it if it was coming.’ But you and I knew. We laboured in secret towards our separation, me nodding obediently at the professional grimaces. ‘Don’t push yet,’ said the midwife, and ‘Close your mouth.’ She said I would scare the other women with my sounds – not the tearing cries she wanted but noises darker and dirtier than a scream. Your father rubbed my back and said, ‘Shhhh. Listen to the doctor, baby.’
The sight of your head shocked them.
‘Oh,’ said the midwife, turning to the trainee, ‘no warning that time.’
To me she said, ‘Alright, you can push now. Come on, push now, push.’
She called your father ‘Dad’, and told him to put a vest on the heater. She was trying to distract him, I thought, for he was eager to put the mask of laughing gas over my face and the more I said no, the more his eagerness grew. The vest was striped white and blue with poppers between the legs, and I knew that it measured from my belly button to just under my breasts.
You had hardly left my inside when your daddy cut the cord, and you and I were two. I didn’t recognize your face. They asked your name but I couldn’t do that, not yet. I could only call you ‘baby’. ‘Hello baby.’
They taught me how to swaddle you, but you hated to be swaddled. You hated to be folded up again, tucked in and stuffed over yourself and made to fit. You liked to stretch your arms, your legs and toes and scrawny neck. Silently you moved like that in your glass box, extending into the world with tiny extremities and glad, glad of it all.
For three days I could not sleep but only look at you. The joy that came was an engulfing kind; a terrifying, snatching kind full of claws and wool and feathers, and the shapeless terror of silence, and I knew already it was not the right kind for a thing like you, that needed to stretch and open.
For three days I tempered it, tempered it down into the practical chores I could make from it: nappies and feeding and biting your nails blunt so you could not nick your cheeks and scalp; the appallingly delicate skin you came in.
When you were three days old, a respectable shade of milk replaced the garish colostrum, and I had soothed it down enough for words. I told you something true then. I whispered it close to your skin that smelled like coconuts. ‘I love you,’ I said, but thought, I have no idea though, baby. I have no idea who you are. He named you then, but I still have no idea. Your life is a journey out of me, a one-way street.
*
When you were four months old and I was sitting my exams, I didn’t go back to sleep one night after your 4 a.m. feed. I couldn’t rest. You snored a baby snore in your crib at my back. Your daddy slept beside me. I tried to tuck myself into the hot curl of his body and his breath but his presence played a cool fever on my bones. I got up and went into the other room of our flat.
The window was silver from the steam of the drying laundry, and the street lamps glittering through. It was cold outside, but when I opened the window, the air hung still. I remember that because it sent a surge of fear and giddiness through me, the way the night refused to move into the warm, as though some law had been suspended here in the unpatrolled hours. There was just the sound of night traffic. Trucks, mostly, lumbering through, rumbling the tarmac, casting their gaze over our walls, our floor, our table, our buggy. Sitting on the couch I tried to study, some Greek myth about punishing gods, hubris, jealous women – but by the time I reached a full stop I had forgotten the beginning of the sentence. I didn’t understand anything.
I took the scissors out from the drawer under the hob, and the Pritt-stick from under the television, and I gathered all our photographs around me.
By the time you woke for your seven o’clock feed, I had made you a book. The book told our story. It began when your father and I met. It chronicled our holidays together, the drunken karaoke, the kisses in the kitchenette while we waited for the coffee to splurt up through the funnel of that aluminium espresso pot your daddy had back then. That was before we heard that aluminium leaks into the brain, making you confused as you grow old, making you forget the references you are made from: your car keys; your phone number; names.
I found the notebook this morning. The photographs have been hurriedly glued. In all the pictures, we are smiling. There is a narrative scrawled beside them in baby language. I have written you a story that is simple and not a lie. I say how in love we were, how happy, and the photos seem to prove it. I do not tell you that the morning-after pill was too expensive, and ‘risk of pregnancy’ a thing inconceivable. Anyway, that might have been a different time. I am no good on dates. I do not say that you were planned, but nor do I tell you what my eyes might have meant, shut into the pillow in the moment of your conception. I do not explain the tedium of slumber-rape, the horror of daily sniping, the way these things wear and wear until the fabric is too thin to handle.
I write that your daddy was happy when I said ‘We are going to have a little baby.’ That is not exactly how I put it, but I think it is what he heard. I tell you we both laughed and were happy. I tell you that he kissed my tummy. I do not tell you what happened then, lips to skin, faces, eyelids, shoulders, looking at each other in the twilight under bedsheets. I do not mention the glaze that sometimes crept into my eyes, or how I resolved that with forgetting I would make it good. It would be to betray you, to tell the words he used, his hand wrapped from behind around my neck, and pushing, pushing: ‘Mine now. You are mine now.’
There are pictures of Halloween, when we tied an orange silk scarf around the bump, and your daddy drew triangle eyes, triangle nostrils, and a smile of triangle-teeth to make you a pumpkin. ‘Bump-kin’, we called you all night. We went out and had dinner with many people I did not know. The girl opposite me was dressed as Catwoman. She had a sultry sweep of eyeliner across each heavy lid, and a way I could not read, of gliding her eyes over you, and when asked if she would one day like children she looked your father in the face and said, ‘I am just back from an abortion. I flew back this morning.’
She left halfway through the main course, and the host smacked his forehead. ‘How stupid,’ he said, ‘to have seated her opposite you pair after what she’s been through. Silly Jules – I just didn’t think...’ I don’t tell you that part, or the desire that happened as we looked at each other, me in my witch costume and she dressed as Catwoman, weak smiles wavering across the black tablecloth and ‘ghoulish goulash’. Perhaps I seemed smug, moving my hand over and over you like a crystal ball; as if I thought I knew something she did not. That was not what I meant by it, though. Not at all. I don’t tell you because I know it is easy to misunderstand, and I know I have a terrible voice.
In any case, she slipped off without a scene and all night he introduced my belly with a joke accent, ‘This is Bumpkin, and this be ma witch...’
I was dressed in black; the top had enough room for you at the front, and the back was bare except for a web of black ribbons laced over my skin. He had lifted a long silver wig from the pound shop, which made me look glamorous and gothic. In the photograph we are beautiful and extravagant, grinning with our dark, painted mouths. My eyes are frilled with fake lashes of purple and silver. There is an envelope stuck to the page opposite, with the orange scarf tucked into it.
The next page is a picture of the two of us with the Christmas tree. We are standing on either side of it, holding the bark, chins raised, goofy smiles, green sprigs flecking our arms. My face is pale from vomiting – it didn’t stop after three months like they said. My nose and eyes are pink. ‘They waited and waited and waited,’ says my handwriting, ‘for their baby to come out and meet them.’ This must have been close to the birth because you are a tight mound under that big sweater of your daddy’s.
There is a photo of me an hour after you were born, my mouth touching your furred head, the hospital sheets pulled up over my breasts. There is one of you under the Christmas tree, asleep on a big toy sheep. You arrived on Christmas Eve and the tree was still up when we brought you home. The needles were a little dry, but still green, and I think they still smelled like Christmas. I have written: ‘At last Mammy and Daddy could take their baby home. They had never ever been happier than when the three of them went to bed that night.’
That is true. I want you to know that. Neither of us had ever been happier.
*
In sleep I am dark and hairy all over. The hair I have is wiry, humid, kinked and disparate like the crunching scraggleweed found at the root of a penis. My mouth is slimy, hot, fanged and chomping, and with my many arms I can reach far on either side. My many arms – or are they legs? – are for reaching and for moving. One by one, the arm-legs move slowly on a tightrope of spun silk. My many eyes show a disco-ball vision of our little room – the damp-mottled ceiling and the lino floor and the curtain-hooks. I cannot see you at first, only flashes of our room: the hinge of the door; the cracked twirl of wicker on our laundry basket, but then there you are, right in front of me, twirling like a suckling on a spit, but you are smiling in a serene daze, smiling with love at my many eyes and my many legs and the fangs in my hot and dirty mouth, and I am turning you before me, swaddling you around and around in reams of white muslin, leaving only your lovely face exposed. What will happen next? What will happen to your lovely face?
*
There are many parts to the story, but it would not be right to share my dreams with you. That would be to tug at the fraying cord between us. That would not be fair. Like I said, it’s a one-way street.
I could tell you that when you were a bump, and we walked through crowds, your daddy stretched out his arm in front of me so that no one could bang into you.
In one of your books there is a picture of a man throwing his coat over the puddle, and his lady is smiling sweetly with cheeks that are apple-red and apple-round, gathering her skirts over her foot and tilting her ankle like a pony, so I think it would make sense to you, if I could say how his gesture made me blush. ‘Bloody ignorant,’ he said to the crowds. ‘Bloody ignorant! Foreigners taking up the street. Excuse me – my girlfriend’s pregnant!’ I could say how wonderful it was to be protected like that, because you will not know what I mean if I tell you how my face burned and my eyes stung, how I tried to like it.
I think I could blame him, though. I think if I tried, I could make a good case, but there are so many parts to the whole that telling it is always wrong.
After the birth he said ‘All over,’ and ‘That’s my girl,’ and ‘My son. My son.’ I wanted some other words. I was exhausted and in shock, my body shuddering back to the shape of me; nothing he said could have been right. It was his voice that felt like a fist, thrusting in at the space between me and you – ‘All over,’ he said, ‘it’s all over now.’
*
In the pub your daddy’s friend smiles; ‘Your fella said something so beautiful just now.’
‘Oh? What did he say?’
I watch her pretty lips part and touch.
‘He said watching you feed the baby makes him wish he had breasts.’
I try to giggle but a cackle comes out. ‘Oh. Boob-envy,’ I say. The words sound bitter. I buy us both another drink.
*
For your first Halloween we make a little pixie of you. You have a felt bonnet that ties with a ribbon under your chin. It has a purple, peaked tip and pointed green ears. I dress you in a soft green babygrow and purple booties with curling toes and bells on the ends. Your daddy wants to put green face-paint on you and take a photo but I say no – not your face. I don’t want anything on your cheeks, soaking through to the magnificent complexity of blood and flesh that your skin protects. He says, ‘What makes you think you know better than me, what’s okay for him and what’s not? It says hypoallergenic. He’s my son too...’
When you are all-dressed-up, you feed rhythmically. Your eyes roll back, lids close and flutter and shut. ‘There,’ I say, ‘there now my little pixie, my pixie baby.’ Your daddy leans over you and, mimicking my tone, he says, ‘There now, your mother is a bossy bitch, isn’t she, little pixie? Yes she is. But soon you will be a big boy and we will do what we want. Soon you will be my big man,’ and I frown, and he laughs and kisses my cheek and I smile.
You fall asleep on the breast and I use a finger to release the vacuum between your lips and my skin, pry you carefully out of the pocket of heat between us, and lay you in your crib. Your daddy is watching something on TV and I am still in my nightdress with the nursing straps and the milk stains, so I take a shower.
When I come out of the bathroom, you are not in your crib and your daddy is gone. Your buggy is here and you are not. You are not in your rocker or your playpen and your daddy is gone. I phone him on his mobile and he answers. ‘Look out the window,’ he says. He is across the road, on the street outside the chipper, looking up at me where I am standing by the window in my towel. There is water trickling from my hair down my neck, and a pool is forming at my feet, but he is too far away to see that so it doesn’t matter. On the road between us, the cars swash him in and out of view. ‘You don’t trust me,’ he says, ‘I can hear it. What do you think I have done?’
My voice is wobbling and rising to a terrible shriek; ‘Where is the baby?’
‘Guess.’
‘Where is the baby? Tell me now. Tell me now.’
‘Use your mother-instinct,’ he says. ‘What do you think I have done?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Say please,’ he says. ‘Don’t be so rude.’
‘Where is the baby please.’
‘Try again.’
‘Please tell me where the baby is.’
‘He’s safe. If you trusted me you wouldn’t be such a psycho about it.’
Then there is a tinkling – your bootie bells, and then your cry and I know where you are. In the boiler closet, strapped into your car seat with the straps that are growing too tight – there you are, disgruntled from a nap you didn’t mean to take, a creased little goblin mewling in the dark. When I lift you out something shifts across your face; for a moment this is a changeling child and in a dizzy pause I listen like an animal for your cry – out in the corridor, perhaps, or down on the street. I bend to smell you. There is green paint daubed like camouflage on your cheeks.
That night I take your book from where I keep it in the drawer beneath the oven. I use a hole-punch to make a pair of eyelets on a blank page. Then I thread the purple ribbon through one hole, and hang a little bell on it. I put the ribbon out through the other hole, and knot the ends at the other side. The book does not close properly now, but I don’t mind.
*
I can’t find the thing to say. Looking through your book I can’t trace it to the moment when tedium turned to torment. I can’t explain why it became less possible day by day: baking him meatloaf, sitting on his knee, dragging running jokes to death, flinching when he spoke to his mates, his voice changing into someone else’s, his laugh a spray of bullets – huh huh, huh huh, huh – giving you suck, giving him head, cleaning the toilet.
They called in a lot, the mates. One afternoon they sat on the couch. They were just back from a trip to Thailand.
‘They like us Irish lads,’ said one, ‘cause we’re nice to them – the English guys abuse them an’ all. Terrible.’
You were nestled in the crook of your daddy’s elbow, sleeping. ‘Do they, yeah?’ he said. ‘Fuck’s sake. Terrible.’
Then they told him about one girl in particular, and it must have been a funny story because he laughed that laugh, and you woke up. I wanted to take you out for a walk but he wanted to keep you and show you to his friends. You cried and clawed my T-shirt but I had to leave you. Please understand. My milk would have tasted like metal, like boiled blood.
*
The sequence of the book is all wrong; I can see that now. After the bell there is another page with your passport photo stapled to the corner. You look startled and are wearing a tiny Hawaiian shirt. That was the spring. Halloween came after. The passport was for our holiday in Spain.
You were only three months old then, four months at most. Getting the photo right was tricky, because no hands are allowed in shot and you could not sit yet.
His aunt said we could use her timeshare house and we left the day the exams finished. I remember warm evenings, you burbling in your buggy, eating out of doors, children running in and out of houses in the dusk, parched fields, white houses.
At night you slept on a double bed, couch cushions penning you in, and we sat by the pool with candles lit and talked and drank wine and dangled our feet in the water.
While he was putting you down one evening I stood by the water in a new white dress. We had bought a bottle of bubbles that day to entertain you. I blew some up into the air; big, slow, wobbly ones at first, then streams of little ones that petered into dots. I could not stop then; I blew more and more, dreading the bottle ending. I watched the bubbles turn slowly like glass planets, and they caught the light of our candles, vibrating with invisible colour, bouncing on the surface of the pool, trembling before they popped. I knew it was beautiful. I knew how happy I could have felt.
Your daddy came out of the house. He had been watching me. He had the camera in his hand. ‘You look so beautiful,’ he said. ‘In that white dress. I tried to take a photo, but the memory was full.’ My chest hurt like a tightening screw and all I knew burst into ribbons of solitary sounds.
*
He wants you for your first Christmas. He puts his foot in the door and says he will keep it there until I talk to him and when I push him he grabs my wrist and asks if I am trying to make him hit me. ‘You’d love that,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t you? I’d never hear the end of it.’ I am not doing myself any favours, he says, or the baby either. If I co-operate with him, then he will co-operate with me and my neurotic demands, he says, he will feed you whatever hippy shit I want and put you down for the regimented nap, and he will not call unexpectedly at night to take you. I remember the mediator saying that co-operation is key. I am not sure I know how to co-operate. I think what she really meant, was bargain.
His big sister phones me to ask, and then his father and they both take the same line: They were expecting you for Christmas. Why should they pay for what I have done? Why should their Christmas be ruined? They didn’t have me down for a sexist. Your grandma has bought you a stocking saying ‘Baby’s First Christmas’ and everything.
So it was me who said yes. But you see it doesn’t matter that it is Christmas – you don’t yet know the difference. This time is the worst, though, because this time it is three whole days and nights he takes you for. He collects you on the morning of Christmas Eve, an hour earlier than planned. A pallor falls over your face when the buzzer sounds. We listen for the heave of the lift, and I open the door for him before he knocks. You cry a lot and squirm when he pulls you off me. He stations you behind his head, hanging a hand at each of his shoulders, to bunch one of your wrists and one of your ankles tight in each of his knotty fists. I think he is hurting you. Your eyes widen at me but what can I say that will not make it worse? I give him a cooler bag with bottles of breast milk, and tubs of cubed avocado and chickpeas and butternut squash. ‘Butternut posh,’ he says. He struggles to take it and to restrain you at the same time. You scream so loudly that I think he might give you back, but he just juts his lower jaw, as if to make it bigger, delving ridges along his collar bone. He holds you firm and you do your worst – mah maaaah mahmahhhhh.
The mediator said to ignore such performances. She said that even very young children can be manipulative. I should try to be rational, she said, and remember that two parents are better than one. You will thank me for it in the future, she said. But I can hear you wailing all the way down in the lift and out on the street and long after and I lie in bed for some time, looking at the wall instead of your cot and trying to remember what the mediator said; trying to be rational.
I will stay here until you are back. My parents think I am with ‘the father’s side’ for Christmas. My mother makes sure to say it, whenever she is seen with us, ‘She is with the father, of course.’ They don’t know what I have gone and done now.
In the evening I text to ask if you have calmed down, if you have some colour back. He doesn’t answer so I wait an hour and phone and he doesn’t answer so I call his sister’s house, where he is staying, but it is a wrong number, so I call her mobile and call and call and text and call and no one answers.
That night I have to pump your milk with a squawking machine, and I think I feel blank but maybe not because I make a sound too like squawking; a terrible sound like braying and squawking at once; nothing as pretty as a weep.
To steady myself I look through the book I bought with thick, matt pages that I will read to you when you are back with me. It is an edition of ‘The Night before Christmas’ – the kind of book with illustrations that tell lots of stories, not just the one in the poem. Hidden tiny on one page is a family of mice hanging mini stockings by their arch in the skirting board. On another, a reindeer munches illicitly on a mince pie meant for Santa. They are the kind of scenes a child might look at over and over, discovering new details every time. Every year, I think, you will find new things. Every year. Because I still think that maybe I can read this book for you every Christmastime, even if it is a few days before or after; that such things have wiggle-room.
They do not answer, they do not call, and then on Stephen’s Day your daddy sends a message:
He wants you to leave us alone. Your harassment is making me angry. I cannot be a good father when I am angry. What are you trying to make me do?
I read the Christmas book and look for all the secret tales. Every six hours I pump a bottle of milk and put it in the freezer. Then I drink a glass of water, to keep hydrated.
The next day he brings you back. You are wax-faced, blue-lipped, and your eyes are so big. You do not cry, but your big eyes grow bigger and you open your palms to me and before I can stop it my voice has betrayed us. ‘My baby,’ I say. ‘Oh my baby.’
He swings you out of reach. You do not cry, even weakly. You say mah mah mah very quietly and you put out your arms as he holds you away. ‘He doesn’t want you,’ he says, ‘you know that, don’t you? Just your tits,’ and oh, your eyes – oh no your eyes, big, round, pink-rimmed – sorry oh sorry it was me who said yes, it was me who bargained you away, and so I say, ‘Sorry, yes I know. Sorry sorry sorry please let me feed him now please I am sorry,’ and he lets me take you. His lip curls as I take out my breast and he says in a babying voice he thinks is mine, ‘Your mummy is a bitch, isn’t she? Yes. You don’t know that yet, do you?’ Then he moves his eyes up my neck to my face, and with a flat voice he says, ‘Someday he will hear about this and he will know what you are.’ This sets a bitter thing coursing through my veins. How is it you don’t taste it?
While he is there you stay limpet-locked into me, feeding, but when he is gone your hands dangle, and then your head. You splutter and vomit something lumpy and lurid blue, and your eyes roll blind and your neck won’t hold—
The ambulance men make me go back in to put on my shoes. They make me give you to them and put on my shoes and coat and I say, ‘But look but look but look at his lips please look at him—’ and one of them puts his hand on my elbow and walks me back to the lift. ‘It will only take a minute,’ he says, ‘to put on your shoes. Come on now and get a coat. We have him. We will get him in the ambulance and you get your shoes now, love.’
On the way to the hospital I phone him to ask what you have eaten. He threw out the bottles of breast milk, he said. He could not touch it because of what I am. A stinking bitch is what I am with stinky little paps – a tit-Nazi, he says. ‘My mates call you the tit-Nazi.’ I didn’t want him to let off steam this Christmas with the lads, he says, he can see it now – I didn’t want him meeting girls and so I let him have you so that his big sister would make him stay in and listen to you cry. I ask again what you have eaten and he says you had formula and baby biscuits, like his sister’s baby. It doesn’t do his sister’s baby any harm. He is hanging up now, he says. He is having a pint and I am to stop looking for attention.
‘He had formula and baby biscuits,’ I tell the ambulance man, and he writes it down. ‘What brand of formula? Do you have the box?’ I shake my head. ‘When was the last dirty nappy?’ I can’t speak; just a terrible breath rushing in too deep and fast, wringing my voice to a gasp. He offers me a sedative and I shake my head.
You are curling soundlessly into your pain, and it takes two of us to hold you out straight so they can do the scan. A nurse holds your feet and I press your shoulders flat, your eyes grow wide in focus and roll back, and you don’t make a whimper. I whisper all kinds of things about Holy God. I ask them to give you something for the pain and they say they can’t, not yet. I chant good boy good boy, with my face at your cheek. The radiographer rings someone and says a word I haven’t heard before but will always know now – intussusception – and a doctor arrives very quickly, and then they say the word again and they tell me it is urgent. A nurse explains it to me slowly, like I am foreign or very stupid, and I am grateful for that because words are starting to slide for me and I am struggling to understand. She says your guts have folded into themselves and they are just getting the operating room ready and they will do their best but I should stay here and let her take you. There isn’t time to put you under for it and it is not a nice procedure but it is usually a success. I will not want to see, she says, and my distress will make it worse for you. I can wait here in the corridor. Now your father is here and I don’t know how he found us. His back is straight and his eyes brilliant with rage and he wants to go and watch them through the glass while they do it and they say okay but the nurse says, ‘Please wait here, Mum. No good can come from watching.’ I sit on the floor beside an arch containing a statue of the Virgin. She is cream-coloured and her robes are freshly painted blue. The nurse brings me a plastic cup of very cold water before she is paged away. Oh Virgin Mother, I will do anything. I will do anything. I will do anything—
When it is over, they say you have to stay in hospital. You are in a cot with high bars and cannot eat but only take glucose from a drip at first, and then blackberry-flavoured glucose-water from squat glass bottles with disposable teats. They have inflated your guts to straighten them out and it was very painful for you but it is over now. ‘It’s over now, my pixie,’ I say, ‘we’re alright now. It’s over.’ I wonder can I blame him, but the nurse says no, there is no known cause for the thing that happened. It sometimes occurs, especially in boys under two, and no one knows why. They will keep you in for three days in case it happens again.
There is a chair beside the cot and the nurse says I can stay with you. She will get a blanket and she might be able to get me a mattress for tomorrow night. Your father says, ‘Why should she be the one to stay? I want to stay.’
And the nurse says, ‘Go home. He needs his mother. Go home please, sir. Have some sense.’
He says, ‘There is no law that says she gets to stay... This is sexism. I am calling a lawyer.’
And she says, ‘Have some sense and some respect.’ She is a lovely hulk of starched pink, taupe French plait, great red-scrubbed hands clasped before her. She stands beside me until he leaves and then she moves us to another ward.
We stay for three days. There are lights on all the time, fizzing in strips along the corridor, boxes holding quiet little creatures with tubes in their noses and lumps of hard plastic bandaged to their hands, their machines yipping. I cannot tease out the promises I made while they were hurting you, delivering you back to me from the pain and the blue lips. All I can say is thank you to the nurses. Every time I see one, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ The nurses scurry back and forth, swishing curtains, speaking to babies in a tired, panicked hush. The other babies slide in and out of my periphery; a bony one in a sling, its face crooked, smeared as though someone has tried to erase it. The nurse coos and kisses its head. ‘Contact is good for him,’ she says, ‘they heal quicker with contact,’ and I tell her thank you thank you, because the other babies are all possibilities of you.
You want to feed but I peel your fingers off my buttons. ‘No, no. Be a big boy now. Have some water.’
There is a playroom with coloured beads on lines of meandering wire, and plastic trucks, and thin Ladybird Classics with careful watercolour pictures, their card covers held on wonkily by loose hoops of thread. The one you want is Rumpelstiltskin; a story of a little man who gets a maiden released from a dungeon cell by spinning gold from straw. ‘Not that story,’ I say.
You nod. ‘Jes, Mama. Jes.’ The price for the gold is to be the maiden’s first child. It is a promise she soon forgets, beaming at the newborn in her arms. The mother’s mouth opens in horror when the little man comes through the bedroom window to claim the child. You like the picture of the baby. ‘Bebe,’ you say, ‘bebe.’
It all comes right in the end, because the mother ventures into the wood on a dark night and learns the name of the little man. Her face can be seen peeking through the branches, and on her smile the yellow glow of the little man’s fire. There he is in the clearing, a terrifying creature no bigger than a toddler. He prances around the fire, back bent, crooked fingers, leering mouth. ‘Rumpelstiltskin is my name.’ Once she speaks his name she is free from her promise. She gets her baby back, and it looks just the same as it did on page three.
Even so, I do not like reading you that book. I hide it on a high windowsill in the playroom, so that you do not keep pushing it at my hands, opening the cover. ‘’Gain Mama, ’gain.’
For three days I cannot sleep but only look at you and listen for your breath when you doze, and when you wake from the sugar and the beeping and the insectile buzz of the lights, I give you each of my forefingers to hold in your fists and I walk you up and down the corridors and lift you to look at the big fish tank. I say, ‘Look! Fish. Pretty.’
And you say, ‘yook. Ish. IpwEee.’ My breasts swell hot and sore at first, but I will not poison you again with all my braying rage. By the third day, your milk is gone.
*
‘Just be decent,’ is what they said at the legal aid office.
I looked through the rails in Oxfam but there was nothing suitable there. I looked in the discount rail in Penney’s too, but the blazers were all too big and in any case I don’t know if a blazer is what they meant.
Your daddy has borrowed a suit, I think, because it is too broad on the shoulders and too long on the arms and he keeps shrugging himself and shifting, as though by doing so he might make himself big enough to fit it. He clears his throat a lot, bobbing the mealy bulge of his Adam’s apple, and he won’t stop looking at me while we stand in the lobby. There are plastic orange chairs fixed in rows along the walls, but I can’t bring myself to sit. If I turn my back he will see my bum and the back of my knees, so I stand with my profile to him – the most anonymous angle I can find. I can feel his eyes on my cheek. He cannot do anything with his looking, he cannot change anything with looking. I try to remember that but still I cannot turn my back. His friend is with him – the one who thought he said something so beautiful. She is trying not to look at me. His sister is there too, and his father. They both nod frantically at me with straight lips, and mutter something. All of them are dressed up for a day out, dressed decently, but I hadn’t the sense or the wherewithal to borrow something.
The legal aid person told me she would meet me at nine thirty in the lobby. She turns up ten minutes late but it feels like a long time because of your daddy looking and looking and clearing his throat. She is a pear-shaped woman in a tight woollen trouser suit. She has a small, avian head and very fine, close-cut hair dyed canary yellow. She looks at my knees, and winces, and I know that I am all wrong. I am wearing a pale blue dress pilled from too much washing and a little stretched around the neckline from a year of your tugging. It is too short and shows my too-skinny arms, but I thought the blue dress was better than the red one.
‘Hi,’ she says, and shakes my hand briskly. She has a gravelly, smoker’s voice. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘How are you? Are you alright? You’ll be fine, just stay calm.’ She ushers me into a stairwell, and sits on a step. ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘Now, it’s not brilliant news because Friel is on today – he’s known as The Bull. He drinks and he’s not a big fan of young mothers, but he’s usually fair. Gruff, but he doesn’t make outrageous orders. Just don’t be crying or speaking out of turn. He doesn’t like hysterics. Make sure to show respect – that’s the main thing. Brush your hair before we go in. Brush it now while I’m speaking to you and put it up – here, I have a bobbin – my daughter’s. Right, so the father is taking you for custody and access, is it? Don’t mind the custody, we’ll contest that. We should put in for maintenance. I see you haven’t done that. Did no one tell you to do that? Not to worry. You just relax now. But you’re giving him guardianship I assume? There’s no point refusing, he’ll get it anyway. If his name is on the birth cert he’ll get it. This child has the father’s name – yes?’
She opens a briefcase on her lap and there is nothing in it but the court summons, and an A4 pad, and a biro. She puts the case on the floor, pulls a foot onto her thigh, and rests the pad on her bent leg – ‘Okay, so tell me quickly – what’s the story?’
I begin with Christmas, and she says, ‘No, go back. Go back.’ I go back to your birth and she says, ‘No, go back to the beginning. Where did you meet the father?’ I go back to Freshers’ week. I didn’t like him, to be honest, but he was persistent. I had forgotten that. I am telling her about missing one of my exams – waiting for him outside the door of the exam hall with you pulling at my earrings, waiting and waiting because he said he would look after you while I sat the exam, but his phone was off, and he did not show. I am telling her the way he sneered when he came in that night, when a voice comes over the intercom. I can’t understand what it is saying. My solicitor holds up a finger to silence me – ‘Hang on,’ she says, ‘wait there. It’s the callover. I’ll be back. Wait there.’
I am alone in the stairwell and I am afraid he will come in so I stay standing with my back against the wall. After a few minutes my solicitor comes back all a-fluster, tilting forward on the axis of her hips and tucking the briefcase under her arm. ‘Quick quick,’ she says, ‘we’re up.’
Your daddy is representing himself. This means he can interrogate me on the stand: he will put questions to me and I will have to answer him. Even though he put in the order, he asks to go first, and my solicitor concedes. Because he is representing himself, the judge must hear him out.
Until I threw him out, he says, he was your primary carer. I was in college. I was enrolled full time, and the college records to prove it. He says I gave you to him until he started seeing someone else and now I won’t let him take you. Before he began to see someone, I didn’t even want to have you for Christmas, he says, I made him take you for Christmas. He has a letter here to prove it, with twenty signatures at the end – people who saw him at Christmas, with his son.
‘She looks all innocent,’ says your daddy, ‘but your honour I can assure you the girl before you is—’ Judge Friel waves his hands to stop the pelt of rehearsed words. He assures your daddy that he is well aware that this country is crawling with black widows. Well aware, he says – it’s because of the constitution. He tells your daddy to save his breath, he is no eejit, he says, and he wasn’t born yesterday. He has seen enough in these rooms to know that they come in all shapes and sizes. He shouts then, tells me to stop making faces for him to see out of the corner of his eye and stop the crying; that it won’t do me any good.
Your daddy has a box of letters with him – letters I wrote to him apologising for being difficult, saying that I love him. ‘She admits to being irrational,’ he says, ‘on three occasions.’ ‘In one,’ he says, ‘in one of the letters she even admits to being depressed.’ He says I am unwell. He hopes I can get the help I need, he says, holding a shoe box towards the judge.
‘I’m not looking at these,’ says the judge. But he has heard.
‘And she wanted an abortion,’ your daddy says, ‘she didn’t want him. She wanted to kill him.’
When it is my turn on the stand your daddy says, ‘I put it to you that you are irrational,’ and ‘I put it to you that our son wants us to be together.’
I open my mouth to speak but I have a terrible voice, stuttering and strangled and unsure because I am afraid I might shriek. My solicitor makes eyes that I can’t read. The judge tells her to please deal with her client.
‘She is very nervous, your honour.’
‘I can see that. If she is old enough to be a mother then she is old enough to speak up. She will have to speak up if she expects me to listen to her. I am losing patience, I’ll tell you that now, counsel. As I’m sure you can appreciate, I have a lot of cases to get through before lunch.’
I once felt like a warm and powerful thing, because I am your mother, but now I know I am weak, my account all patchy and nuanced, my story a box of handwritten concessions and unspoken protests, and things I can’t recognize; things misshapen, discoloured, forgotten. I am not sure enough to find the words. I have not made lists of dates and I have no signatures.
That night I get a text message:
Are you happy now that you have cut our son in two? Someday he will know it is you who did this.
An hour later he sends another:
Someday he will see what you are.
Easter Sunday the springlight wakes you, and you smile and watch your hands above your face, catching hot geometries of sun as it slices through the gaps that frame and cleave our bedroom curtain.
I suppose to you our flat is a whole world, but to me it is a box. Sometimes it is such a small box and I need to get out. I can’t wait, so I change your nappy quickly, and dress you, and for breakfast I give you a flapjack in the buggy, instead of porridge. ‘Special treat my Pixie-Poddle,’ I say, ‘today is Easter.’ I put on a dress I haven’t worn since before you – pale yellow for spring. It brushes softly against my hips. I am pretty again.
‘Pwatty,’ you say. I don’t feel guilty about the flapjacks. I have put dried apricots in them, for the iron, and desiccated coconut instead of sugar. And in any case, I have to leave.
Once you are finished eating you writhe out of your buggy and we walk very slowly in the shadowy streets between tall buildings and out to the broad roads, the dormant water fountain, the light and sky of College Green. Grafton Street is almost empty; just some morning-after couples and the melancholy twang of a busker wrapping himself in his own low, clear sounds; stopping and starting; closing his eyes to locate the note where it is staggering somewhere in his voice, his fingers lax and effortlessly strumming, strumming regardless while you stand and watch him; your feet turned outwards and your belly pushing full sail before you. You tilt your head, your hands perched at your chest.
I am bewildered by the busker; I can’t understand how he can go on strumming, how he does not stop to marvel at you as you stand like that – how he is not struck by the miraculous detail with which you are made – the shocking blue of your eyes, your dimples – one in each cheek and one by your chin – and the funny way you clasp one finger now with all of your other hand – how he pretends not to notice it at all; refuses to be flattered by your rapture. I call, ‘Poddle on now, Baby, come on,’ and you start towards me and then stop. You turn and wave bye-bye to the busker by showing him your palm and opening and closing your fist.
Then you waddle up and demand to be carried, ‘Cawy Mama, cawy.’
It is slow, carrying you with one hand, and steering the buggy with the other, but there are no crowds to obstruct us as we make our way to the park.
For the ducks we have brought a batch of flapjacks that didn’t work out – too tough and dry for you – and you squeal and grin and stomp, press your sticky splayed fingers hard together, giddy with delight to see the mother duck dip and dive for the crumby lumps, her mustard-coloured babies twirling abstractedly about her, sniping occasionally at the water’s surface. We stay for a long time, even after the ducks have lost interest and I allow you to squat unnervingly close to the water and murk it with hard, dry oatflakes.
Afterwards we do a circuit of the park. You strap your car into the buggy, tucking him in cluckily. You push him slowly, the buggy tilted on its hind wheels, his two front tyres peering over the blanket, his headlights facing the sky. You put a finger up to your lips because your car has fallen asleep.
I let you throw ten one-cent coins into the fountain, and coax you back into your buggy with a carton of grape juice and your car, who wants a cuddle.
As we leave the park a man in a very crisp suit jacket, very tight, clean pants, spits at us. It lands on the back of my neck and when I turn to look at him, I see tight lips shrinking up off his teeth like they are melting from the sight of us. ‘Is that your kid?’ the man says, and for a moment I am going to answer. ‘Little slut, what age are you? A bastard isn’t it?’ he says. ‘It’s the likes of you that’s the problem. Fucking scrounger whores!’ As I walk away he shouts after us, ‘Dressed like a slut it’s no wonder you get knocked up at fifteen! Laundries were the right idea! At least you’d be of some use there!’
It doesn’t matter. I have wet-wipes under the buggy and I use one to clean his phlegm from my neck.
You fall asleep on the way home and are still asleep when we take the slow, smelly lift up to our flat. Hidden around our flat – on our bookshelf, in your box of blocks, under the mugs and behind the spider plant – are twenty tiny chocolate eggs wrapped in brightly coloured foil. When you wake we will hunt for them together. We can have ten each.
I unlock the door, push it with my back, heaving the buggy in after me. While you sleep I try to read but can’t sit still. I walk around the small space with bleach-spray and a cloth and check on all the glinting little eggs. I cannot look at you. I cannot bear the lovely rhythm of your sleep, the smooth and shallow lift and sigh and the bigger, rutted inhalation then, followed by the long, easy current of your breath: your wet, slack lips; your eyelashes casting dark wings on the curves of your cheeks. I can’t look because I know it is still here – the debt – lurking in the too-clean light and the dustless corners, waiting.
*
Every weekend I file documents in a warehouse. I file them alphabetically. I earn just the right amount – low enough to keep the single mother’s allowance; high enough to buy you the leather first shoes instead of the polyester ones. The warehouse is high-ceilinged and unheated and there are two other temps there, boys my age, filing in different parts of the building. The stuff on the floor is like brushed card and worn felt and it burns if I move around on my knees between the boxes. One of the boys fancies me, I think, even though I have you and I have said so. But I suppose he cannot understand what that means; how silly things like sex are now, how beside-the-point, and cinema dates, and banter, and how it is a relief not to feel hands on my throat at night and tendrils winding around my tongue.
We file all day and with each hour that passes, I calculate what I have earned and what I will use it for: the gas bill; that jigsaw; free-range eggs. The boy gazes at me a lot over his filing cabinet. He is bored, but also he has notions. He has rust-coloured hair and sweet, rust-coloured eyes and when he looks I am aware of the way my face moves as I file; I am afraid that my thoughts move over my face, and I wish he would not look. From his eyes I think he sees a girl who is fragile, closed and fidgety, but that’s not how I feel at all. I feel dangerous, tentacled, with blurring edges.
*
I carry the book in my rucksack. I know I have to burn or drown it but that is hard. Even if the story is all askew, there are bits of you in there all the same, and bits of me.
*
His access ends at six o’clock every Sunday evening. I wait outside his door and at exactly six he opens it and pushes you through in a buggy with huge tyres like an SUV. He watches me unstrap you and lift you into the hammockish buggy I have brought. Then he hands me an envelope with this week’s maintenance. On the back he has written:
€30.00 as decreed by the powers that be. To be spent on my son not on nail polish or coffee with friends.
You are always blank-faced at the handover; eyes staring steadily at your knees. I kiss you as I strap you in. I won’t expect you to speak until the morning. The mediator said it’s normal – some children even get pains in their tummies and cramps in their legs and so on but it’s all psychosomatic, she said; parents should not be manipulated by such performances. ‘Kids are very adaptable, they grow out of it.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘I only wish the mothers would do the same.’
You are wearing the clothes I dressed you in on Friday morning – everything down to your socks. Last week he sent me a text message explaining why this is. It is because the first thing he does when I hand you over is strip you down and put ‘Daddy clothes’ on you instead; the last thing he does is put the ‘Stinky mummy clothes’ back on you. He says they smell like council flat.
We take the bus home. Your buggy folds against my knee like an umbrella, and you sit quietly beside me, holding one finger with the fist of your other hand. I look out the window, knitting. I am trying to give you space, like the mediator said. It’s a hat for you for the winter. I can knit without looking because this bit is all the same – just round and round and round for four inches.
You pull yourself up, standing on the seat with one arm hugging the headrest, wobbling with the bus. You put the other hand on my chin and pull my face around to look at you.
‘Smile to me Mama,’ you say. ‘I am your little boy, smile to me.’
You use both hands now to mould my face into a smile, pushing up the corners of my mouth. ‘Like that,’ you say. ‘Keep like that.’
*
My college tutor calls me in to discuss the exam results. You are asleep in the buggy and I park you in the hall and leave his office door ajar in case you wake or someone tries to steal you.
He has a long, tea-coloured face with such kind lines on it that I feel ashamed for failing him after all he did for me during the morning sickness months. He even gave me ginger nuts from his wife.
Yes, he says, they are disappointing results – maybe it was too soon to come back? I explain about missing two papers. I could repeat but I don’t think the grant will cover it; I would have to pay and I don’t know if it is possible. He has spoken to his wife about me, he says; his wife thinks the college has failed me.
‘Oh no,’ I say. I mean it, and oh, it is good to hear my own voice again, honest and reassuring. ‘The college has been very nice; very patient. I don’t know what else they could have done. You have been so supportive, really.’
‘Well look, let’s appeal,’ he says. ‘Go to the college counsellor, say you were depressed or overwhelmed – whatever – you might have to exaggerate. Get me a psych report and I’ll make them waive repeat fees. Sorry, I think it’s the only way. Then take a year to figure things out; do try to come back. My wife is very adamant.’
*
Your second Halloween falls on a Wednesday and your daddy wants you for the day. I say okay, the day but not the night. I arrive to collect you at 5 p.m. and it is already dark outside. He opens the door, wiping his hands on a tea towel. He steps back. ‘You will have to come in if you want him.’
There is music playing; a man with a guitar and a lovesick voice. There is a big bowl of marshmallow skulls on the coffee table, and another of bright jellies shaped like witch’s hats. A sheet of beads closes his kitchen from his living room, but they are tangled into a clump, so I can see through to the worktop where there is a single beer bottle with a wedge of lime stuffed into the neck, and a pumpkin with spilled guts.
‘I’m just carving the pumpkin,’ he says. ‘Would you like a drink?’
I shake my head and scan for you. Your daddy nods at one of two closed doors. ‘You will have to go and get him, if you want him.’
You are at the other side of the door. It must be your daddy’s bedroom, because the other room has a plaque on it saying ‘Bathroom’. There are other children in there with you. I can hear their voices, ‘Pow pow... Hoiyyyy–ya!’ but I can’t pick yours out.
The bedroom is warm. It smells of his sex, and of sleep and cologne and damp. The headboard is all curling black bars, and there is a leather belt fastened casually to it. The belt makes my throat taste of acid.
You are standing on the bed dressed in a Spider-Man costume. The costume has padding for muscles – a strap-on six-pack running up your torso, and big foam biceps. You are holding a balloon sword, standing with your feet splayed. There is a big lozenge of black painted across each eye and your cheeks are red with a fading mesh of webs over them.
Your cousins are there. One of them is hurling himself into a wall, falling, getting up and hurling himself at the wall again; ‘Hoiy-ya!’ he says, ‘Hoiy-ya!’
The smaller one is running in a circle saying, ‘Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw.’
You look at me, and then you turn your back, revealing a flimsy polyester sag, the heartbreaking flatness of your tiny bottom.
I say, ‘Hello my Pixie,’ and I cannot stop the smile, for any moment now I will hold you. Your cousins continue to run and crash and maybe you don’t hear me.
Your daddy is standing too close behind me. At my neck I can feel the cold beer on his breath.
‘He wants to stay with me for Halloween,’ he says. ‘He told me. Why don’t you come back for him tomorrow?’ He has a second beer in his hand. ‘Have a drink with me,’ he says, ‘before you go.’
I take the beer, but I don’t drink.
‘Do you want lime?’
I shake my head and I open my mouth again to say your name but no sound comes – my mouth tastes of soil, as though my tongue is stuffed back with clay and sand and even breathing is impossible.
‘He had his dinner.’
I close my mouth and nod. I am not sure what expression my face makes but it causes him to roll his eyes.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a proper dinner... he had peas and carrots and potato.’ Then, as if he has just remembered, ‘Oh, by the way, you can expect a summons in the post. I’m appealing the order. I’m going for custody. I’m not sure you’re fit, to be honest. You can’t really look after him, can you? Temping part-time and living in that shithole? I’m asking for a psychiatrist’s report on you. I’ll be subpoenaing the college counsellors. It’s time I stood up for myself. I won’t be paying you any more either, for the privilege of seeing my son. I have a new solicitor. She thinks it’ll be easy enough to sort out.’
You are standing on the bed now, looking at me with all that facepaint blackening your eye sockets. Your daddy nods at the cousins, ‘How’re you girls?’ and the bigger one lunges at him like a little rhino, his shoulder bouldering forward.
‘I’m not a girl I’m not a girl I’m not a girl...’
Your daddy laughs, bending to protect his groin from the child’s fists. ‘Alright pal, okay.’
‘You’re a girl.’ The boy pummels his knees. ‘You’re a girl!’
You look at me, the sword hanging down at your side. I try to smile and I take a breath. I am going to say, ‘You want to stay with Daddy, Poddle?’ I am going to say it gently; no pressure. But your face is so dirty with that paint, your eyes so pale in the alien crescents that I don’t know what shape my face makes, and my voice – there is too much bubbling for too long in my chest, too much that is ugly and hateful, blood simmered to a thick and pungent metal, and when it comes my voice is a scratching sound, about to break into a fury shriek and so I swallow some beer and you keep looking at me.
Beside me, your daddy is looking too and smiling.
‘He’s two and a half,’ he says.
I nod.
‘It’s time you let go.’ His smile is tight and curling. He makes a little laugh sound – ‘Huh. Weird, isn’t it? Not even three years ago, I watched you give birth.’
I shrug and sip the beer. I think he has rehearsed this. I think that because of the stiff, unnatural little smile, the Hollywood twang in his voice, and the pretend laugh, like a cough – huh.
‘Do you know you shat yourself?’
I shake my head. ‘I think I would remember, if that had happened.’
His mouth lifts now into a big gleeful grin. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘Women forget. Once it’s all over, they forget. It’s proven. Science.’
Then there is a hissing sound; something cold and light on my face. I look up and it’s you, stern-faced stretching your little hand towards me in the Spider-Man hex – the two middle fingers folded down, pinkie and forefinger pointing. Fastened to your arm in a web-patterned wrist strap is a silver can. Streams of white silly-string come shooting from the can, but they slow as they approach, landing silently on my hair and tumbling into little squiggles on the carpet.
‘Mammy has boobies,’ you say. ‘Mammy has boobies.’
Your daddy laughs. ‘Ahhhhhh!’ he says. ‘Web fluid! No Spider-man, noooo!’
To me he says, ‘Lighten up, sourpuss. Is it a wonder he wants to stay with me?’
*
The arms are spinning you around and around. They are awkward, stiff, ungraceful arms, spindly and blank and efficient instruments. I cannot stop them but now I need to because – how did I never see it before? They are not wrapping you, but winding you back, peeling off the days and hours and moments that you are made from, undoing you down to where you started, and I know then. I remember then, the hinge of your conception, the pragmatic surrender-route that made you, the dull and shameful choice to hurry a thing to its conclusion, rather than resist the knuckle and thrust and neck-clamp of him. I still know it though I have tried to slide out of it, avoid the reckoning, spin a yarn and knit a tale.
Now my arms are still but nothing can stop the spindle, nothing but waking, and there is no name that will chase away the debt. It’s you, my darling. I see it now; the bargained chip, the straw of gold, the thing set going, the milk once spilled.
*
Now you are almost three and you have his words in your mouth and his name sewn into the collar of your coat. It is a one-way street; I never thought otherwise. Friday is when his weekend access starts. We meet in the park. I hold your hand as we cross the road, but when we get inside the park gates I let you run on alone.
Your daddy gets down on a knee and opens his arms, the way of returning fathers in family movies. You play your part – great baby grin between the dimpling cheeks – perhaps you have watched these movies together.
You stop and turn to wave, opening and closing your palm at me, before tottering on into his arms. You have a little knapsack on your back. Usually it contains only your favourite car, maybe some medicine, if you are ill, and your animal-shaped vitamins. This time I have put your vaccination book in too, and your passport.
Your life is a journey out of me.
I am sorry, please believe me my darling, I am sorry that I have added no explanation for you to read. I could not make the marks on the page for you. I could not set the letters out. I tried. All night I tried but I could not manage even to put your name down. There is nothing I can say, no language I can speak but screech and claw.
He has you now. A concept sprung cleanly from his voice; a man-born son. I have left no mark on you but a neat scar hidden in the dimple of your navel.
*
Up on deck there are dogs growing restless in their cages; barking and whimpering and howling in the sharp sea spray. A sign says to sit upright and look at the horizon, but by now it is too dark to see that fine discrepancy between water and sky, and up here the smell of diesel and the hound-cries make it worse. I prefer, anyway, to hunker down into the dark and sickly swell, down there in the belly-heave beneath the sea-line.
Through the heavy doors and into a toilet cubicle I lurch to kneel and vomit over and over. The toilets are clean, bleach-white, filled with a saccharine peach-scent smog that clings to the tongue with the burn and the bitter hurl from the dirty inside. I rest here, face to the porcelain seat; bleach and peach and pale vomit and bright bile.
I was never sick like this until you began, and so I almost like it – the endless stir and wrench, the acid weakness and, with every wave of nausea, some awe at the force of it, the crippling pull and retch. It is a keepsake from my time of making you.
I know I have slept because as I wake I am fantasizing about rocking home to death, drowning in a plunge of sea. It is only the cold that frightens me; the way it would trickle under the clothes and then spread through the tissue to the hot and blood-dark places as my heart slowed to a stop. Apart from the cold I think I might like it; the slosh and crash of water, the great to and fro, the pulse of the ocean fighting this ship like a parasite. I wonder what it was like for you; what you heard and what you knew as you stemmed out to flesh in the liquid crannies of me and if it sounded something as comforting and frightening and as mighty as this.
Now I will add the last of that story here. When I can stand and walk, I will bring this to the deck and toss it away into the sea; the bell that heralded your first change, your bracelet from the hospital, your sand-dull curl tied with a ribbon, and all my threadbare yarns.
In the ferry giftshop I bought another book for you. It is blank with a hard cover, powder blue to match your sex and lines for keeping my letters straight.
I will begin at the beginning and I will be clear this time. I will put your story in; dates and weights, perhaps, and your first word. Your first word. What was it? Will I put the ma ma ma of hunger? Was that a word? Or look? Or mine?