The baby’s snuffling wakes you. You lean over, eyes closed, and reach for the phone on the bookshelf beside the bed. It hits the floor with a clunk.
“Fuck.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
RM Block
“You want me to ... ?”
What, help? you think. Why start now? Last night’s argument is still hot in your head. He has said to trust him, to have faith. Before you can say go back to sleep, you hear his breath, slow and deep. You push yourself upright and swing your legs out of the bed. The window is wide open and there’s a faint stir of hot air. Six lanes of traffic, several kilometres away, are humming. The cat is already on your lap, wide-eyed and restless. You shove him off.
Eyes still half-closed, you bend and sweep your hand across the floorboards, like someone drowning or waving, until your scrabbling fingers find the phone. The screen lights up: 1.32am. Already? How could three hours pass so quickly? Before the baby you’d thought your life was constricted by the clock, by the calendar, by the bus timetable. The weekly schedule of meetings. How wrong you’d been. Back then, before, you should have been celebrating the fact that time was entirely your own. That a dinner could be arranged within an afternoon; that, on impulse, you could decide to go for a swim; that, yes, you could have that glass of wine, right then. Now, you are constrained by another human’s need for survival and you have items – a watch, a phone, various apps – that beep reminders at you. Now, your body never lies. There are two circles of damp where your nipples press against the thin cotton. Your T-shirt is in the wash and the nursing bra you usually wear to bed is an unremembered thing hung over a chair.
The baby is whimpering, and milk is rolling down the hard underside of your breast. Breast. Best. Lest. Lest what? He fails to thrive? Flunks out of school? Blames you for every challenge and problem that life presents? There’s so much advice to weigh up and sift through. Doing the right thing seems impossible. It would be easier with a mother or a sister to turn to, but when you say this to Mish and Leah they roll their eyes and laugh.
[ Summer fiction: I Can Do Rude by Maya KulukundisOpens in new window ]
The baby whimpers again, louder, and a tingling pain shoots from your armpit to your nipple. You stand and walk unsteadily towards the door. It reminds you of when you were younger, leaving a club drunk and emotional. The floorboards feel cool and for a moment you are captured by the notion of sinking to the floor and lying there, cheek pressed against the wood. But the baby’s room is just across the narrow hall, the door open.
The cot is pushed into the corner and you are again struck by how something so simple and functional could have been so expensive. As the whimpers turn into full-bodied crying you lean over the railing. He looks like he is trying to fly, his arms flapping wildly. His eyes are scrunched closed and the sides of his mouth pull back rhythmically.
[ Fairytale of Forestside: The fourth circle of hellOpens in new window ]
Even though you’ve fed him countless times over the last four months you pause and stare. Richard likes to joke that this is how you look at contemporary art; with a mixture of bewilderment and pleasure. The wonder of the perfect folds of his ears. The tiny sweep of his eyebrows that can dissolve time. His screaming rises a pitch, interrupting your daze. You sling his body over your shoulder as you move to the livingroom. In one motion you grab the TV remote and sit. The couch is too soft and for a second you lose your balance, tilting to the left, before contact with the armrest straightens you both.
You push your nipple into his mouth and his eyes open, startled, before they close again and he nuzzles in, pulling at you. The cat has taken up his position on the top of the couch. You lean the back of your neck against his stomach. His belly is warm and you feel the vibrations from his rumbling purrs. The baby lies heavy against your chest and sleep pulls at you. Then, as if from deep under water you hear them. A clatter, her moan, his steady grunt. Your anger at Richard flares again. You’d wanted an older apartment, one of those redbrick six-packs built in the ’60s and ’70s with thick walls and large rooms and kitchen cupboards that need a knee to close them properly. But Richard is paying most of the rent and so had had his way.
You’ve seen your neighbours but haven’t properly introduced yourself. She always looks distracted, searching in her bag, fiddling with her phone or ear pods, striding to her car that needs to be parked on the street because each unit is only allocated one space in the garage. Her clothes are corporate. Her hair is slicked into a severe middle parting. You guess she’s in her late twenties but you’ve seen her so seldom it’s difficult to determine her age.
He comes and goes much more frequently. Random sounds from their apartment, on the other side of your wall, begin around noon. You presume he does shift work, at a bar or pub, because you’ve only ever seen him in black jeans and black T-shirts. His front door regularly slams in the late afternoon, just as the baby is beginning to get fussy and you are eyeing the beer in the fridge door. Sometimes he appears next to you as you’re taking out your bins. He is short with a gym-thickened neck, and you feel uneasy, sensing his eyes on you as you go back inside. Other times you see him in the garage as you lift grocery bags out of your car boot. He offered to help once, when you had the baby strapped to your chest and were flailing, but it had been awkward. The baby was tugging your T-shirt and he stood smirking, his eyes flicking to your neckline which was moving south.
When you first started breastfeeding, your breasts lost their sense of fun, no longer just flesh that could be dressed up or down depending on your mood or the occasion
The flimsy apartment walls are useless. They sound as though they are right there in the room beside you. You realise that, like them, you have no private space for secrets. You and Richard haven’t had sex since the baby was born, and 24 hours ago he accepted the fly-in fly-out job that will take him from home for two weeks every month. You wonder if they sit and whisper about you both. Do they mock what you have? Claim that it will never be like that for them? You push your hair off your sweaty neck and blush in the dark. Now their sounds are looser, louder, and you picture her unravelled, while you imagine the boy next door pressing you against your car, his hand between your legs.
The baby pulls away with a yank and you shift him over to the other side. He latches on and his body relaxes again. Sitting there, you think of Romulus and Remus suckling at the wolf’s teat. You think of the pendulous heft of Lucien Freud’s sleeping benefits supervisor. You consider the recent trend for side boobs and corsets. And then you remember how Johan liked to press his chest against your bare back, cross his hands over your breasts and squeeze. How Harry’s gentle nibbles would turn into bites. You think of Chris, who was a licker, sincere and careful. Eamonn, a lusty and vigorous sucker.
When you first started breastfeeding, your breasts lost their sense of fun, no longer just flesh that could be dressed up or down depending on your mood or the occasion. They became all-consuming. Examined and reduced to a list of medical terminology: nodes, glands, areola, lobules, ducts. The baby alternated between being ravenous and exhausted. You were in a similar state. Adrift in an ever-changing ocean of unknowing. Richard listened and applied the same calm and rigour to your complaints as he did to his work. Soon, health professionals called and emailed you links and phone numbers which they said would ease the distress.
And now Richard won’t be there to help. As you juggle cooking and feeding, and bathtime and soothing, alone, he will be sitting in a canteen 2,000km away, with hundreds of other workers, eating meals that have been cooked for him. And after dinner, he’ll wander to his bedroom to watch movies on his laptop or to listen to music. You feel fury that he will sleep through the night without interruption.
Her face relaxes as he looks up at her and, for a moment, you can almost see the sound of his chatter push away her worries
Last night, mid-fight, he’d accused you of purposely forgetting the documentary you’d watched together. He was right. You didn’t want to remember the scenes of tired faces and limb-dragging bodies. The rows of anonymous dormitory bedrooms. The heavy machinery. The dust and isolation.
“Don’t you remember that man from the mining union talking about the high levels of psychological distress?”
Richard’s face was turned towards the window where the glare from the setting sun turned the facing brick wall a warm red.
“I’m not doing this because it’s going to be enjoyable. I’m doing it so we can earn good money and finally buy a house.”
“I don’t want to do this” – your head jerked towards the baby’s room – “by myself.”
“When I’m on leave I’ll be here all the time, 24/7. You’ll get sick of me, I promise.”
“Two weeks away, though, Richard. Two whole weeks! I’ll go crazy.”
“It’s only for the short term. Save up, then get out. That’s the deal.”
You wanted to say: That makes sense, I understand. Instead, you thought, we are not enough, the two of us. We can’t keep you close. You felt a quick surprise that his words didn’t soften you but your anger was solid and made you, for a moment, feel righteous and energised.
There is a single parent who lives in your street. In the morning you see her walking her little boy to the bus stop. He started school this year, his navy shorts hanging below his knees, his body swallowed by his light blue shirt. Her voice rises easily to where you sit on the balcony. You can tell which weekends the boy is with his father because on those Mondays she laughs and dawdles and is patient with his questions. The other Mondays are different. She walks quickly, urging him on, eager to hand him over so that she can remember what it feels like to be untethered.
Sometimes she sees you and manages a smile but more often ducks her head. Irrespective of the day, her face wears an expression that looks like it’s in the middle of a calculation: about rent, bills, after-school childcare arrangements. But you have also noticed that when he isn’t running ahead or lagging, he holds her hand like he is in love. Her body loosens as he pushes against her hip. Her face relaxes as he looks up at her and, for a moment, you can almost see the sound of his chatter push away her worries.
The groans and sighs from next door have stopped. The remote is wedged under your thigh and you pull it out, turn it on. The light on the bottom of the TV turns red. For a second the screen stays black before it blooms bright. You flick through the channels searching for the Winter Olympics that are taking place on the other side of the world.
You have become obsessed with the ski-jumping. There is one competitor – a baby-faced young man from Finland – with a last name distorted by too many ‘a’s and ‘k’s and ‘n’s. As he wriggles his bottom to the middle of the bar his face is still and concentrated. The camera pans close, searching and failing to find any twitch of fear. He takes a deep breath and claps his hands. Then he pushes off. His knees are bent and his body crouches low as he gains speed. The baby squawks and fidgets but you don’t shift your gaze from the TV because he is lifting, launching himself into the monotone sky. As he flies, his body is almost horizontal. The material of his shirt flaps but the rest of him is still. You imagine holding his hand, trusting, the wind icy on your cheeks.
Seven seconds of freedom.
As quickly as he accelerates and lifts, he starts to drop. He looks like an angel, falling. You wonder if somewhere, in a snow-heaped town, his mother is on her knees praying or if she is jubilant in his faith. You wonder if his father is there beside her, or if he is somewhere else entirely.
Clare Roche, who lives in Sydney, Australia, has been shortlisted for, among other things, The Australian Prize for Fiction, and her poetry has been published in online journals in the UK, the US, Germany and Australia
