Escape (21 page)

Lena, in whose house we sprawled, hardly ever sat down. She
paced up and down through the kitchen, into the hallway, opening
the long glass doors that looked out onto her porch. No matter how
far away she got, she always managed to hear what we were saying,
rushing back in to comment. Her baby had dreadful wind and only
seemed to be happy slung over Lena's shoulder like a wet tea towel.
No one said, 'you should let the baby cry' or 'put her down otherwise
she'll learn bad habits'. We accepted that Lena had to pace: that was
Lena.

Rita and Lena were still breastfeeding and often they sat with their
breasts out, or the maternity bra only cursorily flung around them,
forgetting to cover up after the feed. I grew to know those women's
breasts as well as my own. Rita complained of lumpy sore breasts and
Lena said how for the first time in her life she had cleavage. She wished
she could go naked to parties and show them off; it seemed such a pity
to put an ordinary old shirt over them when she went out to do the
shopping.

I grew to love Fridays. What I loved, sitting in that living room
crowded with stained bunny rugs and carry cots and milky towels and
teacups smeared with lipstick and the wafting odour of filled nappies,
was the tacit agreement among us all about the most important things
in life: our babies. We discussed whether they were sleeping, feeding,
putting on enough weight, smiling, hearing, seeing,
sleeping
. There
was no pretence that any other subject mattered. We all talked at once,
over each other, so eager to share our fears, knowledge, mistakes. No
one was 'right' – even Doreen and Rita, with their medical knowledge,
didn't assume leadership. There was none, just the mess and hysteria
of living with babies. We weren't all the same and neither were our
babies, but we were all equal.

We interrupted each other continually, without fear of being
thought rude or selfish, clamouring like children to be heard. We
didn't have to look after each other or placate or appease: whoever
had the loudest voice at the time won the next five minutes' stage,
whoever was quickest to get the last caramel cake won. It was
exhilarating, edgy, wild – sometimes I'd find I was laughing so hard
that I was crying, not sure at all what was the difference. Guido would
have been horrified.

We only saw each other on Friday. No one rang in between to
chat, and when we met there was no big talk, only small, the kind as
essential as atoms. 'Did you go to the baby health clinic? How much
weight has she put on? The hearing test went well, she's rolling over
now, how often do you give her solids in the early phase?'

It was good when we could all stay longer, and witness together
the day changing into night. From Lena's porch the sky flamed gold
then pink, paling into that tender blue like the veins running beneath
the skin of our babies' chests. We'd stand together outside, quiet,
holding our glasses of wine, and watch how the gum trees blackened
into silhouettes against the gold-rimmed clouds.

Rita was always the first to break the spell. 'Gotta go,' she'd say,
sighing, but you could tell she didn't mind. From little things she
said, you knew she had one of those benign fairytale husbands who
didn't mind if dinner was late or she made a mistake or his plans were
changed.

'Can I stay here forever?' I wanted to say, just like the hospital. 'I
never want to go home.'

It wasn't until the third Friday that I discovered Lena was a writer.
She wrote mainly non-fiction, she said, and enjoyed the research.
Her background was in veterinary science but she said being a writer
was a lot more romantic than sticking thermometers up dogs' bums.
She swore frequently, which was somehow reassuring. She had sharp
eyes and a long elegant nose. She'd grown up in England and retained
a faint upper-class twang which intensified when she was making
a point. But the most interesting thing about Lena was that she had
a photographic memory – it was amazing the amount of facts she
collected doing research. She told me that turtles are deaf, lions can
mate over fifty times a day, and the largest cell in the human body is
the female reproductive cell. Women invented windshield wipers and
the laser printer, five minutes of anger disables our immune systems
for six hours, and the pupil of an eye expands as much as 45 per cent
when a person looks at something pleasing.

'How are all these facts stored in your brain? I asked.

She shrugged. 'Who knows? Most of them are totally irrelevant to
my life. Like imagine, this thing I read last year – in a study of 200,000
ostriches over a period of eighty years, there wasn't one single case
where an ostrich buried its head in the sand. I can remember things
like that, but I can't remember where I put my keys last night. It's so
fucking frustrating.' I saw Lena's facts as her tiny pets, all labelled and
crowded into their cages like neatly stacked cargo in a ship's hold.

It was Lena who introduced me to her publisher. I'd been worrying
aloud about our dwindling bank balance and the mortgage and how
much I dreaded going back to work. One day I'll be ready, I said. Like
in about five hundred years.

'What about children's non-fiction?' suggested Lena. 'You're used
to pitching lessons at children – why not books?'

I thought she was joking and I laughed, but the next Friday Lena
presented me with the name and address of her publisher and an
appointment for the following Monday.

Guido thought it was a great idea. 'Children's books can't be hard
to write,' he pointed out. 'They're for children!'

But how would I start, how would I finish, find the time to read,
organise the information?

'How much is the advance?' Guido asked. 'You must go for the
biggest you can get!'

Imagine taking an advance 'as big as you can get', a reward for a
job you haven't even started yet. Wouldn't you have to pay it back if
you found you couldn't write a word? By then we would have spent
it. Maybe I'd have to go to jail. And what would happen to Clara? Can
you take babies to jail or is that only if you actually give birth in your
cell?

I tried to smile as he cleared a space next to him on the couch and
showed me a poem he had finished,
Il Refugio
. His English translation
was written next to the Italian.

'Is rough, this English, but gives you the idea. Take a look, and
you can tell me 'ow to make it better.'

But what would happen to all my domestic tasks if I wrote a book
instead of cleaning? The house would get out of control – bugs breeding
under the sink, cockroach dirt piling up in the cutlery drawers, dust
accruing like debts. I'd have to write when Clara was asleep.
Write
–
facts into order! How would I manage that when I was only barely
hanging on to the rails of life, each day expecting to be swept away?

It took me a long time to read The
Refuge
and when he said
'
Allora?
' I explained that it was so rich and interesting that I had to
immerse myself thoroughly and read it many times. It took five reads
to focus, but on the sixth, my mind suddenly went still. The poem was
beautiful. It began with an early morning walk in the mountains, the
landscape – and the narrator's mind – still blurred with dreams. But
when the dawn light strikes, leaves 'swell like grapes in a bowl of blue
air', and 'green knives of ferns carve white blossoms'.

I closed my eyes for a moment, revelling in the scene. Inside,
Guido was like an untouched wilderness – pristine, mysterious. Even
his uncertain translation shone pure. How did he get his thoughts
like that, like clear running water down mountains? The poem was
a celebration. Was nature the refuge here? A refuge from his own
'dark mind'? How he must need this outlet, this writing that set him
free to
notice
the world. He really should be able to concentrate on
it; what a crime if he had to spend more of his time slogging away at
these mundane Italian lessons.
I walk through glass/ in the clear-edged
morning/ catching falling crystals on my cheeks.

'Aren't there any other words,
sinonimi
in English for this?' he said,
pointing to 'clear-edged'.

'Hmm,' I said, to give myself time. I quite liked 'clear-edged'. It
brought out the sharpness of the dawn light . . . followed by the 'falling
crystals' – dew drops! Suddenly I saw my mother's crystal bowl,
and the way it had shattered into a million shards of light when I'd
dropped it. I remembered the fright and how only moments before
my mermaids had sailed inside it, queenly in their diamond boat.

'What about
shattering
?' I said. '
I walk through the shattering
morning
. . .
catching falling crystals on my cheeks.
'

Guido was silent, so I rushed in. 'Because, well, the morning is
holding still, isn't it, like a held breath, and everything is pure and
cut-glass and perfect like crystal. But perfection can be frightening,
don't you think? There's always the possibility of its being spoilt, you
know, stained or broken . . . You get the feeling that the dark mind
in your poem could mar it, that the exquisite morning might be a
moment only. Also,' I went on, carried away by the vision his words
had conjured in my head, 'sometimes we can feel almost
broken
by
beauty, you know, pierced or changed by it, and in that feeling there's
a sort of vulnerability, you lose your familiar hold on things. You've
caught that so clearly . . . but well, this sounds clumsy maybe, not what
you meant . . .'

'Shattering,' said Guido. '
Frantumare
,
ando in frantumi
. . . In Italian
we don use this verb exactly like that. Interesting – yes, good!' He
smiled then, an excited, happy smile, and as we gazed at each other I
felt we'd stepped inside his perfect morning, together.

Guido rushed off then to rework his poem and I went to get Clara
ready for a walk. I walked up and down Beatrice Street and into St
Paul's and all the way to the park. It was the books or teaching, I told
Clara. I'd have to do one of them. I knew it. Clara took her dummy out
and smiled. If I chose books, I could keep Fridays and we wouldn't
have to be separated. I couldn't imagine being apart now – it was as if
she had always been with me, like my arm or leg. She made me anxious
but she was the
point
of me. Being without her would only have made
the anxiety worse.

We stopped to look at the leaves of bushes as we walked. A small
well of elation still lay in my chest.
Shattering
, I whispered. It had been
a good word, hadn't it?

The first book I was commissioned to write was called
All About Ants
.
Just the pictures of them in the encyclopaedia, swarming uncontrollably
over picnics, rocks, dead animals, made me feel swamped. So many
ants, such tiny bodies stuff ed with so much information, what to leave
in and what to leave out? At first I thought everything should go in,
just in case. Imagine if children sat down to read all about ants and
their parents asked them a really basic fact that everyone (except me)
considered essential, and it wasn't there in the book? Ants, it seemed,
were indefatigable, guarding their eggs, defending the nest, finding and
storing food, their abdomens swelling rhythmically like tiny balloons
as they filled with nectar. Even when I tried not to think about them
they lurked everywhere – in the dishwasher, the oven, between the
toys, busy.

For days I sat at the big oak desk in a panic, trying to focus. Then I
called Lena. 'I can't do it,' I told her. 'All this research – organising it – I
can't concentrate. I've never been able to!'

'But you had to concentrate when you had Clara,' Lena pointed
out. 'If it's about Clara, you're able to block everything else out. I've
seen you!'

Lena was right. When I fed Clara, I made sure I clucked and
distracted her enough so she drank the required amount. I counted
the eggs poured into the spinach tart, the sterilising crystals for the
bottles, made the spoonfuls of formula level with a knife. Once I had
the baby, I knew I had to stay conscious. She only had one mother
after all, and even if I was as panicked as hell, there was no one, surely,
who loved her more.

I thought of these things I had achieved when I sat down to read
about ants on the brown leather chair at the library. You can
do
it, I told
myself. The voice sniggered but I ignored it. Clara lay next to me in her
carry cot, with her red rattle and dummy. I read a whole chapter before
she began to cry. I got up and walked with her around the library – I'd
brought the pouch – and whispered to her about ants. She seemed to
like them. I did too. At home I read more, in the bathroom, in bed,
while I was cooking. Ants were fascinating. Each one was a small
miracle, with their military discipline and self sacrifice. To survive the
long dry seasons they stored water and food like monks. After a while
I realised that reading about ants and then writing about them was
immensely calming.

This is the way I began: I wrote the facts down as if I were making
a list. Like numbers, the facts made patterns when put together
in certain arrangements. And you couldn't argue with a fact, or
take responsibility for its existence. A fact was a fact, its reality as
indisputable as a brick.

As soon as I'd finished
All About Ants
, the publisher asked for
All About Bees
. The clean order of a hive, I found, was as soothing
as valium. Every bit of a bee was important – the worker bee was so
conscientious that even when it wasn't on duty, it produced royal jelly
in its head, which was fed to larvae destined to become queens. And
queens laid 1500 eggs a day! As I used a fact, I crossed it off . I strung
a story together with the facts much the same way I used to string a
necklace with beads.

I grew to adore them all – my facts. They stayed where I put them,
didn't make demands or object. Even alone, they were powerful: just
one single fact could resonate like a symbol, signalling a world. A
series of facts could take you on a longer journey, as dependably as any
other form of metaphorical transport – fiction or film. A simple listing
of facts brought me the universe.

Guido seemed pleased by my immersion in non-fiction. He liked
the three-thousand-dollar advance for
Ants
, and the increase to four
with
Bees
. He didn't talk any more of my return to full-time work.
He didn't know that some days, when he was out teaching people to
speak Italian, I was sitting on my bed, paralysed. He saw me instead at
night, working at the big oak desk with four or five full-colour plated
books spread out before me, my exercise book dark with scribbled
notes. Sometimes he patted my head bent over my books as he walked
by. He seemed most content when I was busy. '
Brava
,' he said once,
approvingly, when I showed him how much I had written. And I did
work well in the evenings, with Clara sleeping cosily in my bed.

Some days he and I hardly said a word to each other. I told myself
this was better than the demands for stimulating companionship,
which I hadn't seemed able to supply. At night, when I'd finished
working I sat fixed to the chair, dreading the walk down the hall to
my bedroom. Guido's door would be closed. I didn't know whether I
wanted him to open it or not.

Sometimes I did walk down the hall and knock. Only if there
was that line of light underneath, lying like a thin gold pencil. When I
opened the door, the line expanded into a clean arc of light, as precisely
as if drawn by a compass. At the apex of the triangle there would be
Guido at his desk, leaning with his hand on his cheek.

But there was a night, when I'd moved on to
All About Flies
, that I
ran down the hall and burst in. The fly facts were so incredible, I had
to share them. 'Listen to this!' I cried. 'There are these male dance flies
that are absolutely extraordinary. I think they should have their own
chapter. Do you know what they do?'

'No,' Guido sighed, 'but I'm sure you'll tell me.'

'Okay.' I looked down at the book. 'Well, at the beginning of a
courtship the male dance flies always present their partners with a
tasty insect wrapped in silk – this gift is supposed to keep the female
occupied during mating, so you know, she won't attack the male.
But some males cheat, and when their females unwrap the silk, they
discover there is nothing inside! Can you believe it? Those cheating
bastards?'

'I suppose, if you say it is true.'

I looked at Guido. A small smile lift ed the corners of his mouth. I
shift ed my weight from one foot to the other. He glanced back at the
papers on his desk.

'But isn't that amazing? I spluttered. 'You know, it's all about
creating illusions, isn't it, pretending in order to get something you
want, like magic and misdirection, and even the insect world do it . . .'

'You should just concentrate on the facts, Rachel,' said Guido.
His voice was like cold tea. He shuddered. 'Ugh, flies. They grow from
maggots, no?'

Occasionally when I knocked on the door Guido turned off the
light and took me to his bed. I could only feel, not see. Each touch
of his fingers on my neck, nipple, in the pleat between my legs was
a surprise, amplified by the dark. While I lay there I thought about
mole crickets, and how the male's underground burrow acts like a
loudspeaker, so its song of courtship can be heard miles away. Guido
could have been anyone in the darkness and so could I. There was no
courtship song. I wondered if he was stroking my neck, or the neck of
someone he was imagining. Perhaps he was vanishing me and in my
place was Jean in her harem pants glinting with sequins, rolled down
to her ankles. Is that why he liked the dark now? Sometimes he fell
asleep before he was finished. 'Too tired,' he murmured. I lay there a
while longer, feeling the warmth of his back.

I decided not to tell him any more about the mole crickets or even
the astonishing flowerpot snake, which was blind and lived in the dark
as well, becoming enormously widespread because of one astounding
fact: the females could breed on their own. 'There are absolutely no
male flowerpot snakes,' I read in one book, 'because they are no longer
necessary.' I didn't think Guido would like that fact and after a while,
when his breathing was deep, I tiptoed back to my room, to little Clara
curled up like a bud in my bed.

With each new phase of Clara's development, further possibilities of
devastation and danger emerged. As she progressed from rolling over
to crawling, to sleeping even less in the afternoons, I found it almost
impossible to write during the day. The newsreel in my head changed:
she no longer fell from windows but choked to death on small objects
instead. Every morning I had to child-proof the house, picking up
stray buttons, safety pins, caps, knobs, anything small enough to be
swallowed by a curious baby. Clara would follow me, moving at an
incredible pace on her bottom, her hands supporting her weight.
Often I had to race her to find the object first. It was nerve-racking.
But whenever she did find one of these dangerous objects, she
inspected it soberly and handed it straight to me. 'Mama!' she said one
day, holding out a bobby pin with enthusiastic expansiveness, crowing
with delight.

'Thank you!' I cried, and I hugged her and tickled her and couldn't
stop touching her smooth little arms and the toasty top of her head and
the silk soles of her feet.
Mamma!
She laughed and laughed until she
got hiccups, and I had to ring Doreen, who said to give her a sudden
bad fright, that always fixes it. Luckily, by the time I'd put down the
phone, the hiccups had gone and Clara was happily sweeping the floor
again like a metal detector over a sand dune.

Clara loved rock music. When 'Mustang Sally' came on she'd
start clapping her hands and stomping her feet, raising her arms to
be picked up. I'd turn up the stereo and we'd whirl around the living
room, with Clara's hot spurt of breath in my ear, shouting
bum bum
in
the chorus. I loved the music, too; it made me feel brave, as if we were
on a road trip, just her and me, our hands held across the gears.

Sometimes the music was too loud, too early, and Guido would
emerge from his room, his face crumpling into a frown. 'What is this
NOISE
! You are not considerate of me,' he complained. But he'd smile
at Clara and swoop her up to dance on his shoulders. I couldn't look
when he did that – wasn't she too high up? I could see too clearly what
would happen to her if he miscalculated, and she fell.

But he wouldn't ever miscalculate, would he? Guido who'd juggled
sticks of fire? 'I think that's maybe a bit too high,' I said once, softly,
seeing her legs wobble, hoping in a way that he wouldn't hear. But he
did.

'You think I take risks with my daughter?' His voice was steely. He
put her down and she started to cry. 'You don't have faith in me?'

'No, no, it's just that you're not used to . . . she seems so high up, I
don't know if she can balance—'

His left eyebrow rose as he stared at me. 'You just want 'er all to
yourself,' he said as he turned away. 'I go out for breakfast, don worry.'

After I'd worked my way through the insect world, the publisher
commissioned me to write a new series of books called 'What Disease
is That?' When I told the Friday women, Doreen and Lena looked at
each other and howled.

'How will we bear it?' cried Lena.

'Save me!' wailed Doreen. She was laughing and snorting so much,
I thought she might need a sudden bad fright to get her breathing
again.

'Mummy, save Dory!' cried Clara.

But I had already collapsed on the sofa, infected by the general
hysteria.

I tried to keep laughing as I moved through bacteria and fungi
and the life-cycles of parasites, but it was hard. After a few weeks I
was convinced that Clara had the beginnings of meningococcal, viral
pneumonia, scabies, diphtheria . . . I felt as if my brain was a laboratory,
breeding possibilities of disaster. Could you get cancer of the pancreas
just by
thinking
about it? I developed mouth ulcers that I'd never had
before, but the doctor said it was just stress. He tentatively suggested
that I needn't make quite so many visits but rather just give things a
few days, unless I was really alarmed. He pointed out that it was a little
unusual and probably unnecessary to see your GP more than once a
week unless you were managing a chronic illness.

Things improved when I began a new series, 'Great Medical
Cures'. The first book was the most optimistic I had yet done. Often
I went around during the day feeling that something wonderful was
about to happen, because together with Madame Curie, I was about
to discover the X-ray. I'd look at Clara putting a piece of fluff -covered
banana that had dropped on the floor into her mouth and think, well,
there are cures for that!

We went to the zoo, the Powerhouse Museum, to the art gallery.
It was absorbing and entirely fulfilling going out with Clara, observing
her little face light up at some exhibit, or more spectacularly, at the
chocolate ice-cream we always ate afterwards. She was such an
enthusiastic companion, and she only wanted to be with me. On those
good afternoons, Clara happy, both of us brimming with milkshake
and information about the world, I felt full again, alive inside the way
I had when I was pregnant. I knew what I was
for
. Once, after Saraah's
birthday party, Clara took my face in her hands and said, 'You are my
present, Mummy.'

With so many outings and conversations, I was late for the first
time for a deadline. I didn't realise how late until I received a phone
call from the publisher, reminding me. Unfortunately, Guido took
the call. I don't know why Mary had to tell him, but he was probably
charming and inquisitive, as he considered her our patron and
deliverer from evil petty matters of money. His voice is also deep
and alluring and mysterious as dark toffee. He's nice to strangers he
admires. I probably wouldn't have ever told him I was late – in the
past year I'd begun to hide things, keep secrets about myself and my
days, the way I did as a teenager when I took periods off school or
stayed out too late in boys' cars.

'Why are you late with your book, Rachel?' he asked. He was
tapping the desk with a ruler. 'Your publisher is very concerned. Is not
good. Your payment will be delayed and they may think you are not so
reliable. Maybe they give the next series of books to someone else.'