The Best Thing (24 page)

‘Oh, okay,’ I say ungraciously and follow him around the house.

I wake up at about eleven in the morning. I lie in bed trying to piece together the last twelve hours. How many feeds did Bella
have? She’s due for one now, I can tell—my left breast is hard as a rock, hot with milk. Even as I notice it it starts to leak. Why isn’t she screaming? I’ve grown so used to being woken up by her crying that it’s weird to wake in a silent house. Weird, but
very
nice.

I try to add up the hours of sleep I got. I think it’s about seven, but broken every hour, and I remember being awake from one to two and also for the dawn. That’s okay, a total of seven means I’ll be able to think about something other than sleep for the rest of the day. I remember handing Bella to Pug as he came in from morning training and veering into the bedroom and collapsing here. Now the room is a hot-box, the garden shrilling with cicadas.

I get up to change breastpads, pick up the last few days’ milky, dribble-stained clothes, both Bella’s and mine. On the way through to the laundry I pass Pug asleep on the couch, with Bella on his chest, also sleeping. I finish setting my room in order, sorting a load of Bella-clothes onto the shelves, making the bed, which I haven’t had time to do for days. Then I go into the loungeroom and squat next to the couch, intending to wake Bella for a feed.

Then I think,
Why?
Obviously she’s not hungry enough to be uncomfortable. Why hop back on the treadmill before you have to? They’re both completely zonked, motionless except for Bella rising and falling with Pug’s breathing. She’s wearing just a nappy, and Pug’s hand is on it, holding her steady. When they get up she’s going to leave a wet print of her thin, froggy body on his T-shirt.

Pug’s snoring delicate snores like a cat’s, a single sticking in the throat on each breath. Bella makes no sound; I have to look really closely to differentiate her breathing from Pug’s. She has such a different face, asleep, without those great dark eyes dominating. I hardly ever see it, these days, trying to get some sleep myself whenever she lets me. There’s something foetal about it; she’s filled out a bit, but she still has a pointed chin. Her skin’s
cleared up since a spotty few days after she was born; she looks almost as dew-fresh as in her first hours.

Mine. Both of these bodies and the people inside them. This time last year I’d only just met Pug, and now there’s not only him, here in my home, but
her,
little
her,
whoever she’s going to be. I can’t believe her, can’t believe I grew her and gave birth to her. I think over her birth almost every day. Sometimes I’m in despair, thinking,
I had no idea what I was starting, I just had
no
idea.
Sometimes I’m trying to catch back that certainty I had then, that absolute, wholehearted willingness to scale mountains, swim seas and fight off hordes of ravenous beasts if Bella’s welfare required it, that strength I got from seeing how strong my body was, the extent of what it could do. I didn’t think I would ever return from that to being my own old self, griping and getting bogged down in tiny day-to-day details. I thought,
Oh, at last I’m grown up, at last I’m mature and noble.
And I was. And if I could have frozen myself in the hours I spent in the birthing-room I would have stayed that way.

But I came home, and discovered here how
many more
tiny day-to-day details there are in a baby’s life. And what details—the lowest of the low, bathing and bum-wiping, mopping up spew! Trying to put together a sentence, battling not to cry and scream yourself. Only just holding back from being an
animal,
let alone managing maturity, nobility!
I had no idea.
Everybody says, beforehand, ‘Oh, you’ll have your work cut out for you when the baby comes,’ but you don’t realise why they laugh that boy-I-only-just-got-out-alive laugh when they say it until you’re caught in the same trap, climbing the same walls, discovering hour after hour how
im
mature and
ig
noble you can be.

It’s only times like this—I back away from the sleepers and curl up in an armchair—times when you get a fragment of a break, that you can appreciate what’s going on. You wonder what happened to that old, before-baby life, and what you were so het up about. God, all those people I hated—who’d waste time on them? (Time, which I had lashings of, then, which I have only
the tiniest scraps of, now!) I used to care
so much
what Lisa Wilkinson thought—I remember, I used to try and dress in her style, even, for a while, which was when I first became visible to Brenner. And Brenner! What made me think we ever had
anything
in common? What made me think he ever cared two hoots about me? The more I think about it, the more I think the problem was that Brenner was just plain
boring
—he was just a superfit body kind of going through the motions of being alive. We never properly talked, just as Lisa and I never did—we always chattered on and cracked a lot of jokes, but nothing important ever got said. Talking with Pug, his words may come out all cockeyed and chewed apart, but he’s always saying something—he doesn’t just talk to make an impression. He’s secure in himself that way.

All I can do now is feel sorry for those people. Looking at Bella, thinking about Jasper and Donna and Lisa, they’re losing out so much (not that they’d think so!) by
not
sitting here seeing this baby,
having
her, having placed her in the world. They seem such tiny undeveloped creatures themselves,
playing
at being people, and getting it wrong. I got it wrong, too, really embarrassingly wrong, but now I’m starting to feel like a
human person,
which means looking out past your own
clothing
and what your body’s telling you and your own feelings, and beginning to see everyone else. And, God!, everyone else used to be like Bella—they all lay, even boneheaded Brenner, curled up asleep, so soft and small and easily damaged that your heart just, oh!, fists tight with fear for them.
Someone
stared at them and wondered, utterly unable to imagine, what they’d be like at one year, at five years, at seventeen!
Someone
held them to be sacred,
someone’s
life would have been ruined if they’d died.

And maybe, bringing them up, someone forgot, because of the details, the multiple and multiplying distractions, how miraculous they were, forgot about the full-blown person arriving and claiming breath, about the complete unconscious trust those little waxy red people had, from their first breath on. And they were allowed to go sour, somehow, and turn around and claw at
the people who’d welcomed them, and anyone else within reach, i.e. me, i.e. everyone who wasn’t a member of their group.

Forgetting—it’s easy to do, when you’re exhausted, and busy, when your child’s been yelling all night, when you haven’t got the time or energy to go to the toilet, let alone shower! Who could blame
anyone
for forgetting?

But there’s nothing in place anywhere to make people remember. Pug’s mum crosses herself every time she passes a church. If there were something like the crosses, the carvings, the stained-glass windows, the architecture of churches in maternity hospitals, in schools, in clinics, instead of them looking like barracks or prisons; if there were something to mark them as places where, every hour of every day and night, new people were arriving; if everyone noticed them and knew what they were about; if everyone believed, and crossed themselves, or slowed their cars, or took off their shoes, or laid their hands on their hearts, or
something;
if there was some ritual that included these places, these people in everyone’s lives, whether they were parents themselves or childless, young or old …

But there isn’t. There’s only the people themselves, the pink, froggy babies sleeping away the hot morning, the fathers providing the body-noise that soothes them, the mothers sitting to one side with their breastpads sodden and the sweet scent of their own milk in their nostrils. There are only the families. And sometimes families stay families, and sometimes they stop being sacred or special, and disperse. And sometimes they form new families and sometimes they strike out on their own, but they always take something with them—some imprint, some way of seeing, feeling, acting or reacting, so that some ancestor walking out of the fifteenth century might recognise my shrug, or my hairline, or the way I laugh or lose my temper, as her own way, or her father’s way; so that Bella lying on her deathbed with her great-grandchildren around her will hear them use my voice, or see her own face, or see Dad’s scowl on one of them.

They didn’t tell us this at school; they told us we were all
individuals carving out places for ourselves. No one ever warned me that someone else could take my heart and bare it to the world for breaking over and over again, the way Bella does. What did I think she was—some kind of
fashion accessory,
like a handbag, a poodle on a leash? Instead she’s my
self,
morphed with someone else’s so I can’t see the joins.

Bella starts her hunger-howl even before her eyes open, desperate in an instant. The room is almost foggy with the smell of milk. I gather her up from Pug’s chest, sit down, attach her to me. She glugs and chokes and shrieks. Then there’s the mind-bend of the milk letting down, as if it’s being pulled from my fingertips, from my tongue, from the roots of my hair.

In slow motion Pug sits up, yawns, rubs his face. Outside the cicadas cease, like a blanket snatched off us, letting cool silence in. Across the dimness, the milk-fog, the gulp and suck of Bella, the sheer impossibility of it all being real, I smile at Pug, and he at me. I smile and say, ‘Good morning.’