Walking to the Moon (17 page)

The morning we brought Lily back from the hospital—the wonder of her, the mottled wrists, the frantic wrestling with the baby capsule—I placed her in the white bassinet in our room and without a murmur she slept. For a long time Michael and I lay on the bed beside her and listened to her breathing. Then he undressed me. It was slow because at first I didn't want him to see me: my loose belly, my cartoon breasts. I sat up and he undid my shirt and then the massive feeding bra, one embossed panel then the other (twin cuckoos), until suddenly we were shaking with laughter at the size of me, the proportions. Then he said, not looking at my face this time but at my lap (he spoke firmly and kindly, as if to a patient), ‘Let me have a look now.'

I lay back and lifted my arse and he pulled off the elasticised mummy pants but not the knickers because I said, ‘No, I'm scared, I don't know what's down there any more.' Michael cupped his hand over the cotton buttress of my pubis and said quietly, ‘Poor little cunt.'

‘Not so little,' I said in a sad voice, but I let him trace soft lazy finger lines around my underpants and after a while I stopped thinking. He eased them off, opened my legs and gazed until at last I said, ‘For god's sake tell me the worst. Will I ever play again?'

Michael looked up at me then and smiled. I smiled right back, and we stayed there grinning at each other like fools while beside us our child breathed in and out, in and out; as if she had been made for it. After a time Michael took his thumb and pressed it softly against the swollen outer lips of my poor cunt, up and down; and then softly against the poor bruised inner lips; here and there; here, there. It didn't hurt at all.

I'm not sure when it all changed. Weeks, maybe months. And I no longer felt godlike, I felt plain and fat and stupid. Michael stopped calling me Mama Buddha. He tried to make me go running and bought low-fat yoghurt. Sometimes I caught him watching me with an odd blank expression. When he was at work I sat on the couch while Lily slept, and rocked back and forth and ate Tim Tams. I was heavy and tired. I moved slowly as if underwater.

When I got back to the flat, that day, Michael was standing stiffly in the doorway, Lily mewing sleepily in his arms. ‘The door was left open,' he said in a tight voice. I looked at him and I saw how the colour drained from the skin around his lips when he was angry. I noted his use of the passive voice, how it obliterated the doer, leaving only the done to. I thought how pointless it all was. I heard my voice flat and unresponsive. ‘I was only gone five minutes.' Lily was awake now, her face red and puckered, preparing to cry. ‘You should have left her sleeping,' I said. ‘She hasn't had enough sleep.'

I took her from him then, back into her bedroom, and lay her on the change table on one of her fine muslin sheets, rewrapped her the way the visiting nurse had shown me; pulling the soft fabric firmly over each shoulder and around each arm to keep her from flailing, then wrapping the long ends of the fabric around and around her small body until she lay there like a moth, blinking up at me with her dark eyes. Then I put her quietly on her back in the cot and left the room, as the nurse had taught me, without looking back.

A couple of days later I went to see my doctor, the doctor Michael had found for me. He listened while I talked and then he wrote me a script for antidepressants. I can't say I felt they made much difference, although Michael said they seemed to be working and I probably worried less. But I still didn't like to be alone with her. I was afraid I would damage her.

Coming up now over a small rise, I am disturbed suddenly by a rectangular pellet of sound. It takes me a moment to realise it is my phone. There is a message. I take off my pack and unzip the front pocket. My call directory tells me that someone phoned half an hour ago. I must have been out of range. I don't recognise the number.

In time, it became easier. I learned to think of myself as someone more sensible, someone with a child. I joined a mothers' group and started swimming and cooked meals for when Michael came home. I drank occasionally and not to excess and smoked one or two cigarettes a night, that was all. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of myself unexpectedly in a shop front and wondered at the woman reflected back, soft-fleshed, mousy haired, indistinct. Sometimes it was hard to believe I was the same person (the life I had before unharnessed), and sometimes, in the supermarket for instance, or once in a lift, I got a sudden lurching feeling as if the world had slipped and I was falling, and I grabbed Lily's pusher to steady myself. But most of the time things were fine. Pretty good. Once a week we got in a babysitter and Michael and I would go out to dinner or to see a film. Sometimes we had friends around and sometimes Michael talked to me about the work he was doing. More than once he said that I was good for him
.
When he was home, he played with Lily or walked her to the beach and she waddled after him, face alight, while I sat on the porch or went inside and did the dishes, and thought that I must be lucky, that I must have done something right, although I stopped wanting sex. I didn't want him inside me.

It is odd now to wonder how I managed to lose so much of myself. Sloughed off layer by unremarkable layer. First, the artifice (the bleached hair, the jaunty sunnies), then the attitudes: the sly jokes, the cocked eyebrow, the occasional recklessness; and eventually what you might call the spirit, a certain blitheness.

Anna did not return for nearly two weeks. Twelve days. I told myself that it was the same as always, a period of days that must be traversed. I told myself it was only two hours. I told myself she must not have had sisters or brothers, or they would have looked after the mother instead. The glands in my throat swelled up. I put a note on my door. Do not disturb. That afternoon Steff delivered a letter with my lunch on a tray, propped up so that I could not miss it, and left (stalked out, I thought) without speaking. It was from Michael. On the back of the envelope he had written in large letters, ‘Please read. It's about Lily'. Inside was a school newsletter and timetable. School starts at nine and ends at three-thirty but for the first fortnight the new children finish at one p.m. I know the school. It is the one Michael and I visited last year. It is the closest to home, but it seemed quite nice, we agreed later—informal, no uniform. In the principal's office with its open door I felt myself start to soften. Passing children looked in and some waved. The principal, a tall woman with big hands and sensible trousers in a stretchy fabric, seemed patient and practical. She too had been an only child, she said, nodding at Lily, who was fidgeting on my knee, and she remembered how exciting it was starting school and meeting so many new friends.

‘I like being an only,' said Lily. ‘Because then I can be the boss.' And the adults all laughed.

‘You'll do fine,' the principal told her as we left, and Michael and I caught each other's eyes and nodded.

Even so, by the time we got home I was blank with fatigue, a white shutter that descended as I climbed into the car, and through which I could barely decipher images or sound. I asked Michael to drop me at home on the way to Lily's crèche, ignoring her wails and his sharp sigh. Inside I felt my way to Lily's room and her small wooden bed, her pink and white quilt. I woke, still curled on my side, hours later, as if drugged.

My phone rings.

‘Jessica,' says a voice, or at least that's what I think it says, and then cuts out. The sound is too distorted for me to tell even if the caller was male or female. I am irritated, first at the caller and then at myself (my curiosity) I check the number. It is the same as earlier today.

The timetable Michael had sent me was full of subjects I could not understand. Acronyms. LOTE. DEAR. Monday assembly at nine-fifteen. Recess at eleven, lunch at one. I pinned it up on the wall above my bed then took it down ten minutes later, oppressed by the information, the segmentation, the passing of each day.

Even alone, time now tracks me down. Playtime, lunchtime. Who will she play with?

A
nna was back the next Tuesday. By eleven-thirty I was edgy, unable to lie still, unable to concentrate. Irritable. I went to the toilet three times, walked into the door the third time, leaving a red mark right in the middle of my forehead. Shit. I left my room at two minutes past eleven and made my way down to the beige room, which was shut. A moment of panic. She had come and gone. Check the hall clock. Three minutes past. I knocked at the door. ‘Come in, Jess.'

She was seated. Resting back in one of the green Ikea chairs. So there was nothing to do but go in: don't smile; traverse the room; put my bag down. Why a bag? Why bring a bag? Sit.

‘How are you Jess?'

Silence. How am I? She sat quietly in her chair, hands resting in her lap, waiting for my response. I felt my eyes start darting around the room, bookshelf, ceiling. I tried to bring them back to her, to find in my body the repose she so clearly had in hers. I tried to find a feeling that came from inside, not just this raw prowling certainty of being looked at.

Finally, in a tight trying-not-to-sound-tight little voice, I said, ‘I hate it when you ask that question. I never know what to say.' Now I could look at her. The ball, I thought, is in your court. Anna didn't change her expression.

‘Is there something you'd like me to do instead?' she said.

‘Pardon?' A quick surge of panic.

‘Is there something else you would like me to do or say?'

Again my eyes started their flickering around the room, her chair, the space above her head.

‘I just feel exposed, I feel as if you're staring at me.'

‘You don't like it when I look at you?'

‘No.'

‘You could ask me not to.'

‘We can hardly have a whole session without you looking at me.' Terse.

‘You could cover your eyes,' she said, unperturbed, putting her hand, visor-like to her forehead, ‘like this.'

For a moment I felt like laughing. It was ridiculous. Childish. ‘No thanks.' An exhalation. A snort.

‘Why not?'

‘Because I'd feel—silly,' I said at last.

‘What would you like to do in that case?' She glanced at the clock. ‘We have, what, fifty minutes to go. Is there something you would like to do with that time?'

I could feel it now. A slow surge deep in my belly. My skin beginning to prickle.

‘I just feel very exposed,' I said, talking quickly now, trying to keep the feeling down, bat it away, get it off me. Get her off me. ‘I mean it's silly, I know, weird, that I would feel that way, but it's just that sometimes in here I feel like an insect—under a microscope.'

I stopped, waiting for her to speak. She kept looking at me, silent, and eventually said carefully, ‘I am aware,' and paused— annoyed, I thought, she sounds annoyed—‘that I have made several suggestions and none have been acceptable to you. I notice that you are agitated. Irritable. But that you—' ‘I just don't like you asking me all these questions,' I said, petulant, a child.

‘Would you like me to ask you something else?'

‘No.'

‘Would you like me to be quiet?' She paused and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. ‘I can do that, you know. Or I can do something else. I just don't know what it is that you want.'

Eventually I said, ‘I don't want you to be quiet, either.' I sounded like a child. I heard myself, but I couldn't stop. I laughed, a nervous snort; trapped in this stupid, stupid conversation. ‘It's ludicrous, I know.' Another snort. An appeal.

‘I find it interesting,' she said. ‘You don't like where the conversation is going, and then what?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘What happens when you don't like something? What do you do with that?'

And I was stuck again. Trapped. Seconds passed. ‘I can't— just sit here—and be—looked at,' I said finally, a compressed whisper. ‘I feel as if you're judging me.'

‘Would you like to check that feeling out with me?' she asked, conversationally. ‘Or do you just assume that to be true?'

‘What? Oh no, I don't, not at all. I'm sure it's not true. At least, I don't know, maybe it is. I just, I just—' I trailed off again, abject, miserable. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.' As I spoke, I shook my left arm, sharply. Shit. Shit. Shit. Anna looked at me, looked at my arm.

‘There's the objection,' she said, as if she had been waiting. There's the bus. ‘You might shake your arm again, Jess.' More a requirement than a request. My arm was lying in my lap now, restless, reluctant, prickles of black dancing beneath the skin. I lifted it a fraction, then dropped it. My body sagged forwards. I shook my head. No.

‘What is happening, Jess?'

I was slumped over, holding my arms around my thighs. ‘Nothing.'

‘Doesn't look like nothing. Feel how you have collapsed.'

I pushed myself back to sitting, trying to be normal, invisible. Upright. Immediately my left hand started tingling again. I shook it again, once, helplessly, near tears, trying to flick away this feeling, this black feeling under my skin. Then I took it swiftly, almost roughly, with my right hand, held it in my lap.