Little Black Book of Stories (9 page)

Damian said, “It’s a girl. I can see her. She’s fine.”

Daisy said, “You, Dr. Becket, will you
go away,
please.”

HE INTERVIEWED NANNIES. They came and sat on his sofa in his elegant flat, and stared at his paintings. He told them that the newborn baby would arrive in three months, and that it was his own baby whose mother would be unable to care for her. They stared with a child-carer’s pity at the pale upholstery. One, who was friendly, and the eldest of seven—“I’ve looked after kids since I was twelve years old, I know all their ways . . .”—he rejected because she was Irish, and wore a religious medal. One, very upper-class, had a slightly loopy look and said she didn’t think Docklands was a very suitable place to bring up a baby. They need fresh air, she said, looking as though finding even these words was a disagreeable effort to her. He didn’t like the sensation of being about to be dependent on, in need of placating, these unknown young women. He finally picked a Dane, called Astrid, largely because she knew about painting, exclaimed over the Herons and the Terry Frosts, said, without pushing, that it would be good for a child to grow up amidst such colour.

DAISY NEARLY LOST the baby at seven months. She was in the hospital for a week, with symptoms of pre-eclampsia, curious pillows of swollen flesh growing around her stick-like ankles. Damian visited her every day. He checked up on her body, and his child’s body inside her body. She didn’t really talk to him any more. The defiance had gone out of her, and was replaced by an unnerving combination of resignation and fear. When Damian said the foetus was in a good position, or that her blood-pressure had improved, she said, “Well, that’s good, then,” as though she expected nothing, either good or bad.

If Martha visited Daisy, Damian didn’t see her. He had seen Martha drive away from the hospital with a man—a man in a good mohair suit, with longish hair, talking animatedly. Martha had her own life. He had a wife in Ireland and an unborn baby in Pondicherry Ward.

BUT IT WAS to Martha that Daisy ran when her waters broke, unexpectedly early. Martha, mistrustful of ambulances, put Daisy in her own car and drove her to St. Pantaleon’s. Daisy, her body heaving, her face blue-white, said, “Don’t go away, please don’t go away.” The admissions desk alerted Dr. Nanjuwany, who took it on herself to alert Damian. He came down to find Daisy clutching Martha’s clothes, saying, “Don’t go away. Please don’t go away.” Martha looked at Damian. She thought there must be some ethical reason why he should not be involved in what was about to happen. She observed that he was at the end of some tether, his self-control exaggerated absurdly. She said, “No, I won’t go away. I want to see this baby.”

Daisy said, “There won’t be no baby. It will all go wrong. I’ve known that all along.” She howled, very loudly, over a wave of contraction and pain, “It’s going to die and so am I and
he
knows it is, and he knows I am,
he
knows . . .”

Martha said to Damian, as Daisy was wheeled away:

“She’s in pain. She doesn’t mean what she says—”

“Yes, she does.”

“They say women in labour shout out all sorts of things . . .”

“They do. I know, it’s my job. But she does think she’s going to die. I see it now. I didn’t see it before. She’s the sort of person I can’t—I can’t imagine what she really thinks or feels—
at all.
”

“Would it be all right if I stay?”

“It isn’t your problem.”

“She came to me.”

He wanted to cry,
I
didn’t. Exactly because she did I couldn’t. And can’t. He flipped his mind back to obstetrics.

“I need to check how she’s doing,” he said.

Daisy’s labour was long and horrible. She made it worse by letting loose nine months of pent-in terror and rage, screaming, weeping, and tensing all her muscles. She could not be too much anaesthetised, for fear of harming the baby, whose heartbeat was irregular, whose presentation turned out to be very awkward, with a twisted shoulder. Dr. Nanjuwany in turn panicked, and, ignoring what she knew and had not been told were all the ethical reasons for not involving Damian, she turned to him. He ended up delivering a live baby, slowly, deliberately, skilfully, not because he was its father, but because he was the man at that moment in that hospital who could deal with such a problem. He stitched the dangerous rip in the neck of Daisy’s womb, stroked the pale hair away from the sodden forehead, took her pulse, and wondered where her wandering soul was drifting as she relaxed into a drugged and unencumbered peace. He had nearly killed her. That was the truth of it.

HE WENT TO LOOK at his daughter.

She had been washed, and swaddled, and was breathing lightly, regularly. She had soft dark hair. She was a little bruised. She opened hazy mussel-dark eyes, and seemed to consider him. He looked back at her, not in pride at his achievement—although in the melodramatic way of real lives, he had saved her, and indeed Daisy. He was overcome with dreadful love and grief. She was a person. She had not been there, and now she was there, and she was the person he loved. It was simple and he was a changed man. His eyes were hot with tears. The hospital rustled and whispered behind him.

WHEN HE WENT to visit the next day, he found he was in the grip of an exalted fear. He was going to see the child again—that was the essential thing. In his mind he had named her Kate. He was going to see Daisy, who did not want to know or see Kate. He thought he would start with the difficult thing— he was not a procrastinator—the difficult thing was Daisy. Then he would revisit his daughter.

DAISY WAS in a curtained-off space of her own, with a bowl of fruit on her locker. She was sitting up in bed in a hospital nightshirt, and her hair was washed and floating. She was holding—he saw her—the baby, in her arms, at her breast. The baby was feeding. He could see the little ripples of movement in the fine skin over the back of her skull. She was feeding from the pierced nipple. Daisy’s little face was completely wet with tears. Her little hands, with their tattooed mittens, tightened round Kate, and grasped. She stared at Damian as though he meant to rip the child out of her arms. Her lip, with its silly studs, trembled.

Damian sat down heavily on the visitor’s chair. Daisy said, in a small but perfectly grown-up voice:

“I didn’t understand. I didn’t know. She’s perfect. No, it isn’t that, everybody says that. She’s
somebody,
she’s a person, and she’s mine and she—seems to need me. I mean, it does seem to be
me
she needs. I mean, I can’t help it, she can’t help it, I’m—hers, I mean, I’m her mother.” The word obviously gave her trouble. She repeated, “I didn’t understand. I didn’t know.”

Damian said, “You are right of course. She is also mine.” He could have added “And I am hers,” but he wasn’t capable of so much rhetoric.

“You know, they all go on about love. Love, love, love. You and me, me and you—well, not you and me
personally,
but in the abstract. No one writes songs to babies, do they? But when I
saw
her—that was love, that was
it,
I know what it is—”

“I know. That’s what I felt. When I saw her.”

The baby hiccupped. Awkwardly, but gently, Daisy tipped her up on her shoulder and patted her back. Then, gingerly, she held her out to Damian, who took her in his arms, and looked down into the unique, lovely face.

“What the hell are we going to do now?” Damian asked.

Martha, bringing a posy of daisies and anemones, came into the little space to find them both staring at the child, who lay on her shawl on the bed between them. Damian and Daisy had faces of baffled adoration. Daisy was still weeping, steadily and easily. It was perfectly clear to Martha what had happened. She thought of walking away, quickly. Damian repeated, just as he caught sight of Martha:

“What the hell are we going to do now?”

Daisy said to Martha like a child to its mother:

“I didn’t understand. I didn’t know.”

“Don’t cry,” said Martha, coming further in. She saw that Damian had tears in his eyes. The baby began to cry and Damian and Daisy both put out their arms to pick her up and comfort her, and both drew back together. Martha, not herself moved to adoration, could see no satisfactory way out of this state of affairs, which was supposed to be not her problem.

“We’ll think of something. Because we shall have to,” she said. The other two nodded vaguely. All three continued to stare at the baby.

A Stone Woman

(For Torfi Tulinius)

AT FIRST she did not think of stones. Grief made her insubstantial to herself; she felt herself flitting lightly from room to room, in the twilit apartment, like a moth. The apartment seemed constantly twilit, although it must, she knew, have gone through the usual sequences of sun and shadow over the days and weeks since her mother died. Her mother—a strong bright woman—had liked to live amongst shades of mole and dove. Her mother’s hair had shone silver and ivory. Her eyes had faded from cornflower to forget-me-not. Ines found her dead one morning, her bloodless fingers resting on an open book, her parchment eyelids down, as though she dozed, a wry grimace on her fine lips, as though she had tasted something not quite nice. She quickly lost this transient lifelike-ness, and became waxy and peaked. Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant.

She busied herself with her dictionary work, and with tidying love away. She packed it into plastic sacks, creamy silks and floating lawns, velvet and muslin, lavender crêpe de Chine, beads of pearl and garnet. People had thought she was a dutiful daughter. They did not imagine, she thought, two intelligent women who understood each other easily, and loved each other. She drew the blinds because the light hurt her eyes. Her inner eye observed final things over and over. White face on white pillow amongst white hair. Colourless skin on lifeless fingers. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of her flesh. The efficient rage of consuming fire, the handfuls of fawn ash which she had scattered, as she had promised, in the hurrying foam of a Yorkshire beck.

She went through the motions, hoping to become accustomed to solitude and silence. Then one morning pain struck her like a sudden beak, tearing at her gut. She caught her breath and sat down, waiting for it to pass. It did not pass, but strengthened, blow on blow. She rolled on her bed, dishevelled and sweating. She heard the creature moaning. She tried to telephone the doctor, but the thing shrieked raucously into the mouthpiece, and this saved her, for they sent an ambulance, which took the screaming thing to a hospital, as it would not have taken a polite old woman. Later they told her she had had at most four hours to live. Her gut was twisted and gangrenous. She lay quietly in a hospital bed in a curtained room. She was numb and bandaged, and drifted in and out of blessed sleep.

The surgeon came and went, lifting her dressings, studying the sutures, prodding the walls of her belly with strong fingers, awakening sullen coils of pain somewhere in deep, yet less than moth-like on the surface. Ines was a courteous and shamefast woman. She did not want to see her own sliced skin and muscle.

She thanked him for her life, unable to summon up warmth in her voice. What was her life now, to thank anyone for? When he had gone, she lied to the nurses about the great pain she said she felt, so they would bring drugs, and the sensation of vanishing in soft smoke, which was almost pleasure.

The wound healed—very satisfactorily, they said. The anaesthetist came in to discuss what palliatives she might be allowed to take home with her. He said, “I expect you’ve noticed there’s no sensation around the incision. That’s quite normal. The nerves take time to join again, and some may not do so.” He too touched the sewed-up lips of the hole, and she felt that she did not feel, and then felt the ghost of a thrill, like fine wires, shooting out across her skin. She still did not look at the scar. The anaesthetist said, “I see he managed to construct some sort of navel. People feel odd, we’ve found, if they haven’t got a navel.”

She murmured something. “Look,” he said, “it’s a work of art.”

So she looked, since she would be going home, and would now have to attend to the thing herself.

The wound was livid and ridged and ran the length of her white front, from under the ribs to the hidden places underneath her. Where she had been soft and flat, she was all plumpings and hollows, like an old cushion. And where her navel had been, like a button caught in a seam at an angle, was an asymmetric whorl with a little sill of skin. Ines thought of her lost navel, of the umbilical cord that had been a part of her and of her mother. Her face creased into sorrow; her eyes were hot with tears. The anaesthetist misinterpreted them, and assured her that it would all look much less angry and lumpy after a month or two, and if it did not, it could be easily dealt with by a good plastic surgeon. Ines thanked him, and closed her eyes. There was no one to see her, she said, it didn’t matter what she looked like. The anaesthetist, who had chosen his profession because he didn’t like people’s feelings, and preferred silence to speech, offered her what she wanted, a painkiller. She drifted into gathered cloud as he closed the door.

THEIR FLAT, now her flat, was on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house in a narrow city square. The stairs were steep. The taxi-driver who brought her home left her, with her bag, on the doorstep. She toiled slowly upwards, resting her bag on the stairs, clinging to the banisters, aware of every bone in knee and ankle and wrist, and also of the paradox of pain in the gut and the strange numb casing of the surface skin. There was no need to hurry. She had time, and more time.

Inside the flat, she found herself preoccupied with time and dust. She had been a good cook—she thought of herself in the past tense—and had made delicious little meals for her mother and herself, light pea soups, sole with mushrooms, vanilla soufflés. Now she could make neither cooking nor eating last long enough to be interesting. She nibbled at cheese and crusts like a frugal mouse, and could not stay seated at her table but paced her room. The life had gone out of the furnishings and objects. The polish was dulled and she left it like that: she made her bed with one crumpled pull. She had a sense that the dust was thickening on everything.

She did what work she had to do, conscientiously. The problem was, that there was not enough of it. She worked as a part-time researcher for a major etymological dictionary, and in the past had been assiduous and inventive in suggesting new entries, new problems. Now, she answered those queries which were sent to her, and they did not at all fill up the huge cavern of space and time in which she floated and sank. She got up, and dressed herself carefully, as though she was “going out to work.” She knew she must not let herself go, that was what she must not do. Then she walked about in the spinning dust and came to a standstill and stared out of the window, for minutes that seemed like hours, and hours that seemed like minutes. She liked to see the dark spread in the square, because then bedtime was not far away.

The day came when the dressings could, should, be dispensed with. She had been avoiding her body, simply wiping her face and under her arms with a damp face-cloth. She decided to have a bath. Their bath was old and deep and narrow, with imposing brass taps and a heavy coil of shower-hosing. There was a wide wooden bath-rack across it, which still held, she saw now, private things of her mother’s—a loofah, a sponge, a pumice stone. Her mother had never needed help in the bathroom. She had made fragrant steam from rosewater in a blue bottle, she had used baby-talc, scented with witch-hazel. For some reason these things had escaped the post-mortem clearance. Ines thought of clearing them now, and then thought, what does it matter? She ran a deep lukewarm bath. The old plumbing clanked and shuddered. She hung her dressing-gown—grey flannel—on the door, and very carefully, feeling a little giddy, clutching the rim, climbed into the bath and let her bruised flesh down into the water.

The warmth was nice. A few tense sinews relaxed. Time went into one of its slow phases. She sat and stared at the things on the rack. Loofah, sponge, pumice. A fibrous tube, a soft mess of holes, a shaped grey stone. She considered the differences between the three, all essentially solids with holes in. The loofah was stringy and matted, the sponge was branching and vacuous, the pumice was riddled with needle-holes. She stared, feeling that she and they were weightless, floating and swelling in her giddiness. Biscuit-coloured, bleached khaki, shadow-grey. Colourless colours, shapeless shapes. She picked up the sponge, and squeezed cooling water over her bust, studying the random forms of droplets and tricklings. She did not like the sponge’s touch; it was clammy and fleshy. The loofah and the sponge were the dried-out bodies, the skeletons, of living things. She picked up the pumice, a light stone tear, shaped to the palm of a hand, felt its paradoxical lightness, and dropped it into the water, where it floated. She did not know how long she sat there. The water cooled. She made a decision, to throw away the sponge. When she lifted herself, awkwardly, through the surface film, the pumice chinked against her flesh. It was an odd little sound, like a knock on metal. She put the pumice back on the rack, and touched her puckered wound with nervy fingers. Supposing something should be left in there? A clamp, a forceps, a needle? Not exactly looking she explored her reconstructed navel with a fingertip. She felt the absence of sensation and a certain glossy hardness where the healing was going on. She tapped, very softly, with her fingernail. She was not sure whether it was, or was not, a chink.

The next thing she noticed was a spangling of what seemed like glinting red dust, or ground glass, in the folds of her dressing-gown and her discarded underwear. It was a dull red, like dried blood, which does not have a sheen. It increased in quantity, rather than diminished, once she had noticed it. She observed tiny conical heaps of it, by skirting-boards, on the corners of Persian rugs—conical heaps, slightly depressed, like ant-hill castings or miniaturised volcanoes. At the same time she noticed that her underwear appeared to be catching threads, here and there, on the rough, numb expanse of the healing scars. She felt a kind of horror and shame in looking at herself spread with lumps and an artificial navel. As the phenomenon grew more pronounced, she explored the area tentatively with her fingertips, over the cotton of her knickers. Her stomach was without sensation. Her fingers felt whorls and ridges, even sharp edges. They disturbed the glassy dust, which came away with the cloth, and shone in its creases. Each day the bumps and sharpness, far from calming, became more pronounced. One evening, in the unlit twilight, she finally found the nerve to undress, and tuck in her chin to stare down at herself. What she saw was a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula in the heavens. It was the colour—or
a
colour—of raw flesh, like an open whip-wound or knife-slash. It trembled, because she was trembling, but it was cold to the touch, cold and hard as glass or stone. From the star-arms the red dust wafted like glamour. She covered herself hastily, as though what was not seen might disappear.

The next day, it felt bigger. The day after, she looked again, in the half-light, and saw that the blemish was spreading. It had pushed out ruddy veins into the tired white flesh, threading sponge with crystal. It winked. It was many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar. She was half-tempted to insert a fingernail under the veins and chip them off, and she could not.

She thought of it as “the blemish.” She thought more and more about it, even when it was covered and out of sight. It extended itself—not evenly, but in fits and starts, around her waist, like a shingly girdle pushing down long fibrous fingers towards her groin, thrusting out cysts and gritty coruscations towards her pubic hair. There were puckered weals where flesh met what appeared to be stone. What
was
stone, what else was it?

One day she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. These she tried to prise away, and failed. They were attached deep within; they could be felt to be stirring stony roots under the skin surface, pulling the muscles. Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle. Slowly, slowly, day by quick day, her torso was wrapped in a stony encrustation, like a corselet. She could feel that under the stones her compressed inwards were still fluid and soft, responsive to pain and pressure.

She was surprised at the fatalism with which she resigned herself to taking horrified glances at her transformation. It was as though, much of the time, her thoughts and feelings had slowed to stone-speed, nerveless and stolid. There were, increasingly, days when a new curiosity jostled the horror. One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules. They glittered as she moved. She saw that her stony casing was not static—points of rock salt and milky quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like tears between layers of hornblende. She learned the names of some of the stones when curiosity got the better of passive fear. The flat, a dictionary-maker’s flat, was furnished with encyclopaedias of all sorts. She sat in the evening lamplight and read the lovely words: pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff.