This Must Be the Place (36 page)

The logical loophole of this had floored Maeve but not Lucas. You go, he had said, when they’d opened their post to find a picture of a small Chinese girl with a blunt fringe and a yellow romper suit. You go and I’ll stay by the phone. I shan’t leave it for a minute. I won’t even go to the loo. Maeve had giggled at this and said, what will you do instead? and Lucas, without missing a beat, said, I’ll get a bedpan, one of those big, Victorian porcelain ones, and you’ll have to empty it when you get back.

Maeve has to grip the bottle hard, so hard she’s worried she might crack it, with her need of him. What would he say to her, what would he think, seeing her handling this so badly?

Maybe, she thinks, as she looks down at the hysterical and miserable child in her arms, she just isn’t meant to be a mother. Maybe she should take her back tomorrow – she should catch that bus again to the place with the apricot façade and find the people who gave her the child and say, I couldn’t do it. I was no good, she doesn’t like me, I can’t do it.

A minute later, Maeve has laid the child on the bed and picked up the phone, dialled a number, waited for the purr-click-purr of an international connection trying, trying, trying its best to make it, to succeed, to get where it wants to be and then suddenly, miraculously, Lucas is speaking into her ear and she is replying.

‘The child hates me,’ Maeve says. There is no good way to break it to him, she has reasoned, there is no way to soft-pedal the fact that they have come to the end of this road, the end of all roads, and are going to have to return the baby. ‘She’s miserable. She hates me. I can see it in her eyes. We have to give her back.’

Lucas says: ‘Where are you?’

Maeve says: ‘The hotel.’

Lucas says: ‘Go and see Claudette.’

Maeve does as she is told. She pretty much always has: first by her parents, then teachers, then lecturers, then bosses, then doctors and a whole host of other, less medically qualified experts in the business of conjuring babies, either from your own body or alternative sources. And see, Maeve thinks, where it’s got her. Here. Nowhere. Worse than nowhere.

She picks up the baby, however, keening now with a hoarse, rending cry, goes out of her room, along the corridor, and knocks on another door.

Her sister-in-law opens it. Her face is creased with sleep and she is wearing a nightdress, a loose white thing.

‘Oh,’ she says, pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘OK.’

She ushers Maeve through the door, past the sleeping form of Ari, who is stretched out under a sheet on Claudette’s bed, thumb in, fox by his side, and into the bathroom.

Claudette shuts the door.

‘Now,’ she says, turning round, ‘what’s up with you two?’

Maeve answers by bursting into tears, the first tears she has allowed herself all day, possibly because of the lovely, inclusive sounding ‘you two’, possibly because Maeve cannot take this sound any more, not a minute more – she has come to the end of her tether, the end of her rope, the end of the road. There is no more – of anything.

‘Shall I take her?’ Claudette asks tentatively, not wanting to grab the child, Maeve sees, against all instincts. Maeve nods, then watches as Claudette lifts the child, the baby, into her arms, watches as Claudette balances on the edge of the bath and sits the child on her knee, expertly, Maeve thinks, competently. And all the while Maeve tries to explain, tries to make Claudette see the magnitude of this disaster: she won’t stop crying, not at all, she doesn’t like me, doesn’t want to be with me, she’ll have to be given back, all a terrible mistake.

‘Might she be hungry?’

‘I tried feeding her,’ Maeve wails, brandishing the bottle, which she finds she is still holding. ‘She didn’t want it!’

Claudette presses her palm to the child’s cheeks, her brow, runs a finger round her collar. How calm she is, how good at this she is. How the child there, on her lap, presses against the white nightdress and makes the curve of her pregnancy evident.

When Lucas had called Claudette to ask her to go to China with Maeve to collect the baby, for moral support, he said, to help on the flight – wasn’t it easier for her to travel, these days, now that she had a married name she could hide behind? – Claudette had said yes, her voice hesitant, careful. Maeve was listening from the other side of the room and she already knew what was about to happen. There is one thing, she’d heard Claudette say, and Lucas had looked at Maeve across the room and he loudly cleared his throat over the ensuing utterance. Maeve had waited a moment, checking herself, checking herself all over, as a person might after a fall down a flight of stairs, but she had at the time been filled with a joyous optimism about the photograph of the toddler in a yellow romper suit so had shrugged and nodded at the same time. It didn’t matter, she’d said to Lucas, as he held the phone to his ear, frowning. It’s OK.

He had asked her again later, as they booked the flights, as they scoured the guidebook to find a hotel different from the one they had stayed in before, which had been infested with cockroaches. Was she really OK to go with Claudette, who was now pregnant? Maeve looked at him. Claudette had pulled off something astonishing, breathtaking, escaping her old life and resurfacing, like a diver, into something new: a new house, a new country and, most surprisingly, a new husband. Of course she’s pregnant, Maeve said to Lucas. You didn’t see that coming?

Now, she doesn’t feel so blasé, so generous, sitting there in a stifling, boxy bathroom, with a child who loathes the sight of her and her beautiful, expectant sister-in-law, who already has one child and will be able to go on having them, as many as she likes, whenever she likes.

‘You know what,’ Claudette is saying, starting to unhook the fabric loops on the child’s jacket. ‘I think she might be hot. What’s she got on under here?’

Claudette peels off the jacket and drops it to the floor. She lifts a jersey over the child’s head. Off come padded trousers, leggings, tights. A second jersey, a shirt, a T-shirt, a pair of socks. Maeve sees the child, her child, emerge from layer after layer of orphanage clothing.

When Claudette finishes and the baby is sitting on her knee, wearing just a nappy and a vest, Maeve has her hand over her face.

‘Oh, God,’ she says, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. What’s wrong with me? How could I have put her to sleep like that, in all those clothes?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Claudette says, dabbing at the baby’s perspiring brow with a damp washcloth. ‘How could anyone dress a child in that many layers in this climate?’

‘I can’t believe I didn’t check!’ Maeve cries. ‘I changed her nappy but I must have been on autopilot because everything I took off I just put back on! This just shows, doesn’t it, that I’m not cut out for this, that—’

‘It’s OK,’ Claudette says, laying a hand on her arm. ‘She’s OK.’

And she is. The child, Zhilan, she is called, which means ‘iris orchid’ – Maeve looked it up – sits on Claudette’s knee, looking first at Claudette and then at Maeve, her gaze one of startled astonishment, her mouth parted in a tiny, round O. What am I doing, she seemed to be saying, in a bathroom with you, and why was I wearing all those clothes?

Maeve looks at her. She looks and looks. If she was a liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breathe her in; if she were a pill, she would down her, a dress, she would wear her, a plate, she would lick her clean. Her hands gripping the hem of her vest, her toes flexed in mid-air, the place at her temples where the black hair crowds in. Her eyelids are the shape of a bird’s wing, her ribcage delicate branches. Her realness, her corporeality, the way her lungs go in and out, the way she turns her head to look around takes Maeve’s breath away. She cannot believe she is here, cannot believe she is hers.

‘She might,’ Claudette says, ‘be ready for that bottle now. What do you think?’

Maeve sits down. She makes herself ready, and when Claudette stands, Maeve opens her arms to take the child.

A Jagged, Dangerous Mass of Ice

Ari, Suffolk, 2010

‘J
ust a moment,’ the counsellor cried, and hurried to cram the remains of his lunchtime sandwich into his mouth, sweep his desk for tell-tale crumbs, crumple the greaseproof wrapper in his fist and drop it into the bin. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ He grabbed the file from his in-tray, swallowing an unchewed hunk of hummus-clogged bread, and flipped open the cover.

Ari Lefevre Lindstrom Wells Sullivan
, he saw. He had to read it twice.
Aged 16
. He let his eye travel down the page as he took a swig from his water-bottle. Lives in Ireland, mother, stepfather, attended this school for a year, subjects taken, blah, blah. But the counsellor’s eye was caught by one particular detail:
Previous schools attended – none
. He sighed and his head gave a single shake. He took a dim view of home-schooling. He turned his swivel chair and stood up.

A child – he opined, to an audience comprising his bookshelf, a watercolour of a Scandinavian lake, a Newton’s cradle, his effigy of a Yoruba deity, picked up a long time ago on a gap-year placement – is a social being. He or she requires, needs, nay, craves the company and instruction of his or her peer group.

The counsellor crossed the room, pausing only to light a candle on the mantelpiece. He had a handle on the session to come now. He felt inspiration, confidence, assurance surge through him. He loved this job, he loved it. He could help this Ari Whatever Hatchback Peugeot Whatever he was called, he knew he could. He could picture the child who would be waiting beyond the door, in all probability nervously, fearfully, although perhaps covering these emotions with the rough façade of teenage bravura. Ireland, the file had said, so the counsellor imagined the offspring of some Celtic hippie types. Auburn dreadlocks, a whispery Irish inflection, dressed in hand-felt and hemp, that particular brand of drivelly, directionless, formless home-schooling written all over him. Couldn’t read until he was eleven, could barely count, even now. He, the counsellor, would bring him out of himself, give him that direction, inspire him to exert himself in more mainstream educational channels, show him that there are other ways to live, besides weaving one’s own clothes, straining one’s own cheese, splitting one’s own logs.

The counsellor flung open the door to welcome this waif, this refugee, this victim of over-parenting.

He beheld a figure in dark clothes seated in the armchair outside his office. One foot balanced on the opposite knee, a newspaper folded on his lap, where a crossword was being filled in with a gold fountain pen. Polished leather ankle boots, navy sweater, narrow trousers and the kind of angular-framed tortoiseshell glasses usually worn by architects or web designers, black curly hair worn neither short nor long. The counsellor thought: This cannot be him. He thought: This must be someone else. A parent? No, too young. An older sibling of one of the pupils?

‘Oh,’ the counsellor said. ‘I was waiting for Ari …’ he floundered ‘… Ari … Le-something … um …’

The person nodded. Really, it was a quite extraordinary outfit – it made him look as though he’d stepped straight out of the pages of a French novel; he ought to be wearing a beret and smoking a Gauloises and expounding the theory of existentialism in a café on the Left Bank. Extraordinary, especially because most of the pupils at the school preferred to dress like off-duty rap stars, in ridiculously capacious jeans, sleeveless vests and baseball caps worn backwards. The person stood, recapped his fountain pen, laid a jacket over his arm and extended his hand. He was tall, this boy, with the kind of rangy, muscular thinness found in greyhounds.

The counsellor took the outstretched hand, bemused, trying to remember if a teenager had ever offered to shake hands with him before. Then he recalled himself to his script. ‘Ari,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’

‘It’s
Ar
i.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You said A
ri
, with the emphasis on the second syllable. It’s
Ar
i.’ The boy smiled. ‘Inflection on the first.’

The counsellor let go of his hand and motioned him inside. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, thank you for clearing that up.’

He felt better when seated behind his desk, when he had the file open before him, when he had the boy situated on the couch, which was sagging and enveloping, designed to make his subjects relax.

But Ari wasn’t in it for long. He was up again, almost immediately, his legs unfolding beneath him, to examine the Yoruba figure, the Scandinavian lake, to run his eyes over the bookshelves.

‘So, tell me,’ the counsellor began, ‘how are you finding the school? You’ve been here – how long? A year?’

‘An academic year,’ Ari replied, without breaking off from his examination of a Moroccan bowl. ‘Just under.’

The fountain pen was gripped in his left hand, the counsellor noticed, where the boy clicked the lid on and off, on and off.
Compulsive tics?
he wrote on his notepad.

‘And before that you were home-schooled?’

‘I was.’

‘By your parents?’

‘My mother.’

‘And your mother is …’

The boy turned an expressionless stare towards him.

‘A teacher?’ the counsellor hazarded.

Ari shook his head and seemed to be suppressing a smile.

‘So, help me paint a picture of your home life. It’s you, your mother, and …’ here, he checked the file ‘… three siblings?’

‘Two.’

‘And they are – how old?’

‘Six and one.’

‘Do they attend school?’

‘No.’

‘Whose decision was it for you to come to school here?’

Ari picked up and put down the Yoruba deity. He shrugged. ‘Mine. And Daniel’s.’

‘And Daniel would be …’ The counsellor floundered through the file.

‘My stepfather,’ Ari supplied.

The counsellor put down his pen and placed his hands on the desk. ‘Ari,’ he said, in a lower voice, ‘why don’t you come and sit? Take a seat. Now, tell me, what kind of a relationship do you have with your real father?’

Ari rolled his eyes. He sat, crossed one leg over the other, laid the newspaper on the floor beside him. ‘Are these standard questions? Do you ask everybody this? “Help me paint a picture of your home life”,‘ he repeated, and the counsellor was almost glad to hear something vaguely teenage come out of his mouth, so unnervingly mature did he appear. ‘“What kind of a relationship do you have with your father?”’ Ari gave a scoffing exhale and looked round with an expression of barely veiled disgust. ‘Is this the kind of asinine nonsense they teach you at counsellor school?’