The Fahrenheit Twins (17 page)

Christine lifted her baby off the changing table and back into his cot. She arranged the loose, floppy arm neatly by his side so that it resembled the other one. She arranged the pale blue blanket over his squirming body and tucked it gently up to his spittly chin. Every time he kicked the blanket away she replaced it, while the window-shaped rectangle of sunlight inched across the floor almost imperceptibly and motes of dust loitered in the overbreathed air.

After a long time the baby stopped shrieking, then his noise subsided to a gulping, gasping yawn. His face began to unswell, gradually losing its resemblance to a punnet of squashed tomato and settling back into an image of a human infant. But for his ugliness and the drool on his perpetually inflamed chin, he might almost be a baby from the cover of a baby magazine. Almost.

Looking at him sometimes, she couldn’t actually see him as an infant at all. He seemed unconvincing as a new arrival to the world. There was a darkness in his brow, a slyness in his eyes, a set to his mouth, which made him look like he was a man already, as if her womb had been some kind of public bar where he’d already spent half a lifetime sipping beer, swapping grievances with his mates, and staring at women’s breasts.

Christine sat down gingerly in the softest armchair, easing herself into it for fear of making the pains from her still-unhealed episiotomy worse. It had been several months now since she’d been cut open, and the wound was refusing to go away. Bending down so recklessly to pick up her fallen baby had really yanked at the scars. She took a deep breath, held it for a long time, and let it go. Then she settled in, next to the cot and the changing table, and watched the sun move across the carpet for the rest of the day.

At twilight, her husband came home.

‘How’s my little man, then?’ he said.

‘He’s fine,’ Christine replied.

‘Have a good day, then?’

‘Me?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

As always, she felt like shoving him into a chair, standing over him, and telling him exactly what her day had been like. She wanted to let him know that her day had been an outrage, a mockery, an insult. All those minutes joined end to end, yet endless; an eternity of useless minutes spent either waiting for nothing to happen, or of waiting for something to stop; of longing for someone else’s sleep (never your own) to go on and on, of being bored and anxious knowing it wouldn’t. She wanted to rail against all the hands-on fussery, the brainless drudgery, the interminable succession of soft interventions, pathetically small triumphs erased by repetition, washed away by piss and tears and lukewarm water, all to achieve an illusion of normality. Every morning at 8:15, her husband would leave her alone in the house with an infant gurgling in a bed of clean fluffy cotton; at 5:45 he would return and find her alone in the house with an infant gurgling in a bed of clean fluffy cotton; nothing, apparently, had happened. She had, apparently, lain around the house like a trusted pet, luxuriating in the quiet and the central heating. No one could begin to understand the violence that was done to her mind and spirit every day, the way her soul was tenderised by a thousand hammer blows delivered with instinctive accuracy and force by a furious little fist.

‘Fine thanks,’ she said.

He switched on the television and, before the picture even materialised, walked away to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea. He had a few minutes to kill, waiting for a domestic soap opera to finish and for the news to begin.

‘Here you are, love,’ he said, handing her a steaming mug as the strident music announced the roundup of the day’s important events.

News no longer made sense to Christine. She wondered whether it made any sense to anybody really, beyond giving them something to discuss at work. A glimpse of a man in a grey suit, strenuously denying the ‘findings’ of a ‘commission’. What commission? What findings? What man? In a moment he was gone, replaced by some new war in a faraway country. What country? What war?

‘Shhh,’ her husband would say, if she ever asked. ‘I’ve missed some.’

Numb, she would leave the battleground to its soldiers and journalists, and prepare dinner. She vaguely wished to be sympathetic to the people suffering in the war, but everyone who appeared on camera seemed so wonderfully free to her, so alive; not one of them was confined to a baby’s cot-side, unavailable to comment on important matters. They gesticulated angrily at the camera, stating their opinions with passion, and the world listened. These war people were exotic creatures, like cheetahs or antelopes, filmed in the wild. Even when covered with blood, stumbling down a bombed street, they inhabited a wider and airier sphere than hers.

A baby’s explosive cry sped through the house and found her where she stood in the kitchen. It impacted against its natural target, her brain, for what must have been the thousandth time.

By chance (for he rarely touched their baby) her husband had made some overture to the infant during an advertisement. In doing so, he evidently nudged the baby’s broken shoulder, well-swaddled though it was in the bedding, and the infant began to scream, as suddenly and loudly as a car alarm.

Christine pulled a bubbling saucepan off the flame, covered it with a lid, and hurried out of the kitchen to the front room.

‘I just tickled him,’ her husband protested, helpless by the crib, his hands twitching at his sides.

‘It’s all right,’ she reassured him, displacing him at the epicentre of trouble. ‘He’s … touchy just now.’

‘Teething, maybe,’ he suggested, straining manfully to meet her somewhere near where he guessed she lived.

‘Could be,’ she sighed, her eyes squinting shut against the electric proximity of the baby’s shrieking as she lifted him, swaddling clothes and all, to her breast. ‘Could be.’

In a couple of minutes she had him quiet, sucking at her. His mouthings were like soft rainfall heard above the low distant thunder of the tumbledryer. Everything was as it always was, by this time of evening. The accident was already fading in her memory, like yesterday’s news, yesterday’s grey-suited men.

Next day, Christine dropped her baby again.

This time it was not exactly an accident, although it was certainly not premeditated either. She was changing him, again, and had just got to the part where she was holding him aloft, blowing gently on his freshly powdered groin. His disjointed arm was strapped with a ribbon of gauze to his stocky torso, and tied with a bow at the back. His free arm punched the air as he yelled. She blew at a distance, taking deep breaths, keeping her face well clear of his lunging feet.

She wondered what would happen if she let him fall.

Her grip was firm; she had no intention of loosening it. Yet she was entranced by the hugeness of the responsibility she carried, and the smallness of the action that might cast a spotlight on her. A single loosening of her fingers would be enough. Even if she was startled into loosening them by the ring of a telephone or a knock at the door, she might still be dragged into the glare of public condemnation. How strange! Her own life had been pummelled into unrecognizability by her baby, she had been hacked mercilessly adrift from the life she’d constructed for herself before falling pregnant, yet no-one was investigating this enormity; there was no public outcry, no police interest, no social worker sniffing around the door. No-one seemed to think that anything untoward had occurred, despite the fact that a confident young woman with a keen wit had been brutalised into a shuffling automaton.

One of the reasons she couldn’t understand newspapers nowadays was that, even from the occasional headline she had time and energy to read, she got the impression that more and more children were being awarded large sums of money to compensate them for any unhappiness they may have suffered while in the care of grownups. The grievances ranged from sexual abuse to misdiagnosis of learning difficulties, and Christine had no doubt that some of them were awful enough to bother the courts with. But she couldn’t understand why no one ever mentioned the suffering of the carers. Tortured to insanity, they ended up with their picture in the paper, captioned THE FACE OF EVIL.

Christine was about to replace her baby in his cot when, without warning, he started peeing. His hard nub of a penis squirted scalding urine onto her breast. In a paroxysm of disgust, she let him fall.

Again, he landed on the thinly carpeted floor; again there was a snap of bone. Again, she picked him up immediately and checked the damage. There was a good deal more of it this time. He had landed bottom-first.

However, calming him down didn’t take quite as long this time. It was as though he himself could tell how badly broken he was, and was scared to make it worse. Tucked up in flannelette, he looked up at her in brute bewilderment.

‘Meh,’ he said.

Next day, Christine left her baby alone in the house while she went to the local police station. It wasn’t far away, a squat ugly prefab opposite the veterinary surgery and the Red Cross charity shop.

Christine walked in through a glass door decorated with leaflets about solvent abuse and prohibited penknives. She identified a policeman and said she needed help.

The policeman was a beetle-browed young man with greased white hair and shoulders the shape of a Pepsi bottle. There were puckered holes in his big earlobes where studs or ear-rings had once dangled. Apart from the official frills on his short-sleeved shirt, he might have been a shop assistant in a clothing store for teenagers.

Pushing her misgivings under, Christine tried to explain the problem. She was alone in the house with a baby, she said, and she was losing her mind. Could the Law help?

‘Are you afraid you might harm your baby?’ asked the policeman.

‘My baby is fine,’ said Christine. ‘It’s
me
who’s in danger.’

‘In danger of what?’

‘In danger of ceasing to exist.’

There was a pause while the policeman considered this.

‘Do you want to see a WPC?’ he said at last.

‘A what?’

‘A woman police constable.’

‘What difference would that make?’

He picked up a telephone and pressed one button. Within sixty seconds Christine was led into a claustrophobically small room, like a bathroom but with two chairs and a desk instead of a tub and toilet. The walls were papered with posters about domestic violence. Christine took a seat, already regretting coming. She wanted to make the police understand that if they wanted to help her they shouldn’t be going about it this way, they should be bringing her somewhere nice, they shouldn’t be enclosing her in smaller and smaller spaces. But somebody else had already started talking. A thirtysomething female in a police uniform was asking questions.

‘Are you afraid you might harm your baby?’

‘My baby isn’t the one in danger.
I’m
in danger,’ said Christine.

‘What makes you think so?’

‘I used to be human being. I’m turning into a machine.’

The policewoman smiled wryly.

‘I’m sure we all feel that way sometimes.’

‘I feel that way
all
the time,’ retorted Christine.

‘So what would you like us to do?’

‘I want you to take my baby away.’

‘You don’t feel you can care for your baby anymore?’

‘I can care for him perfectly well. It’s the only thing I
can
do nowadays.’

‘So what are you hoping the police department could do with your baby?’

‘I thought you might be able to organise giving him to a female prisoner in a gaol. They’re stuck in a cell all day and night anyway. I’m sure it would work out fine, with the right person.’

The policewoman chewed on this for a while, then leaned forward and looked straight into Christine’s eyes.

‘Look,’ she urged, in a compassionate tone. ‘Let’s forget the sarcasm … What are you
really
trying to say to me?’

Christine’s heart sank. She had done her best to explain. Trying over and over again was so exhausting; surely there must be
one
thing in her life that didn’t have to be repeated for endless futility.

‘I used to have a life …’ she sighed.

‘The first year can be very difficult,’ agreed the policewoman. It was as if she was agreeing that the first year of being strangled could be very difficult, or the first year of drowning.

‘I need it to stop now.’

‘What do you think will happen if it doesn’t stop?’

‘It’s already happening.’

‘What’s already happening?’

‘I’m ceasing to exist.’

‘You look real to me.’

The conversation went round and round like this for three or four minutes. The urgent message Christine had wanted to put into the policewoman’s mind kept being deflected, as if by an instinct of avoidance, like an infant turning away from a spoon.

‘But I’m in
danger
,’ she kept insisting.

‘You think you might harm yourself?’

‘The harm’s already
done
.’

‘You feel you’re not coping?’

‘Coping is
all
I’m doing.’

‘You mean you’re
barely
coping.’

‘I’m coping perfectly
well
.’

‘Well … that’s
good
.’

‘You don’t
understand
,’ pleaded Christine. ‘Look at
you
. You’re
here
. You’re not sitting next to a baby’s cot all day.’

The policewoman grinned.

‘Been there, done that,’ she said. Noting the look of aggrieved incomprehension on Christine’s face, she went all sincere again. ‘My babies grew up, that’s all,’ she summarised gently. ‘They’re at school now.’

It was incredible. It was like going to the police when you’d been burgled or attacked or raped, and them telling you to forget it, because life goes on and in a few years from now, what will it matter?

‘I think you might benefit from seeing a counsellor,’ suggested the policewoman.

‘Will a counsellor take my baby away?’

‘No, no, don’t worry about that.’

Christine smiled. It seemed the only possible way to handle such a lunatic situation.