Blame (6 page)

‘Stop comparing her to other kids,' Keith said.

‘I'm sure you were the same,' her mother said.

But the idea that everything was not right gnawed at her all the time.

‘Something is wrong,' Anna wanted to yell whenever someone else placated her. ‘Can't you see? Don't you see it?'

She feels her stomach churn a little and takes another sip of tea. Two weeks ago, if she had been asked to describe motherhood in one word, it would have been ‘anxiety'. It was all she felt, all she had felt for Maya's whole life. Now she has many more words; like ‘despair', and ‘grief', and ‘failure', and ‘broken'. She feels untethered now that there is no reason to feel anxiety. Untethered, unmoored, about to drift far away.

‘Those clinics feel like heaven when you have your first child. I wanted to take my clinic nurse home with me,' says Cynthia, and Anna is drawn back into the little room with the two detectives. She sips her tea again and tries to behave appropriately.

‘Why are you here?' she wants to say to Cynthia. ‘I wasn't talking to you.' Instead, she smiles at the other detective, trying to make her expression as natural as possible, and is rewarded with a smile from Cynthia.

‘How long have you been a detective?' asks Anna.

‘Oh, um . . . just a few months now,' says Cynthia, and Anna sees her cheeks colour a little. Anna smiles at her again, and Cynthia smiles back but more uncertainly this time.

‘Cynthia has great instincts, even though she's new to being a detective,' says Walt, and Anna notes how Cynthia ducks her head a little and enjoys the praise. She cannot remember the last time Keith complimented her or said anything nice about her at all. ‘Don't think about that now,' she tells herself.

‘The day I met Caro felt a bit like heaven,' says Anna. ‘I didn't have any friends who were mothers. I'd tried a couple of mothers groups but they didn't . . . didn't really work out. After Caro had been watching Maya for a while, she said, “How old is she?” and I looked at her for the first time—I mean, at her and not her child. She and I are the same age but she looks a lot younger than me. She always says that's crap but I think she does. She's always had a bit of a weight problem and I—well, obviously I don't. Keith calls me a stick insect.'

‘That's not . . .' says Cynthia, and then she is quiet. Anna can see that she wants to leap to her defence, to the defence of another woman shamed for her body, and she wonders if Cynthia's curvy body has ever been a source of
mean-spirited comments from someone close to her. She cannot imagine this of Walt.

‘Oh, I don't mind. I
am
skinny,' says Anna. ‘I know I am, but since Maya was born, I've never managed to keep weight on.'

‘So, you and Caroline—Caro—started talking?' asks Walt, and Anna can hear an edge of impatience in his voice.

‘Yes, sor . . . I'm getting distracted. Yes, we started talking. She looked like she had just thrown on whatever clothes she put her hands on that morning; you know that look?'

‘Ah, not really.'

‘Well, you must know it, Cynthia.'

‘I do, I remember it well.'

‘She was wearing a pair of jeans that looked like they could still be her maternity jeans—you know, the ones that have that panel in the middle—and she had on a big, loose T-shirt, and her hair was clipped up with three different kinds of clips and there were some curls hanging down her back. She looked a complete mess, but the moment I saw her, I envied her.'

‘You envied her?' asks Walt.

‘Yes . . . because she looked like her clothes—loose and relaxed. I saw she was tired—I mean, everyone with a baby is tired—but she smiled at me and her eyes lit up when she looked at Lex, and I just wanted to be her.'

‘Why?'

‘Why?' says Anna, and then the laugh she had managed to suppress comes bubbling out. Walt and Cynthia look
at each other, and Anna knows they think she is laughing because she's hysterical and because it's better than crying, but she does genuinely find it funny when she pictures herself and Caro at the clinic the first time they met.

‘I didn't mean to laugh,' she says. ‘I think if you'd taken a picture of the two of us that day, you would have seen two such completely different women that you would have automatically assumed that we would never even exchange a few words, let alone become best friends. I was already back in the jeans I had worn before I got pregnant with Maya—in fact, they were a little loose—and, while Keith held Maya, I had spent at least half an hour getting ready to go to the clinic. My hair was perfectly straight and I was wearing make-up. I'm sure I looked like I was on my way to a party but I was sitting there in the clinic, absolutely certain that if I relaxed, even a little bit, I would slip into a coma. I was completely and utterly exhausted. Not just tired but physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted.'

‘Babies can be hard work,' says Cynthia. ‘My boys are five and nine now, but I remember what it was like at the beginning . . . especially when my husband . . . ex-husband . . . slept through the baby's cries.'

Anna takes in Cynthia's smile and her bright blue eyes, and she knows that if she were not sitting in a room with her being interviewed, and Cynthia were not a detective, she would yell at her. She briefly imagines the things she would say, the epithets she would hurl at smug little Cynthia, who knows how hard babies can be. Because if
she has two average kids growing up doing everything they were supposed to do, then she really has no idea at all. Anna takes a deep breath before she speaks, and reminds herself that she knows nothing about Cynthia. It could be that the detective is struggling under the weight of her own problems as well. She has an ex-husband, as she has inadvertently told Anna, and it could be that her children are not average; it could be that she is just trying, as many mothers will, to form a connection with another mother, but Anna knows she needs to help her understand so that Cynthia will choose her words more carefully next time.

‘Yes, all babies are hard work,' she says, leaning forward to engage Cynthia, ‘but Maya was harder than most. I lost all my baby weight in the first couple of months after she was born. I felt like I was on the stress diet. I never had time to eat, and when I did, I had to force myself to swallow.'

‘It can be a very hard time for a lot of mothers,' says Cynthia and this time Anna sees Walt give her a quick look. He has heard something that Cynthia hasn't—or hasn't wanted to.

Anna doesn't know why she needs Cynthia to recognise what she was dealing with. It serves no purpose now but the need to explain won't go away. She wants Cynthia to know that while all mothers sometimes have to look deep inside themselves to find reserves of strength and compassion for their children, some mothers have to look deeper than that. Some mothers have to look past regret and dislike and fear, and find love for their child. It's not an
easy task. She wants Cynthia to understand it because she can never actually use words like ‘regret' or ‘dislike' or ‘fear' when she talks about her child. When she
talked
about her child. She has to keep reminding herself to think in the past tense when it comes to Maya.

If you say the words, you are faced with the full glare of society. If you think the words, all you feel is guilt and self-loathing; but to say you are anything less than totally in love with your child, is considered almost criminal.

Anna tries again. ‘It can be, yes, but for some mothers it's harder than you could ever imagine. Maya wasn't your average baby. For the first two weeks after she was born, she was just an angel, slept all the time, hardly ever cried, and Keith and I even thought that she was already smiling, and then it was like she changed overnight. One morning, she woke up at around seven because the house next door was being knocked down. The sound of the bulldozers woke her and she started screaming; not crying, just screaming. We had no idea what had happened. I mean, I understood about the noise. I had expected it to wake her and I had planned to go out for the day, but the noise didn't seem to just bother her, it seemed to terrify her. She screamed like she was in pain. I thought something had bitten her or she was sick. I undressed her and checked her whole body but I couldn't see anything. I tried to feed her but she just arched her back away from me and kept screaming. I got her out of the house as quickly as I could, thinking she
would be fine if I could just get her away from the noise, but it didn't stop her screaming. I went to my mother's house for the day, but no matter what I did or my mother did, she wouldn't stop screaming. My mother isn't the best with babies but she did try.'

‘What on earth have you done to her?' was what her mother had said when she opened the door to Anna and a red-faced, screaming Maya.

‘I haven't done anything. I don't know why she won't stop crying. Why won't she stop crying?'

‘I don't know if I can deal with this noise all day,' her mother said after trying to bounce Maya up and down for ten minutes. ‘This is too much,' she said after pushing her in the pram for an hour.

‘Help me,' said Anna. ‘Don't you know anything that can help me?'

‘Why would I know?' her mother had yelled and, minutes later, Anna had heard the sound of her car reversing up the driveway.

‘Eventually, I got her in to see the doctor at around four in the afternoon, but by then she had exhausted herself into sleep and the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with her.'

‘Was something wrong with her?' asks Walt.

‘Nothing that could be seen, not then. She never really went back to the way she had been. She stopped sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time at night or during the day, and the only way she would stay quiet was if I
bounced her up and down. I don't mean that I just had to bounce her to sleep. I mean I had to keep bouncing her or she wouldn't stay asleep, until she was really deeply asleep. And if she was awake and not feeding, I had to bounce her so she wouldn't scream. One day, she screamed for sixteen hours straight.'

‘Wow,' says Cynthia, and Anna sees the light of acknowledgement in her face.

‘Yes, wow,' she answers.

Chapter Four

Caro rubs her nose. There is a stale smell and she wishes there were a window to open. She tries to focus on the pale grey walls of the room, which suddenly seems smaller than she first thought.

In her neat pantsuit, Detective Susan Sappington looks like a primary school teacher. Caro can just see her peering at a small child and reducing it to tears for some misdemeanour. She has her hair wound tightly in a bun, and is wearing glasses with red rims that keep slipping down her nose. Caro wants to laugh at her but can't. Detective Sappington doesn't look like the kind of woman you laugh at. She probably never leaves her kitchen in a mess at night or goes to bed with the washing up undone, or . . . or drowns her sorrows in half a bottle of vodka. She looks like a woman who has her life under control.

‘Okay, Mrs Harman,' she says. ‘I know this may seem strange but, just for the record, can I get you to state your full name and date of birth.'

The reasonable way she says things irritates Caro. It would be better if the detective were a little aggressive, but she isn't and Caro can feel her own irritation beginning to choke her. She should not have to be here in this small, stinking room.

‘But you've got all that in front of you. I gave them all my information two weeks ago. It's already written down.'

‘I know but the interview is being recorded, so I just need you to state it for the camera.'

Caro pushes her hair behind her ear again, wishing she had tied it back properly instead of just using some of Lex's hairclips. She can feel her hands shake and wonders exactly how long she is going to cope. She can see herself leaning forward and throwing up on the floor. It would not be the first time she has vomited in a public place; or the second, or the third. She has a humiliating vision of herself in the ladies toilet at the shopping centre last week. She had missed breakfast in favour of her vodka, and then she had gone to the shops and stumbled on a wine-tasting at the liquor store. Caro had made the young man doing the bartending pour her tiny glass after tiny glass of wine, making sure to remark on the taste and colour each time. She had imagined that she sounded like a connoisseur. She thought people were watching her because she sounded like she really knew her stuff. She pointed out to
the elderly man standing next to her the wines she considered to be good, and was offended when he didn't listen to her and instead turned and walked away. After an hour, the manager had come up to her and whispered, ‘If you don't leave now, we'll have to call the police.'

The shop was filled with people and Caro had straightened her shoulders to protest that she was being treated unfairly, and then seen the look in the manager's eyes. It wasn't aggression or anger, but pity. She had left quickly but, after about five minutes, the nausea hit and she had made it to the ladies toilet just in time. While she vomited, she had heard other women coming in and out, the tap of heels on the tiled floor, the whoosh of the hand dryer, and when she was done, a collection of voices whispering about something being wrong. She had wanted to call out to them that she was fine, but once she had finished throwing up, she hadn't been able to do much for a minute except slump on the obviously filthy floor and rest her head on the toilet seat. When she had finally emerged, it had been to find two women in almost matching skirts and sweaters.

‘Oh, my dear, are you all right?' one of them had asked while the other looked concerned.

‘Just fine,' Caro had replied. ‘I'm in my first trimester; you know how it is.'

Yes, they had known how it was, and they had wished her luck and expressed their joy for her, and then they had left Caro staring at herself in the mirror.