Like a House on Fire (10 page)

Once she leaves, I shuffle around the kitchen making dinner.

‘Remember last year, Dad,' says Sam, ‘you made those pancakes?'

‘I do. But we're not having pancakes, we're having delicious pasta.'

It wouldn't kill me to make pancakes. Except that I've succumbed to this reduced, curtailed movement, all this pinched, seized stiffness where everything is such an effort.

‘How do reindeers fly?' says Evie, out of nowhere.

I study the noodles in the saucepan, the grated cheese melting on them.

‘Yeah, Dad,' says Ben, grinning that smart-arse eight-year-old grin. ‘I've got a few questions about those flying reindeer myself.'

‘Oh, I'm sure you have, Ben.'

I think, with a sudden aching spasm, of the year before, when Claire and I had read his note to Santa.
How are you
,
the note said,
and how is Mrs Claus?

‘And how does Santa get into houses where there's no chimney? And how did he carry our trampoline in his sack?'

‘Ben, I'd appreciate it if you thought for a second before you continued with this.'

The other two are staring at him with wide hungry eyes. He falters. I see it.

‘They must be special reindeer,' he says finally. ‘He breeds them.'

‘An excellent answer,' I say.

‘After dinner, can we cook marshmallows over a candle?' says Evie.

‘I don't see why not.'

Definition of psychosomatic: something originating in the mind or the emotions rather than through a physical cause. On the website I clicked on, there was a whole theory about how low oxygen content in the nerve and muscle cells is the true cause of most chronic pain syndromes. They hasten to point out that this doesn't make the pain imaginary, just redirected via some different circuit, I guess. So I eat charred marshmallows tasting of scented Santa candles and say, ‘Mmm, these are terrific,' and when I get the camera to take a photo of Evie's nativity scene, I see it now includes Transformer robots standing around the crib like bodyguards, and I say, ‘They look
great
, Sam. This is about the best nativity scene I've ever seen.'

Then Ben reaches over and puts Darth Vader in the place of Joseph, and wheezes asthmatically, ‘Jesus, I am your
father
,' and laughing feels like panting for breath, remembering what it's like to be fit.

At 1 a.m. I tackle the stairs up to their bedrooms, pausing halfway to allow plenty of oxygen into my nerve and muscle cells, timing my dose of anti-inflammatories but feeling hot pain building anyway, unstoppable. I grope my way in the darkness towards their beds and the sacks hanging off them with the armful of small, perfectly wrapped stocking-stuffers my wife has bought on her credit card.

‘Hi, Santa.' Ben's not asleep. He shifts in the bunk bed to squint at me in the dim moony glow of the night-light.

‘Good evening,' I say. My voice comes out more resonant than I would have expected, considering I'm holding on to the doorjamb in a grabbing spasm, sweat trickling down my neck.

There's a short pause in which he could choose to wake his brother.

‘You're looking fitter than I would have thought,' is what he says.

‘Well, I keep in shape. Lots of stairs in this line of work.'

‘Reindeers OK?'

I have to bite the inside of my cheek. ‘Excellent, thanks.'

‘And Mrs Claus?'

Pain originating in the mind or the emotions — I'm clear on that now. It still locks like brakes, forcing you to skid to a stop. I gesture with the DVD I'm about to put into his Santa sack. ‘Doesn't like me working nights. Lucky it's just the one night, I guess.'

He laughs softly, so he doesn't wake Sam. ‘Will Mum be here in the morning?'

‘Yep.'

‘Goodnight, then.'

‘See you, Benny boy.'

You'll think I'm insane when I tell you I make it back downstairs again just to turn around and work my teeth-gritted way back up again. My physio would roll his eyes and shake his head if I confessed. Especially if I said I climbed back up those stairs for no good reason, other than to get another look at each of them asleep, sprawled in their beds without a worry in the world. He's twenty-six, my physio, and not a father, so it's understandable, I guess.

This whole mind/body somatic thing has got me spooked, so don't think the irony hasn't occurred to me that I can only get comfortable if I lie flat on my back, like the infant Saviour, with one leg raised. I wake up at 5.30 when Claire comes in quietly, and through the doorway, I watch her unloading stuff from the all-night supermarket in the kitchen: two barbeque chickens, a bag of potato gems, one of those seven-dollar ice-cream desserts with the crackly chocolate inside the kids love. She's right, I can see everything from here: the dining-room table arranged with its galaxy of plastic and soft-toy worshippers, swirling around the unbroken Jesus like a constellation. The white cloth we only use at Christmas, with the centrepiece of something glued with curly pasta and spray-painted gold that Evie made at kindergarten. Over there, the stairs they will come down in a couple of hours, to step over me on their way to the tree.

‘Will you do me a favour?' I call to Claire, and she comes over, picking up one of Santa's shortbreads on the way and cramming it sideways into her mouth. ‘You remember that time I got a stiff neck on holidays, when you showed me that back-cracking trick?'

‘Um, yeah. But I'm not sure your physio would recommend it in your current state, would he?'

‘He mentioned gentle pressure. And that's kind of what a chiropractor does, isn't it?'

‘I'm not a chiropractor, though.' She swallows the biscuit. ‘You were on holidays with a cricked neck, not recovering from a slipped disc.'

‘Go on. Don't tell me you wouldn't love to walk all over me.'

She gives a brief, weary grin. ‘Oh, no, that part would be my pleasure.' She gets two chairs and lines them up either side of me and kicks off her shoes as I roll myself onto my front.

‘Forehead and shoulders on the floor,' she says. She grips the backs of the chairs and braces herself against them, and I feel her sure foot, bare and warm, align itself squarely between my shoulder blades.

‘Breathe in and out,' she says, and then begins to press with slow careful weight, down onto my back. I feel her hesitate, like someone testing ice before stepping out onto it, and I hear her say, ‘Well, maybe this isn't doing you much good, but it's working for me,' and I smile into the floor, in spite of myself, feeling my sternum take the pressure. I exhale another cautious breath as her heel pushes a fraction harder and finds the spot and something cracks — we both hear it — like a flexed knuckle. A candle-flare passes up my back, flickering, moth-like.

‘There it goes,' she says, lifting her weight gently off me.

‘Thank you,' I say, and she crouches beside me and brings her face down next to mine.

‘Temporary respite,' she says. ‘Happy Christmas.'

I look at her, feeling that small heat build between us. Our breaths fuelling it, close to the ground. This is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn. I open my mouth to tell her sorry.

Then I blink and refocus, distracted, and see, behind her in the greyish dawn, a line of ground-in glitter and stars stuck in the carpet. Probably with glue.

‘Look at that,' I say, and she turns her head from floor height to see what I'm talking about.

‘What?' she says, mystified.

‘Those stars. There.'

‘Oh … yes! Don't they look great, in this light,' she says, and I reach up to pull the elastic band and grips out of her hair.

Five-Dollar Family

‘This is the most important meal of your baby's life.'

Michelle had opened her eyes, groggy and aching after the birth, and seen the midwife's stern face loom into view over her. ‘What?'

‘You've got to wake him up every three hours, remember? You've got a sleepy baby, and you've got to make him interested in feeding so that he gets all the antibodies he needs from you. And also to make your milk come in.'

She's the bossy one. The other one is nicer, the one who was on duty the morning after and asked Michelle how she was going. That was all — no looking at her stitches, no lectures, just how she was. Then she'd picked Jason up, unwrapped him, and passed him gently to Michelle.

‘See his eyelids fluttering? You can make him interested if you just slowly wake him up. He's got to have this colostrum.' Stacking the rustling pillows behind Michelle's head and sitting back to watch.

There's stuff like condensed milk that the midwives reach over to squeeze confidently from her breasts. She can't believe it. Two days ago she would have been mortified that any stranger was touching her like that, but now, after going through the birth, this minor manhandling just doesn't bother her anymore. Let them poke and probe and pump her — she couldn't care less. It's like this big loose body, slack and sore, belongs to someone else.

Her baby's face looks squashed and red, startling in its strangeness. The photo on the baby-oil bottle looks more like what Michelle had expected to give birth to: a chubby little baby with bright rosy cheeks clapping its hands together, a cute wisp of hair curled up on top. When Des had taken a look at his son, that first afternoon, he'd seemed perplexed. The same startled, faintly incredulous look she'd seen on his face when she'd turned and glimpsed him during the labour.

‘Do you want to hold him?' Michelle had said, trying to manoeuvre herself up in bed a bit. She was getting good at holding him, not so scared. The way they wrapped him, it was like holding a big parcel of hot chips. Jason's face peered out of the cotton blankets; a tiny old man exhausted after a long and arduous journey.

‘Nah,' Des had said. ‘That's alright.' He'd wiped his hands nervously down his jeans — a gesture that had almost made her feel sorry for him again. ‘How about I go and get a disposable camera?' It was the closest he'd come to apologising for taking hers down to Cash Converters.

‘No,' she'd said, stroking Jason's fingers. ‘I'll sort something out.' Deliberately not looking at Des, already wanting him to go.

In the middle of the night, when she hears the midwives go down the hall to the nursery or their staffroom, she levers herself off the bed quietly and takes Jason out of the plastic crib even though they've expressly instructed her not to, and lays him in bed with her, wriggling back down beside him. The light in the hospital is cold, and everything hums. Michelle hates the way her narrow bed crackles, the plastic lining inside her pillow that keeps her awake when she knows she should be trying to sleep. She's not tired now, though. She's burning with bright energy, like someone's flicked a light switch on.

‘
You've got little hands, I've got big hands, let's put our hands together
,' she sings to him in a whisper. She invents heaps of songs, in the middle of the night, songs that definitely sound as good as The Wiggles. She lies curled with her tiny oblivious son, hearing his moth breaths, singing softly to him until she has to put him back in the crib before the midwife does her rounds again. They've tried to be strict about it, but she bets they wouldn't push their luck if she told them to mind their own business. Her wakefulness seems tinged, now, with a private, freshly minted exhilaration.

‘Any milk yet?' the staff keep asking her the next morning as they stride in and out of her room. ‘Your milk come in yet?'

‘Not yet,' she says.

‘Keep at it, won't you? Because it stimulates your pituitary gland to release the oxytocin. That's the let-down reflex.'

‘Right.' She nods, chewing her lip. If only that nice one would come back, and sit down in her room for a while and explain it properly.

‘He's hardly had anything since he was born,' she tells one, worried. ‘And he hasn't even woken up properly yet. He won't starve, will he?'

‘Well, it's only day two. Just keep going with the colostrum. That's the best thing for him. Just wait another couple of days, and we'll see.'

Jason nuzzles up to her breast, licks it. His tiny mouth feels like a goldfish nibbling at her. Her heart thumps with nervousness.

‘Well, that's a start,' says the midwife. ‘You have to try to develop his sucking reflex. But there you go, see? He's getting some now.'

Is he? She can't tell what's going on anymore. The girl in the next room, who's up and on her feet and sashaying out to the courtyard for a sneaked cigarette puts her head in Michelle's room on the way back and smiles grimly. She says she's got the opposite problem, her baby feeds too vigorously. That's what the midwives call it, at least.

‘He's like a shark,' is how the girl puts it. ‘I'm telling you, there's this huge crack in the skin, it's bloody agony.'