The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (13 page)

Unconditional love

I stash the baby in a corner of the lot. It’s shaded by a canopy of rusty corrugated iron, what’s left of an old shed. In this humidity the bent roof only contains the heat. Blackberry bushes, their swelling green fruits shedding petals, cling to my jeans. I step away but the baby starts to moan, making an awful grinding in its throat.

Fine, I mutter, and drag the pram backwards through the blackberries. They shed their petals like confetti. The sky spits and then gives up. The heat presses into my back. I smell shit and pollution. A pram wheel sticks. Fuck, I say over the baby, and manage to pull and push it back across the lot, over the weeds, around half-bricks sunk in the ground, half-buried.

In the park across the street there’s a public toilet, left unlocked. I push the baby inside and rummage in the bottom of the pram for a clean nappy.
Thank fuck they’re disposables. I change it on the cold steel bench. It doesn’t cry. I go for a piss in the stall. When I swing the door open the pram is still there. No one’s going to take it away, not now, not here. I push it back out into the vicious light.

Church, I need a church or something, but along the main street there’s only chip shops and bait shops, a shut down service station now a warehouse for junk furniture, the hardware chain with the sign,
we sharpen knives
. I think of water. No one on the street, but a few women in the bakery, kids in the chip shop thrusting into video games, up against the wall. No one looks at me, a woman struggling with a pram, an ordinary sight.

I’m glad. I push the baby past the shops and down a side street towards the bay. I push it as far as the boat ramp. Concrete presses heat up through the soles of my shoes, which are worn down from walking. The water glares at me, a harsh grey light somehow brighter than the sky. The baby grunts and squirms. It moves its arm up over its head as if to wave. If it wakes will it recognise me?

We slept curled up together, the baby sated with formula, some compound made in a laboratory. Biology is over. I held the baby like an egg, frightened I’d roll on it. Crush it alive. I lay awake in the stickiness of my sweaty clothes. I didn’t take off my shoes in case I had to get out quickly. In the night my sweat was so thick it might have been blood.

It didn’t cry. The baby doesn’t cry.

It is a he but I can’t get around that yet. I think I wanted a girl. Did I want a girl? I never wanted a baby. I wanted this baby
.
This precise life and capacity.

In the morning I passed the pram back out the window, lifted the baby through and placed it in its warm hollow, then hoisted myself onto the sill and dropped out after it. It didn’t wake. Nobody saw us. This town doesn’t bother watching. The building wasn’t even boarded up.

This place, I know the name, remembered why I knew it soon after I got here. I don’t know what reminded me. The car left by the roadside, rear windscreen shattered; the sign on the hardware; the ache in the light. It’s a perfect, preoccupied little coastal town, close enough to the city to have people come and go. It’s all I want.

Must be ten years since they found the bodies buried in that bloke’s backyard. The bloke’s in jail now, but the town’s still looking for him. Their looking hangs in the smog, belched out by the cannery smokestacks. It encloses the place somehow, as if its contentment is conditional on this one bit of history. A love built on punishment.

I stand at the edge where the water lap-laps at the grubby shore. It’s only a weedy inlet where the slow boats trawl out – second-rate water for second-rate recreation. I thought of the water but now I am not so sure. Five minutes ago I would have left it in the vacant lot, but something didn’t sit. I have to find the right alignment, the right opportunity. It is in my hands for just this reason, a happy chance.

I can still hear mothers on the train, mothers on
telephones and in supermarkets. Come here little man, put that down, we don’t do this, we do that, we’ll get ice cream, and the little men look into their mothers’ enormous faces, flattened by birth pain into some half-won serenity, and are amazed. Will it look at me like that when it opens its eyes? It’s so small, hardly awake, hardly alive yet, a fish. Will I include it in a We that excludes all others? Can we drown in ourselves, the imprint of ourselves?

A car pulls up. Some local with a boat trailer starts backing his dinghy into the grey water. The beige four-wheel drive seems too slick for him. I nod at him and he gives me a small wave. When he gets out of the car he ambles over and leans his head over the pram.

Doo doo doo
, he says to the baby.

It makes some half-awake manoeuvre that charms him and he bends up to face me
.

Sweet
, he says.

I squint at him, stretching my lips. He might be a
grandfather.

How old is she?
he asks.

Three months
, I say, and smile.

His nod is reverent. I feel like crowing, waving my arms in a triumphal bird-dance. I anchor my fingers on the pram handle.

The man pauses.
Small for her age
, he says.

My smile freezes.
It’s a boy
, I say, frowning. I’m conscious of my hands on the pram. I want to put them on the baby somewhere, make a sign we are together, but I might not do it right. I might give myself away.

Judgement flickers across his eyes. He bends down to inspect the child. I’m glad he judges us. The baby and I belong to him, to everyone, the world.

Hello, little man
, he says.

The baby has gone back to sleep. The man lingers in front of me, me and my son, the unit, discomfited by our closed circle. He has come close to look at the baby and now he’s standing too close for a stranger. I feel the sweat drip down my back.

Muggy day
, he says.

I nod twice, stare beyond him at the water. He wants something from us. But we have no room between us, the baby and me.

The baby begins to snivel. That does it. He wanders back to his car with shoulders heavy. To look for what’s missing elsewhere. Maybe he’ll find it out on the bay, in the too-bright light.

Two days ago, I was walking to the train station. I had just knocked off work for the afternoon, my early shift that ends at three – designed for working mothers, I thought when I was rostered on, and I am the right age, they needn’t ask. It’s
an enormous bookshop and no one really knows anyone
else who works there; we keep our private lives private, our relationships as casual as our hours. I know if I don’t show up for a few days they will manage. They will probably assume it’s a sick child.

I never wanted children.

I was walking the same way I always walked, down the back streets to the train. Past a row of terraced houses, joined at the edges, closed to the outside. At one of them, a pram had been left on the doorstep. I glanced into it and saw the baby. The baby was asleep, a neat little package.

Something in me fell open like a book dropped on its spine – open at the right page, the quotation you were looking for. The reference that makes sense of the text.

The front door of the house was made of steel. The door opened onto the street, with only that little pram-sized alcove, that small step as threshold. I hovered at its edge.

The door was almost closed. I could hear someone pacing inside, talking on the phone. It must have rung just as she got home. The chances of this were so slender. The circumstances so precisely right.

It took no stealth to pull the pram off the step and push it towards the train. No skill at all. The baby didn’t cry. People didn’t stare at me. Police didn’t stop the train at the next station, or board and search the carriages. I smiled down at the baby with so much pride that no one could mistake me for a stranger.

I rode to the end of the line and then started walking.

I fuss in the pram for the benefit of the man, who won’t be able to see us clearly from his small tin boat, which is out on the water now. Small for his age. Next time I will say eight weeks.

I look down at the baby. His fist lies curled against his side like a shell. He still won’t cry. I am ashamed that I wanted to leave him in the empty lot. I am sorry I thought of water. I lean over the pram, shielding him from the glare with my body. His eyes open and close, open and close.

He doesn’t look back yet. He is too small. But when he does, it will be with the face of amazement, the wide-open face of first-time seeing. It will be with unconditional love.

The air you need

This is how I imagine it:

like a funnel-web spider, he lies enclosed in a bubble of private air at the bottom of the pool. Seen from below, the water’s surface is flesh, smoothed to stillness. When the grey-blue light creeps in at its edges, he pushes against the tiles. The pool skin dapples to a patchwork of pores. He breaks through.

He lifts himself at the edge. The black suit makes the exit quiet, almost silent from the inside. The water slides off, returns disturbed to its bed. He watches the wave-forms break and scatter for a moment, then walks across the dark lawn to where the small white car is waiting. From inside the mask he cannot hear the squeak of his flippers against the grass. She opens the hatchback with the button and it pops up. He lifts the hatch and climbs inside, presses himself against the rubber mats that line the confined space. The last beads of water break their tension and settle between the black grooves. He pulls the hatch down over himself from the inside and it is dark. She begins to drive.

Coiled in the small, insulated space, he releases the mouthpiece, pulls off the mask, and allows himself to exhale into the car’s stale air. Ringed by a red line, his eyes blink and close. Despite the car’s seals, he tastes the tickle of a few dust particles against his tongue. His mouth returns to the oxygen like that of a blind puppy, biting down gently on the hose. He inhales.

At the house she presses another button, then drives into the garage and closes the roller door behind her. The plastic sheeting on the inside of the door ripples back into place with a noise like tearing. She opens the hatch again, and stands to watch her son slowly unfurl himself from the dark like a worm.

She unlocks a door and they enter the house. He pads along the burnished stone floor to his room, waits patiently for her to open the seal. Once inside, he stands in the centre of the room, his mouth on the oxygen, his eyes on his mother’s feet, her clean sneakers covered in surgical overshoes. She does not touch him. They do not speak. She stays a moment, then retreats.

He releases the mouthpiece and sits on the bed. The synthetic mattress, covered in the manufacturer’s plastic, squeaks against his diving suit.
The sound is too loud, and he leaps up as though burned. Slowly, he peels the suit from his skin and rolls it neatly, furling the roll of his night self into a cupboard, closing it away. Naked, he stands in the centre of the room until he feels that every drop of moisture on his skin has evaporated.

He takes the oxygen tank and rolls it to the edge of the room, breathing very shallowly. He inhales deeply, holds it. Opens the door, rolls the tank into the hallway, closes the door, and allows himself to breathe. He doesn’t need much air. He is an expert in conservation, in minimising what he displaces. The bottom of the pool is an exercise in containment.

I imagine this: his mother lying on her own bed next door. She is saving for a pool of their own, but after the psychiatrists’ bills, the medication, the plastic, the seals, the oxygen, twenty years of it, there is very little left to live on. She flattens the covers and thinks of him lying in the effortless bubble of her womb, tiny, coiled, unmoving, an intimate stranger that she thought – despite the reassurance of ultrasounds and heartbeats – would come stillborn. Dreams of the blue child, merman, ghost. The psychic dread that went unsatisfied until he revealed himself, in life, to be this absurd fish-boy, terrified of air.

After a short sleep, she collects the tank, along with the other six empties in the garage, and drives to the hardware store to have them filled. The man has stopped remarking on the amount of welding she must be doing. He leaves her be. She stares out into the heat haze. Out here in the world, alone, there is nothing wrong with her boy. In the open air, I imagine she lets herself hope.

Some mornings she sneaks in to watch him sleep, his small breath moving in and out, his thin blue ribs contracting. Some mornings she believes that he is growing gills. One night he will forget the surface, leave her in the car with the crossword and the radio. He will become amphibious and pale, an albino axolotl like the one they used to visit at the aquarium when he was small, a lumpish monster settled weightlessly at the bottom of its tank. I imagine she believes, until the very last moment, that she will be the one who remains on the surface, the one who is left behind.

The father’s side, she sometimes thinks. There was an uncle who studied dugongs, lived up north somewhere, but she doesn’t know any more. She herself was a water baby, they said; she loved to swim. But there’s no point thinking about the genetics of it, the inheritance of certain tastes. The father left them long ago. The daydream of responsibility halves and splits into infinity, regressing like a double mirror, infinitely small but always the same face, the same hands, telescoping into nothing.

The tanks filled, she places them in the boot of the car. One tank for each night. Her arms, unlike her son’s, are strong and brown. She returns to the house. He will sleep all day and she can get the housework out of the way. The electronic noises sometimes send him into fits of panic. The high whine of the washing machine has been known to make him scream. She got a quieter one, then soundproofed the laundry.

She works through the motions of a normal life, then eats at the kitchen table. She takes him a carefully wrapped meal: pureed and solidified oats, an apple skinned, cored and sliced, perhaps a jar of maraschino cherries or whole dill pickles. He seems to like food preserved in liquid.

In the evening she drives, her son in the passenger seat, until
he finds a pool. Each night he selects one through some
urgent and mysterious necessity. When he knows, he points. His trembling hand might be lifting the weight of his whole body, slight and small as it is. Weight could be the problem to which he directs his stillness. The experiment in displacement.

It is cruel to know she will never understand it. It is cruel to know he will never touch her, never thank her. I imagine she is glad that the painful trial and error it took to reach this routine will never have to be repeated. I imagine she finds comfort where she can. Practises gratitude. Breathes.

One morning he watches the daylight enter the pool’s surface by the corners, pleased at the stillness, the predictability. He lifts himself out and rises. He walks across a stranger’s lawn, deaf to the squeak of rubber on turf, deaf to everything except the absence of one thing, the silent hole like a bubble of air where the low hum of the hatchback’s engine should be.

The street is empty. His mother is nowhere in sight.

This is his mystery and his necessity. He stands dripping in the street for minutes, until the day is up and the tank is heavy on his back. An early jogger runs by, ignoring him. A car passes. Still he waits. Finally a man comes out of one of the houses and stands beside his fence.

You son, are you all right there?
His voice is kind and sounds to the man in the diving suit as though it comes through a thickness of water. The mask. The man from the house comes closer, lifts one hand to touch his shoulder. The man’s hand comes down on his diving suit. Even through the rubber the pain shoots down his arm, branches across his back like lightning. He can’t take out the mouthpiece so he does not scream. He turns and walks down the road, flippers slapping, fast as a penguin. The other man stands, his hand unmoving in the air. He looks around for the cameras.

The man in the diving suit sucks at his air, exhales through the valve. The tank is growing light on his back. He walks at a contained speed to the end of the road, a T-junction. There is a small suburban shopping centre opposite, a car park half-full of newish hatchbacks. He crosses the empty street and makes for the nearest small white car, approaching close enough to touch, but not touching, moving quickly to the next. Each one is wrong in some way. He moves through a nightmare of unpredictable detail. His air is low. He stands in the median strip and bangs his sharp fists into his thighs until he can feel them bruising, even through the rubber. Until he can feel nothing, only the perfection of the rhythm.

And that is how we find him, my son and I. Standing there hitting himself. My son finds him first.
Fistfistfistfistfist
, he says, and shakes his head.
Fistfistfist
. Or it could be
fishfishfish
. He is four and I am only beginning to understand his specific language, his mysterious necessities.

The fish man lives upstairs now. I am glad someone uses the pool; Aiden is terrified of it, as he is terrified of most things. He follows the fish man as far as the gate and watches him through the pool fence. I drive to the fish man’s mother’s house every day, knock, leave notes. I imagine she has gone to another country, another town, somewhere cold, where there is not a swimming pool in every second backyard. I imagine she is having a break. That soon, she will come back. Because I cannot imagine she has really gone.

I do not have to imagine her leaving: she drives off one day into the dawn, alone, taking an hour for herself, two hours to remember who she was before the oxygen tanks and plastic sheets. She drives with the window down and the dust and smog blowing into her lungs, and soon she finds the day open to her, a vast blue.

We all leave like this at some point. It is a question of displacement, of taking the volume of air you need. I imagine the fish man knows this more than anyone. My imagination is my greatest ally.