My Candlelight Novel (14 page)

Then it struck me that I was tired. I had to be up early for the vigil I intended beside Hetty's cot. I wanted to be awake next to her at the exact minute of her birth. So I left my beloved copy of
Shirley
in Maggie Tulliver's hands. When I found it next morning sitting deliberately in the middle of the kitchen table, I knew that I had abandoned it to someone who had not cared for it at all.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

H
ETTY HAD BEEN
born in the early hours of the morning, and slept through the anniversary of her own birth. I put on the nightlight to look at her, and remembered how startled and outraged she'd been, coming into the world. I had been unable to take it all in at the time of her birth, but was overwhelmed soon afterwards. She brought out the extremes in me. I remembered how for so long she'd reminded me of Marcus, and made me long for him, but now she was entirely herself.

I'd read almost the whole time I was in labour to distract myself from the pain: Oscar Wilde. My head swam with it. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I did both, in turn.

My baby finally arrived in a great slippery rush, so shrill and indignant that I was awed by the little termagant I had produced. She was so red, so wrinkled, so determinedly unattractive. Kate was rendered speechless, but according to Lil, the baby was perfect, ‘
a perfect little darlin'.
' I named her Anastasia at once; though I feared her character might be too shrewish for such a pretty name. As Kate left in the early hours of the morning, I begged her to bring me back something to read. I wanted something interesting, something new and challenging. I thought that having a baby might begin to rot my brain, but I also, at heart, wanted to take my mind from the enormous task I'd burdened myself with.

But the moment Kate and Lil had gone, I felt a sudden rush of amazement and love. I floated on a sea of pleasure, and it was only much later that I began to feel tired.

Left alone after the drama of birth, she and I were like two seafarers who'd been struck by a hurricane and had washed up on shore together. She lay peacefully next to me, her tempestuous arrival forgotten. Both of us bore marks of the birth. My stomach, so recently distended, was like a deflated balloon, flabby and wobbly. My nipples were dark brown instead of the usual pink, and there was a brown line of pigmentation from my navel to my pubic hair. The baby had dark hair in strange places (like the tops of her ears) and was pimpled and mottled. In those first days, we were like two impossibly primitive beings. The umbilical cord was gone but it was as though it still connected us.

Before, I used to imagine my life as a car, speeding along a freeway. And I was hanging out the window, the handle of an open suitcase in my hand, spilling out the contents.

And there it all went, whipped away by the wind, almost everything strewn over the road in a reckless extravagance of losing. First of all, to get into the swing of it, I'd lost the big things, Paradise and my grandfather.

Then, in no particular order or importance, I'd lost that little sun-dress I loved when I was seven, numerous single socks, uncountable school jumpers, my mother, the man I called my father, my favourite red silky knickers, Kate's copy of
Madeleine
(plus countless other books she claimed I had caused to vanish into thin air), my virginity (finally! at fifteen), Lil's zebra-striped umbrella…all of it had flashed past, dropped onto the road, and been lost, abandoned – forgotten, most of it.

But as fast as I was losing I was gaining; the future was rushing up to meet me. I had lost both my parents but gained Lil. I'd met Marcus and lost him. And somehow, I had gained a kind of physical beauty. For most of my life I had been very plain, but since becoming pregnant had become quite astonishingly beautiful.

And then I had Anastasia, who, as it turned out, gained and lost that name within six weeks, and became Hetty.

If I ever needed reminding that I had a body, then having a baby did that for me. I didn't stop leaking blood, and then a few days later there was milk, and tears soon followed.

It was just hormones, all the other new mothers in the ward assured me. It was perfectly all right to cry. Look at them, they said, they wept at the drop of a hat, too, and childbirth wasn't even a new experience for them.

I felt so at home with that group of women. They knitted and watched the television, passed sweets around, and talked about their families. I absorbed the delicious details of their lives, and longed for their problems. They simply couldn't get their children to eat green vegetables (and I imagined myself begging and pleading with a wayward child to eat broccoli to no avail). They never had time to clean the kitchen cupboards (
I
wanted to be plagued by filthy cupboards!). They said that it was so relaxing in hospital that they wanted to stay longer. I listened to it all and joined in whenever I could.

They commiserated with me on being on my own with a baby. It must be hard for me, they said.

No
, I told them,
No!
I had Lil, and Kate. They'd seen how good Kate was with the baby. I wouldn't be by myself at all.

But I couldn't stop thinking about Marcus. I undressed Hetty and inspected her for any sign of likeness to him. Her eyes, when she gazed at me, seemed completely her own. Was her skin slightly olive, like his? I peered at her and couldn't decide. But overwhelmingly, what I wanted was to show her to him – I owed him at least that. I'd fallen in love with my baby, and I had no doubt that, when faced by the reality of her, he would too.
Look, look what we made together, in the park that day, and in the red-room. Isn't she lovely?

As I'd instructed, Kate arrived that first afternoon with a book to distract me, but I was beyond distraction. The book was
A Room of One's Own
, by Virginia Woolf. I put it away for later.
Much, much later
, I thought, and turned with relief to the ordinary talk of the women who shared the ward with me. I was made for ordinary things, I decided. At that time, I thought I might never read another book again.

In that short time I'd also discovered something I knew I'd never forget. I knew that love is not
having
something; it is always tinged with anxiety. It is inevitably accompanied by the possibility of loss.

After Hetty was born, I thought a lot about Marcus. He'd inadvertently left a shirt in my room, a grey, short-sleeved undershirt that had captured the scent of his body. While I was pregnant, I had sometimes worn it to bed, and allowed his odour to cling to me. And when I brought Hetty home from the hospital, I would sometimes secretly wrap her in it, so she would learn the scent of her father. Because surely, she had inherited some of that scent herself, and would recognise its familiarity.

I saw him one last time after Hetty was born, when she was just a few months old. There were posters around town advertising The Innocents. Two nights only.

On the first night I dressed in a borrowed dress and borrowed shoes. Only my emotions were my own, though I wasn't even so sure of that. I had only a sense of heightened anticipation, and an obsessive feeling that I had to see him again. I wanted to tell him about Hetty. That was all. That was his right, after all.

No. Enough lying!

I wanted to see him again. A glimpse would be enough. (Liar!)

I wanted to spend the night in his bed. I wanted him to realise that I was the one for him, to meet and get to know Hetty, and love her as much as I did. I'd longed for him all the time I was pregnant. I'd thought about him endlessly like any empty-headed girl with only love on her mind.

He saw me sitting there during their first set and came up to me in the interval. I could see him pretending to forget my name for a while before finding it. ‘…Sophie. You've changed.'

The dress was far more revealing than those I usually wore. It was tight, stretchy, and low-cut. The shoes were high-heeled and strappy; like the dress, they belonged to Carmen and Raffaella, two old schoolfriends who had more glamorous inclinations than I did.

He asked me to wait for him after the gig and I wondered for a moment whether I was too proud.

It turned out that I wasn't.

Before dawn, as I dressed and prepared to go home to feed Hetty (I had expressed milk for Kate to feed her during the night and now I was full to overflowing), he murmured groggily, ‘Will I see you again?'

I told him a time we could meet in the park later in the day.

‘You've changed,' he'd told me in the pub, noticing only the superficial changes in my way of dressing. But in a whole night with me, he'd not noticed how my body had changed: the stretch marks on my stomach, my full breasts. As I made my way home in bare feet (those tippy high-heeled shoes were killers to walk in!), and walked up the steps of Samarkand with them slung from my fingers like the loose woman that I was, all I could think of was Hetty, and how much I longed for her and missed her.

Kate was at the top of the steps, waiting for me. ‘You
do
know I have my English exam today?' she said, as I brushed past her, intent on feeding my baby.

As my milk rushed into Hetty's greedy mouth, I knew that more than my body had changed.
I
had changed. I felt self-sufficient and sure of what I wanted to do.

On the way to meet him, I slung his old shirt over the side of the bridge without even looking back, and went to the park where I waited with Hetty beside me on a rug.

He was late, and he approached with a look of disbelief and wonder on his face.

‘This is Hetty,' I said. ‘I thought you should meet your daughter at least once.'

He said, cautiously, ‘What do you want from me?'

Once I would have said,
Everything
. I want
everything
. I love you. I want
you
.

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘Nothing at all.'

There was a look of relief on his face.

If he'd wanted, I would have let him see her whenever he wanted, with no strings attached. He could have got to know her, let her call him
Dad
. But I wasn't going to ask him to do all that. It was up to him.

He only reached out and stroked her cheek. And soon after, he left us.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

I
DON'T REMEMBER
leaving my grandfather's house. My mother took me away in the night, bundling me into a car that smelt of the cracked plastic seats. I remember waking at dawn, when we took a pee on a grassy headland overlooking the sea, and then the movement of the vehicle, and sleep, overtook me again. From then on it was all impression – dark, smelly rooms in old pubs and meals of chips and sliced bread, nights spent sleeping in the car, and a succession of broken-down rooms, until at last we came to some sort of stability in an old stuccoed block of flats a street or so from a beach. I had learned the magic of words, and this block had a word set in relief on the front, but still to this day I don't know what it was. I imagine it might have been something like Seabreeze, or Seaview (though there was no view of anything), or, more romantically, Casablanca, or Caliente.

That was the place where Kate was born.

It must have been during one of those times when Michael O'Farrell wasn't living with us (and he often went away for long periods, always coming back and ‘making up' with our mother before pissing off again).

My mother had a friend called Loretta, who lived upstairs. She and my mother would talk and laugh together, Loretta leaning out the window with her cigarette, so the foetus wouldn't take in any smoke. My mother would hold her belly and say that Loretta had given her a stitch, she'd laughed so much. Loretta had no children, and a wardrobe full of fancy clothes. She worked in a bar at night.

One day, with a sense of urgency, my mother asked me to run up to Loretta's flat and fetch her. Then we gathered things together and went to catch a taxi to the hospital. We'd only gone down one flight of stairs when I suddenly needed to pee, so Loretta rushed me back up to our flat, while my mother waited, leaning against the wall.

That is how your life can change in one ordinary moment. You go to have a pee and when you return you have a new baby sister.

We heard my mother cry out while I was sitting there on the loo, my knickers around my ankles. Loretta told me to wait, and ran out. But I tugged my pants up and went after her. Looking down from the landing, I saw Loretta holding a newborn baby in her hands as though she was in the very act of catching her. She exclaimed, ‘It's a girl! Maggie, you have another little daughter!'

I still think of the dramatic arrival of Kate, the imperative of her, her suddenness, the pulsing blue-silver cord still connected to her belly. She was quickly wrapped up in a bunny rug from my mother's suitcase, and doors opened and closed all around us with hollow echoes; there were exclamations and hurrying footsteps.

I went to join my mother, and couldn't take my eyes from the baby's face, and nor, I think, could my mother. There was blood all over the steps.

The baby was very calm through all this. She yawned, and shrugged her shoulders with a slow, deliberate movement. Her eyes struggled to stay open. She gave a feeble, protesting cry, thought better of it, and grimaced so that her entire face was encased in multiple folds. I don't think I was half as enchanted by Hetty's arrival as I was by Kate's. Her hair was very damp when she was born, and was plastered darkly to her scalp. It soon proved to be translucent red. Her face was like a pale rose. She would never be ordinary. She was my own, my darling baby, and I took very good care of her, allowing my mother to feed her and change her nappy before continuing to keep watch as she slept and woke and slept again.

My mother named her Kathleen,
Kate
, after her own mother, she said.

And here arrived this same sister, grown-up now (or as grown-up as you can be at eighteen), on the last flight to Lismore on Friday afternoon. She strode across the tarmac, her long legs in black trousers, her red hair tossed about by the wind. She was so pleased to see us that she would not look directly at us at first, only turning her face to us at the last moment. It was composed and private, but I could tell that inside, she seethed with the pleasure of being back. She bent down to hug Lil, and took Hetty in her arms and told her how she'd grown. I could see Hetty waver about putting on an excessive show of shyness and decide against it.