Touchy Subjects: Stories Read online

  These days—A.M., After Moya—Una didn't recognize herself. It was as if there'd been some transformation at the cellular level; a weakening of all the walls. She cried sitting on the toilet—"Just coming, Moya, just a minute; I promise, Mum needs just a minute more"—she cried when she couldn't get her snowboots laced up one-handed and had to shout for Silas; she cried when he was at the office and it took her four hours to make and eat a peanut butter sandwich. She always let herself cry in the shower because her face was wet anyway so it didn't count. She dissolved every time she had to answer the phone, if not with the first hello then as soon as Moya's name came up; she cried so much when trying to book an electrician to fix the furnace thermostat that she had to put the phone down.

  Whenever Una slept—for of course she did get to sleep, at certain periods in each twenty-four-hour cycle when Silas took Moya downstairs between feeds (it was just that these tainted, uneasy mouthfuls of unconsciousness bore no relation to the blissful, unthinking seven-hour nights she'd known B.M.)—whenever she slept, she didn't have time to dream, and only the cheap digital watch she kept on her wrist at all times convinced her that she'd added, say, another forty-three minutes of sleep to her total. She wept in the night when she slumped over to nurse Moya again and looked down the street where not a single other light was on. She wept hardest in the early morning when she was meant to be catching up on her sleep, when the baby was downstairs with Silas but Una could still hear her shrieks through three wooden doors, could hear them so faintly but persistently that she thought she might be having an aural hallucination.

  Delusions of all kinds afflicted her. Again and again in the night she'd hear Moya's whimperings from the cot attached to the bed, and lean over, pick up the baby, put her to her breast ... but why were the cries continuing, getting more frantic? She'd wake properly then and realize that Moya was still lashing about in the cot, so who was this other baby at her breast? Only the balled-up duvet, which fell apart in her sweaty, shuddering hands. And there was Silas, smooth-faced in sleep at her side, like some absolute stranger.

  But even to use the terms night and day was misleading. Day and night were human inventions, Una realized, and Moya—a startled visitor from another planet—had never heard of them. There no longer was any night for Una, in the old sense, the switch-off, shed-your-troubles, knit-up-the-raveled-sleeve-of-care sense. Hers was a work shift that never really ended even when she was meant to be relaxing, one long day that spun on sickeningly through dark and light, sound and silence. She didn't hate other people, not even Silas; she lacked the energy, or perhaps it was that she felt entirely cut off from them, marked out by her fated, perpetual punishment.

  Una had always got on well with her mother, despite their differences. So when Rose flew in from Cork for a weeklong stay, Una put the baby down on the rug, for once, and fell into her arms.

  "Barry's Tea," said her mother, unpacking her bag, "and Bewley's Dark Roast, and a couple of boxes of Black Magic, aren't they your favourite?"

  "That's lovely, Mum," said Una regretfully, "but I'm off caffeine, in case it keeps Moya awake."

  "How many times does she have you up at night now?"

  Una gave a little shrug. "Five or six."

  "How long each time?"

  "Forty minutes, an hour."

  "Ah, you poor child! No wonder you look so awful."

  Which, of course, made Una cry.

  That first night, Rose took her pill and popped in her earplugs, as always when she was in a strange place. Before she swallowed it, she did register a pang of guilt, but it would hardly do any good for her to be lying awake listening all night, would it?

  Rose's idea of being a good grandmother was taking the baby for long walks, but the hard-packed, jagged snow of an Ontario January made it impossible to get the buggy round the block. "Besides, it's too cold to take her out," said Una, putting the wailing baby back against her chest, tightening the sling and swaying from side to side.

  Her daughter wore a glazed look, Rose thought, like someone with Alzheimer's. "It'll be lovely when the weather warms up," she said blandly, before remembering that spring here didn't come till May.

  Silas dropped them off at a café downtown on his way to work. Two sips into her decaf latte Una unbuttoned her shirt to feed Moya. This startled Rose, but she didn't let it show; times change, and sure, why not? She looked around to see if there was a smoking section, but apparently not; she decided it wasn't worth standing outside in the driving snow.

  Una discussed her mental state as if it was a not-particularly-interesting ongoing war in a country she couldn't spell. "Not depression, I wouldn't call it that, Mum; I've only got three of the eight symptoms in the books."

  That was something else Rose found strange: It was all books nowadays; young mothers didn't so much as wipe a bottom without consulting the authorities ("Front to back for girl babies," Una had corrected her this morning).

  "Some women I've talked to at La Leche meetings, they say the baby blues are so normal"—Una broke off to yawn—"It's probably hormones, or the shock of giving birth. Like, I remember, the day we came home from the hospital, I was convinced Moya would never be safe in the outside world; I had this craving to put her back in."

  Rose had a simpler explanation. "Wouldn't anyone lose their marbles from this kind of sleep deprivation? Sure that's how they torture prisoners!"

  Una smiled faintly.

  "If I could just buy you one good night's sleep! I really don't—I've been casting my mind back thirty years," Rose said, her forehead wrinkled, "but I really can't remember having such a hard time with you or Donal." Of course, their father had given them a bottle at three in the morning, that helped, and because they were in their own room she hadn't been roused by every little peep out of them. "You were both awfully good..."

  She'd forgotten: That was one of the forbidden terms. "They're not good or bad, Mum," Una repeated. "They're just babies with needs."

  Rose decided to be frank. "But it's ridiculous for Moya to be carrying on like this, at the two-month mark. She's preying on your feelings, I'm afraid; you cuddle her so constantly in that sling thing, she's spoiled rotten—" Damn, that was another of the words.

  "There's no such thing as spoiling a two-month-old," her daughter said tightly. "The current scientific consensus—"

  "Oh, I'm not saying there's any badness in her," Rose interrupted. "I just mean she's got into dangerous habits."

  Una's stare was cold. "Babies worn in slings for three hours a day cry less and thrive better, it says so in all the books."

  Moya let out a high-pitched wail; Una switched her to the other breast. Rose bit her lip and suggested they have a couple of those lovely looking muffins. By the time she came back with the plate, Una's cheeks were striped with tears again.

  Rose found, over the next few days, that every conversation with her daughter ran straight into a wall. The present generation seemed hedged in by rules, miserably committed to something known as "attachment parenting." (In her day, Rose would have liked to say, they'd just got on with it, watched a lot of telly, and had a laugh when they could.) Everything she suggested had already been judged impossible. No, Una couldn't pump milk for Silas to give the baby at night, because she felt she only barely had enough as it was, and if she skipped a feed she might jeopardize her supply. Sorry, Una wasn't willing to leave Moya with a babysitter so she could have a proper slap-up lunch out with her mother. No, she didn't see how it would help to try to make the baby sleep in her own room.

  As for the little bits of folk wisdom Rose couldn't help offering when she saw her sunken-eyed daughter leap up again—"Give her a bottle of water instead, surely she can't still be hungry," or "Why wouldn't you let her grizzle for five minutes, see if she'll drop offback to sleep"—these were received as if she'd proposed sticking the infant's foot in a broken beer bottle. The briefest suggestion of giving Moya some kind of sedative to let Una catch up on some sleep sent Una off on a five-minute
rant about adults poisoning babies for their own convenience.

  "Sweetheart," Rose burst out finally, "I don't mean to play the interfering granny, I really don't, you're doing a marvelous job"—Moya made a choking sound and brought up white curds on Una's sleeve—"I just can't stand seeing you in this state. Don't you think you're being a bit hard on yourself, playing the martyr?"

  Una's eyes were huge. With fury? Or just exhaustion?

  "Babies are tougher than they look. I didn't run to pick you up every time you opened your mouth, and you grew up all right, didn't you?" There was a pause. Didn't you, she wanted to ask again.

  Nobody quite understood, Una thought, and her mother least of all. Hadn't she chosen to have Moya, planned it, wanted it for years? So she just had to do it the best way she could, even if she felt tangled in a nightmare that wouldn't let her wake up. From the sound of it, her mother's generation had ignored all their instincts when it came to looking after tiny, vulnerable human beings. They'd smoked and drank through pregnancy and labour, bottle-fed their babies and left them dangling from doors for hours, dosed them with alcoholic gripe water, jammed plastic pacifiers in their mouths, left them in barred cots to cry it out ... Of course they needed to believe that they'd done what was right, instead of just what was handy. But who could say how much of the fucked-up state of so many of Una's friends might not be due to buried memories of wailing away alone on those long-gone nights?

  "Darling, it's just that you're in such a bad way," Rose was saying. "Tonight, why don't I stay up with the baby for an hour or two?"

  But could I trust you to bring her in when she's hungry? Una wanted to say. Instead she forced a smile and said it was OK, she was feeling not too bad this evening.

  It was quite pleasant to have company while Silas was out, she supposed, but on the other hand, guests always needed looking after. And Rose, with her dry-clean-only cashmere, after-dinner cognac, and shivering smoke breaks on the porch, seemed such an irrelevance. Shouldn't Moya have brought them closer together instead of the opposite? To avoid discussing the contentious subject of the baby, Una would raise some topic of the day—airline security or pensions or the Atkins diet—but of course all she cared or knew about at the moment was the baby, so all she could contribute was the odd robotic syllable.

  Rose, for her part, seemed to be learning to resist the temptation to give advice—which left her with nothing but platitudes. "Hang on in there," she'd say, squeezing her daughter's shoulder. "It'll be different when she's more active; she'll suddenly get the hang of day and night, wait till you see. One of these mornings you'll wake up after a good night's sleep, you'll hardly believe it!"

  Una nodded, as if talking to a mad person at a bus stop.

  The morning she was to fly back to Dublin, Rose woke early, for her, and pulled out her earplugs. She lay listening to the beautiful silence till she heard Silas pulling the front door closed behind him. She put her dressing gown on and peeped round the other bedroom door. There lay the baby, in the cot attached to her parents' bed, and there was Una, flat on her back, her arms uncurled, as if drifting down a stream. Her face was peaceful, almost young again.

  Rose must have stood on a creaky floorboard as she backed out, because suddenly Una was bolt upright, eyes wild. She snatched up the baby, who began to shriek.

  "Good morning," said Rose, like some nervous chambermaid. She rather wished she'd stayed in bed.

  "Jesus. Jesus Christ," Una said into Moya's fuzzy scalp. "It's light out."

  "It certainly is. Twenty past seven."

  "I thought she'd died in the night." Una's face was contorted with tears again.

  Rose suppressed a sigh. "She's grand. She's had a lovely long sleep, that's all."

  "I don't believe it. Could she have been crying and I just didn't hear her?"

  "There wasn't a peep out of her," said Rose firmly, not mentioning the earplugs.

  Una managed a weak laugh.

  "Didn't I promise you things would get better?"

  "You did."

  "Now, don't be expecting her to pull off a trick like this every night—"

  "I won't," Una assured her mother. "I don't care if she doesn't do it again for months. Now I know it's possible—" Faith glittered in her eyes.

  "So how do you feel?"

  "Fabulous."

  "I'll bring you up a cup of coffee," said Rose.

  "Decaf," said Una, with a smile, sinking back into the pillows with Moya.

  That hadn't gone quite the way she'd planned, Rose thought as she went down the stairs. She'd meant to move from told-you-so to a cheerful confession that she'd given the baby half a teaspoon of her cognac last night. See, she'd intended to say, it did you good, and it didn't do her a bit of harm! But something in Una's eyes had made her reconsider this morning, and perhaps discretion was the better part of motherhood, after all.

  Do They Know It's Christmas?

  Trevor could barely see the traffic light through sheets of rain.

  "Quick, before it turns red," muttered Louise.

  "It's amber."

  "Amber means go if you can. Go on!"

  It was red now; he hit the brake and felt it judder. The wipers kept up their whine.

  A small sigh. "Sorry I snapped," she said.

  "That's OK." Leaving Limerick, they'd been snarled up in Christmas-shopping traffic for the best part of an hour.

  "I should have rung Mrs. Quirk to ask her to look in on the babies," Louise muttered.

  "Mallarmé hates her," Trevor pointed out.

  "I know, but it's better than leaving them alone on such a hideous evening. I'd try her now, but the phone's acting up again. Hey, we could ask your folks for another one for Christmas."

  The mobile phone had been unreliable ever since Proust had ripped the charger out of the wall. "Proust's always so curious about things," said Trevor. "Do you think he's the most intelligent of the three?"

  Louise turned on him. "That's not a fair question."

  "I know, I know, I don't mean it ... divisively."

  "They're all really bright in their own ways. Light's changing," she pointed out.

  His tires squealed through the puddles. "You think they're all perfect," he accused her fondly.

  "No I don't. Well, nearly," she conceded. Nose pressed to the blurred window, her tone sank again. "I wish we were home."

  "Twenty minutes."

  "Fifteen, if you shift your arse. Gide gets so fractious when it pisses down like this."

  "We're living in the wrong climate," he observed, not for the first time. "Not to mention a cultural wasteland."

  "Yeah, well next time Barcelona University has simultaneous openings in classics and sociology we must remember to apply."

  "Ho ho ho," he chuckled like some grim Santa.

  Trevor's favourite moment was always when he put his key in the lock. Eruption, joyous noise, crashes against the other side of the door. Tonight he tried to take his raincoat off, but Gide felled him.

  "Sweeties, gorgeous-gorgeousnesses," Louise was crooning, Proust swinging high in her arms. "We're home, yes we are, yes we are."

  "Let Daddy get up. No licky face, no licky," Trevor was telling Gide gruffly.

  "How's he meant to know not to lick it when you offer it to him like a big jam doughnut?" Louise bent down to kiss her husband under one eye. "Mallarmé doesn't lick faces, does she, lovely girl. Who's a lovely quiet girl?"

  "Did you miss us, Mallarmé?" Trevor asked, sleeking her yellow fur. "Were you bored silly? Just another three days till the holidays and then walkies anytime."

  Proust writhed in ecstasy in Louise's arms, and Gide began another round of barking.

  "Trevor!"

  "I said the VP-word, didn't I?" Trevor rebuked himself.

  As he was putting away the bagfuls of Christmas shopping, he said, "We've bought no presents for them yet."

  "Oh, I know. Do you think—one big one each, or several smalls?"

  "Smalls, definitely. They
love tearing off the paper."

  "They always like some new squeakies. But remember last year," said Louise, "when we gave Gide that rubber apple that was too small and I had to do the Heimlich manoeuvre?"

  "That was the most terrifying moment of my life," said Trevor. "Hey, I asked the dean of arts what he's getting his poodle and he said nothing."

  "You mean he didn't answer?"

  "No, I mean he said, 'Nothing.' He said, and I quote, 'She doesn't know it's Christmas!'"

  Later on, Trevor was making his weekly call to his parents in Belfast. "Not much new, Mum. Except that Proust just gave us the fright of our lives by turning the telly on! With the remote."

  "Is she the fat one?" asked his mother.

  Trevor felt that familiar wave of irritation. "Proust is a he; he's tiny," he reminded her. "The one you mean is Gide, but actually he's been on diet food for three weeks and if you look at him head-on he's really not—" A rubber Bart Simpson, wet with drool, squeaked at Trevor's feet. "Not now, Gide, Daddy's on the phone." Proust was scrabbling against Trevor's leg; they really would have to steel themselves to clip his claws this evening.

  His mother was making some remark about the pack. "There's only three of them," he objected. "Greta's got three kids, and you never confuse the boys with the girls!"

  She let out a short laugh. "Oh, Trev, it's hardly the same."

  He'd given up on breaking his family of the habit of calling him Trev. He chewed his lip, as he picked up the wet toy to bounce it against the far wall. Proust raced after it, but Gide shoved him out of the way. "Be nice," Trevor warned them. "Share your squeaky." Then, with false warmth, "Tell you what, Mum, maybe they'll give you a framed photo for Christmas, with their names on."

  A couple of minutes later he walked into the kitchen, where Louise was frying chicken breasts. "Save me a crispy bit," he said, to postpone what he had to say.

  "Mallarmé likes the crispy bits. You're getting polenta. So how's life in Belfast?"

  He let out his breath with the sound of a fast puncture. "We were talking about Christmas. I was telling Mum not to worry about bedding for the babies, we'll all sleep together on our blowup mattress."