Award-winning author Claire Kilroy’s “lyrical and incisive” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
Soldier Sailor takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Claire Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.
Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn’t know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember.
Tender and harrowing, Kilroy’s modern masterpiece “hums with poetry, insight, and humor...full of truths so sharp and beautiful readers will need to take a breath” (Booklist, starred review).
Award-winning author Claire Kilroy’s “lyrical and incisive” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
Soldier Sailor takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Claire Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.
Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn’t know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember.
Tender and harrowing, Kilroy’s modern masterpiece “hums with poetry, insight, and humor...full of truths so sharp and beautiful readers will need to take a breath” (Booklist, starred review).
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Overview
Award-winning author Claire Kilroy’s “lyrical and incisive” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
Soldier Sailor takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Claire Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.
Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn’t know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember.
Tender and harrowing, Kilroy’s modern masterpiece “hums with poetry, insight, and humor...full of truths so sharp and beautiful readers will need to take a breath” (Booklist, starred review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781668051801 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One One
Well, Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another’s arms. The Earth rotates beneath us and all is well, for now. You don’t understand yet that what we share is temporary. But I do. I close my eyes and I understand.
Past midnight. I am the only one awake in the house. You cause me such trouble but look at you, just look at you. Delicious, a passing woman once remarked, and I held you a little closer. I tell you all the time that I love you, but it’s not enough. I love you, yes? I love you, okay? I love you, are you listening? Do you understand? I’ll exhaust whatever time we have left together pummelling you with this assertion and never feel I have driven home my point. What is wrong with me?
I push my face into your hair, place my lips on your neck the better to absorb you and it feels stolen. Stolen from whom, I don’t yet know. She will reveal herself in good time, in bad time, or maybe it will be a he. They will not be good enough for you and I will smile a brittle smile and keep this knowledge to myself. Whatever it takes to keep you in my life. I am trying to prepare myself. This is me trying to prepare myself.
Do you know what I would do for you? I hope not. What would I not do, is the question. The universe careens around us and I shield your sleeping body with my arms, ready to proclaim to the heavens that I would kill for you: that I would kill others for you, that I would kill myself. I would even kill my husband if it came down to it. I swear every woman in my position feels the same. We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic, even. That we know how to handle it. But I don’t.
I’m too old for you. I see that now. Now that it’s finally time to grow up. I thought I was young but then you blazed into my life and that was the end of that. I can barely keep up the pace. I try, I do, but it goes hard on me. By the time darkness falls, I can’t face my old enemy, the stairs. I slouch there, trying to summon the wherewithal. Yet every night, no matter how wrecked I am, I gaze at your sleeping face. Yes, yes, I know: we scream at each other from morning to night but my love for you swells its banks while you sleep. I murmur it to your sleeping body. Which is no good to you, but still. Here I sit. Have you any idea of your beauty? Photos never quite capture it.
I am worried that one day we won’t speak. It happens all the time. You’ll turn around some day and blame me for everything. Things that haven’t happened yet will be my fault. What I have done and what I have failed to do. And I ask this: that we will always talk. Don’t cut me out of your life. One day you will leave and that is as it should be. Part of me cannot wait. And then there’s this part. I dreamt that our names were carved upon a stone anchor for all eternity. And in a way they are.
It is late and I am tired. There are things I must tell you. Bad things, dark things, things I have concealed. Your trust is so blind that it hurts. I almost left you once.
A bad confession is worse than none at all. I did leave you. There you were, all alone. The wrongness of this image rears up at me at off-guard moments—when I’m rinsing a cup or putting on a wash, you just lying there with your perfect skin. I wasn’t myself. Still amn’t. I waited until you were asleep because I could not do it to your face. You would drift off and I would slip away. That was the plan. Later you would wake and look for me but I would not be there, and I would never be there again.
It was our first Easter together. I had been looking forward to the break for weeks. Relying on it, in fact. Big mistake. I was setting myself up for a fall. The dark months of our early days had been more arduous than anything I had ever experienced or even known routinely happened to women in the Western world, dragging myself through the graveyard shift, wounded soldier that I was. But Easter was on the horizon and the longer days signalled that the ordeal was almost over, that we had gotten through it, we had survived, that everything was about to get brighter, warmer, easier, the world was on the brink of bursting into flower, and in this Eden our happiness—oh our happiness, Sailor! our clean, white happiness—would prevail. If we can just make it to Easter, I coached myself all January, February and March as I inched steadily towards the crevasse. There is always an idealised image in my head of how a thing will be, but it never matches up to the reality.
You are the sole exception.
The discrepancy between my expectations and how Easter panned out made my subsequent dismay vengeful. Self-pity is a dangerous emotion. I should know. I saw in the small hours of Good Friday in a black rage, a malevolent force pacing the corridors of my own home. I was an exhausted woman exhausting myself further and I seem to have broken through some barrier that night because reality ceased to be reality, not that I understood that at the time. To my mind I had experienced a staggering revelation. Namely: I was just a woman. I was just a woman! How had this not registered before? A woman was of less value in this society than a man. A man’s time was more important, he had more important things to do. It was now time to step back and let the man do his more important things. No, Sailor, marriage was not what I had anticipated marriage would be. You leave yourself open when you plight your troth to another person. You place your well-being on a level footing with theirs. If they don’t meet you halfway, well. Well, well, well, I thought as I stared at the door my husband had shut in my face earlier that night. Well, well, well, it’s like that, is it?
When they come, this person you think you want to spend your life with, I will be watching. I will be smiling, teeth bared.
No, I won’t. I will be happy for you. You know I will.
Dawn arrived on Good Friday and with it despair—no sleep but I must face the day. Everything felt weird. Weirder than usual: I hadn’t had an unbroken night’s sleep since you’d exploded onto the scene—I love you, but Jesus wept. If I could just have had six uninterrupted hours to myself, maybe none of this would have happened.
Four. I’d take four. Three.
These are not excuses. There is no excuse. None of this is your fault.
It feels good to talk to you this way all the same. To have this time with you. We are together all day but we never have time, if you know what I mean? Of course you don’t. You hardly know what time is.
My husband had managed to sleep that night. I had heard him—I had listened to him on the other side of that door—snoring away in the box room, those snug, contented snores I used to find endearing, the two of us tucked up together in the same bed on a cold night, except we were no longer in the same room. And soon we would no longer be under the same roof, nor even under the same stars. I could not get my head around it: How could my husband sleep under the circumstances? How was it physically possible? I was too wired to even yawn. Wasn’t the adrenaline coursing through his veins too, making him jumpy and wild? I wanted to bellow it at his door: How can you sleep in there? When you don’t know what you will wake to? All bets are off, don’t you get it?
He wasn’t even tired. That was the killer. He wasn’t the one up every night. I kept slapping the crook of my arm with my hand, like a junkie drumming up veins, to stop myself from doing something stupid. These details are only coming back now. It sounds demented because it was. Up and down I paced outside the box room slapping my arm and sort of panting, sharp shallow huffs as I tried to... what? Contain myself? I had never found myself uncontainable before. I had never been afraid of what I might do next. I gasped with the effort of not screaming, of not hurting myself, of not going in there and hurting him. I wanted to so much that I moaned. He should know what he had done to my world. I am just a woman, I rasped over and over in astonishment, hardly able to credit it. My husband had demonstrated this cold, hard truth to me. I wonder whether you can die of resentment, Sailor? Not instantly, but over time. Can it damage cells and trigger cancer? Weaken your heart? There were times when I resented my husband so much, I worried it’d kill me. If I didn’t kill him first. Look at him, in there sleeping again. He’d been sleeping all winter. The more he slept, the more I seethed. The more I seethed, the less I slept. I kept blinking in the early days, do you remember that? Sometimes you used to smile and blink back, thinking it was a signal we were exchanging. I was squeezing my eyes shut to try to dispel the murky film that seemed to have built up on them. Nothing dispelled it. I made mental notes to replace the lightbulbs with brighter ones but do you think I could get around to it? It’s gone, the murk. It was just exhaustion, the body diverting its energy. Or something. What do I know? Don’t listen to me. As I’ve said, it was an ordeal and I am sorry that at a delicate time in your life the person you needed most was a mess. I got confused once when I caught sight of my coat hanging on the back of a chair in the kitchen. I clapped my hands to my head, wondering how I was over there if I was right here.
“My husband,” I said, stepping back from the box-room door as if I had finally outed the real villain of the piece. It was as great a revelation in its own way as the revelation that I was just a woman. “My husband.” The more I said it, the more peculiar the syllables sounded, until they detached themselves from their original meaning and became the noun describing the changeling that had replaced the man I loved. My husband: the enemy within, he who has taken me down. I cocked my head at the door, ears attuned to the snores, thinking: Who is this individual? Where did he come from, this husband who has seen fit to finish me? Although he had been in my life longer than you, he felt provisional in a way you never could.
Is that wrong?
When my husband woke that morning I felt afraid. Not of him, never of him, but of the next act. It was time. You hardly knew what time was but it was time. He rose promptly when his alarm went off at six thirty but I remained lying in bed, tracking his movements around the house. Showering, eating breakfast, as if it were a day like any other. He was going, of all places, to work. My husband was not expected in the office that day. We had made plans but he was making a point: that his plans no longer included me. The fight the night before had been shocking. I understood that I was in shock. I understood that a lot of pain was coming down the line—the train tracks were humming with it—but that it hadn’t kicked in yet. The fight was over you, Sailor. We fought day and night over you. He’d had it, he’d informed me in a voice so unfamiliar it threw me. It was robotic in tone, an automated simulation, but it was coming out of his mouth. I stared at him in fright, witnessing—in my head, at least—a chilling phenomenon: the real man breaking through the facade he had deceived me with. He had sheared off his hair at some point that day, shaved it off himself with the clippers in the garage, a man heading off to war. There he stood, a steely-eyed mercenary in the doorway of the living room, my husband, wearing that cut-off hoodie because he’d been training again—he trained fanatically once you came on the scene. What was he training for? Night after night he was down in that garage doing whatever it was he did out there, getting leaner, stronger, harder. Defining himself in opposition to me, this wife who had grown weepy and soft. With the knotty arms and the buzz cut, he looked like a thug, an intruder in our home.
“It’s like this,” the real him spelled out in no uncertain terms, one hand on the door handle and the other gripping the frame, because he was not about to set foot in the same room as this wife if he could avoid it. He had already moved his belongings to the box room. “I want you out in the morning. From now on, we communicate through solicitors.”
“That isn’t how this works,” was my reply. I blinked and I blinked but it wasn’t the murk: my husband’s hair was going grey. I had not noticed until that moment. Then, with scathing courtesy, he wished me a good night and shut the door.
I felt no love for him then. I mentally patted my pockets as I slouched on the couch we had picked together that had a his and her side. Do I love him, I asked myself, and trawled through my body with my mind’s eye as if an emotion could be located within the physical self, which, in this case, it could not.
He was so cruel that night. Yet I cannot call my husband a cruel man. I almost did not know him once you entered our lives, no more than I knew myself.
Little by little, the shock wore off.
By midnight, I was frantic. Said all that. By morning, I was resolute.
As soon as the front door closed I sprang from the bed, showered, put on make-up, did my hair, the works, fuelled by a manic energy. I raced through every room in the house, throwing open the curtains. The early morning light was somehow unsound. I was unable for it. The clock had gone forward the weekend before and I felt like I’d crossed several time zones. The dawn light penetrated the rooms in unfamiliar configurations, as if the house had tilted, projecting queer shadows too high up on the walls, and into the recesses of my head, casting light on matters I hadn’t noticed before, specifically the ugly side that had been revealed of my husband, and the ugly side that had been revealed of me. My God, we hated each other. All along, we had been harbouring these unplumbed reservoirs of hate—I cannot tell you what a fright this discovery was. You think you know someone, Sailor. You think you love them. You think they love you. Although I was standing in my own house, I felt myself to be very far from home. If home is a place of safety and sanctuary, then I was as far from it as I had ever been.
I stood by the fireplace biting what was left of my nails. I didn’t cry—I was wearing mascara. Our living room and everything in it looked staged, a theatre set. I didn’t buy it for a minute.
I ate my breakfast standing up, staring at myself chewing in the mantelpiece mirror. Been a while since I’d seen myself in make-up. An abrupt laugh although nothing was funny. I sounded mad so abruptly stopped, which sounded madder still. I put my cup and bowl in the dishwasher and then fished them back out. I washed them. I dried them. I returned them to the cupboard. Left no trace. My husband’s breakfast dishes remained untouched in the sink. He generally cleans up after himself. I’ll give him that.
What a treasure. It’s so low, Sailor. The bar for men is set so low.
The place was strewn with my belongings, stuff that had gathered there because I had gone beyond sorting it out. Chaos was the medium I inhabited once you entered my life, once you became it. I swiped the chaos into black plastic sacks, dumped the sacks in the boot of the car. Back upstairs to reef all my clothes off their hangers. Seams ripped, buttons pinged. My clothes, some of them beautiful, no longer fit me. Loss of self, loss of self—hard to bear. I bagged them up, out of sight, out of mind. I stuffed that sack into the boot too and blinked at it. Like a dead body, I thought, which it kind of was. I loved those clothes, loved the girl I had been in them, but she was gone. Up the stairs, down, up again, down—I was going about things in a haphazard fashion, making work for myself. Didn’t matter. The main thing was to keep moving.
I placed the wedding photograph face down. Stripped the marital bed and put the linen on a boil wash. I hoovered up every trace of myself that I could find, poking the nozzle into corners and behind furniture. So much of my hair. Everywhere I looked there was more of it, a fine tracery veiling the floor the way the murky film veiled my eyes. The amount that had fallen out. I tried not to care. It’s just hair, I told myself. Doesn’t matter. Don’t stop. The train tracks had started to thrum. Something big was coming down the line.
I extracted the bag of hair and dust from the hoover and threw it not in the wheelie bin by the back door but the litter bin at the end of the street. It had rained overnight and I had forgotten to take off my slippers. The wet pavement destroyed the soft soles so I threw them in the bin too and tiptoed back in my socks. I was wild, Sailor, I was out of my mind. I wish I knew where I got the energy. If I did, I would go back and get more.
When I was finished, my house—no, not my house any more—the house was in order. The cushions, they were plumped. The place looked great. I liked that house. It was a good house. No one could pin it on the house. It had surfaces again, polished surfaces reflecting the morning light. The clean lines of my old life. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Now there’s a lesson only learned the hard way. I missed my old cat all of a sudden, though she was as dead as the girl I used to be. You think you’re over something when out of nowhere a tentacle grips you. Skeins of pain unspooling across time: there is no end to it, Sailor. We are walking landmines. My old cat. It’s stupid. What I wouldn’t have given to feel her warm mass in my arms again. The urgency of that need scared me because I haven’t yet lost a person who is close and if this is how bad the death of a cat is? Well. But I didn’t cry: the mascara. I stood there, hugging myself. Then I opened all the windows, not sure why. It was time to face you.
When I saw you, I let on that nothing was wrong. I smiled, might have even sung. I wanted you to remember a warm presence, if you would remember me at all. And you responded, you always did. Your capacity for joy is a thing I prize in you, a quality I am determined to protect. You beamed back at me, your innocence recalling that of Ming, my poor cat. You know her, actually—she’s the one in the photo. I offered her up to the vet one wet winter evening, holding her down as she struggled to escape, assuring her that everything would be fine while the vet shaved her dainty foreleg and inserted a needle. She was dead within seconds. I hadn’t realised it would happen so fast. I thought she would fade away peacefully in my arms while I murmured to her that she was the best, most loving and loyal cat ever—while I thanked her, essentially, while I told her all the things she deserved to be told—but no, she flopped on the table and banged her head. I gathered her up and she seemed to be looking at me, staring out in panic from her paralysed body. “Is she still alive?” I asked the vet in horror. “Is she still alive?” I asked again when he didn’t answer. He reached out and closed her eyes with the sweeping gesture of a hypnotist.
I’m always the one asking stupid questions. The world seems so much clearer to everybody else. I have no aptitude for the practicalities of this life. What can I possibly offer you?
Nothing. Everything. The whole of my heart.
I carried my dead darling through the packed waiting room that had terrorised her only minutes earlier, wiping my eyes and nose with the back of my hand as I paid the bill. I drove home with her curled up on the passenger seat growing cold and stiff and somehow hollow, and it was desperate, Sailor, so desperate, so grim, not the way to end things after all that I owed her. We set out in life believing we will forge so many enduring bonds when really we are blessed with so few, no more than three or four if we are lucky, and one of mine was with a cat. The only bond she got to forge was with me and she gave that her all. Ming was old and suffering and her kidneys were failing. Putting her to sleep was the merciful thing to do. Birth, death—you only get one shot. I got her death wrong and I cannot make it right. I know I’m talking about what I did to her to avoid talking about what I did to you but she sprang to mind when I saw you that morning because she had blindly trusted me too.
Around eleven, the pair of us headed out together. It was an unusually lovely day, or maybe it was just a normal one but I had acclimatised to everything being dire. It had been a harsh winter, the coldest on record apparently, but don’t they say that every year? This was the coldest winter, that was the wettest spring, here comes an apocalyptic summer. I threw a blanket into the car to be safe. The back seat was jammed with the bin bags that wouldn’t fit in the boot. I couldn’t see out of the rear-view mirror as I reversed.
I knew where I wanted to bring you—I had given it some consideration the night before and chosen the cliff path for its beauty, a place you might want to return to some day after the dust had settled—and then we were in one another’s arms once more. I held onto you for too long and not long enough. I should never have let you go. Nothing in my life had ever felt so good. The world rotated beneath us and we were the world. You did not yet understand that what we shared was temporary, that it was in fact drawing to an end. But I did.
I closed my eyes and I understood.
Your dear head resting in the crook of my arm. Me, treasuring its weight. My thumb stroking your cheekbone, your temple, your brow. The blanket outspread on the verge beneath us; the warmth of the sun on our skin. I understood then why people used to smile when they saw us. We were beautiful together, you and I. We were the most beautiful thing I had ever been part of. You studied me for a beat before smiling up and you may as well have driven hot skewers through my sinuses, such was the pain of biting back tears. I bent down and laid a Judas kiss upon your forehead.
Neither of us made a sound. You smiled again but you were getting drowsy. I was in something of a trance myself. I rocked gently, humming a nothing tune. The world kept turning and the sun got in your eyes. They squinted shut. I leaned forward to shade your face. Your eyes opened again. A smile. Shut again. I should have brought a pair of scissors, I thought foolishly, to steal one of your curls. Then your sweet body was falling and I was catching it. No one had ever drifted off in my arms until you.
Your breathing slowed and by and by you were gone. It was like death, Sailor. It was as if you had died.
I stopped rocking you in this awful afterlife but you did not wake. I said your name. I said it twice. I threw back my head. No, you would not remember me. How had I thought you might?
It was time. You hardly knew what time was but soon you’d find out. The rails were zinging by then and they are zinging again now because I am coming to the bad bit. I took out my phone. He still hadn’t called. My husband had wanted to punish me? Well. Before he had started in on me, I had never felt as lost in my life. By the time he was finished, I had stepped off the bottom rung and set foot in an underworld where everything was inverted. I don’t want to trouble you with that place. I powered down the phone and slotted the thin slab into my pocket. I was really doing this. This was really happening.
I extricated myself from your sleeping body and delicately laid your delicate head down. I arranged the blanket around you and stood back. There you were, your own republic, a sovereign state. This key moment in your history was unfolding but you would never have access to it. I had bequeathed you a blank page.
Now what? I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. We were both stuck on the same blank page. I stepped forward to adjust the blanket around you again, willing you to wake up because that would have stopped me. I could never have left you with the image of me turning my back on you. Though in my head, I was not turning my back on you. I was saving you. From me, from how bleak I felt, from that bleakness contaminating you. I’ve said it before, somewhere: depression is contagious. It leaps from one person to the next. Someone would love you, someone would always love you, and she would love you better than me. I left you so that another woman could love you better. More safely, is what I mean. That was the truth of it. Please, I begged, but to whom and for what, I still can’t say.
I stared at the sun. My retinas winced but I brazened it out, squinting at the blazing light through trembling slits, burning off that murky film—or burning it on as it turned out—because when I looked down at you again, you were suspended over a floating hole. Dark shapes throbbed across you, obscuring your face. I blinked to get you back but you were gone. Off I stumbled with a choked noise, baited by those drifting shadows, which were general now, a swarming legion. So this is chaos, I remember thinking. This is the end of days.
A rolling chasm opened up wherever my gaze landed and I pitched towards the void without ever quite reaching it. Two songs were entangled in my brain. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry that. I never meant to cause you any sorrow. I tore at my marriage rings until the knuckle cracked, but no joy. Those things were soldered onto me. I despised my husband then, I despised him, but I loved you more than I’d known it possible to love. In my mind I was performing an act of love. The most loving thing I thought I could do for you was to rid you of me. To set you free.
I didn’t mean to. I never meant to cause you. Or make you cry. All the time gasping for air as if I’d just surfaced from the depths, when really I was descending into them. The Virgin Mary, of all people, came to mind. I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin. Having never given her a moment’s consideration in my life, it then struck me that she was real. Not real as in there beside me—don’t worry, I wasn’t having a visitation—but real as in there had once been a girl, a living girl, a child in fact, called Mary, Maryam, Mariam; a child who had given birth in a stable at the age of thirteen or fourteen or possibly twelve. Where was her mother, was my question. Where was the poor kid’s mother? How could you let your child go through that without being by her side? Unless you had been so brutalised yourself that it seemed normal. Childbirth, let me tell you, is no joke. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Her darkest hour was yet to come. This motherless mother had to watch her son being whipped and mocked and stabbed and crucified—nailed to a wooden cross—and there was not a thing she could do to stop it. She couldn’t even hold her child’s hand. She was there on Good Friday, she stayed by her boy’s side, watched them hammer nails through his dear feet and wrists while he addressed himself to his father in the sky, who was absent. It was easier to be the son on the cross than the mother at his feet, because she would have given anything, anything, to have taken his place. I know this. There is nothing a mother would not do to protect her child from harm. She would kill others for him, she would kill her husband, she would kill herself. Mary suffered more than her child, and for longer. She suffered the horror of her child’s suffering until her dying day.
I feel sick. I feel physically sick at the prospect of harm coming to you. Where are they, those who would hurt you? Line them up. I’ll take them out one by one.
I was in a forest by then. There was heat in the sun, but I was cold. All winter you had kept me warm. Your absence was an amputation. There was a shivery patch where we had been conjoined. He’s free, I told myself, I have freed him, now he is free. You would always be loved. You will always be loved. At night, I touch your face with my thoughts. Could I pick out your hand from a thousand hands? Yes, I could! You saved me. I’m sorry, I’m jumping ahead. This is muddled. So am I.
I followed my jagged shadow. We lurched across uneven ground. Spring, birds singing, an early bumblebee, the ones you always worry will get too cold and die. Those tender, almost transparent—translucent is what I mean—those translucent new leaves on the trees: they had probably only unfurled that morning. My sight must have been restored by then because I acutely remember those leaves. I stopped to look up at them shimmering, all kinds of emerald, backlit by the sun, and we had waited so long for spring that I wanted you to see the baby leaves too; I turned to point them out to you, but oh, oh. I zigzagged like a drunk from tree to tree, pockets rattling. A swathe of bluebells hovered like mist above the grass. Ferns, the scent of three-cornered leeks. The forest got deeper, and I got deeper into the forest, trying to hide my contorted face. “You’re free,” I said, “I have freed you,” because I was talking out loud by then. “I never meant. I’m sorry that. Oh, oh.”
I encountered a mound of briars. It was as high as my chest and tore at my jacket as I attempted to wade through it. I heard fabric ripping and was gratified by the sound. Look at me! I suppose was my logic. Behold my suffering. I was without my anchor, our names carved in stone. You don’t need to hear this. Which is why I wait until you’re asleep.
I got caught before I made it halfway across—of course I did—and when I tried to turn, a hundred hooks snagged my legs out from under me and down I went on my back, toppling like a statue off a plinth. I let myself fall. I was ready to come to a stop. The jittery energy drained from my body as if a plug had been pulled. I was done. I started to cry, in shame as much as anything, on my bed of tiny nails. A grown woman stuck in a bush. The girl I used to be would never have blah blah. I tried to wipe my nose but my sleeve was caught in the thorns, so I lay there snivelling up at the sky, pegged down like a tent.
I grew calm as I abided there with the other wild animals. After a time the forest absorbed me into it and I was grateful. It was more than gratitude: I was moved. That these woodland creatures should accept me into their domain was just so... it was just so... tears again. I loved them, those creatures, I felt an abrupt but powerful kinship with them. Birdsong, squabbles on branches, the drone of insects—the volume crept back up. Wood pigeons re-embarked on their conversations. They were probably talking about me. A breeze was weaving through the canopy. Always loved that sound. I gazed at the leaves for a spell, the world happening up there without me, until it became abstract and I got confused, to be simultaneously lying on Earth and drifting away from it, to be at a remove while it held me up. Wasn’t it lovely, though, our green planet, now that I had a moment to contemplate it—those leaves, that sound, the intricacy of air currents, every last thing in flux. I was finally alone, it came to me then. Alone alone. Alone as in how we face death. Green is my favourite colour, I thought, gazing at its many variations. I hadn’t had time to think in so long. My world had become too calamitous. A balance, the great balance I hadn’t realised was suspended over me all along, had tipped. I was sliding off. Plus I had forgotten to drop the bin bags to the clothing bank. And you, abandoned and irresistible, just waiting for another woman to take you in her arms. A flare of jealousy. I closed my eyes but I didn’t understand.
I’m sorry that. I never meant. A creature was approaching in speculative bursts across the forest floor. I tracked its progress without opening my eyes. A bird? Too loud. It got closer still, then stopped to regard the felled giant in its midst. Fox? Rat? That’s when something pronged my scalp. I launched up and out of there with a shriek, by which time the creature had fled.
On the other side of the briars was a lush clearing of grass, lanced with sunlight and still as a rock pool. No human had set foot there in years. It was a glorious little glade and I immediately thought of you: hey look! But oh, oh. I was so tired, so beyond myself. Mother Mary, come to me. But who was there for her? Who mothered the mothers? Weren’t mothers people too? Weren’t they the ones on the hardest station of all? I took the tub of pills out of my pocket and tipped a few onto the palm of my hand.
I’d left my bottle of water in the car.
Stepping on the moss-green carpet detonated a booby trap of screeching. Birds sprang into life at my intrusion, a pair of them, flapping and shrieking. They appeared to be shrieking at me. I shooed them away but they wouldn’t desist. They had lost their minds too. “Jesus,” I said to them, “what is the problem?” It was a crazy little pocket I had happened upon. Then I saw it.
There on the forest floor, purplish pink among the vivid greens, and just about heavy enough to bend the grass, was a foetus. It was no larger than my big toe and at first I thought it was a big toe. “Fuck,” I cried as I twisted to avoid stepping on it, which put the wind up the birds. Don’t stop, I warned myself, but I had already stopped. Don’t look, but I had already bent over.
Unviably large head, purple body all elbows, bulbous eyelids sealed shut and a yellow beak. The merest membrane of skin. A hatchling.
The birds ramped up their protest. “What do you want me to do?” I asked them. “It’s dead.” I gesticulated at the unfortunate scrap. “Your baby is dead.” I don’t know why I was so callous about it. My mind was reeling. The tablets had lodged in my throat.
And then it moved. The hatchling opened its beak. Gasping for air or food or life. Birth and death. Was it suffering? Should I put it out of its misery? Step on it? “Oh Christ,” I said to the birds, “where’s your nest?”
I squinted up again at the forest canopy. But how could I climb a tree? Even without the stitches, I could not have climbed a tree. So I burst into tears again. It was you there, Sailor, dying in the grass with no one to help you because everything vulnerable was you, everything tender was you those days, and these days, and very possibly all my days. The screeching seemed shriller than before, though we appeared to be down to one bird now. The dowdy one, the female. The male and his glossy sheen had shagged off and the female was beside herself. I reflexively looked around for someone to help but I was deep in the forest, Sailor. I was lost.
I knelt down to pick up the hatchling to... what? Give it back to the mother? Here is your dying chick? Just before I made contact with it, she dive-bombed me. The mother actually dive-bombed me. I sat back on my hunkers in surprise and admiration. So slight, so drab, so courageous. She put me to shame. I stood up and backed off and she alighted in front of her young, setting herself and her pattering heart between us.
Babies die, I thought as I regarded her. That is the world we live in.
I did not make this world.
If I could, I thought, I would make a different world. I would make a different world for you and me, Sailor. And for this brave bird.
But I can’t.
I closed my eyes but I didn’t understand.
Demanding where Mary’s mother was that night was more of it. Mary had a father too. Where was Mary’s father the night his child gave birth in a stable? Where was the hatchling’s father? Why did the burden fall on us, the females, with our ruptured bodies?
And then I heard it, clear as a bell: a baby’s cry.
“Oh!” I whimpered and covered my mouth. That pain again, the hot skewers.
I whipped around. No sign of a baby. I lowered my hands. “Where are you?” I called in a sing-song voice so as not to alarm it. Like the baby was going to tell me. Like it would issue directions.
There was silence for a beat as the baby considered my voice, then it cried again, its wailing redoubled, the short a-wah, a-wah cries of tiny lungs, the type that do something, that loosen something in my core.
“Where are you?” I sang again through a false smile, faking calmness though my heart was racing. The baby had cried right in my ear, but when I had turned, there was no baby. There was no baby in the crazy forest glade.
“I’m coming,” I called, and the baby wailed. But where was the baby? Had I stepped on an unmarked grave? Desperate things happened to newborns in the past, desperate secrets were buried by desperate women. And desperate girls.
I had to go back. But which way was back? The bird screeched and brandished her wings, taking me on with her artillery of feathers while I hunted for a way out. The baby was crying again, the baby was scared. I was crying again, I was scared. I had never heard a frightened baby before and the frequency released something chemical. I had to comfort the baby, calm the baby, make the baby stop crying. I had to hold the baby, and I mean I had to, and right now. It was the most extraordinary compulsion I have known. I had to hold that baby to my chest, to my cheek, to my skin, to my soul, and rock it until it stopped crying, oh, oh.
And then the baby did stop crying, which was worse. Why had the baby fallen silent? What had happened to the baby?
I located the lowest section of the brambles and tore through them, emerging at the top of a gentle slope. I did not remember being at the bottom of a gentle slope on the way there. The baby cried out and I pushed on, chanting I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do as if someone might guide me, but I had made my bed.
I scoured the drifts of wild garlic for my tracks but found no trace. I broke into a run but was I getting closer or further away? It was dismaying, how little ground I covered. Like running up the down escalator. Up until a few months ago, I had regarded myself as young and fit. And up until a few months ago, I was. A dead tree lay propped against another at a diagonal. Had it been there earlier? Of course it had been there earlier, but had I? Had I come that way? I did not remember that tree. But then, what did I remember? Black shapes, floating voids, the end of days. “Where are you?” I sing-songed to the baby.
No response.
In the distance, a dog was barking. I wouldn’t ordinarily have tuned into a barking dog but this was a sustained bombardment. The dog was agitated. Something was agitating the dog. I rerouted to follow the sound. The trees thinned out onto open ground. The dog was still barking. I ran, I tripped, I got up, I ran harder. The breeze whipped my hair down my throat and I gagged. Then I heard the baby again, not up close any more but distant, as distant as the dog. “I’m coming,” I shouted across the meadow.
I ran for that baby, Sailor. I ran until I thought my heart would burst and then I ran more. I had not known I could run so fast, nor for so long. I’m sure I damaged stitches. “I’m coming,” I bellowed, careening over the hill like a Viking.
A swish of blonde ponytail on the other side of the hedgerow. There was a woman with the dog. Her head dipped out of sight. No. She was reaching for the baby. No, no, just no.
When she reappeared, it was not the baby in her arms but the barking dog, a stump of writhing muscle. I came plunging out of the undergrowth and there at the foot of a stone bench was the baby, sensational among the greens and sandy greys. I swept up the blue bundle. It was no bigger than a violin and not much heavier.
The baby abruptly stopped crying as its surprised eyes found mine. “Oh!” I gasped when I saw the beauty of the little face. Look at you! I would have exclaimed if I could speak but I could hardly breathe. Or stand. I sat down hard on the stone bench.
The baby stared at me a moment longer and then howled, and I mean howled, at which point the dog lost its shit altogether. It was all the woman could do to keep it in her arms.
“Are you alright?” the woman wanted to know. She had to yell to make herself heard over the dog. The racket was not helping with the baby.
“I’m fine,” I shouted back, though this was patently not the case. I was not fine and the baby would not be fine in my care. I rocked the howling parcel in the crook of my arm and, when that didn’t work, I propped him against my shoulder and rubbed his back, my lips at his ear. “Shush, little darling, shush.”
Which also did not work. So small, so angry.
I looked up. The woman was standing over me. “Are you sure you’re alright? Are you sure that baby is alright?”
I pushed rats’ tails out of my eyes and nodded: “I’m sure.” Sweat was trickling out of my hair and snaking down my face. “Thank you,” I added to let her know that I had it from here. When she showed no sign of budging, I stood up and pushed past her down the track, making a production of shielding the screaming baby from her barking dog. “Shush, babba, God, please shush.”
The woman trailed me. I picked up speed. She picked up speed too. I went as fast as I dared go bearing such a precious cargo.
“Excuse me, hello? Hello, excuse me? Are you alright?”
I hurried along as best as I was able. Yes, I’m alright, or would be if you’d just back off. She put on a spurt and overtook me, then planted herself across the path to force me to a stop. She was in her late forties, trim, dressed in a gilet and sports leggings, evidently in control of her life, evidently enjoying it, and maybe wrath is too strong a word for what I felt then but I can’t think of any other.
“I want to help,” she told me with a big sincere expression, reaching for my shoulder. The dog, now secured on her hip by just one arm and bulling to get at us, saw its opportunity and lurched. “Jesus!” I recoiled, and the woman wheeled away and set the dog down, dealing it a sharp yank of the collar. I cupped the back of the baby’s bawling head and tucked his hot face into the crook of my neck, or tried to. The baby did not wish to be tucked. The baby was beside himself. The woman remained stooped over the barking dog, holding it by its collar. She did not appear to have a lead.
“Your dog is scaring my baby!” I shouted. “He is scaring my baby, and he is scaring me!”
At the anger in my voice, the dog’s barking morphed into something sinister, something snarling and wolfish. Then, for a brief interlude, we all let rip on the cliff path. “Stop it!” the woman was shouting at the dog as I shouted at her to make it stop, but the dog didn’t stop, and nor did the baby, who was only getting started. In the midst of the uproar, the sun went in and the world turned flat and grey.
Wallop. The dog got it hard across the bridge of the nose. It yelped and collapsed on its back, raising its paws in supplication and exposing a pink belly nubbled with prominent nipples. Another female, possibly one that had recently nursed pups but I am no authority on dogs. I can’t say bitch, Sailor, I won’t say bitch. And nor should you.
The baby, now purple, was screaming at full throttle, his eyes squeezed shut and his tongue curled in spasm in his ridged and gummy mouth. I pressed my lips against his ear so that he might hear if not my voice (inaudible over his howls) the vibration of it, its muffled thrum. “Poor little darling,” I murmured, “poor little babba,” but it was no good. He freed a fist from the blanket and held it clenched in the air like a revolutionary, then arched his back in the grip of what appeared to be some class of fit. Something bad was happening to the baby. I glanced at the woman. She looked alarmed too.
A plastic ring protruded from the folds of the blanket. I fished it out and a soother emerged. I inserted it into his distraught mouth.
It was like putting the pin back into a grenade. The explosion was sucked back in. “Mmm, mmm, mmm,” the baby said as his body gave way and curled into mine. He issued a few more protest cries before pushing his face into my neck and rootling there for comfort. “Mmm, mmm, mmm.” It was the loveliest feeling, to be the one he turned to. “That’s better,” I crooned, kissing his velvety head before raising my eyes to the woman: See? We are fine. Everything is fine.
While she deliberated, now down on her hunkers to keep hold of her supine dog, I set off again down the track. “Wait,” she called, but I wasn’t stupid. I hurried along with the baby’s head cradled under my chin, my shoulder braced for her hand to alight on it once more. If I could just make it back to the car.
I lowered the baby to steal a glance at him. His normal colour was returning. My God, what a beauty—I buried his face in my neck again. I had yanked a Goya off the wall and legged it. I could hardly believe my luck. Still can’t.
I looked over my shoulder. The woman was on her phone crouched over the dog, now back on its feet and asphyxiating itself against its collar. If that dog had been a Labrador, an obliging, gormless Labrador, the woman would have the baby. The baby would be in her arms right now. And my arms would be empty.
But the dog was a terrier so my arms were full and that’s how they would stay. I laughed. Relief. Insanity. Insanity. Relief. The gods had blinked. The world was different to the one I had set out in that morning, oh about a million years ago. I was the vessel bearing the infant to safety, I was Air Force One. The sun—even the sun—had come back out to acknowledge the glory. “Almost there,” I assured the baby. “Almost home.”
It seemed to take longer getting back than it had going out but eventually I rounded the corner and there was my car. It had waited for me, my black steed, so noble, so loyal. My love spilled over for the car. My love spilled over for my surroundings in general. I had so much love, all of a sudden, to bestow. Relief. Insanity. Insanity. Relief.
I couldn’t remember how to drive. Steering wheel, handbrake, gear stick, clutch—I touched each of them in turn while speaking their names in an effort to orientate myself. My hands were shaking. The baby cried. Oh God. I turned around but it was only that his soother had fallen out. I thrust myself into the back seat to plug it back in and noticed, through the rear windscreen, that the woman and dog were catching up. I sat back into the driver’s seat and took the wheel. I breathed, I composed myself, I tried to look normal. The keys. Start with the keys. I twisted them in the ignition and the engine came to life. I pushed the car into gear, strapped on my seatbelt and drove back into my life.
The house was cold by the time I made it home—I’d forgotten to close the windows. I ran around shutting them, the baby in my arms. I drew the curtains too, although it wasn’t yet dark. You’re hiding, I realised as I stole around my own home: I had stowed the car in the garage and smuggled the baby in through the back door.
I brought the baby into the living room and laid him down on the hearth rug. He watched as I assembled logs and kindling in the stove. I struck a match and held up the flame. “This is fire,” I said. It seemed important to talk to him, to tell him things. I touched the matchstick to the firelighter and the flame leapt across. “Fire means that you are warm, it means that you are safe.”
Another lie. Fire means danger. Fire means run. Fire means an agonising death.
I gathered the baby up and clasped his small body to my chest. I would save him. I would run into the burning building and carry him out. Whatever it took.
When had it all become so life and death?
Behind the glass door of the stove, the fire caught. Soon the room glowed. The house that had looked fake that morning was now our refuge. I was coming down from a high, or up from a low; either way I was approaching equilibrium again. My hands no longer shook.
I set about undressing the baby. It made me sad, the care with which he had been wrapped earlier that day. He had been dressed for someone else’s eyes, each layer an entreaty to whoever found him: this child was treasured, please treasure him again. The blanket was blue lambswool with a single white star on it to indicate that this was not a case of deprivation, like in the old days, of worrying about another mouth to feed. Making it a case of what?
I unfastened the mother-of-pearl buttons on the tiny matinee jacket with trepidation. But the baby was perfect, and apparently perfectly happy. He gurgled at me and kicked his legs. His nappy, though swollen, hadn’t soaked through to his babygrow. So he hadn’t been left out there as long as I feared. Maybe he had slept through the whole thing and only just woken when the dog started to bark. But maybe he had been crying for his mother for ages, lying on his back staring into the vast emptiness of the sky. And maybe when her face failed to appear he feared, like the hatchling, that he might never make it back to his nest. The baby I had snatched from the ground was a frightened one. Had the ordeal rocked his foundations? It had rocked mine.
There was a letter in the swaddle. A watermark of tears on the envelope. The mother had wanted the baby to some day see those tears and forgive her. I opened the stove and tossed the letter into the fire.
It was late by the time my husband made it home. The days were getting longer but my husband was getting home later, as if pushing his arrival time forward in small increments would keep me from noticing that he was shirking his duties. My husband must think I am stupid.
There was a time he used to rush home to me, Sailor. A time before you.
He found the two of us on the fireside rug, not a light on in the house. He flicked the switch and I winced.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, switching the light back off. “I didn’t know you were home. I didn’t see the car.”
“I parked in the garage.”
“What about my—” he began, but dropped it. What about my gear, he wanted to ask, the gym equipment that had suddenly appeared. It had juddered across the concrete as I drove the car through it like a snowplough, clearing it from my path.
My husband put his laptop case down and crossed the floor to look into your face. “How’s my little man?”
You raised your eyes to his and smiled. “He’s perfect,” I said.
My husband reached down to pick you up but I stiffened around you: Mine. A beat, then he retreated empty-handed. “I was trying to ring you.”
“My phone is off.”
“Oh.” He turned on one of the table lamps and glanced around. “The place looks different.”
“I tidied it.”
“Wow, it looks great!”
The false cheer. He waited for me to reply. I didn’t.
“So, what did you guys get up to today?”
I smirked.
“What?” Smiling expectantly, wanting in on the joke.
“We went for a walk.”
“Good, that’s good! You need to get out of the house more. It’ll do you both good!”
“Will it?” I asked grimly. I had been launched into outer space and seen how bleak it was out there. I looked up at my husband and realised that he could never understand that place.
“My God, what happened to your face?”
I touched my cheek. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s all scratched.”
“Just some brambles.” My husband had wanted to punish me? Well.
“Oh sweetheart!” He got down on his hunkers and put a finger under my chin to tilt my face towards his. “Are you okay?”
He was demonstrating how caring he was, that he was such a caring guy. I turned my face away. “I’m fine.”
“You look like you’ve been dragged backwards through bushes,” he remarked. “But in a cute way,” he hastily added, fearful of saying the wrong thing. He patted my shoulder and ruffled my hair and performed a series of similarly fond twitches to reassure himself that everything was normal, domestic, whatever. “Look,” he finally said, “I’m sorry about last night.”
I shrugged without taking my gaze from the fire.
“I’m sorry for those things I said. I was angry. You know I didn’t mean them, right?”
You know I didn’t mean them, right? What I had almost done for something he didn’t mean.
My husband was still speaking but I was no longer listening. I could not possibly have heard your cries in the forest, I knew. But I did hear your cries, Sailor. You woke and you cried out for me and I heard you, clear as a bell. We are joined, you and I, our names on the stone anchor. When one of us dies, the other will feel the loss always.
“Did you hear me?” my husband asked, not unkindly.
I looked at him. “What?”
“Your cardigan’s inside out. Poor silly thing.” Then a tentative, “What’s for dinner?”
When he wandered off in search of something to eat, I scooped you up. I held your head in my open hands and studied you like a book. From my fingertips to my elbow, that’s how small you were then. Birth, death. You only get one shot. Sailor, if I could have one wish granted, it would be to do it all over again. I do not want another baby, that is not what I am trying to say. What I want is to do it all over again with you. Except this time getting it right.
But I didn’t get it right. I had my chance. And I blew it.
I love you. You’re perfect. But I’m not.
A wind had risen at the window. The hatchling was out there, the dowdy female too, warding off rats, foxes, the ghosts of dead babies in unmarked graves. All that anguish heaped on feathers and hollow bones. I shivered and put another log on the fire.
She was a blackbird. It took me a while to figure that out because she wasn’t black, she was brown. Designed to blend into the background, I suppose. Her species should be called brownbirds and you should bear my surname and I should bear my mother’s because the male... Oh Sailor, where is the male? When things get ugly, where does he go? I felt certain when I was pregnant that you were a girl, and I practised the things I would tell you throughout your gestation to prepare you for a man’s world. Then you appeared and I don’t know what to say to you except don’t be one of them.