Chapter Julian
Julian
Afterward, Cora is unsure what made her say it, only that she did and it felt right.
Now, as this baby lies in his pram—Julian, sky father, ethereal, transcendent—Cora has a feeling of being more rooted than she has for years.
As though, feet planted, she holds the two kite strings of her children’s lives safe in her palm.
As she walks, there’s a new certainty in her step, an awareness of the extension and contraction of her muscles.
As though something inside has woken. She turns to cut through the common unthinkingly, only noticing when Maia pauses.
But Dad said…A trainered foot hovering above the ground, as though her mother is asking her to step into another world.
“We’ll be okay,” Cora says. “We’ll stick to the main path. There are hardly any big trees right next to it and there’ll be so much to look at.” Surprise registers on Maia’s face, but her foot falls, and then she is off, quietly exploring the new landscape.
Cora has never wanted Maia’s freedom of movement to become constrained, yet she recalls how years earlier, as a ballet dancer, her own body had been alive, alert, attuned to music, intuiting any flicker of emotion—a nerve, a hesitation—just through the quality of her partner’s grip.
And now, she experiences that same heightened sensibility, aware of the kinetic energy in the things around her.
She notices the bump and spin of the pram wheels as they pass over the windswept ground of the common.
The scent of damp air penetrating the sandstone boulders.
How her pupils react as the October light makes brilliant the white of the cricket pavilion.
The way her ears receive the muffle of Maia’s footsteps and the flattening of twigs as she pads along the dirt path ahead.
Feel the floor, every teacher since she was five years old had called out, vowels melding into the piano music that ricocheted around the walls of a church hall, a community center, a studio.
And now, all these years later, she feels the floor again.
She feels all of it. She recognizes its grip, its support, and knows the floor—this earth—has her.
That it rises imperceptibly to meet her, and will catch her if she falls, because she has done the right thing.
Cora is used to sudden explosions that come at a light being left on, or realizing too late she’s been overly friendly in the way she’s spoken to a tradesman.
She lives trying not to set a match to Gordon’s anger, but still she spills petrol about her, dripping it over shoes she has forgotten to polish, sloshing it across a particular shirt not washed in time.
She races from thing to thing, tending to whatever might spark, but it’s always something behind her, just out of sight that she hadn’t thought of.
But today is different. She gets to choose how it’s revealed, what the conditions are, the way it’s presented.
And she feels fearless. Yes, he might—will—be furious, but the consequences won’t be pointless this time.
She will have got what she wants: for her son to grow up with his own name.
When Maia drops back and falls into step with her, she is humming, a low, frantic sound, full of erratic key changes. Cora takes a hand from the pram and squeezes Maia’s mittened palm. “You don’t need to worry. He might be cross for a little while, but he’ll get over it.”
“But you said it was because of what I said before we went in. It’ll all be my fault.”
“No, I said you were my inspiration. There’s a difference.
Van Gogh might inspire me to paint a picture, but that doesn’t mean it’s his fault when my sunflowers look like a jar of yellow Chupa Chups, does it?
You reminded me how important it is for everyone to have their own name, but it was completely my decision to call him something different. ”
“Sunflowers would never look like Chupa Chups.”
“Well, you don’t know that; you haven’t seen mine.
But listen, Julian was a name I’d picked out long before today, so the idea must have already been floating around in my head.
And look at him,” she says, nodding toward the pram, “doesn’t he look like a Julian to you?
There’s nothing else he could have been.
Can you imagine him as a Gordon? Really?
” Maia laughs, a quiet, nervous laugh. She glances sideways, as if to check it’s really her mother.
“You don’t even need to be there when I tell him, but let’s think about how to make tonight special. ”
“What will you cook? Maybe lasagne?” Maia asks, and Cora knows, again, that she has done the right thing, because no child should ever be so used to fitting around a parent that they will suggest the food they like least themselves.
When Maia was younger, Cora had cut open a piece of penne one lunchtime when it was just the two of them. “Look, like a pirate’s scroll,” she’d said, “completely flat once it’s rolled out. That’s all a lasagne sheet is.”
But Maia had pursed her lips. “Flat pasta tastes different. More chewy and fat.”
Cora had picked a tube of penne from Maia’s plate. “Maybe you’re right,” she’d said, biting into it, “they’re probably not quite the same.”
But still, the next time they’d had lasagne, as she’d set the dish onto the table and Gordon had proclaimed it his favorite, Cora and Maia had caught one another’s eye momentarily—unintentionally—and Maia had looked away and said, “Yes, nice sauce,” and her goodness had scrunched at Cora’s heart.
Maia always seemed attuned to the undercurrents in a room.
Cora saw it in the stiff set of her small frame, as though someone had placed narrow rods beneath the shoulder seams of her T-shirt.
She saw it in the way her eyes moved between them, tracking their interactions, while being careful to avoid anything that could hint at an alliance.
She saw it in the way Maia rushed for kitchen roll to mop up a spill Cora might be blamed for.
In the way she watched television with a plate held beneath a breadstick to catch its crumbs.
One day, Cora had taken something into school for Maia—something forgotten, a packed lunch or gym bag—and the receptionist had said, “You might be best taking it down to make sure she gets it in time, if you don’t mind.
” Cora had walked along empty lesson-time corridors and when she’d reached the right classroom, she’d looked in through the glass panel, about to open the door, and then stopped.
Because there was a girl. Pausing in her work to say something to the friend sitting beside her, which made them both laugh.
And for a moment, Cora had not recognized her daughter.
But even when she had, still the two Maias did not perfectly align.
This Maia’s laughter reached all the way to her eyes, her smile fractionally wider and easier than the one she knew.
Maia had looked up then, as though aware of being watched, and she’d smiled and given a thumbs-up as Cora held the forgotten item up to the glass.
But the Maia she’d witnessed had already vanished.
And on the way home, Cora had felt a scooped-out hollow at her core with the realization that, however much she might have imagined she could exist in isolation, just Mum—warm, supportive, encouraging—in her daughter’s mind, she and Gordon were packaged together, two inseparable halves.
It didn’t matter what their different roles might be, Cora was an equal impediment—something to be protected and worried over.
Just as Gordon was a presence to be minded and feared.
At home, Maia cuts stars and moons from colored paper and strings them together with yellow ribbon.
“These can go around our plates,” she tells Cora, who’s chopping vegetables in the kitchen, while Julian sleeps in his pram in the hallway.
Cora smiles and feels almost optimistic.
She hopes she’s not misguided and that she’ll find a way to lead Gordon to see it this way too.
Cora wonders aloud if swimming will still be on after the storm. “I hope not,” Maia says, screwing up her face.
Cora pictures Maia in the changing room pulling clothes back onto her still-wet body and then emerging, damp-haired, into the cold night air. “You’re probably right, I can’t imagine the pool will be open today.”
In the late afternoon, Cora puts Julian in his bouncy chair and sets it in the center of the kitchen table where she can talk to him as she layers sheets of pasta and béchamel sauce into the lasagne dish.
Every now and then, she looks at him and thinks, Julian, and then, sky father.
And they feel like strong, talismanic words.
“Do you like your new name, Jules?” Maia asks.
“Jules,” Cora says, testing how the word feels in her mouth for the first time. “I hadn’t thought of how it would sound shortened. It’s nice. Although careful not to say his name until I’ve told Dad, okay?”
At six-thirty, she hears Gordon’s key in the lock, pictures him hanging up his suit jacket in the hall.
Feel the floor, she tells herself, heels gravitating to first position.
She can hear the approval in his voice when he calls out, “Lasagne! I could smell it the moment I opened the door.” As he passes the dining table on his way through to the kitchen, he says, “And decorations too. Well done, Maia.” But then, “Come on, Cora, it’s not safe to put the bouncer up here.
” He lifts it down smoothly, so he doesn’t wake the baby.
“It’s not as if I haven’t told you enough horror stories from the practice. Try to think.”
Cora apologizes, then asks Maia to lay the table.