Chapter Gordon #2
In the middle of the night, she wakes to feel Gordon’s foot jabbing her ankle.
“For goodness’ sake, Cora. I’ve got to work in the morning!
How can you not hear him crying when I can?
” Cora switches off the monitor and the baby’s cries are muted to a distant wail.
“And don’t do that with the covers—you can get out without letting all that cold air into the bed. Show some consideration.”
She opens the door to the nursery and sound bludgeons her senses, as though someone has turned the volume on a stereo to maximum without warning.
She wants to turn away. Instead, she takes the baby from his cot, sits down in the rocking chair with him, his sobs gradually receding to tiny shudders.
She looks out into the blue-black darkness where she’d forgotten to pull the blind over at bedtime and an image from childhood drifts into her mind.
She cannot remember why she was there or who was with her, but she recalls standing just outside Mr. Barry’s milking barn, looking in through a crack where the door had been left ajar.
There, the vast, bony hindquarters of black-and-white Friesians were lined up, metal suction cups hanging from swollen udders, the air filled with the rhythmic thrum of milk being pumped.
She remembers how the animals stood there, pliant and accepting, and wonders now why they didn’t object, why they didn’t kick their hooves as Mr. Barry bent for their udders.
Did he hit them? Is that why they accepted it?
Was it fear? Perhaps, she thinks, because here she sits in the baby’s milk parlor, in bovine suppliance, breasts fed through the gaps of a sleep bra.
She wants to pull her flesh from the baby’s mouth.
To stand and let him fall from her lap. To let Gordon deal with his namesake’s indignant howls.
She wants to stride from the room, descend the stairs, go out into the street, where she would grand jeté in giant leaps down the center of the road, feeling cold air and moonlight on her unencumbered body, a herd of cows lolloping along behind, making their own ungainly break for freedom.
She is exhilarated and appalled by the violence of these images.
But she is not like her husband; she would never act on these impulses.
The baby pats at her collarbone as he feeds.
She can feel his eyes on her, seeking her out, willing her to look down at him.
She rests her head back against the chair and squeezes his hand gently between her thumb and forefinger. It’s as much as she can give.
The following day, the midwife calls with a form for Cora to fill in, apparently intended to diagnose postnatal depression: I have looked forward with enjoyment to things: a) As much as I ever did, b) Rather less than I used to, c) Definitely less than I used to, d) Hardly at all.
How can this piece of paper hope to crack open the complexity of her life?
Of anyone’s life? She doesn’t even attempt any nuance in her responses and ticks the full-joy option every time.
“Goodness, we are feeling perky, aren’t we?” the midwife says as she looks over Cora’s answers.
Earlier that morning, Gordon had appeared behind Cora, moving her unwashed hair aside to nuzzle her. “You know, if you’re having problems, there’s no need to involve any madwives. You can come straight to me, and I can have someone at work prescribe for you.”
And she’d closed her eyes as he kissed down the side of her neck, not because she was enjoying it, but because she was tired and with her eyes shut, she could switch off and leave her body almost entirely.
“Now get into that shower and make yourself presentable. It’s just a practice meeting this morning, so I can mind Gordon for a few minutes,” he’d said, patting her bottom lightly.
And so here she sits: washed, blow-dried, clean-clothed. Not that one, Cora, there’s vomit on the shoulder.
The midwife plunges a biscuit into her tea, tongue hoovering crumbs from her lips as she speaks.
“To be honest, I should probably check your stitches before I sign you off, but we’re two down right now and I don’t know if I’m going to get to all my babies today as it is.
Are you okay to just mention it to your husband if you have any problems, what with him being a doctor?
Or should I come back later in the week? ”
The midwife finishes her digestive and, even though she says not to get up, Cora walks her into the hallway and closes the door on her brief chapter of at-home care.
She watches herself as she does this. She’s spent a lot of time like this recently—viewing herself from above as she moves around the house, changing nappies, ironing Gordon’s shirts, cooking for his parents.
Almost as though it’s someone else doing these things.
Only with Maia does she occasionally feel herself reinhabiting her body.
Cora sits down next to her as she watches television and Maia snuggles into her side and says, “Mm, smells like you,” before turning back to the screen.
It feels to Cora as though she has left something unspoken, dangling: It smells like you…but is somehow not you.
“What do I smell like?” Cora asks.
“Mum, of course.”
Later, Cora wonders if she’d imagined it, but either way, it pulls her to the surface.
She stares at the screen, telling herself she’ll do better tomorrow.
Just like she had once done with Maia, she will blow raspberries onto the baby’s skin, she will read aloud to him from one of her husband’s books, lulling him to sleep with the sound of her voice, his cheek turning hot and pink against her skin as the afternoon hours pass.
And later, when she puts away the washing, she will carry him from room to room in his Moses basket, talking to him as she folds clothes into drawers.
Together, they will meet Maia after school and buy gingerbread men and they will sit on the shelf in the sandstone near Pig Rock, and the bubble around her, which has contained only herself these past few weeks, will expand to gather her two children in beside her.
Then everywhere they go, they will move as one.
The bubble stretching as Maia runs ahead, reshaping as Cora pauses to step away from the baby’s pram for a moment, but always contracting back to hold the three of them close in its safety.
But when morning comes, she finds she does not have the energy for these things, that she cannot pull back the dullness that blankets her.
It is the same the next day. And the next.
She feeds the baby staring out through the patio doors, looking toward the fir trees at the end of the garden, which somehow give the illusion it’s raining even when the sky is bright.
Then, she carries him upstairs and places him gently into his cot, and when she hears him wake after only twenty minutes, she moves quickly through to the kitchen and turns on the radio, pretending she has not heard, because he was meant to sleep for longer.
Waking so soon was not part of the plan.
She loads the washing machine, turns on the dishwasher, the hum of appliances helping to drown out the baby’s cries.
It is a surprise when, some time later, kneeling on the kitchen floor, clearing out the bag of plastic bags so it will fit more easily on the inside of the pantry door, she sees Gordon’s hand out of the corner of her eye, feels his fingers gripping her upper arm.
She lets out a little scream, shocked to find him—anybody—in the house with her.
“For goodness’ sake, Cora,” he says, releasing her to snap off the radio. “Thank God I came home. Can you not hear him up there? What are you even doing?” he asks, taking in the bags scattered across the kitchen floor.
She looks up at him, one hand suspended mid-fold, and motions dumbly with the other, her words lost. Because, really, even she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
“You don’t deserve children if this is how you look after them,” he says. “This is neglect, Cora. It’s actual neglect.”
He turns and leaves the room, and she stands, letting plastic bags fall down around her.
She runs up the stairs behind him. “I’m sorry.
” She’s already crying, half hysterical.
“Gordon, I’m sorry.” He ignores her, takes the last few steps two at a time.
He is lifting Gordon from his cot when she enters the room and she sees that their son is red-faced, tear-streaked.
That curdy vomit covers his babygro and the cot sheets.
“Please,” she says, reaching for him. “Please, give him to me,” her hands out, needing to make it right. But Gordon turns from her and when she tries to stretch around him, he elbows her away and holds the baby higher on his shoulder.
“You’re an unfit mother,” he says over the baby’s cries.
“I didn’t mean to, please, just give him to me, please,” she says, and for the first time since he was named, she feels a pull toward her baby.
A primitive need to give comfort, to feel his cries subside in her arms. She moves for him again, and Gordon lifts the baby, holds him high in the air to keep him out of her reach.
“No, don’t do that,” she says, hearing the intensity of the child’s wail step up.
“I’ll be good, I’ll be good.” She doesn’t know where these words come from, only that they are intended to make it stop.
An offer of her immediate and total submission.
The baby’s feet are dangling near Gordon’s forehead, its frantic screams filling the air.
Cora backs away, sits in the rocking chair, her hands gripping its arms to stop herself from lunging for him again.
And when Gordon has waited long enough to be sure she will stay there, he lowers the baby to his shoulder, his eyes fixed on Cora’s.
He pats the infant’s heaving back, as it smacks its face impotently across its father’s lapels, smearing them with bubbles of drool and tears.
“If I ever come home to find him like this again, I will take both of them from you, and you will never see them again. Do you understand?”
Cora nods, desperate, still clutching the arms of the chair as tears track down her face. The room feels charged, as though a bomb has gone off, as though bits of debris are still falling around them, floating through air that rings with an echo of what’s just played out here.
“Now do your job and feed our son,” Gordon says. He shakes his head, watching her. And then, “I’ll sort things out downstairs.”
A minute later, she hears the front door open and the clang of something heavy hitting the inside of their just-emptied rubbish bin.
“No, sadly not,” she hears him say, his voice raised, speaking to a neighbor.
“It’s given up the ghost.” And she knows he’s thrown away her radio, a wood-encased Roberts her mother had sent over from Ireland the Christmas before last. There is a pain in her chest and images flicker through her mind: her mother shopping for it; wrapping the box in brown paper on the dining-room table, soft, liver-spotted hands smoothing the end creases into place; packing it into the car to post once the school day has finished.
You did this. This is your fault, she tells herself.
For a few days, Cora feels a shift. A conviction to rework the threads of connection with her son. The will is there, the want is there, but something in the child has changed. Where once he’d turned toward her, now he turns away.
“I don’t think he’s getting any milk,” she tells Gordon a few nights later as they sit in bed. He looks away from his book, touches a hand to the infant’s sunken fontanelle. The next day, after morning surgery, he places six bottles and a box of formula wordlessly on the kitchen counter.
But it is not the relief Cora had hoped for.
The bottles are her neglect, they are her turning up the radio to block out his cries; they are his howls as Gordon held him out of reach.
She feels self-loathing in her pathetic attempts to mother him.
In her desperation for him not to be heard crying in the moments before she can get to him.
In how he no longer seems comforted just to be held in the crook of her arm. She cannot see a way back to good.
By the time the baby is six months old, every week Mehri still says, “Would Maia like to come for dinner with Fern after swimming? It’s no trouble,” and Cora accepts, grateful Mehri seems to understand the invitation can only work in one direction.
“Where’s that beautiful boy of yours,” she says when she drops Maia home, reaching for the baby, who seems to almost vibrate with excitement, a charged atom in Cora’s arms at the prospect of being handed over for a few moments.
One day, they bump into each other outside the bakery and, after leaning into Gordon’s pram to coo over him, Mehri puts a hand on Cora’s arm.
“I’ve been meaning to say,” she says, locking her eyes on Cora’s as though she is trying to plumb her depths for what she keeps hidden, “you can talk to me, you know, if you ever need to.”
Cora thanks her, and wonders what Maia might have said and if it’s time to start collecting her from swimming herself. She raises a shielding hand to her brow and squints into imagined sunlight.
When she walks away, back straight, with what she hopes looks like composure, she thinks she can feel Mehri’s eyes on her, although when she presses the button to cross at the traffic lights, she glances back and sees she’s already gone.
Cora feels her stomach lurch, as though she’s jumped from a plane with no parachute, the ground rushing toward her too fast. But before she can be overwhelmed by the sensation, the green man appears, and she crosses the road, grateful she has the pram to hold on to.