If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Chapter 28

In the bedroom of number nineteen, the mother of the twins lies awake in bed. Her husband sleeps, undisturbed, and she lies still beside him, locked inside the knowledge of absolute pleasure, thinking about the times when this was not the way of things, the times when there was a shadow over their moments together, the shadow of a thing not happened, the shadow of the family thinking badly of them, of her.

She runs her fingers across the smallness of her stomach, and she remembers when this was a painful thing, a thing to be wept over.

A thing to be prayed over.

She pulls at the slight looseness of the skin around her stomach and hips, runs the side of her thumb along the tiny ridges and turns of the marks left by what was there, by the slow swell and stretch of her body.

She remembers the weight of it, the enormousness, she remembers the miracle of it, her body changing to make room for a new body, for two bodies.

And she thinks about the years of impossibility, the unblessed years, the word her husband’s mother used, saying it is a shame that you are unblessed.

And she didn’t mean shame the way some people say it, like as a small sadness, like as when they say it is a shame it is raining, this is not how she used the word, she used it in the old way, the word shame meaning humiliation and embarrassment and wrongness. Shame meaning lower your head and do not look at me you are a bringer of shame into my son’s household.

She didn’t speak quite this clearly, but the things she said meant these things, bitter, spiteful things, and she only said them when neither of the men were in the house.

It was some years ago now, but she still finds it difficult to find excuses for her, the things she said, the way she was.

Her husband makes a noise in his sleep, moves, turns towards her, lays a blind arm across her breast and nuzzles his mouth into her shoulder. She takes his hand and twists her fingers into his, and it looks the same as when their sons were born, when they were laid down toe to toe and they moved together and tangled their legs.

And when she thinks of that moment, of looking at her two newborn sons, her heart blossoms within her, just as it did at the time. She thinks of what it took for them to be born, of all the procedures and rituals, the medicines and the special diets, the calendars and thermometers and endless tests, blood tests and urine tests, and others.

She thinks of the shame of her husband, having to spill his seed into a plastic bottle, she is glad his mother did not know about that. He was quieter for a time after that, after the doctor had talked to him about that test, he said he felt like he was a smaller man, a lesser man. But she kissed him, and she held him, and she told him he was the same to her as he always was, and after a while he believed her and he talked to her about what the doctor had said, the advice he’d been given.

Even now, seven, eight years later, it makes her smile to remember the things they had to do to make the impossible more possible, to call down their blessings. They were things that seemed too ordinary, too mundane, it felt like looking for treasure by guessing six numbers.

She thinks of the things, she kisses her husband’s hand and smiles.

Warm baths, a run in the park, less fatty food.

Looser-fitting underwear.

It had seemed so useless, such an insignificant action in the face of barrenness, like a small glass of water in the middle of the desert, like knocking on a huge iron door with the knuckle of one finger. And so their hopes had not been raised, and they had continued with everything else, the charts and the calculations, the temperatures and the weighings, the estimations of the most suitable time. Fertile windows is what the doctor had said, she said you must estimate your fertile windows and make full use of them. It had seemed a funny expression to her, it made her think of a derelict cottage with ivy and moss growing through the cracked panes of glass.

But still, they estimated their fertile windows, and they made full use of them. She smiles, and her body swells with pleasure, with the memory of pleasure, and she turns slightly and presses herself against her husband. She remembers him once, feigning reluctance, saying my love do you think perhaps we are over-estimating these so-called fertile windows? And she had said yes, I think so, and they had made full use of it.

She looks at him now, his eyes closed, his mouth open, every detail of his face lit up by the sunlight flooding back into the room. His cheeks, rough and a little loose around the bones, the day’s stubble already itching through the skin, dark points peppered with silver. She thinks of the sound her palm would make as it brushed against those tiny hairs, a rasp like the grating of a nutmeg. She touches his skin, gently, she outlines his eyes and his lips, she follows the furrows of his forehead, pinches the thick hair of his eyebrows between her finger and thumb, tugs it into little tufts. He murmurs something, frowns slightly in his sleep, turns his body away a little, his face wriggling back towards her. She whispers a shush, and trails her middle finger across his forehead, down the length of his nose and onto his lips.

She thinks of his face in that moment, remembers the way it changed so suddenly when she told him, it was like the hugest firework on the darkest night, flashing and sparkling and exploding in front of her, his eyes stretched wide, his mouth lifted open and his teeth flashing white and gold, crackles and hisses of delight bursting out from somewhere deep inside him. Oh is it true? he said, oh really? oh is it true? oh praise be he said, oh I am so happy, oh thankyou thankyou he said, and she’d realised he was saying it to her so she’d laughed and said no thankyou, thankyou Mr Baggypants, and he’d laughed, and they’d held each other, and read the letter from the doctor over and over again, talking with joy and excitement long into the night, talking of who they would tell first and when they would tell them, talking of clothes and cots and prams, of decorating the box-room, of good sleep and good food, of extra money, of names. Talking for hours of a good name, for weeks and months as her body swelled and her steps slowed, as the sickness came and went and the excitement grew, as the visits from relatives and friends increased, always thinking of a name. Writing lists, trying out favourites, looking through books for new ideas.

She remembers those last few weeks, isolated in the house, surrounded by people trying to help, surrounded by stories of how it was for them, advice piling up around her like the gifts in the corner of the room.

She remembers how uncomfortable it was, that time, the pain of moving around, the difficulty of sleep, the overwhelming feeling of such bigness, wanting it to be over and yet so fearful of the finishing. She remembers her husband spreading his broad hands across her belly, thumb against thumb and his little fingers not stretching anywhere near her hip bones. How does it feel he’d said, how does it feel to be so strange and new? and she’d said I feel like a mammal and he’d laughed and said but we are, humans are mammals you know. And she’d said no, I don’t mean, and been unable to explain what she did mean, that she felt like a damn elephant, a whale, huge and stately and balloon-like but also she meant not like a human at all, like an animal, locked into a process much bigger than herself, more than one human being, she meant that she felt part of a species, part of something that nature was doing and she had no control of.

The night before it happened, he’d spread his hands again, pressed them palm flat to her swollen skin, a skin so stretched that it seemed translucent, held his hands there and said my God this is going to be a hell of a big baby.

She remembers him saying this, she smiles and she shakes her head, she wonders how she could have had no idea, how neither of them could have had the thought even pass through their minds.

She remembers his awestruck idiocy when he found out, when it was over and he was brought into the room and all he could do was look at her and say my God there is two of them.

She touches his lips with one finger again, stroking the knuckle against the chapped edges of his upper and lower lip, he moves his mouth, his eyelids lift a little, like papers rustling in a light breeze. She whispers wake up, she leans her face across to kiss his mouth, she rolls the weight of her body onto him, feeling the warmth of the sun on her back, moving her head so that her shadow bounces in and out of his eyes. He wakes up, he opens his eyes and she spreads her fingers flat across his chest, moving her hips so that his belly rolls a little from side to side.

She says have you slept enough now, are you rested?

She says the house is still empty you know.

And he raises his eyebrows, and there is a rolling of bodies, a rustling of tangled bedclothes, a creaking of old bedsprings.

And in a moment’s breathless pause, blinking at each other and already wiping sweat from a forehead, she thinks of their further surprise, a few short months after their doubled blessing, the unexpected planting of a third child they had not been ready for, and she knows they were right to seal off further possibility, to let the doctors take scissors and stitches to her husband and close the shutters on their fertile windows. There is not the money she’d said, my body is tired, and he had not been able to deny her that. We have been given more than we asked for she’d said, this is enough now, and he had agreed.

They had kept it a secret, they were not sure his parents would approve, but his mother had made no more comment about extra brothers and sisters for their children. Perhaps she thinks three is enough after all. Perhaps she thinks that they no longer move together in that way, now there is no need.

She draws her fingernails slowly down her husband’s back, she listens to the sounds she can draw from out of him, and she thinks well so at least she is wrong about that.

I woke up late this morning, I had to leave for work without having a shower and I felt sticky and straw-headed all day.

Before I left, I noticed that Michael had left the broken clay figure behind, it was still on the table, lying forlornly on its side.

I picked it up and looked at it again, resting the head on the shoulders, looking at the long thin ears, the tiny beads around the neck, the stillness of the expression.

I wondered how it had been broken.

I wondered if I could fix it, if that would be okay, if it was supposed to be like this.

I looked around for some superglue, I looked in the kitchen drawer with the elastic bands and the sellotape and the silver foil, and I found the leaflets from the clinic, the ones I’d stuffed away in there the other week.

I read the sections I’d started to highlight, I read the rest of them, and somehow it seemed a little less alien than it had before, I kept checking the clock and reading a little bit extra, stroking my belly and imagining the quiet bubbling miracle inside.

But in the end I had to put them back and run for the bus with my mouth crammed full of toast.

And I spent all day standing over a photocopier, getting tiny paper-cuts on my hands and thinking about yesterday afternoon.

I thought about how nice it had been to just spend the afternoon walking around, talking, not talking, thinking, telling each other what we were thinking.

We went to the park, and I saw the girl from the shop downstairs, I think she saw me but I didn’t know whether or not to say hello, I wasn’t sure that she’d recognise me.

I was sick behind some rhododendron bushes, and it barely interrupted the flow of the conversation.

We had lunch in a cafe by the lake, we sat by the window and looked out over the water, he told me about him and his brother learning to swim on a camping trip in the lake district, how they’d egged each other on to walk further and further out.

It was a hot day he said, but the water was still icy cold.

He told me how they stood there, shivering, calling each other chicken, a step further and a step more, until the water was tapping against their clenched teeth.

He was looking at the lake, at the people in rowing boats, and he said we stopped talking, we were looking at each other, wondering what to do next, and suddenly we grabbed each other and pulled each other forwards, out of our depth, face down into the water.

I said and what happened, he said I don’t know, I remember being under the water for a while, throwing my arms and legs around, and then somehow my head was in the air again and we were both swimming.

I told him I couldn’t swim and he pointed at my stomach and said so a birthing pool’s out then and he smiled and I laughed.

And after we’d talked some more we walked back through the park and across town to an art gallery.

There was a special exhibition on, it was only one piece of work but we were there for an hour, looking and looking and telling each other about it in hushed awestruck voices.

It was in one room, a large room with long skylights, and we stood by the doorway and looked in at it, at them, looking over them, thousands and thousands of six-inch red clay figures, as roughly made as playschool plasticine men, a pair of finger-sized sockets for eyes, heads tilted up from formless bodies.

Each one almost identical, each one unique.

We knelt there, looking at them looking up at us, the thousands of them, saying I wonder how long and I wonder if they all and I wonder what.

A small boy came running up behind us, shouting and then suddenly stilled into quietness, he said it’s like being on a stage.

I wanted to steal one, I wanted to put it on my bedside table and wake up to see it smiling kindly at me, but Michael said it wasn’t fair, he wouldn’t let me, he said it might get lonely.

I wanted to count them, give them all names, make up stories for each of them, but it seemed impossible to even begin.

And so we just knelt there without talking, looking at them looking at us, unblinking, expressionless.

By the time we came out the sun was heavy and low in the sky, we were both hungry but I didn’t want to go home.

We went and bought soup from a coffee shop, we sat on high stools at the window-counter and talked without looking at each other, our reflections laid thinly across the glass.

He said you’re not too tired are you, we haven’t done too much walking have we?

I said no, no, I’m fine, I’m a bit knackered but it’s okay I said, I’ve had a good day I said.

And we both sat there with mouthfuls of hot soup and I wondered again what sort of good I meant, I thought about the last few days, I thought about why he was here, about who he was and why he had come looking for me, what he had been expecting, what he was thinking now.

He said, my brother, he said I only met you a week ago and already I feel like I know you far more than my brother ever did, he said it doesn’t seem fair somehow.

I said oh but I feel like I know him, I said you’ve told me so much about him that I almost feel like I’ve met him properly, and he said I suppose but it’s not the same.

There was a pedestrian crossing further up the road, the signal was red and I looked at all the people waiting to cross, a huge crowd of them, motionless, blankfaced, looking up at the lights.

They looked like the figures in the art gallery.

There was a white van parked outside, two men in fluorescent jackets were loading huge reels of cable into it, shovels, traffic cones.

He said what’s the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to you?

I started to speak, I was going to say that day, that afternoon, seeing that moment, watching his brother moving to where it was, but he said I mean really happened to you, not something you’ve seen or read about but happened to you.

I stopped, and I looked at him, and I realised what an important distinction it was.

I said, I don’t know, maybe when I was a kid and I got lost at the funfair but, I’m not sure, let me think about it I said, what about you? and I sucked at the thick red soup, I wrapped my hands around the warm paper of the cup.

He said I was in the back of a transit van driving across rough ground, I didn’t know where I was and I thought I’d been kidnapped.

I looked at him, I thought he was joking but he didn’t smile or say not really.

He said it sounds worse than it was, but at the time I was terrified, I thought I was going to die.

I look at him, he’s staring at the van and he says, sorry, it reminded me, that’s all, the van, I just remembered.

I said and so what was it, what happened?

He said I was hitching home once, and I’d been there a long time, and this van stopped and these two men said I could get in the back.

He said there were no windows, just a couple of thin slits in the roof, and these shafts of sunlight were scanning around the inside of the van as we turned corners and I was catching glimpses of things in the van, bricks, ropes, a spade.

He said they kept braking really suddenly, and laughing these really high-pitched laughs.

And we’d been driving for too long he said, and they’d stopped laughing, and then we were driving along some kind of dirt track, bumping up and down, and I didn’t know where we were.

I said oh my God what did you do what happened, he said nothing, nothing happened, they dropped me off at the end of my street in the end, it was just some kind of joke he said.

He was talking quite slowly, breathlessly, he said and the worst thing was, it was strange, the worst thing, more than the fear of what might happen to me, what they might do or how I might get out of it, the worst thing was thinking that nobody would ever know, that I would just be missing, disappeared, vanished.

He looked at me and he said can you imagine that?

He said can you imagine anything more lonely?

When I got back to my flat in the evening, the green message light on my answerphone was flashing.

I stood there looking at it, hypnotised, I left the front door open and the lights off and I looked at the small green light, blinking in the dark.

I wondered if my mother had called, if she’d had time to think and wanted to say now that she wasn’t angry or upset, that she was glad I had told her and could she maybe come and visit soon?

I wondered if it was my dad, telling me to be okay, saying that my mother felt these things but found it hard to say them, saying she loves you as much as I do you know.

And I watched the light, on, off, on, off, like a persistent knocking at a closed door, I stood closer but somehow I couldn’t press the button marked listen.

I had a sudden idea that my parents had called some people in Scotland, had somehow tracked down the boy who worked at the place where they’d held the wake, had given him my number and told him to call me.

I imagined his rich voice, made thin and brittle by the wires and the machine, bursting suddenly into my flat, saying something like hello well it’s been a wee while hasn’t it how are you.

I wondered what that sound would do to me, if I would recoil or rise up, if whether inside me, somewhere beneath my heart, something would flutter and jerk in recognition.

I remembered the words I had said to Michael, and I wondered if I could say them again, in response, if I could say I’m sorry but it was just a thing that happened, it wasn’t anything, it was just a thing.

And then I looked at the small green light and I thought of Michael’s brother, and I imagined his quiet voice hesitating out of the machine.

I imagined Michael having been in touch with him, saying I’ve met her, telling him that I’d said I’d like to meet him one day.

I imagined him by a public telephone, somewhere on the other side of the world, pacing around it, reaching and withdrawing his hand like an uncertain chess player.

I wondered what he would say, I wondered what I would say if he called again and I spoke to him.

I thought maybe I would ask him about the pictures Michael showed me, the things he’d collected and hoarded, I could ask him why he had them all, if they meant anything.

And I thought I could ask him about the broken figure, what it was, where it had come from, how it had got broken, I thought these would be things we could talk about.

And, of course, I wanted to talk to him about that afternoon, that moment, I wanted to share the remembering of it, I thought somehow he wouldn’t be someone who would say actually can we talk about something else now.

I pressed the button, and the machine said you have one messages, first message, and I listened.

There was a pause, the tiny half-kiss sound of someone opening their mouth to speak, the hard jolt of a phone being put down.

I listened to it a few times, listening for clues, guessing, rationalising.

It was a wrong number, a mistake.

Or it was Sarah, wondering whether to come round, she was just passing, it didn’t seem worth leaving a message.

That pause, short and huge, not even the sound of breathing, no background noise, no movement in the room.

And that half-kiss, the lips parting, no sound passing through them, no air passing through them, just the opening of the mouth and the clatter of the closed phone.

It was nothing, it wasn’t anyone, it was just kids, bored, phoning numbers at random, this was how I made it okay, it was just one of those things.

But I had wanted it to be him, this barely known neighbour calling from some other country, saying something like, my brother said, I wondered, I could come back soon, if you like.

It’s not that I want him, I don’t picture myself lying in bed beside him, I wasn’t listening to that sound and hoping to taste it, I just, I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to know, I wanted to say thankyou and sorry.

But it was not him, it was no one, and I went to bed and thought about the people I know and the people I don’t know and all the people in between, and it took me a long time to sleep.