Jump and Other Stories

A Journey

On my way back home from Europe I saw a beautiful woman with a very small baby and a son of about thirteen. They were sitting across the aisle from me in the aircraft. The baby could not have been more than ten days old. It had abundant black fine hair standing up from its head the way hair lifts from a scalp under water; as if the hair had been combed, floating, by the waters of the womb. The pathetic little bent legs had never been used. The eyelids were thick and lifted slowly, a muscular impulse still being tested, revealing an old and wondering gaze: eyes very dark, but no colour that could be described as black or blue. Perhaps colour has something to do with focus and it was focusing only now and then — that was the wondering — on the face of the mother. Or rather the gaze of the mother. She would look into its face, and its eyes would open like buds. The strange concentration between them was joined, frequently, by that of the boy.

The boy was beautiful as his mother. In words beauty can be suggested only by its immediate signal. Theirs was of clarity. Their identical round brows were clear horizons, their nostrils and earlobes appeared translucent, their skin, lips and eyes had the colouring of portraits in stained glass. The baby was unlike either of them. It was the presence of someone absent; and yet it was so intensely theirs. She parted her clothes (fashionable, expensively, discreetly dressed, she was) and although I couldn’t see her breast I could tell from the angle of the baby’s head in the crook of her arm and the slight bobbing movement of its hairy head that it was sucking. The boy and the mother leant over it — this process — reverently. Once I saw her put her well-used but beautiful hand round the curve of the boy’s head and hold it there a moment. A trinity.

From time to time the boy suddenly became the child he was; he was working at a puzzle or game supplied for youngsters along with the usual handout of head-sets and slippers. He was turned away, then; but kept being drawn back to that contemplation in which he served. Literally: he was up and down during the night, taking the baby’s dirty napkins to be disposed of in the toilet, bringing plastic cups of water which his lips and his mother’s touched indiscriminately. Then the baby slept in its portable cot on the floor and the two of them, the dividing arm between their seats removed, slept as a single form disposed under aircraft blankets. They had even covered the separate identity of their faces — no doubt against the cabin lights.

They left the plane when it landed to refuel in the middle of Africa. That airport recently had been closed for the period when there was an attempted coup in the country; distorted in the convex window of the plane I could see burned-out military vehicles, two of the letters that spelled as the airport’s name across the façade of the terminal the name of the country’s President were missing, and dogs were foraging at the margin of the runway.

She had the baby in her arms. The boy carried their bulky hand-luggage, hovering protectively close as she stepped through the door onto the gangway that had been rolled into place. My window was a lens with a more restricted range of vision than the human eye: mine could not follow them across the tarmac to the terminal building, I don’t know if they hurried anticipatedly, excitedly to what was awaiting them there, I don’t know where they had been, why they had gone, or what they were coming back to. I know only that the baby was so young it must have been born elsewhere, they were bringing it to this place for the first time, this was its first journey. I continued mine; they had disappeared. They exist only in the alternate lives I invent, the unknown of what happened to them preceding the journey, and the unknown of what was going to happen at its end.

I’m thirteen. I’d had my birthday when I went away with my mother to have the baby in Europe. There isn’t a good hospital in the country where my father is posted — he’s Economic Attaché—so we went back where my parents come from, the country he represents wherever we live. I know it only from holidays with my grandma because I was born when they were on another posting.

I’d been my parents’ child — the only one — so long. I always wanted brothers and sisters but never had any. And then, round about my twelfth birthday I noticed it, something went wrong in our house — I mean the house we are living in on this posting. My mother and father were almost silent at meals. The private language we used to speak together — cat-language — we didn’t use any more. You see, I’m allowed to have cats as pets but not dogs, because cats can almost fend for themselves when we get another posting and they have to be left behind; we have a different kind of voice for each of the three cats I have here, and we used to pretend the cats were making remarks about us. For instance, if I was eating with my elbows on the table, my father would use a cat voice to tell me I had bad manners, and if my father forgot to fill up my mother’s wineglass my mother would use her special cat voice to complain she’d been left out. But the cats stopped speaking; they became just cats. I couldn’t be the only one to use their voices. A child can’t use even a cat voice to ask: what’s the matter? You can’t ask grown-ups that.

The three of us stopped going swimming together. We love swimming and before we used to go often to the Consul-General’s pool. But my father made me learn to play squash with him and he took me on spear-fishing trips with men. The sea is very rough here, it’s horrible being thrown about by breakers full of bits of plastic and rotten fruit from the harbour before the boat gets to the place where you dive. These were things my mother didn’t do: play squash, spear-fish. I told her about the sea, but she didn’t say anything to my father, she didn’t take my part. It was a bit like what happened to me: as if she couldn’t use a cat voice to tell him.

He — my father — would hug me, just suddenly, for no reason; not when he was going away anywhere, but just leaving the room, or if we met at the top of the stairs. And my mother encouraged me to spend the weekends with friends. To sleep away from them, my mother and father. I cried once, by myself, because she seemed to want me out of the house. It wasn’t as if they could need to be alone together, to talk without a kid around the way grown-ups sometimes do even though they love you; they would sit there at meals with nothing to talk to each other about, just quiet. The cats would get scraps and say nothing.

And yet it was that time that it happened — the baby. They made the baby. My mother told me one day: I’m going to have a baby. She looked at me very anxiously. To see if I’d mind. I didn’t mind. I know about sex, of course, how she’d got pregnant, what my father had done with her, although they didn’t smile at each other, didn’t tease or laugh at each other any more. Nine months is a long time. I turned thirteen. My father was away a lot, round the country. Once she used to go with him, leaving me for a day or two, but now she didn’t go because of the baby growing, she said. So we were alone together. We watched her changing, the baby changing her. I know some boys aren’t allowed to see their mother’s breasts but she used to swim topless like the other ladies at the Consul-General’s, and I was used to seeing how pretty hers were, not the hard-looking little kind that stick out on girls a few years older than I am, but not the hanging kind that swing when the woman gets up, either — soft and quite far apart, because my mother has broad shoulders. Now the breasts filled up, I felt them against me like plastic bags filled with water when she put her arms round me to kiss me good night, and I saw above the low neck of her nightdress that they were changing, becoming pink and mottled. It was strange, I thought of a chameleon slowly blotching from one colour to another when you put it on a flower. But it was the baby that was doing it. When it began to move inside her she put my hand on her stomach, for me to feel. More like hearing than feeling; it knocked very softly. So I put my ear there. My mother put her hand on my head and I listened and felt. A bit like Morse code, I told her: it would give three or four quick taps and then stop, and start again. What was it saying, doing, in there? We’d laugh, and make up things, like we used to do with the cats. But it was only the two of us and the baby; He wasn’t there.

Sometimes, those months, in a dream I would feel against me the breasts that were changing for the baby and the dream would become one of those it’s normal for boys to have (my mother and father explained before I began to have them). There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you should enjoy those dreams; I just put my pyjamas in the wash. Another time I dreamt I put my ear to where the baby was and suddenly the big hard stomach turned into a goldfish bowl, and the baby was swimming around in there and I was watching it. A golden baby, a big golden fish like the ones He went after, under the sea. But this one was ours — my mother and me — in her bowl, and in the dream I was taking care of it.

I was the first to see the baby. I saw it when it was exactly 40 minutes old. I was the first to see my mother with the baby. I was in the hospital waiting-room with my grandmother and when the nurse said we could come and look I ran ahead and I was there before anyone — nurses don’t count, it’s not theirs. My mother asked the time and when I told her she said the baby was exactly 40 minutes old, she had promised me she would remember to ask the doctor the time the very moment it was born, and she had kept her promise. We looked at the baby together, its ears, its feet and hands; everything was all right. Its eyes didn’t open. We were surprised by its hair; it had a lot of wet-looking black hair that stood up on its head as she carefully dried it with the edge of a blanket. We have pale brown hair; my grandmother says my mother was born bald, and my mother says I was, too. The baby was not like us at all. Neither of us said who it was like. The baby was only what we couldn’t have imagined, what had been tapping messages and changing her body all that time, and had suddenly come out. For the next week we watched it changing itself, beginning to live outside my mother, live with my mother and me.

It was born so healthy the doctor said we could fly back with it when it was only nine days and sixty-two minutes old (I made that calculation while we were waiting for our flight to be called). They gave us the bulkhead seats and there was plenty of room for the baby’s stuff — the seat across the aisle was vacant, only a lady with grey hair in the other window seat. We didn’t speak to her. We didn’t have to talk to anyone, it was just us alone. I arranged our big canvas bag so my mother could rest her feet up on it. Then I fitted in the baby’s cot and there was still room for my legs, although my legs are getting long, my mother’s had to pick out the hems of my jeans. The baby was very good. It only cried when it wanted to feed, and then softly, you could hardly hear it above the sound of the air rushing through the jet engines and people talking in the rows behind us. It was more as if it was talking to us, my mother and me, than actually crying. I lifted it out of the cot each time so’s my mother wouldn’t have to bend and put her feet down. It sucked away just as if it was on the ground and not up at an altitude of 30,000 feet travelling at 500 miles an hour. Its eyes were able to open by then. They are big and dark and shiny. It looked at us, it distinctly looked from my mother to me while we watched it feed — my mother said it was wondering where it had seen us before and forgotten us. That’s how it seemed to her. I thought it was curious about us. We both kissed its head often. That funny hair it has.

The steward gave me an acrostic game but I’m used to my computer games and I didn’t find it too interesting. I tried it while my mother had her eyes shut, resting (it’s tiring, feeding a baby from your own body), but that meant I might miss something the baby was doing — yawning, pulling faces — so I didn’t keep on long. I like old-fashioned rock-’n’-roll my mother remembers she used to dance to and I found the dial number to turn to for it, but I took off the head-set every few minutes because I thought I heard my mother speaking to me. She might need something; feeding a baby dehydrates you, I had to fetch those plastic cups of water from the dispenser for her, and I took the baby’s napkins, in the plastic bags we’d specially brought along, to dump in the lavatory. I pushed them through the flap marked ‘Airsickness Containers’. We had prepared everything for the journey, we didn’t need to ask anyone for a single thing. We made ourselves comfortable and slept, the baby quite safe. We knew even with our eyes closed and the blankets over our heads (my mother is sensitive to light and the eyeshade she was given was too thin) that the baby was there.

Suddenly my mother was saying to me, Here’s the river. I woke up and it was light and I leant over her and the baby and saw far down through the window the whole river, whose other bank you can’t see from the side where we’re posted — it’s such a wide river. We were there. I didn’t think about Him waiting for us. I had so much to do: packing the baby’s stuff away, getting our coats from the overhead bin, making sure for my mother we wouldn’t forget anything. Remember, we’d never arrived with the baby before, it was the first time ever. The baby did not know that posting it had lived in, beginning when something went wrong, growing inside my mother all those months when He was away most of the time. I felt very excited, landing with something new, new. I felt new. I came down the gangway behind my mother who had the baby in front of her, in her arms the way I’d seen her carry an armful of flowers. I carried everything else of ours — the canvas bag, the coats, the cot. We came quickly through immigration because people let you go first in the queue when you have a baby. But we had to wait for the luggage. Before the conveyer belt had even started moving, the baby began to cry, it had woken up and was hungry again. The luggage was a long time coming and the baby didn’t stop. My mother sat down on our canvas bag and I knelt in front of her so people wouldn’t see when she opened her clothes and fed the baby. It was very greedy, all of a sudden, and it grabbed her and pulled — like a little goat, my mother said, and we were smiling at it, saying to each other, just see that, it’s going to choke, it’s gorging, listen to it gulp, when I looked up and saw Him where they had allowed him in through Customs. They always let him in where others can’t go, because He’s the Economic Attaché. I saw Him finding us, seeing us for the first time, watching my mother and me feeding the baby, He might even have been able to see her breast from where he was, He’s tall. He threw up his head and his mouth opened, He was happy, He was coming to get us. Then I felt full of joy and strength, it was like being angry, but much better, much much better. I saw him looking at us and he knew that I saw him, but I didn’t look back at him.

The silence is over.

That is what has been repeating in his head since the alarm clock woke him with its electronic peeps at five this morning. He phoned the airport before he got out of bed, and while hearing the stretched Glockenspiel tape they entertain you with when you’re waiting for Information to answer, that phrase was counterpointing again and again, himself speaking inside himself: ‘The silence is over’. Because the love affair is over. The silence in which the love affair was hidden, precious and thrilling, something she must not be allowed to touch with a word, now seems an agony endured. More than a year of confidences, feelings unexpressed, emotions, anecdotes lie painfully trapped, layer on layer, constricted within him. But she has given birth; he wonders how it will be to see her again, rid of her burden. Her body as it was before, when he used to see it: he saw her only clothed while her body was growing, filling, she stopped undressing in front of him because they could not speak.

The flight is expected in on time. He puts on linen trousers and sandals, the air-conditioner continues to stutter and shudder and soon, thank God, he won’t notice it any more because it won’t be the only noise in an empty house. He shaves but puts the cologne back on the shelf because — like an impulse of nausea the morning after a night out, this comes — it is what he used to smell of when he came home from the bed and scent of another woman, an unsuccessful disguise, he knows, because it was obvious he had showered after love-making, you don’t come from the Consulate offices with wet hair. The madness of it! Just as during that year he couldn’t think about his wife, didn’t see her even when she was sitting across the table from him, so now he is too preoccupied to visualize the woman he couldn’t keep away from even for a day. Driving on the airport road over fallen yellow flowers of cassia trees he feels memory like a hand alternately scalded and balmed — fear of the terrible experience of the wonderful love affair that belongs to this place, this posting, as the trees do, and gratitude to the endurance of these trees, this posting where he is about to be restored. There were tanks rolling along this road not long ago, and it’s unevenly patched with fresh tarmac where it was blown up. But the familiar trees full of yellow blossom are still here. So is he.

He parks the car innocently, now, right out in the open; it has not brought him to any clandestine destination where he would arrive already with an erection. He walks slowly into the airport building because this passage between low hedges of Christ’s-thorn and hibiscus propped up like standard roses — nobody would believe what survives an attempted coup, while people are shot — is the way towards something that is both old and new — nobody would believe what a man and woman can survive, between themselves.

This decaying airport he has been in and out of impatiently many times is going to be where it happens; how strange that is. How appropriately inappropriate definitive places are. He is early, at first the arrival hall is empty, bins overflowing with beer cans seem blown away against the walls, the worn red rubber flooring glittering under its spills and dirt stretches vast, he is alone in the perspective of a de Chirico painting…

These wisps of philosophical generalizing, fragments of the culture and education which overlay the emotions that drive life, drift irrelevantly away from him. She is coming home with a live baby. That flesh, that fact is what has resulted of one night when he returned from a weekend trip with that woman and was so angry at his wife’s forlornness, her need of comfort he couldn’t give, for something he couldn’t say, that he made love to her. Fucked her. It was not even good fucking because he had been making love to the other woman, rapturously, tenderly, hardly sleeping for two nights. It was an act shameful to them both; his wife and himself. It did not serve as a way of speaking to one another. More like a murder than a conception. If it hadn’t been for that horrible night there would have been no baby and — a clutch of fear at the danger so narrowly escaped — he wouldn’t be waiting here now, the love affair might have ploughed on through his life leaving nothing standing.

The gatherings of people who hang about these airports all day rather than arrive or depart are beginning to humanize and domesticate the surreal vacuum of the hall. The men come in talking, there seems always, day or night, something for black men to explain, argue, exclaim over to one another. They are surely never lonely. The turbaned women are clusters rather than individuals, children clinging to and climbing about the mothers’ robes, whose symbols of fish and fruit and the face of the President circled with a message of congratulation on his sixtieth birthday are their picture books. The blacks take their children everywhere, they sleep under their mothers’ market stalls, they nod, tied on their mothers’ backs, through the beer halls — these people never part from their children, at least while they are pre-adolescent. After that, in this country, the boys may be abducted by the rebel army or drafted beardless into the President’s youth labour corps; often not seen at home again, after all that closeness when they’re little, all that flesh-contact of warmth and skin-odours that is — love? He tried to keep the boy out of the silence, to speak to him. To show love. That is, to do things with him. But the fact is the boy is not manly, he’s not adventurous — he’s too beautiful. Too much like her, her delicate skin round the eyes, her nacreous ears, her lips the way they are when she wakes in the morning, needing no paint. Lovely in a woman — yes, loverly, what a man wants, desirable and welcoming (how could he ever have forgotten that, even for one year in fifteen?). But not in a boy. The boy can swim like a fish but he sulked when he was taken spear-fishing with adults, with his father; an expedition any other boy would have been proud to be included in. And those times when love suddenly, for a moment, didn’t mean the other woman, when it was a rush of longing for flesh-contact and the skin-odours of one’s own child, to have that child cling — he didn’t understand, he only submitted. As his mother did, that one night.

He doesn’t allow himself to look at his watch. There is still at least a quarter of an hour to go. That night — that she should have conceived that night. When the boy was younger they had tried for another child. Nothing happened. All the time when it would have been conceived out of joy, when they still desired each other so much and so often! And of course that’s the main reason why the boy has been spoilt — as he thinks of it, he doesn’t mean only in the sense of over-indulged as an only child. And it is also his fault — part of that madness! No point in sorrowing over it now (a spasm of anguish) but when she conceived out of the willed lust of anger and shame he felt at the sight of his victim, he didn’t want to see what was happening to her, he didn’t want to see her belly growing and she didn’t want him to see her. She was alone days and nights on end with the boy, poor little devil. And even when the time came, only last month, for the baby to be born, he sent the boy with her to Europe for the birth. He sent her away with an immature thirteen-year-old as her only companion when his own place was with her (there is a hoarse twanging murmur over the public address system but he makes out it is the departure announcement for another plane) his own place was with her. the throbbing of the words starts up again immediately his attention is turned from the distraction.

This onslaught of the past year rising from the places in himself where it was thrust away both denies his actual presence here in the airport hall where people beside him are eating cold cassava porridge and drinking Coke from the refreshment and curio shop that has just removed its shutters, and at the same time makes momentous every detail of this place, this scene. For the rest of his life, he knows, he will be able to feel the split in the seat beneath him where the stuffing spills like guts. He will be able to arrange the graduated line of ebony elephants from charm-bracelet to door-stop size, the malachite beads, copper bangles, and model space monsters imprisoned in plastic bubbles against card among the dead cockroaches in the shop’s window that he walks past and past again. These are his witnesses. The tawdry, humble and banal bear testimony to the truth; the splendid emotions of a love affair are the luxurious furnishings of the lie.

A green star on the Arrivals and Departures indicator is flashing. He stands up from the broken seat. It doesn’t matter that the announcement comes as a burble, he catches the number of the flight, the green star keeps flashing. The unhappy night when he forced himself to make love to his wife and she conceived this baby he’s awaiting — that’s all over. He is her husband again, her lover. He has come back to her in a way she will realize the moment she steps off the plane and he embraces her. The end of a journey he took, away from her, and the end of her journey, now, will meet and they’ll be whole again. With the baby. The baby is the wholeness she is carrying off the plane to him and he’ll receive.

The ordinary procedure of privilege is taking place: the Customs man recognizes him as usual, someone attached to a foreign consulate, someone who doesn’t have to abide by the rules for local people with their bundles and relatives. Right through, sir, thank you sir. He has passed a checkpoint this way countless times; but this time replicates no time.

There they are.

Through a glass screen he sees them near the baggage conveyer belt. There they are. A little apart from the other passengers ringed round the belt. What’s the matter with the boy? Why doesn’t that boy stand by ready to lift off the baggage?

They are apart from the rest of the people, she is sitting on that huge overnight bag, he sees the angle of her knees, sideways, under the fall of a wide blue skirt. And the boy is kneeling in front of her, actually kneeling. His head is bent and her head is bent, they are gazing at something. Someone. On her lap, in the encircling curve of her bare arm. The baby. The baby’s at her breast. The baby’s there; its reality flashes over him in a suffusion of blood. He pauses, to hold the moment. He doesn’t know how to deal with it. And in that moment the boy turns his face, his too beautiful face, and their gaze links.

Standing there, he throws his head back and gasps or laughs, and then pauses again before he will rush towards them, his wife, the baby, claim them. His cry flings a noose towards the boy. Catch! Catch! But the boy is looking at him with the face of a man, and turns back to the woman as if she is his woman, and the baby his begetting.