and allow the open gullet to fill again with gushing milk.
Consider a child in distress. Not a baby, a child, with teeth and an appetite for crisps and gum. How is its unhappiness signalled? Eyes, yes, brimming with tears. But about the mouth? A trembling, a much-described, a clichéd wobbling of the lower lip. Baby wants more milk. Wants connection of blood-warm liquid flowing from her mother’s body into her own. Wants comfort.
Can the trembling of a child’s lip really be cured by the application of Germolene to a grazed knee, or a mouthful of Smarties? Most adult lips have given up, forgotten how to tremble. Never again will they close on flesh as close, as real, as one-with-them, as mother’s breast. All others are substitutes. They seem to be – for a while, almost certainly are – as good, as potent to comfort and banish the dark. But they are not the real thing.
And the mother? She who has been the source of all love all comfort all warmth and wetness of milky breasts, through whose nipple holes have spun the white life-lines of liquid connecting still her child’s belly with her own? What of her? I am a mother and a child, but write of comfort lost as a child.
Because the baby’s love is for itself. It sucks and cries and demands and lays claim, in order to survive. Its huge self-love admits the existence of no other. Mother is home, food, warmth, life. Its love for its mother is its love of life itself, sweet life to be sucked from the source. The mother, who was herself a sucking baby once, knows her function. She is God, the source of life and happiness: and she is an old dried fruit to be spat away.
Sun. Feb. 9
My lips are so bad I haven’t been out. I’ve passed the time writing nonsense, looking through the window, and pacing up and down. I want to get in the car again. I’m wearing gloves to stop myself from mauling my lips.
And the lips of my children, which feasted on my flesh, now curl or close tight at the sight of me. Only the twins grin and slaver; and as is only natural, they’ll grow out of it.
No lips seek me. Like the housewife that I am, I start to unravel the old useless garment (starting from the site of the hole) in order to make new use of the rewound yarn. My lips spill words, phrases drip from the end of my pen, sentences flow out in a river.
Mon. Feb. 10
The car windows were encrusted with frost this morning – both inside and out. I tried rubbing it with a cloth, which was useless, then walked to a garage and bought some spray. The spray leaves a filmy coating on the glass, which the windscreen wipers smear without removing. I have had trouble focusing, because of this, all day.
I drove for an hour or two, in no particular direction, attracted by roads that promised wide views and few towns. But after a while I found myself coming back into industrial suburbs, the outskirts of Sheffield. I stopped and consulted the road map, because I felt quite clear about what I wanted today: space, snow, straight roads. Emptiness. I decided to head west, where the map showed an empty-looking area, sparsely crossed by roads – the Pennines. In an hour my road led me down into a tight dark town wedged between hills. The blackened stone of its buildings dripped and pressed in around me. There was a fine spray of sleet beating through the air, that melted when it hit street or windscreen. They’d forgotten to switch off a sign warning that the Manchester road was closed due to snow.
As I turned right at the foot of the steep hill out of Holmfirth, I imagined soaring up above the blackened stone walls and slate roofs, and looking down over the valley; if the mist and rain would let me. The wet black road was lined to the right by large Victorian houses, ponderous behind white gardens. The sleet became heavier, thickening up from transparency to whiteness, clotting into snow. And as I cleared the row of houses, breaking into countryside, the wind hit me from the north. The car shifted a foot or so across the surface of the road, where sleety snow was sticking lightly. The wipers were already on; I switched on the lights and the beams picked up two rods of moving air in front of me, as if the snowflakes were dancing atoms in a pyramid of solid matter. In the inch or two of clear screen following the wiper blade I saw the road (no longer even grey now, but white) curving up on ahead of me. I wasn’t at the top. I considered the fact that it would probably be worse up there. Already the solid houses of Holmfirth seemed a long way back. I pressed down on the accelerator, and as I surged on round the next bend, noticed an uneasiness beneath the wheels. Gradually I realized that the deepening snow on the road was in layers, rutted with the passing of earlier traffic.
Above the engine noise the sound of the wind was a constant note – a screech across the metal surfaces of the car, a great howl across the invisibility of the moors, which I guessed must now stretch out all around me. Though I could see nothing. The fact that I could see nothing grew on me slowly. Slowly I realized that the eerie darkness in the car was due not just to the weather, but to the right-hand windows being completely plastered with snow. Odd powdery fragments of flakes danced in through the ventilation system. The atmosphere out there was solid with them. It was impossible to follow any difference caused by the movements of the wipers. They cleared the glass but did so to reveal air half an inch ahead, already clogged with streaming white dust. I slowed down. When I did so the feeling of slipping between ruts in the snow became more strong. I was not sure if I was on one side or in the middle of the road, straddling the tyre tracks of vehicles travelling in opposing directions.
I couldn’t see the wall that had run alongside the road to my left. Perhaps now I was on the moors it had stopped. Perhaps it was still there but I just couldn’t see it. Perhaps in its place there was a five hundred foot drop to a rocky streambed below. I had no idea. Nor, except when the wheels guided themselves by slipping down the packed sides of my predecessors’ tracks and turning obediently to follow in the full depth of the ruts, did I know when the road was doing anything other than running straight ahead. There could be curves, hairpin bends. I could not see the road in front of my car.
I tried to remember whether anyone had passed me. There had been someone in front. He must be up there somewhere in the blind whiteness, extending the road before me. Or stopped dead in his tracks, thirty yards ahead.
I changed down to second gear, let my speed drop to below 10 m.p.h. I was beginning to lose any sense of the road at all. I was slipping and skidding frequently. I noticed I was hot – in fact, sweating. My hands on the wheel were sticky. I switched off the car heater. Part of me was braced, at each bump and slither, to go on falling – off, over, away. To nothing.
I didn’t decide to stop. But I did stop. My foot lifted itself off the accelerator, my left hand moved the gearstick across to neutral and reached down to yank up the handbrake. The car stopped. The bumping and slithering underwheel stopped, although the solid white wind continued to streak across my windscreen. I turned off the engine. The howl of the wind rendered its absence unnoticeable. The window wipers stopped, and the inside of the car darkened a shade. The atmosphere had congealed. Not like darkness, which is penetrable by light. Not like water which, though solid, is clear. This was solid and opaque; like being buried, like soil. Buried alive in whiteness. The wind was pummelling the car from the right, and it shivered and trembled in the force of the gusts, as a larger vehicle will shudder at the idling of its own engine.
I sat still, hands on the wheel. I was still hot. The windscreen was solid now, dark. I tried to imagine what my car would look like from outside. How long it would take it to lose its shape. Then I did something stupid – pushed down the handle and tried to open the door. My weight forced it open an inch or two, before the power of the wind slammed it again. The car was filled with a flurry of snow, which flew all over my face and clothes, and melted on me. The air was ice cold. I don’t know what I had intended. Even if I had been able to open the door – clearly – it would be madness to get out. There was nothing there. Nothing but blizzard.
I was cold now. I couldn’t have come more than five
