day, the silly blonde down the road told the nurse that in town, but on the other side of the river, some guy had sexually assaulted a girl. Then the conversation carried on as if nothing had happened. Only I could have chosen to raise my son in this zoo of punk-rock acid-heads covered in bruises from accidental falls and clichés of self-harm. Personally, I think if your husband or father beats you up it’s your call to tough it out. You should be roaring back at them, not saying good morning. Degenerates. The chit-chat, or rather the solipsism, I’ve put myself through has paid off. There’s the sound of my husband’s car. Straight to the front gate with a smile. There he is, pulling up… He steers around a rock, I walk back and forth, I’m impatient for him to get out and kiss me, for the smell of tobacco in his moustache. We kiss. Without tongue, like all married couples. We go inside and he puts down the suitcase full of unsold products and samples. He tidies the stack of boxes and shows me the wads of tens. Four thousand in bills of ten, wow. I help him off with his jacket. I turn on the microwave to heat up his second dinner of the night and sparks fly. I leave the food in for too long and burn myself when I reach for the plate. We sit down at the table. We look at each other and chat. Quote unquote. This doesn’t count as looking at each other or chatting. A bit later I see him go outside. He says he needs to piss, that he doesn’t know how anyone can piss inside. He’s addicted to the outdoors, I’ve no clue what he thinks is so bloody special about the sky. He likes it when it’s blue and he’s even happier when there aren’t any clouds. Personally, I don’t give a damn if I’m under the open sky or shut up in a trunk. The baby finally empties my right tit and then my left one. My husband is watching cartoons, he does this to switch off. I go over and run my hand along his cheek and he complains I’ve interrupted his yawn. Then we turn off the lights one by one in this home of ours, where everything still smells slightly of leather. I was in the middle of a masturbatory marathon when the aghh, aghh returned and distracted me, aghh. When I went to wash my face, I ran into him. He was as flushed as I was. We barely glanced at each other before going our separate ways.
My last memory of the pregnancy is from Christmas. My husband’s whole family had come to stay from towns even more in the middle of nowhere than this one. My stomach was churning, the baby was moving at an abnormal speed, and people had their fingers crossed hoping they wouldn’t have to rush off to hospital with me and leave their turkey-and-apple dinner unfinished. I was standing in the living room in front of the fire. I can’t remember having done anything in particular to reveal how desperate I was feeling. For some time I’d been containing everything, or so I thought, in a swaying motion that was subtle though intensifying, when, suddenly, I was offered a seat and something cool to drink. Since when did sitting down and having some water get rid of the desire to die? Thanks, Grandma. I’m fine though. But they sat me down and brought me the glass of cool water anyway. These people are going to make me lose it. I wish I had Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon for neighbours; then my son could grow up and develop intellectually by learning that there’s more to the world I brought him into than opening old skylights you can’t see out of anyway. As soon as all the others had escaped to their rooms to digest their meals, I heard my father-in-law cutting the grass beneath the snow with his new green tractor and thought that if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I’d do it. Later on I saw him sitting at his desk, going over last month’s supermarket receipts. He read the price of each product and then checked the total with a calculator. By the time he’d finished recording the sums in his log of monthly expenses, the desk lamp was no longer giving off enough light. We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he’s exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life? In his bedroom there’s a rifle; on his night table, a few cartridges. I won’t be killed in my own bed, he says. If I hear noises, I’ll load my gun and go downstairs. And if there’s trouble, I’ll fire. Straight at the feet, he’d say, inhaling the saliva that was always caught in his throat. My mother-in-law watched me all day long, worrying. She didn’t know what else to do when she knocked on my door at dawn and entered timidly with another glass of water and a green-and-white pill. Thanks, I said, and as soon as she left I tossed it into the fire. I don’t like side effects. I don’t like antidepression. The only thing I could do at times like this was hug my womb and wait. The baby was asleep in there, wrapped up in my guts, foreign to me. He wasn’t much help back then either. As soon as the ritual of the raised glasses and well-wishing was over, I tried to escape my husband’s gaze. He was already throwing darts at the bull’s eye on the terrace. Every time he missed a shot he’d say, Arghh! I walked through the living room, which was strewn with wrapping paper, ribbons and other decorations, to the pile of clothes for the unborn child, but I didn’t put anything away. Instead I went out into the woods, exhausted from the contractions. When I think back now, the pain returns, leaping onto me like a dog. The questions asked that Christmas perforated me with more force than hunters’ bullets. Have you been looking for work? Do you think you’ll send the kid to a nursery? Are you paying your taxes? And your health insurance? Do you need any help? I’m finally here. I only ever come down to the woods at night when it’s an emergency. How is it possible for my father-in-law to spend the afternoon before Christmas going over receipts with a firearm under his pillow. How is it possible for my mother-in-law to speak so softly, walk so neatly, be so proper, and yet offer Prozac to a mother-to-be. How is it possible for my in-laws to have slept in the same sheets, under the same duvet and bedspread, in the same wallpapered room, for fifty years. My husband put down the darts and went looking for me in the forested fields. I walk on and shut myself away among the clusters of trunks and saplings. I’m one person, my body is two. Through threads of smoke, I see a small group of gypsies off on their own, camping near the snow-covered pond in a caravan as ramshackle as ours. I see them there, on the ice and frost, smoking and laughing in another language. In the morning, my in-laws will complain about the beer cans and needles left lying around. Beyond are the bee hives with wild honey and the path that leads to the main road. Mushrooms sprout up everywhere after a downpour, and now I can see them rotting. I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one. That matters more to me than his health insurance. And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance. My husband found me jumping through puddles. I was embarrassed. I said I was just fine and ran back home.
My first memory of the baby outside me is from the porch of my house. Night is falling and so it begins: the decline, the anxiety, the descent into an altered state. I’m afraid of the harm I could cause the newborn, that’s why I’m sitting here in the wicker chair counting fireflies or the cries of animals. I don’t join the others at the table when they call me to eat – leftovers, still, from the Christmas holidays – or sit with them when they’re gathered by the fire the way they are now. I hear forks entering mouths and food being swallowed as I begin to lose my mind, though I don’t know if that’s really what’s happening. No one does. Not me, not my man, certainly not any doctor. My mother-in-law is addicted to doctors, I need only sneeze and she’s ready to call one. She loves them, idolises them. I bet she gets wet even saying the word. I don’t know what she thinks they can do about her ruined pancreas, though. My mind is spent, it’s lost on the river bank. When I finally go in, the food will be cold on the counter and there’ll be a note in his writing saying ‘Enjoy your dinner, I love you’. By the end of the night, I’ve built up so much rage that I could drink until I have a heart attack. That’s what I tell myself but it’s not true. I couldn’t even down half a bottle. My days are all like this. Endlessly stagnant. A slow downfall. Now my mother-in-law is serving dessert, the spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl. Pears baked in brandy, or covered in chocolate. They no longer ask why I don’t sit with them. Why I don’t share the bed, or the table, or the bathroom. Sometimes I go out to kick at the air, and even if I saw my in-laws spying on me through the window I wouldn’t stop. I’ve already counted three fireflies and there must be more. From out here, I can see it everywhere and that’s why I don’t go in. Death is present in the fire, in the carpet, in the curtains, in the stuffiness of the old furniture and the silverware. In the flowerless vase. Death seeps out of the umbrellas piled up near the door. I lie down and get up so many times that I don’t know when I did what. The baby’s so small he gets
