Double Talk (11 page)

Violet begins to laugh. She can't help it. She knows he is quoting these lines from his journal. She knows, too, that he has delivered them pretty much verbatim, except he has replaced the words “cunt” and “tits” with “working parts” — Jesus, she thinks, it's like something her mom would say. Not only does she remember the lines, she can even see the page in his five-subject journal, the coffee stain marking the end of one entry and the beginning of another.

“It's not funny,” he says.

“Oh, Brian, honey, do we ever need to get laid. Come on.”

Baby
Power

Desperate to keep Lucy's histrionics under control — Violet was next door with her ear to the wall — I exhaled against clenched teeth while shaking my head as hard as I could from side to side. The result was a dead-on impression of Donald Duck losing his temper. Lucy, lying on her change table and kicking her hands and feet towards the ceiling, stopped crying. She looked at me intently. I pretended not to look back, while at the same time watching for her “slot mouth” — the name we had given the grimace she always made just before loosing one of her soul-shredding shrieks. I was ready: baring my teeth and gently shaking my head at the slightest evidence that her lips were starting to go geometric, prepared, at a moment's notice, to let loose another cheek-flapping duck quack.

My display took the wind out of her sails every time. She looked at me as though I had snatched what was just on the tip of her tongue to say. After the third or fourth time, she began looking up at me expectantly, arching her nearly invisible eyebrows and now and again doing little shimmies with her hips: this was definitely communication on her part, even if it was only of the honeybee variety.

I listened to Violet's footsteps on the stairs, followed by the rattle of the porch door. I let myself relax a little bit. I wasn't sure what was going on with Violet that morning, though I recognized — when she appeared in the kitchen and hugged me, then announced she was going for a walk — that she had reached a decision of some kind. There was a sense of calm resolve about her, as though she had made her choice and needed only a long walk to think it through one more time. After three months in hell, however, I had no idea what course of action she was about to take. It wasn't inconceivable — her weepy “I love you” and her sullen “I was depressed” notwithstanding — that she would return and hand me my walking papers.

Lucy's diaper was bulging with pee. “Who's a nasty little shagger, then? Who's only a shit leg? Who's a pee bird?” I said, with exaggerated intonation, all the while keeping a big smile on my face. I had to keep the up-and-down intonation going, because everything I said to Lucy in a normal tone seemed to provoke outrage in her.

Reaching to peel the adhesive tabs holding her diaper in place, I did my best not to catch her eye. The truth was that I was petrified of Lucy and had been since the day we first bundled her through the front door. In my more morose moments, I read my fear as evidence of there being some deep deficiency in me. Other times, I saw my fear as the result of Violet's relegating me to the position of second fiddle. How was I supposed to bond with our newborn if I couldn't get near her? Violet's broody, milk-filled presence dominated. She always wanted to be first to snatch up the whimpering Lucy; I swear Violet would have elbowed me in the ribs if I had shown a willingness to compete. Worse still, whenever we disagreed about how to handle our child, the assumption was always that Violet's vote was the tie-breaker. Like most mothers, she exercised what she felt to be a divine right, offering as evidence of that right, to anyone who would dare challenge it, her torn and scarred body.

I soon learned my role. As husband and new father, I was there merely to witness the tribulations of motherhood. I was expected to attend, to be criticised, and to humbly accept direction from someone who knew precious little more than I did about caring for a baby. I had hit the glass ceiling.

Cradling Lucy as though she were a time-bomb that could go off at any moment, I walked down the stairs. I moved as though my ankles were shackled together, making sure both of my feet were firmly on one riser before I stepped onto the next one.

Once in the kitchen, I filled the kettle and placed it on the ring. While it boiled, I lined up four blue plastic bottles on the counter — someone guessed wrongly that we were having a boy — filling four scoops of formula into each one. “I h-am Pablum Esco-Babar,” I said, “and I h-am dey world's biggest supplier of this powder joo love. Why you think I ha-eve this long nose, heh?” Lucy remained deadpan. She then opened her mouth wide. I prepared to unleash Donald Duck the very second her O-mouth showed signs of squaring off at the edges. But there was no need; she was only yawning. Was she beginning to relax? I wondered. Had she somehow registered that Violet was absent and that no amount of screaming would bring her back. It was possible — Lucy was nothing if not cunning. Still holding her in the crook of my arm, I shook each bottle vigorously — something she found interesting — and then placed one in a saucepan of cold water. I figured my efforts would be wasted, and after a brief struggle I would end up pouring all four bottles down the sink. But much to my surprise, once I got the temperature right, and once I had calmed her outrage over my having scalded her (yet another barrage of Donald Duck impressions — so many I began to feel light-headed and disoriented), and once I switched the brown latex nipple for the clear silicone one, Lucy took to the bottle with something approaching savagery.

“Ha! Violet, you fat cow,” I mumbled to no one, as I lowered myself gently onto the couch, “I was right and
you
were wrong!”

Lucy, since her arrival, had brought a cartoon-like quality to our lives. The simplicity of her needs, combined with her direct way of expressing them, had flipped the off-switch on subtlety; overnight Violet and I had become creatures with elastic faces and silly putty vocal chords. Even our language had begun to simplify. We spoke nonsense to her, delighting in using the words “pee” and “poo,” words that hadn't crossed our lips in years. When I floated my cartoon theory past Violet, she argued that there are always exaggerated elements to one's personality. She said that people placed too much emphasis on nuance and complexity, and not enough on slapstick. “Slapstick is a better label for our social behaviour,” she said. “And besides, people spend way too much time intellectualizing parenting. It's largely trial and error.”

I was impressed. And yet there were degrees of slapstick, I knew. If in our childless years we had been cartoons, we were at least drawn with complexity and in full colour. Since Lucy's birth, we had been rendered crudely in black and white against a back-drop of uniform grey.

Our conversation started me thinking about comics I had read in my childhood. I began to conjure up faces from
The Beano
and
The Dandy
, weeklies I read and re-read through the long Irish winters. I was amazed at how much I could recall: Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, Dirty Dick, Winker Watson, characters who had been my mainstays for years. My mother was so disappointed when I decided to ditch these favourites for a new range of comics which were not in the least bit funny:
Battle Picture Weekly
,
The Victor
and
Commando
. Recalling her reaction, an old and deeply buried sense of outrage turned my thinking bubble into a black cloud. Could she not see I had outgrown the zany, subversive world of Korky the Cat, and the toff-baiting Bash Street Kids? Could she not see why I wanted to leave behind stubble-headed Billy Whizz, with his loose socks and legs that turned faster than a fan-blade when he outran toughs, or why I would want to abandon Minnie the Minx to follow dagger-wielding Ghurkhas and bandaged Eighth Army Tommies in adventures called
Knife for a
Nazi
,
Jap Killer
, and
True Brit
. At ten years of age, I wanted my heroes in black and white. Could she not see that life was a process of coarsening, not of refinement?

Listening to Lucy's contented grunts and swallows, I felt my anxiety level — for the first time in weeks — dip from its normal Himalayan range. When she reached up unexpectedly and encircled my thumb with her tiny fingers, I felt something close to euphoria. I noticed her nails had been cut — gone were those Mandarin-like growths that curled freakishly over the tops of her fingers. As I studied her little hand, I could feel the weight of her stare on my face. Perhaps, to her, I was just another strange object cluttering up an alien landscape. I looked into her eyes and felt my heart flutter. There was nothing sinister in the disinterested way she looked at me. Maybe the fact that I was feeding her was giving her pause to reconsider my place in her world. The strange pull and suck of her mouth on the transparent nipple — the way it made the bottle twitch like a divining rod — was certainly giving me pause to reconsider her place in mine. I felt as if I were at the border of some universal truth.

I reached out very gently and began to stroke her soft little wisps of hair. She was so beautiful. And yet it was hard to get away from the notion that interest and self-interest were two halves of the same coin. Now and then she shifted her gaze towards the window. We invest in and are invested in our children, I thought, but before I could develop my notion she began to squirm. I sat her up and, rather expertly, I felt, tapped her on the back until she belched and farted simultaneously. She settled again.

Halfway through her first bottle, she still wanted more. I watched as her eyelids began to droop, her eyes rolling back in her head and then righting, in a way that made me think of slot machines. A few minutes later, believing she was asleep, I tried to pull the bottle out of her mouth only to find it firmly anchored. It was not until I heard the sizzling sound of air entering the nipple that I knew she had finally let go.

Even when she was asleep, I could not take my eyes off her. Who was this little person? Who would she grow up to be? I struggled to stay with my feeling of openness, trying not to think about Violet, trying not to think about how strained things had become between us. People say that you don't know a person's true character until a time of crisis. But I don't believe that. Violet's pessimism was just another facet of her character, ascendant at that particular moment maybe, but hardly the whole picture. The real question was whether it was ever possible to truly know another person.

Immersed in the world of British comics set in the WWII era, I was lecturing my mother one morning on the supremacy of the Luftwaffe in 1940 when she cut me short. “You don't need to tell me about that, son,” she said. When I asked her to explain, she simply said she had lived through it. It was a pronouncement that ripped like cannon shells through my lightly armoured fuselage. How had I failed to make the connection between my mother's Englishness, her age, and the Second World War? In an instant, Messerschmitts, Spitfires, Hurricanes and Stukas scrambled furiously in my upside-down brain, and a voice raw with static screamed in my ear: “Bail out! You've been hit! Bail out!” Until that moment, I had been indifferent to my mother's past. After it, I wanted to know everything about the first seventeen years of her life, particularly the years between 1939 and 1942.

Over the next few months, I badgered her for stories about the war. She obliged by dredging her memories, serving them up to me in a matter-of-fact way, as if her experiences had been nothing at all. She told me about her tom-cat, Toby, killed when he went to investigate a fire bomb that crashed on the roof of their garden shed. Drawing on my comic book lore, I was able to tell her that it was probably a cluster bomb, a Molotov Breadbasket. She said it was the strangest thing because Toby had always loved heat. She said he used to fall asleep in front of the coal fire in the sitting room, and sometimes he would lie so close to it that his fur would start to singe — they could smell it all over the house — and the call would go up to drag Toby away from the grate.

Years later, when I moved to Newfoundland, Wallace politely listened to, but didn't exactly corroborate, the stories his big sister had told me. He confirmed that their Aunt May had a house on Magnolia Road in Chiswick and that they moved in with her after their father died, but he couldn't remember anything about the Blitz. He had no memory of searchlights crossing the night sky, the traffic under blackout crawling ghost-like through the dark streets, nor would he verify that shrapnel made a musical sound when it rained down on brick and concrete. He didn't confirm my mother's assertion about their having grown so accustomed to the nightly bombing raids that they became positively nonchalant about it all. How could he not remember lying in bed during the last days of the Blitz, too lazy to go to the cellar, let alone walk to the bomb shelter? My mother said they could always tell when a bomb was close because the force of the explosion made the curtains puff in. Wallace's dodgy memory undermined my mother's bravery.

And my mother was brave. I told him about the day a bomb fell while she was walking near the Houses of Parliament. She said a very distinguished looking gentleman shouted out to her, telling her to lie down because there were more bombs on the way. She ignored him. “I didn't lie down,” she told me, “because I didn't want to get my coat all dirty.” Wallace nodded his head at this. I took his reaction as a confirmation of sorts: if not of the facts, then of my mother's character. I asked her once if at any time in those years she had been afraid for her life. “Never,” she said, in her usual off-hand way. “The truth of it was, I suppose, that I was too young and stupid to understand the danger.”