Marti Leimbach - Daniel Isn’t Talking

Now Stephen holds my head in his hands, massaging my temples, squeezing together the lobes on either side of my skull, tracing my hairline with his fingernails.

‘Tell me what hurts you so much,’ he says to me.

‘Those fucking drugs you gave me,’ I say. ‘God, how does anyone in your office work on those?’

I can hear his laugh above me. ‘I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.’

‘I’m so worried,’ I say. ‘Worried about the children.’

‘You just need some help. More than that useless cleaner.’

‘Veena. She’s not useless. She’s my friend.’ Veena is a philosophy Ph.D. candidate. She is terrifically smart, and good company, but is in fact terrible at cleaning a house.

‘Well, the last time I saw her she scrubbed the skirting boards until you could eat off them but left the kitchen sink full of dishes.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Veena doesn’t like dust.’

To be honest, Veena is a little weird about dust. She runs a damp cloth along the tops of doors and the back of chests of drawers. She has a special duster she uses for radiators, one she made herself and which she says she should get a patent for. ‘Such a lot of terrible dust you have,’ she says. If she manages to get beyond polishing the picture frames, she might actually run a vacuum cleaner. ‘You are having need of tile floors and shutters, not all these thick carpets and flouncy fabrics gathering dust,’ she has told me. When I protested to her that in every Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to there are nothing but flouncy curtains with complicated pelmets, she made a face and told me London dust is very nasty stuff, plus nobody bothers to wash such things in this country.

‘Why not a nanny?’ asks Stephen now. He is using his most gentle voice, his most loving hands.

‘No. The only thing I like is being with my children.’

‘Then why are you so miserable?’ he sighs. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

But it is not ridiculous. I have read how animals react hysterically, sometimes even violently, in the event of imperfect offspring. One night, while watching television, I saw the awful spectacle of a wildebeest born with the tendons in its legs too short. The legs would not straighten and the newborn calf buckled under the clumsy disobedience of his faltering limbs. Five minutes was all it took for a cheetah to find its opportunity. The wildebeest cow circled her crippled calf, bucking and snorting and running her great head low at the lurking cheetah, who seemed almost to gloat at this unexpected opportunity of damaged young. She ran at the cheetah, but the cheetah only dodged and realigned itself closer to the struggling calf. The mother then tried distracting the cheetah, enticing it to chase her. Trotting gently before it, inches from its nose, the wildebeest offered in lieu of her offspring the sinewy meat of her own buckskin hock.

‘Turn it off,’ I told Stephen. He was sitting in his favourite chair, his feet resting on Emily’s playtable, his dinner on his lap.

‘What? Right now? Let’s just see what happens to the calf!’

I took the remote control and pressed the button as though it were a bullet to the cheetah’s heart. ‘I know what happens,’ I said.

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