Candia McWilliam - A Little Stranger

‘Yes?’

‘I can’t talk to a tree.’ I came out of the border altogether; at least Bet let me know exactly where I stood.

‘With my boys, I don’t always listen, but I’ve always got ears to hear.’

‘Something’s happened to one of the boys?’

‘It’s not one of my boys, it’s your one boy; it’s only a small thing, but I don’t like it. Tell me to mind my pros and cons if you like. I don’t want to worry you, or anything.’ She was suppressing her natural gossip’s instinct to spin out a small mystery; that was a mark of her affection for John.

‘What is it, Bet?’ I was not badly concerned, because I trusted her to show upset in proportion to what had caused it. ‘Have you heard him saying something bad, swearing or something?’

‘As if I’d be the one to fuss about that. No; it’s that Margaret. She’s all so ever so nice, I know, but she can’t listen out for him properly.’

I didn’t want to hear petty tale-telling; I had overestimated Bet.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She takes him for a walk, sometimes even in the car, and she has him playing with her, but she can’t hear him. She has her soundtracks on the whole time.’

‘Soundtracks?’ I thought of a soundtrack for John, full of cooing and yelling and practice-sentences and the disappearing lisp.

‘Small earphones with loud music in. A sort of personal record-player. Kind of thing.’

‘Oh, those things. But I didn’t know Margaret had one of those. After all, she listens to the radio all day.’

‘Probably doesn’t know if it’s off or on. Like those people with no nerves, the ones in Russia. They couldn’t tell you if their appendix had burst, let alone if some little kid had hurt itself.’

‘But why should he hurt himself? Isn’t Margaret always with him?’

‘In a manner of speaking. But you can’t really chat to someone in one of those outfits; I should know that. My boys sleep in them. I’d as soon have had a blind dog look after my boys as a girl in all those wires.’

‘Hold on, Bet, I’ve not even seen her doing it.’

‘Of course you’ve not.’ She gave a meaning look.

‘And is it that bad anyway?’

Deprived of her pellet of malice, Bet seemed disappointed. She sighed hard, and rolled her right thumb around and around the nail of her right index finger, looking down at her pointed red shoes among the thorns and used roses. She sighed again, theatrically, and muttered. What I heard was, ‘the heart doesn’t grieve after’.

These spats were to be expected in a house full of women.

I decided that I would speak to my husband if I saw an opportunity.

Bet and Edie arrived in the morning, just as John left for school. After school, too, he crossed with them, arriving as they left. He was becoming less womaned, losing these first sweethearts with whom he had flirted. That home-bound infant world, in which the broom cupboard and the kitchen are gynaecea, and the smells of Windolene and Brasso as feminine as attar, was shrinking. Bet and Edie, from being his intimates, were becoming to him people who came to clean the house, a thing he saw his parents not doing. To Margaret, I do not think that they were ever more than cleaners, though she did take a break with them halfway through the morning. They drank tea or coffee and ate what Lizzie called ‘ferocious quantities’ of cakes, winged with icing-soldered sponge, or sandwiched with glistening mocha. Margaret drank skimmed-milk milkshakes and valueless ducats of impacted puffed rice.

There is a fatuous state in pregnancy when you know all is well, not only with yourself but with the world. You know that a species which has evolved this miraculous system of reproducing itself, the natty idea of containing the future empursed within, cannot allow destruction to obtain, will not short-change us. You know that, by placing your gravid body between the light of ugly fact and the undefended of the race, you can cut out the glare. I knew, because I had been pregnant before, that it is a fleeting sense of beneficent glowing power, preceding almost invariably a certainty that all shadows are black and all breaths our last, a time during which tears — selfish tears of easy altruism — are never far away, and the newspapers are sopping before their finer print is even begun. I was at the first stage, though, when Bet brought a box into my bedroom, where I stood, squiffy with optimism, showering benevolence upon the bare trees through my window, and on the birds within them — those organised pheasants and the less well-bred members of the parliament of fowls. My turbine of confidence and virtuous energy was capable of anything. I could have illuminated a city with the touch of my finger. I was equal to anything; after all, what could, in this good world, harm me, who contained the point of it all? I could see clearly that, since there was no argument for destruction, there would be no destruction. This dangerous drunken clarity is the closest I have been to escaping the omnipresence of the end. Painting and music remind me, the greater they are, the more of death.

I was hailing the broad day when Bet came in with her box.

‘I’ve got a guinea-pig. It’s for John. Seeing as my husband breeds them for show, this one won’t do. It was a guinea-pig, you see.’

‘Was?’

‘It is a guinea-pig, but it was a guinea-pig. In a sense. I mean, we were trying something. A bit different.’

A mutant. Swivelling off its balanced golden axis, my mind went to the beasts we cannot ignore, the footless shrikes and tubeless snakes, the eyeless cats of a poisoned nature, post-war fauna of our future.

A minute before, I had known all that would never be, and now the word — mutant — had discharged me from my oasis into a desert where war was inevitable and sin weighed as little as good. Pregnancy; is it by definition an hysterical state?

‘Bet, is this guinea-pig anything to do with me?’

‘My husband says we can’t show it and we wondered if John would like it.’

Could I accept a possibly bald or tripod or varicose playmate for my lovely boy?

‘It is kind of you, Betty, but. .’

She ate the inside of her mouth. Lipstick bloodshot the slack skin around it. Her earrings, dependent from fatty lobes, appeared disposable, tatty.

‘. . but let me see,’ I finished.

Its whorls were too vehement for the strict rules of the guinea-pig fanciers, that was all. It was a fat cadpig with a square head like the heel of a snowboot. It was chinchilla grey, with wet eyes and coiffed with frosty rosettes. Its hands looked intelligent, as though they might have known what to do with a cigarette.

‘It’s got a nice nature. Well, it sleeps all day. If you say the word, I’ll get the husband and my sons to bring up its equipment.’

Bar-bells, bookcase, Mouli?

‘It needs a thorough combing, so I’ve got it this nice brush — a babe’s brush, really. Basil’s said he’ll get a pen.’

‘A pen?’ In old-fashioned girls’ stories, the helpless offspring of jungle creatures were always fed with a Waterman bulb. So the same was true of guinea-pigs.

‘You know, for it to run around in.’

‘Of course. Basil probably doesn’t know his nibs.’

Bet looked at me without concern. I was increasingly conscious that only I heard the lower layers of my own remarks. She smiled, and I was back on the planet euphoria, all refugees food to my egocentric charity. Let it rain guinea-pigs.

‘Bet, John will be so pleased. How can I thank you enough?’

‘There’ll come a time,’ said Bet.

She took the animal downstairs. I did not know its name or sex, but I was committed to it.

I continued the day’s tasks, gluttonous of action and achievement, certain of immortality, carrying its pledge within me. I wrote letters, paid bills, made of my own desk and my husband’s geometric altars to the rational mind, and was just believing in the perfectibility of all nature — about to eat the, in my eyes, freakishly beautiful boiled eggs Lizzie had made for my lunch, cupped in unimprovable blue and white — when Margaret came in.