A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

My little girl. What kind of people are you?

Or, kneeing him in the coccyx as he lay beside her, four in the morning outrage, Claire would say, ‘Adam, she’s crying. It’s your turn. Fuck’s sake, she’s going to wake him. What is it, Adam?’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing, Clezz. Give her to me.’

It was the baby’s fault, of course. The baby had aggravated Yosemite from an occasional nag to a disorder. Not just the sleeplessness but the fact of the baby. She recast Adam’s memory, as if she were a belated witness who brought vital new information, newly terrifying consequences.

‘Is she going to be all right?’

‘She’s fine, she’s just hungry. Go to sleep.’

‘No, I mean, when she’s older. Will she be all right, Clezz?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

They had passed the girl to him in the operating theatre, a foot of squiddy cord still attached, the limbs slathered in the white birth cream that they all come out in, the elastic mouth emitting a cry at once mechanical and undulating, like the rise and fall of an air-raid siren. The body looked much too big, way too enormous, to have been living inside Claire until a few moments before. ‘Adam?’ Claire said, because she hadn’t seen the child yet, besides a blur when they waved her above the screen. ‘Is she…?’ Adam glimpsed the gash in her abdomen when he took the bundle from the midwife, saw the layers of Claire’s fat and muscle retracted by the harsh clamps. The wound seemed much too grave for anyone to hope seriously to survive, as if a mid-sized cannonball had punched a hole in her.

‘How do you do?’ Adam said to the bundle, which was wrinkling its nose and grimacing, as if it were about to sneeze. Because what, really, were you supposed to say? Oh I see, it’s you, I get it, of all the genetic possibilities, you’re the one. All the love and worry will be for you. The grey eyes opened, horrified, closing quickly to shrink the world away.

‘Adam? How is she? Is she…?’

Claire was woozy from the anaesthetics they were dripping into her spinal cord. They had rushed her under the knife when the child became distressed, all of it happening with the momentum of an action movie so that Adam barely had time for fear. Put on the gown, put on the mask. Hold her hand. ‘She’s fine,’ Adam told her. ‘She’s wonderful.’ He gave the child to his wife to clasp while they laboriously stitched her up. His eyes met hers, the private, romantic, gulping moment that all just-delivered parents share. Wow and I love you and Oh fuck .

Second time round, he knew the script. Two years before, when Harry was born, he hadn’t been sure what to do or say, what or how to feel. They had been to the happy-clappy baby classes but nobody could tell you that part. He had gingerly walked the squawking bundle around the ward, humming ‘American Pie’, ‘The Boxer’, ‘Take it Easy’. Neil had come immediately that afternoon, he remembered, too soon, really, they had still been disoriented. Neil was pleased to be early, Adam had seen, pleased to get there before their families. A nurse mistook him for the father and showed him how to feed Harry with a pipette. Neil got Harry’s neonatal kryptonite shit on his coat.

This time Adam’s parents arrived first, performing themselves in an oddly chafing way. ‘Out through the sun roof,’ Jeremy Tayler joked, the inveterate jollity that was beginning to seem a form of evasion. They and Claire’s mother cooed all the necessary compliments and made the standard quips — She’s got a good pair of lungs on her! She’s got you wrapped round her little finger already! — there never seeming to be anything personal to say about a baby, a baby being the most particular yet most generic thing on Earth, just as there was never anything but platitudes to offer at funerals.

Neil came just before chucking-out time. He brought extravagant flowers that the Chinese nurse swiftly confiscated; he held Ruby at arm’s length from his bespoke suit, as if she might be booby-trapped.

‘She won’t bite,’ Adam said.

‘It isn’t biting I’m worried about, Ants.’ He handed the bundle back. ‘The good news is, she looks like Claire.’

‘At least, you know, she doesn’t look like you.’

‘Boys,’ said Claire, tubed-up and aching. ‘You boys.’ She laid the baby on her chest and closed her eyes.

‘Wet the baby’s head?’ Neil suggested.

But Adam had to go home to Harry. He sent the ritual email, specifying the girl’s weight and the satisfactory state of the mother’s health, as the mysterious formula required, attaching a photo he downloaded from the camera in which Ruby, purple and wrinkled, looked both a day and a hundred years old. He went to bed, and in bed Yosemite had come back to him. He closed his eyes and they were there: not his own daughter or his sewn-up wife but another father and a different child. It was as if he were watching one of those primitive, flip-through cartoons, jumpy images that nevertheless told a clear story. The jokes, the chase, the conquest. The curse.

The jokes. The whole thing began with the swim, Adam saw on the night Ruby was born, with him reaching out to submerge her head in the lake, her father watching from the shore. The feel of her skull seemed to come back to him, thick with hair (one of his fingers briefly catching in it), but cold from the water like a corpse’s. He remembered his sharp momentary panic that she had gone under for ever and he had done something terrible. He remembered the dirty words he heard himself say afterwards, the macho challenge he issued to Neil, as if the girl were a hill to race up or a fence to hurdle. Stop making excuses. Then the evening and the campfire, and what he hadn’t said, and the scratchy night. He shouldn’t have touched her in the water.

Worst of all, almost, he recalled how, the next day, he had trivialised the whole thing, preferring not to see the gravity and the shame, which ought to have been plain as daybreak. He saw how the grubby self-preservation instinct had kicked in, the pukka voice that said, Get yourself off, whatever you have done, deny, abscond, deflect, get away with it. After that, later, regret it if you have to. Little white lie.

Adam barely slept that night. He couldn’t unremember. Rose and Eric stayed with him as he brought Harry to the hospital the next day; they were with him, the day after that, as he drove Claire and the baby home, at the tortoise speed employed only by new fathers, octogenarians and middle-aged drunks pretending to be sober. He took a week’s paternity leave (not that many people would miss him), and they tagged along as he escorted Harry on their chilly we-still-love-you outings. At the aquarium, on Ealing Common, it became urgently important that Adam remember precisely what he had said and done. He derived a masochistic, almost narcotic satisfaction from the details he recovered: the play of light around the campfire, the smile on Rose’s face as she entered the tent, the hunch of Eric’s shoulders the following morning, as if he might make himself small enough to disappear. He found himself polishing and refining these keepsakes, sharpening their outlines and improving their texture, the better to admonish himself with them. He felt sure he could visualise his own gestures, the leer that Eric must have registered at the lake and Rose seen beside the fire, as if he had borrowed their memories. This, he knew, was always the most coveted perspective — What did I do? Why did I? Who was I? — and the one that was never truly available.

He could hear her sob as he and Neil walked away, or thought he could, the sound long and low like an animal’s. Over and over he saw her father turning back to berate him beside the burned-out campfire. One day you’ll have your own.