Ian McEwan - Nutshell

‘Decide.’

‘I’m frightened.’

‘But remember. Six months ahead. In my house, seven million in the bank. And we’ve placed the baby somewhere. But. What’s it to. Erm. Be?’

His own practical question calms him, allows him to withdraw his finger. But her pulse, which had begun to settle, leaps at his question. Not sex but danger. Her blood beats through me in thuds like distant artillery fire and I can feel her struggling with a choice. I’m an organ in her body, not separate from her thoughts. I’m party to what she’s about to do. When it comes at last, her decision, her whispered command, her single treacherous utterance, appears to issue from my own untried mouth. As they kiss again she says it into her lover’s mouth. Baby’s first word.

‘Poison.’

HOW SOLIPSISM BECOMES the unborn. While barefoot Trudy sleeps off our five glasses on the sitting-room couch and our dirty house rolls eastwards into thick night, I dwell as much on my uncle’s placed as my mother’s poison . Like a DJ hunched over his turntable, I scratchily sample the line. And … we’ve placed the baby somewhere . With repetition, the words are rubbed clean as truth and my intended future shines clear. Placed is but the lying cognate of dumped . As the baby is of me . S omewhere is a liar too. Ruthless mother! This will be an undoing, my fall, for only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards. The Duchess of Cambridge will not be taking me on. My solo flight of self-pity settles me somewhere on the thirteenth floor of the brutal tower block my mother says she sometimes gazes on sadly from an upper bedroom window. She gazes and thinks, So close, yet remote as the Vale of Swat. Fancy living there.

Quite so. Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head. Swat indeed. No bedtime stories to nourish my toddler brain’s plasticity. The curiosity-free mindscape of the modern English peasantry. What then of maggot farming in Utah? Poor me, poor buzz-cut, barrel-chested three-year-old boy in camouflage trousers, lost in a haze of TV noise and secondary smoke. His adoptive mother’s tattooed and swollen ankles totter past, followed by her labile boyfriend’s pungent dog. Beloved father, rescue me from this Vale of Despond. Take me down with you. Let me be poisoned at your side rather than placed somewhere .

Typical third-term self-indulgence. All I know of the English poor has come to me by way of TV and reviews of novelistic mockery. I know nothing. But my reasonable suspicion is that poverty is deprivation on all levels. No harpsichord lessons on the thirteenth floor. If hypocrisy’s the only price, I’ll buy the bourgeois life and consider it cheap. And more, I’ll hoard grain, be rich, have a coat of arms. NON SANZ DROICT, and mine is to a mother’s love and is absolute. To her schemes of abandonment I deny consent. I won’t be exiled, but she will be. I’ll bind her with this slimy rope, press-gang her on my birthday with one groggy, newborn stare, one lonesome seagull wail to harpoon her heart. Then, indentured by strong-armed love to become my constant nurse, her freedom but a retreating homeland shore, Trudy will be mine, not Claude’s, as able to dump me as tear her breasts from her ribcage and toss them overboard. I can be ruthless too.

* * *

And so I went on, drunkenly, I suppose, expansive and irrelevant, until she woke with several groans and fumbled for her sandals under the couch. Together we descend, limping, to the humid kitchen, where, in the semi-darkness that might almost hide the squalor, she bends to drink at length from the cold-water tap. Still in her beachwear. She turns on the lights. No sign of Claude, no note. We go to the fridge and hopefully she looks in. I see — I imagine I see on an untested retina — her pale, indecisive arm hovering in the cold light. I love her beautiful arm. On a lower shelf something once living, now purulent, appears to stir in its paper bag, drawing from her a reverential gasp, forcing her to close the door. So we cross the room to the dry-goods cupboard and there she finds a bag of salted nuts. Shortly, I hear her dial her lover.

‘Are you still at home?’

I can’t hear him for her crunching.

‘Well,’ she says, after listening. ‘Bring it here. We need to talk.’

From the gentle way she sets down the phone I assume he’s on his way. Bad enough. But I’m having my very first headache, right around the forehead, a gaudy bandanna, a carefree pain dancing to her pulse. If she’d share it with me, she might reach for an analgesic. By rights, the pain is hers. But she’s braving the fridge again and has found high in the door, on a Perspex shelf, a nine-inch wedge of historic parmesan as old as evil, as hard as adamantine. If she can break into it with her teeth, we’ll suffer together, after the nuts, a second incoming salt tide rolling through the estuary inlets, thickening our blood to brackish ooze. Water, she should drink more water. My hands drift upwards to find my temples. Monstrous injustice, to have such pain before my life’s begun.

I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple creature needs to evolve the whips and goads of a subjective loop, of a felt experience. Not just a red warning light in the head — who’s there to see it? — but a sting, an ache, a throb that hurts . Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

So what’s the use of a headache, a heartache? What am I being warned against, or told to do? Don’t let your incestuous uncle and mother poison your father. Don’t waste your precious days idle and inverted. Get born and act!

She sets herself down on a kitchen chair with a hung-over groan, the elective malady’s melody. There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse. She’s chosen the first, but it’s early yet. The cheese is on the table, already forgotten. Claude is returning from where my mother will live, a millionairess shot of me. He’ll cross London by cab because he’s never learned to drive.

I try to see her as she is, as she must be, the gravidly ripe twenty-eight-year-old, youngly slumped (I insist on the adverb) across the table, blonde and braided like a Saxon warrior, beautiful beyond realism’s reach, slender but for me, near naked, sunnily pink on the upper arms, finding space on the kitchen table for her elbows among the yolk-glazed plates of a month ago, the toast and sugar crumbs that houseflies daily vomit on, the reeking cartons and coated spoons, the fluids dried to scabs on junk-mail envelopes. I try to see her and love her as I must, then imagine her burdens: the villain she’s taken for a lover, the saint she’s leaving behind, the deed she’s spoken for, the darling child she’ll abandon to strangers. Still love her? If not, then you never did. But I did, I did. I do.

She remembers the cheese and reaches for the nearest tool and makes a decent stab. A piece snaps off and it’s in her mouth, a dry rock to suck on while she considers her state. Some minutes pass. Not good, I think, her state, though our blood won’t thicken after all, because the salt she’s eating she’ll need for her eyes, her cheeks. It pierces the child, to hear the mother cry. She’s confronting the unanswerable world she’s made, of all that she’s consented to, her new duties, which I need to list again — kill John Cairncross, sell his birthright, share the money, dump the kid. It should be me who weeps. But the unborn are po-faced stoics, submerged Buddhas, expressionless. We accept, as our lesser kith the wailing babies don’t, that tears are in the nature of things. Sunt lacrimae rerum . Infantile wailing entirely misses the point. Waiting is the thing. And thinking!