Case Histories - Страница 7

The baby was a parcel delivered to the wrong address, with no way of sending it back or getting it redelivered. ("Call her by her name," Keith said to her all the time. "Call her Tanya, not 'it.'") Michelle had only just left her own (unsatisfactory) childhood behind, so how was she supposed to be in charge of someone else's? She knew the term was "bonding," it was in a baby book she had How to Have a Happy Baby. Hah!). She hadn't "bonded" with the baby, instead she was shackled by it.

All the people who had told her that having a termination and finishing her A Levels was the sensible thing for her to do had been right after all. And if she could put the clock back – which would be another way of getting some time – then that's exactly what she would do. She would be a student somewhere now if she hadn't had the baby, she'd be drinking like a fish and taking drugs and handing in mediocre essays on the 1832 Reform Act or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall instead of sprinkling coriander seeds on a tray of compost while listening to the baby cry wherever it was she had left it when she couldn't stand the noise anymore. The bedroom, probably, so that even now the baby was edging its fat cater-pillar body toward the edge of the bed or chewing on an electrical cord or suffocating itself with a pillow.

Michelle put the tray of seeds on the kitchen windowsill, where she would be able to watch them push their way into the light.

From the window she could see the beginnings of her vegetable garden, neat drills of turned soil and geometric shapes marked out with pea sticks and string. Keith didn't understand why she had started a vegetable garden. "We're living on a bloody farm," he said, stretching his arms out expansively so he looked like a scarecrow – they were in a field at the time – "the place is full of vegetables. We're allowed to take whatever we want." No, actually, the place was full of potatoes, which was different. And swede and kale – cattle food, peasant food. Michelle wanted courgettes and spinach and beetroot. And coriander. And she wanted flowers, beautiful scented flowers, roses and honeysuckle and lilies – pure white lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.

The field in which they were conducting this argument was empty of everything except for hummocky, uneven grass, over which Michelle was striding furiously, bumping the pushchair along in front of her so that the baby bounced around inside like a crash-test dummy. Anger was making her walk so fast that Keith, despite his long legs, was having to trot to keep up with her.

"What's wrong with potatoes?" he asked, and Michelle said, except that she was shouting now, "It's March, there aren't any bloody potatoes, there isn't anything, there's nothing, nothing but mud, mud everywhere and rain, it's like the bloody Somme!" and he said, "Don't be such a stupid bloody drama queen!" And she thought how ridiculous his country accent sounded, like a yokel in a television comedy, a bloody potato-eating peasant. Michelle had got rid of her accent, listening to how middle-class people spoke on the television, how her teachers spoke at school, until she sounded so flat that she could have been from anywhere. She started walking even faster until she was almost jogging.

"And anyway," he shouted after her, "maybe I don't want to eat bloody coriander!" She came to an abrupt halt, whiplashing the baby in the pushchair. She turned round and said, "Well, maybe I do," and glared at him for the longest time, wishing she had the woodcutting ax with her, the ax that would split his skull like a melon or a pumpkin cleaved in two. No, not a melon, melons were sweet and exotic, not pedestrian enough for his head, and pump-kins were vegetables that belonged in fairy tales. A turnip. Turnips were brutal, yokel vegetables. And he would drop like a headless scarecrow, right here in the field, and sink into the soil and never be seen again, and she could give the baby to her mother and ruin another life.

Or perhaps – nightmare idea – he would grow and divide and multiply out of sight, in the soil, and come the summer he would suddenly shoot up, a hundred Keiths, a thousand Keiths, nodding and swaying like sunflowers in the field.

A woodcutting ax – how absurd was that? Everyone else had central heating or at least heating that came from somewhere that they didn't have to think about, they didn't have to go out in all weather and saw and chop wood to make a fire, they didn't have to wait for hours for the fire to heat a back boiler just so they could have hot water.

They didn't even have coal because the wood was free, from the estate. Woodcutting axes were things you had in fairy tales. Maybe that's what had happened to her, maybe she'd got stuck in some evil fairy tale, and until she'd picked every potato in the field or chopped down all the trees in the wood, she wouldn't be free. Unless she learned to spin time. Or her head exploded. So much toil and drudgery, it was like being a serf in the Middle Ages. It was feudal.

"Let me take the pushchair," Keith said. "You're going to give Tanya brain damage, carrying on like that." Michelle felt suddenly spent of all her fury, she was too tired all the time to sustain any-thing, even anger. They walked side by side now, at a slower pace, so that the baby finally fell asleep – which had been the purpose of the walk, a whole lifetime ago.

After a while, Keith put his arm round her shoulder and rubbed the top of her head with his chin and said, "I do love you, baby, you know that, don't you?" and it would have been quite a nice moment if it hadn't been raining and the bug-baby hadn't started crying again.

Michelle had been brought up in a chaotic house in Fen Ditton, one of the dreary satellite villages that the poor of Cambridge were banished to. Her father was a drinker and "a waste of space," according to Michelle's mother, but nonetheless she had stayed with him because she didn't want to be on her own, which Michelle and her sister were agreed was pathetic. Their mother drank too but at least she didn't get violent. Michelle's sister, Shirley, was fifteen and still at home and Michelle wished she could come and live with them but they didn't have the room. She missed Shirley, she really did. Shirley wanted to be a doctor, she was very clever, everyone said she was going "to make something of herself." They used to say that about Michelle, before Keith, before the bug was born. Now it seemed she had managed to make nothing of herself.

The cottage was tiny. Their bedroom was squashed into the eaves and the baby's bedroom was more like a cupboard, although it spent hardly any time in its room, in its cot, where it should be sleeping peacefully instead of always wanting to be picked up and lugged around. She hadn't read a book since the baby was born. She had tried, a novel propped awkwardly on a pillow while she breast-fed, but the baby wouldn't suck properly if it thought her attention was elsewhere. And then she had to give up the breastfeeding (thank goodness) because her milk ran out ("You have to try and relax and enjoy the baby," the midwife said, but what exactly was there to enjoy?), and maneuvering a bottle and a book and a baby would have needed three pairs of hands. Which would be another way of getting more time.

Michelle had spent a long time decorating the baby's room when she was pregnant. She'd painted the walls egg-yolk yellow and stenciled a frieze of ducklings and lambs and sewn cheerful yellow-and-white gingham curtains for the tiny window so that the whole place had been like a box of sunshine. Michelle had always done things properly. From an early age she'd been neat and tidy, and her mother used to laugh and say, "I don't know where she gets it from, not from me" (and how true that was). She'd been the same at school: her workbooks were never smudged, her illustrations and maps were always finely drawn, everything underlined and tabulated and indexed and she'd worked so hard and so methodically that even when the quality of her work hadn't been up to scratch her teachers gave her good marks. And she was supposed to go to university, to break free, and instead she'd been diverted, by someone with an HNC from agricultural college who worked on an estate farm and didn't have two beans to rub together.

She started going out with Keith Fletcher when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one and nearly everyone she knew had been jealous because he was older and had a motorbike and was just this incredibly sexy, handsome guy, with an earring and black hair and that foxy smile so that she used to think of him as a gypsy, which seemed very romantic but of course an earring and a foxy smile didn't make you into a gypsy. Didn't make you into anything in particular. And now he didn't even have the motorbike because he'd got rid of it and bought an old van instead.

And way back then, when all Michelle had to worry about was whether she could get an essay in on time or whether she had a decent pair of tights, back in that other time when she was young, she had thought that a country cottage was also romantic, and when she'd first seen the cottage she thought it was the quaintest, prettiest thing ever because it was so small and so old, more than two hundred years old, built of brick with patterns of flint bedded around the lintels and sills and it had once been – yes – the forester's cottage, and the estate had given it to them to live in when they got married. It was a "tied" cottage and Michelle thought that was funny (but not in a way that made her laugh) because it wasn't the cottage that was tied – it was Michelle.

She'd had a glimpse of a possible future – the pretty cottage, the garden full of flowers and vegetables, bread in the oven, a bowl of strawberries on the table, the happy baby hitched on her hip while she threw corn to the chickens. It would be like a Hardy novel, before it all goes wrong.