If anybody asks, I tell them I never had any children. It’s easier.
But I did have a daughter, once. Her name was Aimee. She liked to play with dinosaurs, and doodle on the backs of torn-open envelopes while I read through the bills. She had a new front tooth poking through, and tiny little fingernails, and she smelled like ‘no tears’ apple shampoo. One day, she was at school learning to play the recorder, and growing cress in a pot with a funny face on it, and scuffing her brand-new patent dolly shoes on the playground. One day she was at the zoo laughing at the tigers, and one day she was crying because her hopscotch drawn in chalk had washed off the driveway, and one day, she was dead. Her bedroom is across from mine in what was our house and is now just mine. Like a dollhouse abandoned mid-play, its façade half-open, its furniture untouched, gathering sentiment like dust. I used to enjoy tidying it. Putting the toys away, making the bed, lining up the books on the shelf. Now it is always already tidy, and all I can do is open the curtains each morning to let the light in, and close them each night to ward off the dark. I used to do it for her, but now I do it for myself. And every time I can’t help but stare down at the unwrinkled pillowcase which has long forgotten the tossing of her little head. But I haven’t. I haven’t. I won’t. My mother lives at the end of the street, and every morning I pop in on the way to work, and she makes me a cup of tea with too much sugar. Except when the tea has gone cold and I leave, I don’t go to work. I go to Aimee’s grave and sit there for a while, and then before I can start crying, I get in the car and drive away, drive until the windshield wipers in my mind have swept away the blur of the tears, and then drive a little further. When I’m with her nowadays, I never know what to say. I can’t ask her how she got that bruise, or whether she finished her packed lunch, or what she learned in her lessons today. Nothing changes down there. And I wish I could put on the night light for her. And I wish I could comb the tangles out of her hair. It feels like that long hour I used to spend waiting for her to wake up, waiting to dress her and feed her and clean her and kiss her and scold her, except it feels like that all the time. Now I struggle to dress and feed and clean myself, to sleep and wake up every day. All I can do for her now is open the curtains and tend the grave. There’s always some filth invading that sacred space. A crumpled crisp packet. Fallen leaves. A dying bouquet of flowers shedding shrivelled petals onto the soil. Even once I’ve picked them up, there’s still an invisible film draped over the headstone like a mouldy, moth-bitten blanket, clinging damply, making my fingertips itch. “Sorry, sweetheart,” I say as I brush it away with my hand. I scrub and scrub away at it with soft words until everything is nice and clean, everything is better. Until one day, there is a mushroom growing on top of her grave. It’s thin, white like sick skin, with a cap the size of a milk tooth. Suppressing my revulsion, I kneel to pluck it, but its stalk snaps in two and leaves my fingertips sticky red. How dare you. I dig into the dirt with my fingernails until I’ve scraped all of it out, then tenderly pack and press the wound until the soil is flat and unscarred again. I place the fungus into a plastic bag and take it to my car. “Sorry, darling.” My stained fingers grip the steering wheel, clench it hard enough to make it turn pale and burst with sticky redness. But it doesn’t. And I pull over, and I forget to breathe, and then I breathe too much, too fast, and then I throw the remains of the mushroom into a neighbour’s bin. The next day, there are two of them. I remove them, but they grow back, more numerous each day. Eventually, I have no choice but to watch them grow, changing size and shape rapidly, protruding and bulging and dimpling in a way that makes me think of marble statues carved out with painful, scraping precision. These days, I think of death so much more than before. Graveyards are about death, yes, but mostly they’re about people, about love and remembrance, using the right words, solemn artifice and lasting flowers, lasting stone. Fungi, though, only know death and decay, which is their life. Looking at their smooth, pale surfaces clinging cup to clammy cup, I feel devoured. The soil I once saw as a cold comforter enwrapping Aimee’s body has lost its protective quality; the mushrooms feast on it, on her, gnawing the wood of her coffin, choking her bones, and I know she is dead, and I know she is rotting, that she is not just sleeping anymore. The mushroom at the head of the cluster is rounded and soft with fuzzy edges. It is uncannily symmetrical, with flaps on each side and two adjacent blotches of peachy pink on top. Lower down, there are mushrooms with flat cups, and five stodgy protrusions each. Something inside me wants to pluck one and bite into it, feel the redness gushing through my teeth. Might it be sweet, like an overripe fruit? Sour, like battery acid? Coppery? But opposite the urge to taste is a leaden disgust which sits heavy in my stomach, makes me recoil at the sharpness of bile. The fungus invades my mind, and as I sit at the kitchen table stirring soup, I am paralysed by nausea. All solid food has the same soft, foam-like texture now. I have to avert my eyes when I walk past the punnets of mushrooms in the supermarket. The dark shadow of my pregnancy cravings falls long over these strange days, life-giving indulgence distorted into this morbid, abortive repulsion. And then, the day comes when I arrive at the grave and the mushrooms are gone. Instead, sitting atop the grave is a little girl, playing with wilted flower petals quietly. I watch her for a while, the back of her head, the familiar, tangled hair, the delicate branch of her neck supporting a head which hangs low like sweet, round, pink fruit. My little girl, but no longer wholly mine. When she notices me, she unfurls, stands, walks toward me with her hand out. I take it. Cold, clammy, spongy flesh squeezed between my fingers. Recoiling, that familiar nausea grips me. She smiles at me as if she’s forgotten how, cutting a gash into the off-white flesh of her cheeks. I can’t smile back. I want to cry, but I’m not sure if the tears that came out would be tears of joy, or sadness, or sticky red liquid eating through my skin and eyes and bones until I soak into the soil. I take her home. It home. It sits at the table. It leans over the cereal bowl where sodden cornflakes float within the sickly, watered-down white of the skimmed milk, as its features do within its face. It doesn’t eat, just plays with the spoon. Not in the restless, curious way that little girls do, but like some creature with no conception of cutlery or how to use it. Back pressed against the counter, I watch it sitting silently, apart from the occasional cough; not hard, or chesty, but an effortless expulsion of air, of who knows what. I try not to breathe. For hours, I assume it cannot speak, or that it has decided not to. That is, until I try to put it to bed, and it looks up and asks me, in a way that is barely a question: “Are you going to give me a bath?” It needs a bath, with dirt crammed under its nails and encrusting its eyelashes. But I don’t want to. No, I can’t. Not again. I purse my lips, shake my head. When I leave the kitchen, it stands in the doorway, watching me. I go to bed and lie there unable to think, listening to the tap thundering down the hallway until my brain overflows. Then, I drag myself out of my room, into the bathroom, to find it waiting in the bath with all its clothes on down to the shoes. In silence, I bathe it; it watches me with an overcast recognition in its eyes, knowing me in some buried, soil-caked sense that its dull mind claws at with blunted talons of thought. I watch it in return, digging around for that semblance of her I saw in it before. It couldn’t look less like her. It has her eyes, yes, and her nose, her mouth, her little hands, but mere millimetres beneath that it is unrecognisable. I can’t look anymore and keep my eyes on the door as I pour water over its head, hand trembling. Last time– No. It’s not her, anyway. It can’t remember. And I shouldn’t remember, either. If I do, I’ll lose myself all over again. Its skin has turned slimy, and when I pat it with a towel, thin layers curl back without bleeding, without pain. The spongy stuff seems to go deep, maybe right to the core, though I know there is something red deep down somewhere. Something that stains, that stings the nostrils and sears the skin, a red, womb-like vacuole where I could float and drown and dissolve, be absorbed like it wants me to. As I tuck the child into bed, silent tears ebbing down my cheeks, it speaks. “Mummy?” It has a voice like a baby doll, plastic and hollow. Aimee used to have one. One that said Mummy, but it had never had a Mummy, and you knew that: its eyes didn’t really blink, it wasn’t really laughing, and when you pressed its stuffed chest, an acidic sound and a high-pitched redness would gush out, and you knew that. “Mummy.” I shake my head. “Did you kill me?” A long, low wail is pulled out of me, inch by painful inch, wet as guts. “Did you kill me?” I can’t answer. I just shake. It won’t stop looking at me, and I know that it knows. It knows what it is to die, and it wants to show me. I don’t know what else to do. I pull back the covers and climb into bed next to it. The sheets are stained. A gory red, turning brown, and then black, black as the empty eye sockets of a skull, and black as the cavity of a body without organs, that isn’t spongy all the way through. “Do you love me?” It throws its arms limply around my neck, its head heavy against my chest like the first clod of mud thumping against the coffin lid. “Yes, I love you,” I sob. “I love you. My little girl. My baby.” It is not my little girl. But something within it is, something that remembers me and needs me and feeds off me, its mycelium penetrating my darkest, coldest parts, too deep to be pulled out. That’s why I let it stay for so long. That’s why I let it creep around, clotting the air into coughs, rotting the table legs, decaying the dried-up insects that collect behind the TV cabinet. Then bigger things in the garden, mice on their backs with stiff paws and bloody fur, birds spilled prematurely from cracked eggs. It consumes them agonisingly slowly, almost as slowly as it consumes me. Did you kill me? It never speaks anymore, but I hear those words in its footsteps, the sluggish, whispering shuffle of its soles over the floorboards. When it passes by my bedroom, I feel as if something is walking over my grave. It paces at all hours, never sleeping, not needing to be tucked into bed anymore. I don’t sleep either, the sheets, the air, the silence, my own thoughts, pressing in as closely as dirt packed around a coffin. I don’t move. Can’t. Just lie on my back with the door locked and my eyes open, waiting for it to arrive at my door, to pause there, to pass by. I don’t know how long this goes on. Eventually, I run out of energy to hate or fear this thing, and lapse into apathy, where every movement feels like trudging through a thick grey sludge, from which emotions emerge as viscous bubbles that die with an unsatisfying pop. The sound of it moving around the house becomes as mundane as a ticking clock, marking my sleepless hours. That is, until I cough. Time stops with that first eruption, not a spewing of lava but a hot, dry expulsion of volcanic ash which rumbles through my body. It hears. It stands outside my door, waiting. I go there to meet it, find it looking up at me. I don’t feel anything. No repulsion, no fear, no anger, no pain. No love. It tilts its head curiously, blinking. Almost like a child. Almost. “I’m going to take you to bed now, alright?” It nods, allows me to lead it to the room, her room, that stopped smelling of her long ago. Now it smells like stagnant puddles, damp earth after rain, wet brown leaves turning to mush. Once it falls asleep, I lift it out of bed, carry it downstairs and into the garden. I walk across the grass barefoot towards the hole I dug, six feet deep. Overhanging branches shield me from the bulbous, judgemental eye of the moon, squinting at me from way up there. Its light turns me into a corpse, slicks my skin with a ghostly clamminess, turns my eyes cold. How deep is deep enough? To bury, to drown, to sleep, to hide? I don’t know; I only know that I must put it back, that dead things must be buried. I lower the child, the thing, into the hole as tenderly as I can, then pick up my shovel. Dirt settles over it like a quilt. It looks peaceful. It looks human. When it opens its eyes, I must remind myself that it isn’t to be able to pile on the rest of the earth. It doesn’t scream, or cry, or move at all. When I’m done, I go inside and fall asleep on the kitchen floor with my back to the sink. You must know what happens next. I know from the moment I wake, casting a searching look outside, combing the ground with my gaze to find that expected speck of white. Over the next few days, I watch it happen all over again. Those bulbous shapes, pushing their way through the soil. Growing. And growing. And growing, in a way that would make no mother proud, until one day, there’s a little girl sat out there, watching me. Smiling at me. I go outside to her, and she stands up. “Are you going to have a bath, Mummy?” she asks innocently, extending a white, half-formed, dirt-dappled hand. I don’t think she really wants to do this, just as I didn’t. But she has to, and I have to, because this is how it ends, as it once did for her. Not under the ground, because we could never get deep enough, but under the water. This is the only way. So, I nod numbly. She takes my hand and leads me inside, away from the unblemished patch of dirt where something that looked like a child once lay, while something that looked like a mother buried it. |