Читать книгу The Harpy - Megan Hunter - Страница 16

7

The day afterwards, we stuck to the usual, and I was grateful for it, at first. Jake brought me a cup of tea, and I sipped it in bed, watching him interact with the children, watching his normality, his smiles. Paddy was talking to him intently about some rare species of shark – a goblin shark – and they spent time looking up images of the monstrous thing online, both of them in their pyjamas. Ted was under the covers with me, still half submerged in sleep, his eyes only just visible over the duvet.

They had a friend’s birthday party that day, and we went together, sipped thin cups of coffee in the soft-­play centre, chatted to the other parents about swimming clubs and the new teacher. Jake only spoke to other dads: I noticed that I felt an obscure gratitude for this, as though it was a gift to me, a bird with a mouse in its mouth. I felt a curiously strong urge to tell one of the other mums, to drag someone into the bathrooms with plywood dividers, like we were teenagers. I could have chosen Mary: she and her husband had sex on Saturday mornings, I knew that already. She let it slip during an otherwise typical comparative conversation about screen time, during which I felt I was minimizing my stats, and she was maximizing hers. We only let them on Saturday mornings, she’d said. So we can have some time.

Despite this confession, her revelations went no further. Nobody’s ever did. I had tried being candid before, at book groups and PTA socials, and it never ended well. Once, drunk on prosecco and inadequately fed on sushi, I’d asked what contraception people used. The silence was acute.

We should be so lucky, someone joked, and laughed. Everyone laughed. End of conversation.

I wondered if they all secretly had coils, jagged, effective pieces of metal in their wombs. I kept considering one but couldn’t face it, couldn’t bear the thought of someone pushing their hand right inside me. After one difficult natural birth and one caesarean, I felt that my body had closed over for gynaecological intervention, forever. I’d recently psyched myself up for weeks to get a smear test only to have it cancelled as the nurse stared into me. You’re still bleeding, she’d said, and it had sounded like an admonishment.

After the party, we all piled into the car in the industrial centre car park, a light drizzle falling outside. The boys were moaning in the back, comparing party bag spoils, wailing about any differences between them. Jake suggested – without looking at me – that we go to the supermarket, and I agreed, my voice almost lost in concrete. In the car, I closed my eyes so I could feel just how fast we were going, how much I was letting myself be carried on.

~

I knew I was meant to pity the unicorn, to feel his pain in my own skin.

Poor creature, my mother always said, turning the page.

But it was the bird-­women I felt for. I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like: my wings filling with air, the whole world flattening beneath me.

~