When he fed from the bottle, her baby was meek as a small lamb or a piglet, swallowing quietly, the formula milk running down his chin. She sat him in the crook of her arm and kissed the top of his head as she tilted the teat towards his mouth. The tablets were making her wake at 2 am, 3 am. Her heart skittered. Outside, foxes made their low, catastrophic noises, ran along the tops of fences, skirted over walls and vanished into the last secret places of suburbia.
She read articles: ‘The Hardest Eight Weeks of My Life’ and ‘What Nobody Told Me About Oxytocin’. She scrolled through advice on stopping breastfeeding, found only support to continue. But mostly, she read the map, running her finger from left to right and from top to bottom, following the course of the A57 out through Broomhill and Crosspool, skirting Rivelin and curving towards Strines. She could remember driving out to Ladybower, misjudging the bends and taking them too quickly, watching the wire hair and rust of the moors easing into view.
Standing before the full-length mirror, she found her breasts had disappeared altogether. For the last six months, they had been swollen with milk, pale blue veins standing out under her skin. Now, her profile had flattened. Her nipples were the colour of freckles. She dropped her t-shirt to the floor and ran a hand down from her collarbone to her navel the way she touched the map. Her body was Sheffield. She would have to learn it again.
From the top of their road she could see the south side of town. In Sheffield you could always get a view of somewhere else, always get up high enough to look across the rooftops. Still, she sought out elevated places. The Greystones pub with its tarmac, makeshift beer garden. The Brothers Arms. The high point of the General Cemetery. Each of her journeys was charted, noted on the map with a faint line lest she forget it. At home, her phone buzzed with messages.
You should breastfeed again. He’s still so tiny.
You should stop gradually.
You should stop quickly if you’re going to do it. Like pulling off a plaster.
It’s hormones.
It’s sleep deprivation.
It’s emotional.
You’re grieving for your child.
She deleted the mood gym. She stopped texting friends back. When that wasn’t enough, she drove down Abbeydale Road South, out through Totley to Owler Bar and then across to Barbrook. She left the car in the lay-by and walked the deep groove of the track out to the little reservoir. There were aimless ducks and the remnants of disposable barbecues, patches of blackened grass. A lone swimmer was making pitiful progress through the weed and peaty sludge, his face set with determination. She crouched by the side of the bank and cupped her hands around her phone and released it into the water as if she were returning a frog to the wild. It slipped easily into the darkness and was gone. On the way back, she visited the stone circle. A flattened ring of twelve squat stones, angled towards each other, their conversation long since interrupted. She consulted her map to know what surrounded her. Ramsley Moor and Big Moor. Then the unnamed things, the indifferent sky and the slow planes.
She began to enjoy the way her son handled food, his detachment and curiosity. He would lift raspberries into the air and repeatedly scrunch them between his fingers, only putting them towards his mouth as an afterthought. When she gave him strips of bread, he sometimes chewed on them but just as often raised them and let them drop ceremoniously. Crusts gathered on the kitchen floor. Then he would grin his toothless smile and grunt. There was joy in the letting go. He loved to throw squiggles of pasta, to flatten his hands in peanut butter. She took him to cafes in the city centre where he flung the mango and avocado she’d so carefully sliced and packed in a plastic tub on the ground to be squashed and trodden, oozing juice into the reclaimed boards. Nobody ever minded. Everybody smiled at his smeared face, the blobs of food on his nose and forehead.
On the last day of the eighth week, she bundled her baby into a sling and set off from Lady’s Bridge, checking the map as she went, not for directions but for place names. There was a spidery footbridge, metal and tall. The Cobweb Bridge. Her footsteps echoed on it. The walls were pink and green with graffiti. She could follow the Five Weirs Walk all the way past the industrial estates and then walk back along the canal to the basin. It was a grey, humid morning and she was sweating already. There were diversions and footpath closures and the route sent her past old foundries and sleepy sandwich shops with chalkboards outside. The could hear welding, men shouting over the din. Somehow, just when it seemed she would never rejoin the water it would appear, rushing constant on her left. Attercliffe, a proud bridge, the weir running silver. By the shopping precinct, she took her baby out of the carrier and leaned him forwards towards the sound. A heron appeared to their right, stepping thoughtfully from depth to shallows. Her son squealed and flapped his arm, bird-like and sudden. There were shopping trolleys and tyres, lengths of orange rope. Life was everywhere around them, endless and derelict and broken. It did not matter, she thought, what any of this was called. It was all pure river.
ROBERT STONE
PURITY
Edward and Marcia had got into the habit of walking along the cliff-top at dusk. What, here on Auskerry, Edward was tempted to call the gloaming. The sultry day was much cooler now and, indeed, would soon be cold. At this latitude the summer sky was still pale, but the first stars could already be made out. Marcia had something she wanted to tell Edward and Edward did not want to hear it.
They ambled hand in hand towards the remains of the chapel, not really intending to reach them. Marcia said she would show him the whirlpool she had been observing that afternoon, a new and especially large one. Her red hair looked almost purple in this light. She was lustrous, thought Edward. She was certainly pregnant, he could tell that, and she knew it, and she was very happy. Despite everything, Marcia had always wanted a child.
She couldn’t leave her telescope unattended on the cliff, but Edward had his binoculars and he stood and looked out at the whirlpool while Marcia sat on a rock, brushed the small stones out of her sandals and explained it to him. She had noted it a week before, but it must be much older, unless it had grown unusually quickly. It was as though the water were being slowly stirred by the invisible spoon of a giant cook. Marcia would film it if they could charge the battery for the camera. Edward nodded. If she liked. The seals were gone from the beach. Luckily, there were no pups at this time of the year.
Edward wondered who the father of his wife’s child might be. He could not be absolutely sure that it was not himself, but he was almost so. That was what Marcia did not know. The extent to which Edward was sterile. He had kept that from her. She thought that they had just been unlucky so far.
– There’s a chance we will see a meteor tonight. It is the Perseid season. It will be easier after midnight, when it gets really dark, he said.
He knew they wouldn’t be out so late.
So, who was the father? He couldn’t believe it was that old goat Jack, let alone Denny, and there was literally no one else on the island. It could have been one of the visitors. There had been none for months now and he couldn’t recall any of their faces. None of them had ever spent a night on Auskerry. That would have been quick work even by Marcia’s standards. Maybe Edward had got lucky, if that was the word for it. Of course, from the gene-spreading point of view, a random tourist could be a good idea, setting aside the barbarity of it.