‘I don’t like ham,’ said Stephanie, who was nearly four.
‘No?’
‘No, I don’t like it.’
‘I don’t like ham.’ They were all saying it now, the big brother and the little brother. ‘I don’t like ham.’ It was all a bit intense, Hazel thought, and accusatory.
‘I think you are confusing me with someone who gives a fuck,’ she said — changing at the last moment, of course, to, ‘Someone who cares whether, or not, you like ham.’
John gave her a quick glance. The child, Stephanie, gazed at her with blank and sophisticated eyes.
‘Maybe a little bit of ham?’ said Hazel.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Stephanie.
‘Right.’
John picked an apple out of the pile on the table.
‘A is for?’ he said, holding it high.
‘Answer,’ said Stephanie. ‘A is for A-A-Answer,’ and the children laughed, even though they didn’t quite know what the joke was. They laughed on and on, and then they laughed at the sound of their own laughter, for a little while more.
‘How do you spell “wrong”?’ said Kenneth, the eldest.
‘W-R-O-N-G,’ said Hazel.
‘W is for Wrong,’ he said. ‘W is for Wrong Answer,’ and they were off again; this amazing, endless, senseless sound — and this time the baby joined in, too.
He was asleep before they reached the hotel. The weather had changed and they carried him through a wind-whipped car park that did not even make him stir. Nor did he wake up in the room, when Hazel prised him out of the car seat — so she lay him on the bed as he was, profoundly asleep, in a dirty nappy and milk-encrusted babygro.
‘He’ll wake up in a minute,’ she said. ‘He needs a feed.’ But he still didn’t wake up: not for his feed, not when John went down to the bar for drinks. He slept through the remains of a film on the telly and another round of drinks, and he slept through the sound of his parents screaming at each other from either side of the bed where he lay. It blew up from nowhere.
‘And you can tell your fucking sister that I don’t want her fucking house.’
‘No one says you want it.’
‘Jesus, sometimes I think you’re just pretending to be thick and sometimes I think you actually are thick. You can’t talk about the carpets without her thinking what you’d put down on the floors if you got her out of there when the old man died.’
‘Oh, you are,’ he said, with his voice quite trembly. ‘Oh, you really are …’
‘You fucking bet I am.’
‘No, well done. Well done.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘Carpet, is it? I thought you were talking about my father.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I thought you were talking about my father, there, for a minute.’
‘Well, I am not talking about your father. That is exactly what I am not talking about. You are the one who is talking about your father. Actually. Or not talking about him. Or whatever passes in your fucking family for talking.’
‘You are such an uppity cunt, you know that?’
‘Yes, I am. Yes, I fucking am. And I don’t want your fat sister’s fat house.’
‘Well, actually, it’s not her house.’
‘Actually, if you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk about whose house it is. We can get our own house.’
‘We have our own house.’
‘A proper fucking house!!!’
Hazel was so angry she thought she might pop something, or have some style of a prolapse; her body, after the baby, being a much less reliable place. Meanwhile, the reason they needed a house in the first place slept on. His blissful flesh rose and fell. His mouth smiled.
The baby slept like he knew just what he was doing. The baby slept like he was eating sleep; his front stiff with old food and his back soft with shit. He slept through the roaring and the thrown hairbrush, and the storming of his father off to the residents’ bar. He slept through the return of his father twenty seconds later to say something very level and very telling, and the double-fisted assault as his mother pushed him back out to the corridor crying that he could sleep in the fucking bar. He slept through his mother’s anguished weeping, the roar of the taps, and the sad slosh and drip of her body shifting in the bath. It was, in fact, only when Hazel had fallen asleep, crawling for a moment in under the covers, that the baby decided to wake up and scream. Maybe it was the silence that woke him. Mind you, his screaming sounded the same as every other night’s screaming, she thought, so it was impossible to know how much he had been damaged by it all; by the total collapse of the love that made him. Could anger hurt him, when he had never heard it before?
Hazel plugged his roars with the bottle that was still floating, forgotten, in the hotel kettle. She undid the poppers on his babygro, as he sucked, and extracted him from it, one limb at a time. She reached between his soft legs to undo the poppers of his vest, which had a wet brown stain across the back, and she rolled the vest carefully under itself to keep the shit on the inside. When the vest was finally off, she pushed two baby wipes down into the nappy to stop the leak. All of this while the baby sat in her naked lap, with her left hand propping up the bottle and his eyes on hers.
The baby was huge. Maybe it was because she had no clothes on, but he seemed twice as big as the last time she had him in her arms. Hazel felt like she kept losing this baby, and getting someone new. She thought that she would fall in love with the baby if only it would stay still, just for a minute, but the baby never did stay still. Sometimes it seemed like it was all around her, as though there was nothing in her world except the baby, but every time she looked straight at the baby, or tried to look straight at the baby … whatever it was, just wasn’t there.
She was looking at him now.
But she still clung to it, whatever it was. She still hoped and hung on. Was this enough? Was this the way you loved a baby?
The line of milk pulsed and bubbled as it sank down into the teat, and the baby started to suck air. Hazel pulled the empty bottle out with a pop and set him on her shoulder, holding him with her forearms now, because she thought there might be shit on her hands.
The baby was full, his belly taut. She would get some wind out of him, and then clean up. Meanwhile, the feel of his bare skin against her own made Hazel vague with pleasure. She brushed her cheek against his fine hair, and the baby belched fantastically down the skin of her back.
‘Oh! so clever,’ she said, dipping and turning around. ‘Oh! so clever,’ dipping and turning back again. She did it a few more times, just to get the weight and poise of it, with the fat baby against her fat chest, and her crossed hands dangling beneath his bum. Dip and turn, dip and turn. The baby’s cheek a millimetre away from her own cheek — a hair’s breadth, that is what that was called. A hair’s breath.
Outside, the wind had picked up.
Rock a bye baby, she sang in a whisper, On the tree top.
She was nearly out of wipes. She did not have the courage to put him in a slippery bath. She would dunk a hotel towel in the sink and use that, no matter who had to pick it up, or use it afterwards. God, this baby business brought you very low, she thought, and turned with a smile to the opening door.
They were shattered when they got home.
John drove as though the road could feel his tyres; the tyres could feel the road. The whole world seemed as tender as they were. At Monasterevin, he reached his hand to touch her cheek, and she held it there with the flat of her own hand while, in the back of the car, the baby still slept.
When they pulled into the driveway, Hazel saw that her tulips had been blown down — at least, the ones that had opened first. She wondered if the storm had hit here too, and how strong was that wind anyway — was it a usual sort of wind? What would she be able to grow, here? She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday’s weather.