A soft warm place

Helen Brain

Lucy and Sam had been friends for four years. They first met when Lucy moved into the street, into a house four up on the same side of the road from Sam's cottage. Sam had newborn twins at the time, and a toddler of three.

Lucy's children were older, but no less demanding. Sometimes it seemed to her that they were incapable of separating from the nipple, metaphorically. They sucked her dry, much as Sam's two babies tugged at her dugs until they were pap, hanging like overripe fruit on a vine.

Sam had a non-ideal husband. Leonard was much older than her - retired, in fact. He stayed at home to care for the children. Well he would as soon as her maternity leave was up. Right now, he was hardly there. He took the opportunity to spend his day at the bowling club bar, coming home slightly sozzled to nag at her because the children's toys were on the floor, they'd run out of milk yet again, and she still hadn't hung out the wet laundry that was already starting to smell.

Lucy remembered exactly what it had been like to have newborn babies. The sense that a front-end loader was driving through the plate-glass sitting room window every morning to dump a load of housework for her to get through. Like the miller's daughter she felt desperately abused, as though someone else had promised she could spin it into gold, or at least make everything shiny clean, she had to do it before nightfall or face execution, and she hadn't a clue where to start.

Now her kids were older and there was less to get through. Unlike Sam, she had the advantage of an excessively tidy husband. Tim was a compulsive tidier. He couldn't relax until everything was cleaned and put away. Tim had always been a worrier, but now he had hit forty it had gotten right out of hand.

He hated his job as a teacher, but was too scared to look for a new one. He was paralysed by his feeling of worthlessness. The education department had changed, children weren't what they used to be, and he was tired of reading pages and pages of adolescent ramblings in barely coherent English. And he felt he had gotten old too young. Every creaky knee or stiff joint was a sign that arthritis was beginning. Every headache was a brain tumour caused by cell phone radiation. People he had been at university with drove smart cars paid for with their company car allowances, and he was driving a 12-year-old Golf that a colleague fixed for cheap on the weekends because they couldn't afford a proper mechanic.

Sometimes Tim seemed to Lucy to be more difficult than the most fractious and difficult of her children. As his midlife angst got worse, so did his need to load her with his troubles. Sometimes, when she was cooking supper - browning onions or peeling potatoes, and she heard his keys jingling and the puppy yapping to welcome him home, her heart sank.

She felt like a quarry. Not only something pursued, as her children hunted her around the house calling "Mom, Mom" from room to room. She had learnt not to answer when they called as a response made their hunting insatiable. Let them track her down by smell and sight.

But she also felt hollowed out like a stone quarry. Every day people scooped more out of her. More nurturing, more loving, more supporting - big boulders were hewed out of her to build supports for the structures of her children's lives. And then at nightfall, Tim came home driving a lorry full of shit and garbage, the detritus of his misery, and he reversed up over the edge and tipped it on top of her. The headmaster was rude to him in a staff meeting, his colleague in the English Department was passing all the dirty work on to him. A taxi had stopped illegally in front of him on the way to work and he'd almost crashed into it. He'd gotten a fine for parking in a loading zone for ten minutes, and the whole country was skewed because of taxi drivers and people like them who were just out to get what they could. The traffic department were just looking for soft targets to fine. And why didn't they come and raid the house at number 4 where everyone knew you could buy drugs but the police didn't want to do anything? And maybe they should emigrate, but he'd heard that the kids in England and Australia were even worse behaved than the ones here, and teaching there was just crowd control. And …

Lucy was too afraid to process any of her feelings, so she let it all sink in, hew away, sink in, hew away. There was nothing she could do for Tim. He wasn't discontented with her, he said, or the children. It was them that kept him going.

But Lucy didn't feel so sure. What if he was in denial? What if he really hated his life at home too? She wondered if he would ever leave them. His father had left for a while when Tim was a teenager, and she doubted whether he would be able to inflict that sort of pain and insecurity on their children. Maybe he didn't find her attractive any more. He certainly didn't want to make love. At night he lay facing away from her, and it seemed like too much trouble to roll over and kiss him when she got into bed. He promised he didn't find her undesirable, but Lucy knew in her heart that he did. How could he love her battle-scarred body, her stretch marks and the varicose veins behind her knee, her boobs which drooped after all the breastfeeding, the rings under her eyes? The extra twenty kilograms, her hair which was going grey at the edges and no longer shone and bounced hopefully like it had when she was twenty and he couldn't keep his hands off her.

She looked tired, and God knew, she was tired. Totally worn out. Keeping going by not thinking, trudging onwards, keeping her mind on the top layer of existence - what to cook for supper, not to forget the orthodontist appointment, to remember the recycling for the school fundraiser, to put petrol in the car before the class outing.

Sam understood. Sam understood all of these things without her having to explain them. The burden of their lives was indisputable, so they didn't need to discuss it.

Sometimes when they were feeling low they would joke about suicide. Neither of them was irresponsible enough to consider suicide, because then the life assurance wouldn't pay out. And their children would suffer. Why don't we rent a hotel room, they joked once. Then you can shoot me and I can shoot you and it'll be murder not suicide.

Sometimes when Tim and Lucy went to breakfast at the local coffee shop, set in the grounds of a nursery, they would see the same two elderly ladies. They were big, hearty ladies dressed in baggy tracksuits with Birckenstocks. "That's what Sam and I are going to look like," Lucy would joke. "One day when we're old, we'll be big and flabby and we won't care. We'll order scones with extra cream and drink wine in the morning, and no one will expect anything of us."

When one old lady became wheelchair-bound, her friend had to push her from the car park to the table under the umbrellas. Lucy began to argue mentally about which one she would be - the pusher or the pushee. Definitely the pushee, if she had her way, but she didn't think Sam would give in without a fight.

They were both so tired. "I'm too tired to even masturbate," Sam said once. Lucy knew the feeling. It was too much trouble. "I just want some wild sex," Sam continued, lighting another cigarette. "But where am I going to find someone to fuck me? Maybe I should become a dyke."

The children were playing Barbies in the next door room. Lucy could hear them squabbling about who would drive the pink Barbie car.

Sam's husband was too old and angry and drank too much to be capable of sex. He blamed it on her. "You"re disgusting," he said to her. "You never eat properly or cook a decent meal for the kids and you're fat. You still look pregnant."

Lucy couldn't work out why it was Sam's job to cook once she got home from work. And to bath the children and to put them to bed. She was the breadwinner. Surely she should be putting on slippers and reading the paper? But Leonard became like another child once she got home. She was the mommy and had to do the mommy stuff. No wonder Sam looked fraught most of the time.

She tried to talk to her about it, but Sam's approach was to keep her head down and get through it. "He's good with the children," she said. "I can't kick him out. The kids love him."

One day Sam popped in for a cup of tea. Her kids were at a party, and she had half an hour to kill.

"I can't stay long," she said. "I have to go to Pollsmoor to buy a lovebird."

"Pollsmoor prison?"

"The prisoners hand-rear them. They're very tame."

Recently Sam had been in hospital for ten days with nervous exhaustion. While she was away no one had thought to feed the lovebird. Her son had found it dead at the bottom of the cage the day she came home.

Lucy made tea. The house was full. The kids were playing Playstation in the lounge, and she hadn't gotten around to washing the dirty dishes yet, so they didn't want to sit at the kitchen table.

They took their tea and wandered through to the bedroom. As usual the sight of a bed called them both, and Lucy lay down on her half. Sam began to move the cat off the chair, but Lucy patted the bed next to her. "Sit here." Sam sat down, straight back, next to her, and Lucy plumped up the pillows so that Sam's back would be supported. "Lean back."

With a sigh, Sam relaxed. "Won't Tim mind?"

"Fuck Tim."

They lay together, chatting softly, and Lucy turned on to her side to face her, like she couldn't turn towards Tim anymore.

Sam was so soft and comfortable. She imagined what it would be like to kiss her lips, to run her cheek down Sam's cheek, to hold herself against Sam's soft breasts and belly, to feel her capable arms encircling her. To be mothered. To give each other what they longed for, slowly and without a fuss. To appease their heart hunger.

One of Lucy's kids peeped through the door at them. "Hey Josh," Sam teased. "Now you've got two mommies. Mommy Lucy and Mommy Sam." The child said nothing and went away, but Lucy heard his bedroom door shut and the lock turn.

"That's another year in therapy," Sam laughed.

Then Lucy's youngest child and his friend came riding down the passage on their scooters, the phone rang, the washing machine beeped for the end of its cycle. They drank their tea, and Sam had to go to Pollsmoor Prison to fetch the lovebird she had ordered for her kids.

Helen Brain is a writer of childrens' books and has published 14 of them, but this is the first time she has been brave enough to bring her writing for grown ups out of the closet. She lives in Cape Town with husband and three sons, and teaches part-time at St George's Grammar School.

LitNet: 09 February 2005

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