Thank you for your kind comments. Others have commented on this – it originally meant I suppose to be ambigious (actual baby cries) or fathers one lost thought – before sinks in. Bothersome so will change/delete. Thanks Mark appreciate you reading it.
Novel Treatments / The Eagle & The Dodo Chpt 1 (2/3) Revised
II
Organs worked a vacantness through her, pushing inner corridors with a digestive mind and a hunger began. Mary’s slow breath was thick and heavy leaving her lungs. Stinging was stinging lower down, kept returning, irritating, obscuring scenes of another world where she was drifting away in a warm, peaceful, rising vapour. Tickling tickling brushed a small fist across her nose. She snuffled settling, her brow crinkled and she rolled on her back. Suddenly her eyes were open into the darkness. (Dark like before – no sound, no warmth, alone.) Squirly gigs and wrigglings like spiralling iridescent mobiles flowered in her vision. A universe of unnamed want surrounded her; a foreigner not knowing what was wanted, only the evasion of discomfort. This place on the other side of birth she found hostile, stark, inconsistent; and there were no liquid winds to dispel unpleasantness. Gaa familiar and unfamiliar, seen before, touched and smelt before, not seen, sensed, felt, unknown of, always accumulating in thought like bullets of illumination that streaked and pulsed intangibly undermining chaos, building on residues of tormented ancestry. The intensity of frustrated need unable to be suppressed broke loose in shrill strips of whipping demand on life, challenging, cutting away some room for her existence.
(Mary crying.)
Crying. Mary crying. He closed his eyes that had hardly opened . . . again . . . but . . . Mary was crying. Mary was crying. He rolled over towards Helen and after a few seconds made out the back of her body inert beside him.
Helen closed her eyes.
He got out of bed shaking himself into full consciousness and stumbled into the adjoining room where he reached down into the milky darkness to retrieve her. In his sleep-lazy arms he felt a stiff weakness as if the blood had turned solid in his veins. Her cries wavered, abating almost immediately as if by his mere touch he had caught and stilled the quivering blades of her need. Holding her against his chest he smoothed her back and walked the room murmuring ‘there, there darling, there, there’.
Under the rhythm of measured pace and sway, hand and voice, her cries tempered into sleepy grumbles. The burning of her brow like a brand against the side of his neck reminded him of her discomfort. Shifting his hand supporting her bottom confirmed she was wet. He transferred her to his other shoulder, reached out and flicked on the light.
In the abrupt brightness they blinked into recognition; he saw the twisted, crushed little red face, her hand come up inexpertly to rub an eye that looked miserable, and that her forehead carried an impression of one of the cot slats. She saw and smelt that it was the other one. She felt her weight confidently and firmly moving in his hands and the next she knew she was looking up at the ceiling having her nappy changed. His shadow shielded her from the direct flare of the incandescent globe. Deftly he peeled off the slick plastic pants covering her nappy and stretching them by the waist elastic fired them into the corner. The stench of uric acid went up his nostrils before he knew it like a charge bayonets fixed. He unpinned her, making sure to put the pins out of her crawling reach, then lifting her by the legs he pulled the nappy out from under her bottom.
“Well my little darling this is a soggy one.” Taking hold of the nappy by his thumb and forefinger he carefully placed its sodden weight over the corner of the change table. “All that juice you had isn’t it, eh?”
She reached up, gurgling, trying to claw his eye.
“You won’t catch me.” He dodged his head about, in and out, blowing gently at her forehead and tufts of her hair. She blinked rapturously and laughed until he stopped. He took three fingers of Vasolene and smeared it over the inside of her legs and folding a dry nappy to the appropriate proportions slipped it beneath her. Fastening one side with a safety pin he pulled the other two corners of the nappy in tight, and pushed his hand down next to her skin to feel for the second pin, which he was with difficulty trying to push through the doubled towelling. Whenever he did this there was always the fear in him that he would miss and puncture her stomach or some other vital organ. The pin came through suddenly, piercing the resistant fibres easily, and before he could pull back against the force of his arm to delay its progress he had stabbed himself in the thumb.
“Eiii, yow – Jesussss . . .” He shook his thumb in the air as if to throw it away then put it in his mouth to suck, inadvertently also pulling a face which didn’t go unnoticed by his one girl audience. She began to gurgle, her face reacting to his antics; opening up, her smile widening into a chuckling font of happiness.
“You’re a devil.” He pulled another face and reached over and tickled her exposed tummy. Made sure to wave his hands about, make a silly sound, to make her laugh.
He had a very distinct appreciation of their almost magic isolation here under the spread of night while everyone was sleeping. He picked her up and held her on his hip with one hand, and with the wet nappy in the other left the bedroom for the darkened living room. It reminded him of what it was like to walk out onto the airfield in the very early morning, the light of the cold, yellow moon making the fog thick and heavy in patches and the fuzzy indiscernible outlines of the trees away off and the hangers, the trucks spaced oddly about imparting in the stale coolness of the air an other worldly touch where dreams waited to stir. Here it was the squarish shape in monochrome of the television, the old armchair, last nights paper left where it had been read, the no longer so sharp petals of a dried flower arrangement on the dining table. These things made him feel he walked through an interlude where time had been frozen. Having her with him made him feel very secure; alone with himself, yet now not alone. On the way to the kitchen he dropped her damp nappy into the sanitary bucket just inside the doorway of the laundry.
The refrigerator, one of their few acquisitions since marriage opened once he had given it a decent tug. He adjusted his stance bending his legs while holding her out so she remained upright while he took a bottle from the second shelf.
“First we take the bottle out from the refrigerator, inside where it’s cold. Whooo.” He closed the refrigerator and walking across the kitchen, squatted and reached below the sink. “Then we put it in a sauc . . . eh come on get out of there saucepan. Naugthy saucepan. Then we put the bottle in the saucepan and let the hot water run over it until the chill goes away. Got that?”
While the saucepan was made into a bubbling bath of hot water for the bottle and its orange liquid she was juggled about, nestled on his hip uncomplainingly looking down intently at all he did. She was quite used to their night time forays. His slant on child rearing was that she should be exposed to as much stimuli as possible regardless of how short her attention span; that familiarity at an early age would later encourage the resumption of knowledge, as if a door had been left ajar. And so he talked to Mary as if she were a little girl, but not babytalk, not simpletonised drivel, though at times he described his actions simply, drawing emphasis to everyday nouns or verbs, not as if she were a child of limited understanding, and that he presumed to know the limits of what her intelligence could take in. He had read somewhere how a child’s capacity to learn was optimised in the first five years of life. It made sense, there was a lot for a young animal to learn – survival depended on it. Helen thought it was crazy talking to inanimate objects. When he was alone with Mary, he’d talk about anything that came into his head, from naming and describing textures, smells, colours and light, sounds whatever he thought her senses were experiencing; to in quieter moments, little gems of his own philosophy on life, or chats of a more personal nature only.
He wanted her to grow up smart, to have a bright, active, interested intelligence. Of course, he wanted her to grow up doing whatever it was she wanted to do, but he wanted to improve her chances of making a more fulfilling choice – whatever it was. He wasn’t going to bully her though; she was going to be her own girl. He wanted her to have an independent view arrived at by her own processes, based on the tools she had been given. He wanted to give her the tools whereby she might be wise and let her go.
He was impatient and anxious for her growth. He wanted to be proud of her, pleased to say she was his daughter – his beautiful daughter. She was his stock and damn anyone who said a word against her – he would be patient for the first one to try. She was his reason for fighting, before she was born, now and in the future. One of the questions the future held though had to be; would he be good enough for her? For a second he felt inadequate and afraid. It occurred to him then that he was only hungry for a chance to prove himself to her, win her respect, but he didn’t want her to grow up too quickly.
“Here we go.” He lifted the bottle from the saucepan and reversed the teat, which had been licking at the juice from the sterile inside. She made a grab for it.
“Uh ah,” he laughed admonishing her, “let me just see how hot it is.”
Whatever the temperature of the liquid it contained, the exterior of the bottle was much too hot for him to handle. He twisted on the cold tap and held the bottle under the stream, from moment to moment checking it, and giving Mary sheepish apologetic grins as a counter balance to the expression in her pleading eyes, which with each withdrawal of the bottle threatened to tip into crankiness.
Finally, the juice sprinkled on his forearm passed the test, and resting her head in the crook of his arm he allowed her to drink. She was gulping the juice and he adjusted the tension of the screw top to limit the rate of displacement. He carried her back to her room, automatically turning the living room light on, and the light in her room off, deliberate aids to what he regarded as the most difficult part of the operation – getting her back to sleep. Laying her back in her cot required the attention of both his hands and while thus occupied he had to try and balance the bottle on her chest as she wasn’t strong enough to hold it herself. To take the bottle away after he had given it to her upset her terribly. He had also learned through experience that she was a light sleeper, and so he always left the railing of the cot up as putting it up after she had settled down always woke her. Midst her airy chewing he regained hold of the bottle from where it had in the last moments of the landing flopped uselessly down beside her cheek. He held it high for her so that she wouldn’t swallow any air.
His legs and back had begun to ache again because he was in an awkward and overextended position over the railing. He watched her eyes opening and closing with every eager mouthful, while the level in the bottle dropped and he adjusted the angle accordingly. Several minutes must have passed, his arm aching through its fixity of position and lack of blood supply tingled warningly. She looked at one of his eyes and at the other, then, as if contented within her examination of his nearness her focus shifted to the shadows playing on the darkened ceiling.
He passed his left hand through the wooden slats of the cot and took hold of bottle, swapped hands and squatted down. He was at eye level with her. She had followed his movements and now inclined her head slightly to the side so that she could still see him. She was slowing down now, and so he stayed still knowing it would not be much longer before she fell asleep. Her recalcitrant eyelids dipped shallower against the struggle to stay awake and the whites of her eyes like fleeting flags of truce revealed themselves more often. The borderline between sleep and wakefulness kept breaking down and she wandered between the two. She wanted to stay alert, safe in her new world, but her body which was possessed with a senseless desire for oblivion succumbed again and again to the inducement of slumber. The two worlds continued to slip one over the other, at times the old world like a fairytale without an ending existing in the new; while at others like tangental dreams, images glossed of the new world would stray beyond their reality into the old.
Juice consumption had dropped to a chew and a suck every so often. For a little while he chose to look upon her as a sort of miniature engine; a simple marvel twixt input and output. But conceiving this thought, he discovered he hadn’t the energy or wish follow on, it was like others he had noticed which waylaid his thinking at this time of night, like the movements of her mouth, all half-hearted. Soon he hoped she would be asleep, and then he could sleep too.
Her eyes had been closed completely for some minutes, her small hands had relaxed their grip on the bottle, and he began carefully retrieving the rubber breast from her mouth. Her teeth reluctantly surrendered it, but the teat was caught by suction and came away with the smack of an affected kiss. The sound was disturbing enough for her lips to search for the missing comfort of the teat, and she woke from her tenuous sleep disoriented and deprived, her face contorted in a hopeless misery of breath exhausting cries paused with whimpers and overrun with tears.
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Helmling reviewed Version 1 -
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You know, this reminds me very much of the way I spoke to my children when they were babies…so for me at least, this is ringing very true.
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Sloper reviewed Version 1 -
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Brian—
You show an in-depth knowledge both of newborn children and of fatherhood. Again, the plot movement is smooth, the syntax lengthy but easy to read, and the imagery very evocative. I like where you take the character, his attachment to his daughter now developing through his duty and interraction with the child. The limited omniscience of the narration allows you to slip easily from father to daughter. Only one aspect seems out-of place. The parenthetical “(Mary cried.)” It is abrupt and unecessary in my opinion. This is, however, a stylistic nit.
Excellent work, I will try to get to part 3.
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