Die, My Love. Ariana Harwicz

Apollo, are you listening? Or any mission to outer space… Are you even paying attention? On the Apollo, watching the earth grow distant… Shhh! Is he crying? What do you mean, is he crying? I’m talking to you about the moon! The moon is just like you lot, come to think of it, he says. You all have your dark side. But I’m thinking about pacing up and down with the baby in my arms, hour after hour of tedious choreography, from the exhaustion to screaming, screaming to exhaustion. And I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever. My husband got fed up, decided he’d had enough, closed the telescope and took it to the garage to store with his tools, my father-in-law’s tractor, and the canoe and paddles. The little man, as my in-laws call him, wasn’t crying, and it was so silent in his bedroom that I had to poke him to see if he was still alive. I went back into the room with the patio doors, walked straight towards my reflection, and slid the door open just before I crashed through. My husband was smoking another cigarette, he’d started a second pack while insulting the moon, women and me in equal parts. I saw the smoke surround him and felt afraid. The most aggressive thing he’d said to me in seven years was ‘Go and get yourself checked out’. I’d said to him ‘You’re a dead man’ during the first month of our relationship. We were standing side by side in the freezing cold, the water in the grass dyeing us. Our feet soaking wet. The earth churned into craters by the moles. He wasn’t looking at the sky any more, and neither was I, of course. But I thought a meteor passed above us, fleeting like everything else in life. Later, we went to sleep, each in our own bed. I’d already grown used to sleeping alone, stretched out diagonally across the bed in this house that was once a dairy farm, whatever that might mean. Any old group of people can make up a family, I said suddenly, letting my eyes wander.

      When my husband’s away, every second of silence is followed by a hoard of demons infiltrating my brain. A rat jumps onto the see-through roof. She seems to be enjoying herself, the crazy little thing. Every minute or so I go and check the baby’s still breathing. I touch him to see if he responds, uncover him, change his position, shine a light on him, pick him up. He’s still at the age when cot death is a risk. Then I get a hold of myself, make a sandwich and sit down in front of the TV. But right away, the aghh, aghh of an owl, that genital sound, involuntary and erotic, terrifies me. I turn off the TV and imagine an orgy of animals, a stag, a rat and a wild boar. I laugh, but then the jumble of creatures is suddenly frightening. The legs, wings, tails and scales tangled up and racing towards pleasure. How does a wild boar ejaculate? I hear the aghh, aghh again, like a man being hanged, aghh, aghh, a hoarse, cat-like gargle coming from the owl’s curved beak. Through the patio doors, I can see out to where the old camper van sits. I don’t know why, but this vehicle that’s left us stranded in the middle of the road on more than one occasion must be cursed. It’s covered in rust, but my man says it’s still got a few miles left on it and the three of us could drive to the seaside. I worry it’ll overturn and that’ll be it, bye bye baby. We’ll have killed the child between the two of us. Between two and four in the morning it’s hardest, later it gets easier and I make myself something to eat. But between two and four I feel this urge to throw myself around. I see the doorknob turn on its own. See myself walking to the woods and leaving the buggy on a downhill slope. Aghh, aghh then thank goodness the phone rings. How far away are you, my love? Still a hundred and seventy miles to go? Oh, you went to McDonald’s? And filled up the tank? Right, give me a call from the next service station then. Kiss. Kiss. The quick roadside calls break up my madness. I go back to see if my baby’s sleeping. I organise his action figures in order of their arrival in our lives. Will my darling husband head to a cheap hotel with some girl working at the drive-thru? I walk barefoot through the house. I go and leaf through a book. My shelves are full of things I bought for the pregnancy and still haven’t read. I’m not good in bed any more and he knows it, I say to myself out of nowhere. That’s why he’s at some roadside hotel with peeling walls and the vacuous drive-thru girl moving on top of him, bouncing better than I can. I like thinking about sex, not having it. I was always good at the theory and a failure at the practical bit, that’s why I don’t know how to drive even though I’ve learnt the traffic laws by heart. I try to concentrate on a book by Virginia Woolf, a gift from my husband, but I’m too full of milk. Why does he sleep so much? Why doesn’t he stir? The death of a child is science fiction. I go and check on him. Then I step outside and a red Ferrari speeds by. I stand at the front gate, phone in hand. Apparently the radiation from mobile phones causes cancer. My hand is a terminal case. He’ll be calling any second now, like he always does when he gets to the next service station. Melisa, the single mum with two children who lives next door, has left the window open and the light on. I think she’s crying, or moaning. She earns a living showing off her arse. A man somewhere will be chatting her up online, typing ‘Jesus, you’re so hot’ and paying more cash to look at her crack for a little longer. Why won’t the phone ring? The client wants to lick her, she spreads herself open, the guy’s sucking on the monitor in his city-centre flat. I look at the little mongrel tied up across the road, sticking its tongue out at me. It’s ringing! Hi, my love… Hiya! Hi! Did you get a coffee from the machine? What did you have to eat? Okay, I’ll wait up for you. Me too. Bye. Kiss. Kiss. There, he’s called now. I used the right voice to talk to him. I asked him the same things as always, like what did you have to eat? Why do we women ask our husbands what they ate? What the hell are we hoping to find out by asking what they ate? If they’ve slept with someone else? If they’re unhappy with us? If they’re planning to leave us one day when they say they’re going out for an ice cream? I dodge the nettles and walk down to the woods. At one point a stag appears and shoots me a hard, animal stare. No one’s ever looked at me like that before. I’d put my arms around him if I could. Later on, I read a few pages. Ever since the pregnancy I’ve been a slow reader and it’s only getting worse, one page and I drift off. But what’s that faint, broken sighing sound? The neighbour with dyed-red hair showing her hole to another punter or the dog in heat? Waiting for my man is torture. I should cook something for when he gets home but I’m not sure I want to. He’s always telling the same story. The time my in-laws were here for the day and I made lunch. The menu: rice croquettes with rice. And they all laugh at me. Well, not all of them, the baby doesn’t. But before the baby existed it was all of them. Fits of laughter. Sometimes I want him to cry so I can sneak into bed next to him guilt-free and drain my tits. On days when my husband’s not here I get aggressive. I go after the weak, like the fat nurse who comes to give anticoagulant injections to the sick man next door. This woman arrives in her little white car every morning at seven on the dot. Her movements are always the same. She turns off the engine, gets out of her car and walks towards the house as only a government employee or home-care nurse can in a nowhere town like this one. Today I took out the rubbish on the hour and gave her a look of disgust as I walked past. She said hello the way civilised people do and I snarled back. I raised my voice and took a few steps towards her, prepared for a fist fight. She shrank back. Poor plump little nurse, she must have thought I was a refugee from some war-torn country. My hair was a mess and I was wearing one of my man’s old basketball shirts, which gave me a figure I don’t have. She must have thought I was going to head-butt her and knock her teeth in. No wonder she scurried away into the sick man’s house, the little scaredy-cat, to rub him with alcohol and give him his injection. I also act haughty with the cashier ladies at the supermarket, the pizza delivery men and the manicurists. I yell at them in public. I like to make a scene, humiliate them, show them how cowardly they are. Because that’s what they are: chickens. How come none of them have tried to fight me? How come none of them have called the authorities to have me deported? It’s so obvious they’re right, that I’m the one who’s looking for trouble, that they’re just doing their jobs and not bothering anyone. When my husband goes away in the middle of summer I leave a plastic doll on the back seat of the car and wait for the alarmed neighbours and state employees to come running. I love watching them react like the good citizens they are, like heroes who want to smash the window and save the little one from suffocating. It’s fun to see the fire engine arrive in the village, its siren sounding. Morons, all of them. And if I want to leave my baby in the car when it’s forty degrees out with the heat index, I will. And don’t tell me it’s illegal. If I want to opt for illegality, if I want to become one of those women who go around freezing their foetuses, then I will. If I want to spend twenty years in jail or go on the run, then I won’t rule those possibilities out either. The other day, the silly blonde down the