Story 1: The open door

The Open Door

It had been a difficult birth. She remembered seeing the sickly babe lying still by the side of her bed and had wondered at her own indifference. Wasn’t it what they had both been wanting, their own child? The light coral painted walls reflected the same blandness that seemed to have overtaken her. She felt a terrible weight within her. The child had been born and yet another weight had crept in and seemed to be pressing on her womb, pushing against her insides. She wanted to jump up, tear off her clothes and run out away down the road, away from the hospital, her new born child and away from Marcelo. But instead, she lay there, staring down at the wan face of her baby, their baby and those pale coral walls seemed to ease the trembling anguish that was growing within her.

Her little boy had grown. She had met the demands of motherhood with a placid resignation. She supposed she loved him in the same way that she supposed she loved Marcelo. It didn’t seem to matter. While he needed her there seemed no reason why she shouldn’t be there – and yet she was conscious of a growing awareness that the absence of tenderness that was constant in herself was reflecting in her own child; it disturbed her. While she could live with a man who looked after her, at least materially, though incapable of inspiring emotions, she felt a revulsion that this same indifference should be invading the fragile world of her child.

Marcelo would be home in just over an hour. The little boy was engaged with his toys. She looked at the fair curls clustering over his wide forehead. His head had always seemed too large for his delicate frame. Whose child was he? He had Marcelo’s deep set eyes and the same fixed lower jaw. Marcelo’s methodical tenacity was there in the way the boy concentrated fixedly on the cardboard pieces of his puzzle. There didn’t seem any space for her. She wanted to love him. She wanted to love Marcelo. She looked again at the clock. Marcelo would come from the station. Time enough to walk in the opposite direction until the bus stop. Nothing untoward in her catching a bus at this hour. No need for any cumbersome bags. She felt no real connection with anything in the house at all. The child was separate from her in his own world and she in hers. Father and son would be good for each other. Her presence was useful, even important but not essential. Perhaps they would be free too; free to love without this cloud of indifference, this echoing scream of emptiness that raged just below the surface.

The television was on but the child still bent over his puzzle, deaf to the noise of the screaming children on the screen, deaf to the soft tread of rubber soles on ceramic tiles, of the abrupt click of the closing of the front door and quick footsteps on and away into the night.