Case Histories

Sometimes Michelle tried to remember what it was like before the baby came, "when it had just been the two of them and they could lie in bed all day and have feverish, exhausting sex and then eat toast and jam and watch television on the tiny black-and-white set that they used to have at the foot of the bed until Michelle knocked it over because Keith was watching the snooker (on a black-and-white set, what was the point of that?) and the baby was screaming and she just couldn't do it anymore.

She did love them, she really did. She just couldn't feel it.

They weren't bonded together, like molecules, molecules that couldn't bond together into stable elements and instead bounced around like bingo balls. She should have studied science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

And then she started getting up even earlier because if she wanted to get out of this mess she was going to have to study for her A Levels. If she got up at four in the morning – when everything was miraculously peaceful, even the birds and the baby – then she could prepare the evening meal, tidy the kitchen, and get a wash on, and then, if she was lucky, she could get her old schoolbooks out and take up her education again where she had left off. Because you couldn't make time, she'd been deluded about that. Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

It was just a normal day (normal for Michelle, anyway). It was a Saturday, and Michelle had been up since half past three and was feeling particularly satisfied with her strategy. A dish of lasagna, neatly cling filmed, was sitting in the fridge, waiting to be heated up later, and she had made a chocolate cake – Shirley's favorite, because her sister often took the bus and came to visit on a Saturday. She had read three chapters of Mowat's Britain Between the Wars and had made notes for an essay on King Lear. The baby was fed, washed, and dressed in the nice blue-and-white-striped OshKosh dungarees that Shirley had bought. Michelle washed the windows while the baby amused itself in the playpen. The sky was blue and the breeze was fresh and Michelle could see green shoots appearing in the vegetable plot, even the coriander had germinated.

After a while she glanced at the baby and saw that it was asleep, curled up like a bug on the floor of the playpen, and Michelle thought she could use the opportunity to get on with her geography, and at that moment Keith lumbered into the house with a pile of logs he'd just chopped and he dropped the logs onto the hearth with a great clatter, making the baby wake up with a start. Automatically, like a switch thrown, the baby began to scream and Michelle began to scream as well, just standing there in the middle of the room, with her arms by her side, screaming, until Keith slapped her on the face, hard, so that her cheek felt as if it had been branded.

Her throat was very sore from the screaming and she felt weak, as if she were going to drop to the floor, and what should have happened at that moment – because, let's face it, they had been here before (although not the slapping) – was that she would burst into tears and Keith would put his arms round her and say, "It's okay, baby, it's okay," and she would sob until she felt better and they would cuddle the baby between them until it felt better too.

Then they could have made a fire with the logs, because it was still chilly in the evenings, and heat up the lasagna and settle down to watch some rubbish on the new color television they'd bought to replace the old black-and-white one. They would have gone to bed with full stomachs and had sex to make up and slept well so that they would be ready for another day of the same old, but what actually happened was that Keith made a move to put his arms round her and she spat at him, which was something new as well, and then she ran outside and got the ax from where it was stuck in a log beside the sawhorse, and then she ran back inside with it.