Fatherhood E-Book

Caleb Klaces

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 120

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Fatherhood is the debut novel from award-winning poet Caleb Klaces, combining prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction. Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from – the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain. Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet.

Leseprobe

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Caleb Klaces is the author of Bottled Air (Eyewear, 2013), which won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, and two chapbooks, All Safe All Well (Flarestack, 2011) and Modern Version (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2018). Extracts from Fatherhood won a 2015 Northern Writers Award. He teaches at York St John University.

Fatherhood

by Caleb Klaces

Fatherhood

The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations.

Jorge Luis Borges

This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant.

Annie Dillard

In the tenth month of my wife’s pregnancy I put aside my lifelong commitment to avoiding harm, and purchased mousetraps. The rodent population had exploded during spring, and now the summer was so hot that young mouse families were fleeing the plane trees’ inadequate shade for the cool of the ancient riverbed which lay under the cellar of our rented basement flat. They emerged in our kitchen at night to lap at the spilled juice of the pineapple intended to entice our unborn child into the visible world.

Under the greasy sun, a fox made parenting look elegant. She licked her paws while three squealing cubs dug up a piece of black meat with four legs and a collar. Inside, we sat naked between mounds of bleached-white baby clothes and watched the World Cup. All these men are alive, I kept thinking. Layers of shadow billowed on neon turf. The players played on regardless.

My wife had a job. I had a grant to write a novel. A distant relative from the Russian branch of my family had died, unexpectedly leaving us a slice of the proceeds of his bedsit. The will stipulated that we use it to invest in a piece of England. I scrolled through photographs of farms and beach huts, unable to take myself seriously enough to consider a period terrace. When I imagined life outside of the capital, above ground, I already missed the city.

The feeling reminded me of the final summer of university: a blank stretch between exams and results, when everything is over and nothing has yet begun. Ten years before, we had shared an itch. We left our notebooks out for one another to read. After lunch we took pills and whispered about our social responsibilities. On the way from one pub to another we broke off from the group to find a bedroom, any bedroom.

Not since then had my wife and I been so physically involved. We were the only members of our group, but we snuck quietly to the bedroom. We drew the curtains on the watching fox.

This time the logistics—pillows, headboards—were confounding. We rolled away from one another and lay still. It was necessary, all of a sudden, to be polite to the baby. I took chocolate bars from the labour bag and we ate them in the dark. We dreamt we were too old to move.

But the next morning, we slotted together in ferocious agreement. I loved—I don’t know how to say this—the feeling that I was drawing the baby out into the world, that my desire was extending a greeting, to which an unseen body might respond. There were so many pulses: in the throat and in the taut, round stomach; in the places where bodies curve into themselves, fold and open. Each of us pulsed with the blood of the others. I counted myself, counted myself again.

Do I need to lay down a bin bag?

I wanted to be the taxi driver’s friend and I had never seen my wife so powerful and so delicate and I didn’t know what to reply.

My wife, after eight hours of contractions, was deep inside pain. I said no to the bin bags and helped her into the taxi. I discovered that I was a prude, flinching at the small moans becoming public.

The breeze through the taxi window did something wonderful. The contractions appeared to pause. She smiled. She looked like a disco ball, glittering in daylight.

The driver said into his mirror that it was all worth it. We thanked him.

Offensive speed bumps on the hospital roads.

I expected a welcome party. Instead I saw midwives eating packed lunch on a wall. I said,

That’s nice, midwives eating their

packed lunches.

The taxi driver hung all the bags and car seat off his arms and followed us in. My wife found the buzzer. She was back behind a cloud.

There was a chair so my wife sort of sat on it. Every part of her was involved in the convulsions. The midwife took phone calls. I filled the water bottle.

Let’s get you onto the bed.

I can see baby’s head.

Curtain across.

The midwife abandoned taking her pulse.

You’ve done very well to get to this point

on your own.

My wife had been courteous, I wanted to say, since 5 a.m when she woke with contractions. We had walked the contractions round the park, under the dovecote, stopping at the toilets. At home we had sat in darkness with the contractions while I asked her medium-difficulty trivia questions. I had cleaned every fork in the drawer and spent minutes choosing socks. I wanted to be wearing the right pair of socks. She had been in labour while I spent an hour chasing a butterfly out of the window, refusing the metaphor. She had been in labour while I read online reviews of taxi companies. Now I touched her shoulder and she thanked me and asked me not to touch her shoulder.

We need to get you onto this bed.

Can I stay on this bed?

There’s not enough room for two beds in

this room.

I can’t move. Can I have a moment?

(Astonishing poise.)

Take your time.

Gas and air. My wife lifted herself with great effort and lightly. A new midwife arrived, introducing herself as someone we had bumped into in the corridor. I said it was nice to finally meet her. The midwife angled the bed. Someone took the baby’s heart rate.

Time started again, or events waited in line rather than happening all at once. I ran away towards where I was. I found the flannel—an unbelievable triumph—and doused it. My wife took it with a slow, steady hand. I breathed gas and air. I told her she could do it. Then I corrected myself to say that she was doing it. The midwife heard me and also said,

You are doing it.

You are doing it.

My wife apologised for the noise she was making. The whole room giggled with disbelief. I think I said,

It’s a great noise!

It’s a great noise!

A pause, as when waiting for a reply from someone who has left the room.

I stroked her face. Her eyes were wide and alarmed, making room for the baby the midwife was talking to, inside and outside the room:

Keep your heart beating for me.

Then asking everyone in the room

to push for

me for

the first time

too much

baby

slid into the midwife’s arms. Slow and sudden as something missed. I had been crying for some time. I looked down towards where the baby would be. It was too much: the sun. Grey baby on a rope.

Grey sun seen through sobs. Grey baby, gulping towards a breast. There was beautiful purple thick blood on the sheets. I wanted to lay a hand on every head in the room. I wanted another word for love.

The midwife hovered between the machinery and us. She smiled, was about to say something, then returned to her task.

I didn’t hold the baby immediately. The baby was all that I could see and was impossible to look at. I approached, then didn’t. There was a soothing commotion around the end of the bed as the midwife gathered up bloody sheets. My wife smiled one long solid smile. She asked the baby,

What do you know, baby? Please tell us.

I rubbed my head against my daughter’s head. I kissed my wife. I fell away again into my corner. I returned and kissed them both. I was surprised not to know who my daughter was.

Strange weightless conversation broke out then with the midwife, answers and questions spoken without conscious thought.

The placenta, the baby’s only belonging, filled a bucket. Of which:

Do you want to take a photograph?

The baby arrives home. You must bathe it in words. You are a relentless tour guide, unfamiliar with the world you describe. The baby arrives at the home of its home, which is its mother’s body. You care for its mother’s body. There is nothing you do not want to take care of. You take care of a gin and tonic and dab the baby’s head. You dream about the baby’s head pickling in gin and tonic. When you wake, the baby is where you left it. You believe you can feel the movement of air when the moth lifts. You can taste the notes of kumquat promised by the coffee’s packet. You are surely a good father. You cannot get enough of the midwife’s praise for the quick birth, the breathing baby, her IHEARTDAD mug of milky English Breakfast. Then the midwife starts telling you a story about a couple she worked with who unpicked the mother’s stiches themselves—they stored them in a biscuit tin—so that they could return, post-haste, to their intimacy, and in your hyper-receptive state you think the midwife is trying to tell you something, but what?—that is, until she goes on to describe the exorcisms her husband performed when they lived down in the dark south-west, and it is clear she means no more than she means. You are still a good father. A good husband, too, she confirms. Intimacy between the two would-be parents, you now realise, had been stifled by a nervous desire for intimacy, as though the only way to be close was actually to enter one another. Before the baby, you see now, each touch had broken you into a new set of parts: your feet and your ears occupied different rooms, different tenses. To your surprise, the new body puts everything back together again in the present. The animal will not be apart from the family it has created. Time is coated in the animal, which goes on living as you go on. With the animal in the room it is necessary to wait for the next word before moving on to the word after that; a manner of speaking contrived to move at the tempo the baby keeps alive; not contingent on a particular past and not anticipating a particular future; only moving away from or towards being present as it continues, until forty-two days have sped by, at which point the parents of a child are legally obliged to register the name of the child and the child with a name with the crown. You watch with pride as the Registrar of Births and Deaths lifts a sheet of slightly green watermarked paper from a locked drawer and sends it through a gravely dustless desktop printer to print the name, sex, date of birth, place of birth (district and sub-district), her own name and jurisdiction and the present date, then signs the certificate, to make the baby official. You say to your official baby,

I won’t fuck this up.

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