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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
It's early morning and there's a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she'll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding's proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
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Seitenzahl: 479
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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‘The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.’
— Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath
‘Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.’
— Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch
‘Kate Briggs treats the quotidian rhythms of Helen and Rose, mother and baby, with unusual attentiveness, perspicacity and, most importantly, largeness of thought. This makes The Long Form a radical, celebratory and quite magical consideration of the profound creative possibilities inherent in, and intrinsic to, everyday experience. It’s such a lively and generous book.’
— Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move
Praise for This Little Art
‘Kate Briggs’s This Little Art shares some wonderful qualities with Barthes’s own work – the wit, thoughtfulness, invitation to converse, and especially the attention to the ordinary and everyday in the context of meticulously examined theoretical and scholarly questions. This is a highly enjoyable read: informative and stimulating for anyone interested in translation, writing, language, and expression.’
— Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t
‘I have been thinking, many weeks after having finished it, of Kate Briggs’ truly lovely This Little Art, a book-length essay on translation that’s as wry and thoughtful and probing as any book I’ve read in the past year. My favourite works are those in which one feels the writer wrestling with genre even as she is writing; Kate Briggs does this with her own kind of magic, never failing to write beguilingly and intelligently and passionately about the little art of translation, which in the end shows itself to be not so little at all.’
— Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
‘Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are “the silent masters of culture”. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote “hidden masters of culture” and that it’s “our recognition” of translators’ “zeal” that “remains silent”…. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers.’
— Marina Warner, London Review of Books
‘In This Little Art, a digressive, scholarly, absorbing 350-page essay, Kate Briggs roams across the vast terrain – practical, theoretical, historical, philosophical – of translation…. There have been many books written about translation, but few as engaging, intriguing or exciting as Kate Briggs’s exploration, with its digressive forays, infinite self-questioning, curiosity, modesty and devotion to the concrete – the very qualities, as it happens, that distinguish the translator’s labour.’
— Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement
‘This Little Art maps the current landscape and disputed territories of literary translation with exquisite precision. With xenophobia on the rise across the western world, the complex art of translation has achieved a new level of relevance for English-language readers and Briggs has crafted an excellent exploration of the reasons why.’
— Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear
‘In This Little Art, Kate Briggs looks at the “everyday, peculiar thing” that is translation, testing it out, worrying at its questions. She deftly weaves her recurring threads (Roland Barthes, Crusoe’s table, The Magic Mountain, aerobic dance classes) into something fascinatingly elastic and expansive, an essay – meditation? call to arms? – that is full of surprises both erudite and intimate, and rich in challenges to the ways we think about translation. And so, inevitably, to the ways we think about writing, reading, artistry and creativity, too…. It comes to its revelations through practicality, curiosity, devotion, optimism, an intense and questioning scrutiny, as the work of a great translator so often does.’
— Daniel Hahn, translator of José Eduardo Agualusa
‘There is no other book on translation quite like This Little Art. It is a triumph and a joy; an ever-shifting kaleidoscope trained on a process which is too often invisible; and a reminder that choosing between one word and another is the basis not only of translation, but of working out what we think about the world.’
— Annie McDermott, Review 31
THE LONG FORM
KATE BRIGGS
CONTENTS
‘My problem: how to pass … from a short, fragmented form (“notes”) to a long, continuous form (typically called “the novel”).’
— Roland Barthes, 1978, tr. Kate Briggs (2011; 2022)
‘To be sure, prosaic creativity generally proceeds slowly, begins in narrow spheres, and is hardly noticeable. For that reason we do not see it, and think that innovation must come from somewhere else.’
— Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (1990)
FIRST THING
GUESSING AND MOVEMENT IN THE LIVING ROOM
The beginning of each new project was always a continuation. For the time being, it was the basic but not obvious project of sleep.
A co-project: involving Helen and her baby, starting out from where they were first thing in the morning, carrying forward the experience of their long and wakeful, interactive night.
Helen: tall in proportion to the room, her hair hanging heavily, heating her neck.
The baby: wide-open, shifting and lively in her arms.
Spread out over the floor was a playmat: a thick square divided into four distinct sections.
Its colours were a bit faded. From the sun, from the heavy rounds it must have done in someone else’s washing machine. Its spaces looked touched, well-mouthed; its closer textures more or less exhaustively pre-explored.
Even so, like the light show enclosed in a moulded plastic star, the all-in-ones they’d received handed-down, along with the mat, in a large-format bag-for-life, to Helen and the baby, it was all new.
Weirdly, relentlessly, startlingly new.
Underfoot, the mat made the thin carpet soft.
Already, it changed the whole inhabitation of the room.
SLEEP
One of the mat’s zones looked agricultural: satin crops of different shades of green furrowed with dark-brown artificial fur.
Helen wanted to rest her head in that patched field. She was tired.
We could sleep there, she thought.
She looked down. The baby’s head was a weighted sphere, warm and heavy in the crook of her arm, the rest of her fidgety and light.
The baby lifted her chin, gazed back up.
Helen loosened the idea from her own head and offered it out: smiling and nodding with it. Floating it, like a proposition, to the baby.
She let the baby’s gaze range, intently, around the edges of her face.
Then, on second thoughts, tugged her idea back in: actually, I decide.
She looked up, away, and restated this firmly to herself: I decide.
And I say we lie there and go to sleep.
The task of kneeling without support: squatting, then kneeling. It was a bit unsteady, ungainly, doing this, with a baby in her arms.
Carefully, she set the baby down in the field portion of the mat.
The baby arched her back, kicked her heels, sensitive to the change of surface: this sudden flatness underneath her; the way it seemed to give in.
Helen lay herself down, too, stretching out her frame to its full extent, then turning towards her, drawing in close.
The smells of the field mixed with the deep and different body-smells of the baby.
The field smelled like lemons.
Like something else: a chemical note.
It was yielding, comfortable: a duvet, almost. But pointed and bumped here and there with plastic parts and scratchy parts on the floor.
She nudged her nose against the baby’s shoulder. She pulled her knees all the way up until they touched the small heels of the baby’s feet, making her body into a protective container wall.
The baby twisted her hands, twitched her legs. She opened and closed her mouth. Something above her, at an angle, caught – it captivated – her attention.
Helen lay her head on her elbow, exhaled. Her breath blew a warm breeze across the baby’s face.
She changed her mind, shifted: rested her cheek in the cupped palm of her left hand.
She whispered sleep well to the baby and closed her eyes.
Slowly, one by one, she gave her limbs permission to relax.
Then, in the next moment, she was back up to standing again, her head bopping the rim of the ceiling lamp, setting it swinging, releasing a great puff of dust into the air, the baby high in her arms, because for her part the baby – feeling too loose, too unbounded and far too infinite on the mat – preferred to be held.
In one holding position and then another.
Always, with a slight bounce to the hold.
THE EARLY MORNING
The night they’d had.
The playmat.
Their pressing project.
It would all have to be reconsidered.
HELEN STARTED AGAIN
The mat was a big square.
Spread out over the floor, it made a path around itself. A narrow walkway of carpet tracking the edges of the small front room.
It was a garden. Say it was a garden.
A squashy formal garden to be turned around, not napped in, or trodden over.
Within the square, zones: the field scaled down to a patchy bit of lawn. The bed to one side of it grew fabric flowers. Glinting among them: the small rounds of scratched, card-backed mirrors.
Helen was tired. It had felt good to curl up on the floor. Now she decided – new decisions displacing recent decisions, her ever-adjustable resolutions – that aroundabout it, indirectly, she would walk, sway, hold.
Motion the baby to sleep.
The third section of the mat grew lift-the-flaps, zig zags and other dotty patterns.
Its fourth, plainest-looking bed grew sounds (deep pockets of unexpected underground sound).
INDOOR WALKING
A slow start. In recent weeks, she’d learned that there was no point in hurrying this.
So let there be no hurry.
Moving at a regular, bouncing pace. Lifting one bare foot on the rising beat. Setting it down on the falling beat as the other began to lift. Marking one time-gap, another time-gap. These timeworn measures – they spoke of rhythm, body-balance and complicated coordination. The path was made from ridged, hard-wearing carpet. It hugged the wall all the short way to the window.
Already, a rest-stop.
Helen stopped here, shifting her own weight as a way of bouncing the baby, looking out at the street through a clear space above the mountains. (Overnight, condensation made a mountain-scape on the glass.)
Here was the teenager from a few doors down: head bowed, earphones in, mooching off to school. What time was it, exactly?
She looked down at the baby.
The baby was wide-awake.
Sleep time.
In the tree outside, offsetting the sounds of cars starting, she could hear insistently, irregularly: a bird singing.
For the moment, just one.
One solitary, hard-peeping bird.
ALTERNATING
Swapping out a run of high, light, tip-toed steps for a sequence of longer, flatter, heavier steps, she followed the path to the desk at an angle to the window. A cut of plywood resting on trestles. Helen had g-clamped the plastic end of a mobile to the far edge of it; positioning it in such a way so that it could reach out, arc, and suspend its open structure over the baby’s chair – which, turning the corner presented by the mat, was now directly in their path.
She stepped over it.
It was two, three paces to the hard arm of the sofa.
Then round the corner, along the sofa’s edge, past the big plant and it was out – out of the volume of the living room and into the narrower, darker shadows of the hall.
Stop here again, and rest.
It was very short: their one turn about the mat, the duration of their indoor walk. Helen stood in the hallway, her mouth open against the baby’s hard head, breathing in her fine dark hair, taking this on board.
Then it was back on the path to the window.
Hello street.
Still parked cars; powerful peeping bird.
Streetlight and tall, new-leafed tree.
On the desk was a lamp, its matted vegetable base and big paper shade. Above it: some bookshelves. Helen adjusted her hold, hitching the baby a bit higher up, cupping the back of her head with the hollow of her hand. The lamp: together they peered down into it, checking in from above on the blue-grey bulb. Was it lonely?
Yes? No?
What a question. We don’t know.
ART AS EXPERIENCE
One of the books on the shelf had been turned outwards. Propped in this way deliberately, to make its cover face the room. Black against white, cut out and high-contrast: stimulating for the baby. Helen really liked it. It was a picture of a man lying on the ground: his wide back, his knees bent, the weight of his large upper body resting on his elbow. The creases in his clothes picked out in white, showing where his limbs folded. From the slope of his shoulders, the size of his ears, it was clear that he was not a young man.
He was studying.
There was foliage sprouting to one side of him: the branches of a shrub with prickly, sharp-pointed leaves. There was no grass depicted but, as Helen saw it, he was clearly studying something: a flower, or a creature. She imagined a snail feeling its way forwards, stickily, in the grass.
A loose time-scene: it spoke of calm and concentration.
Perched – one on his bald head, the other on his bended knee, their wings open to flap but seeming not to disturb his involvement, more participating in it, almost contributing to it – were two ducks.
Or were they hens?
Helen shifted the baby downwards into a chest-to-chest position.
Moorhens?
The baby bumped her brow, gently, against Helen’s collar bone.
One moorhen and a woodcut – a linocut? – duck.
Onwards.
CHEST-TO-CHEST
This is a good position, she’d read: the baby can’t see your face but she can hear your heart.
Their walk had a slow tempo.
It was a measured project, an even-sided square.
But every now and then it could quicken: high-stepping over the bouncy chair and jigging past the sofa.
Pausing again, resting to look anew at the big plant: its will-to-reach sideways, outwards, upwards, at strange, unexpected angles; noting how the dust was thickening on its split leaves, wondering whether this might be keeping it from breathing, in its plant-like way – and then it was out, crossing the threshold of the living room to re-join the shadows, the things on hooks, big coat, bright fluorescent hat, tightly wrapped umbrella and bashed trainers of the dim narrow hall.
LIKE THIS
Helen walking a baby; her baby.
Telling herself that she was showing her things, introducing her to the world in this early domestic configuration; in these small, small doses.
Distributing emphasis and attention. Feeling tired and hopeful. That she would succeed in wearing the baby out with the different aspects of their shared living space.
The mat, a central sound-, colour-, pattern- and texture-garden, not to be trodden on.
The lamp and the desk and, attached to it, reaching out and away from it: the mobile. Its shapes dancing lightly in low open space.
The window.
Look at the mountains on the room-side of the glass.
Beyond them the tree, the cars, the houses and flats immediately across the street; all elements of the further-world, the immense more-of-the-world outside.
The baby gazing widely, loosely: getting drawn outward and feeling moved by a shift in her visual field; being intermittently faced with the closeness of Helen’s big jumper: a sudden darkening; a louder heartbeat, too close, itchy and a bit too hot.
Tolerating this alternation, more or less.
AT THE SAME TIME
Helen walking herself. Helen showing herself things.
Helen introducing herself as if for the first time to the details of the room as a way of seeing through this project: her own logic, enthusiasm; her private rationale and sense of broader purpose to doing what, if it were not for the baby, she’d have no cause to be doing.
Getting into this on a Tuesday morning, the start of an ordinary working day.
Walking around and around a playmat for the sake of getting someone else to sleep, also for the sake and the prospect of her own stretch of rest. This being the calmest indoor-way she could come up with, in the moment, of getting them both there.
It was a co-project, a complex interaction where, on both sides, the it’s all for you – this sense of an action so clearly being undertaken for the priority-sake of you – was being ever-offset, resisted or supported by the counter-force of a me.
Not only you. But, in this case, Helen. Bringing her own style to it: the pace of her own needs, longings, interests, and imaginings.
Another square round.
The mat garden. Stuffed green around the edges: a hedge to contain its mix of pattern and colour.
Don’t step on it.
Helen taking care not to step on it.
These superstitions, unlikely sorts of bargains she’d started to strike. Making regular deals with the universe, all the biggest forces: keeping to the path. I’ll keep to the path, she said, privately. But in return: (please) let the baby sleep a good, long sleep.
ARTICLES
Testing the possibilities:
‘A’ baby: sounding non-specific, inaccurate when there was this evident weight and present, moving energy – this world-gazer, taking it all in gravely, with gravity – reaching in her arms.
‘Her’ baby spoke of attachment, beholden-ness, and protection. All orders of relation that Helen wanted and felt. But also of ownership, and something like command. Like a command of the situation, as if she’d had a chance to assess the nature of this new person, her character, her scope – and could claim to have some measure of who they were to each other, as well as a measure of herself.
‘The’ baby said: this person here, in her vulnerability, in her emergence – and not anyone else. It said ‘the only baby’ in this setting, like ‘the only sofa in the living room’ or ‘this particular tree’. Of all the possible newcomers, of all the local species, this one growing outdoors, within sight of the window – what was it?
The kind that stretches its bark, breaking it into patches. Mottled black, brown, white and grey. Helen waited for the name, which surfaced and sank, to rise up and present itself again: a sycamore tree.
WALKING ON AND AROUND
The plant with its rangy shapes, its thicker stems supported by long canes (long ago, Helen had tied them in with odd bits of string).
The small, skirted sofa.
On the trestle desk, a laptop and Helen’s plugged in, lit up, charging phone.
The baby making muttering noises, starting to twist inward, growing fretful and harder to hold. Helen aware that she was pushing it: stretching out a path and a process that could only ever go on for so long, sharing their greetings around the room.
What had they snubbed – failed to acknowledge?
Look! A postcard from Rebba, tacked to and making an abstraction in the wall.
Again, the concentrated scene.
Black and white: the striking pleasure of contrast. A cut-out posture, speaking of study and calm interest, set facing outward, to share its gentle mood with the room.
Helen was conscious of her left breast aching, now singing out its proximity to the baby’s face.
The book was a course of lectures delivered by the philosopher John Dewey in the 1930s. On the cover, the AS EXPERIENCE parts of its title – Helen noticed this now – were printed in the same wet, new-growth green as the leaves on the tree outside and one of the satins in the mat.
They bounced past the sofa.
Hall, shadows. Shoes.
Energy dip.
The best thing, though, was the window.
Coming back to the window.
Close, residential street.
Hello glass.
Touch it – I know, I know. I’ll touch it for you.
It’s wet.
It’s wet because it’s colder outside.
All the cars that were going to leave will have left by now.
The mountains have changed shape. We can wipe them.
Hear how it’s quiet. It’s quieter now and already a bit later.
Take your time, our time, to listen to the bird.
The one bird, repeating itself.
Register the increase. Morning: how already the room feels a bit fuller with light.
Then off again and around. Taking direction from the squareness of the mat on the floor. Using its shape for their own purposes. The dust from the ceiling lamp travelling with them through the air, dispersing, having not yet decided where to settle in the room.
Until at last the moment came when their shared capacities for movement and interest were exhausted. Opened then tested to the limit of being fully exhausted and – judging it – Helen moved to sit down. Tentatively, she parsed the room for a landing site. There was a good spot on the floor. Near the sofa, close to the baby’s chair. To reach it she cut diagonally across the garden. She trod over the lawn and the fabric flowerbeds, crushing them both underfoot. Her big bare feet took light away from the mirrors. Sitting herself down, the baby in her arms, she rucked up one soft corner, flipping it over, making the separated zones clump and touch. It didn’t matter. The mat could be a cloister garth for a while: a temporary imaginative structure to get organized by and move around.
Now it could collapse.
SOUNDING AND LANDING IN THE LIVING ROOM
SLEEP
With her one free hand Helen lifted her jumper together with the thin layer of her t-shirt, made darker in patches from milk. She bunched both under her armpit, releasing one solid breast from her bra. The baby, who’d been fretting, grew frantic. She knew what this sweet smell was – she knew it forcefully. But Helen’s heavy jumper and then her t-shirt fell over her face and she started to cry. For a few long, fraught moments, Helen, the baby, their clothing, fought and failed, manoeuvred and failed to attach themselves together, until, in exasperation, Helen stripped off her top layers and dumped them, damply, on the sofa behind her. Against warm skin, the baby at last achieved her strong, airtight connection. And so Helen started the countdown. Counting down quickly, internally, from five,
four,
three,
two
stalling at two.
Now
one –
the moment when her milk released.
She did this because it was a distraction from the pain that could still detonate in the depths of her breast at the beginning of each feed (rarely, but always unexpectedly, and for that reason hard to prepare for): sending sharp stars coursing down the inner channel of her arm into the palm of her hand then back up to her breast and from there to her brain. Also, because it felt silly, and a bit childish: to dock the baby against herself as if she were the smaller of two space ships. Then, because childishness felt like an act of private resistance, a way of pushing back against the colossal size and pressure of a sudden recent thought: of all the available positions she might go on to occupy, dynamically, tentatively, in her lifetime, she would no longer be – that is, if anyone ever is, she, Helen, would no longer solely or straightforwardly be – the child.
She fed the baby. A channel opened. The baby fed from her.
Like this.
Like this.
The initial sharp and short, rapid tugs giving way to an easier, calmer feeding rhythm. The tension leaving their bodies. Helen could feel her hard left breast soften, the baby, her baby, loosen and relax.
With her legs stretched out across the recent garden, her torso and her head adrift in some notion of outer space, she fed the baby.
In silence and then with a low hum.
She felt her back tugging down at the fabric she’d bought to disguise the sofa. When the bright blue throw she’d bought from the market managed to cover the sofa completely, the living room, the narrow kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, the hall, all four rooms and interim spaces of the flat felt like hers – like theirs. When the fabric slipped, as it often did, partly because the sofa was made from something coated and slippery, not really like textile at all, partly because the piece was not quite large enough, exposing the loud pattern beneath it – blocky with red and black, white and grey – she remembered all over again that it all belonged – not the lamp or the books or the mat, nor the baby’s chair – but her own big bed, the cooker, washing machine, the fridge, the rooms and the base components of the new home-life she was inventing for them both – to the short and sturdy, clipped-haired, clipped-toned woman who lived upstairs.
She fed the baby – creating, then maintaining the conditions for the baby to feed from her.
Like this.
Humming in and out of pop tunes, bolshier club anthems, making the ootsootsoots sound in the back of her throat of beats heard at a distance, through a tiled wall or swinging door. Catching herself doing this, wondering at it for a moment. Then starting again more purposively with a lullaby. Letting that lull through her for a while. Until it, too, changed, merging in and out of the chorus parts of long-forgotten school-assembly hymns.
She shifted position, crossed her legs.
The support for her back was the base of the sofa. She leaned into it, and let her chin rest in her neck. She swallowed. With her head bowed, she closed her eyes. Tiredness fell down. Like night-fall, it dropped right through her, sinking. It made a sinkage in her corner of the carpet and into it, partially, she sank. She could sleep now. She could very easily just simply fall asleep.
But there was a small draught making the long hairs among the freckles on her arms stand on end. There was the weight and tug of the baby still feeding in her arms. Together they held something inside of her taut, keeping her awake.
She fed her baby until the baby’s eyelids began to droop, the strength of the gum-seal weakened, and her mouth eventually disengaged.
Then sat for a bit longer, humming on. Dipping the baby now and then, in memory of the bounce. Looking, on occasion, up out of the window.
The street so quiet. Quieter than anywhere she’d ever lived.
It had rained in the night.
From where she was sitting, through the mist and blur of condensation, she could make out the bark mottling the middle portion of the tree.
She worked her way up to a kneeling position.
To the sprung chair: with the baby in her arms, she walked the tiny distance on her knees.
Spacing them out.
Her mind now intent on spacing the spaces between her hums and bounces out.
The baby sighed; a whisper of outbreath tickled her arm.
Leaning over the chair, the back of the baby’s head throbbing in her palm, she lowered. Thinking, as she had thought pretty much every time she’d done or attempted this over the past few weeks: so this is what ‘gingerly’ means.
Caution.
Cautiousness.
A set of performatively delicate steps: taking elaborate care not to hurt anyone, including oneself, not to disturb anyone, including oneself.
She lowered the baby ever-deeper through unresisting – wide open – space.
And through time: through stretching and unchecked, open-ended time.
Still bouncing her but now in ever deeper and wider arcs, each one a little bit lower and deeper than the last.
Still humming, intermittently, to the tempo, the rest and dip, of the bounce.
The origin of this was prehistorical:
When the length of a day was so much shorter, the carpet underfoot foamed high, deep green then mulched dry and brown with broken forest ferns, she would have bounced like this – surely she would have hummed and bounced like this? Making a contact call, singing:
I’m here.
I’m still here.
The baby’s breath synched in and out of time with the measures in the room: Helen’s own slower breathing, her heartbeat, the slow turn of the mobile and, outside, the stop-start, discontinuous peeping of the one earnest bird.
I’m here.
The mat, which had been kicked away, made a colourful hump in the near distance.
She landed.
Landing the baby in the proxy hands of the hot pink recliner chair.
The chair that she had tipped back into relax-position, into it’s-okay, it’s-alright, you-can-sleep-here position.
I’m still here.
She maintained contact. Staying for one further prolonged moment still in touch with the baby. Skin-to-skin. Skin-to-the brushed cotton of a newborn all-in-one suit. Her inclined body, her hands, slightly sweaty, all extending the share of heat.
She crouched like this, one further breath, one further beat, holding still, her body a curve over the baby’s, taking shelter under the dancing cover of the mobile – its laminated canopy of bobbing and gapped, black-and-white shapes.
Here I am.
The baby was drifting.
And you know what?
I’m here.
She was pulling. They both were. Pulling deeply and widely in opposite directions. Helen pulling herself away, delighted to rediscover her hands, her arms, eager for this stretch of temporary separation.
Here I am.
Helen sat back on her heels. She rolled her shoulders and began to twist a bit of elastic off her wrist.
I’m still here –
Now that her hands were free, she would use it to put up her hair.
And you know what?
In that moment: a doorbell.
WELL?
Well! (The exclamation a means of starting a new phrase. Marking a pause. Or expressing a range of emotions: surprise overtaken by reflexive anger; not yet resignation, something like the furious opposite of relief.)
At first it was just the shock of sudden noise. A short event of intervention. But then it rang again, very decisively, like a buzzer on a quiz show:
Someone knows the answer!
Who? Hold on:
To what?
The doorbell.
Someone was outside. Pressing to call her out. Or to bring something in.
The baby jerked. She seemed to be grasping at something: at present-ness, at Helen, at return.
The bell buzzed again.
The finger outside was pressing it hard – and releasing.
Then pressing it longer and harder – and releasing.
The baby’s body twitched, her eyelids flickered open, flickered closed.
And now, unbelievably: her drifting-sleeping, separated baby was awake.
Helen shook her head.
She felt a heat rising in her spine.
The bell, its effects. They were all inside her body.
Fucker she said, under her breath.
The heat from her spine spread to beat in her armpits; now it was pumping out colour in her cheeks.
The bell rang again. Fucker.
She said it louder, with more force. In her voicing the word meant you’re kidding me. It meant tell the universe it must be fucking kidding me.
The bell. It wanted her to respond to its summons.
She knew this.
She considered the clothes she’d dumped on the sofa. She was half in, half out of her bra. But maybe the problem was. Maybe the point was:
she couldn’t.
She looked at the baby. But the baby was fine. Her expression read as interested. As purposeful and engaged. She was already taking seriously the fact of being newly wide awake, from the laid-back position of her bouncy recliner chair.
So alright. ALRIGHT!
She could.
She would.
She scrambled to her feet, pulling t-shirt, jumper back on. She broke out into a large step, a great march to power her out of the living room and down the short distance of the hall. A furious chanting march:
Fucker
You fucker –
You fucking fucker –
She pulled the door open.
The rush of cold air made her face feel hotter.
She couldn’t look at the person standing there.
She couldn’t greet him.
He was holding something out.
She wanted to hit – not him, but the doorframe, maybe, or herself.
She snatched the offering – a cardboard pouch – from his hands, her movements all theatrically oversized.
She let the door slam.
Good, she thought.
Good.
Why not?
Let it slam directly in his face.
For the problem.
What was the problem?
As in: her problem? She turned the question on herself.
The hall smelled like rainy days. Like her own coat and the insoles of her shoes, mixing with the past: the distant, layered living of different groups of people.
It was only the future.
A doorbell, buzzed at a reasonable early-start time in the morning, and already it had changed the course, the whole future of their day.
It thwarted, parted and redirected the morning. For now: either the whole recent sequence would have to be performed again. Only this time faster, and abbreviated, with the chances far smaller and fading of landing the baby settled and asleep in her chair:
the holding,
the walking, to the window, and the bulb in the lamp.
The square path.
The walk to the plant and can it breathe and judging it – no, not yet.
The eyelids and the lowering (gingerly, gingerly).
The crouching, prehistorically, and the landing, the crouching and the landing… Performing each of these actions all over again until, once more, in their different ways, and carried forward by their different motivations, they both arrived at the point of finally, finally, letting one another go: Helen letting the baby go, putting her down, exactly as the books instructed, clipping her an arm’s reach away into her sprung chair; the baby letting Helen go; the baby releasing Helen, if only temporarily, from the nervous constancy of her own attention.
Or, the baby would stay awake.
She would simply stay awake now – for however long it might take for them both to live through another cycle of interest and hunger and drowsy-into-sleepiness. Only this time, Helen knew, her patience would in all likelihood be thinner. Because her hair was still down, loose and hot, it was more likely to fall heavily: flopping all over the baby’s face, irritating them both. And because her sense of her capacities was now smaller, she was likely to go faster, to race through what had a chance of working only if it were paced – and the baby would catch her mood, quickening, agitating along with her own impatience and agitation, responding in kind. So while it might be true – in fact, Helen knew it to be true; she had been learning this, and relearning it each day – that these cycles of waking and sleeping had a sort of looping pattern, meaning that whatever occasions for sleep were missed could be counted on coming round again, eventually – it was also, likewise, and even more powerfully the case that how these durations and intervals were lived out by the two of them through any given moment of the given day depended on this: on some boy-man not jogging up the steps in his bright breezy sweatshirt, his soft easy joggers. On some unthinking finger, working to the tempo of its own unimagined urgencies, not pushing hard into the doorbell the very second the baby had been put down and released into sleep. On the loud buzzing of the bell not just sounding once, and letting it go,
or twice and letting it go,
but – pushing – pushing at it and pushing again –
to the point of BASHING through the door not like a finger but a GREAT FOOT intent on KICKING at her time, the small bucket of gathered time she’d been collecting for herself as she’d progressed through the different levels of the morning, you
FUCKER.
An elderly woman bumped her caddie along the pavement outside. Somewhere further down the street a car door slammed. Each morning, the slow-paced woman would pull her shopping trolley with effort, then pause to scatter bread for the pigeons by the bench on the corner. On her daily trip to the shops; the same bench. It was also where the teenagers gathered after school.
Helen felt like crying. She felt like – sorry.
The anger she’d marched heavily to the door in – it fell from her shoulders like a costume, like a cloak.
Sorry, she said, though not sure for what. (For swearing, for shouting. For getting upset; for upsetting someone else.)
The feeling to cry – it gathered. It smarted. It passed.
Sorry, she said, willing the message out through the letterbox, so it might catch up with the young delivery man, lay a quiet hand on his arm.
Sorry: a habit-word. Also, a renewal word. A spell for getting it together, starting again.
It was alright.
The pouch she’d received held a book. A long book. A volume so thick because it was so long; unfit to fit through the letterbox.
Helen knew this because she’d ordered it. She’d even been waiting for it. Pacing back and forth to the window, hoping that it would be delivered that day. Specifically, a novel. Old, second-hand, but new to her. An interesting object to spend time with.
Helen went back into the living room.
Her baby was healthy. And look – she wasn’t crying.
It was all alright.
The big plant was dusty but clearly still alive and there was light falling in from the window.
Her new-old novel had arrived.
It meant a different place to put her attention.
She had capacities. She did.
She would make a cup of tea.
Who knows but why not imagine that it (their day, and the future) had every chance – since both Helen and the baby had been born with most of life’s chances – of being okay?
She would try feeding the baby again, eat something, and make a cup of tea.
Once more, she adjusted her sense of the morning.
It was remarkable to her – exhilarating and exhausting – how many times this could happen: how many adjustments a person could make, mining deep for a new seam of resources, despairing, altogether, of their existence, then finding them unexpectedly in the air, like the moon unsought at lunchtime. She counted on this. Sometimes, she worried over how far she depended on it: on having her resources handed back to her by the baby, replenished by some unexpected gesture or new expression of the baby’s, or by something else, a message from Rebba on her phone. The strange colours of the river in the park; a duck with its bum in the air, or its weird grey-rubber feet, unexpectedly lifting her mood. Because what if they stopped? These offerings, offering themselves.
Or what if she stopped? Whatever this was, this capacity, an inner availability, to be changed and moved by them.
Helen returned to her spot on the carpet.
The novel she’d ordered was The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding.
First published in 1749.
Second hand, it cost her one pound & thirty-two pence plus postage and packaging. Three days later, it was here – bringing in its different energy. Its humour and its ideas. Its love stories. Its own household arrangements. Of all the novels, this one.
EXCELLENCE, SIMPLY DELIVERED
said the red words, boldly. Now pulling away, now rounding the street corner, printed large down the side of a bright yellow van.
Hello baby, Helen said, turning her face to look directly at the baby in the chair. Her huge face, looming in.
Hey babe, she said, to amuse herself. (My babe in arms; a person so young – so defined by youth – she can only be carried).
Hey, she said it once, smiling, seeking eye-contact.
Hey, she said it again. Only this time more gently, breathing it out slowly (I greet you).
Then, touching at the different parts of the mobile, one after the other, setting each element of the composition moving, getting the whole delicate thing going, relating and offsetting, and making a sound pattern between them in the air:
hey
hey
hey
This is our situation.
ROSE
The baby, meanwhile, with her presence and her incipience, her actions and reactions, her own forms of experience, stared intently at Helen’s forehead.
The baby’s name was Rose.
THE MOBILE
SUSPENDED ABOVE ROSE’S EASY CHAIR
It nudged and slightly shuddered.
It pressed. It lifted.
Restless, it was never completely still.
Thrumming beneath it, for Rose it was like this. The mobile like her sensing of the world: it was near and juddery, gapped with negative space, edgy and alive. More or less monochrome. Patched with greys, bright pieces and looms of darker, heated shadow.
It was like this: schematic, suspended; held in readiness.
Offering itself in one shaky arrangement, then another.
In one close presentation.
Then another.
The shapes it suspended were simple, very elemental. One long afternoon, a week or so before Rose was born, Helen had sat largely on the floor, assembling them from a kit she’d ordered online.
A round figure, with no corners or edges: a CIRCLE.
A plane figure, rational and even-angled: a SQUARE.
Two sharp TRIANGLES, positioned as if head to toe.
DOTS! A sample of unevenly spaced dots.
WAVES: a cross-section of undulation.
It was important that each shape offset the others, that each one be positioned at an appropriate distance from the others. For the whole thing to hover – hold itself out in space and counter-balance – it mattered that not one of its parts be given more weight.
She’d done this – with threading, with fiddly little knots, with clear fishing line.
She’d clamped the shoulder of its supporting arm to her desk.
And now, independently –
It moved.
It turned. It jogged.
With even the slightest current of air – a door opening, a person breathing near it, just heat – it could quiver, lift, and change direction.
It rotated.
It kept itself at a tolerable, tactful reserve.
Though sometimes, without warning, it encroached. For Rose, it could seem to rush at her, hemming down and packing her in. Her set-up in the sprung chair under the mobile: it was formidable, at times, how much Rose could hate it. How a gentle turning scene – a place of contrast, of involvement – could stress her, bewilder and oppress her.
For now, though, she studied it: the lilting canopy of overhead shapes.
Her focus lifted towards the circle: a big bright eye.
It broke loose from the circle.
It carried back to the undulation in the direction of the great light-source of the window. She felt the movement as a change in her insides, which were interacting with the room.
For Rose was a mass and a void, too.
She was pointed and gapped, full and empty, twisting and suspended, spacey and closed.
She was DOTS.
She was still, holding to her proportions. Now suddenly outsized. She was a retreating ebb, now an un-gathered but gathering, persistent flow.
She kicked her legs.
Like this – sensationally, kinetically – the world hung all around her.
It took shape. It changed shape.
It beckoned to her with its light and shadow and with the stretches and points of her interest she turned towards it.
Phasing through calmed then bored, agitated then enlivened, stressed then distressed, her sensational lifeforce wholly uncontained by the space she could take up in a room, the crook of an arm, the dimensions of her tiny cotton suit, Rose flexed the space-time around her.
It flexed back.
She kicked out a leg to meet the world and she vibrated it.
Alongside her, Helen tore at the seam in the cardboard, weighed a novel in her hands.
The radiator beneath the window lifted its background hum to a slightly higher key: its way of announcing that the water running through it – like the package-sorting, like the freelance bodies who were at that moment delivering packages door to door by the van, like all the other networked, outdoor-to-indoor connective systems – was plumbed in, plugged in and working; now working harder.
The bird outside in the tree stopped its peeping.
Or, it continued, very likely.
But in the remit of another window, a room inhabited by other people, a bit further down the street, somewhere else.
AN ENVIRONMENT WITH ITS OWN SUGGESTIONS
I’ll start this maybe later, Helen said to herself, feeling all of a sudden a bit daunted by the reading choice she’d made. But she’d opened her novel without really intending to and her eyes had fallen on a paragraph. Here was the description of a house. All novels describe housing, living conditions, forms of human shelter, and the house on the page presented in 1749 as newly built. A big, roomy house – the word it used was ‘commodious.’ Set on a hill in the English countryside. Against a hill, ‘but nearer to the bottom than the top of it, so as to be sheltered from the north-east by a grove of old oaks, which rose above it in a gradual ascent of near half a mile.’ Low enough not to be overly exposed, ‘and yet high enough to enjoy a most charming prospect of the valley beneath.’ Protected, but with a wide-open view – Helen gave the whole passage her attention and the setting unfolded the way she felt it. It spread itself out like a cloth. A topography of distinct zones, each one embroidered with its own small details. High above the house, there were firs, rocks, and a waterfall. It tumbled to her mind’s ear first as noise, then as a movement, a vague sense of white force foaming over blue, then a clear falling ‘over the broken and mossy stones’. Now it flattened and slowed – ‘running off in a pebbly channel’ before rounding the house to join in with the deeper waters of a large, glistening lake. It was the centrepiece of the view from every window in the front: a lake, filling ‘the centre of a beautiful plain, embellished with groups of beeches and elms and fed with sheep’. The feeling, broadly, was of space: plenty of space, revealing itself over plenty of time. Sheep grazing. Old groves and groups of younger trees. But now it extended further. Out of the lake ‘issued a river’ – tugging the view into its own beyond, meandering on ‘through an amazing variety of meadows and woods’ for several miles, all the way out to the blue line of the horizon, and eventually emptying ‘itself into the sea’.
Space, time: extension in all directions – though to the right the fabric bunched. Here was a smaller, shallower valley, ‘adorned with several villages’. Clusters of smaller houses, poorer houses, gathered around the towers of an old, ruined abbey. Look to the left, though, and here once again was spread. It was more land belonging to the house; a spread checked and marked by variety: ‘a very fine park, composed of very unequal ground, and, varied with all the diversity that hills, lawns, woods, and water … could give.’
The season: spring. It was the middle of May.
The time: first thing in the morning, the dawn of a new day.
Possibility, potentiality: the opening of a territory, large enough to present as basically open-ended, though in real times somewhat delimited. To the South, by the thin blue arm of the sea. To the East, by ‘a ridge of wild mountains, the tops of which were above the clouds.’
Now, a narrowing, a foregrounding: here was a figure in motion. It is Mr Allworthy, the owner-occupant of the house, a man replete with benevolence, pacing back and forth on the terrace, as the sun rises.
Helen read on.
She felt rather than saw the gait of an older person walking. She responded in her lungs to the description of the dawn: the pink lighting, illuminating in touches first the outer edges, then the central portion of the scene. But now, oddly, there was a turn. A jolt: a pinch or snag in the steady spread of the telling:
‘Reader, take care.’
It was the narrator speaking, switching unexpectedly from description to an informal direct address: ‘I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of a hill.’
Not the geographical one, where the spring-source of the waterfall gushed forth between dark rocks, but a figurative hill as high as Mr Allworthy’s exaggerated goodness.
The problem, as he saw it: I have led you up here. But now, ‘how to get thee down without breaking thy neck I do not well know.’
From such open elevation, how to get things – like this possible person, this whole narrative project – down and grounded? That is, operating on a closer, more human scale?
The narrator, turning the matter over: Honestly? ‘I do not well know.’
Other than together. ‘Let us e’en venture to slide down together.’
Reader, my neck is your neck. The ambition: to see if it might be possible to do this, achieve this (the project of narration), without either one of us getting hurt.
And now – what’s that? A bell’s ringing.
Listen: Mr Allworthy is being summoned down to breakfast. Perhaps that will do it: locate us all in the common need to eat.
The narrator: clearly, ‘I must attend.’ An obligation (where I go, you go) he frames as an invitation to the Reader: ‘Come along.’
Helen received it. She re-voiced it in her head, in the silent voice of her own private reading, and it was as if she were somehow inviting herself.
‘If you please, I … shall be glad of your company.’
HELEN LOOKED OVER AT ROSE
She looked at the walls. She took a new measure of the size of the room, the wet shapes on the window, the nearness of the street.
Their situation: it was supported and sustained by the fact of accommodation. (Thank you, Nisha; thank you, social connections; thank you, Nisha’s husband’s mother, who owned the flat and lived upstairs.) As well as, relatedly, by an income – a proportion of it paid out as maternity leave – to cover the rent.
At the same time, it’s a living situation continually (re)produced and in a fundamental sense defined by their condition of intensive and continuous mutual address.
Their common addressivity; their common responsivity. Two people, facing each other: occupying, for what to Helen felt would be an incalculable time to come, the position of first responder (the other’s most immediate, first because always-on-the-scene, addressee).
Is this what you mean?
This was Helen asking Rose.
I put it to you: with the action I am carrying out now, lifting you up, setting you down, keeping you warm, leaving you temporarily alone (strapping youin to your bouncy chair while I storm off to answer the door) – have I understood what you mean?
Is this what you need?
Is this what it – all of it – is, what aliveness feels like, and means?
This was Rose asking Helen, venturing back, responding in her own startling manner to what had been proposed or suggested – Helen, asking: Are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you happy? Are you ‘good’?
(A ‘good’ baby, she was learning, each day adding a new, unexpected definition to the ordinary words in her vocabulary: so, this is what ‘good’ means. This is what they mean by it: predictable and easy-to-read. Settled. Pick-up-able and, importantly, put-down-able. A new person born already aligned with or at least willing to fall in without resistance to the adult rhythms, presenting within the expected range of not excessive, but reasonable and meetable needs.)
