My eyes sidle over each of the walls in the warm dark. Sitting against one and breathing slower than me is Harry. The edge of the plug socket puckers his naked hip as he curves into his DS. I think he has stopped breathing while Garden Fishing loads his catch. The lights on his face- purple to orange and back- also light the wall and, as his shadow breathes with him, I know his catch must be loading.
Tomorrow, he will ask me why we pay for fish in supermarkets and I will turn the question back on him as if it were a learning opportunity. This is because I do not yet have another child. Who is being paid to make DS’s? Are you making DS’s or are you just playing DS’s. Where are your fish? I try to lead him through questions so he can learn something himself. Also, I am curious if consumer capitalism is an intuitive logic. Where are your fish? Looking towards his pocket he jiggles like he needs a wee but I know that what he actually needs is to show me his library of fishes. Harry may not know about consumer capitalism and I may not know whether Harry would have arrived at it singlehandedly but I do know about the breeding of fishes on Garden Fishing.
Again, I am feeding and watching the walls of rooms. My middle child is latched. In another year’s time she will be my middle child. She stirs in, her lips puttering about the nipple then bites, just as my eyes meet a corner. The angle and the pain fuse. I am inside out and a corner is inside of me, angled in my deep stomach. I do not tense my body up, remembering Harry forgetting to breathe as his catch loaded, and breathing myself, slowly, into each tooth.
Before my youngest was born, just before, Daisy balenced a sticklebrick on my exposed stomach. Popped it comically beside the button of my stomach which was also popped, like the air seal on a jar already opened. Purple little dome, pop pop blue brick. Mummy is a construction site. She ground the sticklebrick in, to make it stay and I read her two stories that night, starting again at the first word after I reached the last. A few weeks later I told the story a third time, or I told a third story, and Harry leant against the hard corner of the headboard of his sister’s bed and listened. He watches children’s TV with a non-committal attitude now, sitting one buttock on the arm of the sofa and kicking a socked foot. Triple vision, the theme tune again. He kicks along and the dull thump into the sofa’s sidewall enters me. Maria, in my arms and only two weeks old, sucks at nothing and I lean back again into this full room of family.
Fox White
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