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Kat Nugent

Born in Indonesia, Kat Nugent is a London-based copywriter and brand consultant for the lifestyle sector. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an undergraduate degree in English Literature and History before moving to London to work in publishing and advertising.

Her writing has been published in HuffPost UK, Dear Damsels, Every Day Fiction and Man Repeller. She has been writing short stories that explore the dark corners of family relationships and has recently started working on a longer piece of fiction about folklore and fractured identity.

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Her Old Self

The midwife lowers a swaddled bundle into Nora’s arms while Max jokes about how it looks like a giant cannelloni. Or is it a cannoli? Nora is hardly listening. “I’ll let the three of you get acquainted,” Nora hears the midwife say before the door clicks shut. Three of us? Of course. Max. She keeps forgetting that he is right there, standing at her bedside. She can barely feel the weight of his hand on her shoulder. Her body is a husk, hollow and empty. She has pushed and pushed and everything has come out with the baby.  

The bundle makes a gurgling sound and Nora peels back the layers of swaddling. The baby is opening and closing his mouth like a fish drowning in air and without thinking, Nora presses the knuckle of her pinky finger into the gummy cavern. He starts to suck ravenously. Max leans in and whispers in Nora’s ear, “Looks like our little one is hungry already.” Our. The word is an intrusion. She forces a smile then readjusts herself in the bed, shrugging his hand off her shoulder. Something warm and slippery leaks out of her onto the hospital sheets. 

Soon, the sucking stops and Nora removes her finger. That’s when she realises that the baby has been born with blond hair. Max’s hair. It is damp and strewn across the baby’s head like algae on a rock. Leaning in to inspect the strands, Nora notices Max’s hand now resting on the back of her neck. It is clammy, hot and cold at the same time and if he doesn’t remove it, she will scream. 

“Could you go and get me a juice?” Nora tries to speak in her baby voice, the one she always uses to ask Max for things, the one she knows he likes. But her throat is raw from hours of howling and her words come out in a growl.

“Your wish, my command,” Max says. He bows his head, turns on his heels and skips out of the room.

Maybe the blond is only temporary, Nora thinks, turning back to the baby. A baby’s eye colour can change months after it’s born. Even years. She takes a pinch of hair and gently pulls it away from the baby’s scalp. Nora frowns knowing that it will never turn black like hers. She releases the hair and smooths it back down. That’s better, she thinks, covering the blond hairs with her palm. She smiles down at his pink swollen face. It is heart-shaped the way hers is, wide at the forehead and sloping to a small point at the chin. He has a big button nose like she does, and his lips are small and defined like hers are. In fact, without that blonde hair, she can’t see Max in the baby at all.

 

“Home, sweet home,” Max says. Since the baby was born, he talks mostly in jokes and clichés. He pushes the door open and Nora steps inside holding the baby close against her chest. Everything in their apartment is as it was when they left it. The silver exercise ball rests against the edge of the sofa, half a biscuit sits surrounded by crumbs on the coffee table and a mug of peppermint tea, now murky like pond water, is perched on the edge of the kitchen island. 

“Let’s show our little guy his room,” Max says, pulling the baby from Nora’s arms. She watches him walk away and wills for the baby to cry and claw at him, to demand to be returned to his mother. But the baby is disloyal and sleeps soundly in Max’s arms. Not one peep. Nora doesn’t follow behind them. She walks to the kitchen and slips off her sandals. All the windows are closed and the air is stale and hard to breathe. The tiles feel cool under her bare feet and for a second, she thinks of stripping off her clothes and lying across them. Instead, she traces her fingers over the granite countertop and onto a resin dome filled with their wedding flowers. 

It’s difficult for Nora to think of herself as a wife and even harder for her to think of Max as a husband. Goofy, silly Max. Max who used to make her laugh so hard, she thought that one of her ribs might pop free; Max who lets life’s stresses slide right off him; Max who can never see what the big deal is anyway. But Nora has grown up. She knows now that jokes have a time and a place and that your first ultrasound appointment is neither. She knows that when Max’s worries slide off him, they land on her. And she knows that having a baby is what the big fucking deal is.

It had been Nora’s idea to preserve the flowers this way but the sight of them now – the squashed white and pink petals folding over one another within a web of gypsophila – makes her feel nauseous. Their colours are as vibrant as the day she’d carried them down the aisle two years ago, but it’s all pretend. The flowers are not alive, and worse, they haven’t been allowed to die. They are stuck here, trapped in a plastic limbo between being and not. 

 

First Nora changes the baby’s nappy, then she changes hers. This is the routine. In the first few days after the baby was born, his nappies were smeared with black-green sludge as if they’d been dragged along a swamp floor. Now, three weeks later, they are packed with mush the colour of baked custard. The change is normal – the nurse had assured her of that over the phone. “Did they not go through this in your NCT classes?” He sighed before Nora hung up on him. Change is normal, so what can it mean when things remain the same? Since they came home from the hospital the contents of Nora’s diapers have not changed: bright red blood clots. Sitting on the toilet, she spreads her knees to stretch the diaper open between them. She picks up a clot the size of a blueberry and rolls it between her fingers. It is smooth and velvety and slips out of her pinch, landing on the floor with a splat.

“Nora, honey, everything okay? You’ve been in there a while now.” It’s Max’s mother, Sue. She taps three times on the door and asks in a stage whisper as if to say that she knows that everything is not okay but that Nora’s secret is safe with her. And for a moment, Nora believes that maybe it is. Because Sue – Nora realises as if for the first time – is also a mother. Max wouldn’t understand but maybe Sue would. Maybe Sue, a mother herself, could tell Nora why she feels like this. But what is this exactly? How can it be explained? It is a deal gone terribly wrong. She has sacrificed all of herself, emptied it out on the hospital bed in exchange for what was promised to her – an indescribable, unfathomable love, a guiding purpose, maternal power, magic, bliss. But there is nothing, only an emptiness that echoes through the cavities once so full of who she was. She has paid the ultimate price and has returned empty-handed.

Nora reaches for the door handle when she hears more whispers. “Probably fine… fine, fine, fine,” Sue hisses. “But best keep an eye on her. Just to be sure.” Now Nora knows that Max is out there too. She retreats from the door and presses the heels of her palms against her eyes. “All fine, Sue!” Nora says. “Will be out in a minute.”

“It takes a village.” That’s what Max had said when he told Nora that his mother would be coming to stay. “You haven’t been yourself,” he continued, reciting borrowed words, “it’s been ten days now and you’re still so –” He stopped and pressed his lips together before cupping her hands in his and scanning her face with concern. “It won’t be for long. Just until you’re back to your old self.”

 Old self, Nora thinks, wetting the corner of a towel under the tap and rubbing it over the curdled vomit on her shoulder. In the mirror, her face looks like a waxwork, shiny and shrunken. Old self. She grips the sides of the sink and leans into her reflection, searching the eyes which sit deep in their sockets. Old self. Old self. Old self. Someone is mumbling. She spins to look at the crack under the door and, seeing that the shadows are gone, realises that she is talking to herself.

 

It has been nearly four weeks and Darling Child still doesn’t have a name. “We need to make a decision, Nora. He needs to be registered,” Max says, marching into the nursery. Nora doesn’t look up but she can hear the jingle of Sue’s bracelets following behind him. In bed, Max reads out names from lists he finds online. Alexander, Benjamin, Charles, Duncan. But nothing is right. Nothing fits the baby, so this is what Nora calls him now: Darling Child. She picked it up from the Mumsnet forums that she scrolls through in between feeds and changes – online discussions where she hoped she might find solace or if not that, solidarity. Instead, she found only distraction, mothers using acronyms to brag about their DCs (Darling Children), expose their DHs (Darling Husbands) and moan about DMILs (Darling Mother-In-Laws) who are too hands-on and DFILs (Darling Father-In-Laws) who are too hands-off.

 Nora is sitting in the nursing chair, which isn’t actually a nursing chair at all. It’s her office chair which they now call the nursing chair, the same way that they call her study a nursery. She doesn’t take her eyes off Darling Child who is curled against her breast, eyes flickering wildly in a milk-drunk dream. She has only just managed to get him to latch and any sudden movement could bring this moment to an end and this moment mustn’t end. These moments are precious; they are the only times that Nora can feel that Darling Child is hers and that she is his.

“So, sweetheart,” Sue says, “we were discussing it and we think –” she pauses, a cue for Max to take over. 

“Robert,” Max says. Nora doesn’t look at him, she looks up at Sue who is smiling widely, her hands clasped under her chin. “Mum suggested it,” Max continues as he rushes over to Nora. “I think it’s kind of great, you know? For dad.” Nora frowns, looking down at Max who is now knelt in front of her, stroking the top of the baby’s head. “Little Robbie.”

Darling Child unlatches and fills the room with a terrible cry that makes Nora’s heart skip with pride. Robert is not her son’s name. She knows this and so does he. “Oh god, no, he doesn’t like that,” Nora says. She stands up from the chair and begins to rock Darling Child back and forth in her arms. “You don’t like that at all, do you?” She whispers, walking out of the room, past Max and then past Sue. “Not one bit.”

“Well, he needs a name, Nora,” Max calls out after her, frustration fizzing at the edge of every word. Nora turns to face them from the hallway. 

“Dominic,” she says. The name forms on her tongue before she can even think of it. “His name is Dominic.” Sue and Max nod like bobbleheads. 

“Okay,” Max says slowly. “Yes. Okay. Right. Dominic.”

“Well, sweetheart,” Sue says, shaking her head, “Little Dominic needs a change. He won’t stop crying until we get him out of that full diaper. Here,” she says, her arms outstretched, “let me take him.” 

 

Nora and Max lie in bed illuminated by the blue glow from Max’s reading light. Today is a Tuesday and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Sue is on night-time Dominic duty. One-on-one time is important, Sue says. She means Nora and Max but really, Nora suspects, she’s talking about herself and Dominic. Nora’s hands tremble as she tries to think of the last time she had one-on-one time with her son. It’s warm tonight, too warm to sleep with the covers on, so Nora has kicked them into a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed. In the shadows, it looks like a body wrapped in a shroud. From next door, Dominic’s white noise machine fills the apartment with a static that makes Nora forget the difference between sound and silence. Her back is turned to Max and she is staring out of the sash window, entranced by the crescent moon. It is so thin; it is as if someone has taken a scalpel and cut a sliver from the sky. She imagines reaching up to it, into it, ripping it wide open, and letting the silver molten spill out and flood the world beneath.

Suddenly, a click and the room is swallowed by night. There is a moment of stillness before the mattress begins to shift. Max inches himself closer and closer until his breath lands on the back of her neck. Nora holds still, so still, and closes her eyes. Every part of her tenses and she focuses on bringing her heart rate to a stop. It doesn’t seem so impossible; her body has performed far more extraordinary acts. 

“You awake?” Max whispers. “Nora.” He places his hand on her waist. Flinching, she reaches back to pull it off her but he squeezes, his fingertips anchoring into her flesh. “Please,” he says, “I miss you.” There is something loose and broken in his voice, a filament rattling inside a blown light bulb. She feels the calcified part of herself crumble as she realises that she misses herself too. And from the rubble, a terrible guilt rises. Throughout the pregnancy, she had hated Max for his failure to grow up. For his failure to try. But is she trying? She has let herself become a stranger to him, a stranger to herself. It has been six weeks since Dominic was born and she continues drifting further and further away. She must try to get back to herself. Her old self. And maybe the only way is together. The act must sometimes precede the feeling; isn’t that what it means to make love? She lifts his hand from her hip and brings it to her breast. Softening, she sinks back into him and as he enters, she shudders, feeling even more of herself scatter away.

 

Dominic is a good baby. Such a good baby. That’s what all the visitors say. Whether he is sleeping in his Moses basket or wailing as he tries to wriggle free from Nora’s arms, they all say the same thing. This makes it impossible for Nora to know if her son is actually a good baby, and if she is, as they all say, a natural mother. Really she knows that neither is true. The visitors come at all times in the day. They bring presents wrapped in powder blue paper and never stay longer than half an hour; Nora has started to suspect that this is when the novelty of a new baby expires, after thirty minutes. Today, Sara and Imogen, Nora’s friends from university, are coming to visit. When the doorbell rings, Sue is preparing a spread of vegetable batons and dips in the kitchen while Nora is sitting on the living room sofa with Dominic lying splayed out on her lap. He looks right past her, over her shoulder as if waiting for somebody else, somebody better, to appear. Nora places her finger in his tiny outstretched hand to see if he will do as all babies do and curl his fingers around it. Flinching away from her touch, he closes his empty fist.

There is an excited exchange of greetings at the front door before the voices all drop to hushed whispers. Everybody is always whispering in this house. They pretend that it’s so they don’t disturb Dominic but Nora knows that it’s because they are talking about her: how she is feeling, how she is eating, how she is feeding. The influx of visitors this week is part of Max and Sue’s plan to get Nora back to her old self. But Nora now knows that there is nothing left to get back to. She won’t tell Max and Sue this though. No. They are already so paranoid, who knows what they’d be like if they knew?

“Nora, you are glowing!’ Imogen says, rushing over to her. Her smile is spread and pinned to her face like a dead butterfly.

“How are you doing? How is the little guy?” Sara says, a head floating over Imogen’s shoulder. Nora performs the same script she does for every visitor. When she’d heard that it was Sara and Imogen coming, she’d thought that this visit might actually be different. She knows now that they are all the same. She tells them about how well Dominic is doing, how he’s gaining weight as he should, developing as he should. And herself? Oh, she’s doing fine! As well as can be expected, she tells them. Obviously, things are difficult; she can’t remember her last full night of sleep, she says. This is the point at which everyone always laughs. Nora doesn’t know why; she can’t think of anything less funny than this. And then, of course, she tells them how all the stress and pain and exhaustion disappears when she looks into Dominic’s eyes. That’s where she stops. She knows better than to tell them how she’s afraid that everything has disappeared into those eyes. 

Now it’s time for them to get what they’ve come for, a cuddle with Dominic. Max comes and takes him from Nora’s lap and places him in Imogen’s. Now, Dominic is Imogen’s baby. He sinks happily in her arms. Sara and Imogen are laughing and cooing, providing commentary for everything he is doing. Blinking. Yawning. Stretching. Dominic takes a lock of Imogen’s hair into his hand and lets out a delighted squeal. Nora watches as Imogen does not pry his fist open the way that she would. Instead, Imogen tickles his hand, and offers up her finger. Gleefully, Dominic accepts the exchange; he releases the fistful of hair and grasps onto it. Good boy. Clever boy. 

 

Finally, they are alone together. The world is still sleeping and the first light, a purple-yellow glow the colour of a healing bruise, streams through the window across their naked bodies. Their clothes are in a pile by the door: her nightdress and blood-spotted underwear, his dinosaur onesie and yellowed diaper. The bathroom tiles are cold on Nora’s skin so she has laid down a hand towel for Dominic to lie on. He is sleeping now and she lies on her side next to him, her body curled around his. She watches his tummy rise and fall with every breath and strokes it gently, circling the belly button through which she had once given him everything.

Outside, the birds begin their dawn chorus and a cold sweat blooms over Nora as she thinks of the world waking up around them. She only wants to be with him, to experience that bond that she was promised. Inside here, alone together, maybe it’s possible. There are too many distractions out there, too many obstacles. She has not even been allowed to bathe Dominic alone. A mother should be able to bathe her son alone! But Max and Sue are always there, watching. Always watching.

Pulling back the plastic curtain, Nora reaches into the bathtub and presses the rubber plug into the drain. She turns the tap halfway and the sound of running water wakes Dominic. He squirms, his skin glowing red as he scrunches up his face and pulls his little limbs into himself before unfurling them again. “Shhh, baby. It’s me. It’s mummy.” Sliding her hands under his armpits, Nora lifts him from the floor. She raises him up and lowers him down, up and down, up and down. And finally, there it is. A smile emerging from his face like an oasis.

Nora lowers Dominic into the plastic baby seat which is half-submerged in water. As she turns off the tap, he looks at her with anticipation, kicking the water around him. Splish! Splash! “Yes,” she says, laughing. “Yes, darling, we’re going to get you nice and clean! Squeaky clean.” She scoops up water with a cupped hand and pours it over him gently, first his body, and then his head. Now Dominic is laughing too, a rippling symphony of giggles and babbles. It is the most wonderful sound Nora has ever heard and she smiles down at him as he blinks up at her, droplets clinging to each eyelash like morning dew on a dandelion. Dizzy with affection, she lifts Dominic from the tub and brings him to the mirror. Silent and slack-jawed he reaches a doughy hand out to his reflection. Recognising it as his own, he smiles. Nora smiles too and, catching a glimpse of her face in the mirror, reaches out for her own reflection.

Suddenly, footsteps. On the other side of the door, the footsteps become louder and louder until they stop. The door handle jerks downwards and the door rattles in its frame, blocked by the bolt lock. “Nora?” It’s Max. His voice is croaky and quiet. Half asleep. “Nora,” he says, louder this time. He knocks on the door, first with his knuckles and then his whole fist. Now he is wide awake. “Mum!” he calls. “Mum!” More footsteps. “She has him in there,” Max says loudly. The time for whispering is over. 

“We’re fine!” Nora says. Her voice surprises her. It is high pitched and crackles with rage. “We’ll be out soon! It’s fine!”

“Please open this door, Nora.”

“We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine!” She is trying to sound calm, but the words come out warbled.

Dominic is crying now, his wails rising to crescendos that bounce off the bathroom walls. “Nora!” There is a loud thud, and then another. Clutching Dominic against her chest, Nora crumples to the floor. He is a bundle of her flesh and blood and skin and bone and as he cries, his body shakes like an earthquake in her arms. Now she is crying too. Big, hot tears that land on Dominic’s face. Finally, she had found herself. In the mirror, holding him, there she was. A new self. The woman she’d been waiting for. And now here they are, come to take it all away again.