Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
What if there were no mistakes? What if everything was right? What if I wrote his name upon this page?
Aiden.
“Are you writing about me?”
“How can I be? I don’t know you. You are just a name and some dark brown eyes.”
Silence.
I look into these dark brown eyes. He doesn’t know what to make of me. But I know what to make of him. Anything I like.
He comes back for his coffee cup.
“You just wrote me name again, didn’t you?” he accuses.
“No.” I’m lying in a way, because I know what he means. I’m getting off on a technicality.
“You did, you wrote my name. I can feel it. I can see it across your face.”
“No, I wrote ‘He comes back for his coffee cup.’” I confess. I’ve always been a terrible liar.
He looks down at the coffee cup in his hands and wonders what the hell is going on.
“Why are you here?” he says to me.
“Same reason as you. Where are you going with your coffee cup?”
“If I tell you are you going to write it down?”
I look down at my page and back at him,
“Probably.”
He turns with his coffee cup and walks into the kitchen. He doesn’t say anything. But I write it down anyway. He doesn’t like me writing about him. He thinks it’s strange. What could I possibly have to say about him. I only know his first name and that he is here with me and twenty-three other people. Court Ordered Anger Management, enforced for the verbal abuse of a Traffic Control Officer.
He deserved it.
I don’t normally yell and I don’t know where it came from, the power behind the rage. But once I started I couldn’t stop. I was too scared to stop. Scared to think what might happen when the yelling and adrenaline subsided and I had to look at what I’d done. Shaking.
The Traffic Control Officer burst into tears.
He was a rotund, blonde man of about forty-five, but with the simple face of someone much younger. He hadn’t cried in twenty-three years, when his childhood dog died. He had loved that dog when he was a boy, but neglected it now that he was having sex with actual girls. The dog stayed in the family home with his parents and died of a broken heart, realising that his soul-mate had moved on without a backward glance.
I’ve no idea if any of this is true, but this is the story I told myself as I watched a grown man in an unflattering grey uniform look me in the eye and cry messy, trying-not-to-cry tears. Tears oozed from his eyes as snot bubbled from his nose. Saliva escaped out of the corners of his mouth as he sucked in and spluttered out. Noisy. Undignified.
I stood and watched. Impassive. Feeling the adrenaline drop from my head, through my throat, heart and guts down to my feet like a lift with it’s cables cut.
I watched this soggy, sodden mess of a man with fear in his eyes as my heart rate gradually slowed. It wasn’t me he was afraid of. It was himself and the messy despair pouring out of his face from a place so deep it can’t be named.
I watched. I thought of him and his dog. And I wanted to slap him. I wanted to hit him with an open palm right across his puff-muddy cheek. Instead I took my open palm and laid it gently across my seven and a half months pregnant belly.
Are you shocked? Do you think a pregnant woman should be full of love and light and never angry? Or is that my own projection? Love and light. And anger. Sure. Why not? Aren’t we all a mess of contradictions like this.
Especially in the face of a stout blonde man issuing an infringement in the time it took me to wade to the metre and put my money in it. I told him, as he taped the infringement to my windscreen.
“I’ve just paid for two hours.” I said ungraciously, knowing what was coming and resenting it like crazy.
He said it was too late, the infringement had been issued and now it was on me to write a letter to appeal. And that just seemed ridiculous and time consuming and unjust and can’t you see I’m fucking pregnant.
I wanted to shout at him, so I did. And he dissolved into his own unspoken grief leaving just a murky puddle that I stepped over. I wasn’t sorry.
I don’t know how anyone found out about it. Perhaps witnesses reported it. Or perhaps the puddle filed a report. In any case I was ordered to attend an Anger Management program and there was Aiden.
“Did you just write my name again?” he said, peering over my shoulder.
“I did.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” his dark brown eyes pleading, but also a touch angry.
“Why are you here Aiden? And why are you wearing shorts with bare feet? It’s freezing and the heating’s inadequate. Is it that boy thing where, like preschoolers you just don’t feel the cold?
“It is. And I like to feel the grass between my toes.”
We were standing face to face, so close my giant belly skimmed at his. The room was fluorescent-lit with linoleum floors and plastic chairs. Aiden was mad and I was in love.
“Why are you here? What did you do?” I asked again with a conspiratorial tone.
I wanted to hear his story, to see his eyes sparkle as he told it. To watch his toes tangled in the grass that wasn’t there.
“Nothing.” he said and sipped his coffee, the cup cradled between both hands warming them, his toes silently seeking grass in the linoleum. He looked at me and sipped and swallowed. And I looked at him
“Nothing?” I challenged.
“Nothing.” he glinted, “I like to come here and drink the coffee.”
The class resumed, the instructor returned, AGGRESSION he wrote on the white board and swiped an underline. I took my seat behind Aiden and watched the back of his neck. He turned and asked,
“Did you just write my name?”
I wasn’t sorry about the puddle and I wasn’t sorry about the father of the baby inside me. Both had to disappear because with Aiden it was love. The bare legged-boy and me with my giant soon-to-be-a-baby belly.
No fear, no doubt only this perfect, essential moment and a lifetime in which to write Aiden.
“Are you sure about this? About having someone else’s baby?” I asked as I gripped his hand
A month and a half had passed since we had met at Anger Management.
The labour had started slowly, euphorically a few hours before. I didn’t wake him. This part of the journey was just between me and my baby. In fact the entire birth-journey was. Aiden would just be a spectator, thought he didn’t know that yet. I mean, what can a partner do? Watch, encourage, support and be confident in the knowledge that this is not about you.
I gripped his hand, squishing knuckles together, contracting and breathing and being transported.
“This child belongs to no-one.” he said by way of reply.
“But you’ll be the one she calls Dad? And raise her to always be barefoot?”
“I will.”
It was as close to a vow as we ever got, non-traditionalists at heart
You can’t tie down man who is permanently barefoot. And who would want to?
I took comfort in those dark brown eyes as the labour intensified. I worked hard and enjoyed a knowing that I had found love and it had found me.
***
Kate McTernan writes weekly at onesmalllifeblog.blogspot.com.au and tweets @onesmalllife