The Dictionary of Lost Words(62)

ATTEND


To direct one’s care to; to take care or charge of, to look after, tend, guard.





TRAVAIL


Of a woman: to suffer the pains of childbirth.





DELIVERED


Set free; disburdened of offspring; handed over; surrendered.





RESTLESS


Deprived of rest; finding no rest; esp. uneasy in mind or spirit.





SQUALL


A small or insignificant person.

A sudden and violent gust, a blast or short storm.

To scream loudly or discordantly.



Light edged the curtains. The room was empty of its earlier crowd. The mess had been returned to order. Lavender masked the smell of blood and shit.

Shit. I’d said that word aloud, over and over. And I’d said others that Mabel had taught me. My throat was hoarse with them. I hadn’t dreamed it.

Though I did dream. And in the dream, a baby cried.

It was crying still. My breasts ached from the sound.



Their conversation was whispered, but I heard it.

‘Better off not seeing it, else she changes her mind.’ The midwife.

‘It needs a feed.’ Sarah.

‘To keep a lie-child condemns her and it. I’ll fetch a wet-nurse.’ The midwife.



I threw back the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Unfamiliar muscles moaned from their ordeal. A terrible sting made me squeal. I had a memory of that pain, blurred by ether.

I tried to rise, but my head throbbed and the sharp sounds of a moment before became dull, as if I’d just slipped below the water in a bath. I sat back down and closed my eyes. In the darkness behind my lids was the negative of a face, two points of unwavering light seared onto my retina. When I finally stood, I felt my insides slip out. I reached down to stop the flow, but there was no need; someone had fitted a belt and padded it with a towel.

‘Back to bed, sweet girl.’ It was Sarah. She was still there, her freckles in full colour, her eyes holding me, still unwavering.

‘I should nurse it.’

‘Her,’ she said.

Her, I thought.

‘I should nurse Her.’





NURSE


Of a woman: to suckle, and otherwise attend to, or simply to take care, or charge of an infant.



They were all there: Ditte and Beth, Sarah and the midwife. They watched as I nursed. They heard Her suckling as I heard Her suckling, but they couldn’t feel the strength of Her suck or the weight of Her against my belly. They were oblivious to Her smell. For half an hour, Her little noises were the only sound in the room. No one gave voice to their hopes or their fears.

‘Tears are quite normal,’ said the midwife.

How long had I been weeping?



How many times did I nurse Her? I couldn’t count, though I’d meant to. Time became an elastic thing, and the boundary between dreams and waking was blurred. They took it in turns to sit with us, never leaving us alone. I wanted to bury my face in that sweet place below the shell of Her ear, breathe in the warm biscuity smell of Her. ‘I could eat you up,’ I wanted to say. I wanted to undress Her and trace every chubby crease, kiss Her from head to toe and whisper my love into the pores of her skin.

Several weeks passed. I did none of these things.



Sarah sat on the bed, her large, freckled hand stroking the golden down on our baby’s head. ‘You can change your mind.’

I’d tried to imagine it a hundred different ways.

‘It’s not just my mind that would need to change,’ I said.

She knew this. As she looked at me, I saw relief wrestle with a shadow of regret. She was glad, I think, that I’d said it out loud. She turned from me, took longer than usual to fold a new napkin.

‘Shall I take her?’ Sarah asked.

I could think of no way to answer. I looked down and noticed milk had pooled at the edge of Her sleeping mouth. I moved a little and watched it dribble down Her chin. I felt the weight of Her, so much heavier than when I’d first held Her. I tried to think of a word that could match Her beauty.

There was none. There are none. There never would be a word to match Her.

I gave Her to Sarah. A few months later, Sarah and Philip emigrated to South Australia.





There was no end to the words. No end to what they meant, or the ways they had been used. Some words’ histories stretched so far back that our modern understanding of them was nothing more than an echo of the original, a distortion. I used to think it was the other way around, that the misshapen words of the past were clumsy drafts of what they would become; that the words formed on our tongues, in our time, were true and complete. But I was realising that, in fact, everything that comes after that first utterance is a corruption.

I had forgotten, already, the exact shape of Her ear, the particular blue of Her eyes. They got darker in the weeks I nursed Her; they may have gotten darker still. I woke every night to Her phantom cry and knew I would never hear a single word wrapped in the music of Her voice. She was perfect when I held Her. Unambiguous. The texture of Her skin, Her smell and the gentle sound of Her sucking could be nothing other than what they were. I had understood Her perfectly.