Eli begins cooking breakfast. He drops a big yellow knob of
butter into the frying pan and soon the room smells of bacon.
Butch is drooling. A long strand hangs from the corner of his
mouth then drops straight through the child’s head onto the floor.
“Butch, gross,” Clem reprimands.
The child, unperturbed, squints momentarily before resuming
the game with the water bowl and remote.
“She’s hefty for a ghost,” says Clem and stabs her fork into
a rasher and cuts, mixing it with egg before scooping it into her
mouth. Yolk drips down her chin.
“He’s a baby,” says Eli. “Babies are meant to be chubby.”
“He?” says Clem.
“She?” says Eli.
Clem is short for Clementine. She is named after a character
in a James Baldwin novel. Eli is short for Eliyahu. He is named
after an Israeli football player. Ghost child has no name. No
parents. No gender.
Clem suggests checking the nappy to see if they can
designate one, but the ghost child is hard to catch. It slips through
their fingers just when they think they’ve got a hold, or disappears
and reappears out of reach.
They can’t agree on a pronoun.
“You’re such a narcissist,” says Clem.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a man you want a boy. A mini-Eli.”
“No, I don’t. I just think he looks like a boy.”
“Babies don’t look like anything,” says Clem. “They’re
just babies.”
“Well, what about you then? You want it to be a girl. Are you
a narcissist?”
Clem ignores him.
They stick to “it” though both are uncomfortable with this. The
child offers no comment. It can’t speak and seems unconcerned
by the matter.
Eli offers the child a doll and a truck as a way of determining.
Clem tells him he’s being ridiculous. That such desires aren’t
innate but cultivated by culture.
The child plays with the doll and the truck. Then discards both
for Butch’s bone.
Clem can see herself and Eli in the child. She’s sure she’s not
imagining it. Eli’s nose – broad and wide-nostrilled – and her
mouth – fat-lipped but pinched. It’s hard to tell definitively though,
because they often get lost in the background. The pattern of
a cushion or bedspread distort the child’s features.
Sometimes there’s a familiar expression: Eli’s look of surprise,
eyebrows up in perfect arches; Clem’s look of concentration,
furrowed brow, curled lip. It’s disconcerting. Seeing her
mannerisms mimicked. Clem wonders if her mother felt the same.
Ghost child crawls or sometimes toddles around the house. It’s
hard to keep track of, particularly as it can pass through walls. It’s
often silent, except for a squeak or a sudden laugh. It rarely cries.
In the middle of sex, as they are changing position from Clem
on top to doggy, Eli lets out a shriek, grabbing the doona and
upending Clem. On the floor, legs and arms akimbo, a sharp
pain in her shoulder, Clem sees the child standing at the end of
the bed, watching.
“Fuck,” she snaps.
“Don’t swear in front of the kid. Cover up,” says Eli, throwing
her a blanket.
“Why don’t you knock, kid?” says Clem.
“Babies don’t knock. They don’t know to,” says Eli. “Read the
baby books.”
Clem looks into the baby’s eyes and thinks, bullshit. Ghost
child laughs, turns, and toddles out.
“I think he has my eyes,” says Eli.
Clem agrees but doesn’t say so.
She comes home to find Eli clearing out the study. There are
piles of books, his computer, her laptop, the desks, her easel and
brushes and paints and paintings lying out in the hallway and
lounge. There is a crib and a change table alongside the desks.
Eli is turning the study into a nursery. There is newspaper laid
out on the floor. He’s painting the room yellow. The ghost child is
pulling up the sheets of paper and scrunching them in a pile.
“Gender neutral,” says Eli.
Clem stares at the canary colour and feels the sudden urge to
paint it over pink. She doesn’t like pink, but that’s not the point.
She’s not sure what the point is, but is sure there is one.
“Gumtree,” says Eli, pointing at the crib and change table.
“A bargain.”
He beams and carries on.
Clem looks down at her paintings. Eli has them in a pile with
a printer cartridge resting on top. The one she can see beneath the
cartridge is of a landscape. Bland, anaemic. A piece of crap,
Clem thinks. But it makes her feel sad seeing it dumped there.
“Look,” says Eli, holding up Where The Wild Things Are.
“My favourite book as a kid. I’m going to read it to him at night
before bed.”
Clem looks at the book and looks at Eli.
“Max,” she says. “That’s a good name.”
“For Maximillian? I knew you’d come around.”
“For Maxine,” says Clem. “And ghost children don’t sleep.”
The ghost child squeals and claps its hands.
There is a drawer in the kitchen full of ovulation kits and
pregnancy tests and pregnancy vitamins. Clem routinely pees on
sticks looking for double lines or smiley faces. The electronic
ovulation kits give her the smiley faces when she’s fertile. A big fat
zero when she’s not. Reward and punishment. She can’t help but
feel thrilled, like she’s really achieved something, when she gets
a smiley face. And like a failure when she doesn’t. It taps into her
need for praise, for external validation, normally sought for from
parents, teachers, institutions, employers, friends, enemies and,
now, from a piece of plastic. She hates herself for this.
When she gets smiles, she charts her fertility, barks orders
militantly, the sex is perfunctory.
When she gets a zero she sulks and drinks. Sometimes she
cries, but only if there’s no-one around.>FICTION