The plaited roots at the place most suited to climbing had taken on the dark polished look of oil-coated metal. A thick, low trunk gave way to a plateau at its centre, heavy branches extending out from its edges. We had to gently trick him into coming down from the ancient tree where he had decided, he told us, that he would like to live. Part of the tree had been burnt recently and I felt ashamed, although the vandalism was not mine. I felt that the tree was weary and wanted to be left alone to feel the cold breeze and the damp ground.
In one of the meadows, he sat down in the deep grass and took to moving handfuls of perfectly mole-sifted soil from their tiny hill to form another. We joked about the mirage-like stately home that marked out its own incongruous brick rectangle amidst the green. The scent from the malt factory was everywhere.
He seemed tired from the travel and excitement of visiting friends, though it turned out he was coming down with chickenpox, the first visible signs of which blossomed the following morning on his neck and flanks. So the next day he and I spent at home, back in the city, forming an inventory of his growing number of spots, and thinking, intermittently, about the weary tree and the perfect grains of soil. As he checked my arm for chickenpox, I wondered whether the confusion between where my body ends and his begins works both ways.
***
I have not written for a while – a few weeks, I think. The light summer evenings seem to have inspired a shift in his rhythms towards a later bedtime, so now we play when I used to write, and my thoughts are slow and heavy with tiredness by the time, finally, I feed him to sleep. Picturing all this, I realise that there is a particular kind of play reserved for the end of the day. Emptying his drawers is a favourite. But I want to write and, thankfully, the nights are beginning to draw his bedtime back from its solstice peak. So I begin again, in spite of the doubts and exhaustion that have grown to fill the space.
As I read back the first paragraphs I wrote here, two or three months ago now, I barely remember having written them, at night no doubt, as I am now, poised to shut the iPad’s cover should he stir beside me. Recently, his sleep has altered its nature, deepening and thickening so that he can no longer sense my absence through it. I could write elsewhere tonight, but it is me who must adjust now to this newfound freedom, so here I am, still, in the dark.
***
His sleep-sweated head smells like things found in a rock-pool and left out to dry in the sun and breeze: vegetal but also flesh and salt.
***
It is odd that I should write at all really, when, as the NHS therapist and I establish, I am unsure that I even exist. Am I trying to make myself a shadow, show myself that I might be gently and insubstantially traced upon a surface in some shifting form?
***
Our world was quiet this morning because it had rained.
***
Should I write about how he has discovered humour in the sounds of language – picking up on a word I stumble over, and how funny the mangled version is? Repeating it for days to himself and to me, and laughing at the strangeness of its shape, knowing already that there is a pattern, and that this error-word does not fit. And now making up error-words of his own – splargle! – working so hard to formulate them in his mind, then offering them up with peels of laughter and an almost crazed joy in his eyes. I feel at these moments that he understands language better than I do, that he can see its very glowing core, its fibrous roots. Not only can he use it, but he can also play with it, affect himself with it. When I write, I feel that I am within sensing distance, just barely, of language’s vibrating core, its power – but he is right at the centre.
***
He is sick again, with a fever and a retching cough. I sing him to sleep as if he were a newborn. He sleeps with his head on my stomach, one shoulder on my pubic bone, the other on my thigh, his feet touching mine, exactly where he put himself for the comfort he needs in his sickness. Soon I will have to move him awkwardly to the cool pillow that he chose to forgo tonight in favour of my soft stomach. When I held him as a tiny infant, my body, I was told, would change its temperature to regulate his. I mourn, suddenly, the loss of such magical powers and the distance that replaces them. But, as I place my palm against his forehead, I notice that his fever has dropped and I laugh at myself for wondering if, perhaps, I still possess them.
***
Books slip away as I read them, becoming a kind of aerated, holey, brittle substance and settling as wordless ashes.
***
I watch two small objects caught by the glance of light from beneath the door. I cannot work out what they could possibly be. They are both a similar size, that of a medium-sized pebble, and appear pale, possibly white. The one closest to the door has a flat surface at a gently sloping angle, with a shallow curved underside. The one a few inches to its left might have a convex surface or be curved all the way around. Their lit profiles are reflected faintly in the dark grey of the painted floor. The light coming under the door softens as it begins to rain outside. I can hear it through the window behind me, behind the blackout blind. Most of his small objects are wooden or plastic, but these appear to be something else. He is drifting into sleep at my breast now, the movements of his arms becoming slower and the tension leaving his back. When he is fully asleep, I can go and pick up the objects, but for now I just stare, affecting patience that is unnatural to me. Eventually I lay him on the bed and cover his bare legs with a blanket, edge myself out of the bed and leave a roll of duvet in my place, between him and the edge.
I had forgotten about the objects but go back a few minutes later to see what they are. A small piece of yellow pavement chalk broken in half.
***
The winter has been hard again. The indoor textures of carpet, padded plastic, hard plastic, vinyl and polished wood. When we are able to be outside, the grass or sand is a glory.
He asks me what they are as he picks up open handfuls of amber-brown fluff caught by the ridge of an uneven seam between concrete and grass. Seeds, I tell him, from the trees. I do not know the name of the tree that makes these multitudes of furry seeds that the wind blows, again, from his open palm.
And later we witness the moment a gust of wind pulls furls of petals from a blossom-covered tree and fills the air with their suspended paper-snow bodies.