GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23
NAOMI WOOD
‘Comorbidities’
FOR A WHILE, MASON HAD WANTED TO SPICE THINGS UP IN THE BEDROOM. ‘If we don’t make an effort now, there won’t be anything left to improve,’ he had said, and though I knew he was right, I was also tired. I was always with the kids. His work was crazy. Even sex once a week was an effort, and often as soon as we got into bed its warmth overpowered us.
When I thought about our lives, I thought about the therapy pie charts on the Internet, where they cut the pie into slices of time: like, here’s your pie for work, pie for sleep, pie for kids. I knew our sex pie was so thin it could barely stand on its own. More of the pie had to be given to sex: all the websites said that. They also said that if you don’t have sex now, you can’t have sex later – and I knew we couldn’t stay on this minimal sex-percentage for ever, but we were tired! We were both so tired!
I also spent a lot of my time communing with the kids. I think Mason was a little jealous of my romance with Aida (6) and Casper (1). Often, I felt lovestruck with my babies. Mason was always having to pull me out of their beds because I’d fallen asleep, generally communing, amygdala to amygdala. Sometimes, it felt as if both babies were still inside me. I had read that the Y-chromosomes of boy foetuses have been found in the bones of dead mothers. Once they are inside you, they are inside you forever, sweeping through you with a Coriolis Force that went ‘I love you/you drive me nuts/I love you/you drive me nuts’ which would bore down to Australia before you got to the end; and besides, it always ended up with ‘I love you’, because that’s the way it went with your kids.
This is how my love felt for Aida and Casper: bone-deep; viral.
A good deal of my pie chart (like maybe 8%) was also spent tracking the global melt of the polar ice shelfs according to the NASA website, which was a large percentage, particularly in comparison to the zero-point- something of our sex-life. My capacity to worry about anything really was capacious, even profound, though I personally could not see how anyone slept at night, when floods, intensified storms, and freak supercanes were already bearing down upon us.
The other mothers at Rhyme Time could see it in me, this craziness, this relentless worry. They avoided me and talked with each other. I sang the nursery rhymes, but with very little heart. Sometimes I’d talk to them but it always ended up in eco-doom: ‘Do you think our babies have a future?’ I’d say. ‘Will it be too hot to breathe?’ But they did not want to hear of our babies’ extinctions. They wanted to sing ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’, over and over, though the farm would be ashes, the animals, charcoal, and the MacDonalds and their kiddiewinks, burned in their beds.
When Aida started to ask about Climate Change, I levelled with her: ‘It’s all our fault,’ I said, but mostly Granny and Grandad: Cherry and Zhe-Shing, her ma ma and yeh yeh. Then Aida would run around butt-naked in the house screaming ‘The world is on fire! The world is ON FIRE!’ while Casper played with his new bottle, mauling the nipple with his teeth.
‘Mason,’ I said, in the middle of one night. ‘Do our kids have a future?’
‘I’m asleep.’
‘I know, Mason, but I’m scared.’
‘You’re always scared, whereas I have almost no opportunity to sleep.’
This seemed too good to have been made up on the spot. ‘Did you practise that?’
‘Maybe,’ he said, rolling over, and I thought he really was asleep but then he said, ‘You need to de-catastrophise. None of this helps the world.’
This is why I’m not horny! I wanted to say, the world on fire is not arousing! But in the morning I gave Mason a blowjob, as a way of saying sorry that I woke him, and sorry that our sex-pie was so thin. ‘Thanks,’ he said afterward. ‘We needed that.’
Mason was a celebrity Mental Health nurse. Day in, day out, he was saving the lives of all the teenagers butchered by the Internet: its hateful gossip, its rancorous memes, its 24/7 bullying. He listened to teenagers talk him through their suicide plans, and then he had to carry that home. Sometimes I read his Twitter feed to see what he was feeling, to trace the graph’s curve of years spent in the NHS (x) and his personal sense of failure to the kids he had lost in his high-security ward (y).
That morning, the morning of the BJ, he put out the stuff for breakfast and whistled as he went. I wondered, if I had chimerically morphed with the kids, whether his brain might be equally comorbid with his dick.
We heard through the kitchen the sounds of our neighbour Kelly and her daily panicked descant as she embarked on the school run. She had four kids. Four! I’d told her I’d only had as many kids as I had hands. ‘Otherwise they’d be raised by feet,’ she’d said, looking with darkening anxiety into the kitchen. Kelly was also very tired, but she always listened with sympathetic absence to my thoughts on the planet.
Mason was right, though. My catastrophising wasn’t helping. Aida’s drawings showed the charred remains of lollipop trees, and when I looked at my babies there was a fiery orb around them, as if their aura re-circulated the cognitive blazes I privately envisioned. Mason had asked me to please not discuss this with his mother, because these conversations always went badly, but one day Cherry somehow embroiled me in the discussion.
‘If I stop eating pork,’ Cherry said, ‘the world is not going to suddenly get better.’
Mason shot me a look. He had been at the hospital for a long time; the shift was in his face.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but if everyone stopped eating pork it might.’
Casper kept on yanking at my bra. I was sure I still smelled of milk, though I had stopped breastfeeding weeks ago. Probably it was glandular. Maybe I was secreting it.
‘Squeezy’s so hungry,’ she said, which was the name she used instead of Casper. She picked him up and settled him on her lap. ‘Aren’t you, baby?’
‘Pigs fart,’ said Aida, hooking backward. ‘That’s why the world’s warming up.’
Cherry narrowed her eyes. ‘I did not live through decades of Communism to be told what to do here. If you’ve eaten boiled shoe leather, you notice the pork in your porridge. Aida, come here and count Squeezy’s fat rolls.’
Mason’s mother had hated our choice of name for Casper. Cherry had said it had supernatural connotations. (‘Because of the Disney movie?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Like the friendly ghost?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she said again.) Mason insisted his mother had a point, or at least that the point, however outlandish it seemed to me, was culturally sensitive. In Hong Kong, Mason said, there were massive holes in skyscrapers, like three apartments wide, for bad spirits to fly though – did I know how much that ancient suspicion could cost a real estate company? Ten of millions! Not letting ghosts into your house was worth tens of millions of dollars! Naming your child after a Disney ghost was just inviting bad luck right into the crib.
But the real problem with Cherry was that she was always right, about everything. She’d swum from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to escape Communism, waded through the Mai Po marshes at dawn – and that was in the day when you’d be shot if caught. But I put my foot down on the Casper front, insisted it was a name I had long cherished (who knows) and as a result Cherry always gave him less lai see than Aida at Chinese New Year, which was weird, because he was a boy, and, you know, etcetera…
‘It’s their future,’ I said, choking up, ‘that’s why I am concerned.’
‘Hey,’ said Mason. ‘Are you crying?’
‘I’m not crying.’
Since stopping breast-feeding I had felt very emotional. Perhaps I hadn’t been ready to stop, but Mason had this idea that when the baby was a year old it was time to let them go. In truth, while feeding Casper, I had never felt sure of my boundaries. There had been merge. Ontologically, I had felt somehow synthesised. I had loved it, and at the same time felt stranded by it.
‘It’s the milk,’ said Cherry, ‘it’s coming out of your eyes.’
‘It’s not the milk coming out of my eyes.’
Cherry looked at me and crossed herself. Cherry was both a Taoist and a Baptist, I guess to hedge her bets. ‘If you have another baby,’ she said, ‘then you can feed that one too. Mason said you’re sad about stopping.’
‘I’m not sad. I’m fine.’
Cherry desperately wanted us to have a third child. Perhaps it was because she herself had had only one.
‘There are already too many people in the world,’ I said.
‘Nonsense.’ She looked at Mason. ‘Poor Mason, you look so tired. Why don’t I take Squeezy too next Saturday?’ she said, actually winking. ‘When was the last time you were by yourselves? You can have a date night!’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, before Mason could agree.
‘Squeezy’s on the bottle now. I can give him that.’
‘Yes, Ma,’ said Mason, before I could offer another protest. ‘That would be wonderful.’
When Cherry had gone, Mason cracked open a beer. Caspar was threatening to run a black crayon up the wall. When I took it off him he started to cry, then he took his frustration out on Aida, clawing at her face. Then Aida tripped him over, and his wails filled the room. ‘Enough!’ said Mason. ‘Time for bed! Everyone!’
‘It’s four o’clock,’ I said.
‘Then why aren’t we watching TV?’ he said. ‘And no Topsy and Tim; that shit has like very toxic gender roles.’
I thought about what a good mood he had been in after the blow job and how he hadn’t whistled for weeks. As we settled down on the sofa, I said, ‘How about a home movie on Saturday night?’
‘Sure,’ he said, laughing, as Topsy made cupcakes with Mummy, and Tim drove his toy 4x4 across the savannah of their astroturfed garden. ‘See you there, Kim.’
About seven bijillion years ago Mason and I met on a dating app dominated by aggressively randy men. I’d been sent tons of dick pics, which made me feel horny and sometimes grossed-out. Sometimes I got into extended sexting conversations where I’d take nude pictures of myself and they’d send laughably priapic photos, which I’d then Reverse Google Image Search to see if they had been cribbed from the Internet. Sometimes we’d have phone sex which would end with an insane orgasm but also the astral distance of strangers who didn’t love each other, who didn’t know each other, who didn’t even know if the profile photo of the other was real; though sometimes it was this very nothingness that made the exchange so arousing, like having sex with a zero, or a bot, or yourself.
With all these guys any hope of a relationship was useless. It was like whamming your head into the crotch of all these dudes, giving 800 blowjobs, and asking for nothing back, and I knew the delinquency was only a front to hide my inner, terrible longings for intimacy.
So when I started messaging Mason I found his sincerity almost anti-normative. As a public-facing Mental Health nurse, he had half a million Twitter followers @PoetParamedic. He had warned me, over the app, that he was Chinese, like fully Chinese, and that when some white women met him, they were disappointed. He was in turn surprised when, at the tail-end of our first date, he found me so wet for him, and I had felt for the first time at twenty-seven the total vortical tension of falling in love, and I thought back with some regret to the austerity of all those unnumbered dudes with whom I’d done, so many times, so many nothings.
Mason was quieter than the other guys I’d dated, and a thousand percent more sensitive. Often, when I fucked up, like for example when he was recording a live segment for TV at home, and the kids swarmed into the living-room as I was scrolling Instagram in the kitchen and didn’t notice after five, then ten minutes, he was more or less instantly forgiving. He lived with the theory that with no ill-will there was never any responsibility; the kids he worked with were proof of this. Given world history, I personally thought this was a bad argument, but one I accepted.
The next Saturday we packed Aida and Casper off to Cherry’s. We would reunite at Jade Garden, but for the next twenty-four hours, both kids were gone. Instead of being anxious, as I thought I would be, I felt joyful, and pleasantly surprised. There was a sense of festivity in the house.
I told Mason that I had great things planned for us, sexually, on our first kid-free morning, but in the meantime, we would sleep. We hadn’t slept through the night for twelve months, and that night we slept cadaverously and without interruption. When we woke there was actual daylight peeping in at the curtains, and we thought with astonishment how nobody needed anything from us.
For a while I looked at Mason’s body; the sexy hair from his navel to crotch, his slender frame which hid his strength. When he was in his scrubs he looked even better because I could see the faint outline of his penis, which seemed, to me anyway, like a failure in tailoring? I kissed him on his chest. I could tell he was close-eyed-thinking rather than sleeping. I whispered: ‘Do you want to make that home movie?’
He opened his eyes. ‘I thought you were joking?’
‘Why not?’
I could tell he was surprised. For most of my pregnancy and Casper’s life, I had stopped initiating. I knew it made him sad that I no longer wanted him like he wanted me. He understood – we both understood – our inability to care for one another when our burden of care was so large – but it didn’t mean he wasn’t sad that this part of us had so quietly died; a part of us that in our twenties had been so raw and lurid.
‘We’ve got to be careful,’ he said. ‘Paris Hilton… Kim Kardashian.’
‘Weren’t they on purpose? Didn’t they actually release them?’ I shifted onto my back as he played with my nipple. ‘And Hulk Hogan,’ I added.
‘Hulk Hogan what?’
‘He released a tape.’
‘Did he?’ He scrunched up his nose. ‘Gross.’
Mason stopped with my nipple and read a blog about digital security and home movies, then went downstairs to fiddle with his laptop: turning off the Cloud, putting his searches on private, clearing his cache and browser history, then turning his phone onto aeroplane mode. I knew he was right to be paranoid. A few years ago, his Twitter account had been hacked, and the hackers had taken Thai LadyBoy faces and pasted them onto pictures of him they’d found in his iPhotos, with racist captions in shadowbox lettering saying things like ‘Yin, Yang, suck my dang’. Otherwise he got sent messages saying ‘Why dont u kill urself’, or a pasted menu from a Chinese takeaway, or they’d send videos of themselves wanking during his Teen Mental-Health slot on CBBC.
When Mason came back he put his phone on the pillow, flipped the viewfinder and toggled to video. I wondered if I should have tidied my bush but it was too late now.
‘Are you sure everything’s off?’
‘Sure.’
‘We’re not on Instagram Live?’
‘No.’ He showed me the phone’s aeroplane mode. ‘Imagine we’re inside the plane, forty thousand feet from the world, our family, the kids.’
‘Are you sure though?’
Knowing I could kybosh this whole thing with my anxiety, Mason started kissing me, and slowly I began to switch off my worries. At first, we couldn’t look at each other without laughing. But when I watched the video I stopped thinking. It was pretty hot. I was turned on by Mason’s lips and the way they were mashed by my own. When he took off my T-shirt I watched as his lips moved the nipple around, kissing, licking, and I couldn’t really tell who was dominating what; the breast or Mason.
Casper had favoured the right boob, and it was noticeably bigger than the left, but I tried not to think about the kids. I wondered if I would feel weird about my post-pregnancy body, but it looked fine: the boobs had more sag, there was a cradle of fat hip to hip, but mostly it was OK. Mason’s body was still pretty much the honeymoon it was in his twenties, which wasn’t fair, but it was at least mine to enjoy.
Mason sat me on top of him. In the video we watched ourselves intensely, which you’d think would be monotonous but it was actually very arousing. We came quickly, and I pressed the red button immediately to stop the recording.
We cuddled, then Mason went to the bathroom. When he came back he twinned his phone to Bluetooth, and I listened to the lonely submarine pulse of the speaker trying to find its pair. He began a mellow playlist I hadn’t heard in a while. Soon I realised it was the same playlist as when I’d been in labour with Casper, though I think he had forgotten this. The Brian Eno song began playing, and Caspar’s labour came back to me: the abrasion; burn; rip; a flow of blood; then everything went dark, as if I had died – but instead a baby was placed on my chest; a heavy baby with a mineral stench.
Mason was sleeping now. Over the song I heard the rhythmic loop of the bathroom’s extractor fan, coming at me in waves. I felt a little sad. The sex had been nice, kinky; a return to form. It had a lustfulness we had once totally taken for granted. But something in me felt empty. Only now that the kids were away did I realise how much we had both lost, and the cost we had paid. I thought I was about to cry, but instead I saw Casper’s favoured breast begin to leak, gently lapping milk against the pillow.
The windows of Jade Garden were tinted, as if to ward off great shelves of subtropical light, and inside the air was hostile with air-conditioning. On some tables there were pristine cloths and spotless Lazy Susans; on the tables recently vacated, a general wreckage of tea-leaves, bones, towers of dim sum crates, and the general atmosphere of a raid. Through the aisles older women pushed trollies, picking up empties as they went.
When I saw my children, sitting nicely for their yeh yeh and ma ma, I felt things which were hard to admit. I wanted to preserve who I had been this morning, and not go back to being these alien people of endless patience. I looked at Mason, panicked, not wanting to say goodbye. He kissed me. I guess he was thinking the same thing. Then we went over to them: our old frontier.
Zhi-Sheng’s nose ruffled when I kissed him hello. Even with the faintly aquatic smell of prawn in the air, I could still smell the bedsheets on us. He was filling in the dim sum docket. ‘Are you still vegetarian?’ he asked.
‘Pescatarian.’
‘What’s that?’
Mason placed his phone on the table provocatively. I looked at it and looked at him. ‘Only seafood,’ he said. ‘And fish.’
‘What’s the point in that?’
‘Fish don’t fart,’ said Aida.
‘Exactly,’ I said, putting her on my lap. I looked at the outline of Aida’s face, and the fineness of her features, her overwhelming beauty.
‘Can we play “Silly Lady”?’ she whispered.
“Silly Lady” was a game Aida had enthusiastically responded to, and it involved me pretending I had absolutely no idea who she was, and that I had to take her to a police station in order to find her real mummy. It only worked if we played it in public – that was the point – there was a longing in her to feel publicly disowned, which might, I guess, be universal. Often in this game she went berserk, saying ‘Mummy! Mummy! It’s me!’ as she jumped into my eyeline, but I would disavow all knowledge of her, and one time she had laughed so hard she had wet herself, as if her bladder could not handle the queasy uncertainty of not being mine.
‘Not now, darling,’ I said.
‘Did you profit from the morning?’ asked Cherry, a glint in her eye.
‘We just watched a movie,’ said Mason, suppressing a smile. He tapped his phone with a finger. ‘We’ll probably watch another one later, too.’
‘Squeezy was so cute. He filled diaper after diaper! When are you going to potty train him?’
‘Next summer,’ said Mason.
Crates of dumplings arrived: rosebuds of siu mai, winter melon bao, and some won-ton that Cherry scooped out for Casper. As I watched Zhi-Sheng dunk his bun in soya sauce, turning its milky whiteness the colour of wood-stain, I realised I was ravenous. Everything Cherry put on my plate, I ate; even the chicken feet. Zhi-Sheng said something in Putonghua, which I guessed was ‘I thought she was pescatarian’ and Mason just shrugged, and smiled at me for miles.
Zhi-Sheng had to order more. He had a long conversation with one of the trolley ladies while Cherry visibly yawned; he was always flirting with the waitresses, getting a little drunk, and flushing pink with beer.
Aida put one of the bamboo crates on her head, and said, ‘Look, I’m ma ma when she was a peasant!’ and I swatted the crate away before Cherry could see. More food was brought. Because of the video, what had gone into it, I felt so hungry. On and on I ate, and I thought: I could do this all day. I could do this all day!
‘Are you pregnant?’ Cherry said quietly.
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ I said, with a mouthful of dumpling. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’
‘You know, I couldn’t conceive in Shenzhen. All that sweet stuff in Hong Kong – the dan tat, the peanut butter pancakes! – that’s finally what made Mason.’
‘Or maybe you were less stressed?’ I said, eating the chicken foot the way I had learnt from her, with my lips closed and my mouth labouring: ‘I can’t imagine the shoe factory was very, you know, nourishing?’
For years Cherry had made knock-off Michael Jordans at a factory in Shenzhen that specialised in perfect counterfeits. She returned my gaze with a simple sweetness. ‘No. Freedom did it.’
‘How was church?’ I asked Aida.
‘A man was in the water and another man had to pull him out!’
‘He made such a loud noise!’ said Cherry. ‘So dramatic! Like he was drowning. You’re meant to fill in the form if you can’t swim.’
‘I can swim,’ said Aida, with some expectation.
‘You can wait till you’re eighteen,’ I said.
The conversation went Putonghua, and I tuned out, tranquilized by the MSG, and happy to step out of the grown-up conversation. Repetitively I fetched whatever morsel Casper threw to the floor; Mason watched Aida spin his phone on the table; and I finished off the last of the food, not before Casper had a mini meltdown about being in the high-chair. I reimagined ourselves into the famous scene of Don’t Look Now, but this time it would be the two spacey parents responding to their children in the restaurant which would be cut into the sex scene. And the audience would think: haven’t they done enough! Don’t they deserve a longer break!
I looked over at Mason, who was also lost in thought. I wondered if intimacy was fleeting, or whether you had to constantly make it. Supposedly – this was also from my websites – it couldn’t be relied on without you putting in the effort. I don’t know. Most of my friends thought I was lucky to be in love with my husband after kids. A friend’s husband now actually slept in a toddler bed, because their youngest boy would howl ‘I’m lonely, I’m lonely!’ in the night, and they’d dozily swap places at three in the morning. So yes, I felt lucky, but also…
I looked at the bones on the table. What had I done? Why had I eaten all this animal? I shivered. I felt crazy today, and unlike myself. Maybe I was doped up, on sex, on MSG; the mood felt fugue-like, and not unwelcome. There was an air freshener a little way off, and I tried to pace how long it took to spray its scent, which I realised was pine.
‘Mason,’ I said, and he turned to look at me, but I didn’t have anything to say, and he took my hand, and Cherry nodded to herself, as in confirmation. The table now was completely clear.
‘I’m glad you’ve broken the curse.’
‘She’s not pregnant, Ma,’ said Mason, exasperated. ‘We told you. No more babies.’
‘Why not? Look at Squeezy!’
We all turned to look at him. Casper leant over and bit me with his hard ridged gums.
‘Two is enough,’ Mason said, as I pried Casper off me.
‘Two is no better than a pair.’
I didn’t know what this meant.
‘Chery’s always been baby-mad,’ said Zhi-Sheng. ‘That’s why she loved Mason too much.’
‘You can’t love a baby too much,’ I said.
‘Yes, you can,’ Zhi-Sheng said, and then he watched his wife, to see how she would react.
After lunch we went to Hyde Park. Mason went ahead with the push-chair and his dad, while Aida was with me and Cherry. The day was bright and glossy, and the trees, heavy with blossom, were shook by mild winds. The heavy refrigeration of Jade Garden was beginning to thaw, and all the cultivated nearness of the restaurant had dropped away.
‘Is Mason OK?’ said Cherry, walking close to me.
I knew it took a lot for Cherry to ask me this. ‘His work is exhausting,’ I said. ‘The case-loads are bigger. The work is more complex.’
‘We could take them on a Friday night too?’
‘Then he just wouldn’t ever see the kids.’
She nodded. ‘I show the ladies at Bridge the videos of him on TV. They’re so jealous, but they don’t even know.’
‘It’s hard.’ Though I knew she wouldn’t understand, I wanted someone to talk to. ‘We say: here’s the Internet!’ I gestured to an imaginary esplanade. ‘Poke around, kids, but it’s like a dungeon in there? Rape porn, bullying, one-dollar bikinis’ – I was counting them out on my fingers – ‘beheadings, hacking, child abuse – often from each other. I mean. This is what he listens to. This is what is on his mind all the time.’
Cherry nodded but looked vacant. We passed the Peter Pan statue with the rabbits and children coming out of the aquatic black rock, and I thought of our neighbour Kelly, with her kids swarming about her skirts. ‘I grew up in a village,’ she said. ‘I have no idea.’ Cherry looked at the sculpture plangently, as if it hid all the children she had never had. ‘So you’re not pregnant?’
‘Nope.’
We carried on to the Serpentine. The light had a satiny bounce off the water, and Cherry popped on her Raybans, which made her look fantastic. ‘I never liked her,’ she said tartly as we reached the Memorial Fountain.
‘Princess Diana?’
‘What a whiner. If was a princess, I would have enjoyed myself!’
Mason and his dad had already crossed the river, and I saw Cherry gaze at them fondly. In the push-chair, Casper had nodded off, his absurd curls crowning his big forehead. Zhi-Sheng waved and blew a kiss; maybe the amatory result of the lunchtime beers.
Aida ran over to the bridge. As I watched her, I thought of our video in the future, joining the deadly slime of the Internet that had made all his teenagers’ lives miserable. The thought of someone leaking our video onto some people-powered porn hub made my face burn. Imagine if the kids, one day, found it, and watched it! I thought of Mason touching the aeroplane mode to show me his phone was off. When he’d done that, had he accidentally turned it on again? I felt intensely panicked, and texted Mason on the other side of the river: delete the video.
I saw him look at his phone. Three dots appeared as he wrote back.
The air had gone gummy and chilled, and a wind gusted through the trees. I turned, looking for Aida, who was now on the bridge. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. Over here! I wanted to say, the Coriolis Force barrelling through me. Aida, Aida, I love you! While we were in the shade, she was in the last of the sun – and the radial flames tore around her head.
NAOMI WOOD is the author of three novels, including Mrs Hemingway, and a forthcoming collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (2024). Her stories have been/will be published in the Washington Square Review, Joyland, S Magazine and Stylist. They have also been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize and the London Magazine Short Story Prize in 2022. She was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (Italy) and Nanjing Writers Residency (China) in 2022 to finish this collection.