Honking and Suckling

The radio decays into static and they are alone with the
firecrackers of the universe in the dark night. He changes hands on the
wheel, reaches down to the dial, but finds only bursts of foreign
voices and the chattering of starlight.

Her head has fallen onto his shoulder, rocking with the suspension, a
little dribble falling from the corner of her mouth. He should push her
body back, so she does not wake cramped, but her milky lack of perfume
makes him need to feel her close by.

Also, he should stop and wake her, as they agreed. The changeover point
was hours ago, somewhere in the black mirror. But, when she sleeps, she
looks peaceful as a child, the wrinkles relaxed and a flash of tooth
beneath a hint of smile. When she sleeps, what visions does she see,
are they memories? Are they truly visions, as she claims, or fragments
of her desire?

He presses on, presses the gas down, and speeds on into the night.
She's seen a better life for both of them, in a little house that has
only sky and rocks for company. That's all we need, to build a future
for us. And this must be better, surely, than the troubles that they
wrote off with a wave this morning. He moves his hand to her empty
stomach, and wonders where their child is tonight.

Madeline wakes up in stages. Firstly, she reaches down to feel the
child inside her. Secondly, she reaches out to touch the baby by her
breast. Lastly, she remembers a nurse's arms pulling him away. 'The
doctor said you shouldn't feed. Best not to form a bond. There's a good
girl now.'

'Where are we?'
'Not sure exactly, past Scotch Corner, near the border.'
'Have you got the passports?'
'They're in the bag. We'll stop before we get there and check them over
again. You can't be too careful.'
She watches the video of shadows playing across the windshield.
'We've done the right thing, haven't we?'
He keeps looking straight ahead.
'Didn't we Malcolm?'
'We did the right thing.' The temperature has dropped by degrees. The
cabin is cold and the heater too puny. 'What I wouldn't do right now,
for a proper heater. That's first on the list.'
'It's a long list,' she says.
'It's so good to be liquid again.'

She opens the glove box and shuffles things around. 'Have we any
chocolate?' She finds the estate agent's brochure and unfolds it. She
switches on the interior light to look at it again.
'Hey, don't do that. I can't see properly.'
'There's no other cars,' and she's right, there are no other cars on
the road. No headlights, taillights, nothing. He fished his torch from
the driver's door, 'use this. Don't shine it in my eyes.' Then he
switches the interior light off with a click.
In the amber torchlight, the pictures of the house look different.
Still as big, still as beautiful, with the kitchen to die for and the
acreage you could raise twenty children in. But the squares of the
windows seem the wrong proportions. Not ugly, not even suburban, but
slightly less perfect than they were. She notices a crack running
between the bedroom and the bathroom windows.
'Look there's a crack. I can't believe I didn't notice it before. That
wasn't there when I saw it before.'
'You mean, when you saw the pictures before?'
'No, when I saw the house before. You know when I mean.'

She means in her vision. He doesn't reply, because although he tries to
believe it all, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes, he thinks they're
chasing mist, shooting into the sky and finding the clouds aren't
clouds at all, but millions of sad raindrops.

They used to watch the clouds in the park. He saw boats and continents
and she saw faces and birds. Even when she traced the outlines with her
finger - there's the eyes, there's the mouth - he though they probably
saw different things. Do two people really see the same thing when they
see a shade of green or blue? If you listen to the same song, through
the same headphones even, do you hear the same sounds? When I hear a
cough in the instrumental, do you hear it? Or has the melody taken you
away?

They'd been through the same things. He was inside her when she said,
'that was it. Didn't you feel it?' and kissed his cheek. Of course, he
didn't feel anything besides relief and a fluttering of panic. And all
the times the baby kicked her, when it send her half mad and made her
drop things, his sadness grew that, in this, their most intimate
connection, he would always be a bystander. He stood by at the birth,
briefly presented with his son for inspection, before the infant was
removed and the cheque placed in his hand. Walking out of the hospital,
it felt as if they should be cradling something, but the slip of paper
was too insignificant. It had seemed like a dream, as if it never
happened, but it really had. Since, the visions, which she took to be
an extension of reality, seemed less real too.

'We need to stop soon. I'm seeping.'
'I haven't seen any pull-offs for miles.'
'We'll just stop on the edge of the road, look here, by these
rocks.'
He pulls to the other side of the road where there is less mud, and
gets out to stretch. In the eastern sky, the faintest strands of light
flecks the mountains. Below the tree line, where stonewalls mark the
fields, a tractor is scuttling towards a herd of cows, dog scampering
behind.
'It'll be dawn soon. We should sit and what the dawn.'
He crosses the road and sits on a rock, a giant pebble left by the ice
age, cold as ice to the touch. He scratches at its surface with his
fingernails, and make no impression. The pattern of shiny and black
dances before him, but he can't see anything in the static. 'Tell me
your vision again.'
She forces the car door open. She's undone her cardigan and squeezes a
swollen breast above a plastic cup. When he sees milk squirt from her
nipple, he feels strange, a little dirty and a little sick. When she
looks up, she laughs. 'Do you like me doing this?'
'No. I don't know. No, I don't think so. It doesn't seem
natural.'
'It isn't.'
He looks away again, back to the fields, watching the tractor, circling
in silence. Suddenly he can hear an engine, loud and fast, coming down
the road. A red car bounces into view. It gets closer, but she doesn't
cover up and, when the driver sees her, he honks wildly on his horn.
The passenger window rolls down. An arm shoots out, fist clenched, its
owner yelling and whooping. The driver keeps honking until it
disappears over the next ridge.
'They saw you.'
'Yes,' Madeline grins, 'they did.'
'Tell me the vision again.'
She puts down the cup, and closes her top. 'We wake together in a sun
filled bedroom, bigger that you can almost imagine. There's no mould on
the window and, when I open the window, there's no fumes, no lorries
and all I can see is countryside. In the distance, there is a lake and
we have a boat there. We go down to the lake, catch salmon, and bring
them back for breakfast.' She picks the cup back up and swirls it
around. She studies the contents as if they are tealeaves. 'The house
didn't have a crack though.'
She extends her hand into the road, tips the cup until the liquid
gathers on the rim, but doesn't flow over.
'We should be getting on,' he tells her, but they both watch the milk
defying gravity. He's tied, tiered enough to believe gravity might
fail. But it doesn't and the contents spill out, into a little white
puddle on the tarmac.

He slams the door and fires up the engine. Over the next ridge, they
can see streaks of rubber on the road, that will wash into potholes and
form pools as dark as peat. She places her hands on the
dashboard.
'Maybe,' she says, 'we should turn around.'