GHOST CHILD

The story that bagged the ELLE fiction competition.

THE GHOST CHILD APPEARS early one morning. Clem notices it on her way to the toilet. It sits in the hallway, sucking on one of the dog’s bones. She is surprised that the child can pick up the bone with its transparent hands. Surprised to see the bone wet with saliva. But not so much that she stops to look for long. Sleepy and cold, she needs to wee and the child seems content enough. Clem wees and goes back to bed. “There’s a ghost child in the hall,” she says, pulling the doona over her head.

Eli mutters something and gets up. Moments later, he climbs back into bed and confirms that, yes, there is a ghost child in the hall. “What shall we do about it?” he asks. “Sleep on it,” says Clem. The ghost child is in the kitchen when they get up. Playing with the dog’s water bowl. Butch, the dog, is sitting there watching, managing to look both curious and affronted. The child is dipping the TV remote in and out of the water and laughing.

Clem and Eli agree that the child has a nice laugh. It makes them laugh.

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.

Clem prepares a lecture on the film Alien. She is going to discuss motherhood. The monstrous feminine. The abject.

It’s early and Eli is still asleep. Clem couldn’t sleep. She had felt nauseous. Laid there from 3am until 5am, before finally slipping out from the warmth and turning on her computer.

There is a picture of the alien bursting from John Hurt’s stomach up on the screen. Clem is scribbling down notes about borders being violated, bodies transgressed, blood, guts, vomit, semen, shit and piss. Identity, subjectivity threatened, destabilised.

She shivers as an icy breeze passes over her feet and ankles. She looks down. The child looks up at her, legs crossed, sitting at her feet, playing with her slippers. Rubbing its hands over them, through them.

It has a widow’s peak just like Eli. Pale shadows beneath the eyes, soft blooms, which match his. Clem’s never noticed this before. Normally its outlines are vague, barely discernible. But right now, they seem a little more solid. Gelatinous. Shimmering like liquid mercury. Clem’s stomach churns. She runs for the toilet. Her period is late, but when she does a test there is only one line. It could be too early to tell or maybe she’s just late.

Clem googles early signs of pregnancy and how long it can take to get a positive test result. She reads the comments in baby forums. One woman says she didn’t get a positive test until eight weeks. Another says she continued to get her period well into her pregnancy. Another says she has been trying for 14 months now and is giving up hope of naturally conceiving. She says she’s scared.

Clem reads this last one several times before giving up her search.

Cramps. Not too painful, but uncomfortable enough to wake her. To make it difficult to sleep.

She bleeds for 12 days. Brown, then bright red. Winecoloured clots.

On the twelfth day, Clem books an appointment with her doctor. By the time of the appointment, the bleeding has stopped. Clem is apologetic. She feels as if she’s wasting the doctor’s time. It was probably a freak period, she thinks. Or cancer.

“It could be an early miscarriage,” the doctor tells her, eyes sympathetic, tone gentle. “Oh, okay,” says Clem. She goes for a drive. Stops at a servo and buys a fat donut with pink icing and rainbow sprinkles. She goes to the lookout spot at the nearby airfield to watch the planes take off and land. Modest Mouse plays from her phone.

The icing on the donut is wet and sticks to the paper bag when she pulls it out. It’s stale when she bites into it. But she eats it anyway, watching the planes cross a sky that turns from mauve and gold to cobalt, listening to Modest Mouse sing – “And we’ll all float on okay.”

“Where have you come from?” Clem asks ghost child. “Who do you belong to?”

But ghost child is too busy touching the bricks around the fireplace, feeling them, smelling them, tasting them, tracing the cracks, to answer. At 2:48 in the morning, ghost child begins to bawl.

Clem burrows under the blanket. Eli gets up. Clem spreads out on her stomach, lying with her head pressed against the warm sheets, Eli’s smell. Rexona, sweat. Eli comes back in and turns the light on. “I can’t find him,” he says. “Help me look.” They search the house, but ghost child is nowhere to be found. Ghost child’s cries fill every room.

Clem sneaks out the back and sits in her dressing gown with a wheel of brie and a cigarette. She eats half the wheel. She smokes the cigarette, watching the stars. The house is quiet when she goes back in. Eli tells her she stinks when she climbs into bed. He doesn’t mention ghost child. “I’ll change the sheets in the morning,” she says. She lies there in the dark, listening to Eli breathe. She feels empty even though she’s full of cheese. “Is ghost child yours?” Clem asks. Eli is playing Super Smash Bros on the Wii. “Hang on,” he says. “I’ve almost got this.” He doesn’t. He swears and throws down the controller. “What?” “Ghost child, is she yours?” “I think so,” he says. “Isn’t he ours?” Clem looks at ghost child, who is sitting quietly with a book about succulents. The book is upside down. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. They sit in silence, watching ghost child turn pages. Clem begins doing the pregnancy tests earlier and earlier. As if she might be able to catch the double line unawares. Feeling that this might prevent the flow of blood. Trick it somehow. It doesn’t. Instead her periods come earlier and earlier. She bleeds intermittently between cycles. She worries she’s menopausal. She worries about becoming anaemic. All she seems to do is bleed. Sometimes, when Clem goes to touch Eli’s shoulder to tell him something, it’s as if her hand passes straight through him and her voice disappears. He carries on with whatever he’s doing until she tries again – her hand meeting solid flesh, her voice barking “Eli!” “Shit!” he’ll say, jumping, “Where’d you come from?” “It’s taking longer than I thought,” says Eli. This takes Clem by surprise. More his articulation of the thought than the thought itself. She starts to cry.

“Her period IS LATE, but when she does a test there is only ONE LINE”

“Hey,” says Eli, putting his arm round her. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t mean anything by it. I think it can take a while. And if it doesn’t happen, then it doesn’t. No big deal.”

But it is a big deal. Clem can feel the weight of it, it sits inside her. Ghost child watches her. “Besides,” says Eli, “the problem could be with me.” But Clem doesn’t think so. Clem goes for an HSG scan. She has given blood, she’s peed in a cup, all based on where in her cycle she is even though she doesn’t know what her cycle is anymore. And now this.

Naked from the waist down in a hospital gown, she lies on her back with three people around her. The radiologist, a nurse and a nursing student. The latter just there to observe. Next to her, on a screen, she can see an X-ray image of her pelvis. Bones.

Clem is a skeleton woman. A skeleton woman with a ghost child. The radiologist tells her that it’s a bit like a pap smear, but that she’ll insert a catheter and through the catheter flood the uterine area with dye.

“You might cramp up a bit when the dye goes in, like a period,” she tells Clem, “but we’ll be able to see if everything’s in order. The dye will fill the uterus and then the fallopian tubes.”

On the screen, Clem watches the catheter enter her, long and white and thin. It pushes up into the cavity amid her bones. She thinks of the game Snake she used to play on her old Nokia and wonders if the line will just keep on moving and growing and moving and growing. Then, out of the end of the white line, darkness blooms. Fills her uterus. But it doesn’t fill the fallopian tubes. Not everything’s in order. Clem doesn’t have to show Eli the scan. By the time she gets home, she is less solid, less real, than the X-ray itself. “Look,” she says. “My fallopian tubes have gone AWOL.” Eli tells her it will be okay. Clem drinks a bottle of red wine on an empty stomach while googling fallopian-tube blockages. And then she drinks another bottle. And then she throws up on the bathroom floor and in her hair, missing the toilet.

Ghost child lets out a long squeal and clenches its fists, dropping to the floor. Stunned, Clem watches. Ghost child’s legs are running nowhere; face screwed up, mouth wide.

“I’m the one that should be having a tantrum,” says Clem, and notices peas in the vomit. When Clem sees her GP, he tells her the scan is ambiguous. “There could be a blockage or perhaps your tubes just spasmed. It is an uncomfortable procedure, after all.”

Clem could see her tubes doing this – freaking out and closing up. Maybe even just to embarrass her. Or from performance anxiety.

“But,” says the doctor, “further testing will need to be done. Just to be sure. I’ll have to refer you and your partner to a fertility clinic and they’ll probably recommend an ultrasound. And then, if there is a blockage, probably laparoscopic surgery. Otherwise, IVF might be the other way to go.”

Clem doesn’t like the idea of further poking and prodding, insertions and harvesting. She hates being made aware of her corporeality. She hates having to make a decision like this.

The doctor says, “We’ll also need a sperm sample from your partner as it can be a combination of issues with both parties.”

Clem feels a little better. She’s solid enough to take a hold of the X-rays and test results without them slipping through her fingers.

Clem tells Eli he has to see the doctor about his sperm. He looks put out. Clem wants Eli to be a little put out after all her smiley faces and vitamins and catheters and blood tests and peeing on things. She wonders if any fertility procedures for men involves the insertion of a catheter. Just to check everything’s in order. Or just for kicks. Clem sits on the floor with the ghost child. “I don’t know what I want to do,” she tells it. Ghost child looks at her with interest.

“I’m scared,” says Clem. “I’m scared we’ll do this and nothing will happen, and I’m scared that we’ll do it and something will happen.” Ghost child nods. Clem can see it understands. “It’s just I don’t know what I’m getting if it does.” And then adds: “I’m teaching Rosemary’s Baby this week so I guess that’s weighing on my mind.”

Ghost child laughs. And this makes Clem smile. It is a nice laugh.

“It also scares me there might be something really wrong. Perhaps I don’t want to know.” Ghost child nods. “But then I think I’ve gone too far. I can’t not know. I can’t not try,” she says. And then, “I just feel lost.”

And ghost child takes her hand and it’s an odd feeling, barely there, cool like water, but comforting. Ghost child smiles. It’s a lovely smile. Clem likes it. It is, she thinks, a bit like her smile.

E“She WONDERS if any fertility procedures for MEN involve a catheter”