The Ice is Singing by Jane Rogers

Author:Jane Rogers [Jane Rogers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857869500
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2012-09-18T09:07:12+00:00

Sun. 23

And more recently, Marion? On the more recent occasion of you leaving your children, your younger children, your baby twins – did you make any provision for their welfare in your absence?

It was not the same. And I did make provision. Sensible Sarah was in the bath, the twins sleeping in their cots. After her bath she would come down to watch News at Ten with me, and find my note and the money on the kitchen table. She came from Edinburgh to help me with the twins; she had come to shoulder the very responsibility I left her with. The babies are not abandoned, they are left with a responsible aunt, better able to care for them and look after them than I.

I try to imagine them and I can’t. I try to imagine them crying, but I can’t see their faces – or decide which one I’d be looking at. I try to confront the damage I may have done to them; the gaping insecurity opened up under their scarcely balancing baby feet. I consider how I may have scarred the new lives entrusted to me.

But I hardly can. They are shadowy. I have never been able to see them. And by leaving them, I relinquished control.

With Ruth and Vi I couldn’t bear to. It was like handing over control of my own body, letting someone else eat and sleep and breathe for me. I knew how to do every little thing for them, down to the smallest detail; how they should be got up and washed in the morning, how potted and dressed, how breakfasted and groomed. Each detail of their daily routine was as clear in my head as my own, and the notion of someone else doing it – of any of it being done differently – appalled me. I remember Sunday mornings when Gareth offered me a lie-in, and I lay fretfully in bed listening to him forgetting to clean their teeth and not knowing which drawer the clean socks were in, until I came to dread Sunday more than any other day of the week. Once or twice I stupidly got up and barged in to help. He was furious.

I controlled them. I owned them. Their attention was mine to dispose. How I showed them – everything. Look at the doggy / horse / pretty flower / trees in the wind / sun on the sea / boy in the book / girl on the bicycle. Listen to the fire engine, burglar-alarm, ice-cream van. Smell the roses, shoe polish, niffy cheese. Look listen learn say; they were mine to give the world to and the world was mine to give them.

When Ruth was three I took her to a mothers and toddlers group. Vi was asleep in her pram. It was raining, and the church annexe we were in echoed with the pattering of rain on roof and windows; was full of the smells of floor polish and damp hair and old wood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.