Sonography

a short story about motherhood and learning to listen

He comes along the ribbon road, her son, a squat black shape across the yellowed moor. Bel picks at the doorframe’s peeling paint and watches him come. There must be something wrong: she heard it in his voice last night. Blue flakes fall on her bare feet and on the cold stone step. She used to know him well, or thought she did. Now, this distance. He’s taking forever to cross it, but he is crossing it, and she won’t have him finding her here waiting. Inside, she moves from room to room like her own idea of a mother, looking for something to pretend to do, waiting to see who he is now.

She goes to the yoga mat and steps on, shifts her weight and closes her eyes. There are eyeballs in the soles of her feet and they can see. She looks down through them and it lines her up right through: bones, muscles, joints, all quicken with attention. It’s been four months, the longest they have ever been apart. He wasn’t meant to come home yet. When she thinks of him in Donegal, working in that hostel for the homeless, she imagines it grown out of the cliff itself, Atlantic waves battering its walls, bearded bright-eyed men shuffling along the corridors. She imagines a lighthouse beam travelling through his room at night like a slow heartbeat. His pals are having far-flung gap years. She would have wished more ease for him, more warmth.

The morning sun is still low slung and makes her almost blind. Spider webs catch dreams in every window. Simon being Simon he wouldn’t fly home, wouldn’t even let her drive and collect him from the ferry, had to throw himself on life’s mercy and into the cab of a passing truck, some lonely lorry driver probably, reciting a life story. It’s what folk always do with Simon, always have. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, the silent unseen world beneath. She feels it all along her spine. Birdsong. Wind in the trees. There’s something wrong. His voice was muffled on the line as if he was ashamed. She heard the beat in it, a hurt that neither of them named, words bounding to and fro across the air. She had to keep asking him to repeat himself.

She folds from the hips. Forehead to knees she listens into quiet. Breath opens in her back. Ribs move apart. She sees his face, but at the age of two or so, a small fold of worry between the eyebrows, the large and earnest eyes looking up at her through years. Last night, putting the phone back in her bag, unable to get to him, she thought of the sonographer again. Claire her name was, Claire for light. It has stayed with Bel two decades now. While half her current yoga class are little more than a blur of Jeans and Janes, of black Lycra and blue, Claire – her name at least – has stayed. Not surprising considering her line of work, what she could show you.

That day Bel had sat in the waiting room with a hand across her stomach, trying to know, one way or the other, about the tiny creature supposed to be growing inside her. Her own line of work, after all, involved the ability to know, to know the body from the inside out. She couldn’t tell. Even the pose itself, one she had seen pregnant women adopt, was a pose and nothing more. It seemed so unlikely, pregnancy, both that it could happen to her and that it could happen at all – as if someone might still tell her she’d imagined the whole thing. The woman across the waiting room, Bel thought, though clearly in pain – her head bowed close to her companion’s shoulder – was coping surprisingly well. She thought this as if the woman’s situation had nothing to do with her own.

Bel heard her name called then and bounded Tigger-cheerful across the room. This was Claire, though at that point she was only the sonographer. Bel could tell from Claire’s face that the wide smile spreading on her own wasn’t quite the thing. Claire looked like somebody trying to decide if a joke is funny before allowing themselves to laugh. We’re going this direction, she said, but her voice didn’t go any direction. Bel followed her along the corridor. She was small and slight. The uniform was wearing her. It was wonderful, the way she’d learned to keep herself in neutral, that voice that didn’t hint at no, or yes.

It had been the day before that Bel had felt something run out of her in the supermarket as she squatted to get a jar of good honey from a low shelf. Since then there had been time to tell the story to herself. To tell it both ways. That everything was fine. That it was over. The uncertainty was energising. She wasn’t sure which one she wanted to be true.

There was a dither at the door as the two women waited for the other to go in first, then they were inside under soft lights and here was a bed already covered with its paper sheet, anticipating the body’s uncleanliness. The machine lurked in the corner, a bulky grey oracle, a long shadow that emitted a low hum, chanting almost, except it didn’t need to take a breath. Claire gestured to the bed. Bel took off her shoes, bare feet black between the toes from the studio floor. As Bel lay down, Claire started to reel off instructions like she was reading from an autocue: if you could just push the leggings down to the hips; if you could tuck that paper towel into the waistband; if you could raise the t-shirt up above the stomach. The machine waited, its patience limitless.

This might be cold, Claire said, applying gel to Bel’s pale stomach. She put the probe on then, moving it from side to side. It might take a moment to see what’s going on, she said. The ceiling was made of those polystyrene squares. Bel thought down to her feet, to the eyeballs in the soles. The machine kept humming, like a person might if they were trying to pretend everything was fine, when it wasn’t fine.

Bel spoke up, over it. How does it work?

Claire glanced up. This thing? It uses sound above the range of human hearing to create an image of the body’s deep structures.

Outside the range of human hearing, Bel said.

Yes.

Deep structures.

It was like Claire was looking at Bel for the first time. Basically we’re looking for a heartbeat, she said.

The machine kept humming. Claire turned back to the screen, angled away from Bel so she wouldn’t be able to see for herself.

You’re still having some bleeding, Claire said.

A bit.

And the cramping?

A bit less than yesterday if anything, Bel said. So I don’t know.

Claire nodded and glanced at the machine, as if it too might speak. Then she said, Sorry. And in the pause that followed there was a flicker inside Bel, almost a decision, something that said No: as in, No that’s not what I want, or No there must be a mistake, or No, that thing has got it wrong.

Take it easy. Early morning muscles are cold muscles. Fifty-five now. Still, thank God for a body that serves. And Bel would thank God if she had a god to thank beyond attentiveness, beyond attending to the object and the object itself: this life. The same mat now for decades, the same routine, same floorboards to look at: make it new. Stepping into a kind of dark despite the slanting sun that laps at her bare toes. Because one day it’s a different part of the foot that needs to go down, or up, and that shifts everything. All along the arrow of her body things spiral, shift, rotate. She forgets the names. She’s given up with the names. They don’t stick, however many anatomy books she reads. Tibia. Fibula. Whatever. Sometimes in the middle of a class she finds she’s prattling like a child, using sounds you wouldn’t find in any dictionary, because they’re more precise. They humour her, her students: those ladies of a certain age with their Lycra and their jokes, their bravery. They’ve stuck with her and she with them, for decades sometimes. She has come to know the particular heft and shape of this one’s calf, seen that one’s limbs lighten to become wings, watched as a shoulder tight with some old heartbreak learn to soften.

She eases her body up to standing and lopes over to the door. Outside Simon is close enough that she can recognise the gait, the loose swing of his limbs and the rhythmic bounce of the heels. Today she tries to read his state of mind in it, an added weight perhaps, though maybe that’s just the rucksack he carries. He’s still not close enough for her to see his face. Low sun washes over everything so that he shimmers as he comes, his edges soft.

In the picture books she read him as a child the sun always had its rays. He grew up drawing it that way, as if it was the only way. But the sun doesn’t have rays, not like that, and not hanging in the sky above a pointyroofed, four-windowed house. She’d watched him learning the conventions, unlearning how to look. She never knew whether to go along with it, though he seemed to learn more from what she did than what she said, which was a worry in itself. And now this bloody-minded job at the end of the earth just the latest example of an almost religious need in him to go against the grain, this getting battered by the waves: hearing that in his voice last night.

He falters in his walking like he’s seen her. She steps back from the door. Sometimes when she thinks of him she feels tiny, like he’s looking at her across a great distance, putting her safely in the past. The room is cut across with sun. She walks right through it, back onto the mat and bends over backwards, walking her hands down the wall towards her feet. Mum’s the word for her, the sign. She tries to act against it, won’t make pancakes for breakfast, even though she wants to, even though he’ll be hungry. She tries to think what casual thing she’ll say as he stumbles through the door.

Sorry, Claire said. I’m just going to having to press a bit. It might be a tad uncomfortable. There was a pause then like a silence in music that shapes the sound, and then she said, It’s good news.

Bel had turned thirty-five that spring. Perhaps that was why she’d started to want a child. All that talk on the radio about fertility, women leaving it too late. She had started to read about the signs of ovulation and to take her temperature each day. Three months in a row she’d gone to the same city pub, timing her visits to the date of peak fertility. She had picked one that was quiet enough she could sit at the bar on her own without drawing comment, but peppy enough that, if she spotted someone tall with regular features, someone who seemed nice, or nice enough, there would be a good chance he would be looking for the same thing as her – or almost the same thing. It had been a kind of game, the odds good but far from certain: wanting it but never quite choosing.

Do you want to see? Claire crossed the room to press a button on the screen above the bed. Bel understood then how it might have gone, how the screen might have stayed dark, that Claire might have spoken the kind words she had learned to say, then ushered Bel out of the door into another room, that Bel would not have seen this otherworld.

Instead, back by the machine, Claire said, This is the head here, the back, the feet. She was doing something so that an arrow on the screen pointed at different parts of the image. It was like snorkelling, like sticking your face into the water and opening your eyes. Can you see the heartbeat?

Bel couldn’t. Claire zoomed in. She pointed with the arrow. There, she said. And there it was: a tiny, rhythmic dither in the grey.

Fifty-six millimetres long not including the legs, Claire said.

Bel, laughing. Fifty-six? Knowing she would have to go back up to breathe, and then the white shape looming just beyond the glass, floating in the murk.

Claire was taking more measurements. This is the brain. Big brain. Good heart, strong. Two arms, two legs.

That sounds about right, Bel said.

Then, as Bel remembers, they sat together and looked at the screen in silence. Curled like a question mark, the creature shifted in its private underwater cell, a hermit in a cave, a seahorse in its rock pool, alone, complete, its requirements simple and met. It was like a kind of eavesdropping, the creature filling the screen, its back rhythmically flexing updown updown updown, oblivious. And that was her, Bel. Cave. Rock pool. Home. That creature had been in there for weeks now without her knowing anything, except in the abstract, the two of them two sides of the same coin, joined but hidden from each other.

Claire pressed a button then and the machine took a different viewpoint, moving further back to show the little creature jumping up and down on froggy legs. It made them laugh, Bel and Claire, Claire and Bel.

How can I not feel that, Bel asked. That machine knows more about me than I do.

Yes and no, Claire said.

It’s a marvel, Bel said, though in fact, now she looked at it straight on, the machine’s bulk seemed unremarkable, like some oversized bit of office equipment – a photocopier perhaps. What else can it tell me?

It’s not telepathic, Claire said. It just shows you what’s there.

She was typing something into a computer. Bel looked at her face in the screen’s glow, the tug of something puckering the pale skin between her eyebrows. Whatever it was remained unsaid, just outside the range of human hearing, some grief perhaps, some loss of love, something done or left undone: the ghost of an image drawn in sound.

She stopped typing and stood up. She smiled. Try not to worry, she said.

After that a nurse in blue came in with the paperwork. At some point Bel must have been given the black-and-white print out, but as far as she remembers she didn’t see Claire again. She still has it stuck to the fridge, browned around the edges now and brittle. Chin tucked into his chest, one arm behind the head, Simon floats at ease, a small, bunched hand above him in the dark like an uncertain moon. Bel peers at the image, as she has so many times, as if there’s a mystery in it she hasn’t yet solved. Like any photograph it seems to offer knowledge, until you realise that, like light from a star, it shows you only what’s no longer there.

She’d like to say that was the day they met, but perhaps there wasn’t a single meeting – certainly not the moment of conception, in a sad high-rise with all the lights on, and not the moment of birth, Bel so drugged on gas and air that she’d hardly been able to keep her eyes open, let alone do the bonding thing she’d heard so much about. Their meeting had begun inaudibly, a conversation that, by the time she heard it, was already underway. Still, she was the first world he learned. The image is evidence of a sort: somewhere along the way the conversation had begun, they did meet, there was a time when he belonged with her and she with him.

She hears the scrape of feet on the step outside. She goes to the door and pulls. It sticks: sticks and gives, and here he is, a bag slung over one shoulder, the man-shaped bulk of him still a surprise, the moor behind containing all the yellows: ochre, lemon, custard, acid, fear. She meets him eye to eye. She reaches a hand across the space between them.

This story originally appeared in Ambit Magazine.