Soldier Sailor (eBook)

Claire Kilroy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-37558-5 (ISBN)

Infos

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 The Times Novel of the Year And a Guardian, FT, Economist, Irish Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Irish Independent and Independent Book of the Year 'One of the finest novels published this year.' Sunday Times 'I could not put it down.' ANNE ENRIGHT 'It's very moving, also very funny.' PAUL MURRAY 'My favourite book I've read this year.' PANDORA SYKES 'I lived and breathed beside her narrator.' DAISY JOHNSON In her wildly acclaimed new novel Claire Kilroy creates an unforgettable heroine, whose fierce love for her young son clashes with the seismic change to her own identity. As her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy, creativity and the passing of time, an old friend makes a welcome return - but can he really offer a lifeline to the woman she used to be? Readers adore Soldier Sailor: ***** 'About as perfect a piece of writing as you'll find.' ***** 'Unbearably tense and frequently hilarious.' ***** 'An entirely different voltage to anything I've read ... she somehow manages to verbalise *exactly* the feelings and thoughts I, certainly, had at points when I was a young mother' ***** 'This story touched me on such a visceral level.' ***** 'I was held captive by this novel ... an utterly absorbing depiction of motherhood' ***** 'I loved this book. Any woman, with or without children, will see themselves mirrored in this narrative' ***** 'An excellent, interesting and rather unforgettable creation.'

Claire Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as 'compelling ... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed. Educated at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin.

Textauszug

TWO

I opened my eyes. You can sleep standing up. Another lesson learned the hard way. I’d been back in that dream, that hideous dream I used to get about you, when your father asked whether I was going to it.

‘To what?’ I responded in mild alarm. What had I forgotten this time? And why had I come to the fridge? You were on my hip. You were always on my hip. My body had twisted to adapt to your weight like those windblown trees that grow by cliffs. My belly button still isn’t central.

‘To that.’ He tapped the flyer held to the fridge door by a magnet. The primary colours of the Baby and Toddler Group – toy blocks, handprints, ABCs – images that are patronising, now that I think about it, given the target audience is not the infant but the adult who brings the infant along, the invariably female adult. ‘I thought you said you were bringing him to that.’

‘What day is it?’

‘Thursday.’

‘Oh.’ Every Thursday morning! said the flyer. ‘The bins have to go out.’

‘You should bring him to that,’ concluded the Child Developmental Specialist. ‘Socialise him,’ he added, a word he had picked up from me.

I had been talking about socialising you at the Baby and Toddler Group for weeks although now apparently it was his idea. Problem was I couldn’t get out of the house on time. It was difficult to explain the obstacles to my husband because they weren’t obstacles he recognised. They weren’t obstacles I’d recognised before having you, the whole three-steps-forwards, two-steps-back racket. Since becoming mobile, you could undo faster than I could do.

It wasn’t yet fully bright outside. My husband was already dressed, his hair damp from the shower. I was still in my pyjamas. ‘Em.’ I opened the fridge and stared at the contents, hoping for a clue. They were sockets, my eyes. Two hot holes bored into my skull. ‘I feel more tired than when I went to bed.’

‘Bad night?’

Silly question. All nights were bad. Your father still slept in the box room. ‘I just don’t feel able for today.’

‘I’m sorry, honey.’

‘I need to get some work done. Maybe when you’re home, you can do his bedtime?’

‘I’m working late again.’

Yes, the office. His suit, his tie. My pyjamas, my postpartum body. A roll of flab for my role of flab. Engage the core, the ab app exhorted me. What did that even mean?

Still no idea why I’d come to the fridge. I swung the door shut again.

‘Milk,’ my husband reminded me.

I pulled the door open and handed him the milk.

‘Jesus Christ, is that all that’s left?’

‘Sorry.’ Milk was my responsibility.

Schlep schlep in my slippers, a slab of flab crossing the floor. I tried to lower you into your high chair but you screamed and clung on, monkey baby. I took you back onto my hip. ‘That hurts, darling,’ I said, untangling my hair from your fingers.

‘Here’s your tea.’ My husband held out the cup. He could see my hands were full.

‘Thanks. Leave it on the counter.’

‘Put him down.’

‘I can’t.’

I could feel him taking me in – the pyjamas, the unwashed hair, the ineffectiveness. ‘I’m not incompetent,’ I told him. ‘I’m exhausted. There’s a difference.’

‘I didn’t say you were incompetent.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I’m just saying: put him down.’

‘And I’m just saying: I can’t.’

‘Of course you can put him down.’

‘I can’t. I can’t listen to him scream. I literally can’t. It scrambles my brain. You don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t. He’s a baby. Babies scream.’

‘How about you put him into the chair?’ I angled you around to face him. You reached out to your dadda.

He gestured at his suit. You were a barfer, Sailor, a dry-cleaning hazard. He glanced at his phone. ‘I’ve got to go to work.’

‘Lucky you,’ I remarked flatly.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘At least you can go. At least you can work.’

‘Man goes to work. What a bastard.’

‘I can’t do my work any more.’

‘No one’s stopping you.’

I gesticulated at you.

‘So get up earlier. Get up at five.’

I thought I might burst into tears at that. The membrane was thin that day. The membrane between coping and not. But I’m so tired! I wanted to weep. ‘You get up at five,’ I said instead.

I followed him out to the hall, schlep schlep. He put on his new navy wool coat. The three of us in the hall mirror. You, me and Hugo Boss. We no longer looked like a married couple. What’s he doing with her?

‘Bye bye, Dadda,’ I said on your behalf, waving your little hand. Your father kissed us both before closing the door, a guillotine severing me from my world. Which is not to say that your father was my world, but that he was free to roam in my world, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I’d been banished. Now I lived in your world. It was small.

I had missed my window for a shower. I had missed it yesterday too. Whenever yesterday was. You started to grizzle. Schlep schlep back down the hall. Seven thirty-five. Thirteen more hours to go.

*

I sorted the washing into three piles. The whites, the coloureds, the dark wash. The coloureds had it by a nose. All your bright babygrows and sleep sacks. I stuffed them into the washing machine. To entice you off my hip, I’d set you up with those purple detergent capsules, the ones that look like big jellies.

That’s a joke. I’d given you the bottle of bleach.

Relax. You had your cars, okay? I’m not saying I was a great mother but I did my best. You’re alive, aren’t you?

I went through each item of laundry, pretreating the stains. So many stains, none of them mine. Word of advice: don’t leave all your washing to your partner. I couldn’t bear for anyone to resent you. Especially someone under your own roof. You might be murdered in your bed.

Though you won’t. It’s the women who are murdered.

I read the dosage instructions and still didn’t know whether the water in my area was hard or soft.

You were learning free will that day. The very thing I was losing, you were gaining in inverse proportion, your independence premised on dismantling mine. You threw down a car and whined. I tossed your elephant top into the machine, set off the wash, and picked you up. ‘Okay, darling, let’s have breakfast.’

I tried again to insert your legs into the high chair and again you shrieked and this time yanked my hair. ‘Ow!’ I objected. In your fist, a thin lock, which we both frowned at. I had already lost so much hair. Already threadbare. You took your soother out of your mouth and stuffed my hair in instead.

I tried to get breakfast ready with you on my hip, but it involved kettles and microwaves and your flossy head lunging forward at intervals to get a better look. So I deposited you out of harm’s way on the playmat and scattered a few toys around you.

You screamed and the toys were sent flying. You screamed while I stirred and buttered and poured, while I gulped the tea my husband had left on the counter. Normally I would have relented and picked you up but I’d had it after the hair incident. I had had it that morning as I had had it every morning and every afternoon and every evening since you were about six months old, since it had dawned on me that this was my life now, this was freelance motherhood: struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own, which were louder and angrier and scared us both.

Your screaming rose an octave. I clapped my palms to my burning eye sockets and then to my ears. ‘Shut up!’ I was suddenly yelling, ‘just shut the fuck up!’ I had had it so then you did it. You were up on all fours. You tilted your head back before walloping it hard against the floor.

The sound was like a watermelon dropping from a height. No: the sound was like a baby’s skull hitting a tiled floor. My baby’s skull. Which wasn’t even closed yet, which still had a soft spot at the crown, your fontanelle; further reminder, where none was needed, of your fragility.

You howled as you lined yourself up to do it again. I sprang forward and inserted my slippered foot. Your head came down on it with some force. You...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.5.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: A Life's Work • Anne Enright • Making Babies • Nightbitch • Rachel Cusk • Rachel Yoder • Sarah Moss
• ISBN-10: 0-571-37558-8 / 0571375588
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-37558-5 / 9780571375585