‘Functioning’ by Jeanne Sutton

A staff member at the school rings Claudia on a Tuesday in May to confirm her son Harry is starting in September. He’s risen up the waiting list; the woman’s voice down the line is clear. It holds the audible inflection of a smile. A ‘well done you’ tone.

Before the conversation, Claudia had been staring at her phone screen where Harry’s jam-covered cheeks burst up at her. Her phone has been on silent for two years now, so nothing trilled to signal the call. No heralding trumpets, no slow march of warning. Instead, Harry’s grin is interrupted by a silent pulsing red and green transmission. Her son’s face reminds her of the world. Claudia doesn’t recognize the number. She traces and drags the under-glass graphic upwards with her index finger to accept.

At first, the chat is stilted. You’re Harry’s mother. Good news. The start date. No uniform. Some materials and forms will be in your inbox by day’s end. We actually have an app for after-school activities, but maybe wait until he’s a little older. This will all be a big change for him, and you.

By the end of the call, Claudia’s face is overheated. Her replies are affirmatives and promises to check out everything. Her husband is in work and probably wouldn’t be home until late. She will tell him about the phone call tonight as they go through another box set. She suspects the school didn’t call him. He is only Harry’s father.

Claudia goes for a walk. Instead of taking a turn for the park as per, she crosses the junction near her home and heads towards town. She has a list of tasks on her phone that could be performed anytime – why not now? Some parents call into the daycare around this time to sit with their children as they eat lunch.

On Harry’s first day there three years ago he found a jigsaw and threw the pieces in the bin. A staff member said to Claudia theirs must be an anti-clutter house. Claudia held her tongue but her face was a barely-holding-on fizzy bottle cap after a shake. She wanted to take off her boot and a thin expensive sock and show that childminder, whose face and name she later forgot, a Lego-imprinted flap of flesh hanging off her arch.

In an over-lit pharmacy, she picks up some heavily advertised shampoo and conditioner, adding discounted slimy tissue masques to the pile. Magnesium supplements, which a friend told her would help her sleep, are also bandied into the basket; their shake-shake-shake a bell on a cat.

Harry had asked for a dog for his sixth birthday. Claudia told him he was let look after a pet when he was a ‘big’ age and he had decided the upside down balloon was that. The upcoming date is starred in the 18-month diary she regularly orders from a Swedish stationery company.

Claudia is supposed to be weaning herself off other sleeping aids. When the US news shows her husband watches speak about that country’s opioid crisis, she feels judged for needing drugs to sleep. Not guilty. She has stopped reading women’s websites because they mostly assume blue screens and bad blinds thwart slumber. Boring recommendations of lavender spray close Claudia off, like a tulip in the dark.

She adds child-friendly chewable vitamin C to her purchases. Schools are petri dishes in a warm fridge. Sticky fingerprints bloom with germs, akin to reverse motion videos of dandelion fluff blowing away.

Over the next two hours, Claudia weighs down her tote bag with a violet and lime green bra and knickers set from Marks & Spencer. She is slowly embracing lace half cups again. Nude coloured reinforced and stiff underwear had sandbagged her flesh rounded and smooth the past four years. Her body has shed its motherhood hangover. It is moving onto a new stage. Her stomach has no need for pillow softness now. Her nipples no longer look farmed. She adds some boy’s clothes to the pile. There is no uniform at Harry’s school. It is one for all faiths. None in the case of the Irish children.

At the time, five years ago, Claudia was nervous about putting Harry’s name down. It was a very competitive process. Her baby was only weeks old and scrambled in the Moses basket when she rang the school to ask about enrollment. The voice at the end of the line tsked and warned Claudia she had left it very late. Claudia felt a flash of anger at another woman telling her that in between feeds, cries, arguments, boiling glass, feeling like she was never going to be pretty again and whispering prayers of sorry to her baby as she trimmed his nails, that she was supposed to have thought half a decade ahead. A small lifetime. She knew her husband wanted Harry in this school, so she accepted the smug judgment. She turned the cheek and thought: Harry will probably never have to endure this feminine whiplash. As her dignity took a battering, her son smiled up at her from his bed of organic cotton, his gums wet ham. She rang two other schools to cover her bases.

When her husband comes home that evening, earlier than they both expected, Claudia bakes some chicken, potatoes and greens. In bed that night she tells him about the phone call and Harry’s mild victory. She kept saying we were very lucky, Claudia shares with the dark. He gives her a tight hug they both swiftly abandon. They had perfected their Morse code clutches in the early days of dating – when someone expressed an opinion they both knew was dodgy, support signals; if one of them wanted to speed up party goodbyes, short bursts to remind each other of their entwined perspective.

The next morning Claudia wakes early and makes porridge before heading to a weightlifting class. She doesn’t know the names of any of the women in the studio with her but they acknowledge each other with smiles and nods and comments about the weather. Most of them share the same concerns about bone density and paid parking. She is home again by a quarter past nine.

Claudia went to the 10 o’clock class once, last year. It was full of new mothers. Babies could be left in their little car seats in the corner of the room, a cute spate of wild mushrooms gurgling and bashing soft felt toys away from their splayed laps and onto the painted concrete floor. The instructor joked that settling your baby only counted towards her class if you got some squats in. Claudia vomited after that session in the café toilet next door. The hot milky drink she ordered for comfort rose fast up her throat. It barely dropped into her stomach. The bowl over which her head hung, liquid dripping fast from her lips, looked full of blitzed sclera. She texted her husband and he fetched her. Claudia found a new café in the area to decompress after weights. She cut back on dairy. It was only boiling vomit in her.

The summer passes in milestones. She rings a florist for them all. Her in-laws had an anniversary celebration. Her sister married at a venue beside a lake. Harry’s fifth birthday.

In early August Claudia tells her husband she had a chat with her old manager and that the company has a role starting in a few weeks. They want her to consider taking it. He reaches across the table of the local restaurant they eat at one evening a week, and squeezes her hand. Claudia is actually looking forward to returning. She misses banal chatter in the communal kitchen. She likes dumb staff nights out in the business park bar, where Cash&Carry-sourced sauce clots on platters of fried food.

While her underwear has lost its functional vibe, Claudia’s actual wardrobe bears some revisiting. She cleared out everything two years ago in a robotic fugue. The type of action people said was healthy. She even repainted door frames scratched with toddler Ogham. Her husband was distraught and shook her when he found out what she had done. They didn’t have sex for months. He returned to loving her after they went to the wedding of his boss. They knew very few people at the party and he returned from the bathroom to find her holding court with their table. Claudia was comfortable thawing strangers. Her favourite teacher in school was a former nun who said small talk was a kindness. Claudia carries this practice into her social media use. She tries to leave at least one compliment a day under photos. That dress is gorgeous, where did you get it? Great spot for lunch! You’ve convinced me to tell David we’re going on a cruise next year.

She finds herself scoping out dresses in town after adding them to her basket online. She wants to feel the material between her fingers and on her skin. After an extended period of yoga pants and cashmere blend jumpers, she isn’t keen on a cheap uniform of navy and burnt orange polyester. She is done with trends and promises of brief consolation.

In the end, she only buys herself a new nightgown. For Harry, she has trousers, shoes, long-sleeved tops, a denim jacket, a woollen hat with no bobble, gloves not mittens. He was no longer a toddler. She also finds him a pencil case from a Minions range and a school bag with eyes on it.

She washes all the clothes for Harry when she gets home, to stamp the shop and other people’s skin out of them. She tumble-dries, irons, folds and puts away. She then orders a selection of basic clothes for herself from a label she knows does not annoy her. She is ready for September.

The day she returns to work is the same day school begins. Her husband offers to drive her to the office but she tells him to go on his way. I’m womaning up, she jokes, biting into wet golden toast. Besides, the bus goes near work and she still needs to sort out her hair. He kisses her goodbye and palms her arse. You seem to find me sexier when I’m paying taxes than when I’m making you steak and ironing your shirts, she says. I find you sexy when you take on the world, he replies quietly before heading off.

Claudia doesn’t get the bus from the edge of the estate. Her manager told her to come in for ten her first day back. She walks by the school where she had sent numerous forms via registered post. The children are either scrambling through the door or clinging to their parents’ legs in the yard. Koalas do that, she thinks. She carries Harry’s bag in her right hand and walks up to the staff member at the door. She tells the youngish man that Harry left his stuff behind in the car and is in Ms Fogarty’s class. Claudia deposits the bag with the eyes, now fed with a plain chicken crusts-cut-off sandwich and a juice carton in a metal box inside, on the threshold. Russian dolls of care. She swiftly turns away and walks to the bus stop to get to work on time. She has everything she needs in her coat pockets.

Her husband rings at lunchtime. She has been ignoring the other phone calls from the unsaved number she recognizes. She picks up, a greyhound out the trap, and tells him from a locked disabled toilet that she is sorry. You don’t have to be sorry, he says. I won’t do it again, she says. Don’t be sorry. That is his refrain, it’s going to be okay. She gulps words: I wanted to be his mammy, I want to be a mammy. The desperate counterpoint burns her throat as she keeps from crying and having to explain a face stripped by rough toilet paper to her manager.

He collects her from work that evening and in the car tells her it is all sorted. They were probably pissed off we took the place of another child, she says looking out the window at the pewter river. To be honest Claudia, I couldn’t give a fuck about someone else’s child, he says, a fuse gasping itself out of life.

From issue #9: autumn/winter 2019

About the Author
Jeanne Sutton is from Tipperary and lives in Dublin.