Volcano is what I call the daughter my insides pieced together from semen and gametes, the pint-sized evidence of a pleasure so fleeting, it frays in my memory. Volcano is what she is. I don’t invoke that title when Mma is awake. How will she shed her molten skin if I name it? My finger traces the letters on Mma’s small thigh while she sleeps, quickly so she doesn’t stir.
The volcano baby is a wish I’d yanked from the sky carelessly, almost a year ago. I was in a different kind of love at the time, a cavalier feeling not at all like what her father and I bat amongst ourselves now. I wanted, deserved, an heir. A child with his face and mine. What would become of us when the meat on our skeletons sloughed off with age? We are orphans, her father and I, and only children. Alone in the universe but for each other. And I suspected he would die before I did. He hates when I speak so plainly about his impermanence but that is the sort of luck I have. Let us make a child in our image, I said to Mma’s father, just a man then, not a sleep deprived parent. She will be our sentient museum, carrying all our histories in her brain.
Her father did not understand my agonising need to transcend time, but he was as foolish as I was then. He held my hips to his and poured and poured and poured into me until he was blue in the face. To hold her steady in my womb after he had done his part, I laid flat on my back with my knees to my chest for ten uninterrupted minutes. Waiting until I knew the semen had settled. I didn’t need to wait that long, folded up pretzel-like on her father’s bed. Mma was desperate to exist.
She erupted, our Vesuvius, from the cave between my legs in the parking lot of a hospital. Mma had stolen my impatience, the clever girl, and made it her own. No hospital bed for you, she crowed. Let me out now, please. Weary in the head and legs, I squatted over her father’s hands, out there in the open. That is how my volcano was born.
She has not lost any of that impatient steam since her birth. Mma’s discontent crowds our mouths with the aftertaste of unease. We cannot decipher the ragged gurgles and roars slipping from her little body. Our ears are too green, not yet attuned to the nuances of infant-speak. Why do you hate us? I want to ask her, but I cannot. The overpriced baby manual gathering dust on my nightstand warns against wielding incendiary language around infants. A baby is incapable of hate, the author asserts on the book’s second page. But the smug bastard does not know my Mma.
It is not a pleasant morning in our duplex. Mma is teething. As she batters socked heels into her cot’s firm mattress, we flow around her, gathering items we believe will restore peace, our tributes to an unforgiving despot. Her father presents a rattle he’d purchased at a nearby flea market the day before. Chock full of beads and seeds and whatever else. The rattle’s fluted body is orange in some places, solid green in others. Colours wrung from lead in a distant factory. Mma hates the stupid rattle, how its noise competes with hers. She flings the toxic thing at her father, and it connects with the centre of his forehead. Clack. The rattle draws blood. A dot of quivering red emerges between his plucked eyebrows. I stare at the blood, and he stares at me. Mma’s father abandons us in the nursery, allegedly in search of something cold to chill our child’s inflamed gums. Coward.
Don’t leave me alone with her, my eyes say to his back, but he does not hear the plea. Mma turns her focus to me, suddenly placid. She wants to be held. I scoop my volcano up gingerly so she does not burn my forearms, consulting the rolodex in my brain for a song she might tolerate, something with a fluidity to it. The lullaby comes to me. It is not one my mother passed down. Mma will not accept used gifts.
The song is about a crying baby, much like Mma. This baby is justifiably upset. An eagle has disrupted its peace. The baby’s mother, incensed as any mother would be, comforts her baby with this promise – she will cook a soup with uziza leaves and pepper, a meal so spicy it will bring a hiccupping end to the troublesome, and apparently greedy, bird.
Mma seems to enjoy the Igbo lullaby, despite my butchering the lyrics, and rubs her scalp against my chin. She smells all baby, of milky, powdery loveliness. Her volcanic alter ego is appeased. I continue to rock her and myself, humming only the melody. I feel her father’s eyes watching us, from the nursery’s doorway. He will not come close, not yet. The man does not want another lump on his head.
The volcano is dormant, temporarily sated by expressed milk and Tylenol, so I hide from father and child in the guest bathroom. You are safe, I whisper to my bloated reflection. She does not look convinced and points weakly at the bathroom’s door. Lock it, the mirror-me implores, wide eyed and agitated. I obey.
My midday ritual can commence. The scarred pouch Mma came from peers dolefully at me from its prison, a cropped nightshirt riddled with moth holes. I place a hand on the ruched skin and cannot feel it, not even when I press down hard near my belly button. The skin has lost its elasticity and sensation. Mma took it all with her, leaving me with nerveless fat. I remove the shirt and knead ointment squeezed out of an unlabelled tube onto my stomach.
Hot water. I splash handfuls on my neck and cleavage. Warm me up, I ask the tap water, and it pities me. The liquid slurps up the pressure wriggling inside me, and I can exhale finally. I close my eyes and visualise the petrol gauge of a car ticking upwards until it fills. The mental exercise works, somewhat. I feel less like a mangled tampon.
My body holds the stains and smells of another too easily now. Its loyalties have changed, the turncoat, and it never hesitates to remind me of this chilling fact. Mma reigns supreme, my swollen breasts and shrivelled nipples bleat in mammary unison, and my sternum agrees, curved into the perfect shape to receive my baby’s curled up frame.
Mma hears me thinking of her somehow and calls out, a shrill cry that slams fists against the closed bathroom door. I hunker down in the tub I have only just filled, covering my ears with cupped palms. Stay put, I say to myself. Her father will fetch her. And he does. I listen for his laboured footsteps. There they are, marching reassuringly towards the nursery. My clenched buttocks relax when the baby ceases her shrieking. I am free for another half hour. Not enough, the bath water pouts. Stew a little longer in me. But I can’t. This is the bed I have made, and I must sit in it.
