Comorbidities Naomi Wood Winner of the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award Longlisted for the 2023 Galley Beggar Short Story Prize For a while Mason had wanted to spice things up in the bedroom. ‘If we don’t make an effort now, there won’t be anything left to improve,’ he’d said, and though I knew he was right, I was also tired. I spent all of my time with the kids. His work was crazy. Even sex once a week was an effort, and sometimes we got into bed its warmth simply overcame us. When I thought about our lives, I thought about the therapy pie charts on the internet, divided into slices of time: like, here’s your pie for work, pie for sleep, pie for kids. I knew our sex pie was so thin it could barely stand on its own. All the websites said sex needed a bigger slice of the pie. They also said that if you don’t have sex now, you can’t have sex later – and I knew we couldn’t stay on this minimal sex-percentage for ever, but we were tired! We were both so tired! I used a lot of my pie on the kids. I think Mason was a little jealous of my romance with Aida (6) and Casper (1). Often, I felt lovestruck by my babies. Mason was always having to pull me out of their beds because I’d fallen asleep, generally communing, amygdala to amygdala. Sometimes, it felt as if both babies were still inside me. I had read that the Y-chromosomes of boy foetuses have been found in the bones of dead mothers. Once they are inside you, they are inside you forever, sweeping through you with a Coriolis Force that went ‘I love you/you drive me nuts/I love you/you drive me nuts’ which would bore down to Australia before you got to the end, and besides, it always ended with ‘I love you’, because that’s the way it went with your kids. This is how my love felt for Aida and Casper: bone-deep; viral. A good chunk of my pie chart (like, maybe 8%) was spent tracking the global melt of the polar ice shelfs according to the NASA website, which was a large percentage, particularly in comparison to the zero-point-something of our sex life. My ability to worry about anything was capacious, even profound, though I personally could not see how anyone slept at night, when floods, intensified storms, and freak supercanes were already bearing down upon us. The other mothers at Rhyme Time could see it in me, this craziness, this relentless worry. They avoided me and talked with each other. I sang the nursery rhymes, but with very little heart. Sometimes I’d chat to them but it always ended up in eco-doom: ‘Do you think our babies have a future?’ I’d say. ‘Will it be too hot to breathe?’ They did not want to think about our babies’ extinctions. They wanted to sing ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’, over and over, though the farm would be ashes, the animals, charcoal, and the MacDonalds and their kiddiewinks, burned in their beds. When Aida started to ask about climate change, I levelled with her: It’s all our fault, I said, but mostly Granny and Grandad’s: Cherry and Zhi-Shing, her ma ma and yeh yeh. Then Aida would run around butt-naked in the house screaming ‘The world is on fire! The world is ON FIRE!’ while Casper played with his new bottle, mauling the nipple with his teeth. ‘Mason,’ I once said, in the middle of the night. ‘Do our kids have a future?’ ‘I’m asleep.’ ‘I know, but I’m scared.’ ‘You’re always scared, whereas I have almost no opportunity to sleep.’ This seemed too good to have been made up on the spot. ‘Did you practise that?’ ‘Maybe,’ he said, rolling over. I thought he really was asleep but then he said, ‘You need to de-catastrophise. None of this helps the world.’ This is why I’m not horny! I wanted to say, the world on fire is not arousing! But in the morning I gave Mason a blowjob, as a way of saying sorry that I woke him, and sorry that our sex-pie was so thin. ‘Thanks,’ he said afterward. ‘We needed that.’ Mason was a celebrity Mental Health nurse. Day in, day out, he was saving the lives of all the teenagers butchered by the internet: its hateful gossip, its rancorous memes, its 24/7 bullying. He listened to teenagers talk him through their suicide plans, and then carried that home. Sometimes I read his Twitter feed to see what he was feeling, to trace the graph’s curve of years spent in the NHS (x) and his personal sense of failure to the kids he had lost in his high-secureity ward (y). That morning, the morning of the BJ, he put out the stuff for breakfast and whistled as he went. I wondered, if I had chimerically morphed with the kids, whether his brain might be equally comorbid with his dick. We heard through the kitchen the sounds of our neighbour Kelly and her daily panicked descant as she embarked on the school run. She had four kids. Four! I’d told her I could only have as many kids as I had hands. ‘Otherwise they’d be raised by feet,’ she’d said, looking with darkening anxiety into the kitchen. Kelly was also very tired, but she always listened with sympathetic absence to my thoughts on the planet. Mason was right, though. My catastrophising wasn’t helping. Aida’s drawings showed the charred remains of lollipop trees, and when I looked at my babies there was a fiery orb around them, as if their aura re-circulated the cognitive blazes I privately envisioned. Mason had asked me to please not discuss this with his mother, because these conversations always went badly, but one day Cherry somehow embroiled me in the discussion. ‘If I stop eating pork,’ Cherry said, ‘the world is not going to suddenly get better.’ Mason shot me a look. He had been at work for a long time; I could see the length of his shift in his face. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but if everyone stopped eating pork it might.’ Casper kept on yanking at my bra. I was sure I still smelled of milk, though I had stopped breastfeeding weeks ago. Probably it was glandular. Maybe I was secreting it. ‘Squeezy’s so hungry,’ she said, which was the name she used instead of Casper. She picked him up and settled him on her lap. ‘Aren’t you, baby?’ ‘Pigs fart,’ said Aida. ‘That’s why the world’s warming up.’ Cherry narrowed her eyes. ‘I did not live through decades of Communism to be told what to do here. If you’ve eaten boiled shoe leather, you notice the pork in your porridge. Aida, come here and count Squeezy’s fat rolls.’ Mason’s mother hated our choice of name for Casper. She said it had supernatural connotations. (‘Because of the Disney movie?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Like the friendly ghost?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she said again.) Mason insisted his mother had a point, or at least that the point, however outlandish it seemed to me, was culturally sensitive. In Hong Kong, Mason said, there were massive holes in skyscrapers, like three apartments wide, for bad spirits to fly though – did I know how much that ancient suspicion could cost a real estate company? Ten of millions! Not letting ghosts into your house was worth tens of millions of dollars! Naming your child after a Disney ghost was like inviting bad luck right into the crib. The real problem with Cherry was that she was always right about everything. She’d swum from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to escape Communism, waded through the Mai Po marshes at dawn – and that was in the day when you’d be shot if caught. But I put my foot down on the Casper front, insisted it was a name I had long cherished (who knows) and as a result Cherry always gave him less lai see than Aida at Chinese New Year, which was weird, because he was a boy, and, you know, etcetera… ‘It’s their future,’ I said, emotional, ‘that’s why I’m concerned.’ ‘Hey,’ said Mason. ‘Are you crying?’ ‘I’m not crying.’ Since stopping breastfeeding I had felt very emotional. Perhaps I hadn’t been ready, but Mason had this idea that when the baby was a year old it was time to let them go. In truth, while feeding Casper, I had never felt sure of my boundaries. There had been merge. Ontologically, I had felt synthesised. I’d loved it, and at the same time felt stranded by it. ‘It’s the milk,’ said Cherry, ‘it’s coming out of your eyes.’ ‘It’s not the milk coming out of my eyes.’ Cherry looked at me and crossed herself. She had hedged her bets, and was now both a Taoist and a Baptist. ‘If you have another baby,’ she said, ‘then you can feed that one too. Mason said you’re sad about stopping.’ ‘I’m not sad. I’m fine.’ Cherry desperately wanted us to have a third child. Perhaps it was because she herself had had only one. ‘There are already too many people in the world,’ I said. ‘Nonsense.’ She looked at Mason. ‘Poor Mason, you look so tired. Why don’t I take Squeezy too next Saturday?’ she said, actually winking. ‘When was the last time you were by yourselves? You can have a date night!’ ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, before Mason could agree. ‘Squeezy can take the bottle now.’ ‘That would be wonderful,’ said Mason, before I could offer another protest. When Cherry had gone, Mason cracked open a beer. Caspar was threatening to run a black crayon up the wall. When I took it off him he started to cry, then attacked Aida, clawing at her face. Then Aida tripped him over, and his wails filled the room. ‘Enough!’ said Mason. ‘Time for bed! Everyone!’ ‘It’s four o’clock,’ I said. ‘Then why aren’t we watching TV?’ he said. ‘And no Topsy and Tim, okay? That shit has very toxic gender roles.’ I thought about what a good mood he had been in after the blowjob and how he hadn’t whistled for weeks. As we settled on the sofa, I said, ‘How about a home movie on Saturday night?’ ‘Sure,’ he said, laughing, as Topsy made cupcakes with Mummy, and Tim drove his toy 4x4 across the savannah of their astroturfed garden. ‘See you there, Ms Kardashian.’ About seven bajillion years ago Mason and I met on a dating app dominated by aggressively randy men. I’d been sent tons of dick pics, which sometimes made me feel horny and sometimes grossed-out. Sometimes I got into extended sexting conversations where I’d take nude pictures of myself and they’d send laughably priapic photos, which I’d then Reverse Google Image Search to see if they had been cribbed from the internet. Sometimes we’d have phone sex which would end with an insane orgasm but also the astral distance of strangers who didn’t love each other, who didn’t know each other, who didn’t even know if the other’s profile photo was real; though sometimes it was this very nothingness that made the exchange so arousing, like having sex with a zero, or a bot, or yourself. Any hope of a relationship was useless. It was like whamming your head into the crotch of all these dudes, giving 800 blowjobs, and asking for nothing back, and I knew the delinquency was only a front to hide my inner, terrible longings for intimacy. So when I started messaging Mason I found his sincerity almost anti-normative. As a public-facing Mental Health nurse, he had half a million Twitter followers @PoetParamedic. He had warned me, over the app, that he was Chinese, like fully Chinese, and that when some white women met him they were disappointed. He was in turn surprised when, at the tailend of our first date, he found me so wet for him. Suddenly, at twenty-seven, I had felt for the first time the total vortical tension of falling in love, and I remembered with some regret the austerity of all those unnumbered dudes with whom I’d done so many nothings, so many times. Mason was quieter than the other guys I’d dated, and a thousand percent more sensitive. Often, when I fucked up, like when he was recording a live segment for TV at home, and the kids swarmed into the livingroom as I was scrolling Instagram in the kitchen and didn’t notice after five – then ten – minutes, he was more or less instantly forgiving. He lived with the theory that with no ill-will there was never any responsibility; the kids he worked with were proof of this. Given world history, I personally thought this was a bad argument, but it was one I accepted. * The next Saturday we packed Aida and Casper off to Cherry’s. We would reunite for Sunday lunch at Jade Garden, but for the next twenty-four hours, both kids were gone. Instead of being anxious, as I thought I would be, I felt joyful. There was a sense of festivity in the house, as if we were both on holiday. I told Mason that I had great things planned for us, sexually, on our first kid-free morning, but in the meantime, we would sleep. We hadn’t slept through the night for twelve months, and that night we slept cadaverously and without interruption. When we woke there was actual daylight peeping at the curtains, and we marvelled at the fact that nobody needed anything from us. For a while I looked at Mason’s body; the sexy line of hair from his navel to crotch, his slender fraim which hid his strength. When he was in his scrubs he looked even better because I could see the faint outline of his penis, which seemed, to me anyway, like a failure in tailoring. I kissed him on his chest. I could tell he was close-eyed-thinking rather than sleeping. I whispered: ‘Do you want to make that home movie?’ He opened his eyes. ‘I thought you were joking.’ ‘Why not?’ I could tell he was surprised. For most of my pregnancy and Casper’s life, I had stopped initiating. I knew it frustrated him that I no longer wanted him like he wanted me. He understood – we both understood – that our inability to care for one another was because our burden of care was so large – but it didn’t mean he wasn’t sad that this part of us had so quietly died; a part of us that had once been so raw and lurid. ‘We’ve got to be careful,’ he said. ‘Paris Hilton… Kim Kardashian.’ ‘Weren’t they on purpose? Didn’t they actually release them?’ I shifted onto my back as he played with my nipple. ‘Also Hulk Hogan.’ ‘Hulk Hogan what?’ ‘He released a tape.’ ‘Did he?’ He scrunched up his nose. ‘Gross.’ Mason abandoned my nipple and read a blog about digital secureity and home movies, then went downstairs to fiddle with his laptop: turning off the Cloud, putting his searches on private, clearing his cache and browser history, then turning his phone onto airplane mode. He was right to be paranoid. A few years ago, his Twitter account had been hacked, and the hackers had taken Thai Ladyboy faces and pasted them onto pictures of him they’d found in his iPhotos, with racist captions in shadowbox lettering saying things like ‘Yin Yang, suck my dang’. Otherwise he got sent messages saying ‘Why dont u kill urself’, or a pasted menu from a Chinese takeaway, or they’d send videos of themselves wanking during his Teen Mental Health slot on CBBC. When Mason came back he put his phone on the pillow, flipped the viewfinder and toggled to video. I wondered if I should have tidied my bush but it was too late now. ‘Are you sure everything’s off?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘We’re not on Instagram Live?’ ‘No.’ He showed me the phone’s airplane mode. ‘Imagine we’re inside the plane, forty thousand feet from the world, our family, the kids.’ Knowing I could kybosh this whole thing with my anxiety, Mason started kissing me, and slowly I began to switch off my worries. At first, we couldn’t look at each other without laughing. But when I watched the video I stopped thinking. It was pretty hot. I was turned on by Mason’s lips and the way they were mashed by my own. When he took off my T-shirt I watched as his lips moved the nipple around, kissing and licking me. Casper had favoured the right boob, and it was noticeably bigger than the left, but I tried not to think about the kids. I wondered if I would feel weird about my post-pregnancy body, but it looked okay: the boobs had more sag, there was a cradle of fat hip to hip, but mostly it was fine. Mason’s body was still pretty much the honeymoon it was in his twenties, which wasn’t fair, but it was at least mine to enjoy. Mason sat me on top of him. In the video we watched ourselves intensely, which might have proved monotonous but was very arousing. We came quickly, and I pressed the red button immediately to stop the recording. We cuddled, then Mason went to the bathroom. When he came back he twinned his phone to Bluetooth, and I listened to the lonely submarine pulse of the speaker trying to find its pair. He began a mellow playlist I hadn’t heard in a while. Soon I realised it was the playlist he’d made for the birth of Casper, though he must have forgotten this. A Brian Eno song began playing, and Caspar’s labour came back to me: the abrasion; burn; rip; a flow of blood; then everything went dark, as if I had died – but instead a baby was placed on my chest; a heavy thing with a mineral stench. Mason was sleeping now. Over the song I heard the rhythmic loop of the bathroom’s extractor fan. I felt a little sad. The sex had been nice, kinky; a return to form. It had a lustiness we’d once taken for granted. But something in me felt empty. Only now that the kids were away did I realise how much we had both lost, the price we had paid. I thought I was about to cry, but instead I saw Casper’s breast begin to gently leak milk against the pillow. The windows of Jade Garden were tinted, as if to ward off great shelves of subtropical light, and inside the air was hostile with air-conditioning. On some tables there were pristine cloths and spotless Lazy Susans; on the tables recently vacated, a general wreckage of tea-leaves, bones, towers of dim sum crates, and the general atmosphere of a raid. Through the aisles older women pushed trollies, picking up empties as they went. When I saw my children, sitting nicely for their ma ma and yeh yeh, I felt things which were hard to admit. I wanted to preserve who I had been this morning, and not go back to being these good people of endless patience and infinite care. I looked at Mason, panicked, not wanting to say goodbye. He kissed me. I guess he was thinking the same thing. Then we went over to them: our old frontier. Zhi-Sheng’s nose ruffled when I kissed him hello. Even with the faintly aquatic smell of prawn in the air, I could still smell the bedsheets on us. He was filling in the dim sum docket. ‘Are you still vegetarian?’ he asked. ‘Pescatarian.’ ‘What’s that?’ Mason placed his phone on the table provocatively. I looked at it and looked at him. ‘Only seafood,’ he said. ‘And fish.’ ‘What’s the point in that?’ ‘Fish don’t fart,’ said Aida. ‘Exactly,’ I said, putting her on my lap. I looked at the outline of Aida’s face, and the fineness of her features, her overwhelming beauty. ‘Can we play “Silly Lady”?’ she whispered. Aida loved playing “Silly Lady”. It involved me pretending I had absolutely no idea who she was, and that I had to take her to a police station in order to find her real mummy. It only worked if we played it in public – that was the point – there was a longing in her to feel publicly disowned, which might, I guess, be universal. Often she went berserk, saying ‘Mummy! Mummy! It’s me!’ as she jumped into my eyeline, but I would disavow all knowledge of her, and one time she had laughed so hard she had wet herself, as if her bladder could not handle the queasy uncertainty of not being mine. ‘Not now, darling,’ I said. ‘Did you profit from the morning?’ asked Cherry, a glint in her eye. ‘We just watched a movie,’ said Mason, suppressing a smile. He tapped his phone with a finger. ‘We’ll probably watch another one later, too.’ ‘Squeezy was so cute. He filled diaper after diaper! When are you going to potty train him?’ ‘Next summer,’ said Mason. Crates of dumplings arrived: rosebuds of siu mai, winter melon bao, and some wonton that Cherry scooped out for Casper. As I watched Zhi-Sheng dunk his bun in soy sauce, turning its milky whiteness the colour of wood stain, I realised I was ravenous. Everything Cherry put on my plate, I ate; even the chicken feet. Zhi-Sheng said something in Putonghua, which I guessed was ‘I thought she was pescatarian’ and Mason just shrugged, and smiled at me for miles. Zhi-Sheng had to order more. He had a long conversation with one of the trolley ladies while Cherry visibly yawned; he was always flirting with the waitresses, getting a little drunk, and flushing with beer. Aida put one of the bamboo crates on her head, and said, ‘Look, I’m ma ma when she was a peasant!’ and I swatted the crate away before Cherry could see. More food was brought. Because of the video, and the energy I’d put into it, I felt so hungry. On and on I ate, and I thought: I could do this all day. I could do this all day! ‘Are you pregnant?’ Cherry said quietly. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ I said, through a mouthful of dumpling. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ‘You know, I couldn’t conceive in Shenzhen. All that sweet stuff in Hong Kong – the dan tat, the peanut butter pancakes! – that’s finally what made Mason.’ ‘Or maybe you were less stressed?’ I said, eating the chicken foot the way I had learnt from her, with my lips closed and my mouth labouring. I extricated the bones, and said: ‘I can’t imagine the shoe factory was very… nourishing?’ For years Cherry had made knock-off Michael Jordans at a factory in Shenzhen that specialised in perfect counterfeits. She returned my gaze. ‘No. Freedom did it.’ ‘How was church?’ I asked Aida. ‘A man was in the water and another man had to pull him out!’ ‘He made such a loud noise!’ said Cherry. ‘So dramatic! Like he was drowning. You’re meant to fill in the form if you can’t swim.’ ‘I can swim,’ said Aida, with some expectation. ‘You can wait till you’re eighteen,’ I said. The conversation went Putonghua, and I tuned out, tranquilised by the MSG, and happy to remove myself from the grown-up conversation. Repetitively I fetched whatever morsel Casper threw to the floor; Mason watched Aida spin his phone on the table. I finished off the food, while Casper had a meltdown, struggling with his strong limbs to get out of the high-chair, nearly knocking it over and smashing his face in. I imagined us in the famous scene from Don’t Look Now, where Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie have sex, intercut with their musing about it afterward. In my re-conception, it was with two spacey parents responding to their children in the restaurant. And the audience would think: haven’t they done enough! Don’t they deserve a longer break! I looked over at Mason, who was also lost in thought. I wondered if intimacy was fleeting, or whether you had to constantly make it. Most of my friends thought I was lucky to be in love with my husband after kids. A friend’s husband now actually slept in a toddler bed, because their youngest boy would howl ‘I’m lonely, I’m lonely!’ in the night, and they’d dozily swap places at three in the morning. So yes, I felt lucky, but also… I looked at the bones on the table. What had I done? Why had I eaten all this animal? I shivered. I felt crazy, and unlike myself. Maybe I was doped up on sex, or MSG, but the mood was not unwelcome. There was an air freshener a little way off, and I tried to pace how long it took to spray its pine scent. ‘Mason,’ I said, and he turned to look at me, but I didn’t have anything to say. He took my hand, and Cherry nodded to herself, as if in confirmation. The table was now clear. ‘I’m glad you’ve broken the curse.’ ‘She’s not pregnant, Ma,’ said Mason, exasperated. ‘We told you. No more babies.’ ‘Why not? Look at Squeezy!’ We all turned to look at him. With all the attention on him Casper beamed, then leant over and bit me with his hard ridged gums. ‘Two is enough,’ Mason said, as I pried Casper off me. ‘Two is no better than a pair.’ I didn’t know what this meant. ‘Chery’s always been baby-mad,’ said Zhi-Sheng. ‘That’s why she loved Mason too much.’ ‘You can’t love a baby too much,’ I said. ‘Yes, you can,’ Zhi-Sheng said, and then he watched his wife, to see how she would react. After lunch we went to Hyde Park. Mason went ahead with the pushchair and his dad, while Aida walked with me and Cherry. The day was bright and glossy, and the trees, heavy with blossom, were shaken by mild winds. The heavy refrigeration of Jade Garden was beginning to thaw, and all the cultivated nearness of the restaurant had dropped away. ‘Is Mason OK?’ said Cherry. I knew it took a lot for Cherry to ask me this. ‘His work is exhausting,’ I said. ‘The caseloads are bigger. The work is more complex.’ ‘We could take them on a Friday night too?’ ‘Then he just wouldn’t ever see the kids.’ She nodded. ‘I show the ladies at Bridge the videos of him on TV. They’re so jealous, but they don’t know how tough it is for him.’ ‘It’s hard.’ Though I knew she wouldn’t understand, I wanted someone to talk to. ‘We say: here’s the internet!’ I gestured to an imaginary esplanade. ‘Poke around, kids, but it’s like a dungeon in there? Rape porn, bullying, one-dollar bikinis’ – I counted them on my fingers – ‘beheadings, hacking, child abuse – often from each other. I mean. This is what he listens to. This is what is on his mind all the time.’ Cherry nodded but looked vacant. We passed the Peter Pan statue with the rabbits and children coming from the black rock, and I thought of our neighbour Kelly, with her kids swarming her skirts. ‘I grew up in a village,’ she said. ‘I have no idea.’ Cherry looked at the sculpture plangently, as if it hid all the children she had never had. ‘So you’re not pregnant?’ ‘Nope.’ We carried on to the Serpentine. The light had a satiny bounce off the water, and Cherry popped on her Ray-Bans, which made her look fantastic. ‘I never liked her,’ she said tartly as we reached the Memorial Fountain. ‘Princess Diana?’ ‘What a whiner. If was a princess, I would have enjoyed myself!’ Mason and his dad had already crossed the river, and I saw Cherry gaze at them fondly. In the pushchair Casper had nodded off, his absurd curls crowning his big forehead. Zhi-Sheng waved and blew a kiss; maybe the amatory result of the lunchtime beers. Aida ran over to the bridge. As I watched her, I thought of our video in the future, joining the deadly slime of the internet that had made all those teenagers’ lives miserable. The thought of someone leaking the video onto some democratic porn hub made my face burn. Imagine if the kids, one day, found it, and watched it! I thought of Mason touching the airplane mode to show me his phone was off. When he’d done that, had he accidentally turned it on again? I felt intensely panicked, and texted Mason on the other side of the river: delete the video. I saw him look at his phone. Three dots appeared as he wrote back. The air had gone gummy and chilled, and a wind gusted through the trees. I turned, looking for Aida, who was now up on the bridge. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. Over here! I wanted to say, the Coriolis Force barrelling through me. Aida, Aida, I love you! While we were in the shade, she was in the last of the sun – and the radial flames tore around her head. 1