A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk

is able to sit up and eat food. It is designed to give the baby every nutrient she might need. It is sterile and emerges at the correct temperature. It can be given anywhere and at any time. As the baby grows, the mother shrinks. The reserves of fat she accumulated during pregnancy fuel the work of the breasts. Her uterus contracts; hormones circulate and are discharged. Her body is writing the last chapter of the story of childbirth. It has the beauty, the symmetry, of a dance. By its end, motherbaby is ready for life as mother and baby. The paint has dried; the joins no longer show. Ingenious, no?
    Do you want to try putting her to the breast? the midwife enquires as I am wheeled from the operating theatre. I look at her as if she has just asked me to make her a cup of tea, or tidy up the room a bit. I still inhabit that other world in which, after operations, people are pitied and looked after and left to recuperate. My daughter’s small body, bundled in blankets, is handed to me, and as I take her I experience a moment of utter, almost visionary, clarity. In this moment I realise that a person now exists who is me, but who is not confined to my body. She appears to be some sort of colony. What she needs and wants will vie with, and often take priority over, what I need and want for the foreseeable future. I put her to the breast. The word ‘natural’ appears in a sort of cartoon bubble in my head. I do not, it is true, feel entirely natural. I feel as though somebody is sucking my breast in public.
    The midwife compliments my daughter on her sucking. She is territorial and confident. She knows how to suck better than I know how to be sucked. Bizarrely, I imagine this fact to be the result of some prenatal conspiracy, in which my body was named as the pick-up point.
The milk will be in the breast. The midwife will give the signal. You must take the milk every three hours otherwise the supply will dry up. Our agents will be in touch shortly. They will come to the woman’s house calling themselves ‘health visitors’.
After perhaps a quarter of an hour of sucking a vestige of my assertiveness rises to the surface like something from a shipwreck. I need a cup of tea, to wash, to rest. I realise that while the baby is feeding I can do none of these things. I wonder when she will stop. Eventually I drift into a half-sleep and when I awake I see that detachment has occurred. My daughter lies in my arms with her mouth open and her eyes shut, giving nothing away. The next time we do it I find that I have acquired an awareness of the matter of stopping. I sit there for what seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time, and then I wait. I watch her pink pursed lips, her jaw moving up and down, trying to detect in them some hint of finality. I shift about meaningfully. I look around the room hoping that by the time I look back stopping will somehow have been achieved. Another fifteen minutes pass, then half an hour. Finally, for no apparent reason, her mouth releases the nipple with a self-possessed pop. This pop seems to me to punctuate a decision in which I played no part. Just put your little finger in her mouth and force her gums open, says the midwife cheerfully when I tell her the next day that I have been feeding the baby for an hour and believe that my legs have gone into deep paralysis. I am delighted with this advice, which I receive like a mandate for my own continuance. I am allowed to live, it seems. My daughter’s eyes are shut. I put my finger into the corner of her mouth and silently wrench it open, like a prisoner attempting a jailbreak.
    Back at home, the slow-moving bulk of motherbaby wanders the fragile rooms, as brainless and clumsy as a dinosaur. Milk drips unbidden from my breasts, soaking my clothes. Small daggers of pain prick my body. I cohabit uneasily with myself, with the person I was before. I look at this person’s clothes, her things. I go through her memories, like an