They’re a neat edge around a hole, lips. Like a button hole. We girls learnt button-hole stitch at junior school. Blanket stitch, the stitch for binding raw edges. Over and over goes the thread, passing the needle through each previous stitch’s loop, linking them together to make an edge.
I circle it. Over and over (sewing or unpicking?) I painstakingly circle the hole. The world resolves itself into images and theories of lips.
Consider Lips
Mouth edges. The rims of darker skin that frame the hole into which go air drink food thumbs lollipops cigarettes nipples and other parts of other people’s anatomies. Out from which come breath (used air) spit (lubricant and dissolver of those anatomies and lollipops) vomit (regurgitated food and drink) and words. Which have no counterpart in any of those things that go in. Except that words name them: identify them, ask for them, and so appear to own and control them all.
It’s not all to do with going in and coming out, though – don’t think of lips as just an entrance way. That would be to disregard their intrinsic beauty and agility. They are the face’s leading actor. Curving in smiles and grins, stretching in exasperation, pursing in annoyance, hollowing to a thin round O of desolate misery, downturning at the corners in set lines of anticipated and fulfilled mediocrity and boredom. And when you touch them with your fingers doesn’t your skin wonder at their smoothness and durability, their appearance and texture of inside-the-body skin, which yet survives in the dry outside? Their sex colour, the bruised pink-brown of all hole-edges. Their luscious, curving shape, which makes you want to lick them.
As for their movements, in speech alone their flexibility is extraordinary. When Billie Whitelaw played Beckett on TV, they filmed nothing but her speaking lips. Her lips filled the screen with a life, a tension, a manipulation and concatenation of muscle movements which was riveting; awe-inspiring. The words formed by these lips were lost – meaningless, insignificant – beside the movements which formed them. Medium made mincemeat of message.
On another surface – the surface, say, of your body – lips can mould, brush, skim, suck, infill any space or crevice. Against your lips they can breathe, tremble, press, grind, hold in open-mouthed suspension. Kiss.
Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.
My children’s lips. My husband’s lips. Lips that have touched me.
Babies’ lips.
They come ready pursed, as big from top to bottom as they are from side to side. In age our mouths elongate – wider and wider in grin or grim, both of which are similar in that they are lines that know; alas, that know. A baby’s mouth knows and seeks to know nothing beyond nipple. Ejected from warm wet inside to cold dry outside, from darkness to light, from flesh-fluid suppleness to the disparate harsh angles of metal, plastic and starched white sheet, the baby wants home. Warmth. Wetness. Flesh. Insides. Its body is nothing but an aimless sack, with every nerve leading to its lips. Only its lips know how to make it survive. Its lips slot and damp like a vice over nipple. Nipple, source of warm wet nourishment, connection with mother’s insides, meeting of flesh.
At the first closing of new-born Ruth’s jaw on my breast I shouted in pain. If she could have sucked my nipple off and wormed her way back inside through the bloody hole it left, she’d have done it. A new-born baby’s suck is a desperate thing. The mother’s breast is the life-line, the life-hole. The greedy twins sucked me raw, till my nipples swelled and cracked. Little animals chewing at dugs; would tear the flesh and eat it if they could, if it would help them.
On the breast, a baby’s lips (contrary to popular belief) do not form the shape that we call suck. Sucking goes on inside, further down the baby’s maw. The lips are there for manipulation and control, making, in the course of feeding, a score of tiny adjustments of motion and position. The top lip closes over the flesh in a straight line, so that neither the pinky-brown of lip nor of areola is seen. The infant’s top lip is a flat surface; when they grow older children’s lips become fuller, but roundedness here would prevent that neat seam, one plane of flesh cleanly fitting another. The underlip is turned out, in a pout, around the underside of the nipple. When the first gush of milk stops and the baby requires more, it allows the nipple to slide very slightly out of its mouth. No longer sucking, it holds the nipple between jaws and applies with the lower lip an infinitesimal trembling motion. The upper lip remains still, a pressure point. The effect upon the nipple of being ever-so-slightly trembled from below is a tickling, turning to a tingling, turning in the mother’s body to a sense of yearning which is satisfied by the sudden release of a hidden reserve of milk shooting through the breast. The lower lip stops trembling, slides quickly over the edge of the areola, to clamp in position and allow the open gullet to fill again with gushing milk.
Consider a child in distress. Not a baby, a child, with teeth and an appetite for crisps and gum. How is its unhappiness signalled? Eyes, yes, brimming with tears. But about the mouth? A trembling, a much-described, a clichéd wobbling of the lower lip. Baby wants more milk. Wants connection of blood-warm liquid flowing from her mother’s body into her own. Wants comfort.
Can the trembling of a child’s lip really be cured by the application of Germolene to a grazed knee, or a mouthful of Smarties? Most adult lips have given up, forgotten how to tremble. Never again will they close on flesh as close, as real, as one-with-them, as mother’s breast. All others are substitutes. They seem to be – for a while, almost certainly are – as good, as potent to comfort and banish the dark. But they are not the real thing.
And the mother? She who has been the source of all love all comfort all warmth and wetness of milky breasts, through whose nipple holes have spun the white life-lines of liquid connecting still her child’s belly with her own? What of her? I am a mother and a child, but write of comfort lost as a child.
Because the baby’s love is for itself. It sucks and cries and demands and lays claim, in order to survive. Its huge self-love admits the existence of no other. Mother is home, food, warmth, life. Its love for its mother is its love of life itself, sweet life to be sucked from the source. The mother, who was herself a sucking baby once, knows her function. She is God, the source of life and happiness: and she is an old dried fruit to be spat away.
Sun. Feb. 9
My lips are so bad I haven’t been out. I’ve passed the time writing nonsense, looking through the window, and pacing up and down. I want to get in the car again. I’m wearing gloves to stop myself from mauling my lips.
And the lips of my children, which feasted on my flesh, now curl or close tight at the sight of me. Only the twins grin and slaver; and as is only natural, they’ll grow out of it.
No lips seek me. Like the housewife that I am, I start to unravel the old useless garment (starting from the site of the hole) in order to make new use of the rewound yarn. My lips spill words, phrases drip from the end of my pen, sentences flow out in a river.
Mon. Feb. 10
The car windows were encrusted with frost this morning – both inside and out. I tried rubbing it with a cloth, which was useless, then walked to a garage and bought some spray. The spray leaves a filmy coating on the glass, which the windscreen wipers smear without removing. I have had trouble focusing, because of this, all day.
I drove for an hour or two, in no particular direction, attracted by roads that promised wide views and few towns. But after a while I found myself coming back into industrial suburbs, the outskirts of Sheffield. I stopped and consulted the road map, because I felt quite clear about what I wanted today: space, snow, straight roads. Emptiness. I decided to head west, where the map showed an empty-looking