When the baby’s eyes are open, they are quite a startling blue, but now they are shut, and her mother has said all babies start out with blue eyes, Amy did too, and that they might turn dark like hers later on. Then her mother would have two dark-eyed beauties. Amy hopes the eyes won’t turn dark.
Babies can’t see at all when they are first born, her mother says. Amy wonders about that, how people can know something like that. She lets her hand just touch the top of his head very lightly in the place where she has been told not to touch him. It’s a soft spot almost like a heart, she thinks, that seems to beat. Her father is always telling her not to touch the baby’s head because this soft spot hasn’t closed up completely yet, and for some reason it makes her want to touch that very spot. She is to be very, very careful, her father says. She presses down very gently on the little beating heart, and the baby stirs, waving his pink arms and legs around.
Her baby brother arrived in the night. Babies often arrive in the night, her mother says. They had to lift Amy out of her bed and wrap her in her blanket so she could sleep in the back of the car while they drove all the way to the hospital, but she couldn’t sleep because her mother was making such a strange sort of moaning noise. She’d never heard her mother cry out like that. The baby was making her mother moan and use God’s name in vain the way her mother had told her never to do.
Her mother kept saying, “Oh God in heaven, the pains are so bad already. How will I bear it?” and her father drove very fast through the night, and Amy was frightened as the car screeched round the curves and her mother kept saying God’s name in vain. It was a long way to the hospital. Her father, too, swore at the state of the roads and the bloody government, and said all sorts of bad words he wasn’t supposed to say. When they finally arrived, they dumped Amy hurriedly on a hard chair in a waiting room with an old lady she’d never seen before and went away for a long time. Amy didn’t like the way the old lady smelled. There was an awful light shining in her eyes, and she couldn’t sleep in the chair, and the old lady kept talking to her and saying her daddy would come soon, he had to stay with her mother because she was making a beautiful new baby for Amy and she was not to cry, which made Amy scream louder and louder. Finally her father did come back after hours and hours, it seemed to her, but only to take her to her grandmother’s house, which was in the town. She didn’t want to stay with her grandmother, who made her eat disgusting boiled spinach and go to bed too early and didn’t even have any TV. And when she came home, the baby was there.
Amy moves away from the pram. She thinks she might take a little walk down to the river at the bottom of the garden before her mother comes back, though she knows she is not supposed to go down there alone.
Babies, in her estimation, are not any fun. She had been expecting to play with her little brother the way her mother kept telling her she would be able to do. “You’ll have someone to play with,” her mother kept saying. But you can’t play with a baby. Instead, he screams or lies sleeping and spitting and pooping, and he smells. Everyone hovers around him and brings gifts for him and ignores Amy for some reason. Everyone coos and says how beautiful he is, which is just rubbish, Amy thinks. What is beautiful about this pink thing? Amy thinks the baby looks a little bit like a pink slug or maybe some kind of worm.
Stella has difficulty finding a parking spot near the co-op. She had forgotten it is a Saturday, and all the farmers and their wives seem to have come in to do their shopping at the same moment. Stella circles around through the dusty, congested street, gets caught up behind a big truck, and honks her horn. Finally, she finds a space and rushes out of the car fast, flies up the steps quickly, and enters the cool of the co-op. There is a long line. A black woman stands in front of her with a big basket of produce. If she had been white, Amy would have asked if she might go ahead of her, as she only has the one item, but she is afraid the woman might think she thinks she is better than her, that she is playing the Madame, and has a right to go ahead, so she says nothing but fidgets nervously, looking at her watch as the minutes pass. She thinks about her baby boy and Amy.
Surely he will sleep for an hour if not more, and Amy will play happily in the garden on her own. She is a good child, her Amy, and very clever for her age, always asking questions about everything. She has been rather quiet and serious lately, just staring at Stella with her big dark eyes, particularly since the baby has arrived. Stella is not quite sure what Amy is thinking about sometimes. She thinks of the day the baby suddenly screamed, a loud indignant scream, and she ran to pick him up only to find the red mark on his leg. Was it really an insect bite? Amy looked a little sheepish, watching her pick up the baby and give him her breast. Was there a glimmer of fear in her eyes?
Why is the woman taking so long? And should she give up her errand and just go home without the baking powder she needs for the cake, after all? She is about to give up when the woman finally moves on and it is her turn. The shopkeeper apologizes for the long wait and seems to want to talk to her. Surely the woman can see she is in a hurry? Stella says something about having to run, grabs the packet, and escapes from the shadows of the shop, running down the steps to her car. To her horror, scratching in her handbag she realizes that in her haste she has shut her keys in the car, and the door is locked.
Amy strolls through the long green reeds going towards the Limpopo river. She says the funny lines she loves, which her mother has taught her about the river: “I am going to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, to find out what the Crocodile has for dinner.” She likes the cool of the shadows in the reeds and the rushing sound of the wind and the running water. The broad, muddy river, churned up by the heavy rains, runs fast here over the stones.
She is getting hot and thirsty and starting to get hungry. Her mother usually gives her a snack, what she calls elevens, because she has it at eleven o’clock. Amy looks at her watch and sees her mother has been gone for over an hour. She knows she is not allowed to go down to the river on her own, but she decides she will just go for a moment. She will take off her socks and sandals when she gets down there and put her feet in the cool water. She’ll splash some water on her face. She knows not to wade too deep into the river because there are crocs in the water and sometimes even sunning themselves on the bank and some of the native people have been caught when they went down to do their washing.
That’s when she hears the sound of her baby whimpering. She will go and see what is the matter with him. Perhaps, she thinks, he’d like to come down to the river with her, too. Perhaps he would like some of the cool water on his face. Surely he must get tired of drinking from her mother’s breasts all the time. Personally, Amy finds it rather disgusting to watch her brother sucking and sucking on her mother’s fat dark nipple. Sometimes a little bit of milk comes out of the side of the baby’s mouth. Now that the baby is there Amy’s mother smells different, too, milky and sometimes slightly sour, and her skin looks different to Amy: pale and thin.
Panicking now, Stella runs down the road to the only garage, which is, fortunately, not very far. The young boy who is the only one there, this Saturday, takes awhile before he understands what she is saying. Finally he says, “How old is your car?” as though that is a relevant piece of information. When she tells him, he says, as Mark did long ago, “No problem, then,” and he goes back into the garage walking slowly and casually though she has explained the situation. He comes out waving a wire hanger triumphantly. She stares at him, and he says, “This will do the trick,” and follows her down the road to her car.