And yet it was that time that it happened — the baby. They made the baby. My mother told me one day: I’m going to have a baby. She looked at me very anxiously. To see if I’d mind. I didn’t mind. I know about sex, of course, how she’d got pregnant, what my father had done with her, although they didn’t smile at each other, didn’t tease or laugh at each other any more. Nine months is a long time. I turned thirteen. My father was away a lot, round the country. Once she used to go with him, leaving me for a day or two, but now she didn’t go because of the baby growing, she said. So we were alone together. We watched her changing, the baby changing her. I know some boys aren’t allowed to see their mother’s breasts but she used to swim topless like the other ladies at the Consul-General’s, and I was used to seeing how pretty hers were, not the hard-looking little kind that stick out on girls a few years older than I am, but not the hanging kind that swing when the woman gets up, either — soft and quite far apart, because my mother has broad shoulders. Now the breasts filled up, I felt them against me like plastic bags filled with water when she put her arms round me to kiss me good night, and I saw above the low neck of her nightdress that they were changing, becoming pink and mottled. It was strange, I thought of a chameleon slowly blotching from one colour to another when you put it on a flower. But it was the baby that was doing it. When it began to move inside her she put my hand on her stomach, for me to feel. More like hearing than feeling; it knocked very softly. So I put my ear there. My mother put her hand on my head and I listened and felt. A bit like Morse code, I told her: it would give three or four quick taps and then stop, and start again. What was it saying, doing, in there? We’d laugh, and make up things, like we used to do with the cats. But it was only the two of us and the baby; He wasn’t there.
Sometimes, those months, in a dream I would feel against me the breasts that were changing for the baby and the dream would become one of those it’s normal for boys to have (my mother and father explained before I began to have them). There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you should enjoy those dreams; I just put my pyjamas in the wash. Another time I dreamt I put my ear to where the baby was and suddenly the big hard stomach turned into a goldfish bowl, and the baby was swimming around in there and I was watching it. A golden baby, a big golden fish like the ones He went after, under the sea. But this one was ours — my mother and me — in her bowl, and in the dream I was taking care of it.
I was the first to see the baby. I saw it when it was exactly 40 minutes old. I was the first to see my mother with the baby. I was in the hospital waiting-room with my grandmother and when the nurse said we could come and look I ran ahead and I was there before anyone — nurses don’t count, it’s not theirs. My mother asked the time and when I told her she said the baby was exactly 40 minutes old, she had promised me she would remember to ask the doctor the time the very moment it was born, and she had kept her promise. We looked at the baby together, its ears, its feet and hands; everything was all right. Its eyes didn’t open. We were surprised by its hair; it had a lot of wet-looking black hair that stood up on its head as she carefully dried it with the edge of a blanket. We have pale brown hair; my grandmother says my mother was born bald, and my mother says I was, too. The baby was not like us at all. Neither of us said who it was like. The baby was only what we couldn’t have imagined, what had been tapping messages and changing her body all that time, and had suddenly come out. For the next week we watched it changing itself, beginning to live outside my mother, live with my mother and me.
It was born so healthy the doctor said we could fly back with it when it was only nine days and sixty-two minutes old (I made that calculation while we were waiting for our flight to be called). They gave us the bulkhead seats and there was plenty of room for the baby’s stuff — the seat across the aisle was vacant, only a lady with grey hair in the other window seat. We didn’t speak to her. We didn’t have to talk to anyone, it was just us alone. I arranged our big canvas bag so my mother could rest her feet up on it. Then I fitted in the baby’s cot and there was still room for my legs, although my legs are getting long, my mother’s had to pick out the hems of my jeans. The baby was very good. It only cried when it wanted to feed, and then softly, you could hardly hear it above the sound of the air rushing through the jet engines and people talking in the rows behind us. It was more as if it was talking to us, my mother and me, than actually crying. I lifted it out of the cot each time so’s my mother wouldn’t have to bend and put her feet down. It sucked away just as if it was on the ground and not up at an altitude of 30,000 feet travelling at 500 miles an hour. Its eyes were able to open by then. They are big and dark and shiny. It looked at us, it distinctly looked from my mother to me while we watched it feed — my mother said it was wondering where it had seen us before and forgotten us. That’s how it seemed to her. I thought it was curious about us. We both kissed its head often. That funny hair it has.
The steward gave me an acrostic game but I’m used to my computer games and I didn’t find it too interesting. I tried it while my mother had her eyes shut, resting (it’s tiring, feeding a baby from your own body), but that meant I might miss something the baby was doing — yawning, pulling faces — so I didn’t keep on long. I like old-fashioned rock-’n’-roll my mother remembers she used to dance to and I found the dial number to turn to for it, but I took off the head-set every few minutes because I thought I heard my mother speaking to me. She might need something; feeding a baby dehydrates you, I had to fetch those plastic cups of water from the dispenser for her, and I took the baby’s napkins, in the plastic bags we’d specially brought along, to dump in the lavatory. I pushed them through the flap marked ‘Airsickness Containers’. We had prepared everything for the journey, we didn’t need to ask anyone for a single thing. We made ourselves comfortable and slept, the baby quite safe. We knew even with our eyes closed and the blankets over our heads (my mother is sensitive to light and the eyeshade she was given was too thin) that the baby was there.
Suddenly my mother was saying to me, Here’s the river. I woke up and it was light and I leant over her and the baby and saw far down through the window the whole river, whose other bank you can’t see from the side where we’re posted — it’s such a wide river. We were there. I didn’t think about Him waiting for us. I had so much to do: packing the baby’s stuff away, getting our coats from the overhead bin, making sure for my mother we wouldn’t forget anything. Remember, we’d never arrived with the baby before, it was the first time ever. The baby did not know that posting it had lived in, beginning when something went wrong, growing inside my mother all those months when He was away most of the time. I felt very excited, landing with something new, new. I felt new. I came down the gangway behind my mother who had the baby in front of her, in her arms the way I’d seen her carry an armful of flowers. I carried everything else of ours — the canvas bag, the coats, the cot. We came quickly through immigration because people let you go first in the queue when you have a baby. But we had to wait for the luggage. Before the conveyer belt had even started moving, the baby began to cry, it had woken up and was hungry again. The luggage was a long time coming and the baby didn’t stop. My mother sat down on our canvas bag and I knelt in front of her so people wouldn’t see when she opened her clothes and fed the baby. It was very greedy, all of a sudden, and it grabbed her and pulled — like a little goat, my mother said, and we were smiling at it, saying to each other, just see that, it’s going to choke, it’s gorging, listen to it gulp, when I looked up and saw Him where they had allowed him in through Customs. They always let him in where others can’t go, because He’s the Economic Attaché. I saw Him finding us, seeing us for the first time, watching my mother and me feeding the baby, He might even have been able to see her breast from where he was, He’s tall. He threw up his head and his mouth opened, He was happy, He was coming to get us. Then I felt full of joy and strength, it was like being angry, but much better, much much better. I saw him looking at us and he knew that I saw him, but I didn’t look back at him.