Baby

When the pains come and go, I try to concentrate on our Billy’s balsa aeroplane twirling around on its string from the breeze through the window crack. I don’t want to cry out, for the women in the street to hear.

Mam . . . I want you, Mam. You’d know what to do.

• • • • • •

I cut the cord with a pair of scissors and clear away the slime around her mouth and nose. She’s crying now.

“Ssssh!”

 She doesn’t stop. She has a funny little mouth, all gummy, and a flat nose.

Well, I don’t know what to do with her. And what am I going to say when Dad and the boys get home? They’ve never noticed because I always have a pinny on.

• • • • • •

Best take Baby to Mrs Hartley two doors down.

I can see her through the kitchen window, peeling potatoes for her famous meat and potato pies. She’s singing.

“Oooh, Mary,” she says, as I open her back door. “What have you done!”

She washes her hands and takes Baby from me. There’s meat sitting in the bowl on the table, all gristly and bloody. It looks like the thing that came out of me after Baby that wasn’t another baby – more like a liver, but I don’t think a liver would come out that way. But if it can, I’m not at all sure you can live without one, so perhaps I’m going to die after all?

Mrs Hartley cleans Baby in a bath of warm water in the kitchen sink. Outside, smoke is drifting across the two fences from the fire that I set burning in that old drum in the yard to get rid of the bloody rags and the maybe-liver.

“That wasn’t your liver,” Mrs Hartley says. “But we need to fetch a doctor.”

“No – the pains are smaller now,” I say, “so I must be getting better.”

 The last time a doctor came to our house he went up to see Mum, then came downstairs and shook his grey head. Dad cried out loud – a great howl, like a wolf – which shocked me because I never thought men cried until then.

 I quite like Baby now that she’s been cleaned up. A doctor might say I can’t keep her.

Mrs Hartley says I have to feed Baby with my titties. I don’t much care for it, but Baby doesn’t seem to mind.

• • • • • •

She’s asleep now.

Looking at her, a strange feeling is creeping over me. It’s like . . . like the sun’s just broken through a dark cloud and my whole body’s filled with light.

 “I feel funny, looking at her.”

Mrs Hartley puts her hand on my shoulder. “That’s love, dear,” she says.

She makes me a cup of tea and a slice of buttered toast, then tucks me up with a blanket on her couch and tells me to go to sleep for a while.

“You’ll be exhausted, poor lamb,” she says. And I am.

But I can’t sleep. There’s a buzz going right through me. Mrs Hartley’s gone back into the kitchen and I’m lying here, looking around the pin-neat room, wondering how she keeps it so clean. But Mr Hartley works on the buses and doesn’t bring all the muck from the mines home with him every night, and all her children are grown up, so there are no sticky Billy-fingers all over the walls.

I am tired . . .

• • • • • •

Billy’s home from school. I reckon he likes Baby.

“Don’t get so close, wi’ yer big nostrils,” I say. “You’ll frighten her. Look, she’s crying now.”

Billy puts his hands over his ears and cries himself. I’m on the brink of crying too, but oh, there it is! The siren sound for the end of the shift. A knot of panic starts tightening in my stomach, like I used to get when the air raid warning went off in the middle of the night and we had to get to the shelter but couldn’t find the cat. They’ll be home in ten minutes and there’ll be no tea on the table.

“Don’t worry, love. I’ve got a spare meat and potato pie they can have, and I’ll go round and talk to your Dad about the Other Thing,” says Mrs Hartley. She drops her voice to a whisper when she says ‘The Other Thing’ as though it’s something she can just mention in passing, half-mumbled, in the hope Dad will only half-hear. She’s a very kind woman.

• • • • • •

She says Dad’s not best pleased with the news. His face went bright red, despite the coal dust, she says. He seemed to calm down a bit at the prospect of one of Mrs Hartley’s famous meat and potato pies and went to sluice off in the yard while it’s in the oven.

Best take Baby home and face the music.

• • • • • •

“Can I keep her?” I ask.

Dad grunts through a mouthful of pie. I’m not sure what kind of grunt it is.

• • • • • •

It’s midnight and Baby’s still crying. Our Jimmy shrieks, “Shut that bleedin’ baby up!’ across the landing. We all have to be tippy-toes around Jimmy – he’s only been home a few weeks and lost all his straight hair with the jungle fever. Now that the hair’s grown back, it’s all corkscrews and piggy-tails and he’s gone all wiggly and restless himself.

• • • • • •

There are some ladies here from the Welfare, wearing high-neck blouses and carrying clipboards. They call me ‘Mum’ and the baby ‘Baby’. They keep coughing ever so politely, peering out of the corners of their eyes at Dad’s pipe rack and at the mermaids and swallows tattooed on his arms. They seem to like the word ‘concerned’. Dad says they can fuck off, nosy buggers, but not to their faces.

 I say, “Should I offer them a cup of tea and a biscuit?”

 He says, “Alright, but not the custard creams.”

 But they don’t want tea.

 They want Baby.

Julie says: I live in Surrey with my husband and our dog. Originally a Northerner and with a passion for history, I set a few of my stories in the North and in the past, such as Baby, which is set in Manchester in 1946.