There were, he realized then. The smaller children were with her again, only they had multiplied. There were dozens of them. Well, four. Their hair was all soft and springy-looking and no-colored, but it hadn’t been combed, so it sat like tousled nests on their heads. Some of them had knitted cardigans on, and their shorts were long, for shorts, and very pale, as if they had been washed a lot. Three of them wore pink plastic sandals and one wore blue Wellingtons. The girl herself wore a sundress with a flouncy skirt and flip-flops, but it was cold in the supermarket because of the food, and Jake shivered just looking at her, even though he was wearing a thick sweater that one of his grandmothers had brought him back from a holiday and had a picture of a football stadium—unidentified—on it.
He was supposed to be buying nappies for Marguerite. He moved away from the fish counter, and went looking for the baby things.
“Newborn,” his mother had said.
“I know that,” he’d said. What kind of an idiot did she take him for?
“No, I mean, it’s a size,” his mother had explained. “The smallest.”
“Oh,” he said. “All right.”
But there weren’t any “Newborn” that he could see, only sizes that seemed to go by weight. He wondered what Marguerite weighed. Not a lot was about the best estimate he could manage. They didn’t do nappies in “not a lot,” though.
“How old is it?” said a voice beside him.
“What?” he asked, startled, and spun around.
It was the girl again.
“The baby,” she said.
“Oh, nought, I suppose,” he said, reddening. “I mean, it’s not old enough to have an age.”
The girl stared at him. Her eyes were mostly pupil, huge black pools, fringed with yellowy green, not the sort of color eyes usually are. Cat’s eyes, he thought.
“They all have an age,” she said evenly. “You count it in months before they get to one, or in weeks when they’re very new.” She spoke extra clearly, as if she thought he might be a bit thick.
“Newborn,” Jake said promptly.
“Then you count it in days,” the girl said. “But there aren’t any ‘Newborn.’ You’ll have to ask.”
“Ask!”
Jake was horror-stricken. It had been embarrassing enough to have to get the wretched things, but he’d planned on doing it in manly silence, just picking up the packet and marching nonchalantly to the checkout. He hadn’t reckoned on needing to have a conversation about it, with an adult he’d never met.
“Or you could get the next size and hope for the best,” the girl went on. “Even if they don’t fit, they soon will, so it won’t be a waste. Is it yours?”
Jake blushed bright red. “Of course not,” he said. “I’m only eleven.”
She burst out laughing. Her teeth were small and even and he could see right down her throat when she threw her head back.
“I didn’t mean that!” she said when she’d gotten over the first gale of laughter. “I meant, is it in your family? But I suppose it must be, or they wouldn’t have asked you to get the nappies. Boy or girl? Oh, dear,” she added as she went off into another fit of laughter. She wiped a tear apologetically from her face. Her skin was very pale, and she had freckles, but they were very pale too, so pale you didn’t notice unless you looked at her face closely under the harsh lights of a supermarket.
“Girl,” he muttered. “Marguerite.”
“I see,” said the girl, sobering up. “What weight is she?”
Weight, weight, what’s all this obsession with weight? Jake wondered. It’s not as though you could eat babies or had to carry them in your arms over mountains. Who cares what weight it is? It’s going to change all the time anyway, not like the weight of a liter of water, which stays comfortingly static.
He shrugged.
“Well, look,” said the girl, losing interest, “I have to go. Take those ones, you can’t go wrong with them.” She thrust a brightly colored packet at Jake and yelled at the top of her voice at the same time: “Come on, Dalys!” The children in the cardigans and shorts materialized magically and gathered around her.
“I’d call her Daisy if I were you,” the girl said as she swung her supermarket basket onto a bony hip. “You have to be beautiful for Marguerite. Daisy will do for just pretty.”
She was gone before he got a chance to ask her own name. “Or even plain,” she added, walking away from him.
“In a pinch,” he thought he heard her say, but he couldn’t see her. She must be in the next aisle.
What did she mean?
Was she suggesting that their baby wasn’t beautiful?
She had no right! What did she know about their baby? Nothing. Not a thing.
CHAPTER
10
His mother didn’t seem to mind that he’d bought the wrong size of nappies. In fact, Jake thought she hadn’t even noticed. Just goes to show what a lot of nonsense it all is, he thought, all that weight stuff.
“What would you think of Daisy?” his mother asked, opening the packet. “Mmm,” she added, sniffing the clean smell of the fresh nappy.
Daisy! That’s what the girl had suggested. Jake jumped guiltily, as if his mother had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, or thinking something he shouldn’t have been thinking.
“Daisy?” he managed to squeak out. “What made you think of that?”
“Mrs. O’Dea was here,” his mother said. “You know, the large woman who runs the garden center and smokes too much? She brought me a potted marguerite, for luck, she said, because of the baby’s name, and it turns out it’s one of those big daisies. Isn’t it pretty? All sort of smiley. So I thought, Daisy. For everyday, I mean. She can be Marguerite on her birth cert, of course, and her passport.”
“Yeah,” said Jake, pouring himself a glass of milk. “Whatever.”
“Oh, Jake, I hope you’re not … I don’t know, going to be difficult?”
“I’m not,” said Jake, reaching up for the ginger biscuits, which his mother always put deliberately slightly too high up, so that people wouldn’t scoff too many of them. “You know I’m not. I just mean, it’s your choice. It’s nice. Daisy’s nice. What does Dad think?”
Dad loved Daisy. The name, the child. He was, in short, besotted. Jake had never seen him like this before about anything. He woke her up when he came home from work, just so he could look at her. He fished her feet out of her Babygro and kissed the soles of them and the tiny ankle bones. That made her squirm. Her squirming made him laugh. She squirmed, he laughed, they were happy together. He pressed the tip of her nose with the ball of his thumb, as if he were ringing a doorbell, and she opened her eyes wide in surprise and waved her fingers around like little starfish arms.
Jake pressed his own nose experimentally, to see what it felt like. He wondered if anyone had ever done that to him. He couldn’t imagine it.
CHAPTER
11
Jake looked up “Daisy” in the library. He’d looked up “Marguerite” before, and found it meant “pearl,” which had seemed completely wrong. “Daisy” was more down to earth.
“The word ‘daisy’ comes from ‘day’s eye,’” he told his parents that evening. “Did you know that?”
“Of course,” said Jake’s mum. She always knew everything, or pretended to.
“Why?” Dad asked. He could never work things out for himself. Jake sometimes wondered how he didn’t get fired from that job of his.
“Because it opens up in the morning and closes at night,” said Jake. “Those little white petals, just like eyelashes.”
The baby cried. She often did, and she seemed to make a point of doing it when Jake had an interesting conversation going.
“She doesn’t get it,” Jake said resentfully. “About closing at night, I mean. Somebody should tell her to start living up to her name.”
CHAPTER
12
Jake had been to the park to kick a ball around with Finn and a f
ew of the lads, and when he got home he had that hot, heavy feeling you get in your feet when you’ve been running around, and you just want to kick off your shoes, drink a glass of something cold and then stand under a cool shower and gasp as the water pours over your head and trickles down your shoulders.
But—there she was, the greyhound girl with the very pale freckles, in the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk and talking to his mother. And eating ginger biscuits, he noticed. The whole tin was on the kitchen table.
“Oh, Jake,” said his mother. She had Daisy in her arms. “Stella here just called by to see Daisy.”
Stella. Jake registered the name dully.
He took a ginger biscuit, with a defiant look at his mother.
“Hi, Jake,” said Stella, as if they were old friends. “I was just saying to your mum how you’d been telling me all about Daisy the other day, you know, in the supermarket?”
“Er, yes,” said Jake uncertainly.
“So here I am,” she finished, as if that explained everything.
It didn’t, of course. How had she found out where he lived? Had she followed him? Been watching him? He looked at her suspiciously. She must have been. There was no other explanation. It made him feel prickly under his football shirt.
He gulped. “Well…” he started, but he didn’t know how to continue. He couldn’t think of a thing to say in this absurd situation. “I have to feed the fish,” he said eventually, and he left the kitchen and pounded upstairs.
He didn’t come down again till he heard the front door thudding. By then he’d fed the fish (they didn’t need feeding), had his shower, dried his hair with his mum’s hair dryer (he never did that), changed his clothes and started to tidy his desk (he never did that either).
“You never mentioned your friend before,” his mother said, when he reappeared in the kitchen.
“She’s not my friend.”
“Oh, don’t be like that, Jake. It’s all right to have a friend who’s a girl. They’re not poison, you know. They haven’t got a disease. You’ll work it out soon enough, I suppose.”
“She’s not my friend,” he persisted. “What did you say her name was?”
“Jake!”
“Stella, was it?”
“Jake, that’s not funny.”
“Mum, I’m telling you, I don’t know her.”
His mother stared. “That’s funny,” she murmured.
“Yeah, we-eird,” said Jake, relieved that at last he was being believed. “I saw her in the supermarket, we said about three sentences to each other, and next thing she’s in my kitchen! How did she know where I live? That’s what I want to know. She’s some sort of a witch. How did she know my name? We weren’t introduced, you know.”
“Oh, Jake, she’s not a witch. She just likes babies. Some girls are like that. She got an inkling of a baby in the neighborhood, and she turned up on the doorstep. It’s not that peculiar. And I probably mentioned your name. Though, come to think of it, she knew Daisy’s name. Did you tell her that?’
“No,” said Jake. “It was a few days ago. She was still Marguerite then. That’s odd, Mum. You have to admit that’s, like, strange?”
“Well, she’s a nice enough girl. Though I have to say, that dress, in this weather.”
“It’s June, though,” said Jake, suddenly changing sides. His mother had that effect on him sometimes.
“Theoretically,” said his mother.
She was so illogical.
“No!” said Jake. “It’s actually June. Not theoretically.”
“You know what I mean. The weather’s dreadful.”
“It’s weird about the name, though,” Jake said. “Maybe we should go back to calling her Marguerite. Just to be on the safe side.”
“We can’t do that. I’ve got to like Daisy. Anyway, we can’t keep changing her name. She’d get confused.”
“Mum, she’s a week old!”
“Ten days. And she knows her name,” his mother insisted. “She turns her head when I call her. Watch! Daisy, Daisy?”
The baby turned her head and stared a big wet blue stare at her mother. She parted her lips and blew a soft bubble.
“See?” said his mother triumphantly.
Jake shook his head. Mothers were so unscientific. Or maybe it was poets.
“Oh, she left her address,” his mother said suddenly, producing a crumpled piece of lined paper, torn out of a copybook, out of her pocket.
“Her address?”
“Yes, she said you’d be wanting it.”
“I don’t want it!” said Jake, pushing the scrap of paper across the table, as if it were infected.
“Well, neither do I,” said his mother. “I’ve only just met the girl. Put it in the bin, if you don’t want it.”
Jake picked it up reluctantly by one corner, using his nails, and held it at arm’s length. He couldn’t help noticing what it said, all the same. She had very clear, flowing handwriting, and she wrote in large, black letters—not like most girls, who went in for mauve and silver and wrote tiny little swirly words, like snails, and put little circles instead of dots over their i’s. Her address was almost the same as his. They were in Mount Gregor Road; she was in Mount Gregor Park. In number ten—same house number as them.
Funny that, he thought, as he stepped down hard on the bin pedal and dropped the paper in on top of eggshells and coffee grounds and a nappy neatly rolled up and wrapped in a drawstring nappy bag.
CHAPTER
13
Well, you can’t forget somebody’s house number if it’s the same as your own, can you? Which is how Jake came to be standing outside Stella’s house, thinking it looked a bit small for all those children. Just two windows with a door in between and no upstairs. There was a small gate in front, which was closed, and a big one at the side, for cars, which was wide open.
“It’s not as small as it looks,” Stella said.
She was doing it again! Witching about the place. Jake spun around.
“I never heard you coming,” he said accusingly.
“Dancing pumps,” she answered, lifting one foot, in a pink ballet shoe, and pointing it in the air. “Nice, huh? I don’t dance, though, I just like the pumps. I got them in the Oxfam shop. I wouldn’t like you to think I’m some sort of ballerina person. I’m more a football sort of person, actually. Not that I have anything against ballerinas, it’s just not me. But you have to admit that pink satin shoes are cool. Even a boy can see that, I imagine.”
Jake was just about to say he liked football too, but she took off again before he could get more than a grunt out.
“That’s the right word, you know, ‘pumps,’ but it’s terribly ugly, isn’t it? I am in a dilemma about it.”
Jake stared at her. What was she on about?
“I mean,” Stella went on, “I like to use the right word when I know what it is, but I don’t like using ugly words. That’s the dilemma, you see. Dilemma’s a nice word, I hadn’t noticed that before. Do you like it?”
Jake went on staring. He couldn’t think what to say.
“I collect words,” Stella said. “It’s my hobby. But it’s a bit like collecting seashells—you can’t collect them all, so I only collect the beautiful ones. Like ‘mackerel,’ and ‘plinth,’ and ‘obloquy’ I try to go by the sounds, not the meanings, but sometimes the meanings do get in the way, like ‘tryst,’ for example. I don’t know whether I really like that word, or whether it’s just the idea of it. Do you see what I mean?”
Jake coughed. “I like mackerel,” he said at last.
“It goes back and back,” Stella said, nodding at the house. “Like to come in? You could see my word collection if you like. It’s in my room.”
“No,” said Jake.
“OK,” said Stella, unexpectedly. She pushed past Jake and opened the gate. Suddenly, there were children everywhere: two swung out of a tree in the front garden; two tumbled out of the front door, squawking gleefully. One waddled around the side of t
he house, a small one, barefoot and wearing nothing but a nappy and a blue cotton sun hat, and stared at Jake.
Stella skipped up a couple of shallow steps and onto the garden path. When she got to the front door, she turned and waved at Jake. “Bye so,” she called.
“Bye,” said Jake, crestfallen, and watched as she scooped the smallest child up and swung him onto a bony hip, then pushed the door wide open. The children all swarmed around her and she touched each one lightly on the head, as if counting them. The children piled in the door, and the house gobbled up their delighted squabblings. The door closed behind them, and the air was full of an uncanny silence.
Jake stared at the door. Then he shrugged and turned away.
CHAPTER
14
Jake’s mum sat in her study in her dressing gown in the mornings and tried to write. Nothing came. That had never happened to her before, she moaned. Always, something came. All her creativity was going into her milk, she said. Jake thought that wasn’t a nice thing to say. Women shouldn’t talk like that in front of boys. It was embarrassing.
“I wish I smoked,” she said.
“What!” Jake was aghast.
“Poets who can’t write smoke. It’s better than nothing.”
“No, it’s not, it gives you cancer,” said Jake darkly. “And strokes. And heart attacks. And bad breath. And varicose veins. And nightmares.” He just threw in the last one for effect. Also, he was interested to see if she would challenge him on it.
She didn’t even notice.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to start now. It’s just that it would be something to do. It would be nice to have something to do. With my hands. With my mouth. You know.”
Jake didn’t know. It was his feet that gave him trouble when he had nothing to do, not his hands or his mouth. They kept wanting to kick things. Football helped, but sometimes you couldn’t play football, like in the middle of the night or in a snowstorm or at Sunday lunch. It was amazing the number of times you couldn’t play football, if you set your mind to thinking about it. In school, in church, in any building, actually, come to think of it. On the bus, on the train, at the airport. On Sundays in Scotland. In bed, in the shower, at the swimming pool. And in Jake’s back garden, because there was a sunroom at the back of their house with glass panels. Breakable glass panels, as his parents frequently told him. Expensive-to-replace glass panels.
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