and hungry all over again. You had me vexed, son.’
For weeks she didn’t get to finish a cup of tea or sit
down to a proper meal. She barely spoke, and when she
did it was through a veil of exhaustion, with a two-second
satellite delay. Bad thoughts came. Fear for this tiny thing
in her care, all kinds of wicked shadows snarling and paw-
ing at the door. Some nights her moods got so moribund
she harboured thoughts of putting a pillow over my head
so as to get it over with quick.
‘What stopped you?’
‘You weren’t baptised yet.’
Night after night I wailed my beetroot head off, and
my mother walked the floor and patted my back in time
with the songs playing on the local radio station, her
walking, me bawling. One night, maybe three or four in
the morning, the news came on. The man reading the
headlines said the Met Office had issued a storm warn-
ing: gale-force winds, possible flooding. People were
advised to stop home except for emergencies.
I went on caterwauling, and my mother rocked me in
the crook of her shoulder, breathing my newborn smell.
She held me to her breast and murmured into my pink
cockleshell ear, ‘It’s an ill wind, son.’
And for no other reason than to drown out my
squalling, she began to sing, the first thing that came
into her head. As soon as I heard that sound, I fell
silent. The song died in her mouth and she stared,
stunned, as my eyelids came down and my body went
limp. She laid me in my crib, checked my breath with
her compact.
7
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