CARDIFF DEAD

YOU stare across the Tigris, and the light and heat could kill a man. Your eyeballs are melting, jackhammers pounding inside your skull and you look at the other lads – your mates from the Taff; new faces from the Thames, the Tees and the Tyne – and they look none too clever either. And you reckon they got mullered last night and all.
    For all the training, you never expected the call. Spend the last night getting hammered. With those rag-head Muslims not drinking, and all. And you and the lads had a right laugh. And the birds were loving you, war hero and all that. Well, not a war hero yet, mind. But give it a couple of months and a chest full of ribbons; you’ll be beating them off with a stick. 
    You’ll be back for that redhead, mind. Name’s Gwenan, she said. Cheeky cow, she is. Looked into your eyes, bold as brass. ‘Oooh, I loves a man in uniform I do,’ she teased. But you didn’t wake up with Gwenan. You woke up on Slugger’s sofa, clothes smelling like a tart’s boudoir, shirt spotted with blood. And all the lads pissing themselves at the joke. And there round your neck is the new tattoo. And it isn’t bloody funny, and you damn near burst into tears. ‘You sick bastards,’ you yell. ‘My mam’ll cane me if she sees this.’ And you borrow a tie and collar to go home.
    You leave on the train, and your mam’s eyes are red. Best not to remember; focus on the knot in your stomach and the drumming in your head. And you fly all night and the engine noise is murder, and your neck is pins-and-needles raw. And when the carrier lands, you stand in the door and the heat hits like a SAM-6 missile. And there’s this smell, a dirty, farmyard smell. And it smells like oil, and blood, and death. And then you pull yourself together sharpish. Only doing your job, mind. And not paid for bloody opinions.
    Settle in soon enough. Wake up, breathing and spitting sand, wash your gritty head, rush to mess for breakfast. Then on with the kit and out on patrol, winding through the back streets behind Friday mosque. And you sweat under the vicious morning sun, with your gun and your beret, and the pretty Iraqi girls turn away, melting into the walls when you pass. All wrapped up like birthday presents they are. But there’s a cheeky one who stares right back. Sweet on the sergeant, you reckon.
    ‘Fancy playing pass the parcel, love?’ says Sarge. 
    And the old men sit in the doorways and stare and mutter in their language, lots of ‘ch’ sounds, just like Welsh, and spit in the dust when you pass. Fair dos mind; you’d do worse than spit, if a bunch of Iraqis walked through Splott waving guns. Little beggars, the kids are, shouting ‘Gimme sweet! Gimme pen!’ And Sparrow the Cockney lad teaching them new words. Next morning, all the little lads running at you, screaming ‘lovely jubbly’ and ‘leave it, you muppet’. And Sparrow creasing himself, trying not to smile.
    Then he’s on at you to teach them Welsh. Not that you talk Welsh, mind. Couple of years in school, and what good learning another bloody language, says mam, when you don’t talk English proper? So you start with Welsh geography; Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllantysiliogogogoch. Long name for a tiny bloody village, that. And all the little girls laughing, struggling to say ‘ll’. So you teach them Welsh poetry: ‘Cardiff born and Cardiff bred, and when I dies, I’ll be Cardiff dead’.
    Back in camp, you shower off the heat and dust. There’s soccer, Geordie lads thrashing Sparrow’s lads – soft bloody southerners – and you watch British TV and call mam on the satellite. And later, you lie back in the cold night air, and the black veil sky has a million stars, the local villages having no electric, and it’s not so bad; not like war, or nothing. Them Arabs respect the British, see: talk to them nice, they talk to you nice. Not like further north, and them shit-for-brains Yanks.
    But some days, there’s no patrol. It’s special operations. And it’s not bloody funny, up before dawn driving round marshes that smell like rotting flesh. And that morning you aren’t proper awake when the bomb hits, and Sarge takes it full force, body shattering like a comet. And the grenades are coming at you, bullets bouncing round your feet. And no time to register, just grab your mate and your gun and run from hell. But your mate’s arm is missing the rest of him. And you stop dead, holding this bloody arm covered in Leyton Orient tattoos and a blue ink love heart for Sparrow’s teenage sweetheart. And there you are, stuck in a turkey shoot, legs turned to stone. And nothing to do but laugh.
    Next day, you wake up to jackhammers all over. But no heat and no sunlight, eyes in a blindfold and a chill on your spine from lying, hog-tied, on stone. And all you see is feet and ankles. One pair of Nike daps, white, seen better days, no socks and two inches of skinny, brown ankle under drainpipe jeans. Two pairs of calloused feet in sandals, one foot with a purple toenail, long and cracked like slate, white hems stained with dust. One pair of tough US army boots, all shined up proper smart, under khaki fatigues. Handy with their fists are Stone Toes and Sandals; smack round the chops, just in passing. But Puss-in- Boots is the worst. Proper sadist, that one. When he comes by, you curl up small and quiet, head behind arms and kidneys pressed into the wall. 
    Later, they put you in a cage, right arm handcuffed high above your head and Puss-in-Boots gets in, and gives you a pasting. Twenty minutes of fists and feet, and he says not a word, just grunts before he goes in hard. And it’s psychology, that; he wants you to scream. So you grind your teeth and pretend that he’s the one in chains and it’s you dishing out the GBH. After a while, when it hurts too bad for mind games, you focus on mam, and the lads, and Gwenan, and Sarge, and Sparrow, and then Sylvester Stallone jumps into your head. Old Sly, playing Rocky, up against the ropes, eye hanging from socket, taking it like a man. And you’re close now, blue and black from neck to knees. Ready any minute to start sobbing like a girl, but Puss-in-Boots misjudges and tires before you break.
    Stone Toes walks in, and they take off your blindfold, and you’re in an outhouse. Puss-in-Boots is shorter than you guessed, face masked by the folds of a scarf, and a twisted part of you wants to know him. So you raise your head and square your shoulders at him. And he stares you down, unbuttoning his khaki shirt and slipping it down his arms. And you see his back, brown skin criss-crossed silver and red, scars and burns like snakes-and-ladders. Then he holds out his right hand, each digit missing tip or nails. And you look into the deadest eyes you ever saw. And you know what terror is.
    Nike Kid has the camcorder. He gets Puss-in-Boots and Stone Toes to stand next to your cage. Five masked men walk in, bristling with guns and knives, and line up for their close-up as Puss reads to camera. And he’s giving it plenty, with yelling and waving of fists, and you nearly spoil it by giggling. But you think about your poor mam, and what’s left of your dignity damn near chokes you. Camera still rolling, Puss-in-Boots aims a last casual punch. Your head rolls limp, his laughter insulting your ears. The filming stops, and the men pile out. Nike Kid strolls over and leans his hip against the cage. He looks at you serious, like; not taking the piss. His scarf has slipped, and you are looking up at a lad even younger than you, skinny little bugger, hair shorter than his eyelashes. Angel eyes.
    ‘I apologise,’ he says.
    You look at the kid, gobsmacked. These people have blown up your truck, killed your mates, tied you up in a pigsty, beaten you to pulp and – to make your week completely fucking perfect – filmed a video nasty to send your mam.
    ‘You apologise?’ you yell. ‘Where I come from, butty, sorry don’t cover it. There is no word big enough.’
    Kid looks at you, ironic. ‘You’re not wrong, English,’ he says, sparking a roll-up and handing it through the bars.
    ‘Welsh,’ you say, automatic. Like it matters.
    You inhale slow and deep, smoke curling in your head, a dark green haze filling the space above your eyes. Three drags later, you’re glowing like the Ready Brek kid, screaming bruises tuned down to a gentle throb. For a spliff-packing, god-bothering Iraqi, he isn’t such a bad lad, you reckon. And you tell him that, and all. 
    ‘I’m not Iraqi,’ the kid says. ‘I come from Palestine. But I will never see my country in this life. Tomorrow, it ends.’
    He waves towards a backpack, half-collapsed against the wall, loose wires trailing in the dust. You stare at his skinny teenage neck, torn and dirty Ronaldo football strip and wisp of a moustache. The clouds are sucked right out of your brain and a small, cold knife runs the length of your spine, planting itself in your guts.
    ‘Sick bastard, Mohammed, or just plain evil?’ you ask.
    ‘My name is Yusuf,’ he says. ‘And the brothers would say that’s for God to judge.’
    He assembles another spliff, and tells you about a seaside village he will never know. The cool sea air tastes of pine needles and bitter oranges, olive trees hugging deep, red earth, his great-grandparents’ house bleached like pebbles against a turquoise sky. You close your eyes, and hear the seagulls, and drift off to your own lost beach and the girl with the long black hair.
    One night, he tells you, the militia raids the village, and the women stuff their jewellery into their bosoms, grab the children and run. Everything is abandoned, save the heavy silver house key: the family hope to return in weeks, if not days. But later, Yusuf’s great-grandmother is buried without a prayer in a roadside grave, her baby wrapped in bloodstained robes.
    The silver key is passed down four generations, each inheriting the bitterness of the fathers. Yusuf tells you about his grandfather, whose dowry was lost with the family olive groves, who beat the mother of his nine children every day for not being the woman he could have had. You were fourteen when they jailed dad for beating mam and this story makes you sick.
    Five years before Yusuf’s birth, the bloodstained alleys of Sabra and Chatila shame a complicit world. Yusuf’s father escapes to a shiny, new haven where, stateless and despised, he drives rich Saudi housewives from mansion to mall. Yusuf describes his school days, improving his English by watching CNN, frozen with guilt to see bullets and bulldozers tear his people apart. And then his father’s taxi hits the imam’s son’s Ferarri, and everything is lost to a blood debt. 
    God and priests are merciful, they say. Yusuf’s parents have five daughters, and the magic kingdom shows no mercy to fatherless foreign girls. Forced to choose prison or poverty, Yusuf’s father offers the imam his only son. The imam has lost three sons to the minefield mountains of Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir.
    ‘Careless of him, that,’ you interrupt, sarcastic. 
    The score settled, Yusuf continues, his family is deported, pockets empty yet again. That year, four hijacked aircraft return destruction to sender. Now, everything is possible, if you believe enough. Fourteen, furious and abandoned, Yusuf has nothing but the silver key and a belief in divine justice. 
    ‘And so, it was written,’ Yusuf shrugs, exhaling. ‘They sent me to Iraq to die.’
    His face is suddenly tired and closed, and he looks away. You reach out your free left hand and touch his arm. He looks down, shocked, then cups your hand with his own.
    ‘Stupid English,’ he says, almost affectionate. ‘Believing nothing except money.’
    You laugh. ‘Bullshit, if you knew what the army pays.’
    He grinds the dead spliff under his grey-white daps. You look at the backpack again, and you’re closer now to knowing what it takes to load it with nails, fix the wires, fasten the buckles. Say goodbye. But still… Would you choose your target, scanning the crowd for a man whose profile, silhouetted against the sun, reminds you of your dad? Or would you wade out, eyes squeezed shut, into a faceless tide of people and leave that decision to fate?
    Distant voices hover in the still night air. A baby wails and a woman’s voice is raised in anger. There are villages hiding in the darkness. And no-one to help if you scream. Yusuf is staring, his head cocked to one side. ‘What does love feel like?’ he asks. 
    ‘To hell with that, mate,’ you say, punching his arm. ‘It’s a shag you want, not some bird nagging you home from the pub.’
    He blinks at you, surprised. ‘You never loved a woman?’ 
    You think about the girl from Cyprus, black hair in salty tangles, aniseed lips. Three summers and winters you waited, and only the torn letters, mailed back by her dad, to show for it. Went back to fetch her last year, you did, and she’d married her cousin two weeks before. Too scared of the unknown to follow her heart.
    ‘No,’ you lie.
    He looks at you directly. ‘Before I die,’ he says. ‘I want to make love.’ 
    You look at your watch, still set to GMT+1. Must be nearly midnight. ‘Well best get on with it butty, to keep tomorrow’s date with paradise.’
    He fixes you with angel-devil eyes and your guts leap into your ribs. Shit – not that. ‘Steady on mate. I meant, let’s go find you a woman. And then I go back to my mates and you go meet Baby Jesus.’
    His eyes are wet and he turns away. ‘If one among the pagans asks thee for asylum, grant it to him, so that he may hear the word of Allah, and escort him to where he can be secure,’ he whispers. ‘If I save one life, could that make a difference to God?’
    You clutch his dilemma like a drowning baby. ‘These guys will kill me,’ you plead, gripping his arm. ‘You don’t want that. We’re two lads trapped in a bigger game. You and me, we’re the same, and it’s in your power to let me go.’
    He pulls away. ‘We are not the same,’ he says. ‘My fate is written. Tomorrow, I die. You give me what I need: I help you escape.’
    You’d sooner pull your own eyes out with a corkscrew than kiss another fella. Nothing personal, mind. But faggots are shirt-lifting, paedophile scum, and you remember how your dad came to your room some nights when you were really small, and the smell of engine oil and cider filling your bedroom. You remember his big hands sliding under the sheets, and no matter how loud you screamed, you made no sound. To this day, the smell of cider makes you sick, and your mam don’t let you talk about it.
    Yusuf is unlocking the cage, and the light in his eyes reminds you of your dad. And there’s a part of you knows it’s no big thing, not really, if there’s even one chance in a billion he keeps his word. But he walks into the cage, and you back away, bruises slamming hard metal.
    ‘No way,’ you tell him quietly. ‘You can’t make me do this.’ 
    Your reflection is swirling in the huge black depths of his irises and when you drag your eyes away, you see the dagger shimmer in his hand. And he comes closer, until there’s nowhere to run and your every muscle is wire-tense, waiting for the kiss of steel, and you close your eyes and hope it comes soon. But he leans his whole body up against you softly, eyelashes like velvet moths against your cheek, and presses the mother-of-pearl handle into your palm.
    ‘''Show me the source of death,”’ he whispers.''' Is it the dagger or the lie?”’
    You raise the small, curved blade to his face and run the gleaming tip along the planes of his cheekbones. He stands there, eyes half-closed, as the knife chases the shadows of eyebrows and lips. He’s already there, under your skin, the woodsmoke-cardamom scent of his moustache filling your head like water.
    You wrestle your demons a while longer, but your fingers open and the knife drops to the floor. His hands move down your face to the buttons at your throat, but stop at your tattoo. He places one shaking finger below your Adam’s apple, tracking the indigo dotted line that snakes a path through the softest skin on your neck, two words inked on your pulse point in a Celtic typeface; torri yma.
    You pull him close to stop him trembling. ‘Cut here,’ you whisper. 
    ‘I could never do that,’ he says, lips at your throat. Then he kisses you, and your bodies melt together like oil on water. His skin is salt and bitter honey in your mouth. You are spinning like a Sufi dervish, whirling in a midnight sky.
    But then, the sky tears open, as mortars slam the walls. You hear the metal whine of bullets, beyond the howling of dogs and the screams of the women, and as god-knows-what unfolds outside, you hang like a practice target off an iron chain. Yusuf’s gun and backpack are near, but he stays there, clinging like a human flack jacket, as the doors burst open and your rescuers, a shouting tide of khaki, fill the room with bullets.
    And as the bullets punch through his body and into yours, purple explosions burst like sea anemones under his yellow shirt. His hand, twitching and bloodied, is gripping the silver key, and his eyes widen in shock. ‘Jennah,’ he gasps.
    As his body melts and puddles to the floor, you pray that someone will tell your mam that this fire was neither foreign nor friendly. You want her to know, and to tell the world. One by one, the women’s jagged screams judder into silence. And you hang there, slumped from your chain, molten liquid seeping through your brain, your life dripping slowly into Yusuf’s broken doll corpse. 
    And your dying breath whispers, ‘No.’

Kit Habianic

Warsaw           We talked solid mechanics,
                        stresses, strains, yield criteria,
                        as we ate duck in a little restaurant
                        in Warsaw’s Old Square,
                        these Polish mathematicians and I,
                        men of my own age,
                        comfortable now in their profession
                        - boys in the Warsaw Uprising,
                        furtively distributing leaflets,
                        carrying messages through the sewers
                        as tanks jarred overhead,
                        experts in the mechanics of guns,
                        while I took the tram to school,
                        played goalie on the football pitch.

                        Out the windows the lamplight
                        cast shadows in the Old Square,
                        old only in name, for these men
                        had seen it destroyed.
                        Why, I asked, when Poland
                        was so devastated by the war,
                        did you rebuild the Square first,
                        just the way it was?
                        The answer was so obvious to them
                        that they only murmured replies
                        and we returned to solid mechanics.

BABY

When the ambulance drops her in front of her block of flats, she hardly dares to climb out, the white bundle in her arms seems so small and fragile. She sits shivering with cold or nervousness, clutching it to her shoulder, until the driver opens the rear doors and comes to help her down. He touches her elbow gently and guides her to the front door. Together they cross the echoing concrete stairwell scrawled with graffiti, to where the lift stands open, its metal doors gaping. As they travel upwards to her floor, he leans over and strokes back a little wisp of hair from the baby’s forehead.
    ‘You’ll be all right, love?’ He looks at her almost paternally as he puts down her battered holdall and backs towards the landing.
    ‘Yeah.’ She can tell from his eyes that he’s sorry for her. He gets called out here quite often – on Saturday nights, especially, after the pubs throw out. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘We’ll be okay. I’ve been here two months already. He’ll have his own room and everything. It’s not like it’s a squat.’
    ‘No.’ He laughs, but it sounds slightly uneasy. ‘I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.’ He hesitates. ‘Anyway, you know where to find us. You’ve got the phone number. I don’t have to tell you where we are.’
    When he’s gone she goes into the room she thinks of as the baby’s bedroom and unwraps him carefully, cradling the back of his head in her hand. She lays him down on the plastic mat and starts to change his nappy. She’s not used to it yet, she doesn’t seem to have enough hands, but he’s a good baby, he hardly even wriggles. She puts him down in the borrowed crib, his little cheek squashed into the mattress, his mouth pushed out of shape so he looks almost cross. For a few seconds she stands staring down at him, listening to his light breathing, watching the folds of the blanket rise and fall. He’s so tiny. At a sudden loud noise from outside – a motor-bike revving, someone shouting something – he jumps, throwing his head back and his arms out to either side. He gives a little whine of protest, then settles back into his dream, sucking noisily on his closed fist. The soft breathing starts up again. She’s almost frightened it’ll stop if she tiptoes away too soon.
    All that first day he does nothing but sleep. She hears sounds under her – doors slamming, the clatter of feet, loud laughter echoing in the stairwell, the clank and crash of the lift. But in his crib her baby hardly stirs. It’s not until the night-time that he starts to wake up properly, looking at her out of those big unfocused eyes of his and rooting for her nipple through the crumpled, milky fabric of her clothes. Whimpering, then crying. Then screaming, his face flushed with what seems to her like anger, long shuddering breaths of pure noise.
    But when she’s feeding him, his mouth clamped to her breast, he looks so contented. She settles back on the low chair and hears nothing but the rhythmic murmur of his satisfaction, sees nothing but the gentle filling and emptying of his cheeks, the tiny pulse beating in the top of his soft head. Outside, just sky, the usual haze of the city. The roar of a late car, silence, a door-slam, and it squeals away. And in here just the two of them. She could almost swear her baby’s growing, a bit less frail already, a bit plumper than he was – that she’s already given him some part of herself he needed. In a few months he’ll look like one of those advertisement photos, a cuddly one-year-old standing in nothing but a disposable nappy, looking back at her upside-down from the space between his fat thighs.
    The days pass, all alike, and she doesn’t see anyone. There are only sounds. People laughing in the stairwell, drunken singing. Cars that come and go. Once, the sharp sounds of a quarrel, a man’s voice shouting, ‘You fucking bitch!’, slurring the syllables. Then a woman screaming, subsiding in a confusion of choking sobs. In the dark of the early morning, the faint whirr of a milk-float, a long way down. 
    And the nights are alike too. The baby wakes at ten, and again at two. Sometimes after she’s fed him he refuses to go down again. If she tries to put him back in the crib his body starts to tense up and go red, his arms and legs working. His little mouth opens on a round O of silence as she waits for the first shriek. She picks him up hurriedly and he looks back at her, calm and alert. She unbuttons herself again and he pats her skin gently with his open fingers, dragging on her empty breast until she closes her eyes and the tears squeeze out from under her eyelids on to his soft hair.
    And he’s doing well, she only has to look at him. His cheeks have lost that wizened look. His fingers aren’t as long and thin as they were. He’s losing the frog-belly and little out-turned frog-legs of a newborn and plumping up. When she fastens the tabs of his nappy she could swear she’s having to pull harder to make the two sides meet.
    One night he wakes her at four. It feels as if she hasn’t even had time to drop off. She struggles to open her eyes. But his crying’s a kind of frenzy that reaches into the deepest part of her body – she doesn’t have any alternative. She sits up in the near-darkness, the walls of the bedroom reeling, and puts her bare feet to the floor. She goes into his room and picks him up. He flops against her shoulder and stops crying. She can feel his damp cheek against hers, the little hairless patch on the top of his head where he’s rubbed himself almost bald on the end of the crib. What’s the matter with him? She tries to dredge up what people have told her about babies, so she’ll know what to expect. She undoes her nightdress. Both her nipples are sore and cracked from the way he pulls at them. As he takes her in his mouth, she winces and almost cries out.
    When she’s fed him, she sits and holds him for a minute in her arms, feeling the warm, heavy weight of him in her lap. He belches and a little stream of milk runs down into the creases of his neck. Somewhere out in the alley, the snarl of a couple of fighting cats. And then a liquid rumble, quite close. Her baby is filling his nappy. His face has gone purple. After a while, she lays him down on the changing mat and starts to take off his clothes.
    Everything’s soaked with a pale, mustard-coloured mess. The nappy’s full of it – soft and wet and slightly granular. His legs are coated, and the legs of the Babygro. He’s got shit between his toes. The shawl’s marked with a jagged stain. Even the skirt of her dressing-gown is soaked yellow where he was sitting on her knees. She scrapes the curds off into the toilet, puts the clothes all to soak in a bucket, grabs a clean nappy. But when she goes to do up the tab, the back and front won’t come together. She pulls and pulls, but there’s still half an inch of softly bulging flesh that won’t let itself be covered. The baby’s fat thighs fill out the leg-holes completely, ringed with pink where the plastic’s starting to cut in. In the end she gives up and wraps him in an old-fashioned towelling nappy she’s dug out from the back of the cupboard. Tomorrow she’ll go out and get him the next size up. She didn’t realise they grew so fast. Nobody ever told her these things. As she leans over the crib to put him back into it he opens his eyes and looks at her sleepily. He pulls up the corners of his mouth in what must be his first smile.
    The next morning she dresses him up in cosy-toes and woolly hat and mittens and carries him to the lift with the buggy. At the bottom the doors clank open on a small huddle of young girls. They turn their backs on her, giggling in a fog of smoke. She catches them glancing back at her over their shoulders, laughing even harder. She doesn’t look at them. She unfolds the buggy and straps him into it. As she pushes it towards the door the girls step aside to make room. She catches the words ‘little fat pig’ as she goes past.
    She leaves the estate quickly, crossing the open grass by a path that cuts diagonally towards the shopping arcade. Strewn across the ground, wads of crumpled kitchen paper and broken polystyrene trays shiver in the wind as she steers between them. By the time she reaches the chemist’s, a few drops of cold rain have fallen on her arms, making dark spots on the sleeves of her jacket. She picks up a packet of disposable nappies, pays for it and goes towards the door.
    ‘What a lovely baby!’ Just in the doorway, an older woman is leaning over him, her mouth distorted into a kind of kiss. Her lipstick’s bled into the surrounding skin. She bends over to tickle the baby under his chin. ‘You’re gorgeous, you are! Gorgeous! How old is he?’ She straightens up and turns round. ‘No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Fifteen weeks? Sixteen?’
    ‘Eight days.’
    ‘You’re joking!’ The woman laughs. ‘Look at him! Come here, darling! Oh, I could eat you up!’ She pushes her face at the baby and shakes her head rapidly from side to side, her nose almost close enough to touch his. ‘Isn’t your Mum silly? You’re a real charmer, you are!’
    ‘I had him eight days ago.’
    ‘Well.’ The woman looks at her with something like distrust. Or perhaps it’s concern. ‘I must say he’s very big for eight days, love,’ she says gently.
    ‘I know.’
    ‘And beautiful.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Look...’ She fumbles for something in her handbag. She finds it and snaps the gilt clasp shut – a small notebook. She scribbles something and tears out the page. ‘There’s nothing I don’t know about babies. If you need to ask someone, that’s where to find me. Solids, nappy-rash, teeth, you name it. I had six. All grown up now, and bigger than I am.’ Her eyes stray to the plastic packet swinging from the handles of the buggy. She’s reading the weights, doing her sums, still trying to work out what age the baby is. ‘Fourteen weeks?’ she says. She screws up her sun-ray mouth again. Two days later he won’t go in his crib without crying. Every time she tries to put him down he opens his mouth and starts to wail. He seems to be looking at her accusingly. And yet she’s fed him. She lets him suck almost endlessly, until she can hardly stand up without feeling woozy. And in less than an hour she feeds him again.
    And then she realises what the matter is. He’s too big. He’s growing out of the crib. When she puts him down on the mattress his head’s squashed against the scratchy wicker surface, his feet flexed to make room, like someone lying in the bath. She picks him up and examines him. There’s a red welt on his forehead, where he keeps looking up and straining and rubbing. And his feet have two angry looking blisters. She puts the little basket crib away in the cupboard and gets out the full-size cot. She spends an hour fitting it together, cursing, not enough hands, the whole shaky structure leaning and threatening to fall sideways at any moment, wing-nuts spinning out from between her fingers and skidding across the floor.
    When it’s done she lowers the side and puts him in. It creaks under his weight. He looks up at her contentedly and then falls asleep. When he finally wakes and starts crying it’s the middle of the night.
    She leans over to lift him out. Anything to stop the screaming. But she can hardly manage it. He’s a dead weight. She has to lift the sliding side of the cot right out and roll him towards her before she can get hold of him properly. And his clothes are gaping. The waist of his little velour trousers has worked its way down to his knees. And his top’s pulled into such tight creases across his chest he can hardly breathe. She gets a pair of scissors and slits it from hem to neck.
    The next morning she’s woken by loud noise. A long metallic ringing cuts through her dreams. A fire-alarm – in her sleep she can already smell smoke, she’s gathering her baby to her and running out into a street lit by jumping flames, waiting for the dark houses to crumble the moment she steps across the threshold. But no, it’s only her doorbell. She sits up and pulls on a sweater. She goes to the door in her bare feet and opens it on its chain. She recognises the midwife, a thin section of face, collar, light mac, dark tights, shoe, visible