Her and the baby

She only has eyes for the bald baby with the horrid piggy face
January 20, 1998

I remember the first time I saw her. It was Christmas time. I don't think it had snowed yet, but the night was ever so cold and sharp and it felt like needles when it hit your face. On the way, we pretended to be smoking by breathing out great billows of mist.

I didn't even notice her at first. There was too much to look at. Everyone was moving and stamping warmth back into their feet; their silhouettes were lit by the shivering light of the candles. It all smelt different; exciting, special. Everyone was brushing past us, three times larger than usual in all their layers of clothing. Somebody tweaked the pompom on my hat. An old man wrapped in swathes of furry pink mohair, so curled over that he was only a little taller than me, stooped for a moment and looked into my face. His wrinkles frightened me and I shrank into the legs of my mother. A moment later I felt something tugging at my arm. I looked down and saw his yellow-nailed hand, so shrivelled it must have been at least one hundred years old, pushing a plastic-wrapped boiled sweet between my fingers. The old man was swept along by the crowd, leaving me with his sugary offering. It was purple, grape or blackcurrant probably, one of my favourite flavours, but I could still feel the dryness of the old man's touch; I imagined flakes of his skin clinging to the sticky surface of the candy and so I dropped it on the stone floor. A large, booted foot stepped on it and it lay there, shattered in its plastic wrapper.

I must have been wearing about five or six layers: several jumpers and a thermal vest tucked into my knickers. All she had on was a blue dress, blue like the sky in the sunshine, and a funny white shawl thing over her head. She was higher than the rest of us, surrounded by candles. I couldn't take my eyes off her. My mother had to keep nudging me so I'd turn back to my hymn book. I thought she had the prettiest face I'd ever seen-all pointed down except for the eyes which turned upwards. I thought she was an angel; I didn't know any better.

I was tired by the time we came to leave, so my father lifted me up into his arms. As we walked out I looked back at her over his shoulder. She was still standing there in her sky blue dress.

You know how it is when you hear a new word and then you begin to hear it all the time? It was like that with her. I started seeing her everywhere we went. Coughing and spluttering with post-Christmas flu, my mother took me to the doctor's surgery; and there she was in the waiting room. Then I saw her in a bookshop, and at my brother's school, even at my grandmother's house. She'd let her hair down at my grandmother's. It reached to her waist in long golden waves. For weeks after, each time I looked in the mirror, I'd tug furiously at my short pigtails and I cried when my mother took me to the hairdressers' to give me a neat bob.

one sunday, i was lying on my stomach on the living room floor drawing a picture of a dancer pirouetting on an elephant's back. My father was sitting in his chair, hidden behind his paper. There was a great noisy shuffle each time he turned a page. After a while I looked up, and there she was on the front page-a huge black and white photograph of her. (I guessed she must have been famous.) Something was different, though. In her arms she held a baby. I stared at that baby's face and hated it as I'd never hated anything before. She was looking down at it, smiling at its bald head, and I could tell she loved it.

The telephone rang and my father laid down his paper and left the room. I stretched out, pulled the front page towards me and glared down at that shiny baby face. Instantly I knew what to do. With my pencil I stabbed two holes where the calm, tiny eyes were and then, taking a red crayon, I drew blood coming out of its mouth and a dagger in its heart. I smiled to myself, pushed the paper back, and returned my attentions to the pirouetting ballerina. My father came in, smiled at me, and I smiled back. He sat down, picked up his newspaper and then I heard him draw in a breath very loudly. I looked up and saw his face, stiff with shock, his eyes fixed on the blood and gore in front of him. With his face frozen, he turned to me, then back to the massacred baby, then back to me. I remember thinking that if he stared any harder his eyes would pop out from their sockets and I imagined them rolling off his lap and across the carpet.

"Did you do this?" he asked me. His voice sounded very serious. I nodded, but all of a sudden I was scared. He seemed terribly angry that I had drawn on his newspaper.

"Why on earth did you draw this, Violet?"

I shrugged. My mother came in and my father jumped up to speak to her. When he showed her the bloody baby she gasped and I hid my head in my arms. The carpet itched my nose. I could just hear them talking. My mother's voice was very high and I could tell she was crying. She swooped down to me. "Why did you do this, Violet?" she asked, pulling my hands away from my eyes. I knew then that you must never draw on newspapers.

we went back to the church soon after that Sunday. All the way there I zigzagged along the pavements trying not to step on the cracks. My mother was irritable and kept grabbing my hand and pulling me along so that I couldn't stop my feet from falling on the gashes between paving stones. I kept looking for the bears, but we were walking so fast I suppose they didn't have time to come out. My mother met a friend of hers near the post office and they started chatting. I was holding her hand and after a while I began to lean out from her and sway.

"Violet!" she scowled.

We were standing underneath a tall tree and I began to kick at the dust at my feet. Cradled in a pocket of earth I saw a tiny bird. It was really just a curled up embryo surrounded by the wreckage of its fall, the slivers of pale blue eggshell. I pulled at my mother's arm to reach closer to it. It was about the size of a 50-pence piece, purplish in colour, too young to have feathers. Its tiny beak had been nudged into its chest, its legs had been twisted, and its eyes were slammed shut. I stared at it in wonder. My fingers itched. I stretched out, and over, and grabbed at it just before my mother tugged me back to her side with a sharp "Violet!" She didn't see me slip the tiny foetus into my left mitten, which dangled on a string from the arm of my coat.

A very wide old man in a black dress welcomed us in. It was a dark day outside and the church seemed dull and cold. There was none of the warmth and bustle of that Christmas night. I pushed forward to peer around the old man's skirt to see if she was still there. To my delight, she was. She hadn't moved at all, but the halo of candles was gone and she stood shivering in the stone arch. We took echoey steps down the centre of the church, straight past her and into a small room that led off on the left. It smelt like there was dust in the air and damp in the walls. Great piles of hymn books teetered around the edges. On the right, an electric fire was fixed to the wall and the old man flicked a switch so that one element began to glow orange. There were a lot of children's paintings sellotaped haphazardly to the walls and on a table stood a framed sepia print. It was a faded photograph of a group of black tribesmen holding feathered spears and wearing minuscule loin cloths, while in the centre of the group stood three stiff-looking gentlemen in black dresses.

She was there, just next to the window, and that pleased me, but she was holding that horrible baby again so I scowled at its piggy face. My mother had sat down and begun talking to the man; then she turned round and pulled me towards her. From her handbag she withdrew the photograph from the newspaper, carefully unfolded it, and gave it to the old man. He looked at it quietly, scrunched up his thick eyebrows and pursed his fleshy mouth. He looked at me, back at the photograph, and then back to me. Then he leant forward. The plastic chair he was sitting on squeaked as he leaned over and I wanted to smile because it sounded like he was farting; but he was moving so close I just stayed still. I'd never seen anyone with hair coming out of his nostrils before. When he spoke his breath smelt of old eggs and I wanted to turn away.

"Why did you do this, my dear?" and his left hand gestured to the paper he held.

"Oh she won't be able to tell you," said my mother. "She's..."-she paused to flick her eyes over to me and then back at him-"...mute." She always pronounced that word very precisely, pushing out her lips for the "mu" and ending with a sharp click of her tongue at the front of her mouth.

The old man exhaled with a long "Ooooohhh" and I imagined the egg smell clinging to my hair. To my relief, he sat back again with a few more squeaks of the plastic seat.

"Very worrying," he murmured, "very worrying."

My mother looked pained and dropped my hand so that she could tangle her own fingers together. I was becoming tired and turned round to stare into the glaring eyes of one of the black men in the photograph. I wondered if he had been a cannibal. Then I looked up at her, but I didn't like to see her crooning over that baby so I stuck my tongue out at it.

"Look at her," wailed my mother, "she's sticking her tongue out at the Lord!" I drew my tongue in.

The old man looked anxious and leaned towards my mother as if she might fall at any moment and he wanted to catch her. His pink tongue licked his lips slightly and he opened his mouth to speak but then simply mumbled another "Very worrying." I wondered if that was all he could say.

"Violet!" called my mother. She grabbed at my hand but missed it and instead caught my swinging mitten. There was a sharp crack as the tiny spine broke and I winced as I remembered my little bird. "What is this, Violet?" She pulled the mitten towards her, dragging my arm with it. I think she expected to find a secret store of stolen sweets. When she saw the featherless, shrivelled, beaky little creature she let out a scream.

The old man jerked forward to drop his hand on her knee and as he did so the newspaper cutting fell loose and slowly fluttered to the floor, coming to rest on the cold lino. I felt sick when I saw it. It seemed so cruel. They had decapitated her, cut round the gory baby and sliced off her head. I stared at the jagged line that cut just above her pretty shoulders and it made me so angry and so sad. I darted forward to grab it. As I did so my mother snatched at my arm. It set me off balance and both of us tumbled onto the lino. My arm knocked the table and the black tribesmen and stiff-looking gentlemen fell to the floor with a smash. Taking the newspaper baby, I tore him in half, crumpled him in my hands, put him in my mouth, chewed for a second, and then swallowed.

"Violet!" sobbed my mother, "Violet!" Her voice was a thin, rasping wail smudged by tears. Her hand was groping at my foot. The wide old man was pressed against the far wall. His face was frightened, his mouth tunnelled into a long "o." He looked like a frozen photograph.

I could feel hot tears fighting at the corners of my eyes. I looked at the still faces of the tribesmen lying under shards of glass on the floor, then to the tiny, shrivelled foetus lying neglected on the lino, and then I looked up to her. Even then, after all the noise and commotion, she was still calm, and perfect, and beautiful and smiling down at that baby. That baby, whom I knew she loved more than me. She just stared and stared at him and didn't even turn once to glance at me. I opened my mouth to scream and, of course, no sound came out. For a second, we were a silent tableau.

after that everything happened too quickly and everyone talked too fast for me to work out what they were saying. They brought me to this place with its pale green walls and put me in a very high bed with white sheets, which each morning and evening they tuck very tightly around me and under the mattress. There are a lot of kind ladies who come in and talk to me and pat my head. They all dress the same. I think, perhaps, that they want to look like her because they all have those funny white shawl things over their heads but they wear black dresses not blue.

There is one of them who sits in my room with me all the time. She is quite old and I like her because she makes me laugh by making this face where she sticks out her tongue and crosses her eyes. I can almost do it myself now, it is just that I'm not very good at the eyes. She goes to sleep quite a lot of the time, but we can hear the clipping heels in the corridors before the other ladies arrive so I nudge her and she jerks awake and smiles at me.

On the pale green wall at the foot of my bed hangs a painting of her. She is holding the baby whom I used to be so jealous of. At first that annoyed me but now I'm getting used to him. I'm almost sorry I punched in his eyes and covered him in blood and swallowed him. I lie here and I look at her and look at him and sometimes I close my eyes and imagine that I am that baby in her arms. Then I'll hear the clip of heels and turn to nudge the old lady sleeping beside me.