Until he came to know what he was looking for, it was only the label that was supposed to provide the proof, though he couldn’t be expected to read from such a distance, identifying his personal belongings like a standard uniform boxed among the rest.
’Scuse lady, he stopped the duty nurse, I’m here for my son? Murphy’s the name. Where’s the little toughie?
But something had happened to the boy, and there was a girl, instead, which left Mark flustered. Speechless, to tell the truth. And not even chubby or winsome, his daughter, but skinnnnny. A horrible thing, was all he felt, hardly endearing.
Which is not a promising start. Sure, so she’s not born in China, and no one sticks needles into her body because she’s a girl, twenty-nine thin teeth floating in her fluids and piercing her organs, discovered years later when she’s X-rayed for aspecific pains. And her mother is not a young woman in India, risking an illegal foetal screening, her femicide unwittingly feeding the demand for child brides.
Nothing this big, the Murphy baby. She is just a girl, and all that followed was a father’s disappointment. After that let-down he’d put his head into Nora’s ward to say cheers, but the wife was sleeping, so he didn’t have to say anything. He definitely didn’t stay. Couldn’t. He was working a major repair in the floating dock.
For some reason, however, in the short visit he’d become fleetingly aware that his wife and daughter were coupled. Female. And that he was the only one in the new family with no tag on his arm, that paper bracelet thing.
Hm. He shook his head, not vigorously, just the shudder of a dog, dreaming of shaking dry. Quashing his thoughts, Mark Murphy headed back to work. The foreman had cut him a little slack that day, kid being born, but he couldn’t afford to screw this up.
After more than a week Nora leaves hospital, and now the baby is stronger; she’s a stayer after all. But so small. Needs custom cloth nappies cut from flannelette, and she’s still far too tiny for the cot. She’d slip through the bars like a jumper from a high-rise window and break onto the floor.
She would. She could die. Could be left for dead. Which is something to think about, and the weary mother does. Sometimes.
But instead she puts the newborn in a shoebox, her mattress a small hot-water bottle wrapped in a receiving blanket. It’s done with something resembling care, carefully, because Nora is not one to be careless, but still the baby looks like an abandoned kitty, rejected by its mother and being raised by hand-held titty bottle.
None of which interests the child when she is told the anecdote, so many years later. Instead, she thinks of the fascinating system at Cuthberts shoe shop for giving and receiving change. How the saleslady puts the customer’s money in a brass cylinder which is inserted into a tube and shot, via air, along a system of aerial tunnels to the next storey of the building. It’s called pneumatic, this magic. Then a clerk in the Accounts Department works out the change, writes up the receipt and puts both in the cylinder, which is dramatically returned to its place of origin. The Accounts must always be up, Halley thinks, and down there, where the customer waits, the receipt, the change, appear in a whoosh of arrival. As close to a gift from God as you’re likely to get.
Halley imagines the customer’s shock at finding a tiny baby curled in the cylinder. She imagines it really happening, without courier or covenant. What a surprise! She thinks that getting a baby might actually not be that different, even if you’re the mother.
Did you feel that the baby being inside was like that? Halley asks her mother, And did you like to think about what I would be like? And Mommy . . . Mom, when you saw me, she persists, Did I look like you? And did you like me?
Nora glances at this strange child stranded there with her. She says What do you mean, Halley? Can’t you say clearly what you mean?
And when the girl looks offended her mother says to Slow down. That she must talk more slowly if she wants people to understand what she’s trying to say.
Close-coupled
After the baby, when the balcony unit off the Ridge proves too expensive, Mark and Nora move to the corporation flats. Kenneth Gardens. It’s Nora who finds the place, makes enquiries, takes her warm plate of pleas and thank yous to the official in the council office.
Though some people aren’t interested in listening. Mark’s friends, for instance, who are all too ready to make the new Murphy home at 4 Ixia Court into a den of thieves.
Nora doesn’t want them there, she tells Mark. Your cronies. A crew of ne’er-do-wells.
They bring bolts of fabric, wrapped in tough plastic, sealed cardboard boxes – goods they’ve skimmed from whatever ship they’ve been jobbing.
But Nah, it’s nothing, one of these chancers will say, You must just tell Mark to only keep it for a bit. Stash it till things cool off. He doesn’t have to move it or any.
So his mates always knew where to find Mark, and where to get tanked on the friendly beers he provided. But if they stopped by to drop off goods and Mark’s wife asked where he was, then they were close-mouthed against her questions, tight as mussels.
All they’d do was mock, joke like a brash of boys while they waited, toasting their dewy, golden bottles in the baby’s direction, laughing, always so much laughing. How Mark Murphy was a bladdy good seaman, and nobody can deny. Another peal unbottled for all to enjoy.
Halley never knew to laugh or cry. She was much too small. Just a baby. Yet even now, as she recalls her mother’s tightly knuckled face, it doesn’t sound funny.
Soon, the little Murphy has grown some, though she remains a bony, unappealing infant; never the sugared dainty of the preferred female standard.
Nor is she anything like the little blighter the father was expecting, just as he is nothing like the husband anticipated by her mother, so maybe things even out. But all this is of little account, and for the present Mark is gone. Somewhere up north. A job in Rhodesia.
Where if he didn’t realise it, Nora curtly told people who asked, There was no ocean, so no openings in the ship repair business.
Maybe he was planning to turn his hand to something else? Aunty Beulah from upstairs suggested, meaning find his luck or chance his arm, her faith in heavy engineering, if not in Mark, not completely undermined.
Now, now, Nora, she’d soothe, Could be that up there the going’s good? Some spin-off from Kariba, you know, which is a lake, after all. To a boat, she reminded her friend, Water is water, no?
Yes, said Nora, Because it has no need to slake a thirst.
The baby is hard work for the mother, with that thin, persistent niggle, and a tendency to be awake when most households are dead asleep. Often, the child still shuns the breast, so could be it’s lack of food that keeps her wailing.
What does she want, Nora grates, Why won’t she sleep? Cannot be teething: she’s too small to be cutting teeth.
Long, dark nights, Nora holds the wailer over her shoulder on the narrow back porch. Up and down she sleepwalks, one way then another, keeping watch, tramping grooves in the wooden floor like a trolley track, pat pat patting the baby’s ribbed back.
It’s only exhaustion that keeps her from hitting harder.
Soon the fractious patterns are established, and Nora cannot keep herself from thinking she’d been mad to want a baby. And that if she had wanted a baby, it certainly wasn’t this one. But imagine wanting any baby with that man, she stirs herself up, all defiant. And in this crazy country! Why are women so stuuupid? she wonders, angry enough to join the women who marched on the Union Buildings, instead of falling in love. But she’s missed that boat by years, she knows, and will never find out now if it was possible to have both.
But she also wants reassurances against politics, and they come, of a sort, through the voice of authority, namely Springbok Radio. On the news, listeners hear that 1960 is a thing of the past; that the unrest had been provoked