And she obviously wasn’t in the mood to explain how this had happened, plus I didn’t really think it was the right time to ask her. And she kept on asking me what was going to become of her, and she kept wondering aloud how she was going to take care of the baby now that the baby was born, and big tears kept on sliding down her face. I tried to cheer her up by telling her a few jokes, and I’m not a hundred percent sure but I think that was a bit of a help, because she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. Images of George Corporamore crept around in my head: of him feeling Maggie’s shoulder that night in the hall, with his pointed fingers, and of him always looking at her as she passed by. I thought about how I wanted to hurt him and kill him and tell him to stay away from her and not to touch her and to leave her alone.
I’m not somebody who turns my back on my responsibilities. I stick around when people need me. I’m not trying to sound like a saint or anything. It’s just that I think that’s important. Even if I am only a kid.
The baby started to cry a little bit, but I sang her a song for babies that I knew really well. It’s got all these words about the first time you see a baby and how you want to keep them warm and safe and stuff. She stopped crying, which was the whole idea.
I gave her back to Maggie. The three of us fell asleep in that broken-down wreck of a place. Maggie and the baby on the old mattress, and me on the floor beside them. And that night, just for a little while, I stopped worrying about everything. We slept a certain type of sleep that can only be slept by people who have done something very important.
You can’t be worried all the time. Sometimes you have to take a break from it.
Chapter 18
IT WAS difficult to believe that someone so pointy and hard and ugly could be the father of someone so soft and round and perfectly beautiful. Apparently as soon as Corporamore had found out that Maggie was going to have his baby, he had told her that she had to leave and had forced her to pretend to everyone else, including me and Kevin, that she’d decided to leave of her own accord for no particular reason. She was too ashamed to go to her parents, and she didn’t want to be a worry to them, seeing as they had a load more children to feed already, which is why she ended up in the rubbish gate lodge with the wind whistling through it and no proper toilet or running water.
We didn’t get to complain about the behavior of George Corporamore, even though it probably would have done us a world of good. There wasn’t time.
I didn’t need to talk about what we were going to do next, because I had decided that we were going to smuggle Maggie and the baby back to Blackbrick, at least for a few days while we figured out a plan. Ross, one of the coolest horses of all time, had waited quietly outside the gate lodge for practically the whole night. Now everybody needed to be somewhere that was warm and where there was food nearby.
The baby was small and pretty quiet. It was going to be easy. I told Maggie I was going to take Ross back up to Blackbrick and that I’d be back to get her with Kevin and the cart. She was totally okay with it, but I wasn’t going to wait around, just in case she changed her mind.
“By the way, what’s her name?” I asked.
“Nora Cosmo McGuire,” Maggie said, looking down at the baby as if there was nothing else to worry about. “Nora for short.”
I woke Kevin up. “What’s happened?” was the first thing he said, because when you have something important to tell someone, it must be written all over your face. I told him how I’d found Maggie, and for a second he was delighted, slipping out of his bed and hopping around on one leg trying to get his trousers on, saying, “Well, that’s a relief.”
Then I told him about the baby and he fell over.
“A baby? A real baby?” he said when he’d recovered enough to start quizzing me. “What’s going on, Cosmo? Why didn’t you come and fetch me? What the bloody hell . . .?”
I thought he deserved to know then, about that time I’d seen Maggie and Corporamore in the shadows. But as soon as I explained, I was sorry I’d even opened my mouth. His jaw tightened and he got a look on his face that I’ll never forget. His hands curled up into hard fists and he kept saying something under his breath.
“Cosmo, get out of my way. You’ve been in my way since you came here. It should have been me. I’m the one she needs. I’m the one who should have been with her all this time. Not you. Not George Corporamore.”
I told him that if he came with me and if he just saw Maggie and the baby, he’d probably calm down.
We hitched Somerville and Ross to the cart, which was easy because by then we were professional experts at it. But Kevin didn’t look at me or talk to me at all, not like he usually did. And his face was set in a grim clench and it stayed like that until he saw her.
“Are you all right, Maggie?” was all he could say for a while, but he wasn’t smiling and his face wasn’t soft the way it usually was when he looked at her.
She held Nora out for him to see. He bit his lip, and very quietly he whispered, “How, Maggie? Why?” Maggie closed her eyes really tight and shook her head from side to side and pressed her lips together, and basically it was obvious she was never going to be in the mood to answer questions like that. Then the baby made this little gurgling squeak of a noise, which lightened the atmosphere a bit.
“What do you think of her?” Maggie said eventually, and Kevin had to admit that she was a smashing-looking child, just like her mother.
We found this massive floppy old sock, and it fitted perfectly on the baby’s head. Maggie fed her real breast milk, and me and Kevin weren’t even embarrassed. After all, I guess that’s one of the reasons for boobs.
We walked out of the gate lodge like a group of injured soldiers. I looked back at the south gates, even though I never really liked looking at them. I thought about the night I’d first arrived, the night that I shook the gates and screamed up into the sky.
It was a bit hard for Maggie to walk. We helped her onto the cart, and then very carefully we passed the baby to her. Maggie winced a few times as we moved the horses as gently as we could up the avenue. I could tell from the way that they were walking that they knew they were pulling something very precious, and baby Nora kept sucking away the whole time. Me and Kevin were tenser and edgier than we had ever been, which I thought must be what proper adults must feel when children are born.
I still don’t really know why Maggie was so ashamed of having a baby and why she wanted to hide away from everyone the way she did. As far as I was concerned, she should have been completely proud of herself. I mean, having a new person inside your body and then doing all that extremely hard work to get the new person out, and then feeding the new person with your own body. That’s an amazing thing. I’d never realized how amazing it was until I was close up to it.
“I’m a sinner, Cosmo,” she said to me. “I’ve done a terrible, wrong thing, and I’ll suffer the rest of my life because of it, and I deserve to suffer.”
I kept telling her that there was nothing to be ashamed about. I did have a few opinions about Corporamore and what I’d like to do to him, but I kept all of them to myself because you don’t want a new parent to be influenced by negative energy. They’re exhausted enough as it is, and they can start crying very easily even if you say nice things to them, like for example if you tell them their baby is lovely and stuff like that.
So anyway, we were on our way back to Blackbrick, me and Maggie and Kevin and the baby and the horses, and Maggie was looking down at Nora, who was asleep. And I could feel all these massive waves of worry sloshing around inside me.
And I was thinking how much I didn’t want to be worried anymore. About anything. Even though by then I was used to tracking down disappearing pregnant girls and working out rescue plans for miniature infants. You know, nothing too bloody demanding or anything.
Mrs. Kelly must definitely have known all about Maggie’s situation, because when we knocked on the door of her basement quarters and explained what had happened,
she said, “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, so soon?
“Is everything all right? Are they both quite well?” she asked, and I said they were fine but that it would be really handy if Maggie and the baby could stay with her in her quarters because that way Mrs. Kelly could keep an eye on them.
“Of course they can. Where else would they go, with me rattling around and so much room on my hands?”
Maggie had been waiting outside, holding the baby and swaying slightly to and fro. But we told her to come on in, and as soon as she was inside, she was all, “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Kelly. I’m so very grateful to you. Oh, God bless you.” I thought it was a bit over-the-top, to be honest. I wished she’d stop saying that. It’s up to people to help babies. Nobody should feel grateful about it. That’s just what humans are supposed to do.
And as soon as Mrs. Kelly saw Nora, she was enchanted like everyone is when they see a new person, all sweet and squirmy like that.
Kevin and I cut an old mattress and stuffed it into a bottom drawer in a chest of drawers in this small corner of Mrs. Kelly’s rooms. I wasn’t at all sure it would satisfy safety regulations for newborn infants, but after a bit of squabbling that got slightly nasty, we calmed down and finally agreed that it was going to have to be good enough. On the floor beside the drawer we made up a bed for Maggie.
I wish I could show them to you, with their black hair and their big round eyes and their serious mouths and their pale faces. I wish I could show you what they were like.
Maggie was pathologically thirsty and kept on asking for more milk. It’s quite hard to transport milk down a rickety old staircase in secret when you’re in a hurry and when all you have to carry it in is a tin can with a weird curvy handle.
I know it’s everyone’s duty to take care of babies, but still they have to be lovely to survive. Otherwise, after a while, people would throw them in the corner, because even though they’re very small, they are also unbelievably high-maintenance. Their cuteness is their secret weapon. It makes everyone want to do everything for them and keep them clean and more or less behave like their personal slaves.
After the baby was settled in and we had put everything into a manageable holding pattern, I went to the kitchen to give Mrs. Kelly an update. How many times Nora had fed, how Maggie looked, stuff like that.
It was around that time that I began to feel radically left out. Everybody had a focus, and in each of their cases that focus wasn’t me. They were getting on with their lives. After all, that’s what people have to do, and if I didn’t do something to get on with mine, I was going to end up being a third wheel forever.
For the first time in ages, I wanted to go home. It became like a banging in my head. I kept imagining my grandparents searching around, shouting for me, just like I had done for Maggie. I thought maybe that Mum might have decided to come back, and maybe she was looking for me too. And I realized something that’s hard to explain—something to do with love, and I felt terrible about the stress that I must have created by disappearing off in a taxi that night and not coming back.
I’d let myself forget about the future and the people in it, but the future was where I belonged. You have to live in your own time zone. You can’t live in someone else’s. It goes against the natural order of things.
I don’t know exactly why, but Brian popped into my head too, as though he were alive for a second with his own face right in front of mine. If Brian hadn’t bloody well died, then nothing else bad would ever have happened. My mum wouldn’t have become a workaholic and gone off looking for business on the other side of the world. Granddad’s brain wouldn’t have wanted to erase everything it had once known. Everyone wouldn’t have been tormented the whole time thinking about what an idiot Brian was to fall out of a stupid window.
I mean, seriously. Who does that? People are supposed to have basic survival instincts. At least that’s what I thought.
If it wasn’t for Brian, I wouldn’t have ever even met Dr. Sally or any of those losers. Taxi Guy wouldn’t have brought me to Blackbrick. I wouldn’t have been abandoned in someone else’s past.
People tell me that it’s bad enough having a brother who’s alive. But having a dead one really sucks.
I was tired. I should have gotten used to it. I should have accepted it by now. I should have been over it. And I should have been all right. We all should have. But none of us was all right. My granddad was demented and sitting there like a vegetable. And my mum. Where was she, for Chrissake? Sydney? Who goes to Sydney? I mean if you’re going to go off and leave everyone when everyone needs you most, surely you could think of somewhere better than that. And Ted? He was too busy being a pioneer of cutting-edge science to worry about me.
These were the things that began to go through my head, but by then I didn’t have anyone to talk to about them anymore, because Maggie was obsessed, obviously, with the baby, and Kevin was more focused on Maggie than ever, and Mrs. Kelly was busy shining over all three of them like this big benevolent protective sun.
And I was back on Cordelia duty.
Cordelia said she knew something was up. I asked her what she knew, and she said that she knew Maggie was going to have a baby. I didn’t tell her the baby was already here. She started saying how there was something terribly wrong about Maggie still being under the Blackbrick roof, still being sheltered by the generosity of her family when “in truth, by now Maggie should be out on her ear” for being about to have a baby when she wasn’t even married.
Something rose inside me then. Something brave. I don’t really know why. I guess it was just that there were certain things I wasn’t in the mood for anymore.
And the time to be polite and well behaved felt like it had gone. So I put the breakfast tray down on the bed, and I sat down myself, quite close to her.
“Get off my bed this instant!” she whined.
I told her that I had something to say, and then without waiting for her permission, I said it:
“First of all, Cordelia, I never want to hear you talk about Maggie McGuire like that again.”
“Oh, really? And what will you do about it?”
I’m not a million percent proud of the way I behaved after she said that, but she was being pretty provocative.
I toppled the tray over, and the bacon smeared greasy stains on her frilly white bed and egg dripped in yellow plops and the teapot crashed to the floor. Cordelia started ringing this stupid little bell and shouting, “Help, help!”
I took the bell away from her and told her to shut up.
“Do you know that there are kids not much older than you all over this country, working every day until their knuckles bleed? Do you know that one Maggie McGuire is worth, like, about five million Cordelia Corporamores?”
Cordelia was quiet for ages then and she looked out the window, and I explained how even when people acted politely to her, it was only because they felt they had to. It wasn’t actually because they wanted to or anything. And I asked her how she thought she would feel if people behaved toward her the way she behaved toward everyone else. I’m not sure how long my lecture went on for. All I know is that once I started, I found it more or less impossible to stop.
She said she was going to have me kicked out of Blackbrick, and I was all like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.”
And then I asked her why she was always so mean. She said it was none of my business but that if I must know, she’d had a rotten time in her short life. She said that everyone basically ignored her. That she had had a brother who’d died.
So then it struck me that it might be quite lousy to be her, too, which was another big first for me in the realization stakes.
“Cordelia, you need to know something: there comes a time when you’ve got to stop using your past as a license to do whatever you want. There comes a time when you have to get over things like that and get on with being the best person you can be. If you let the past determine your future, you’re probably screwed.”
You don’
t always know how true something is until you say it out loud to someone else.
I was beginning to feel a bit bad about the mess I’d made in her room. I started cleaning up. And then, quite surprisingly, Cordelia got out of her bed and began to help me.
“Am I really so very dreadful?”
The way she said it was kind of trembly and unsure, and her voice sounded little and shocked, the way someone’s voice is when they’ve just realized something about themselves that they’d prefer not to have known.
“Yes, you are. Dreadful. That’s pretty much the word, but the good thing is, you see, that now that you know, you have your whole life ahead of you to do something about it.”
And that was when Cordelia Corporamore, the spoiledest brat I’d ever met, said something to me that I’d definitely never heard her say before. She said she was sorry. She went even further than that. She said that she didn’t know how Kevin and Maggie and me had put up with her for all these months. She said that her horrible behavior was like a prison that she couldn’t get out of. I told her she should consider herself lucky, because if she thought about it for a second, it was the kind of prison that she could easily walk away from whenever she wanted.
“Look at me,” I said to her. “I’m stuck here. This is a real prison for me. I used to have a key to get out of it, but your father took it off me one night last winter and now I think I’m pretty much here for good, and I want to go home, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do.”
“I am a dreadful person and I’m bitter, and I was jealous of the three of you,” she said as if she hadn’t been listening.
“Jealous of us?”
“Yes,” she said. “You were always having such a tremendous time, and I felt left out. I wanted to spoil your fun. That’s what Blackbrick does to people. It makes people hard and cruel, and I think that everyone should try to stay away from here as much as they possibly can.”
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