3. Feb, 2021

'Ugly Baby'

“I wish you could come and stay, Fee.”  It was more of a plea than an invitation.  Monica sounded exhausted.  “I tell you, this baby never sleeps!  I mean, he’s beautiful, of course and it’s wonderful…”

She trailed off.  Fee felt at a loss.  She had rung to see how things were going and readied herself for an excited babble of earth mother bliss.  Monica loved babies, had always loved babies, had coined it in during their teens as the go to babysitter and had her first three girls in rapid succession in her twenties.  Monica and her husband, Jacob, both loved children in fact and were forever telling Fee, who had never wanted them yet, how great it was.

“Hey, they’ve got a free ‘sort of Auntie’ for Christmas and birthdays,” Fee would say.  “I’m an asset as I am.”

Now, Fee frowned at the phone, sure that she had just heard a stifled sob.  Monica, like herself, was forty now, perhaps ‘number four to round things off, a happy accident,’  was taking an unexpected toll.

“Monica, are you ok there?” Fee asked, concerned.

“Yes,” came an unusually small voice.

“Is Jacob…?”

“He’s fine.  Well, he’s shattered, too.  He’s got to go for another conference trip again next week.  I don’t know why so many have to keep coming up right now.”

This sounded more as if Jacob were taking up an opportunity to escape than it being a necessity for him to go the way Monica said it, dispirited, and as if it had become a subject of bleak discussion between the couple.  Any dissonance between Jacob and Monica was very unusual.  They had always been the embodiment of domestic bliss to Fee, who had spent many nights unravelling her own shorter lived, if passionate relationships, over the phone with Monica, bottles of wine to hand at either end of the divide.

Fee started considering going.  Monica was Fee’s best friend and had been since early childhood.  Fee was due to travel down to visit her parents the following week.  It was not all that far away, really, from where Monica and Jacob lived.  She could break the journey there, stay one night over the weekend, perhaps, see how everybody was and maybe plan a longer stay when she had some more time off.  

“Jacob’s away soon?  How are the girls?” she asked next.

It occurred to Fee, smiling to herself, that perhaps newbie’s problem was that he realised he was going to be outnumbered all his life by three girls.

“Yes, he is but, honestly, he’d love to see you too, Fee.  He’s here this weekend.  Girls are good.  Well, one of them’s always at ‘that age’ these days, whatever ‘that age’ is!”

Fee laughed, glad to hear her friend rally a little.

“I haven’t seen you all in so long now!  I’d love to come.  It’ll only be short and sweet, though,” and she explained her thought of staying over a night while on the way to make her usual family visit.

“You could do that?  Oh, Fee, that is fantastic news!” Monica had exclaimed, and there was clear relief in her voice that Fee was coming.

It made Fee uneasy because it was out of character, but lack of sleep and a disruptive, very young baby were probably all it was down to.  After this, Fee booked her rail tickets and packed her bags.  She was pretty immersed in her own life and it wasn’t as often as it could have been that she saw Monica so, all in all, she felt a visit was not before time.

Jacob picked Fee up at the station.  She thought immediately that he looked a lot thinner than she remembered, his sporty leanness somehow gone stringy.  There were deep shadows under his eyes, and he was undesigner stubbly.  His hair and rough shadow beard were stippled with white now which, given that he was so dark haired, seemed to stand out startlingly as a new sign of growing older.  Fee ran her hand through her own curly topped pixie crop, a vibrantly cosmetic red, a smack in your eye colour.

“Wow!” said Jacob.  “That’s different!  You’re looking really well, Fee!”

She knew that she did.  The new hair went with a drop in dress size thanks to cutting down on booze and take-aways, together with picking up a determined exercise regime.

“Thank you.  I decided I didn’t want to be fair, fat and forty anymore.   It’s asking for gallstones and who needs that?” Fee laughed.  “Looking good yourself, there, J.”

Everybody, except Monica, called Jacob ‘J’.

“No, I don’t,” he laughed back tiredly.  “I look knackered.  I’m a shadow of my former self.”

This was so true that Fee couldn’t help saying,

“You are all right, though, aren’t you, J?”

“Of course.  Just new baby syndrome.  Runs in the family right now.  Wait till you see the rest of them!”

Again, he was joking but he gnawed on the inside of his cheek for a silent moment while he drove.

“How’s Monica doing?” asked Fee.  “She sounded a bit ‘end of tether’ on the phone.  Maybe just one of those sleepless baby nights, huh?”

“One of them!” Jacob exclaimed with feeling.  “The girls were never like that.  I mean, at times, obviously, but…”

“I bet they love having a baby brother, don’t they?  They must be a great help.”

“Well, they try, bless them, but he's not an easy baby.  Hey, I’ll be putting you off.  You’re our lifesaver for tonight.  Breathe a bit of life back into us all.”

When they arrived at the house, which stood alone in its garden, a country cottage kind of place which always looked idyllic on a sunny day like this one, the three girls were standing in a line outside.  There was something oddly stilted about their pose, as if they were in some long ago photograph, standing quite still, unsmiling, and somehow looking as if they had been there like that for a strangely long time.  Fee looked at them as the car approached.  They were all taller now, of course.  Maddison at thirteen was shooting up, Helena, nine, shedding her once solid puppy fat and Taylor, six, was serious in her little girl glasses and pigtails.  Their solemnity, their stillness, struck Fee as peculiar but the moment she and Jacob pulled up and she got out, the impression vanished as they all danced up to hug and greet her in turn.

“I love your hair!” cried Maddison.

“Wow!  Look how you’ve all grown!” exclaimed Fee, hugging her surrogate nieces back.

Jacob was looking past them all at the house and Fee was struck again, seeing him standing in the strong sunlight, by how gaunt he looked.  He no longer seemed to bounce a little as he walked, either.  The skin on his face was more lined and there were sags around cheek and jowl, as if there were little flesh beneath to fill it.  She hoped that Jacob wasn’t ill in some way he wasn’t disclosing, or perhaps didn’t know about

 He wasn’t pale, though, being sallow and always lightly tanned from being outside as a garden designer.  Jacob was a committed ecologist too and these were the conferences he attended and spoke at.  For them to have stepped up now, with all the climate change and species threat going on was not surprising, but for him to be going away as much as Monica had described, now that was.  Jacob had always been a very devoted father.  Still, the girls were old enough to help Monica out, Fee supposed.

She began to hear the sound that Jacob was tuned into, a thin, keening, penetrating wailing from a crying baby.  There was something viscerally distressing about the noise.  It was full of the angry torment of some want unsatisfied, hunger, or another deep distress.  The girls all turned to it too.

“The baby’s crying again,” said Taylor flatly.

Jacob’s lips tightened briefly, then he said,

“Come on in, Fee.  Monica’s dying to see you and you have to meet Jackson!  You know, he’s such a beautiful child.  He came out looking perfectly finished, golden.  They said it was a touch of jaundice at first but he’s fine.  He’s going to have really dark eyes, they’re inky blue right now and he has loads of hair, he’s got a little quiff already, hasn’t he, girls?”

“Yeah, Jackson’s so cute!” said Maddison.

“I cuddle him all the time!” said Helena.  “He never stops crying much, though.”

Her freckled face looked puzzled by something.

“And he’s always hungry.  He’s a greedy guts!” put in Taylor.

“Babies are always hungry, hun,” said Jacob, smiling more like himself.

There had been a time when Jacob’s smile had made him the most attractive person Fee had ever seen in her life, but it had been Jacob and Monica from almost the very start, so she had had to sit on that.  It would never have occurred to either of them to stray, which was why what Jacob said next struck Fee as strange, even though it was a common enough proud parent remark.

“He’s so beautiful, I can hardly believe he’s mine!” Jacob said as they opened the front door to go in.

The wailing intensified, a powerful command for some need to be met and then, there was Monica with the child in her arms.  Her hair was piled up in a soft knot but the loosened tendrils from it were lank, rather than floating prettily round her face as usual. She was still flabby with baby weight and yet wasted looking like Jacob.  Fee was surprised, even alarmed to see such evidence of the physical toll she had conjectured.

“Fee, darling!  You’re here!” Monica cried, as if to a saviour presence.

Fee went across to give her a hug but instead, Monica handed the baby to her.  Fee held her arms out instinctively to catch him, although taken by surprise by the speed of the handover.  The baby, probably a couple of months old now, stopped crying abruptly.  He stiffened, intuiting a stranger and looked up at Fee intently.  She had the sense of a powerful personality in the making.  What really surprised Fee, though, was not finding the baby beautiful at all but really quite ugly.  Jackson had very strong features, out of proportion for his face.  His big ears stuck out and she could see no golden tone to his skin, which was both pallid and blotchy from squalling.  The thick hair was coarse.  His stare was that fathomless one of all small babies, but it was flat, lacking the wonder she remembered in the girls of seeing things in the world for the first time.  She was disconcerted to feel that she was being assessed.  Suddenly, the baby held himself quite tense, the small knees jerking convulsively to his middle and the penetrating screaming began again.

“Is he ok?” asked Fee, alarmed.

“It’s just colic, the doctor says,” Monica answered tiredly.

The baby wriggled and grimaced, his small tongue sticking in and out. 

“No, it’s not,” said Taylor.  “He’s hungry again!”

“I just fed him’” said Monica, sounding cross about it.  “He can’t be.  He’s a windy baby, that’s all.”

“I’ll take him outside,” said Maddison.  “Fee’s only just got here!”

She gave her parents a reprimanding look and took the baby from Fee, going  outside with him and  breaking the suspended animation everyone, especially Jacob and Monica, seemed to be in around Jackson.  Everybody visibly relaxed as the wrenching cries retreated into the distance outside, Maddison walking up and down the garden with the baby.

“Let’s get a drink!” said Monica.  “This calls for a celebration.  Helena and Taylor, will you take Fee’s bags up for her?  You’re in the usual spare room, Fee.  It’s done up ready for a nursery too but don’t mind that.  Jackson’s still in with us, nights.”

Monica, Jacob and Fee headed into the living area and the drinks cabinet, where Jacob proceeded to mix them all some stiff looking gin cocktails.

“Aren’t you, er?” Fee asked Monica delicately.

“Breastfeeding?  No.  He’s on formula.  In fact, I can’t.  My milk failed to come in.  Never happened before.  Doc says probably my age, the signals a new baby’s needing it didn’t kick in.  I mean, I am forty now, as he pointed out.  He’s got a great bedside manner, hasn’t he, Jacob?  Even told me I’m probably in perimenopause and it’s a surprise I got pregnant at all.”

“It was certainly a surprise to me,” said Jacob, turning from his cocktail mixing, an edge to his tone which was hard to gauge.  “But you know, I think Monica just missed having a baby.  Some people fall in love with having babies and Monica’s always been one of them.”

“Oh, come on, you were as pleased as punch about it!” protested Monica.  “I know we said three was enough and we had more freedom now the girls were older but, you adore him!  Besides, it takes two to tango, fella, don’t forget!”

Her face lit up with the old, curvingly full lipped Monica smile, which made Fee and Jacob smile too.

The moment, which had sounded like resentment from Jacob, passed and the alcohol was a happy hit, relaxing them all.  Maddison came back in to say,

“He’s nodded off. I’ve put him down.”

“Thanks, babe,” said Monica.  “Never lasts long, Fee, let’s make the most of it.”

“I’ll leave you girls to it’” said Jacob.  “Have a good long catch up.  I’ve got to finish my paper for the conference.”

He took his drink off into the study with him.

“Helena, Taylor ‘n me are fixing you all pizzas for dinner,” Maddison  smiled

“Fabulous,” Fee beamed at her.

They really were such a lovely family together.

“So, now you’ve met Jackson!” Monica smiled.  “Isn’t he just gorgeous!”

“Perfect!” Fee enthused, whilst thinking that maybe the reason why she really saw Jackson as ugly was just because she had never been all that much into babies herself.

“It wasn’t an easy birth.  Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict the gory details on you, Fee.  It’s just, it was long drawn out and then when he was born, he wasn’t breathing right so they took him straight off.  Then after the longest time in came my midwife carrying this lusty, golden baby boy.

‘Listen to him now, shouting for his first feed,’ she said to me.  ‘He’s grand, so he is.’

I had about four different midwives because Jackson was taking his time.  She was lovely, that last one.  Irish.  She was really dainty, and she had incredibly bright eyes, so sparkling.  When they took Jackson away, I was crying my eyes out and she held my hand and kept telling me not to worry, she’d make absolutely certain I had a strong baby boy in my arms to take home.  And I did.”

Exhaustion, emotion, baby blues hormones and a drink had brought tears to Monica’s eyes.

“Oh, come here, sweetheart,” said Fee, giving her a big hug and was surprised, when she did so, how she could feel the bones under Monica’s loosened flesh.

The baby’s awakened howl came through the monitor and Monica groaned.

“There he goes!  My boy’s up again!”

But she had brightened and over the evening it was more like old times, although Monica and Jacob were the same and yet not the same.  From time to time, Fee would catch one or other of them in a vacant stare, having fallen silent.  They both looked so tired, Fee thought sympathetically.  The baby, alternately guzzling or outright screaming, was passed between one person and another during the evening, always restive, until the three girls, under Maddison’s careful eye, took him for his bath and brought him back down for bedtime cuddles.  The girls went to bed, but it wasn’t long before Jackson’s crying meant Monica had to go up and bring him down again.  Taking advantage of the private moment, Fee asked Jacob,

“Are you sure he’s ok, the baby?  Maybe there’s something underlying that needs sorting out with him?”

To Fee, the baby still looked as ugly as he had done at first with those marked, out of proportion features and somehow just not quite right, even though everybody else pronounced him beautiful. 

“We keep getting him checked out, don’t you worry" said Jacob.  "Nope, the doc says he’s as fit as a fiddle.  It’s all noise.  He’s just a difficult baby.  Guess we’ve been lucky before.”

Fee left it at that.  After Monica came back with him, Jackson stayed down with them until the adults went to bed themselves. 

During the whole evening, everybody’s attention had been on Jackson, tense about appeasing whatever his needs were.  They were all, even the children, Fee could see, worn down by the intensity of it and she couldn’t help thinking, whatever they said, that something was wrong about this baby, or with him.   The girls had taken turns nursing him, but he wouldn’t let Fee hold him at all, twisting, screaming angrily and doubling up in her arms.  That first moment of assessment had seemed to tell him that Fee was not part of his brood, or perhaps her innate lack of feeling for babies was transmitting to him.  She didn’t remember the girls being like that with her, but perhaps Jackson was an extra sensitive baby?

Tired out but at least having had a reasonably social time as old friends together, they said their goodnights shortly afterwards.  The spare room, with its mobiles, luminous ceiling stars and wacky wallpaper, ready for the baby when the baby was ready for it, needed quieting down with the lights off before Fee could get to sleep at all.  The already outgrown Moses basket in the corner, draped with its gauzy veils, was Halloween ghostly in itself, as if its inhabitant were not just nearby in the bedroom with his parents but altogether absent and Fee found the room unsettling.   Jackson’s proper crib was in Monica and Jacob’s room, but he spent most of the night awake in bed with them, they had told her.   The baby’s outlandish wailing continued keening through the house and made for disturbed drifting in and out of sleep, dropping off and then half waking.  At one point, Fee startled awake to the sound of sharp rapping on the wall behind her bed head but thought she must have dreamt it because when she listened, everything, even the baby, was silent. 

She fell asleep again and dreamed that her door opened and Jackson, little baby as he was and too small to sit up or even raise his head yet, walked right in on his tiny, bendy legs and stood staring at her fixedly from the side of the bed.  Fee jerked awake again fully and gazed up at the luminous stars on the ceiling, trying to settle her nightmare nerves.  There had been something surreal and nasty about the vision.  Nodding off, she again woke to the sound of rapid rapping on the wall behind her head.  This time she got up to check and found her bedroom door was ajar after all, or had she just opened it herself, half asleep?  Fee shook her head to clear it.

Across the corridor, Taylor’s night light was on, her door half open too, and Fee peeped in.  The child lay on her back, her mouth open, sleeping deeply, her face pale in sleep, vulnerable without her glasses.  Maddison’s door was shut, Helena’s ajar and she was sleeping, like Taylor, on her back, mouth fallen open.  Fee looked down towards Jacob and Monica’s room.  She must have imagined the rapping, surely?  Still, the silence, after hearing the baby cry all night, was somehow disturbing.

Fee hesitated and then, her nerves jangled too from the whole experience of the day and with her instinct that something was very wrong here persuading her to make the intrusion, she opened their bedroom door.  The landing light was left on for bathroom visits and to allay night fears in Taylor and Helena, who were still young enough to need it on, and so it illuminated the room.

The baby’s crib was empty, but he was on the bed.  Fee went further in.  Jackson lay in the crook of Monica’s arm, but his face was pressed hungrily right into hers, mouth attached to hers like a sucking parasite, his body quiveringly intent and strong looking.  Monica was quite still, almost trance like.  Her face was pale, distressed seeming and yet asleep.  Jacob was on his side, turned away from them, snoring slightly.  Fee gave a little cry of shock and the baby lifted its head and turned its flat stare right at her as she stood there, then it rolled on its back and started its ferocious screaming.  Monica’s eyes shot open and Jacob sat up.

“Fee!” exclaimed Monica, grabbing the baby and rocking him on her shoulder.  “I’m sorry, did he wake you?  He brings the whole house down with it when he yells like this at night.”

The noise, Fee felt, was fury at being interrupted in his uncanny feeding.

“He was, he was...over your mouth, Monica!” she stuttered. 

Surely, he couldn’t have looked up at her, it must have been an illusion when he fell back rolling over?

“Aww yes, he falls asleep kissing me sometimes.  Jacob too.  It’s the sweetest thing to see, isn’t it?”

Fee stared at the ugly baby, thinking fatigue must have unhinged her perceptions of this strange child and Jackson screamed and screamed.

“Go back to bed, Fee.  He’ll be fine.  I’ll get up with him for a while, hun,” said Jacob, sounding exhausted.

He came out of the room with Fee, carrying Jackson,  and she was struck again by how pared down and bony Jacob’s face looked, or perhaps it was just the landing’s light casting sharper shadows and angles from its bright bulb?

“You look so tired, J,” Fee said tenderly, putting her hand on his arm.

“We all are, Fee.  We all are.  You go back to sleep now if you can.”

Fee went back to the little nursery room, empty of the baby it was meant to hold, and she couldn’t shake the feeling, in the depths of her somewhere, that Jackson had never been that baby.  That Jacob knew it but just couldn’t face seeing it.  What nonsense, she told herself firmly.  Changelings of sinister origin were not wished on mortals by wicked fairies outside of folktales.  Jackson was just a baby boy.

In the morning, they had a tiredly chaotic breakfast together, and Jacob drove her to the station.  Monica, holding the fretfully wailing Jackson, and the three girls came out to see her off.  When she got to the station and Jacob waved her away through the train window, she had the same poignant thought she had had looking back and waving at Monica and the girls, which was,

“I might never see you again.”

What nonsense, she told herself once more.  The next time she went to visit them, everything would be fine again with their little family.  The baby would grow out it this.  Even so, all the way to her own parents’ house, she couldn’t shake that sense of dread and her intuition that something, whatever it was, was very wrong with Jackson.   Well, she said to herself, you never were very big on babies, but she failed to convince herself. 

Thoughts of her friends’ predicament stayed with her and she talked about it to her mother when of course, what Fee described sounded far more normal than it had felt to her at the time.  She left out what would have now sounded like foolish, fanciful details but when she was alone at night, she could still see Jackson suckling on Monica’s mouth in that unnatural, preying way.

She thought of how Jacob and Monica were dwindling, as if the fat were being winnowed from their bones. She thought of the sleeping girls, both lying on their backs with their mouths so vulnerably open and she remembered her dream about Jackson walking right up to her bedside on his tiny limbs.  Some nightmarish conflation of what she thought she had dreamed and what she believed she had seen Jackson doing made her feel as if Jackson might just as easily have walked into his sisters' rooms too, seeking to feed on his real sustenance.  

Then, all the comfortable conversations with her mother earlier about 'how hard it could be with babies, you know', fell way from her again, leaving her horribly and deeply uneasy, her premonition that she might never see her friends again after this returning to her.  Had she really seen that ugly baby lift his head to stare at her with those flat, old soul eyes before he rolled back on the bed, screaming and screaming?  No, she told herself in the morning again.  She couldn't have.  Could she?