Page 62 of Little Wing
‘Oh, you’re bright all right,’ I told her.
‘Or Liverpool University – because of the You Know Whos.’
She makes me laugh, my friend. She calls the Beatles the You Know Whos like she’s taking the Lord’s name in vain if she doesn’t.
‘If I don’t get a place, maybe the Merchant Navy – like so many from here. But I don’t have sea legs though. Maybe I’ll jump ship at Liverpool and find a job at the Cavern Club. Did Jimi Hendrix play there ever?’
‘1966,’ I tell her.
‘You’re an encyclopaedia of modern music, so you are, Flora Buchanan.’
Not really.
We meet twice a week, usually. We don’t have telephones so I can’t phone her like I could Joan. When we see each other we just say, same time Thursday or same time Monday. The route is only four miles end to end but it’s a slog because I’m bigger now. It also feels longer because the changes in the landscape are so stark, like walking through one land into another. When I set out, I think of Jessie setting out too, and then the walk isn’t as intimidating, as lonely as it might feel otherwise. We have our favourite boulder that is pretty much halfway and we usually share carrots or a slice of cake or some bread and butter. And there we sit, my friend and I, chatting or singing our music. Jessie loves a boy called Lachlan McCrae. I said to her, your parents will worry I’m a bad influence on you. And Jessie said ach, not a bit of it.
I worry that her mum and dad won’t want her being friends with someone like me but she said they don’t disapprove of me. Quite the opposite, she said. She told me they feel for me and the wee bairn.
Today was proof. We met on our rock – I brought two slices of Mrs Buchanan’s jam sponge that I made yesterday and Jessie had a bag with her.
‘These are for you.’
But it wasn’t carrots.
Inside was a woven shawl in patterns of gentle cream and pale grey and golden honey. Very soft. And inside that, little miniature clothes. Baby clothes.
I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted by their tininess.
‘They are for you – for when the baby comes. This one – I wore this.’
It was a cotton nightie, with a yellow duck embroidered and a little frill around the wrists.
‘This one – this was my wee brother Glen’s.’
It, too, was white cotton, with three embroidered fish: blue, green and turquoise.
‘My granny did the needlework.’
There was also a bonnet and a cardigan, hand-knitted, the colour of butter. There were muslin squares and terry nappies and a dozen safety pins with white safety caps, all clipped onto to one very long one. They reminded me of birds sitting on a wire.
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought about any of this, about clothes for You. That you will be so tiny as to fit them, so real as to fill them.
Sometimes I gladly forget that you can’t stay ripening inside me for ever. Sometimes it’s a bit too much to consider that you will appear, in just over three months’ time.
I didn’t know what to say because I was scared as well as too choked at the kindness of it.
‘Och, don’t go crying, Flora Buchanan – you’ll start me off.’
I put Jessie’s hand on my belly so she could feel you wriggle.
We sat like that for a while. Not a cloud and the breeze was gentle, warm, it lifted Jessie’s hair revealing all the freckles on her forehead which I’m sure I saw multiply before my eyes.
‘What’s it like?’ she asked.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it’s like butterflies. Or imagine a bunny getting comfy in a burrow.’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘The – intercourse, I mean. The sex.’
I had to think about it carefully because I constantly shy away from memories of my old life, that night in particular. So I sat in the sunshine on our rock and I thought about the party and the delicious punch and the tiptoeing upstairs, hand in hand with the handsome boy who said relax, baby, relax.
