ton.
I thought about leaving it right there in the carpark behind the recycling bins, where it couldn’t do too much damage to itself and someone would easily find it before it starved or anything. But I knew that if I did that the people in the store would remember me and track me down after all the fuss we’d just had. So I laid it on the back seat of the car, buckled it in with one of the seatbelts and the blanket off the back window, and got in the front. I started the engine.
I would drive it out of town to one of the villages, I decided, and leave it there, on a doorstep or outside a shop or something, when no one was looking, where someone else would report it found and its real parents or whoever had lost it would be able to claim it back. I would have to leave it somewhere without being seen, though, so no one would think I was abandoning it.
Or I could simply take it straight to the police. But then I would be further implicated. Maybe the police would think I had stolen the child, especially now that I had left the supermarket openly carrying it as if it were mine after all.
I looked at my watch. I was already late for work.
I cruised out past the garden centre and towards the motorway and decided I’d turn left at the first signpost and deposit it in the first quiet, safe, vaguely-peopled place I found then race back into town. I stayed in the inside lane and watched for village signs.
You’re a really rubbish driver, a voice said from the back of the car. I could do better than that, and I can’t even drive. Are you for instance representative of all women drivers or is it just you among all women who’s so rubbish at driving?
It was the child speaking. But it spoke with so surprisingly charming a little voice that it made me want to laugh, a voice as young and clear as a series of ringing bells arranged into a pretty melody. It said the complicated words, representative and for instance, with an innocence that sounded ancient, centuries old, and at the same time as if it had only just discovered their meaning and was trying out their usage and I was privileged to be present when it did.
I slewed the car over to the side of the motorway, switched the engine off and leaned over the front seat into the back. The child still lay there helpless, rolled up in the tartan blanket, held in place by the seatbelt. It didn’t look old enough to be able to speak. It looked barely a year old.
It’s terrible. Asylum seekers and foreigners come here and take all our jobs and all our benefits, it said preternaturally, sweetly. They should all be sent back to where they come from.
There was a slight endearing lisp on the s sounds in the words asylum and seekers and foreigners and jobs and benefits and sent.
What? I said.
Can’t you hear? Cloth in your ears? it said. The real terrorists are people who aren’t properly English. They will sneak into football stadiums and blow up innocent Christian people supporting innocent English teams.
The words slipped out of its ruby-red mouth. I could just see the glint of its little coming teeth.
It said: The pound is our rightful heritage. We deserve our heritage. Women shouldn’t work if they’re going to have babies. Women shouldn’t work at all. It’s not the natural order of things. And as for gay weddings. Don’t make me laugh.
Then it laughed, blondly, beautifully, as if only for me. Its big blue eyes were open and looking straight up at me as if I were the most delightful thing it had ever seen.
I was enchanted. I laughed back.
From nowhere a black cloud crossed the sun over its face, it screwed up its eyes and kicked its legs, waved its one free arm around outside the blanket, its hand clenched in a tiny fist, and began to bawl and wail.
It’s hungry, I thought and my hand went down to my shirt and before I knew what I was doing I was unbuttoning, getting myself out, and planning how to ensure the child’s later enrolment in one of the area’s better secondary schools.
I turned the car around and headed for home. I had decided to keep the beautiful child. I would feed it. I would