enough to empty them into a hole in the ground rather than any other space that happens to be near you. I find it hard to fathom how evolution has deemed this behaviour to be favourable—after all, even a dog knows not to shit where it eats.
You, however, shit where you will. And feel proud of yourself afterwards.
You have lived for over two years, a period during which most other creatures on the planet will have matured, procreated, or even died, yet every aspect of you still seems premature.
You are a little safer in your strides now, less prone to accident. You are also fat. Your arms and legs bulge as if they have not been allowed to grow into themselves. Speech has arrived too, although ‘speech’ is not an accurate description of what you do. You make various rasps, slurps, cries and groans and, occasionally, a combination of these can be identified as a word. The first of these was not, as I had planned, ‘Ima’. It was a surprise when you first said it. I was chopping wood outside while you babbled to yourself. Then you stood up and pointed east.
‘Sea.’
I stopped, momentarily thinking that somebody else must have climbed to our dwelling rock, so different was the word to your usual slush and clamour.
You turned to me and repeated it, smiling.
‘Sea.’
Admittedly it is not a complex word—a phoneme couplet, onomatopoeic if you have ever heard tide on a shingle beach—but the diction was perfect. The first part of the equation to which your frontal lobes, lips, tongue and vocal cords had been stumbling ever since that first cry in the Halls of Gestation, had finally been solved.
You appeared most pleased with yourself.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Sea.’
YOU STILL CRY at night, but it is no longer the aimless wail of your infancy. Now the cry has direction and purpose—namely me, and my immediate requirement to bring comfort.
From what, I do not know. Life, I suppose, like Roop.
There is a pattern to these nocturnal demands; they usually follow a day of outbursts. Outbursts are something else entirely. They have no purpose, no direction, they are just what they are.
If something goes wrong in your tiny world—for example, if a piece of vegetable does not have the correct consistency or shape, or if an object you are manhandling does not conform to your expectations, or if I move, speak, stand, sit, or position the muscles of my face in a way that does not please you—and more often than not what does not please you is precisely what you have requested—then an outburst may occur. During an outburst, everything breaks down. Instantly.
You flush, you cry, you thrash, you flail, you fling yourself upon the ground and hammer your fat fists upon it, squealing like a pig for the thing that will not, and cannot possibly, occur or exist. Any sense of reason that I may be forgiven to believe you have been building through your quiet study of the rocks, grass, small animals and cups of river water I give you to occupy your mind while I work, is washed away in a tide of tears. There is no reason, no rational thought, nothing but a screaming little animal upon my floor.
Nothing can be done during an outburst. Any attempt to soothe or allay only stirs up more trouble. The shock of violence, I imagine, might stop you; a slap or a pinch. But I have never struck anything in my life. No erta has.
Nothing can be done. I have learned to spot the signs of an outburst and when one is near, I stand back with my arms folded and let it pass.
I know what these outbursts mean. You were born believing that you rule the universe, and every piece of evidence that suggests otherwise makes you rage, deranged, like a despot robbed of power. Now I understand why such things as queens and emperors and presidents existed before you; they were merely toddlers who never grew up.
The most dreadful outburst occurs when you are woken early from sleep. This is when you are at your worst; overrun with yourself, unaware of the world, slave to your own petulant, ill-defined desires.
I expect you will learn to control them in time, but even then they will still exist, lurking behind every smile and sigh. As you mature, you may no longer wail and slam your fists upon the floor when things do not go your way, but some part of you