The magazine you've been hoping to find welcomes you to:

Baby Alan
By Juliet West

We were twenty minutes from home when my iPod ran out of power. I left the earphones in and stared out the car window, watching a buzzard stretch itself into the wind, glide over the fields then land on a round wooden fence post. Donk. Mum had one of her tapes on, some folk band she’d seen at a festival two hundred years ago. There was a taste of Auntie Di’s tuna and red onion sandwiches in my mouth, and my teeth were still aching from the cookie dough ice cream.

So, everything was going fine, until the crying started up from the back seat.

Waaaa-waaaa wa-wa, waaaa-waaaa wa-wa.

‘I thought he was out like a light,’ Mum said, clicking her tongue against her front teeth. ‘I’ll just have to pull over and feed him.’

My toes tightened in my trainers and there was that weird shrivelling feeling low down in my stomach. I wanted to shout: for god’s sake, just ignore the bloody thing; it’ll stop in a few minutes. But if I said that, there was always a risk she’d start crying too, and I’d have to listen to both of them - Baby Alan’s wail-on-a-loop and Mum’s soft sniffling.

So I kept quiet and felt in my jacket pocket for the conker Saul gave me last autumn. The smooth red-brown skin had turned wrinkly and dull. I ran my thumb over the bumps as Mum stepped on the brake and changed down the gears.

Waaaaa-waaaaa wa-wa.

It was hard to work out where Mum was planning to stop because there were no laybys up ahead, only a roundabout. She took the second exit then pulled over towards the verge. But it wasn’t much of a verge, just a narrow stretch of grass bordered by a thick hedge running along the edge of a field. We parked half on the verge, half on the road. The traffic whiskered past, fast, making our car shiver. A lorry swerved to avoid us, thundering towards the middle of the carriageway.

‘You can’t stop here,’ I said. ‘There isn’t room.’

‘This is fine. I’ll put the hazard lights on.’ She took off her glasses and re-tied her ponytail, bony fingers snapping the hair-band into place.

It was busy that afternoon: people were heading west for the holidays, visors down against the summer sunshine zipping in through their front windscreens. Busy in the opposite direction, too.

But my mum didn’t care. She prodded the red triangle button on the dashboard then hitched up her long green dress and climbed into the back seat.

‘Shush now, shush now, milky’s coming,’ she whispered, picking up Baby Alan and feeling in the spiky straw moses basket for the bottle.

I imagined being old enough to drive. I imagined tearing Baby Alan from Mum’s arms, chucking him out the window, reversing over his head then putting my foot down all the way home. And instead of being a nice quiet girl I would yell at her while I was driving along. I’d scream: stop being so weird, Mother, stop being so fucking weird. There’s no need to feed Baby Alan pretend milk from a toy bottle. All you have to do is turn the little white switch halfway up his spine to OFF.

Baby Alan made a sucking sound. I heard his eyes shudder shut. Ahhhh-ahhhh slurp-slurp, ahhhh-ahhhh slurp-slurp.

I stared down at my hands, picked some dirt from under my thumbnail. Listened to the tick of the hazard lights.

I ran it over in my head again - the day when it all started. That boring Saturday a couple of years ago when Mum said she’d give me double pocket money if I had a proper sort-out in my bedroom. There was so much junk crammed in the bottom of my wardrobe none of my clothes could hang straight. I was happy enough to tidy up - I needed to make room for all the cool new stuff I’d been given when I was in hospital. (Even though the lump turned out to be nothing: ‘just a harmless cyst’, and I’d felt a bit guilty packing the books and the iPod and the CDs back into my little wheelie suitcase - like maybe I should give them back now I wasn’t ill after all.)

I organised three piles - one to keep, one to chuck, one for the charity shop. There wasn’t much I wanted to keep. I was nearly twelve, and most of the games and jigsaws had been sitting around for as long as I could remember. The magnet set was ok, but other things were broken, or they had bits missing, or they were grubby, or pink. Mum came in and looked at my chuck heap.

‘This can’t all be rubbish,’ she said, crouching down and picking about in the pile. ‘What about Baby Annabell? Those dolls cost a fortune new.’

We looked at the doll. There was a toy nappy pulled over her head, with curls of shiny yellow hair springing through the leg holes. Thunderbirds stickers were pressed like tattoos on her arms and she was wearing a sort of loin cloth or thong made out of loo roll and bits of Sellotape.

‘Who’s gonna want that?’ I said. ‘I’ll spruce her up and she’ll be good as new. I bet there’s a little girl somewhere would be thrilled to have a Baby Annabell.’

She grabbed the doll by the ankles and swooped out the room.

I didn’t know the word for it then. But now I can see that it was ironic, because Mum always moaned about Baby Annabell in the days when I used to play with her. ‘I keep thinking I can hear a real baby crying,’ she’d say. ‘Why did they have to make her so lifelike? Whatever happened to imagination?’

I thought she was just annoyed because Dad and Caroline had bought her for me. They’d got there first.

___________

Continue reading this story in our 100th issue celebratory edition...

 

Follow the links below for a taster of the great reads waiting for you in our special 100th anniversary celebratory edition. You can buy it right now by clicking HERE or better still, take out a subscription online at our subscription page. Don't forget our specially discounted rates for two or three year subscriptions. LITTLE BUNKAR - Adam Hays ROSIE - R.S.Mann THE CROCODILE HOUSE - Emma Seaman SELECTION OF POEMS 100th Issue Front Page CONTRIBUTORS A-Z

 

The New Writer   PO Box 60  Cranbrook  Kent TN17 2ZR UK
tel 01580 212626    email editor@thenewwriter.com

This site designed and maintained by Wealdtec Computer Services