My mother groaned! My father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
(William Blake, Infant Sorrow)
(A large, white bird drops swoops over the Mersey Estuary and settles)
I knew no words for my pulsing sleeping sack. No words for this tender bunker, somewhere on the hospital’s fifth floor. Indeed, I knew nothing of buildings at all.
Yet now a drum beat trembles my veins.
Happiness never lasts: my first lesson. For my sleeping bag has begun squeezing me, just this hour ago. First my head, squishing my nose, then my chest, the hips for which I have no name, and my small feet.
And now, hang on: worse. Now I’m moving, an astronaut in biology and more – more! – squeezing. There is pounding in my ears rises, and I’m being squished, squashed, again and again, and – well, I can tell you now: I’m not so sure about this.
Then it’s cold, cold, cold on the top of my head, LIVERPOOL cold, and a cold I’ve never felt before, let alone north-of-England cold, and something talks to me of the ocean and now that cold, well, it’s over my ears, eyes, my nose.
I had assumed this amicable, warm coating was my birthright. That I had some kind of tenancy privilege. Wasn’t this true?
Birth: resentment’s crucible.
Cold on my shoulders, cold on my chest. And there’s a monster, yes: an actual monster, who’s got hold of my head and is pulling, and oh, this is too much.
But it’s only the start and soon I hear a ‘schloop’ of separation that will forever resonate as some kind of cosmic betrayal.
So here I am.
Cold, laid out on the deck, my unconscious mother on the gurney above me.
The monsters are suddenly still. Well I don’t know about you lot, I think, but I, for one, have made a decision.
I’m going back.
I scoot to my mother’s collapsed legs, and cling, gazing at the place that is my first view of the sacred, divine portal that has transformed me.
I see it there above me, moist and red, a heaven’s gateway and I’m an infant mountaineer, tackling the heights of my mother’s thighs: ready, oh, lordy lord, so ready.
I want transforming back.
Elbow after elbow, knee over knee, the monsters are taking a break and are looking elsewhere. And I’m making good progress, but then one of them sees me and lets out a hideous cackle.
And instead of glorious return, I am placed in the arms of an ugly, hairy beast. He looks at me as if I am the most fearful thing in the world.
I glare.
I stare.
He’s making truly strange noises, now, this hairy one, and I’m not having this, and I kick and am surprised to hear a wrenching sound burst from my throat. And soon I have the hang of it there’s no stopping me. Take that you monstrous beast, just take it.
He lofts me across the bed and I see that my mother’s eyes are now open. Looking at her, I understand some reflection of my cozy sleeping bag. I pause my gigantic vocal emissions and mull this not-too-bad-looking soft, pinking giant.
The arms are fleshy, and warm. These large, round balloons look just fantastic. Big red things press down on my crown.
A situation, I feel, that calls for a re-assessment.
But don’t judge this minute-old book by its cover.
As I gaze upwards, something whispers an ancient truth.
Strategy.
I will bide my time.
I contact my mother’s eyes with mine – and I start to cry.
Forgiveness will be a hard-fought matter.