Nano Day 02

******

He grew like a young tree, like a pig fed on milk and molasses. Anwen watched him, unaware of her own growing, unaware of the maturity that was fed into her with this new, helpless thing in the house.

Her mother and father called him Idwal. For those first few weeks Anwen's time with him was limited. Her mother kept to her bed, and, once the midwife was gone, kept the baby close beside her, persuading her husband to move the Moses basket into their bedroom so that she could lie near him, could sleep when he slept and wake before he awoke. When he cried, his mother picked him up, wrapped in his wrappings, and nestled him to her breast. And she stared at him, unconscious of the presence of anyone else – and Anwen stared too, wondering at how special this new thing must be that it made her mother forget her, of all people.

Anwen was kept from the room as much as possible. She ran in in the morning to tweak the blankets and stare at the baby's red, pinched face, and she was allowed to come and sit with her mother and the baby for a few minutes before her nain came to take her to bed. But the rest of the day was spent creeping towards the door and being caught and removed by large hands – by her father if he was in the house, and by her nain if her father was not.

The house was full of largeness – large arms to pick her up and sweep her away, her mother, a whale beached in her bed, her father, all legs, his head a mile away in the sky, and her nain, solid and bulky, breasts like a bolster in her blouse, bending down to her. She and the baby were the only smallnesses.

Taid had gone back to his small, square house in the village, but nain was staying, sleeping alongside Anwen in her bed, in order to help with the baby and cook meals and clean and knit the family together with her presence while the mother was so tied to the new creature in her arms. The smell of her was constant in Anwen's nostrils – the cigarette scent of her in her clothes and hair as they slept together, and the subtle, homely scent of sweat as they grew warm together.

'Don't bother your mam, she's tired,' nain would always say, and Anwen would try to squirm and escape her hands, and would fail, and be borne back downstairs, wailing.

The kitchen had been transformed to a hot, fevered place of washing and cooking. Nappies had taken over the house, the terry towelling squares either wet in the top loader or being drawn through the aged mangle, or hanging across the kitchen on strings laced from the beams, or hanging across the garden on the washing line. The scent of wet, clean cotton was everywhere. Anwen used them for shawls and headscarves, or for cloaks and capes, or dropped them on the floor and made stepping stones, and then wailed again as her nain took them up in exasperation and put them back in the huge wicker laundry basket, telling her They're not a toy, Anwen love. They're for the baby...

It seemed that nothing about the baby was meant for Anwen, and the world was mostly made of people trying to separate her from him, and her from her mother. So Anwen would wait until the moment that her nain was most distracted, and her father out in the fields, and she would sneak silently up the stairs, her tiny weight not making the wood so much as creak, and would reach up for the door handle and creep into her mother's room. So often she found her lying asleep in bed, bare breasted, with Idwal clutched close to her, his mouth just slipped off the nipple and milk pooled in his open gape. And Anwen would crawl into the bed behind her mother, hugging herself to her sleeping back, and fall into slumber herself. She had learnt that if she was asleep she would not be removed, even if discovered. If she was asleep she seemingly reverted to a baby herself, and was given all the leeway of a baby. So she lay with her eyes closed and one hand clutching onto her mother's clothing, and basked in the scent and the warmth of her mother and her precious baby and of the milk that seemed to be everywhere.

******

At first Idwal was a fascination – a live doll for her to look at, a new pet. And then, after the first few days were past, she grew tired of him – tired of his crying, tired of the attention that he sapped from everyone else in the house. Tired of taking second best from her nain when she wanted her mother.

And then, after two weeks had passed, her mother rose from her bed like something reborn, weary but complete, with the baby in her arms. Still Idwal followed her everywhere – but he was put down, sleeping in his Moses basket, or sleeping on the armchair wrapped in a blanket, and Anwen had hours to spend, staring at him in his sleep. Nain spent less and less time with them, and Anwen's mother began to wash the nappies and cook the dinner, and dirt and dust grew on the floors and surfaces because there was just no time.

And Anwen stared at Idwal – stared at his misted eyes with their hints of brown, stared at his furious square mouth and his clenched fists as he cried for attention, stared at his withering, dead-thing cord and his resolutely male body as his nappy was changed, and wondered at the colour of that slop attached to the towelling. He squirmed and flailed like a blind thing, and she wondered at him, and never stopped wondering.

Love grew like a kernel, like a pearl layering itself up around an irritating nematode. He cried, and she tried to soothe him, and he cried and cried until their mother came and took him up. He cried, and she wrapped his blankets tighter, and waved toys before his eyes, and tried and tried to persuade him that her love was as good as a mother's. He woke her up at night, and he continued to take precious attention away from her, and he made her parents short-tempered and anxious, and he posseted white curd onto her clothes – and one day she realised that she could never live without him.


2.

Anwen appointed herself as a guardian angel. And Idwal grew, like a young tree, like a pig fed on molasses. He learnt to smile. He learnt to chuckle, to roll onto his stomach and lie there, high and dry, wondering how to get back. He learnt to listen for Anwen's voice, and to stare at his hands, and at to grab at Anwen's hands with his and to stare at them too. His grip was like the grasp of a drowning man.

He learnt to sit, and then to crawl… He crawled and crawled like a wind-up toy, and she held herself back from helping him, know that only need would force him forward. And then – he learnt to walk, and he finally became human.

His walking came about by stealth. Idwal would crawl, and crawl – and then a thought would plant itself in his mind, and he would find a cliff-face to cling to, and rise up. The determination burned in his eyes. She watched him as he stood there, clinging to the grained edge of the side-table, hands dimpled with effort. His eyes were always fixed on his goal – a windfall apple, a soft lambskin toy, his pull-along duck with the flaking paint. His legs jittered with the effort, never quite understanding how to move and balance at the same time – until he suddenly broke free from the table like a ship leaving mooring – and wavered, and thudded down onto the cushioning pad of his nappy.

And then one day, with the windfall apple in his hand, and his eyes set on Anwen – he set out towards her, a ship on an uncharted ocean, no longer hugging the shoreline but making for new land. And he reached her, and thudded down onto the cushioning pad of his nappy. And she ran to tell her mother in the kitchen, and she did not believe her. And she told her father when he came in from the sheep, and he did not believe her – and then Idwal arrived at the kitchen door, nine months old and grinning, with a windfall apple in his hands, and thudded down onto the cushioning pad of his nappy – and Anwen's mother and father erupted in laughs and forgot about her presence to praise him. But like any guardian angel, praise for her prodigy was praise for herself, and she did not mind.

And then mischief was unleashed on the world. Anwen would open the door to the yard and lead Idwal into danger, into the wheel tracks of the great, towering tractor, into the dirt and mire of sheep droppings and mud, to the edge of the pond which was treacherous and choked with weeds. Her father fixed a bolt on the door, high up, out of her reach, and she screamed and cried and stamped, and beat at the door with her fists, and Idwal stood, tottering, staring in wonder at such a storm from his adored big sister.

And then, after many months had passed, when he had ceased to be a baby, and even the term toddler was passing out of range, Idwal spoke. Before this, Idwal had stared, and pointed, and signed, and wailed, and stared with his dark eyes as if staring could become doing – but he had not uttered a word. The bolt at the top of the door was left undone day by day, and the pond had been roughly fenced about, and the sheep had lambed, and the hay been taken in, and the sheep lambed again, and Anwen was facing the spectre of school, levied like a threat, when finally Idwal spoke. Not a word but a small sentence, suited to his size.

'Anweh take my seep.'

Anwen was stood at the door, five years old, her new coat buttoned to the top despite the September warmth, and a satchel with nothing in it, and her father waiting with impatience to put her in the car to take her to her first day at school, when Idwal walked towards her with determination, with his arms clutched about the bald leather of his lambskin sheep, saying, 'Anweh take my seep.'

And Anwen took it from him, the toy worn smooth with his love and scented with every biological utterance a child can make from babyhood to three, and hugged it and him, and cried through the car journey until she reached the door of the school, and then for some time beyond.

Leaving Idwal was a bereavement that she could not bear, not even with all the cajoling of Mrs Thomas and the threats of Mrs Hughes and the kind, enveloping hugs of the dinner ladies who reminded her of her nain. It was a bereavement that she did not truly get over until Idwal joined her at school, two years later, talking like a professional to her and silent to everyone else. She heard them, the teachers, murmuring about his intelligence, wondering if he was backward or a little slow – but she knew that there were worlds and intrigues hidden in the folds of his mind, and she was the one he privileged to share them with.

And so they settled in to life, and Anwen forgot that there had been a time before Idwal. They were inseparable. Everyone said that – the teachers at school, the men who came sometimes to help on the farm, Anwen's parents and her nain and taid. They all said, They're inseparable, those two. No good will come of it…

She would experience a moment of surprise if her mother ever said, That's my boy, to Idwal. My boy, she thought furiously. Idwal was her boy. No longer her baby, or even her toddler, but her boy, the other half of her being, her closest friend.

Oh, the jealousy if he smiled for anyone but her. His smile was a live, flitting thing, a bird darting toward a morsel of food and then retreating before it was caught. She would have caught it, in butterfly nets, in spider's webs, in jars with the lids screwed tight. She would have kept it only for her to lay eyes upon, as her own special prize, as her beautiful captive. His smile brightened his eyes and focussed his long, lithe body and made his hair glint with threads of gold – and when it appeared she wanted to turn it on herself like the beam from an angle-poise lamp, and stand sublime in its warmth and brightness, and let the rest of the world shiver in the shade.

Idwal ran to her in the morning when he woke. He ran to her when he hurt himself. As he grew older she was always the first one he came to, when their mother was so busy up to her elbows in flour or soap-flecked water or any of the hallmarks of her ceaselessly working life. He ran to her with cuts and scrapes, and she bathed and dressed them. He ran to her with tales of teasing at school, he ran to her with the cooling corpses of mice that the cat had caught and tears of pity running down his cheeks. Later, as the years grew on both of them, he ran and pillowed his head against her soft chest, and she held him without words and let the warmth of their blood spread between them.

And so they came to some kind of adulthood, when Anwen discovered that her body would bleed every month, and Idwal choose to hide himself from her when he was changing his clothes or washing in the bathroom, and although they were still children, something had changed.

3.

Summer was climbing to its heights, and Idwal had become fourteen almost half a year ago now, and Anwen was moving steadily towards seventeen. Moving towards seventeen, but always looking back toward Idwal, who was mature for his age, everyone said. Intelligent for his age, mature for his age, sensible for his age. Everything about him was done so as not to let Anwen down, and all of Anwen's actions were focussed on him, on being the right person for him to follow so blindly. He had been following her since he could walk, and he had never yet fallen in the pond or climbed into the wrong fields through her leadership. Even now, when he was about to take an unknown step, he would look at her and say, 'All right, now, An?' and she would nod if it was, and he would go ahead.

Anwen had discovered a love for numbers, and she was studying hard, pursuing four A Levels with more diligence than Idwal was putting into his Os, and sometimes she would look at him, look up from her lined paper with its tight-written answers – and wonder what would happen when her A Levels were finished, and life took her away from him. Perhaps he was thinking the same, but he simply looked up from his own work and let his dark eyes burn on to her, and then looked down again, and carried on his work with a bored sense of duty. Numbers tasted and felt and sparkled to Anwen – but Idwal had interest in the farm, and what was needed for the farm, and while he paid special attention to biology and to some extent to geography, the rest was a wilderness of wasted time to him. The farm was an inevitability in Idwal's life, and thank God that he wanted it to be.

The summer was hot and rich, and the sun shimmered on the slate roof and penetrated into the rooms below, and flies buzzed against window glass in a blind fury, and Anwen's and Idwal's summer holiday homework was thrust aside for the hay. It was like a festival, a celebration, bound in with fear and worry and glancing at the sky and tuning to Radio 4 every morning in the thin light of dawn and listening to Farming Today for the weather forecast and praying for the rain to hold off long enough to make good hay. The threat of thunderstorms, the threat of the grass mouldering on the ground, the threat of wet bales spontaneously bursting into flame after too long fermenting in the barn – all this was etched into their father's face, and their mother stood in the kitchen with one eye on the sky and the radio on. And the sheep continued in the fields, chewing blindly with their half-shorn, half-grown coats, and knew nothing of the panic that was raised for their sakes as soon as a dark cloud loomed over the mountains and hovered in the valley.