Baptism

I was indeed seven when my brother was born. But I'd like to reassure my family that the characters and events below are fictional! Having written it, I realise it's about belonging.

Matilda was seven when her brother was born. For almost nine months her excitement and pride grew as she imagined stepping smartly into the role of big sister, wise enough to help him (or her, but she preferred a brother) build his first Lego spaceship and mature enough to comfort him when he cried. She herself would of course not cry any more - she would be too old for that.

But before that glorious time could arrive, two weeks of terror were suddenly imposed on her. Mummy, apparently, was too pregnant to look after her and Daddy was far too busy working to keep a roof over his expanding family’s heads to look after any of those individual heads. Relatives had to be found who could provide a temporary home for the big sister-to-be. And since it was the summer holidays, there was no need to keep her near school - or school friends. 

Granny and Grandad graciously took her in for the first week. 

It wasn’t the first time she’d stayed at their house, but as the front door shut with her father on the wrong side of it she found herself staring across the uncharted wasteland of more days and nights away from home than she’d ever endured without her parents - and the customs of this badly-lit, tobacco-infused country were very different from home. Matilda excused herself to go to the toilet and cried hopelessly against the mint green tiling. 

Granny, who didn’t seem to like being called Granny but offered no alternative to facilitate better relations, had precise and non-negotiable ways of doing things. Sweeping - an unforeseen alternative to the vacuum cleaner - had to be done by pushing the broom vigorously in front: never by pulling it towards you. That might be easier for little arms, but no one ever got anywhere by making allowances for littleness. Sweeping the downstairs floors and drying the dishes were Matilda’s jobs.

If household chores were notable for their austerity, mealtimes had a stern hedonism to them that made Matilda forget she had ever been hungry. The margarine her parents bought was outlawed here, in favour of butter she found unpalatably rich. As she tried to introduce the merest appearance of it to her toast at breakfast Granny swiped her knife from her hand.

“Stop faffing, child, and let me. It’s got to go right into the corners,” Granny said as she spread the butter with the zeal of an avenging army spilling blood. 

It was the same with the stew of unidentifiable fatty meat at dinner time. Matilda’s tummy shrank between the demands of politeness and the horror of eating. 

Grandad puffed comfortably on his pipe from the armchair under the fringed lamp, neither a threat nor a refuge. Although he did introduce her to his greenhouse full of tomato plants, and she wondered at this leafy corner of riotous abandon, ungoverned by her grandmother’s all-seeing gaze.

The only authority her grandmother seemed to acknowledge above her own was the church. On Sunday she instructed Matilda to put on some decent clothes and only raised her eyebrow a fraction at the stripy dress Matilda chose from her suitcase. Her father, perhaps, could be blamed for any deficiency in its contents. They walked to church along sun-baked tarmac, Matilda as quiet as her grandmother’s shadow.

Summer had not been admitted to church. Under the highest ceiling she had ever seen, Matilda shivered as the man in the pulpit intoned many lengthy messages that were clearly important for the people in the pews to grasp if they were to avoid getting into trouble. Unfortunately Matilda couldn’t grasp them at all. Trying to make sense of the sentences was like pulling apart candyfloss: the harder she teased at familiar individual words the harder they stuck in their mystical new arrangements.

She glanced at Granny, whose stony face gave away as little as the columns around them. Then everyone was rising and shuffling slowly to the front. Now she felt Granny turn portentously.

“You haven’t been baptised thanks to my stupid son, so you can’t join in. Stay here.”

As her grandmother joined the throng of the faithful, Matilda’s cheeks flushed in a cold fever of shame. Perhaps this was the underlying stain on her character that made everything she did so displeasing to Granny. She sat alone in the pew, horribly unbaptised.

On the walk home she summoned the courage to ask, “What happens when the baptised people go to the front?” 

Granny sighed briefly at the educational task ahead of her. “We receive the body and the blood of Jesus Christ,” she began - and to Matilda’s consternation she took up the baffling logic of the man in the robes, talking about bread and wine and blood and sacrifice as though they were governed by impressive laws Matilda had never encountered. Matilda’s life was embarrassingly lacking in both wine and sacrifices. 

She gleaned only that Jesus, much like Granny, looked more kindly on baptised people than on people whose parents had neglected this enigmatic event.

The week’s persistent fear was interrupted by one unexpected delight: Daddy sent her a letter. Matilda’s face lit up as though she’d been found by the beam of a searchlight. She hadn’t been forgotten. 

Daddy hadn’t written much, but his distinctive handwriting was almost as good as a hug. And he’d drawn her a picture: a father with a swaddled baby held against his blazer. ‘Daddy and Spud’ he’d titled it, in anticipation of the tiny arrival. Curled under the humid tomato leaves to read it a third time, Matilda grinned right down to her knotted insides and felt that she might not die of loneliness after all. 

On Tuesday she was collected by Aunty Rose and everything changed again. 

Aunty Rose and Uncle Charlie’s house was large and light and surrounded by fields. Sunshine and the sound of children playing seemed positively welcome inside its walls. Her cousin Joe tore through the gravel drive on his bike in relentless circles, flinging up stones that his parents only sighed at. Matilda tried to banish her grandmother’s arched eyebrows from her mind’s eye.

And here was Annie, revered cousin Annie, who was twelve and whose hair grew long and shiny so that she could flick it nonchalantly like the older girls did. Matilda wondered whether such flickable hair was a natural consequence of starting secondary school or if she would have to learn how to tame hers at home.

Annie took her new audience straight up to her bedroom so Matilda could admire the clothes she’d acquired on a recent holiday to Paris. The nautical blue shorts and the flamboyant pink blouse whispered wordlessly to Matilda with beguiling glamour.

“You can have my old shorts!” Annie announced benevolently. They weren't French, but they had been Annie's and that was enough for Matilda. She wore them every day until Aunty Rose discreetly took them away to be washed.

Eventually Annie got tired of being so grown up and they ran around the fields looking for rabbits, which Annie declared she had seen from her window but which evaded even the stealthiest human pursuit.

Matilda’s relief at arriving in a country of predictable customs imbued everything with an urgent glow, as though each minute was a gift to be appreciated lest it be revoked. But try as she might, she couldn't get her taste buds to feel the same. For a second week, mealtimes drove her insides to a pitch of anxiety. She couldn't complain that the food here was too rich or too stewed to recognise: each ingredient sang of its freshness and health, a rainbow on the plate. Each horrified her with its crisp unfamiliarity. 

Matilda nibbled at an asparagus tip in grateful despair. It was almost worse that Aunty Rose and Uncle Charlie didn't scold the way Granny did.

On the fourth day Aunty Rose put a different dish in front of her at dinner time: a toasted cheese sandwich. Fat fluffy bread and thick slices of melted cheddar - a lifeline of simplicity. Matilda’s new sense of ease lasted until she heard Annie's knife and fork hit the table.

“But why can't I have cheese on toast if Matilda can? You know I hate artichoke hearts…”

“Darling, you usually eat artichoke hearts. If you don’t want them today, just eat the fish.”

Matilda tried to eat her delicious toast invisibly but felt her babyishness radiating from her like a beacon. Voices rose around the table until Annie’s chair shrieked backwards with indignation and she stalked out of the dining room. Her food sat untouched.

Matilda spent the next day studiously avoiding Annie, wandering round the edges of the garden picking the occasional daisy or forget-me-not and wondering if it was best to give her posy to Annie as an apology for the cheese on toast or her aunt as a thank you for it.

Then Joe came racing across the lawn and skidded to a breathless halt in front of her. 

“You’ve got to come to the kitchen. I’m not to say why,” he smirked.

In the kitchen, everyone else was standing round the scrubbed pine table with strange smiles. Matilda looked up at their faces, bemused and silent.

“Well. Matilda’s got a brother!” Aunty Rose’s words ushered in a momentous new era of Matilda’s existence.

Somewhere, a baby now existed where there hadn’t been one before, and this baby was her brother. She was finally a sister. How to behave, in this new world? She would certainly become an expert at reading bedtime stories. She wondered if she would have to eat artichoke hearts now. 

Uncle Charlie was pouring wine into glasses for Rose and Annie and Joe. Aunty Rose reached for a little tumbler on the dresser and said, “I think this calls for Matilda to have one too, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” said Uncle Charlie with a stern expression, “it would be a crime not to celebrate the arrival of a new family member properly.”

Matilda sipped the pungent liquid in the little glass. It tasted of deep, complicated things. And of the future. 

The following morning a familiar car crunched up the drive and suddenly she was free - Daddy was here and her suitcase was going into the boot of the old Vauxhall and her relatives were once again people she saw at parties where everyone got just a little dose of everyone else and then went back safely to their own homes.

Soon they were approaching the anonymous double doors of a hospital ward. Daddy, who didn’t usually hold hands with anyone, took her cold hand in his large warm one. “This is it Matty, are you ready to meet Spud?”

She giggled. “We can’t call him Spud!”

Then the doors were open and Mummy was visible, sitting in a rumpled hospital bed and smiling across at them. The air prickled with the tang of medicine but it seemed that Mummy and the baby were both fine. All the things she loved about Mummy were still there, only veiled with weariness and a pallid hospital gown.

She paused shyly, feeling the cobweb of family relationships shift and re-settle itself around them. The only part of the baby she could see was two wrinkled red triangles - tiny angry feet. Mummy tilted the bundle very gently so she could see that he was asleep, his eyes as furiously knitted into him as the soles of his feet. 

Matilda imagined what a shock it must be, to arrive all of a sudden in the outside world, dependent on these people who considered themselves your family. Even worse, perhaps, than staying at Granny and Grandad’s. She wished the newborn a silent, heartfelt welcome. 

He didn’t have a name yet, Matilda was horrified to learn. 

Her parents explained that she too had spent a few days without a name while they got to know her and wondered what name might suit that little round face. And she’d ended up with a fine name, hadn’t she? They hadn’t forgotten, or in haste left her with something silly like Spud.

So while Mummy came back home to spend her waking hours with the baby suckling greedily at her breast, and Daddy went back to the office with a relieved slam of the front door, Matilda got some paper and felt tips out and started making a list. Her favourite characters from tv, the boys she considered nicest in her class, almost every boy’s name from Swallows and Amazons and The Famous Five.

She presented the options to her tired parents over dinner. Each of the names suggested significant character traits, of course, and it would be important to divine which one truly represented the baby and who they hoped he would become. Her favourite was Zachary, she emphasised. They said they would think about it for a little while. 

The passing minutes and days weighed heavily on Matilda. Here was her baby brother, gazing upon his surroundings with eyes that had never before seen this battered Winnie the Pooh book, or that table cloth with the apple pattern that he’d just been sick on - and soon he wouldn’t be new any more! He was growing more familiar with the world every moment, and they had done nothing to mark his arrival in it. They hadn’t even named him. 

The baby, for his part, appeared to enjoy Matilda’s attention. He blinked placidly while she read him Winnie the Pooh stories and his anguished tears subsided when she peered over the cot rail at bedtime. She sang him lullabies of nonsensical verse she had made up on the swing in the sunshine and delighted in the spell they seemed to cast. She couldn’t fault him as a baby brother - he was perfect. But she worried that in the absence of a proper welcome, he was anxious on a deeper level.

Finally her parents talked about naming him. Disappointingly, they didn’t seem as enthusiastic about Zachary as she was, and had a few ideas of their own. Matilda chewed over these as she chewed her fishfingers, relieved that progress was at least being made. 

“How about we each put our favourite name in a hat?” asked her mother after dinner. “Matty, you can pick out the winner.”

She had to admit that this seemed fair. Daddy found a holey old straw hat and they each wrote a name on a page from the little notepad by the phone. Matilda felt time slow down and brush like feathers against her hand as she picked one folded note from the hat. 

Joshua, it said. 

She looked at the letters. Conjured the face of a Joshua at three, four years old - at seven as she was now. He was noisier than Zachary, and had different hair. But perhaps that was okay. 

And this name was Mummy’s choice. Her mother was sipping her wine without giving away how she felt, but Matilda reflected that Mummy deserved to give her son the name she wanted after all the work she was doing to look after him. 

“Can Zachary be his middle name?” asked Matilda.

Her parents agreed it could, so she cleared a space in her mind and solemnly allocated it to Joshua Zachary. 

She woke the following day with a sense of its significance. The baby’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction now that he was Joshua Zachary, and more properly her brother. She incorporated his name into new songs and stories for him and hoped eagerly that he felt he belonged in the family now. But her parents went about their day as though nothing had changed. Daddy went to work and Mummy started vacuuming after she’d given Joshua his morning feed. 

Something was missing. Matilda sat on the floor next to Joshua’s cot feeling her limbs tingle. Time was running out to give Joshua Zachary the celebration he deserved. If Mummy and Daddy weren’t going to do anything, she would do it.

Mummy switched the vacuum cleaner off a few minutes later and peeped into Joshua’s room. Her face became an O of horror.

Matilda was standing over baby Joshua holding a green glass bottle at an uneven tilt. Dark red liquid was splashing into his pink puckered face, his desperate wails mixing with unearthly gurgles.

“Matty what on earth - ?“ gasped her mother.

Matilda’s solemn expression flickered. “I’m giving him a baptism!”