giving birth to birds [short story]

I got the idea for this on a train, having recently failed a driving test. 

When I did eventually pass (in my early thirties), I also had to do the theory. 

At the early noughties test centre full of identical terminals (I bet it's all remote now), everyone else was seventeen or eighteen. Apart, that is, from one guy of about my age who named the complex, multi-ton piece piece of industrial plant that he was taking the test for and then asked, "what are you learning to drive?" 

"A car," I replied.

This is a 'next breakthrough in human evolution' story. 

It's 1,700 words long [5 to 10 minutes to read].

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Winter

First I know about it is when I find Amanda sitting on the settee rather awkwardly one Thursday she’d taken off work in order to decorate (though it didn’t look like she’d been decorating). Since we bought the house, Amanda’s painted, wallpapered, put carpet down and fixed the guttering. I’ve never decorated but my PhD thesis on the contradictions in Frege’s logic is one of the standard reference works on an admittedly small subject.

“What is it, love?” I ask. Perhaps I should’ve guessed that something hormonal was happening when she started bringing in cushions, throws, catalogues, Hare Krishna handouts and bundled copies of the Advertiser (our papergirl throws them away in the woods), and arranging them in the lounge.

“We’re having babies, Seb,” she says.

Now, the doctors have told us, kindly but more than once, that Amanda’s reproductive capabilities don’t meet the mark and that we can’t be responsible for replacing ourselves. At the time, Amanda took it very badly. Being a stoical sort of chap (cognitive-behavioural therapy more than the philosophy business), I get ready to begin a speech with “my love, we’ve been through this; unfortunately, the doctors...” but she moves aside to show me the four eggs she’d laid. They’re each about the size of a bowling ball, ivory in colour and lightly veined with the palest blue imaginable. Perfect, like harvest mice or the better phrases in Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

“Amanda, that’s great,” I say.

What else is there to say? If we’re having children, I’m pleased. They say that having children can’t save a marriage but I’m sure that it can fill an awkward pause in the conversation. It feels like the last six months or so have been an awkward pause in the conversation. So we agree to do what any parents would’ve done: we take turns warming the eggs. One Friday evening, while listening to Messiaen, drinking white wine and reading a nostalgia book about Pages from Ceefax, I fertilise them. Biological process: it’s both a pleasure and an embarrassment.

Spring

When they’re born, it’s immediately obvious to me what we should call them. We call them Huey, Dewey and Louie after the trio of fictional anthropomorphic ducks who appear in animated cartoons and comic books published by the Walt Disney Corporation. The fourth, which seems weak and not long for the world, we call Emil Cioran and feed to the others. Of that which we cannot speak, etc.

Born punching and kicking, the triplets grow stronger and healthier. “You certainly look more robust than your mother and I,” I murmur, leaning over the cot, thinking of my asthma, her diabetes, SSRI prescriptions, fears of open spaces and seagulls, hypertension, anaemia. “What do you think this is, the Midwich Cuckoos?” After some discussion – Amanda’s half-Jewish and I’m Church of England; I went to Buddhist meditation classes for a year but there aren’t any Buddhist faith schools – we take them to City Life for baptism and enrolment in the Youth Church. It’s one way to keep them all busy for free on a Sunday. When the youth pastor says something inane about ducks to water, ducks get it?, Amanda gives him a Paddingtonesque hard stare.

Summer

We’re neither of us tidy people and this is not the house in which we’d planned to have children. From here, I can see the ironing board, the vacuum cleaner, TV, various book stacks, Amanda’s pile of birthday presents which still haven’t found homes, the settee and the clothes horse, plus fouled Advertisers, Tellytubby videos and bits of membranous shell. Oh, and Lego of course. Always Lego.

At City Life, the triplets are enjoying Youth Church. Huey doesn’t give much away but Dewey starts learning guitar and PowerPoint, and Louie tells Amanda that he’d like to take the Word of God to Iran. One Sunday, the pastor, a rugby-playing man named Geoff, tackles me about my reluctance to help Amanda decorate.

“What about the story of Mary and Martha?” I ask. Luke chapter ten. “Mary and Martha were sisters,” he replies, talking as if to a special needs child. A couple of weeks later, we decorate. I help. We make a playroom with pictures of Harry Potter, the Good Samaritan, Iris Murdoch, the Gruffalo and other luminaries on the walls. After selling a first edition of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics – sshh! I won’t tell you how I came by it – I buy a second-hand Vauxhall Corsa.

Autumn

Though feeding is a struggle at first, we enjoy parenthood. As much a vocation as a mere fact, it lifts us. What a surprise! My will has chosen life, as previously-dumb Holly Hunter says in The Piano.

When the Health Visitor sees the triplets, their height and weight gains and developmental indices are off the dial. “What are you feeding these children?” she asks. What games do they like? Do they have friends to the house? What do they like to watch on television? A couple of days later, Children’s Services turn up. They seem bothered on two counts. First, they appear to have worked out or intuited what Huey, Dewey and Louie’s first meal was; second, they’ve observed that the triplets appear to be thriving in the midst of what looks like squalor and neglect. There’s no recipe for raising healthy kids, is there?

A few weeks later, I’m reading the triplets a bedtime story. Danny the Champion of the World. It’s early October and the wind is throwing handfuls of rain against the windows. When I finish, Dewey and Louie are already asleep and Huey asks me what he means.

“What do you mean by what, pickle?” I reply.

But what does he mean is what he means and it’s a fair question.

“Well, I think that there are essentially five different standpoints from which we can establish the terms of reference necessary for beginning to calibrate our response - and really we’d be investigating semantics, epistemology and, though it’s not really my field, post-Hegelian theories of time and history...”

“It’s alright Dad,” he says and then tells me that in the changing rooms at school he’s been teased for not having a belly button. It’s a shame we can’t protect them all the time. When Children’s Services return, they bring an expert from the Natural History Museum’s Palaeontology Department. They’ve accepted that the triplets ate their sibling: we’re just a different culture, that’s all. I mean, just - get over it, right? They do wonder aloud about whether City Life Church is right for us as a family but, on the whole, hooray for cultural relativism.

Winter

Getting ready for Christmas, I vacuum and clean the house for the first time in months. I even open a bottle of Windowlene (to clean with, not drink). There’s the usual nausea as I fetch the tree and decorations down from the loft – remembering the thing that happened with Uncle Nigel one December 27^th when I was about nine; that was weird, we never talk about it though. It was the same year I got Big Trak.

Western civilisation hasn’t failed yet and there are still goods in the shops, so we drive down to Toys R Us and get the triplets an Xbox 360 and an electrical set. I had one of those when I was little. We buy silly putty and various other pocket money toys. We buy Louie a camera and Dewey the new England away strip. In Waterstone’s, we get Huey Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (we ordered it; they didn’t have it in) together with a good edition of the Tractatus. That’s my boy. (“Isn’t that a bit hard?” asks Amanda. It’s what he asked for, I reply. And it’s the easier translation).

On Christmas morning, the triplets show some properly childlike enthusiasm while opening their presents and then we have a cooked breakfast. My favourite thing about Christmas used to be Radio Three on Christmas mornings but this year I’m enjoying my fine sons, even if they’re developing nictitating membranes, asking if girls can stay over, and looking forward to moving out. Huey cries off attending church because of Anselm and an alleged lack of fit between God’s status as the ground of all being and his evident world-historical partiality in Scripture. “I want to stay and finish Splinter Cell,” says Dewey. Sorry, I reply; that doesn’t qualify as a conscientious objection. “That so takes the mick,” he says. True, but there must be some bulwarks against chaos. In the second week of January, a good clutch of GCSE results are posted online; heavens, but this is all going by quickly.

Spring

I struggle to believe it but a year after they’ve hatched, they leave. Dewey’s talked himself into a job with Activision in the States, Louie’s a student psychiatric nurse and Huey’s a security guard at a cosmetics firm’s experimental kitten farm. He emails regularly in his favourite font (JAF Bernini Sans) about his workout regime, libertarianism, global power politics and Ayn Rand.

It’s been a busy year. Birth, childhood, adolescence, exams and all of a sudden the whole ‘empty nest’ thing. Also, we re-organised the shoe cupboard; we found a hedgehog in the back garden; ferry disaster off Brittany; UKIP surge; Elizabeth II died; I started to get junk mail from the Sunday Times Wine Club and, mein Gott, an invitation to join the University of the Third Age.

I look at Amanda a little differently now that she’s the mother of our three children as well as my wife. These days, we hold hands in restaurants as though we’re young and newly in love (even more careful about what we eat though; don’t want to be up half the night). Although I enjoy her company more than ever, I miss our young children. I miss our car journeys out past the level crossing at Shawford and into town to visit the bowling alley, Café Anomalos or Funky Jack’s Play Shack. I even miss the night feeds: looking out into the darkness, I picture myself in the rocking chair at 3:00 a.m. or so, watching the Parliament Channel or Turner Classic Movies and regurgitating vegetarian kosher ready meals into three feathered eager throats.