Mike and Camille’s second child is born barely a month before Alice is due to give birth to our first. Two days of agonising labour for Camille and agonising waiting for Michael give way to relief, fatigue, and joy when Jennifer finally arrives on a bright summer’s morning in the ninth year of the village. Alice emerges from the small room of the village hospital that has become almost a full time delivery ward in the last year, beaming with pleasure, her hand subconsciously stroking the swollen bump of her heavily pregnant belly. I kiss her, and she sinks into a seat next to me.
“I think Camille is going to sleep for a week after that,” she says. “It’s a girl, her name’s Jennifer, and everything is fine. Mike’s got her whilst Camille gets cleaned up. Ugh,” she shivers, and I put my arm around her, “I didn’t ever realise how messy this all is. You’re going to owe me big time for putting me through that.”
“Hey,” I put my other hand on her lump, and am rewarded with the soft pat of our child kicking my hand, “you’re the one who wanted a baby.”
“Yeah, well, if I’d have known what it entailed I’d have sworn off sex for the rest of my life. I mean, you should have seen the size of her head. That’s just not right.” She shakes her head, and her long curly hair falls down around her eyes. I lift up her chin and brush her hair away, kissing her.
“It’s going to be just fine. You’ll have the shortest labour in medical history, totally painless, and our will be the most perfect little girl ever to bless her parents.”
“Oh, we’re having a girl now are we?” This has been a constant source of teasing since Alice told me she was pregnant some six months ago.
“Well, better that we have a girl who takes after her mother than another boy who takes after me.”
As if on cue, Chris bounds into the room, a toy aeroplane held aloft in one hand, making a noise that sounds more like an angry wasp than a jet plane.
“Mom, Dad, I am flying across the ocean to Europe. Look, we’re all in Dad’s aeroplane.”
I take the plane carefully from my son and hold it up to my eye to inspect it. Chris is six, and has an extremely active imagination. His current obsession is aeroplanes. Last week it was cars, and he spent every spare minute begging me to take him out for long drives, something that I did at every possible opportunity.
“Oh look mom,” I am developing something of an american accent as Chris resolutely refuses to pick up on my dulcet British tones and gets confused when I call Alice ‘mum’, “I think you need a new sick bag.”
Alice gives me a look that says I am going to pay for that later, her chronic bouts of morning sickness still not distant enough a memory. She takes Christopher’s hand and he tries to give her a hug, his little arms barely making it around the side of her belly.
“Chris, would you like to come and meet auntie Millie’s new baby?”
“Is that okay?” He’s adorably sweet on the subject of babies, has been ever since Cam had her son, Simon, just over a year ago. He’s been looking forward to the arrival of both his new sister (or brother) and new cousin for months, asking how long it would be until they arrived almost daily.
“I think it is. Come on, bring Daddy so he can keep uncle Mike awake.”
Chris hands me his toy plane and takes my hand so that he can lead me and Alice into the delivery room.
Camille is laid back in the bed, nursing a tiny blob of new born child her her breast. I stop and am about to suggest that we come back later but Cam looks up and waves us in. Mike is sat beside her on the bed, holding Simon in one arm and cooing over his daughter. Chris climbs onto the bed and sits back from Camille whilst she pulls Jennifer away from her nipple, the tiny infant blowing colostrum bubbles and reaching out for her suddenly missing meal. He hand waves in the air for a moment, eyes still closed against the light, and then she gives a small burp and seems to fall asleep.
“Just like her dad,” Camille laughs. She appears to be more tired than I’ve ever seen her, but at the same time radiates a glow of immense satisfaction. Mike just seems exhausted, his grin permanently affixed to his face.
“What’s her name auntie Millie?”
“This is Jennifer, Chris.”
He holds out his hand to touch hers, then pulls it back when she tries to grip his fingers in her tiny digits.
“Hello Jennifer,” he says.
“It’s okay Chris, she likes to hold onto things like that. You can let her hold your finger if you want.”
Chris reaches out and Jennifer latches on to his hand instantly. He smiles up at me and Alice for approval, and Alice strokes his hair.
“I think she likes you Chris-o.”
“She’s so small.”
Camille moans, a deep, heartfelt noise that makes it clear that Jennifer could be a lot smaller as far as she’s concerned. Mike and I wince, and Alice laughs. Chris is confused.
“What’s funny mom?”
“Nothing hon. Just wait and see how quickly she grows now though. I bet she’ll be as big as Simon in no time.”
Simon takes after his father in no uncertain terms, growing at an uncanny speed for a child of only a year. Already he’s as big as many of the two and three year olds in the village creche.
“Hah, just you wait until it’s your turn Alice,” Camille laughs, “then we’ll see how small you think this little one is.”
“Not likely. Brian’s going to be raiding hospitals for opiates for the next few weeks. I don’t care how old they are, I want drugs.”
“As long as I can have what you’re having,” I tell her. “Poor Mike looks like he could do with a little pick me up.”
“You’re not kidding.” It’s the first word Mike’s said. “I think that was the longest forty eight hours of my life.”
Camille coughs, and Mike turns red.
“Come on Mike, let’s go find you something to drink.” I lead him out of the room, he follows with a wave and a mouthed ‘I love you’ to Camille. She call out as we leave:
“Bring something back for me.”
We head back to Mike’s, where he manages less than a single glass of the locally produced whisky before falling asleep in his chair. I leave him with a blanket over his legs and decide to take a walk through the village before heading back to pick up Alice and the two boys. We’ve been looking after Simon for the past couple of days, and Chris has been enjoying having another kid about the house. Alice as been living with me for the past year, her own house turned over to a new family as the population of the village has started to swell.
The village has changed in the last few years, evolving to meet the changing needs of the population. Joshua’s early idealism about minimising use of materials from the outside world has diminished somewhat, and scavenged material is increasingly prevalent in housing and municipal projects. Glass has been notoriously difficult to produce and vast quantities have been brought in to glaze the entire town. Electrical power is now available constantly and with enough surplus generation to meet domestic needs around the clock. Of course, there are strict rules about the types of device we use, making efficiency of paramount concern, but we now have a village – wide wireless network that provides for a telephone system. Most homes have a computer of some kind, and for those that don’t want one the community hall, library and school provide several for public use. The village’s collected knowledge is slowly being transferred onto computers, a process that is augmented whenever a forward thinking expedition decides to raid an Internet Service Provider in New York and bring home another few hundred hard drives stuffed with assorted data.
I wander through the village, around the central hub, and north along the main avenue. I recognise several acquaintances who I greet briefly along the way. Alice and I have become established pillars of the community in the last two years, she now teaching at the school and I running the library. Nobody even realised that there was a need for a library until Alice suggested that it might be an interesting diversion, and now we have thousands of reference books on almost every imaginable subject of use, not to mention a burgeoning collection of fiction works. Of particular use has been the number of medical reference texts that I have gone to great lengths to collect from medical schools and libraries, especially the New York Public Library. The village’s library is my own personal memorial to Clare, too late to help her, but at least it serves a purpose for the community.
The streets of the village are now lined with street lamps, bright light emitting diode lamps of Mike’s design that draw power from the recently installed electrical mains. The grey metal poles rise from the ground every few dozen yards, their lamps dark in the bright morning light. I count the distance home by their regular spacing, almost two kilometres to my bungalow. I have a mild headache from another night of too little sleep, a habit that takes a greater toll on me now that I am in my forties. There are painkillers in the bathroom cabinet that I fetch when I arrive, and swallow one with a glass of water. The mains water supply is slightly warm from the summer heat, but even now at the height of summer the coolness of the river prevents it from becoming tepid.
I settle down in one of our lounge chairs and nap for half an hour, letting the painkiller work it’s magic on my headache, and then return to the hospital. Camille is dozing with Jennifer also asleep in a tiny cot beside the bed. Alice has moved Chris and Simon out into the waiting room where Chris is entertaining the younger boy with displays of aerobatic daring using his toy plane. Alice looks tired herself, and I settle down beside her on the bench.
“Hey gorgeous, let’s get you home and let you sit down somewhere comfortable.”
“That sounds like a wonderful idea.” She rubs her belly. “This little one is restless today and she won’t let me sit still.”
I gather Simon up in my arms, and Chris takes Alice’s hand for the journey back to the house. Once there Chris runs outside to play for a while, and I settle Alice on the sofa, her feet up and Simon sat gurgling next to her.
“Brian? Is this our normal life?”
Yes, I tell her. I never knew it, but I know now that deep down, this is exactly what I have always hoped for.