Between you and me, I don’t think it’s true at all. But then, who knows? After all, I did see a dragon flying overhead yesterday, and when you’re seeing dragons instead of planes there’s reason to believe your best friend can give birth to a goblin.
I don’t think it helps the confusion that Spruscia seems, by all rumors, oblivious to the abomination spawned of her loins. Perhaps she’ll remain maternally blind until baby steals his first car. And no wonder she didn’t realize; after all, you don’t see too many baby goblins in films nowadays. While their ugly green parents might be on the chopping list of every foraging hero, there are laws against depicting cruelty to children, even when they’re green and have claws.
Either way, I intend to find out if it’s true or not.
Spruscia lives in Gretnaville, about nine miles from where I live and work as an artist in gentle seclusion on the edge of Borrowmoor Forest. I’m low on paint, though, so tomorrow I’m going to cycle in to town, and on the way I’ll stop into the hospital and have a look at this baby for myself. I’m quite excited. No one I know has had a baby for some time.
I’m outside Gretnaville Maternity Unit now, about to go in. I’ve chained my bike up outside, though being a screaming neon green color I doubt anyone will steal it. I feel a little nervous as I stand inside the revolving door and let it ease me inside. It’s my first time to see the baby, which is currently four days old, but I haven’t seen Spruscia for months. These days, work takes up a lot of my time.
Upstairs, I’m led down a hallway by a nurse—a Sister, though bless her, with the hair on her top lip she looks more like a brother—and into a ward filled with women lounging back in chemical-white beds, sleeping, eating, reading magazines. Spruscia is lying in a bed near the window, staring out at a grey sky. She looks bored out of her mind.
“Hello, stranger,” I say, walking over.
She looks up at me, her eyes a little glazed. At first she doesn’t seem to recognize me.
“It’s Amber,” I say.
“Oh, hi,” she mutters. “Long time no see. How are you doing?”
“Not too bad.” I glance around. “Where are all the kids then?”
She smiles. “This is the intensive care ward. All the babies are in a room down the corridor, in incubators. We’ve all suffered difficult or premature births. They leave us here a few days to recover.”
“Oh, nice. So you’re still on drugs?”
Spruscia smiles. “Yeah. My cervix is still a little swollen.”
“Oh.” I don’t ask her to elaborate. “Have you seen the baby yet? I take it you get a look before the nurses haul them away.”
She nods. “Yeah, I’ve seen him. He’s real cute. Doesn’t look much like me, but then he is only a baby, after all.”
I’m dying to ask what he looks like, but I can see the vacant pride in her eyes. I guess it’s a maternal thing. She could have given birth to a rock and still loved it.
“Have you got a name yet?”
She smiles. “I like Darren.” She gives me a sly sideways glance. “Don’t tell anyone, but that’s the name of the hunky new doctor in Days of our Lives. Maybe Darren’ll grow up to be a doctor one day.”
I humor her with a quick nod and a smile, though I’m already starting to wonder about her sanity. If what Janice, her sister, told me, the last place a thing like Darren should be is in a hospital, around so many people with weak hearts.
“Can I go to see him?” I ask her.
“Of course.” Spruscia lifts a hand and points towards the corridor on the left. “Down that way, you’ll have to ask a nurse to let you in, but tell her I sent you. She can always come and check with me.” “Thanks. I’ll be back in a moment.”
I stand up, head down the corridor. I easily spot the incubation room. There’s a window at about head height which looks in on a room full of incubators all aligned in ordered rows. A man in jeans and a woman wearing only a dressing gown are inside, leaning over one and pointing inside. You can’t see the babies from here, because the incubators have grey plastic sides which are covered with dials and digital displays and have a complicated assortment of wires and tubes sticking out. I strain my neck to see, but whether boy or girl it must be cute because they both have dumb grins on their faces, and look blissfully happy. The artist in me can’t help but think the woman would benefit from a little makeup, though.
As I watch the man looks up, and turns to look over his shoulder. I follow his gaze, and although I can’t hear anything through the soundproofed window, I can see an incubator near the back start to shake back and forth like a washing machine set on heavy spin. It looks like the thing is malfunctioning, but a nurse fiddling with an incubator nearby just gives it a weary glance and carries on with whatever she is doing. I guess Spruscia’s baby must be inside, and start to remember what Janice told me on Sunday evening.
I go up to a nurse standing guard outside the door.
“Umm, is it ok if I go in? My friend Spruscia’s baby is inside. Err. . . Darren. She said I could take a look.”
The nurse stares at me. Her face is hard; she should be a prison warden, not a nurse. “Are you the father?”
“Sod off!” I say, spreading my arms. “Can’t you tell I’m a woman?”
I am actually quite humiliated when the nurse takes the following couple of seconds to look me up and down. I do a lot of exercise, but I’m not that butch.
She raises an eyebrow and shrugs. “You never know. When you see that thing you’ll wonder where the hell it came from, too.”
With those encouraging words ringing in my ears, she lets me inside. As I go through the door the couple pushes out past me, the man glancing nervously back at the shaking incubator.
The incubators are bigger than they look from outside the room, about half the size of a bathtub. They have glass lids, and from what I can see about two-thirds are occupied with weedy little pink babies attached up to tubes and wires. I feel a sudden maternal pang, and for perhaps the first time in my life feel the urge to have a kid or two of my own. Many of them look sick, and the desire to pick them up and want to make them better overwhelms me. I can understand the love on that couple’s face, maybe even that on Spruscia’s.
Darren’s incubator has stopped shaking, though that just increases my trepidation as I approach it. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, then open them and peer down through the glass at whatever is inside. My eyes widen and I have to take a step back.
Janice’s description had been kind, if anything. It’s sort of cute, if you see it in a certain light…
In the dark, maybe.
Darren is at least four times the size of any of the other babies in the room. Any other baby I’ve ever seen, for that matter. But that’s nothing. You get big babies all the time, especially in America where they get drip fed burgers and fries. The difference with Darren is that he doesn’t look much like a baby at all.
Once, a few months ago, when Spruscia first called me to tell me the news, I offered to paint her baby when he or she arrived, give her something to put up on the mantelpiece. It would look nice and it’s always good practice for me. But it looks like someone has got here first, quite literally.
Darren looks like a lavender-green monkey but with longer claws, and sits in the centre of the incubator glaring up at me with one side of his lip curled back in a slipstream horror impersonation of Elvis. There are two bony protrusions either side of his brow, sprouting out from a tuft of green hair which is thick and wiry like couch grass. His arms are already muscled, and the long serrated claws on his hands have torn the mattress inside to shreds. He sits amongst a snow drift of fluff so deep I can’t even see his feet, something I should perhaps be thankful for.
“Isn’t it hideous?” a voice says, and I look up to see the nurse I’d seen earlier standing just behind me.
I nod, lost for words.
“He’s doubled in size over the last forty-eight hours,” the nurse says. “Even so, he was huge when he came out, already fully functional. He bit off half the midwife’s little finger. She’s had to take a month off to recover, get some counseling.”
“Why’s he in intensive care? He doesn’t look exactly ill or anything.”
The nurse shrugs. “The janitor had a cat travel cage, but he wouldn’t fit in that. This is the only other thing we had with a lock on it. We’re hoping the mother will be well enough to take him home before he outgrows it.”
A dull growl comes from below us, and we look down to see Darren’s lips torn back in what can only be a grin. He stretches his arms out and grips the sides of the incubator.
“Oh God, here we go again.”
We both step back as Darren goes crazy, shaking the incubator back and forth and making fluff fly everywhere until it almost buries him. I look across at the nurse, her dismayed expression mirroring my own. We look back at the incubator, which now resembles one of those snow shakers you can buy in confectionary shops.
The nurse shrugs again. I shake my head.
Spruscia looks up from a magazine as I walk back into the ward and sit down next to her. “You look tired,” she says. “Been working hard again?”
I sigh and nod. “Feels like it.”
“Did you see Darren? What did you think of him?”
“Umm, he’s certainly something.”
She nods frantically, face beaming with motherly love. “Oh, isn’t he?”
I can’t resist: I have to ask. “So umm, where is the father at the moment?”
She shakes her head. “Oh, that’s the thing. You know, Amber, I’m not too sure.”
“No?”
She grimaces, though her eyes are still absent, and I can tell she is thinking about Darren. “It was just one of those things, a once off. I don’t really remember it, you see.” She chuckles. “I was, umm, a little drunk at the time.”
Uh oh. “Where did you, umm, meet him?”
She sighs as though it doesn’t really matter. “It must have been last October or November. At a party.”
“Yes?”
She clicks her fingers together. “Yes, that’s it. A fancy dress party. Oh, we had so much fun.”
I sigh. Clearly the drugs hadn’t worn off yet. “It was Halloween, wasn’t it?”
She gives me an airy smile. “I guess so.”
“And you don’t remember Darren’s dad at all?”
“Well, we were a little drunk, we kind of went upstairs for a bit of a play around, you know. He had a great costume on.”
I feel like someone has punched me in the stomach, but guess it’s just my heart sinking. “What, umm, did he go as?”
“Oh, he went as one of those things out of Lord of the Rings. The bad guys, the Uruk-Hai. Only he told me it wasn’t just a costume, that he had actually been an extra in the film. Can you imagine it? A real life movie star!”
“Oh, fantastic,” I say, mouth dry. “What was his name?”
She laughs again. “He wouldn’t tell me his real name. He made me call him Glodlak. All part of his act, I think. He was so charming! We had a great time. His costume was fantastic. It looked like it had been done by professionals.”
I force a smile. “Maybe it had. So, did you see him again?”
She shakes her head. “Oh, no. He said he had to go off to a convention and all that, sign books and DVDs. It’s a hard life being a movie star.”
“I guess so.”
“So, how are things with you?”
Just over six weeks have passed since I went to see Spruscia and Darren. Since then I’ve immersed myself into my art, tried to put that crazy little monster out of my mind. The only problem is, I’ve found I have an issue with green paint. Whenever I wipe it across the canvas I see his nasty little face grinning up at me. I’ve had to throw out all my green shades, which is a pain but is also proving to be an artistic challenge. I’ve even sold my bike. The green was just too similar.
I’m now considering a holiday, perhaps a fairly long one. I need to get away. I went on the Internet last week, and looked up dragons, just to have a little chuckle. It amazed me to find that they’re starting charter flights in October, and I came within a mouse click of buzzing one on the credit card. Cheaper than you’d think from the limited availability, but after thinking about it I started to go off the idea. Thought maybe I’d stick with British Airways instead.
I don’t hear much from Spruscia, though I get the odd phone call from Janice, who always gives me an update. Darren is four feet tall now, and Spruscia has been forced to build him a special ‘play-pen’ out on her lawn to stop him eating the furniture. Apparently he’s proving such a problem that Spruscia’s already signed him up for anger management counseling as soon as he’s old enough to talk.
In fact, according to Janice, the only thing that calms him down is a good fantasy story, read aloud, or a decent sword and sorcery flick. His favorites are apparently Beastmaster and Labyrinth, though he doesn’t seem too keen on The Lord of the Rings, because the parts featuring the Uruk-Hai getting chopped up by Aragon and company tend to make him angry.
And I heard that only yesterday the father turned up on the doorstep, demanding to see his son. He’d heard about Darren from somewhere, maybe read it in the papers, and taken leave from his latest promotional tour.
Spruscia has, allegedly, refused to talk conditions unless he agrees to take off his stupid costume, and tell her his real name.
I guess there’s just no convincing some people.