The Gap of Time (2 page)

I saw the strangest sight tonight.

I was on my way home, the night hot and heavy, the way it gets here this time of year so that your skin is shiny and your shirt is never dry. I'd been playing piano in the bar I play in, and nobody wanted to leave, so I was later than I like to be. My son said he'd come by in the car but he never came.

I was on my way home, maybe two in the morning, a cold bottle of beer heating up in my hand. Not supposed to drink on the streets, I know, but what the hell, after a man's been working nine hours straight, serving shots when the bar's quiet, playing piano when it gets busy. Folks drink more when there's live music, and that's a fact.

I was on my way home when the weather broke in two and the rain came down like ice—it was ice—hailstones the size of golf balls and hard as a ball of elastic. The street had all the heat of the day, of the week, of the month, of the season. When the hail hit the ground, it was like throwing ice cubes into a fat fryer. It was like the weather was coming up from the street instead of down from the sky. I was running through a riddle of low-fire shrapnel, dodging doorway to doorway, couldn't see my feet through the hiss and steam. On the steps of the church I got above the bubbling froth for a minute or two. I was soaked. The money in my pocket was stuck together and my hair was stuck to my head. I wiped the rain out of my eyes. Tears of rain. My wife's been dead a year now. No use in sheltering. Might as well get home.

So I took the shortcut. I don't like to take the shortcut because of the BabyHatch.

The hospital installed it a year ago. I watched the builders day by day while I was visiting my wife. I saw how they poured the concrete shell, fixed the steel box inside the shell, fitted the seal-shut window, wired the heat and light and the alarm. One of the builders didn't want to do it, thought it was wrong; immoral, I guess. A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we'd die of heartbreak.

The hatch is safe and warm. Once the baby is inside and the hatch is closed, a bell rings in the hospital and it doesn't take long for a nurse to come down, just long enough for the mother to walk away—there's a street corner right there. She's gone.

I saw it happen once. I ran after her. I called out, “Lady!” She turned round. She looked at me. There was a second, the kind that holds a whole world—and then the second hand moved on and she was gone.

I went back. The hatch was empty. A few days later my wife died. So I don't walk home that way.

There's a history to the BabyHatches. Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

I did some research. In Europe, in the Middle Ages, whenever that was, they had BabyHatches back then. They called them Foundling Wheels; a round window in a convent or a monastery, and you could pass a baby inside and hope that God would take care of it.

Or you could leave it wrapped up in the woods for the dogs and wolves to raise. Leave it without a name but with something to begin the story.

A car skids past me too fast. The water from the gutter douses me like I'm not wet enough already. Asshole. The car pulls up—it's my son, Clo. I get in. He passes me a towel and I wipe my face, grateful and suddenly tired out.

We drive a few blocks with the radio on. The freak-weather report. A supermoon. Giant waves at sea, the river over its banks. Don't travel. Stay indoors. It's not Hurricane Katrina but it's not a night out either. The cars parked either side of the road are halfway up their wheels in water.

Then we see it.

Up ahead there's a black BMW 6 Series smashed full frontal into the wall. The doors are open both sides. Some small junky car is rammed into the back. Two hoods are beating a guy into the ground. My son leans on the horn, drives straight at them, window down, shouting, “WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK!” His car slews in as one of the men fires a shot at us to take out the front tyre. My son spins the wheel, thuds the car into the kerb. The hoods jump in the BMW, scraping it the length of the wall, shunting the junky car across the street. The beaten-up guy is on the ground. He's wearing a good suit. He's maybe sixty. He's bleeding. The blood is washing down his face under the rain. He says something. I kneel next to him. His eyes are open. He's dead.

My son looks at me—I'm his father—what do we do? Then we hear the sirens start up from somewhere far off like another planet.

“Don't touch him,” I say to my son. “Reverse the car.”

“We should wait for the cops.”

I shake my head.

We bounce the busted tyre back round the corner and drive slowly down the road that passes the hospital. An ambulance is leaving the emergency garage.

“I need to change the wheel.”

“Pull into the hospital lot.”

“We should tell the cops what we saw.”

“He's dead.”

My son stops the car and goes to get the gear to change the wheel. For a moment I sit sodden and still on the soaked car seat. The lights of the hospital slice through the windows; I hate this hospital. I sat in the car like this after my wife died. Staring out of the windscreen seeing nothing. The whole day passed and then it was night and nothing had changed because everything had changed.

I get out of the car. My son jacks the back and together we lift off the wheel. He's already rolled the spare from the trunk. I put my fingers into the ripped rubber of the dead tyre and pull out the bullet. Whatever we need we don't need this. I take it to drop it down a deep drain at the edge of the kerb.

And that's when I see it. The light.

The BabyHatch is lit up.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected—the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

Because there is a baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body's in slow motion. The child's asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I've got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she's as light as a star.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

The congregation is strong this morning. Around two thousand of us filling the church. The floods didn't put anybody off coming. The pastor says, “ ‘
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it
.' ”

That's from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.

The Church of God's Delivery started in a shack, grew to a house and became a small town. Mostly black. Some whites. Whites find it harder to believe in something to believe in. They get stuck on the specifics, like the seven days of Creation and the Resurrection. I don't worry about any of that. If there is no God I won't be any worse off when I'm dead. Just dead. If there is a God, well, OK, I get what you're saying: so where is this God?

I don't know where God is but I reckon God knows where I am. He got the world's first global app. Find Shep.

That's me. Shep.

I live quietly with my son, Clo. He's twenty. He was born here. His mother came from Canada, her parents came from India. I came here on a slave ship, I guess—OK, not me, but my DNA, still with Africa written in it. Where we are now, New Bohemia, used to be a French colony. Sugar plantations, big colonial homes, beauty and horror all together. The ironwork balustrades the tourists love. The little eighteenth-century buildings painted pink or yellow or blue. The wooden storefronts with their big glass windows curved onto the street. The alleys with dark doorways leading down to the ladies of pleasure.

Then there's the river. Wide as the future used to be. Then there's the music—always a woman singing somewhere, an old man playing the banjo. Maybe just a pair of maracas the girl shakes by the cash register. Maybe a violin that reminds you of your mother. Maybe a tune that makes you want to forget. What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

“Shep! Shep?” It's the pastor. Yes, thank you, I am all right. Yes, what a night it was last night. God's judgement on the million crimes of mankind. Does the pastor believe that? No, he doesn't. He believes in global warming. God doesn't need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That's why we need forgiveness. Human beings don't know about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a word like tiger—there's footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is.

I can't forgive myself for what I did…

One night, late, deep night, the dead of night—they call it that for a reason—I smothered my wife in her hospital bed. She was frail. I am strong. She was on oxygen. I lifted the face cone and put my hands over her mouth and nose, and asked Jesus to come and take her. He did.

The monitor was beeping and I knew they'd be in the room soon. I didn't care what happened to me. But no one came. I had to go and fetch someone—the place had too few nurses and too many patients. They couldn't be sure who to blame—though I am pretty certain they thought it was me. We covered my wife with a sheet, and when eventually the doctor showed up he wrote “Respiratory Failure.”

I don't regret it but I can't forgive it. I did the right thing but it was wrong.

“You did the wrong thing for the right reason,” the pastor said. But that's where we don't agree. It may sound like we're just tossing the words around here, but there is a big difference. He means it is wrong to take a life but that I did it to end her suffering. I believe it was right to take her life. We were married. We were one flesh. But I did it for the wrong reason and I knew that soon enough. I didn't do it to end my wife's pain; I did it to end my own.

“Stop thinking about it, Shep,” says the pastor.

After church I went home. My son was watching TV. The baby was awake, very quiet, wide eyes on the ceiling where the light made shadow bars through the slatted blinds. I picked her up and let myself out again and headed for the hospital. The baby was warm and easy to carry. Lighter than my son had been when he was born. My wife and I had just moved to New Bohemia. We believed in everything—the world, the future, God, peace and love, and, most of all, each other.

As I walked down the street carrying the baby I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time. My body straightened, my step lengthened. I was a young man married to a beautiful girl and suddenly we were parents. “Hold the baby's head,” she said as I carried him, my hand enfolding his life.

That week after he was born, we couldn't get out of bed. We slept and ate with our baby lying between us on his back. We spent the whole week just staring at him. We had made him. With no skills and no training, no college diploma and no science dollars, we had made a human being. What is this crazy, reckless world where we can make human beings?

Don't go.

What's that you say, mister?

I'm sorry, I was daydreaming.

Fine looking baby.

Thank you.

The woman walks on. I find I am standing in the middle of the busy street holding a sleeping baby and talking to myself. But I'm not talking to myself. I am talking to you. Still. Always.
Don't go.

See what I mean about memory? My wife no longer exists. There is no such person. Her passport has been cancelled. Her bank account is closed. Someone else is wearing her clothes. But my mind is full of her. If she had never lived and my mind was full of her they'd lock me up for being delusional. As it is, I am grieving.