Thought Crimes (19 page)

Many resentments attend this episode.

Allie and Martin had been desperate to have children for more than a decade. They'd tried everything known to medicine, interventions humiliating as they were costly, but it proved impossible for them to conceive. Allie's sister Robyn even offered to carry a child for them. If ever a couple deserved to receive a foundling, they were it.

More than anything, they resented the secretiveness of friends like Sam and Beth, who'd often said they never wanted children, friends who'd pretended to be sympathetic to Allie and Martin's plight. If they'd been sincere, the couple would have given them Natasha. People like Sam and Beth had no right to a baby. Their dishonesty made them undeserving. For all the talk of miracles, these events have been unspeakably cruel to couples with no outlet for the love they wish to offer a child.

We now know of thirty-seven incidents where Hampton residents woke on the cool morning of June third to find carefully swaddled infants waiting on their doorsteps. Only three of these foundlings were left at homes where there were already children. Among the recipients were four single women, two single men, three lesbian couples, two gay couples, and two elderly childless couples. Not one of the chosen said a word to anyone until irrefutable assertions were put to them, or until certain that mention of their find would not threaten the loss of their child.

Dinner parties were impossible to plan. Overnight, Hampton became a suburb of dodgy excuses, of sudden illnesses and unexpected urgencies. Habitual entertainers put up the shutters. Mothers complained of daughters-in-law who'd polluted their sons' affections.

Loving a child so much that you'd to lie to safeguard that love involves difficult trade-offs.

Local sporting stars announced sudden, unexplained retirements. Fiercely resolute businesswomen like Harriet Song withdrew so abruptly from their regular activities that associates suspected cancer. Harriet said nothing to curb these speculations. She needed time with her baby. Hamptonians became weekend stay-at-homes. Some discovered the pleasures of cooking.

We should hesitate before speaking of miracles. None of the recipients had prayed for a child to be delivered to their doorstep. Inexplicability doesn't make an event miraculous.

Nor is seeking an explanation the same as expecting to find one. The novelist Manuel Primm describes a similar episode occurring in a small Spanish village during Cervantes' time. Half a dozen foundlings appeared, and no one could ascertain the identities of the infants' parents. These babies, and the middle-aged couples who received them, would later be put to death by the Inquisition.

We'd considered having kids, and not having them. If Annie was hankering, or if starting a family had been a major issue, I might have gone along with her, though I was always the one who said, Why add another hungry mouth to a fucked-up world? I meant it, too. It really pisses me off the damage we've done to this continent in two hundred years. Everything: the forests, rivers. Fish are disappearing, and the water's full of shit … Annie can be pessimistic too, only she says that if sensitive, thoughtful people give parenting the arse, we'll end up fouling the gene pool. She thinks we take ourselves and our business on the planet too seriously. And maybe that's the deal, for us to go on playing Chinese Whispers with the genetic code and let entropy take care of itself … Before the Pill, you didn't have the luxury of thinking like this. If you wanted to get your tail in, you had to face the consequences … This stuff is confusing as fuck. If someone had asked me what I'd do, I would've said that I'd be onto the cops in a flash. I mean, the days when you dump unwanted kids on a doorstep are long gone. And there must be a distressed young mother out there who needs help … I dunno. It's impossible to rationalise the emotions. When I picked Jules out of the basket, he started crying, but then I jiggled him, and he went straight back to sleep. It was like something I'd always done. Something I was meant to do. After that, right and wrong didn't come into it. Annie was the same. Neither of us mentioned what it would do to our career or travel plans, whether we could afford to raise him, or if we might regret it ten years from now. Jules looked just like Annie in her baby photos, and the sky could have caved in for all we cared. Nothing else mattered.

These babies are too perfect. They don't challenge the recipients to prove their mettle as parents. Always grinning and gooing, good sleepers. They were, are, healthy, even-tempered and adorable. Everyone's idea of what a baby should be.

If the envious couples who'd spent half a lifetime wishing for babies ever knew just how undemanding the foundlings were to their undeserving finders, their resentment would turn psychotic.

P had been about to tell S that he was leaving her for a sales manager at work, that he and this colleague had been having an affair for six months. He felt certain that S already knew.

Did he still love his wife?

When S stopped laughing at his jokes, P stopped asking what she felt or cared about. If you'd told him that a baby held the solution, he would have jumped on you. The very worst thing a couple in crisis can do is have a baby.

As finder of the child, S chose the name, Chrissie – this before she'd even checked its sex, or informed P. But when she told him, something opened up inside the man, as if a wizard had shot helium into his chest. When his wife asked what they should do, P told her to say nothing to anyone.
Chrissie had chosen them.
This man, who'd never lifted a finger to clean, now tore through the junk room like an uncorked genie, creating a nursery fit for royalty. That night, he told S about the sales manager, and agreed to his wife's terms. She would forgive him provided he never saw the temptress again.

Were we selfish? Absolutely. But we didn't know how to be otherwise, and weren't capable of understanding that selflessness brings its own joys.

Our selfishness was also the product of something much bigger than ourselves. Fear, mainly. We were too conscious of our place in time, too aware of the difficulties the future would hold, unable to see trade-offs as anything other than negative. We were terrified of showing fear, or need. Winners are never needy.

So we let time paint us into a corner. You don't schedule a nappy-change in a diary, or trade up to the latest model in model sons. If the jargon describes child rearing as basic taskorientation, that task defines itself as demand at any hour of the day or night, till time, and your consciousness of time, become re-calibrated.

You are not heroic because of what you've done, or intend to do, you are heroic because you are present when these instinctive demands are made of you.
The present.
When you finally learn to live in the present, with the soiled nappies and shrieks that mightn't go away, you begin to appreciate that the big game we've been signed up for is geared toward optimists, persons fool enough to believe that no crisis is more challenging or inevitable than a succession of nappy-soiled, chuck-stained immediacies. Trapped in this present, the only sensible course is to insist that you are generating a future where happiness will remain possible.