The Sister Swap. Susan Napier
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strangely disturbing thought of that hulking brute as the father of her innocent little godson made Anne hug him tightly and he let out a squawk of protest.
‘Sorry. We won’t talk about that bad man. We won’t even think about him, will we? Now, what are we going to unpack next, Ivan? You show me. Point to a box…’
The active assistance of a seven-month-old wasn’t conducive to efficiency and it took a long time for Anne to organise her rather meagre possessions. Since the loft was furnished, albeit rather sparsely, she hadn’t needed to bring much, but she couldn’t have left her books at home and then there was all the considerable paraphernalia required to keep Ivan the Terrible happy, healthy and occupied.
Most of that she took into the small bedroom at the windowless end of the main room and while she was there, assembling, with her usual lack of mechanical genius, the portable baby Easi-cot—’Easy, my foot!’ she grumbled to Ivan as he busily babbled incoherent advice as to how to connect point D with section 2—she was distracted from her task by a sound on the other side of the wall. Music.
She scrambled up over the narrow bed and pressed her ear against the painted surface. Jazz.
‘Well, of all the cheek!’ She was almost tempted to go out and turn her own tape back on, even louder than before, but she had to concede that he didn’t appear to have the volume very high. Then she heard another sound, a very familiar electronic tap-tapping.
‘He’s got a typewriter.’ She looked down at Ivan in consternation. He grinned back, showing all six teeth. ‘Oh, no! Ivan, what if he’s a writer too?’ Overwhelmed with dismay, she slumped beside him on the floor. Ivan began to laugh his piping little shrill and she leapt up again, conscious of those listening walls. ‘No, no, darling—shush!’
Anne tucked Ivan under her arm and scurried back out to the big room, her heart beating like a drum. ‘We mustn’t let the bad man hear you,’ she admonished him, one finger held in front of her lips as she placed him in his high chair in the kitchenette and began to forage in the refrigerator. ‘If there’s one thing crabby old hermits hate more than loud rock music it’s crying babies. So you will be good while we’re here, won’t you, darling?’
Ivan issued a scornful babble at her words, as well he might. The Terrible was Anne’s purely ironic nickname. Ivan was the most friendly, good-natured and wellbehaved baby in the world. In fact, he was enough to make a capable adult feel inferior. Sometimes Anne felt as if he was not really a baby at all, but a computer-generated ideal. He didn’t dribble, he never threw up his food or cried for no apparent reason; he even messed his nappies in the tidiest possible fashion. You could set the clock by his naps and he had slept through the night since he was four weeks old. If it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t walk or talk for himself Anne would almost feel superfluous to his well-ordered existence!
While Ivan amused himself by painting on a Charlie Chaplin moustache with a disintegrating rusk smothered with his favourite Vegemite spread, Anne whipped them both up an omelette for dinner, adding extra cheese to her own and herbs from the garden pots that her father had carefully packed in a wooden crate with plenty of damp newspaper for the flight north.
She sat on a stool at the breakfast-bar to eat hers, revelling in the peace as she popped the occasional spoonful from Ivan’s bunny-plate into his mouth while he diligently helped out with his fists, chuckling as the mixture squelched out from the bottom of his chubby fist on to his cotton bib.
Back at home mealtimes were always rowdy affairs, with her mother and father and her four brothers always competing to air their cheerful opinions. They were a very close-knit and gregarious family, except for Katlin, who at twenty-eight was the eldest, and had chosen to move off the small, isolated South Island family farm while still in her late teens and live in virtual seclusion in order to write. Ivan’s arrival on the scene had been a cataclysmic upheaval in her solitary life. As usual it had been her more responsible sister who had been left holding the baby…this time literally!
Anne grinned to herself as she mopped up Ivan’s efforts at feeding himself with a damp cloth. A big city and a small baby were hardly what most people would see as a peaceful combination, but for Anne it was the realisation of a dream and she intended to make the most of it. Just a simple thing like having what she wanted for dinner instead of what would sustain gargantuan farm appetites gave her a magnificent sense of independence.
She gave Ivan the bottle of milk which rounded off his meal and then sat him down on the floor to play with his plastic blocks while she dragged the lop-sided cot out of the bedroom and finished assembling it. By the time she managed to attach the wheels correctly Ivan was looking heavy-eyed, and sucking his thumb, a sure indication that he was tired. No doubt his incredibly accurate internal clock had told him it was past his bedtime but, true to type, he wasn’t complaining.
She bathed him in the kitchen sink since the tiny bathroom which opened off the kitchen—obviously for the convenience of the plumber rather than the tenant—only possessed a shower, toilet and small basin, but Ivan didn’t seem to mind. He kicked and splashed merrily, briefly regaining his liveliness, before dozing as she patted him dry and put on his thick night-nappy and stretchy sleep-suit.
He was asleep almost before his head hit the mattress, his hands clutching the fuzzy pink stuffed pig that was his prized possession. She kissed him on his button nose, a flood of tenderness warming her with contentment as she softly sang him his bedtime song and then quietly wheeled the cot through to the bedroom.
She tiptoed back out to the living-room and plumped herself down on the high, polished-cotton couch, pleased that it was long enough for her to stretch out full-length. There was also an easy-chair, a large bean-bag and four spindle-backed chairs around the oval wooden dining-table to choose from. At home it was a battle for the best sitting space in the evenings. A wooden roll-topped desk on which Anne had set her typewriter, a small coffee-table and a large bookcase were the only other furnishings in the room apart from a few scattered rugs on the bare floorboards.
The man from the foundation had been slightly apologetic that there was no television but Anne didn’t mind. She had her small music-centre and anyway she intended to be too busy to be a mere spectator of life from now on. There was no telephone either, which had given her a few qualms at first, but there was a phone box just up the street and she could appreciate that the usual grant recipients preferred to be incommunicado while they were beavering over their manuscripts.
She lay on the couch, her couch, listening to the muted sounds of the city, then she got up, dissatisfied, and dragged the heavy piece of furniture over to the arched windows. She had earlier opened the curved upper portions of the window with the long wooden window-hook and now she folded back the lower, rectangular segments. With the couch angled just right she could lie on it and look out at the last orange glow of the sun as it curtsied behind the jumble of city buildings. As the twilight turned to dusk she was able to see the lights burning at the entrance to the art school, and behind it in the multi-storeyed school of engineering. Across the road were the other main buildings, the library and theatre and administration blocks. Soon she would be a part of the stream of students that came and went each day from that campus city-within-a-city.
Fired with a fresh wave of enthusiasm, Anne made herself a cup of tea and got out the course leaflets and introductory material that the university had sent her when she had enrolled in her language courses. She had several days to familiarise herself with the city and make arrangements for Ivan’s day-care before orientation week started, but she intended to be well-prepared for her first foray into higher education. She had already purchased some of the basic required texts and she added them to the little pile and made herself comfortable on the couch.
She was reading about the gender endings of Russian nouns when the pendent lights overhead flickered once and then went out.
The dark wasn’t complete because of the street-lighting outside but it was enough to disorientate Anne as she tried to negotiate the shadowy loft, trying to remember if the man from the foundation had mentioned a fuse-box. She checked the refrigerator, just to make sure that it wasn’t just the light bulbs that had blown, but the light