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“What do you think of her?” Maggie said eventually, and
Kevin had to admit that she was a smashing-looking child, just like her mother.

We found this massive floppy old sock, and it fitted perfectly on the baby's head. Maggie fed her real breast milk, and me and Kevin weren't even embarrassed. After all, I guess that's one of the reasons for boobs.

We walked out of the gate lodge like a group of injured soldiers. I looked back at the south gates, even though I never really liked looking at them. I thought about the night I'd first arrived, the night that I shook the gates and screamed up into the sky.

It was a bit hard for Maggie to walk. We helped her onto the cart, and then very carefully we passed the baby to her. Maggie winced a few times as we moved the horses as gently as we could up the avenue. I could tell from the way that they were walking that they knew they were pulling something very precious, and baby Nora kept sucking away the whole time. Me and Kevin were tenser and edgier than we had ever been, which I thought must be what proper adults must feel when children are born.

I still don't really know why Maggie was so ashamed of having a baby and why she wanted to hide away from everyone the way she did. As far as I was concerned, she should have been completely proud of herself. I mean, having a new person inside your body and then doing all that extremely hard work to get the new person out, and
then feeding the new person with your own body. That's an amazing thing. I'd never realized how amazing it was until I was close up to it.

“I'm a sinner, Cosmo,” she said to me. “I've done a terrible, wrong thing, and I'll suffer the rest of my life because of it, and I deserve to suffer.”

I kept telling her that there was nothing to be ashamed about. I did have a few opinions about Corporamore and what I'd like to do to him, but I kept all of them to myself because you don't want a new parent to be influenced by negative energy. They're exhausted enough as it is, and they can start crying very easily even if you say nice things to them, like for example if you tell them their baby is lovely and stuff like that.

So anyway, we were on our way back to Blackbrick, me and Maggie and Kevin and the baby and the horses, and Maggie was looking down at Nora, who was asleep. And I could feel all these massive waves of worry sloshing around inside me.

And I was thinking how much I didn't want to be worried anymore. About anything. Even though by then I was used to tracking down disappearing pregnant girls and working out rescue plans for miniature infants. You know, nothing too bloody demanding or anything.

Mrs. Kelly must definitely have known all about Maggie's situation, because when we knocked on the door of her
basement quarters and explained what had happened, she said, “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, so soon?

“Is everything all right? Are they both quite well?” she asked, and I said they were fine but that it would be really handy if Maggie and the baby could stay with her in her quarters because that way Mrs. Kelly could keep an eye on them.

“Of course they can. Where else would they go, with me rattling around and so much room on my hands?”

Maggie had been waiting outside, holding the baby and swaying slightly to and fro. But we told her to come on in, and as soon as she was inside, she was all, “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Kelly. I'm so very grateful to you. Oh, God bless you.” I thought it was a bit over-the-top, to be honest. I wished she'd stop saying that. It's up to people to help babies. Nobody should feel grateful about it. That's just what humans are supposed to do.

And as soon as Mrs. Kelly saw Nora, she was enchanted like everyone is when they see a new person, all sweet and squirmy like that.

Kevin and I cut an old mattress and stuffed it into a bottom drawer in a chest of drawers in this small corner of Mrs. Kelly's rooms. I wasn't at all sure it would satisfy safety regulations for newborn infants, but after a bit of squabbling that got slightly nasty, we calmed down and finally agreed that it was going to have to be good enough. On the floor beside the drawer we made up a bed for Maggie.

I wish I could show them to you, with their black hair and their big round eyes and their serious mouths and their pale faces. I wish I could show you what they were like.

Maggie was pathologically thirsty and kept on asking for more milk. It's quite hard to transport milk down a rickety old staircase in secret when you're in a hurry and when all you have to carry it in is a tin can with a weird curvy handle.

I know it's everyone's duty to take care of babies, but still they have to be lovely to survive. Otherwise, after a while, people would throw them in the corner, because even though they're very small, they are also unbelievably high-maintenance. Their cuteness is their secret weapon. It makes everyone want to do everything for them and keep them clean and more or less behave like their personal slaves.

After the baby was settled in and we had put everything into a manageable holding pattern, I went to the kitchen to give Mrs. Kelly an update. How many times Nora had fed, how Maggie looked, stuff like that.

It was around that time that I began to feel radically left out. Everybody had a focus, and in each of their cases that focus wasn't me. They were getting on with their lives. After all, that's what people have to do, and if I didn't do something to get on with mine, I was going to end up being a third wheel forever.

For the first time in ages, I wanted to go home. It became like a banging in my head. I kept imagining my grandparents searching around, shouting for me, just like I had done for Maggie. I thought maybe that Mum might have decided to come back, and maybe she was looking for me too. And I realized something that's hard to explain—something to do with love, and I felt terrible about the stress that I must have created by disappearing off in a taxi that night and not coming back.

I'd let myself forget about the future and the people in it, but the future was where I belonged. You have to live in your own time zone. You can't live in someone else's. It goes against the natural order of things.

I don't know exactly why, but Brian popped into my head too, as though he were alive for a second with his own face right in front of mine. If Brian hadn't bloody well died, then nothing else bad would ever have happened. My mum wouldn't have become a workaholic and gone off looking for business on the other side of the world. Granddad's brain wouldn't have wanted to erase everything it had once known. Everyone wouldn't have been tormented the whole time thinking about what an idiot Brian was to fall out of a stupid window.

I mean, seriously. Who does that? People are supposed to have basic survival instincts. At least that's what I thought.

If it wasn't for Brian, I wouldn't have ever even met Dr. Sally or any of those losers. Taxi Guy wouldn't have
brought me to Blackbrick. I wouldn't have been abandoned in someone else's past.

People tell me that it's bad enough having a brother who's alive. But having a dead one really sucks.

I was tired. I should have gotten used to it. I should have accepted it by now. I should have been over it. And I should have been all right. We all should have. But none of us was all right. My granddad was demented and sitting there like a vegetable. And my mum. Where
was
she, for Chrissake? Sydney? Who goes to Sydney? I mean if you're going to go off and leave everyone when everyone needs you most, surely you could think of somewhere better than that. And Ted? He was too busy being a pioneer of cutting-edge science to worry about me.

These were the things that began to go through my head, but by then I didn't have anyone to talk to about them anymore, because Maggie was obsessed, obviously, with the baby, and Kevin was more focused on Maggie than ever, and Mrs. Kelly was busy shining over all three of them like this big benevolent protective sun.

And I was back on Cordelia duty.

Cordelia said she knew something was up. I asked her what she knew, and she said that she knew Maggie was going to have a baby. I didn't tell her the baby was already here. She started saying how there was something terribly wrong about Maggie still being under the Blackbrick roof, still
being sheltered by the generosity of her family when “in truth, by now Maggie should be out on her ear” for being about to have a baby when she wasn't even married.