That night I worked so long and hard, attempting to remove his gorgeous but too conspicuous golden plush. I carved into the shaving foam and at first he lay stunned, letting me stroke his fur away. I thought I could remove all traces of his leopard spots with a swift and trusty blade. After a few strokes I became less careful, and he turned fractious and twisty. I nicked his precious skin, bright blood welled up and he howled. His face was a tight mesh of anger and pain.
I flung the razor into the bath, horrified by what I’d been doing. What I’d been doing to my own flesh and blood.
I picked up my cold, wet, soapy child and licked the tiny wound on his stomach. His blood tasted, naturally, like mine. Soap got into it and he yelled and kicked some more.
I felt the naked, bristly flesh under my tongue where I had tried to shave him. I felt the neat straight line of where the resilient fur resumed.
I held him out to have a look, once his cries of protest had tired him out and he had quietened.
In that patch I’d shaved clean of fur, his spots were as bright and evident as ever. They stared back at me and I thought, I’m such a stupid prick. I’ve been shaving the proverbial.
I sponged him clean of soap and put him back to bed.
So you’re stuck with these spots for life, Jep.
He’s humming into my neck in apparent contentment as I think this, as we sit in the sun in Princes Street Gardens. He hums rather loudly, deep in his throat.
The odd thing is — and I can’t be sure yet if this is real or not — my spots are starting to fade. Each day they have grown a little less distinct. But perhaps I am making this up. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m coming or going these days. Such are the joys of fatherhood.
The people passing by our bench feel tempted to come and see my child, to pet and examine him. It’s a compulsion they have. I try to ward them away and luckily this works. I feel them thinking, What’s this lad doing with a baby that small? It doesn’t look right. He looks a bit rough, that lad. Where’s the baby’s mother? Shouldn’t she be in charge of the child? He isn’t holding that baby correctly. Look how clumsy he’s being!
Of course I can’t be sure of what they’re thinking. But I do feel clumsy holding Jep. How am I supposed to know how to hold a baby? No one’s ever told me. It isn’t instinctive, at any rate. I imagine that it is for mothers.
I try not to think about the actual scene of giving birth. I feel like you do in those dreams where you are somewhere you know you shouldn’t be. In a supermarket with no clothes on, upon a theatre stage in the wrong play and none of my lines learned. There are times between the moments of sheer panic when it’s just me and Jep and everything’s fine. He’s a loving bairn. I can see that already. He’ll be intelligent too, and strong. He stares at you when you talk to him, stares at how your lips work, as if deciphering your words. You can see by his eyes how intelligent he will be. That split lip of his, that cat’s muzzle, twitches slightly in response, as if he’s preparing words of his own. He has vestigial whiskers there, the short hairs stiff and brushy.
I gather him up and like any other baby he smells milky and clean. Except when he’s just eaten and you catch that whiff of dead, raw meat on his breath.
We walk further into the park and I decide I like it here. Funny to think it’s so near the busy heart of town. It’s so peaceful. We round the corner and there’s the golden fountain, teeming with warriors, horses and trumpeters. The fountain I saw in my dream before I came here.
“That must mean we were meant to come,” I tell Jep. “If I saw it in my dream.”
Then I have to go to the loo, even though I hate public toilets, how dark and messy they always are. I have to go to the loo quite a lot these days. Does having a baby mess your waterworks up?
I have to take Jep into the cubicle with me.
These toilets are kept quite clean, luckily. I suppose it’s a very touristy area and they have to put on a show. The gents is busy with dads and their small sons and they’re all chatting away along the steel urinal.
When I’m using the loo I read the graffiti out of habit. A fair amount is about football and some of it is about the Scots versus the English. Most of it is of course phone numbers and desperate-sounding messages suggesting times and places. Some vicious, homophobic replies. Bigger than all the other writing, in thick black marker, straight in front of me it says: GOOD COCK FUN. And it seems like a slogan, a simple advert. Jep’s head is lolling against me as he nods off to sleep again. I realise, as I step out of the cubicle, that I’m blushing.
What
