Marisa was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the baby. It seemed strange that this alien being had been squashed up in her mother’s stomach and had emerged, bearing only the vaguest of resemblances to a proper human, with skin so thin and stretched it seemed almost translucent. The baby’s fingers were tiny as maggots; her eyes cloudy like apple juice. And all the grown-ups were mad about her, this squalling newborn, who had no personality as far as Marisa could see.
‘You need your nappy changed, don’t you, sweetheart?’ Marisa’s mother would say, cooing and smiling and lifting the baby high in the air so she could sniff her bottom and then make a great show of wrinkling her nose. ‘Ugh. What a pong! You need a clean nappy, don’t you, darling? Yes, you do. Yes, that’s just what you need.’
On and on it would go, with Marisa skulking on the sofa watching it all unfold with degrees of embarrassment and disgust. She couldn’t understand why her mother was talking to the baby in the first place, when it couldn’t understand. The whole thing seemed to be a display put on for everyone else in the room, whether it was Marisa or herfather, or the neighbour who occasionally popped her head around the kitchen door, having let herself in.
‘What a cherub,’ their neighbour would say. She was a woman in her late fifties, with three grown-up children of her own, and a bosom that would spill out over a checked apron she apparently never took off. ‘Aren’t you a lucky older sister, Marisa? You must be so proud of this little munchkin.’
‘Yes,’ Marisa said, and then returned to whatever book she was reading at the time.
Once, when the baby was a few months old and down for her afternoon nap, Marisa had conducted an experiment. Her mother had been sleeping on the sofa downstairs, limbs flung out gracefully, her patchwork skirt riding up her thighs. Her father had been at work. The house was silent, apart from the deliberate ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
In the nursery, the cot was pushed against one wall, with a mobile of brightly coloured elephants and beach balls twisting in the breeze above the child’s head. The window was fractionally open, and a ribbon of sunlight unfurled across the floor.
Marisa knelt down by the cot so that she was level with her sister. The baby’s eyes were closed, its nostrils dark and mysterious like miniscule caves, the flesh around them frilling delicately as it took shallow breaths. Marisa always thought of the baby as an it, but her sister was actually called Anna. Anna and Marisa, joined by the pretty vowel sound at the end of their names, so that if you said them quickly one after the other it sounded as if you were laughing or singing.
In the cot, Anna was stirring. Her pudgy arms started to wave slowly, the peony-pink hands clenching and releasing. It was as if she could sense she was being watched. Marisa waited. She wanted Anna to be awake. She needed it, for the experiment.
The baby’s eyes opened. They were dark blue and had lost their earlier cloudiness. Anna’s pupils swam and then locked into focus on Marisa’s face, and the baby smiled, pushing her cheeks up so that they dimpled at the top.
A few weeks before, the baby had been in her mother’s arms, peering over her shoulder. The baby had smiled at Marisa and Marisa had pointed it out in delight.
‘Oh, that’s not a real smile,’ her mother had said confidently. ‘It’s wind.’
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the nursery, feeling the roughness of the carpet imprint itself on her bare feet, Marisa was not sure if this was a real smile or a windy one. She wanted to see if her baby sister was like her. If she felt things in the same way as Marisa did. She seemed so alien, with her bald head and tiny fingernails, that Marisa struggled to think of her as a real, living person even though her mother insisted she must love her, unquestioningly, as an older sister should.
‘You’ll need to help us look after her now,’ her mother had said when she came home from hospital, the baby tightly swaddled in her arms. ‘You’re the big sister. She’s going to love you to pieces.’
Marisa had a vision of being loved to pieces – scraps of skin coming apart at the seams and floating into the atmosphere.
In the cot, Anna is starting to grizzle next to her toy bunny, her fingers crunching closed, then open. Earlier, Marisa had taken a pin from her mother’s sewing box. She had been holding it carefully in her dress pocket ever since. Marisa took out the pin.
Marisa leaned towards the cot, slipping her hand through the bars, the pin pointing outwards from the grip of her thumb and index finger. Anna was still looking at Marisa, gurgling and wriggling. Her eyes were fixed on Marisa’s face. Above, the mobile shivered and elephants with jaunty bow-ties cast their dancing shadows across the ceiling.
Marisa selected the softest part of the baby’s flesh, on the upper part of her arm. The skin there was plump, like the freshly baked loaves of bread her mother used to leave out for Marisa when she got back from school. Swiftly, before the baby could move, Marisa stuck the sharp end of the pin into her arm.
For a split-second, the baby looked at Marisa with confusion. In that moment, she looked older than anyone Marisa had ever met, as ifshe understood everything in a single instant. Marisa drew a sharp breath. She wondered if she had been right all along, that this wasn’t in fact her baby sister, but a life form from a different dimension sent to spy on them and ruin Marisa’s life.
But then the baby screamed. It was a howling scream, not like the usual cries of hunger or tiredness, but a catastrophic shriek of what Marisa recognised immediately as pain. Pain and upset and mistrust. The baby was screaming so loudly that Marisa felt a lurch of panic. She checked Anna’s arm. The pin had not drawn blood. There was instead a full stop of red, unnoticeable unless you were looking for it. Marisa put the pin back into her dress pocket. Her chest was tight with the feeling of having done something unforgivable.
She reached back into the cot, but the baby flinched and Marisa realised that she was scared of her now.
‘Shh, shh, shh,’ she said hopelessly, trying to copy her mother’s intonations. ‘There, there, it’s fine. I’m here. We’re here. It’s OK.’
But the baby would not be pacified and after a few more seconds, Marisa thought she was going to throw up. What if she’d ruined the baby forever? She only wanted to see what would happen. Anna was red-faced now, her eyes scrunched, tears blotting the blanket beneath her.
‘What on earth is all this?’
Marisa looked up to see her mother rushing into the room, already unbuttoning her blouse in readiness to feed the infant. Her mother still had that half-asleep look and her cheek was wrinkled where the edge of a cushion had pressed into her face.
‘Shush now, darling, shush, Mummy’s here.’
She lifted Anna out of the cot and kissed her cheek with excruciating tenderness. Marisa started to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I just wanted to see …’
Her mother looked at Marisa absent-mindedly. ‘Why areyoucrying?’ she asked, briskly, before lifting her breast out of her bra. She squeezed the nipple into the baby’s mouth but Anna wouldn’t settle and kept twisting her head out of the way.
‘What happened?’ she asked Marisa.
