56
Chelsea, 1993
One summer’s night, toward the middle of June, I heard my sister begin to moo.
There was no other word for it.
She sounded entirely like a cow.
This went on for some time. She was in the spare bedroom, which had been readied for her. Clemency and I were ushered away from the door of the room and ordered to stay in our own rooms until we were told we could come back.
The mooing continued for many hours.
And then, at around ten minutes past midnight, there was the sound of a baby
crying.
And yes. It was you.
Serenity Love Lamb. Daughter of Lucy Amanda Lamb (fourteen) and David Sebastian Thomsen (forty-one).
I didn’t get to see you until later that day and I must confess that I quite liked the look of you. You had a face like a baby seal. And you stared at me unblinkingly in a way that made me feel seen. I had not felt seen for a long time. I let you hold my finger in your little hand and it was strangely nice. I’d always thought I hated babies, but maybe I didn’t, after all.
And then, a few days later, you were taken away from my sister and moved to David and Birdie’s room. My sister was brought upstairs and put back in the room she shared with Clemency. At night I could hear you crying downstairs and I could hear my sister crying next door. She was brought downstairs during the day to pump breast milk into a medieval-looking contraption, which was then poured into medieval-looking milk bottles, and then told to go back to her room.
And so everything changed again: the lines between the thems and the usses shifted a few degrees and my sister was once more one of us, and it was this final act of cruelty that brought us back together.
