Nation

hadn’t she worn her one clean nightshirt?
    “How dare you walk in like—?” she began.
    “Woman baby,” said Mau urgently. He had only just arrived, and had been wondering how to wake her up.
    “What?”
    “Baby come!”
    “What’s wrong with it now? Did you get the milk?”
    Mau tried to think. What was that word she used to mean one thing after another thing. Oh yes…
    “Woman and baby!” he said.
    “What about them?”
    He could see that it hadn’t worked, either. Then an idea struck him. He held his arms out, as if there was a huge pumpkin in front of him. “Woman, baby.” Then he folded his arms and rocked them.
    The ghost girl stared at him. If Imo made the world, Mau thought, why can’t we understand one another?
    This is impossible, Daphne thought. Is it about that poor woman? But she can’t possibly be having another baby! Or maybe he means…?
    “People come island?”
    “Yes!” shouted Mau, relieved.
    “A woman?”
    Mau did the pumpkin act again. “Yes!”
    “And she’s… enceinte ?” It meant pregnant, but her grandmother said a lady would never use that word in polite company. Mau, who was certainly not what her grandmother would have thought of as polite company, looked blank.
    Blushing furiously, Daphne did her own version of the pumpkin act. “Uh, like this?”
    “Yes!”
    “Well, that’s nice,” said Daphne, as steel terror rose up inside her. “I hope she’s very happy. Now I’ve really got to do some washing—”
    “Women’s Place, you come,” said Mau.
    Daphne shook her head. “No! It’s nothing to do with me, is it? I don’t know anything about…babies being born!” Which wasn’t true, but she wished, oh how she wished it was true. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear…no! “I’m not coming! You can’t make me,” she said, pulling back.
    He gripped her arm, softly but firmly. “Baby. You come,” he said, his voice as firm as the grip.
    “You didn’t see the little coffin next to the big one!” she screamed. “You don’t know what that was like!”
    And it came to her like a blow. He does. I watched him bury all those people in the sea. He knows. How can I refuse?
    She let herself relax. She wasn’t nine years old anymore, sitting at the top of the stairs cowering and listening and getting out of the way quickly when the doctor came thundering up the stairs with his big black bag. And the worst of it all, if you could find the highest wave in a sea of worsts, was that she hadn’t been able to do anything .
    “Poor Captain Roberts had a medical book in his sea chest,” she said, “and a box of drugs and things. I’ll go and fetch them, shall I?”
     
    The brothers were waiting at the narrow entrance to the Women’s Place when Mau arrived with Daphne, and that was when the world changed yet again. It changed when the older brother said: “This is a trouserman girl!”
    “Yes, the wave brought her,” said Mau.
    And then the younger brother said something in what sounded like trouserman, and Daphne almost dropped the box she was carrying, and spoke quickly to him in the same language.
    “What did you say to her?” said Mau. “What did she say to you?”
    “I said: ‘Hello, lovely lady’—” the young man began.
    “Who cares what anyone said to anybody? She’s a woman! Now get me in there!”
    That was Cahle, the mother-to-be, hanging heavily between her husband and her brother-in-law, and very big and very angry.
    The brothers looked up at the rocky entrance. “Er…” the husband began.
    Ah, fear of the safety of the wingo, thought Mau. “I’ll help her in,” he said quickly. “I’m not a man. I can go in.”
    “Do you really have no soul?” said the younger brother. “Only, the priest said you had no soul….”
    Mau looked around for Ataba, but the old man suddenly had business elsewhere.
    “I don’t know. What does one look like?” he said. He put his arm around the woman and, with a worried Daphne supporting her on the other side, they headed into the Place.
    “Sing the baby a good song to welcome it, pretty lady,” shouted Pilu after them. Then he said to his brother: “Do you trust him?”
    “He is young and he has no tattoos,” said Milo.
    “But he seems…older. And maybe he has no soul!”
    “Well, I’ve never seen mine. Have you seen yours? And the trouserman girl in white…you remember the praying ladies in white we saw that time when we helped carry Bos’n Higgs to that big house