Get A Life

– The child's accepted at a nursery school. – Paul's like his mother, depends on evidence, whether it's a conservation back-of-beyond or their private lives in question.

– Not all nursery schools. Wasn't there even a case – a woman went to court when a kid was refused. The nursery school pointed out that very young children bite when they get in a temper. -

– The child's how old? -

– It's not sure, about three. I suppose they tell by the teeth and not all come out at the same rate. Nickie's were early. -

Be

Be

She sees he won't oppose – whatever Lyndsay decides, he is convinced is all right. For Nicholas: he doesn't decide, for Nicholas. She should, she wants – fuck him if he doesn't put his child first, above all the orphans in the world – to turn on him angrily but she does not. In this life put together since the time he went home again, out of touch, there is still, underneath, something between him and the woman who is his mother that shuts out everyone. He's here in the bedroom but the lines are down.

Whatever it is she wanted to prove by adopting in old age, and on her own, a child who might die and whose physical possibilities of growing up with the birthright of a female, clitoris, labia, and vagina, must be damaged however clever the surgery was, his mother's choice isn't an easy one. This bright and beguiling little girl is self-willed in excess of her size and approximate age, manipulative, a show-off in the spotlight of demanded attention and the next half-hour gloweringly withdrawn. – Just plain naughty. – The foster-mother/grandmother laughs even when exasperated.

Who knows if the virus covertly hunts this child down as rogue cells may still be holed up somewhere along his bloodstream. His mother is an old hand at interpreting prognosis, monitoring it coming about either in its negative or positive proof, back in the quarantine, his. And as then, she somehow establishes, creates ordinariness in this other unwelcome metamorphosis of a family – Adrian missing, some other being added – out of uncertainty, the unresolved. Which surely you've learnt by example of ecological solutions, is a condition of existence? No? Is she compensating for lack loss of him, Adrian – is he coming back? Is she punishing Adrian by showing she makes bolder choices than his, going all the way to the exhibition (no less) of extreme moral choice, taking on some child not orphaned but even worse, abandoned, and still further from human to inhuman act, a victim raped, disease-infected, while in the state of total i

Lyndsay takes Nickie and Klara to the zoo. Klara demands, The sa-el, the sa-el, and Lyndsay corrects her. The two children raise a chant: The see-al, the see-al! Other visitors smile at the little scene, assuaging pleasantly their guilt of the past when the zoo was closed to blacks except on one day a week and black and white children did not chant together.

Does his mother feel Adrian 's eyes on her from somewhere in the fjord – wherever whatever – the stratosphere that is his absence? Does he see these occasions of hers as defiance?

Or isn't she thinking of Adrian at all, at the zoo with her grandchild and her child. Not when she and Klara come to the son's house at weekends – it's nice for Nickie to have a playmate who is naturally part of the family. Adrian has left Mexico. But not to come home. When they're at table together, the Paul-and-Be

Nickie and Klara get on well together in the contesting ma

All right, the zoo. City children learn of their existence – co-existence – with animals other than cats and dogs. When Nicholas is older, take him along on working assignments; it'll be some years, the conditions are not for small kids, but a youngster of eleven or twelve, that'll be the time. Children see something of the wider concept of the environment on television – does Be