Will You Hold My Baby?

Part Two

Relief and reluctance were a strange mix of emotions for a couple of minutes. I was glad that I wasn't going to have to get a taxi alone to the other side of Manchester at one in the morning, but I didn't necessarily want my boss to pick me up. Alan had only ever seen the version of me that I presented at work. The version he was going to get was the tired, aggravated one wearing shorts and a crop top underneath a cardigan which should have been thrown out years ago and with her hair haphazardly tied out of her face. Not a side of me that I'd ever planned on showing to him.

And I was so, so tired. Illness was trying to suck me into sleep where I sat.

I stood. It was time to swallow my pride. There was no way I was going to sleep in an airport, but I'd recently met someone who had asked to do just that.

It didn't take me long to find her. She was sitting near to the bathroom with her legs sticking straight out in front of her. With her skirt spread out the way it was, I could see the it was sporting the same kind of questionable stains that her son's jumper had been, along with rips at the seams, and something which really resembled milk vomit soaking into her top. The baby was lulling to sleep beside her, right on the dirty floor. It took everything in me not to turn around and walk away.

I knelt down at her other side, making sure to keep a more than reasonable distance between us. "Excuse me."

She looked at me with interest and it irritated me that she obviously knew what I was about to say.

"Wasn't expecting you to come back," she said.

"Well, we're sitting next to each other on the plane so I was going to have to at some point." I replied, carefully keeping my tone indifferent. "Look, I'm really tired, and I know you are too. I really need to sleep during this flight. If I hold your baby until we board so you can nap, will you please swap seats with me?"

She was nodding before I'd even finished my proposal, that same look of desperation from the hotel returning to her eyes.

"Okay, cool. Where's his pram?"

"I accidentally left it in the taxi," she said, and the lack of care in her voice made me want to change my mind.

"No problem," I adopted a level of forced professionalism similar to when I was talking to Alan. "Pass him over. What's his name?"

"It's Isiah." She lifted him, rousing him from his snooze, and leaned over to place him in my arms. It was definitely vomit on her t-shirt. "And I'm Brandy."

"Mine's Clara," I said, hearing my own name spoken aloud for what must have been the millionth time that week. "Is this where you're going to be later?"

"Yes, come and wake me when the flight is boarding."

"Okay."

As I walked away, I made a mental note to try and wake her up before the boarding was announced. I was sure I'd hear the staff mention it if I hung around near the gate. Maybe it was the exhaustion getting to me, but I was ridiculously paranoid that Brandy was going to refuse to get up when it came to it. Something was telling me that I was going to be holding this baby for the next eight hours.

But, looking on the bright side, Isiah seemed content enough to be carried – and not bounced – through the shops and around the waiting area. I tried not to mind when he shoved his fist in his mouth and then wiped his saliva on the bare skin of my shoulder where the sleeve of my cardigan had fallen down. Luckily, his mother had actually thought to change his clothes since the hotel so he was relatively clean.

After a while, the motion of walking and the vibration in my chest as I aimlessly chatted to him sent him to sleep with his head nestled in the curve of my neck.