Be My Baby

We pick our way over flattened grass between stalls and rides. The warm night, ripened with frying onions and petrol, makes me loose limbed.

I never want to go home.

Tom leads, scrawny buttocks in white boxers visible, tracksuit bottoms pulled low. Thin and deep brown, I know his vertebrae are delicate knuckles down his back. Discrete, careful, I watch him during swimming at school.

Smoking, he hides the cigarette as if jealous, in the palm of his hand.

“Come on you batty man,” he calls back.

He sees it first. I watch his shiny lips, his voice swallowed by music and sirens and the concussion of generators. In a mess of cables between a ghost train and an arcade, the baby lies unmoving.

Pink and bald, it is almost hidden by grass and polystyrene cartons. Tom nudges it with his foot.

The baby doesn’t move.

Tom takes a picture of it with his phone.

I will him to pick it up, to tell me it can be ours. I see us, together, in a silent park in the sunshine, a hand each upon the handle of the pram.

I want Tom to guess.

The baby crying shocks us both.