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00:56:00

She actually didn’t talk to him that much. He sensed that spending time at home and not contacting her friends was having an impact on her mood. She was sleeping longer than usual. She ate more than necessary. She bought a lot of sweets and fizzy drinks and now she was getting really fat. On his comment that she should look out for what she was eating, she showed him the biggest middle finger he saw in years. It wasn’t about the size. It was about the impact. She was silent, overfed and she constantly watched the same American TV shows which from YouTube she was able to display on the TV screen. Now Stephen Colbert, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and James Corden welcomed their everyday routine and stayed as fixed flat-mates, breaking the silence with scripted rounds of applause from the audience. She watched hours of film stars interviews, singers performances, and celebrity gossip vlogs. She was glued to make-up tutorials, recipes for dieting and coming back to the pre-child weight. She could concentrate on footage of reviewed shopping hauls, discussions about bags, cosmetics, T-shirts, skirts, dresses, and shoes. She started ordering the shopping online and he was now confused whose package the courier was bringing at the door: his or hers. She dove into his lifestyle completely. As her biological clock downregulated, she walked into the kitchen at night and ate until she felt sleepy again. She developed terrible stretchmarks on her stomach, hips, and tights. Her breasts grew and in the rubbish box, he saw packages from the underwear shops.

He remembered his mother’s bras. He would look at them secretly and they were decent enough to make him think about his mother as a sexual being. Once she got divorced, she tried various relationships, but she had difficulty in finding the right partner. She always took his opinion into account and he was sure he put a damper on a few of her romances. He sometimes didn’t like the guys she was dating. Sometimes they didn’t like him, as if he was a leftover from the past life, over which they had no control. But mother did make an effort. She bought new lingerie, she put on make-up, created a cloud of mystery and sex appeal with her expensive perfumes and sometimes didn’t come until the next day. She stayed at their place. Having sex. That was beyond him. The girl must have been having sex just the same as she carried now the burden of her pleasures. But the bras that she bought were not as attractive as his mother’s used to be. They were big comfortable bras. Looking at her now, the last thing she cared about at the time was to look sexy. He never took care of his outward appearance. Maybe also, for this reason, he didn’t miss the outside, where he just had to pretend that behind clean and ironed clothes everything was just well.

The idea that there were three of them was intriguing. It was like a family of three. The father, the mother and a child. He wasn’t in love with her, she wasn’t in love with him. The grapefruit was simply in his last stages of development.

He read about a child a lot. She was watching TV series so he caught up on the knowledge of first months care, breastfeeding, and nourishment. He actually enjoyed the prospect of taking care of a human being. He never had a pet, neither he had a cousin, a distant nephew or a neighbor with whom he could spend his babysitting hours, getting any form of experience. The prospect of spending time with a little human, in theory, was simple and learnable. In practice, it might have appeared more complex. But he always liked children. He didn’t mind waiting in a queue in a department store behind a woman with a stroller. Sometimes the baby was screaming, occasionally it took all the things from the shelves and put them into the stroller at the alarm of the mother. He didn’t mind looking at children playing in the playground. Their noises didn’t irritate him at all. He felt a weird sort of satisfaction when a child ate the snack given to him by the mother or when he stopped crying, soothed after falling down. He sensed this mission accomplished. He wanted to school some mothers who didn’t pay enough attention to the child and left them to their own devices, ignorant to the risks awaiting them. The park was close to the street, the park was full of hostile people, violent children, pedophiles, crazy kidnapping mothers who couldn’t have children on their own. He didn’t mind expenses: toys, gadgets and pocket money. It all made sense. It prepared a young one to be an adult. In a vicious world where you still fought for survival, when you could still die an unexpected death at the hands of freedom fighters, or fail terribly at school and later on at work, you couldn’t expect the child to be all nice and clean. It could instinctively be born vicious, aggressive, abusive or angry. It could play on its instincts then to be a stronger human, to win a better female, to outwit the competition, to create a stronger family. It had to know how to survive.