Chapter 3 of A Net Too Wide To Break His Fall, by Matt Boothman
I wrote this story chapter by chapter, without outlining first. It was an experiment in writing consistently, producing a chapter once a month, without fail, for the Foggy Outline newsletter. So don’t expect something polished or finished; but what it does have is momentum, and a fluidity that came from wanting to change things up enough to keep myself interested enough to write more.
If you’d be interested in a properly edited, fleshed out, finished version of this story, let me know!
Two texts from Callum. That was restrained, for him. He had to have been waiting an hour or two at least. Maybe he was learning a bit more appreciation. Or maybe he was biting his tongue.
Marielena was the crucial first node in the network of connections Callum’s life depended on. The first to introduce him to another person. The only person in his life he’d never needed to be introduced to. The all-important first and only exception to the rule. Exactly why that responsibility had fallen on Mari, both of them had their theories, but neither of them agreed, and neither knew for sure.
It might have made more instinctive sense if they’d been twins, acquainted in the womb, but they weren’t even full siblings. Mari’s dad was Callum’s dad, but his mum wasn’t hers. Mari was six when the two of them met, and seven when Callum was born. Old enough, apparently, for Callum’s mum to ask if she wanted to be there, to hold her hand and watch the midwife work and be the first besides the parents to meet the baby.
Callum was his mum’s first baby, and she’d gone against the midwife’s advice and insisted on having him at home. A happy family occasion, all holding hands and welcoming Mari’s baby brother straight into the house they’d all share together. In the event, it was a complicated and exhausting birth, and that house was only Mari and Callum’s home for another nine months.
In between the panting and the screaming and urgent murmurs of the grown-ups, Mari remembered the kind midwife taking enough time out to tell her that the baby was having trouble finding his way out, and that he was also having trouble keeping track of the baby long enough to lend a helping hand. A slippery little character, he’d called the nearly-born baby. There were lots of problems a mum and a baby could have when it was time to push, the midwife explained: the baby could get tangled up or twisted around, and it could be hard to figure out exactly how from the outside; but it wasn’t usually hard to figure out where the baby actually was. That was a new and puzzling challenge, indicating that Mari’s brother would most likely turn out to be remarkable in some way, the midwife mused aloud, with a frankness seven-year-old Mari felt like he would probably put more of a lid on when talking to her dad.
This was already a pattern she’d noticed in her life; grown-ups unburdened themselves to her unprompted, possibly in the belief that it would go over her head, or that she could shrug their anxieties easily from her young shoulders.
By the time baby Callum emerged – quiet but unmistakably keening – his mum was pale and crumpled, like a collapsed paper lantern. The midwife, almost without thinking, maybe ruthlessly prioritising, maybe just following the pattern, deposited the baby in the only empty pair of hands in the room: Marielena’s. She froze with the bundle balanced awkwardly across her forearms and palms, tense and unsure of herself, as the midwife efficiently clipped the cord and attended to his other patient.
While the midwife saved Callum’s mum’s life and Mari’s dad fetched and carried, Marielena drifted to a laundry-covered chair in the corner and tried to mimic the way she’d seen people holding babies before. Visiting friends of her dad’s, and mums on TV. She looked at the baby for a lack of anywhere else to look that wasn’t in some way alarming, and wondered if she’d been that weird colour when she was brand new, or if that was only boys.
A note of panic in a grown-up’s voice startled her out of it. Just a note among many – confusion, exhaustion, concerted calm and forced jokey good cheer – but unmistakably the first note of a phrase ending in full-scale hysteria.
“…pretty sure there ought to be a baby around here somewhere?”
“Here,” said Marielena, but “No,” the midwife dismissed her, barely glancing her way, “you’re not a baby any more, my love – I’m here to deliver a baby, your mummy definitely just had a baby, there should be…”
“Yes, here,” said Mari sharply, insistently, annoyed at yet another example of the grown-up habit of handing off things to her that she didn’t know how to carry yet. It was late, she was tired and it wasn’t her job to take care of the baby; it was time for her dad or the baby’s mum to take over. She carried him to the bed, ignoring the flapping, shooing, panicky hands of the midwife, and said, using the formula she’d learned from TV, the words she’d expected Callum’s mum to say to her before she was ever expected to say them to anyone else:
“This is my baby brother.”
The midwife hesitated mid-shoo, as if struck by a sudden thought. His attention fixed on the baby for the first time. He breathed out. “There you are.”
“Where…?” said Callum’s mum, reaching.
The midwife took Callum from Mari and settled him in the reaching arms. “Here. Safe and sound.”
“Where…?” Callum’s mum seemed to register the weight in her arms but nothing of its nature.
“Gave us a few scares there, but you’ve got a healthy looking baby boy,” said the midwife.
Callum’s mum freed her arms from under the baby, leaving him to roll and wriggle on her chest, and reached towards the midwife again. Her eyes were open, Callum was revving up to a full bawl, but “Where?” she said again, more urgent this time.
“Right there,” said Mari, thoroughly fed up with grown-up nonsense and starting to worry that holding the baby would fall back to her if this continued. “Here, this is the baby, your baby.”
Callum’s mum jerked like Mari had just dropped the baby on her from a height. Her arms curled round him. “Look,” she said to Mari’s dad, “it’s our baby.”
And that was the beginning of the network.
Mari’s little brother didn’t exist. At least not in the same way as other people. His was a potential existence. That was how she came to understand it.
For another six or seven years, she didn’t understand it, not consciously, not intellectually. She just lived it. Worked with it. It was how the world worked. She didn’t need to understand it, the rules of it, any more than she needed to understand gravity to stay on the ground.
She was thirteen or fourteen when she first thought to step back and consider it, to figure it out more objectively. Maybe she hadn’t had the tools before, or maybe she’d known it would sound absurd when put into words.
Callum only existed for certain people: people he’d been introduced to. The person doing the introducing, naturally, needed to be someone he’d previously been introduced to, by someone else he’d been introduced to, and so on and so on, back through the network – to Mari. Callum’s first node, his patient zero. The one who’d given him his introduction to his own mother, without which she would never have acknowledged his existence. Without which he’d never have survived. Mari hadn’t understood that at the time, but the weight of it had attached itself to her nevertheless. She was far more aware of it than Callum himself seemed to be. The precarity of his situation never seemed to unbalance him. He let precious connections drift and fade away, safe in the knowledge that Mari, his original, would always be there, solid and constant. Another burden for her to bear; as if the ones her seniors placed on her weren’t enough.
Alone in the corner of the pub round the corner from the party, she read his texts again. At least he’d got himself inside. At least he wasn’t freezing on the doorstep while she steeled herself. This was the introduction that could free them both, but if she made it, there was no going back. Vivian Hithercombe wouldn’t fade or drift. He’d be stuck with her. And Mari with the knowledge that she’d done that to him.
She imagined Callum haunting the house on Bronze Street, as it filled up with people. Eyeing each other. Making each other laugh. Needling each other. Sharing themselves. Mari imagined her brother alone among connected people.
She down the last third of her vodka tonic, paid her tab, set her shoulders, and walked round the corner to ruin her little brother’s life.