This might not have happened, but it did. It started on an island called Lundy, a three-by-one-mile hunk of granite not far off Devon's Hartland Point, less than a dozen houses and a few hundred thousand birds. Herring Gulls, Puffins, and the Kittiwakes.
I was on the island, half-hiding, half doing my PhD on Kittiwake Nesting Habits. Jenny appeared with a load of third year psychology students, looking at the same birds as me for an Animal Behavior project.
We ended up (all 11 of us) sleeping in a building called The Old Barn. Boys (and man) downstairs, five hormonal girls upstairs.
By the second night, I had been adopted, and for my initiation, the first full-on party was started. The pub was raided for crates of Wicked, a barrel of some local beer, a crate of cider, and some new drink called Jägermeister. We were all wasted by 9:00 and moved on to spliffs.
Someone had brought a half-decent sound system, but most of the music was not to my taste—at 28, a late starter, I was very old—but this girl Jenny took pity on me and played some random rock, then Jim Steinman and Meatloaf. Now I was chilled.
"Jenny" was gravitating to the old guy (I wasn't complaining), and back then, other than my research, the only thing that mattered to me was fucking. To be fair, I wasn't trying very hard. A PhD knocking off a not-quite 21-year-old student was a quick way off campus, and bye-bye academic career.
So, at least that night, I was more or less an innocent bystander, just keeping my head down and gently mellowing. Meatloaf was still playing (but not loud enough) and I was (I think) on my third or fourth run at the weed. Vaguely, there was this not-at-all-bad-looking woman folded into me, and all was good with the world.
It was a bit sad, but I was introducing Jenny to Meatloaf. Oh, God, the uneducated young! She at least knew Queen—there was not a person on the planet who didn't know "Bohemian Rhapsody"—and she fucking loved "Who Wants to Live Forever." She would play it on repeat she said, when she'd taken the tabs.
I let that go and talked of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," "Bat Out of Hell," "Hot Summer Night," and my absolute fave, "Dead Ringer for Love." "That is a big bloke," I said (not thinking), "but Cher—and him—them dancing in that bar, on the bar, that was absolute, utter sex."
The thing I didn't mention was Jenny was a large girl, and dark-skinned. She grunted something over the music. It turned out it was, "Let us go then, you and I," perfectly Eliot, and we left the gang to walk outside, look at the rhododendrons lit silver by the moon, stare at the sea, talk. Yes, of course we did.
There's a bit in the middle about missed periods, two, three, four pregnancy tests, the long phone calls, the deep conversations in the corner-seats of dusty pubs.
Jenny was from Venezuela and more Catholic than the Pope. She was having it. We married to shut the gossips up. And no, I didn't love her, not then.
But life does things. People can adjust. We were married (in Liverpool's big round Catholic Cathedral) when Jenny was about four and a bit months. Being less than naturally slim, she didn't show, but then, two weeks later, she started to explode.
At five months, Jenny was round and brown; at six she was wide and brown; at seven she had grown to be somewhere between a Volkswagen Beetle and the Goodyear Balloon, but to me—an utter surprise—she was quite gorgeous.
Was it twins? Triplets? Quads? Should we order sets of five of everything? Five gingham school dresses, five first-communion outfits?
Jenny laughed like a rutting turkey. I didn't give a shit. I was in love.
But then, overnight, something happened.
Seven, eight weeks early, the pain came, her waters broke, but Jenny just knew something was wrong. She made two phone calls. The second was to the hospital. On the first call she said, "Momma, I was right. Dark clouds is coming. Momma! Momma!" To me she said, "Jack, Jesus, everything is so bloody different."
She just knew.
The rest? I can't remember. I remember the midwife; the woman-doctor whose bleeper kept going; what I saw in her eyes; the blood everywhere before they pushed me from the room; the rubber-flapped, see-through door slapping open and slapping closed behind me; me not quite on the ground, terrified.
I will not write the rest. Only that when Momma Claudia arrived, too late, she was a very large woman—very—and darker, darker than Jenny. And beautiful.
