Sadhbh has become a gentle force of chaos. It’s enjoyable, right now, after watching her caution dur
Sadhbh has become a gentle force of chaos. It’s enjoyable, right now, after watching her caution during the first two years. You never had to tell her anything twice, you never had to worry about sharp knives. A disarmingly careful being. It’s left us somewhat lacking reflexes. But another overnight brain change has happened, and now she is clambering wildly over furniture, always on the edges of chairs, leaning drunkly. I look away for a moment and she’s somehow dragged two dozen folded sheets out of the cupboard with uncharacteristic speed. It’s oddly rewarding to watch. We treat the bidet as her small sink, where she stands and washes her hands after coming in from the pandemic. She washes the panda and the babies too—it’s a good incentive to draw her up there. A few months ago we dragged down the family Playmobil for Sadhbh’s cousin, and all Sadhbh wanted was a small plastic panda bear (not actually Playmobil), and three Playmobil babies from the ‘70s. They live together, they adventure together. Of all her myriad pandas, this one is identified as ‘the panda who lives with the babies”. They have taken names (her name and two real babies she’s met). They are… important in our days. Anyway, scene set: she is washing them in the bidet, and with that new unpredictability she neatly inserts baby Rossa into the overflow hole. He hangs at the lip for a moment as I freeze, thinking how to safely retrieve him, and with wonderful comic timing Sadhbh gives a tiny laugh, then pokes him into the darkness. The way I say ‘Oh’ gives her pause, and she stands staring at the hole for a moment, then looks at me. ‘Can Pierce get him?’ I tell her I’ll have to see. I start thinking about u-bends and spanners, and peering behind, but it’s worse than I feared: he’s been dropped into a ceramic cavity between the overflow and the drain. There’s nothing to unscrew. Sadhbh can tell I’m stalling, and her questions become a little more quavering, so I reassure her that we’ll figure it out, and that I’ll have to do it later, using unspecified tools, and she accepts what I say because I fix things. When she lost her wooden panda in the Botanics last month she laughed and pantomimed for fifteen minutes as Helene panickedly searched through the undergrowth. Trusting in us utterly, it’s brutal. Helene found it in the end.Later I sneak up there without her and examine the situation, and then spend thirty minutes sweating and cursing with a length of thick wire as I try to either push or pull unseen objects through the ceramic chute. What I’m thinking is: ‘This is just a Playmobil toy, we can find another one. Even if we don’t, she’ll forget about it. This is something I will get used too, a hundred beloved toys will meet gruesome ends. It is not a real baby, or even anything she thinks of as a real baby. She does not necessarily feel for it as you fear she might. It is not really trapped.’I discover the baby by feel, and manoeuvre it so that its little face is staring out the tiny hole where the chute meets the drain. Another fifteen minutes convinces me he will never fit through this hole, though an arm occasionally manages it. This is worse, must worse, because I realise that if I can’t get him out he will lie here forever, peering out, catching my eye every time I clean the drain. Sadhbh will see him. He is not a real baby. He is not a real baby. It’s getting dark. I put away my mess and put the plug back in the drain, covering his little smiling face, and go upstairs to work. I am 20% sure I can get him out. Later I picture a way to do it, it lands in my brain like it’s surfaced from my subconscious. Beautifully clear but dependent on so many assumptions. I am 50% sure I can get him out. I wait until the next day, because I need daylight, and wait also until the afternoon, because I’m afraid to try it and fail. He’s there, waiting and smiling, when I pull up the plug. I poke and prod with the wire for five minutes until his little arm falls out the hole, and then laboriously tie a strong linen thread around his tiny wrist. Already we feel wonderfully connected, after so long pushing him around by feel with a length of wire. I loop the wire’s end tightly and tie the string to it, and then push the wire back up the hole (almost impossible) until it appears at the back of the overflow hole. My fingers are ragged from jamming them into sharp-edged angles. I grab the wire and draw it slowly, waiting for unnavigable resistance, but the little guy appears, hanging from one wrist, smiling, uncannily like a miner coming out of a pit. I am thrilled, I am dancing with the little fucker. Sadhbh, when she gets home, takes all this for granted. -- source link