the bearded lady

There was – or there will be – an accident with a carriage clock and a vibrator. I won’t go into details, but the upshot was that I gave birth to a time machine.

It was an easy birth. The time machine climbed into the world and stretched its arms and legs out in several dimensions. It looked like something that had been fashioned out of clockwork and clothes hangers and covered with ribbed black rubber. It had a lot of fingers.

I didn’t feel an instant bond with the time machine. Like many new mothers, I found myself in a state of shock and awe. This was made worse by the fact that I hadn’t even known I was pregnant – in fact, I hadn’t been pregnant. The pregnancy was to come later, and the conception happened sometime after that, although perhaps not surprisingly, I remembered that event very clearly. Or will remember it. I get confused.

Actually, I don’t suppose I ever really bonded with the time machine. I did try. I gave it a name – Audrey – but it never really stuck. I painted the box room yellow and put a bed in there for it. But it never slept. Or cried. Or did any of the normal baby things. And as it grew up, or down, or stayed the same, things just got worse. You can imagine.

“Bath time!” I would call up the stairs. But the time machine would only laugh. Who was I to tell it what the time was? And it was right. When I looked again, it would be bedtime or time for Coronation Street, or… 1986. I began to feel that the time machine was laughing at me, even that it hated me. Maybe all parents feel that.

I don’t think the time machine ever really understood how difficult things were for me. I was lonely, you see. Oh, there were a few men around, but once they knew my situation, they steered well clear. The time machine was jealous, I think. Once, when I was in my teens, a chap proposed to me, but just as I was about to answer, the time machine appeared out of my future and kicked him in the shin. And that was that, really.

That’s the trouble with being the mum of a time machine. It takes over your whole life.

I won’t say it’s been all bad. Some mornings I get up and find I’m seventeen, with gravity-defying breasts and my whole life ahead of me. Except it’s not really ahead of me, is it? I can’t even say it’s all behind me. That’s hard to understand when you’re a teenager.

It doesn’t even give me birthday cards, or chocolate on Mothers’ Day. We don’t have Mothers’ Day. We do have a lot of Sunday afternoons, though. They go on a for a long time, Sunday afternoons, don’t they? Millions and millions of years.