The Broken Pane

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Ido not have a first memory of my little brother. I do not remember my mother being pregnant, or her telling me that a baby was coming to live with us. There is an awareness of Nicky’s presence in my life that appears in my childhood recollections, like a bright light. Can anyone honestly say they remember it all accurately?

My mother, Ange, was pregnant again at the age of twenty one. Not an unusual age to be pregnant in those days, though her contemporaries in the maternity clinic were all anxiously patting their first bumps, asking her for advice on cots and layettes.

Shortly after her twenty-second birthday and a relatively quick labour that lasted under three hours, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Nicholas James.

This time round, my father Mick waited at the hospital, pacing the halls of the ward, grinding one finished cigarette into the standing ashtrays before immediately lighting the next, breaking only to refill his coffee cup, seasoned with a top note from his flask.

A young nurse came to find him in the late afternoon: “Congratulations, Sir, it’s a healthy baby boy.”

To the nurse’s surprise, he hugged her in delight.

Mick, I mean Dad, always said that she had looked flabbergasted. He only ever used the word when he told this anecdote, savouring the use of it. I suspect he was not entirely certain of the meaning and had picked it up at the time to use in this specific context.

I could never use it without picturing my father, sodden in his cups, welling up over the tale of the birth of his son.

He told it well, the birth of his second child, there at his wife’s bedside as soon as he was summoned, how tenderly they kissed, the baby nestling between them. The room was warm and clean, my mother’s blonde hair gently cascading down a shoulder, glowing with her light of happiness, basking in the joy that he had bestowed on her, a perfect boy.

This vignette was often repeated, the beats familiar, and we, his audience, knew to sigh contentedly at the end of the telling.

About the author

A well-kent face on the Scottish poetry scene, Charlie Roy has performed at the BBC Slam, the Edinburgh International

Book Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In prose as in poetry, her work focuses on women’s lives, mental health and family. The Broken Pane is published by Leamington Books, price £16.99