Diana Champa
Fiction
Diana told herself I’ll write when the baby sleeps.
When sleep comes for the baby she puts him down in the crib on his belly, the safe way according to the experts. The clock reads 10:03 p.m., and her hand rubs crown to forehead, crown to forehead, crown to forehead. She rests her hand softly on his back, and there!
How the baby looks like a cake decoration in his pajamas and folds of fat she thinks. I will not eat him even though he looks delicious. The urge, she knows, to eat a sleeping baby is called cute aggression. It’s scientific and normal.
She turns and looks at her husband who is already in bed, reading. The lamp clipped to the headboard creates an ugly and distorted pool of light onto the book, his hands and part of his face.
“That clip light is so ugly,” she says, taking in the room: their bed, the dresser with the mirror, a crib, two nightstands, an armoire, and sometimes the pram.
“Yes. But it serves its purpose.”
“I love this place but it’s too small,” she says moving toward the kitchen, avoiding piles of laundry and shoes on the floor. The rooms are arranged in a long, single line—one directly into the other without a hallway, and the kitchen, like the flat itself, is long and narrow, not even wide enough for a table. But there is a bathtub. She flips down the button on the electric kettle. It’s on South Parade, she told him, which is a much quieter street. She tried to justify the extra expense but the whole time he knew it was really about the bathtub and he didn’t care anyway.
When they first moved to Belfast, long before the baby arrived, when it was just the two of them, the University put them in accommodations in a row of run-down buildings on the lower Ormeau. It was across the street from The Hatfield, one of the city’s oldest bars and known for the notoriously loud students who drank there. In bed, at night, they could hear the students talking, smashing glass, laughing, whooping it up all through the hours. She remembers how, on their first night, the students sang along to a Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton karaoke duet.
“They probably don’t know it was written by the Bee Gees,” he told her.
And while he was right it was not the Irish welcome she imagined.
A thin, steady stream of steam begins to rise from the spout of the kettle, curling upward in wavering ribbons. It thickens and rolls upward carrying heat in a visible wave until its inside bell dings. An electric kettle! It was one of those anomalies that first surprised her but now seems genius. She lifts by its handle and pours the hot water into the mug that’s been sitting there waiting with the tea bag.
“I’m going to try to get some work done,” she says.
“Is that decaf?”
“No,” she says. “But I have like three more interviews to transcribe.” She holds her mug and crosses the bedroom.
“Goodnight, Dear,” he says and she smiles at him.
What a lark! It hits her that they have been living together, in this foreign country, for three years. The laptop’s cool blue light flicks on as she spreads her things across the dining table—tea, notebooks, folders, loose papers. Sometimes it hardly seems worth the effort, laying everything out when she’ll only have to clear it again for breakfast. She did a lot of roaming at first, visiting the same places over and over to make them feel familiar or maybe, she thinks, to make herself feel familiar. At first her days in Belfast were punctuated by the books she borrowed from the library, the coffees bought at cafes and ingredients needed for dinner: cauliflower, pine nuts, lime, paprika; parsnips, honey, cream, thyme. Those little errands were all she had while he was attending classes. But then she got a job. Twice a week now she takes the bus north to the city center and then another one further out to the West or to the East of Belfast. She interviews women- asking them what their life was like, about their city, their families- and prepares the interviews for a collection in the library and, eventually, as the basis for a play. To prepare for this job she sat in the public archive and read about Belfast. It wasn’t its history she wanted but its stories because in Northern Ireland facts depend too much on who was telling them. During the Troubles she learned, the wives of American diplomats crossed the border to meet with women in Northern Ireland, observing them almost as if they belonged to some remote tribe. After the visits, the wives noted the warm embraces and startling honesty they encountered in the North.
Back and forth her eyes dart between the loose pages of her own cursive and the crisp of black letters on white screen, she types her own impressions. There was a midwife who had to scale a wall to assist a delivery during the Troubles. In October of 1959 there was a bread strike. Women in Belfast like country western line dancing and swimming…. It’s a little past one a.m.
There were blue eyes, long nails, expensive perfume, thick brown hair, glamorous clean freaks, and someone who liked to give hugs for free. One woman had a baby who died but never had a name. She didn’t get to meet her baby because her priest decided it would be too hard.
From the other room there’s a sound and she looks at the time. 1:43 a.m. It’s a superficial kind of whimper she hears and she’s on the edge whether to go back in the room or not. Babies get themselves back to sleep she tells herself. But she goes to him because people live on all sides of them: above them and on both sides and when the baby cries at night she’s afraid they can hear him.
In the bedroom, with her bum balanced on the edge of the bed and her body leaning over the side of the crib. Her husband sleeps while she does the Shush Pat; that’s what the book says “Don’t pick him up, go shush shush as you pat pat.”
In the dim light coming in from the lights in the back alley she sees the spines of the row of books along the wall and remembers all the things she has attempted to read to the baby. He rejected Shakespeare and cried through Plath but sometimes while she nursed him, he tolerated a few lines of Rilke.
Shush pat.
Shush pat.
Shush pat once more.
There’s a rhythmic movement to her hands and her thoughts. She doesn’t know how to sing but she can hum and she loves him and hopes if she does both at the same time, this magic love hum, that he’ll be quiet and go back to sleep.
Shush pat.
Shush pat.
Shush shuch chish pat, shush shush chush chish pat.
The baby cries—a squawk that starts low, then quickly swells, and within seconds she knows it won’t stop until she lifts him. She moves with him in the darkness. Through the flat with the baby in her arms, bouncing him gently, patting his small back as they move to the bathroom through the kitchen and back again. She thinks about Mary.
“In my day,” Mary explained when she visited her in North Belfast, “women followed their husband’s dreams. His was to be his own boss. He wanted to own his own business.”
When they reach the sitting room, she whispers into his head and waits for his eyes to close.
Mary owned a home bakery with her husband Joe. “Banks weren’t too keen to lend money, so we borrowed from family and friends. We owed a lot.” She shot a look at Lila and had to explain how banks didn’t lend Catholics money.
“Life was easier for us,” Lila told her, expressing pity. “The women of today, they have too many choices… too many things to do. They must decide to work or to raise children. It’s too easy for them to get tangled up with choices.”
“All I wanted was a day off,” Mary said.
In the dark, she paces by memory, careful of invisible edges, cradling the baby and swaying him gently back and forth, her body moving with fatigue.
“But,” Lila said. “They do have education.”
The baby won’t settle. Rocking forward and back from the waist, her legs in a wide stance, shush pat shush pat shush pat.
“Belfast for love.”
“Do women still do that for love?”
For my husband she confessed when they asked why an outsider would choose Belfast. Mary wanted to know if she resented her husband.
Shush pat.
Shush pat.
Shush pat once more.
Shush pat, Shush pat.
Standing at the sitting room window, rocking and bouncing him with the practiced rhythm of exhaustion.
She met a lot of Marys.
One went out to work at fourteen. “It was hard work but good craic.”
The baby cries and she walks the length of the flat, again.
Craic? “It’s like banter. Have a laugh, walk down the road and gossip,” they explain. Mrs. Martin remembered electricity getting installed in her home. Mrs. O’Hare said there’s plenty more fish in the sea. Mary never had time for her kids, to do fun things or go on holiday. Ruth told her that after the war, when rationing still shadowed everything, a birthday meant being given an egg — and all your brothers and sisters would watch.
Right now, what I want most, she thinks, What I want most…. is sleep. She whispers softly, hoping sleep is finally near.
She’s back in the front of the flat at the big window, looking out onto the road. The sky is a deep purple, lit by a half-moon and a few warm streetlights. No one is awake. It’s 2:43 a.m., too early to hear the recycling truck come to collect the bins, too late for anyone to be dropped off by a taxi.
In a few hours she will put the baby into his pram and go out for the day and the woman across the street will wave at her. Maybe she’ll go to Rickey’s. Ricky’s veg shop has green metal shutters that go up at dawn in the winter months, stopping halfway like a lady flirting with her eyelids. The girls set up and they talk to the baby while she picks out her carrots and apples.
One woman told her: eight people lived in two rooms with a toilet outside. Clothes were washed in big pots over a fire.
When the door opens it smells like fresh linen.
Sleep is a dark and silent undertow pulling at her but the baby cries.
An infant yelling for food is primal, the liquid inside of her body broadens and contracts.
All she wants is her own bed. Lean, lift. She spoons the baby, gathering sheets and creating disorder in the bed. Feed, calm.
It swells. It’s quiet.
Away like the books say.
When she was pregnant, she read about a new science discovery about how male cells from fetuses can migrate into the brains of their mothers, their own twisted coiled chromosomes crawling into theirs. My son and his DNA are implanting itself in my brain, she thinks.
Dancing was a Saturday night ritual.
She hears a tea pot banging against a cup.
It was cold in the shade Laura Grady told her. All three sisters stand on a sandy beach with the sun on their shoulders. Maureen is the child on the right.
What about the butcher? Money problems.
Someone’s Aunty Mary was wearing a new red coat when she got trapped under a wall during the Blitz. She was on fire and prayed for a quick death.
Mrs. Hoppy kept a tin of buttons and once gave a cold man her coat.
Round and round and up and down a penny a ride goes Mickey Marley’s Roundabout on High Street.
For there she was.
Diana Champa is the Director of Literary Engagement at School One, a small high school in Providence, Rhode Island. There, she develops creative writing programs for students in grades 7–12. Her projects include launching an annual anthology showcasing some of the state’s strongest student writing, producing anthologies and oral history projects featuring first- and second-generation young women. For three years, she served as a Public Humanities Fellow at Brown University, where she mentored students and helped connect their academic work to real-world applications of the humanities within the broader community. These experiences have deepened her belief in the power of storytelling to build connection, empathy, and understanding.
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