Chapter One

Don't Call Me Ishmael!

Michael Gerard Bauer

According to the doctor, I was due before the end of July. By August the first, Mum had been in hospital for a week and after a number of false alarms had become, well, a little emotional.

‘I feel like a whale!’ she moaned repeatedly, holding on to her swollen stomach with both hands as if to stop it from exploding. Dad reckons that with her belly button popping out, it looked like she was being attacked by a giant breast. Apparently Mum failed to see the humour in this observation at the time and threw a bedpan at him. Like I said, she was a little emotional. Anyway, Dad decided that Mum needed cheering up. Or as he likes to put it, ‘I had to do something to stop her whaling.’

But what happened next was no joke for me. Dad made an excuse to go outside, saying he was going to ring family and friends to give them a progress report. Twenty minutes later he returned. But when she looked to where he was standing in the doorway, Mum found herself confronted by a cross between an escapee from a lunatic asylum and some kind of deranged pirate.

It seems that while Dad was away he had somehow convinced the nurses to help him strap his right leg up behind his thigh and to attach a hollow cardboard cylinder to his knee like a wooden stump. They also supplied him with an old wooden crutch, a surgical eye patch that they had coloured with a black marker, and a bandanna made of gauze from which a tangle of Dad’s red locks sprouted like mad snakes. The costume was topped off by a little blue teddy bear that was sticky-taped to my father’s shoulder as a stand-in parrot.

Dad posed dramatically in the doorway, with his left hand thrust on his hip while he swayed unsteadily. ‘Arrrrr,’ he cried insanely, with eyes glinting at Mum’s huge, pale belly, ‘I be Cap’n Ahab and I be seeking the white whale!’

Now that might have been the end of Dad’s demented send-up if it hadn’t been for the fact that Mum had just guzzled a mouthful of water and had been caught pre-swallow. Apparently, as Dad tells it, there was a second or two while my mother stared at him with her cheeks bulging like an ‘obese goldfish’ before a strange, gurgling, humming noise started in her mouth.

Soon after, her belly began to shake like blancmange and her eyeballs, under the strain of jamming her mouth shut, looked like as if they had decided it was time to abandon their sockets and leave home.

Eventually the pressure was just too much. Suddenly a short, sharp jet of water shot from my mother’s pursed lips, cleared the bulge of her stomach and scored a bullseye on the chart that hung from the end of her bed. Dad’s eyes widened with delight before he shouted triumphantly, ‘Arrrrr-arrrrrhhh! Thar she blows!’

And blow she did.

Dad describes the gush of water that came from Mum’s mouth as ‘Niagara Falls on a good day.’ In between spluttering, choking and gasping for air, Mum laughed so hard that her own waters broke. Then the contractions started and accelerated straight into overdrive.

When Dad realised that Mum was roaring as much with pain as with laughter, he instantly sprang into action. Thrusting aside his crutch, he stepped boldly into the room. Unfortunately he had forgotten entirely about his ‘wooden’ leg. As the cardboard cylinder crumbled beneath Dad’s weight, he lurched forward and made a desperate grab for the curtain that hung bunched at the end of the bed. A shower of curtain rings exploded into the air, ricocheted off the walls and ceiling and clattered around the room like plastic hail. At this point tears of laughter were rolling down my mother’s face as she clutched her belly and shrieked hysterically, ‘No, please, stop it! Stop it! Oh please! No more, I can’t bear it! Stop!’

Dad reckons he knew just how Mum felt at the time. With his leg strapped behind him when he fell, his knee had crashed helplessly into the hard linoleum floor and he was now on his back rocking in agony and choking with laughter. It didn’t last long. A new sound began to fill the room. It was a deep, growling, grinding moan.

And then … well, I guess you know what happened next. Thankfully my parents have spared me the gruesome details. All I can say is that it wasn’t long before Mum and Dad were gazing lovingly at their firstborn child. Me. We were one small happy family. Everything was perfect. Until …

‘A boy, a beautiful boy,’ Mum said, wiping tears from her cheek. ‘But what about a name? We still haven’t decided on a name.’

Whenever Dad tells the next bit he does all the actions. The scene has become so familiar it’s as if I remember it myself. He frowns, leans over with his ear hovering close to his newborn son’s gurgling mouth and listens intently while his eyes dart back and forth as if he is hearing some wonderful secret.

‘What’s the little fella saying?’ Mum asks.

Dad raises his head and looks at her in wonder. ‘He’s saying … “Call me Ishmael”! ’

When the doctor finally bustled into Mum’s room that fateful day around fourteen years ago, she found my parents dissolved in joyous, uncontrollable laughter with their baby son between them. I wasn’t laughing though. Dad says I was ‘shrieking like a chainsaw’.

Maybe even then I knew what my father had done to me.