Chewing on the wheelbarrow

February into March 2013

One night getting in from a performance after my flatmates have gone to bed, I am challenged by one of the preternaturally humanoid cats who also share the flat. She shoots out one end of the sofa, I approach the other, she shoots out that end, almost simultaneously, skidding across the wooden floor, Cato-like in her vigilance.

It's about 10.30pm and my roommate is up. Cue drinking, eating, giggling and both of us practicing our standing. It may as well be 10am: the little fella is AWAKE. Quietly awake, but awake nonetheless. And he cannot understand why I won't play ball. Or Barney the Dinosaur (Barney is, apparently, a dinosaur from our imagination..... aargghh!!!) Or that great hair pulling game. Having got up at 6.45 today, before my miniature roommate, in order go to Home Affairs to extend my visa, (because we are extending the tour for a schools' festival!) I want to go to sleep.

And then he starts talking. Really talking, loud, insistent words designed to put me off my journey to bed. He is emphatic, insistent and so I continue with my ablutions, get my stuff off my bed, put on my jim-jams, and then settle him again, dummy, blanket, adoptive-love-teddy. I tell him it's time to go to sleep and, miraculously, he agrees - lights out and not a peep.

The flat, however, is not so accommodating: it makes all kinds of noise in the wind. It's like there are a number of very boisterous ghosts in the flat. The cats are responsible for quite a lot of movement and noise, eating lizards, chasing their own tails, springing unbidden from places I didn't know were there, but there is more to it than them. The wind can get very, very high here in Cape Town, but even when it's not that high the noises are frequent and bizarre. Luckily, though, the skill of sleeping through when my roommate wakes in the night, means that I have extended my already considerable sleeping skills and the wind can rearrange things - and it does - yet I will mostly sleep on through.

My roommate is growing fast, he can crawl forwards now, and says specific things, rather than just burbling. He's not speaking any language I speak, but I can tell he's saying things, proper things with proper meaning. My cousin's boy, Matt, spent lots of time with their Zulu domestic worker when he was very small. So, when he started talking scribble, before he could actually speak in a language anyone else could get, his scribble was Zulu. Ten years on he knows very little Zulu, studying it at school now he wishes he was as fluent in Zulu as he was in its nonsense counterpart.

By day, my roommate is tormented by the cats - they sit and stare at him as his unpredictable shuffle-trundle brings him purposefully closer to them. At the last minute they simply get up and move slightly further away, escaping the baby's grasp. Obviously this is a metaphor for life: you may want something, but it eludes you. Often it seem to elude you at the last minute, willfully, only to sit just a small distance away to observe you, emotionless. Frustration is what it's all about. Or maybe that's just me.

My roommate is, as I have mentioned, a gorgeous, easy baby. He may simply chew on his new wheelbarrow, but he also smiles and burbles, giggles and only complains a bit when he wants feeding/changing/more Barney. He nearly always gets a tour of the kitchen if he visits a restaurant and everyone remembers his name. I repeatedly tell his parents how lucky they are to have such a good baby. I should state clearly here that they seem great parents to me, but being a great parent will not necessarily bring you a good baby, and vice versa.

He is a classically South African baby, given up by his mother for adoption and now living with his gay parents. And his mum chose my friends to be his parents. The incredible constitution of South Africa means that a gay couple can adopt, indeed, a single gay friend of theirs has adopted. Of course, the fabulous constitution combined with the terrible amount of babies in need of families means gay people can adopt a perfect, beautiful, baby.

Not that the exemplary South African constitution means that there is no homophobia in South Africa, far from it, there is even a thing called corrective rape suffered predominantly by women, but I am sure, what with rape not being about sex and all that, that gay men suffer it too... which would be funny, obviously, were it not beyond ghastly. But where there is a constitution, there is hope, and I am committed to hoping that the extensive nature of these crimes will pass into South Africa's history, a strange, chilling glitch.

There have always been lots of black or coloured people looking after white kids in South Africa, but now, more and more, you see couples of all shades looking after coloured and black babies. There are so many different stories, you cannot guess what any given story is, so why bother? The story is that babies need families and grown-ups often want children. Mark says that people sometimes say to him what a wonderful thing they are doing for my roommate, but the truth is that they wanted to be parents and they are lucky to have him and they know it.