Howard McKenzie-Murray
My friend Lou just had a baby. She’s a lesbian shiatsu practitioner. I don’t know exactly what shiatsu is, but it’s totally changed her life. The rest of my friends are Peter Pans, like me, so she’s the first friend of mine to come even close to having a baby.
She wanted it to be natural—no epidural, no hospital, nothing. Everything’s organic with her. She even has a veggie patch in a communal garden and sings in a choir. She’s this wholesome saint. Her clothes are never clean though, because she uses natural, hypoallergenic detergents that basically do nothing. And I know that everything I’m saying makes her sound like she’s in a cult or one of those people who talk in a fake yoga-teacher voice—but she’s not. She really makes you rethink those stereotypes.
She had a water birth in May. Again, I don’t know what that is. I didn’t want to ask because it makes this gap between us bigger. It feels like Lou’s crossed over into a beautiful sunny paradise where real women gather, mothers, and I’m left behind in this playground of childhood I refuse to leave where nobody knows what a water birth is. When I hear “water-birth” I picture a baby shooting down a water slide into this pool of newborn babies who are all floating on their backs. And Beethoven’s playing in the background.
I got a whooping cough vaccination and visited Lou when the baby was two weeks old. She moved back to live with her mum in Reservoir—but the nice part of Reservoir. The baby looked kind of pink to me on that visit, but I’m not a paediatrician, so I didn’t say anything. She just looked a bit raw. Like when my friend Kelly had a chemical peel and couldn’t go into the sun for a week. I only said how cute she was and how tiny—which she was. She was nearly a month premature but, apparently, the healthiest baby going. She was guzzling down Lou’s milk and putting on weight. And hardly crying at all.
Lou’s convinced it’s because she only eats organic. The baby wasn’t half-full of pesticides. She was a beautiful, organic baby. Lou also thinks it has to do with the fact she sees a Chinese Medicine doctor who prescribed herbs for her pregnancy that kept her yin and yang balanced and kept all the energy flowing about.
Anyway, a few weeks after my first visit, Lou invited the gang—me, Kelly, Martha and Jordan—to come over Saturday to hang out with the baby. I’m good friends with Kelly and Martha, and I know Jordan. Jordan’s non-binary, by the way. But they were a guy. I say it just so you can picture their journey. I don’t think they like me because I kept saying ‘him’ instead of ‘them’ when I first met them. Which was shitty of me, and I didn’t mean to do it, but I just see that wisp of a moustache and I say ‘him’, you know? It’s a lot to reprogram. This is embarrassing, but I went home and practiced visualising Jordan’s face and saying ‘them’.
Clearly, I still feel ashamed because I’m going on about it too much. But I was a little rattled the Saturday morning at Lou’s because of that. It was more relaxed than the first visit two weeks before. On the first visit, the baby was everything. So pink and fragile and raw. Like an elaborate piece of glass-art nine months in the making that would shatter into a million pieces if you so much as sneezed. It was a relief to close the door behind me on the baby that first visit, to be honest. It was too much pressure for me.
***
This Saturday morning, with the whole gang at Lou’s, the baby was just another person in the room. The conversation was still mostly about the baby and baby-life. We were out in the living room drinking chai tea that Lou makes from scratch out of organic products.
After about half an hour chatting, this old man shuffles into the room in this thick, brown suit and sits on a chair against the wall.
He’s ninety-plus, I’d say. He’s got this spotty, bald head and a smile on his face. He had really watery eyes, too, that reminded me of my greyhound. All of us except Lou notice the old man and the conversation kind of stopped as we waited for Lou to realise and say something. And she did. It was her granddad. And we throw these big, polite waves at him and give him big smiles and huge nods and he just keeps smiling back at us like a trooper.
Lou told us he’d been in Vietnam and we all did the ‘O’ sound and big nods. He’d been what they call a ‘Tunnel Rat’ who crawled through Viet Cong tunnels and defused land mines, and got a bucketload of medals. At the same time—and I’m not complaining either—but he kind of cramped the conversation. We went silent at first. Then went back to asking those safe baby questions that I was hoping we were done with. “No, she’s not eating yet,” Lou answered. “They don’t eat solids for ages. She’s just a tit girl.”
We nodded to that. I looked at her granddad. His blue shirt under the old, brown jacket made me feel so sad. It was just a colour-combo thing—but it was doing things to me. “They say it basically never happens,” Lou said, “but she sleeps through the night. Like a rock.”
We nodded to that too. Somebody said, “What an angel”—which didn’t feel like something one of us would normally say, but it also made me wish I’d said it. All I could think about was how incredibly pink and raw and small the baby looked under it’s tiny, blue beanie. I was paranoid it was shrinking before my eyes. I was worried that the next time I looked in the crib there would be just an empty, woollen cardigan and beanie.
Lou’s granddad sat in his chair smiling into space with his watery eyes. Everyone else had forgotten he existed, but I couldn’t look away. The baby meant nothing to me suddenly. This incredibly old man had captured my heart. I wanted to ask about him, you know? So how many times a day do you feed him?
The baby was in a small crib that you could pick up by handles and put on legs. The crib on legs was sitting just off to the side of Lou who was relaxing back into the sofa with her steaming chai. I love Lou. I don’t know how she exists. She’s so sincere. She sends this wholesome smile at you that you can’t believe. And she was extra radiant that morning. She looked beautiful. So relaxed and womanly. When Martha asked if she could hold the baby Lou shrugged like it was none of her business if Martha wanted to hold it. Then she goes, “Just don’t pull off her arms, will ya?”
“How do I look?” Martha asked with the baby in her arms. I didn’t know if she’d practiced or if it was just this innate thing that women suddenly know how to hold babies. The instincts just kick in. I had no idea how to pick a baby up. Martha even did this hip rock thing that just looked great. “Umm…” Martha sniffed the air. To the baby she said, “I think baby’s made a little surprise in her nappy for mummy.” And she gave the tiny, pink nose the tiniest little nose-push. “I think so.”
She put the baby back down in the crib and we all started sniffing the air. Kelly gave us all this guilty look and said, “Guys… I love baby-poo-smell. Is that wrong?” Jordan said, “O my God, yes. That’s how Nature gets us.” I said, “It’s like the smell of petrol—it feels shameful to like it so much.” We were all cracking up. Except Lou. She just sat with a radiant smile on her face and her eyes closed. She was in a bubble. A baby-bubble of peace and happiness. Like one of those Indian gurus.
We were all sniffing and making lots of comments. It was nice because we were less on edge now than when Lou’s granddad came into the room and sat on the chair. He’d drifted into the paintwork by then. One of us said, “There should be a perfume. Baby-poo perfume.” And someone else goes, “Baby-Poo, by Chanel. For those special occasions.” Then Kelly said, “Baby’s got a million-dollar ass right there. You just gotta patent it, Lou. Gotta slap a patent right on that tiny ass there.”
We were all cackling like idiots, trying to think of other jokes, and sniffing away. Drinking it in like we were in a rose garden in Paris. It was great. It felt like this was what a friend having a baby should be.
Meanwhile, Lou had taken the Tasmanian wool blanket off her lap and pulled herself out of the sofa to actually deal with the baby. And we’re all interested in what a baby’s soiled nappy looks like so we hover around as Lou unwraps the nappy cloth. In a baby-voice Jordan said, “Somebody’s been a naughty baby.” And Martha says, “It’s like she’s saying ‘I’m here’, you know,” and she started crying. That set everyone off crying. In a whimper Martha says, “She’s saying ‘Don’t forget about me. I know I’m tiny and can’t talk yet, but I want to be part of this’.” Martha, Kelly, Jordan and I were all sniffing and wiping our eyes. We looked at the baby as if she really had said those things, and we wanted her to bask in our attention. Martha started sobbing.
Between sobs she managed to get out, “It’s like an SOS. I guess that’s why it smells so nice.”
And now Martha wasn’t speaking for the baby. The baby was speaking for us. That was us in the crib. It was our SOS, our invisibility, our inability to somehow really be a part of this, our helplessness to change ourselves.
As we cried and sniffed and blew our noses, Lou lifted the baby up out of the nappy. The cloth was completely clean. Nothing. It was perfectly white. Pristine actually. We were all just staring at it. Wiping our eyes. Trying to work out what we were looking at.
I think it was happening for everyone at the same time. The cogs were ticking in everyone’s head. I look up at Lou’s granddad. He was still sitting there with his blue shirt under the brown suit jacket and the same half-smile on his face which was kind of looking away now towards the sheer, rose-tinted curtains where the winter light threw a square spotlight on him. In the dim, feminine room he was suddenly blazing. Like an angel in those Renaissance paintings.
“Well, sir,” Lou said, impressed. “You got our attention.”
Howard McKenzie-Murray is a fiction writer and playwright from Western Australia. He is a regular contributor of fiction to The Saturday Paper, and his short fiction has been anthologised by Grattan Street Press. His most recent stories have appeared in Island, Berkeley Fiction Review and Locative Magazine. His debut novel, This is Where We Say Goodbye (Fremantle Press), is out May 2026.
IG: @_howardmckenziemurray_
Featured photo by Helena Lopes (Pexels)
