Rachaela glanced about her. The ward was full of fulfilled and cow-like women waiting to give their udders to their young. In the wings waited the proud husbands, boyfriends and parents. The nurses on the ward were strict but applauding.

The room rocked with the howls of babies now being put to the breast, stilled. Rachaela had seen. The small mouths avid, the hands punching and grabbing. Tiny vampires, all of them. But this one, this monster, would have to make do with a bottle.

‘You don’t like it, do you?’ she said to the monster as it sucked. ‘Bottle or go without.’

She hated it. When it cried she stared on it remotely. She who had been its suitcase.

The room had altered. There was a cot. She could put the baby into this miniature prison and it crawled there in the trap.

Sometimes she had to lift it out, feed it, and change its nappies, thick with excrement.

The room stank. She kept the window open and the fire on. As the weather eased she left the fire off.

Emma came in and out. She arranged the feeds, trying the temperature of the milk. She took the baby out of the pen, and played with it. She had bought it blue and pink fluffy toys. The baby watched the toys with increasingly beady eyes.

‘Isn’t she pretty?’ said Emma, perhaps to encourage.

The baby was not pretty. It was a baby. Primeval and unfinished, crawling about like a busy white slug.

All night the baby cried.

Rachaela got up and fed the baby. She rocked it roughly, loathing it, and the baby grew hysterical. It was strong. With every day its voice got louder, its punches and kicks more hefty.

Rachaela touched it as little as possible.

In the end she left it to cry.

It screamed for hours, probably waking the entire house. Near morning it burned itself out.

Rachaela got up and looked at it. Its bluish-black eyes seemed to focus on her for the first time. It had learnt something.

They took the baby for rides in the pram, to the shops, and up to the tiny park with its three or four flowerbeds and margin of trees. Cold winds knifed at them but the baby was snug in its portable bed, the blue and pink rabbits bobbling between its face and the real world.

‘Lucky she wasn’t born on Christmas day,’ said Emma. ‘She’ll still miss out on presents, poor little sweetheart.’

The baby now had a name. It was called ‘Ruth’.

‘Rachaela and Ruth,’ said Emma, and to the baby, ‘Whither though goest, I will go.’

Emma had actually named the baby, reeling off name after name, pausing to assess their merits, recommending, persuading, until at last to stop her, Rachaela assented.

It sounded like a Scarabae name. It was unavoidable, Biblical. Ruth, daughter of Adamus.