The Fetch. Finuala Dowling

remember seeing anyone as undressed as Dolly at a funeral, but he said nothing. People were best left to be themselves. When she’d disappeared through the milkwoods, he unrolled a hose from its wheel fixture next to the rainwater tank and watered his vegetable patch. He was particularly proud of his scarecrows, which were dressed in Sharon’s castoffs. Then he picked three ripe tomatoes and some basil and went inside to make a salad.

      He cleared away the marmite jars so that he had room to work. The table faced the open kitchen door. He could watch the lizards sunning themselves on his doorstep, and the witogies frolicking in the stone basin he’d made at the base of the water tank.

      The child looked furious. It stood in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame for support, and scowled at William. Its sodden nappy hung down.

      “Hello,” said William.

      The child held William’s gaze steadily.

      “Does your mummy know where you are?” he asked.

      The child nodded, though it was hard to tell if the nod had anything to do with the substance of William’s query. Its eyes now fixed on the baskets and buckets lining the walls of William’s cottage, stacked high with broken gadgets. The child addressed William in a questioning tone, saying something that sounded to William as though it might have been transcribed in a mixture of orthographies.

      “Nguni Häagen ngô?”

      The child seemed fluent in English, Zulu, Ice Cream-ic and, perhaps, Vietnamese.

      “Come in and have a look,” said William, gesturing towards the baskets in a welcoming manner.

      The child toddled past William, stopping at the first of the containers to examine its contents.

      Nothing like this had ever happened to William before. Baboons, porcupines, meerkats, even a spotted genet on occasion. Stray humans too, but never a baby. Could it have found its way up here from the beach or had it come down from the scenic drive?

      The child was amusing itself by extracting partly dismembered electrical circuits and switches from William’s containers and examining each one before tossing it aside. Then it pulled at its sodden disposable nappy and said: “Off!”

      “Right,” said William. He released the tapes securing the nappy so that the pulpy plastic fell to the floor around the child’s ankles. Clearly, it was a boy.

      What to do about a replacement nappy? A large safety pin was the easy part: he knew he had one in the trays of his tool box. But what did he have in the way of wicking? William walked slowly through his cottage, pondering the problem. An old, worn bath towel would do, cut down to a square. He found what he was looking for and carefully folded the fabric side to side to make the cut exactly.

      A loud, indignant wail started up. The boy! William hurried back down the passage. The baby had pulled too hard on one of the baskets, which had toppled over, releasing an avalanche of broken TV remotes, as well as a discarded pair of swimming goggles and a snorkel.

      William swiftly lifted the capsized container and picked up the crying child. The boy cried with yet greater force when William attempted to lower him onto the improvised nappy which he’d laid out on his work bench. He put the snorkel into the boy’s hand and was rapped on his head for thanks.

      When the towel was fastened, William grabbed a nearby plastic shopping bag, emptied it of rusty nails, snipped two leg holes in the bottom and squashed the boy’s thighs into the roughly fashioned waterproof. He wound masking tape round and round the boy’s waist so that the pants were secure.

      By now the child was shuddering with grief, its face a slimy mess of snot and tears.

      “M-m-m-ama!” it gasped.

      “We’ll go find her,” said William, lifting the boy onto his hip. Surely the boy’s mother would be walking up the hill towards them? But as he left the cottage and walked past the open door of Dolly’s caravan, the boy pointed and sobbed yet more vociferously for his Mama.

      Oh shit! thought William. The baby must be Dolly’s.

      William took the baby on a full tour of the caravan in order to demonstrate that there was no mother there. The interior was strewn with baby garments and G-strings, empty wine bottles and sour baby bottles. But the boy was not at the empirical stage yet, and when William carried him outside again, he pushed his heels against William’s thighs, writhing in his arms to show his displeasure.

      “We’re going to find Mama,” William said firmly as he stepped down from the caravan and set off for Midden House.

      His mind rapidly filled with arithmetic. The child’s behaviour indicated that Dolly was its mother. But was he the father? Or Chas? Or even Neville? The unknown quantity (n) was the child’s age. The younger it was, the less likely that Slangkop men were involved. The nappy was a good sign, as well as the Danish/Vietnamese.

      William let the boy down gently so that he could toddle downhill. For the boy’s amusement, he pointed out all the little arthropods about their daily routines: the damselfly pausing on a restio reed, the glittering monkey beetle feeding on a pincushion flower.

      He showed him birds too: a Cape grassbird inside the cage-like branches of a geelbos, an orange-breasted sunbird perched on an Erica mammosa.

      “That little bird is all alone in its genus,” he observed. “A monotypical taxon. Like us. Or not. Multicellular life is over-divided, you’ll find, by taxonomists. We crave uniqueness.”

      He lifted the boy again and stepped right in among the bushes to show him the golden orb-web spider.

      “Look at that web,” he said. “So strong. Not even the wildest wind can destroy it.”

      The child seemed soothed by William’s monotonous interest in biology.

      The back gate of Midden House was open. In the kitchen, Emmanuel did not seem surprised to see William carrying a baby dressed in a plastic bag. He smiled and pointed towards the interior of the house, made a drinking motion with his hand and said something hardly more comprehensible than the child’s utterances.

      William was about to do as Emmanuel seemed to be suggesting when Neville arrived breathlessly at the kitchen door.

      “I tried to keep her at the clubhouse, but she’s insisting on gate crashing!”

      “Dolly?” asked William. “I thought she was already here.”

      “She wasn’t welcome,” said Neville. “Tried to cadge money off some of the mourners. I took her to the clubhouse and gave her some drinks but now she’s on the rampage again.”

      “Waar?” asked Emmanuel.

      Noise from the front of Midden House alerted them to Dolly’s likely whereabouts.

      “She must be down on the lawn already,” said Neville. He looked at the baby in William’s arms. “Is this another of your recycling projects?”

      “Ja, well, you see, I think there’s a complication …”

      Fundiswa’s entrance interrupted William’s reply.

      “Hurry, hurry! Emmanuel! She’s on the back wall of the tidal pool and she’s taken her top off!”

      Neville hurried out. He was the man for this job.

      Fundiswa busied herself filling the kettle, making more tea for Chas’s guests. William was in her way and she was forced to come to a halt before him. She looked from William to the baby and then back again.

      Remembering her strongly expressed views on sperm, his sperm in particular, at their last encounter, William thought it would be politic to follow Neville out of the kitchen.

      But his progress was slow. Midden House was full of mourners, either friends of Chas, there to support him, or elderly contemporaries of Mrs Fawkes.

      Chas’s friends were blasé about Dolly’s nudity. They’d seen it all before, their expressions