9781529931471 by Smakprov Media AB

KERRY HUDSON Newborn

Running Away, Breaking with the Past, Building a New Family

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First published in Vintage in 2025

First published in hardback by Chatto & Windus in 2024

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Material in chapter three first appeared in altered form in This Is How We Come Back Stronger by And Other Stories and The Feminist Press in 2021: https://www.andotherstories.org/ this-is-how/

Material in chapter twenty-one first published in altered form in the Guardian

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To my husband, Peter, and our son. You two are my foundations and my sky. I love you both so.

At the end, she wipes away the blood and the ink on my chest in front of a head-to-toe mirror. I let my hair down for her to snap some pictures. I reapply my red lipstick. I’m not seventeen years old again. But I am new in my own way, constantly evolving and reinventing myself as women always have done to survive the stages of their life, serpents shedding skins. The magpies y just below my collarbone and they are beautiful.

When I leave I walk down the steep hill eating my doughnut. I call Peter. ‘It was good. I think it’s good. I’m coming home. I can’t wait to see you both. I love you.’ Now I have a new skin for a new life.

Part One LIFE

Chapter 1

When I go back into the bathroom there it is. No more than a whisper, a shadow of a second line. A life changed in a 1mm by 2mm blush of pink. I call Peter in and we stare, shining a phone torch light on it. I laugh and cry all at once – my on-brand response to being overwhelmed. ‘It’s happened. It’s real, isn’t it?’ Peter nods and holds me, but doesn’t say much himself. We take a picture of us holding the test, standing in our grubby little Airbnb at bathroom. Peter in his baggy, threadbare T-shirt, me in a rumpled khaki boiler suit. Peter looks at me. ‘Your expression.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a mixture of every emotion ever.’

He looks terri ed, shell-shocked. The picture we take is full of joy and fear. A picture capturing so much, hope arriving even when it’s long been abandoned and the unfurling of all the consequences for us still to come.

I’d been morti ed to be going through this charade again, the shame lodging in my windpipe like a too-big lump of food. But still, I hadn’t been able to stop myself. I’d bought the cheapest pregnancy test possible (I’d pissed on enough ve-pound notes), ‘Just in case, just so I’m not just thinking and thinking about this,’ I said to Peter who was standing next to me looking tense. I’d asked for the test in English though the pharmacist only spoke Czech. Was it paranoia or had she tilted her head in a sympathetic way at my delusion? A slick of sweat shone on my face

despite the Prague cold and I wiped at it with rough gloved ngers.

At home, or our temporary home for now, I peed on the scant strip of cardboard and walked away. I’d done enough staring and waiting for my life to change in those three-minute gaps. But, this time, the change has actually happened.

I think immediately of my mum. She told me I was conceived in San Francisco where she and my dad, fully two times as old as her twenty-one years, had been travelling the west coast, staying with an assortment of ‘hippies and freaks’. It seems appropriate that I’ve conceived somewhere far from home too. When my mum realised she was pregnant they were already back in London, living in a squat. She told my father who dropped to his knees and declared, ‘What am I going to do?’ It turned out neither of them ever wanted to ‘bring a child into this world’. It was then Mum realised she’d need to be not pregnant or she’d have to go home to Aberdeen. And so, after an abandoned trip to the abortion clinic where she couldn’t quite go through with what might have been the best thing for both of us, she returned to Tory, my mercurial grandma, and worked in the sh houses.

I can’t know for sure when I conceived but I like to think it happened after a night of drinking huge glass goblets of red wine at a gay club on a steep hill lined with other small and idiosyncratic bars. It happened after watching people sing terrible covers of Adele and Coolio at drag queen karaoke. After a night of laughter and conversation and watching people make good-natured fools of themselves. After a taxi through Prague, over the river all lit up and shining like a million silver mackerel dancing. After crawling onto our foam mattress, slept on by so many others, and smelling Peter’s skin, and just feeling, nally, so very happy.

I think I felt it too. I was sitting in the garden of a cafe a few

weeks after that night out, speaking to Peter who was calling from Zurich airport, on his way home from visiting his father. A telltale pinch – as though someone had taken a crochet hook to one of my fallopian tubes. Of course, I’d read about implantation, the moment the fertilised egg burrows deep into your uterus as though taking a bite from your esh. I’d read every forum post on conception possible so knew that science doubted implantation cramps while hundreds of women’s experience suggested otherwise. The chasm between science and women’s experience was one I’d get used to navigating.

I told Peter before we hung up, wanting to mark the moment just in case, ‘It could be? Maybe? Perhaps?’ He gently ignored the fact I’d had so many of these false alarms. My heart was too bruised to hope too much but I still did. He told me, ‘You’d be a wonderful mother,’ and I told him I’d love to experience raising a kid with him. Though I knew that by even uttering those words, by making the wish so solid, I was stepping right back into heartbreak.

As the news, and my embryo, take root I think often of Peter’s expression when I showed him the positive test.

I knew Peter was uncertain. For a long time I was too. How does someone who had the childhood I did, with foster families and homeless hostels, empty cupboards, and two parents with equally extreme mental illnesses, raise a child? Is it possible to be maternal when you haven’t even spoken to your own mother for sixteen years and the last time you did see her she was chasing you out of a shopping centre screaming ‘you’re a bitch’? I know rsthand that some people should never, ever be parents. So, I’d left it as late as I thought I could plausibly stretch it.

I’d spent my early thirties telling anyone who’d listen that ‘motherhood isn’t for me’. This was a simpler way of saying, ‘I’m

still trying to make sure my childhood trauma doesn’t ruin my life, I’ll be fucked if I’ll let it hurt another generation too. Also, perhaps relatedly, I like drinking to excess, living in poky studios in big foreign cities where I know no one, and sleeping with strangers.’ So, I didn’t build a future around motherhood as so many do. In fact, in my mid-thirties when I was writing and renting a friend’s spare room in between months of travel to Sarajevo, Berlin or Lisbon, I felt grateful not to have ‘that urge’. As I watched my peers panic at the thought of their waning fertility and take out bank loans to freeze their eggs (or freeze their expectations of their prospective partners), I felt smugly free of that anxiety.

But as every year passed ‘that urge’ did come in rushes, like travel sickness, leaving me woozy and vertiginous and trying to understand if, instead, I might just want a plane ticket or a kitten or simply another piece of cake. After the rst twenty years of my life nearly killed me, one way or another, I was doing well. I had a good career as a writer and had just published a book, Lowborn, that allowed me to lay many of my demons to rest. Plus, by then I had my husband Peter, who made me feel safe, secure, properly loved exactly as I was, my many aws and all. In fact, perhaps he especially loved those aws. Some people will be angry at me for writing that. And perhaps it shouldn’t be noteworthy at all to have a partner who respects and accepts you completely. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so grateful. But I’d never known love like it in any sense – romantic, maternal, paternal, or platonic – and it was like getting under a heavy duvet after a really exhausting day. In our three years together, Peter had never once judged me or treated me badly when I had been vulnerable – even though those vulnerabilities often manifested themselves in ways that I’m sure were not easy to live with. Instead, he embraced them and

told me, when I felt ashamed or guilty of the way I could be fractured, that they were part of me and he loved all of me. That’s not to say he didn’t fuck up, as I did too, in myriad other ways, but that acceptance remained a constant, rm ground to stand upon during the Richter scale magnitude of new love.

I sometimes joke that I ‘summoned’ Peter in a South American desert. And though I am joking I do also remember the exact moment I decided I would nd a partner to love and spend my life with. I was on an overnight bus from Buenos Aires – where I had been writing a novel and eating steak, ineffectively learning the tango in an old church community centre in a rough part of the city and going on Tinder dates with terrible, terrible men – to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. It was dusk and a heavy lilac sky full of rain hung over the at arid landscape. When the storm came, with pale pink ashes of fork lightning, rain lashing the windows, it was utterly beautiful. Just one of a thousand perfect, lonely memories I’d made over my year of travel through Europe and South America. And there I decided – I wanted someone. Not just someone. I’d had plenty of someones. I wanted the person. My person. I was ready for them now. I actually wrote that in my notebook – aware of my naivety but undeterred. I might as well have been writing with a grape-scented gel pen. I knew it would be hard, me being me, and likely painful, me being me, but I wanted to share this world with my person. Then, via cheese toasties at a circular bar and sweaty runs through the broken streets of Asunción and a brief ing on a schooner in Paraty, I came home to London and met Peter.

We met in Dalston in a pub opposite the at where I’d lived with a girlfriend for two years, the ghosts of our explosive arguments still echoing off the old Victorian walls. I drank pints, he drank halves. He was handsome but a little quiet. I took his

reservedness, which I’d later understand was nervousness – ‘I was amazed when you even messaged me’ – for lack of interest, and protected my ego by friend-zoning him after a full and generous ve minutes. I do remember that at one point he told some quick, funny jokes and gave a wide, relaxed smile and I felt a tiny spark on the cold int of my heart, but otherwise I went home early via a Turkish corner shop where I bought an Oreo ice-cream sandwich and a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch to eat in bed. In the morning I woke to an email from him recommending some women post-punk singers I might like. I sent him my customary message, informing him, rst, that I was familiar with all those singers, thank you though, and, second, that ‘I didn’t feel the spark, I’m sure you’d agree, but you seem really cool – it’d be great to be pals’, and went back to sleeping with 45 per cent of the people I made eye contact with in Hackney basement bars, the highlight being an American who squeezed my breasts like he was juicing oranges until I reminded him they were attached to my body which for some reason he took offence to.

Peter and I did end up being pals. Real friends. We met a second time in the same pub and bonded over our Scrabble hatred/ ineptitude. We spoke about his rst marriage which occurred in New Orleans three weeks after meeting his ex-wife in Florida and which ended three years later in heartbreak. We spoke about my ten-year on–off relationship with a woman which also ended in heartbreak. We met for walks on Hackney Marshes and swims in London Fields Lido. We took our cameras to Brick Lane and played at being photographers. We had coffees in little DIY places that would spring up in strange spaces and then disappear again. We talked a lot about what we might do with our individual futures. We talked a lot about love but never about whether we might love each other.

Usually painfully, neurotically insecure about my desirability in all interactions, when I was with him, I was blissfully, joyfully completely myself – a revelation since I was often self-conscious even in my own company. I just knew instinctively that he would never hurt me. It felt to me, who had learned to code-switch and change my costume, accent and mannerisms to t with whoever I was trying to charm, that though I didn’t think much of who I actually was, he accepted me, even admired me, exactly as I truly was. Every time I spent a few hours with him, no matter what we did, I left feeling lighter, surer and optimistic about the world. He was, as Charlotte Rampling once said in a documentary called The Look, ‘a person who you can be alone together with’. Always socially avoidant, when Peter messaged me for a quick drink or coffee, I would drop everything and go. Little did I know he was just as solitary but would do the same for me. We were lone wolves who found we could be very happy alone together.

For ve months we carried on like this. Then he told me he’d had a date. A pub landlady. He told me he liked her and asked my advice about whether he should sleep with her on the second date if he was serious about trying to get involved with her. My game face was good – I jostled him just a little too roughly, spoke a little too loudly, ‘At last. I’m happy for you – go for it! Of course, you have to see if the sex is good! How exciting!’ and then I had a little cry on the way home because, somehow, I’d just imagined he was waiting for me like I, I nally realised, had been waiting for him.

The next week, I went on a book tour to France. It should have been a triumph – my rst overseas tour! French press interviews while drinking café allongé with my chic PR person! And in many ways, it was – I travelled by train to a different town each day and at night had dinner at a revolving selection of crêpe

restaurants with a revolving selection of local literary gures who all found it fucking hilarious that I spoke very little French. Afterwards, I returned to my hotel where I’d drink a single solitary cocktail in the hotel bar. In the mornings, I’d take a picture of my breakfast tray arranged artfully on rumpled hotel sheets. Still, when I was over-tired and over-socialised, just thinking of Peter would bring me a sense of calm and contentment. I found myself messaging him often. Over the breakfasts, on trains, slightly tipsy last thing at night. I found I missed him.

When I saw him next, at a friend’s party, I asked him to come home with me and he refused. Bewildered, I sent him a message at 2 a.m. from my very conspicuously empty bed – drunk and outraged – I thought something was happening here? Am I wrong? He came the next night and told me he really thought I just wanted to be friends. He didn’t want to ruin that. I told him no, I wasn’t sure yet, but I thought maybe, perhaps . . . ? He kissed me. He stayed the night.

He knew of my past, of teen promiscuity, a rape, assaults, fucking around as an adult. He understood sex was both powerful and extremely complicated for me; he treated me with nothing less than love – though we were yet to say those words – and I felt completely safe. I love sex. But I also associate sex with violence and trauma and sexualisation when I should have been having a childhood, and though I swore that would not de ne me and I’d mostly managed it, that night was the only time I’d ever slept with someone for the rst time without being drunk.

We lived for the next two weeks on Lu biscuits and caramel au beurre salé given to me in goody bags in France, shitty instant coffee, and very good sex. Occasionally we would emerge, shaky and blinking in the light like new fawns, to get a takeaway pizza and a few bottles of beer. It was wonderful. It was love.

It’s a shame you can’t stay in your metaphorical and literal sex bubble forever. Eventually, we had to face our individual and collective shit. That was very hard indeed since we both came with huge amounts of baggage, high walls, intimacy and trust issues. His marriage almost ten years earlier had hurt him beyond my understanding. He told me he’d always been a shy child and teen, reserved to the point of silence, but that when he met his rst beautiful, sparky, sociable wife in Florida, her love for him, their love story, was proof he was worthy. Years later, when she told him that, in fact, it wasn’t the relationship that didn’t work but that he was not the sort of man she wanted, he retreated from love or intimacy and the possibility of more heartbreak. We were both independent people to an extreme, too. We had thrived on this independence and quick, casual relationships, a lot of time alone, and work that enabled us to spend time in our imaginations. And now, we were meant to somehow allow ourselves to be vulnerable to one another, to risk ourselves and our peace? We were to actually consent to entanglement. Besides, we were so opposite in so many things: yes versus no, cautious versus impulsive, quiet and gentle versus outspoken and salty. We approached the same things from entirely opposing perspectives. Though by the time we met he was as penniless as me, Peter grew up in a wealthy Swiss family in a huge house with its own duck pond in Zurich, while I’d grown up in extreme poverty, which I was in the midst of writing about. And, believe me, this summary doesn’t even begin to tackle the whole wrecked cities of dysfunctional behaviours we were both trailing in our wake.

One early day in our relationship I waved to a child toddling through a park and Peter asked me if I wanted to have my own. I didn’t really think about the response or the context of him asking

it, it was the same knee-jerk one I always gave: ‘Not really. I like my life. You?’ He replied, ‘Probably not.’ I did not mention my fear of hereditary madness, of neglect, that keeping my own body and soul together sometimes felt like all I could manage. I did not mention that I was still tending to a broken, sad wee girl and that girl was the kid I was who had been through so much.

The discussion took no more than two seconds. Later I would learn he’d almost got a vasectomy in his twenties during his rst marriage and I nally understood that his casual question and the non- committal reply were probably more certain than I’d imagined. But we were on the ride by then and it was unstoppable. Or it felt like it was. Besides, we loved each other. He told me for the rst time while we watched reworks spark up over tower blocks from the darkened windowsill he’d later fuck me against. ‘I think I love you.’ And I laughed because by then I knew full well he did love me and that ‘think’, his natural tentativeness, caution, was something I was getting used to. Sort of.

Mostly, though, we were actually quite brave. Both in our mid-thirties, we knew we didn’t want to mess around, and it seemed we’d found something that felt serious and special. So, over the next fteen months, we cleared out and knocked stuff through. We untangled and rebuilt and reinforced. When our respective emotional complexities – a polite way of putting our shit – reared up and threatened to win, we saw a couples’ therapist at the end of the Central Line. We moved into a cheap at in Walthamstow with a ‘murder stain’ on the carpet. We joined our paltry nances. We made ourselves open and vulnerable. I was astounded to learn that when Peter needed a cuddle or needed to hear something nice from me, he simply asked for it. In turn, I

learned to ask too rather than acting out. I was honest about my anxiety, about my past, about who I actually was rather than who I hoped he might think I was. I learned to express my vulnerability in words rather than destructive actions. Eventually, we went travelling (the great litmus test of a relationship, I nd). And, after many a tearful row in Bangkok shopping malls followed by cocktails in night markets, night swims and beautiful neonstreaked city bus rides through Vietnam, Peter hired motorbikes for us and he proposed at the top of a mountain pass.

Nothing is perfect, and I still had my constant companion, anxiety, which sometimes provoked minor (sometimes major) explosions. I had grown up observing and experiencing such awed versions of love I had no idea how to navigate it. Peter – more on the depressive side – would have moods where he’d pull away and become cold. But mostly we knocked together a new city made of the ruins of our past and all the lessons salvaged from our previous decades. For all our opposites, we shared the same values and ideals and we built that new city on all the things we found we loved in one another: fun, sex, laughter, kindness, contrast, swimming naked, afternoon cinema trips, recipes with too many ingredients to which we’d add a few more, long walks looking for the minutiae of domestic life, journeys on old trains, absurd humour, brutalist buildings, good bread, trash Australian TV, the rst coffee of the morning, sneaking bottles of champagne into Pixar animations and getting gently smashed. The long list of the things we found alive and beautiful in life stitched our disparate parts together. I had never seen Peter be anything less than kind, gentle and excessively thoughtful to every human and animal he encountered. He’d rescue earthworms from Hackney pavements and walk them to the park.

In the end, the city we built together from the wrecks we had been lugging around felt solid. I believed it had strong foundations.

Or I did until I realised there was a thing that was bigger than our shared love of each other and life. A few years into our relationship, not yet married but already engaged, ‘the urge’, that baby urge, came upon me in a baking hot churchyard in Budapest where we’d been living for a few months. I said it almost conversationally, just as he had those years before, ‘You know, I think I would like to have a baby one day.’ And he replied, quick as a shot and just as fatal, ‘Well, I think I de nitely don’t.’ And suddenly those solid foundations were very shaky indeed. We sat in silence, the sun beating down, and then walked back to our crumbling old apartment – wooden oors, windows that rattled with the trains, a water heater held together with silver tape that smelled strongly of a gas leak – and lay down in bed together. He explained to me that he liked his life just as it was, that he was an independent person, a sel sh one even. He didn’t want to feel responsible for another life and wasn’t having a child the ultimate responsibility? He liked oating around on a whim doing what he chose to with his day. Wasn’t having a child the polar opposite of everything our life was right then?

In the end, we backtracked, because continuing the conversation was too big. It meant too much. Because the road we were going down led nowhere good. ‘I’m not saying never. Maybe one day,’ he told me unconvincingly. ‘I wasn’t even really serious. We’ve loads of time to work it out,’ I replied equally unconvincingly. But I didn’t work it out and, more and more, I began imagining something, someone, I thought to myself, ‘part him and part me and completely its own thing too’.

So, I talked about it more. I talked about it endlessly. By the time we were resettled in Liverpool and I was writing my memoir Lowborn about my own poor and dif cult childhood, I couldn’t shake the idea that I didn’t just want to be a mum, I was meant to be one. Writing Lowborn meant me stringing out my innards in public. Every hard moment of the rst sixteen years of my life – and there were many – pinned out like dirty laundry on a washing line. But once they were all out, agonised over and rearranged on a page, I tentatively came to think that perhaps, with Peter by my side, I might not in fact in ict generational dysfunction on my child. That instead I could use everything I had learned to care for a child just as they should be cared for. I would give a child the exact opposite of everything I had experienced and there would be real joy in that.

Eventually, nally, on a cold morning in Sicily, tangled in sheets and satiated by holiday orgasms and cannoli, Peter gave in. We whispered to each other, ‘Let’s just try. See what happens.’ Or actually, in retrospect, perhaps it was just me who whispered it. Anyway, the point, it seemed to me, was that I had won.

Once Peter had agreed, not exactly enthusiastically but allowing himself to be bobbed about on the ocean of my drive, never one to live by half-measures, I embraced my future motherhood with tenacity. I beamed at the boy at the till in Superdrug who always had perfect contouring, a slick of gloss, as I bought my prenatal vitamins. ‘£5.99. You’re having a baby? Congratulations!’ ‘Not yet. But thank you!’ I felt I deserved those congratulations for even getting to that point (which in a way was true). ‘We’re trying.’

And try we did. I bought a machine to track ovulation from eBay, a lilac gizmo that would show a full bar of possibility crowned with a jellybean-like egg – an old-school fundraising-omiter with high stakes – when it was time to fuck. The woman I bought it

from told me she’d got pregnant so early she still had extra sticks and that seemed like a very good omen. This is what the urge turned me into. A superstitious woman wanting to believe in magic.

I joined, for my sins and poor judgement, some internet conception chat boards. I drank pineapple juice and ate the brous core. I did a ‘sperm meets egg’ conception plan where we had so much sex that Peter joked about becoming a dehydrated husk as we functionally rolled on top of each other with the air of people who were about to clean the kitchen bin. We gave up alcohol. I contorted myself after sex and Peter slid a pillow under me so we wouldn’t lose a drop, as though his spunk was as valuable as liquid gold. I thought I should get a jump on things and plot our budget for the next three years. Because if you’ve grown up homeless and impoverished your rst thought will be that your child will want for nothing. After much research, I decided I would have an epidural and breastfeed, that I would have a crib that was next to the bed. I listened to hours and hours of pregnancy podcasts. And, joyful as I was at this new stage in my life, I didn’t hold back from telling people. Even those who didn’t ask since I assumed, correctly, as a woman approaching the end of my thirties it was a constant silent question anyway.

In a charity shop, I picked up a book called Planning for a Baby? – How to prepare for a healthy pregnancy and give your baby the best possible start. A chunky book with a pink and baby-blue font, a picture of a mother in a spotless white terry-towelling robe coddling a naked baby who had an alarming amount of dark hair and thick eyebrows – a mini Groucho Marx. The irony of carrying that while picking away, scab by scab, at my own childhood trauma and generational dysfunction was not lost on me. I brought that tome up and down the country in my little grey wheely

suitcase like a talisman . . . to the site of my care home, a homeless hostel we lived in which was full of men recovering from addiction, the council at where I experienced the terror of a mother’s mental breakdown, the house where I was raped, the family planning clinic where I booked my two abortions.

After a month, I took myself off to Tbilisi in Georgia – my ‘last child-free adventure’ I thought – wandered the old streets, refused wine from my kind guest-house owner and swerved their famous sulphur saunas. I walked around the wooden houses with tiny ornately carved windows. I took a cable car to the funfair at the top of the mountain but, afraid to go on any ride, I wandered about the hall of mirrors screaming at my own distorted re ection. I was sure that when I visited a local market the smells – spices, cigarette smoke, fresh bread, roasting lamb – were heightened. Wasn’t I feeling pinches and tugs in my abdomen? I walked through the city’s winding streets with a full, lit-up sense of being on the precipice of something new and wonderful.

I think I took ten tests in Tbilisi though it was probably more. Each morning in the guest-house bathroom, reminiscent of a Wes Anderson lm, with blue-and-white tiles and its Germolene pink bath with a water heater that looked as if it would take off like a rocket, I waited for two lines and saw only one. When the tests I’d brought in my suitcase ran out, I walked through the dusty heat to a pharmacy in the mall and shamefacedly google-translated the buying of more. Those too disappointed me.

One day on my way to breakfast, I found kittens, only a few weeks old, still looking more rodent than feline, abandoned in a wooden drawer with a few cat biscuits skittering around in it. They had been left next to a religious monument, a framed goldand-turquoise picture of Jesus, with fake white roses inlaid around the frame, by a street light with exposed wires coiling around it.

Two kittens, a tabby and a tortoiseshell, with nubs for their ears and pipe-cleaner tails. I sat on the ground beside them in the burning sun frantically and futilely googling animal shelters in Georgia, unsure of what to do. A kind local came out of his home, gave me an off-brand Mini Magnum but shook his head when I motioned to the animals. Eventually, I realised they would die in the heat, the tortie already looking limp and lifeless, so I picked up the drawer and snuck it into my guest house. They stayed there, joined by a pink T-shirt and mustard-yellow cardigan. The drawer sat in the middle of the bed as I begged the internet for information. No, I couldn’t nd a surrogate mother to feed them. No, there was no vet nearby to help. In the end, I mixed milk and yogurt I bought from a makeshift kiosk in someone’s home garage and fed it to them with the corner of a dish sponge, carefully squeezing it into their tiny mouths no wider than the tip of a pinkie nger. I learned on YouTube how to massage the pee and shit out of them. I lay awake by their side all night, trying to feed them, stroking their little bodies with a wet annel to simulate the licking their mother cat might have used to cool them. On the second day, after going to a hunting shop and miming a syringe (I think he thought I wanted drugs), I went to a pharmacy where I was able to get baby formula and that syringe and the tortie nally found its strength, standing on its sibling’s head, its two paws clutching the syringe, sucking away, voracious for milk and life.

For those days I didn’t sleep or eat anything other than the Pringles and M&M’s I’d been able to buy at the kiosk. My protective and maternal instinct sent me quite mad. I can only explain this by telling you that they were so utterly vulnerable and alone but they were alive and they were ghting and if they were then so was I. I tweeted every foreign diplomat in Georgia hoping I