of small moving parts which is hard enough for anyone to carry, and certainly ought not to be handed out without warning. Would it help, she wonders, to have a label that says This is not a toy – it can kill you? Who knows, people do what they want, warning or none. Some days, though history can seem so terribly ordinary, a moment that begins before you even realise it, there comes the instant you know what you’re holding and you can’t put it down; then you can’t stop yourself from thinking that the point of it all is only to get you dead. Or at the very least to leave you crying, and falling apart.
Whatever it is, in the morning the carpet is darkened by a patch of wet that must be cleaned, and with all that’s happened in the house of the world, it’s not so hard to believe that this is blood.
When the father comes round again, chastened for the mo’ by another failed enterprise, he once again wriggles past his evasions and he and Nora kiss and almost make up. It’s then he meets his second daughter, by which time it’s way past the date to register her birth.
To correct his paternal lapse, Mark Murphy makes his way downtown to Home Affairs, and he is channelled into the appropriate line, where he must wait along with all the others who require certificates of birth, and death, identity books, and the various species of paper which will entitle them to pass into the public record.
The Murphys have decided to call the infant Jennie, and the father, inspired by fresh starts and new leaves, queues with unusual patience to enter this piece of very ordinary information in the requisite government register.
He stands inside, dreamily thinking. Looks at the big clock on the wall; the sparse, balding scalp of the man in front; the sign which says Oswald Pirow Building. Finds himself chuckling at the ridiculous thought of ‘Oswald’. Imagine! What a name! Not what he’d call any son of his . . . If he had a son, that is.
Still waiting, to pass the time he hums an old English country air that’s been enjoying a popular comeback. ‘I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair’, words and tune lilting in his head. For a moment, he almost begins to sing aloud, carried away by the catchy, silent soaring. Then he thinks of his sister Norma, the surprise of how the baby resembles her. Remembers the car accident in which Norma died, on her way back from a twenty-first bash with her boyfriend.
Mark, musing, waits so long in the tedious queue, so mindful of the pretty melody and the sad descant of his dead sister, that when he arrives at the counter and must provide his daughter’s chosen name, he gets flustered. He’s been far away, plus spelling was never his strong point. Many things have had to be spelt out for him, and even then . . .
So on the form he prints ‘Jeanné’. Steps back from the word a pace and slightly cocks his head. Looks at the man behind the counter who is studying him quizzically, on the verge of impatience.
Humh. Does that look . . . can that be right? Mark squints at his efforts, then laughs. Oh well, can’t take it back now. What’s done is done.
The clerk ratifies firmly. Stamp!
And thus Mark shackles the baby to an impromptu title which no one will ever know how to pronounce, or spell. When calling register, teachers will hesitate over ‘genie’ (maybe?) or (could it be?) ‘zhjaan’, or (possibly?) ‘zhjannay’. Perhaps it is merely ‘jean’? They are unable to reconcile the exotic spelling with the child’s curt, plain-spoken correction. Jennie. Really! People are affronted. Was such rudeness called for? Jeanné takes to spelling the name how it was meant to be, aloud, as if for some mentally deficient chump: jay ee en en ai ee. Pretty simple, huh? Though teachers, especially, consider her a liar or an idiot when they try to reconcile the vowels.
But Jennie’s logic is clear. She is completely intolerant of learning; sees no point if even careful spelling and enunciation cannot teach teachers the absolute basics: how to recognise her name. No wonder she doesn’t answer when called. The music teacher will be particularly perplexed: it is completely beyond her how a child with an exquisite soprano and perfect pitch can seem deaf to her patient, inspired instruction.
Mark, having stood in the queue in that abstracted frame of mind, and then at the last minute feeling slight panic at his undeniable sense of having messed up, again, also decides, without running it past his wife, hell, why not, he’ll give the new baby a second name, which is Norma, after the tragic sister. Somehow he thinks that this will ease the ruckus that’s going to be raised when he gets home and has to hand over the birth certificate, which will show another misnomer confirmed by official pink ink.
Ever the cock-eyed optimist, he reckons blithely that look, if Jeanné won’t do, the wife not happy with that, at least there’s a back-up. Quite sensible, really, and he starts to feel almost chuffed.
Norma. Will do the trick, no? Was a good name, that, good enough for his sister. Busy reasoning, he even convinces himself that ‘Norma’ marks an important gesture towards family tradition, and is some compensation for the fact that with their first-born he and Nora hardly knew what they were about, having had on the spur of the moment, as it were, to find a suitable name for a girl. This time he’d wised up, kept his options open and didn’t count his chickens.
He seems to forget, however, that his wife is not one to tolerate either male ineptitude or a man’s foolish flummery, not to mention his relations, so why he thinks she’ll be placated by ‘Norma’ is anyone’s guess. Nora is sick of Mark and his stories, and would like him to grow up.
But anyway, now it’s Jeanné Norma’s turn to start growing, and despite her father’s subsequent ridiculous fancy, a false memory par excellence – that yes, indeed, the name of his second was inspired by Norma Jean . . . Marilyn Monroe? – she grows increasingly to resemble the deceased sister. Jennie has thick, black-brown hair that frames her delicate face in lustrous waves, her eyes are dark and sultry, and there’s the mouth that makes no concession to propriety, sulky and sexy by turns.
Soon, she’s two years old, but even as a toddler, Jennie is a siren. Most unlike her sister, who at three can whistle like a boy and already likes to trumpet her own importance.
Atavistic Jen is how the Murphy women are supposed to look, although the family has historically been predisposed, by preference as well as genetics, towards males. But as Jennie grows she repeatedly tries to tell people, No, she is just herself. They must stop comparing. She starts off so completely herself that this is how she remains; not even her two names are enough to hold her back, keep her in the odd relation that people have fixed for her. She shrugs off the ghost of the name. She is Jennie. She is Jennie on any and every document, naming herself as she’s been doing since she knew her name and was able to talk. If there are queries, which inevitably there are, given the discrepancy, and her birth certificate or ID must be produced to verify her identity, she produces it, blaming the inexplicable on her crazy parents.
Families, shrugs Jen, the whys and wherefores. They cannot be explained.
Names are quite a thing for the Murphy family. Something so simple, you’d think, but they find it hard to get right. So they don’t, really, and whatever you’re called, you simply have to live with it.
Though when it comes to names, Jennie and Halley have different strategies.
When the newlyweds were taken by surprise that their first-born was a daughter (meaning, mainly, that Mark was so fixed on a boy he hadn’t stopped to consider the only other alternative), the unborn son was already called Ryan Patrick. Both solid, traditional monikers which would merge nicely, melodiously, with Murphy.
(Though nobody had given a thought to the initials, which would be RPM, enough Revolutions Per Minute to make any child dizzy at the thought.)
And
