All in a Name

His first reaction is shock morphing quickly into happiness, but before that, somewhere in the mix, a hint of despair. He dismisses it as inappropriate, files it away for later review and loses himself in jubilation. She laughs as he kisses her over and over again.

Then he pulls back and pauses as if coming to a conclusion, "I suppose we'll have to get married now."

She laughs again, "Ever the romantic, darling, but it really isn't necessary. Everything can go on just as before. Well, maybe not everything, but there's no need to be conventional all of a sudden."

Later, when she is dozing against him, he rests his hand on her stomach. It can't be true, but he imagines her belly has swollen a little already. His mind wanders far into a contented future, but is arrested once again by that nagging feeling, tight in his chest. He was wrong about it before, not despair, but fear. Fear leading quickly onto memory.

It must have been fifteen years ago. More. He had a flat above a launderette and was eking a living as a full-time writer and a part-time barman. He was walking to the corner shop when he saw her. It was her eyes that got to him. She can't have been more than ten or eleven, but her eyes were brimming with a weary sadness, and blooming on her cheek was a day-old bruise. He was about to overcome his initial wariness and ask her if she was okay, when a sour-faced woman stormed up and cuffed the girl around the head before dragging her into a nearby house.

He might have let it pass, might have dismissed the scene as an angry mother berating her runaway child, but the bruise and something in the older woman's manner left a sour taste in his throat. When he got home he found the phone book and reported the incident to the local social services office.

Having done his civic duty, he thought nothing further of it until a Sunday morning some months later. The sun was burning through the early morning cloud as he browsed the papers over breakfast when an address jumped out at him - the very same house he had seen the girl bundled into. His eyes scanned the story, picking out the details. Fascinated, he read it again, more carefully this time.

It appeared that the police had raided the house after an anonymous tip off to find... Well what didn't they find? Pretty much every kind of illegal activity was going on there, up to and including the trafficking of children. That is, the trafficking of one child, presumably the girl he had seen, referred to here as Child A.

It seemed the girl had been brought from her country of origin at a very young age, barely a toddler. Sent, it might be conjectured, by desperate parents, hoping for a better life for their offspring in a promised land across the sea. That better life did not materialise when she arrived in the UK. Instead she ended up ten years later, bruised and broken in the street, cuffed around the ear for escaping yet again.

Perhaps the most shocking of all the shocking indignities the girl's captors placed upon her was the fact that they denied her a name. She was too young or too traumatised to remember the name she was given at home, and they simply didn't bother to assign her a new one. It struck him as about the worst thing they could have done to her. For to deny someone a name is to deny them any relationship with the outside world. To do so was to denigrate her totally and utterly. To remove her very identity.

So it is this memory that, fifteen years later (or more), arrests his happiness at the new knowledge of his own successful procreation. This fear for a nameless child that he transfers to his own unborn infant. His body stiffens with distress and something - his unconscious movement, or the emotion in the air - stirs her from sleep. She sees his face and asks him what is wrong. He doesn't want to tell her, but he can't hide anything from her - he never could. As the sorry tale spills out of him, so do tears, the first he has cried in a very long time.

"I suppose it's part of it," she says, stroking his hair, "the fear. Before we could do as we wanted, because we weren't beholden to anyone or anything, apart from each other. But now... Well, we'll never be entirely unafraid again."

It is his turn to laugh. "Thanks ever so much for cheering me up, darling. You always know the right thing to say." Soon they are both laughing uncontrollably at the black humour of it all, and then the phone rings and it is her mother, and there are more tears - happy ones this time - as the day's news spreads a little further.