To Say Nothing of the Baby

The rain on the roof sounded like someone tearing paper very slowly. Three in the morning, and my son had decided sleep was something that happened to other people.

I had done the rocking, the shushing and the slow laps of the hallway that leave you dizzy enough to want a cry yourself. My wife had fed him at midnight and again just before two, and now she was finally under, one arm flung across her face, breathing the way I'd have paid money to breathe.

So it was my shift. I sat in the nursing chair, the one that creaks on the left, and looked for something to say. At our last check the Plunket nurse had told me, kindly and a bit vaguely, to talk to him. "Anything," she said. I had used up anything. I'd described the room, the weather and my theory about the squeaky garage door. I'd sung two songs and lost the words to both. The board books were on the floor where he'd swatted them, including a giraffe with crinkly ears that sound like autumn leaves.

Then I saw it, wedged beside a box of tissues: a yellowed paperback with a cracked spine and foxed edges. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1889. I'd bought it years ago at a school fair in Grey Lynn for two dollars, meaning to finish it. I stalled around the Hampton Court maze, where Harris marches a crowd of strangers in, perfectly sure it's simple, and loses every one of them. I remember laughing on a bus.

Page one, then. My son squirmed and went heavy on my shoulder. I started reading, barely above a whisper.

* * *

The book opens with the narrator, J., reading a medical book in the British Museum. He works through the diseases in alphabetical order and decides he has every single one of them except housemaid's knee. And he feels rather hurt about it.

That got a laugh out of me, too loud, and I froze. He didn't wake.

I'd spent that week searching the meaning of every noise he made. The snuffles and grunts, and worse, the silence that had me bent over the cot until I felt his breath on my cheek. My wife had found me at two one morning reading about spit-up on my phone, and had taken it out of my hand and walked me back to bed like a sleepwalker. So I knew exactly how J. felt, sitting there with every illness in the alphabet and a mild sense of grievance.

My son didn't care about the jokes. The sentences were what he wanted. Jerome writes long, rolling sentences that bend like a river, and I could feel the little one waiting on the rise and fall of them. When I paused, he stirred. When I tried to skip a page of riverbank scenery to get to the next joke, he made a small noise, less a complaint than a reminder. I went back. I read every word after that.

Voices happened, too. George came out pompous and put upon. Harris started as my own voice and drifted, over a few nights, into the voice of every uncle at every wedding I went to as a boy, the one who is sure the buffet is this way. With a burp cloth over my shoulder I felt like a waiter in a very odd restaurant, serving Victorian comedy to a critic of four and a half months.

We went down the Thames like that for a couple of weeks.

* * *

The pineapple tin turned up on a bad night. I couldn't find the lid for the bottle. I checked the bench and then the pocket of a dressing gown I wasn't wearing. The little one was building up to something, the red-faced climb I had learned to dread. I sat down hard in the creaking chair and opened the book where the bookmark was, a dairy receipt for milk and a loaf of bread.

George, Harris and J. have a tin of pineapple and no tin-opener. They try a pocket knife, then scissors. They try a sharp stone from a field and the mast of the boat. They beat the tin flat, then square, and it still won't open. In the end Harris throws it into the middle of the river.

I read it far too fast, Harris getting louder as his confidence went up and his results didn't. My son hiccupped. Then he laughed, a proper little gulp of a laugh, right as the tin went into the river.

It was probably wind. I know that. I'm counting it anyway.

My wife appeared in the doorway, one side of her hair flattened by the pillow. "Has the dog done anything yet?" she asked.

"Not much," I said. "He's made up, apparently. Jerome invented him. The men were real friends of his, but the dog isn't."

She nodded as if that settled something and went back to bed.

* * *

On Saturday morning I told Mr. Mummu about all this over the fence. He was in the garden with his notebook, the one titled "Urgent" that is mostly shopping lists, and he listened with his pen raised.

He told me he'd been in a neighbourhood book club for three years and had never finished a book.

"I read the first chapter," he said, "and the last page. So I can join both ends of the conversation."

I laughed. Mummu didn't.

"They let me stay," he said, "because every month somebody reads out their favourite page. And I listen. Properly." He flipped the notebook open. Between "dhania" and "lightbulbs" were lines in pencil, a sentence here, a scene there, the titles of books he'd heard and never held. "Thirty six books," he said. "One good page at a time."

Some books are meant to be heard, passed from one voice to the next like a plate at dinner.

* * *

On Tuesday night I finished it. First time in my life, at three in the morning, out loud, to someone who won't remember a word of it.

I'd forgotten how it ends. The river gives them two days of solid rain and they give up. They leave the boat at Pangbourne, catch a train to London and sit in a warm restaurant while the rain comes down outside. Harris raises a glass to three men well out of a boat. And Montmorency, at the window, stands on his hind legs and gives one short bark of agreement.

So the dog did do something in the end. I told my wife at breakfast. She said good for him.

Jerome first set out to write a serious guide to the river, full of local history, and the jokes took over. The book hasn't been out of print since 1889, and I think I finally get why. Those long sentences want a breath behind them, and the jokes want somebody in the room to catch them. I had been reading it wrong for years, alone, on buses, skimming the scenery to reach the funny bits. My son got the part that mattered most. A voice in the dark, saying the words.

The paperback lives on the changing table now. The spine is a little more broken. One of his socks marks the last page, blue with grey stripes, small enough to sit in my palm with room to spare.

Last night he fussed when I closed it and the room went quiet except for the rain. So I opened it again. Page one, the medical book, the housemaid's knee, and Harris already on his way.