Blue Blood Babies

Blue Blood Babies

Chapter One

There’s something wrong with me.  It’s hidden, under the skin where nobody can see, but I know.  I know, my parents know, and my baby sister Anna knows.  But that’s it.  Not another soul.  Not even my best friend.  Because there are some things you just don’t talk about.  You shouldn’t be ashamed of it, my mum tells me, but that doesn’t stop her concealing it from everyone in her life – even my grandparents.

It started before I was born, in the year X24.  My mum was just six weeks pregnant, and she was at her first visit to see the doctor.  He was worried, he told her.  Worried because, at thirty-seven, she was older than the average first-time mother.  Her health could be at risk; her health, and the health of her unborn child.  But not to fret, there were things they could do.  For example, the pharmaceutical company, Axloncentrix, had just released a new drug, and its primary function was to ease pregnancies for women such as my mother.  He had a poster about it on his wall, and a free sample she could take away today.  Just try it and see how great you feel.

You can imagine what happened next. 

Seven months and three weeks later I was born, a perfectly healthy, perfectly normal baby boy.  I was a little late, but other than that, in the hospital, everything seemed fine.  I passed all the examinations: sight, hearing, reflexes.  Then there were the blood tests.  My mum was too busy dealing with a wriggling, screaming baby, irate at the needle that had just been plunged into its veins, to notice that as soon as she left the room the nurse ran down the corridor, the tiny vial of my blood clutched in her hands, face grim.  Then the doctors started coming to see me.  They tickled my chin, smiled reassuringly at my mother, and left, whispering furiously.  That was the first clue.

The second followed soon after, and it was a whopper.  I was wrapped snugly in a soft, woollen blanket, Mum dressed in real clothes for the first time in days, holding me close, protectively and still a little gingerly - there weren’t a lot of babies in our family – and my dad was there, grinning like an idiot and clutching the “hospital bag” in one hand and the “every little thing a baby might possibly need bag” in the other.  It was a nice day, in the middle of summer, and the sun was shining brightly.  Mum only made it one step outside the door before she stopped dead in her tracks, gaped down at me, then whirled around and sprinted back inside, screaming that her baby, her new-born angel baby, was sick, suffocating, diseased, dying.  Somebody do something!

But there was nothing they could do.  Because, medically at least, as far as they could see, there was nothing wrong with me.  No mystery illness, no circulation problem squeezing the blood out of my veins.  I was fine.  I was more than fine, they said, I was unique.  In the weeks and months that followed, as the story broke in the papers and on the movebox, my parents came to realise that I was not unique, but definitely rare.  Different. 

I was a blue blood baby.  Some strange chemical reaction against the drug my mum had taken had turned the blood running through my veins a strange hue of blue.  It was all but invisible under the electric lights, but outside, under direct sunlight – like some badly made up vampire in a dodgy B-movie – it showed.  Unlike other babies, who had a healthy pink glow, I looked like death, or as if I was freezing cold. 

Of course, the catastrophe of X28 changed everything.  After that there was no sunshine for anyone.  Then we moved.  And the secrecy started.

I have a little secret of my own, something nobody knows.  I discovered it by accident one day, just messing about.  It was in school, in Science to be precise, and we were experimenting with UV lights.  I forget what the point of the lesson was, the experiment hadn’t worked at any rate, and the teacher was trying to explain to us what we should have seen, if the equipment had functioned, which it didn’t.  I had already tuned him out, and was playing with the tiny UV flashlight – about the only thing which did work – training it on the unsuspecting arms, faces, exposed slithers of back of all of the people sitting in front of me.  Bored, I started doodling shapes with it on the back of my hand.  Just circles and arrows and the like, I’m not particularly artistic.