the assistant

All I wanted was one morning.

One morning, to myself, to do one thing without being interrupted. I was drawing the map. The big one. The whole kampung, every house and the longkang and the kedai and the rambutan tree and the pipe and the field, all of it on one sheet, the master map that every future operation would need. It was going to be my best work. It just needed one quiet morning and a flat floor and nobody touching it.

The trouble with one quiet morning in our house is the baby.

The baby is the smallest one and the baby wants whatever is the most important thing, and a big sheet of paper on the floor with a girl bent over it being serious is, to a baby, the most important thing there has ever been. The baby eats Plans. It is not personal. The baby has eaten three of my plans this year, two homeworks, and one thing of Kak Long's that I am not allowed to talk about. Paper, to the baby, is just food that has not admitted it yet.

So I could not just shoo the baby away. You cannot shoo a baby. A shooed baby comes back twice. What you do with a force you cannot defeat is you give it a job.

I made the baby my assistant.

"You," I told the baby, "are now Official Assistant. You have important duties."

The baby looked at me with total trust, which is the most dangerous look there is.

Duty one was to guard the floor. I pointed at a spot well away from the map and told the baby this spot was the most important spot and must be guarded. The baby guarded it by sitting on it. The baby is an excellent guard of a spot, as long as the spot is one the baby has decided to sit on, which, luckily, it was, because I had let the baby choose by pointing at where it already was.

Duty two was to hold the paper. Not my paper. A blank piece of paper, a decoy, so that the baby would have a paper of its own and leave mine alone. I gave the baby the blank sheet with great ceremony. The baby took it, very pleased, and held it for almost a whole second, and then completed the task its own way, which was to put the paper in its mouth. I considered whether a wet chewed piece of paper counted as a held piece of paper. I decided that it did. The baby had completed its first assignment. The baby was thrilled. So was I. The decoy was working.

Duty three was the hat. Every assistant needs a uniform. The uniform was a tupperware lid, which I put on the baby's head and called a hat. The baby kept the hat on. The baby loved the hat. I had, I thought, built the perfect system. A guarded spot, a decoy paper, a hat, and a quiet morning finally opening up in front of me like a clear road.

I got back to the map. I drew the longkang. I drew the pipe over the longkang. I was just getting to the good part, the rambutan tree, when I realised I needed to move to the porch, because the morning light on the porch is better for the fiddly bits, and the map was getting to the fiddly bits.

And I had a problem of my own making.

I had given the baby one more duty, the most important one, the porch door. Earlier, when the baby kept crawling toward the porch, I had told it that the porch door was a Very Important Post and that guarding it was the top job an assistant could have. The baby had taken this completely to heart. The baby was now sitting square in front of the porch door, in its tupperware hat, guarding the post I had given it. Exactly as ordered. It would not move. I had told it this was the most important thing in the world, and the baby believed me.

I needed the door. The baby was guarding the door. I could not fire the baby. You cannot fire a baby. And I could not order it off the post. I was the one who had told it the post mattered more than anything. And the baby, for once in its small chaotic life, was doing exactly what it had been told.

I sat down on the floor next to the baby.

There was nothing else to do. The map would not get its fiddly bits this morning. The good light on the porch would go on without me. My one quiet morning was over, beaten by my own assistant, who was guarding a door I needed against me, in a hat, with total devotion.

And there it was, the thing I had got backwards all morning.

The baby was never waiting for a job. I am the job. Wherever I am is where the baby wants to be, and it has never once got that wrong, not even today, not even with a tupperware lid on its head. The baby does not want a post. It just wants to be where I am.

The baby looked up at me from under the tupperware hat. Then it held something out, very pleased, the way the baby gives you things.

It was the decoy paper. Wet. Chewed. The completed assignment.

I took it. You take what the baby gives you. That is its own rule and it is older than me.

The baby crawled the small distance over and sat down on my foot, which is the baby's way of filing itself somewhere safe. The tupperware hat slid down over one eye. Then the baby went to sleep, right there, on my foot, guarding nothing now except me.

My foot went to sleep too, after a while.

I did not move. The map could wait. I had found the most important post in the whole house, and it was the one with the baby asleep on it.