Since this is a Will Self novel, "Lithy" is no ordinary baby but a lithopedion - a fossilised embryo retained within the mother whose existence was only discovered after Lily's death.
'Well, Lithy - and why wouldn't I?' For the first time in the eleven years we'd haunted each other, it stopped dancing and spoke clearly.
"Cos I lu-urve yoo!' warbled Lithy, who'd had twenty-one years to come up with a better line but whose material had been garnered mostly during the first few months it spent in the pink pleats, when the pop rhythms still resonated in my tautish belly.
You've always said that all English women - 'OfOf a certain age, a certain class - ' 'Are pear-shaped, and in death Mrs Green inverts this state; when, quickening with putrefaction, pullulating with drosophila grubs, head swollen with fluid, she becomes - for the first time in decades - the body of the pear, rather than its stalk.' 'Oh spare us this, Lithy, this pissy little guignol.
D'you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang, d'you wanna be in my gang - oh yeah!' And this did bring Rude Boy over, but only to cuff Lithy, who screeched and appealed to me, but I shoved it off and it kicked at Rude Boy and Rude Boy kicked out again.
Lithy, amazingly, leant against Rude Boy's knee.
So these interminable branch offices that I've revolved through, while Lithy sat in my lap and Rude Boy ranted in the vestibule, trying to piss on back numbers of the Reader's Digest, haven't been so strange, or so different.
Lithy is a minuscule cadaver of a child - about half the size of a kewpie doll - who was misconceived, then died mislodged in the folds of my perineum.
Lithy never had any resentment or blamed me for its partial existence.
But in the end Lithy did become the child I'd always wanted for myself, wise enough and sufficiently eloquent to re-parent me.
They don't take it well, yeh-hey.' In 1988, on the dark landing, Phar Lap Jones spoke the truth while Lithy gambolled at my feet.
