The Baby Laughed At The Empty Doorway For Eleven Minutes And I Timed It

She was ten months old and she was the happiest baby I have ever met, and that is important, because this is not a horror story about a possessed infant. She was joyful.

At about seven in the evening she was on her play mat and she started laughing at the doorway.

Babies laugh at things. They laugh at fans and at their own feet and at nothing at all.

This went on for eleven minutes.

I know it was eleven minutes because I looked at the clock at the start, out of a vague, prickling instinct, and I looked at it again at the end.

Proper laughing. The full-body kind, where they go over backwards and have to be righted.

She was tracking. That is the part I have never been able to put down. Her eyes were following something across the doorway, left to right, and then back, and every time it came back she went off again.

At one point she reached up. Both arms. The universal, uncomplicated, up-please gesture.

And she held them there, and she waited, and then she laughed again and put them down.

I did not go and look. I sat on the floor of that living room with my back against the sofa and I did not turn round, and I have never forgiven myself for it, and I have also never once regretted it, and I am aware those two things cannot both be true.

At eleven minutes she got bored, or it left, and she went back to chewing a giraffe.

Her mother came home. I said, in a very light voice, "She was in a good mood tonight."

And her mother, taking off her coat, not looking at me, said: "Laughing at the door?"

I said yes.

She said, "That'll be my mum. She died in March."

And then she went and made a cup of tea, and asked me if I wanted one, and we sat in the kitchen and talked about her mother for an hour, and I have never been paid for a night I earned less.