He has lied for her. I am certain of it.
Any remaining belief in his honesty evaporates, right there in the court. They’re in it together. He’s testified for her because he once loved her. But look! They’re communicating.
They’re still looking at each other. I can’t take it any more. I’m going to ask him. I’m going to ask him in person what the fuck went on that night.
47
Becky
7.00 p.m., Thursday 26 October
‘Layla, there really is absolutely nothing to be crying about,’ I have said about a hundred times. She should be in bed. Xander is out, at a sleepover, no doubt not sleeping. The only one of us who truly wants to be in bed is me.
We have both had less than two hours’ sleep. I don’t know how she is still crying. We still have one more night together, before Martha and Scott are back.
She is fed – boy, is she fed, three ounces! – and she isn’t wet, and she doesn’t seem to have any wind and her legs aren’t tucked up in the frog-like newborn way. But she is crying. Crying and crying and crying. The sounds have taken on tones within themselves, like a vast orchestra or – more apt – a heavy metal band. I grit my teeth against the noise. How many hours until Martha is home? Sixteen? I look down at Layla. It will be okay. I’ll take it one hour at a time. No baby ever came to any harm through crying, I tell myself.
I do another bottle. I google how much is the maximum amount of Calpol she can have, and decide I’ll save that like a trump card. Besides, I know babies. She’s not in pain. Not physically, anyway.
You’d think you would get used to the noise, but let me tell you, you don’t. Martha and Scott would know the science of it, no doubt. We’re not supposed to get used to it, or something. But Martha and Scott aren’t here. Nope. It’s just Layla and bloody useless Becky.
I am aware of something hot and volatile inside me. The sort of dart of anger you get when you’re stuck in traffic and are very late, or like last year when the bathroom ceiling caved in, just like that, on a bloody Tuesday night, or when your period arrives for the thirty-sixth time in a row, like the 07.49 to London: often delayed, tantalizingly so, but nevertheless always there in the end. We stopped trying, after four years, and split up soon after that. Xander, conceived so easily one night, was not to have a sibling, no matter how hard we tried.
I open a bottle of red. Ah, that satisfying pop as the cork slides out. I’ll have two glasses. No more. Just to take the edge off. As I sip, I think about what Xander said earlier, after school: ‘She seems very upset.’ He was resting his weight on his elbows, on the breakfast bar. He kept lifting himself up on it, like a pull-up.
‘Stop doing that,’ I said. ‘You’ll fall over.’
‘What’s she got to be sad about?’ He raised himself up again, the muscles in his arms tensing.
It was such a simple question that I felt my heart expand in my chest, relieved that I could still feel that warm, hot centre within me. That deep well of love for my son. I reached across and ruffled his hair. Such a simplistic thing to say: What’s she got to be sad about? Such a nine-year-old thing to say. But then, maybe it’s not to do with his age. Maybe he got it from Marc. It’s actually totally the sort of thing Marc says. ‘Why be sad when you can eat a bag of Doritos?’ he once said to me, and I really think he meant it. Why indeed? I feel a lurch of pain, remembering that. God, I loved him. I loved him so much. Nothing else compares. I can picture the evenings spent just doing nothing. Mundane things. Television. Ironing. But I always felt so lucky, just so lucky next to him.
How could I ever have it again? I can’t, that’s the truth. But, actually, isn’t the Marc I know now – the Marc I text constantly now – the exact same Marc I once loved so much?
I can’t answer that.
What might’ve saved us? More date nights? Were the clichés really correct? We’d been arrogant; so confident in our relationship that we didn’t even notice it failing. The truth is, they all take work.
It could still work. No, it couldn’t. I slept with somebody else. Another fuck-up in a long list of them. Martha would never cheat. Scott would never cheat. Marc would never cheat. It is just me, always only me, who succumbs to temptation. Who smokes and drinks and sleeps around.
This is just the nostalgia talking. I am looking after Layla, and the texts with Marc are getting more and more frequent, and it reminds me of those early days with Xander when we had been so happy. That is all.
‘She’s not sad,’ I said to Xander. She’s angry, I realized. She was angry with the world. I didn’t share this with Xander. Instead, I said, ‘She’s only just come into the world and it’s cold and she’s hungry. She’s shocked.’ As am I, I wanted to add.
‘She wants her mum,’ Xander said, with curious insight for a nine-year-old.
I nodded and gulped a bit. She wanted Martha. Angular, calm Martha. Layla would, of course, know her over blobby, impatient me. We were so different, Martha and I. Layla couldn’t be fooled by me, the lesser Blackwater sister.
Now, it’s just Layla and me in the living room. Xander is away overnight; the first time he’s not with Marc or me in his entire life. He seemed glad to be going to a quiet, calm house without any crying babies. I try to pretend he’s with Marc. It’s easier that way. Marc was the only other person as watchful as me, when Xander was a toddler. ‘He’s got a Lego block in his hand,’ Marc would say. ‘Mind he doesn’t eat it.’ The anxiety of parenthood had been divided equally between us. There was no helpless man act, no inability to stack a dishwasher or remember a birthday card while seemingly having not lost the ability to go to work or remember what time the boxing was on. There was none of that bullshit, thankfully. Of course, there was another kind, as there always is.
I stare at the wall, now, and not at Layla, and try to count to ten in my mind again. That doesn’t work, so I watch the second hand of a clock on the wall as it completes a full circuit. Sixteen hours. Perhaps I could ask Marc to come over. Share the load. But no. That’s not fair, is it? It wouldn’t even be fair if we were together. This is our mess. Mine and Martha’s.
Layla’s face is bright purple, her gums like angry red watermelon slices in her mouth, and I wearily make up another bottle. I consider texting Martha, but I don’t. What’s the point? It would only upset her. And she wouldn’t be able to come home any sooner. Scott should be here, but who am I to tell him that? I cringe as I imagine writing the text. Come and look after your child! I would say. And Martha and Scott would roll their eyes at silly, dramatic Becky: the hired help, the nanny, unable to cope with looking after a baby. ‘This is what we pay you for,’ Martha would admonish, and I would feel small and sad and shit at being unable to do yet another job.
Instead, I get out my phone and text Marc. It’s weird, I know, but I am sort of beyond caring. Marc and I always had a wonderfully weird relationship, and we will forever. We were weird when together, and weird when apart, so why not sit comfortably in the wasteland between parents, friends and ex-lovers?
Jesus, I’m worried about Layla. And me! I write to him.
The crying is so loud I think I might actually go mad. I look at her little red face and shift her from being up against my shoulder to the ‘tiger in the tree’ hold. Her limbs are bunched up, angrily, but her left arm swings down like a monkey’s. I pat her back, which feels tense. It doesn’t feel like wind, but what do I know? It feels taut with stress. Like she is carrying the weight of the world.
For fuck’s sake. For fuck’s sake. Just shut up. Anger seems to suffuse me, like I have been dipped in lava. Just shut up. I down my first glass of wine, and wait for the numbing effect to kick in.
I stand again and stare out of my living-room windows and out into the night. Jesus, I’d take a difficult boss over this, any day. Layla is more difficult than the very worst of the television people. I try to bring a smile to my face at the irony of it. But that’s the thing: you can only laugh at your situation if you are not frightened of it. I
am frightened, here tonight, with a baby who won’t stop screaming, trapped in an arrangement I didn’t intend to turn out this way, and so nothing is funny. Nothing is nice. Nothing is comforting, except wine. I imagine I feel similarly to Layla.
My phone pings, the special tone I have assigned to Marc. He has sent a lovely text full of advice.
I consider the list while looking at Layla and find a song at random to play on my phone. Green Day blares out, and she cries harder. I leave it on for a few seconds longer, but it seems to anger her further, so I turn it off. I go back to the text and, over the next half an hour, I work my way down the list. She refuses the next bottle. I give her a bath, which she cries through, and put her into a new nappy and yellow sleep suit with bears on the feet. I grasp her little hands. They feel just the right temperature, but I turn the heating up regardless. I add a layer and then I remove two. It is like the worst exam of my life, like some vast logic puzzle I have to do while my ears are being tortured. I pour a third glass of wine – fuck it – and take her upstairs and over to the feature wall in the bedroom and show her the black and white polka dots. And – ah. At last. Silence. My ears ring in the unexpected quiet, as if they have simply started to scream, too. Layla stares at the polka dots in awe.
I was six months pregnant with Xander and couldn’t stand on the stepladder to paint the ceiling because I was so unbalanced with my bump.
Marc found it hilarious. ‘Hang the wallpaper with me, instead,’ he said.
We left the ceiling half done. We were like that.
‘Are you bothered about a half-painted ceiling?’ he said to me.
‘But,’ I said, ‘it should be finished. When we sell—’
‘Do you care?’ he had said.
The arguments that I had stacked up – my parents’ arguments, Martha’s voice in my head – fell away.
‘Not at all,’ I said.
He brought the dining table up. My job was to spread the paste on to the back of the wallpaper. Marc set a bucket beside me and brought me a chair.
The paste looked like cheap porridge, thick and gluey. I dipped the brush into it and pulled it out. The paste dripped off it.
‘None of that ready-glued wallpaper shit,’ Marc said. He showed me how to paste it on to the back of a sheet while he hung one on the wall.
‘It’s quite methodical,’ I said, breathing it in. The paste smelt comforting, somehow. Starchy, almost straw-like. I was standing in a slice of sunlight, the light warm on the tops of my feet, and Marc was humming gently under his breath, and I thought: How is it possible to be this happy, at nineteen and unemployed and pregnant? It couldn’t be true, and yet it was. It so clearly was.
‘You’ve dropped loads on the floor,’ Marc said with a laugh, reaching down to blot the drips with a wad of blue tissue.
I liked that laugh. That laugh that said: ‘I will never shout at you. Life simply isn’t that serious.’
I was scrolling through my phone while Marc hummed under his breath. He’d tagged us on Facebook – he loved Facebook – as hanging out. Only I knew we were hanging wallpaper, and I liked that: our secret, inner language. Our own code. It only got richer over time, like a slowly marinating stew.
We were obsessed with renovating our house – the little house, we called it, for some reason – in time for Xander’s arrival. We did six rooms in two months, becoming like a one-dimensional couple who work together and talk only of the business. We had become obsessed with the idea of the mantelpiece. We would fantasize about when the house was done. We would have things on the mantelpiece. Curated pieces: dishes from Nepal, pretentious trinkets, the sort of thing Martha started buying after she met Scott. Whenever we saw anything – a stupid wooden box in HomeSense, or the ugliest handmade ornament for sale on Facebook – we would say, ‘For the mantelpiece?’
Later, when we did the living room, I was too large to even hang wallpaper, so I just sat in a corner of the room while Marc did it, instead. I read quiz questions to him off the internet. ‘What’s number one in the UK charts right now?’ I would say, and accuse him of being old when he didn’t know. ‘Coldplay …?’ he would say, and I’d hoot with laughter. ‘It’s Drake,’ I’d say, rolling my eyes, and Marc would say, ‘Who?’
I sat with my back to the radiator in the bathroom while he tiled, one cold Sunday. Xander was kicking away inside me while I drank a can of Coke and watched Marc grouting. He was meticulous with it, like an artist, I always thought. He knew so much stuff. That was one of the things I loved most about him. He knew where the electricity cables ran behind the walls, where the hot and cold water pipes went. He was like a magician who could see behind the scenes. And he’d learnt it all himself, too. His father was rubbish, had never taught him to be handy. He’d gone on all these courses to learn how to do all of it. Basic mechanics for cars. Carpet fitting. And now he did everything. He had about nine jobs. He listened to football podcasts all day at work and finished sometimes at three o’clock. I loved that about him, too. He made me somehow see that life didn’t have to be experienced in a big way, and that happiness was small, really. I still have that attitude now. I can have as much fun in the bakery aisle of Sainsbury’s as in a club in Ibiza. It’s all about attitude.
‘Do you think our baby will have kids?’ I said to him as he moved the trowel back and forth, his eyes flitting over the tiles. Afterwards, I knew, they would all be identical, perfectly uniform. I would always have a lovely house, thanks to him. Design school or no design school.
‘Who knows?’ he said, stopping to look at me.
‘I’d love to know whether or not I’m going to be a granny,’ I said.
‘I just think,’ he stood, his hands on his hips, and looked at me, ‘I just think I’m going to have a rather nice life either way. No matter what.’
That optimism. I closed my eyes, relishing it, like the sun on my face on a hot day. Was it possible to fall in love with a mindset? If so, I had.
He put an arm around me. We hugged for so long that a bit of grout, thicker than all of the rest, dried and set before we could remove it. He kissed the top of my head. He didn’t care.
Layla starts crying again after a minute of the wallpaper – one minute’s blissful silence – and I sigh heavily. I take her into the bathroom and find the piece of grout. I put my fingers around it and try to pull it away, but it’s stuck fast, like a barnacle. Good, I think, anchoring myself to it.
I put her down in her Moses basket, but the crying only gets worse. Little tears are dripping out of the corners of her eyes and gathering in her ears like caught rainwater. Her gummy mouth is moving, angry, frightened. I understand it, suddenly, somehow: she wants her mother. Of course she does. It’s obvious.
I leave her there and sink down the wall to sit on the floor. It’s not fair. Men go to work but women can’t, because of this. These tears and this unhappiness. I am the closest Layla has to a mother and yet I am nothing – not a patch on Martha. I don’t smell like her, I don’t dress like her – stylish but classic, like a royal – and I don’t sound like her, either. She needs Martha’s warmth, her calmness – she’s so serene – and her quiet organization, her firm, angular grasp. None of my stupid jokes and fumbling disorganization. She needs Martha. Not me. Not Marc. Not even Scott. It isn’t fair, none of it.
And so instead of trying to stop Layla, I simply join in. After a bit, I pick her up, and together we rock and sob on the spare-room floor, my feet lying underneath the bed, toes just touching the underside of the mattress.
Jesus, the garden is cold. It’s seven thirty. I didn’t think. I just stumbled out here, desperate to get away from the crying, the relentless, sheer bloody-minded determination not to sleep. God, it’s horrendous.
I dial Marc’s number without thinking.
‘Alright?’ he says. ‘Still crying?’
‘Yeah, she just won’t stop,’ I say. My voice is full of tears; I can hear them. There have been too many tears in this house recently. Mine, Layla�
��s. Even Xander was strangely mournful the other morning, tired of the all-day crying, as we all were. I hope he’s alright with it. That it isn’t affecting him. That he knows I love him.
‘It will get better. And you can give her back soon.’
But it will never end, I think, looking up at the sky and blowing a bloom of air out. There will be more work, not less. Martha has always worked too much. Too many good bloody causes. And I will never get to design school. God, what was I thinking? I wanted to escape the set-dressing, but I didn’t think beyond that. And now what? I wish I could quit. Go to design school. Or even just get a normal job again. But Martha will never find another nanny willing to be so flexible, will she? And then all those children in Kos … they will suffer, too.
‘Have you fed her – loads? She’s definitely not hungry?’ he says.
‘No. She’s not hungry. Definitely not.’
I think of Layla writhing around as I offered a bottle. I’d defrosted it correctly, and then she’d refused it, and I had thrown it angrily in the bin. Fuck’s sake. My own anger scares me, and I try to breathe through it, to let the thoughts go. Don’t attach meaning to them.
Have more wine. That’ll help.
‘Where is she?’
‘Inside. I’m in the garden. Having a break.’
She is upstairs, in the makeshift nursery, in the Moses basket. Her legs will be kicking up, clenched to her body. Her face will be red. Little arms and legs making cycling motions as the anger fills her body, too.
Something rises up inside me. Something dark and furious. How could Scott leave me like this? How could Martha? This isn’t supposed to be my job. This isn’t my child. It’s not fucking fair.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says.
‘I’m not. Honest. I’m not. It’s just – ugh.’ I try to play it down. I don’t want him to worry.
No Further Questions Page 22
