Layla and I are standing by the full-length living-room window, looking at the nearby still life of the sea, when Martha finishes her phone call.
“That was Ami again,” she says.
Ami is her intern at Stop Gap.
“How often are you taking work calls?” I say, thinking of my own maternity leave, spent tipping bags of Maltesers into my mouth and watching Homes under the Hammer while Xander slept.
She lowers herself onto the sofa, not taking Layla as she usually would. I am glad of it. I am enjoying her warm body against my chest—the baby smell. I had forgotten the baby smell. Xander now smells earthy, of outside air and boyhood. Sometimes, when he’s kicking a football against the side of the house, or when he’s deep into his computer games, his body moving with the controller, this way and that, I will feel so full of love my chest might burst. When he catches that look, he gives me this lopsided, self-conscious smile. He feels my love, but he is shyly embarrassed by it. It is the way it should be. I hope it stays that way.
But, oh, that baby smell. Marc and I tried so hard for another. At first casually, and then more scientifically, with ovulation sticks and temperature charts. It never happened. I never once had a single symptom of pregnancy. “It’s like our bodies forgot how to make one,” I said one night to Marc. He’d avoided my gaze. Later, I thought I heard him sobbing in the shower, but I wasn’t sure.
Martha’s phone rings again, silently. She cuts it off. Layla stirs against my chest, her little hand flexing against my finger that she’s holding. God, Martha. Don’t you realize how lucky you are? That baby smell. Their little fat fists. Their soulful eyes.
“It’s constant,” she says. “She’s going back to uni shortly.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I can’t hire anyone. Well, I don’t trust anyone. Not with the big stuff. It’s all still being set up . . .” Stop Gap is Martha’s charity, designed to help refugees by providing them with a school in which to play and learn. She saw the refugees on holiday and started setting it up almost immediately after getting home. Her change of career surprised everyone except me. She’s always been this way: empathetic, helpful. It made perfect sense, to me, that she would do that.
“You like to be in control,” I say.
We sit in silence for a second. Martha moves into the kitchen and sits at the table. So I do, too, Layla still in my arms.
I look up at Martha. She’s rolling an onion bhaji directly into the pot of raita, seemingly lost in thought. She has a husband, a baby, a blossoming charity that’s expanded enough to pay her a wage and help refugees. I glumly rip off a massive piece of naan bread and mop up some sauce with it. What have I done, compared to her? Had a baby at nineteen. Worked for a load of television jerks since. I’m separated, soon to be divorced. A single mum. Probably infertile, or just drinking too much to conceive, if that’s even a thing.
It’s true that comparison is the surest route to unhappiness, I know, but, God, does that stop us? So is Facebook. So is smoking. So is wine.
“Don’t drop tikka masala on her head,” Martha says, watching me bring the naan bread to my mouth as Layla sleeps.
“I’ll try not to marinate your baby,” I say, my jealous thoughts forgotten. She is nice. She deserves these things. “Couldn’t you do bits and bobs for Stop Gap? To keep your hand in, so you can do it on your own schedule and don’t get disturbed all the time?”
“Could I?” she says. Her eyes go wide. I remember it well. Like: Shit. There is a world beyond nappies and milk and controlling nap times with the zeal of an army general.
“Of course you could. If you don’t trust people. Just do like ten hours a week or something. Remotely. Pay someone to have Layla.”
“I hadn’t thought—she’s so tiny,” Martha says, looking at Layla, asleep in my arms. “She’s never usually this docile, either.”
“Do you want to?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Then do.” I point with my spoon. “Scott does. You could get a nanny. Few hours a week?”
“Yeah . . .” She pauses. “I don’t know. It feels wrong.”
“You’re hardly wanting to go and do seventy-hour weeks as a trader,” I remark. I spoon some tikka masala into my mouth. “This is spicier than usual.”
“But I need a nanny who could be—ad hoc. Just when things kick off. At the moment we’re trying to hire a proper teacher for the school. That’s what that was about.” Martha looks at her phone, then points to the curry. “It is spicier. I kind of like it, though. Listen—I could do ten hours a week, couldn’t I?”
“Of course.”
“But they’d have to be . . . whenever I want them. To put out fires, like this. Scott’s put the money in, but he doesn’t have the time. The gap-year student can’t be expected to run it. And . . . I want to. To keep it going. The school is my other baby,” she says with a self-conscious smile. “It has to be me. Just in the initial stages. Then I can hand it over. But I have to . . . I have to find the premises. Hire the people. Don’t I?”
“Yes,” I say honestly.
“I need flexible childcare.”
“That’s like gold dust,” I say, thinking of Xander’s old nursery and its ridiculously ruthless rules. A pound for every minute after 6:00 P.M. you were late picking up.
She looks at me, and I at her, and, I swear to God, we have the idea at the exact same time.
“You could do it,” she says. “And set-dress much less.”
She says it simply. Neither of us needs to hash out the specifics; we have never needed to. We leap over them. It must be something unique to us, and not our upbringing, because Ethan is never on the same page as we are.
“Be your nanny?”
“Yeah. God—you’d be brill. I can pay you. Really well. If you could—”
“What, be at your beck and call?”
“Basically.”
She doesn’t sense the warning in my tone. I want to help. It seems to make sense. But . . . don’t take the piss. That’s what I meant by that.
We sit in silence for a few seconds in Martha’s warm flat. I could sit here, looking after Layla. See more of Martha. Collect Xander from school every day. Not have to worry about bloody set dressing all the time. I could be around more, stop him playing endless computer game after endless computer game. Get him outside—running, or something.
“Just try it for a bit, maybe?”
“How long?”
“Few months?”
“I could get rid of the worst clients of mine,” I say. “Keep the rest. The non-bastards.”
She’s looking at me so earnestly, and suddenly I just think: This helps her, and it helps me. It’s a no-brainer.
“Let’s do it,” I say.
* * *
—
First-day nerves,” I say, four days later, to a very stressed Martha.
“I’m glad. Means you’ll do it right,” she says.
“Whatever,” I say. I know how to look after a baby. Xander is safely at school until three. We have ages. I don’t have to set-dress today, and so today is a good day.
Martha is hastily changing a nappy, and Layla is bright red.
“God,” I say, startled at her expression. “What’s she angry about?”
“You need to get her wind out,” she says. “She’s got a bit of reflux. I will be three hours.”
She has expressed some breast milk. She’s going to a café nearby, to make calls. To answer emails. She doesn’t want to do it in her house, where she can hear Layla cry, she says.
“Oh, like massaging? Xander never really had much wind . . .”
She shows me. The “tiger in the tree” hold. Laying Layla on her back, cycling her legs. Layla on her front.
“Do you understand that?” she says.
A slice of
something cuts through me. Why is she saying it like that? Does she have to be so . . . patronizing? In my head, I imagine telling Marc about that comment, as I often do. In my fantasyland, we are still together, and he says to me, “Ignore her, Sam. She’s a patronizing arse.”
“Yes,” I say to Martha.
“You’re lucky. Xander was a total dream,” she says, perhaps sensing my annoyance, as she puts her coat on.
“I know.”
Even when he had mumps, Xander slept. Marc got them, too. God, how we laughed at his huge jowls; we called them his turkey wattles. Marc hadn’t been vaccinated, for some reason. He lost loads of weight. It was weeks before the swelling in his neck went down, and months before I stopped calling him moonface.
When Martha has left, I cycle Layla’s legs for her, and she cries and cries. I massage her stomach, hold her in the poses Martha showed me. I feed her. Burp her endlessly. Baby massage. Soothing songs. Little walks. Bounce her.
I start to hear different tones within her screams, by mid-morning. By lunchtime, I feel certifiable, and take her out for a walk where strangers stare at me as we pass, as though I am a lunatic, as though it is me who is screaming.
Martha isn’t back by two forty-five, and so Layla comes to the school gates with me, like a very loud alarm I have to carry around with me. Xander is less than impressed, and walks on ahead of us, trying to get away from the noise, I guess. I take him straight to Marc’s, who has to shout for me to hear him over the din.
“What do you mean, nannying?” Marc says.
I see it before he can cover it up: irritation. The very specific brand of Marc irritation that only Xander and I can spot. His eyebrows go up, his mouth curls ever so slightly in disdain.
“I’m going to be looking after Layla—for money.”
“Why?”
I shift my weight, moving Layla from one hip to another, and just look at him. “She needs a nanny. I need money,” I say.
“You don’t need money. You’ve got my money,” he says shortly. “You don’t need them to employ you.”
“I want to stop doing so much set dressing. I hate it,” I say. Something rises up inside me, as it often does. My mind treats me to a slide show of my failures and of Martha’s perfection. Baby in her thirties. Strong, stable marriage. A blossoming charity. A flat that overlooks the sea. No unexplained infertility, unlike me. How come some people get it all and some people get nothing? How is that fair?
“Oh, great,” he says. “Sure, why not just swap jobs without telling me?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything anymore,” I say coolly to him.
“All right,” he says, raising his hands, palms toward me, as if in surrender. “None of my business, is it?”
“No,” I say to him.
He is like this, sometimes. Quick to anger. I used to see it all the time with Xander. He dropped a fork on the floor once and Marc blew up. I had to calm them both down. Xander had cried and Marc was crimson with rage. Over a fork, for God’s sake.
I say nothing else, and walk down the drive with just Layla, who is still bright red and crying.
I used to think the desperate mothers asking forums about these babies were exaggerating. Newborns sleep twenty hours a day! I would scoff, inwardly.
By the time Martha returns, my whole body is rigid, covered in sweat. I am wrung out. I think about what Marc said: You don’t need them to employ you. Is it true? Is that how far I have sunk? Am I Martha and Scott’s staff now?
My next day with Layla is a week later. The nannying arrangement starts to take shape, allowing Martha some control over what’s happening with her charity.
But ten days after that, everything changes again.
11
Martha
The prosecution want to call a woman called Sophie. Becky’s brow looks heavier. It’s an expression I can easily recognize, and I think: Sophie must mean something to her. Though I don’t know what.
Becky wore a similar expression on her first day of nannying. At the time, I’d thought it was attitude. She’d left every job she’d ever had, I had realized the night before the arrangement began. What had I let myself in for?
I look around the courtroom as Sophie is ushered in.
This is what I had let myself in for. This is where it ended.
In death.
In murder charges.
In destruction.
Sophie is young, maybe slightly younger than Becky. Her ankles are slim in skinny jeans and as she takes her place on the stand, her hand flutters at her chest. She must be nervous.
Ellen lumbers to her feet.
“Sophie,” she says. “Can you tell us about the day you saw the defendant?”
“I just saw her. One day.” Her tone is defensive, that of a person who has perhaps said too much, and now she finds herself in a witness box, taking part in a trial for murder.
“And can you tell us a bit more about that?”
She opens her mouth to speak, and then begins.
12
Sophie Cole
4:00 p.m., Tuesday, October 10
Sophie had discovered that she liked to study in dirty pubs. The cheaper the better. She drank gallons of Pepsi—she preferred it draft, from a pump—and ordered chips after she had read fifty pages, the halfway point.
Today’s topic was dose calculations. She was studying to be a veterinary nurse. She took her shoes off and sat cross-legged, her knees resting on the underside of the table. It was just the sort of place her father used to take her, this pub in particular. Here, among the barmen who called her sweetheart and the bloke who couldn’t get off the slot machine, she felt at home.
She checked her phone. Jay was at after-school football until six. She had two hours.
She heard a heavy sort of walk behind her, but didn’t turn around. She would only get distracted. That was her deal with herself: She could work in pubs so long as she didn’t get talking to anybody.
She heard a baby’s cry behind her, and a child’s voice, all at once. She reached into her bag for her earbuds and began untangling them. She had enough of children at home, thank you very much.
Just as she was untangling the final knot—how did they get so entwined?—she heard the woman’s voice.
“All right, what do you want?”
Sophie cocked an ear. That was definitely Becky, from the school. Sophie didn’t know her well. She thought she might be divorced. She was always cracking up with Xander, her son. They seemed to get on like friends.
“Coke?” Xander said hopefully.
“No way,” Becky said.
Sophie peeked a look. Yes. It was her. She didn’t realize she’d had a baby. It must have been ages since she’d last seen her. Sophie put her earbuds in, regardless. Becky was a chatterer. She’d never get anything done if she realized it was her. She’d see if they stayed quiet, and if they did, she wouldn’t need to put any music on; she could just pretend.
Right. If a spaniel weighs 18kg . . . She diligently copied down the equation that followed the preamble, even though she didn’t have a clue what it meant.
Sophie heard Becky’s tread again after a few moments, returning from the bar. And then the distinctive splash of liquid on the wooden floor.
“Shit,” Becky said.
Sophie raised her eyebrows and took another look. Wine. God knows, people had judged her when she still had a young person’s railcard and a five-year-old, and yet, she couldn’t help but judge back, sometimes. White wine in the afternoon, with two kids. Huh.
“Xander, for God’s sake,” Becky suddenly said. Sophie knew the tone well herself. She called it the bedtime tone, when she was just waiting for the minutes to slide away so she could justify being on her own. No moans of Muuum or sticky hands or random shouts at the television, no legs kicking her on the sofa as Jay, unac
customed to his new lanky frame, tried to get comfortable, no Robinsons Fruit Shoot spillages on cushions that couldn’t be machine washed.
Sophie turned around. Xander was rocking back on his chair, teetering precariously. He wasn’t friends with her own son. Jay had once described him as weird.
Becky was definitely separated, Sophie remembered now. She had referenced it obliquely, as was her way, saying, “Oh, I don’t need to share the remote control with anybody now,” at some school social occasion. Sophie had always quite admired her. She seemed to be one of those people who really did not care what anybody else thought of her.
Sophie drained the Pepsi from her glass just as the baby started crying, properly crying. Hmm. She opened the music app on her phone and scrolled through it, trying to find something ambient and non-distracting. She wouldn’t turn around and chat. She wouldn’t.
Ed Sheeran, that would do. She found her favorite song. Right before she pressed play, she heard it.
“Xander!”
She turned around. Becky’s face was bright red. The baby was in the car seat, crying. Becky was ignoring her, which Sophie thought was odd. She couldn’t ignore that sound. Weren’t we programmed not to be able to?
As Sophie watched, Becky reached for Xander’s hands, her teeth gritted. She pulled on his wrists, forcing him forward, and his chair back onto the floor. He had to steady himself as he flew toward the table.
“Xander. If you do that again, I’m going to smack you,” Becky added.
As if it wasn’t already bad enough.
13
Martha
I can’t help but look straight across at Becky. Her bottom lip is glistening. She has opened her mouth in shock. The whites of her eyes shine and she looks down, trying, I think, to look dignified.
The Good Sister Page 8
