This Has Been Absolutely Lovely

by Jessica Dettmann

‘Naomi and Simon tried to get their kids to call me that. It didn’t stick, sadly. I liked it, but they dropped the Granny bit.’ Annie turned to show Jack Petula’s sleeping face. ‘Look, I’ve just got her off.’

  ‘Thanks. Hey, nice fringe. When did you get that?’

  ‘You’re the only one who’s mentioned it. I had it done yesterday. Just on a whim. Does it look all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Very cool. Look, I need to pop out to the shops. I sort of assumed Molly was on top of organising all the baby gear but it turns out she hasn’t really got much yet.’

  ‘You know what they say about assuming, Jack.’

  ‘It makes you an arsehole?’

  ‘Something like that. What has Molly not got that you need?’

  ‘Well, she actually hasn’t got anything. You know Molly: never do today what can be put off until the last minute. It’s like she had no idea we were having a baby for the last eight months. We need a car seat for one thing — they won’t let her out until we have that. And a cot or something like that, for Petula to sleep in. And clothes. Nappies. A pram. Bottles maybe?’

  ‘If you’re going to be at Pa’s with us for a while, maybe just get a bassinet for now, rather than a great big cot.’

  ‘Yes, good idea. A bassinet.’

  Annie paused in her swaying and looked at her son-in-law. ‘It’s a basket. For babies to sleep in.’

  ‘I thought that but it’s good to be sure.’

  ‘In fact,’ Annie remembered, ‘I think I still have the one from when my kids were babies, in the attic. I’ll get it out. You’ll need a new mattress for it.’

  Jack looked uncomfortable. ‘Annie?’ he said. ‘Do you think Molly’s going all right?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s just, don’t new mums normally have all this stuff organised? I mean, I know Petula was early, but shouldn’t Molly have put some thought into baby equipment before that?’

  Annie looked askance at him. ‘How much thought had you put into it?’

  ‘Yeah, fair point,’ he admitted. ‘Bit sexist of me. It’s just . . . there’s something else. It’s probably normal. She doesn’t seem very connected, or happy, about the baby, you know? I know the pregnancy was a bit of a surprise, but we were excited, and now she seems . . . disappointed.’

  Annie thought about it. Molly had been a bit spaced out, she conceded. And she had been anxious about how she’d adjust . . . but she was already so good with Petula. ‘She’s very tired. And the birth was quite a shock. I’m sure she’ll feel better once she’s home and she’s had a bit more time to get used to it all.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Jack was palpably relieved. ‘Silly of me. I was just thinking about these cows on my uncle’s farm. Some of them just sniff their calves and wander off. I’m overreacting, aren’t I?’

  Annie smiled at him. ‘Yes, Jack. Molly’s not a cow. We’re a bit more complicated, human mothers.’

  He laughed too, and went red. ‘Sure. Yes, of course.’

  * * *

  That afternoon Jack drove to a local baby megastore. There were two to choose from, and he went with Baby Universe over the more parochial sounding Baby World, assuming its range would be bigger.

  The air inside was thick with marital tension. In every aisle were couples engaged in varying levels of discord over devices for keeping their offspring alive. He missed Molly.

  ‘Fine,’ he overheard an exasperated man say in the change table aisle. ‘So . . . not the one we decided on then?’

  He passed a woman with a frankly enormous belly, sitting in a beige leather rocking chair, her swollen ankles propped up on the matching footstool. A toddler was sticking his head up her skirt while before her a man was folding the display model of a double stroller and trying to explain how she’d be able to lift it with one hand into the back of a Kia Carnival, but she had the far-off look in her eyes of someone who’d stopped listening to him years before.

  Jack spied a shop assistant, a young man in a bright yellow shirt, and after several minutes chasing him round the store, glimpsing him at the ends of aisles and over the tops of displays, managed to corner him.

  Unable to escape, the young man, whose nametag read Marco, turned to face Jack. ‘Can I help you with anything?’ he asked helpfully, as if he hadn’t been trying to avoid exactly that for the past five minutes.

  ‘I need a bassinet mattress and a car seat and some other things.’

  ‘Right. Well, here are the mattresses.’ Marco gestured vaguely at the area behind him, where assorted baby receptacles were displayed.

  ‘Can you recommend one?’

  Marco pretended to know the first thing about them. ‘Hmmm. This one is good, I think. It’s SIDS-free.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘SIDS-free. It’s got no SIDS in the mattress.’

  ‘SIDS, as in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? What used to be called Cot Death?’

  ‘Is that what it stands for? Well, yeah, I guess. I think the older style of mattress wasn’t guaranteed SIDS-free but these new ones, they’re made of ti-tree fibres, and they’ve got no SIDS in them. So, yeah, better for the baby.’

  ‘They would be,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll take one of those.’

  ‘Right you are. And the car seats are up there at the front of the shop.’

  ‘Are they all car-crash-free?’

  Marco looked at him like he was crazy. ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll just get the second most expensive one.’

  Chapter 23

  On Jack’s return to the hospital, Annie drove home. Molly and the baby would be discharged in a couple of hours, and had been promised a vintage bassinet to hold the brand new SIDS-free mattress. Annie needed to dig it out of the attic, where she assumed it was, somewhere. Jean would have stored it up there, neatly, once Molly herself had outgrown it.

  Outside it was cool and overcast, sprinkling with rain, and the roads were quiet. It wasn’t looking good for a sunny Christmas Day.

  When she opened the front door she was met by the smell of something delicious frying with onions and garlic. It was definitely meat. Naomi must have come to a compromise with Diana. Annie headed straight up the stairs and retrieved from her bedroom the long hook for pulling down the attic ladder. Normally the hook stood in the upstairs hallway, but after an overenthusiastic and unfair jousting match had resulted in a tearful Sunny and a bruised Felix, it had been removed from the children’s reach, and the whole house had been searched for other easily weaponised tools.

  Annie hooked the ladder, pulled it down and opened the hatch to the attic. The trapped heat coursed out, smelling like dust that was about to catch fire. She climbed up, switched on the light her father had installed, and looked around. Good heavens there was a lot of crap up there. It was crammed with boxes, suitcases, baskets, small pieces of furniture and broken electrical appliances her dad had thought still too good to throw out. It was almost worth bequeathing the house to her children now to make dealing with the detritus of her parents’ and grandparents’ past someone else’s problem.

  The sound of footsteps came from the landing, and Naomi appeared halfway up the ladder, her head just visible. ‘What are you doing up here? Re-gifting old bits as Christmas presents?’

  ‘I wasn’t, but that’s not a bad idea. I’m looking for the bassinet. It must be here somewhere.’

  Naomi came all the way up and looked around. A box of plastic car tracks was by her feet. She and her siblings had built towns with them in the dining room. She reached in for a piece, which immediately snapped in two, the plastic perished. ‘What a shame,’ she remarked. ‘Felix and Sunny would have been right into that.’ She reached for a cardboard box marked Baby Clothes in Jean’s neat fine handwriting. ‘Mum, look. Would these be our old baby clothes or yours? Granny must have packed them away. Molly might like them.’

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Annie, as Naomi passed over the dusty box. ‘If t
hey’re not all moth-eaten.’

  Inside the box were notebooks, not clothes. ‘Bummer,’ said Naomi. ‘Must have been a reused box.’ She reached in for a notebook and opened it; turned a few pages. ‘Mum, who did these?’ She handed over the open book.

  Annie looked. It was a drawing of a house: a familiar-looking, single-storey brick house. ‘That’s the house on the corner. It’s the one you look at from the bus stop. This is very good. Look at that detail: you can see the tendrils on that vine growing up the fence. Extraordinary.’ She turned the page. It was a drawing of the next house. And the one after that. The book was filled with the houses of Baskerville Road, rendered in intricate detail in what looked like coloured pencil. She flipped back to the front and there, inside the cover, was her mother’s name, in her mother’s handwriting. Jean Thorne.

  ‘Granny did those?’ Naomi sounded incredulous.

  ‘She must have. Look.’ Annie spotted a pair of tiny initials in the lower right-hand corner of the first picture, and quickly looked at the others again. The initials were present in each. JT.

  ‘I didn’t know she could draw.’ Naomi took out more notebooks filled with more drawings: the houses from the surrounding streets. ‘These are really good. They’re like, I don’t know, the illustrations you’d see for new housing estates. But done in pencil. When was she doing them?’

  ‘They’re dated, look there in the corner. This one is ’77, that’s ’74. There’s a whole box of them.’

  ‘And you didn’t know she did these?’

  Annie was embarrassed. She’d never seen her mother draw anything, let alone this near photo-realistic illustrated survey of their entire neighbourhood. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think Pa knew? Look at this one — the detail of those, what are they called, those scalloped wood things?’

  ‘Shingles. Maybe he knew. I don’t know.’

  ‘He mustn’t have known, or he would have got her to do something with them. Exhibit, or sell them or something.’ Naomi spoke with the confidence of an over-encouraged child whose parents, desperate to nurture and facilitate, had pounced on anything creative she and her siblings had shown the slightest aptitude for.

  Annie wondered about that. She didn’t remember her father ever championing her mother. He’d regarded her highly as chief cook and bottlewasher, he’d praised her pavlova, and he’d loved her, but had he been interested in her? Not really. Annie hadn’t either. An ember of shame burned inside her now. And regret. She’d dismissed her mother out of hand without even really bothering to get to know her.

  What did the drawings mean? Who had they been for? Why hadn’t her mother ever shown them to her?

  Mousy and suburban: that’s how she had seen Jean. Sweet, but old fashioned. Friendly, sociable, but not someone you could imagine having a really deep conversation with about anything. Mum had just been Mum. She hadn’t really been supportive of the idea of Love Triangle moving to England. At the time Annie had seen it as Jean being ultra conservative and thinking Annie had to be a suburban mother too, though perhaps that was just because she was scared of losing her only child to another country. But what else had she been? What parts of her had Annie never looked at? A new image of her mother was emerging, like a slowly shaken Polaroid.

  The shame glowed more brightly when Annie considered how she’d used her mother. Every chance she got, she’d dumped Molly, Simon and Naomi on her — though Mum had seemed okay with that. Maybe she had been, but what if she hadn’t? She might have just felt there was no way to say no. She might have wanted her daughter’s happiness more than she wanted anything for herself.

  And what had Annie made of herself? With all that help, all that sacrifice from her mother? She’d produced a few jingles. Nothing more. Not enough to constitute a legacy by any measure.

  Was it too late? If she worked extra hard now, could she leave something worthwhile behind? Something that might make Jean’s sacrifices for her worth it?

  Making her dead mother proud was at best, she realised, a spurious reason for her to pursue her music career again, but like a rock climber, Annie found herself reaching out for any small handhold to help drag herself up the cliff face. It was a stretch, and it wasn’t much, but it was enough to hold her for the moment.

  She thought of the open mike night and the memory made her burn with embarrassment. But success wasn’t meant to be easy. That was part of the deal. Triumph over adversity: that was part of the narrative. Maybe it hadn’t been as bad as she thought. Not being signed to a record deal on the spot at her first open mike night didn’t mean she had failed. If that was going to be enough to stop her, it was a pretty feeble attempt at a comeback.

  The importance of persistence was something she had stressed to her kids when they were growing up. You had to try and try again. Mastery lies atop a mountain of mistakes and all that. Not that you’d know it, from the way they flitted from one thing to another.

  ‘Nomes,’ she said, ‘remember how I used to write songs, when I was young. Before you guys?’

  ‘Of course.’ Naomi smiled at her through the dusty gloom of the attic. ‘Love Triangle.’ She began to hum the first few bars of ‘Home Is Where Your Heart Is’, and the phrases drifted into Annie’s head and straight back out again without sticking.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve been working on some new songs. Quite a few new songs, actually.’

  ‘That’s cool. Are you happy with them?’

  ‘Pretty happy. I even performed at an open mike last night.’

  ‘What? Why didn’t you tell us? I’d have come.’

  ‘I didn’t want everyone there, making a big deal out of it.’

  ‘Is that why you —’ Naomi made a snipping motion near her forehead. ‘It looks good. Can you sing something for me? One of the new songs?’

  ‘Now? Up here?’

  ‘Why not? Just quickly. There’s not enough oxygen for a long song.’

  ‘All right, let me think.’ Annie looked up, furrowed her brow, then closed her eyes. Tapping her foot to count herself in, she sang a funny tune, bouncy and bright.

  ‘What’s it called?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘I think, “Not the Girl Next Door”.’ Annie searched her daughter’s face, hoping to see a trace of pride.

  ‘Are you sure you wrote that?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. What makes you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just sounds really . . . not familiar exactly, but maybe as if it’s like something else. But not precisely like anything else. I don’t know how to say it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s good?’ Annie suggested. ‘I think good songs make you feel like they were always songs in your soul, and they immediately feel homey and familiar. It’s hard to believe you’re hearing them for the first time. Like meeting a cousin or something, someone who looks a bit like someone you already know and care about.’

  Naomi’s face lit up. ‘Oh Mum! I know what you should do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kids’ songs! What was that old album we had when we were little? With a song about a hippo on it?’

  Annie’s heart barely had time to register excitement before it thumped back down in her chest like a bag of wet potting mix. ‘Anne Murray.’

  ‘Yes! Like that! You should write a whole bunch of songs for kids, and you could record them for Sunny and Felix and Petula. That would be such a sweet thing for them to have.’

  Annie forced a smile as her gut clenched with disappointment. It was the open mike night all over again. That was how people saw her. A grandma. Who did she think she was kidding? That was what she was. No one would take her seriously. She hadn’t thought this through properly, with a realist’s eye. She’d been so caught up in the feeling of freedom, in the joy of creating again after so long, that she’d failed to see the one thing everyone else saw. The only thing most of them would see. She was too old.

  She remembered hearing an interview with Pink — on The Graham Norton Show she thought it must have been. Pink said w
hen she released an album at the age of thirty-six, her record company had sat her down and told her to prepare for it not being played on the radio, because she was over thirty-five. Annie was more than twenty years older. Even if anyone was interested, did she still have the energy for this fight?

  Turning away from Naomi, she shifted more boxes that didn’t need moving, blinking away tears. ‘That’s a good idea,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Maybe I will.’ Her fringe tickled her forehead and she blew upwards to shift it. It was annoying. She found the bassinet and passed it to Naomi. ‘Here it is. Still in perfectly good nick. Pa bought that. He liked things that were built to last.’

  Chapter 24

  When the midwives approved Molly’s and Petula’s release, at five in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, Jack carried the capsule car seat into the hospital room and together they settled Petula into it. They stood back to admire their work. She looked like a doll in a bucket.

  ‘She’s too small for it,’ said Molly, frowning. ‘Didn’t it come with more padding?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Jack. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s for a newborn?’

  ‘It says zero to six months. She’s zero months. But, look, we’ll bring the straps in more, and there, see? She can’t move a muscle. Safe as houses.’ He gently pulled on the straps to tighten the harness, and Petula’s face crumpled. She started the hiccupping warm-up cry, a little puttering sound they knew already could go one of two ways: either she’d stop, like a lawnmower with a faulty starter, or she’d repeat the sound two or three times, like someone was giving her pull cord a really good yank, and then she’d be off, roaring away.

  They both took a small step back and waited to see if their luck would hold. It didn’t. Petula began to scream. Molly sighed and gave Jack a look.

  He smiled nervously. ‘You keep giving me that look. Does it mean you think I know how to make her stop? Because I don’t. I was just trying to make her safer. I didn’t know she’d go off. I didn’t mean to cut her red wire.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll get her out and feed her again.’ Molly picked up the baby, sat back down on the chair by the window and pulled down the front of her top. Petula latched on, Molly bit her lip, and the cries wound down to aggrieved snuffles. Molly stared out the window, astonished by her own power to calm her child. Jack couldn’t do that.