Love... And Sleepless Nights MAY 2012

by Nick Spalding

  ‘Not a problem.’

  Keene starts to walk away, back in the direction of his own car.

  ‘Mr Keene?’ I call to him and he turns back. ‘Does it get any easier? Bringing up kids I mean?’

  He responds with a snort of laughter. ‘Easier? Trust me Newman, this is the easy part. You just wait until the little bastard starts moving around under its own steam. That’s when your problems really begin!’ He chuckles again and turns away for the final time.

  I am left with the secure knowledge that I’m going to have to kill myself.

  Poopy’s reign of terror is only just beginning…

  Here’s a tip if you’re planning on having children any time in the near future: sleep as much as possible. Whenever and wherever you can.

  Luxuriate in your bed. Have enormous, satisfying lie-ins. If you think you’ve slept too much, just roll over for another half an hour and pull the covers over your head.

  Believe me, these pleasant memories will keep you going at three in the morning, when you’re standing butt-naked in the front room with a baby in your arms, rocking her gently to stop her screaming the house down.

  Laura’s Diary

  Thursday, June 5th

  Dear Mum,

  Believe it or not, it’s actually possible to see the inside of your own eyelids.

  …no, it really is.

  All you need to do is give birth to a baby that never sleeps for more than thirty eight seconds at a time and spend six months in her company.

  I can close my eyes now and see patterns swirling in the darkness. It’s quite hypnotic.

  A lot of people say that when you’re deprived of sleep over a long period of time it can lead to hallucinations. I can’t say I’ve experienced this as yet.

  I even said as much to my new friend Barnabus the purple troll, who lives in the cupboard under the sink and drinks the Cillit Bang.

  After Jamie’s little accident at work I started to take on more of the nightly feeds. I felt it a better idea for me to walk around like one of the undead instead of him, considering I don’t have to sit at a computer monitor all day to earn money. I get my maternity pay whether I’m awake or fast asleep, so it seemed the logical solution.

  This of course makes me a complete idiot.

  I went from being able to function quite well on approximately six hours sleep to malfunctioning like a submerged toaster on three.

  Then Poppy started teething.

  It’s quite amazing how you can think a baby has reached the absolute limits of her abilities to drive you insane – but can then ramp it up an entire other level thanks to the emergence of teeth.

  I am quite sure my daughter is going to grow up to sing in a heavy metal band.

  I believe this partly due to her father’s horrific taste in music, and partly due to the fact that when she screams it sounds like the gates of Hell have opened in the next room.

  I looked out of the window the other day to see a whole flock of starlings crash land on the garden in a collective fit. The gargantuan sound waves coming from Poppy had scrambled their poor bird brains with disastrous consequences.

  There must be ways of making money off my daughter’s inhuman decibel levels, but I’m way too tired to think of any right now.

  My common sense has gone out of the window thanks to the lack of rest and effective ear plugs. So much so, I made a dreadful mistake on Tuesday – and inadvertently stumbled on to something quite, quite horrific.

  It was about ten thirty in the morning and I was enjoying a cup of coffee in the thirty eight seconds Poppy had dropped off for.

  I’m still not used to this lifestyle.

  Everyone I know is out at work. I have no idea what to do with myself when not dealing with my incandescently angry daughter.

  I could watch some television, but the only thing on at this time of day is the kind of programming reserved for the mentally retarded. The only other choice I have is the news, which is too depressing to contemplate.

  My only recourse of action is to snatch a few moments of sleep here and there. This would work out fine were it not for the fact that Poppy is psychic.

  As soon as I slip into a temporary dreamless slumber, she’s awake and bawling the house down again with her aching gums.

  Such is the case on Tuesday, when I snap awake to the sound of my daughter screaming the house down, spilling coffee on my pyjamas.

  I stumble upstairs to the bedroom and pick Poppy up, wincing as she delivers an eardrum splitting shriek right at my face.

  I start to massage her gums in the hope it might cool her down a bit, but with no luck. Then I try the teething gel I’d bought from the chemist.

  This doesn’t seem to have any appreciable effect either. If anything, having a gob full of nasty tasting gel makes Poppy even angrier – and therefore even louder.

  My only other choice at this point is to just rock her and hope she cries herself out.

  Ha!

  Fat chance.

  Nearly an hour later she’s still going for it in a big way. I now think that as well as a heavy metal singer, Poppy will also be a long distance marathon runner, given her seemingly inexhaustible supplies of energy.

  I have completely run out of options.

  My sleep deprived brain cannot think of anything else to stop her.

  As it’s mid-morning on a Tuesday all the friends I would ring and ask for help are at work. Even Melina – the person I always turn to first on baby matters – isn’t available. She’s on holiday in Tenerife for the week… the utter bitch.

  I’m definitely not going to the doctor for advice. I just couldn’t bear the humiliation.

  There’s no-one I can ask for help!

  …then one name springs to mind, making me grimace.

  Jane.

  Jamie’s mother.

  Without you here Mum, she’s the only parental unit who might be able to offer some advice. After all, she’s raised three kids of her own, so she must have some nuggets of useful information tucked in that bear-trap that passes for her mind.

  My relationship with Jane has been incredibly strained ever since the night we announced the pregnancy. Jamie tried his best to mend fences for a while, but he gave up eventually, once he realised he was on a hiding to nothing.

  The simple fact of the matter is some women just don’t get on – and never will. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; we just have the ability to rub each other up the wrong way and create animosity that can never be overcome.

  Jane is the second such person I’ve encountered in my life. The first being Susan Bleakley, who I first developed an instant dislike to at infant school. We ended up following each other right through to the end of our college years and I still want to punch her in the face whenever I catch sight of her when I’m out shopping.

  The thing is, if you asked me to give a reason why we hate each other, I couldn’t give you one – and neither could she.

  A similar situation exists between Jamie’s mother and me. The mutual dislike was there the first time we met and it’s never gone away since.

  …me calling her a bitch probably didn’t help the situation I have to admit.

  Nevertheless, on this particular Tuesday morning I’m desperate, so I pick up the phone and call her…

  Bugger.

  No answer.

  Jane doesn’t work and Jamie’s moaned on several occasions about her relaxed, care-free lifestyle courtesy of his father, so I have to wonder where she might be.

  As their house is only ten minutes drive away (unfortunate in other circumstances, but handy today) I elect to take the gamble that Jane didn’t hear the phone and strap Poppy into her car seat, intent on driving round to find her.

  The car engine makes Poppy scream even more, so I spend ten minutes with my teeth gritted during the drive to the palatial five bedroom house Jamie’s mum and dad own near the waterfront, just outside the city.

  I pull into the driveway and am relieved to see Jan
e’s car.

  ‘Poppy?’ I say to my red-faced daughter. ‘You stay here for a moment while mummy just checks to see if grandma’s home, okay?’ She can’t understand a word I say of course, but she responds anyway with a fresh bout of screaming.

  I’d never normally leave her in the car like this, but it’ll take me mere moments to ring the bell – and I could frankly do with a few seconds peace, if I’m honest.

  At the front door there’s no answer when I press the doorbell.

  I rattle the letterbox, with similar negative results.

  It seems very strange that Jane’s car would be in the driveway, but that she would not be home. Jane drives everywhere. Michael Newman earns a damn good wage as a chiropractor and she intends to spend every penny of it she can, damn it.

  I trot round to the side of the house, open the gate and wander through into the garden. I can still hear Poppy - and the driveway is very secluded - so I’m not worried about her being kidnapped by one of the hoards of paedophiles the papers keep telling us are hiding behind every bush in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Jane?’ I call, passing the heated swimming pool and rounding one corner of the massive conservatory.

  ‘Jane?’ I repeat and reach the conservatory double doors. ‘Jane? Are you ho - ’

  Oh my God.

  Oh my actual God…

  There are sights no person is meant to see. Visions of such magnificent terror it would quail the hearts of the gods themselves.

  A German soldier sitting on the beach in Normandy on June 6th 1944 for instance, seeing the five thousand ships of the allied assault descending on him like the wrath of mankind…

  Or a Japanese woman, tending her garden on March 11th 2011, seeing the wall of water created by the awful tsunami coming straight at her…

  How about an American businessman, buying a bagel on a New York street on September the 11th 2001, looking up to see a plane fly into the World Trade Centre building?

  To these please add Laura Newman, looking through a patio door on this very day in history, seeing her sixty three year old mother-in-law bent over a rattan sofa – her wrinkly arse exposed for the world to see, while a man twenty years her junior and dressed in neon Lycra, thrusts into her from behind - a look of aggressive delight on his face.

  I feel the universe shift on its axis.

  Existence itself teeters on the brink of an abyss.

  I must stop looking…

  I must turn away and run for my very life.

  I must leave before Jane looks up and sees me standing –

  Oh fuck it, she already has.

  I’ve never seen a woman move so fast.

  With a shriek that would rival one of Poppy’s finest, Jane jerks upward. This produces an equally loud squeal of agony from her paramour, thanks no doubt to the fact his penis is bent back painfully as she does so.

  Jane then pushes herself backward, sending the muscle-bound squealer stumbling. He falls, crashing into the forty inch plasma screen TV Michael Newman had bought as a treat to himself, because Jane hogs the fifty inch LCD screen in the living room.

  Jane pulls up her trousers, her eyes never leaving my shocked, ashen face.

  She ignores Lycra boy’s wholesale destruction of the conservatory and rushes in my direction.

  My heart hammers in my chest.

  She’s going to murder me.

  As sure as eggs are eggs, Jane Newman is going to throw open her patio doors and come at me like an enraged honey badger.

  She does indeed throw open the patio doors, but I’m spared a hideous mauling.

  Instead, Jane tries to smile.

  She fails miserably. It looks more like someone’s electrocuting her.

  ‘Hello Laura!’ she says in a voice several octaves above the norm.

  ‘Jane,’ I answer warily. ‘What’s going on?’

  This is a bloody stupid thing to ask. It’s obvious what’s going on. Jane has been getting rather too friendly with her gym instructor. In fact, to borrow a rather unattractive phrase Jamie seems to enjoy trotting out just to irritate me every once in a while, the gym instructor was ‘balls deep and going for gold’ in my mother-in-law – of this there is no doubt.

  I know it.

  Jane knows it.

  The gym instructor - who’s penis I can still see poking out from the zipper in his Lycra shorts – knows it too.

  Jane’s face drops. ‘Oh God Laura. Please don’t tell Michael!’ Her face drops even further. ‘Please don’t tell Jamie! I beg you!’

  Most of me is in deep shock.

  I’m still trying to process what I’ve just stumbled across and the fact that Jane is begging me for mercy doesn’t register for a few moments.

  I stare at her dumb-founded, trying to marshal my thoughts. I’m disgusted, repulsed and horrified in equal measure.

  I’m also entirely unsurprised.

  The whole situation borders on the clichéd: bored older woman married to successful but dull man, has an affair with attractive younger gym instructor.

  It’s a bloody miracle the guy isn’t the pool cleaner, really.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Jane. This is a pretty upsetting thing to see.’ I grimace and look at Jane’s love monkey. ‘And so is your penis, matey-boy. You want to tuck the little champ away now?’

  ‘Nigel!’ Jane shrieks.

  Nigel looks down and realises his penis is still waggling freely in the wind. I have to grudgingly admit that from the size of it Jane has chosen her partner in this sordid little exchange quite well.

  Once Nigel junior is safely tucked away, his owner looks up at me with a sheepish expression on his face. ‘I’m very sorry about this.’

  ‘Not as sorry as you’re going to be if you don’t sod off right now, Nigel,’ I order with a stern expression.

  ‘Yes, you’d better go Nigel,’ Jane says in a meek tone of voice. I have to say it’s one I thoroughly approve of.

  Nigel rushes past me, turning as he leaves. ‘Will I see you at the gym tomorrow, sweetheart?’ he says to Jamie’s mother.

  It’s all I can do to not throw up my breakfast.

  Jane has the decency to go bright red. ‘I don’t know Nigel. After this, I doubt it. Just go away will you!’ The waspish tone with which she dismisses him is far more the Jane I’ve come to know and loathe.

  The gym instructor does as he is bid.

  Once he’s gone I turn back to my mother-in-law. Now the initial shock has passed, I’m formulating some opinions that Jane Newman isn’t going to like one little bit, but sure as hell is going to listen to. What she’s done here is awful. I may not like Michael much either, thanks to his obsession with my breasts, but he doesn’t deserve this.

  And what kind of mother does this to her son as well? Jamie’s going to be heartbroken when I tell -

  Poppy!

  I’ve left Poppy in the fucking car!

  Here I am mentally berating Jane for being a bad parent and I’ve left my baby in the car like a dog.

  ‘You stay right there!’ I bark at Jane.

  Five seconds later I’m opening the car door to find my daughter fast asleep. There’s not a paedophile in sight.

  I carefully unbuckle her and carry her back to the rear of the house.

  Jane starts to babble as I return, but I silence her with a finger to my mouth, holding the car seat up for her to see her sleeping granddaughter.

  What follows is a strange pantomime of me asking Jane where I can put the baby, her eventually cottoning on to what I’m saying, and me tip-toeing through to a downstairs guest room, where I leave Poppy sound asleep.

  I close the door as quietly as possible and slowly walk back through to the conservatory, where Jane awaits.

  With the baby safely squared away for the time being I can deal with the horrors I’ve just witnessed. ‘What the hell are you playing at Jane?’

  She sinks into the couch she was so recently being penetrated over and looks at the broken TV.

 
Then something deeply distressing happens. Jane begins to cry. It’s rather like seeing a sabre-tooth tiger playing with a ball of string.

  ‘I don’t know why I did it Laura!’ she wails. ‘Michael doesn’t come near me anymore. All he cares about is that bloody thing!’ She stabs a finger at the television. ‘Nigel just showed me some attention. One thing led to another and…’

  ‘He’s slipping you a mid-morning length?’

  ‘Yes!’ She starts to cry again. ‘I haven’t felt wanted in years! He… he made me feel special. Can’t you understand that Laura?’

  I had intended to launch into a verbose attack on Jamie’s mum, having been on the end of many a barbed comment and throw-away insult over the years. I was looking forward to getting some payback for all her self obsessed, holier-than-thou bullshit.

  This isn’t that Jane Newman though.

  This is a sad, lost and lonely woman, rapidly descending into her dotage. It’s quite pathetic – and takes the wind out of my sails completely.

  I sit beside her. ‘Yes, I understand. Though he could have made you feel special with a meal and a bottle of wine, Jane. You didn’t have to go straight for the hardcore doggie-style antics.’

  ‘I’m such a fool!’ Jane punches the couch armrest. ‘I’ve ruined everything. You’ll tell Michael and Jamie and everyone’s lives will be destroyed.’

  Aaah…

  So the real Jane Newman starts to re-assert herself.

  Laying this at my door is a masterpiece of deflection. I’m not having it. ‘Don’t bring me into this, Jane. This is your doing. I won’t say anything, but I expect you to have the guts to tell them yourself.’

  I’m not really sure if that’s the right way to play this, but I’m not letting this manipulative harridan paint me into a corner, where I have to be the one to decide whether the truth comes out or not.

  Her eyes narrow. She can see I’ve got her pegged.

  It’s wrong, but a small part of me does an exultant back flip of pride.

  ‘You can’t expect me to tell them.’

  ‘I can and I bloody do. This is your mistake… you deal with it.’