by Helen Walsh
‘So it’s not just me?’
‘Joking, aren’t you? This little madam hasn’t give me forty winks since she was born.’
‘Hah! Seriously? Fuck. Joe just never— has never—’
I still can’t say it. Joe. Will. Not. Sleep. Vicky drops down to her knees, sticks her head inside his buggy.
‘Ah, but look at him! He’s just gorgeous! Aren’t you?’
‘Don’t be fooled. He’s the devil’s spawn.’
‘Ah, darlin’– have you heard what your mam’s saying about you?’
Joe gurgles. I’m shot through with a surge of relief, of ecstasy. I have met someone whose child doesn’t sleep! I want to know everything!
Vicky stands up again, darts a look at the café. The last of the NCT mums is inside, now. She gives me a teasing look, rocks ever so slightly from side to side. ‘So . . . to bunk or not to bunk? That is the question.’
I give the café a once-over. Behind the tinted glass, a silhouette is standing on a chair, opening a window.
‘Haven’t got much choice now, have we?’
The window resists at first, then jerks open. They’ll see us any second.
‘I think we’ve been rumbled.’
Vicky links me around the elbow, and starts pulling me down the path, giggling.
‘Nah – fuck it! Let’s go to ours for a glass of wine!’
* * *
Vicky lives in a spacious 1930s semi with barrel-fronted windows that look out on to a tree-lined avenue whose gutters are still studded with the spiky brown husks of conkers. It’s the kind of house I’d have grown up in if Mum had had her wish. On the little picket gate there’s a sign saying Chat Sauvage and when Vicky lets us in, I have to fight myself not to react to the stench – or stenches. Cat wee, last night’s supper, something damp and mouldy; the house is full of pungent smells. The whole place is chaotic, filthy in places. I almost fall over a Tesco bag that has keeled over in the hallway, spilling out dirty nappies. Vicky just kicks it aside as we step in.
‘Make yourself at home,’ she winks. ‘I’ll go and pop a bottle.’
I wheel Joe into the living room, flooded with winter sunshine, and try to push my anxieties back, but there are cat hairs everywhere. Mindful of the bacteria that must be running rampant on every surface, I gently push his buggy back out to the hallway and leave him sleeping soundly in the porch. And once we’ve walloped our first glass, I stop noticing my surroundings.
‘God! Look at us pair of plonkies! Where did that go?’
She tops up the glasses. Half measures. I give her an eyebrow. She nods to her baby.
‘She’ll be legless, poor thing.’
I laugh. ‘At least we’ll both get some sleep tonight.’ I reach for the bottle, top mine up. The delicious sluice of cold Sancerre slices right through me. I’m giddy and optimistic – happier than I’ve felt in a long, long time. I know the wine is responsible and I know it’s nothing more than a fake head-rush, but so what? I don’t drive, and who wants reality? That’ll be back soon enough. ‘I had no idea you were . . .’
I’m trying to think of an elegant way of saying ‘on your own’. I know it’s wrong but I’m still tingling from the joy of her revelation that there’s no significant other in her life.
‘A fellow saddo?’
I almost yelp with mirth, spitting wine all over her carpet. I laugh, long and hard, physically unable to breathe in.
‘Now look what you’ve made me do! You sad old bitch!’
And she laughs, she throws her head back and shows her teeth – but something has changed. Through the foggy blur of the wine-buzz, I know that something is wrong and, somehow, Vicky is changing gear. Her face has sobered, her eyes are probing mine. Whether with hurt or indignation, I don’t know, but that cheeky sparkle has gone out of her, all of a sudden. She addresses the rug as she speaks.
‘I did get a lot of help from my old man, after Jeffrey left.’ Jeffrey! She had sex with a man called Jeffrey! Serves her right, then. I try to fight back the crater-wide smile that’s threatening to erupt all over my face. Vicky reaches down to the vibrating baby seat where Abigail, her docile and delightful baby, blows bubbles and fixes her wonky gaze on something that doesn’t exist. ‘He did everything for me, Dad. Fixed up the nursery. Took me to all my antenatal classes. Went shopping for baby clothes, the crib, everything you could think of, Dad had thought of it first.’ And I’m trembling here. Out of nowhere I am unable to control the swell of outrage and disbelief and red-hot jealousy. I thought she was like me. I thought I had a friend here. I grip the glass, trying to breathe through the spiteful onslaught of emotions. ‘And as for this place . . . well, we just couldn’t have afforded to get our own place. Simple as that.’
We? So she’s not all alone, then. I clench my fists, but no. It will have to come out. Once again, I can see my lips are moving, but I have no control over the message.
‘I bet he even gets up to her in the night, doesn’t he?’ With an embarrassed smile, she shirks the question and spirits my glass up and away from the table. I lunge out a hand. ‘Hey, I’ve not finished with that.’
She calls back from the hallway. ‘I’ll cork it for later. You should eat something.’
Patronising cow! How dare she?
I attempt to get up, go after her, but my legs are dead-weight from the wine and I’m suddenly overcome by agonising tiredness. I don’t know how long she leaves me sitting here but when I come to the sun has dipped behind the clouds; my anger tamped down to sadness. The aftertaste of the wine feels rancid in my throat, sour on my tongue. I’m sinking here and it’s a real struggle to keep my eyes open.
I’m vaguely aware of Vicky coming in, pulling down the blinds. I force myself wide awake for one moment.
‘There’s nothing fucking cool or glamorous about bringing up a bastard on your own.’
‘Shhhh.’
A blanket being placed across me, the fire lit. I pull myself up again.
‘Sorry.’ I smile up at her through the drugged weight of my eyelids. The motherly creases around the corners of her eyes and the strands of grey slicing up her hair make me feel young and needy and so horribly abandoned for a moment that I start to cry. ‘I miss her.’
‘Who, honey?’
And even if I wanted to there’s nothing I can do to stop the waves crashing over and pulling me down.
*
I wake up, knowing instinctively where I am but not knowing why. It’s dark outside. How long have I slept for? Where is Joe?
On the other side of the wall I can hear plates clanging, laughter. My hair is wet and matted to my face. My tits feel damp. I fumble out for the lamp switch and the clock on the wall bolts me upright.
I get up and, feeling the first splinters of panic in my throat, make my way down the hallway towards the source of noise and light.
* * *
A teenage girl, dainty, pretty and with the same oval grey eyes as Vicky is talking to a man in his early sixties. He’s slender with a shock of white hair and sharp blue eyes like my father’s. His sun-browned arms are dappled with liver spots. The man is holding a spoon to his mouth, hovering over a vat of Scouse. The girl is slicing beetroot. Slowly I creep into the periphery of their vision and they stop talking and turn to take me in – the frightened child, frozen in the doorway of her parent’s room, shaking from the nightmare that woke her, that won’t go away.
The man steps towards me with arms open wide, his face creasing up into one magnificent smile.
‘Ahhh, Rachel! I’m David, Vicky’s father.’
The girl grins at me with small teeth, holds up a hand. ‘Hi. I’m Meg.’
‘Vicky’s sister,’ says her dad, all proud and smug.
‘Where’s Joe?’ I ask.
‘Upstairs, I think. Are you going to stay for tea? It’s nothing—’
I turn tail and leave them, already scaling the stairs two at a time before her old man can finish his sentence.
At the end o
f the landing a little bar of light spills out from under the door. I can hear Vicky now, singing to a baby. And it’s not love or joy that sweeps through me, nor is it plain old relief or guilt. It’s something unpleasant, something instinctual.
‘Vicky?’
‘In here, Sleeping Beauty.’
I push open the door. Vicky smiles up at me, doesn’t break from her song, her head swaying rhythmically to the lullaby on her lips. The baby suckling from her breast is not Abigail. It is my son. My Joe.
I gawp, dumbstruck, unable to move, unable to fathom what I see. Joe’s forearm is resting on her collarbone in easy repose. His little thumb caresses his own palm in ecstasy as he suckles away. She lowers him now so I can see his face. His big slick eyes look right up at her, attentive, content. And all I can do is stand and stare.
Finally, words come.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
An immeasurable silence, filling up the spaces between breaths. Vicky’s face crumples in on itself. So bitterly shocked and hurt is she that I have to step back, take it all in a second time.
‘I . . . God, Rachel . . . I didn’t think. You needed your sleep. He was hungry.’
My instincts don’t waver.
‘You have no right,’ I say. ‘NO right!’
Confused, saddened, but with the noble certainty she’s committed no wrong, she gently, lovingly removes my little man and hands him back. He looks drugged, sated. My baby is happy.
I pass the old man on the stairs; he flattens himself to the wall to let me past. I bundle Joe into the pram, click the brakes off and bodily lift the whole buggy out of Vicky’s porch. And I walk and walk, further and further away from whatever that was, back there. When I come round, we’re sitting in the little derelict park again and I’m staring at the slide where Ruben fucked me, once.
30
Joe is five weeks old. The days grow shorter. The nights are cold and dense. If it wasn’t before, then sleep, or lack of it, has become the lodestar around which my every waking thought orbits. I am obsessed with sleep. I fantasise about it, I ache for it, and down on my knees I beg for it. In those rare and grainy snatches of half-life that now pass for sleep, I dream about it. Its elusiveness beats through my veins like a secondary pulse.
I take to playing a kind of Russian roulette, accosting new mums in the supermarket, the street, and asking after their baby’s sleeping habits so that I can pit them against Joe’s. The answers these interrogations elicit will either elevate me to a state of euphoria or sink me like a stone. When they tell me, No, my baby doesn’t sleep either, I’m socked with a sudden burst of hope and deep raging love for Joe and my heart skips to the beckoning promise of all that lies ahead, all those antenatal fantasies that had me cradling my bump in joyful anticipation – conker-picking in the park, Christmas trips out to Haworth, my doe-eyed little boy dozing softly on my lap on the coach back home as I watch the moon rise – and when I put him down I find myself laughing out loud at the absurdity of our situation, shaking my head in a kind of mocking, affectionate, Well, here’s to another night of hell, Buster!
But then when I’m told, Yeah, sleeps like a dream, eight till eight, has done since the day I brought her home, my heart plummets and I look upon these mothers with the same acid resentment I looked upon the fudge-skinned girls at school, with their perfect little bums and full mouths, and who made me so aware of my own flawed design. I trudge home, sad and bitter, and this time when I heft Joe on to my breast for his final feed of the evening I regard him with pity, wishing him to a different mother, wishing I could turn back time, before one became two.
I try supplementing his final feed of the evening with a few inches of formula and in between feeds I tease watered-down baby rice into his mouth. His gut is too immature for solids and I’m aware of the damage I’m wreaking but I’m desperate now. He puts on weight but still, sleep resists him. He will not sleep.
* * *
I want my daddy. I need him. I need Dad like I’ve never needed him before. I call to invite him round for dinner, leaving as upbeat a message as I can manage. And I’m shot through with a dizzy rush of love for him when he phones back and says: ‘Rachel!’ Then – ‘Are you okay?’
I’m not okay. I’m totally and utterly lost, and I tell him so, more or less.
‘Listen. You come to me,’ he says. ‘Get Joey settled, put your feet up and let me do all the running around. Deal?’
I smile through my tears.
‘Deal.’
I walk Joe down through the park and, even though it’s always been there and even though I’ve been wanting to take him since he was born, it thrashes through me, stops me dead still when I see the lake ahead.
‘Oh my God . . .’
It’s flat and stark and beautiful, cans and plastic bags floating as though laid with utmost care upon, or minutely just above, its surface. The lake. Our lake. It floors me. I drag myself up by the handles of the buggy and swallow hard, suck down one deep draft of dank November air and I march onwards, downwards.
But this is good, being with Dad. Joe keeps to his side of the bargain by nodding off halfway there. There’s something warm and lovely about the dim amber lighting as Dad opens the door to us that immediately makes me calm again and so much more secure. I back the buggy in over the step and push Joe through to the sitting room. Dad starts pouring from a decanter of wine.
‘I’ll leave it just now if that’s okay, Dad.’
‘Oh?’ He turns, disappointed. ‘Come on! I got it in specially for you. It’s your favourite Rioja. You’re allowed one glass, surely? Your mum always did.’
I smile him off.
‘Maybe a bit later. Just let’s make sure the baby isn’t going to give us a hard time first, hey?’
‘Sure thing, kid. You know best.’ I kiss him on top of his head and I can see he’s placated. ‘You just sit tight, there. Put something on. I’m just going to flash-fry the courgettes, and then . . .’
I follow him into the kitchen.
‘I’ll help.’
‘You sure?’
‘Well. Not help help.’ He smiles. ‘But I’ll watch.’
‘Good girl.’
He softens the radio – must be Radio Four, they’re talking about different types of compost – and fishes out a copper pan so worn it’s almost silver. The centrepiece of their kitchen is a clunky old range – black, solid iron – and seeing it reminds me of Jan. I lean the small of my back against it, facing Dad.
‘Dad?’
‘Darling?’
I can feel my voice receding. I clear my throat, but it’s barely a whisper when it comes out.
‘I’m really sorry about Jan.’
He hesitates.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes, you do.’
He disappears into the pantry, comes back with a splendid, fat courgette. He forces a kindly smile.
‘Well. We all say things we don’t mean.’
‘I know, but nonetheless.’
He sighs, begins chopping quickly and expertly. I didn’t know my Dad could slice veg like Jamie Oliver!
‘She only really gave me the gist of it. She deleted the message before I got a chance to . . .’
‘Dad.’
‘Let’s say no more about it.’
‘Okay. But two things. I’m really, really sorry. Yes?’
‘Accepted. Thing two?’
I shake my head.
‘I really, really have not been sleeping. At all.’
Dad places the knife down on the chopping board and removes his spectacles.
‘Why didn’t you say?’
He comes over, puts his arms around me and cradles my head. I speak into his chest.
‘Because I didn’t . . . I don’t want to go running to people with every little mishap or quibble.’
‘People? Darling – I’m your father!’
‘I know, I know. But you know.’
He steps back, goes to tur
n down the heat on the front burner.
‘Your Mum had that. Dreadfully. With you.’
I squeeze an apologetic smile.
‘How on earth did she cope? How did you?’
He chuckles at the recollection.
‘Phenergan.’
‘Finnegan?’
‘Knockout drops.’
He turns, starts scooping up the sliced courgette and transferring it to the pan. There’s a delicious sizzle as it hits the hot butter. ‘Well, it was supposed to be a decongestant, I think. But let’s just say that Phenergan helped put you to sleep – when we really needed it!’ He gives the pan a little shake, moves the courgettes around with a wooden spatula before snapping off the heat, leaving the pan on the burner for the last few seconds. He winks at me. ‘Now you just go and sit down, young lady. Dinner is served. Almost!’
I hear him, but I’m not listening. I run upstairs and, with desperate excitement and fear, I haul out the old shoebox and scrabble my way through the photographs. And there it is. There she is. A beautiful young lady smiling, so happy, next to my dapper young father. The girl from down by the river.
‘You’ll be fine, love. Really. It’ll all be fine.’
* * *
I’m deaf to Dad’s pleas to run us home. I want to walk. We have to walk.
‘If that’s what you want, honey.’
I nod.
‘Honestly.’
‘Very well.’
He pauses, gives me an anxious smile.
‘I thought we might take Joe on the ferry.’
The idea fills me with a weird exaltation.
‘Yes! When?’
‘Soon.’
‘Supposed to be a cold snap coming, isn’t there?’
‘So much the better. Your mother loved the river most at its least hospitable.’
I kiss him, zip myself tight and head off into the night. Joe is still asleep and the river fog enshrouds us, its salty spray giving off the stink of tar. Still, I park the buggy and take a seat on the bench. The bench where Mum was. Way upriver, a foghorn sounds, sinister yet self-confident, like the lowest note of a cathedral organ.
‘Mum? Mum, come and see me.’
