by Fiona Gibson
While he kicks on the bed, delighted with his nakedness, I lay out miniature clothing. Obviously I can’t put him in anything knitted by Constance. The range includes frilly-collared sweaters from which Ben’s head pops out as if emerging from a cake, and knitted coats called matinee jackets, even though it will be years before he goes to the cinema. I might have considered one of Constance’s plainer creations, but all have puckered seams and gaping buttonholes. They appear to have been knitted on forks.
I ease his pliable body into a plain white all-in-one. He gazes at me, clearly of the opinion that I am some remarkable human being. Sometimes I wondered why he likes me so much.
The buzzer sounds. My cab has arrived early deliberately to catch me in a state of undress. To save time, I consider pulling on outer clothing over my dressing gown. But what if I arrive at the studio with the cord dangling at the back, like a tail? Eliza would worry that I have deteriorated from merely sounding hollow to being unable to dress myself. It’s a short step from wearing your bra on top of your coat.
The buzzer sounds again, repeatedly, as if being pressed by a child. A singsong voice calls: “Neee-na. It’s us. We’re back.”
I open the door. A tricycle hovers at eye level, its rusting frame flecked red and blue. Frayed washing line lashes a wicker basket to the handlebars.
“She forgot we were coming,” says Dad.
“Of course I didn’t forget.”
“Let’s see him then,” says Mum, tottering past me. “What is he now, three weeks?”
“Two months.”
“Gosh,” says Dad, “how did that happen?” He places the tricycle on the floor, pointing it towards Ben.
“Thanks, it’s lovely.”
“We didn’t know what to give you, did we, Jack?” says Mum. “Thought you’d have everything already.”
To ensure a respectable distance between herself and Ben—presumably to minimize any risk of being asked to hold him—Mum rests her bottom on the suede cube. She is wearing a snagged lemon skirt which she tweaks with insecty fingers. “He’s like you,” she says, peering down at him. “Like you when you were that age.”
Occasionally something happens to remind me that I am the result of an unspeakable act involving the coupling of my parents. Mostly, though, our family tree twigs seem wrongly connected; a line might link me to Mum but it was surely a slip of the pen. I can see where I’m coming from with Dad; we share weighty noses, an all-over doughiness and slump into chairs, knees thrust apart. Mum’s narrow brown legs are pressed tightly together. She has pinned up her peppery hair with a smattering of plain brown kirby grips, the kind you buy at the chemists, 15p for several hundred.
“How was France?” I ask.
“Nothing done to the house, of course,” says Dad. “Damp seeping into the back bedroom. Terrible smell.”
Mum splutters, stops a laugh with yellowing fingers. “We bought Camembert and you know, with the damp and stuffiness, I went to take a piece off it and the whole thing—” her dainty shoulders quiver “—was a mass of teeny white weevils.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to eat cheese?” I remind her. Mum sees Ashley, an alternative practitioner of dubious pedigree. He has advised her to banish gluten, dairy products and citrus fruits from her diet and sends her home after each visit with huge, flecked tablets, possibly intended for horses. She sticks the horse pills to her forehead with tape. It’s for her brain blockage, Ashley says. He’s worried about her brain.
“If I can’t have a nibble of Camembert in France—” she says, tetchily.
“Don’t you think you should sell the place?” I suggest. “It’s a liability.”
“Oh, no,” says Dad. “It’ll all come together eventually.”
Several years ago, on a driving holiday in Western France, my parents noticed a crumbling structure slumped at the end of an overgrown lane. Any sensible adult would have driven swiftly onwards to Dijon and booked into a snug hotel. My mother made Dad perform a reckless U-turn and check that the house was as awful close up.
The English owners invited them in. They had intended to transform the rotting heap into a lucrative holiday let until their drunken stupors wore off and they wisely decided to hurry home to a centrally heated town house in Holland Park. It was meant to be, my mother said. She failed to notice that, as the house hugged a grassy bank, it will forever be a stinking pile unless someone removes the hill.
This does not appear to concern my parents. The decaying property provides a handy excuse to amble to and from Burgundy, checking that the heap of slates has still not been arranged to form a new roof but is simply becoming a little more moss-covered with each visit. “The garden’s looking wonderful, though,” adds Dad. “We brought you back some rosemary. Did we leave it in the car, Kate?”
“Mmm,” murmurs Mum, inhaling deeply. I suspect she wants a cigarette. Ashley doesn’t know she smokes. He can’t understand why the blockages aren’t clearing or what makes his pendulum rotate in an alarming anti-clockwise manner when he dangles it over her lungs.
“I’m just popping out to the garden,” she says.
“Mum, I’m sorry, I should have remembered and let you know, but this isn’t a very good time to—”
Ben gives a little squeak.
“Gosh, hello!” says Dad.
“Would you like to hold him?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Would you like a cuddle, Mum?”
She makes for the door, scrabbling in her tasseled shoulder bag for a lighter.
Ben cries shrilly. “Does he do that a lot?” asks Dad. He sinks into the chair, trying to melt through the soft leather to a place where there are only springs and stuffing and no spluttering infant.
Smoke meanders in through the open front door. “There’s a man here,” says Mum. “He keeps saying Lavender Hill. He looks awfully cross.”
Remembering that I am still wearing a dressing gown, I dump Ben on Dad’s lap and hurry to the bedroom.
“Will you be long?” he calls pleasantly.
“Pop him over your shoulder and walk up and down.”
“The man says he was told to pick you up at ten-thirty,” shouts Mum. “What does he want?”
I tumble out of the bedroom, flinging items essential for Ben’s survival into the baby-changing bag. “Sorry, Dad, but we’re due on this shoot thing with Eliza.”
“This what?” asks Mum, grinding her cigarette into the doorstep with the toe of her shoe. Ben arches stiffly, writhing in Dad’s arms.
“Here, let me take him.” I scoop up Ben, allowing him a couple of seconds’ false hope that he is about to be cuddled, then slam him into the car seat. “It’s for Eliza’s magazine,” I say over my shoulder. “They want a baby as a, as a…”
I belt Ben’s seat into the minicab. Dad eases himself in beside it.
“A sort of prop?” suggests Mum, exhaling fag breath as she shimmies into the front seat.
5
Your Sociable Baby
The cab rattles to a halt in a cobbled alley scented with a pedal-bin stench from the canal. My parents bound out of the car. “So,” says Dad, “this is where these photographers do their pictures. You’d never think it.”
I have met plenty of photographers but not the kind who work for glossy magazines. When a “real” person was having their photograph taken for Promise, we called upon someone from a local paper—your man at the Cherrow and Spalding Advertiser—who, while not obviously grubby, appeared as if certain nooks and crannies would benefit from closer inspection. I encountered one of these photographers while interviewing a woman from Hull who had given birth while still wearing her leggings. She hadn’t known she was pregnant.
The photographer winced as she plugged the roaring baby on to its bottle. “It’s all pretty tragic, isn’t it?” he whispered. He had a glossy, oval face, like an olive.
Our hostess peeled cling wrap from a plate of grated cheese sandwiches and set them on the smallest table fr
om a nest of three. “So,” she said, “are you stopping the night in Hull?”
“God, no,” said the photographer. “I’m on the next train back to Leeds. Got tickets for a-ha’s comeback tour.”
Which struck me as more tragic than carrying a baby to full term and being blissfully unaware of it.
Smoke shoots from Mum’s nostrils as she crams in a fag before being forced indoors again. The receptionist glances up from a chaotic desk. Her inky hair is secured in sticky-out bunches with cheap plastic hair bobbles. An owl pencil case rests by the sticker-covered phone.
“Model?” she rasps, jet eyebrows scooting upward.
“Not me, I’m here to—”
“The baby. It’s for the shoot, yeah?”
I nod, hoping she realizes we’ve been forced into this. Her eyes shoot to the left, indicating that I should proceed through a battered swing door. I nudge it with my backside and swing Ben’s car seat into a vast, chilly studio, the heavy-breathing specter of my parents behind me.
The state of Eliza’s hair suggests that the shoot is not running smoothly. It slumps around her face, weighed down by anxiety. “Greg’s having a tizz,” she whispers. “Stay out of his way until he’s ready for you.”
“It’s not what I wanted,” snaps the photographer. “Not the color we talked about.”
“I thought you wanted blue,” says a hollow-faced boy holding a paint roller.
“I said turquoise. A diluted, wishy-washy, rained-on turquoise.”
The assistant’s roller drips onto the studio floor.
“He’s painted the cove the wrong color,” hisses Eliza. “Greg’s not pleased. He’s very particular—that’s why he’s so good.” She holds an iron and a flimsy dress of pale lobster hue. Things are not looking good on the color front.
“What’s a cove?” I ask.
“Infinity cove. That curvy wall. It’s supposed to be blue.”
“It is blue,” protests the assistant. He has knobbly elbows. His green eyes look disappointed with life. A small, snuffly dog pads through a spillage of paint and cranes upward to sniff his crotch. The assistant teeters back, clearly not having the authority to bat the quivering animal away from his toileting region.
Greg tries a gentler tone. “I said pale, Dale. Almost pastelly. Like last time.”
“It is pale.”
“It is pale, yeah, but I wanted really fucking intense.”
A balding man carrying a tray of oozing pastries pauses to glance at the cove, imagining, perhaps, his own particular shade of blue, but is interrupted midthought by Greg, bellowing, “I wanted fucking larkspur, Dale.” This outburst prompts Ben’s eyes to ping open and his face to crumple and deepen to a subtle, yet really fucking intense shade of fuchsia.
I hadn’t realized how many bodies are required to create a photograph of a girl in a limp, sleeveless dress. “And they wanted, like, glossy lips,” the makeup artist tells a dressing room jammed with assorted persons, all busily patting knitwear. “I told them no. I don’t do glossy. If you want glossy you have totally the wrong makeup artist.”
“Nightmare,” agrees the hairdresser. He has triangular sideburns and is combing something snotlike—possibly serum—through the model’s marmalade hair. “You’re only trying to be creative and say something.”
Several weightless women tut sympathetically and tear into the pressing task of arranging necklaces in perfect oval shapes on the cluttered dressing table. Perhaps these are Eliza’s assistants: Collator of Shoes, Editor in Chief of Accessories.
Ben mews timidly from his car seat.
“Is that yours?” asks the hairdresser. “It must be sweet, having a baby.”
“Oh, it is.”
“Ahh. Anyway, I was thinking of messing this up and leaving it rough-looking for texture, what do you think?”
“I think my baby’s too young for that,” I cackle.
No one laughs. The model blinks slowly on to the mascara wand, regarding me with uncertain eyes.
My parents have settled themselves on an L-shaped sofa. Mum coils herself on the black leather, snuggling into its creases as if it were a nest. She fiddles with an untidy heap of model cards, each depicting a headshot of a girl on the front, and a variety of poses on the back. She can smoke as much as she likes and blows out quick puffs, as if learning to whistle. Dale brings my parents coffee in trembling plastic cups.
“Mum,” I say. “Ben needs feeding.”
“Oh. I might have some barley sugars in my bag.”
“He doesn’t have barley sugars. He has milk. I’ll need to heat it up.” I consider asking her to locate the kitchen while I comfort Ben, then decide against it. She might blunder outside and drop his bottle into the canal or, if she located a source of hot water, heat it to such a temperature that it would strip his throat lining. Sometimes I wondered how I scrambled through babyhood without being singed or horribly damaged. I carry Ben to reception to ask where I might warm a bottle. “A what?” says the girl, fixing her bunches.
“Baby’s milk.”
She scowls as if I’d asked her to express fluid manually from her own, upwardly-mobile breasts. “Prrr, I don’t know. Maybe hold it under the hand dryer?”
“It won’t—” I begin, but she has returned to the urgent matter of grooming her owl pencil case.
I carry Ben, now rigid with misery, into the dressing room. Four lit cigarettes teeter on an ashtray. There must be a kitchen; what about the tempting snacklets Eliza talked about? Trays bearing edibles appear briefly and are carried swiftly by the balding man to another studio.
“Poor baby,” says the model. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Maybe it’s got a pain,” suggests the makeup artist. “An ear infection, don’t babies get that? Is anything pussy coming out?”
I ease Ben over my shoulder and bounce gently.
“Urr, he’s puked,” says the model. The Managing Director of Earrings swipes at my cardi with a cotton wool ball, leaving a streak of white fluff. At each inhalation, Ben’s abdomen pulls sharply in on itself. I wondered if it is possible for an infant to implode through sheer grief.
“Isn’t there a kettle?” I say desperately.
The model sucks black coffee through a straw so as not to dislodge her lipstick and points to a corner of the dressing table. High Priestess of Hosiery tries—unsuccessfully—to stab its plug into the socket. “Now how do you work this thing?”
The small dog yelps, scratching the concrete floor. Greg turns up the music. It’s dance music, which you need a birthdate in the eighties to understand. Although the kettle has been switched on, little appears to be happening. To stopper Ben’s mouth—and expecting him to reject it immediately—I jam the bottle between his lips. He sucks experimentally, pulls off in disgust, then decides that fridge-cold milk is preferable to fruitless howling.
“Let’s party,” says Greg. He dances, arms bouncing like inner tubes. “Where’s my model? Fern, are you ready?”
Fern steps out of the dressing room, smiling weakly. “I thought there was a guy in the shot. Weren’t we waiting for a guy?”
“There he is,” says Greg, indicating Ben.
“I mean a man.”
“The male model hasn’t shown up,” explains Eliza. “He’s in a band, doesn’t really want to model at all. We were lucky to book him actually.”
It strikes me as a weird kind of lucky when he hasn’t even bothered to show up. But at least he’d agreed to the job in principle. Eliza seems grateful for this. “We should wait another half hour,” she says. “It’s the whole point of the shot—girl, guy, baby. Kind of slutty looking.”
“Slutty?” I say. This term hadn’t featured when Eliza first mentioned the shoot.
“The idea is, they’re dressed up and spaced out but pissed off because they’re stuck at home with a baby.”
“They could have booked a baby-sitter,” I suggest.
“It’s not literal. Just a feel.”
“And what do you w
ant Ben to wear for this slutty thing?”
“His suit’s a bit naff. Just a nappy, I reckon. We don’t want him widdling all over that dress. So if you could strip him off while we wait for our guy—”
“Let’s get on with it,” says Greg. “I’m not hanging around for that arsehole.”
Dale lumbers up beside me, jaws pounding a pastry. “The guy’s not really a model,” he explains, “but that’s what they all say, you know? That’s a nice baby you’ve got.”
“Why do they say that?” I ask.
Dale shrugs. Perhaps there is something unsettling about making a living solely from one’s appearance. It’s not as though you’ve had much to do with it. Your genetic makeup is down to your parents; by rights, your earnings should be dispatched directly to Mum and Dad. Maybe that’s why models are quick to point out that they’re only doing it for a bit. You can’t do that with motherhood: pretend it’s not what you do really. The baby certainly knows who his mother is. You can’t pass yourself off as a casual baby-sitter who’ll be off, clutching a couple of tenners, when the real mum and dad teeter back from the pub.
Fern hovers before the blue background, her arms cradled, awaiting a baby to fill them.
“Mum,” says Greg with a finger snap. “We’re ready.”
I have become Universal Mum, devoid of name or, come to think of it, the promised goat cheese pastries.
“He’s asleep.”
“For how long?”
“An hour, maybe more. He tends to go off late morning after a bottle, though sometimes he needs a jiggle in his pram and then—”
“Mum, we’re doing a shoot. We are ready.”
While it is acceptable for an adult male not to show up for work, an eight-week-old baby is not allowed to sleep at naptime. I pass Ben to Fern. He opens his eyes momentarily, apparently content with this substitute mother.
“It’s not working,” says Eliza. “We need a man. Let’s have someone stand in, any old guy, so Greg gets into his head what the shot’s about.”
“What is it about?” murmurs Mum, scattering ash onto a model card.
Eliza’s eyes roam the studio.
