Erin switches the white-noise machine on. A facsimile of a hairdryer fills the room though she can still make out the sound of Amanda’s singing. But the window’s closed. The tune must have got stuck in her head. She closes her eyes and pictures Amanda, cross-legged on the pulled-out sofa bed, eyes closed, singing. Her dress now a brilliant white tunic, a crown of shells in her hair. Erin smiles to herself.
Her mum always used to say that when you’re a parent of young kids, it’s best to have people around as much as possible because it forces you, the parents, to be nice to each other. Perhaps Amanda’s presence, her self-possession, her Zen-calm, will bring a counter-melody into their house that will bring Erin and Raf’s relationship back to some kind of harmony. With a guest around, she might be a bit more judicious with her phone use, something she knows he’s really struggling with. Perhaps having Amanda here will force them to inject some brio into their everyday interactions and sharpen some of the flatness that Raf seems to have projected towards her since Bobby was born. He didn’t seem flat tonight. He seemed heightened, on point.
Erin’s exhausted. She’s been thinking about putting her head to this pillow, of being alone in her bed, since she dragged herself out from under the embrace of the faux-fur coverlet inside her yurt this morning. But she can feel the buzz behind her eyes. The flickering LED dots in her head of all those unanswered messages, all those people demanding she engage with them. She pulls her phone up out of the covers from where it was, clenched in her hand next to her collarbone, sits up against the headboard and sparks it into life.
6
Bobby sneezes and two thick trails of snot spurt out of his nose with such alacrity that the shock makes him burst into tears. Erin apologises to a mum she’s talking to whose name she can’t remember, gets down on her knees and hoists Bobby up from the gym matting into her arms. She wanders away from the people she’d just been telling about her digital detox retreat over to her stuff. She roots around the compartment under her #gifted buggy but she can’t find any tissues. How can she never remember something as fundamental as tissues? She looks over to a circle of bearded dads, a number of whom she knows to say hello to, and wills one of them to sense her plight and come and help, but they’re too busy laughing at their toddlers scrapping in front of them like tiny gladiators.
She glances around the church hall, polystyrene ceiling tiles and walls of corkboards laden with colourful flyers for colourful church events. Bobby’s mewling is obviously not drilling into anyone else’s temples because no one seems to have noticed. Abi, a ruddy-cheeked local mum who lives up near the library, glances at Erin, widens her eyes in sympathy before turning back to a lady who resembles a pumped-up Dolly Parton whose legs two toddlers seem to be trying to topple like Samson in the temple. This group used to be one or two grannies on childcare duty and a dozen or so beleaguered local mothers, but since Erin posted about it a month or two ago it’s become almost unbearably busy with most of the former attendants crowded out by a flood of down-from-London migrants and their exotically named children.
The old dear, Megan, who helps out at the group, arrives at her shoulder with a huge box of tissues. Erin wipes Bobby’s nose despite him trying to dodge the tissue like an amateur boxer, but as she goes again to pinch a rogue trail that she missed before, she clunks the back of his head with her wrist. He arches his body. There’s a moment of deafening silence before he erupts into an indignant scream. Erin swallows and holds her eyelids shut hard for a moment as heat flushes all over her skin.
When she opens her eyes it feels like the whole room is now looking at her. She summons a wide smile and gives eye-rolls to anyone who makes direct eye contact with her. She notices Sophie Delauney (6.4k followers), a heroin-chic twenty-eight-year-old singer with eighteen-month-old Abel and a tiny beach-ball pregnant belly, standing with her gaggle of music-scene friends. One of them, Kristina, glances over at her. Erin puts Bobby up in front of her, tries to make him dance his legs around, just as Amanda did yesterday, but the screams don’t abate. She mimes pulling the trigger of an imaginary gun at her temple for anyone still watching. Kristina grimaces; another mum, Amina maybe, wrinkles her brow in disgust, making Erin instantly regret the gesture.
She cradles Bobby into her and makes a shhing, soothing sound, but she may as well be singing the cucaracha to the boy for all the difference this show of mothering ever makes with him. Bobby screamed when he first came into the world and it feels like he hasn’t stopped since. Erin’s convinced he doesn’t like her. And sometimes, particularly times like this when she just can’t seem to stem the flow of his anguish, she’s not sure how much she likes him. Something for which she wears a near-constant millstone of guilt around her neck. He’s her baby, she loves him, she’s meant to love him. But it’s not easy to love a wailing ball of rage.
Glowing red filament heaters rain artificial heat down on the hall. She wishes her friend Caz was here. Caz used to come to this group with her before it became a cool ‘hangout’. Caz would just whisk Bobby out of the room and somehow bring him back calm. Caz has a son a couple of years older than her daughter Imogen so Caz knows how to be a mother.
Erin decides to do what her friend would do. She grits her teeth as she forces the bucking Bobby into the straps of his buggy. As the screaming carriage parts the Red Sea of people on its journey towards the exit, every parent turns and gives Erin a look of commiserative support. She responds to them with comical eyebrows, apologetic waves at not having had a chance to catch up, an ironic thumbs up. To them she’s breezy, chilled out about Bobby screaming, nailing it, for those that follow her Instagram, very much on brand. They have no idea that, now she’s outside on her own in a battery of cold air and the boy’s shrieks are even louder than before, if someone offered her a flight to the other side of the world right now, she might just hand Bobby to Raf and get a cab to the airport.
She pushes the buggy down the road towards the sea. Clouds sit low in the sky and the air, pregnant with the threat of rain, clenches around her like a cold hand. Erin tries to take her mind to a place of Zen as Bobby’s cries become gurgled up with the phlegm he never seems to be able to shift. Has he got enough clothes on? she thinks. Is this my fault? Do I take him out too much? It’s fucking January by the sea. I’m such a selfish bitch, she thinks. She’s doing the calming breathing she got off a YouTube video someone posted in her comments but it’s having the opposite effect and she feels near hyperventilation and she’s reminded of her panic attack. No, she thinks to herself, I’m fine, Bobby’s just hard, it’s teeth, it’s reflux, it’s a phase, this isn’t me, there’s nothing wrong with me. She looks through the clear window in the buggy’s hood. Bobby’s little round head is beetroot-coloured and he’s thrown his blanket off.
She gets to the promenade, having to shove the right-hand wheel of the buggy hard over a protruding mound of concrete from where someone has driven into a metal bollard, and the jolt, or it could be the sea view, seems to calm Bobby momentarily.
She glances over at the greasy spoon cafe to her left populated by the blue-rinse brigade. The stinking wheelie bin dedicated to dogshit that stands by the steps to the beach. The middle-aged man giving his crumbling beach hut a coat of brown paint. She puts her hand on her phone in her coat pocket. She could do something for her stories. Talk about how challenging Bobby’s being, talk about how when he screams it makes her insides feel like they’ve been thrown into a deep-fat fryer. She could weep into the collar of her coat. But she won’t. Grace Fentiman, an influencer’s agent she’s been talking to, said that her sunny, funny tales of new motherhood by the seaside are exactly what the world needs right now. The sky is grey, the sea is grey, the air is heavy with the stench of rotting seaweed. Sunny, funny.
Bobby rears up his footmuff and coughs out the beginnings of a new bout of crying. Erin pushes the buggy roughly to the right, onto the small bridge that goes over an inlet. Machine-gun bursts of agony still. Maybe his underdeveloped digestive system isn�
��t coping with the feed she gave him forty minutes ago, but even though she knows it’s wrong, Erin can’t help but blame Bobby for how insane his screams make her feel. Her phone is in her hand now. She scrolls through Instagram. Unreal sunlight of people on holiday, the elegant tones of magazine-worthy interiors, minimalist plates of work-of-art food.
In the distance she sees a woman she knows, Lorna Morgan, walking along the promenade towards them with her mother-ship double buggy and accompanied by her daughter, Clara, bedecked in head-to-toe hot pink, on a Barbie-pink scooter. Lorna, the twins and their older sister are all identical. Very pink skin. The same length straw-blonde hair. Their shoulders go straight into their heads and whenever Erin sees them all together she has to try very hard not to think of Tennessee Williams’s description of children – no-necked monsters.
Erin hides her phone under the buggy’s handle as they approach and puts on a blank expression, a hint of a lazy smile even, as if her son’s screams are water off a duck’s back. As they pass, Lorna creases her face at Erin in some pretence of concern. Erin smiles and walks on. Erin’s pretty sure Lorna doesn’t like her much, but at this moment in time, she’s struggling to care about it.
Thirty seconds onwards she pulls the buggy’s cover back. Bobby’s face almost fluorescent, more and more mucus sludging out of his face. She looks around her before shaking the buggy, hoping to surprise him into silence. Another howl. Stress billows around her head like someone’s set off a flare. Erin swallows, looks round to see Lorna heading away, far in the distance. She darts her eyes around the beach to see if anyone’s looking before picking up the pace, driving the buggy uphill onto a grassy mound, the fronts of her shoes slipping slightly in the mud. She pockets her phone. Both hands on the buggy. Bobby splutters, the cries going to a higher register, more strained now but just as forceful. Her head feels like it’s going to burst. She shakes the buggy again. More screaming. Shakes it again with such ferocity she almost lifts it off the ground.
She stops. Comes round to face Bobby, kneels down on the wet ground and tries to get her hands round her baby to pull him out. But he’s still strapped in. She attempts to twist him around his restraints but he buckles in the opposite direction.
‘Fuck,’ she intones up to the darkening sky. Then someone’s there. A burgundy flash comes between her and the buggy.
‘Have a breather. There you go, lovely boy.’ Erin blinks round to see Amanda clicking Bobby out of the buggy and into her arms. She wraps her maroon coat around the boy, who’s arching his back away from her like Alien trying to burst out of her body. Erin wheels away towards the sea, does exactly as she’s told and takes a moment. In the periphery she can hear Bobby ramping down a little, bursts of pained crying becoming further apart. Erin presses the tips of her fingers into her eye sockets but her skin is still vibrating as the stress courses out into the air.
A black dog races across her eyeline on the beach. She turns back to Amanda who’s wearing tight yoga pants and trainers under her coat. She’s dipping her head behind the collar of her coat, playing a game of peekaboo that’s confusing Bobby into calm.
‘You OK?’ Amanda asks as Erin returns.
‘Fine now, thanks.’ Erin’s embarrassed, not sure how much Amanda saw. There’s warmth in her eyes so hopefully she came along at the end and didn’t see her shaking the buggy. Erin offers her hands to take Bobby back.
‘It’s OK,’ Amanda says, pulling Bobby towards her, going in for a mock bite on his neck. ‘Sometimes you need someone else to take over for a minute. That sort of screeching, it’s so much worse for the mums. It’s evolutionary. Like a bolt of lightning. Meant to make sure mum stops everything she’s doing to help baby.’ Erin thinks of herself scrolling through Instagram, trying to numb herself to her baby’s screams. Guilt pinions her deep in the gut. ‘When we were back in caves though, poor mums had all the other women around to help out when it got too much. Not having to deal with little demons like you, all on their own.’ She nuzzles into Bobby’s nose as she says this to him. ‘Your mumma needs a break I’d say.’
‘I’m fine,’ she says and Amanda nods, examines her, seeming to look at the space around her, weaving her head in the air like a dancing python.
‘I know,’ Amanda says to the boy, with enough meaning for Erin to think that perhaps she saw a bit more than she thought. Rain starts to dot Amanda’s coat. ‘Shall we head back?’ she says, taking control.
Erin clenches her hands, feels nails press into flesh as she and Amanda walk past the three newly built houses where builders call to each other under a flapping blue tarpaulin. She’s lost her temper before with Bobby. She’s never done anything that would hurt him. But being caught at that level of chaos, that pitch where you’ve lost control of what’s considered normal, civil, with your own child, is chilling to experience. Like someone listening in on your darkest thoughts.
‘Are you doing anything for you?’ Amanda asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Acupuncture, meditating, yoga, a hot bath even.’
Erin smiles. ‘No time. Nice idea though.’
‘You’ll be amazed how much more you’ll appreciate him if you’ve had a break.’ Erin clunks the empty buggy up the kerb and onto the pavement of her road, Bobby still cocooned inside Amanda’s coat.
‘Do you have kids?’ Erin asks. She assumed she doesn’t because she’s here on her own, but perhaps they’re at home with her husband or ex-husband.
‘I was a teaching assistant for a while, been a childminder for years, babysitting as well. Even the hardest kids I’ve had, the real pain-in-the-posterior ones, once you’ve had some time away from them, you realise they’ve always got their hooks in you, energetically speaking. It’s only when you see them again, you feel how much you’ve missed them, how much you need them.’ Amanda’s gooey eyes are fixed on Bobby. Her words make Erin wonder whether there’s something wrong with her because she didn’t feel a surge of gladness when she was handed her baby last night. When she looked down at his closed eyes as he fed first thing this morning it didn’t feel like he had his energetic hooks in her, it didn’t feel like there was anything between them. But he’s chained to her, stuck with her poor boy. ‘Anyway, it’s just a thought. What do I know?’ Amanda says as Bobby places a hand on her freckled cheek. A lot more than I do, Erin thinks.
She clicks the brake of the buggy and goes to open her front door. Amanda flicks her rain-darkened hair into Bobby’s face and it looks like he might actually be enjoying it. Erin’s phone buzzes in her pocket. The long vibration of an email. Something lights up in her at the thought of some news, something tantalising from the outside world and Amanda catches it. She looks at the baby and back at Erin then she bursts into a beaming smile, eyes moistening. Erin swallows spit, ashamed, because she was excited to get an email and Amanda thought the three of them were having a moment.
7
22 October 1998
Had the shock of my life this afternoon. I came home from school and there, in my kitchen, sipping on a glass of ice water, was Donny. He was wearing overalls that were spattered with lilac paint.
He said he’d been going house-to-house offering to do a little decorating on the cheap and Mum had said that the front fence needed a going over. I asked him if he knew I lived here and, although he said no, I think he kind of did. A few days ago he said he needed to see me outside of school, but I knew, with Craig being like he is, that might be difficult for us, so now he’s here. It’s so romantic.
When Mum came back in from the garden, I went straight upstairs to do my homework because I was sure I wouldn’t be able to hide the connection that’s growing between us. It feels so strong, so intense, even though Mum’s not exactly the most switched on in terms of reading energies, I just know she’d sense it. But I watched him from my room. He painted the fence with meticulous strokes, took time over it, prepared his tools before moving to each section. He didn’t look up at my window, not once, even though he must
have known I was there. Not until Craig came back from work, and when he glanced up at me watching down, Donny’s eyes followed and we looked at each other for a second before I ducked into the shadows of my room. I expected Craig to tell him to go home but, I don’t know how Donny did it, he must have told him a joke or something, which he never does with me, because Craig looked like he didn’t mind him. And when Craig saw how good a job Donny had done on the fence, he seemed happier than I’ve seen him for ages, which is still barely smiling, but still.
Since he moved in with me and my mum two years ago, Craig’s always warned me off boys, told me I’m too young, that they’re all out for the same thing. But Donny isn’t like that. Craig hasn’t got the capacity to understand the purity of what’s developing between him and me. But seeing the two of them together in the yard, Craig not telling him to ‘piss off’ instantly, gives me hope that one day, maybe, we can let our devotion to each other shine out in the open.
8
‘He OK?’ Erin peeps over the beautifully ornate wrap-scarf that’s tying her baby boy into Amanda’s chest.
‘He’s watching the world go by. Go walk over there.’ Amanda shoos Erin off with a schoolmistressy finger-point. Erin accepts her mock castigation with a smile and almost skips over a rock to walk closer to the shoreline. Amanda found Erin after Bobby’s nap and almost forced her to come out for a walk on the beach. It’s not that she didn’t want to go, but wearing Bobby in their structured sling for any longer than five minutes gives Erin the shooting hip pain she’s had ever since giving birth to the huge-headed little man. She also didn’t fancy spending an hour pretending she was chill while Bobby clambered and scratched at her trying to get out, which was his current mood when it came to being in any form of transport apart from her arms. So Amanda offered to take him. She went to the studio to grab a scarf she had and, like an illusionist doing some kind of disappearing act, wrapped Bobby onto her front and they set off.
The Family Friend Page 3
