Ghiie288 How do your children ever see you? You’re always mooning around like a teenager. Mums should be at home looking after their children. Disgusting.
11
Erin’s key trips to the side of the lock. It’s seven forty-five and she’s had a premix G and T on the train to celebrate signing with her agent. A couple in fact, on top of the prosecco or two she had at the studio when Grace showed up. She puts her phone back in her coat pocket and tries the door again. The key slides home, but when she goes to turn it, it sticks. For a moment she thinks the locks have been changed before she gives it a wiggle and lets herself in. She drops her bag down onto what was a pile of coats behind the door, but it clatters onto the laminate flooring. The coats have been hung up somewhere else.
The house is charged with the pungent smell of a Middle Eastern souk. Cooking spices mixed with some kind of citrus aroma, lime or lemongrass. The hallway is dark, the living room dimmed. There’s a candle she’s never seen before flickering on the hall table, the mirror behind creating its double. This doesn’t feel like her house.
She hears movement upstairs. Raf must be giving Bobby a bath. His responses to her multitude of texts about leaving the baby with Amanda, checking that he was OK with her doing the podcast, telling him what time she was going to be back, have been uniformly utilitarian. That’s fine, Good luck, Hope journey OK.
‘Whatcha.’ Amanda’s voice from the kitchen. Erin dips into the main room and sees her leaned over the kitchen surface chopping something. She’s wearing Raf’s navy apron over a pale grey dress, hair in two French braids. ‘How did it go?’ She turns, kitchen knife turfed in chopped coriander. ‘Should I ask you for an autograph?’
‘Wouldn’t bother,’ Erin says through a polite chuckle. She looks past Amanda at her kitchen. It’s pristine and a floor lamp has been moved to the side of the bookshelf so, with the spotlights from the kitchen ceiling turned off, the space looks warm and intimate. The sofa that Erin leans her leg into appears to have been hoovered. There are no toys on the rug, no crumpled nappy bags in a pile on the console table by the doorway, no mugs of half-drunk instant coffee filming over on the coffee table.
‘The place looks amazing.’
‘Bobby had a long nap an hour or so after you left.’
‘Here? In the house?’
‘In his room, yeh.’
‘Wow,’ Erin says, through half-clenched teeth. She pinches one of her eyelids together like there’s dust in it.
‘Know you said to take him out in the buggy for naps but with the rain … He was so tired after we’d played for a bit, I thought I’d chance it.’ Amanda turns back towards the pot that’s steaming up the window in front of her.
‘And … ’ Erin can’t quite form the question. Bobby’s never slept in his cot for her, not during the day. He just screams and screams until Erin picks him up and shoves him in the carrier or the buggy and out into the world. ‘Did he not, er, protest? To being left?’
‘We’d had a pretty intense peekaboo session, I read him about three thousand stories, then we practised some standing up against the wall. He was knackered.’ Amanda must see the defeat coming into Erin’s expression because she adds, ‘Between you and me, I think he was sick of the sight of me. Wanted to sleep away the minutes until he could see his mum-bear again.’
Amanda takes the lid off the bubbling stockpot and releases a dry-ice puff of steam that collects underneath the kitchen cupboards. She sweeps the chopping board of herbs into whatever she’s cooking. There’s a thud from upstairs and a sloshing and then Bobby cries out. Erin feels the familiar punch of panic, the relaxation from the booze and the train instantly wrung out like a wet flannel, and she turns towards the narrow staircase, climbing two at a time. As she gets to the top, the cries have gone. Erin pictures Amanda lying on the floor next to Bobby on the Berber-style living-room rug, face in balled hands like a teenager, fascinating Bobby with her games and attention. Not sitting behind him, staring at a phone screen, but actually engaging with him, and she can almost taste how shitty it makes her feel.
Erin stops at the door of their bedroom. In the bathroom she hears Raf shhing their son as he heaves out snotty breaths. She waits, picks at a turned-up corner of wallpaper and it comes away. She scratches at a hole in the plaster, white dust collecting under her nail. The carpet in this upstairs hallway needs replacing. She doesn’t take any photos for her feed up here so it’s still as they bought it. The choices of a pensioner. Concentric shades of brown. Decor that sparks zero joy. The studio near King’s Cross where she recorded with Ally earlier was beautiful. Spotless glass, dark red iron girders on the ceiling, a huge coffee machine so golden and gleaming it could have been from Greek mythology. Ally told her to take her shoes off to experience the carpet, and when she did, it felt like each of her toes were being given a shiatsu massage. An assistant offered her a beer or a gin and tonic. She asked for a sparkling water, professional, and it arrived with a cold frosted glass, crushed ice, a slice of lime and a small bowl of cashew nuts. Ten years of learning lines and recording tapes, sleazy meetings with sleazy nobodies for short films, fringe theatre, viral marketing campaigns all in the hope that one day she might be treated like someone that deserves a free drink with all the trimmings. It was exhilarating. As a small lump of the wall comes away and drops onto the floor, dust around it powdering the carpet, she wants to be back there. The space, the quiet, the focused energy of a workplace.
The truth is she’s scared. Not just of Bobby screaming when he’s handed back to her. She’s scared of how Raf will be. Ever since the post-interview elation melted into the synthetic train seating, she’s felt the fluttering wings of worry about what he’s going to say about her leaving their baby with Amanda for the day. Before Bobby was born, Raf talked about how he didn’t want his children raised by nannies and boarding-house matrons like he was, and she knows this is different, Amanda is his friend, but concern for how he’ll react steams inside her nonetheless.
But when she rounds the corner and stands in the door of the bathroom, bubbles and water sloshing on the lino, her fiancé turns to her with a huge smile.
‘Hello, Mum-mum,’ he says, lifting Bobby into a towel and onto his chest. He comes over and wraps his arms around her, Bobby’s wet hair leaving a dark mark on her jacket. He hands the baby into her like they were playing rugby, a wedge of bubbles still stuck in the thick rolls off his neck. She wipes them away with a corner of his towel and pulls his bunny-eared hood over his head. He looks well rested, jolly, the sort of baby you’d see on a poster. The clenched feeling in her chest whenever she’s holding him seems to slacken a little. He’s not smiling, of course, but he almost looks pleased to see her.
‘How did it go?’ Raf asks, moving past her to make space in their cramped bathroom. She comes through and places Bobby down on their bed where Raf’s laid out a nappy, the pack of wipes and his sleepsuit like they were surgical implements.
‘Really well, I think. She was nice. Lovely, in fact.’
‘I’ll do him.’ Raf brings a tube of organic moisturiser from one of the #gifted boxes and squirts it onto Bobby’s naked belly, making him squirm. ‘Have you seen the house?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Can’t believe Amanda had time to do a whole spruce-up while looking after the Bobmeister.’
‘He had a really long nap, she said.’ Erin thought she’d made a simple statement but her tone must have been tinged with protestation because Raf turns to her, a little shocked.
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t take it personally, babe, she’s got nothing else to think about.’ Erin smiles, comes over to her unusually content baby and helps Raf keep him still by dangling her necklace over his face. Raf seems different, more energetic. When they first met, four years ago or so, she was entranced by his self-assured poise. His charisma, the enigma of him. This tall man, with his own sense of style, kaftans and loose-fitting linen trousers like a character in a Bond film. His vo
ice was insouciant, he had a smile that played behind his lips but rarely came out, always calm, self-possessed. But when you got past his veneer of cool, which in itself felt like you’d been let into a secret club, he’d reveal this megawatt sparkle in his eyes when you got him onto something he was into, revealing that there was a passion, a fire inside the stillness. But in the last eighteen months, so much of that has gone. He’d never complain about his life, often the opposite, telling her how perfect things are now, but there’s a heaviness about him that was never there before. Erin knows it’s stress, the pressure of having to provide for them, to make a life for them, and, although he would never want her to, she feels responsible for the dulling of her boyfriend. But tonight he seems to have some of his former zip back.
Erin doesn’t want to puncture it, but she decides to rip off the plaster.
‘I signed with the agent, Grace, the one that’d been emailing me.’
Raf picks Bobby up and stares at her.
‘Oh, right.’ He nods, keeps nodding, not aware he’s doing it. He wriggles Bobby into his sleepsuit and takes his wet towel over to the radiator by the window. He holds Bobby up, showing him the view, although there’s no moon, nor stars visible to light the sliver of sea they can normally see through the gap between the flats opposite.
‘I know we should have talked it through,’ she says, leaning against the frame of their bathroom, ‘but she’s really good, like really impressive, and she doesn’t represent many people. So I didn’t think I could say no, and at the end of the day if I don’t get any money, then she doesn’t get any money.’ She comes over to him at the window, thinks about threading her arm through his but decides against it. ‘And, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but this could be – people earn a lot of money doing this stuff. Like, a lot. Wouldn’t it be so great, you know, take some of that pressure away? Bobby and money stuff, sometimes feels like all we talk about. I know how hard it is, how hard you’re working, providing for us all. I want to be the one who brings home the bacon for once, it can’t be all on you forever, it’s not right. And at some point, maybe you could ease off a bit, spend more time with the little guy.’ He huffs a laugh out to himself. She catches muscles moving in his face, inscrutable. Is he angry? She’s overstepped the mark. After all he’s doing, all he’s done for her, is it ridiculous to expect him to look after Bobby while she goes off to work? He sweeps his nose against Bobby’s bath-fresh, glowing cheek.
‘As long as you don’t forget about us, big shot,’ he says, almost a whisper. They stare at the black, rain-dappled glass for a moment. The halogen buzz of street light fighting through the weather, the pounding sound of thick waterfalls onto the flat roof above the bay window from their overburdened guttering. He reaches his arm round her waist squeezing her into him. ‘Smells amazing, doesn’t it, whatever Amanda’s cooked?’
Bobby seems to take his words as a cue as he lurches towards Erin, forcing her to catch him in the crook of her arm.
‘Wait, his tummy, you’re –’ Raf’s warning comes too late as a scrambled-egg slick of thick vomit spits out of Bobby’s surprised lips and onto the arm of Erin’s gleaming white top. ‘Shit.’ Raf takes Bobby back. ‘God, you have to be so careful with his tummy, don’t you?’ he says. Erin smiles as she tries to pinch the sick up in a tissue without spreading too much onto the cotton. She looks at Bobby’s face staring at her from Raf’s arms. His brow pinched together, molten-brown eyes devoid of sentiment. She smiles inside because Raf seems to be OK with her getting an agent, he seems fine with her taking a job, something that will give her a little respite from the boy staring blankly at her. She glances down at the tissue. There are little nuggets of green in Bobby’s sick, cucumber, courgette perhaps. Amanda managed to get Bobby to eat some greenery. If she has to be away for work, something that Grace seemed to suggest might become a fairly regular occurrence, he’ll be in great hands, she thinks, better hands than hers.
She sits on the bed and takes off her top, her milk-engorged boobs cupped in a bobbled peach maternity bra. Raf gives her a cheeky smile and hands the boy over to her. Bobby latches on, his eyes closed as he goes about his mechanical feeding. She tries to breathe through the pinch of his teeth, the ache of the milk emptying out of her ducts. Raf’s OK with it, she thinks, and, even if it’s just a few hours a week, she’s going to have a life outside of these four walls, a break from this delicate little boy whose arrival has only ever made Erin feel like she’s got everything wrong.
12
23 November 1998
Donny left me an orange Post-it in my locker on Friday afternoon that had the word ‘tomorrow’ and an address on it. There’s some sort of colour code to the notes he leaves me but he’s told me I have to work it out and I haven’t managed to yet. The address lead me about half an hour out of town and finding the exact location took much longer. And when I eventually found it I was amazed to discover that he lived at the old plantation house.
He said he hated the huge house so we walked down to the creek at the end of their estate. He brought pâté and figs. I didn’t like the pâté but didn’t tell him. He can be abrupt sometimes, a bit frosty. But it only makes me want to please him more.
We sat among rocks at the edge of the water. I didn’t know what to say to him and he didn’t speak. Just stared at me, a tempest of thought swirling in his eyes. After some time, quite a long time, of saying nothing, I stopped feeling stupid and managed to join him in the meditative state he seemed to have fallen into as he just looked at me. We were silent for almost an hour. And in that precious time it felt like something shifted even deeper between us.
When he finally opened his mouth, it was to tell me to sing. He’d watched me rehearsing in the school choir, I hadn’t seen him at the back of the room, and he said I had a beautiful voice. I was embarrassed but I wanted to make him happy so I sang ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. He stopped me and told me to sing something beautiful instead. I made it up. He closed his eyes to listen and I felt like I was making him happy. He looked at me and smiled. I stopped holding my body, felt my muscles relax. I uncoiled my hair from its plaits and lowered the ends of it into the creek.
Then he jumped into the water, just like that, and I jumped in after him, both of us fully clothed. He said that we should leave school together. He laughed as he said it as if he was joking. He said he’d watched me with the people in my class, smiling as they mock me, trying to ingratiate myself with them, joining in their inane conversations about TV or music. He said it makes him furious to see me debase myself to fit in with their small-minded world. He’s worried that they’ll drag me, my soul, down to their level unless we get away. I’d never put it into those words but I suppose I’ve always felt the same.
He got out, and while I was coming out of the water and drying myself, he started sketching something in a notebook. I asked to see it. It was a version of one of the primitive women he’d shown me on the postcards from his trip. Spines of rib dominating a stick figure, features exaggerated, monstrous even. I asked him if that was how he saw me and he laughed. The figure was holding something in her arms, a bundle. I asked him what it was in her arms. He told me it was a baby.
13
Forty-six more people have liked Erin’s post about Grace since she last checked, 3,476 now. There are twenty-eight new followers. Not a lot. She puts her phone on the table behind the sofa and carries Bobby over to the fridge. She opens the door and sees a bag of tired supermarket parsnips being squeezed into the side by an enormous box of glowing organic vegetables that Amanda’s clearly bought.
When Erin first joined Instagram she was sometimes staggered by how excited she got when someone would like her post, or she’d look through the profile of a new follower to see that they weren’t some lonely loser but a vibrant young mum with an exciting life, a chic house and attractive friends. And when there was a deluge of followers, after the big mummy-blogger Aisling Strang (376k followers) told her acolytes to have a look at Erin�
��s feed, it felt like a hit of hard drugs. Hundreds of strangers telling her how great she looks, how funny she is, how much she’s smashing motherhood. It’s intoxicating. The only downside is that she’s now hooked to that feeling of validation, and although she acquires new followers every day, when she looks at her phone, she’s always disappointed when the steady flow hasn’t burst into a torrent.
She grabs a large carrot out of the box, snaps the greenery off, goes over to the tap to wash the mud off, all while holding the baby on her less-painful right hip. She bites into the carrot. It’s delicious. Just like all the food that Amanda’s made them since arriving. It’s been a few days now and she’s been the perfect guest. It’s not just that she’s helped out with Bobby, but also the acts of unasked-for thoughtfulness like refilling the basket where they store the nappies; she’s bought candles, reed diffusers and a large succulent she’s put by the fireplace that looks superb. But she hasn’t been under their feet during the day, constantly trying to spend time with Erin. She walks a lot, has gone on a trip to a castle further down the coast on the train, she’s borrowed a bike from one of their neighbours. If anything, Erin would like to see more of her. The times where she’s accompanied Amanda, to town for a coffee, the old underground grotto covered in fake cave paintings done by an Elizabethan eccentric, have been some of the best times she’s had while looking after Bobby, but she seems determined not to impose. And Erin has to respect that. She’s often caught her deep in thought and, although they haven’t talked much about her new-old boyfriend, it seems that Amanda’s genuinely taking some time for herself away from him to try and figure out the future of their relationship. Erin’s in awe of it, slightly jealous even, the sort of studied contemplation of a major life decision that she’s never even countenanced herself doing.
The Family Friend Page 5
