The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  ‘Right, well, that’s good.’

  ‘I don’t know, something like this happens and you question everything. It could be anyone. Literally anyone. That’s the thing.’

  ‘I met her, Amanda. End of last week at Millie’s Movement.’

  ‘Thursday?’ Caz nods. ‘I was meeting someone from Channel 5. Jesus, listen to me.’

  ‘She’s not a laugh a minute, bit starey, glazed, you know, head in the clouds, but friendly. That hair though, eh? Thick as a rope.’

  ‘You could sleep in a bath of hair mask every night and you wouldn’t get hair like that.’

  ‘Put it in a fucking Gro-Bag every day.’

  ‘Inject each strand with anabolic steroids.’

  ‘You could, er – No, I’ve not got another one,’ Caz says, defeated, leaning the chip bag over to Erin who dips her hand in and brings out a thick clump of them.

  ‘I know she seems pretty out there,’ she says, ‘but she’s good fun actually, and amazing with Bobby, been an absolute godsend in terms of Insta-stuff that’s kicking off. I’ve got all these events lined up and there’s no way I could do it without her helping out with Bob.’

  ‘What sort of events?’

  ‘Well, it’s erm – speaking at a MotherLoving Institute thing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Do you follow them?’

  ‘Aye. That’s –’ she looks down, scratches at her waterproof jacket – ‘that’s impressive.’

  ‘I can’t believe it really.’ The MotherLovingInstitute (178k followers) is a big new collective of bloggers who have banded together to campaign for mothers’ issues, particularly relating to loneliness and mental health, being more openly talked about.

  ‘You not want any more no?’ Caz says, hoisting the chip bag off Erin’s lap as she stands up from the wall. ‘Can I see the video?’

  Erin’s shoulders hunch and she shakes her head. ‘I’m going to delete it. Sorry. I don’t want anyone to see me like that.’ She stands up and leans forward with a paper napkin to wipe a spoonful of sick that’s dribbling down Bobby’s chin towards the collar of his Eskimo-style bodysuit.

  ‘It happen a lot? Losing your temper with Bobby?’

  ‘Never,’ Erin says, a little forcefully. ‘I’d barely slept. He wouldn’t stop screaming.’

  ‘No judgement here,’ Caz says, bending down next to Bobby’s buggy to pick up the squid he’s dropped. ‘Once, when Stanley was screaming like that, I grabbed his ankle, gave it a squeeze. Pretty hard. Got agonising guilt straight afterwards, questioned whether I was a fucking psycho or whatever, so that’s good at least.’ She wipes the crumbs of tarmac off the toy and hands it back to Bobby.

  ‘It’s not me at all,’ Erin finds herself saying. Which is something she’s not certain of. In the early stages of her pregnancy she started to feel a constant edge of rage buzzing behind her forehead like an electric flycatcher. When she was out and about, she was good at suppressing it, but at home she wasn’t so successful. She could see Raf’s love for her, his devotion, chip away in tiny fragments every time her anger bubbled over and he found himself scalded by it.

  But perhaps this is the real her. The real her that’s shouted at Bobby, that’s twisted his limbs into clothes harder than she should, that’s hissed at him through gritted teeth for him to just stop crying when she desperately needed a moment to reset her head. When she was a kid she’d never dreamed of being a mother and maybe that was her instinctively knowing that she shouldn’t be, that she didn’t have the constitution for it. ‘The idea of it going viral –’ she shudders as she says it – ‘and everyone seeing the sort of person I am.’

  ‘All parents have lost it once or twice. That’s not who you are.’

  ‘If something happens in a video that goes up on the Internet, it’s more real than reality.’ An empty nappy bag blows in the wind and sticks to Erin’s leg.

  ‘Well, no one saw it, not even me. Get some pics up of Bobby in some of those neon dungarees you’ve got, eating avo toast from one of those fancy black plates and watch the “likes” flood in.’

  Erin slugs some water from Bobby’s sippy cup, to wash away the oily residue in her mouth.

  ‘Probably get told avocado’s got too much fat for babies.’

  ‘Aye, then the Chilean government would send you two thousand avocados so that’d make up for that. You’re very lucky, remember.’ The ice wind swirls into the harbour so Caz gets a blanket out from under the buggy and wraps Bobby up in it like meat in pastry. Her two children are at nursery. Stanley’s four and Imogen’s seventeen months. With her riot of dark curls, wide hazel eyes and her tattoo of an eagle feather on her wrist, Caz is the sort of mother Erin would like to be. Cool, confident, no-nonsense. Happy to laugh at how much of a nightmare her kids are but still rampant with love for them. She’d march through walls for her children. Erin barely puts her phone down for Bobby. The video has affected her, touched a nerve far more than it should have. Caz is right. She’s very, very lucky.

  Sunbeams reach around a batch of cumulus clouds that hang above the town in front of them. The dappled sunlight brings out the colours in the painted facades of the old Victorian terraces that overlook the harbour. When the sun shines you can imagine this place, its fish and chip shops, ice-cream parlours, its kiosks and sea-view pubs, teeming with life as it does in the warmer months.

  As they walk back up the hill towards their cars, parked on the far side of the restaurant, away from the harbour, Bobby grows bored of being constrained and begins arching his back against the buggy’s strap like Frankenstein’s monster. Caz rounds the buggy and coos into his face, reaching her hand for something. Erin understands she means a snack and panics to find something. She hands over a shard of rice cake from a packet in her rucksack and it placates the boy. As Caz pushes the buggy up the hill, Erin dashes onto her phone quickly. Twenty-three followers just since she left the coffee morning. Bobby has got a great outfit on under his snowsuit, plus fours and a bright green T-shirt like a clown-golfer, and she’d posed him with two giant croissants instead of ears so he looked like Big-Ears from Noddy.

  A gaggle of mums, various shades of bright dyed hair, come out of the coffee morning as they pass the restaurant. They stop Erin, though she’s only met them once or twice before. One asks where she’s going to be tomorrow morning. One if she has any tips for day trips. One congratulates her on the new agent. Caz hasn’t stopped walking so Erin tells the women she’ll see them all around before skipping up the cobbles to catch up with her and Bobby.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, threading an arm through hers and putting her hand next to Caz’s on the handle of the buggy. She leans her head on her shoulder.

  ‘Price of fame,’ Caz says. Erin spots an old man with yellowing hair standing on the stern of his boat staring at them. She looks back towards the restaurant, the three mothers are looking up at her, one waves. Erin unlinks herself from Caz, suddenly paranoid about how someone taking a photo of them could spin it. She gets a flash of that angry woman, her, almost launching the same buggy they’re pushing now across the patch of grass. The price of fame.

  15

  8 January 1999

  So now we’re bound.

  I want to write it down, everything that happened, so that when we’re old we can remember it all in vivid detail. Everything has changed.

  During the day I found a Post-it. Orange, which I know now means that it’s an instruction. 4:00 a.m., Central Bus Station. And then a stick sketch of one of the indigenous women from Nourlangie. This was it.

  I snuck out of the top window and had to jump the roof of the porch so I didn’t wake Mum and Craig. We arrived at Kakudu when the sun was high and the dark mass of rock stood against it like a sleeping animal. We hiked around the perimeter. We drank from pools. We ducked away from the path to walk in and out of shallow caves. I ran my hands over the drawings, depictions of love, of dedication to the perfect unity between two souls that ancient civilisations seemed to unde
rstand far better than we do. Donny’d brought food. Water. He’d thought of everything. Then we found what we’d been looking for. A wide gully of rock protected from the wind, flat, and totally private.

  I drew a small circle with a piece of chalk I’d brought with the pair of compasses he packed. I placed the chunk of rose quartz I’d stolen from my mum in the middle of the circle. Then I set about smudging the area to purify it before the ceremony. We couldn’t get wild sage so Donny got a large bag of dried sage from the supermarket. I put it in a little crucible and lit it before wafting the pungent smoke into all the gully’s nooks and corners. I’ve seen from Mum how negativity can cling to relationships so I wanted to do everything I could to purge the negative energy before Donny and I start this new phase.

  He’d found a ceremony in a book he’d studied – Magick in Theory and Practice by an Englishman called Crowley. We’d gone over what we had to do on the bus, but still, as we sat opposite each other and tied our wrists together with his silk scarf, it was frightening. The air felt charged, heavy like before a storm, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The wind seemed to be moaning through the gully, singing to us, whispering to us. And then I laughed. And he laughed with me. It was silly, we both felt it, tethered together, a pyre built around a pink rock sitting between us. But we have created something, a connection we share that makes us more, makes us greater than everyone else. Since school ended for the summer, every time I’ve been able to get away, I’ve gone to him, and when Craig started asking questions about where I was going, Donny started coming to me, doing more odd jobs for us for a pittance. Craig was delighted. Donny’s work was good, he relished the idea that he was getting a good deal and underpaying the little city boy. I almost enjoyed those times more than when we could just be together unwatched, the stolen glances, touches behind Mum’s and Craig’s backs. The summer has been like a blissful dream, and if life were to end now, it would be enough. So with school starting up again soon, it felt we had to consecrate what’s grown between us. To make it official.

  Donny lit the pyre. The kindling went up quickly. I lowered my side of the scarf into the flames, probably too quickly, because I was scared the fire would burn out and I wanted everything to go right. The silk took some time to catch, but soon we stood up, the flames having freed us of our physical bonds, but holding hands still above the fire. We took off the burning cuffs of silk and put them on top of the quartz. Then Donny stoked the sticks and I blew on the pyre we’d made and the fire began to lick the sides of the stone.

  As the sun plummeted we sat across the fire from each other. Donny was silent for some time, he seemed bored, distracted. I lowered my top so he could see me, he’d never seen that much of me. He told me I terrified him. He drew me towards him and held me there, arms surrounding me, enclosing me. It felt like my whole body had been dragged inside his. He asked me to sing for him and I did and he smelt my hair and said it was the feeling of home. It felt primordial.

  I had thought we might consecrate things in a different way, the way the girls in the top year are always talking about. A real wedding night. I am terrifying. The way I feel about him is terrifying. It terrifies me. He rubbed a hand over my bare midriff and whispered into my ear what an incredible mother I’d be.

  Mum was furious with me when I got back but I wouldn’t tell them where I’d been. I stood silent as Craig ranted and slammed hands on tables at me. He grabbed me at one point, I think he might have hurt me if Mum hadn’t been there, but I still couldn’t stop smiling.

  Now I’m in my room. Without him and with him. Always with him.

  16

  BRAUNEoverBRAINS

  Contact: grace.fentiman@rfgtalent.com

  389 posts 41.6k followers 1,438 following

  ERIN BRAUNE

  Mum to Bobby. Salty sea-dweller. Bright up your life. Reformed thespian.

  This is my waste management athleisure. Because, these days, I mostly work in waste management.

  This is Bobby’s poo face. Tongue out, beetroot complexion, and even though the eyes look crossed, they somehow follow you while the deed’s being done like a painting in a horror film. Maybe eye contact helps him relax?

  I’m honoured to be talking at the MotherLoving Initiative party tonight at Claridge’s. (FEARNE COTTON IS GOING TO BE THERE.) I know there are mums way more amazing than me, far more qualified to talk about the way a baby turns your life upside down and how to rebuild positively. BUT I want you all to know, and I know you know, that if I post something in my stories where I’m posing with A-list or more likely Z-list celebs, or if me and @annamaitron are singing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ at midnight, that nights like tonight are the outliers and that 99% of my time is spent dealing with this boy and his poo face, and his sick face, and his angry face and, so far, zero smiles. Unlol. Bonjours to you all. Will post some shiz in my stories.

  #everydayi’mshovelling #lookintomyeyes

  #nappynappyjoyjoy

  #iloveyoufearne

  #sorryinadvancefearne #supermumsofinstagram

  #moonlightingmumma

  @varyafinn whoop, whoop, poop.

  @motherlovininstitute can’t wait to have you. We are PSYCHED. FYI @fearnecotton is bringing extra security

  @gossamer we’ll be there! #1stnightoffin6months

  @julesspurn women have been bringing up kids for thousands of years without going to talks about it. What a load of shit.

  @aleister have a nice night away

  17

  Erin can’t get reception on her phone in the chemist so she bats the rubbery phone case on the handle of the buggy. Their part of town is dominated by seafront flats with elderly inhabitants who treat the little pharmacy like a social club. Erin’s record waiting time to get the medicine for Bobby’s reflux is forty-five minutes. At least there’s usually a large supply of purse-lipped old dears to swoon at Bobby and today’s no exception. A lady in her eighties, in great shape and wearing a very elegant plum coat that Erin would consider wearing, leans over the sunshade making goo-goo noises at him. She makes a comment about how sweet his little serious face is. Erin tries to catch the harassed-looking chemist’s assistant she gave her prescription to ten minutes ago but the girl’s working hard to avoid making eye contact with any of the people piled around her desk. Erin’s train up to London is in an hour and she needs to get home, drop Bobby off with Amanda, get showered and changed, put some make-up on and then get to the station.

  She spots two women in the queue for the post-office desk at the back of the chemist’s looking at her. They’re both in their late thirties, one wears a green beret and thick-rimmed glasses and both have chunky knitted scarfs on, typical BRAUNEoverBRAINS followers. One of them steals another glance and turns back again, pretending she wasn’t looking. Erin enjoys these moments of recognition. It’s thrilling that people are excited to see her, that she’s a talking point, a story for those who follow her to tell their friends. More often than not they might approach her for a chat or vice versa. But Erin won’t talk to them today. Now they just remind her that she’s being watched, that there’s someone who probably lives nearby that wants people to know that she’s not a fun, sunny mum who dresses her super-cute, olive-skinned baby in out-there outfits. Someone who wants people to know that a lot of the time Erin feels so out of her depth, so out of control, she thinks that her super-cute, olive-skinned baby should probably be taken away from her.

  ‘Hiya.’ Erin looks round to see Lorna Morgan wearing a coat that resembles loft insulation, stood in front of a double buggy blocking the aisle behind her. Erin looks over at her twins. Sleeping serenely as always. Erin sometimes wonders whether that’s the reason she’s taken a dislike to Lorna, her boys seem so easy in comparison to Bobby, but no, Erin doesn’t like Lorna because she’s not very easy to like. ‘Was your little boy alright the other day?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The other morning when he was very upset. We passed you both on the prom or have you forgotten s
eeing me?’ Her voice comes right out of her nostrils, but she’s right, Erin hadn’t remembered that, a few minutes before she went up onto the grass, a few minutes before she was filmed shaking her son’s buggy, Lorna Morgan had been there with her horde of pink children.

  ‘I did. Yeh. Thanks.’ Erin peers to the back of the dispensary willing someone to arrive with Bobby’s drugs. As they stand there side by side, silence breeding between them, Erin thinks about whether it could have been Lorna that filmed her. She had the kids with her and was walking in the opposite direction. But she could have circled round and been standing across the road from the grass as it’s on the route back towards her house. But could she do something like that? Lorna was one of the first people she met when they first moved down here. Erin was five months pregnant and they organised a coffee and a walk on the beach. Lorna is Kent born and bred and talks as if she’s always trying to beat some personal best for words per minute. There was always a gossipy element to the stories she told Erin, an icicle core of mean-spiritedness. Everyone she mentioned, those Erin vaguely knew, those she didn’t, were, in some way or other, conducting themselves incorrectly, in her plentiful opinion. So when Lorna suggested another mum-date, Erin prevaricated. Which, when they saw each other with their new babies at baby-groups, Lorna seemed to have taken to heart as a snub. Then, two months ago, Erin soured things further by intervening in a conversation Lorna was having with a criminally underslept-looking mum called Jules. Erin very calmly suggested that Lorna ease off on doling out her ‘infinite wisdom’ to Jules that morning. The word was that Lorna had taken that very personally indeed.

  ‘Saw you got an agent.’ Her inflection soars but it’s not a question.

  ‘That’s right, yeh.’ Erin nods and smiles to Bobby’s elderly entertainer as she heads past them towards the door.