The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  ‘I agree,’ he says. ‘You can’t run away.’ Erin squeezes his thumb.

  ‘Good,’ Grace says, ‘I think that’s the right play as well. We’re on the crest of getting somewhere really exciting. So in terms of next steps…’ Over Grace’s shoulder Erin notices Amanda putting something from the counter into her bag. She scans the surface, a Pyrex bowl of lightly steaming water, a dishcloth, a spoon. Erin looks up and sees Bobby, limpet-like on Amanda’s hip, slurping on his bottle. How does she get him to do that? she thinks. How does she get him to sleep so easily? Erin’s tried the topless cuddling technique but it didn’t work as she’d hoped. Perhaps it’s stress, the stress that radiates from her body. Since he’s been born, with every scream, every scratch, every noise he’s made, every panicked thought he’s demanded from her, her head’s felt like a microscope slide invaded by a rapidly multiplying cell, always on the verge of cracking down the middle.

  ‘Is it possible to download images from Instagram, Ez?’ Raf’s voice cuts into Grace’s strategy that Erin was only half listening to.

  ‘Um–’

  ‘Not easily,’ Grace says, ‘not from someone else’s account. Why?’

  ‘If your guy, Xavi, can get me them as JPEGs, I could probably find out what sort of camera they were taken on.’

  ‘Raf’s a graphic designer.’

  ‘I’ve got software that can go pretty hardcore on an image and there’s a lot of photographers work at my office. I mean, we’re assuming it’s done on a smartphone but, to take images, that many images, without you noticing, Ez, it’s possible whoever it was was using a proper DSLR camera. Just a thought.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Grace says. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Erin’s had the same thought. If whoever it is has some sort of telephoto lens, they could, like a sniper in some horrific war movie, be shooting her from anywhere without her ever knowing. And in that case, what other photos could they have? Have they been outside her house? Taking photos through their front window. She looks at the bay window. They took down the chintzy curtains the previous owners left and haven’t got around to replacing them. Likewise, their bedroom window had a blind, but the cord has snapped so they’ve taken the whole thing off. Raf wanted to fit shutters but said they couldn’t afford them yet. Perhaps this might spur him on to do something about it.

  ‘Do you think it’s the same person as the other week?’ The three of them at the table swing round to Amanda in the kitchen, Bobby lolling across her as he drinks. Erin and Grace catch each other’s eye. Grace knows that Erin hasn’t told Raf about the video on the bank of grass on the seafront. Bobby’s head begins to droop so Amanda shifts him into an upright position and stands staring at them, her elaborate purple dress and wide, innocent eyes making her look almost doll-like. Raf seems to growl as he clears his throat.

  ‘What happened the other week?’

  33

  Raf’s shoulders couldn’t be more hunched over if he was scrumming down in a rugby match. He perches on the edge of their sofa, holding Erin’s phone out in front of him as if it were a bomb. The only sound in the room is the roar of the wind battering the microphone of whatever the video was recorded on. The video ends. Erin begins to speak but Raf puts a hand up to stop her. He presses play again. Erin feels like she has a stitch. She can hear Bobby squawking upstairs with Amanda. Soon after Grace left, Raf asked her if she’d get Bobby ready for bed. He didn’t need to explain why. As Amanda crossed the room to the stairs, Bobby clutching at her neck, she mouthed ‘I’m so sorry’ to Erin. But it’s not Amanda’s fault that she lied to her fiancé.

  The video ends again. This time Erin decides to let Raf speak first. The hum on the fridge behind her suddenly seems as if it’s being played through a sound system, such is the silence that gathers between them.

  ‘What happened after this?’ His voice is low.

  ‘He was stuck in the buggy. I couldn’t get him out.’ A deluge of words tumble from her mouth. ‘He’d been screaming all morning, like screaming screaming. It must have been reflux pain. It was horrible. He was arching his back so much that I couldn’t get him out to give him a cuddle.’

  ‘So what did you do, give him a slap to shut him up?’ He twists his body to her, expression neutral as his words pierce like a stiletto.

  ‘I should have told you, I know I should have told you, but –’ She moves across the floor to him, but he doesn’t open up the space on the sofa so she’s forced to perch on the arm. The wind is throwing sheets of rain at the big window, rattling the frames and drawing Raf’s attention back to the halogen glow of the street outside their house. ‘I didn’t want you to see me like that.’

  ‘Your “team” managed to sweep it under the carpet?’ He glances at her and she nods in response. He bites his top lip and closes his eyes. ‘You weren’t ever going to tell me?’ She feels like she’s onstage and has forgotten her lines, throat dry, pulse racing. Of course she wasn’t going to tell him and her hesitation tells him as much. He sucks air through his teeth, stands up and bangs his shin as he walks towards the hall.

  ‘You’re going out?’ she says, voice cracking. She wants him to have a go at her, she wants to have it out with him and to be able to explain why she’d behave like that, why she wouldn’t tell him about it. She wants to be able to tell him that she feels like she’s not the mother he thinks she should be, that no matter how many times he reassures her about how good she is with Bobby she can see in his eyes that he thinks she’s failing them. But he’s going.

  ‘It’s hammering down. Can’t we – Talk to me.’

  He stands in the door frame, pulling his long grey waterproof over him. He screws his maroon beanie onto his head and pauses, looking at the floor.

  ‘Someone is following you around taking photos, videos of you and our son. Think about Bobby. For once in his life, think about him.’ Erin stands, she opens her mouth. ‘What? What are you going to say? That you were thinking of him? That you always put him first? Fuck. I can protect you. My job is to protect you if you’re bringing psychos into our life. But how can I do that if I don’t know what’s going on? And like, what is going on? What else haven’t you told me?’

  She goes to him, she’s garbling. ‘I’m sorry, I should – I was just so – I felt so –’ She’s grabbing at his waterproof, smelling the black pepper from his aftershave.

  ‘Or do I need to protect him from you?’ His words spread a chasm between them. She looks at him, his eyes dewy pools overflowing with disappointment. He tenses the muscles in his jaw and eases her hands off his jacket. ‘I’ve got work, a mountain of work, that I can be doing.’ He slides around her, straining every sinew not to make contact with her, his fiancée, as he walks out of their house.

  She goes into the kitchen and flicks the kettle on almost by impulse. A cup of tea will do nothing to improve her situation but she’s grown up in a household where it’s the prescribed balm for almost any ill so she goes about rinsing a mug that’s been left on the counter. Bobby’s half-drunk bottle rests on the side. She squeezes her left breast. It feels flaccid, less pumped up than it would have done at this time a couple of weeks ago. She’d found it so amazing that, after a few painful weeks to begin with, her body instinctively learned her son’s eating habits and moderated her milk supply to suit him. Her phone buzzes in her pocket and it reminds her that she’s chosen to interrupt this amazing natural process. She’s chosen to rely on Amanda, on sporadic pumping and a little bit of formula to feed her baby. She’s chosen to invite the world into their lives. She’s chosen to hide threatening behaviour from her husband, for what? Her phone buzzes again, and again shortly afterwards. For that, she thinks to herself. For the dopamine hit of a thin plastic block of computer chips buzzing in her pocket incessantly. She takes the phone out and looks at the dark mirrored tile in its tan leather case. The thirty-four new notifications don’t have their normal effect. She feels the device’s insubstantiality in her hand and thinks about how easy it wo
uld be to casually drop it in the washing-up bowl, to cram it down the waste disposal unit and listen to it being macerated. Instead she blackens the screen, and just for a moment, she hates it, hates it for how much she needs it.

  She picks up Bobby’s half-finished bottle, takes the lid off and puts it in the microwave for a few seconds. It beeps that it’s finished just as Amanda rounds the corner into the kitchen clutching her son in his monochrome sleepsuit. She spots Erin putting the bottle on the kitchen surface and slamming the microwave door.

  ‘Don’t you normally breastfeed him to sleep?’

  ‘Thought I’d have backup in case he doesn’t want to have a go on these puppies again.’ Erin points to her chest.

  ‘I can do it,’ she offers, ‘if you have stuff you need to take care of?’

  ‘No, I want to, thanks.’ Amanda smiles and hands Bobby over into Erin’s arms. As his little hands grip the flesh on her forearm she’s struck by how ape-like babies look as they swing from the safety of one adult’s arms to another’s.

  ‘Are you sure you’re calm enough?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m so so sorry, Erin.’ Her inflection goes up in that way Australians sometimes do. ‘I really thought you’d told him.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Erin says, holding Bobby’s gaze, ‘I should have. Not your fault.’

  ‘And, I wasn’t earwigging, the other week. You had your agent on speakerphone. I couldn’t help hearing.’

  ‘It’s fine. Honestly. I fucked up.’

  ‘Let me give him the bottle,’ Amanda says, clutching her wrist. ‘Go and do a meditation, or listen to some minimal techno, or whatever you do to relax. Spend some time on your social media or whatever.’ She glances down to the phone in Erin’s other hand. ‘I feel so awful about this.’

  ‘Raf’ll get over it.’ Erin picks up the bottle that feels too hot in her hands. Bobby grabs towards it, so she squeezes it into her jeans pocket, the heat searing her bum through the denim, and heads towards his nursery. ‘Go out,’ she says to Amanda as she gets to the corridor down to Bobby’s room. ‘I deserve to do some time in solitary with Sir Screechalot.’ Amanda stands bathed in the orange light from under the kitchen cupboards. Her arms are crossed in front of her midriff and she seems coiled in a way Erin’s not seen before. She looks concerned. Erin doesn’t know why but she feels bad for her, bad to have put her in the middle of this situation. ‘Honestly, don’t worry. This is my fault,’ she tells her.

  ‘I hope he can forgive you,’ she says, with the dawn of a smile.

  ‘Thanks,’ Erin says, turning Bobby as he grapples over her shoulder to try and get to the bottle before heading into his room. She knows that the video makes her look bad, she knows that not telling the father of her child about something like this is thoughtless, but she hadn’t even considered the fact that he might not forgive her.

  She gets the bottle out of her pocket once she’s darkened Bobby’s room and sits in the #gifted ergonomic beanbag chair next to his cot. Bobby’s nursery is by far the most beautiful room in the house. Bouji Mumma Boutique had sent her loads of amazing stuff, prints, a rug with a hand-stitched elephant on it and a tepee decorated with Mondrian patterns. She’s about to get a boob out to see if he’ll accept it, but he’s crawling across her lap to the bottle so she decides not to bother. Erin squirts some of the bottle onto her hand, it still feels hot but probably just about OK. She adjusts herself in the chair to get comfortable, knowing that to avoid any screaming, and she really can’t handle any now, she might have to stay in the chair for half an hour with him sleeping on her once he’s finished. She licks up the milk resting on the flesh between her index finger and thumb.

  It’s sweet. She’s tasted her breast milk before and it’s always a little sweet but this tastes like cake icing. As Bobby gets over her legs and reaches for it, she puts it up, out of his reach. She puts her tongue on the hole in the bottle and squirts more out. It’s insanely sweet and there’s another taste, almost medicinal.

  ‘Baaa.’ Bobby calls out a warning of a tantrum at the bottle being withheld from him. Erin blinks, unable to make sense of what she can taste. The room feels too dark all of a sudden and she clicks a lamp on next to her, causing Bobby to shield his eyes from the light. She sucks on the bottle, any squeamishness about drinking her own milk miles from her mind. It’s so sweet that she winces as if she’s accidentally drunk neat cordial.

  Bobby lurches up and squeals out in anger at her. She shoves the bottle into his hands and he collapses down into her arms and drinks it down greedily.

  The taste stays on her tongue, the tangy cloy she gets after drinking Coke, which she hasn’t done for years, but then that liquorice, medicinal taste. Like herbal cough mixture. The row of hessian bags filled with herbs and spices in Amanda’s studio flies into her head. Then she remembers Amanda in the kitchen this evening, while she and Raf were talking to Grace, squirrelling something away into her bag.

  Erin grabs the bottom of the bottle and Bobby’s closed eyes jerk open, his hands grip it harder, feeling the tension of her hand. Erin wants to yank it away from him and throw it far away but she can’t have him go ballistic. Whatever it is Amanda’s putting in his bottle, it’s nothing that’s going to harm him, she feels sure of that. But Amanda has put something in her son’s bottle. She’s put something in Bobby’s milk, the milk Erin has sucked out of her by a machine like a dairy cow for forty-five minutes every morning, and not told a soul about it.

  She wants to text Raf, to call him back to the house and tell him what she’s discovered, but she can’t. Not with how he left. It would seem desperate, a pathetic excuse to try and get him to overlook what she’s done.

  She looks up at a small piece of rock on Bobby’s bookshelf that’s been there for nearly two weeks. It’s a circle, pinkish-white. One of Amanda’s crystals. Erin thought it was a nice gesture when she first saw that it had been placed in here. But now it feels like an invasion, a quiet colonisation of her baby’s space. She swallows a lump in her throat and listens to the regular sucking sound of her son getting to the end of the bottle. The milk, her tampered-with milk, mixing with air so it almost sounds like kissing, as his body becomes limp with sleep in her arms.

  34

  ‘So it’s either deal with angry Houdini in the buggy, or two weeks of agonising hip pain after a morning babywearing. I’ve never seen Sophie’s Choice, but I have to assume that this is way worse.’ Erin stops recording herself. Bobby’s hammering at a toy xylophone as if he’s writing a symphony designed to give her a headache. She googles Sophie’s Choice. It’s about the Holocaust. She’d get slaughtered for that. She deletes the video.

  Outside the clouds sit latent in the sky, the heaviness of the air threatens the drizzle that’s been off and on all morning. Erin’s spent the last few hours trying to create content in the house and she just can’t seem to get it right. It’s two days after the photos were posted and although her heartfelt response seems to have worked and the backlash against her has been fairly mild, now she’s been exposed as being a far less breezy and ‘chill’ mum than she’d previously portrayed, she’s overthinking her posts to the point of paralysis.

  There are some mums that are popular for being no-holds barred in their parenting journeys. Who cry and confess into their smartphones, locked in the bathroom, while their babies scream outside – people like it, it’s relatable. But there’s no doubt that Erin’s sunny positivity has proved a runaway success in comparison to those. ‘There’s only so much “poor me” grim reality people can handle before they turn off,’ Grace had said to her once. And since Erin first got on any social media, in the frontier days of Facebook, she’s agreed with that axiom. When people would write a status update alluding to something bad that’s happened, a ‘Really tough day today’, ‘Feeling low’ or even an ‘FML’, when everyone else piled on to send messages of sympathy or support, Erin would always be conspicuous by her silence. She could never understand how it would help th
e person. She found it needy, a pose of vulnerability, of weakness affected to get people’s attention, even if that attention only manifested itself as pity. Her mum was a GP before she retired, very hard-working, very impressive considering she’d not come from an academic family. Her sister, Erin’s Auntie Claire, had been ill a lot as a child meaning their parents had lavished most of their time and affection on her. So Erin’s mum had learned to get attention by being impressive and that need not to reveal the weak parts of her character was drummed into Erin from an early age.

  So this morning she’s been trying her best to be ‘authentic’, but failing miserably. In an authentic post she might be warning whichever cowardly shit is taking pictures not to fuck with her or her six-foot-three fiancé, it might feature her calling out Amanda’s gall putting some herbal tincture in her son’s milk, or it could feature her doing an Edvard Munch silent scream at her own stupidity at not telling Raf about the video. Because that’s mainly how she feels today. Furious with herself, frazzled by the barrage of destructive thoughts pluming in her head, and tired, on-the-edge tired.

  The night of Grace’s visit she barely slept, trying to solve the thousand-piece jigsaw of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Raf stayed at the studio working that night, which hadn’t been uncommon with him before they had Bobby, but he hadn’t done it since. Then last night he came back long after she’d gone to bed and, although she sat waiting for him, he didn’t come up to her and left in the morning before she got up with Bobby. She’s had moments of being furious with him for the casual way in which he’s kept himself away. Going AWOL to come to terms with his wife having lied to him is a luxury that a baby’s primary caregiver doesn’t have. But she knows she doesn’t have a leg to stand on any more. She’s fucked up and it’s better he have time to forgive her. He’s never responded well to her confronting him about anything.