by Lindsey Kelk
When she didn’t reply, just blinked her long lashes at me and gave a sleepy smile, I pulled the covers up over her little legs and thought of all the things I’d learned in the last year that had never even occurred to me before. Like baby pillows. I’d searched high and low. Looked in the shops, I’d checked online, I’d even turned to Etsy, but it turned out babies don’t have pillows, only a mattress. Who knew? And then it was the quilt. Some people said they could have quilts, other people said they couldn’t. Louisa said she used a sleeping bag but Erin said sleeping bags would be too much in my apartment because it got so hot. My mum said I had a home-knitted blanket and I’d been lucky to even have that … Life was a lot easier when the only things I searched for were discount Marc Jacobs handbags and photos of Chris Hemsworth with his top off.
‘She didn’t really nap this afternoon so she should sleep OK,’ Alex said as I tiptoed into the living room once Al was fully asleep. ‘We went for a walk around the park but she would not give it up. I think she was hoping to get a glimpse of Patrick Stewart.’
He smiled at me with heavy-lidded eyes, put a glass of red wine in one of my hands, the TV remote in the other then disappeared back into the kitchen. If that wasn’t my most intense sexual fantasy, I didn’t know what was.
‘Her and me both,’ I said, setting down the remote and following him into the other room. ‘You were all right today, though? I’m sorry I didn’t text as much as I said I would. My phone wouldn’t turn on so I had to text from my laptop and—’
‘You sent thirty-seven texts,’ he replied, taking a sip from his own fingerprint-smudged glass. ‘How many times were you planning on sending?’
I shrugged, peering into a bubbling saucepan. Ooh, pasta. The deal for now was I would go to the office Monday to Thursday and work from home on Fridays. While he wasn’t away on tour, Alex would be home with Al Mondays and Tuesdays and the part-time nanny we shared with Sasha and Banks, a couple from my antenatal group, came by Wednesday and Thursdays so he could, in theory, get on with writing his new album.
In theory.
‘Did Graham come over?’
Alex shook his head and snatched his fingers back from the spitting pan.
‘He and Craig are gonna swing by tomorrow. We’ve gotta figure out the set, make more time to rehearse. It’s creeping up on us real fast, we’ve only got three weeks.’
In an attempt to get themselves back into the creative flow of things, the band had announced a hometown show, their first in more than a year, supposedly to try out new material. Only there was no new material. And the show was in less than three weeks. Unless Alex was planning on rocking out some adult-oriented rock covers of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, he definitely had an uphill struggle in front of him.
‘You look so good today.’ Alex tossed a tea towel over his shoulder and looked back at me. ‘Did you get your hair done or something?’
‘I washed it,’ I whispered brazenly. ‘And then I brushed it.’
‘That is so hot,’ he replied, leaning over to press his mouth against mine in a decadent red wine kiss. ‘You want to blow off dinner and go straight to bed?’
‘What’s for dinner?’ I asked, breathless from the kiss.
‘My celebrated spaghetti in sauce from a jar and pre-shredded cheese.’
It really was a difficult choice.
‘Will you still love me if I say dinner first and then bed?’
Alex took the spaghetti off the stove and dumped it into the colander that waited in the sink.
‘I would love you even more than ever,’ he replied, clearly relieved. ‘I didn’t sleep last night at all and with Al not taking a nap all day, I’m exhausted. I’m so tired I don’t even think I could get it up.’
‘Oh good,’ I muttered as I remembered I hadn’t shaved my legs in over a week. Because we hadn’t had sex in over a week. Or was it two weeks? Maybe more.
‘What’s up?’ Alex asked.
‘Nothing,’ I replied, replacing my frown with a grateful smile. ‘Hey, do you know what normcore means?’
Even though I’d always thought of myself as someone who prized sleep above almost everything else in life, ever since Alice came along, I had found myself awake at two thirty in the morning, right on the dot. Almost every night, I found myself lying in bed wide awake, even when Al slept straight through. Always looking for a silver lining, I tried to fill these weird little moments of me time with useful tasks, like watching YouTube videos and eating.
‘And then she called me normcore,’ I whispered into my headphones as I prowled around the kitchen, looking for snacks.
‘Well, I don’t know what that is but it doesn’t sound very nice,’ Louisa said, her lovely face looming large on my iPhone screen. ‘Tell her to sod off.’
My absolute favourite thing to do with this unwanted gift of useless time was to call one of my best humans in the UK and interrupt her breakfast routine. I watched over Louisa’s shoulder as my six-year-old goddaughter, Grace, merrily poured herself a red Le Creuset mixing bowl full of cereal behind her mother’s back.
‘Do you think my life has got boring?’ I asked, dreading the answer to my question. Louisa had known me forever and she wasn’t terribly good at sugarcoating.
‘If your life is boring, I should take myself down to the glue factory right now,’ she replied. ‘Listen to yourself, woman.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ I opened the fridge and pouted at the miserable contents. I would not be reduced to eating a pouch of pureed baby food. Again. ‘My life is amazing. This is the first week I’ve felt like I’m getting myself back, you know? I actually feel like myself again.’
‘I remember trying to renew my passport when Grace was six months and Tim came home to find me sobbing on the settee,’ Lou replied. ‘I was so broken I couldn’t remember my middle name. You’re definitely doing better than me.’
‘I’m not completely on top of it,’ I admitted. ‘I’m knackered all the time and I can’t get through a full set of adverts without crying and I have to unfasten the top button on my jeans by lunchtime every day, but other than that, yeah, I think I’m there.’
‘I thought you said you’d lost all the baby weight?’
‘This body grew a baby and I will not be fat-shamed by you or anyone,’ I replied, trying to look as indignant as possible for someone who had already eaten three Penguin biscuits before calling. ‘And for your information, I did get rid of all the baby weight but I replaced it with Christmas weight and the pastries-from-the-new-coffee-shop-that-just-opened-round-the-corner weight. Plus, I feel like everything has moved. Pregnancy is rude, why couldn’t it put everything back where it found it?’
‘It’s all a matter of discipline, Ange,’ replied the woman who still weighed exactly the same as she did on her wedding day and tried on her wedding dress once a month, every month, to confirm it. ‘Just eat less and move more. Dead simple.’
I was about to give her my best snappy comeback when Gracie splashed an entire four pints of milk into her mixing bowl.
‘Does Gracie always make her own breakfast?’ I asked innocently.
Louisa glanced over her shoulder then immediately did a double take.
‘Oh, fuck,’ she grunted, dropping her phone on the kitchen table. I smiled happily at her faux gabled ceiling as the wailing started across the room.
‘I’m going to have to call you back,’ Lou said, her face sweeping across the screen. ‘There’s bloody Coco Pops everywhere.’
‘Wait, you said you wanted to ask me something,’ I reminded her. I’d woken up to several WhatsApp messages, which usually required me to find some bizarre toy like a WTF doll or some such shite that was already sold out in England – but such were the responsibilities of Cool Aunt Angela in America.
‘Honestly, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on,’ Louisa said while Gracie continued to wail in the background. ‘I’m coming to see you!’
‘You are?’ I opened the fridge and grabbed
the pouch of baby food. ‘All of you?’
‘No, just me,’ she explained. ‘Tim and I were supposed to be off on a dirty weekend but he’s been pulled into a work conference. Figured I’d abuse his air miles and get some quality BFF time in.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ I replied. ‘Clearly Gracie can be left alone to look after herself.’
‘Grace is going on a pony camp with her friend Lily and her mummy,’ she said loudly. ‘If she behaves and stops crying and eats her breakfast like a good girl.’
‘I h-hate i-i-it,’ I heard Grace stammer through choked sobs. ‘I w-want my Coco Pops.’
‘What have you given her?’ I asked, peering at the tiny, tear-stained face behind my friend.
‘Coco Pops,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘But she wants them in the mixing bowl. Tim put them in there months ago so they could share and now she insists on it every single day. Because some daughters don’t realize there’s seven quids’ worth of cereal and milk in that bowl and some fathers laugh at them every time they do it, which just encourages said daughters.’
‘Which ends up with said mothers going completely bonkers,’ I finished for her. ‘So, I am getting the feeling you could use a weekend away. When were you thinking of coming?’
Louisa’s entire face broke out into a bright, happy smile.
‘Weekend after next,’ she said. ‘I’ve already booked it, had to grab the seat while it was available. I will see you a week on Thursday!’
‘A week on Thursday!’ I forced the corners of my mouth up into a smile while my heart began to beat faster. ‘That is very soon and specific and what were you going to do if we weren’t here?’
‘Where else would you be?’ she scoffed. ‘There’s no running off all over the world these days, Angela. You’ve got a baby now. Even if Alex goes off on tour, you’re going to be at home, aren’t you?’
I sucked in my bottom lip and bit down hard.
‘I’m so looking forward to it. I can’t wait to give Alice a squidge.’ Lou smiled so happily, I couldn’t help but smile back. ‘Some proper quality time with my two favourite girls.’
Right on cue, Grace began to wail from her spot at the kitchen table.
‘My favourite girls other than you,’ Louisa yelled, shaking her head at me and frantically waving. ‘Say bye-bye to Auntie Angela.’
The call ended abruptly, leaving me all alone in the dark kitchen with a phone in one hand and a pouch of pureed apples and plums in the other. I unscrewed the cap on the pouch with my teeth and squished half of it into my mouth. Alex liked to make his own fruit purees but there wasn’t always time and, though I didn’t have the heart to tell him, Alice definitely preferred these to his homemade efforts. Also, I knew it was petty but sometimes his perfect father routine was ever so, ever so very slightly grating. No matter what my mother, his mother, fourteen thousand mummy bloggers and Gwyneth Paltrow said, a couple of store-bought processed fruit pouches weren’t going to kill her or me.
I pushed the door to Alice’s room open, just a fraction. The calming blue light from her humidifier cast just enough of a glow for me to see her peaceful, sleeping face. I smiled and fought the urge to go over and stroke her little pink cheek.
‘I will always let you have a mixing bowl full of Coco Pops for breakfast, even if Daddy says no,’ I whispered, closing her door and tiptoeing back into my bedroom. I plugged my phone into its charger and slid under the covers, curling myself around Alex’s sleeping body and burying my face in the nape of his neck, waiting for sleep to come back to me.
CHAPTER THREE
‘So do you think it’s better to split the site into sections or just use tags?’ I asked Ramon, head of design, as we stared at three different screens, each showing a dummy mock-up of my new site on Wednesday afternoon. ‘Maybe a floating menu at the top of the page—’
Before I could finish the thought, my screen froze and the disembodied head of our fearless leader appeared in front of me. Cici, the great and terrible.
‘Can you come up to my office?’ the head requested.
‘Now?’ I asked. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’
The head smiled.
‘Hit the penthouse button in the elevator, it’ll bring you straight up.’
The head disappeared.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I said to Ramon as I gathered my notebook and a pen. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘No, you won’t,’ he replied. ‘But I agree you need a drop-down menu. I’ll figure it out.’
‘You decided to keep things low-key in here then?’ I said as Don let me in, only stopping to pick my jaw up off the floor. Cici shrugged, seated in what had to be a custom-built chair behind what had to be a custom-built desk. Although it wasn’t really a chair, more of a throne that had mated with a tube of Ruby Woo lipstick on the set of a Lady Gaga stage show. A huge, glossy pop of colour in the otherwise all-white office with views out over the East River. She’d always been destined for an office like this, I realized, high in the sky and looking down on New York. She was born for it.
‘What’s up, boss?’
She gave a happy shimmy as I sat myself in one of the butter-soft white leather chairs on the opposite side of a crystal desk.
‘I do love hearing that,’ she said, nodding when Don appeared with two glasses of water and placed them on the coasters before scurrying away without a word. ‘Here’s the thing. It’s been a really fun six months doing literally everyone’s job for them but I need someone else to oversee the editorial because, like, I don’t want to do it any more. I really like being the CEO but I don’t want to have to deal with all the, you know …’
‘People?’ I suggested.
‘Exactly,’ she agreed, slapping the air for not getting it as quickly as I did. ‘The people. And the actual work. It’s really not my thing. Someone else needs to deal with the day-to-day running of the sites. I don’t have the time to sit in editorial meetings, pretending to give a shit.’
There was an argument to be made that honesty wasn’t always the best policy. I’d known Cici for years but that didn’t mean I was always ready for her bluntness. All the diplomacy genes had gone to her identical twin, Delia, in the womb but what Cici lacked in subtlety she made up for in … well, nothing good.
‘Someone has to give a shit,’ I told her. ‘You’re ultimately responsible for what you’re putting out.’
‘Exactly, that’s the problem. I hire people because they are the best at what they do but they’re always asking for my approval on every last little thing. It’s a huge turn-off,’ she sniffed. ‘So we’re creating a new role to deal with it.’
I straightened up in my chair as far as my high-waisted jeans would allow. I’d made a mistake abandoning my maternity jeans already and I knew it.
‘I’m hiring a VP of content.’ She leaned back in her lipstick throne and fixed me with her steady gaze. ‘What do you think?’
Biting my lip, I considered my answer. I thought it was a great idea but I also knew I didn’t want to do it. I left my last job when it became too corporate and I wasn’t ready to sign up for an even bigger, even more management-y role. I wanted to come in, write stories I cared about and go home at the end of the day, wondering why my brain made up words like management-y. I wanted to see my husband, hang out with my friends, put my baby to bed every night and still have time to binge on Netflix and eat an entire pizza. Taking on a bigger job would put all of that at risk, especially the Netflix and the pizza, and I just wasn’t having it.
‘I think it’s brilliant,’ I said, trying to come up with the most gracious rejection I could. Cici was not someone I wanted as an enemy. Again.
‘Right?’ she said, letting out a sigh of relief. ‘So, you might think this is crazy but you were the first person HR suggested for the role.’
‘Me?’ I gasped with fake surprise. There were no Oscars in my future.
‘Yeah but I told them you wouldn’t be interested so they found someone in the L
ondon office. I interviewed her yesterday and she’s starting next week.’
Oh.
‘They were all crazy about hiring internally, and obviously you have experience at this kind of thing, but I know it’s not what you want to do,’ Cici said, tapping her finger aggressively against the trackpad on her computer to bring it to life.
‘No,’ I agreed, fighting my FOMO. ‘It’s not what I want to do.’
But it would have been nice to have the chance to turn the job down.
‘You’re going to love Paige,’ she went on, eyes scanning her inbox as she spoke. I could tell her attention was already elsewhere. ‘You guys have a ton in common. She’s British, you’re British. She worked at Spencer UK, you worked at Spencer US.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘She’s a little younger than you,’ Cici said as she tapped away at her keyboard. ‘And she comes from more of a fashion background so she’s, you know, cool. And she has really great ideas. And hair. Fantastic hair. So not, like, everything in common, I guess.’
I’d never heard Cici be so complimentary about anyone. For the first year I’d known her, she would only refer to me as the ‘girl who turned men gay’, which wasn’t even true. All I did was encourage a very famous, supposed shagger of an actor to come out, which was, in hindsight, a total blessing in disguise. These days we’d just post a ‘hashtag live your truth’ pic on Instagram with seventeen rainbow emojis and no one would say a single thing about it, but back then it was kind of a big deal.
‘Since you did the whole London to New York thing, I’d love for you to help her out for the first few weeks,’ she said, forcing her features up into a cheerful smile. ‘Make sure she settles in right.’
Oh good, another job for me. So, on top of looking after my actual baby, I now had to babysit a younger, more fashionable, more senior version of myself who had better hair as well.
‘I can’t wait to meet her,’ I replied, focusing on the giant Andy Warhol original behind her desk. Even though Cici was right, I wasn’t interested, for some godforsaken reason, tears were burning at the edges of my eyes. My emotional response to any given situation had been out of control ever since I found out I was pregnant. Alex had already banned me from watching any and all reality TV after finding me in floods of tears after my favourite bladesmith was eliminated on an episode of Forged in Fire.