“She’s not sad,” I said to Xander. She’s angry, I realized. She was angry with the world. I didn’t share this with Xander. Instead, I said, “She’s only just come into the world and it’s cold and she’s hungry. She’s shocked.” As am I, I wanted to add.
“She wants her mum,” Xander said, with curious insight for a nine-year-old.
I nodded and gulped a bit. She wanted Martha. Angular, calm Martha. Layla would, of course, know her over blobby, impatient me. We were so different, Martha and I. Layla couldn’t be fooled by me, the lesser Blackwater sister.
Now it’s just Layla and me in the living room. Xander is away overnight, the first time he’s not with Marc or me in his entire life. He seemed glad to be going to a quiet, calm house without any crying babies. I try to pretend he’s with Marc. It’s easier that way. Marc was the only other person as watchful as me, when Xander was a toddler. “He’s got a Lego block in his hand,” Marc would say. “Mind he doesn’t eat it.” The anxiety of parenthood had been divided equally between us. There was no helpless-man act, no inability to stack a dishwasher or remember a birthday card while seemingly having not lost the ability to go to work or remember what time the boxing was on. There was none of that bullshit, thankfully. Of course, there was another kind, as there always is.
I stare at the wall now, and not at Layla, and try to count to ten in my mind again. That doesn’t work, so I watch the second hand of a clock on the wall as it completes a full circuit. Sixteen hours. Perhaps I could ask Marc to come over. Share the load. But no. That’s not fair, is it? It wouldn’t even be fair if we were together. This is our mess. Mine and Martha’s.
Layla’s face is bright purple, her gums like angry red watermelon slices in her mouth, and I wearily make up another bottle. I consider texting Martha, but I don’t. What’s the point? It would only upset her. And she wouldn’t be able to come home any sooner. Scott should be here, but who am I to tell him that? I cringe as I imagine writing the text. Come and look after your child! I would say. And Martha and Scott would roll their eyes at silly, dramatic Becky: the hired help, the nanny, unable to cope with looking after a baby. “This is what we pay you for,” Martha would admonish, and I would feel small and sad and shit at being unable to do yet another job.
Instead, I get out my phone and text Marc. It’s weird, I know, but I am sort of beyond caring. Marc and I always had a wonderfully weird relationship, and we will forever. We were weird when together, and weird when apart, so why not sit comfortably in the wasteland between parents, friends and ex-lovers?
Jesus, I’m worried about Layla. And me! I write to him.
The crying is so loud I think I might actually go mad. I look at her little red face and shift her from being up against my shoulder to the “tiger in the tree” hold. Her limbs are bunched up, angrily, but her left arm swings down like a monkey’s. I pat her back, which feels tense. It doesn’t feel like wind, but what do I know? It feels taut with stress. Like she is carrying the weight of the world.
For fuck’s sake. For fuck’s sake. Just shut up. Anger seems to suffuse me, like I have been dipped in lava. Just shut up. I down my first glass of wine, and wait for the numbing effect to kick in.
I stand again and stare out of my living-room windows and out into the night. Jesus, I’d take a difficult boss over this, any day. Layla is more difficult than the very worst of the television people. I try to bring a smile to my face at the irony of it. But that’s the thing: You can only laugh at your situation if you are not frightened of it. I am frightened, here tonight, with a baby who won’t stop screaming, trapped in an arrangement I didn’t intend to turn out this way, and so nothing is funny. Nothing is nice. Nothing is comforting, except wine. I imagine I feel similarly to Layla.
My phone pings, the special tone I have assigned to Marc. He has sent a lovely text full of advice.
I consider the list while looking at Layla and find a song at random to play on my phone. Green Day blares out, and she cries harder. I leave it on for a few seconds longer, but it seems to anger her further, so I turn it off. I go back to the text and, over the next half an hour, I work my way down the list. She refuses the next bottle. I give her a bath, which she cries through, and put her into a new nappy and yellow sleep suit with bears on the feet. I grasp her little hands. They feel just the right temperature, but I turn the heating up regardless. I add a layer and then I remove two. It is like the worst exam of my life, like some vast logic puzzle I have to do while my ears are being tortured. I pour a third glass of wine—fuck it—and take her upstairs and over to the feature wall in the bedroom and show her the black-and-white polka dots. And—ah. At last. Silence. My ears ring in the unexpected quiet, as if they have simply started to scream, too. Layla stares at the polka dots in awe.
I was six months pregnant with Xander and couldn’t stand on the stepladder to paint the ceiling because I was so unbalanced with my bump.
Marc found it hilarious. “Hang the wallpaper with me instead,” he said.
We left the ceiling half-done. We were like that.
“Are you bothered about a half-painted ceiling?” he said to me.
“But,” I said, “it should be finished. When we sell—”
“Do you care?” he had said.
The arguments that I had stacked up—my parents’ arguments, Martha’s voice in my head—fell away.
“Not at all,” I said.
He brought the dining table up. My job was to spread the paste onto the back of the wallpaper. Marc set a bucket beside me and brought me a chair.
The paste looked like cheap porridge, thick and gluey. I dipped the brush into it and pulled it out. The paste dripped off it.
“None of that ready-glued wallpaper shit,” Marc said. He showed me how to paste it onto the back of a sheet while he hung one on the wall.
“It’s quite methodical,” I said, breathing it in. The paste smelled comforting, somehow. Starchy, almost strawlike. I was standing in a slice of sunlight, the light warm on the tops of my feet, and Marc was humming gently under his breath, and I thought: How is it possible to be this happy, at nineteen and unemployed and pregnant? It couldn’t be true, and yet it was. It so clearly was.
“You’ve dropped loads on the floor,” Marc said with a laugh, reaching down to blot the drips with a wad of blue tissue.
I liked that laugh. That laugh that said: “I will never shout at you. Life simply isn’t that serious.”
I was scrolling through my phone while Marc hummed under his breath. He’d tagged us on Facebook—he loved Facebook—as hanging out. Only I knew we were hanging wallpaper, and I liked that: our secret, inner language. Our own code. It only got richer over time, like a slowly marinating stew.
We were obsessed with renovating our house—the little house, we called it, for some reason—in time for Xander’s arrival. We did six rooms in two months, becoming like a one-dimensional couple who work together and talk only of the business. We had become obsessed with the idea of the mantelpiece. We would fantasize about when the house was done. We would have things on the mantelpiece. Curated pieces: dishes from Nepal, pretentious trinkets, the sort of thing Martha started buying after she met Scott. Whenever we saw anything—a stupid wooden box in HomeSense, or the ugliest handmade ornament for sale on Facebook—we would say, “For the mantelpiece?”
Later, when we did the living room, I was too large to even hang wallpaper, so I just sat in a corner of the room while Marc did it, instead. I read quiz questions to him off the internet. “What’s number one in the UK charts right now?” I would say, and accuse him of being old when he didn’t know. “Coldplay . . . ?” he would say, and I’d hoot with laughter. “It’s Beyoncé and Jay-Z,” I’d say, rolling my eyes, and Marc would say, “Who?”
I sat with my back to the radiator in the bathroom while he tiled, one cold Sunday. Xander was kicking away inside me while I drank a can of Co
ke and watched Marc grouting. He was meticulous with it, like an artist, I always thought. He knew so much stuff. That was one of the things I loved most about him. He knew where the electricity cables ran behind the walls, where the hot and cold water pipes went. He was like a magician who could see behind the scenes. And he’d learned it all himself, too. His father was rubbish, had never taught him to be handy. He’d gone on all these courses to learn how to do all of it. Basic mechanics for cars. Carpet fitting. And now he did everything. He had about nine jobs. He listened to football podcasts all day at work and finished sometimes at three o’clock. I loved that about him, too. He made me somehow see that life didn’t have to be experienced in a big way, and that happiness was small, really. I still have that attitude now. I can have as much fun in the bakery aisle of Sainsbury’s as in a club in Ibiza. It’s all about attitude.
“Do you think our baby will have kids?” I said to him as he moved the trowel back and forth, his eyes flitting over the tiles. Afterward, I knew, they would all be identical, perfectly uniform. I would always have a lovely house, thanks to him. Design school or no design school.
“Who knows?” he said, stopping to look at me.
“I’d love to know whether or not I’m going to be a granny,” I said.
“I just think”—he stood, his hands on his hips, and looked at me—“I just think I’m going to have a rather nice life either way. No matter what.”
That optimism. I closed my eyes, relishing it, like the sun on my face on a hot day. Was it possible to fall in love with a mind-set? If so, I had.
He put an arm around me. We hugged for so long that a bit of grout, thicker than all of the rest, dried and set before we could remove it. He kissed the top of my head. He didn’t care.
Layla starts crying again after a minute of the wallpaper—one minute’s blissful silence—and I sigh heavily. I take her into the bathroom and find the piece of grout. I put my fingers around it and try to pull it away, but it’s stuck fast, like a barnacle. Good, I think, anchoring myself to it.
I put her down in her Moses basket, but the crying only gets worse. Little tears are dripping out of the corners of her eyes and gathering in her ears like caught rainwater. Her gummy mouth is moving, angry, frightened. She wants her mother.
I leave her there and sink down the wall to sit on the floor. It’s not fair. Men go to work but women can’t, because of this. These tears and this unhappiness. I am the closest Layla has to a mother and yet I am nothing—not a patch on Martha. I don’t smell like her, I don’t dress like her—stylish but classic, like a royal—and I don’t sound like her, either. She needs Martha’s warmth, her calmness—she’s so serene—and her quiet organization, her firm, angular grasp. None of my stupid jokes and fumbling disorganization. She needs Martha. Not me. Not Marc. Not even Scott. It isn’t fair, none of it.
And so instead of trying to stop Layla, I simply join in. After a bit, I pick her up, and together we rock and sob on the spare-room floor, my feet lying underneath the bed, toes just touching the underside of the mattress.
* * *
—
Jesus, the garden is cold. It’s seven thirty. I didn’t think. I just stumbled out here, desperate to get away from the crying, the relentless, sheer bloody-minded determination not to sleep. God, it’s horrendous.
I dial Marc’s number without thinking.
“All right?” he says. “Still crying?”
“Yeah, she just won’t stop,” I say. My voice is full of tears; I can hear them. There have been too many tears in this house recently. Mine, Layla’s. Even Xander was strangely mournful the other morning, tired of the all-day crying, as we all were. I hope he’s all right with it. That it isn’t affecting him. That he knows I love him.
“It will get better. And you can give her back soon.” But it will never end, I think, looking up at the sky and blowing a bloom of air out. There will be more work, not less. Martha has always worked too much. Too many good bloody causes. And I will never get to design school. God, what was I thinking? I wanted to escape the set dressing, but I didn’t think beyond that. And now what? I wish I could quit. Go to design school. Or even just get a normal job again. But Martha will never find another nanny willing to be so flexible, will she? And then all those children in Kos . . . they will suffer, too.
“Have you fed her—loads? She’s definitely not hungry?” he says.
“No. She’s not hungry. Definitely not.”
I think of Layla writhing around as I offered a bottle. I’d defrosted it correctly, and then she’d refused it, and I had thrown it angrily in the bin. Fuck’s sake. My own anger scares me, and I try to breathe through it, to let the thoughts go. Don’t attach meaning to them.
Have more wine. That’ll help.
“Where is she?”
“Inside. I’m in the garden. Having a break.”
She is upstairs, in the makeshift nursery, in the Moses basket. Her legs will be kicking up, clenched to her body. Her face will be red. Little arms and legs making cycling motions as the anger fills her body, too.
Something rises inside me. Something dark and furious. How could Scott leave me like this? How could Martha? This isn’t supposed to be my job. This isn’t my child. It’s not fucking fair.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Babies can handle being upset. She won’t remember.”
“I’m not. Honest. I’m not. It’s just—ugh.” I try to play it down. I don’t want him to worry.
He wants to come over. To help. But I can’t let him do that. He can’t help me. I raise my eyes heavenward and try not to think about it.
He gives some pat advice, about it not becoming my problem, but it is: It is.
I stand in the garden for a few more minutes, scrolling through the texts again. I’ll get her some Calpol. To calm her down. To numb any pain she’s in. And maybe then I will calm down, too.
A strange plan is forming in my mind, unwittingly, as though it is not my own, mental weeds growing, obscuring my homegrown plants. I could leave. Go to Londis. Buy the Calpol. That could be my breather. And then I wouldn’t have to put her in the pushchair, bring everything with me: the changing bag, the endless bottles.
It’s almost the same as standing in the garden and having a smoke and a cry. I’ll be less than five minutes. I put her on the kitchen floor yesterday, and she survived that.
It’s not cutting corners: It’s survival.
I stand and listen in the hallway. Her crying hasn’t become any louder, and so, satisfied, I leave her, closing the door behind me softly. I lock it, too, to keep her safe.
48
Martha
Frannie is next. A curious woman who lives opposite Becky. I know her to say hello to, but then, I know almost everybody Becky knows, and vice versa. This is how our relationship was. Her oldest friend became my friend, and came to my bachelorette party. We forgot how we knew the people in our lives, only that they were tangled up in the web of me and Becky.
Frannie’s very fair, and very serious. Becky says she is too earnest. I have only met her a handful of times, and know that she used to live with her sister—they were often to be seen reading in their garden—and had a dog together called Patrick who they took to a dog nursery every morning at eight o’clock. Becky called it Malory Towers for Dogs and would only ever refer to it as this. But then the sister left. “Got married, had a baby,” Becky said bitterly.
Frannie enters the courtroom, brought to the witness box by an usher. She’s wearing a pair of huge glasses. Her hair is dip-dyed, near blond at the ends and dark at the roots. “Very Brighton,” Becky would say.
She’s wearing a paisley dress with bell-bottom sleeves that drape absurdly over the wood of the witness box.
“Are you Francesca Lewis?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Will you tell us a bit about what you saw on the nigh
t of the twenty-sixth of October?”
49
Francesca Lewis
7:20 p.m., Thursday, October 26
Frannie was trying to French-plait her hair. It wasn’t so bad, living alone. It felt fat and full. Plus, she felt sometimes like she was a more interesting person when she lived alone. She was a cross-stitcher, a woman who liked to take a walk around the streets right before bed, a lipstick-lover.
She propped the phone up on the windowsill, paused on the first video. She liked to do her hair there. She could stand the phone up against the glass and use the pane as a mirror. This is how she did the hair tutorials, even though she was thirty-four and alone and should probably be depressed.
She was just reaching up to loop a complicated bit of hair that didn’t seem to belong anywhere into the main plait, when her eye was caught by a woman at the window opposite. Ah. Wasn’t that nice? Her neighbor, Becky. Cradling her sister’s baby. Becky was looking after her a lot at the moment.
They were always exchanging things: the car seat Becky had given to Martha, the pair of shoes Becky had borrowed for a night out. “See you Thursday,” Martha would say, “and bring the chutney.” Things like that. Family stuff. She missed that. Her sister, Olive, now lived in Cornwall with her new husband. It had all happened very quickly.
Frannie looked across again at the image in the window. It gave a new meaning to the word tender. One hand around the baby’s head, protectively. The other around its bottom. Comforting. Her body bent toward the baby. The room softly lit, amber, behind them.
She couldn’t help but wonder as she stared at the mother and baby framed in the window, like a Madonna and child.
Despite herself, Frannie couldn’t help watching them for a long moment. Aunt and niece.
50
Martha
Thank you,” Harriet says. “So how would you describe the defendant’s body language toward the baby?”
The Good Sister Page 23