Did My Love Life Shrink in the Wash?: An absolutely laugh-out-loud and feel-good page-turner

by Kristen Bailey

  ‘Speak for yourself. I’m bloody gorgeous, me.’

  Meg does this sometimes – she slips into Northern which just makes me realise how far away she really is from us.

  ‘And when can I ask about Will?’

  I exhale deeply. Meg has not said much when it’s come to Will but maybe that’s the beauty of her; the judgement is more subtle compared to my mother or Lucy.

  ‘He made me a mix CD,’ I say, almost as if I’m trying to defend what’s he’s done.

  She pauses. ‘When did he regress to his fifteen-year-old self? Did he send it with a pack of Love Hearts and then inscribe your name on his locker?’

  I see it doesn’t impress her much. It didn’t me, but Lucy made me play said CD in the car. He’d thought about every song on there so deeply. It had everything from our favourite Britpop to gigs we’d been to, referencing the concert where he first told me he loved me, and finished with ‘Hey Joe’. That nearly made me cry. It made me think of how we came up with Joe’s name. We’d liked the idea of celebrating his male midwife, the simplicity of it, but we needed to check the musical connections, naturally. Joe Strummer, Joe Cocker, Joey Ramone and a classic by Hendrix. It all fell into place so easily.

  ‘I’m just letting us have a moment.’

  She pauses. I know what she’s thinking. A moment by definition doesn’t really last a fortnight.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about what happened when Tess was first born? What happened with Danny?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t hear this from me but she was born and when we got down to the maternity wards, the man broke down.’

  This is a strange image of someone we all thought was a tad surly and non-emotional.

  ‘And it didn’t stop there. He cried a lot. I used to find him crying folding the laundry, blubbing at how little she was and how he was scared she’d break.’

  ‘That’s really… sweet.’

  ‘It was annoying as fuck. There I was sitting in a rubber ring on the sofa with piles the size of dates and there he was crying about how beautiful the baby was…’

  I laugh. Mainly because at least I didn’t have the piles.

  ‘The way I always see it is that we carry the babies, we grow them inside us, we feel everything when they’re born, like everything. But men don’t have that run-up; suddenly, BOOM, this is your baby. You’re a father. Own it. People deal with it in different ways.’

  ‘Like running away?’

  ‘Where does Peter live? Battersea? It’s hardly the other end of the world.’

  ‘And what if I said looking after Joe was too much, what if I wanted my time out and I just walked out on him?’

  ‘You’d never do that. Which makes you immediately better than Will but then, you are my sister. You’re a good mum. And a good person.’

  Oh, Meg. That’s why she crafts words for a living. Would I walk out on this one? I look down at him in my arms, still trying to work out what the deal is with the carrot. Days like this can be a struggle, but it really would suck not to have him around. I pat him on his nappy and realise that it’s possibly full. That’s probably not helping his woes.

  ‘I have to go and change this one. Thanks for the carrot advice.’

  ‘It’s all I’m good for really. Love you, B.’

  I hang up, imagining if Meg had been at that party a few weeks back. She’d have chased Will down the street and dragged him back by his collar, made us get over ourselves – and then probably slapped some sense into the sisters in the kitchen too.

  I lay Joe down on the change mat I have permanently parked next to the sofa, opening up his nappy, and study his sad baby eyes. You’re hurting, aren’t you, bubs? You’re growing teeth. Next it will be puberty. Then you’ll move out and I’ll only see you when you want loans or Sunday lunch. Maybe a shallow bath might help instead. I clean him up and hook him over my arm. Filling the bath, I dunk him in. Is this the right thing to do? Who knows anymore? Just don’t pee in there, please. My phone suddenly starts vibrating on the floor so I scoop Joe out with a towel and answer it by placing the handset under my chin.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Beth?’

  I pause for a moment to work out whose voice that is on the end of the line. ‘Yasmin?’

  This is a surprise. Why is she calling me? Shit, should I be at a shoot or something?

  ‘Are you busy?’ she asks.

  I’m not sure how to answer. I’m about to baste my son’s baby butt in cream and scramble to get a nappy on him but apart from that…

  ‘I’m just with Joe.’

  The sound which greets us next is a breathless sobbing, like she can’t quite catch her words.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m just… I’m bleeding. I don’t know anyone else with a baby. I don’t think this should be happening.’

  I stand here, silent. Mainly in shock that she’s called me but also sad that out of what I assume to be a large circle of friends and family, I am her first port of call. How scared and desperate must you be to call someone you hardly know when you’re hurting?

  ‘Are you cramping?’ I ask her. ‘Is there pain? I’m not a doctor and but I can call my sister?’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she says abruptly. ‘I have an appointment lined up with the antenatal clinic in an hour. I just can’t do this… what if…’

  As strange as it feels, I think I know what she’s hinting at. What if I’ve lost a baby and I’m just sitting there, having to cope with that information on my own? I would never have coped. And I had sisters, my mother. There was Will.

  ‘Tell me what hospital and we’ll meet you there.’

  ‘Everything is fine. Can you hear the heartbeat? Healthy baby.’

  A kindly sonographer and a midwife have a Doppler over Yasmin’s stomach as she lies back on the bed, the echo of the heartbeat skipping in time with the clock in the room. I’ve not been in a hospital since Joe was born so it’s bizarre to be back. The crackle of the paper sheets draws me back to my first scan. Will cried when he saw what he thought was the baby. Turns out it was just a random part of my innards. But he squeezed my hand so tight, inhaled sharply to hear we were having a boy. We still have that scan on the fridge.

  ‘All looks good to me. The baby is well. How is your morning sickness?’ asks the midwife.

  ‘Pretty bad. And not just confined to the mornings,’ replies Yasmin.

  ‘OK. Well, some women get spotting as their bodies adjust to the pregnancy. If the bleeding gets heavier or you get any cramping then call us again but your baby looks fine to me. The morning sickness should subside as your body gets used to all the extra hormones. Your blood sugar is low. Do you eat enough?’

  I want to say that as a model, food is an alien concept.

  ‘I’ve had trouble keeping anything down. Beth told me to eat Tangfastics.’

  The medical professionals look at me in disgust. I wasn’t telling her to eat those solely; as part of a balanced diet of course. If she’s just eating them, that baby will come out with some angry soured expression.

  ‘Well, just make sure you’re eating other things too. Did this happen with your other pregnancy?’ she asks, looking at Joe. He looks up from his stroller, big eyes like a lemur penetrating the gloom of the room.

  ‘Joe’s mine,’ I mutter.

  ‘Are you her partner then? Sister?’ she asks me, trying to work out our relationship. Shit. She thinks we’re either married or related. Talk about a total mismatch in terms of genes or coupling.

  ‘She’s my friend,’ Yasmin says.

  Friend: an interesting definition of our relationship. I don’t know whether to correct her and just say we used to take the same number bus home when we were sixteen.

  ‘Well, you must be a very good friend to be here. Look after her. Lots of liquids and make sure she’s taking antenatal vitamins. Folic acid, in particular.’

  I feel the need to salute this instruction as it dawns on me that
I have been assigned follow-up ‘friend’ duties. They both leave, pulling the curtain behind them while Yasmin rubs the ultrasound jelly off her still enviably flat stomach.

  ‘I’m glad you’re OK,’ I say.

  Silence. She seems a bit sheepish, at a loss for words.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she says finally. ‘No one’s ever, I mean… I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t nothing. You were scared, emotional.’

  She runs her tongue along the top of her teeth, almost like I’m shaming her for feeling something about this incident, this pregnancy.

  ‘Is Jethro on tour?’ I ask her, curious why he isn’t here instead of me.

  Her nostrils flare and her face quivers with emotion.

  ‘Jethro moved out. With Dicky. About a fortnight ago now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Simple maths tells me that was around the time of the shoot. Has she been carrying this on her own since then?

  ‘What about… your family?’

  ‘I… I haven’t told my family yet. And all my friends are’ – she pauses to find a word – ‘they wouldn’t be interested.’

  ‘I think if you were sick or hurt, they might want to know.’

  She shakes her head sternly. ‘No one needs to know.’

  That puts me in my place. Is this her way of telling me that I’m supposed to remain tight-lipped?

  ‘I haven’t told anyone, if that’s what you’re implying.’

  ‘No. I meant my friends are different to you. They wouldn’t care,’ she says, ruefully. ‘To be fair, I don’t have many friends. Real friends.’

  ‘What about Kelly Taylor from school? You went out for lunch with her the other day.’

  I realise that’s evidence I’ve been stalking her on social media.

  ‘Kels is just some social hanger-on. She likes the freebies. I think she’s leaked stories about Jethro to the press before.’

  ‘Oh.’ Surely you shouldn’t have lunch with people like that then? But now doesn’t feel like the time for a lecture.

  ‘Are we friends then?’ I ask her. It feels ridiculous to ask this, like I’m seven years old and confirming that we might get to play together in the playground.

  ‘Well, yeah?’

  ‘I mean you have peed in front of me,’ I joke.

  She looks at me strangely. ‘I pee in front of everyone. I’m a model. I have no inhibitions, I have to strip in front of strangers.’

  ‘Oh, well… It’s not what I usually do.’

  It feels good to lay down the peeing boundaries now if we are going to proceed with this relationship.

  ‘Does Jethro not want the baby then?’ I ask.

  Her eyes glaze over and she exhales, almost laughing. ‘It’s not Jethro’s.’

  ‘Oh.’

  My eyes scan the room on receiving that information. That sucks. For Jethro. And for her. But it makes me piece together what I know, what I’ve seen.

  ‘Harry?’ I whisper.

  She nods, staring into her lap. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for about eighteen months. I brought him to your party. He was Boba Fett.’

  I pause to take that information in. Lucy said you did the fandango in Emma’s downstairs bathroom. We can officially put that party down as the worst party in the history of birthday celebrations.

  ‘So Jethro found out?’

  She nods. ‘To be fair, we’d both been doing our own thing for a while. He’d been shagging some music exec on tour but the pregnancy was the final nail in the coffin.’

  Momentarily, I think about how Instagram has always painted a very different picture. If you were to follow their feeds you’d see they were still taking pictures of their non-dairy low-fat coffees and happy faces in paid promotion work, and there was no mention of a separation, not even a cryptic meme referring to heartbreak.

  ‘Does Harry know?’ I ask.

  ‘I called him before you. I’ve been calling for a lifetime. Today, he told me I was making this up to get his attention. Told me not to ring him anymore. Or talk to him. And told me it was my responsibility to do the right thing and get rid of this baby,’ she says in a whisper.

  The emotion, the raw fragility in Yasmin’s voice, destroys me.

  ‘And then I could only think to call you.’ She sits on the edge of the bed, cradling her head. ‘I just don’t know what he’s thinking. All that time we’ve been dating, he’s been telling me he’s going to leave his wife, that he loves me, and then as soon as this happens, he fucks off and tells me it’s over. He tells me he has a family, that I would be breaking it up.’

  I’m doing a whole series of mental calculations in my head. This was not a one-off snog in a corridor or a rando shag at my least favourite birthday party ever. This was a whole affair. And I think about what Giles told me about Harry, about how he was a social climber, someone vying for work and attention and my heart twinges that Yasmin fell into that trap. Because her heart aches; she entered into that relationship with the intention of something greater. I am conflicted, too. Shouldn’t I be feeling angry with her for conducting an affair with a married man? Weirdly, I’m not. This girl, who I thought to be devoid of emotion, is revealing herself to me, peeling back the wrapper slowly. Before, I thought her barely human, some caricature of a girl I used to go to school with. But now, I’ve seen a baby growing inside her, its tiny heart beating. All the emotion that comes with this life-changing moment flows out of her. You can read it all over her perfect face. And I just want to hug her. I want to tell her it will all be alright. I’ve done this, I’ve been there, it’s not completely awful.

  Joe gurgles in the corner and we both look down at him. That plum-sized baby in your stomach could one day grow into that. It’s amazing, if terrifying. Yasmin stares at Joe for a moment too long then gets her phone out, scanning numbers.

  ‘I’ll book an Uber. How are you and Joe getting home?’ she asks me, dabbing at her tears with her sleeves. I hand her a tissue. Oh God, me and my bleeding heart. Because I think of her returning to that empty house now, how it’s devoid of company and warmth and her tiny whizzing dog. I recall how I felt when Will first left and the crushing loneliness of him not being there. At least in that moment, I had a Joe. That feeling I know she’ll carry forces the words out of my mouth.

  ‘I’m driving. Come, I’ll give you a lift and you can come back to mine for a bit.’

  Track Nineteen

  ‘Parklife’ – Blur (1994)

  ‘Yasmin King is living with you?’ asks Lucy, her words slow and enunciated. ‘You really are some stupid but very special saint, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not living, really. She kinda just pops by with food and coffees. Like nice food, too. Bento boxes, frittata and actual chimichangas from posh food places.’

  Lucy doesn’t seem too sure about this type of recompense but when someone is bringing you miso salmon bento and you know they’re pregnant and alone, you don’t turn them away. The afternoon I brought her home, she curled up on my sofa and we binge-watched Gossip Girl and we debated about how Penn Badgley has got better-looking over the years like a young George Clooney. I fed her crisps and made her tea, grateful that I hadn’t thrown away the camomile shite my mother had gifted me. She stayed the night on my sofa and left the next morning. She started coming back on random days, usually without warning. She’d look at Joe, watch me change his nappies and hand me wipes. We’d occasionally sit in silence on our phones or have debates over noodles (apparently I should be going brown rice soba. Like that’s going to happen) and about whether it was normal to lust over Zac Efron. The answer is yes since he did Baywatch. When she asked about Will, I panicked and lied, telling her he’d gone away on a trip. Where to? Baku, I blurted out. All sorts of architectural shit happens in Baku, apparently. To have told her the truth would just be too complicated, too sad. And on bad days, she’d stalk Harry on social media. She’d look up his wife and gawp at their family pictures and we’d
both do next-level detective work to work out his plan, his agenda. He would post family pictures with pointed comments almost directed at Yasmin talking about family, love, his wife and they would floor her. She’d hold onto her stomach and sob and I’d hand her tissues and not know what to say or do except stuff her with Haribo and let her soak through my sofa cushions.

  ‘She really is desperate for company then,’ says Lucy.

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘Not what I mean. Like, what about her family? Do they not like her?’

  Lucy is pushing our niece, Violet, on a swing while she talks to me. Our other niece, Iris, walks precariously over a climbing frame. I don’t think that’s safe. Is that safe? It’s making me very nervous.

  ‘It’s the pregnancy thing. The shame. Her dad is quite traditional. So I think she’s just attached herself to someone with a child who won’t pass judgement. She remembers you though, she liked you at school,’ I say.

  ‘Who wouldn’t? I’m a fricking dream. Come on, Vee, let’s see if we can swing you so high you go over the bars.’ Violet’s face reads horror and delight. ‘And so some bloke called Harry is the father and there’s a whole shitstorm there because he’s married? That’s juicy gossip. So she left the rock star? How do we know he’s not the dad?’

  ‘Because of the dates. He was on tour. And he’s taken custody of the dog.’

  ‘The one that pissed on you?’

  ‘Yes. And you can’t tell anyone. Keep that trap shut.’ I realise I may have disclosed all the details to the wrong sister here. ‘I want to make sure she’s OK. She’s given me no clue as to whether she’s keeping the baby or not, but you can tell she just needs someone.’

  ‘Beth, if she takes advantage of your good nature, I will track her down and beat her.’

  She would but to be fair, I think all that Yasmin is seeking out is a warm body to ensure she’s not on her own. What also confuses me is how she doesn’t disclose any of this on her social media. On Instagram, it’s as if nothing has happened. She isn’t letting on that the boyfriend isn’t around anymore. She posts pictures of her cross-legged on her concrete floor and yoga mat looking serene and poised and aligning her chakras. I don’t get it. Mainly because at that early stage of pregnancy when my body was adjusting to those extremes of hormones, I constantly looked like I’d been on a bender and dragged home by my hair.