I’ve heard this line before. This is Troy all over again. Wanting Helen but not prepared to fully let me go. That’s what Adam’s doing. Christ, what the hell attracts me to these people? I should have a slogan: Emma Baker — she’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
Maybe Ian was right. I need to let go of the tow rope. I think I’ve had enough of being dragged through the water at high speed.
‘Adam, you need to go back to your own tent now. I’ll move my kids.’
I feel around for my clothes and dress clumsily in the dark. It’s even colder now.
Unzipping the tent, I clamber out. Inside Adam and Bon’s tent, the three kids are curled around each other like kittens. None of them has remained in their sleeping bags. Carefully moving heavy little arms and legs, I untangle my children and haul first Tim, and then Freya back to our tent, tucking their sleeping bags around them.
Adam is standing awkwardly outside, waiting for me to finish.
It’s a petty move, but once I’ve brought Freya in I don’t go back out. I zip the tent up behind me and climb into my sleeping bag, with a child tucked under each arm.
I hear Adam, in the darkness, waiting. After a few minutes he must figure out that I’m not coming out to say goodnight, and I hear him get into his tent.
I’m so tired now, but sleep isn’t coming. The heady cocktail of whisky, anger and guilt see to that. The air mattress has now almost fully deflated and I can feel the rocks on the ground digging into my back. It’s no less than I deserve. I hope Adam’s air mattress is flat too, and there are rocks under his back.
What was I thinking, going to bed with Adam? Of course he wasn’t seriously interested in me. He’s been so sweet and attentive, but also so vague about Ilse. Looking back, it’s perfectly clear he was just trying to make himself feel better. That’s what you do when you love someone and you think you’ve lost them. You do whatever it takes to make yourself feel better. For Adam it was flirting with me. For me it’s been inserting myself into Troy and Helen’s relationship. How could I have been so foolish, for so long? Well I’ll be buggered if I’m going to hang around on the reserve bench of yet another marriage.
Something rustles in the leaf litter outside my tent. It’s something small. Probably a mouse. But it’s quite close to my head. I whack the canvas and the thing scurries away.
All is quiet for a moment, and then I hear it come back. This time it’s come along the side of the tent, near where my feet are. It’s scratching at the canvas. I kick the tent wall and it stops.
Then it runs up the side of the tent, mercifully still on the outside, and across the roof, which sags alarmingly. Whatever it is isn’t that small. It’s not a mouse. It runs back down the other side.
This needs to stop. I’ve no idea how to make it stop. I don’t know what it wants.
‘Go away,’ I whisper. ‘Please.’
The rustling stops. I lie for several minutes, listening. Nothing. Slowly, my eyelids droop and I fall into the deep sleep of the emotionally exhausted.
I wake in utter confusion, what could be moments or hours later, when something furry runs across my head. What the fuck?
Flailing madly, I leap upright, but there’s just enough air left in the mattress for it to behave like a waterbed and I immediately tumble over again. I feel for the torch, which I know I left near where my head was, even though I fear that’s where the creature is. But I need light.
Flicking the torch on, I see there is a hole in the tent; something has eaten its way in. And now it’s in here somewhere. What does it want? Food. It must want food. But I don’t have any food in here. I’m not an idiot. I know you don’t keep food in your tent.
Except the chocolate. There’s a bar of chocolate in a boot. Inside the tent. That’s what the animal wants. A midnight feast.
I put the boot outside the tent, with the chocolate still inside. Maybe if I leave the tent flaps open the animal will follow the chocolate outside. That’s the extent of my problem-solving capabilities right now.
I don’t know what else to do. I really just don’t know. And I’m so tired. I start to cry.
I’m tired of doing the hard things by myself. I know that’s pathetic, and that I’m a capable grown woman who doesn’t need someone to help me get this probably very small and not in any way dangerous native animal out of my tent, but I wish I weren’t alone.
It turns out that sitting down on the bed and crying for a while isn’t the worst idea. While I’m still, a little furry brown face ventures out from behind a backpack in the corner. I think it’s some sort of bush rat.
Neither of us moves.
‘Hey, rat,’ I whisper. ‘Could you go? Outside? There’s chocolate out there.’
It stares at me for a few more seconds, before turning and burrowing back into the corner of the tent. There’s more scrabbling and a tearing sound, and then everything’s quiet again. It’s eaten its way back out. I sigh.
I zip the tent up again, switch off the light, and lie back down between the kids, who, astonishingly, have slept through the whole rodent incursion and mother meltdown.
Of course that doesn’t last. No sooner have I closed my eyes than Tim nudges me.
‘Mum, I need a wee.’
‘Mmmm . . . just go out and wee on a tree,’ is the best I can offer.
‘It’s too dark. I need you to come.’
Trying my very best to keep my muttered ‘fuck’s sake’ inaudible, I stagger outside and while Tim relieves himself of what sounds like about twelve litres of wee, I stand in the freezing air and realise I can see the faintest glow of morning in the sky.
* * *
Freya’s the first camper awake, properly, for the day. I make no effort to keep her quiet. Fuck you all, I think. It’s hugely uncharitable, but I haven’t slept. Kids only grow when they sleep, and adults only regenerate goodwill when they sleep. I’m all tapped out.
Ian and Julia, aggressively early risers themselves, decide to come over to our camp with their bowls of cereal. I’m actually pretty pleased to have their company, but maybe I’m delirious from lack of sleep.
By the time Adam emerges, I’ve had three cups of coffee and two sachets of toffee-apple-flavoured instant porridge. I’m nevertheless still a bit drunk.
‘Morning,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Good sleep?’
‘Not really,’ I reply. ‘I had a rat in my tent.’
‘Hah!’ Ian snorts. ‘Is that what they’re calling it these days?’
‘Ian!’ Julia thumps him on the arm, but she’s trying to conceal a smile.
Everyone heard us last night. Oh God. I thought we were so quiet. But realistically, how quiet can two drunk people shagging in a tent really be? My embarrassment is so strong I feel I could actually dematerialise and vanish. That would be the absolute best-case scenario right now.
‘No,’ I say, pretending not to know what he means. ‘An actual rat ate through my tent.’
‘Shit, really?’ Adam looks astonished.
‘Really.’
‘How did you get it out?’ asks Julia.
‘I suggested we start a relationship and it ran screaming into the night. It’s my signature move.’
Julia and Ian roar with laughter and Adam looks suitably mortified. Good.
* * *
By nine o’clock, I’ve packed up our tent and loaded the car. I want, with every fibre of my being, to drive home at once, get into a hot bath and then sleep for twelve hours, but Tim is determined to go on the bushwalk everyone’s been talking about.
‘It’s not super long,’ Julia tells me. ‘About six kilometres, round-trip. The kids love it.’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Let’s do it.’ My ears are ringing with tiredness, but I just can’t ruin this for Tim. He’s having such a nice time.
Everyone’s faffing about packing their rucksacks and filling their water bottles, so I head off down the track with Freya and Tim. We’re going to be slow, going at Freya’s pace, so we mig
ht as well get a head start.
Julia’s right — it’s a beautiful walk. The sky is finally clear and blue, but we’re protected by the canopy, so we walk in dappled sunlight. The path is an access track, wide enough to get a vehicle down if you needed to, so it’s a pretty smooth walk for Freya. I’m sure I’ll end up carrying her for much of the hike, but for now at least, she and Tim seem happy to walk together.
I take huge breaths of the fresh cool air and, as I put one foot in front of the other, I start to feel human again. Maybe there’s something to this whole ‘getting out in nature’ idea. It does seem pretty restorative. The kids want to chat, and we have one of those aimless, fascinating conversations you can only have when there are no other distractions.
They ask me dozens of questions, and I do my best to respond, even though I don’t know the answers most of the time. A combination of guessing and distraction works well.
‘What’s that tree for, Mummy?’ asks Freya.
‘It’s for measuring the distance between the ground and the sky.’
‘Really?’ Tim is sceptical.
‘No, probably not really. It’s for birds and animals to live in, and to shade the ground so smaller plants can grow. It was also food for dinosaurs, originally.’
‘Not T-Rex.’ Freya is very sure of herself in this department.
‘No, not T-Rex,’ I agree. ‘He ate meat, didn’t he.’
‘Yes, but Charlie at my preschool is like an ankylosaurus.’
‘Is he? How’s that?’
‘He only eats plants.’
‘Oh. With people that’s called being vegetarian.’
‘Sometimes he eats the plants in the gardens at preschool and the teachers have to stop him.’
‘Maybe he’s actually an ankylosaurus then,’ I suggest.
Freya looks at me like I’m insane. ‘No, he has really soft feet.’
We’ve been walking for an hour when I realise no one has overtaken us, which is very strange because a herd is only as fast as its slowest buffalo, and Freya is really a staggeringly slow buffalo. Maybe we’ve gone the wrong way, or maybe everyone else sensibly decided that bushwalking with a hangover is a terrible idea. We turn and head back to the campground.
There are two cars left: ours and Ian and Julia’s. They are sitting on the bonnet of their car, and when they see us they cheer.
‘Hooray! You’re back! Everyone else decided to give it a miss, but we thought we’d wait for you.’
‘Everyone?’ I ask.
Ian gives me a wry smile. ‘Afraid so,’ he says. ‘A bunch of them decided they would rather visit those caves on the way back than do a bushwalk.’
I’m so touched they didn’t go as well. I feel like crying. ‘You didn’t have to wait,’ I say.
‘Nonsense,’ Julia says. ‘We weren’t going to leave you alone out here.’
‘Well, thanks. That was really kind.’
‘Now,’ Ian says, peering at me, ‘are you all right to drive back?’
‘Oh, totally fine,’ I say, opening my eyes as widely as I can and trying to look alert.
‘You’re completely exhausted,’ Julia tells me. ‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘Really, I’m fine, there’s no need—’
‘Excellent!’ Ian looks thrilled. ‘She never lets me drive.’
‘Daaaad,’ comes a moan from the back seat of Ian and Julia’s car. I peer in and see Georgie and Damon sitting, seatbelts fastened, ready to go.
‘Emma, give me your keys,’ Julia orders. ‘Ian, get those kids on the road. They’ve had enough of you fart-arsing around.’
Looking delighted, Ian jumps into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. He makes a wide victory circle around the campsite, with his window down, waving merrily at us the whole way.
‘Good grief, Ian, just go!’ Julia shouts.
She turns to me. ‘You need a sleep. Are you any good at sleeping in cars? I can never sleep in a moving vehicle.’
‘I could probably sleep standing right here,’ I admit. ‘Thanks, Julia. This is so nice of you.’
‘Don’t be silly. This is what friends do. We can’t have you falling asleep and crashing into a tree.’
I put Tim and Freya into their seats and then we are away.
We bump along the track and tears start to fall down my face. I pretend to look out the window at the bush. I’m so disappointed — in Adam, but also in myself. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen with Adam today, but not only is it clear that he doesn’t want to go out with me, now I don’t think I even want him as a friend.
Against my will, my mind drifts back to the sex last night, and I realise with a shock that we didn’t use a condom. It never even crossed my mind. I’ll need to get the morning-after pill, like some stupid teenager.
I close my eyes and lean my head against the window. Long before we get to the main road, I am asleep.
Chapter Seventeen
Thanks to Sunday traffic, it’s late afternoon before we get home. Both children and my mobile phone are completely flat on arrival, but perk up significantly with some wi-fi and electricity for the phone, and a couple of hours of TV for the kids. I’m slightly alarmed at how intent Freya and Tim are on absorbing the screen’s rays. I thought being outside in nature was supposed to recharge them, but instead I think it just wore them out.
After almost complete silence the whole way home, fifteen minutes glued to the telly and they start to make sounds again. Likewise the phone. Once it gets enough power to switch back on, it emits a volley of notification pings and buzzes and bleats.
When I’ve loaded the washing machine and stuffed away the camping gear in the shed — temporarily, of course; I know I need to open the tent and let it dry properly or it will turn into a mouldy horror show — I sit down with my phone. I have five voicemail messages from Carmen. I check my email: eight emails from Carmen. Where to begin?
The doorbell rings, immediately followed by the sound of a key in the lock. Laura. I don’t really know why she bothers with the doorbell when she only gives you approximately eight milliseconds to respond before she lets herself in. It’s not enough time to stop doing anything, should I have been doing anything I didn’t want her to see.
‘Hi, Laura,’ I call.
She comes in carrying a steaming dish of lasagne and I want to fall to the ground and kiss her besneakered feet.
‘Thought you might need some dinner,’ she says. ‘Camping’s knackering. How was it? Did you have an amazing time? Also, I still don’t know what happened with that hot man after I left you at the pub last Saturday. Presumably nothing, because Dad said you all had gastro on Sunday.’
‘Do you even need me in this conversation or are you happy to answer all your questions yourself?’ I ask her.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Well?’
‘In a nutshell, last Saturday night Adam came home with me and we kissed and then Troy rang from the hospital where he had taken Freya because he is a massive overreactor. Then there was the gastro. Then we went camping and I got pissed again and this time no one called to interrupt so Adam and I slept together, not as quietly as we thought, either, but that’s another story. Then he told me he loves his wife. Then a rat ate its way into my tent and eventually back out again. Then the kids and I went on a bush walk, while everyone else, including Adam, bailed and left early, and my shouty neighbours drove me home because I was so tired I would have crashed the car. So, no, I wouldn’t say we had an amazing time.’
Laura is looking at me, slack-jawed. ‘Right. Well. Shit. That’s quite an impressive effort for your first game back after injury, so to speak.’
‘Indeed,’ I say. ‘And on top of that, last week Dad gave me a lecture about being less of a perfectionist and less helicoptery and letting the kids go more and focusing on my career.’
‘He’s right about that,’ Laura says, matter-of-factly. ‘You do need to ease up on the perfect mother and ex-wife act.’
‘That’s what
he said. But I don’t understand. I’m not a perfect mother. I’m not trying to be. That’s Helen. I’m trying to give my kids a normal childhood. I let them watch TV and they don’t do any extracurricular activities and they always have stuff on their faces. They eat sugar. One of them dresses as a tiger every day, which is probably not psychologically healthy, because I can’t be bothered to talk her out of it. And I’m not allowed to even see Lola any more.’
My phone rings. I can see it’s Carmen. I ignore it.
‘Do you need to get that?’ asks Laura.
‘I can’t answer it until I’ve listened to her five voicemails. I need to know the back story.’
‘Maybe you should listen to them now then, because now there are six voicemails to catch up on.’
‘Fine.’ I dial up my voicemail and put it on speakerphone while I get on with making a salad.
‘Emma!’ comes Carmen’s immediately hysterical voice from the tinny phone speaker. ‘Tiny hitch with the manuscript. Might need to pull you in on this one. Call me ASAP.’
That’s a bit vague. I play the second message.
‘Emma, what I said before about the tiny hitch. It’s not a tiny hitch. I was in the room with Wanda before and I couldn’t talk but things have gone fucking tits-up here. I ended up coming up to Woop Woop to help her and now she’s got the shits with me. Some rubbish about negative energy. The mad witch reckons I’m harshing her vibe and she can’t write with me here. Like, not even with me in the house. It’s beyond unprofessional. She wants me to leave. You’ll have to take over. Call me immediately, if not sooner.’
Take over? As in, go up to wherever Wanda’s house is? That’s well above my pay grade.
Message three starts: ‘All right, Emma. I don’t know what this silent treatment is about but frankly it’s not okay. I called you an hour ago. You need to ring me back or I’ll go to the next editor on my list. Maybe I wasn’t clear in my earlier messages. Wanda can’t finish the book alone. She needs someone, and she would like that someone to be you, to come up here and help her. I have tried, but we aren’t really seeing eye to eye on a few issues and we’ve decided it’s best if I take a step back. So I need you to call me to say you can be on a flight up here first thing tomorrow morning. Okay? It will take her three days once you’re here. She’s so close, but there are a few people she hasn’t managed to write about who quite frankly are the ones we want to hear about, so she needs someone to sit with her all softly softly and pat her back and get her to fucking write those chapters. Otherwise the book’s not worth publishing, and if the book’s not worth publishing . . . well, I don’t want to sound dramatic, Emma, but my life won’t be worth living.’ With that entirely non-dramatic statement she hangs up.
How to Be Second Best Page 24