by Lisa Jewell
Not that Beth blamed Meg in the slightest for being the way she was. How could she be otherwise, given how much she’d always railed against her mother’s ways? But a little bit of give, a little bit of flexibility, wouldn’t have gone amiss. She saw it in Bill’s glances sometimes, little twitches of his eyebrows, little half-formed smiles or grimaces. Bill hadn’t signed up for this. He hadn’t signed up for not being able to kick off his trainers and drop the remote control absent-mindedly down the side of the sofa. He hadn’t signed up for there being a right way and a wrong way to hang up a tea towel or open a carton of orange juice. He hadn’t signed up for tiny aggressive hand-held vacuum cleaners that sucked away crumbs before he’d even noticed them, and newspapers being folded away and disposed of before he’d even read them, and half-eaten packets of biscuits being thrown away because a new packet had been purchased. He really, really hadn’t. But he was a good sport. He didn’t like it, but he put up with it. Because Meg was Meg and he loved her.
She tiptoed away from Molly’s room and then peered into the tiny little box room that had once been an office and now housed a shelving unit full of carefully arranged baby accoutrements: a pile of tiny nappies, already out of their packets and stacked just so, a pile of ice-white muslin squares and nipple pads and Babygros and soft animals and jars of cream and fluffy towels. They didn’t know what they were having, a strangely laissez-faire attitude, mainly down to Bill who would clearly appreciate a few more surprises in his life. Everyone thought it would be a boy. Just because everyone always thought it would be a boy. But Beth thought it would be another girl. She could see it in the extra bloom on Meg’s skin.
The clock ticked round to 6.37. Beth decided to take a very quick shower. The only shower in the flat was in the en suite to Meg and Bill’s room so she hadn’t used it before. She took the soft blue towel that had been left folded just so for her at the foot of the little put-you-up bed in the box room, and she checked once more on Molly, and then she walked through Meg and Bill’s bedroom – bed made, slippers in pairs, coordinated cushions – and into their shower room. She showered fast, mainly because she didn’t want Molly to wake up and find herself alone, but also because she felt she shouldn’t be in here, in their little sanctuary, in the place where Bill and Megan took their clothes off, in the place where they brushed their teeth together every night and had private conversations and made plans for their future. She didn’t use any of their products for fear of messing anything up, and after her shower she sprayed the inside of the cubicle with the spray that had been left for that purpose, and she cleared all the glass walls with the window scraper, and then she wrapped her blue towel about herself and dashed back to the little box room, where she dressed and put on a tiny bit of make-up.
It was now almost 7 a.m. She wondered if they were at the hospital yet. She wondered what they were doing. She wondered how this day was going to pan out. She wondered how the next few days would pan out. The baby would be in a Moses basket in their room at first and Meg had said she could stay in the box room as long as she liked. In fact she’d said, ‘Please stay, please, I need you!’
But there was Easter to think about, and Mum. There was also the lack of space in this tiny flat and the stress of living with a newborn, and more than any of that there was this thing between herself and Bill. If the baby came home tomorrow, she could stay another twenty-four hours and then still be home in time for Easter lunch. Beth knew on a fundamental level that her sister needed her more than her mother did. She knew that Easter lunch was not as important, in the scheme of things, as spending time with her new niece or nephew, but the sheer, ground-in pull of it, of her mother’s emotional neediness, was virtually impossible for her to ignore.
‘Mama?’ said a small voice in the hall outside her room. ‘Mama?’
‘Hello, sweetie.’ She quickly got to her feet and went to Molly.
‘Where Mama?’
She looked dishevelled, almost Neanderthal. Her hair was a puffball of knotted curls and her cheeks were blotchy with sleep.
‘How did you get out of your cot, sweetie?’
‘Mama?’
‘Mama’s gone to have the baby. To the hospital. With Daddy.’
‘Mama have a baby?’ she asked thoughtfully.
‘Yes. At the hospital.’
‘Beth make a toast?’
‘Yes!’ Beth breathed a sigh of relief that the news had not been met with tears or anxiety. ‘Beth make a toast. Come on, sweetie.’ She took her niece’s small hand in hers and led her to the kitchen where she sat her in her highchair. Molly looked just like Meg, just like her, just like Dad and Auntie Lorna. She had the Bird face. It still took Beth by surprise that this child existed. It felt like only a few minutes ago that they had all been children themselves. And in fact, in most respects, Beth still was. She still lived at home, she still slept in a single bed, she still used the same face flannel and stared at the same face in the same mirror in the same bathroom. She still had breakfast with her mum and dad every morning and drove her dad’s car and ate food bought and prepared by her parents. She was, to all intents and purposes, seventeen years old. Except she wasn’t. She was twenty-four. A twenty-four-year-old woman. In July she would be twenty-five.
She had no idea why she was still at home. She had a boyfriend. They’d been together for four years. His name was Simon and he was doing a Masters in Combined Science in York. She only saw him every fortnight or so and even then he was too distracted and stressed even to contemplate having conversations about their future. Not that she wanted to have conversations about their future. She didn’t know what she wanted yet. She didn’t have a clue. She’d done a secretarial course just under six years ago. She could type a letter in a minute and a half and take down a garbled conversation in shorthand and programme a word processor to print addresses on to envelopes. She was working for a local building company as PA to the managing director. Her boss said she was the best secretary he’d ever had and had given her three pay rises already. She was great-looking (other people told her that all the time, complete strangers sometimes), she was young, she was hard-working and bright and conscientious and yet …
She gazed again upon her niece, chasing a slippery piece of banana around the tray of her highchair with one chubby finger. The child that her sister and her partner had made together; that her sister had grown in her body, in her womb, had pushed out and fed and nurtured and got to the age of nearly two without any harm coming to her, whilst simultaneously washing lots of clothes and plumping lots of cushions and buying lots of fresh fruit and working part-time in a school and making a whole other baby. She couldn’t, she just couldn’t, imagine any of it. How did a human make all those decisions? All the big ones, and all the little ones? How would you know you were doing it right? How could you trust yourself? Beth did not trust herself in the slightest. She felt much safer bobbing about in the same patterns and the same places with the same people.
She thought back to the year Rhys had died. She remembered sitting in a weird wine bar near Covent Garden with Megan, before Meg had met Bill, when she was eighteen and Meg was twenty and they were both still vaguely on a par with each other. And she remembered Meg suggesting that she could come and live in London with her. Come and share her bedroom. She’d been half-tempted. It had seemed a soft entry into the world of grown-up-ness. Her sister there by her side to hold her hand. But then Rhys had done what Rhys had done and how could she? How could she have left them all there? And so she had stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And the only mistake she was currently in danger of making, she realised, was the mistake of leaving it all far too late.
Meg was at a hospital called the Whittington in Highgate. It was big and Victorian and scary-looking and it was hard to believe that something as wholesome and cheerful as the arrival of newborn babies was happening within its mouldering walls.
Beth was directed to a labouring room (which put her in mind of a room full of men in dungarees with
pitchforks and chisels and sweaty backs) where she found Meg and Bill flicking through magazines and eating tortilla chips.
‘Was she all right?’ asked Meg, the minute Beth walked into the room.
‘Absolutely fine. Honestly. She is one cool customer. She didn’t even say goodbye.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ said Meg, holding her hand against her chest. ‘That’s the first time anyone apart from me or Bill has ever dropped her off – I thought she might freak out a bit.’
‘No, she’s been a little angel. Ate all her breakfast, let me change her nappy, wasn’t too keen on getting into her pram but we managed it in the end.’ Beth beamed. She was feeling strangely powerful. She had not only cared for her niece single-handedly, she had also successfully navigated the streets of a frankly rather terrifying inner London neighbourhood with a child in a pram and then found her way, using public transport, to the hospital.
‘How are you?’ she asked, her eyes directed at Meg’s stomach.
‘Well, apparently I’m only five centimetres dilated and my contractions have slowed right down, so looks like we might be here for the long haul.’
‘The childminder lady …’
‘Danielle?’
‘Yes, that one, she said Molly can stay extra hours. She said she can keep her until six if you like?’
Meg smiled. ‘Oh,’ she said happily, ‘that’s great. I love that woman. Have you told Mum?’
Beth gasped. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘I’m really sorry! I completely forgot. I was going to do it earlier, but I didn’t want to wake her, and then Molly woke up and it was all so busy just getting her ready and everything and—’
Meg rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘My family is unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Completely.’
‘There’s payphones round the corner. I’ll go and call her now.’
Bill counted some coins out of the pocket of his jeans and gave Beth a complicitous smile that made her catch her breath. But there was no reply at home and Beth went back to Meg’s room.
‘You know,’ said Meg, ‘in other families, in normal families, the mother would have been here right now, holding my hand, helping out. And please God, don’t think I’m not grateful to you, because I really, really am, but you shouldn’t have to be doing this. You have your own life to live. My mother should be here. And if she can’t be here she should be on the phone every hour asking for news. You know, she has not called me once since my due date, not once, since argh, Jesus, argh!’ She clutched the sides of the bed and sat up rigidly, her teeth clenched together and her eyes screwed shut. Bill jumped to his feet and took her hand. ‘Another one?’ he asked.
‘Argh!’ replied Meg. ‘Jesus Christ!’
Beth stared at her older sister through wide circles of eyes. She’d never seen another human being make that face before, or the noise that came with it. It was horrible.
‘Shall I call the nurse?’ she asked, edging towards the door.
Meg relaxed the rictus mask of her face and said, ‘No, don’t be daft. It’s just a contraction. I’ll be fine.’
A contraction, thought Beth, what is a contraction? It was a word that meant nothing to her beyond a vague association with the mechanics of childbirth.
‘What does it feel like?’ she asked.
‘It feels,’ began Meg, ‘like a gigantic metal fist squeezing and twisting and pulling all your internal organs until you think you’re about to pass out. It is the most revolting feeling imaginable. And you know, as much as I think our mother is completely and utterly useless in almost every respect, I will always have the greatest admiration for the fact that when she had the twins she had to do this twice. In the same day.’
Beth smiled. Meg had said the same thing last time, after Molly was born, and had been terrified during both pregnancies that the sonographer was going to point out two babies on the screen.
‘Coming up for six years,’ she said, her thoughts turning to Rhys. ‘I can’t quite believe it.’
Meg nodded. ‘Twenty-two,’ she sighed. ‘I wonder what he’d be doing now …’
‘Rhys?’ asked Bill, looking over the top of his magazine.
They nodded.
‘Poor soul,’ he said.
‘Has Mum been to his grave lately?’ asked Meg.
Beth bit her lip and shook her head.
‘You?’
She shrugged. She kept meaning to. ‘Not really.’
‘Not really? I mean, you either have, or you haven’t.’
‘Well, in which case, no, I haven’t.’
‘Oh, God, Beth—’
‘I know,’ she interjected defensively. ‘It’s just, it’s so scary there. I don’t like going on my own. I always feel like I’m going to get raped or something.’
‘Can’t you go with Dad?’
‘I suppose. It’s just, he’s hardly ever around. And when he is he’s just kind of … busy.’
‘Busy doing what?’
‘Oh, God, I don’t know, just doing stuff. Writing his memoirs, apparently, though I’ve never seen anything he’s written. And catching up on correspondence. Anything to keep him away from Mum and Vicky.’ She sighed. She hated talking about home. It made it sound all wrong, whereas, when she was there, living there, just getting on with her life, it all felt perfectly reasonable.
But Beth was spared the trouble of taking this conversation to its uncomfortable extrapolation by the onset of another contraction and the sight of her big sister throwing herself back against the pillows and screaming, ‘Jesus fucking Christing bollocks, let me die.’
Meg was still having irregular contractions by the time Beth had to leave the hospital to collect Molly from the childminder. There was talk of doing something to get them coming more frequently, to move labour along. But it seemed to Beth that the baby was not coming any time soon and that she would be required to stay overnight with Molly and repeat all of today’s processes over again tomorrow. Which was fine.
She had finally got through to Lorelei at about midday who had said, ‘Oh, how marvellous, tell her I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for her all day. And Vicky will too, won’t you, Vee?’
She’d heard Vicky chirrup something affirmative in the background and made a mental note not to share Vicky’s best wishes with her sister. ‘Well, I’d better be off, darling,’ her mother had said a moment later. ‘Time to collect Sophie from nursery. And then we’re taking her to get new shoes. Let me know the minute there’s any news, though, won’t you, darling. And big hugs to Meggy and Bill.’
It had been as if she’d called to tell her that Meg’s car was in for an MOT or that her cat was having an operation, but she’d dismissed the thought before it grew roots. It was just her mother’s way. Lorelei filled her head with the things closest to her, the here and now, not the over there and then. It was how she was. It didn’t mean she was a bad person. But still, Beth had waited a count of five or so minutes before returning to Meg’s bedside where she’d slapped a joyful smile on her face and said nothing about new shoes for Sophie.
She took Molly to a playground on the way home. An old lady admired the little girl and said, ‘She looks just like you.’ And Beth smiled and said, ‘She’s not mine, actually. She’s my niece. I’m just looking after her, while my sister’s in hospital having the second baby.’
The old lady smiled back and said, ‘You’ll have your own one day then?’
And Beth’s smile stretched out uncomfortably and she said, ‘Yes, I’m sure I will. Yes. I’m one of four, so you know …’
‘Yes. When you come from a big family, you want it for yourself, don’t you? But you shouldn’t wait too long, not if you want your children to be close to their cousins.’
She said this sternly, with a hint of insight, as if she knew. As if she’d looked at Beth and seen inside her soul, seen a clear line to her future. But then her smile softened and she said, ‘But you’re still young. No rush really, is there, dear?’
Beth laughed nervously, po
litely. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no rush at all.’ But she knew that there was. And it had nothing to do with babies. Before she could even begin to think about babies she first had to find her way to the starting blocks of life.
She was reading Bridget Jones’s Diary. She’d found it on her sister’s alphabetically ordered bookshelves. It had been published the year before and everyone had been talking about it and telling her she should read it, but Beth didn’t really read. Usually she watched TV with her mum until she was so tired she could barely speak and then she flopped into bed. But Molly was finally asleep in her cot after a long and rather disordered evening, and there was no one to watch TV with. Hence the book. It was quite funny, although she found it hard to relate to all the talk of weight gain (she never gained weight) and drinking (she never drank) and mad, mouthy girlfriends (she had no mad, mouthy girlfriends). But she was enjoying the bits about the heroine’s crush on an unsuitable older man.
Although, no, she would not call what she was experiencing a crush, no, it was not a crush, it was a … frisson. Just a sort of electrical thing, invisible to the naked eye, like a tripwire. It was in the way he looked at her when there was no reason to be looking at her. The way he grasped her by the waist when he hugged her hello and goodbye. And she still hadn’t decided whether she was flattered or appalled.
She was going to turn down the corner of the page and then realised that bent corners were probably on Meg’s long list of Minor Domestic Misdemeanours, so she inserted a hairclip instead and was about to turn off the bedside lamp when she heard a sound that made her heart beat violently. It was the front door. She heard it first open, and then click shut, very gently. She held her breath and put a hand over her racing heart. She envisaged gangsters, she envisaged knives and guns. She envisaged being gang-raped and brutally murdered. She envisaged all the things that she never worried about when she was at home in the Cotswolds. She did not belong here, in the city. It was not the place for her. She wanted to go home, home to the country, to her safe cosy room in her parents’ safe cosy house. Why did Meg live here? Why had she had children here, in this terrible place? She glanced around the room, looking for something heavy, or sharp, or both. But all she could see was nappies and plush bears. She gulped back a strangled cry and was about to start whimpering when she heard a man clear his throat outside her bedroom door.