Little Disasters

by Sarah Vaughan

  ‘She just wants attention. We need to ignore her. It works best if I do it this way.’

  She puts an empty glass in the dishwasher; reaches under the sink for a cloth and starts spraying the glass of the bifold doors with the window cleaner. He can’t see the smear she seems to be cleaning. All the time, the crying continues, a soundtrack of distress.

  ‘I’m just going to get changed,’ he says, but she doesn’t respond. Unable to just stand by and listen, he bounds up the stairs and pushes open the nursery door.

  Betsey has obviously been left for some time. Her face is puce; her skin hot as if she has overheated through the effort of sustained screaming; her nappy is sodden against her red raw skin. The nursery is pristine: white wooden furniture that’s unchipped, clean sheets, soft animals arranged in a basket, those ordered drawers that send a strange chill through him. There are no toys in her cot apart from her favourite, a velveteen rabbit that Bets chews, the ears grey and soggy with spittle. But there’s a jarring disconnect between the perfect setting – and the immaculate kitchen downstairs, and the ordered snug where the boys are confined to their gadgets – and the anarchy of his baby’s wretched, frantic crying. He changes her nappy, and tries to soothe her, his chin resting on the top of her head.

  ‘Shh, shh, it’s OK, baby,’ he murmurs, his palm patting her back in an imitation of a heartbeat, self-conscious at first, but then less so as she starts frantically sucking her thumb. ‘Shh, shh. It’s OK.’

  It calms him, realising that he is capable of soothing her like this; that he is not so redundant as a parent.

  ‘Shh, shh. It’s OK,’ he repeats.

  But his heart constricts a little because he is not so sure it is.

  *

  Later, over dinner, he tries to suggest that perhaps Jess has become a little obsessive about the housework.

  ‘Obsessive?’ She puts down her cutlery. She has barely touched the lamb tagine.

  ‘Well, not obsessive, just conscientious,’ he backtracks. ‘Betsey’s drawers, for instance: it must take ages to make them like that?’ He catches sight of her expression and stops. ‘All I mean is, I’d far rather the children were happy and the house messy. I hate to think of you worrying you need to make everything perfect for me.’

  Her face closes over as it does when she’s hurt.

  ‘Have the children said they’re unhappy?’

  ‘Of course not. No.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand the problem.’

  He feels the words dry up in his mouth as he tries to capture his unease.

  ‘I don’t want some sort of Stepford Wife,’ he blunders on – and where had that come from? ‘I mean. I don’t care if the house isn’t pristine, if the toys aren’t put away, if there’s a bit of mess. That’s not what matters, is it? I hate to think that you’re making the place immaculate while Betsey’s screaming upstairs.’

  Her face is like a mask: bland, unresponsive, her way of staving off further criticism. He’s gone too far in implying she has neglected the baby and yet he is reluctant to drop the issue. They need to be honest about this.

  ‘I just . . . I’m worried that things feel out of balance: that you don’t seem happy or even content at the moment. Not in the least. Not like you used to. That you don’t seem fulfilled – or even happy with the kids.

  ‘This should be a precious early year with Bets, shouldn’t it?’ he ploughs on, unsettled by her silence but determined to get the words out now his sense of what is wrong is crystallising. ‘All those milestones, all those memories . . . She’s our last baby, and I thought you wanted to spend time just enjoying being with her?’

  She looks at him as if he is speaking a different language, and he’s blurrily aware that he might have an idealised vision of motherhood: one that doesn’t fit with her experience, at all. He never thinks about what they get up to, though he vaguely imagines Jess pottering around, or going for brisk walks, or relaxing with friends in cafes. He has never considered it as a particularly arduous day . . .

  But he can see, from her reaction, that his perception is skewed.

  ‘Have I got this all wrong?’ He laughs a little nervously. ‘I don’t mean to criticise: I want to help make things better. I don’t think your experience of motherhood needs to – or should - be this way.’

  She looks at her lap, twisting her rings. If only she’d look up. He wants to catch her eye; to reassure her that it will be OK, and that, though he might not understand her, he loves her more than he can possibly articulate. He has always felt like this about her. He reaches out a hand but she snatches hers away.

  ‘Jess . . .’

  ‘Don’t.’ Her voice is savage.

  When did she become so prickly? He thinks of that cliché about walking on eggshells, usually said of an abusive partner. He feels like this and has done for the past few months.

  ‘Jess – please.’

  He thought he had snared the problem, and that raising it would make things better. But he only seems to have heaped on more distress.

  He gets up and goes to put his arm around her, to try to make everything right, but she recoils, twisting her face away from him. Feeling stupid, he returns to his seat. If he waits long enough perhaps she’ll eventually see this as an opportunity to tell him what’s wrong. But, instead, she starts clearing away. The bin lid clatters and there’s an angry hiss as she squirts the sink with antibacterial spray.

  ‘Will you please just stop,’ he says, because this is part of the problem and she doesn’t see it: can’t even stop when he’s trying to get to the heart of the issue. She carries on and he sits there, his words bouncing off her back.

  ‘I just don’t know you any more,’ he adds, and he doesn’t really mean to say it out loud but there it is: the fact of the matter, squatting in the space between them. Her shoulders round, almost imperceptibly, and he wants to hold her; to tell her that he doesn’t mean to wound her; that, in his clumsy way, he is only trying to help.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she says at last, and her voice is as curt and clipped as a post-war broadcaster’s; her profile as coldly perfect as a cameo brooch.

  And then she says something she has never said before, not even after Betsey’s birth when sleep was at a premium and he would have completely understood if she felt so fragile she couldn’t bear another body lying close to hers.

  ‘I’m going to sleep in the spare room.’

  *

  The next morning he leaves early for work without saying goodbye and their conversation – their argument – keeps nagging at him, his comments ragging his thoughts. This isn’t like them. They don’t row, Ed having discovered early on that Jess hates conflict: a legacy, no doubt, of a childhood with her father. Neither of them shouted last night, he reminds himself, but he suspects he sounded pious. Judgemental. I hate to think you’re making the place immaculate while Betsey’s screaming upstairs.

  And so he does something spontaneous, and entirely out of keeping. He excuses himself from a meeting and tells Jade, his PA, he’ll be taking the afternoon off. Then he travels home, unease growing exponentially with each Tube stop, bemusement at his behaviour increasing too. Nursing a bunch of white roses, he tells himself he just wants to make it up to her. At the very least they might talk, unimpeded by exhaustion and the demands of small children. But, early in his journey – somewhere between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road – he forces himself to admit to a more dubious motivation. Because isn’t there something underhand about his behaviour, too?

  It isn’t purely his desire to smooth things over with Jess that has forced him from his desk but his concern for Betsey: this creeping realisation Jess’s treatment of their daughter isn’t massively maternal; is maybe a little detached. It’s not that she is cruel, but she’s not as engaged as she was when the boys were small. When Betsey’s little body had shuddered against his chest, he’d felt her relief at being picked up, and he wonders if this distress was atypical or if it frequen
tly happened. Out at work for fifteen hours a day, he has no idea what goes on at home when he’s not there, and, for the first time, this perturbs him. And so this seemingly loving trip home is powered, in part, by a need to find out.

  *

  Of course she sees straight through him, when he arrives home to find her, sitting at the kitchen table, immersed in something on her laptop.

  ‘Are you spying on me?’ A raspberry spot flares in the centre of each cheek as she slams the MacBook cover shut.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You’ve never popped back like this before. Do you think I’m neglecting Betsey?’

  He doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘Can you hear her?’ She pauses, a hand to her ear. ‘If you’re wondering where she is, she’s in her cot. She isn’t crying. She isn’t distressed. This happens at this time of day, every day, because it’s naptime. There’s nothing unusual, or odd.’

  He is thrown by her tone: this curious mix of triumphant and defiant. It’s so different to her usual manner that he almost wonders if she’s been drinking. He moves closer, trying to detect a hint of white wine.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Her voice is querulous, and the too-loud sound pollutes the space between them. The house is quiet, though he knows logically that Bets is asleep.

  ‘Go and check up on her if you like.’ She reads his mind, her tone as sardonic as a teenager’s – and it’s this that drives him to bound up the stairs.

  Betsey is lying on her back, staring at a mobile of suspended ducks, kicking her feet ineffectually, apparently not in the least perturbed at being put to bed.

  His relief is immense.

  ‘Hello, Bets,’ he whispers and she turns her huge forget-me-not blue eyes on him and stares, surprised to see him there. Her face crumples and her mouth turns down, her bottom lip protruding. Before he can do anything, she is bawling: cheeks red, eyes spilling outraged tears.

  He lifts her awkwardly, determined to quieten her as he managed the previous evening. She has a healthy set of lungs on her, as his late mother might have said. He doesn’t want to give Jess any ammunition to criticise him and so he needs to stop this outburst, quickly; needs to reassure Bets, too, though he doesn’t seem capable of doing this.

  ‘Shush.’ He presses his lips to the top of her head, where her curls grow damp with sweat. She squirms, twists, thrusts her feet down, arches away from him; does everything she can to express her distress.

  All he wants is to soothe her, and make her quiet, so that Jess can’t be disparaging and he won’t feel even more inadequate. But her cries grow louder until he is staring down her throat at her tonsils, mesmerised by how angry she appears. There’s none of the shuddering relief of last night; nothing to suggest he’s calming her down, that he’ll make things better. What sort of a dad is he that he can’t stop this and that she carries on, irrespective of whatever he is doing?

  He puts her back down, a little clumsily, and this seems to shock her out of crying. She stares at him again and he sees that she is startled: her mouth forming a tiny O, her outrage tempered with a look of disbelief.

  He stands at the end of the cot, surprised by the abrupt silence, and feels utterly lost. Is parenthood meant to be this bleak? He’s doing so well in his career – earning well, excelling professionally – and yet life at home is one long struggle: the benefits outweighed by the frustration, the tedium, and now this fresh fear that something is seriously wrong with Jess.

  So many of his colleagues have three or four kids. It’s the ultimate status symbol: a sign you can provide for that many children; a sign of your virility. He’d wanted a little girl, because he thought it might complete their family and bring fresh happiness, particularly to his wife. But life, even with Frankie’s needs, was so much easier with just the boys. Now they’ve upset the delicate balance and there’s no room for lightness, or selfish enjoyment, any more.

  What the fuck have we done? He bends over, crouched on the floor of the nursery, the enormity of their mistake coalescing in his mind.

  He doesn’t realise he’s spoken aloud until he sees Betsey, watching him furtively, through the bars of her cot. She’s clutching Liz’s rabbit, no longer grey but washed and dried since yesterday evening, and sucking hard on her thumb.

  And the thought comes to him, cool and clear; so sharply defined he can see it.

  She is a lovely little girl but, just for a moment, he wishes she had never been born.

  LIZ

  Wednesday 24 January, 2.45 a.m.

  Twenty-three

  It’s the sound of a baby that wakes me. The unrelenting, pitiful cry that tears through my sleep and shakes me from a nightmare so engrossing I can’t tell where the boundary between my subconscious and reality lies.

  My top is drenched with sweat, my heart castanetting as if I’ve physically tussled with sleep – and, yes, my duvet’s twisted, the cover wrenched from its feathery heft and there’s something pressing down on my face. I thrust the pillow away and knock a half-empty glass off the bedside table. It spills, chill water spreading all around.

  I spring out of bed, disorientated as I adjust from the vividness of my nightmare to scrabbling around in the darkness, mopping up a puddle, and trying to locate this ragged cry. No longer a screech but the wearying sound of a baby being soothed by its parent, a child who will still take some time to fall asleep. It’s Max Gibson, our neighbour’s three-week-old baby, who seems constantly befuddled by this strange new world in which he’s found himself. The sound, curiously intimate, seeps from the house next door.

  I rifle in a drawer for a dry T-shirt; get back into bed; pull the duvet close around me to stop my shivering and block out this sorrowful lullaby. But the pillow’s cold and lumpy and I toss and turn. Nick stirs in his sleep and reaches out to give me a cursory hug, arm flung over the curve of my waist, hand cupping my left breast. ‘Go to sleep,’ he murmurs, his voice just audible from the depths of his drowsiness. Then he rolls over, dragging the duvet back to destroy the warm cave between us before I give it a quick, assertive tug.

  Max’s cries are slowing now. But if he is slipping into sleep then I doubt I will. I glance at the clock radio. 02.47: the worst time of the night to be awake. Insomnia, which plagues me given half the chance, sees an opportunity. I think of Betsey: not technically worsening but far from stable, given the three lengthy seizures she suffered yesterday; and of my mother. Ponder, not just on her drinking but on her reasons for remaining so secretive about my baby sister, to the extent that she’s always refused to divulge her name.

  Clare.

  I roll her name around in my mouth then whisper it out loud, feeling a rush of tenderness for this unknown sibling; unremembered and only spied through a chink in a door. I’m back in that cottage, peering at her now, or rather spying on my mother. Her expression’s still impenetrable: a mixture of anguish – that’s not too strong a word for it – and a flicker of something else. Horror? Or is it fear?

  Other memories crowd in. Slivers of a story that splinter against each other. I am three and sitting on a rag rug in next door’s cottage. Nathalie, one of the hippy neighbours, is trying to plait my hair. Her fingers nip my scalp but I don’t complain. Her breath reeks of garlic, and the cottage is sickly sweet with what as an adult I will recognise as a mix of joss sticks, mould and weed. Still, I don’t say anything because I sense that I need to keep quiet. This situation’s unusual. Nathalie has never looked after me before.

  I dig my fingers into the weave of the rug, trying to separate the thick strands of red and purple and green – bright flashes of colour all the more exotic because those at home are muted: mud brown, bottle green, the off-white of terry towelling nappies that will never be pristine. My left hand clutches a plastic Tiny Tears doll. Baby wees water if you fill her up and press her tummy. She’s orange and hard; doesn’t break if you throw her. She’s not like my baby sister at all.

  Jed, Nathalie’s boyfriend, is peering out of the window. �
��They’re still here.’ He gestures with his head and I see that a car – white, mud-splattered, with writing on the side of it; something I’ll later recognise as a police car – is parked out in the lane.

  ‘Shh,’ Nathalie says in her fairy voice, and she rolls her eyes towards me. I don’t like the look on her face. I want Mattie; I want my daddy. I want to know where they both are, and my mother. Somehow I sense that my being kept here has something to do with her.

  I roll against Nick, unsettled by this memory and trying to stop the images that seem to have been unleashed from my subconscious.

  Another fragment, another shard that must come later that day. A man has left our cottage. An older man in a tweed jacket and rust-coloured trousers with grooves like ploughed furrows. Dr Moore, our local GP. His head’s bowed and he’s talking to my daddy outside, though it’s dark and it’s been raining: droplets drip from the thatch of Nathalie’s roof and gleam like jewels in his hair.

  He looks worried, Dr Moore. I watch his expression, caught by the light from Nathalie’s old oil lamp. A look of pity, and a trace of sorrow. He’s talking quickly, telling my father something important, something my mother mustn’t hear, because otherwise why aren’t they in our cottage but outside with water sliding down my daddy’s neck? My father’s broad shoulders heave, once, then twice, and I know with a child’s intuition that he is crying.

  And in a flash, I am slipping into the cold. My feet are wet – I haven’t thought to put on wellies – and I’m shivering as I clutch my father’s large, calloused hand. He won’t look at me, but Dr Moore bends down and places one large hand firmly on my shoulder, his eyes serious and kind. He smells of clean clothes and tobacco. I’m reassured: here is someone who might make things better. It’s the first time anyone, other than my father, has made me feel this way.

  ‘Your daddy’s sad but he’ll be all right. Your mummy will be too. Will you look after them for me?’

  It’s too big a burden to ask a child but of course I nod. I’m Daddy’s good girl even if my mother doesn’t see me that way.