by Amy Bratley
‘Point taken,’ said Leo. ‘I completely agree. I’ve handled this so badly.’
Mel shook her head. More than anything, she wanted to be left alone. She wanted to be left alone to think about Coco and Jacques and Leo, but, before all that, she wanted to be left alone to think about her baby. She felt angry that her baby, about to be born, was being outshone by all this . . . crap! A sudden pain ripped through the bottom of her back, like the baby was kicking her coccyx. She took a sharp intake of breath.
‘I don’t feel awfully calm,’ she said, pulling away from Leo. ‘I feel sick.’
‘Don’t be mad with Leo,’ said Coco. ‘This is not his fault. I think he was trying to do the right thing. From what I see, he’s so excited to have your baby, but he felt guilty—’
‘Thank you, Coco,’ said Leo, holding up his hand. ‘But I can speak for myself. I know you think I’m a shit, Mel, but I’m not. I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me for not being honest with you from the start.’
Mel shook her head and sighed, before exhaling. She sat down again on the sofa, feeling utterly confused. She jumped when her phone started to ring and vibrate. She didn’t recognize the number, but automatically picked it up.
‘What?’ snapped Mel, rubbing a finger along her eyebrow.
‘It’s Alan,’ said an exhausted-sounding voice. ‘Do you have a moment? I wanted to talk to you about Katy. I’m worried about her.’
Chapter Twenty-five
The phone was ringing. Again! Crikey, thought Lexi, I’ve traded social work for a job in a call centre. So far that morning, with Poppy in her arms, Lexi had spoken to Rebecca about cracked nipples and Erin had called to tell Lexi she was having problems climbing the stairs, thanks to her stitches. Lexi had listened intently as each woman talked matter-of-factly about their dilating cervixes, contracting uteruses and sore breasts. Lexi had added her own sordid tale of constipation and fibregel to the mix. At least they’d had a good laugh. Funny how quickly she had become close to the other women, sharing intimate details that even Catherine, her best friend, didn’t know – and wouldn’t want to know. It was as if having a baby put you in a new, private club where each understood the other on a whole different level. It was brilliant, actually, having the other mums. Probably, in normal life, she would have taken one look at each one and decided they weren’t her type. But she would have been wrong. All of them – with the possible exception of Katy – were lovely. She’d also had a missed call from Alan, but he’d left a message, reminding Lexi that she and the others were supposed to be going over to Katy and Alan’s house that morning. She listened to his smooth voice rumble on in the message three times before deleting. Well, he had a deeply sexy voice.
‘Who is it this time, Poppy?’ she said to Poppy, locating the phone under a cushion. She glanced at the number. Uh oh. Mum. She answered the call, knowing that, if she didn’t, her mother would spend the remainder of the day trying to hunt her down.
‘Mum,’ she sighed.
‘Why are you ignoring me?’ her mother said in a flat voice. ‘Why do you never ring me? Are you hoping that I will just go away? You’re all I’ve got, Lex, you know that—’
‘I do ring you!’ Lexi said. ‘But I’ve just had Poppy, and I’m not ringing anyone.’
‘That’s not true,’ her mother said immediately. ‘You’ve been engaged all morning.’
‘That’s other people calling me,’ said Lexi. ‘My friends calling me.’
‘Friends?’ said her mother. ‘You never had any friends at school, because you weren’t very sociable. I hope Poppy isn’t like that, but I suppose we don’t know much about what her personality will be like, do we? I can’t get my head around the fact that you don’t actually even know the father, that you’ve not even met him. Don’t you think it’s the most bizarre way to bring a child into the world? I wish it hadn’t come to this Lexi, I really do—’
Lexi stared up at the ceiling, stuck her tongue out as if she were being asphyxiated and put the phone down on the table. What a short memory her mother had! Lexi hardly knew her own father, because, when given an ultimatum to choose between families, he’d rejected Northampton with Lexi and gone with the wife and child in Weymouth. He’d always liked arcade machines. So, what was so different, really? Lexi sighed again. With the tinny, tiny sound of her mother’s shrill voice bemoaning the world in the background, she carried Poppy to the other side of the room to look out of the window. Her mother could go on talking for hours, leaking her poisonous negativity into Lexi’s ear, Lexi thought, watching a robin hop about in the garden. Gazing at Poppy, though, she felt suddenly guilty, returned to the phone and picked it up. Her mother was still going on.
‘—and so I think you should give WeightWatchers some thought, Lexi,’ she was saying. ‘I’ve never really known why you didn’t do that in the first place. Might have been easier than all this.’
‘WeightWatchers?’ Lexi said. ‘What are you on about?’
‘Lexi!’ wept her mother. ‘Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? For God’s sake, I’m going now. I’ve had enough of this. I can’t cope with you—’
And then she was gone, and there was nothing but the dialling tone. Lexi felt her stomach burn with a rush of acid. She rubbed her left eye and sighed. Poppy began to cry.
‘Are you hungry again?’ asked Lexi, as Poppy started to whimper and she felt the responsive tingling of the ‘let down’ of milk in her breasts. Pressing her hands to her chest briefly, to stop the milk leaking, she carefully put the tip of her little finger in Poppy’s mouth and felt her clamp down with her hard little gums with the force of a staple gun.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she said. It had only been two hours since the last feed, and when had it been before that? Maybe less than two hours. And the night had seemed like one long feeding session, with a few snatched minutes of blank sleep in between. Though she’d tried to keep a record of the times she was feeding Poppy during the night, holding a pen and paper and reading the clock were two ambitions too many. But wasn’t Poppy supposed to be feeding less often? What was it that parenting book said? At first, a newborn baby would feed every two and a half to three hours on average. If it was feeding more often than that, the baby was ‘snacking’, and snacking was apparently not good because the baby would miss out on the richer, creamier, ‘hind’ milk. The term made Lexi feel like a dairy cow. She sighed and blinked, trying to clear the fog in her head.
‘Let’s feed you then, Poppy,’ she said, unclipping her feeding bra and removing a breast pad, which she discarded on to the floor. She aimed her spraying nipple at Poppy’s open mouth, wincing slightly as the staple gun latched on. Moving around a bit, Lexi settled when the now-familiar dragging sensation of Poppy’s feeding didn’t hurt and actually felt quite relaxing. She laughed a little laugh. The whole thing was such a performance it felt completely bizarre.
‘Oh, Poppy,’ she said, her eyes flitting about her living room, ‘look at this place.’
In the bewildering, exhausting twelve days since Poppy had been born, it was as though a team of burglars had ransacked Lexi’s home, turning out every drawer and cupboard, leaving muslins, nappies, breast pads, sleepsuits and rogue baby socks absolutely everywhere. Then there was all the stuff from visitors: well-meaning friends had brought helium balloons, flowers, baby massage cream, a large tin of chocolates and baby shoes, all of which were still scattered on the carpet in amongst the wrapping paper. They’d used every cup and plate in the flat, too, munching on cake as if it were somebody’s birthday. Lexi told herself not to care about the chaos. Poppy had been born hungry, and her appetite had rendered Lexi powerless to do anything remotely domestic. Even taking a shower felt as luxurious as having a spa day. Lexi glanced down at Poppy’s perfect little elfin face as she sucked, then heard the most awful explosive noise coming from her bottom.
‘Uh oh,’ said Lexi. ‘That didn’t sound too good.’
She screwed up her face as she
watched bright orange liquid ooze out of the nappy and soak into the white sleepsuit Poppy was wearing. Poppy, seemingly unaware, carried on feeding. Lexi popped her little finger into the side of Poppy’s mouth to detach her from her breast. Poppy, unsurprisingly, began to cry.
‘Sorry, baby,’ she said, ‘but I need to change your nappy.’
Dressed in pyjama bottoms and dressing gown, with her feeding bra, which was flapping open most attractively, underneath, Lexi quickly found the changing mat, nappies, cotton-wool balls, a cup of clean water and a box of industrially scented nappy sacks. Warnings about babies suffocating on nappy sacks rushed into her head, so she moved the box well out of reach. So far out of reach, in fact, she had to get up to reach one.
‘Sshh, shhh, shhh,’ she said, like a train, as she unbuttoned Poppy’s sleepsuit and surveyed the damage. ‘Arrgh, I think we’re going to have to give you a bath.’
Carefully putting a new nappy on her daughter and disposing of the old one, Lexi picked up Poppy and cradled her against her chest. She moved to the sofa to feed again and turned on the TV. Thirsty herself now, since she hadn’t had a drink since when – yesterday? – Lexi reached for her glass of water, but realized she had sat a little bit too far away. Sighing, she rested her head against the back of the chair in exasperation, when the doorbell sounded and the phone rang at exactly the same moment. Lexi picked up the phone first, knowing it would be her mother.
‘What are you doing all day now you’re not at work?’ came her mother’s accusatory voice. ‘I can hear the TV. You were always on at me to turn off the telly. Now you’re watching it! Tables turn, don’t they? You were so rude earlier I need you to apologize before I can do anything else—’
‘Oh, Mum—’ said Lexi, wishing she could tell her mother what she really thought of her. ‘I wasn’t rude . . . I don’t know what to say to you when you’re in this mood.’
‘You could try an apology,’ her mother said. ‘For being so mean to me.’
Lexi squeezed her eyes shut, utterly exasperated. This was classic Lorna Mason: she’d attack from all sides, with completely opposing points of view from one minute to the next. Trying to have a sensible conversation was hopeless. The doorbell rang again, for longer this time. Lorna began weeping down the phone. Lexi felt her entire body flush.
‘That’s the door,’ she said calmly to her mother. ‘Got to go. Don’t cry. I’m sorry. Speak soon.’
Putting the phone back down on the carpet, hissing swear words at her mother, the doorbell rang for a third time, and Lexi exhaled.
‘Christ!’ she said, imagining irrationally that it was the donor at the door. ‘Give me a bloody chance!’
Not having the heart to detach Poppy from her feed, she carefully stood up, keeping Poppy on the breast, and staggered slowly towards the door. The TV carried on talking to the empty room behind her.
‘Hello?’ Lexi called, irritated, to the shadow of person outside the front door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Lexi,’ said Gary, bending down and speaking through the letterbox, ‘I’ve come to pick you up. You rang yesterday and said you wanted a lift this morning, didn’t you? To Katy’s house? When you didn’t open the door straight away, I thought you might be in trouble.’
‘Trouble?’ she said. ‘Of course I’m not in trouble.’
‘Well, it’s just that I noticed the other night that your smoke alarms are out of batteries,’ he said, producing a packet from his pocket and pushing them into the flat. ‘I thought I could replace them for you.’
Lexi’s mouth fell open, and she nodded numbly. The world had gone completely mad. Or else, she was even more sleep deprived than she thought.
‘Thanks,’ she said, unlocking the door. ‘Hi, Gary. I completely forgot I called you. Sorry. I literally don’t know what day it is at the moment.’
‘That’s fine,’ he said quickly. ‘The batteries were a crap excuse. I wanted to see you.’
Lexi blushed. It was cold outside compared to the hot fug of Lexi’s flat and, at that moment, probably alarmed by the cool air, Poppy broke off Lexi’s breast and Lexi’s nipple was exposed for Gary and half of Brighton to view. Bar a narrow pavement, Lexi’s front door was directly on the roadside and, when a bus drove past, everyone on board was apparently facing in her direction. A driver in the car behind the bus, who had seen it all, honked his horn. Gary turned round to give the driver the finger and swear at the car at the top of his voice.
‘Oh my God!’ she said, pulling her dressing gown around her with her one available arm and closing her eyes in embarrassment. Opening one eye, she cringed. ‘I can’t believe this. Gary, stop shouting!’
Poppy started to cry. She wanted to feed again. Lexi lifted her up, supporting her tiny head with her hands.
‘Oh, sorry, baby girl,’ she said, cuddling her. ‘We’ll go back inside.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Did you see those spoilers on that guy’s car? Meathead. So, can I come in? I feel like I should be selling chamois leathers standing here like this.’
Lexi shook her head and gestured for Gary to go into the living room, then re-found her position, draped herself with muslin squares to protect her vanity and popped Poppy on the breast. Her phone started to ring again. ‘Mum’ flashed up as the caller ID.
‘I can’t stand it,’ she said. ‘My mum is hounding me. I’ve spoken to her twice already, and she’s being so horrible about the whole sperm-donor thing.’
Gary looked completely blank. His expression made Lexi laugh. The phone stopped ringing. Seconds later, it started again. Lexi moved to pick it up, but Gary got there first. He gave Lexi an imploring look and raised his eyebrows.
‘May I?’ he said. Lexi shrugged, intrigued. She watched him lift the phone to his ear.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Battersea Dogs Home. Do you have a hound to re-home?’
Lexi burst out laughing and Gary grinned, listening to Lorna’s reply.
‘No, madam,’ said Gary, ‘this is Battersea Dogs Home. You must have the wrong number. We have an Airedale by the name of Lexi, but no humans at all.’
He put the phone down and Lexi smiled.
‘Airedale?’ she said. ‘Is that a reflection on my hairstyle? My mum’s been a bit crazily angry with me since I decided to have a baby on my own, but then she’s happiest when there’s something to be upset about. Sometimes I wish I could divorce her, then I feel guilty and wish I could be more patient. She’s the one person in my life who has all this power over me. Anyway. How are you, Gary?’
‘I think you should tell your mum to back off,’ said Gary. ‘It’s not like you’re a kid any more. You’re both adults, with your own lives. She’s no right to dump all that stuff on your shoulders, especially now. She should be protecting you, with your gorgeous baby girl, not bullying you. She sounds like a witch.’
Lexi widened her eyes and nodded. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Don’t hold back, Gary.’
He lifted his hands up, as if to ask for mercy. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But that’s my view. It seems to me that, right now, you need all the support you can get. So that’s why I made these for you.’
Opening up his carrier bag, he pulled out a home-made lasagne and a home-made apple crumble. He held them up in their brown earthenware dishes with a lopsided grin on his face. ‘Not exactly cordon bleu,’ he said, ‘but I thought you probably don’t get much time to cook. I’m quite handy in the kitchen, actually.’
He stood there, looking awkward, and Lexi pointed towards the kitchen. Poppy had fallen asleep, so she did up her feeding top and rested her on her chest, gently rubbing her back with small circles.
‘That’s so sweet of you,’ she said. ‘The fridge is on the left.’ Feeling touched, she heard him open it. A few moments later, he closed it.
‘Are you even eating?’ he asked, poking his head back in the living room. ‘There’s a head of celery and a jar of jam in that fridge. Let me get you some shopping in. You can write a list and I’ll bring it over for
you, or when I drop you off at your friend’s house, I’ll get it for you then. How does that sound? You must be knackered.’
Lexi didn’t say anything. She was knackered – completely, utterly, mind-numbingly shattered – and hungry for something that wasn’t toast, cake or takeaway. She had tried to stay in bed, as Ginny had recommended, but it was almost impossible. The visitors had come thick and fast, and Poppy was awake every ninety minutes. Less even. She refused to start complaining, though. Having Poppy was a miracle. She could cope with the tiredness.
‘I am tired,’ she said, appalled to find herself welling up. ‘But that’s all. God, I don’t know what this is all about.’
Gary came and sat on the sofa next to her. He held out his arms, offering to take Poppy. ‘Can I hold her, while you have a shower? I’ll call you if she wakes up.’
‘Thanks. Since having Poppy I haven’t been able to do anything at all. I can’t even seem to be able to go to the toilet without waking her or—’
‘Go on!’ Gary said again. ‘Have a shower.’
Lexi hardly dared breathe in the shower she was so preoccupied with listening out for Poppy’s cry. But there was nothing, just the occasional reassuring comment from Gary: ‘She’s opened her eyes! . . . She’s closed them again! . . . She’s moved her left arm! . . . She’s looking at her hand!’ Towelling herself down, she noticed one of Poppy’s socks in the corner of the bathroom and, at the same time, heard her gurgling in the living room. She looked at her reflection and felt an enormous sense of pride. Finally, after years of thinking about having a baby, she’d got Poppy, the daughter she’d dreamed of. But there was a slight niggle in her head. Maybe, if she’d pushed for Alan, she would now ‘have it all’. Quickly getting dressed in the bedroom in a grey woollen maternity dress from Gap, she dismissed her thoughts as ludicrous and a result of hormonal imbalance. She towel-dried her hair and moved through to the living room to Gary and Poppy, who was now back in her Moses basket.