The Predictions

  Lukas didn’t acknowledge my remark. While I tried to sleep, he watched Zachary, but not as closely as I would have, not like the hawk I had asked him to be.

  Five days later, without Lukas, Zachary and I flew back to London, holed up in our flat, and remained inside, venturing no further than the front doorstep, for the next six weeks. Lukas stayed on in Europe to finish the tour (there were too many livelihoods at stake to cancel) and without him around I fell into a wormhole. Zachary did not sleep for more than two hours at a time, three at the most, which meant that by the time I had put him down and drifted off to sleep, I never managed more than an hour or two in one go. I lost whole weeks to this relentless cycle of feeding and changing and putting the baby down and working out whether or not it was worth trying to sleep in between Zachary’s naps or to hold out, white knuckled, until the slightly longer sleep he may or may not have at the end of the day. When we’d been up all night, the new day starting without the last one ending, I would sometimes just curl up on the floor in my dressing gown and howl along with Zachary.

  Sometimes I would think about leaving the house, and mentally start making a list of all the items I would need to take with us, and how long I might be able to stay out for, but the effort of actually doing any of it was too great, and I would sit down, exhausted, and stare at the front door in defeat. Lukas had arranged for one of the PAs at his record company to deliver groceries twice a week, and each time she came to the door, laden with bags, and asked to see the baby, I carried him out to her so she wouldn’t be able to see how disgusting it was inside the flat.

  When Lukas came home he was shocked, but I couldn’t explain to him what was going on because I was so deranged with tiredness that I could no longer speak in whole sentences. He tried to hire a nanny to give me a break but on her first day with us I refused to let her anywhere near Zachary. “What if he cries?” I had protested. “How will you soothe him? What are your qualifications? Do you have a criminal record?” At the end of the day, she had thrown up her hands in frustration. “I give up.”

  One day Fran came around in an attempt to stage what I supposed was a kind of intervention—­as though motherhood was only a temporary condition that I could just be snapped out of. She brought champagne, Vogue magazine, a gram of cocaine. “Since when did you start doing that stuff?” I said when she cut it up in front of me and casually did a line. It was eleven in the morning. I had gone from having no idea what time it was to obsessively watching the clock, waiting for nap time or waiting for Zachary to wake up, my days measured in portions of sleep. Fran reached for the Moët and expertly defoiled it. “Go on,” she said. “Zachary’s asleep. By the time he wakes up, you’ll be sober.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said, gesturing to my breasts. “The booze hangs around in the milk.”

  “Nonsense,” said Fran, picking up my glass and clinking it with hers. “One sip of this and you’ll forget you even have a baby.”

  Fran had lost weight, not just puppy fat but half of her breasts and hips and the filling that puffed out her cheeks. Next to her I felt like a living doughnut, soft and lardy and filled with cream. Since the baby was born, I had put on weight, not lost it. To please Fran, I took a sip of the champagne but it tasted like turpentine and I spat it back into the glass.

  In the next room, Zachary whimpered, and I got up to check on him. He was so pure, so innocent, and I wished that Fran, and her drugs, would leave.

  Lukas and I had been told by the doctor not to have sex for six weeks after Zachary’s birth but that date came and went without either of us even considering it. He had been sleeping in the spare room so as not to disturb us when he got home late at night after recording—­Cheatah had gone straight into the studio to cut a second album—­and when that had finished, he didn’t come back to our bedroom. After a while I couldn’t remember what had instigated the separate rooms or who it was meant to benefit, but the arrangement had become a habit. Our lives collided for only a few short hours in the middle of the day. Lukas would crawl out of bed to lie on the floor with Zachary, staring in wonderment at his smiling, cooing son, until Zachary cried or shat his pants, at which point Lukas would hand him back to me. I had tried to show him how to change a nappy or settle him with a gentle swaying and rocking motion, but too much time passed between practice runs, and he forgot, or lost confidence, and Zachary sensed his fear, his uncertainty, and mirrored it back to him with his bellowing.

  Lukas thought the answer was to get me on my own, to take me away from Zachary for a few days so we could be a ­couple again, but I couldn’t understand why he wanted to go back to the old configuration when we had become something new and wonderful, a family.

  Our first official family outing—­and the first time I had left the house in six weeks—­was a disastrous trip to the park that I’d had to force Lukas into. He couldn’t see the point of walking around a pond in the middle of the day. “Since when do we hang out in Regent’s Park?”

  “We might see a squirrel. Zachary can feed the ducks.”

  He was too young to do anything but lie on his back and stare at the trees in astonishment, but I had packed a picnic and spent hours gathering up items we might need for the outing—­spare nappies, burping cloths, wet-­wipes, a change of clothes, talcum powder, an extra blanket. The stroller was so weighed down it needed a Sherpa.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” said Lukas, eyeing the load.

  “But I never leave the house,” I said, hearing the petulance in my voice. “You don’t know what it’s like to stay home all day.”

  “That’s why I hired a nanny, to give you a break.”

  “But I don’t want a break from Zachary. I want us to spend time together as a family.”

  Lukas shoved the stroller roughly out the front door, letting me know that he would go along with what I wanted but only under sufferance. I stood on the top step, squinting in the sunshine, blinded by it, overcome with fatigue after packing all our gear, and wishing I hadn’t bothered.

  In the park, ­people stared at Lukas, but I didn’t think it was for the reason he thought, which was that he was famous. There was plenty to stare at in an ordinary gobsmacked way: the crocodile-­print spandex pants, the waist-­length corkscrew perm, the fact that a guy dressed like that was pushing a baby in a stroller. But just in case, he put on his sunglasses and scowled from behind them at passersby to let them know he was off duty and did not wish to be disturbed.

  We fed the ducks by holding a piece of bread in Zachary’s hand, then launching it out for him to the waiting birds, a pretense that fooled no one and made the ducks charge aggressively at our ankles, trying to hurry us up. We spread out the picnic a safe distance from them, ate a ­couple of fish-­paste sandwiches, then were pelted with rain at the same moment Zachary chose to shit his already urine-­soaked pants.

  In the old days, or even six months before, we might have laughed at the awfulness of the outing, what a farce it had been, but that day we couldn’t. I was too sleep-­deprived to find anything funny, and Lukas had his mind on a whole other life.

  At night, when I could have slept for a few hours, I lay awake fretting over Zachary, consumed with anxiety. His existence defied the prediction but at the back of my mind was the thought: What if it’s only temporary? What if sorrow is yet to come? With each passing day, I loved him a bit more, and had more to lose. Wide-­awake, crazed with insomnia, brooding, I would remember what we had been taught on the commune about the dangers of manifesting thoughts. We’d had it drummed into us to be careful not to dwell on our fears or we would make them a reality. But the harder I tried to expel my dark thoughts, the more persistent they became.

  I shared none of this with Lukas, partly because I knew what his reaction would be, and largely because he was never there.

  In the autumn, when the trees outside our window were golden and red, he came home early one mo
rning and climbed into bed with me, something he hadn’t done for months. It was just starting to get light outside. I smelled whiskey on his breath. “Darling,” he said, low and urgent. “Wake up.”

  The first thing I thought of was Zachary. “What’s wrong? Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. Guess what? It’s finished!”

  “What is?”

  “The album!”

  “Oh.” I collapsed back onto the pillow. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Six maybe?”

  I had only just fallen asleep again after a three a.m. feed. “That’s great, darling,” I said, but with little enthusiasm.

  He left the room, and a little while later, the front door slammed. The noise woke up Zachary. It wasn’t even six—­it was five forty-­five.

  Five hours later, midmorning to a normal person, Lukas came back, took a shower, made a pot of coffee. “You know we’re having a playback this afternoon of the new record,” he said, a box of birds. “You should come.”

  “To the studio?”

  “Yeah, bring Zachary, it’ll be fun. Everyone will be there.”

  In my head I quickly tried to work out if I had anything decent to wear that still fit me that I could also breast-­feed in if I had to, then I started on calculating how we would travel to the studio, how long it would take, whether it would interfere with Zachary’s feed times or nap, and if it did, whether he would be able to hold it together, before getting on to whether the slight pleasure of listening to Cheatah’s new album would outweigh the inconveniences. “I don’t know, babe. Maybe you should go without us?”

  “We could go to the park afterward. Or to a restaurant—­we haven’t done that for ages. Zachary can sit on my lap.”

  He had played on my weaknesses, both of them. “Okay,” I said reluctantly. “But if it all turns to custard, I might have to leave.”

  “Of course. Whatever you want.”

  A smooth black car, not quite a limo, picked us up at four in the afternoon. Zachary had woken late from his nap and I had rushed his feed, pulling him off before he was finished. In the back of the car, I lifted up my shirt and tried again, much to the delight of the driver, who spent more time glancing in the rearview mirror than he did looking at the road ahead.

  “You’re not going to do that in the studio, are you?” said Lukas, looking worried.

  “No way. That’s why I’m doing it now—­to get it out of the way.”

  “I’m sure we can find somewhere private, if you really need to.”

  “Thanks.”

  The car swerved to avoid a pedestrian, throwing us across the slippery backseat. Zachary popped off the breast, yelped as though someone had stuck a pin in him, then searched again for the nipple and bit down hard on it. “Ouch! Fuck. Sorry,” I said, and Zachary looked at me as if to say, Don’t even think about doing that again.

  “You know you don’t have to come,” said Lukas. “If you don’t want to.”

  “Do you want us to be there?” My voice was harried, shrill.

  “Of course. But I can get the driver to take you home again, if it’s too stressful.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, brightly despairing. “I really want to hear the new record. Tell me what it’s called.”

  “Cover Me in Sugar.”

  “Cover you in sugar?”

  “It’s a reference to female ejaculation.”

  “Yeah, I think I get that.”

  By the time we arrived at the studio, Zachary was a human milkshake. In a flash of fatherly pride, Lukas insisted on carrying him in so he could present him to his friends, but even as we made our way across the lobby, a snail trail of white goo escaped from Zachary’s mouth. He sucked it back in, miraculously, and we pressed on into the lift, which whooshed up to the eighteenth floor with rocketlike speed. It was so fast that my own stomach yawned, and I glanced at Zachary, who answered with a tiny burp. Good—­a burp is good. Air escaping.

  We were late. Marlon, Serena, Vince, Alan, and Fran, their expressions anxious, and some men in suits whom I didn’t recognize and wasn’t introduced to, were seated on long leather couches, waiting for us; Spike was there too, looking, as always, fidgety and smug.

  Apart from Fran, no one had met Zachary yet, and I thought at least someone might be interested in meeting him now, but I was wrong. He was ignored, and so was I. If being pregnant had rendered me embarrassing, unfunny, mute, then having the baby had granted me the cloak of invisibility. Or maybe they were just nervous about the record. It stung to be overlooked, but I was also relieved. I had been worrying about what I would say to these ­people if they asked me how I was or what I had been doing all day.

  I settled into the corner of the couch furthest away from the playback speakers with Zachary on my lap. He had started making the baby-­lamb noise that led to his either falling asleep or working up to an almighty fuss.

  We got through the first track okay, though I barely noticed the music coming from the speakers. When the track finished, instead of moving on to the next one, Marlon conferred with Lukas behind his hand, then walked over to the playback machine and switched it off. Lukas had his back to me, but I could see he was agitated, sweating. With no explanation, Marlon left the room, followed by Lukas. After they had gone, no one discussed the song we had just heard, but there was some discreet shrugging among the executives, and Zachary kept up his chorus. Then Fran and one of the executives started exchanging heated whispers, careful to keep their voices low so the rest of us wouldn’t hear.

  After about five minutes, Marlon and Lukas came back into the room, big smiles on their faces—­too big—­and the atmosphere in the studio lifted to match.

  “Guys,” said one of the suits, “we were just saying how fantastic the new stuff sounds. Love the direction you’ve taken it in. Really sharp, really fresh.”

  “Let’s get on with it, shall we?” said Lukas.

  When the next track started, I paid more attention, but I couldn’t believe I was listening to the same thing as everyone else. Underneath the usual screeching guitars and driving bass was some kind of acid house beat. I didn’t know rave music very well but I’d seen a news item on illegal dance parties and what reporters had been calling the Second Summer of Love. I listened more carefully, glancing at the drummer, Alan. He was staring at his shoes, looking uneasy. Clearly, the acid house had not been his idea. Zachary didn’t like it either. He curled up his fists, screwed up his face, and as the track reached what I supposed was the bridge, he opened his mouth, not to scream, but to let a torrent of curdled milk and saliva pour from his mouth. There was perhaps a cup of it, and it went all over him, all over me, all over the shiny red leather couch. When I tried to clean it up with the burp cloth, it came away in long, viscous threads.

  No noise had accompanied the reflux but in a matter of seconds we switched from invisibility to the focus of everyone’s horrified attention. Five or six adults jettisoned themselves off the couch to get away from us, away from the sick, while others checked their clothing for trails of white slime.

  None of these adults helped us or followed us out of the studio, and we had made it down to the lobby and called a mini cab before even Lukas arrived at our side. “What just happened?” he said, looking flustered.

  “You didn’t see? Zachary spewed his guts out. I should never have fed him in the cab.”

  “You fed him in the cab?”

  “Yes. You were there.”

  Lukas rubbed his cheek absentmindedly. He had been like that so often lately—­present in body but not in mind, his brain down the road, having a pint.

  I said, “Darling, what’s wrong? Is it the record?”

  “We worked so hard on this one.” He looked down at his feet. “I really thought we had nailed it.”

  Rid of the milkshake, Zachary had fallen asleep in my arms, his h
ead at a wonky angle, his cheek and mouth squashed together. Lukas was waiting for me to reassure him but all I could think of was that if Zachary slept now, in the cab, he wouldn’t sleep later, at home, and I would spend the next four or five hours listening to him grizzling and squawking unhappily.

  “It sounded great,” I said, reaching for a compliment, and hopelessly paraphrasing one of the executives. “I love the new direction—­it’s so sharp, so fresh. I’ve never heard anything like it before.” That last part, at least, was from the heart.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Lukas, but I could tell that he didn’t believe me, that he didn’t trust my opinion.

  The record came out three weeks later and it was an even bigger hit across Northern Europe than the last one. In West Germany it went straight to number one. Teenage girls queued up around the block the morning it was released, and some stores sold out within hours of opening. But in England, the album tanked. Not only that, the reviews were savage—­so bad that I had to start hiding newspapers and magazines from Lukas, because each one plunged him into a cataclysmic funk. Even hard rock magazine Kerrang! had been unkind. The worst was in the Guardian, read by millions, not just music fans. Lukas got me to scan it first to see how terrible it was, and reading it in front of him, I felt sick.

  When I got to the end of the column, I went back to the beginning, hoping to find something positive. But the second read was worse. I had missed some of the sarcasm.

  “Well?” said Lukas.

  Was there anything I could say that wouldn’t make it worse?

  “The guy who wrote this is a jerk,” I offered. “He’s more interested in sounding clever than in reviewing your record. Don’t even read it.” I tossed the thing aside, to emphasize it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

  Lukas retrieved it immediately, flipped straight to the review. I couldn’t watch him read it and got up to make a coffee. When I came back, he was staring grimly ahead of him, eyes flickering with murderous thoughts.

  He said, “Listen to this: ‘If the Eurovision Song Contest had a Hair Metal Rave category, then this lot would take out the prize . . .’ ”