by Fiona Gibson
Yes, but Max slept in his own bedroom. You’d hardly know he was there.
As I curled around our baby, I’d tell myself that everyone found it hard at first, and that this was normal. Tod would soon sleep through the night, in a room of his own, and there would be flowers and eggs again.
The fan heater whirs lazily but it’s still cold enough for our breaths to come out in pale puffs. Gordon and Betty omitted to mention that we’d need oil for the heating to work. They left the knickers and block of green sponge, but no oil. I suspect that Gordon stuck a pipe in the tank to siphon out the final drops. When I called the oil company, a woman said that someone would show up in the next two or three days. She couldn’t be more specific, not with the backlog of deliveries after Christmas and New Year. “Most people,” she added, “make sure they have plenty of oil to get them through the festive season.”
Ding-dong, Avon calling. Being the only one properly dressed, Marcus answers the door. I snatch his brown sweater from an open bin liner of clothes and pull it on over my pajamas. Two strangers follow him into our kitchen: a woman who, despite it being January, has a bright, sunny look about her, with blond hair piled up on her head, secured by an enormous tortoiseshell gripper. She looks like a holiday rep. In Marcus’s sweater, I feel like a root vegetable.
A man with a sharp, pecky nose, significantly shorter than the woman, says, “Hope you don’t mind us just dropping in. Carl Griffin,” he adds. “My wife, Lucille. We saw you move in. Thursday, wasn’t it?”
“I think so,” I say. Was it Thursday? With no job and no school routine, the days all fuzz together.
Carl eyes the packing boxes and heap of discarded newspaper. “You’ve got your work cut out,” he says, shooting air out through his nostrils.
I wonder why they’re here. I have never had dealings with neighbors, at least not in a friendly way. Perhaps they want to borrow sugar or are expecting hot drinks.
“Thought we’d say hi,” Lucille says. “Wondered if we could help.”
I glance at the bin liners and packing boxes and wonder if she means rummaging through our private things.
“Hard, isn’t it, settling into a new place?” she continues. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty going on around here. You wouldn’t believe it, for such a small place. So many groups you can join.”
She parks her dainty rear on a vacant chair. Is this how people behave around here? Barging in at ten-thirty on a Sunday morning? We could have been doing anything. London might have its downsides but at least friends let you know several months in advance if they’re planning to drop by. You know by September if anyone’s thinking of popping round for pre-Christmas drinks.
“That would be great,” I say, wondering what kind of groups she means. I have never belonged to anything, apart from a mother-and-baby gang that strolled through the park every Thursday, among hostile-looking dogs and their surly owners.
Marcus makes tea in a pot. Tod stares at Lucille’s head, clearly fascinated by her tortoiseshell gripper. Carl tells us about the superior course at Lexley Golf Club and asks, “Do you play, Marcus? Not that you’ll have time at the moment. Complete renovation job, isn’t it? Old Gordon and Betty, it got too much for them in the end. I helped out with the garden but there’s only so much you can do.”
“That was good of you,” Marcus says.
“You don’t want the place going to rack and ruin,” Carl continues. “We’re a Best-Kept Village, five years running. You’ll have seen the plaque in the High Street.” He tries to make eye contact with Tod, who is stretching bacon rind like elastic. “Very brave,” he adds, “taking this on. Our place, we bought it new. First owners. Carpeted, everything. You get great deals on a new build.”
“We wanted a challenge, didn’t we, Ro,” Marcus says.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Lucille spots Tod’s slab of green foam on the table. “You like flower arranging, Ro?”
“God, no. Tod’s planning to cut it into strips to make little hedges.”
“That’s very creative,” Lucille says. “I can see you’re artistic, Tod. You’ve got pen on your cheek.” Tod leans back, as if scared that she’ll try to wipe off the ink.
As she gets up to leave, Lucille says, “We’re in Briar Avenue, number seven, right on the corner. You must pop round for coffee.”
I thank her and wonder if I might just do that: how else do adults make friends in new places? Stalk likely candidates in the street? Place an ad in the Lexley Gazette: “Wanted urgently—friends. All applicants considered”? Women use their babies to help them befriend other mothers, but Tod is past the baby stage. He slurps his drink noisily—the spout cup’s only allowed at bedtime—and wipes a milky moustache on his pajama sleeve.
Lucille delves into her cream leather shoulder bag and hands me a card that reads, Fab-U-Look. Lexley’s Premiere Pampering Experience. “I’m in the beauty business,” she explains. “Massage, eyelash tinting, waxing—we’re doing a special on bikini wax if you team it with the half leg. After moving house, you’ll need a treat. Give yourself an overhaul.”
I must look like Gorby Cottage, requiring general upgrade. Our survey mentioned rising damp and woodworm boring through sub-floor timbers. I wonder if Lucille can do anything about that.
When they’ve gone, the house sinks into stillness. Then I notice other noises above the fan heater’s whir: creaks and the occasional rattle, which Gorby Cottage seems to be making all by itself.
I thought the countryside was supposed to be quiet.
Marcus’s journey to work will take one hour and twenty-five minutes door to door. He has treble-checked train times, driven to Lexley to study the layout of the station car park, and bought a new laptop to use on the train. The trip to Chetsley Primary School is simpler—a five-minute walk—yet I have been up since six-thirty to ensure that Tod is ink-free and respectable. I wet his hair to flatten the fuzz at the back, then blow-dry it to create an eerie, helmet-like effect. He looks like a mannequin in a 1960s children’s clothing store. I could muss it up—rub that waxy stuff through it—but don’t want to risk botching his do even further, not on his first day.
He stands stiffly before me, as if his school uniform is made from cast iron. I wrap my arms around him and say, “You’re going to be fine.”
“Yuh,” he mutters.
A few minutes later I take his hand as we cross the road. We pass the perfect white cottage where the old lady chases runaway leaves. The oak’s thinnest branches wave lazily. Tod still hasn’t spoken as we reach the Best-Kept Village plaque, which announces Chetsley’s winning years in elegantly carved script, with space underneath for future triumphs.
We pass the Poacher’s Retreat, which offers Sunday lunches (children eat free), real ales and famous warm baguettes. Clusters of hanging baskets smatter the white walls, awaiting spring flowers and praise. It’s the kind of welcoming country pub to which my parents would occasionally take me and my sister, Natalie. Whatever the weather, we would eat in the beer garden. Dad, a Yorkshireman with a passion for cheese, would always order a ploughman’s. Natalie and I would be allowed shandy, and try to act normally as our heads turned light and fluffy as pompoms. Then my parents would squabble over whether we should or shouldn’t leave a tip on the outside table—“Anyone could pinch it,” my mother would snap—and we’d rattle back to London in the Morris Traveller.
Tod glances into the bookshop where homecraft manuals are arranged on a floral patchwork quilt. Outside the grocer’s, a teenage girl is counting change in her palm. No one else is in sight. Where is everyone? With a jolt, I panic that I’ve scrambled my days and it’s really Sunday. It’s only when we turn the corner, and the yellow school is in view, that we see children and adults ambling toward its gates.
Tod grips my hand harder. Sometimes I’m fooled into thinking that pretty soon he’ll be mature enough to play out on his own without tumbling face-first into a fast-moving river or electrocuting himself on overhead wire
s. His small, rather sweaty hand suggests that he’ll still be clutching my legs, and unable to aim accurately while peeing, for some decades to come.
A bald janitor in a fluorescent yellow coat bats children in through the door. Tod’s schoolbag slumps too low on his back; I didn’t adjust the straps properly. I wish I’d taken more care over assembling his lunchbox: plain egg sandwiches, Penguin biscuit, flattened packet of Quavers. Don’t children judge each other on the contents of their lunchboxes? These are rural kids. Country people like their grub; Anna warned me that her sister had gained a stone within two months of leaving London. Even her hands looked pudgier, Anna said. She had become addicted to steaming pies and slabs of cow, served in pubs like the Poacher’s Retreat.
Tod’s new teacher, Miss Cruickshank, stands in the playground with her arms firmly folded across a shimmery red blouse. I wonder what she and Tod will make of each other. After the eyebrow incident, when things had settled down, Emily at his old school called me in for a meeting. She plucked at her crystal choker and said, “Tod’s fine, academically, but developing social skills—interacting with classmates—is just as important as learning. Perhaps you could help him at home.” She had a pained look, as if she were swallowing pins. I wanted to ask, How do you make a child interact? Maybe I didn’t talk to him enough. That day, after school, I fired questions at Tod and suggested fun things we could do, like make a lime-jelly pond with sweets dropped in, until he escaped to his bedroom and feigned sleep.
Miss Cruickshank waves from the main entrance. Tod’s feet are nailed to the pavement. “It’ll be okay, sweetheart,” I whisper. “Look, here comes your teacher. Doesn’t she look nice?”
Her flat brown shoes smack firmly on the tarmac. Tod presses himself into my hip. I wish Marcus were here, that he’d gone to work later just to do this bit with me. Nettie, his business partner, could have manned the office until lunchtime. But Marcus is frightened of Nettie. She is his mother’s age, his mother’s friend, and stumped up most of the cash to set up Skews Property Letting on the condition that she could bag the best desk, the one facing the window, and scare clients with her deep-frozen phone manner.
Miss Cruickshank’s blouse is right in my face now, billowing like a windsock. She smiles briskly and says, “Hello, Tod. We met when you looked round the school, remember?”
He stares up at me, blinking rapidly. I kiss his cold, clammy cheek, and she guides him into school, this woman swathed in flammable fabric and lavender scent who I know nothing about, who could be anyone. That’s the trouble with school: one hundred thirty kids, controlled by six adults. What kind of ratio is that? Teachers have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss your child’s progress at the end of every school day. You’re not allowed to creep into the playground with a stepladder and press your face against your child’s classroom window. Twice-yearly reports, and parents’ evenings are your lot. Anything could go on in that building.
I should go home now and tackle the list of tasks necessary to transform Gorby Cottage into a wonderful home to wow my London friends. The school door closes. A late-comer clatters across the playground, princess hair flowing behind her like mist.
Some mothers blub at anything. Seeing their child with a tea towel on his head in a nativity play is enough to have them gulping and mopping their faces on sleeves. I’m not that sort of mum. It’s school, that’s all. Part of being a kid. And Tod, I remind myself, as tears spill down my cheeks, is just an ordinary kid.
chapter 4
Livestock Nightmares
Suzie lives with her three children. She also lives with Peter, who has barely registered that they have produced these infants of varying sizes, each requiring care and attention or at least the occasional whale-shaped foodstuff flung onto a plate.
Their second-floor flat is in an unloved terrace off Bethnal Green Road, across from a small playground where all the play equipment was deemed unsafe and taken away by the council. When Tod was a baby, I knew I could show up at Suzie’s anytime I liked, with my son in a deeply unhygienic state, and she wouldn’t start sniffing or telling me off. The chaotic nature of Suzie’s existence would make me feel instantly in control and sorted, a person qualified to write authoritative tomes on the correct way to raise children.
In truth, though, it was Suzie who knew how to do things. During our early weeks of buggy pushing, I would gobble up her childcare tips, such as placing an open bin bag in the middle of the living room, into which your sick child’s soiled nappies could be lobbed. She thought nothing of strapping her youngest into a bouncy contraption that hung on the door, and leaving him there for a whole afternoon. Suzie didn’t make me feel neglectful for not taking Tod to baby massage classes. “Who needs the massage?” she would retort. “The baby or the mother?” I needed Suzie then, and I need her now, to reassure me that Tod will not be irreparably damaged by being forced into an unfamiliar school, in the care of a teacher in a gigantic red blouse.
“Yes?” Suzie pants into the phone. She sounds like she has a wardrobe strapped to her back.
“Is this a bad time?” I ask.
“Ro, God, I miss—No, you can’t have a biscuit, Laura. What am I, a bloody café?”
“Just wondered if you’d like to—” I start, but Suzie can’t hear me because a child—presumably Barney, her toddler—is yapping for attention.
“No,” Suzie says. “I haven’t found the racing car key. If you left it on the floor, I’ll have vacuumed it up. Now go away. I’m on the phone to Auntie Ro.”
“Want to talk,” Barney demands. “Want Ro.”
Suzie’s voice is replaced by ragged breathing. “Hello, Barney,” I say. I like Barney—his nasal emissions fascinate me, those pearly rivulets descending toward his upper lip—but I don’t want to talk to him now.
“Just say hello,” Suzie prompts him.
A three-year-old doesn’t just say hello. He sniffs into the phone and parps the first verse of Postman Pat. “Black and white cat,” Barney warbles. “Got apple.”
“Have you? That’s nice.”
“Don’t like Ham,” he continues. Ham is Sam, Barney’s five-year-old brother. “Ham boof me,” he adds.
Barney is now trilling the popular French ditty: “Frere-ah Jack-ah, Frere-ah Jack-ah, Tommy-voo?”
“Please put Mummy back on the phone,” I plead. “Suzie?” I shout, hoping she’ll hear me. She has probably collapsed from exhaustion. Suzie has devised intricate games to enable herself to lie down. She plays hospital and has the three of them wiping her forehead with moist J-Cloths and pressing plastic stethoscopes to her thudding chest. Suzie was not one of those mothers who blubbed at the gate. When Sam started reception class, she had to force herself to think about sad things—starving children in poor countries—in order to look suitably grief-stricken.
“Am in bedroom,” reports Barney.
“Barney,” I say sternly, “I need Mummy.” I can’t shout at him; he’s only a kid, and not even mine. Only when there’s a clonk—he must have dropped the phone—can I safely assume that he’s wandered away to tip jigsaws out of their boxes.
“Ro, you still there?” Suzie says.
I phoned to confess that Marcus and I have made a dreadful mistake; that we had no right to thrust our son into the care of Miss Cruickshank when he had formed a fragile attachment to Emily with her crystal choker. But Suzie is telling me, “Weird thing happened yesterday. Sam gets himself stuck at the top of the helter-skelter in the park—you know how I am with heights? How I get nauseous just looking down from our balcony? He won’t come down the steps or the slide. He’s screaming his head off. Everyone’s staring at me—bad mother—thinking, why isn’t she up there, rescuing him?”
Why do women do this? Mothers are meant to support each other, offer mutual stroking and comments like “You’re right, there’s no point in changing his nappy two hours before bathtime, it’s a waste of Pampers.” Secretly, though, we’re thinking: How tight is that?
“T
his woman sees Sam,” Suzie continues. “She’s pregnant, massive, but hares up the helter-skelter and carries him down under one arm.”
“That was kind of her.”
“You know the strangest thing? It turns out she bought your flat.”
I wonder if she complained to Suzie about the banging upstairs, or has been flooded out.
“And she said it’s perfect,” Suzie adds.
Putting my flat on the market felt like preparing to have some bodily part amputated. Marcus, however, could barely conceal his delight. For a man who had marched into my life, zooming his hand like a plane, saying, “I have clients desperate for places around here,” he was remarkably keen to move on. I’d suggest buying home accessories to spruce up the flat, like a magazine rack or wastepaper bin. “It’s not worth getting anything new,” he’d insist, soon after he’d moved in. “We won’t be here much longer. We’ll buy somewhere that really feels like ours.”
I had no intention of moving, and told him so. Our one trip to IKEA resulted in Marcus deliberately losing himself in the warehouse section, and becoming so incensed with the buffeting checkout queues that he stormed off, saying he wasn’t wasting another minute of his life to pay for some pistachio-colored candles and a shower curtain patterned with fish.
Our excursion to a bathroom showroom was equally fruitless. I only wanted a new loo. The seat had parted company from the main toilet bit and could send you pinging off to the left if you didn’t have your wits about you. Marcus stared mournfully at a loo that possessed a removable ring for easy cleaning. I sat on it to demonstrate its elegant lines, but felt stupid, worse than lying on a mattress in a bed shop. I regretted bringing him to the bathroom place. I’d been right to worry about living together; one minute you’re kissing in the backs of taxis. Next thing you’re staring at bidets. There’s no in-between bit. Couples should be warned about that.
Marcus wanted to move soon after the wedding, then during my pregnancy, before I became too unwieldy. Then I was too unwieldy and we decided to wait until after the birth. Tod started crawling, then walking, and then demanding sets of one hundred felt tips, never to have their lids replaced, and we were still there. Whenever something went wrong with the flat, like the fighting upstairs or wasps taking up residence in the bathroom extractor fan, Marcus would give me a look that said: see? And he would point out that the proceeds from selling my place would convert neatly into a stately home in the country, or at least a traditional cottage with garden. It might be ten thousand miles from a Pret a Manger, but at least we’d have space.