by Fiona Gibson
My trout came with an unwieldy salad, incorporating too many ingredients. Slices of plum and blood orange slumped uneasily against a heap of spring onions. An uncut beetroot seeped into a slagheap of Russian salad from a tin. We talked about the areas of London we liked and didn’t like. I felt as bland as my trout, but with heavier bones. When I told him where I lived, Jonathan gnawed gamely at his chicken and said, “That’s an interesting area.”
“It’s up-and-coming,” I lied.
Jonathan had wisely bought in the chunk of East London bordering mine, which boasted two organic pubs, a comedy club and fabulous Thai take-away. Where I lived there was only a grocers, a minicab office and a mysterious store crammed with dead sewing machines.
Jonathan used phrases like “foot on the ladder” and “long-term investment.” I didn’t confess that my own flat was rented and that a strange man from Dundee lived upstairs with a boisterous Alsatian that lollopped unattended among the junk mail in the hall. Jonathan’s cheesecake sagged stickily beneath its yellow skin. I couldn’t eat dessert. My stomach had shrunk to the size of a broad bean. I was running out of steam.
An inquisitive face peered in through the “O” in Trattoria. On spying the cheesecake, it hurried away to the new, instantly popular restaurant two doors down, which offered white bowls of noodles to models and fashion students at rowdy communal tables. As we left, a mouse darted between the red chair legs, diving for cover behind a chipped gold radiator. The waiter presented me with a slimy-stemmed carnation plucked from the vase. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” he said, as if the meal had been just the start of it.
We stopped at the tube platform, wondering what to do with our hands and mouths. Our train rumbled its approach. “Sorry about the restaurant,” I said, looking up at him. He smiled expectantly. I liked that smile. “Maybe next time we could—” There: I’d said it.
He looked surprised. “Next time I could cook for you. If you feel okay about coming round.”
A man tumbled out of the train and beamed soppily into Jonathan’s face. “Hey, mate!” he said. His tie was askew, cheeks scribbled with veins. “Who’s your friend?” the man asked.
“This is Billy,” Jonathan said to me through his teeth. “An old school friend. Billy, I’m just—”
“Who are you?” Billy blasted in my face.
“We just ran into each other,” said Jonathan.
“Why don’t we all have a beer? It’s too early to go home. Come on, my shout.”
Billy rummaged in his pocket, rattling coins. Jonathan bit his lip. “I’ll call you, Billy.”
“He always says that,” Billy laughed, and ricocheted along the platform, lobbing a fistful of coppers in the vague direction of a busker’s open guitar case.
“Sorry,” said Jonathan.
“Why? He was only—”
The kiss came from nowhere. He started it, taking my face in his hands. Then there were lips. I dropped my carnation onto the platform. His mouth was still on my mouth, hot hands tightly holding my hands, as our train clattered out of the station, without us.
Jonathan took to cooking for me. He said I didn’t eat right. Too much cholesterol, furring up my insides. He seemed happy to rattle around in his sleek, grown-up kitchen, stirring things. Better than going out, he said. He knew where he was. Everything at hand.
I had never dated a man who knew what to do with capers. At least I assumed we were dating, which sounded creakily old-fashioned, but I couldn’t say I was going out with him as I only saw him at his flat. The one time I coaxed him to my place, we lay on my grazed sofa where he gave me a back massage and the Dundee man’s Alsatian barked above our heads.
Jonathan was happier on home turf where everything was shiny and smelt lemony. I would watch him at work with yellow rectangular sponges and dimpled blue cloths. He would tell me about the inner workings of computers, which I found comforting. His job sounded terribly precise. Software developers were either right or wrong. There were no gray areas.
As he prepared supper, I would hover on the sidelines, observing ingredients in plain glass bowls: roughly-chopped herbs. A lime, halved, ready for squeezing. I had only ever seen TV chefs prepare everything beforehand. When I cooked, shifting a solitary object around in a frying pan, I would pretend to be such a chef. I’d say, “Now we’re cracking the egg, sliding it into the pan…a little black pepper please…” My left hand—the assistant—would pass the grinder and I’d ask, “Doesn’t this look tasty? Shall we let the studio audience have a try?” I would flip the egg into a torn-apart roll and bite into it, bursting the yolk. “Mmm,” I’d say. “Delicious.”
Perhaps Jonathan had come along in the nick of time.
“You can’t be pregnant,” he said, “after one little accident.” He had turned up at my office off Leicester Square, clutching his briefcase nervously. We crossed the road to the nearest pub, one I never drank in. They still did meals in baskets. On the bar was a plastic tub of whiteners, for coffee. “I did a test,” I said.
He ordered a glass of white wine which came in an oily glass. I asked for water. “You’re serious,” he said.
“It’s not the kind of thing I joke about.”
We sat in a corner, bordered on two sides by smeared windows. He placed two abandoned chips, coiled like slugs, in the ashtray. “So what do you think?” I said, helplessly.
“What do you think I think? I’m pleased.” He squeezed my hand bravely across the table.
“It’s too early. We’re not at that stage, not nearly.”
“Could it be wrong, the stick thing?”
“I don’t think these things lie.” I fished it out of my pocket and showed him. I’d wrapped it in paper from the office loo, which fluttered toward the maroon carpet like a miniature sail.
“What do you want to do?”
“Have it, what else?” This wasn’t strictly true. I couldn’t think of any reason not to have it.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Sick. I was doing an interview yesterday, this woman whose husband made her move out of their bed so his dog could sleep with him. Massive Afghan hound thing, stinking of wet fur. Even when the woman put it out of the kitchen, I could still smell it, stuck to my coat.”
Hair clung to my forehead in a miserable droop. Jonathan pushed it away. “Poor Nina,” he said. “It’ll be okay, I promise.”
Anyone would have thought we were a proper couple.
3
Taking Your Baby Out
Martha’s cleavage looms dangerously close to my eyeball. A wooden beaded necklace bounces lightly between her freckled breasts. “Everyone finds it painful at first,” announces my breast-feeding counselor. “But the nipple toughens up into a hard little nub. In no time you’ll be popping it out in cafés, on trains, even in the theatre, darling, without a second thought.”
It is Martha’s purpose to convince me that a four-day-old infant can be nourished solely via one gnarled nipple. The other nipple (for I have two) has withered to a mean-looking raisin and is therefore temporarily out of service. As a result, the breast to which it is attached has grown so bulbous that I fear it might burst, splattering Jonathan’s seventy-eight-year-old mother, Constance, with sweet fluid.
“I want to put him on formula,” I tell Martha. She shakes her head quickly, as if I’m a child demanding to tightrope walk on live electrical wires. Secretly I have bought some factory-made milk. I crept into the chemist’s, pulling up the collar of my jacket. It’s tucked behind the organic rolled oats with a tea towel folded over it.
“But you’re managing fantastically,” insists Martha. “And think of all the good you’re doing your baby. Less risk of gastroenteritis, higher intelligence. You know, breast-fed babies have a far higher chance of getting into university.”
This suggests that my son might leave home at eighteen rather than lying on the rug and demanding bags of crisps and his pants to be ironed at the age of thirty-seven, which can only be a good thing. Martha rests a stubb
y hand on my knee. “A woman I know made a rubber ball from elastic bands. Built it up for weeks before the baby was born. When it came to feeding, she had this rubbery globe to bite on.”
“Biscuit?” asks Constance, hovering with a sugar-speckled plate. Constance is my pretend mother-in-law and has brought her own biscuits. Jonathan and I are not married. As the baby was conceived before we had learned each other’s surnames, we haven’t had time to get married.
“Jonathan was bottle-fed,” blares Constance into the anxious air. “I’d put in a rusk to thicken it up and fill his belly so he’d sleep the full twelve hours.” She arranges finger Nice biscuits to form a perfect fan shape. She’s a small, busy woman with a fallen-out perm that looks rained on. “He was a guzzler,” she adds. “But I routined him. We did that in those days. Weren’t you on the potty at fourteen months?”
“I don’t remember,” splutters Jonathan.
“Oh, he was. Not completely trained but only one serious accident, in Boots, and they were ever so good, let us use the staff facilities.”
Jonathan smiles sadly at his feet.
“On his second birthday,” she rattles on, “I took off his plastic nighttime pants and said, ‘We don’t need these anymore, do we?’”
Jonathan tweaks the heel of his sock.
“And that was that,” announces Constance. “Dry as a bone. A late developer in other ways, though.”
My redundant breast oozes milk. The baby cottons onto what is required and gulps thirstily, then plops off again, leaving the in-service nipple spurting milk. I stop the flow with a clamped-on hand. Jonathan lurches forward with a tissue, dabbing the air around my breast. “Perhaps you’re not relaxed enough,” suggests Martha.
“I think I’ll make dinner,” says Constance. In the kitchen, drawers are opened and banged shut. “Don’t you have any mince?” she shouts.
The baby coughs, spraying milky saliva. I tip him over my shoulder and pat his back, forcing out a curdled jet.
“Believe me, it gets easier,” says Martha, now looking hopeless around the eyebrows. She crunches the last Nice biscuit and wipes her hands on tenty brown trousers. She locates her bag beneath Constance’s bundle of knitting. “Jonathan can help,” she adds. “I know he can’t feed per se—doesn’t have the equipment—but it’s good for bonding, to involve Dad in winding and settling. You know the key to successful breast-feeding, Nina?” Her tongue shoots out, desugaring lips. “Looking after yourself. Loving yourself. Saying: I may be a mother but I too have needs.”
“Yes!” I say, too eagerly.
“And you’re lucky to have a supportive partner.” She smiles richly at Jonathan and strides past the glossy black door to her next appointment where New Mother is managing marvelously, intending to breast-feed until the child is able to position itself on the bosom while watching an R-rated movie on TV.
Jonathan peels the sleeping baby off me.
“You must have a heavy-bottomed frying pan,” mutters Constance.
I flop backwards onto the sofa, aware that one breast, an orb of veiny Stilton, is fully exposed. “I’m putting him on a bottle,” I croak.
Constance emerges from the kitchen clutching an open packet of Bisto. We don’t use it; she must have brought her own. She holds it in one hand and a teaspoon, loaded with ashy powder, in the other. Her eyes rest on the baby. He lies on the sofa, drunk on my milk, ready to be decanted into his cot. Pink legs and arms are splayed, as if he has tumbled from an airplane.
“Funny,” she says. “He looks nothing like you.”
We live in the ground floor flat of a converted three-story Victorian terrace. The hallway is never littered with junk mail or neglected Alsatians. Jonathan owns the square front garden that juts from the flat like a table leaf. He had it paved with reclaimed slabs (for low maintenance) and edged with galvanized pots of lavender (for fragrance). There’s a backyard, too, where Jonathan plans to introduce more plants, perhaps bamboo and some elegant climbers.
He has lived here for several years. He gutted the place immediately after moving in, chucked other people’s appalling taste into a skip. Before renovations started he had the forethought to take Polaroids of old-person’s swirling rusts and olives. His mother thought he had ideas above his station, flinging out perfectly usable fixtures and fittings. He ignored her, he told me, and marched past with faded velvet curtains and a bathroom carpet stinking of ammonia. The Polaroids were stuck into an album alongside shots of each room as it is now, with shades of creamy vanilla and blue everywhere.
“I know what you’ve done,” I said, when he showed me the album on my second visit to his flat. “You’ve made it look awful in the before pictures like they do in makeovers. So the woman looks even better afterward.”
“What are makeovers?” he asked.
“You know. Before and afters. In the before picture they slap Vaseline on her face to make it look greasy.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
I laughed and flicked the album’s pages. Polaroids were captioned: Hall—before. Bathroom—after. Back door—sanded but not painted. There was even a photo of the skip with a shower curtain lolling over the edge. “You’re so particular,” I said, “for a man.”
“What do you mean, for a man?”
“I mean it’s unusual. I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“Is that a compliment?” he asked, shutting the album firmly.
“Just an observation,” I said.
I moved in with Jonathan six months ago. This changed me in small ways. I noticed that my toothbrush splayed untidily and bought a new one (turquoise to tone with Jonathan’s white-and-blue-tiled bathroom). Instead of bundling underwear into a drawer, I took to folding my pants.
We were a real couple now and proved it by inviting friends to dinner. Jonathan’s friends were mostly from work, and talked about their roof terraces and how great it would be to have a shed. They always left by 11:00 p.m. I preferred Billy who would roll in several hours late with a hot, pubby face and his dinner dried up in the oven. The tube was a challenge for Billy. Each visit, he’d blame his lateness on falling asleep on the train and completing a circuit of the Circle Line. Occasionally he ventured farther afield, and found himself in Barnet or Ongar where he’d dawdled to study tiny frogs on the platform. He felt in his pocket where a frog should have been, but found only tobacco fallen out of its pouch.
In the old days, when I was normal, I might have stayed up with someone like Billy, talking nonsense. But Jonathan would become agitated and start jigging his knee. He’d throw Billy a blanket and me a look that said: time for bed. In the morning I’d find Billy sweating on the sofa, fouling the minimalist décor with his breath.
Mostly, though, we saw the work people. After cheese and dainty slivers of celery, Jonathan would pass round the album of Polaroids. Everyone would agree that we had made dramatic improvements, forgetting that I was a recent addition, quickly moved in with my expanding belly. One night, when the friends had gone home, I asked, “Have you lived with anyone before?”
Jonathan continued polishing wineglasses and said that he had. Billy had lived on the sofa for a couple of weeks, following a disastrous affair with a flight attendant. When Billy had lit a roll-up from the gas ring—setting his fringe alight and filling the kitchen with vile fumes—Jonathan had suggested he might go home and try to repair the relationship. “Can you imagine,” he said, “how awful burning hair smells?”
“I meant have you lived with girlfriends.”
He edged a wineglass into its rightful position with a middle finger. “There’s been no one,” he said.
“What? No one serious? No one you wanted to have a child with?”
“No one special,” he said.
I watched him wiping surfaces he had cleaned already, wishing I could jam my stupid questions back into my mouth.
Leaving the house with your newborn according to Babycare:
1. Start with a short, local trip. If anything happ
ens, at least you can get home quickly.
2. Head for open spaces, not busy streets.
3. Take nappies, wipes, barrier cream, breast pads, dummy, a bottle if necessary, a book or magazine, extra blankets if it’s chilly, a sun hat if it’s hot and a spare outfit in case your baby’s nappy leaks.
4. Stay calm.
Jonathan returns to work. He smiles encouragingly as he steps into the car, leaving me with sandpaper eyes and a baby with no instructions attached. Back inside I turn to find the chapter in Babycare entitled: What to Do with Your Newborn During the Day.
There isn’t such a chapter. A two-week-old human doesn’t appear to be capable of anything much, other than feeding and sleeping. He can’t hold a rattle or make biscuits with a heart-shaped cutter. He hasn’t even been named. Jonathan’s suggestions (David, Anthony, Martin) feel enormous for a person fifteen inches long. Eliza contributed a fashionable list: Milo, Dylan, Spike. Couples from the antenatal group favor dowdy (but ironic) names suggesting persons old enough to remember the Second World War and bang on about it endlessly: Fred, Walter, Stanley. My mother called, shouting, “You haven’t thought of Colin?”
I’m warming to Benjamin. It’s a flexible name, hanging comfortably regardless of a person’s size. He sleeps now, the blanket rising and falling gently. Confident that he won’t catapult himself from the sofa onto the polished floorboards, I tread lightly to the bathroom.
I have piles, and waxy white pellets to put up my bottom to make them go away. After poking one in I inspect the kitchen, in search of tasks. The coriander is out of alignment with the other herbs. Something else is wrong: a sour whiff. The kitchen never smells bad when Jonathan is here. He has been at work for less than an hour and already the flat is decaying. By the time he comes home, it may be derelict.
Jonathan has tidied the fridge, transferring eggs from their box into dimples in the door. Nothing bad there. It can’t be a nappy; soiled offerings are swiftly bagged in peach-scented sacks and dumped in the outside bin. Jonathan bought a nappy disposal unit but I can’t figure it out. More switches and buttons. Equipment overload. The smell intensifies when I twist to the right; sicky and acidic. Perhaps it’s on me. But there’s no stain, no evidence of anything spewed up. Stay-at-home mother fills her people-free days with lining up herb jars and obsessing over odors.