Babyface

by Fiona Gibson

“What about him?” suggests Dale. “The old fat guy?”

  “Would you mind,” asks Eliza, “just for a minute?”

  Eliza has never met my parents before. Dad smiles uneasily. She steers him across the studio as if he’s a supermarket trolley with a busted wheel and positions him next to Fern. He squints into the lights. He’s wearing clapped-out cords with the knees worn smooth. Next to Fern, he looks 103.

  “That works,” Eliza says.

  Dad smiles uneasily.

  “Nice,” agrees Greg. “A bit closer to her, Papa.”

  “It’s great that he looks so uncomfortable,” whispers Eliza.

  Bile simmers in my throat. Ben flops in Fern’s arms, eyelids drooping. “Mum,” commands Greg. “Keep. Baby. Awake.”

  I clap my hands. Ben’s eyelids tremble, then shut firmly.

  “Sing,” demands Greg.

  Which song? “Twinkle Twinkle” isn’t rousing enough. “Old Macdonald” has a habit of chundering on for weeks if you’re not careful but I clear my throat and begin:

  “Old Macdonald had a farm

  Ee-eye ee-eye oh

  And on that farm he had a…”

  A farmyard flashes into my brain: cockerels and piglets and ponies, crowing and snorting and whinnying together. Which to choose? I can’t decide, not on four hours’ sleep. I’ll have to speak to Jonathan about spending a night on my own in a hotel.

  “Mum?” says Greg. “Are you with us?”

  The small dog yaps. From a distant corner of the studio Dale’s tremulous voice rings out:

  “And on that farm he had a dog

  Ee-eye ee-eye oh.

  With a woof woof here and a yap yap there

  Here a howl. There a growl, everywhere a yip-yip.

  Old Macdonald had a farm

  Ee-eye ee-eye oh.”

  Ben flinches. A glimpse of eyeball, an awakening smile. “Closer now, Pops,” urges Greg. “Lean on her. Arm round her waist. Look at her. Look at me.” Dad’s eyes swivel as if operated by joystick. Ben leers at the lens like it’s a bulging, milk-filled breast. Dad stares at Mum, pleading for help.

  “Relax, Dad,” Greg urges. “Feel like you’re a puppet and your string’s gone loose.” Dad’s knees tremble. Next to Fern, he has aged, collapsed in on himself. The studio door swings open. A male model saunters in, just in time to do the shoot with Ben. I know he’s a male model because he’s carrying a black portfolio, and a guitar.

  Dad’s so tired I have to ease him into the cab. His knees click irritably. Mum clutches a stash of goat cheese pastries, wrapped in an oil-stained serviette.

  Dale buckles Ben’s seat into the back seat. “I loved your song,” I tell him. “All those different barks. Do you like dogs?”

  “No,” he says. “I fucking hate them.”

  I intend to tell Jonathan about the shoot as soon as he comes home but it doesn’t feel like the right moment. “Minimalism is dead,” he reads flatly from InHouse. “Go crazy for eccentric florals after too many years of good taste. It’s time to chuck in the chintz.”

  “I’m sure it won’t happen,” I reassure him. “It’s just someone making stuff up.”

  He places the magazine on the polished floor. “What do you mean, it’s made up?”

  “They’re paid to spurt waffle. I did it myself for ten years.”

  Jonathan sips from a wineglass. In the year and a bit we’ve been together, his hairline has snuck back. I only notice the change when I stare at that lonely hearts photo. He looked amiable then, and unruffled. “Why would they make things up,” he says, “when there’s real stuff to write about?”

  “Real isn’t grabby enough.” Where did I hear that? From Chase, my old editor. I had submitted a piece about a woman who survived solely on rum and raisin ice cream. I’d been especially proud of the story—it had that crucial “thank God that’s not me” factor—and had taken along a carton, plus wafer biscuits, to get on the woman’s good side.

  “It’s not enough,” complained Chase when I handed in the story.

  “Well, I think it’s pretty extreme. Think of what it’s doing to her intestines. It’s hardly normal.”

  “No one in Promise is normal, Nina. We need an edge. I know…”—and now I was about to discover why he was editor of Britain’s bestselling weekly while I was a lowly features writer—“…say she wakes up in the night, feels that familiar urge—the desire for something creamy and sweet…her husband’s asleep. She knows it’s wrong but can’t stop herself. She pulls on a housecoat over her nightie and sneaks out to, to…”

  “The freezer,” I suggest.

  “A twenty-four-hour Tesco. That’s the photo—her in a flowery housecoat creeping out of the supermarket with a family-size tub under her arm.”

  Jonathan drains his glass in one gulp. “I can’t believe he’d manipulate people in that way.”

  “He didn’t do it. I did. I even took along a nylon housecoat with a gathered yoke and ribbon at the neck and told her it was Promise policy to supply the clothes.”

  Jonathan stares gloomily at InHouse. “Your magazine might do that. This sort doesn’t.”

  “Of course they do. They can’t show flats like yours every month. They pretend it all changes, like fashion.”

  “Ours,” corrects Jonathan. “Flats like ours.”

  His eyelids are heavy. He places the wineglass on the floor and edges over to make room for me on the sofa. “Come here,” he says, patting the space.

  He curls around me, breath warm on my neck. A hand edges up my T-shirt, loitering inside my bra. Immediately—although Ben has not ventured near this region for several weeks—baby lips form in my brain. Jonathan and I have yet to resume our sex life. We should have done it by now. Babycare, which generously allots one and a half pages to the well-being of the parents and 377 to the nurturing of the child, states, “You may resume intercourse after your six-week postnatal checkup.”

  There is no reason not to do it, or at least to have a go and see what happens. Dr. Strickland assured me that my stitches were healing marvelously, yet I fear that, at the sight of a naked adult male, everything will ping open again. I read that new parents should “seize the moment even if it’s in the middle of the night. No matter how sleepy you are, sex can rebond you as lovers, not just new mum and dad,” but can’t imagine Jonathan being delighted by such clumsy treatment, even if I felt like it.

  “You’re tense,” he says. I wonder how long it will take for his fingers to stimulate milky seepage. Babycare acknowledges New Mother’s reticence, suggesting, “Subconsciously you may fear becoming pregnant again. Make sure you are confident with your method of contraception.” Condoms: fat lot of use they were a year ago. Jonathan’s other hand shuffles tentatively up my skirt. “Massage each other sensuously,” Babycare advises, “with aromatic oils such as ylang ylang and tuberose. You may find it helpful to explore the vaginal area with your fingers or even examine it with the aid of a mirror.” These days, looking at my face is terrifying enough.

  “Are you all right?” asks Jonathan.

  “I feel funny.”

  “What about?”

  I want to say: where do I start? I can hardly remember how all this came about. What was sex like, before sperm skidded through a tear in the helpless beige rubber, my breasts ballooned and a squiggled line appeared on my belly? I don’t recall that we did it that much. We didn’t need to. Once was all it took.

  “It’s not right,” I say, “being in the same room as Ben. He might see something.”

  “He can’t. He’s asleep.”

  “He might wake up.”

  Jonathan sits upright and silently flicks through In-House. He stops at a page offering decluttering tips: Don’t view the process as insurmountable. You’ll feel overwhelmed and never get started. Take it one step at a time.

  Later that night I turn to the sex bit of Babycare: “No need to rush back into penetrative sex. However excited you may feel, the perineum may still be bruised and tender
.”

  The fact that the perineum is mentioned at all confirms that New Mother might have a more pleasurable time extracting her own teeth.

  6

  Introducing Solids

  Jonathan brings coffee and two croissants on a plate. It had been a pleasant surprise to wake up with the bed to myself. For a moment, I thought my nightmare about losing Ben in the park, along with my front door key, had segued neatly into the flannel pajamas fantasy.

  “Eliza called,” he says. “Something about the pictures being great, just what she wanted. What pictures?”

  I bite into a croissant, sucking its butteriness. “Probably Cuba. She was in Havana last week. Complained that she couldn’t find a building that looked run-down and Cuba-ish enough.”

  He laughs. “Funny she’s your friend, being so different.”

  “You know what’s even stranger? You’re her type, exactly. You’d never think it.”

  “And what type is that?”

  I don’t know how to put this. Eliza favors conventional men. Nothing excites her more than polished black shoes, a brass-buckled briefcase, an evening paper tucked under the arm. She cites banking as the ideal profession but is also partial to lawyers, librarians, computer programmers (as long as they don’t talk about work) or, in fact, any job requiring a hushed environment and serious, grown-up clothing. When we’re out, her neck swivels at each glimpse of charcoal suit. Perhaps they offer respite after the difficult colors she has to deal with at work.

  Unfortunately such men rarely respond well to Eliza. She has a fondness for short, slithery dresses that look like underwear, as if she’d started to put her clothes on but lost interest halfway through. It’s something you might expect a new mother to do: the fashion equivalent of starting a sentence and forgetting what you’re going to say.

  “You mean conventional men,” Jonathan says.

  I think of the suits she says hello to, who make excuses to go to the bathroom and reappear armored with girlfriends in pastel blouses. Morning aromas drift into the bedroom. Jonathan has clearly been busy. The absence of clattering from the activity arch suggests that Ben has been fed and lulled to sleep.

  “You’re not conventional,” I say.

  “But I wear a suit.”

  “You have to.”

  “I like wearing it. I’d wear it even if I didn’t have to.”

  I know that. Dress Down Fridays cause Jonathan a degree of anxiety. I vacate the bedroom while he sifts through insipid polo shirts, flapping fabrics before the full-length mirror. He was born to inhabit a suit. Constance showed me a photo of him as a child, possibly attempting to fill me in on his history. Jonathan aged seven or eight, wearing a paper crown like you’d find in a Christmas cracker, squeezed between two robust adults. Constance smiling at a fiercely attractive man in suit and tie—presumably Jonathan’s father, although his identity was unconfirmed and I didn’t like to ask. Jonathan wore a suit and tie, too, its knot tight against his throat.

  “Was it Christmas?” I asked unnecessarily, as a glistening turkey and torn crackers littered the foreground of the shot.

  I rest the plate on my lap, transferring croissant crumbs to my mouth with a wet finger. “Just because you wear a suit, it doesn’t mean you’re—” My head empties itself of all logical thought.

  “What am I?” Jonathan asks.

  “You’re a great dad.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The way you comfort him and have patience—much more than me. The way he loves you.”

  Jonathan takes my empty plate and brushes croissant crumbs from the duvet.

  “I know he does,” is all he says.

  Beth and Matthew chose the restaurant. I wonder why—out of the seven couples in the antenatal class—we’ve stayed in touch with this one. Between them, they radiate so much smugness you can smell the pinkish haze around their heads. Beth took to calling me after Ben’s birth, enquiring whether I was “coping” before moving on to detail how easy everything was. She had a head start on me. Her daughter, Maud, was born four days before Ben. “It’s all in the attitude,” she’d remind me. “Relaxed mother, relaxed baby.”

  Beth had been big on relaxation during our classes, breathing like bellows as if poised to give birth on the teacher’s sea grass matting. I preferred the look of a fat girl who smelled of mushy peas, wore a gravy-stained sweatshirt and announced, on day one, that her boyfriend couldn’t be arsed to come. She slouched with thighs thrust apart on a batik-printed cushion and declared that she intended to take full advantage of the pethidine, diamorphine and any other goodies on offer. I hadn’t seen her after that first class, so presumably she couldn’t be arsed to come again either.

  “Lucky us,” smirks Beth, bobbing onto a chair facing the waterfront. She wears a pale denim dress with short puffed sleeves and white flowers embroidered on the collar. A rabbit knapsack clings to her back. Beth has tumbled from a Beatrix Potter book.

  The restaurant hums with grown-up Sunday lunchers. Beth unbuttons her dress and pops Maud’s head into a white broderie anglaise bra. Of all the names available, why Maud? Already, they are mulling over which school to send Maud to should she—as already suspected—turn out to be gifted. Beth thinks she might be musical as the kid slaps the keys of Grandma’s piano when they visit her in Oxfordshire.

  “Such a happy feeder,” announces Beth to no one in particular.

  “So is Ben,” I say. “We’ve started giving him solids.”

  “At three months? Isn’t that early?”

  “Our health visitor suggested it. Said the odd little taste won’t do any harm.” I like our health visitor. She has a crisp Northern Ireland accent and bit Ben’s fingernails when I couldn’t find the baby scissors.

  Beth frowns, running a palm over her child’s colossal forehead. “Maud has only had breast,” she says. “Incredible isn’t it? Every little bit has been made with mummy’s milk, hasn’t it, sweetheart?”

  “Ben’s food is all homemade,” I blurt out. “Pureed carrot and broccoli and all sorts.”

  “Gosh,” says Beth. “How do you find the time?”

  Jonathan fills everyone’s glasses from the water jug. He has the good grace not to point out that I have yet to locate the blender’s on button. He has taken on the matter of Ben’s nutrition, appearing perfectly happy to spend one evening a week finely chopping and steaming organic produce to be whizzed in the blender, frozen in ice cube trays and popped into plastic bags, labeled and dated and stored in the freezer. I assist by writing with an artistic flourish, Pear and Apple Medley.

  Beth props Maud on her denim lap and expertly rubs her back, easing out a polite belch. She places the snoozy child in the car seat at her feet. “You know, we’re thinking of having another,” she says. “Not trying exactly, but not not trying, either. Aren’t we, Matthew?”

  Matthew and Jonathan have been muttering together, discussing the function of each building across the river. “We’ll see,” chuckles Matthew. “Now, have we all decided?”

  Unused to the concept of eating out, I stare at a menu that consists of too many choices with baffling terms such as tagine and coulis.

  “What about you, Nina?” chirps Beth.

  “I can’t decide. I might have monkfish but dill chicken sounds tasty.”

  “I mean, do you want another baby?”

  I gulp air. My mouth feels formless. “We don’t know, do we, Jonathan? We haven’t got to grips with this one yet. Have we, Jonathan?”

  “No,” he says, dipping his nose into the menu.

  “What’s annoying is there’s only ever two or three things for vegetarians,” grumbles Matthew. “They palm you off with a vegetable bake and never stipulate what a bake actually is.”

  “We could have gone to a vegetarian restaurant,” I suggest.

  “I’m having salmon but not with the roast pepper chutney,” says Beth.

  “Aren’t you vegetarian, too?”

  “I am. But I eat fish.
”

  “And chicken,” adds Matthew.

  Beth smiles tersely and folds Maud’s blanket to form a neat oblong. “Funny how your baby’s made from the best bits of each of you,” she says. I glance from Beth to Matthew. Oily complexions that haven’t got their acts together postadolescence. Beth’s skinny plaits peter out at her shoulders. Matthew has slippery lips. “Everyone says Maud should be a model,” she adds. “But I hate that, don’t you? Little girls with ringlets. Pushy mothers wanting a share of it all.”

  “It is rather naff isn’t it?” Matthew is whirling the wine in his glass and sniffing it.

  I bite into a rosemary-infused olive.

  “Aren’t they the best thing?” says Beth. “They marinate their own. We come here all the time, don’t we, Matthew? Maud’s very good in restaurants.”

  I wonder if now might be an appropriate moment to announce that Ben was dragged by his fame-grabbing mother to a studio dense with cigarette smoke. I could add that he was stripped to his nappy in a cavernous, un-heated space, force-fed cold milk and manhandled by strangers barely able to operate a kettle. I wonder how that might go down in present company.

  “Does Ben have much personality?” asks Beth, staring down at him.

  I am tempted to brag that when he wakes up he will astound her with a repertoire of juggling tricks but mutter only, “He likes his activity arch.”

  “One of those gaudy plastic things? Maud only has wooden toys. Did I tell you she can already hold a crayon? Boys lag behind, of course. You’re talking years before he’ll sit quietly with a dot-to-dot book.”

  I toy with the possibility of kicking over the table and its glinting array of glasses and porcelain dishes filled with black pepper and sea salt. But they’d assume it was my hormones.

  Ben’s eyes open. I reach down to lift him from his seat. He howls and spews a bellyful of vomit onto his striped cotton top and the white tablecloth.

  “Oh dear,” says Beth, leaning backward.

  The initial retch is followed by a screech of such volume that the entire restaurant appears to swivel one gigantic, chomping face, praying for the offending infant and his liquid emissions to be removed immediately.