Babyface

by Fiona Gibson

  “You’re shaking,” says Eliza.

  “My brain doesn’t work. I can’t make decisions. Even little things, like do I go to the loo now or hold on for a bit? I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  “Should you see someone?”

  I think of Ashley and Mum’s horse pills.

  “What triggered this off ?” Eliza asks. “I thought you were coping. Assumed you enjoyed your funny daytime world.”

  I tell her that, after being humiliated in the Changing Village, I’d attempted to calm myself with a hot drink. A new café had sprung up in the place of the friendly old one with its all-day five-item breakfasts. Dozens of unfamiliar coffee varieties were being dispensed in chrome-handled glasses and potty-size mugs, with or without white chocolate flakes or gingerbread crumbles or some kind of vanilla gloop. I’d stared at the blackboard, wondering whether the gingerbread crumbles would float on top or plummet to the bottom like overdunked biscuits. The menu milled with chalked words and wiggly drawings of steaming cups. “Coffee to go,” I said meekly.

  “What kind?” asked a girl with an airbrushed face.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, can you decide? We’re busy.”

  I’d left the café without buying anything.

  “You didn’t call me because you couldn’t choose coffee,” says Eliza.

  “No, I called because of Ranald. Remember Ranald, the camping man? He called me Nancy.”

  Cindy hands me a porcelain cup of unidentifiable herbal tea with the bag still in it, leaking redness.

  “You need something special,” said Eliza. “Something to remind yourself you’re still a woman.”

  Cindy has Ben in her arms. He regards her with exaggerated blinks, wondering why his mother is never as well turned out as this. She plucks a narrow black dress from the rail. “Try this. The baby’s fine with me.”

  I look at her: slender and ironed with contented infant. Magazine mother and child. She drifts back into the shop with Ben. I strip off my outer clothes and pull on the dress, expecting nothing: a stretchy black tube with miserly straps.

  It drapes gracefully, creating the illusion that I have never seen the inside of a maternity ward.

  “Shoes,” commands Eliza.

  Cindy reappears with sandals like tangles of licorice.

  “Where would I wear these things?”

  “Anywhere,” Eliza says. “They’d do for when you go back to work. People wear anything to the office these days.”

  It seems so long since I entered a place of work that I cling to an image of sensible workaday shoes and enormous clanking computers. Promise’s offices were so dismally beige I was grateful for those triumph over tragedy interviews, and always willing to travel to the women’s homes. Even Luton could be uplifting on a sunny day.

  “We’ve got the old Nina back,” gushes Eliza. I view my reflection and try to straighten my shoulders. Wet eyes and chunky bra straps aside, the effect is, although not quite goddesslike, a marked improvement on the woman who barged in through the etched-glass door.

  And I have to admit, I rather like it.

  By 10:30 p.m. Jonathan has neither returned from his after-work drink nor phoned to say when he’ll be home. I resist the urge to call his mobile. Why shouldn’t he stay out late? He needs a break. Everyone does. Even Beth goes out occasionally, with her coffee morning cronies, to bemoan the condition of East London’s parks and slag off mothers who give their infants fizzy drinks. Jonathan and I could go out. I’d wear the dress—which I’m wearing right now—and he’d spend all evening staring at me in a funny way. But so far he’s shown no desire to venture out after dark—until this evening, of course, when presumably he’s rollicking from pub to pub with various female colleagues attached.

  At eleven forty-five I rehearse my speech: “As you can see I have bought something to make myself seem attractive to you. Though obviously I come way down in your list of priorities.” By twelve-fifteen the speech has been rewritten to include: “You can fuck off.” I wonder how he would react to a barrage of swearing. I have never heard Jonathan swear properly. Just the occasional “bugger it” when he’s running late in the morning and can’t get his cuffs done up. Even then he ruins a perfectly decent swearing moment by apologizing afterward.

  At one twenty-six Ben wakes for a feed. It seems unimportant that I’m cradling him while wearing a dress that cost more than our new stereo, which we never use because Jonathan doesn’t like music, not even classical. As Ben chugs his bottle, I make a mental note to inform Jonathan that I’m moving in with Eliza and would he mind driving round at some convenient moment with my things? Not that I own much. My belongings appeared instantly shabby in Jonathan’s sleek surroundings. What use had I for my ratty paperbacks and the cookery books my mother donated when I left home, even though I couldn’t remember her ever preparing a meal from scratch? One included a chapter on nightmare constructions requiring intricately carved fruit and piped cream. Jonathan frowned at it, suggested we rationalize my stuff, and dropped off the undesirables at a Sue Ryder shop. My black photo album—a present from Eliza, into which she’d stuck pictures of the two of us in Corfu—must have been packed into the box with the piped cream cookbook because I never saw it again.

  I still have my clothes of course: prepregnancy outfits now unfashionable enough to look faintly knackered, yet not so ancient that they’d create some kooky retro look. But I do have my new dress. It looks even better in the dim glow of the plug-in night-light. I fancy myself even if Jonathan doesn’t. No point in pretending. It’s over.

  As the taxi growls outside the flat I roll words around my mouth: We’re finished. We’ve tried, made a decent stab at this, but it’s not working. You can see Ben as much as you like. Take him to the park like weekend dads do. I’m sure it won’t screw him up, if we separate when he’s little. It needn’t be messy. We’re reasonable people, aren’t we?

  A figure emerges from the cab and loiters at our gate. A burglar, sensing female alone with baby. Through the spyhole I watch the person rummaging in its pockets for something—crowbar? Knife?—then stagger against a galvanized pot of lavender.

  I unlock the door.

  “Hello,” says Jonathan.

  “Where have you been?”

  He glides past me, self-consciously upright as if balancing books on his head. “You’re wearing a dress,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you phone?”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “You’ve had me demented.”

  “Can I have a closer look at that dress? I like the way it scoops down at the front.”

  I step back from him. “Don’t think I’m mad because you had a good time. It’s not that—”

  “You’re sexy,” he says.

  “Why did you make me so worried? You don’t know what it’s like, being here, waiting.”

  “I like you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Can’t we just go to bed?”

  I’m about to tell him no, we can’t, because we don’t do that kind of thing—sure, we go to bed, but we don’t go to bed—but he’s already lurched for the bathroom, banging the door behind him. From in there comes a thud of something heavy meeting floor tiles. I try the door. It won’t open.

  “Jonathan, please let me in.”

  The something heavy shifts just enough to let me squeeze through the gap. Jonathan has crash-landed on the bathroom floor, tie strewn diagonally across his shirt. I crouch beside him, try to hold him, but he arches away like babies do when they don’t want you.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  He fixes his gaze on the point where the blue tiles meet cream. Calming colors. His favorites.

  “I drank too much,” he tells the tiles.

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  “Nina,” he calls after me, “it’s not right, is it, any of this?”

  I look back to see that his cheek is crumpled against the loo seat. When I’m closer I rea
lize that he’s crying without making a noise, not delicate teardrops but sheets of fluid, dripping from his mottled chin onto the perfectly pressed but grubbily fingerprinted collar of his shirt.

  9

  Making Baby Friends

  Jonathan sleeps through the polite peep-peep of the travel alarm and refuses to respond to several reminders that the working world anxiously awaits his presence. I suspect that this is the first time in the history of Jonathan that he has failed to show up for work. “Shall I phone in for you?” I ask.

  A timid growl comes out.

  “What shall I tell them?”

  He flips from his back onto his stomach, hair clinging to his scalp in moist swirls. “Sayamill,” he groans.

  “Just ill.”

  “Or sick.”

  “Right. I know,” I say, reaching out to pat the wet head and deciding to make the call instead, “I’ll tell them you had bad seafood.”

  I dial and start, “It’s Nina, Jonathan’s…” I hate that. How you don’t know what to call yourself if you’re not married. Wife is plainly inaccurate, girlfriend too frisky considering we jointly own a food processor, and partner sounds so businesslike you’d never believe sex was involved (which it isn’t, but still).

  “I’m calling for Jonathan,” I say. “He’s been up all night with his stomach.”

  Jonathan’s colleague chuckles and says, “Seafood?”

  “That’s right.” I step into the bedroom to report that I have pulled off a fine act of deceit but Jonathan is unconscious. The room stinks of pub carpet. Old alcohol, fermenting in the gut. The sash window opens stiffly but crashes down again, snapping at my fingers. I wedge it with Jonathan’s work shoe.

  The doorbell rings. Beth marches in, skinny plaits tied with gingham ribbon, and Maud bound to her hip by a fragile-looking scarf. She pecks my cheek. Up close, she smells of baking. I’d forgotten that I’m hosting a coffee morning for Beth’s new-mother gang. Therefore I have failed to prepare an impressive array of warm, home-baked goodies as is customary on these occasions.

  I stumbled into the coffee morning circuit accidentally, introduced by Beth, who took me under her wing way back in those antenatal classes. “You need baby friends,” she declared when we’d become proper mothers and it became apparent that she knew more than I did. A “support network,” she called it. Women who know what you’re going through. My name was swiftly added to a list of novice mothers who kicked off tentative friendships, discussing sleeping patterns and the healing of Caesarean scars. Tips would be swapped. Within weeks, fragile intimacies were formed. I hadn’t been faced with so many unfamiliar faces since starting school, aged four.

  Phoebe arrives shortly after Beth, chomping some kind of foodstuff, probably breakfast. She has a jaw like a brick and an over fondness for blusher. Phoebe appears to feed her older child entirely on breadsticks and crudités, but thinks nothing of troughing fudge brownies all morning, which strikes me as unfair on the kid. No wonder he has a disgruntled air about him, like something’s missing, probably chocolate.

  Beth met Phoebe at a painting workshop. The word “workshop” implies light engineering, but this type involved placing babies and small children on a plastic sheet and allowing them to express their creativity with stumpy brushes and water-based paint. Beth mounted Maud’s creation in an outsize clipframe that hangs over their traditional fireplace. I feel obliged to say something intelligent about the colors—“the way that purple swirls about with the red! The juxtaposition of lilac and green!”—every time I go round there.

  I rummage in the cupboard for some snack that might pass as home-baked. A woman with blue-veined eyelids and sun-blistered shoulders announces that her husband wants to move to the country. “Why?” asks Beth. “The country’s all right to visit but—you know, what would you do all day?”

  “I’ve told him,” she says. “Explained that I can’t live outside a five-mile radius of a Hobbs.”

  I dump a plate of artfully arranged (but obviously shop-bought) oat cookies on the coffee table. “You can’t get anything in the country,” Beth continues. “Matthew and I are just back from Somerset. Everyone was friendly—happy and simple the way they are in the country—but you couldn’t buy watercress or any kind of lettuce you’d want to eat and I’m stuck there, rustling up a salad with an iceberg.”

  “Coffee?” I enquire. Four additional women have arrived. They have bossy voices and mobile mouths. Their children are plonked on the rug where I have arranged a selection of what I hope are ecofriendly toys, produced from sustainable resources while encouraging hand-eye coordination. I’m learning fast. No palming off twenty-first-century baby with a gnarled Miffy book.

  Ben observes his playmates fearfully. A new arrival removes her child from his front-loading carrier. I met her at Beth’s but can’t remember her name: so many new acquaintances to file correctly, plus the names of their babies. That’s the hardest part. Unless a child possesses an outstanding feature—a dense rug of hair or vast, flapping ears—I can barely distinguish one from another. In a clump like this, it’s virtually impossible. I often ask, “How’s Jacob sleeping these days?” only to be met with, “Joshua’s doing a full six hours, thank you.”

  This woman’s name starts with J or maybe K, I know that much. She has a felt-making business requiring much rubbing of wool through an old net curtain and hanging the resulting sheets on her washing line. Her current project is an outsized slab to adorn the wall of a primary school canteen. Beth told me she lurks around skips, fishing out discarded objects—chest of drawer handles, scraps of moldering upholstery—to stitch onto the felt. “How’s your felt thing going?” I ask.

  “My what?” She reaches for biscuits, sees what’s on offer and quickly withdraws her hand.

  “That thing for the school,” I say uneasily.

  She rubs her powerful upper arms, making a rasping sound. “It’s an installation.”

  “Is it nearly finished?”

  Her child—an ill-tempered ball of a boy called Ernie or possibly Alfred—starts crying. She plonks him on her bosom while still standing. “It’ll never be finished,” she retorts. “It’s a work in progress. That’s the idea. The children keep adding to it, stitching on found objects for years and years—forever in fact—so it’s constantly evolving.”

  “I’d like to see it when it’s finished,” I say. “I mean not finished.”

  The living room is stiflingly warm, perhaps due to the number of adults milling about it, or heat radiating from Jonathan’s sweating corpse in the bedroom. Beth and Felt Lady are discussing their POOP campaign (Poo Off Our Pavements). Beth is to put pressure on the parks department to erect a dog lavatory, which I assume is a Portakabin with miniature toilet inside but turns out to be a designated fenced-off area.

  Felt Lady offers to produce leaflets to thrust into the palms of owners spotted with defecating dogs. She and Beth huddle over a notebook, debating the wording. “Your dog has been spotted soiling a public area,” begins Beth. “Please pick up deposit and place in dog-mess bin.”

  “Not enough oomph,” chips in Felt Lady. “Put: cut the crap. Dog owners must clear up after their pets or face a fine of—”

  “We can’t fine them,” says Beth. “We’re not the police.” Maud interrupts with a startling wail as if she’s been bitten. Beth carries her to the kitchen, pointing at our storage jars of pasta. “Look,” she soothes. “Tagliatelle. Penne. Spag-yeti.”

  Maud squawks angrily. Phoebe’s kid—he’s around two or three, I have yet to get to grips with bigger children’s ages—investigates a drawer filled with treacherous cooking implements. “Haven’t you child-proofed your drawers?” asks Beth.

  “No need. He won’t be crawling for months yet.”

  “Isn’t he trying? I know he’s only four months, but so is Maud, and she’s desperate to get moving. The health visitor couldn’t believe how advanced and determined she is. But, then, we do a lot with her.”

  I glance int
o the living room where Ben is sucking the ear of the black, featureless bear donated by Eliza.

  “Perhaps he needs more stimulating toys,” remarks Beth.

  Phoebe’s kid produces a miniature taxi from his dungaree pocket and raps it sharply on the door of our stainless steel oven. I’m unsure about the etiquette of telling off someone else’s child. “Now then,” I murmur. “Let’s not do that.”

  Maud, unimpressed by our pasta range, writhes in Beth’s overlong arms. “Do you have any rice cakes she could nibble on?” she asks. I locate an open packet of off-white tiles and hope Beth doesn’t register their bendiness. Phoebe’s kid opens the oven door and places his taxi on the wire shelf.

  “That’s an oven,” I point out. “Very hot.”

  He twiddles the knobs, attempting to turn on all five rings and gas us. It’s 10:27 a.m. Apart from Beth, who refuses to poison her insides with my freshly brewed offerings and accepts only plain hot water, we are all drinking coffee. This counts, then, as a coffee morning. Should Eliza burst in between skirt-choosing appointments, I have planned to say that these women descended on me without warning, forced their way in and started boiling the kettle. It’s almost true. They’re not friends exactly. We are linked by our lifestyles—wipers of bottoms, dispensers of milk—and a rabid desire for adult company.

  “Can I ask you something, Nina?” says Beth. She looks especially greasy today. Her fringe and forehead form a buttery slick. She strokes the Peter Pan collar of her candy-pink blouse.

  “Ask away.”

  “Is Jonathan romantic?”

  “It depends what you mean. He’s thoughtful,” I say, then remember the previous night and add, “most of the time.”

  Beth breaks off a corner of flexible rice cake. “Matthew’s not. He used to be. He’d buy me spontaneous presents in his lunch hour. Little things you’d never get for yourself—perfume, lacy underwear with the dangly bits for your stockings to hook on to—just to say he still thought of me as his lover, you know?”