by Fiona Gibson
I crouch beside him, hoping my backside doesn’t appear on the monitor and fill the entire screen. “Ben?” I say softly. “It’s okay. Can you smile for the man?”
What starts as a small, frightened cough revs up to a desperate splutter. I haul him over my shoulder. “God,” says the boy, “is he choking?”
“Just emotional. Got a throatful of his own snot.”
“Don’t worry,” he sighs. “Everyone has off days.”
I clamp Ben firmly under one arm while I try to shake open the buggy and succeed only in bashing its wheels on the pavement. Ben’s cheeks burn scarlet. He’s plank rigid as I squash him into the seat. Two almost identically dressed females cross the road towards us. “How did it go?” asks the mother.
“Fine,” I mutter, “though you never know what they’re looking for, do you?”
She frowns at Ben’s blotchy face. “He looks upset. You should get him straight home. I never make Raven do an audition if she’s not in the mood.”
“Was she in the mood today?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman beams. “Charmed them. They didn’t even mind about her forehead. But as you say, you never can tell. That’s what makes it so exciting. Isn’t it Raven?”
Raven sucks a vivid orange ice lolly. “Mummy,” she whimpers, huddling into the deep velvet folds of her mother’s skirt.
Jonathan appears to have made a full recovery. He crouches on the kitchen floor, squirting the oven’s insides with an aerosol can bearing the warning: “Highly Toxic. Risk of Serious Damage to Eyes.”
“You should be resting,” I say.
“I feel better doing something useful. What have you been up to?”
“Walking. Just wanted to give you some peace.”
“You’ve had a haircut.”
“Oh, yes. Just had the urge,” I tell him, stripping Ben to his vest.
“He looks cross.”
“Got stroppy at the hairdressers,” I say, heading to the bedroom for a clean vest, although he doesn’t need one.
“Nina?” Jonathan calls after me.
I open drawers of socks and hats and babygros, but no vests. Jonathan follows me, still holding the can of oven cleaner. I wonder how he’d react if I told him. Whether he’d squirt me. “What are you looking for?” he asks.
“Where do we keep Ben’s vests?”
He opens the wardrobe and plucks one from the vest shelf. “I have to tell you,” he says.
I smile blandly at him.
“Great haircut.”
“Thanks.”
He looks at me curiously, as if he’s about to draw me. “I like the way it flicks under and out a bit. Makes you look…cheeky.”
“You don’t think it’s too young?”
“No. You look different, though.”
“In what way different?”
“More like…before Ben.” He takes a step closer. My instinct is to back away in case he spots something close up; my fibbing eyes which have flitted about an audition suite all afternoon. But my back meets the wardrobe. I’m trapped by a Swedish flatpack construction.
“We’d better check Ben,” I say quickly.
“He’s strapped in his seat. He can’t go anywhere.”
“What if he’s crying?” I feel Jonathan’s breath now, hot on my face. He tastes minty, and smells freshly bathed. He’s still clutching the oven cleaner. My legs hook lazily around his. And nothing terrible happens. No clanking sounds come from my insides. I still work.
11
Choosing Child Care
Beth darts about her kitchen, chucking chopped dates into a mixing bowl, presumably to prevent the resulting cake from being too much fun. Three weeks have passed since her coffee morning outburst. She looks perkier. The forehead slick has been blotted away. Even her plaits look less dismal.
“Jonathan wants to get married,” I tell her.
“Do you want to?” she asks.
“I can’t see why not. We won’t go for a big splashy do. And at least I’d know what to call him.”
She smiles daintily. Beth thinks I met Jonathan through mutual friends at a dinner party. I didn’t want her to assume I was sleazy or desperate or foolish enough to arrange a date with a stranger. Jonathan has been primed not to mention the ad, should we ever have another meal out with Beth and Matthew (unlikely, after the spewing incident).
I perch on a cottagey kitchen chair worn shiny by bottoms. Beth favors the country kitchen look: enameled jugs bearing delphiniums, fruit basket lined with a gingham square. In one of those drawers stenciled with yellow-beaked ducks, there’s bound to be an apron. “When you’re married,” I say, “you know where you stand. It must feel more secure.”
“I don’t want to know where I stand,” says Beth. “I want a night out, a surprise, planned and sorted without me having to do anything about it. ‘Hey, Beth,’” she cries, mimicking Matthew. “‘Don’t bother cooking tonight. Put that spoon down, cupcake. Dig out your good shoes, the ones with the thin ankle straps. We’re going somewhere special.’”
She places the cake in the oven. I wonder when I’ll learn how to do that: click into Mother the Baker. Five years down the line, I’ll be roped into the PTA and obliged to contribute walnut loaves and sugar-dusted sponge cakes in order to raise funds for crucial school equipment. By this time classes will be restricted to one workbook per seven kids. My son’s academic career will rest solely on my ability to extract something from the oven that someone might actually pay 50p for.
“Why don’t you ask him?” I suggest. “I’ll baby-sit.”
“We have a baby-sitter. We can go out whenever we like. And having to ask spoils the whole—”
“Who baby-sits?”
“The au pair, of course.”
“So you found your eastern European?”
Beth laughs. “Not exactly. A lovely girl, Rosie, from Kent. Pretty little scrubbed-up thing. Went to one of those progressive schools where they only go to lessons when they feel like it.”
“And what happens when they don’t?”
She shrugs, wiping the kitchen table with an orange sponge shaped like a goldfish. “A lot of sitting under trees, it sounds like. Everyone had their own plot of garden. I’ve told her to make sure Maudie gets plenty of fresh air because, you know, me and the outside don’t get on.”
“Could she sort out your garden?” I ask.
“Well, I don’t like to ask. It’s not strictly in the job description. But I’m hoping she’ll dig up that woody old flowering red currant. Matthew won’t—he used to do the garden. Not now, with his telly. Look at the state of that lawn.”
Beth’s garden yawns from the kitchen window, bordered on all sides by a six-foot creosoted fence. She had the fence erected for privacy so she could practice her yoga on the lawn. The patio area has been decked, which Beth regretted instantly. Matthew’s fault, she told me, for not sharing the burden; how thin she had grown from perpetual breast-feeding, fingers shrinking until skin hung limply at her knuckles (first place to show weight loss, apparently). And her ring slipped off, that serious diamond from Liberty, down a gap between the decking. The whole lot will have to come up. Not for sentimental reasons—though it was her engagement ring, purchased when he did still surprise her—but because she can’t bear to think of another couple moving in, deciding that decking is very last century, and spying a glimmer of gold in the soil.
“Where’s Maud?” I ask.
“Upstairs, playing with Rosie. You must establish rules, from day one. Rosie knows not to clatter about when I have friends round. And food—she can help herself from the everyday biscuit tin. But I don’t want to open the cupboard and find my dark chocolate cookies all gone.”
Sweet, youthful singing filters downstairs. Maud is laughing. I have never heard that child laugh before. Perhaps Rosie is playing a tape of anonymous babies giggling to stimulate Maud’s sense of humor.
Beth sets two places for lunch on the kitchen table. With a flourish, she tugs the te
a towel off an enormous salad dish. Nutty kernels nestle among glistening leaves and grilled peppers. “You must be feeling better,” I say, “bothering to toast pine kernels and all that.”
“Oh, Rosie knocked this up. You owe it to yourself to get one.” She is about to pour sparkling grape juice but I’ve brought wine, and want some. “Just a sip,” she says. I’m about to suggest pouring Rosie a glass but assume she’ll eat later, picking at leftovers with Maud in the playroom.
The note Blu-tacked onto the maternity ward’s toilet door went like this:
remember ladies
when you pee
clench to hold the flow of wee.
squeeze it tight
and hold it in
to keep the pelvic floor in trim.
It seemed a tragic waste of time, all that clenching and squeezing when there were ample visible areas to work on. But now I wish I’d put in the effort. I dribble wee constantly, like a mouse, and Beth’s overreliance on stair-gates is enough to put you off going. I squirm on the kitchen chair and leave it so long it’s threatening to spurt out before I’ve sat on the loo. But I make it in time and, awash with relief, find Rosie and Maud two floors up.
Rosie smiles gappily through a tumble of loose brown curls. This fresh, perky girl, with just the right amount of freckles, belongs on a TGV at the start of an Inter-rail trip, not flicking the wooden beads of an abacus in the upper reaches of Beth’s town house.
“Thanks for lunch,” I say.
“That’s okay. Any time.” She wears jeans, a white vest and no bra. Her skin is the type that adapts easily to the sun; none of your calamine lotion scenario. Maud bulges her cheeks blankly. Rarely have I seen a more unattractive infant. Squeezed into a dainty madras-checked sundress, she looks like a transvestite. “Isn’t she adorable?” says Rosie. “And so clever. I can’t believe the stuff Maudie can do.”
Maud jams a clenched fist into her mouth.
“Are you just out of school?” I ask, trying not to raise the pitch of my voice like you do when addressing a child.
“I’ve worked for a couple of years,” Rosie says. “Waitressing, bit of modeling—you know, life drawing classes. Freezing, half the time. Some rotten adult education center. Two-hour sittings that felt like a week.”
“That must have been awful.”
“Last job, I was dancing. That was better.”
“What kind of dancing?” I ask.
“Lapdancing. Great money but the hours—forget it. You can’t do it, not for months on end. You’re knackered. There’s a cut-off point. So I thought I’d try this instead.”
She presses the play button of Maud’s cassette player:
Itsy bitsy spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed poor Itsy out
Who are they, these primpy singers? Three years at drama school and you wind up belting out nursery songs with such clarity that could ping your fillings out.
“Lapdancing?” I repeat.
“In a dirty old men’s club?” barks Beth at my shoulder.
Rosie looks up, cheeks flushed prettily. “It’s not just men. Women go, too. Lots of men take their girlfriends just for fun.”
Beth breathes deeply, like a doctor’s checking her chest.
“Maybe Matthew would be up for it,” I tease. “There’s your night out. You were moaning about him never surprising you.”
“I don’t think so.” Beth’s neck tendons jut out as if they might snap.
“It’s not what you think,” says Rosie. “The girl does her dance, that’s the end of it. There’s no touching.”
“And what did you wear for this dancing?” enquires Beth.
Rosie plants Maud on her knee, landing a kiss upon scrubby hair. “Nothing. You have to wear knickers for pole dancing though. They’re pretty strict about that.”
Beth hoists Maud from Rosie’s lap. The child howls in protest, straining towards her new best friend. “Where are we going?” I ask, following Beth as she clomps downstairs. Despite the lazy heat she bundles Maud into a chunky knitted jacket, striped like Neapolitan ice cream, plus a marshmallow sun hat, snapping the press-stud shut among Maud’s many chin folds. “We’re going for a walk,” she announces.
“It’s not like you,” I say, “desperate to go out.”
She stuffs Maud’s left foot into a sheepskin bootie. “I feel cooped up. Actually, I’m nauseous.”
“Maybe it’s the wine,” I suggest. “You’re not used to it. Bad idea, drinking in the day. If I did it too often I’d be slugging all afternoon. I love wine.”
I shouldn’t have said that. That’s the trouble with the coffee morning crew. Occasionally you forget that you don’t know each other, not really, and that your friendship is built upon the terries-versus-disposables debate and a collective horror of dog muck.
Beth attempts to feed Maud’s hand into a rainbow-striped mitten. “It’s not the wine,” she says, as Maud shakes it off. “How would you feel, knowing someone you’d hired—someone you trusted with your most precious thing—was willing to dance, stark naked, for men?” She squashes the now bellowing Maud into her buggy, aggressively strapping her in. “I’m not a prude, you know that. But she could have warned me, instead of landing it on me out of the blue.”
“You didn’t ask,” I suggest.
“What would I have asked? Hello, darling, do sit down. Now tell me, is there anything I should know about your past?” Beth flashes a brief, manic smile.
“She seems lovely. Don’t let it spoil things.” Why am I taking the side of someone with whom I’ve conversed for less than five minutes?
“She’s a prostitute,” Beth hisses. “Tell me you really believe they just writhe on a pole. If they’re prepared to do that, they’ll do anything for money.”
Rosie trips lightly downstairs. “You’re not allowed to meet the guy privately,” she says. “The club would lose its license if you did.”
I steal a glance at her body, at the biscuity middle that dips in like a sand dune as she reaches for Maud’s changing bag from the hook in the hall. On spotting her new primary carer, Maud relaxes and smiles.
“I’ll bring the rug and some toys,” says Rosie, “so Maud can play in the sunshine.”
We buffet out of the house, with Polly Put the Kettle On chiming weakly from the playroom.
In the playing field Beth plants herself on a bench. Before I had Ben, I couldn’t grasp the concept of urban parks. Those angular green shapes on the A-Z were interesting only to rottweilers and their fat-necked owners. And those daytime people, shunting buggies.
Beth’s park, in the green splodge pecking order, is lower down the food chain than ours. “We were clever to buy here,” she confided once. She sounded like Jonathan. No one bought flats where they wanted to live anymore: they bought to be clever. “It’s the next hot spot,” Beth insisted. “Look at the gift shops with their wrought iron candlesticks and ethnic doo-dahs.” Passing through Beth’s area, you might be conned by its rinkydinkiness: useless shops selling candles too expensive to burn. But wherever you are, the park tells it like it really is. Beth tries not to register the Bacardi Breezer bottles slumped in the grass. When a man in a shimmering track-suit allows his greyhound to defecate on the grass, she doesn’t have it in her to say anything or even thrust him a POOP leaflet.
Rosie lies on the blanket with both babies. “Do you mind if I strip her off a bit?” she asks. “She’s roasting in all these layers.”
“Whatever you think’s best,” Beth manages.
It can’t be easy, two adults doing essentially the same job, stifled in politeness. I wondered how it would be to have another female, especially one as eye-pleasing as Rosie, emerging from the bathroom at 7:00 a.m., fragrant and moist from her shower.
Beth hooks wiry hands into her hair. Her plaits have come out. When she removes her fingers, clumps stick out like birds’ wings.
“We should have brought sunscree
n,” I say, to take her mind off the dancing. She rubs papery fingers together. Beth has eczema. It bubbles up, she told me once, the instant she feels out of kilter inside. As if her skin is rejecting her body and wants to get away from it. “Nina,” she says suddenly, “see that blanket?” Maud kicks happily on her back, batting the blanket with a rattle. “I made it,” she tells me.
“You’re clever. I wouldn’t have the patience.”
“Started it the minute we conceived. Well, as soon as the pregnancy was confirmed. We’d been trying for over two years. All the tests. By then it had become mechanical. Like putting oil in the car. At the wrong times, I wasn’t interested. Seemed like a waste. And then, when it happened, I started working on that blanket, right until labor pains kicked in. Like a good luck thing, to make the baby seem real.”
Beth has never before volunteered such personal information. I’m not sure what to do with it. “One hundred sixty-four buttercup squares,” she continues. “Do you think that’s why Matthew’s gone off me?”
“It’s a beautiful blanket,” I say helplessly.
“And who’d bother, when you can buy one in John Lewis’s baby department, probably better made? I had to bin half the squares, they were such pathetic, withered things. You know how your brain goes when you’re pregnant? How you lose perspective? I was obsessed with that bloody blanket.” She slides her wedding ring back and forth along a bubbly finger.
“Have you asked Matthew if there’s anything wrong?”
“There’s no chance to talk properly these days, not with Rosie about, twenty-four hours a day, whizzing up Maud’s juice.”
“Shush,” I say, “she’ll hear you.”
Beth stares ahead, hands now clasped tightly to her lap. Rosie stretches out slender brown legs. Beth smacks her hands to her mouth.
“What is it?” I ask.
“The cake. It’s still in the oven.”
Chase’s flamboyant hair bushes upwards, its volume enhanced by some mousse-textured product. “My girl,” he says, bounding into reception. I’d forgotten my former editor’s grand, cocky movements, which fill maximum space. “We’ve missed you,” he announces. “There’s a person-shaped hole where Nina should be.” He takes a step back, appraising my appearance. I’m wearing a starchy gray jacket that wraps around me like cardboard. The buggy mars my professional aura. Ben sucks each finger in turn, hypnotized by the bright lights and Chase’s beachball face.