I checked my watch: six-thirty, and time to give Lila her bath. I had become adept at blocking things out while I cared for my daughter—just as I had with Nick in years before—and I let my nerves unwind into the familiar routine now.
The kettle on, the formula mixed, and the bottle placed in cold water to cool. The bath running, the thundering of the tap’s plume into the tub a version of white noise that both Lila and I had come to love. The baby kicked on her back, her changing mat brought through to the bathroom floor, while the water came up to temperature.
There is no perspective to raising a child. Everything is immediate. A child’s needs are absolute—whatever else the world asks must wait. The sense that my rib cage might burst with joy had never left me even as I felt the sky could fall in on me. I had heard of the women who couldn’t connect with their babies, who cared for them as automata until the love kicked in. I wasn’t one of them—there was nothing mechanical about my reactions to Lila. To me, they were the most perfect expression of being human, a pendulum between ecstasy and worry.
What I resented was the rest of the world creeping in, seeping through the cracks, like ecto-slime from a horror film, to fill up a mold around me and my baby. I couldn’t bear this, the most expansive range of emotions I had ever felt, to be sculpted by the life I had had before them. By work and Maggie; by friends and Winnie; by Nick? No, Nick was different. I knew that he had, as I had, recognized another dimension to himself from the moment of Lila’s arrival.
He doesn’t have to fit her in the way I do. It’s enough for him to have his life and her as well. I have to change my outline to let her in.
Gazing down at Lila, freshly towel-dried and popped into a fuzzy sleepsuit that rendered her even more like a little teddy, I felt the usual blissful drag on my heart. I savored the moment of gently depositing Lila into her cot as the final few seconds before I had to deal with real life again.
The nursery door closed, the monitor on and a small, breathy, supine figure flickering on its screen, I found my phone again and sat on the sofa downstairs with it, and a glass of wine that, tonight, I didn’t feel guilty about. There was no one around to judge. It’d be out of my system long before Lila’s next feed anyway.
Just as there was no punctuation in Winnie’s message, so there was no overt animosity. Her first move was a blank, an empty version of how we both felt, a step taken in the dark without knowing whether there was firm ground to land on.
And yet everything about it made me feel uncomfortable. There was nothing warm about it. It had been intended to catch me off guard and to leave a chill. To remind.
The new girl in question was Lila, but we had used that term years ago, to refer to somebody else. Helen.
The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck had stood on end when I received it.
I drafted and redrafted my response—not in the message screen, in case it sent before I was ready or notified Winnie that I was typing…, a detail I had always found ominous—until I had done more rewrites for this than I ever had done for Moff.
I would send my reply in the morning. I knew well enough from my own dating career, Triassic period though it felt by comparison to the many complex apps and arrangements Maggie talked of, that it was never a good idea to send a weighted text ahead of a night one hoped to spend sleeping. Not that I did much of that anymore anyway.
I sipped my wine, a sweet Gavi poured into a Florence flask of a glass from a set Nick and I had been given as wedding presents, and flicked from the Notes app on my phone to Instagram. Maggie was on there again, a picture of two gin and tonics on a wooden table I recognized as one in our local pub, the Abbess.
When will she come clean about Tim?
I wondered whether there was a way—subtly, of course, and swiftly followed up with a “silly me” apology—of outing my replacement’s relationship, so that all the hundreds of followers Maggie had gained in the wake of her “singles on top” piece could finally see her for the fraud she was. A comment beneath the picture perhaps? @-ing Tim and telling the lovebirds to have a fun evening together?
Too obvious.
Such were the mechanics of the seesaw I found myself on opposite Maggie. Whatever either of us did rebounded on the other, even if it was unintentional. An act of deliberate sabotage would be seen instantly for what it was: jealousy, envy, pathetic spite.
I flicked past pictures of toothless baby grins posted by the women from my parenting classes and arty shots of cocktails from PRs I had known in a former life, past country-house vistas from some of my colleagues, and carefully curated modern and minimalist interiors from the others, those who projected status with their London pads rather than their ancestral piles.
Idly, I opened Facebook, less full of my London life and more full of the people Winnie and I had shared classrooms with—plus Maggie. On here, her gin-and-tonic post was subtly different, a shot that featured Tim’s hand on hers in the foreground, subtitled with the word happy. I felt a whoosh of disappointment that Maggie had got there before me and gone public, that whatever tiny hold I had had over my replacement was gone.
I had known Tim for the best part of a decade, could see he was happier now than at any point during those years. I had sometimes felt him looking at the relationship I had with his best friend, my husband, with a yearning—nothing remotely sexual, more a desire to have what we had. Now that he’d found it, I felt myself depleted in his eyes. Maggie had taken that from me, too.
Running a hand self-consciously through my unwashed hair, I recognized within myself a simultaneous swooping sense of excitement for Maggie, a woman on the brink of what might be the most important relationship of her life, and a bitter scorn that she felt the need to share it with the reassuring clamor of a remote audience.
What you do every day with pictures of Lila, you mean? Maggie’s voice taunted me.
This was life now: The only other way was to turn off the lights and pretend you’d gone out, as Winnie had done. Was I more disturbed by Maggie’s needy availability or Winnie’s sudden disappearance? Impossible to say.
An icon flared red in the corner of the screen, of my eye, and I clicked it without thinking: a friend request.
There was the idiotic picture again, those stupid joke sunglasses.
“HelenKnows wants to be your friend,” the request read.
Setting my wineglass down so abruptly it spilled onto the rug, I mused in silent horror. What exactly was it that this person might want from me? Several things, I noted, she had taken already: my peace of mind, my self-esteem, my attention from my infant daughter, the supposedly impenetrable bubble of love in which Lila and I had once existed. Precisely the things that Maggie and Winnie were steadily dismantling, too.
Ignoring the spilled wine, I revisited the Twitter profile. The troll continued to bombard female public figures with vitriolic comments about their appearance and their professional standing. She had recently got into an online fight with a popular news anchorwoman about the color of a suit she had worn to read the headlines. With every malicious post I read, many of them sent in great clusters during the small hours—You’re awake then too, are you?—I felt my own sense of dread subside. HelenKnows was a troubled individual, spitting bile at any target she could find. The communications with me, though seemingly personal, were part of a wider crusade rather than a witch hunt.
With this latest though, she felt closer to home; I couldn’t shake the feeling, a small current humming along my skin, that she was watching me even though the shutters were closed. Although I seldom used Facebook, it was a personal account, not a public profile like the others. On there, this friend request felt like a sudden knock at my door.
A click on HelenKnows’s page revealed nothing—no other friends, no messages, no posts. I hesitated before choosing to report her, with the sense all the while that she would know the moment I did so. I
worried I would be goading her with it, how she might react to the perceived slight. Then I remembered my tormentor had been the one to get in touch with me, that it was her aggression; she had elbowed her way into my memories, shattered my solace.
Whatever she thinks she knows can only have come from one person: Winnie.
I hadn’t thought about Helen since school, not in an active way. It was all in there under the surface, but I had learned not to pay attention to it directly. Whenever I fizzed with anxiety and worry—which was often—I attributed it to whatever was in front of me, not the insistent drone that was always within.
The eyes. The stares. The open mouths. The scream as she fell. And the noise she made as she landed.
I shook my head forcefully. Too much Helen had got in.
I clicked “delete” to her request and refreshed my Facebook feed once again. At the top, Maggie’s latest picture had several likes and a ladder of comments underneath it.
“Awwhhh cheers hun!”
“You deserve it!”
“Bon weekend, Mags!”
What must it have been like to live a life that brimmed over with good feeling, where people spouted positivity for positivity’s sake? The scorn I felt for Maggie’s online existence wobbled. For so long now, mine had been defined by loss and death and fear.
You could have warned me.
The phrase floated into my head and I remembered my reply to Winnie, waiting to be sent in the morning. It niggled at me, a blade in the flesh that I needed to remove before the wound could heal. Opening my messages, I paged to beneath the photo Winnie had sent a few hours ago—Was that all?—and typed my response:
“You always were better at making friends than me.”
I clicked “send” and closed my phone down entirely, draining the glass I held in my other hand. For the first time in months, I felt the illusion of being in control. I knew nothing had changed, but I had stopped wondering how I had angered my old friend, was no longer waiting to hear from her, no longer scraping before Winnie even at a distance, apologetic for circumstances over which I had no say—the death of one child and the burgeoning life of another. And something that had happened years ago.
After months of feeling remorseful and ashamed, I now felt angry.
Winnie specialized in making others feel guilty; that was how she had dealt with what she had done. Winnie had a talent for doling out shame, always calm, always serene, always ever so slightly disappointed and resigned. After it was all over with Helen, Winnie had made it clear that no one else could ever come close, that I would always be the second choice she hadn’t intended to make.
Well, now I’ve made mine: No more of this.
Filled with purpose and suddenly upright with an energy I had forgotten had ever existed within me after months of nightmares and the minimal sleep Lila allowed me, I set my empty glass down and stood.
It had grown dark, the evening gloaming replaced with blacker night, and the shadows in the hallway stretched along the walls. The top of the stairs was an acute angle in the darkness. What I needed was up there.
I decided to delete myself. I would take myself off all the online outlets that I felt had made the leap from my screen into my soul and, in doing so, had lowered my defenses to Maggie, to Winnie, to this Twitter troll, whoever she was. I would do it on Nick’s computer, the giant inch-thick screen that occupied most of the spare room, where he had often worked in the evenings before Lila was born, creating glyphs and logos for his clients.
I’d been horrified when he bought it and I found out its price tag—an echo from my thrifty youth—but I’d also been secretly pleased. Nick’s acquisition was the stuff of Manhattan lofts, that screen, the hip designer dream, something my teenage self would have longed for, had she had a clue that brushed steel could look so good.
I could just have removed the app from my phone, but I wanted it to be final, wanted to make sure I had done it properly. Slightly drunk, I reasoned that killing myself online should be done with a certain amount of ceremony. My sober self also knew that, for the same reason I sometimes saw the interns at work stifle a giggle at my out-of-touch tech questions, I still saw desktops like Nick’s as the only means of doing what I thought of as “business.”
First time I’ve sat at a desk since Lila was born; I’m almost excited.
I flicked the light at the bottom of the stairs and climbed them decisively. From the sitting room at my back, I could hear the low hum of the baby monitor as it relayed the image from the camera trained on Lila in the nursery—Yes, “the nursery.” From behind her door at the top of the stairs, there came every so often—much less often than I was strictly happy with, I had realized after her birth—a small, irregular gust of an out-breath and the rustle of a tiny body shifting in its sleeping bag.
In the spare room, Nick’s screen winked, always on, always ready. It reminded me of myself during the night, motionless, with all the appearance of sleep but ready at a moment’s notice to perform whatever task Lila required of me. I clicked the light on at the wall, picked my way through the boxes we still hadn’t quite got round to unpacking—two years on—and the bags of baby clothes that Lila had already grown out of, waiting to be passed on.
“Mummy’s bags of heartbreak,” Nick called them, teaching me about my sentimental attachment to the tiny things Lila had first worn. He always seemed excited about whatever the next phase of Lila’s development was, I noticed, whereas I marked every new learning, every rite, as a little death: a step further away from the time when Lila and I had been the same person. I hadn’t much enjoyed being pregnant, but I couldn’t bear the idea of it becoming part of our distant past.
Lowering myself into the chair in front of the desk—a chair that had cost almost as much as the screen but that we both had fallen in love with for its retro appeal as much as we had delighted in the space-age look of what sat on the desk above it—I waved the mouse to wake the computer. The black expanse, wider than my head by several feet each side, sprang into luminous pixels.
I found I was looking at a pinkness that stunned me. The shadow of a fold here, the tail end of a smear there. A fingernail, an eyelash came into focus. Then a hat—and a bunny. The picture of Jack taken soon after his birth, and his death—the picture that Nick had deleted from my phone—took up the huge screen.
I often giggled at Lila’s ability to be shocked long after whatever it was that had caused it had passed. Her startled jump coming several seconds after a loud noise or someone entering the room had made me laugh. But now I felt a similar delay as my mind struggled to process the image before me.
And when it did, I leaped from the chair as if it were hot on the back of my legs and let out a cry that was somewhere between a gasp of disbelief and a wail of horror.
This was gone, this picture; Nick had deleted it.
I grasped, still reeling, for all the reasonable explanations for why it was on his screen, but there weren’t any. Nick was the only person who used this computer, was the only other person who’d been up here in weeks.
Except for Maggie.
Maggie had been in our house alone all afternoon but had come upstairs specifically after dropping Lila off in the evening. Just after I’d had the message from Winnie.
Now I thought about the moments immediately before I received Winnie’s picture. Maggie had spent far longer up here than she needed to. And I had hardly been in a state to notice which rooms she’d been into. The door to the spare room was right next to the bathroom, after all.
Maggie had done this. Maggie, who was taking my job, my friends, my life—and now, it seemed, my sanity.
Maggie had put this picture here for me to find. But why?
Winnie. Who had been in the café, who had posed for a picture with my daughter—my lovely, rosy-cheeked, healthy baby. Winnie had asked Maggie to do it.
; 1
A world without children is a world with no future.
And given how hard I have worked to forget the past, where does that leave me?
These are the thoughts on repeat in my brain, in time with my steps as I pace the streets trying to forget. No, not forget—I won’t allow the image of my son to fade, yet I can already feel the details of him escaping me.
The scent of him, rust and caramel, is evaporating as if on a breeze. The noises he made, the soft rasping snuffles before the harsher noises began, are fading as the days whiz by without him in them. The humbling sense of completeness that Charles and I felt as we held him—that won’t go. But I worry that the profound emptiness that hangs like a weight in my arms never will, either.
I walk the streets trying to numb myself, not to forget. To take the remorseless edge off what has happened to me. As if by putting one foot in front of the other over and over I can somehow wear down the razor’s edge of my feelings.
During the week, I get up at dawn to catch the train with the city crowd. Chancery Lane, St. Paul’s, Aldgate, Bank, Canary Wharf. Gray streets lined with gray buildings where gray people walk to work. I go there just to exist. In the office districts, you aren’t assaulted by prams and the women who wheel them around every corner. A pedestrian in London’s pinstripe postcodes is just that—not a man or a woman or a wife. Not a mother.
In these childless streets, I seek to remember myself. The feeling never goes, even if I can banish the visuals for a short time. There’s no room for anything else, for everything else. For things I used to think I needed. For people I used to think I cared about. For the mistakes I’ve made and the secrets I’ve kept.
Maybe that’s why I feel them bubbling toward the surface again after all this time.
On the weekend, I can’t escape as easily. I risk bumping into people—families, fortunate and whole—heading for the shops, the museums, the theaters. Places you go when life is something to be enjoyed rather than endured.
The New Girl Page 15