The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  No, I enjoyed the time Maggie and I spent together because it reminded me how good friendship is, how exciting the gradual knitting of two personalities can be, how gratifying to note where they converge, how they differ. I grudgingly admitted to myself that perhaps I had missed Margot these last few months, after all.

  Most of all, I enjoyed laughing without feeling guilty for it. There isn’t much humor in my and Charles’s house.

  So I was only too happy to celebrate with Maggie, when she dashed into the pub to meet me and blurted out her success at work. A column! I made all the right noises, knowing as I did what it would have meant to Margot to have been given one. And what it would mean to her that Maggie had got it instead.

  I was pleased for Maggie, but my delight ran deeper than my feelings for her: I felt the thrill of cruel satisfaction. Margot had sailed along in life; she worked hard, but things came to her easily. Dream job, great man. She’d got pregnant without really even trying, where it had taken an increasingly fraught year for me and Charles, and then—

  So when we drank to Maggie’s success, our glasses in the air for ever more convoluted and silly, wine-blurred toasts, I was sticking a metaphorical finger in my oldest friend’s eye as much as I was cheering on my newest one. Finally, something that would take the luster off Margot’s gilded existence, dull it almost to the cloudiness my own had taken on.

  A couple of bottles down, I had sunk into my seat and into such torpor while Maggie was in the bathroom, thinking of Margot, and of Jack—always of Jack—that I had to ask her to repeat what she’d said as she slid back into the booth next to me.

  “I said, I’m babysitting on Friday night,” she laughed. “Wild, I know. Hey, what about keeping me company?”

  Tears sprang to my eyes before I could stop them. The lead in my heart seemed even heavier than usual. The smell of caramel, and then ferrous, bloody rust, wafted into my nostrils, and I found I was telling Maggie about the little boy who had been wrenched away from me only an hour after I’d brought him into the world.

  About his tiny fingers, their fleshy pads a row of pink peas in a pod. About the spiral of black hair on the very top of his head that we covered with a white cap. About the moment his death changed the world for me: from one I actively participated in to one I stared down at from somewhere way above, like an astronaut seeing Earth from space, with a knowledge so terrible it was beyond most other people’s comprehension.

  “Oh my God, you poor thing,” Maggie said, laying one hand on my arm across the table, as I spoke.

  Tears dripped down my nose and landed on her wrist, but my voice no longer wavered when I cried; my voice didn’t crack with emotion anymore. I had become expert in doing pretty much everything while crying these days: talking, watching TV, washing up, phoning the bank, going to the supermarket.

  “I’m so sorry,” Maggie said earnestly. “That’s fucking terrible.”

  I liked her even more for swearing. I had stopped going to the support groups and seeing the professionals who made euphemisms of what had happened to me, who told me Jack had “passed” or “moved on.” He’d fucking died, and it was fucking terrible.

  “It isn’t just that,” I continued. “It’s Charles. He won’t talk about any of it. All I want—all we both want—is another baby….But, I don’t know how…He doesn’t want to dwell, says it isn’t helpful. He shuts me down every time, says I need to move on.”

  At this, my voice finally broke.

  It was a truth I hadn’t shared with anybody—who did I have to tell? Charles and I were like survivors of a bomb, staggering around opposite sides of the pit it had blown open in the center of our marriage, our home, our hearts. I was picking my way through the wreckage and stumbling over the rubble, still reeling from the impact, while he was neatly trying to rebuild the walls.

  My hope was that another baby would bring us back together; my fear was that we had been blasted too far apart already to manage it.

  “Winnie, that’s awful,” Maggie said soothingly. “Can you talk to anybody about it? I’m sure time will help….”

  I nodded and stared down at the wooden pub table, names scratched into it and sticky rings where earlier glasses than ours had stood. It had helped release some of the pressure, talking to Maggie; she knew the right things to say, even if she didn’t have the answers.

  “And obviously, no worries about Friday,” she continued. “Babysitting is probably the last thing you want to do.”

  How wrong she was there, though. I’d have given anything to take that little chick in my arms, to comfort her and sing her to sleep. To stroke the bridge of her nose to make her eyes close, something the books had told me and I’d never had a chance to try.

  “Are you looking after that little blond poppet?” I tried to make my voice sound casual, as though I were making the connection for the first time.

  “Lila,” she said, nodding. “Yes. Her mum’s actually the woman whose job I’m covering. I think she’s having a bit of a tough time.”

  This was the first time Maggie had mentioned Margot, and her presence was an electricity between us: I could feel a mirror image of resentments against the woman we had in common. This was my chance to tell her, to reveal the link, but I let the moment slide by, because anonymity was my passport into that house with Maggie on Friday night; it was the camouflage I’d use to get close to Lila. Just for a moment, I told myself. Just to sniff that sweet baby smell from the top of her head the way I had with Jack.

  I’d wanted to meet the woman who was covering Margot’s job for some time. I knew my oldest friend well enough to realize whoever had stepped into her shoes at Haute would make Margot feel compromised at best, completely discombobulated at worst. The reality sounded more serious than I had expected, and I wondered—briefly, distractedly—what role I might have played.

  I thought wryly of the evenings Margot and I had spent together in pubs, at parties, in my old flat as she had whinged about the workload, the pay, the offhand injustices dealt to her by the entitled women she worked with, who looked down on her for being normal. Maggie seemed to have found the joy in that job; all I had ever heard from Margot was the anxiety. Perhaps that’s just the pattern our friendship had taken, after what had happened at school: We had become a sounding board for each other’s fears rather than our triumphs.

  I’d been following Maggie on Instagram for months already, eager to see how she’d slot into the role I’d heard so much about over the years. This is how friendships form now: in scrolling rather than handshakes. They populate the sidebar of your own feed: “You might also know…,” like useful things to buy rather than real people that you might get on with. It’s how dating apps work, after all, so why not friends too?

  You know their faces as pixels before you’ve heard their voices. You’ve seen their wedding pictures, scrolled through their holiday snaps; you know their exes, how many children they have. You almost start talking about their kitchen extension before you’ve even been introduced, and then you realize you’re not supposed to know. It’s a performance, though—because everyone knows you’ve done it, looked, searched, pried. There is no mystique, no getting-to-know-yous; there are no secrets anymore—apart from mine and Margot’s.

  That was why, when I recognized first Lila and then Maggie in the café, I slipped the baby’s water beaker out from the basket beneath the pushchair seat in order to have a reason to catch her up afterward. I knew from her Instagram that she’d been to the bakery before, but it was pure luck we’d ended up there together the next day. I couldn’t have planned it better.

  “Poor woman,” I said thoughtfully. “Do you know, perhaps I could join you for a little while. I’ll have to face up to other babies eventually, and it’d be good to do it somewhere calm and quiet. And to have you by my side.”

  Maggie clasped my hand tightly and her own damp eyes sparkled up
into mine as she ducked to see into my face, bent over the table. I gave her my best wobbly but brave smile while, inside, I felt I was made of pure, shining, emotionless steel.

  8

  MARGOT

  @HelenKnows: How come you didn’t get the column @hautemargot?

  My phone alerted me to the comment that had been left under Maggie’s latest Instagram post just as I was about to tackle the problem of what on earth I could possibly wear out that night.

  I was furious with Nick. How could he have arranged for Maggie to babysit without asking me first? He knew I hated surprises but had turned up after work one day with it all planned out and an expression so hopeful, so endearing, I didn’t want to ruin it—again.

  Instead, I swallowed my suspicions and let them continue to buzz and to drone on in my mind, because I knew how they would sound if I let them out of my head. Paranoid. They would sound insane.

  And yet, here she was again: this troll who knew exactly the weakest spots in my emotional range.

  Winnie.

  It could have been some other former schoolmate targeting me, but it seemed unlikely given none of them had ever really noticed me enough to bear a grudge.

  I just wished I knew what she wanted. I went about my daily tasks and looked after my daughter under a cloak of fear and anxiety.

  That’s what you want though, Winnie, isn’t it?

  It was true: The more scared I was, the safer Winnie had always felt.

  I couldn’t be angry with Maggie for posting about her news—and yet I was. She’d sent me a sweet message, saying thanks so much, she so valued the opportunity I’d given her to start at Haute; she knew I must have had a word in Moff’s ear for such an amazing opportunity to have come up.

  I felt like I’d eaten a lemon. My insides convulsed with shame at the memory of what I’d actually said to Moff. She hadn’t even replied to the message, something I felt increasingly grateful for. I regretted trying to land Maggie in it with our boss—but then she put a saccharine selfie up on Instagram with some bullshit caption about how she’d “grown as a writer” and was delighted to become Haute’s newest columnist, and I knew I’d eat a whole bag of lemons just to see her taken down a peg or two.

  No sooner had I unlocked my phone and swiped through to read the comment—the @HelenKnows profile page remained blank—than it disappeared. Maggie must have deleted it, for appearance’s sake. I had to admit that was kind of her—and then I felt angry at her charity.

  “Urghhhhhhhh!” I tugged at the ends of my blond hair and pulled my tired face down in a gruesome but honest-feeling stretch, thoroughly sick of myself, before seeing Lila’s worried expression reflected behind me in the mirror. I peekabooed back at her, and danced about on the spot, and she became a little emoji of joy, the clouds lifting from that round face of hers into a sunshine grin. I felt my heart relax, if only for a moment.

  I propped Lila against the pillows on my and Nick’s king-size bed and gave her the box of plastic eggs she loved so much to play with while I, a mother now but once someone else, tried to remember who I was—who I had been—enough, at least, to pass for a woman who went out for dinner on a Friday night.

  I lost count of how many pairs of jeans wouldn’t fasten, of the T-shirts that pulled across my stomach, of the shirts through which my breasts strained heavily. I marveled at the distance between the two sides of a zipper, as though it were a fresh revelation. I knew I was bigger, but by this much? When? And how? I had lived in elastic waists since halfway through my pregnancy; I had lost track of who I had become.

  I wondered whether people were talking about it behind my back—that feeling I knew all too well. Thank God Moff hasn’t seen. Whether Maggie had noticed. Of course she’s fucking noticed, she’s probably thrilled about it. That wasn’t fair—Maggie wasn’t spiteful. Or was she? The photo.

  Defeated, I yanked my maternity jeans back on and doubled the now-empty jersey panel where my bump had lived over at the low-rise waistband, which nevertheless bit tightly into the flesh around my hips. Over it, I pulled the petrol-blue metallic sweater I had last worn at our Christmas party. The one Maggie bought in a different color.

  I regulated the purple beneath my eyes and the pinkness in my cheeks with a few sponge dabs of foundation, and lined my eyelids with the liquid black I had applied six out of every seven days in the lifetime before Lila but not touched since. I had to crack the seal where the fluid had dried around the lid. It felt like delving into a memory.

  Never mind that I was bigger than I used to be; Nick hadn’t seen me with makeup on for months. He’d appreciate my making the effort. Although that effort felt like so much more of an exertion than it used to.

  When Maggie arrived at the door, we circled each other like two boxers in the ring. Even when we tried to tiptoe around each other’s feelings, we nevertheless managed to trample on them. Now that she was here, I couldn’t bring myself to congratulate my rival. She was so excited, so fresh and energetic in comparison to the version of me I had cobbled together in the past half an hour, that I found it almost physically painful to look at her.

  Not now. I heard Winnie’s voice in my ear, the old exhortation for calm, for peace, for me to allow myself some distance from my own thoughts.

  “Thanks again!” I trilled falsely as Maggie hung her coat up in the hall. It was a beige gabardine mac of the sort I had once found, many moons ago, in the debris of the fashion cupboard—but hers was brand-new, spotless and crisp.

  My every fiber screamed a protest against leaving my most treasured possession in the company of the woman who had spoiled the last thing this precious to me.

  A flashback to a dream, where Lila was being handed past me, above my head, on the interminable staircase. I shook it from my head and plastered on a smile.

  “She’s in bed now, almost asleep I think.” I cocked my ear from the bottom of the stairs toward the top, where a faint chirruping could be heard: two notes, a high and a low, repeated over again. “She sings for a while before she drops off.” My love for Lila made the breath catch in my throat.

  Maggie placed the heel of her hand over her heart in solidarity. It was the one topic on which there was no jostling for position: Each of us adored the baby who was cooing to herself above our heads, and rocking herself back and forth on the little monitor screen I’d set up in the sitting room.

  “Please don’t answer the door to anybody,” I insisted in a blurt. “Don’t let anyone—”

  “We’ll be fine,” Maggie purred, one hand on the front door to close it as I stepped out onto the terra-cotta tiled porch. “Now! Have a wonderful date night! Get really drunk! Snog like teenagers!”

  I never snogged as a teenager, I was too busy not cracking up.

  9

  MAGGIE

  She’d had to almost physically push Margot out of the door. Maggie had never seen anybody look less excited to be going out. She could have been in deep space, in a convent, in a coma, and still her every cell would have known when it was a Friday night—she lived for them. Except, of course, when she spent them looking after someone else’s baby.

  Maggie put it down to a newfound maturity that the prospect of a Friday night in had become as appealing as one spent out and about, trying new food, new places, giggling with delight at the fun of it all. But it was more that she simply loved spending time in Margot’s house. A Friday night in chez Cath was a little lacking in allure by comparison.

  Margot’s house put her at ease—so calm and quiet, so cozy and well appointed. It was a grown-up’s house. Everything about it was bountiful, from the plumpness of the cushions to the generous span of the artisanal ceramic plates to the vintage yellow-tone glow of the Edison lightbulbs she had all over the place. Maggie and Cath existed under mean strip lights and glaring halogen spots.

  The first time she babysat for Margot, Maggie had briefly pre
tended that the house was hers and flounced around accordingly, picking things up and putting them down again. So no, she didn’t mind a Friday night in at all. In fact, she even had a little lie-down on Margot and Nick’s bed, just to test how comfortable it was. It felt like being prone on a marshmallow.

  Margot had put a feather duvet on the mattress under the fitted sheet so lying on the bed made you feel like an ancient god reclining on a cloud. Maggie wondered whether Margot had learned the trick, as she, Maggie, had, from the smart boutique hotel they’d stayed in during fashion week in New York. Discovering that had been one of the new girl’s more slack-jawed moments of the season.

  Ever since, she’d found out so many little life hacks designed to make even the most privileged existence a bit more enjoyable that she’d started writing them down in her little notebook: scrambled eggs made with cream; botanical hand wash with little scratchy beads in it that gave you a mini massage as you soaped; satin pillowcases to stop your hair from going fuzzy overnight. The very act of writing them down was inherently uncool, Maggie realized, but it felt important to document the minutiae of the high life, in case she forgot them when she was no longer living it.

  Maggie sighed. A column was all well and good, but it wouldn’t stop Margot from coming back to claim the job from her.

  10

  MARGOT

  As I quickly walked the ten-minute route to the high street, where I was meeting Nick for cocktails, I wondered that it had ever felt normal to go out alone. To be out without responsibility. To be out without knowing whether I’d go home that night or in the morning. To stay out, indefinitely, if I wanted.

  I had done that once, spent a whole weekend in a warehouse illegally converted into a dusty dance floor. I had turned up on Winnie’s doorstep at eight A.M. on the Sunday, covered in silt kicked up from the disused railway sidings I had spent two days marching on to a repetitive, thudding bass line. Winnie told me I looked like a scared rabbit and hustled me into the shower before talking me down, shifting her afternoon plans with Charles so that she might stay with me and reason away the saucer-eyed dread. Because Winnie knew my fears so well, she knew how to soothe them too.