by Tracy Bloom
‘Fine,’ said Ben, nodding his head with a slightly glazed look on his face. ‘Great, no problems at all. Seriously. Look, Braindead popped in just now for a chat and he’s gone down the pub for a quick one. Mind if I join him? You don’t mind, do you? Good, I’ll see you in about an hour then. Bye.’
Katy stared after Ben open-mouthed, clutching Millie very tightly as she gurgled happily.
She walked into the kitchen to go and put the kettle on. However, she couldn’t actually see the kettle, such was the chaos that met her. The dishwasher hadn’t been unloaded, so there were dirty pots everywhere on the side. The pushchair and baby seat cluttered the floor and the steriliser seemed to have disappeared to be replaced by a screwdriver. Eventually she located the kettle on the breakfast bar next to a bowl of water. What on earth had gone on that day? She scrutinised Millie for signs of discomfort, distress or harm. She appeared to be fine. She gently laid her down in her baby seat and handed her a rattle to wave around and spit all over before she began the process of restoring some order into the totally trashed kitchen.
Chapter Ten
Ben, Braindead and Rick sat in the corner of the Nelson sipping on pints as they contemplated the white and pale blue steriliser sitting on the table in front of them.
Ben wasn’t really taking anything in. His first day as a stay-at-home dad had hit him like a steam train. His ability for conversation was limited and his appearance – well, his appearance was dishevelled, to say the least. His usual post-work uniform of tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie had given him an active, lively air in the past, whereas today his shock of ginger beard, unbrushed hair, T-shirt he had slept in and stained tracksuit bottoms indicated boy on benefits at best, tramp at worst.
Braindead had plugged the steriliser into a socket he’d spotted on the wall and was peering at the buttons on the control panel.
‘Is anyone going to tell me what that is?’ asked Rick, nodding at the plastic contraption on the table.
Silence.
‘Braindead?’ asked Rick, when it was clear that Ben was not capable of speech just yet.
‘Still not exactly sure,’ replied Braindead. ‘Cleans stuff for Millie, I think. Ben called in a state, so I dropped everything. Well, luckily I’d seen the episode of Location, Location, Location I was watching. I went round and offered to open it up, take a look inside for him, but he stopped me before I could get stuck in.’
‘It sterilises the baby bottles,’ said Ben wearily.
‘Right,’ Rick nodded.
‘Katy showed me how to use it and it looked so easy that I told her not to bother writing it down,’ sighed Ben. ‘But then I couldn’t remember and tried to poison my own child.’
‘Wow!’ shrieked Braindead. ‘You didn’t mention that. How did you manage that?’
‘I touched the teat,’ said Ben, shaking his head. ‘Always use the tweezers. I do remember Katy saying that. Not your fingers. Then I couldn’t remember if I’d washed my hands.’ He put his pint down on the table and buried his head in his hands.
Braindead and Rick stared at the broken man.
‘Katy makes you use tweezers to touch her tits?’ exclaimed Braindead. ‘That’s weird.’
‘Not her tits,’ moaned Ben, not raising his head.
‘You are allowed to touch other women’s tits as long as you use tweezers?’ Braindead continued. ‘Having a baby has seriously screwed with Katy’s head, man. This is not right.’
Ben looked up.
‘Not tits, teats,’ he said. ‘You know, the things that go on the top of babies’ bottles. What the baby drinks through.’
‘Is that like French for tits or something, then?’ asked Braindead.
Ben stared at him for a moment before managing a sarcastic, ‘Yes.’
‘Jesus, that is fucked up!’ exclaimed Braindead.
Ben didn’t reply.
‘So La Teet thingies all go in here, do they, to get clean?’ asked Braindead.
Ben nodded.
‘To protect Millie from germs?’
Ben nodded again.
‘So?’ said Braindead, looking confused.
No-one answered him.
‘So,’ Braindead continued. ‘When Katy was breastfeeding, did she have to stick her tits in here too?’
Ben blinked at Braindead and chose not to answer, taking several large gulps of his beer instead.
‘Of course she didn’t,’ he finally said.
‘You have no idea, though, where those tits might have been,’ Braindead protested. ‘Why do you have to go to all that palaver over fake tits when you don’t bother with the real thing?’
Ben sensed there was something entirely logical and rational in what Braindead was saying. Sadly, he realised he was no longer capable of being logical and rational. He was a dad now.
‘You just do,’ he shrugged.
‘But why?’ pressed Braindead. ‘I don’t get it. Who knows where Katy might have had her tits before she feeds Millie?’
‘I don’t know why,’ answered Ben, hoping Braindead would drop it. ‘You just do.’
‘But that’s stupid,’ Braindead retorted. ‘Why do something when you don’t really know why you’re doing it?’
‘Because,’ Ben said wearily, ‘I’ve been told to do it in such a way that there’s a slim chance something terrible might happen to my daughter if I get it wrong , and then I would be a baby killer and rot in jail.’
Braindead and Rick stared at Ben, open-mouthed.
‘I know it sounds stupid,’ he continued, ‘but having a baby makes you do stuff you would never normally do because of the fear you might become a baby killer. That’s just how it is.’
‘So if we don’t manage to make this thing work,’ said Braindead, nodding back at the steriliser, ‘then we could become baby killers too?’
‘Precisely,’ Ben responded grimly.
‘Fuck me,’ said Braindead, shaking his head. ‘I’m not going to prison for the sake of some stupid white machine.’
‘Why don’t you just ask Katy to show you again?’ asked Rick.
‘Are you insane?’ gasped Ben. ‘Admit to Katy on my very first day that I wasn’t up to it? I told her I could do this, no problem, piece of cake. How will it make me look if I admit I couldn’t do something as easy as work a stupid steriliser?’
‘Daft question, I know, but did you keep the instructions?’ asked Rick.
‘Keep instructions for this?’ said Ben. ‘Really? They were filed in the bin.’
‘Well, is there anyone else you know with a baby who can show you what to do?’ Rick persevered.
‘Yes,’ muttered Ben. ‘I suppose asking her is better than the embarrassment of asking Katy again. I’ll call her tomorrow.’ He stood up to get another pint.
Katy watched as Ben flicked on the kettle when he got back from the pub. It had taken her an hour to put the kitchen back together into some sort of order, but Ben didn’t seem to notice. The fact the kettle was magically back where it should be, rather than upended on the kitchen table, didn’t seem to register at all.
‘Braindead okay, then?’ she asked, when Ben wasn’t overly forthcoming with conversation.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he replied, getting a mug out of an overhead cupboard. ‘You know, usual Braindead.’
‘I really am sorry I was late home,’ she said, putting her hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s fine, really,’ he said, turning and giving her a smile at last. ‘Tell me how your day went.’
‘Well,’ she said, moving to perch herself on one of the high stools at the breakfast bar. ‘It was a bit odd to start with, I really did feel like I was the new girl all over again, but then I went to the Monday morning directors’ meeting and it was like I’d never left. Honestly, they were having exactly the same conversations as the ones they were having before I went on maternity leave. Ridiculous.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Ben over his shoulder as he put coffee in his mug.
‘But Andrew wa
s really clear with me when I caught up with him after the meeting. He said the only thing I needed to focus on was saving the Crispy Bix account. Apparently he’d had an irate phone call from the MD before Christmas saying they were on the brink of ditching the agency.’
‘Blimey,’ said Ben, turning to face her.
‘Andrew said he’d told him he was dragging his top account director back from maternity leave to sort it out.’
‘Wow,’ said Ben. ‘You must have been chuffed he called you his top thingy?’
‘Well, yes,’ Katy admitted, ‘but talk about being under pressure on your first day back. Anyway, I got stuck into the creative team and we came up with a plan of action, so that by the time I spoke to the MD at Crispy Bix we’d solved all his concerns. I could tell when I picked up the phone he was ready to lay into me, but he seemed more than happy by the time we’d finished talking.’
‘So mission accomplished then?’
‘Yes.’ Katy nodded, a highly satisfied smile on her face.
‘So it was a good day?’ he asked.
‘It was. I thought, you know, that I might have lost it a bit having been away, but after today I think I can still do it.’
‘I’m really pleased for you,’ said Ben. ‘Glad that today’s been such a success.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be there without you, would I?’ replied Katy. ‘So tell me how your day has been. You’ve breezed it, right? I bet she’s loved having her daddy all to herself all day.’
‘Yeah, piece of cake,’ Ben shrugged. ‘No problems at all.’
‘Great. And how did you find Music, Mummy and Me?’
‘Fine,’ said Ben.
‘I wasn’t sure how you’d take to it, to be honest. Thought you’d find it a bit odd, you know, all that sitting around, singing stupid songs.’
Ben shrugged.
‘It was alright.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’
‘Sure,’ he said, turning away and pouring hot water into his mug.
‘When you first suggested us swapping roles I thought you were mad,’ she said to his back. ‘To be honest, I didn’t know how you’d cope being a stay-at-home dad.’
‘Why?’ Ben turned back to face her, frowning.
‘It’s just that it’s not as easy as it looks, is it?’
‘We have been absolutely fine,’ said Ben, looking slightly irritated. ‘You can go off to work and solve the nation’s advertising woes and rest assured that I am capable of taking care of our child.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘You haven’t,’ said Ben. ‘But if you stop me from getting in front of that telly to find out how Leeds have done tonight then I’m likely to get very, very upset.’
Katy stepped aside to let him go past her into the living room. She reached up to kiss his cheek but he wasn’t looking and she was left pouting into thin air. She stared after him. This wasn’t how she’d envisaged the end of her day. It was with a sense of excitement that she’d driven home to be back in the bosom of her family. She realised it was the longest period she’d ever spent away from Millie and she’d been longing to see her. A total contrast to the constant dull desire to have just five minutes to herself when she’d been at Millie’s beck and call. She felt renewed, refreshed and ready to focus on some family time, and had expected both Ben and Millie to feel the same. However, Millie appeared to be indifferent to her mother’s absence and was happily ignoring her under the baby gym, and Ben was doing everything to avoid talking to her. She could tell he’d had a difficult day. She knew Ben. He always went into himself when he was stressed, and his usually happy-go-lucky nature seemed muted. She was also certain that he would have hated his first music class and he was lying when he said he’d enjoyed it. And what on earth had he done with the steriliser?
Chapter Eleven
One week later Ben sat in the doctor’s waiting room dreaming hazily of the day when his greatest problem in life had been how to make a damn steriliser work. A phone call to Charlene the following day had provided him with the answer to all his problems . . . or so he thought.
‘No idea,’ Charlene had replied when he’d enquired if she had experience with the type of steriliser they had. ‘Have you looked on YouTube?’
‘You are a genius,’ he’d declared then slammed the phone down and fired up the laptop.
‘Come on . . . come on . . . come on,’ he’d muttered over and over again as he waited for the lethargic machine to spring into action. His fingers tripped over themselves as he delved headlong into the YouTube search engine until he found his saviour in Melanie of Minnesota. She rambled through the inner workings of his model of steriliser in a cluttered, dark kitchen somewhere in deepest Midwest America. Her video would win no prizes for production values, editing or scripting, but after five separate viewings it had got its point across and Ben sat with a great sigh of relief in front of a fully functioning steriliser.
At that moment he felt he was back in control. That everything was going to be all right. That his plan to swap roles was actually going to work. But he had merely been on day two and it was a rookie error to think he’d nailed it. He was yet to experience that day three would be exactly the same as day two and yet entirely different. That he would ping round like a silver ball in a pinball machine, propelled from pillar to post in the desperate effort to meet the demands of an eighteen-week-old baby. Constantly trying to stay one step ahead of Millie’s ever changing timetable as she slept and woke and ate and spewed and pissed and pooed on a whim and without warning as he ran round like a jackass trying to keep all the plates in the air without the slightest clue what he was doing.
He felt he probably could have coped with the total randomness of Millie’s actions and his inability to be prepared for the right one at the right time had it not been for the utter exhaustion he was feeling, having taken over the night shift too. In a moment of madness, he had insisted that since Katy had borne the brunt of the worst of the initial sleepless nights during the breastfeeding phase, now that she was back at work, he should be the one to get up for Millie in the night. What he hadn’t accounted for was that his options for catching up on all this lost sleep were precisely nil. A nap during the day? No chance! If Millie did deign to take a nap he was too busy clearing up whatever devastation they’d caused beforehand. He realised he could go to bed early, of course. But if he went to bed early, when exactly would he have a life? This issue perplexed him greatly. When exactly would he get to do what he wanted to do, not what a small baby dictated he should do? When would he get to watch the footie on the telly exactly? Football at this point came ahead of the need for sleep; however, at this precise moment, as his head began to droop at ten-thirty in the morning while he sat in the crowded waiting room, he began to think that he would have to let go of the last vestige of his manliness and start going to bed before the watershed.
‘Ow!’ he exclaimed as he felt a sharp pain in his ribs.
‘You were snoring, dear,’ said the elderly lady sitting next to him, who must have incredibly sharp elbows.
He glanced around him as he wiped drool from his mouth to be met with a sea of geriatrics smirking at him.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, giving himself a shake. ‘She had me up for two hours last night.’
‘Cancer, was it?’ his neighbour asked.
‘What?’ he said, giving the lady a look of alarm. ‘I was going to ask the nurse if maybe she was teething or something.’
‘Not the baby, your wife.’
‘I’m not married.’
‘She died before you got married? I’m so sorry.’
‘Who died?’
‘Your baby’s mother.’
‘She’s not dead.’ Ben looked up to check he was really having this conversation. By the looks of the captivated faces around him, he was not only talking about a non-existent dead wife, he was also enthralling the entire waiting room.
‘So where is she then?�
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‘I believe she said she was going to a meeting about retro-chipmunk animation.’
‘Oh, I see,’ the lady nodded. ‘So you’ve taken the day off to bring this little one to the doctor’s, then.’
‘You could say that,’ replied Ben. ‘Taken every day off, actually. I look after Millie. Katy, my fiancée, has gone back to work full-time.’
The elderly lady was now openly staring at him.
‘And they call that progress,’ she finally said through pursed lips.
Ben could feel his eyelids drooping again.
‘Ray never even changed a nappy, never mind be left alone with my three. He was too busy out doing the real work.’
Ben jerked his head back quickly in an effort to stay awake.
‘This is the hardest I have ever worked,’ he muttered.
The woman turned to stare at him again.
‘How many children do you have?’
‘Just one.’
‘One?’ The woman laughed to herself. ‘You just wait, young man. You wait until she’s properly teething and you literally have no sleep, then weaning when you spend your entire life trying to get soggy food off the floor, then walking as you spend all day trying to stop them killing themselves, and then the devil that is potty training, by which time you’ve made the mistake of having another one, so you’re right back where you started, only double the trouble. Believe me, if you find this hard you have a serious problem. Men are just not cut out for this kind of work.’
‘Amelia King,’ the receptionist shouted.
Ben leapt up, eager to escape the elderly know-all who was predicting his future as the most terrible nightmare imaginable. He rubbed his eyes and picked up Millie in her car seat, then set off down the corridor.
Five minutes later and he was finally sitting in front of a neat-looking woman whose name badge identified her as Pippa Harper, health visitor. In his haste to escape he’d failed to take note of who he was seeing or through which door they would appear, forcing him into an embarrassing return to reception to ask for directions in front of the evil woman.
‘So how is Amelia doing?’ Pippa asked.