by Fiona Harper
‘Oh, Mags,’ Becca says and kneels down beside the chair and hugs me hard. I can hear that she’s crying too. ‘This won’t last forever. You’ll be OK, I promise.’ And that just makes me cry all the harder, because I can’t promise her the same. Not in this life. Not in any life, and I wish so hard that I could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
‘It’s your turn!’ I yell up the stairs to my husband. ‘He’s done another one.’
‘He can’t have!’ Dan yells back down. ‘I thought you’d only just changed him!’
I turn to look at Billy, who is wide-eyed and innocent in his Moses basket, but a sweet, fetid smell is filling the room. ‘Like father, like son …’ I mutter as I walk over to him, but I pick him up and cradle him. We’ve been home three weeks now and as much as I wanted to pretend he didn’t exist immediately after the birth, he’s definitely growing on me. I can’t blame him for not being his sister … or his almost sister … or his alternative self … or whatever this weird reality would make him, can I?
I still don’t love him the way I loved Sophie, though. I think that part of me might have switched off. I love him like you’d love a cute puppy or a kitten. I don’t feel any more connected to him than that.
I realise I haven’t heard Dan’s heavy feet on the stairs, so I wander out into the hall and look up towards the landing. ‘Dan!’
Silence, and then, ‘I’m just coming. For goodness’ sake!’ And then he appears, scowling at the top of the stairs and thumps down them. He hardly looks at me as he takes Billy from me and heads over to where the changing mat is laid in the corner of the living room, nappy bag spilling its contents beside it. We don’t bother putting it away, because it’s in constant use. I never knew a baby could produce so much poo. It’s like the milk runs straight through him.
I don’t know what’s got Dan’s knickers in a twist. After all, I let him sleep while Billy snuffled and fed and pooped his way through the night, getting up four times, even though I think looking after a newborn all day is every bit as draining as dealing with Year Elevens and their mock exams. I was trying to be supportive, but now I want a little bit of traffic coming back my way, I get nothing. Typical. I mime strangling Dan behind his back as he lays Billy on the changing mat, despite the fact my son, even he could focus that far, is far too young to be in on the joke.
‘You might want to get the wipes ready,’ I say, peering over Dan’s shoulder. ‘And the cream.’
I can see Dan’s shoulders tense beneath his rugby shirt. ‘Who’s changing this nappy, you or me?’
‘You, but – ’
‘Well, just let me bloody well change it, then. I don’t need a backseat nappy changer. I’m perfectly capable of doing it on my – oh, hell!’
I close my eyes and shake my head. I don’t know how many times I’ve warned him that Billy likes to get one last squirt in after the fresh air hits his bottom. And now baby poop is everywhere: all over the changing mat, all over Billy – and I’d just changed him into that Babygro half an hour ago – all over Dan’s sleeves. ‘That’s why I – ’
‘Don’t,’ Dan says through gritted teeth. ‘Just don’t.’
‘Fine.’ I cross my arms and walk off. ‘I was only trying to help.’
‘No,’ replies Dan, as he finishes cleaning the poop up with a few deft wipes and installs a brand-new nappy on our son, ‘you were just taking another chance to pick away at me. I know I’m supposed to be supportive because of the hormones and everything, but since Billy was born I haven’t been able to do anything right!’
Billy must pick up on Dan’s tone because instead of staring at him in fascination, as he usually does to the person who changes his nappy, his little face crumples and his bottom lip hooks over. Seconds later he starts to wail.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ I say.
Dan stands up and hauls Billy against his chest. ‘What I’ve done? It was you who …’ And then he shakes his head and walks towards me. ‘You know what? Never mind. It’s not worth it.’ And then he holds Billy out to me. ‘I’ve got to finish that marking.’
I keep my arms folded, wondering when I’m supposed to get a chance to rest. I’m dead on my feet and I’m not a hundred per cent sure Dan’s still going through those exam papers. It doesn’t usually take him this long and I suspect it’s just an excuse to hide away in his study and mess around on the computer. He’s got a new game on there – Lemmings or something – and he’s obsessed with it. But instead of saying anything, instead of letting him see me crumble and cry, I straighten my back and accept Billy, resting him in the crook of my elbow. It’s no good, though. He starts to cry harder. Must be able to smell the milk.
Dan turns and trudges up the stairs.
‘Just as long as you know I won’t be able to cook tea while I’m minding our son,’ I say to his retreating back.
‘Whatever.’
I want to scream and stamp and shout, but I can’t. It’d upset Billy, and now he’s got the idea of milk in his head he’s not going to shut up until he’s had another feed. Muttering under my breath, I head for the corner of the sofa where I have my ‘V’ cushion, comfy pillows and muslins waiting for me and as Billy feeds I decide that if I don’t get out of this house soon I’m going to go crazy.
All Dan and I do is snipe at each other. It’s like we’re in a competition to see who had the lousiest night’s sleep so we can claim an hour off while the other one looks after the baby and feel justified in doing it. Or who had the worst nappy. Or who bounced him up and down the most when he had one of his colicky episodes.
It wasn’t like this with Sophie. Not this bad, anyway. I mean, we fought, we moaned, but it wasn’t like this. I don’t know why but everything Dan does and says irritates me. I end up snapping at him and then he accuses me of picking and retreats even more into himself, which just makes me even more angry. It’s a vicious cycle. One we’ve been in before, not even this bad, and we still hadn’t managed to jump start ourselves out of it almost twenty years later. The fact that it’s not only happening again, but that it’s worse this time, makes me want to lie down and cry.
But I can’t. I’ve got to look after Billy, so I decide to get the pram out and get some fresh air. There’s no telling how long his self-absorbed father is going to be ‘marking’, even if it is a Saturday afternoon.
I decide to give Becca a quick call before I leave. She’s popped in a few times since I’ve been home, full of the joys of her new romance, but I really need to talk to her properly. I’ve got to find a way to make her see sense.
Thankfully, Grant is away this weekend, so Becca is more than ready to make the forty-minute drive to Swanham. I arrange to meet her at a cafe on the High Street. It’ll only take me ten minutes to walk there, but I wander round the busy streets with Billy in his pram and eventually he drops off into one of those sleeps I pray for, the kind where you could drive a freight train past his head and he wouldn’t wake up.
I go in and order a pot of tea and a brownie and for once Becca turns up right on the dot. She gets herself a coffee and a large slice of carrot cake and we sit at a table in the corner, where there’s room to park Billy’s pram.
‘How are you doing?’ she asks, sympathy weighing down her words. Lots of people seem to speak to me that way at the moment.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I’m doing much better.’ And I am. I’m starting to cope with being stuck in this unwanted life. Knowing that I won’t be here forever keeps me putting one foot in front of another in the mornings.
‘You look it,’ Becca says, and I don’t miss the tiny sigh of relief. ‘Now you’re feeling more up to it, perhaps we can have that dinner we talked about? Rather than me and Grant foisting ourselves on you, maybe you can come round to mine? I’ll cook and you can get to know him a bit better.’
I busy myself checking on Billy, who is sleeping so soundly he hasn’t moved, not even twitched an eyelid, in the last five minutes. I need time to think. When I look back up a
gain I say, ‘That’s a lovely idea, but I’m really not sure about taking Billy out for a whole evening.’
Becca glances over at the pram. ‘Seems like he’d be good as gold.’
‘He’s not always like this, you know. Sometimes he just screams his lungs out for no reason.’
‘But that won’t matter, will it? I mean, we know you’ve got a new baby, that things don’t always go smoothly. We’ll just work round it.’
I avoid Becca’s gaze and tuck Billy’s blanket more snugly round his middle. ‘I just don’t want you to go to a lot of trouble cooking a meal and then us ruin it by not being able to sit down and eat it, because we’ve got to walk around burping his highness here – ’
‘Maggie?’
‘What?’
Becca purses her lips together. ‘Is there some other reason you don’t want to come to dinner?’
I try to look innocent. ‘What other reason could there be?’
‘Grant.’
‘What about him?’
Becca takes a sip of her coffee then looks me in the eye. ‘I saw the way you looked at him when we popped in last weekend. You hardly said a word to him.’
‘I said “hello” and “how are you?”. I asked how his work was going. Sorry if I wasn’t full of sparkling wit and repartee, but I’d only had three hours sleep the night before.’ I’m getting cross now, but mostly because Becca has caught me out. I’d tried to be nice to Grant, tried to remind myself that things could change, that he could be different in this life – he certainly had a different job – but all I could think about was those times when Becca had appeared on my doorstep in tears, or worse, the times she’d gone silent on me, not answering her phone for days, because he’d been so awful she couldn’t even bring herself to tell me about it. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude to him.’
Becca’s expression softens. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Then next Saturday evening you can come round and have another go.’
I open my mouth, brain frantically searching for another excuse, but she knows me too well. ‘Don’t be like that,’ she says, cutting through the waffle I haven’t even spouted yet. ‘I’ve never been that way with Dan. I’ve always loved him because you loved him. That’s what friends are supposed to do, isn’t it?’
I have no answer for that. Yes, she always has been wonderful with Dan. They’re kind of like brother and sister now, teasing each other, bickering over silly things, but underneath there’s a deeply-held affection. But it’s different. Dan’s a good guy.
What confuses me most is how Grant and Becca keep ending up together. Does that mean it’s fate? Does that mean the universe keeps trying different patterns, different variations, until the right one works and they’re happy together? And if it is, doesn’t what seem a really cruel way to go about it? What about all the other Beccas who are miserable and hurting? I don’t get it.
‘I just want you to give him a chance,’ Becca says, her eyes pleading. ‘That’s not too much to ask, is it?’
I sigh. Maybe it isn’t. Because in this reality, this world, Becca is in love and all of the bad stuff hasn’t happened yet. It’s not lost on me that in my ‘other’ life, she’s doing exactly the same to me – rejecting the man I love for no good reason – and I suppose I could make it tit for tat, but where does that get me? Our friendship is disintegrating in that life, and I don’t want that to happen here too. Besides, if Grant really does turn out to be a sadistic prat again, she’ll need me more than ever. I have to stand by her, stand by her choice. I can’t see any other way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I open my eyes and instantly realise there’s something wrong. Billy isn’t crying. I check the bed next to me and find Dan gone. Light is seeping through the curtains and the digital alarm clock blinks a time of 8:03.
I leap out of bed. I last fed Billy at twelve-thirty. He normally wakes every three hours on the dot screaming for more milk.
I scramble across the bedroom, dodging a stack of Dan’s school stuff and a pile of clean washing that I don’t remember putting there, but I can’t see Billy. His Moses basket is full of more clean washing – Dan’s socks and pants – and I start digging, flinging them behind me as my heart thuds in my ears. I keep going until I find … sheet.
Nothing else.
No Billy.
That’s when I really start to panic.
‘Billy!’ I scream into the air. ‘Billy!’
I’m rewarded with a gurgle, but it’s not coming from our room. Oh, thank God!
I scramble out onto the landing, which is filled with its usual mountains of crap – why did I marry a man whose idea of cleaning up is just to create a fresh pile of his stuff somewhere new in the house? – and race in the direction of the raspberry-blowing noise I can hear.
It’s coming from the spare room. I fling open the door and spot Billy’s pink skin behind the bars of the cot bed we’d got for when he’s older. What on earth was Dan thinking, putting him in that? He’s far too small.
But when I lean over the railing I discover Billy is huge. He’s lost that scrawny translucent newborn look and now has fleshy, dimpled wrists and elbows. His hair is twice as thick and twice as dark as it was yesterday. I mean, I mean … he looks like a four-month-old!
That’s when my brain catches up with my panic.
I’ve jumped again.
Not back to Jude. Not back to the man I love and the life I want, but just further along in this one, like I did that time in Italy. I feel as if something hard and blunt is piercing my heart. What if I never go back? What if I’m stuck here now? Perhaps I’ve subconsciously made my choice and this is where I’ll stay. Because I have a feeling, you know, that one day one of these realities will stick, and it’ll have something to do with me. I just haven’t worked out the hows and whys of it yet.
But then Billy looks up at me, waggles his legs up and down and gives me a gummy grin. A rush of warmth pours from that hole in my newly skewered heart and I reach down and pick him up, hug him to me and stroke his downy soft hair with my chin. He clutches onto me with his chubby fists and I start to cry.
‘Where did you learn to smile like that, my beautiful boy?’ I ask him and I’m rewarded with another showing of his dimples, his complete and unguarded joy at seeing me. I kiss his fat little cheeks over and over and when he starts to giggle I can hardly stand it.
I’ve missed so many precious moments: his first smile, his first laugh. Possibly even his first taste of solids. I want to scream out to God or heaven or the universe – whatever is pulling me this way and that through time like this – and tell them to hand over the remote. I want to rewind, to catch up with what I’ve missed.
I wander downstairs and check the kitchen calendar, Billy tucked between my armpit and my hip. I’ve been making sure to keep it up to date, marking off each day with a tiny dot in the corner of each square. The last dot is on the sixteenth of November.
Wow. Three and half months. That means Billy is almost eighteen weeks old and, for me, autumn has frosted into early March overnight.
I spend the day with my son, getting to know him again, finding out the new things he can do. I discover he’s incredibly vocal, babbling away to both me, himself and any passing toy, with great gusto, that his favourite hobby after exercising his own voice is sucking his toes and that he’s desperately trying to work out how to roll over onto his front, but can’t quite get that last arm out the way and it makes him very cross when he finally topples back down onto his back again.
I feel different, I realise, as I walk Billy through the park in his pram, trying to get him off to sleep for a good chunk of the afternoon. I’m not exactly happy, but I don’t feel that sense of heaviness I did just after I gave birth. Maybe it was something to do with hormones after all. Or maybe jumping is like dreaming and my brain has processed the shock of having Billy instead of Sophie while I’ve been unaware of time marching on around me.
I always wanted a second child, so maybe my wish has come
true. Just not in the way I expected it to. I’ve got to try to find some joy in this life if I’m going to be spending time here, and since my marriage is clearly not going to provide that, maybe Billy is it.
I also feel differently about Dan. I’ve noticed that after a jump I often feel as if I have a bit more perspective. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer in the middle of whatever I was feeling and doing. It gives me a sense of distance. I start to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that things were good between Dan and I.
So, when I’m back at home and I hear the door go around six, I wait for Dan to make his usual trip to the kitchen to peck me on the cheek and put the kettle on. After the inevitable thud-thump of his shoes hitting the hall carpet, one after the other, I hear him go upstairs. I wait to hear the loo flush or something, but there’s nothing. Moments later the study door shuts. It doesn’t exactly slam, but he didn’t just nudge it closed either.
OK, I think. This is new. So I decide to take the initiative and I make the tea myself and take Dan’s upstairs. He’s on his computer again. No pixelated lemmings in sight, thank goodness, only a Word document that he seems to be annotating. Doing marking after all. ‘Here,’ I say, as I put the mug of tea on the desk. And because there’s an atmosphere, because we always seem to be at each other’s throats these days, I add, ‘Peace offering.’
My gesture does not have the desired effect. Instead, Dan turns to me, his expression at once both scoffing and incredulous. ‘You really think a cup of tea is going to wipe out what you said to me last night?’
I stutter. It’s times like these when I really hate my stupid kangaroo life. I have no idea what I said, whether it was justified or not, whether Dan has just decided to take my words in the worst possible light, which tends to be his default position these days. There’s only one way out. ‘I’m sorry.’ I say.
He doesn’t respond at first. Too surprised at hearing those words leave my mouth, probably. I realise that I don’t often apologise without a good deal of justification and putting my side of the story out there first. In this instance, however, I have no choice, because I have no story. I have no justification.