by Zoe Deleuil
My frustration dissolved at the sight of him, at his smooth skin, his perfectly proportioned body, so neat in its little grey flannel sleepsuit, his eyes meeting mine and his body light enough to move towards me with one hand as I rolled on my side and pushed up my t-shirt. He latched on easily and I could feel he was getting a good feed, his eyes only half-open as he slowly drank himself into a milk coma.
‘That was something Rachel mentioned,’ Paul said. ‘She was thinking, if you weren’t breastfeeding all the time, she could give him formula. So could I. To make it easier for you to get some rest.’
How could he not see that breastfeeding was the one thing that was going well in all this? The one thing my body had managed to do like it was supposed to.
‘It’s hard to think about that right now,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just managed to get it working, I don’t want to mess it up. And I’d have to go out and buy all the bottles and stuff.’
‘Maybe you could express some milk and I could feed him, and you could get some sleep? It might help with my bonding?’
Oh, give me a break, I thought, knowing I was being unfair but unable to stop myself.
‘So you want me to go out and buy a pump? And then sit and pump milk?’ I started to raise my voice and the baby startled, so I made myself whisper. That was the other problem with house guests and babies: you could never have a good yelling match and then move on.
‘I’m already feeding him every two or three hours, and through the night. I don’t really want to sit and express milk on top of that to help with your bonding.’
‘But it’s a good idea. It would mean you could sleep.’
‘I want to sleep now.’
For a long time neither of us said a word. Wide-awake again, I was furious. At my inability to articulate what was so hard about this new life, at his inability to understand how my life was transformed while his went on largely unchanged.
‘Sorry,’ he said at last, his voice polite and formal in the still room, and I thought to myself, with queasy certainty, We’re not going to get through this.
11
Morning, some time before dawn. Paul had left the bed during the night to sleep on the couch and I could hear him snoring away. Deep in the kind of unbroken, luxurious slumber that I longed for.
Already I had learned not to look at the clock, because it was too demoralising if it wasn’t even midnight when the baby first woke for a feed and I would know there were hours of confused darkness ahead of me to get through until daylight and coffee and some semblance of ordinary life. The baby was beside me, his arms wide in complete abandon, his mouth slightly open. Now that I was awake he had finally decided to rest.
It had been a night of constant feeding, with him refusing to lie in his cot, not settling until he was right beside me. Every time I fell back to sleep, I’d be woken again, twenty minutes later, by him crying and clawing at me, insatiable, always wanting more. Maybe I was dehydrated and he wasn’t getting enough fluids. Maybe he was boosting my supply or having a developmental leap, as the baby books called it.
I felt like I was looking at everything through blurry glass. If I could only get enough sleep, I could probably work out what was going on, but the broken nights seemed to be a permanent state now, and I had no idea how to change that, how to be focused and optimistic and alert enough to make the first step into competent parenting.
The memory of the midwife making Paul a bed and encouraging us both to get some rest now made sense. She knew that sleep was over for us. It was something that I’d only realised a few nights later, after I had tucked the baby into his bassinet, thinking how intense the last few days had been and how much I was looking forward to a good night’s rest. And then, after about thirty seconds of soothing darkness, the baby had woken up and howled and hadn’t let up for three hours.
Eventually, I got up and made some toast and some strong black coffee and sat staring out the window, feeling as grey and polluted and drab as the ragged pigeons that clustered along the window ledges of the Golden Lane estate, avoiding the metal spikes that had been nailed there to discourage them.
I heard the baby cry out in the bedroom. He might be stirring in his sleep, only to settle himself again, so I left him alone, hoping for fifteen minutes to have a shower, or sit and stare out the window for a bit longer.
Rachel’s door creaked open and she went in to him, and I heard her chatting to him, waking him up fully. She brought him out to me.
‘Look who’s here!’
I smiled, trying not to show my annoyance. ‘Hello.’
He did look beautiful, drowsy and blinking in the grey morning light.
‘Here you go.’ She dumped him in my lap and he slumped against me as if he was equally disenchanted at the arrival of yet another day. Was he understimulated? Did I need to do more with him?
She went to the window. ‘The sun is shining!’ She smiled, looking out onto the mirrored office windows and satellite dishes of the council estate like it was some hilltop Provençal village in late summer. ‘Finally shining! Let’s go out!’
English people seemed to have a very different idea of what constituted a sunny day, I’d observed. It was a weak, hazy sunshine, with no stamina, and it would be gone in an hour or two, replaced by freezing cold darkness and, by the look of the dark grey sky behind it, icy sleet. The thought made me want to curl back up into bed, between my warm, slightly milk-stained sheets.
‘Really? It might be sunny but it’s still cold out there. And I got so little sleep last night. I don’t feel up to it, to be honest.’
‘Oh come on. Let’s go out. It’s my last day in London for a bit. And we’ll see a movie.’
If I could get to a dark cinema it would be okay. I’d feed the baby to sleep and keep him lying on me and maybe have a little nap in the warm theatre.
‘It’s sunny, we can’t not go.’
‘Okay. I’ll see what movies are on.’
Rachel rushed off to the shower and I contemplated the baby and thought about how much easier this day would be if I could share it with this child’s other parent.
As Paul was heading off to work, he’d mentioned he had a drinks function after work, some networking event, and I thought, How convenient. Not only did he get to network and drink wine and eat rare beef canapés and pâté and cheese and lots of fiddly things that were far better than anything I would eat today, and do all that informal networking that would ultimately see him earn more and work longer hours and be more powerful than me, he also got to come home tonight, cheerful and slightly pissed and safely past the baby’s bedtime, same as all the other blokes. And they all knew that they were propping each other up. They knew it wasn’t fair. But they also suspected, correctly, that looking after a baby was monotonous, and it was comparatively easy sitting in a meeting with a nice coffee or going to a work function and trading banter. And that is why women turned to valium in the 1960s and to SSRIs today. Because it made it easier for us to keep smiling and to keep doing and to not feel quite so very, very angry, because despite everything, nothing had changed. We got to work, yes, but we still had to do everything else.
Not that I had much to complain about compared to some women, I reminded myself. And, yes, he did make dinner last night. But still. God, I was fuming. Ten minutes into my day and I felt ready to murder someone, namely Paul, who was probably sitting at his desk, beavering away, completely oblivious.
I looked down at the baby, lying still and content in my lap, then lifted him up and smelled his neck, felt his breath and his tiny wet mouth against my neck, such sweet air coming from his perfect, healthy, unpolluted lungs.
Rachel opened the bathroom door in a cloud of steam and the scent of the expensive shampoo the beauty editor had given me before I’d left work.
‘Come on! Go have a shower!’
‘Okay.’
The problem wasn’t the baby. The problem was all the crap that came with it.
Out on the street, Rachel
said, ‘I’ll take you to lunch! You’ve been so good, letting me come and stay. Let me buy you lunch.’
‘Where should we go?’ I was thinking we would head to some café nearby, maybe in Exmouth Market, but she had set her heart on Mrs H, a place in Notting Hill that she had read about in Metro.
We walked to the Tube station and carefully carried the pram down to the platform. We stood all the way to Edgware Road, where we had to change to get onto a Circle line train to Notting Hill Gate.
The café Rachel had chosen was crowded, and when we sat down in a cramped booth seat the couple at the table next to us – young, childless, artfully dressed – looked startled, and then annoyed. I lifted the baby onto my lap and in doing so caused his sock-clad foot to swipe a spoon off the table and onto the polished concrete floor with an echoing clatter.
The couple now looked extremely annoyed. Sighing heavily, the woman picked up her spoon and cleared her throat at me.
Oh, grow up. It was a baby, for Christ’s sake – a human, only slightly less socialised than those two. It would pay their pension one day, if they were lucky enough to live that long. And at least they’d had a full night’s sleep. Did I used to get this annoyed by babies? Possibly, but that was beside the point.
‘Do you want to share a sandwich?’ said Rachel, looking at the menu.
‘What – why?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not that hungry.’
I didn’t feel like sharing a sandwich. What I wanted was something hot and nourishing and filling, followed by six coffees. I was depleted and thirsty and starving and already the baby was starting to fuss against me, meaning he was going to want a feed soon, which would leave me even more hungry and thirsty. If I’d known we were going to come all this way to share a sandwich I would have stayed in bed.
‘Oh, I’ll order something,’ I said. ‘I’m quite hungry, I don’t think half a sandwich is going to cut it. I can pay. You don’t have to buy me lunch.’
‘Are you sure?’ She looked worried.
‘Yes. That’s fine. It’s kind of expensive here, I can pay for myself.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
‘No worries.’ I smiled, telling myself that I couldn’t get enraged at people for wanting to share a sandwich just because I was tired. At least she was trying.
The baby was fussing on my lap and the couple beside me stopped talking and eyed us with something approaching horror. As I tried to calm him down they kept looking at me, as if staring into the abyss at their own possible future as tired and dishevelled parents. Or was it my hectic imagination again? Either way, I needed to feed the baby.
I reached inside my top and unclipped my bra, which was starting to feel warm and wet, moving the baby into a position that would enable him to latch on and also keep me covered. It wasn’t easy, but I managed it, pulling up my shirt and wincing at the baby’s frantic mouth bumping up against my raw skin.
And all of a sudden, the café became very quiet. The woman was now looking at me like I’d slapped her, and the man looked disgusted. But the baby was oblivious, hungrily feeding, although the milk wasn’t flowing as fast as it could because I was tensing at how painful it was. Still, he persisted, and I forced myself to relax, breathing as deeply as I could and ignoring muttered comments now issuing from the next table about how it wasn’t really the time or place, and wasn’t it also a bit of a hygiene risk?
I don’t particularly want to be doing this either, I wanted to snap at them. But when a baby’s hungry, he’s hungry. There is nothing I can do to change that, and if they had to listen to his hungry cry for more than thirty seconds they’d be trying to jam a nipple into his mouth themselves. If anything, they should be thankful someone fed them back in the day, and they could now sit here in a fancy café being completely outraged as a result.
I stared at the woman with my eyebrows raised, and then at the bloke, who went bright red and looked away quickly. Sometimes the abyss looks back, pal. I suppressed a laugh at my own silly joke and Rachel gave me a puzzled expression.
‘Sorry,’ she said to them, tilting her head apologetically. ‘It’s not ideal, but when they’re hungry, you have to feed them.’
I stared at her in disbelief. ‘What did you say that for?’ I asked her.
‘I was trying to explain to them that you can’t help it,’ she whispered. ‘They seem a bit funny about you … feeding at the table.’
‘I’m sure they’ll get over it eventually.’
The couple said nothing, and I felt oddly ashamed. I thought back to my Australian childhood and how common it had been back then. Was it less acceptable here? Was it actually considered unhygienic to breastfeed in public? I should have stayed home, or found the bathroom.
A man about the same age as me walked past our table with a tray of coffee and walnut cakes for the elaborate centre display and gave me a small, understanding smile and a tiny nod. Judging by the dark circles under his eyes he had a baby at home, too.
I smiled back at him, and as the baby settled against me, falling into sleep, I didn’t care when the woman gave me another dirty look and said, loudly, ‘Shall we go to Barcelona this summer? Just, you know, to chill?’
My food arrived at the exact moment the baby required an immediate nappy change. Rachel offered to do it and, because I was hungry, I hesitated.
‘Honestly, it’s fine. You’ve got soup, it’ll go cold. Let me do it.’
I found her a nappy and a packet of wipes and the change mat, and she took the baby from me and vanished towards the back of the restaurant.
The soup was good – dark brown lentils and bacon, salty and hot with lots of bread. I ate as fast as I could, knowing that once the baby was back I would have to hold him.
But ten minutes later, as I was finishing, Rachel still hadn’t returned. The room was suddenly too loud around me. I felt my heart start to race as I got up, light and panicky, almost knocking the phone of the judgemental woman off the table next to me.
The restaurant was in one of those creaky Victorian buildings with basement toilets at the bottom of a narrow, badly lit staircase. The air was warm and smelled like old sewerage pipes and I didn’t want him down here. I never should have let her take him. The women’s toilets were cold and empty. Where were they? Looking down the hallway, I saw another door with a baby change sign on it.
‘Rachel?’ I knocked loudly, but heard nothing. The door was locked, but I could hear running water through the door. I banged louder against the scratched wood. Finally, I heard fumbling and the door creaked open. Rachel peered out at me, breathing heavily, the baby in her arms. Was she crying?
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That took a while.’
‘Are you okay?’ I asked her.
‘I’m fine.’
The baby looked at me from her arms. Whatever had happened, he wouldn’t be able to tell me. But he didn’t seem upset.
‘Here.’ I held out my arms. ‘Can I have him back?’
‘Sure.’ She handed him back to me and walked away, back up the stairs to our table. Following close behind her, I noticed that her hands were trembling.
As we paid, I could see the rain starting to fall outside. Once we stepped into the street, it pelted straight onto my hair because I’d forgotten my hat, and trickled, icy cold, down my neck and into my collar. It was not soft London rain, but heavy and penetrating, and I was worried about the baby’s pram and how waterproof it was. He would be startled by cold water, and by the sound of the rain hitting the plastic cover.
‘Do you mind if we go and look in a few shops?’ Rachel asked. ‘I haven’t been shopping like this in months.’
‘Okay. But weren’t we going to see a movie? There’s one at the Gate starting in twenty minutes.’
‘Oh, I forgot we were going to see a movie. Maybe not. I don’t think we’ll make it. Sorry. Another time, perhaps.’
So instead we wandered through expensive shops selling forty-pound mugs and French cosmetics and Italian glassware. E
ach time we left the perfumed warmth of one, we had to step out again into the darkening day, where crowds of people swarmed and coughed and shoved each other, stepping neatly around my pram, as we went from hot to cold to hot again.
After a couple of hours I said to Rachel, ‘Should we get a bus home soon? I don’t think I can face the Tube again.’
‘Okay.’
Rachel didn’t know where to go, so I checked a street map at the bus stop and worked out the bus stop we needed to be at, which turned out to be on the other side of the road and up a little, back in the direction we’d come from.
Once we were on, we found a seat up the back. I sat and shivered in my rain-soaked coat. In the seat in front of us, a man was hacking into a tissue, leaning his head against the window. Across the aisle, a teenage boy was whispering something into the ear of the schoolgirl sitting next to him, who appeared too frightened to move. The air was close and I worried about the baby getting sick.
Rachel looked over at me, and in her eyes I thought I saw a glimmer of impatience. ‘You’re not that tired, are you?’ she said sweetly.
It appeared that what she wanted me to say was that I was fine, that the shopping journey wasn’t too much, that it had been, in fact, a really good idea. But I couldn’t.
‘I’m really tired,’ I told her flatly, and she said nothing. She looked closed off, staring out the window, not talking to me.
The bus felt dark and nightmarish, but the baby was asleep, so I closed my eyes too and we didn’t speak again as we made our slow, jolting way home.
12
One clammy hour and another bus later we arrived, pushing the pram from the station, through the brightly lit underpass and into the dim foyer of Cromwell Tower. The grey man nodded at Rachel.
Inside the apartment, I took my coat off and drank some water – it was strange how in such freezing cold you could get so thirsty – and ran the baby a bath. My feet were damp and aching, my throat was sore and I was shivering, but once I was sitting on the tiled floor of the steamy bathroom with the sound of the water running, nothing seemed so bad.