by Zoe Deleuil
I took the baby’s nappy off so he could kick around without it, and he squealed happily, his bright eyes meeting mine, with what looked like the very start of a smile. He was so perfectly formed, with his spindly legs and his soft belly and the long feet that still had such strong reflexes, I only needed to touch them with the tip of my finger for the miniature toes to curl up tightly. He seemed spellbound by the sound of the bathwater, the smells and the warmth and the softness of the towel and the freedom of not being swaddled in an uncomfortable papery nappy. I sat and absorbed his contentment, revelling in the way that a day that had seemed so long and exhausting had now arrived at this peaceful point.
I thought of something Jennifer had said, as we had both gazed at him in the Museum of Childhood lying in his pram and staring up at us with an expression of pure contentment: He’s beautiful. So happy to be here, existing in this very moment.
She was right. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this moment. The running water, the feel of his skin, his face. As I sat there, staring down at him and stroking his wrinkled pink feet, I became aware of Rachel standing in the doorway. She came in and scooped up his little body from the towel, then took him over to the mirror, looking at the reflection as she held his face against hers. My hands tingled with the urge to take him off her, to rescue him from whatever she was thinking about.
I thought back to how she’d disappeared with him for so long at the café, long enough for me to start to panic. And that she had offered to change his nappy. It was probably my tiredness, this seeing danger everywhere. I got up and took him from her without saying anything, and she watched as I put him back on the towel and tested the bathwater.
‘That was so weird today, when I was in the toilet with him,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Someone came and knocked on the door. They stood there for ages, wanting to make sure I was okay. No idea what they thought was going on.’
She studied me for a long moment, her small blue eyes unblinking. She looked tired. Exhausted, actually. Whatever she was doing, it seemed to enervate her.
‘Really?’
She sat down on the closed toilet lid and continued to study me. It was uncomfortable, the way she lurked, studying me, as if waiting for something more, so to avoid her gaze I poured some bath oil into the water.
‘Yeah. I finally opened the door and said I was busy and there were two more toilets they could be using instead of banging on the door of mine.’ She laughed. ‘It was one of the waiters. He looked so cross.’
I looked down at the baby’s face. He was so far away from being able to take care of himself. So many years until he could even cross a road unharmed, let alone know when someone didn’t have his best interests at heart. Maybe it was impossible to ever know. What if he’d been harmed already and I didn’t realise? It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to hurt him, but what was she trying to tell me? It was as if she were testing me, seeing what she could get away with, and what she couldn’t.
‘So, why were you in there for so long?’ I finally asked, after a long, measured silence in which it felt like she hardly blinked.
Instantly she was alert, sitting up straighter, still giving me her complete attention but in a way that seemed more eager, not so apathetic. ‘What do you mean?’
I sighed. Sometimes she appeared so slow to understand. Knowing I wouldn’t get anywhere, that I was sure to lose, yet suddenly angry, I answered back.
‘I mean, why were you in the toilet for so long with my baby? What were you doing? I was wondering myself. I probably should have come looking for you, but I kept expecting you to come back.’
In slow motion her expression changed, her mouth opening slightly and her eyes widening to a look of confused sadness.
‘I don’t really know,’ she said eventually, in a small, careful voice. ‘Maybe … you seemed like you weren’t that alert, and I thought I’d give you a break, let you eat in peace. You need to look after yourself. He is completely dependent on you, you know.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that, Rachel? Do you actually think that has never crossed my mind?’ I tried to keep my voice calm, but I could feel anger starting to flood my vision.
‘What I mean is, it’s important to listen to your instincts.’
She stared at me for a long moment and I felt like an infuriating schoolgirl being told off by a teacher.
‘I know that too. All I ever do is listen to my instincts.’
‘Oh, Simone. Why are you like this?’
I couldn’t keep up with her. ‘Like what?’
‘So suspicious. I mean, what are you trying to say to me?’ She stared off into the distance, shaking her head in despair. ‘I am trying to help. You asked me to take him, don’t you remember? You wanted to eat. You asked me to help you, Simone.’
Had I? She sounded so sure, but I didn’t remember asking her. And even if I had, why was she gone so long? Every moment I said nothing weakened my position further.
‘I don’t remember asking you.’ Did it even matter? All I wanted was to bathe the baby and go to bed.
‘I want to help you. Help you with the baby. He’s family, and so are you now.’ I looked at her again and she wasn’t looking at me, but at the baby, who was lying very still on the towel, as if listening to our voices.
My head ached as I realised she’d drawn me into a conversation that would lead nowhere useful, and might even be reported back to Paul as evidence of my hostility towards her. My throat was burning and my muscles were aching as if I hadn’t used them for days. I could feel a cough building in my chest.
And then she was crying. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done. I’m really trying here.’ She cried for a little longer as I stared at her, then seemed to pull herself together. ‘I’m on your side, you know.’
I didn’t have an answer for that. The conversation had somehow turned into a confrontation I had no energy for. The bath was deep enough so I turned off the tap and undressed the baby completely, then lifted him up and held him against me, focusing on him and nothing else.
Rachel sat, sniffing every so often, waiting for me to say more, but I couldn’t come up with an appropriate way to smooth things over. It was beyond me. The only thing I wanted was sleep – long hours of deep slumber in some remote mountain cave, piled with old, soft blankets, far from the world.
After a few moments she got up and walked out, and then I heard her on the phone, talking quietly. I leaned over the water, breathing in the steam for a moment. The water was warm and deep and smelled of lavender, and when I lowered the baby into it he looked thrilled, not quite smiling, but alert, with his mouth open in an expression of comical wonder as I sailed his little body through the water, from one end of the white porcelain tub to the other, which to him must have felt like a long way. His fringe was pushed back, as if he was tearing along a river on a jet ski, and his eyes were wide. His expression had a new quality, of shocked delight in bodily sensation that I hadn’t seen before, and I gazed at his face as I rocked him back and forth through the deep water.
He had so much to look forward to, and it was my responsibility to look after him, to listen to my instincts and keep him safe from harm, so he could grow up and do it all. No more letting him out of my sight. No more letting Rachel help, and allowing her to take him away to dark dingy toilets because I was too tired or hungry to do it myself. I leaned my head on the rim of the bath, still supporting him with my hands, thinking that the small room must be very steamy, because it was suddenly so much harder to breathe.
When I came out of the bathroom with the baby wrapped in a towel, I saw that Rachel was getting ready to go out, putting on my scarf and fiddling with her phone at the front door.
‘You off out?’
‘I gave Soraya a ring. I felt like catching up with someone for a drink and a chat.’
Soraya was my friend, and the thought of them going out together made me feel left out. I knew it was silly, though, because Soraya was far more soci
able than me, always making new friends and trying new places, and it never usually bothered me.
‘Does she want to come over here?’
She smiled tightly and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. We both want to go out, maybe grab a glass of wine or something to eat. I am craving a rare steak. Is Smiths of Smithfield open tonight? Or that gastropub on City Road?’
‘They would both be open. If you want steak I’d say Smiths is your best bet, though.’
‘Okay. Well. Have a good rest. I’m going to Bristol in the morning, so I might not see you.’ She wasn’t making eye contact, and I felt like I needed to somehow repair things between us before she left.
‘Well, have fun. Say hi to Soraya for me. When are you back from Bristol?’
‘Not sure yet. See you.’
She gave me a wary look before turning away from me and leaving, and I wondered what she was going to say to Soraya about how things were going here.
Paul was still out at his work function, so I went to bed, the baby beside me, feeding himself to sleep as I tried to stay still, my throat so raw it made me wince to swallow.
Paul arrived home sometime later, and I heard him showering and then cooking something in the kitchen before the TV went on and then off again.
I was dozing in a feverish haze, the baby beside me for once lying quiet and untroubled, like the baby I’d imagined before I had a real one. Paul slid into the bed carefully, trying not to wake me.
‘Hi. I’m awake.’
‘Oh, hi! How are you?’ He sounded friendly, from too much wine or simply because he was happy to see me, it was hard to tell.
‘I’m okay.’
‘How was your day out with Rachel?’
‘It was alright. A bit weird. We went out for lunch and it was a bit … I don’t know. Tense, or something.’
‘How come?’
Because Rachel took a really long time changing the baby’s nappy? Even in my head it sounded ridiculous, so there seemed to be little point explaining it.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It was probably a bit ambitious.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Sorry. I know you want me to try and get along with her.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about it, Simone. Maybe you don’t get along. She’ll be gone tomorrow for a bit, and we can have some time to ourselves.’ He ran his hand along my leg and sat up. ‘God, you’re burning. I can feel the heat coming off you. Are you okay?’
‘Not really. I don’t feel good. We were out in the cold for hours, on buses, in and out of shops, on the Tube. There was a really sick man on the bus in front of us, coughing away. Maybe I picked something up. I’ve got such a sore throat, and it came on really fast, it’s weird. Do we have any medicine?’
He disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard him slamming cabinets, then picking up his keys and going out. Ten minutes later he was back with a Boots bag filled with lozenges and pain-killers and throat spray. He brought me water and dosed me up on painkillers, then gave me a couple of Strepsils, leaving everything by the bed.
‘Thanks.’
‘Do you need anything else?’
‘No. All I need is sleep.’
‘Should I take the baby from you? So you don’t make him sick.’
‘I won’t make him sick.’ I knew from all my reading on an exhaustive American breastfeeding website that I’d be passing on antibodies through my milk, but I didn’t have the energy to explain that to Paul. ‘He’ll be fine.’
The baby rested in the crook of my arm, his face completely still, and I wished he was inside me again, a foetus, safe and enclosed, where no-one could ever take him away from me or hurt him. It was too risky, I decided, having him out in the world, with me in charge.
13
In the morning Rachel was gone before I got up, and the cup of tea Paul had left by the bed was cold and metallic tasting. The queasy viral feeling was stronger and in the bathroom mirror my eyes were red and my cheeks flushed as my body tried to burn off the infection. But despite all this, the baby was deeply asleep and I was the only one home, so I had a reason to get out of bed. Without Rachel, the atmosphere felt less stifled, the air clearer, and I set about reclaiming the apartment, which had taken on the stale and dingy look of a cheap hostel. If I could restore order, somehow, it might all feel more manageable. I could smell the garbage disposal chute from the hallway, filling the air with mysterious, foul odours from deep inside the Barbican. We probably needed to call some on-site maintenance person, but I didn’t know the number. I didn’t know much at all about the workings of the building; it was like living in a hotel sometimes.
As I passed Rachel’s room I glanced in, feeling like an intruder. She had made the bed roughly, but had left her clothes in a pile on the carpet, and books and receipts and rubbish scattered across the table. She didn’t seem to have taken much with her. The room smelled like her perfume, a woody smell with a musky undertone. I yanked the window open to let in the petrol smells and cold impersonal air of the city, then stepped out quickly, closing the door behind me.
Next I went into the bathroom, pulling out all the cleaning stuff from the cupboard and scrubbing the sink and toilet before getting under a hot shower. It had been so long since I had felt properly alone. It was a shame this virus thing was slowing me down, but if I ignored it I could try to move forward, and start making sense of this new life.
Maybe I’d go out and buy some food, from the big Sainsbury’s at Angel, once the baby woke up. We’d been living on toast and pasta and lukewarm tea for days. And I’d drop off a bag of clothes at the charity shop – that always made me feel virtuous – and then come home and cook something for dinner.
Getting ready took a while. Dressing myself, dressing the baby. Undressing him to change his nappy. Finding my phone, my wallet. Standing in front of the mirror and trying to make my face and hair look less deranged. Putting on a coat, packing the baby into the pram. Unpacking and feeding him. Changing his nappy again. And all the time I felt the day speeding away from me as I struggled to catch it, held hostage by this small human and his bodily functions. But I had a vision for the day – an ambitious one, perhaps, given how I was feeling – but it was a plan, a todo list, and I was determined to tick off every item. Finally we got out the door, after what felt like hours of wandering around the apartment with the baby draped over my shoulder, trying to remember what I’d gone into a room for.
Outside, the cold air and weak sunshine, and the bus arriving less than a minute after I got to the stop, all buoyed me. On the bus I got talking to an elderly man whose dog, a solemn grey staffy called Molly, sat on the seat beside him. Despite being bundled up in a tartan coat, she shivered slightly and he kept a consoling hand on her as we chatted.
‘She doesn’t like the cold,’ he told me. ‘It makes her miserable. But she needs to go to the vet today.’
Molly looked at me with her emotional brown eyes, as if she were part of our conversation, and I marvelled at all the endless unseen, unpaid care going on around me, even in a place as frenetic as London. How lucky any creature was – staffy or newborn baby or elderly parent alike – to have someone look after them, to put a blanket on them if they were cold and worry about them in the rain. Closing my eyes, I pictured beds, flannel sheets, lamps and darkness and the quiet of everyone asleep.
‘How old is your little one?’ he asked.
‘Almost five weeks.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘It gets better. We had three.’ He shook his head. ‘You never really get on top of it, parenting. The minute you think you have everything under control, it sort of morphs into something else. Dogs are easier children.’ He smiled to himself, and pulled his staffy closer.
The supermarket was chaotic, with squished blueberries spilling from plastic punnets, pillaged shelves and fluorescent lighting, bags of oranges from Spain, tired-looking asparagus from Mexico and beyond that, the sweet waft of baking bread and the humming rows of chiller cabinets. There was
one thing I hadn’t considered, though. It was impossible to push a pram and a trolley at once, and I needed to carry it all home on the bus, so I took a blue plastic basket instead.
What I really wanted was chicken noodle soup, with simmering yellow broth and golden speckles of oil. Jewish penicillin, as Soraya called it. A fat whole chicken was called for, but the weight of it unbalanced my basket, so I set it down on the ground and rearranged everything. Picking it up again, it hung over my arm without tilting, and I wandered ahead feeling oddly lighter. It was amazing what simply rearranging a basket could do. It was all suddenly so much easier. A woman gave me a surprised look as I turned the corner, but I ignored her and kept going.
Standing in the middle of the aisle, trying to mentally write the shopping list I’d forgotten, I recalled my last visit here, when I was forty weeks pregnant and so delirious I had to stop and text Soraya to see what she thought of the name Elmo if it was a boy. Her reply was obscene. I laughed at the memory, feeling unexpectedly like my old self again as I dropped some spaghetti into the basket, before venturing deeper into the aisles in search of dark chocolate and coffee beans. Something was niggling me, that feeling of being in a vast supermarket and knowing you’ve passed the key ingredient that was the whole point of the journey. Yet at the same time, being back in Sainsbury’s, doing a food shop, felt strangely easy, easier than anything had felt for a while.
Eventually I got to the checkout and unpacked my basket. And then a cold faintness hit me as I realised what I was missing.
The baby.
Where was the baby?
The baby was gone.
My mind went blank and I looked at the checkout operator for salvation. He was a young guy and he appeared to be half-asleep, barely registering my panic when I said to him, ‘I’ve lost my baby.’
He looked back at me, blank-faced. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘No!’ I stared at him, willing him to help me, to set off an alarm or shut down the store and call in a SWAT team, helicopters, the army, order a total lockdown of the supermarket and surrounding streets and the entire city and all London airports. I had some dim, terrible memory of a novel that was very similar to this exact situation, a child going missing in a London supermarket, never to return.