The Yummy Mummy (4 page)

Alice studies my face thoughtfully. “It’s not the only way, you know,” she says suddenly.

“What do you mean?” My words slur.

“Your way. ‘Making the best of things.’ Pretending it’s the Waltons.” Alice’s head cocks to one side, curls clumped like a bouquet on her left shoulder.

“Don’t know what you mean.” I shift uncomfortably, cross my arms and legs.

“You
do
. I’ve seen it before, lived it, Amy. Hanging in there with a man because he is the father of your child when you know in your heart it’s not right.”

“That’s a bit presumptuous!” How dare she?

“Sorry. Just . . . don’t feel trapped.”

“You’re wrong!” I swivel around in my seat, so that she can’t see me blinking back tears. “It’s been tricky. But it’s just a patch.” I’m babbling. I don’t want Alice poking around inside my feelings. They’re private. “Babies test things, don’t they?”

“First drop-off Ladbroke Grove, love?” rasps the taxi driver. We sit in silence as the cab swerves into Oxford Gardens, shuddering to a stop outside a big stucco house. The house is very white in the car lights, like it’s been newly painted. There’s a small sporty vintage Mercedes outside. Alice gets out of the taxi, gives the driver twenty quid, tells him to keep the change, and leans into my open window.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to upset you. Me and my big mouth! I’ve had such a cool time.” She cups my face with two hands, planting a sloppy kiss on my cheek. “You could do with some cheering up.” I nod, rather pathetically. “Why don’t we do a bit of shopping, get you sorted out?”

Shopping? I’m not sure a trip down Bond Street will fix anything. “I’m fine.”

“But you seem a bit down on yourself, and I always find the best antidote for the baby blues is a bit of self-love. You know, new clothes, new hair, that sort of thing.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Alice.”

“A makeover!” Alice’s head bobs with enthusiasm. It bashes against the window frame. “Ouch! Honestly, you’d feel so much better!” The taxi driver drums his wheel impatiently. I shake my head. “Amy, I’m being selfish,” she whispers. “I love any excuse to shop. And I’d love to give you a new look. I’m one of those people. I give strangers extreme makeovers in my head.” I look at her blankly. “It’d be a great project. Project, er, Project Amy!”

Fuzzily drunk, I’m not entirely sure what Alice is talking about. But it sounds exhausting and expensive and vaguely insulting. I am tired and want to get home. “Um, thanks for the offer. But it doesn’t sound like my sort of thing.”

Alice’s face falls. “Oh well. Big lunch next week, all the girls. You must come and meet everyone. I’m going to phone you.”

The idea of meeting
everyone
, whoever they are, makes me anxious. I’ve not felt sociable since having Evie. Indeed, I’ve been grateful for a decent excuse not to go out. Like a strange inversion of my pre-pregnancy self, I’ve turned down so many invitations from the girls at work and my single childless friends that they’ve stopped asking. The rare times I have acquiesced, I’ve made sure the social date will take place weeks after the concession. Then I seem to hurtle toward it at breakneck speed, the date getting bigger and more ominous the closer I get, like a fallen rock in the middle of a road. So I swerve, and cancel.

Alice’s tall ectomorph figure strides down the gravel. It crackles like knuckles under her heels. A security light comes on. There is a light on behind the white blinds in the big bay window. Babysitter or John?

The taxi whizzes north, up tatty Great Western Road, past drunks and junkies and boarded-up shop fronts. My body, still soft from pregnancy, swollen with milk, shouldn’t be on these dirty, wet streets. I want to be at home desperately. We are speeding, taking corners too fast. Yes, we are definitely going to crash. A tiny baby will be left motherless. And it will be my fault.

Home. The lights are off. I trip up the stairs into our bedroom. Joe is asleep, snoring lightly. I am noisier than I want to be on the floorboards in Evie’s bedroom. My feet are heavy.

I peer into Evie’s cot. She is perfectly still. I can’t hear her breathe. Evie?

I put my finger under her nose. No reassuring rush of warm air. I poke her cheek, too hard.

“Owwah!”

I have not been punished.

Three

MY DARLING DAUGHTER IS ALIVE, PINK AND SNUFFLING
in her cot. Everything is fine. This is my first thought on waking. My second thought, a rather more unsettling one, is that perhaps Alice is right and making the best of things isn’t the only way. And maybe I could do with a wax.

Ouch, bright light. Joe yanks the curtain back too hard. A vein throbs on his forehead. Joe is cross. Joe doesn’t look great when he’s cross. There’s an impotence about his anger. It doesn’t do much for my penitence.

“Evie must be hungry,” he growls, disappearing into Evie’s bedroom.

Tiny legs pumping like pistons, face crumpled, full of ancient anger, Evie swoops toward me in Joe’s hands. As she gets nearer and realizes that she is going to be fed, her mouth opens, her fists unfurl. She grabs for my boob, captures my sore nipple in the O of her mouth, and sucks violently. I try hard not to think about the Orgasm on a Beach I drank five hours earlier.

“It’s just irresponsible,” Joe says, big windshield back to me. Hairs have grown on the back of his neck in the last few months, below his hairline, where you’re not meant to have them. Parenting has strange side effects: While I lose my hair—seaweedy clumps of it collect in the bath plug—Joe gets more hirsute.

“I’m always trying to get you to go out and have a good time, shopping with Kate or visiting . . . I don’t know . . . or, er, getting out a new video.”

“Wild.”

“Amy, we tried doing the dinner party thing. Twice. Both times you fell asleep on the sofa before pudding was served. And when we went to Leo’s party we were the first people to arrive, the first to leave. We were home at nine P.M.! But it’s different with Alice, isn’t it? Alice phones and you behave like a naughty teenager. Thing is, Amy, you’re not. You’re the mother of a little baby. . . .”

“Funny, I forgot.”

“Amy . . .” He rears up with a great inhalation, puffs his chest out.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I went out and had a laugh. Once. The only time in, let’s see, almost a year.”

“How much did you drink?”

“One glass of champagne.”

Mastering his adrenaline rush, Joe slumps down on the side of the bed, his hefty frame slipping on the plum satin throw that was once so sumptuous but now looks like it’s starred in a mammary splatter movie. He strokes Evie’s head as she feeds. This is the closest his hand gets to my breast these days. He used to love my nipples, before they became distended in pregnancy. He would lick and suck them. He doesn’t do that now. That would be weird.

“Have you ever seen such a beautiful baby?” he says, softening.

Evie smiles on cue, a pure smile springing from that unpolluted pool of joy that’s hidden just below the surface of babies like buds of teeth. She looks a bit like my mum—big wide face, paddle-pool-blue eyes. My yellowy olive skin. Yes, beautiful. I think I can almost say this objectively, having examined other babies in the park. So many of them look like old Tory MPs. This said, Evie wasn’t always gorgeous. When she was born I called her the Purpling.

“I’m sorry,” I say, trying hard to sound like I mean it.

It works. Joe’s shoulders drop and he releases the tension with a little cough, relieved he doesn’t have to exert authority he doesn’t feel, that I’ve made it easy for him. My unreachable cantankerousness neuters him, I think. He pushes hair back from my face tenderly, releasing a whiff of stale cigarette smoke.

“Yes, I know, I need a bath.”

Joe turns on the taps in the bathroom before stomping downstairs and clattering and crashing about the kitchen. (The sound of Joe is unique as a fingerprint: I could identify him in an acoustic lineup.) I dig deeper under the duvet and admire the perfect whorl of Evie’s ear, tracing it with my fingers. The bath rumbles and a cloud of lavender-scented steam billows through the bathroom door.

Evie dribbles to a finish and grins: I have delivered, fulfilled my function. Her eyes search around this room, her house, her universe. I feel like she’s been here forever sometimes. Soft, pink, and pretty, she fits in. Unlike Joe. He is just too big somehow, his frame too heavy, his breath too meaty for this room with its tinkle of rose fairy lights and white painted floorboards (scuffed now by his heavy feet) and my odd little Portobello finds—the Victorian dresses, the chipped pink-polka-dot jug—that he neither likes nor understands. It’s a girl’s room, where I used to lounge in pajamas with a pore strip on my nose and a glass of Chablis in my hand, singing along to Norah Jones. No, the house has not been adapted to coupledom, let alone family life. Not like those houses with his ’n’ her dressing gowns, double-end baths, and loos with no doors because the couple are so close they no longer require privacy to pee.

No, Joe and I row about storage. Things are that bad. True, his knicker drawer is still a cardboard box. What with my maternity clothes as well as my old clothes and Evie’s outgrown baby clothes, there is no spare drawer space. Joe keeps saying I’ve got to snap out of denial, pretending I’m a single girl who buys bric-a-brac from Portobello market on a whim. No, we are a family now. I must give in and go to Ikea.

Sometimes, in my blackest, most sleep-deprived moments, I see Joe as a trespasser. When I got pregnant he lived in a one-bedroom flat in Hackney, just off a street known locally as “murder mile.” The flat had a damp problem and a perilous unofficial roof terrace with no fencing. (He’d plowed all his inheritance into his design company and two Eames chairs.) I owned a nice two-bedroom maisonette in Kilburn—not exactly Chelsea but better than Hackney—with a newly fitted kitchen (a present to myself after a pay rise in the days when I was rewarded for hard work) and a newly decked large balcony, which my mother sweetly civilized with potted palms. I suggested he move in, had to. Joe is proud. He nodded quickly, wanting the conversation to finish as soon as possible. He wanted to be the one doing the providing. He hadn’t won the jackpot, I laughed, trying to joke away any emasculating niggles. I’d made some canny moves, sold property at the right time, inherited just enough when my dad died to make a mortgage manageable. (I should have had enough for a proper house, but Dad frittered most of it away on Las Vegas minibreaks.)

In my twentieth week of pregnancy Joe moved in, trailing his possessions—a fungus-crusted microwave, a stereo, a PlayStation, an iPod, the Eames chairs—and his clothes in a ratty old backpack he took traveling around Africa in his year off.

To my surprise, I discovered that I rather enjoyed having a man living in my house. As my bump had grown, so had my sense of vulnerability and my need to be—whisper it—
protected
. Just a little bit. And with Joe in the house I slept better. And I enjoyed the ritual of sit-down mealtimes rather than snatching at hummus and pita bread. Comfortable. Yes, I felt comfortable.

Aborting Evie was never an option. I’d done that before, in a not entirely dissimilar situation, different man. September 23, a ghoulish secret anniversary. I can’t erase that memory: lying still on that slab, legs up in stirrups, the sweet nurse who couldn’t speak English wiping away my tears with a scratchy tissue, the surgeon’s hands, cold as equipment. I didn’t expect it to hit me so hard. I believed it would be just an unpleasant rite of passage, all my friends had had them. I hadn’t expected to feel so empty afterward. Like waking up from a drugging and finding a scar where a kidney had been. I cried for five days, pretended I had an eye infection. And yet. I don’t regret it, not exactly. There will always be a question mark—how old? dark or fair?—but I don’t wish “it” were here, tugging at my breast. It was a lesson. And if I hadn’t had one abortion, perhaps Evie would have been the lesson instead.

So I knew what to do next time. Precisely nothing. Momentous calculated inaction. (I’m good at that.) It was the most significant non-thing I’ve ever done in my life. Joe held the stick up to the light, as if checking the authenticity of a bank note. “We are pregnant!” he said, eyes bright and teary. The collusive plural made me slightly uneasy. Still, I didn’t realize then that the little blue line would sever our lives in two: single girl/parent; I/we; passion/practicality. No, I thought life was going to get simpler. No more searching for “the one.” No more wondering when to window a baby into my career. And, I suppose, the eradication of the possibility that I wouldn’t find a suitable father for my child until it was too late and my eggs had shriveled like old peas and I’d turned into one of those “I forgot to have children” women featured in the
Daily Mail,
or worse, that I’d be like our friend Kate, who’s young enough but just can’t get pregnant and no one knows why.

“Breakfast!”

Thud, thud, thud.
Joe walks heavily, on his heels. The door swings open, he perches a tray perilously on the bed. The tray, covered in a rosebud print, is a present—“something useful now that you’ll finally have to be domestic”—from my mother. Joe’s breakfast, as always, is a medicinal assortment of vital nutrients. A handful of almonds, great protein, great source of vitamin E. Handful of blueberries, antioxidants. Glass of orange juice swimming with the sediment of a “Postnatal Essential Vitamin” powder that tastes as foul as that worm powder Mum used to force down me as a kid. Whole-wheat toast with jam. (My favorite, peanut butter, is strictly embargoed because of risk of passing on a nut allergy in breast milk.) A poached egg, no runny bits—salmonella, you can’t be too careful. Two fish oil capsules, sourced from nontoxic deep Arctic waters, great for DHA, improving baby’s cognition. There is an order, a symmetry, to the tray’s contents, like one of those remember-everything-on-the-tray games played at children’s parties. He never used to be this anal.

“Joe, I can’t eat all this. Really. It’s sweet of you but I’m just not that hungry.” My stomach is churning.