It was slowly getting worse. Eleanor could almost manage it, as long as she planned enough time away from the house. She was out for ten hours on Tuesday to Friday, a shot in the arm that left her just sturdy enough to get through the evening and the night. Weekends were more difficult, but she was strategic, making sure the stretches inside were not too long, or at least punctuated by a walk to the park or a trip to the shop. If she was desperate, she stood in the doorway to the garden, even though she and Richard had both decided it was too dangerous to have it open in case the children attempted the steep, rickety staircase down to the lawn, which he promised to have replaced by spring. More often she found herself drawn to the front of the house, away.
Just when she thought she had it under control, something would go wrong. It would rain, Isobel wouldn’t stop crying, Rosie would be furious about her coat. She’d be trapped, and then it would erupt suddenly: thick black liquid crashing at the sides of her head as she threw up in the wastepaper basket.
They had a weekend in Oxfordshire planned to celebrate Richard’s birthday and Eleanor used that as sustenance, fantasizing about an entire night within a different set of walls. She imagined them driving there, the distance between herself and the house slowly expanding. She felt she could breathe more easily. They would go to Richard’s parents for a few days over Christmas and their best friends were getting married in the new year – any pleasure she took in the idea was now overtaken by the excitement at the prospect of another night away.
*
Mondays, her day with the children, were truly difficult. Rosie and Isobel confined her to the same small trail of coffee shops and parks surrounding the house, always calling her back with their demands or quirks. She had felt this before of course, but never particularly minded it; sometimes even enjoyed the less dynamic way of life. Now, she felt tethered.
The Monday before they went away, she argued with Rosie on the bus. Rosie wanted her to pretend to drive the bus, but it was crowded and Eleanor felt self-conscious, so she said not now; Rosie demanded and Eleanor refused. She tried to distract her but Rosie was tenacious and it went on and on. Why hadn’t she just pretended to drive the bus? But they were struggling for something else now: Rosie had been wilful and aggressive all morning – ice cream now; do real drinking, not pretend drinking; not that cup; draw a curly-wurly, that’s not a curly-wurly – and Eleanor was finally, pointlessly, resisting. Rosie was becoming anguished, on the verge of screaming, and Eleanor felt a familiar compressed nub of shame and panic that drummed at her sides.
She didn’t know why she was finding it so difficult. Feeling ill must be something to do with it – a headache and being sick made everything harder. She couldn’t remember when Rosie’s tantrums had started, but they seemed to have increased dramatically, in volume and intensity, since the move. Eleanor found it impossible to explain how shocking and draining she found it. When she tried to talk to Richard about it, the words turned light and insubstantial as soon as they left her mouth, just as they did when she mentioned it to friends or other mothers. She could only bring herself to talk about it in a jokey way, and everyone responded accordingly, jolly and dismissive. It was a phase. Rosie would grow out of it.
She was so embarrassed, she wanted to get off the bus immediately, but didn’t think Rosie would manage the walk. She made herself wait until they were two stops from home, but Rosie refused to get off and it was a few minutes before Eleanor managed to get her out of the doors with the buggy. She told herself that all children had tantrums; that it was normal. Struggling to keep hold of Rosie’s hand, terrified she was going to go wild and run out into the road, it didn’t feel normal at all.
Rosie had been a sweet, easy baby and a sweet little girl. At two, she had had a perfectly triangular chin and large eyes and matted hair and Eleanor knew she was enchanting, to strangers as well as those who loved her. She was naturally extroverted, which Eleanor admired, but found puzzling – it was so unlike her or Richard. Rosie would wander around tables in cafes and steal people’s straws and hand lumps of sugar to them. When Eleanor swooped in apologetically, she saw people crane towards Rosie, real delight on their faces.
She was now nearly three and a half. Her hair was darker and her face had become paler and more serious. In some ways, Eleanor loved the way she looked even more: she looked less like a child in an advert and more like Rosie. But she was different in other ways too. The move had made her inconsolable: she cried when Eleanor put her toys in boxes and at the sight of her bedroom without any furniture in it. When she saw the movers load Isobel’s cot into a van, she screamed and wet herself. Eleanor waited for her to settle down in Litchfield Road, but sometimes she was afraid something had permanently altered. In the new house, Rosie was belligerent, hostile, fierce.
Eleanor dragged Rosie down the street, while she howled and screamed; Isobel had woken up and was crying too. Eleanor thought of all the things she could have done differently, how she could have avoided this. It was her own reaction she found the most disturbing. Why hadn’t she just done what she was asked? Not because it was a strategy or she believed it was the best thing for Rosie, but because she couldn’t bear to. She had instinctively wanted to assert herself. There was something mutinous and egotistical rising up in her and she didn’t particularly like it.
Eleanor had never thought she was stubborn or self-important; that was not how she saw herself. Everyone talked about motherhood as a great change, and she had changed – of course she had – but privately, she feared that she hadn’t changed enough. She desperately wanted to be calmer, more self-effacing, more accommodating – all the things that mothers were supposed to be. She didn’t feel like a mother; she felt like a person with a child, and it frightened her. She began to wonder if this had always been true. Perhaps she had just been lucky that Rosie and Isobel were easy and she could bury her incompetence, a grave, miserable secret. Now things had got difficult and she was being exposed.
*
Rosie was calmer when she got home, but Eleanor’s nerves were still frayed and she felt a sharp surge of irritation when she opened the door and saw Zoe had left her bicycle too close to it: there wasn’t enough space to get the buggy in. She left Isobel on the step and wheeled the bicycle forward. Gripping the handles, she felt a disturbed kind of envy. She remembered cycling to work, flying through London, as close to weightlessness as she’d ever come. Zoe’s bicycle felt light and graceful in her hands, like an animal.
‘I can’t cycle now I’m a mum,’ someone at work had said to her when she was pregnant with Rosie. ‘Maybe dads can, but I just feel I owe it to my kids to stay alive.’ This had never occurred to Eleanor, and she tucked it away, while she observed how other mothers behaved. Her colleague was right, it turned out, and she was grateful that someone had alerted her to it: mothers don’t cycle. She hadn’t minded, hardly registering the moment when she decided it was silly to have her bike taking up space if she never used it and that she should get rid of it. She propped Zoe’s bike by the radiator and tried to shake off her feelings as she went back outside to get the buggy.
Later that afternoon, it started to rain. Eleanor had been counting on another trip out towards the end of the day, but when she heard the gentle tapping at the window, she felt real dread. Within a few minutes, the windows were rattling and draughts were coming through the cracks. They were marooned.
She was in the children’s bedroom. Zoe had got home half an hour ago and Rosie was still volatile; she didn’t want to risk Zoe overhearing another tantrum. The nausea was getting worse; she wondered if she was going to be sick. It would only be an hour and a half until Richard got back – as soon as he was home, she would fake a need for something from the shops and walk up to London Fields. She thought, longingly, about the weekend away.
She was trying to play shops with Rosie, while Isobel pottered around the room. Isobel seemed curiously attracted to picking up anything that might cause her harm and Eleanor was constantly having to get up and stop her. Every time she turned her attention away from the game, Rosie became furious. ‘Play properly, Mummy!’
‘One second, Rosie, be patient,’ she was saying, just as Rosie sank her teeth into her arm. She was stunned: by the speed, the pain, the viciousness. When she managed to say something, her voice was loud and sharp and didn’t sound like her own.
‘Rosie, no! That’s very bad – no biting!’
Rosie looked at her. Eleanor’s arm was throbbing. She managed to speak more quietly but her voice was still strange.
‘No biting, Rosie. We don’t bite people. Say sorry.’
‘No!’
Eleanor felt shaky and her eyes were swimming and she wondered again whether there was any point in arguing about it. Isobel started to cry and she tried to bounce and soothe her, unable to really give it her full attention. Rosie unexpectedly gave in.
‘Sorry, Mummy.’
‘That’s OK, Rosie. Can I have a hug?’
She put Isobel down and held Rosie’s small body in her arms, while Isobel sat on the floor and cried. Then she tried to continue hugging Rosie, while freeing one arm to dangle a garish green toy in front of Isobel’s face: it had a bell and bits of plastic attached and it clicked and jingled in a way that temporarily seemed to help. Rosie pressed her fingers curiously on Eleanor’s arm, on the mark her bite had left: an angry ring of red parentheses.
‘Mummy’s owie,’ she said. Eleanor smiled gratefully.
‘Yes, that’s right! Mummy’s owie.’
‘Poor Mummy.’
‘Yes, poor Mummy, but it’s all right now.’
‘Kiss it better?’
‘Yes, OK, kiss it better.’
Rosie bent down and kissed it. Eleanor felt one of those strange unexpected surges of joy at the feeling of Rosie’s clammy lips on her skin. Then Rosie bit her again even harder, and recoiled, with an expression on her face as though she knew she’d done the wrong thing and it delighted her. Eleanor didn’t recognize her daughter at all. She heard herself scream – thin and high-pitched – and then she burst into tears.
*
She was still agitated when Richard came back. Rosie ran downstairs and flung herself at him, shouting ‘Daddy!’ Eleanor followed her as fast as she could, carrying Isobel.
Richard held Rosie in the air. ‘Hey, Rosie-posie! Have you had a good day?’
Eleanor stared at him, thinking that her distress must be imprinted on her face, that he would notice and ask how she was. But he was tickling Rosie, while she shrieked.
‘Richard, Rosie bit me,’ she said.
‘What?’
She remembered Zoe and motioned for him to go into the kitchen. She hoped Zoe hadn’t heard any of the noise from upstairs.
‘Rosie bit me,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh, Rosie, you’re a cheeky monkey, aren’t you? You bit Mummy?’
‘She can’t go round biting people!’
‘No, you’re right. Mummy’s right. No biting, OK, Rosie? We don’t bite people.’ He put her down and got a glass out of the cupboard. He looked at Eleanor properly for the first time.
‘Eleanor, what’s wrong? I know it’s not good, but she’s only little. I’m sure it’s just normal toddler behaviour. I don’t think you should make too much of a big deal about it, otherwise she’ll start doing it for attention.’ He nodded at Rosie. ‘It’s six thirty. Shouldn’t we start doing their tea?’
‘I think I need to get something from the shop first. Can you watch them for a sec? Sorry, I know you’ve only just got in.’
‘Eleanor, it’s pouring, you’ll get soaked!’ he called after her as she grappled frantically with her mac in the hall cupboard. ‘We must be able to do something with what we’ve got in the fridge.’
‘Sorry, sorry!’ she said, slamming the door behind her. She started running down the street, knowing she was going to be sick, not wanting any of the neighbours to see. She reached the dark, empty expanse of London Fields and vomited by the railings. Someone stopped and asked if they could help her and she said she was fine, horrified by the mess she’d made on the pavement, feeling too disgraceful to accept help.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Food poisoning,’ she said, so they didn’t think she was drunk, and they walked on.
Her hood had fallen back and wet hair plastered her face. The rain felt like medicine. She tipped her face upwards, as if to get as close to the sky as possible.
Later, after she’d put Rosie and Isobel to bed, she consulted the internet. Biting was perfectly normal, a phase, but she’d handled it badly, of course. She had made a fuss and that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. She should have resisted the urge to cry out or get angry. Used positive words and a positive tone of voice. Distraction. Star charts. Hand puppets to demonstrate kind behaviour. The website acknowledged that it could be very painful, being hit, kicked, punched or bitten, but she should try to conceal the agony. She sat at her computer and cried.
*
The next day, the stones started. Eleanor was taking Rosie and Isobel to nursery, navigating the buggy out of the narrow doorway. Rosie was clutching her juice carton and howling, ‘I don’t want it!’
‘Well, give it to me then, Rosie, you don’t have to have it.’ Eleanor held out her hand.
Rosie cried louder and held on to the carton even tighter. ‘I don’t want it!’
Eleanor sighed, as she made her way down the steps. ‘What is it you don’t want, Rosie?’
There, at the bottom, were six pebbles, lined up in size order, deliberately placed.
‘I want you to go away! I hate you!’ Even though Eleanor was becoming used to this, it still cut her, somewhere. She didn’t have time to think about why the stones were there or what they might mean. She kicked them to the side before manoeuvring the buggy out into the street.
Two days later, they were there again. Rosie was calmer, and Eleanor noticed how strange it was, how carefully they had been lined up. She didn’t have a free hand, so she pushed them away with her foot. The next time they appeared, she let go of Rosie’s hand and bent down. ‘Stay there, Rosie! Just one second!’ Half afraid to touch them, she made herself pick them up and put them out on the street.
The next day, when she saw them, she put them in her pocket, carried them to nursery with her and after she had dropped the children off, put them in a bin three streets away.
Richard told her it was probably kids messing around. She couldn’t quite believe him, but it was another thing she had to learn to live with, along with the headache and the biting and the feeling of not quite being there. She let them accumulate, these discomforts, because she didn’t know what else to do.