Look what you made me do, little bitch.
Soma woke up with a cry. In her nightmare, she was pinned to the floor by a dark shape. She lay still, rigid with fear, too afraid to open her eyes in case he was still there. The waking day filtered into her mind. Something was pressing down on her face. Something big, but not heavy and stale as she’d feared. She couldn’t smell him. In fact, it smelled nice in this dark place she didn’t recognize. Holding her breath, she listened. There were noises, clinks and gurgles. Somewhere she could hear voices. Recognition of where she was came all at once. In England. The thing on top of her was the duvet. She had somehow got it over her head. Excitement and fear tussled it out, making her feel ill. She opened her eyes and cautiously pushed her head out from under the bedcovers. The light, which she had left on when she went to sleep, illuminated her tidy little room. It was still cosy and bright and safe. She sat up and hugged her knees.
My name is Soma. She had to remember she was called Soma now. If she failed to respond to her name, Madam would suspect something. It was important that Madam didn’t suspect anything. The best way to achieve that was to be as quiet and inoffensive as possible. That went with being Soma. She had to do whatever Madam said and do it well.
Hard work wasn’t a problem. She had been working at the garment factory since she was fifteen. A sudden pang of sorrow for what could have been surprised her. It could have all been so different. Teenaged Jaya had had a plan. She was going to save up her wages from working at the factory. Maybe she could have met someone. Maybe that young security guard who always smiled at her when she clocked in at work?
She shook her head and the strange lack of weight made her reach up. Her scalp was covered in a thick layer of bristles. Her hair. Her beautiful hair that made her look like the woman in the shampoo commercial. Suddenly, her eyes were full of tears. She could never go back. That man had taken it all away. There had to be a new plan now. And that involved being Soma. Jaya and her ruined life had to be shut away and forgotten. It was the only way.
She brushed the tears off her face and once again her fingertips touched the places where her hair used to be. No. She would never be the same person again. Maybe, if she tried, she could be someone luckier.
Sliding out of bed, she looked for another layer to put on. Footsteps came up the stairs. She froze.
Someone knocked on the door, a smart, impatient rap. Soma hurried to the door, removed the chair from where she’d wedged it, and opened the door. Madam was outside the door, fully dressed. Soma felt a stab of alarm. Was she supposed to have been up and ready?
‘I’m going to take Louie out for a few hours,’ said Madam. ‘I wanted to say, you can relax and get to know the place, if you want.’
Relieved, Soma opened the door a bit more until it caught on the chair. Madam peered in and frowned. ‘Did you put the chair against the door?’
‘Sorry Madam. I…’
Madam held up her hand. ‘Don’t apologize. It’s okay.’ She examined the door frame. ‘We’ll get a latch put on this door for you. You should feel safe in this room.’ She glanced back at Soma. ‘I’ll ask my cousin to come and put the latch in. Until then, you can wedge the chair under the door if that makes you feel safer.’
A small knot unravelled in Soma’s chest. A room she could lock. What a kind lady this Madam was. ‘Thank you, Madam.’
‘Now, the rooms on the floor below are out of bounds,’ Madam carried on. ‘But you are free to go anywhere else in the house. There will be no one here for the next few hours. Have a look around.’
A wail rang up the stairwell.
Madam clicked her tongue. ‘Coming, Louie,’ she called, over her shoulder. ‘I’ll be back in a few hours. After lunch, I’ll take you to the shops. You’ll need to buy some warm clothes.’ With that, she turned and disappeared down the stairs.
Soma listened as mother and baby left the house, slamming the door shut behind them. After that, she stood still, her cheek resting against the side of the door, and listened to the house gurgle and creak. She had heard of houses that made noises like that. Her own home had no plumbing. There were no pipes to hum, no wood to creak. How did people sleep when the house itself made so much noise?
After a while, she got dressed. She was so cold, she put on all the clothes she had, then, as she warmed up, took a couple of layers off. Finally, dressed in leggings, t-shirt, a dress, a jumper and a cardigan, she went in search of breakfast.
There were all manner of things in the kitchen. The only foods she actually recognized were bread and bananas. So she had a few slices of bread with butter. She bit into a banana and almost spat it out with disgust. Those weren’t bananas. Funny looking plantains, maybe, but they weren’t any sort of banana she recognized. Because she knew better than to waste food, she ate the horrible, pasty thing anyway.
She walked through the house. Everything looked and smelled impossibly exotic, from the soft carpet underfoot to the funny contraptions that plugged into the wall and made the place smell of cinnamon. In the sitting room downstairs, she found a TV and DVDs. She wondered if she was allowed to watch TV. The thing the Gamages owned was enormous and flat, completely unlike the small TV at the shop that she and her mother went to watch the tele dramas on. Soma looked behind it. It was a screen without the back bit. Incredible.
Yamuna took Louie to meet his NCT contemporaries. These mid-morning meet ups usually took place in coffee shops on Princes Avenue, and were the only mother and baby things she could bear. She had tried all the others – bounce and rhyme, messy play, whatever, but Louie was such a grumpy baby that she’d stopped. This group, well this was different. At least they’d met her before she’d had a baby. They might see her as something more than the shadow that pushed the pram.
A couple of the others were already there, their happy, chuckling babies on their laps. Bugger. It was the two yummy mummies. They’d both found time to do their hair and make-up and they looked positively glamorous. Ugh. Yamuna, took a deep breath and strode towards them.
It had been fine when they were all hugely pregnant and sharing their fears. Most of the women were younger than Yamuna by nearly a decade, but that hadn’t mattered so much when they all had huge bumps, interrupted careers and impending motherhood in common. Then the first babies showed up and there was all the talk about the amazing experience and the trials of breastfeeding. Not all babies took to it. Louie, for example, refused to latch on properly, making the whole process agonising. In the end, Yamuna had given up and put Louie on the bottle. While it worked well for Louie, it was another mark of her failure as a mother.
She greeted the others and made the obligatory admiring noises at the babies. ‘Louie’s asleep,’ she said apologetically. ‘I might go grab a cup of coffee before he wakes up.’
‘Oh sure. We’ll watch him for you,’ said one of the mums, looking up from waving a toy at her daughter.
Yamuna hurried to the queue and ordered herself a strong coffee and a slice of cake. If Louie stayed asleep, she might even get to drink her coffee this time. She didn’t really have to concentrate on the conversation, just ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and let the other two talk about homeopathy and baby yoga or whatever else the superbabies were doing this month. The moment she sat down, Louie let out a teeth-jarring screech.
‘I guess he’s awake,’ she said.
The others rolled their eyes and laughed in sympathy. As though their perfect babies did that sort of thing too.
In the few seconds it took for Yamuna to get Louie out of the pram, he had got everyone’s attention. She liberated him from the blankets and joggled him on her hip. He wasn’t due for a feed, so she checked his nappy. Nope. His wailing paused for a moment while he had a look around.
‘Let’s go meet your little friends,’ she said. ‘Won’t that be nice?’
Louie’s improved mood lasted all of three minutes before he started up again. People looked up from their coffees. Even the other two babies gave them funny looks. In the end, Yamuna fumbled around in the changing bag and got out a bottle of milk to shut him up.
‘Ah, he was hungry,’ said one of the other mothers. She was under thirty years old and had managed to shrink back to more or less her original size within a couple of weeks. Yamuna still wore maternity tops with jeans.
‘He’s always hungry these days,’ said Yamuna. ‘I’m wondering about weaning him.’
‘Oh, you can’t wean him until he’s six months. Anyway, I thought bottle-fed babies got fuller than breastfed ones.’
Was that a dig about the bottle-feeding? Yamuna gave the woman a quick glance, but couldn’t tell.
‘Are we the only ones coming today?’ said the other one.
‘I think so. There are fewer and fewer of us, these days,’ said the first, raising her eyes heavenwards.
‘I won’t be able to come from next week,’ said Yamuna. She shifted Louie a little, so that she could catch a dribble of milk that escaped from the corner of his mouth. ‘I’m going back to work.’
The news was met by a studied silence. Then, ‘Wow. That’s soon. Is the maternity provision at your work really bad?’
‘Not really, I…’ Her employer actually had an excellent maternity policy, but Yamuna couldn’t wait to get back to being a functioning human being. She was a rubbish mother, she knew that. At least at work, she was a competent scientist. It would be a relief to be good at something for a short while each day. ‘I thought it was best to go back. You know… professionally.’
The other women nodded. ‘It’s a fair point,’ said one. ‘I’d go back to work, but by the time I’ve paid for childcare, I’d be making a loss.’
‘What are you doing for childcare? Did you find him a nice nursery?’
‘We’re hiring a nanny.’ Au pair, nanny, all good descriptions, but none really covered the frightened girl that she’d picked up from the airport the day before. ‘She seems good with Louie, so far.’ At least that was something.
‘Oh, lucky you! I wish we could hire a nanny!’
Yamuna said nothing. She’d left Soma sleeping off her jet lag. The girl was young, she would recover from her flight in a day or so and then she and Louie could get to know each other better.
Louie had finished his bottle and was lying with a thoughtful expression on his face. Which probably meant he was planning to fill his nappy. Yamuna reached over to take a sip of her coffee. It had cooled down to tepid. She picked up the cake and lifted it to her mouth.
Louie’s bottom made a series of popping noises. The smell rose from him almost instantly. Yamuna put her cake back down uneaten and reached for the changing bag. As she stood up, Louie began to howl again, and people turned to look at them. Yamuna wished she was somewhere, anywhere, else.