Afternoon, Wednesday, October 25
I am in Sainsbury’s and have forgotten how difficult everything can be with a baby. Xander never cried quite like this. The health visitor called his sleep abnormal, but Marc and I didn’t care.
“Our baby sleeps too much!” Marc said to me one night while we were lying together on our cheap IKEA bed, Xander asleep in the Moses basket just a few feet away.
We spent hours in that room, in those early days. We used to eat dinner in bed. We weren’t tired, and Xander would have tolerated sleeping downstairs with us and being carried up when we went to bed. We just enjoyed being lazy in there, together, watching television on the old TV set and eating.
“Can you imagine what a doctor would think about that for a complaint? Please help us; we’re fully rested!”
“Besides, he’s pretty fat,” I said, sitting up slightly on the bed and leaning over to look at Xander. The rings of fat around his wrists and ankles. It was warm in the bedroom, and he was naked save for a nappy.
The memories are bittersweet, these days. “Don’t worry,” a friend once said to me when I mentioned Marc’s name one too many times on a night out. “Everyone has an ex they’re still in love with.”
I had blinked, and denied it. And yet, later that night, in bed, I thought: Of course. Of course I am. But it’s too late for us, anyway, now.
Is it?
The quiet question rises inside me. But it is. I am incapable. I am incapable of telling Martha how hard the nannying is, and I am incapable of telling Marc how sorry I am about what happened between us. What a fuckup I am. Martha knows how to apologize. And Martha can cope with Layla. What’s the point of me? God, I want a glass of wine as big as my head, now. I’ll buy a fucking bottle.
Layla has cried in the ready-meal aisle of Sainsbury’s, and through all of the fruit and veg. As I reach to grab a bottle of milk in the dairy aisle, Marc texts me, just a photograph of a beautifully laid carpet.
Lovely! I reply, gritting my teeth while Layla cries as I adjust her in order to respond.
You okay? he replies immediately. It’s true it’s unlike me to send such a short, dismissive reply.
In baby hell, I send back. Lovely carpet though, really, I add. I love how a carpet can transform a room. I know I would’ve been an excellent designer; I could always select the exact right color. There’s a huge difference between oatmeal and fawn, trust me.
When I started set dressing, and back when Marc was still my husband, I would gather up my materials and go with him on his carpet-fitting days. I would sit in the room next door to the one he was fitting in, spread out my cardboard and sequins and Sellotape, and we’d chat, and he would swear at the carpet stretcher, and his bad knee.
We’d play games—listing celebrities beginning with every letter of the alphabet, or playing I spy—and he’d make me proud of him with how fastidious he was, how neat. I loved to watch the transformation take place, from bare floor to fluffy carpet. I loved the smell of it. Marc later told me it was caused by something called 4-phenylcyclohexene, which rather took the romance out of it. “No, it smells of newness and hope,” I replied, and he threw his head back with laughter.
You need to tell her no, next time, Marc types back now as I stand in the supermarket. Takes the piss.
Doesn’t it just, I reply, but say nothing further.
What else is there to say? The last thing I want is Marc getting protective, intervening, trying to fix it, as is his way.
I buy only the necessities, now, alone: milk, a reduced baguette, some hummus. I have four bottles left of Martha’s milk, so Layla will be okay. I need to get home and tidy: I cringe as I think of the house waiting for me. I have always had a tendency to let things get sinful before I tidy, enjoying the dramatic transformation even a bit of housework brings about. I’m looking forward to removing the soiled dishes piled high on the kitchen windowsill just as soon as Layla gives me a moment.
My phone rings in the car and I answer it on hands-free. Marc’s deep voice booms through the in-car system. “I can already hear her,” he says.
“Don’t, Marc,” I say.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t . . . it’s fine. Just don’t.”
“They’re taking advantage of you,” he says.
“They’re not. They’re really not. I volunteered. It’s only tonight. One night.”
“But it’s all the time, Sam,” he says.
I shrug in the car as I wait at a set of traffic lights, even though he can’t see me. “Yeah,” I say. “I know. I know it is.”
“Why is she crying so much, anyway?” he says. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s a baby,” I say. We hang up soon after that. God, I don’t need him to tell me they’re taking advantage of me. It makes it worse, not better.
We are hot when we get home, and Layla is bright red and screaming as I open the car door. It won’t open fully, and closes back onto my hip, and I clench my jaw. “Please be quiet,” I say, taking a moment to lean against the side and try to breathe. “Please, please just be quiet.”
As I scoop Layla up, I see her. My neighbor, Theresa. She’s in yoga wear. A vest top and a long-line cardigan. Leggings. Ugg boots. No doubt about it: She has been eating avocados and meditating. Straight out of a fucking rom-com.
She lifts her arm in a wave. The smile dies as she sees Layla’s bright-red screaming face.
Theresa once complained about one of the other neighbors, Sheila, who liked to cook and listen to reggae every Saturday afternoon. I liked to hear the reggae drifting through the walls, and smell the spices and the jerk chicken. Sometimes, Sheila brought leftovers round on paper plates covered in foil, and I liked that, too—like party food. She had stopped bringing Theresa leftovers, she told me, after the complaint. And she had turned her music down, too, so on Saturdays I had to strain to hear it.
“My sister’s baby,” I say, swinging Layla’s car seat. It’s weightier than I remember with Xander. How did I carry this stuff around all the time? I must have had absolute guns for biceps, like Michelle Obama, or something.
“Oh, is she struggling? Your sister?” Theresa says.
“No, no. Not really,” I say. “Her job is . . . I’m stepping in. Sorry for any crying,” I say with a grimace. “She’s not very settled. At times.”
“Why are you . . . That’s so generous,” she says.
“Yeah, well. She couldn’t find a nanny who she could just call up. You know?”
She lifts her chin and looks at me squarely. She has moaned, in the past, about me, too. About Xander and his footballs. She doesn’t much like children, is my guess, and she doesn’t want there to be a baby next door. She is one of those people who sees kids, somehow, not as volatile little humans with fat hands and short legs and tempers, but as another species entirely. “Give him a bloody break,” I have wanted to say, over and over, when she texts me: Another ball in our garden. Always full stops at the end of her sentences.
Layla has been crying for the entire conversation.
“You see?” I say with a laugh as we turn to go in, holding tightly on to the car seat, even though it is making my arm tremble. Oh well, I think bitterly. Martha’s life may be perfect, but her baby sure isn’t.
“She’s very noisy,” Theresa says. “Has she been fed?”
“Yes,” I say, testily. Does everybody—every single person—insist on treating me like a piece of shit? Like a child? A rubbish employee who needs micromanaging? I clench my jaw in rage.
As I turn to leave, I see Theresa’s eyes taking in the plates in the kitchen window, piled so high it looks as if they may fall at any moment.