The Yummy Mummy (35 page)
4 A.M. LONDON. I WAKE FROM A NIGHTMARE OF BEING
scooped out of my bed in a giant rock pool fishing net, wielded by Kate. Evie’s wailing, forehead hot as a stove. I clear the bobbles of vomit off the sheet and cradle her to my chest. Dear Evie. I spoon her pink Calpol, her second dose. She wails some more. I lie her back down but she won’t sleep, tossing her tiny head from side to side as if trying to shake something out of it. Is she really sick, like proper sick? Or did the Cornish wind just give her a cold? She must be exhausted. We got home at midnight. I am an irresponsible parent.
Now, where did Joe leave the thermometer? I scramble through old soaps and nappy cream in the airing cupboard. Nothing. Her nappy bag. Nothing. Eventually, after a thirty-minute search, I find it in the cutlery drawer. 102.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot. Then I spot a speckle of pink on her arm. A rash. Meningitis?
No!
I grab a glass tumbler, put the light on. Evie screams. A symptom? As I roll the glass over her arm the rash seems to fade. Or does it? Am I pressing too hard? Evie screams some more. Joe would know what to do. I try his mobile. Voice mail.
Evie’s wails get higher and shriller. Okay, action. I bundle Evie into her car seat, sad face screwing purple. I hardly ever drive the car. Joe always does. But he’s not here. I swivel the key in the lock. It doesn’t start. Then the car jolts forward. Evie bawls. I try to reach behind to comfort her but can’t do it while driving. It’s so fucking difficult on your own. The streets are dark, wet, and empty. I jump a red light.
St. Mary’s A&E. Other people, groaning and bleeding. A man with half his face sheared off, the white of his nose bone visible. A wailing African woman. But Evie is seen immediately. The doctors are concerned. Tests. They prick her with needles. She reaches out to me. But the nurse, a pretty Filipino nurse, holds her tight. I am rigid, cold with dread. My baby, my baby. Please don’t let my baby die. The nurse pats my arm. No worry, she says sweetly, no worry. More tests. Wait and see, Miss Crane, says the pink-eyed doctor. I wonder whether he’s washed his hands. Do I ask? Too late. Evie is plugged in to a cloak of wires, breathing monitored. It’s a little fast, they say. I can hear it now, heartbeat like galloping horses. She whimpers and I hold her tiny fat hand. I make a pact with God, just in case there is one.
7 A.M. I have begun to hallucinate with tiredness. The lights and beeps of Evie’s cot are a soundtrack to the slide show in my head, a slide show of me and Joe having sex on the sofa to MTV, the afternoon we conceived Evie. Then, hospital. A white theater. Chris Rea on the radio. (This upset me, my “birth plan”—that fiction—had stated Johnny Cash.) Smell of rubber gloves and cheap disinfectant. Me, wired to machines, beeping like a car crash victim. The euphoria of the epidural, as the pain leaves my body with an upward whoosh like the soul of a dying man. A green sheet, a windbreaker, hiding my lower body. Surgeon rummaging in my stomach. Rising panic. Joe holding my hand tight. Joe whispering into my ear, I love you so much, Amy. You’re doing so well. But I’m not doing anything, a powerless, carved-up lump. Then Joe’s eyes and mouth O. An angry kitten sound. Lifted from behind the green sheet is a teeny baby covered in white gloopy stuff, like bacon fat. She hasn’t got a willy. She roars. The nurse puts her on my chest. She weighs nothing. Joe is crying, beaming. I smell my baby—metallic, interesting—and wait for that huge foamy wave of maternal love to crash all over me like it says in the books. But it doesn’t.
“Miss Crane? It’s the doctor.” I crack open my eyes, feeling like I’ve been out raving all night on bad drugs. The doctor is new, looks about twenty-three. I didn’t see him last night. I don’t recognize the nurses either. Where is the nice Filipino one? No familiar point of reference now that the cold gray dawn flaps the stained curtains. But the doctor has good news. The doctor says Evie has a nasty virus. I was right to bring her in. But the rash has gone. Her temperature has dropped. Evie can go home. Keep her cool. Lots of fluids. Come back if she deteriorates.
I thank the doctor profusely. He smiles briskly and moves on quickly in squeaky shoes. And I ache for Joe in a way that I’ve never ached for another human being. The longing for him is so intense I can hardly walk, but I just manage to shuffle one foot in front of the other, soles tingling, dizzy and weightless like I’m standing on a cliff edge, about to fall. We get to the car.
I have a parking ticket.
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT THINGS COULD ONLY GET WORSE, I
wake up feeling a tiny bit better. The disaster movie was rather well directed in the end. I drove the car and parked it without scaling the curb, albeit in the wrong place. Most important, Evie is fine, the virus departing as quickly as it came. (Does this mean I must honor the pact? Visit Grandma in Harrow every week, swap PR job to work as terminally ill children’s care assistant?) Okay, the Polzeath fiasco was anticlimactic. But I went, rather than sitting around and thinking about it.
I also awoke this morning inhabited by an unfamiliar feeling, a strange clarity. It took me a while to put my finger on it. Then I realized: I am not exhausted. Evie has slept through for the last two nights. This is without precedent. No 3 A.M. singing for milk. No 5 A.M. disco whooping. Not a pipsqueak. Consequently, for the first time in months, I’m reasonably well rested. My mood has palpably shifted. The world is a brighter place. My eyes seem less shortsighted. The smudgy muddle has gone.
I feel ready to embrace parenthood wholly, no hunkering over the past, for the single life that was. And I know—for the first time ever, perhaps—what I really want; ironically, considering I can’t get it. I want Joe. And the kind of happy family unit that disappeared from my life at age nine. Okay, I still wouldn’t mind Kylie’s bottom, but it’s slipped a few notches on the priority list. No more miserable cellulite-gazing. No more self-pity. I am just so bloody grateful to have Evie throwing her porridge on the kitchen floor.
I roll the mulch of oats up with paper towels. There is a busy ecosystem growing beneath the kitchen units: hard twists of pasta, shriveled peas, coins, sachets of Calpol. Must be where Alice dropped her handbag. And what’s this? A blister pack of pills. Painkillers? Handy. I blindly slide them into my bag.
Half an hour later we’re out of the house, no one dragging me, no harebrain action plan. Just me and Evie, regular mother and daughter, pram ticking north, walking out into our cool city, my head held high, agoraphobia lifted like a lid. Needing to return to my ground zero, after a long walk I eventually push past the Nash buildings, through the horse chestnuts, into Regent’s Park.
The black water shines like a polished granite kitchen worktop. Ducks and geese paddle toward us fearlessly, impatient for crusts of the morning’s toast.
“Ack ack ack!” shrieks Evie, arms waving in evangelical rapture.
An old lady smelling faintly of talc and damp tweed creaks past. She stops, gazes at Evie and, without introduction, stoops down to stroke Evie’s cheek with a nostalgic smile. Then she creaks on. Did she once come here as a young mother? Perhaps her own mother, now inevitably long dead, brought her to the ponds. You forget that old people had young mums, too. Does she still miss her? How terrible that all mothers and children are separated by death eventually. That we have such a short time to get it right.
“I’m not going to give up, Evie.”
“Ack ack ack!” Evie points at an exotic red-legged duck waddling toward the willow-shaded benches.
“Ah, I thought it began there . . . ,” I say, following her finger to the little blue bridge where I once stood, gourd-shaped and brokenhearted, past and present cracked in two. To the path where I once ran, panting and humiliated, off into a future I’d dreaded, always expected.
“But it began here.” I twizzle my finger against my head.
Evie looks at me like I’m making perfect sense. “Ack ack ack.” I lift her out of the pram and rain kisses on her ears and nose and eyebrows, feeling a little more like the Amy who climbed that little bridge, not the one who descended it. She’s been a devil to find. Because she wasn’t scrunched like tissue paper into the toe of a designer shoe. Nor was she in a gap between the thighs. No, I realize now, I found her in my past, huddled, scared, like a child in a locked cupboard. And it was the birth of Evie that forced her, wailing and shivering, out into the world, and brought all my issues to the surface. I thought motherhood was the end of me but it was just the beginning.
Shame I couldn’t have learned all that without pan-frying my relationship.
But that’s life. That’s what I’ll tell Evie when she’s older. To misquote John Lennon, it’s what happens to you when you’re busy worrying about other things. I will contain my sadness now, dear Evie, move on, give you the best start possible, nuclear family or not. No more eating out of baked bean cans.
Evie pats my nose with popelike slow solemnity, as if registering the promise. Suddenly, the Regent’s Park mosque erupts in a call to prayer. And the greige sky that’s hung over London like a wood-chip ceiling for days splices and splits and sunshine pours over us, making the water dance. Eyes shut, relishing the unexpected warmth, we instinctively turn our heads toward the light.
“ARGH! AMY!” NICOLA SCREAMS, PULLING ME THROUGH
her front door and into a rib-cracking hug. “I didn’t think you’d actually come! I’ve been so worried about you.” She holds me by the shoulders and stands back, alarmed. “Oh God, you are all skin and bone. You look awful.”
“Thanks. But the good news is that my appetite’s boomeranged back. I am starving.”
“Thank God, thank God. . . .” Nicola ushers me into her kitchen and sits me down at the sticky kitchen table and brings plates of cake, crumpets, and pretzels. We talk about wild-goose chases along windswept Cornish beaches and hospitals and boyfriends while Evie and Thomas develop their immunity on Nicola’s kitchen floor. I eat up her laughter and company as hungrily as the food. Two hours feels like five minutes. The day, noticeably shorter now, is beginning to darken. I’m thinking about leaving, when Nicola bends double.
“Ow, period pains,” she says. “Worse than ever. We were told they’d get better after having a baby. Another lie!”
Glad to be the one offering help for a change, I pick Alice’s pills out of my handbag, hand them over. “These should do the trick.”
Nicola flicks the pack in her fingers. “Where did you get these?”
“Alice left them.”
She slides them over the table. “They’re not painkillers,” says Nicola, matter-of-factly. “You really do need glasses. Read the pack, Amy. Prozac.”
“Prozac? No way, not Alice!”
Nicola huffs. “I don’t know why you’re shocked. Mother’s little helpers, Amy. Doctors give them out like free contraceptives to weepy postnatal mums. They don’t interfere with breast-feeding and the like. My sister took them.”
“Alice is not exactly a new mum. Nor is she weepy.”
“The drugs do work.”
“I just don’t get it.”
Nicola laughs. “I bet all her gang rattle when they walk. She’s exactly the kind of woman who would freak out after having a baby. You know, fully in control of her life, then it’s all lost in a splatter of shit and screams and vomit.”
“Sounds like me.”
“You didn’t freak. You just had a tricky start. More cake? Don’t worry, I didn’t bake it. I buy, now I’m working.”
“Go on, then,” I say. Nicola dumps another slab of chocolate cake on my plate. “Well, if these pills can turn a lump of misery into five foot eight of shining social confidence, maybe I should give them a whirl.”
“No way!” Nicola says. “The world doesn’t need any more glass-half-full people. Besides, you’d miss being in touch with your miserable-sod side. I know I would.” She bends down and swipes Thomas up just as he attempts to fork the plug socket. “What’s the time? We better go.”
“Go? Where?”
“Oliver’s party! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
“Haven’t been paying much attention to anything other than my own navel recently.”
“Well, you’re coming.” Nicola starts packing Thomas’s nappy bag. “You can’t hide away any longer.”
“Oh, er . . .” This trip to Nicola’s was monumental enough. “Really, I’m . . .” Nicola picks up my handbag. “Do I have to?” Nicola nods. “Okay, okay, if you promise to rescue me if the inquisition gets too heavy and Hermione starts regaling me about that cashmere bootie company. . . .”
“And the scones. Are you in an emotionally fit state to stomach the scones?”
“As long as they don’t come with Cornish clotted cream. That might make me regress.” I laugh, not because anything’s funny exactly— I still ache for Joe—but more as a release.
Nicola grabs my hand and squeezes it. “Well done.”
“What?”
“Pulling yourself up by your old bra straps. It’s so good to hear you laugh again.”
ONE TRAINER ON SUE’S DOORSTEP, ONE ON THE PAVEDPATH
. I can’t do this.
Will be good for Evie
. Can’t do this.
I need to start getting out more, no more moping
. Can’t face the pity.
Mum said
. . . Both feet on the path. Stern look from Nicola.
The door opens. Sue is wearing a fireman’s hat made out of red cardboard. She kisses Nicola normally then swivels stage left and with a loud wet sigh pulls me into her gristly bosom. “How
are
you?” she gasps.
“Fine, better than would be expected.”
“It’s all right, you don’t need to be brave around me, poor thing.” Sue tries to collude Nicola in a Look. But fails. “This will cheer you up.” Sue shoves black triangular paper pirate hats on our heads. “Come in, me hearties!”
Balloons bang into our faces, twirls of candy-colored paper catch in the mouth. The sitting room is a riot of screaming babies, cupcakes, and exposed nipples. Nicola is immediately pulled aside by Hermione and I’m left wondering who to talk to.
“Alan!” Sue calls out to a blond man bouncing a grizzling Oliver on his corduroy-clad knee. “Amy, Alan, my husband.”