Dead Lovely (3 page)

At first I thought it was the baby blues. I’d heard that on day three (when your tits transform into granite boulders capable of hitting innocent passers-by with shots of warm milk), you can get a little teary. This is the perfectly normal baby blues. So when I cried because the breakfast lady had no apricot jam, I didn’t panic. This was the baby blues. Perfectly normal.

But on day four I cried because no matter how hard I tried I could not find my pelvic floor muscles. On day five I cried because I was beginning to face up to the fact that one day I would have to do a poo. On day six I cried when I did the poo and on day seven I cried at a Cornflakes ad on the telly. On day eight I cried when I went home with my
slightly-less-
yellow child. He’d had jaundice, which had made him very yellow and meant we couldn’t go home till day eight.

In the third week I cried every time my mum came over because I felt like I was the stupidest and worst mother in the history of the world.

‘Maybe you’re depressed? It’s quite common,’ she whispered nervously on one occasion.

I was holding Robbie against my rigid, tense nipple and grinding my teeth at the time. ‘You go have a nap,’ she ventured, watching Robbie wail as he tried to extract juice from my brick. ‘Then
afterwards
, maybe we could ring the health visitor, or Kyle, together?’

‘I’m fine,’ I snapped.

She didn’t give up, bless her. She left pamphlets about postnatal depression on side tables. (I threw them out.)

She got Kyle and Sarah to visit me. (I talked about the weather.)

She just happened to show up at the same time as the health visitor. (I talked about the weather, which was fine, like me.)

I was always ‘fine, fine, fucking fine!’ God, if I wasn’t fine, then what kind of woman was I? The kind that’s a failure. The kind that doesn’t deserve to be a mother.

When all else failed, she and Dad took Robbie and I to Italy for some rest and relaxation. I have never found anything so stressful in my life – filling in Robbie’s passport application form without
touching
box-edges; holding him up in a photo booth so he
was the right size, shape, colour; finding decent
law-abiding
citizens to verify his identity on the back of the photos; standing in an emergency passport queue somewhere in town while he howled; packing clothes for two not one – nappies and wipes and things I’d never had to pack before; standing in airport queues with my parents, who could not
disguise
their worried faces.

We stayed in a five-star hotel with a pool and an award-winning restaurant that overlooked the
breathtaking
Lake Como.

It was awful and I was awful. I argued with the hotel manager about the air-conditioning, with the bus driver for not helping me up with the pram, and with Mum and Dad about everything else. It was the
opposite
of rest and relaxation.

After we got back from Italy, I took Mum’s advice and decided to invite my antenatal friends over. We were all around the same age, we’d all had jobs and lives, and being together had been a real giggle during our pregnancies.

But when they arrived it felt to me as if
something
weird had happened to them since they’d given birth. They were not only
not
a giggle, they seemed to have changed into competitive witches.

‘I’d never let him sleep in the bed with me!’ said one of the mums.

‘The trick is don’t let them get away with it,’ said another.

‘At six weeks most of them sleep through, although my Zara is already sleeping all night.’

‘You’re very highly strung, aren’t you, Krissie?’

Worse still, they moaned on and on about their men, smugly oblivious to the fact I’d have given
anything
to have another adult in the house to talk to, to share the burden with, to love.

But their men were apparently all useless lumps of lard who:

Followed them around the house trying to get it, but they were not going to get it, oh no.

Did not seem to understand that evening pints down the road were a thing of the past.

Needed management, because they have no idea, honestly …

Poor bastards. If I’d had a man to share nappies and arguments with, I was sure I’d be the
anti-stereotype:
grateful, loving, easy-ozy, and willing to give it, oh yes.

They left just in time, because if they had stayed any longer I would have screamed even louder than their perfect, cretinous babies.

Mum was probably right about the postnatal
depression,
but I couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything for the black cloud that had suddenly fogged my world.

Six weeks came and went and there was no sign
of Robbie sleeping through. I’d go to bed and pray that he would, but he never did, and so neither did I. Instead I entered the dark hole of sleep-
deprivation-psychosis
where everything is dreich and miserable and pointless, even chocolate.

My morning routine had changed from Lavazza and bath, both frothed, bright GMTV tidbits before leisurely stroll through architecturally exciting streets with trees, to dealing with crying peeing shitting leaking eating messing dressing messing and redressing.

Zara’s mum – we no longer had names, we
antenatal
women, we were ‘Zara’s mum’ or ‘Beth’s mum’ or ‘Robbie’s mum’ – Zara’s mum phoned at this point and said not to worry if Robbie wasn’t sleeping well, because three months would definitely be a real turning point. Most of them ‘give back’ at three months and everything falls into place she assured me.

At six months Robbie still did not give back, and I realised I didn’t even know what ‘giving back’ meant. I rang Zara’s mum to tell her this and she said, ‘Well at nine months things will be a lot better.’

‘I don’t believe you!’ I said. ‘You’ve lied to me twice already!’

When she suggested I really should talk to someone, I said, ‘That’s what I’m doing, I’m talking to
you
, but what’s the use in talking to you if you’re just going to lie to me?’

She hung up.

After another month of this I decided to go back to work and absolve myself of daytime responsibility. My increasingly anxious parents supported this
decision
and were happy to help out with Robbie, who they’d well and truly fallen in love with.

Each morning when I arrived Mum and Dad would open the door and give me a hug, clearly worried about me, but not wanting to say anything to upset me. They had food and milk and proper care and attention at the ready, and I would hand Robbie over and cry all the way from Kenilworth Avenue to the Kingston Bridge.

It didn’t help, going back to work. First day back, I was dying to talk to Marj. As well as being a great pal to have lunch with, Marj had been my weekender, the chick I went out with on Saturdays, the one who thought I was the funniest girl she’d ever met, who’d always guffawed at my fabulous mock reasons for chucking boys, including:

Peter Fischmann had an outie.

Rob Bothwell spat his prune pips onto my plate.

Giuseppe Conti did not have a car.

Jimmy McGeogh gave an inappropriate standing ovation.

Jonathon Miller was married.

I sat down at lunch that first day and Marj made the mistake of asking how Robbie was. ‘Well, last
night he slept from eight till ten, then woke to feed, and then slept from twelve to four-thirty, which wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t get back to sleep after that and ended up waiting for him to wake up at seven for his morning bottle, so I’m a bit tired.’

I had never seen eyes actually glaze over before – but I could have put a cherry on top of Marj’s. And it began to dawn on me that I was as boring and moany as my antenatal friends.

After the first week, Marj realised that my world had narrowed alarmingly and I had no other stories to tell. I started eating lunch at my desk the
following
week and discovered Marj’s new Saturday pal was a girl called Tilly who’d just split up with her man, Toby, because he’d sent her a professional portrait photograph of himself.

Each morning, I felt like I’d worked a full shift by nine-thirty, and I would spend the day in a cyclical wasteland of forgetfulness. I would sit at my desk staring at my over-filled diary and then, as if
someone
had yelled, ‘On your marks, get set, GO!’, I would bound from said desk with all the purpose of a champion hurdler and stride out of the room, only to stop, bewildered, halfway along the corridor. Why had I left my desk? I would then walk backwards and try to retrace my steps. Usually, I’d just forgotten that I needed a pee.

I began to wonder how I’d ever managed the job. Before long, I had thirty cases: five children on the
child protection register, another ten in care, and the rest on the brink of being taken into it. I had angry parents yelling at me on the phone, or waiting to yell at me in reception. I had admin staff refusing to type reports for me. I had managers with
questions
I couldn’t answer – ‘What did the head teacher say about the carpet-fitting knife, Krissie?’ ‘Were the leg burns fresh?’ ‘Calves swollen?’ ‘Did she actually buy some pork sausages?’ ‘Was it blue or yellow valium?’

I got home late most nights, having visited houses to talk in riddles.

‘Do you mind if we come in?’ (We’re coming in.)

‘An anonymous source said Rachel was on the step for an hour last night.’ (You are guilty of child neglect, and your neighbour is watching.)

‘I can see needles under the television.’ (You’re a liar.)

‘Do you mind if we take her with us for the night?’ (We’re taking her, no matter what you say.)

When I finally got home after work, I would spend the night worrying about Jimmy Barr’s uncle who was getting out of prison, about Bob being beaten, Rob being touched, Jane being left in her buggy outside the pub. It was the hardest, most relentless of jobs, and I had lost the strength to cope with it and the confidence to judge others when my own parenting was so crap.

After a few weeks of stopping, puzzled, in corridors
and lecturing bad parents about safe drug use and appropriate boundaries, I fainted.

Sarah picked me up from work that day, then rang my mum and asked her if she and Dad could look after Robbie for the night. After some hushed conversation between the two of them, Sarah put me in the spare bed in her beautiful house with a happy film and a hot chocolate and a kiss on the forehead.

As I lay there watching television with soft warm lighting and no baby, I loved Sarah more than I had ever loved her. Sarah, who always looked after me, always protected me.

And when she told me the next morning that work had agreed that I should have a break and that she and my parents had agreed it would be good if they looked after Robbie so that I could go on a camping holiday with her and Kyle the following week, I loved her even more.

Something changed in Krissie when she woke the next morning. Perhaps it was having a full night’s sleep, perhaps it was the idea of a week in the
Highlands
with no responsibilities. Whatever it was, she felt different, she felt good, and she was going to make some changes, be a better person. She
formulated
a good-mother strategy in her head that involved sacrifice, greater patience and eventual joy.

After breakfast with Sarah, she decided to go shopping. An autumn wardrobe would help her pick up Robbie with a fresh face. Afterwards, she would take him to the park and they would feed crusts to the ducks and play with crunchy red autumn leaves and laugh.

Shopping was not a success. Krissie had a new body and did not know what to do with it. She collected size tens from the racks in H&M fully
expecting that most of them would look good, only to find that three of the trousers did not make it past her thighs. She wondered why the hell her thighs had changed shape – the foetus had been nowhere near them.

Krissie returned to her parent’s house in
Kenil-worth
Avenue at three that afternoon, determined to implement her good-mother strategy. She packed Robbie into her car and drove to the park. When she got there, Robbie had fallen asleep, but she took him out of his seat and put him in his buggy because that was the plan. She walked a still-sleeping Robbie to the duck pond and threw two bits of bread in the water, which sank. After taking a photo of Robbie sleeping in the buggy with her mobile phone she walked through a soggy scattering of yellow leaves. Then she walked back to the car, put Robbie back in, which woke him up, and drove home to her flat.

Robbie cried all the way.

As soon as Krissie got inside, she poured herself a red wine. A clean nappy for Robbie came next.

Krissie had a sip of her wine and put Robbie into his high chair. She then sat down at the table beside him, drank the rest of the glass, looked at him and put her head on the table in exasperation at herself, her inability to cope, her abject parenting skills.

Then she felt something on her outstretched hands. She lifted her head and saw that Robbie had grabbed her fingers and was holding onto them
tightly. He was looking her in the eye and laughing. The two things were connected – the hand-holding and the laughter. He was talking to her, telling her that he liked her, and asking her to hold his hand.

But she didn’t hold his hand. She poured herself another glass of wine.

After the fourth glass, she put the empty bottle under the sink and realised with horror that there were at least a dozen empty bottles there. She told herself that these had taken a long time to
accumulate
and that it only looked bad because she was saving a bootful for the bottle bins near Asda.

Then Krissie put Robbie to bed. It wasn’t like in the movies, Krissie thought to herself, when parents kiss a forehead, turn off a light, stand dotingly at the door and then walk away. Putting Robbie to bed was more like storming the shores at Gallipoli: scary and futile.

She had tried the antenatal mums’ consensus of strict routine: food, stimulation – but not too much, bath, bed. It didn’t work. She’d tried depriving him of sleep during the day. Nup. Tried sleeping with him. (It worked but she made the mistake of telling Fraser’s mum who said: ‘NO! He will die if you keep doing that. Didn’t you hear about the baby who suffocated!’) So Krissie turned to her latest hardback childcare purchase,
Controlled Crying,
which told her to reassure him, leave him to cry, then return at increasing intervals throughout the evening. ‘After
one week, your baby will sleep through!’ the book had promised.

This was day six, and Krissie very much
suspected
that she might need to ask for her money back. She had left Robbie for two minutes, returned to reassure, then four, returned, then eight, returned, sixteen, returned, and here she was, retreating from the darkened room for the fifth time like a burglar, praying that Robbie would not notice that his mother was decreasing in size and then disappearing out the door for thirty minutes this time.

‘Go somewhere far away,’ the book had advised. ‘And be strong!’

Until now, Krissie hadn’t been able to, but today was the first day of her new life as a resolute, capable, loving, boundary-setting mother, so she was determined.

Outside the bedroom, Krissie heard music coming from downstairs. She hadn’t heard the boys play for months and the sound sent a rush of
excitement
through her. Without giving herself time to think, she put on some lip-gloss, grabbed the baby monitor, set the alarm on her watch for thirty minutes, and went downstairs.

When Marco answered the door she said, ‘I haven’t got my tambourine, can I rattle something of yours?’

Marco replied exactly as she’d hoped. He seized her around the waist and kissed her. He then looked
at her monitor, from which Robbie’s voice was wailing.

‘Don’t worry, he’s fine,’ she said.

They staggered into the hall, and into the bedroom, and then Marco lifted up her skirt.

The pain surprised her. It was sharp and piercing, and as he penetrated her a snapshot of midwives and blood and large metal salad servers flashed before her. What had happened down there? Had they sewn her up a little tighter than before?

The sound of Robbie’s crying whirled out of the monitor and around the room and she looked at her watch over Marco’s bobbing shoulder … He’d only been crying for ten minutes. She shook her head and returned her attention to Marco, who gave three quick shoves before he was done.

Afterwards they walked into the living room, where the other lad was playing his harmonica. He didn’t acknowledge Krissie at all.

‘You sure he’s all right?’ Marco asked, grimacing at the screaming monitor as he handed her a shaker.

‘Yep, don’t worry,’ Krissie replied, turning the monitor down a bit after looking at her watch.

Without another word or glance in her direction, Marco picked up his guitar and started playing.

Krissie felt humiliated. What had she done? What was wrong with her? She didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to behave, so she sat there and shook her shaker while the baby monitor howled an
agonising harmony. The seconds pounded on her watch, but she would not give up, she would wait the full thirty minutes. She would be a good mother.

Sarah arrived at Krissie’s house at nine o’clock. Concerned about how her friend was coping, she’d decided to drop in.

She knocked once but there was no answer, only the sound of Robbie crying. She phoned Krissie’s mobile, which she could hear ringing inside. She rang the landline again, but it rang and rang. Sarah banged on the door. No response. Mindful of Krissie’s fragile state, Sarah phoned the police.

The siren made the boys stop playing, and when the siren stopped the alarm on Krissie’s watch started going off. It was time to reassure. She jumped to her feet and ran upstairs.

When she got to her door, Sarah was standing there.

‘What are you doing here?’ Krissie asked.

‘Where were you? I called the police! Quick, open the door,’ Sarah said.

‘What? Why? He’s fine!’ Krissie said as she turned the key. She went into Robbie’s bedroom and saw that he was bright red with panic.

‘Hey!’ Krissie said, picking him up. ‘Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay.’

Tears came to her eyes, seeing him like that.
What had she done to him? She rocked him gently, and for a fleeting moment she understood him, that he was lovely, that he liked being held in her arms, that only his mum could calm him down. She cried with him, her lips against his tiny ear. ‘I’m here, I’m here.’

‘Controlled crying,’ she explained to Sarah. ‘I was trying to be strong, like the book says. I had the monitor.’

An incongruously pretty young policewoman knocked on the door a few minutes later. ‘Everything okay?’ she asked when Krissie answered the door.

‘We’re fine. I was just downstairs briefly. Doing controlled crying, you know, teaching him to sleep. I had the monitor on and was heading back up when Sarah arrived and called you.’

‘Controlled crying? That’s a nonsense if you ask me. You’re better off putting them in bed with you,’ the too-pretty cop said, before heading out the door.

‘Shite, I’m so stupid! I’m so sorry. Shite! Shite! Shite!’ said Krissie, tossing her childcare book into the bin and carrying Robbie into her room.