OMG Baby! (19 page)

‘Please, Max? I’ll deal with her.’

‘I can’t live with her.’ He says it like a warning.

‘I promise I’ll deal with her.’

‘OK, Viv,’ he says dejectedly. ‘OK.’ He nods and his anger disappears as quickly as it started, like the strike of a match in a gale.

R
ipening is happening inside me
. I am ripening and I feel sick.

At work the next week, I find myself Googling ‘dealing with difficult people’ and make a list of strategies to use on Rainey. Apparently, what you have to do is remain calm in the face of provocation. I’ll tell that to Max because I can’t believe how calm he was after the disastrous NCT class and how patient he’s been since. Then you have to think about things you like about the difficult person and try to focus on those. For example, the night after the NCT class, she made dinner and she apologised for attacking Max and he said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ so that is a good thing, even if Max and I couldn’t stomach the tapioca dumplings she’d prepared and had to go out later to stuff our faces with pizza.

But I have to face defeat; now she’s driving me mad. She’s a slippery customer and I have totally failed in my quest to make a proper family for Angel, I think gloomily.

One of these dealing-with-difficult-people tips says you may have to avoid the difficult person. Get them out of your life and surround yourself with lovely, positive, shiny happy people. It’s not inclusive, but I’m doing it: I’m telling Rainey to go.

In many ways I wonder why I haven’t done it already. I’ve been cross enough and got close a few times, but when it comes to the crunch, I can’t bring myself to throw her out. I was hoping she’d go of her own accord without a struggle. I know her drug-baron story doesn’t hold water; I mean, she doesn’t seem to be in hiding or anything, doesn’t wear a disguise on the way to the shops. Unless the guys who are after her aren’t very efficient drug-baron types and keep getting distracted by sparkly things in shops and missing out on nabbing her?

Oh God, I just can’t throw out my own mother, even if she’s so irritating it makes me dread going home, even if the way she has of pronouncing foreign words super-correctly in the middle of sentences is
très
annoying.

But what if I let her stay, like a very old incontinent dog that’s gone smelly and can hardly walk but you can’t get rid of for sentimental reasons? After all, I made her a promise that she could stay just as I promised Max she’d go. When I think of Max I think she has to go. What about Max? He was hurt by her and I told him she’d be gone soon. There’s no way out of this. I’ll tell her today. The trouble is, when I think of it, think of her leaving, my heart becomes seven years old again and seems to pull loose of its moorings as if she has it on a hook. I know telling her to leave will be the last thing I’ll ever get to say to her. I’ll never see her again; she won’t come back.

I close down the search and concentrate on work. The atmosphere in the office today is frosty even though the heating has been fixed. I’m being viewed by Michael and Christie as some sort of Dickensian evil-boss figure who subjugates her workers out of greed. I wouldn’t care but Michael has agreed of his own free will to a Barnes and Worth meeting, but he said if the meeting fails, he’ll be gone. I’ve just drafted a very sweet email to Mole asking if we might present our range to her and I include Michael’s name before mine in the sign-off. I click ‘send’ without a trace of guilt.

‘The trap is laid. Now we wait,’ I mutter.

‘God!’ gasps Christie in horror.

‘Oh, sorry – did I say that out loud?’ I press a finger over my lips.

Christie gives me a dirty look as she heads over to the printer. She’s wearing shiny trousers with a peacock-feather pattern and a royal-blue shirt.

‘You look really nice today, by the way.’ I smile, but she ignores me. I look across at Michael scowling at his machine. I reach into my desk and take out the chocolate advent calendar I’ve been saving. This will cheer them up. I shake it so the chocolates rattle. ‘Ooh, look – I bought us an advent calendar and it’s already the tenth, so we have nine chocolates to scoff!’

Michael looks up. ‘Ten chocolates,’ he corrects.

‘I ate the 1 December chocolate already.’

‘Without us?’ asks Christie. ‘When did you?’

‘Sometime back in November,’ I say, and they stare cruelly. ‘I had to – my cervix was ripening . . . or something,’ I say, and Christie clutches her throat in disgust.

‘Viv, if your cervix was ripening, you’d be dropping a sprog, not stealing chocolates from the proletariat,’ scoffs Michael.

I look at him and decide not to cross swords with such a creepy pregnancy expert. People are upset enough, and besides, he always wins. I wish I could just swallow
Forty Weeks and Counting Down
and absorb all the information that way instead of having to read for hours on end about cervixes thinning and being pulled up like socks.

‘Anyway, who wants a choccy? Look – there’s a little bell, or a snowman?’

‘No, thanks,’ says Christie, sashaying back to her desk.

‘Suit yourself,’ I say, and shove two snowmen in my mouth.

I read through my emails feeling more and more despondent. There is not one reply to any of my meeting requests. I suppose that’s better than an inbox full of rejections: there’s still a very slim hope of a meeting, an anorexic hope. I think about Sebastian at Belle Peau. How he said he’d look at our website. I open our website. It looks great. Michael really is very good. I bring up Belle Peau’s website, and no, it’s too fancy and difficult to navigate. It could do with redesigning. It could do with a few of our products on as well . . .

‘Stop the train! I’ve got it,’ I say, holding up a palm as I stare at the desk, mentally formulating a plan. ‘Michael, how easy would it be for Belle Peau to put some of our crackers on their website?’

‘Cinch,’ he says.

‘I’m going to ring Sebastian and ask – no, beg him to put something of ours on the website before Christmas. Would you be able to do the design for them? That could be a sweetener.’

Michael starts up rocking in his chair and tapping his teeth with a pencil at the same time. ‘I just need the codes,’ he says.

‘And, Christie, could we get hold of the stock in time to fulfil the potential orders?’

‘If I speak to China today.’ She shrugs.

We all look at each other for a long moment, and then I nod solemnly into their eyes and pick up the phone.

O
n the bus
home shuddering along the Euston Road, I think about the work situation. I gaze at the lit shop windows as we slide by, all piled high with the kind of gifts I used to put together when I worked for Barnes and Worth. I dreamt up so many seasonal gift sets; there wasn’t a single holiday or occasion that passed without one. They all sold really well. This cracker idea is just an extension of gift sets; therefore I reckon I can do it. I can make it work. I still have it. I spoke to Sebastian for nearly an hour today, and although it was nigh on impossible not to copy the whistley ‘s’ – especially when saying ‘Christmas’ a lot of times – he went for it! Two crackers from us are to go on his website by the end of the week, and he was interested in having Michael redesign their whole website in the new year. We’ll have a scramble to get all the logistics in place, and it may not even bring in any money, but at least we have some interest, a possible customer. Our first bit of good news.

I feel like celebrating and think of maybe picking up a bottle of cava on the way from the bus, and some orange juice to mix mine with, but then I remember I promised myself I’d speak to Rainey about moving out and suddenly feel my happy mood evaporate. As the bus hisses to a stop, I text Lucy to see if she’s free to meet for a quick drink.

My back aches. My legs are swollen. I’m tired. I rub my pregnant belly, feeling a rounded bit under my ribs. Is that a head or a bottom? I wonder what it will be like to be a mum, to be responsible for another person. I look up at a commuter holding a newspaper. The headline is about a missing girl. There’s a story about a knife-crime victim. What kind of world am I bringing a baby into? I think about Rainey as I watch people get off and onto the bus, struggling with bags and enormous rolls of wrapping paper. Christmas is not a good time of year to send your mother packing, is it?

I let that thought settle and melt into a puddle of guilt and my phone beeps a message. Lucy.

B
ack at the flat
, I’m thankful no one’s home. It’s perfectly tidy and clean since Rainey moved in and that’s something that can be said for her: she’s a neat housemate. (But has to go.) I ring Lucy and afterwards sit and think about Lucy’s mum. It’s funny the bits and pieces you remember about people. There was this one time she came to our house and went on and on to me about how to peg washing on the line, tops by the hem, not the sleeves, jeans by the legs. She cleaned our stained coffee mugs with bleach and frightening vigour. I found her handbag on the sofa with a half-bottle of vodka in it.

Of course, Lucy losing her mum has added a new layer of guilt to the Rainey situation. Lucy was never close to her mum; I mean, who gets married without even telling their parents? But now she’s devastated. She thought they’d have a relationship one day, thought that having a baby would bring them closer. She’d hoped that her emotionally unavailable mum would be a really good grandma. Now she’ll never know. Now she’s in Cheltenham spending Christmas filling bin bags with her mother’s things for the charity shop. It’s too sad.

However, I’m a woman of strong resolve. There’s no point in being sentimental: I’m telling Rainey to leave. So what if Lucy’s sad news has made me appreciate the fragile beauty of the precious mother-daughter relationship? So what if it’s cold outside and nearly Christmas? God, I feel bad. I go off to take a shower, and when I return to the living room, there she is hunched on the sofa looking pained. I wade in anyway. No time like the present for throwing out your mother.

‘Rainey, I need to talk to you,’ I say decisively, and she raises serious eyes to meet mine.

‘Thank God you’re home, Viv. I have something to tell you,’ she says, bringing me up short.

‘Good. Right then, well, you go first.’ I bow my head to listen.

‘I’ve found a lump.’

‘What?’ It takes a few seconds to take this in and in that time my thoughts race through irritation that her thing to say is so dramatic it trumps mine, fear that she might be dying, relief about not having to tell her to leave. I can’t now, can I?

‘Under my arm. It hurts.’ She massages an armpit, wincing.

I sit beside her. ‘Let’s have a look.’

She positions my hand over a grisly ball beneath the skin at the side of her breast.

‘Quite big, isn’t it?’ she breathes, turning terrified eyes onto me.

I feel around the sides of the lump, but it moves each time I press, making me queasy.

‘There’s definitely something.’ I nod, tucking the hand under my leg. ‘Have you just noticed it?’

‘I’ve had it a while, but it’s grown.’

‘You should see a doctor.’

‘I’ve just been to your Dr Savage. I got an appointment with him straight away.’

‘And?’

‘He’s very worried. They’re putting me in for tests.’ I study the lines of her face. I can’t see Dr Savage worrying about much – it must be serious.

‘When? What tests?’

‘I’ll probably hear next week, but it’s nearly Christmas so a lot of the cancer docs are away.’

There, she’s unleashed it, the C-word. The bones of my chest ache.

‘Cancer,’ I say, staring into space. She has a lump. A lump means it could be cancer. Cancer – that terrible, wicked, sly thing that takes people away. I feel pretty bad about nearly throwing her out now. If she has cancer, she could be leaving for good. I’m surprised to feel a tear roll down my face and quickly wipe it away.

‘What did you want to talk about?’ she asks.

‘Nothing. It’s not important.’ I turn my back and think about Lucy losing her mum and imagine losing mine.

‘It’s OK me staying a bit longer, isn’t it, Viv? Just while I wait for the tests?’