Babyface Read online

  I call Jonathan to announce that we’re going out. “Good idea,” he says. In the background phones ring, colleagues babble. Clearly they’re having a wonderful time.

  “I don’t think it’ll rain,” I tell him.

  “No, but take the rain hood in case.”

  “And the mobile.”

  “Make sure it’s charged. Sorry, Nina”—a pert female voice has interrupted him, possibly to call him to a meeting but, more likely, to announce an impromptu office party—“someone wants me. Go easy now.”

  I ram the buggy, which doubles as a carrycot and incorporates far too many knobs and levers and a padded pouch called a Snugglebabe, into the street, gouging a sliver of black paint off the door. A cluster of mothers is ambling towards the park, dangling toddlers on reins. If Eliza were here, she would point at the most dolliedup one and whisper, “Not a good look.” A MILT, she’d call her: Mother in Leather Trousers. I’ve read the term on the “fun” page Eliza writes for her fashion magazine: snippy comments about celebrities’ outfits. I used to help her think them up. We’d balance drinks and Eliza’s lilac suede notebook on the wall outside the Dog and Trumpet, back in the sixteenth century when I frequented licensed premises.

  “Do you know a baby’s face can burn in seconds?” An elderly woman with a soft puff of double chin has squashed next to me on the park bench. “Babies’ skin is ever so sensitive,” she scolds. “Don’t you have a canopy for that?”

  The sun shines weakly. Yet the woman’s concern—plus the fact that she appears to be wearing several tweed coats on top of each other—makes me doubt my heat-sensing abilities. The sick smell is still noticeable, too. That means I’ve brought it out with me.

  The woman peers into the pram. Satisfied that Ben’s epidermis has not formed a blistered sheet, she squeezes his cheek. This wakes him instantly. His lower lip puckers, and his cries—though not as alarming as when heard in the flat—are enthusiastic enough to suggest that snack time is upon us.

  Stupidly I am wearing a dress with a zip at the back. In order to extract a breast I have two options: hoist it over the neckline which, given that each is fully inflated, will alert the attention of teenagers dogging off school and possibly even the police. Or I could raise my entire dress and sit naked apart from my knickers and a ring of bunched-up fabric around my neck.

  I delve into the baby essentials bag and extract a bottle. “Mine were breast-fed,” says the woman. “All nine. One died.” She stares at me with small, sticky eyes.

  “This is the first bottle he’s had,” I explain. “It’s just a backup.”

  “You’ll get your figure back quicker if you breast-feed. It drains the fat out of you.”

  Babycare warns of the tricky progression from breast to bottle but Ben’s eyes bulge with delight at the sight of clear plastic, his vigorous sucks flattening the teat. Along the path, a copper-haired woman marches toward us, her necklace bouncing in time with each stride. “I thought it was you,” announces Martha, my breast-feeding counselor. “You look fantastic. Aren’t you coping amazingly well?”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I feel fantastic.”

  “And look at you—out and about already. That’s an achievement in itself.”

  I am rather proud of having made the arduous journey from flat to park, past potential dangers such as the organic pub and the paper shop. “So how’s…” she begins.

  “Benjamin. Ben. He’s doing fine.”

  But Martha has stopped listening. Her eyes swoop on the bottle plugged between Ben’s lips. As he gulps, emitting appreciative um-ums after each swallow, I realize there is little hope of passing off a factory-made bottle as a genuine human breast.

  Perhaps I’m not cut out for this job.

  4

  Sleep Deprivation

  Eliza has a beautiful neck. It is long, like a candle, and waxy smooth. She rubs cream into it; special cream containing minerals from the Dead Sea. She buys two fat pots at a time: one for home, one for the drawer of her desk.

  She is a fashion stylist on a magazine. There appear to be two strands to the job: urging her readers to spend several hundred quid on a plain gray cardigan, and traveling to exotic locations “for the light.” The majority of Eliza’s fashion shoots require trips to sunnier climes. Occasionally she’ll go somewhere freezing and force models to trudge through the snow in dangerous sandals. Apparently the light in the parks around her office isn’t good enough.

  On these trips abroad, Eliza’s main role is to sympathize when the models complain about the heat or the cold, and to bribe indigenous peoples to stand next to them, adding local color. While Ben naps and I wonder whether to shine up the stainless steel hob that Jonathan has already polished, I amuse myself by imagining Eliza in Lapland, bellowing, “Bring on the Hopi tribe!” at which time a cluster of pissed-off locals troop into shot, wondering why a thin, scowling girl is wearing a cream beaded gown on a mountain.

  Before Ben, I worked on Promise magazine. Its flimsy pages featured “real” people (i.e., not thin people) telling dreadful true-life stories: like coming home from bingo to a burnt-down house. Chase, my editor, liked a twist (ideally the woman whose house had burnt down should unearth a winning lottery ticket in her handbag which, fortunately, she had taken with her to bingo). He called such stories “triumph over tragedy.” They gave hope, he said; that no matter how cruddy your morning had been so far, something wonderful might happen to you, too.

  Chase was lying. Promise was successful because it made you think, “Maybe my life’s not that bad. At least we haven’t been persecuted for our love and forced to live in a henhouse.” And you’d pour yourself a cup of tea and reflect that, while your husband had left you for the nineteen-year-old baby-sitter and something sinister was bubbling up in the toilet, things could be worse. You could be in Promise.

  Ben and I have spent five days shuttling from flat to park and back again when a cab pulls up outside the flat. Eliza’s neat bottom bobs as she bends to pay the driver. “Could I have a receipt?” she asks. “Put fifteen quid, would you?”

  Eliza has brought a present for Ben: a black velvet teddy devoid of facial features or any child-stimulating embellishment apart from a Louis Vuitton ribbon lashed tightly round its neck. It smells of floral-scented soap. I suspect it’s an unwanted present from a PR flack that has lain in Eliza’s desk drawer for several centuries. “Thanks,” I say. “He’ll love it.”

  Ben lies on his back beneath a vivid plastic contraption called an activity arch. Jonathan winced when he saw it, complaining that its primary hues and bashy noises were out of keeping with our vanilla-toned living room. But the activity arch has turned out to be a fine acquisition. Ben will gaze happily at the dangling plastic balls for anything up to a minute and a half. I place the Louis Vuitton teddy beside him. Drool slides down his chin.

  “Are you feeling all right?” asks Eliza.

  “I’m fine.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. Her lashes are dusty with old mascara. “Are you really all right?” she says in a softer voice. “You seem…”

  “It just takes some getting used to.”

  She sinks into the sofa, propping turquoise heels on the tan suede cube. Her shoes look badly treated. “I’m supposed to be on appointments,” she sighs, “but I’ve sneaked off to see you. You sounded so hollow.”

  I know what appointments mean: gliding around the offices of fashion publicists to select a belt or maybe a necklace. On an extremely busy day she might have her hair blow-dried straight or select a bias-cut skirt to use on a shoot. “I was probably tired,” I say, trying to sound unhollow. “I just feel a bit flat, that’s all.”

  “You’re spending too much time at home. Daytime’s weird, isn’t it? There are people about, but they’re aimless. It’s creepy.”

  I wish the phone would ring or that someone would burst in with a belated congratulatory bouquet.

  “When you’re busy at work,” continues Eliza, “you don’t think about dayti
me people, popping out to the shops, trimming hedges…”

  “I don’t trim the hedge,” I snap. “Jonathan does it.”

  “So what do you do all day?”

  “See people. Make new friends.”

  “You mean coffee mornings, stuff like that?”

  In fact, I have attended one prelunch gathering where hot beverages were offered. Being at home so much, I worried that I had lost the ability to converse with adults. Ben was six weeks old but I felt like I’d not spoken to anyone big—apart from Jonathan—for several decades. My mouth had started to work stiffly, and when Jonathan came home I’d burble minutiae until he escaped to the bathroom. Even Eliza kept our phone calls short, and often yawned.

  I’d surprised myself by enjoying the coffee morning. I ranted non-stop—which required a tricky kind of circular breathing—until the lifeless woman I was talking to said she had to see to her baby, even though he was propped up on cushions, happily licking his chin.

  “It’s good for me,” I tell Eliza firmly. “I need to meet people with babies.”

  She picks up Jonathan’s interiors magazine and flips its shiny pages. It’s called InHouse. She studies a concrete sweep of building clinging precariously to a cliff. “You need to get back into the real world,” she says.

  “It is real.”

  “I know. This is what mothers do. But I thought you might fancy something different.”

  “What kind of different?”

  “We need a baby for a shoot,” she says, glancing quickly at Ben. “Week after next. Not doing anything, are you?”

  “I’ll have to check,” I say, staring at her feet. The heels have formed little square indents on the suede cube.

  “Don’t look so worried. He wouldn’t have to do anything. He’d just be a prop.”

  “Don’t you have people who supply babies for that kind of thing? Baby model agencies?”

  She nods dismissively. “Too cutesy. Rosebud lips, big eyes. Cliché, isn’t it? I’m looking for character.”

  Ben has stopped gazing at the dangling spheres and glowers at Eliza. I notice, perhaps for the first time, that his eyelashes are particularly dark and luscious. “You’re saying he’s ugly.”

  “No, just unusual. Cute, in a weird way. Doesn’t look like either of you.”

  Ben’s deep pink lips part, hinting at a smile. I wonder if it’s a real smile, or just wind. Or perhaps he’s about to fill his nappy, and this is his concentration face.

  But the mouth rises at its corners. A wobbly half smile hovers uncertainly, as if it might pop in an instant. I want to tell Eliza that this, his first smile, is some amazing thing that even Babycare doesn’t mention.

  “Three hundred pound fee,” she announces. “I’ll send a cab so you won’t have to cart all that baby equipment you lug about. And you’ll get lunch.”

  “What kind of lunch?” I have taken to punctuating long, adult-free days with around fifteen small snacks: the odd slice of ham, a fistful of gherkins. No plates or cutlery.

  “Organic buffet. Roasted peppers, seared salmon. Dinky goat cheese pastries you won’t believe.”

  Ben’s smile wilts. He turns back to the activity arch, regarding himself in a swinging mirror like you’d find in a budgie cage.

  Sold, for a goat cheese pastry.

  Before Jonathan, my boyfriend selection methods were more haphazard. I met Ranald in the Dog and Trumpet’s downstairs room. Wendy, our pregnant art editor, was having a party to celebrate her departure from buff-colored office life. She danced, grazing the embarrassed post boy with her pregnant dome. You could see her belly button jutting through her flimsy white tunic.

  No one had proper parties in houses anymore. Gatherings were held in pub basements that were used three times a year and reeked of damp and disinfectant. The manager would attempt to create a celebratory atmosphere by plugging in a fan heater. You never found anyone promising in these downstairs rooms.

  Ranald had wandered in after taking a wrong turn during his hunt for the toilet. He emitted outdoorsy freshness, even while picking at a dish of aging Bombay Mix. The music was so loud I couldn’t make out his words. I stared, mesmerized by his mobile lips. His teeth were white as Tipp-ex.

  The music stopped. “I’m going camping next weekend,” he shouted. “Want to come?”

  “What? In a tent?” I roared back.

  He laughed. “You’ve never done it, have you? You media lot. Fond of your poncy hotels.” He scanned the room with flinty eyes. Wendy took one puff of the junior writer’s cigarette. There was grit in the bottom of my glass.

  As Ranald was so attractive—of a high enough standard, in fact, to model casual separates for mail-order catalogs—I said I’d rather sleep in a tent than one of your poncy hotels any day of the week. We set off for North Devon at 8:00 a.m. the following Saturday and arrived at his uncle’s farm before lunch. I had limited myself to one item of skincare: tinted moisturizer with sunblocking properties. I explored his sucked-in body under drab green nylon and he told me off for being too enthusiastic. We woke to rain, battering the tent. Ranald made me wash in a feeble stream with orange industrial soap. He glared as I dabbed on moisturizer afterward. From that moment his mood soured and he accused me of not helping enough. When we dismantled the tent, he shouted at me for losing the tiny drawstring bag into which an enormous heap of rustling nylon was to be stuffed.

  “I didn’t lose it,” I said. “I put my jumper in it and used it as a pillow.”

  He whirled around and—in something of an overreaction—flung a tent peg at me. It whipped past my cheek and lopped into the long grass. It took us twenty-five minutes’ hunting to retrieve it.

  We drove home without speaking. He kept the engine running outside my flat. “Thanks for a great weekend,” I said.

  I called him later that night to break it to him that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for a relationship.

  “Okay,” he said. I waited for him to add something else, like, “It’s been fun, though, hasn’t it?” or, “You’re a lovely person, Nina.”

  “Are you still there?” I asked.

  Ranald yawned. I remembered then that he hadn’t chosen me or even found me attractive. He had simply been hunting for the toilet and gone down too many stairs.

  I can’t sleep for the looming horror of Eliza’s shoot. I’ll call and say I’ve changed my mind, wasn’t thinking straight. Sleep deprivation: it makes you say yes accidentally. Before having Ben, I considered sleep a tedious but necessary procedure for promoting cell renewal. I didn’t look forward to going to bed. Nor did I wake in the morning and immediately calculate how long I would have to remain upright before sliding back under the duvet.

  Now, however, I think about sleep constantly. In my fantasies, rather than being pleasured by an assortment of unfamiliar men, I am simply lying down with my eyes shut. Sleep-related garments creep into the picture: cotton nighties, flannel pajamas. Even bedsocks. In these fantasies I lie on my back, diagonally across the mattress with arms splayed to occupy maximum space. No room for an adult male or even a baby.

  Ben operates on an upside-down schedule: drowsy in daylight, alert after dark. “Human beings are not designed to sleep at nighttime,” warns Babycare. “It’s the safest time for hunting. We should be out, foraging for food.” This appears to be accurate as, approximately every two hours between 10:00 p.m. and dawn, Ben’s eyes spring open and he assumes the eager expression of one who would rather be thrashing through undergrowth than snuggling beneath a blue blanket appliquéd with rabbits.

  Some nights, it hardly seems worth going to bed at all. I research the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation: lethargy, mood swings, clumsiness, dizziness, skin irritations, an inability to cope, a tendency to lose perspective, temporary memory loss and other things I’ve forgotten. Sleep occupies so much of my brain space, there is little room for anything else. I can barely dress myself without mislaying my bra and discovering it, hours later, dangling from the chrome ho
ok where the oven glove should be. During a march around the park, I somehow part company with my front door key and have to summon Jonathan home from the office.

  I loiter at our gate, trying not to attract the attention of the surly couple across the road with their threatening This Is A Neighborhood Watch Area sticker. To appear friendly, I hum a lullaby, even though Ben is asleep. Finally a vehicle lumbers into our road and Jonathan springs out, my rescuer, key poised to jab in the door.

  As my intellectual capabilities appeared to be crumbling, so Jonathan becomes Patron Saint of Getting Things Done. I watch as he measures formula for Ben’s bottles; capable Dad-hands, simultaneously stirring basil-scented sauce to accompany the fresh linguine he picked up at lunchtime.

  “I can’t do the things you do,” I tell him.

  “You’re fine,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”

  Eliza told me to relax about Ben’s shoot, not to deck him out in a sailor ensemble like some revved-up showbiz mother would. “Don’t go to any special lengths,” she instructed. “Put him in one of those button-up things with the legs in them.”

  “A babygro.”

  “And don’t bother about his hair. We’ll deal with that on the shoot.”

  As I peel off Ben’s damp night nappy I consider simply not showing up. Something terrible’s happened: a baby emergency. He has a rash. She wouldn’t want him, would she, with festering spots? Or some domestic disaster. I’ve been attacked by the nappy disposal unit. The blades flew off the food processor, lacerating my arm. I must think of something. I only agreed from a self-centered desire to be out of the house with someone fetching me snacks. Enticing, yes, but at what price? If anyone comes near him with their hairspray or fierce eyebrow tweezers, we’ll be out of there. Ben’s well-being is my priority. I am his mother.