Authors: Rowan Coleman
“Do you mind. He’s about my age!”
Both women laughed.
“We could go together if you like,” Tiffany said. “To the class? ’Cos I think it’s important to know all that stuff, don’t you? In case of emergencies or things.”
“Um.” Natalie wasn’t exactly sure what all that stuff was, but oddly enough she liked this Tiffany girl and the thought of getting out of the house to somewhere light and warm was alluring, even if it was on a cold and dark March afternoon and only to sit in the back of some boring class.
“I know it’s chilly out but he’ll be fine all bundled up in a sling,” Tiffany said, thinking she needed to persuade Natalie. “Jordan loved getting out right from when she was tiny. They like the colors and movement, you know. It stimulates their brain.”
Just then the lights came back on, making everybody squint and blink and Freddie fuss. Natalie hoisted him up onto her shoulder and bobbed up and down on the step until the whimpering subsided.
Gary Fisher, followed by Anthony, emerged from the basement. He looked pointedly at Tiffany and Jordan.
“I needed the loo,” Tiffany explained. “And Natalie didn’t mind.”
Gary gave her a skeptical look, wondering how she had
managed to be on first-name terms with his new client before he was.
“It’s fine really,” Natalie told him, before adding hopefully, “Just a fuse then?”
Gary, who it seemed was more comfortable communicating with facial expressions than with words, twisted his mouth into a sideways knot and then puffed out his cheeks.
“Not exactly,” he said on an outward breath, as if he really didn’t want to tell her anything bad at all.
“How bad?” Natalie asked him.
The corners of Gary’s mouth plunged downward in a grimace.
“It’s pretty bad,” he said, looking as if the whole thing was his fault. “You don’t want to hear this but I have to tell you, it’s about as bad as it can get. It was dangerous. You’re really lucky that everything shorted without starting a fire—it could have been much worse…”
Gary stopped talking when Natalie burst into noisy, messy tears that surprised everyone, including Natalie, who didn’t just cry but emitted long, loud, heartfelt sobs that rattled with phlegm on every intake of breath.
“It’s all going wrong!” she wailed, starting Jordan off. “I can’t cope with this! How am I supposed to cope with…with…
this
!”
Inside her head Natalie could hear herself crying, and she could feel the overwhelming wave of anxiety that had gripped her without warning. But there was some integral part of her that was asking incredulously, “What
am
I doing?”
Internally she realized that things weren’t that bad and that of course she could cope with this, she’d coped with far worse in her time. It was an odd kind of split personality that had developed since Freddie was born. The “normal” her was still there; the ca
pable and excellent-in-a-crisis woman she knew took pride in but she seemed to be trapped inside this other crazy woman who was prone to crying and wailing when she couldn’t get the lid off a jam jar never mind deal with a power cut.
Slowly Tiffany put her arm around Natalie’s shoulders. “There, there,” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” Natalie managed to say at last, calming down a little as she sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. “I don’t normally cry. I’ve got a business and a mortgage and everything…I used to be great under stress. I don’t know what’s happened to me recently.”
“That little one happened to you,” Tiffany told her, patting her shoulder gently. “This isn’t you. This is your hormones. You’re not a nut, honest. You wouldn’t believe the hell I put Anthony through right after Jordan came. It’s the same for us all. And the last thing you need is any kind of hassle on top of all that. So don’t worry, all right? You’re totally normal.”
Natalie looked at her baby’s now tranquil face—at least he wasn’t upset. A light switched on suddenly might unsettle him, but he didn’t seem the least bit distressed to be held by a sniveling, incompetent woman. She found herself smiling at him and then Tiffany.
“I made Jordan cry,” she said apologetically.
“She likes crying,” Tiffany said, patting Natalie’s shoulder lightly again. “It’s her main hobby.”
There was a cough by the front door and Gary edged a little closer to Natalie before crouching down beside her.
“I’m really sorry, Mrs.”—Natalie did not feel like filling in the gap so he went on—“I didn’t explain it very well. I mean, yes, it was dangerous, but like I said, you’ve been lucky. I can patch it up safely for you tonight and then I’ll need to come back and start rewiring as soon as possible. I’ve got a lot of jobs right now
but if you decide to use me then I’ll put them on hold.” Gary glanced back over his shoulder at Anthony, who had thrust his hands deep into his pockets and was studying his sneakers with infinite care. “If you liked I could have a word with your husband…?”
Natalie sighed. She suddenly felt terribly tired and didn’t want to have to explain herself to the electrician, deciding it would be much less complicated to tell him a small but convenient lie instead.
“My husband works away a lot,” she said. “In…Dubai. He’s an engineer.” She glanced up at Gary’s concerned face and gave him a watery smile. “You’ll have to deal with me, I’m afraid. I’ll try to keep the crying down to the bare minimum.”
Gary nodded, his hands on his hips.
“Well, I don’t like to see anyone left in the lurch, least of all a young lady on her own. I can be back tomorrow to make a start if you like. Or if you want to get in a few quotes from other electricians and check my references…”
Natalie looked up at Gary Fisher. He wasn’t that much older than her, she thought, perhaps four or five years, but something about his turn of phrase and attitude made him seem as if he was from another era, when everybody lived in black and white and a nice cup of tea solved everything.
“Start in the morning,” she told him decisively, with a smile that would have been flirtatious if it wasn’t for the appalling condition of her skin, not to mention her swollen nose and red eyes. “And thank you
very
much. You’re my hero.”
Natalie was charmed to see Gary blush as he bustled back toward the cellar with Anthony to make sure it would be safe for the night.
“The power will have to go off again for a bit,” Gary warned her as he headed down the stairs.
Natalie looked thoughtfully at Tiffany. “Come on then,” she said. “Let’s go to the baby class thing.”
“It must be tough being on your own,” Tiffany said, as they headed toward the health center. “Haven’t you got any family to help out?”
“No,” Natalie said. “I was an only child and my dad was killed in a car accident when I was quite small and as for my mom…she lives in Spain. But it’s not help with Freddie that I want, it’s seeing people outside the four walls of the house. I’m going barking mad with no one but Fred to talk to all day. It’s just really nice to have a conversation with someone my own age—well, half my own age.”
Tiffany laughed. “You know what you need, don’t you?”
“A nanny?” Natalie suggested.
“No, dummy,” Tiff said amiably. “A baby group!”
N
atalie was disappointed to see that none of the other mothers who had come to the first-aid class had arrived in grubby tracksuit bottoms and mucus-stained sweatshirts with unbrushed and un-washed hair.
She was not used to being intimidated by other women, especially not the kind who had babies and went to first-aid classes on a Tuesday evening, because she simply didn’t know any. For most of her adult life Natalie had never paused to worry about how she looked because she knew she looked pretty good. She didn’t care that she wasn’t especially thin because in her experience curves were far more appealing than rib cages. And she didn’t mind the little bump in her nose or the fact that she was fairly short. She thought the bump gave her face character, and high heels resolved any issues about the length of her legs. As for her dark hair, that had started going gray before she was twenty-five. She simply dyed the silver into oblivion and planned to keep on doing so until she
was gray enough to go blond. Natalie had never been the kind of woman who was always dieting, always looking over her shoulder in mirrors and moaning about this or that unsatisfactory little part of herself. Until now.
Now she was comparing herself to a roomful of women in sweaters and finding herself sorely lacking. It was a feeling that was nearly as uncomfortable as the site where her stitches had been, on this hard plastic chair.
“Right, mommies!” The midwife, a scary and oddly hard-looking woman, started chirpily, holding a rather frightening-looking plastic baby up by its neck. “My name is Heather. Many of you will recognize me because I delivered your babies. I must say it is nice to be talking to your faces for a change!” Heather obviously expected a laugh and looked quite put out when all she got was a couple of embarrassed coughs.
“Um, thank you for coming to tonight’s class. I think you will all find it very useful information so please pay attention because it might just save your baby’s life…”
“Sorry, oops! Oh sorry…
sorry
…sorry.” Natalie turned to see where the serial apologies were coming from and was happy to see a woman who looked almost as disheveled and confused as she did, edging clumsily along the row toward the empty seat next to her.
“Sorry,” she apologized to Natalie for no particular reason as she sat down.
Natalie smiled at her and turned back to Heather, who was slapping the plastic baby on the back with gusto.
The apologetic woman rustled and fussed in her seat, rattling a large rummage bag that seemed to be filled with a least ten pounds’ worth of small change and several sets of keys until she produced an old envelope and a pen. Natalie couldn’t help but glance at her—she was rather diverting.
“I’m taking notes,” the woman said in a low voice, catching Natalie’s curious look. “I’ve done this three times before but I always instantly forget it. Miraculously my husband has actually got home from work before midnight for once, so I thought I’d pop out and get another refresher. You never know when one of the little beggars is going to stuff an eraser up their nose or swallow a golf ball, do you?”
“Don’t you?” Natalie exclaimed in a wide-eyed whisper. “What, even when they’re this small?” The woman looked momentarily confused and then saw Freddie sitting in Natalie’s lap, optimistically reaching for the hair of the woman sitting in front of him. Natalie tucked his small questing hand inside hers, prompting him to give a little frustrated whimper.
“Well,” the woman said, smiling indulgently at Freddie. “You’d be surprised at how tricky they get once they’re mobile. It won’t be long until this one is crawling and then all hell breaks loose. I’ve got four children, the fourth is nearly four months old and already itching to crawl. It’s all downhill from now, I’m afraid!” She chuckled merrily but stopped when she saw that Natalie was not joining in.
“Four children!” Natalie couldn’t help exclaiming quite loudly. “Good God.”
The woman shrugged. “I always wanted a big family.” She nodded at Freddie, who was endeavoring to lean over his mother’s restraining arm and get hold of a hank of that hair if it was the last thing he ever did. “Your first, then?” she asked. “What an angel. What’s his name?”
“Freddie,” Natalie said. “It’s a traditional family name, goes all the way back to…well, a long way anyway.”
“Freddie, I like that. I’m Megan by the way, call me Meg. Nice to meet you.” Megan held out a hand which Natalie took with her free one and shook once.
“Natalie,” she said. “So how do you cope with four—do you have a nanny or an au pair?”
“Ladies!” Heather’s voice rose and Natalie realized she was addressing her and Megan. They exchanged glances like two girls caught out in assembly. “This is not a mothers’ meeting; if you didn’t come here to listen, then you should leave.”
“That’s funny,” Natalie whispered to Meg. “I was fairly sure it
was
a mothers’ meeting.”
“Sorry,” Meg said out loud to Heather, tucking one riotous red curl behind her ear. “
Dreadfully
sorry.”
“Me too,” Natalie said, with much less conviction. She glanced at Tiffany, who rolled her eyes at her before returning her concentration to Heather, who was now shaking the plastic baby quite hard and shouting, “Wake up baby!” at it very loudly.
“That would hurt, wouldn’t it?” Natalie whispered to Meg, as Tiffany seemed quite absorbed by the lecture.
“I would have thought so…” Meg said, vaguely. She bent her head closer to Natalie’s. “So, how are you finding it, with your first? I can just about remember that mine was a sort of nightmare and a wonderful dream all rolled up together. I was so glad to have Alex and be a mom at last, and my husband Robert just doted on the pair of us—treated us like royalty.” She sighed and looked wistfully at the strip lighting for a moment. “It was a lovely time. But it hurt like hell and I slept so little I could barely speak. Actually, I don’t think I’ve slept more than about four hours a night since Alex was born, but I seem to have got used to it. I mean, look at me now, I can’t shut up!”
Natalie found herself chuckling along with Meg. She was the kind of person who was utterly alien to Natalie’s social world, with her wild red hair and a shapeless pullover that probably hid a lot of lumps and bumps, over that long-worn-out skirt. Absolutely not someone Natalie would have met in the course of her everyday
life. Maybe that was why she already liked her; she offered Natalie no reminder of the life it seemed she had left behind forever.
“I always think it’s with your first that you have the most fun,” Meg went on, oblivious to the stony glare that Heather was directing at her. “Going to all the coffee mornings and clinics, making friends. You don’t do that so much with your fourth, people tend to think you don’t need any support anymore because you’ve done it so often. Are you in a group?”
Natalie had avoided finding out about anything like that during her pregnancy, partly because although she was not in denial about the pregnancy itself, she most certainly was about how she came to be that way. And anyway, she was determined not to be a mother in the way that everybody else was, in that it was not going to change
her
, that essence of Natalie that made her the woman she was. She would still be
her
, but with a baby. The slight technical hitch with her plan was that every so often she couldn’t exactly remember the
her
she used to be.
“I’m not really a joiner,” Natalie said thoughtfully, wondering if that was still true. “And I’ve never really liked being organized by other people or told what to do. But actually it would be sort of nice to get a bit of advice. And I am a bit lonely being on my own…my husband works abroad—and I’ve got no other family to speak of so perhaps I should give it a go…”
She let the husband comment slip out so easily that Natalie realized she had almost forgotten that it was a lie. That was two or possibly three people she had told, or at least implied to them that she had a husband somewhere. Natalie hadn’t lied because she was ashamed of her single-parent status. On the contrary, during her pregnancy she’d rather admired her vision of herself: a woman alone and entirely independent, who didn’t need any man to prop her up. But it was easier to invent a husband than have to field
questions about the baby’s father. She didn’t want to have to explain to anyone, least of all a lot of very proper women—and Tiffany—that she most likely got pregnant during unprotected sex in a Jacuzzi with a man she barely knew then and had never seen since, and who still didn’t know that he was a father.
Yes, it was far easier to have a husband in the background somewhere. It was a simple lie, and one that as far as Natalie could see was utterly harmless.
“I know what you mean,” Meg agreed with a sigh. “Life always seems to be full of people waiting to organize you and tell you what you’re doing wrong. Robert, my husband, for example, love him. Or worse still my sister-in-law, Frances. She’s just had her first baby, but you would never have guessed she was a beginner. Apparently I’ve been getting it all wrong for the last eight years. She organizes poor baby Henry like he’s a private in the army.” Meg smiled. “I don’t know how I get mine fed and clothed every day, to be honest, but it happens somehow and they seem happy and healthy, so I can’t be that terrible at motherhood.”
“
Ladies
,” the midwife interrupted them once again. “I am not here to waste my or any of these other mothers’ time listening to you two gossiping.” She crossed her arms, dangling the plastic baby by one ankle. “Kindly take your conversation outside.”
“Sorry?” Meg said politely.
“Are you chucking us out?” Natalie asked in disbelief.
“I am,” Heather said.
“Oh dear,” Meg said anxiously. “I’m
terribly
sorry.”
Natalie looked at Tiffany, who seemed to be having a hard time not laughing out loud, and she did not miss the irony that it was her, the grown businesswoman, and not the schoolgirl who was getting chucked out of class.
“Fine,” she said, standing up and hoisting Freddie onto her
shoulder. “I have never been thrown out of anything before in my life,” she lied. “But if it makes you feel powerful to throw me and my tiny baby out into the night, go right ahead. You do it.”
“Good-bye.” Heather did not waver.
“Outrageous,” Natalie said.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Meg said, as the pair of them edged their way along the row.
“Why is it,” Natalie demanded once they were in the lobby, “that as soon as you have a baby the whole world seems to think they have the right to treat you like a second-class citizen?”
“Well, perhaps,” Meg said. “But I think we were slightly in the wrong, too, don’t you? It’s my fault, of course. When I actually meet an adult who will talk to me, I can’t stop. It’s like a compulsion. I think I must have a conversation about something other than Barbie or Thomas the Tank Engine and I must have it now!”
Natalie laughed; she hadn’t laughed so much since she went into labor. It was nice to discover that she actually could laugh, and better still didn’t seem to have stress incontinence anymore.
“Oh well, I don’t care anyway,” Natalie said. “It’s the perfect end to a perfect day.”
She told Meg the story of her electrical problems. “They seem like nice enough chaps but it’s just the disruption, isn’t it? And the not being able to walk around in your undies.”
This time Meg laughed. “Come to my house,” she offered instantly. “Come in the morning. I don’t live far from here, on the other side of the park—Victoria Road.” She retrieved her old envelope, scribbled an address and phone number on it with half a broken Crayola, and ripped it in half. “In fact, you’ll be doing me a favor; the dreaded sister-in-law is due round with little Henry. If there’s someone else there she’s far less likely to bully me into cleaning!”
Natalie smiled at her second unlikely new friend of the day.
“If you’re sure,” she said, looking at the address.
“Positive. We can start our own renegade baby group!”
“She was in a proper bad mood once you left,” Tiffany said, appearing at Natalie’s side as the class let out. “I thought I was the one who was always in trouble. That was funny.”
Meg smiled brightly at the young girl.
“That’s a lovely baby,” she said to Tiffany. “How long have you been looking after her?”
“Since she was born,” Tiffany said, immediately defensive. “I’m her mom.”
“Oh dear.” Meg looked mortified. “I’m so sorry. I thought you were her nanny…you look far too…slim to have had a baby!”
Hastily Natalie introduced Tiffany and Meg to each other. “I only just met Tiff tonight too,” Natalie told Meg, wanting to put Tiffany at her ease. “She’s my electrician’s apprentice’s girlfriend and current motherhood guru.”
“Oh how lovely!” Meg seemed to have a boundless enthusiasm for pretty much anything. “Well, Tiffany, come round tomorrow to mine for coffee. Natalie’s got the address. I’d love to have you if you don’t mind a messy house—you’d be very welcome.”
Tiffany chewed her lip as she looked at the two older women whose worlds were so utterly different from her own.
“I don’t know…” she said. Her confidence and composure seemed to wane briefly and her soft, not yet adult features looked uncertain. Natalie had to resist the compulsion to hug her. That was another new thing that had started to happen since Freddie’s birth: maternal urges. Of course, Natalie had expected them to come with maternity, but she hadn’t expected them to extend past her own baby. Still, somehow she thought Tiffany wouldn’t appreciate being mothered just then.
“Come on.” Natalie found herself coaxing the teenager. “You may as well. You said I need a baby group, and Meg’s had four kids so she must know something useful.” Still Tiffany hesitated. “You can come round to my house with Gary in the morning and we’ll go together if you like.”
Natalie was not sure why she was quite so keen to get Tiffany to come with her, except that perhaps for the first time in what seemed like ages Tiffany made her feel like a grown-up again. Not because she was so young, but because she didn’t treat her as if at the same time as giving birth to Freddie she had also delivered her brain.