You Be Mother Read online

  Dedication

  It has to be for you, Bebs.

  Epigraph

  Any idiot can face a crisis.

  It’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.

  Anton Chekhov

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I 1. Good luck getting home

  2. I just lie there, really

  3. A saviour is born

  4. I think he likes you more than me

  5. Basic meals and snacks

  6. Comprehensively inducted

  7. Briggy’s Starving Artist Period

  8. This ruddy latch

  9. A hundred and ten per cent ready

  10. Very English skin

  11. Southbound traffic

  12. I would hang on to those

  13. Clayton’s panicking

  14. The pastry will lose its crunch

  15. Absolute steel

  16. There’s no need to be vulgar

  17. Baby corn was very big in Gordon in the nineties

  18. A night off the Jude talk

  19. A complete milk food

  20. A first-rate interferer

  21. The longueurs

  22. Their train is stuck at Potter’s Bar

  23. Jude, get your wallet

  24. Cohabiting’s a bit louche

  25. Dear as he is

  26. Are you on drugs?

  27. It doesn’t even hurt

  28. Dust in my flutes

  29. Lettuce can tolerate a setback

  30. One up from dead

  31. Quite the motley crew

  32. Artisanal condiment

  33. A toothbrush for Kentish Town

  34. You must go

  35. Fresh-ish

  36. One of my foremost traits

  37. A stitch of harm

  38. There is no Monique

  39. Bed of peace

  40. Sniffer of nighties

  41. You’ve made everything worse

  42. No lectures please

  43. Death by toxic towelette

  44. The eternal hairshirt

  45. I’m having a personal crisis, Lawrence

  46. Changi Best Value Pharmacy

  47. One in four’s a dry one

  48. Horrible, horrible

  49. Deadly Predators or Arsenal

  50. Brigitta’s got herself in the papers

  51. The Cremorne Point Benevolent Society

  52. Advanced Night Repair for tired skin

  53. Lessons in Saltwater

  54. Pantry staples

  55. The tectonics of structural systems

  56. Mate, can babies eat toast?

  57. Currants in the cake

  58. The Siege of Ladbroke Grove

  PART II 59. September can be full of false promise

  60. Crying, Excessive

  61. Something with explosions

  62. My hands is very sticky

  63. More than you ever will

  64. Let us climb up the rockery

  65. Eggs and soldiers

  66. It won’t be nice cold

  67. Owing to my prostate

  68. Brigga’s Box of Sad Things

  69. Is she a wreck?

  70. A dead-set waste of time

  71. You’ve been such a trooper

  72. And crisps

  73. Hosing the green bin

  74. Up and down the highway like a yo-yo

  75. You don’t look Korean

  76. We’re not exactly badly off

  77. Love-rat director given boot by radio star wife!

  78. The doghouse

  79. Infamous Abi

  80. A slave to your wash cycle

  81. We are awful

  82. Looking a gift horse in the mouth

  83. Such an arse

  84. There is one thing

  85. One adult and him

  86. All our mornings

  87. Well, Merry Christmas then

  88. Mostly it’s been torture

  89. Lucky you

  90. It is not a special day for us

  91. I am a fucking social worker

  92. Run to the pain

  93. Conversationally at Southgate Centre

  94. Hello Morris

  95. Let me go now

  96. You look a bit rough

  97. Captain of the Hockey Thirds

  98. I’m three fingers

  99. Crowded with incident

  100. It means we have made it

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  PART I

  1.

  Good luck getting home

  From behind, it looked as though the girl might be trembling, although it could have been the constant up and down movement of her jigging the baby strapped to her front.

  Brigitta, next in line, watched as the girl removed one item at a time from the counter of an all-hours chemist. A packet of scented wipes and a Twix were first to go. Next, the travel-size deodorant and two-pack of blue plastic dummies. Each time, she asked the man to try her card again. ‘What about now? Or now?’

  As her baby’s dry, reedy cries gathered force, the girl’s rocking motion grew more frantic. Brigitta tried to be patient. Truly though, she only wanted to pay for her water and find some deserted corner of the airport to wait out the night.

  She looked at her watch. It was still on Sydney time. She guessed it would be midday in London, and some non-existent hour here in Singapore. It had been more than forty minutes since they’d all been herded off the plane, after sitting for twice as long on the runway while rain pelted the fuselage and gave the inside of the cabin the quality of a tin shed.

  The head steward had come over the intercom at ten minute intervals requesting patience until finally announcing, to jeers from the cabin, that there would be no flights out tonight and they would now begin deplaning. Nobody could exit the terminal, he warned, in case they were required to board again at short notice. ‘Shouldn’t that be called replaning?’ Brigitta said to her rowmate. 74D and E. He shook his head, no English.

  Now the terminal heaved with exhausted, grubby-looking travellers and the line forming behind Brigitta began to radiate a restless energy.

  ‘What about just them?’ the girl asked. A single packet of newborn nappies remained on the counter. She spoke with a strong Croydon accent, although to Brigitta’s ears trained by drama school and a year and a half in a studio flat in Kentish Town, it sounded like she’d gone to some effort to knock the South London out of it. ‘How much are those nappies on their own?’

  Brigitta could tell she was on the verge of tears now and felt a twist of sympathy. Being stranded for hours on your own was bad enough, but with a tiny baby . . .

  ‘Do you sell them in ones then?’ the girl pleaded. ‘Why are they so much?’

  Brigitta shifted her weight from one foot to the other. When the girl’s card was declined again, Brigitta leaned forward and tapped her shoulder. She turned, braced.

  In normal circumstances or kinder lighting, her face might have been quite lovely. But her pale skin, unblemished except for a hair-thin scar on her forehead, was taut and drained, tinged lilac beneath her dark, sloe eyes. Tears quivered at their rims. Her copper hair was pulled back and tied with a rubber band; two strands escaping from the front had jagged ends, as though they’d been cut with school scissors. Brigitta glanced into the carrier and saw that the infant inside was so small, only the top of a dark, soft crown was visible below the padded rim.

  ‘Could I just put all our things together on my card?’ Brigitta whispered. ‘Just so we can get out of here?’

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t. Here, you go ahead of me. S
orry.’

  She stepped aside as the man behind the counter picked up the nappies and tossed them into a plastic basket at his feet.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Brigitta said, ‘you obviously need all those things. Who knows how long we’ll all be stuck. Truly.’ Then turning to the man, she said crisply, ‘We’ll have all those things back thank you.’ Brigitta handed over a black Visa card. Well, her mother’s card, really, for emergencies only, although clearly this was one.

  ‘If you write out your details, I could pay you back when I get to Australia,’ the girl said, accepting the bag with a look of immense apology.

  ‘Oh, funny. That’s where I’ve just come from,’ Brigitta replied. ‘Don’t worry, though. I quite like the idea of being the bailer-outerer instead of the bailee for once.’ On impulse, Brigitta reached out and squeezed the girl’s hand. ‘Good luck getting home. If that’s where you’re going.’

  ‘You too,’ she said. They separated at the door and walked in opposite directions to their own flights that, when the weather finally broke, would carry them as far from home as it was possible to go.

  2.

  I just lie there, really

  The gate would not open, but Abi could not turn back now. She pulled hard at the bolt on the other side of its low pickets until its rusty casing lifted a small crescent of flesh out of her thumb. The bolt shifted a promising half-inch, then held. With her other hand, Abi held the handle of Jude’s heavy pram to stop it rolling further down the steep path that veered off the main walking track around Cremorne Point and led down to this fenced enclosure ringed by tall trees. She stood in their shade and worked the lock. Overhead, a mob of brightly coloured birds pecked at the hard, black nuts that clustered about the trunks, casting the empty shells down onto the paving. They made a ticking sound like rain all around her.

  Abi’s need to be in and on the other side rose into a sort of fury. It was so hot. Ferocious in the sun, humid in the shade and so relentlessly stifling in the flat that sweat found a continual course from her neck, through her bra, to the waist of her jean shorts.

  * * *

  Before arriving at the gate, Abi had found a small, grassy playground and gone in to feed Jude, feeling certain that although empty now and exposed to blazing sun, other mothers would begin to arrive at any moment. Almost immediately, a little girl greased with suncream had appeared out of nowhere and run towards the swings.

  ‘Two minutes, that’s all bubba, it’s too hot. No. Emily! Hat stays on,’ a woman’s voice, high and broad, called after her. Abi straightened her back.

  ‘Scorcher, hey?’ the woman said, ambling in and noticing her there. She removed her sunglasses and began cleaning them with the hem of her T-shirt. ‘Where’s your other one?’

  Abi smiled brightly. ‘Oh, he’s my only one.’

  ‘God.’ The woman sounded offended. ‘Then why are you at a playground?’

  Abi could not think how to reply so after a polite interval, she interrupted Jude’s feed, returned him writhing and unhappy to the pram and continued along the path.

  * * *

  It was around the next broad curve that flashes of bright, gold light through trees appeared on her right, and Abi skittered down to where she now stood, peering over the gate at what lay on the other side. Even as Jude’s crying swelled to suggest a state of near starvation, she could only survey it in silent awe.

  A pool. A long, narrow rectangle of deep water, bordered on all four sides by a sun-bleached wooden boardwalk. The far side was cantilevered above the bright, surging water of the harbour, but its concrete edges were painted a municipal blue that somehow turned the water inside a pale, riverish green. Captivated, Abi tried to locate a suitable metaphor, but her tired mind could not think of anything better than Aquafresh toothpaste in the cool mint flavour. There was no one on the other side of the fence, a faint breeze ruffled the pool’s surface. The thought of pushing the pram back up the hill, without first touching the water, feeling it wrap around her wrists and cool her blood, concentrated her energy. As Jude’s crying reached a pitch, she tried forcing the bolt further into its barrel, in case that was the knack of it.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘Fuck.’

  The knot behind her breastbone tightened as Jude became frantic. Maybe you had to pay someone and they gave you a key? She hoped not, since she didn’t have any Australian money yet.

  When her next effort failed, a wave of intense fatigue passed through her body. It had been so hard to get here. Each leg, Croydon to Heathrow. Those eight lonely hours stranded in Singapore. To Australia and to a top-floor flat in this unknown suburb.

  But her course had been set ever since a weary GP in the Student Medical Centre confirmed her pregnancy. By then Abi already knew but remained so deeply terrified by the prospect of motherhood that when she brought home a Boots own-brand test kit, she found herself unable to provide a single drop of the necessary fluid across three separate attempts. It was only when strangers started giving up their bus seats, and other students eyed her knowingly around campus despite the loose T-shirts and men’s duffel coat she had started to wear, that Abi forced herself to make an appointment.

  The doctor took out a pamphlet called ‘The Three Trimesters’, scored through the first two with a marker, and slid it across the desk towards her.

  ‘How could you not know?’ she asked, vexed.

  ‘I just thought I was getting fat.’ Abi could not meet the doctor’s eye.

  ‘But you’re so tiny, you didn’t notice when you began showing?’

  ‘I didn’t show for ages,’ Abi said truthfully. ‘And anyway I haven’t got a mirror you can see your whole self in at home. You have to stand on the loo and then you only get to here.’ She made a sawing motion just below her chest.

  The doctor took a cardboard dial out of her desk drawer. Two layers turned on a split pin, and shaking her head, the doctor rotated the smaller, inner circle.

  ‘Well, if the dates you’ve give me are right, you’re due in ten weeks. January 13. You really didn’t know?’

  Abi stared into her lap.

  ‘How long have you been sexually active?’ the doctor asked, exhausted by the task of running interference between all the sperm and eggs on the Kingston University campus.

  ‘Oh, I’m not,’ Abi said, reddening. ‘I just lie there, really.’

  The doctor sighed and returned her dial to the top drawer. ‘Well, if you know who the father is, I’d let him know quick-smart.’

  3.

  A saviour is born

  Abi sat in the bus shelter outside the medical centre and tried to call Stu but her phone was out of credit. When she got back to Highside Circuit, she shut herself in her room, undid the complicated system of rubber bands that had been keeping her jeans together for some time, and sat down with her thick, ancient laptop. The task could not reasonably be put off any longer. And besides, Abi needed to begin formulating her means of escape. Her baby would not be raised in the ex-council where she had grown up, and still lived in with her mother Rae, who generally speaking, sat sixteen hours a day in her armchair wearing a parka and knit hat against the aching cold of the front room, a mug of Weight Watchers Cream of Veg skinning over on the card table in front of her.

  She would liven up whenever Pat from next door came around with her OK! to trade for Rae’s Hello and stay on to watch Strictly Come Dancing without ever letting her Parliament Blue lose its salivated purchase on her bottom lip.

  Occasionally the pair applied themselves to collages, made from magazine pictures glued into cheap scrapbooks from Poundstretcher. Pat liked proper glamour shots, with hair and makeup and preferably taken in the star’s own home. Rae preferred pictures that proved Celebs Are Just Like Us! So they rarely went after the same prize with their scissors.

  ‘Which do you like better, the samba or the rhumba?’ Rae would occasionally ask her daughter, one eye on her pasting, the other on the glittering stage.

  Nestled into a s
leeping bag on the facing sofa, Abi would say she didn’t care. Then, guiltily, ‘Probably the samba.’

  ‘Ooh, listen to you. Aren’t we posh?’ Pat would say every time Abi spoke in an accent that wasn’t uncut Croydon. Abi had adopted it as a matter of survival when she started at a girl’s grammar on the other side of the river. You couldn’t get by with a South London accent there, they would know instantly you were a scholarship girl.

  ‘Sahm-ba. Saahm-ba,’ Pat would repeat in imitation ‘Hear that, Mum? Oooh, I do like to dah-nce the saahm-ba.’

  ‘Leave her alone, eh Pat. They’re about to say the scores.’

  Now in the cold of her bedroom, Abi opened Instant Messenger. Stu’s status was ‘online’ and Abi began to type.

  Abi.Egan89

  Are you there?

  SRKellett

  What’s up.

  Abi.Egan89

  Sorry I couldn’t ring. No credit. But . . .

  Abi.Egan89

  . . . turns out I’m a bit

  Abi.Egan89

  on the pregnant side

  She considered adding a surprised face made of punctuation, but did not want to seem flippant. Then came a lengthy pause that Abi knew wasn’t due, in this instance, to Stu’s need to look down at his hands as he typed. He was a solid, confoundingly dyslexic student of architecture, considerably more able with pen and graph paper. When ‘Stu is typing’ appeared and disappeared twice more, Abi could no longer bear it.

  Abi.Egan89

  I just found out today.

  SRKellett

  I thorght you said u had stuff sorted???

  Abi.Egan89

  I did. I don’t know what happened.

  SRKellett

  & yr sure? No chance it’s a mix up?

  Abi lifted her vest and looked down at her stomach as a small ripple passed below the surface. A tiny hand, possibly a foot.

  Abi.Egan89

  Nope.

  SRKellett

  Faaaaaaarg. Babe!!!

  SRKellett