You Be Mother Read online

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘As in, drawn a picture of you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. No, probably not.’

  From his half-empty pack, Stu pulled out a leather folio that opened to reveal two rows of expensive-looking pencils.

  ‘Are you seriously going to draw me?’ Abi laughed. ‘Can you draw people?’

  ‘I can do hands and everything,’ Stu said, pointing her towards the bed and settling himself in a facing chair. ‘Sit however.’

  Abi hesitated.

  ‘Serious.’ Stu pulled out the finest lead. ‘In my head, it’s four o’clock in the morning. I’m not going to sleep any time soon and who knows if Prashant will want to pose for a tasteful nude.’

  Stu looked at her open-faced, waiting. ‘Just if you want, though. No pressure. I’m sure I can find a fruit bowl I can do instead.’ He was the least self-conscious person she had ever met. Abi only ever thought of herself the way she imagined other people did. Tiny, a bit weird, always staring, but Stu was happy to sit, and stretch and draw and kiss people on the mouth whenever he felt like.

  ‘All right then,’ Abi said, first sitting then lying on the bed. ‘Draw me like one of your Croydon girls.’

  Stu looked at her quizzically.

  ‘You know, from Titanic when he . . .’

  ‘Haven’t seen it,’ Stu said.

  Abi reddened. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Maybe move that arm a bit,’ he said, and Abi did as he asked, the colour in her cheeks lingering for some time.

  * * *

  The next morning when Abi arrived at Student Services for her half-day Saturday in the same outfit as the day before, Tanya stirred her Nescafé suspiciously and asked if the missing student had ever turned up. Abi was happy to confirm that yes, he had, and he’d been fully and comprehensively inducted. Carefully rolled in her bag were three pencil drawings, of a small, slender girl with dark eyes, hair that caught the light and elegant limbs, in advancing stages of undress.

  When she left work that afternoon, darkness already falling, Stu was waiting for her on a low brick wall opposite the entrance. He sat with knees spread in a posture of total ease, as though needles of rain were not coming at him sideways. In his hand was a plastic bag from Boots, The Chemist. ‘Got you a present,’ he said, holding it out. A toothbrush, a pink pocket hair brush and a stick deodorant claiming a connection to summer orchids, instantly became the most romantic gift she had ever received.

  ‘I thought we could have another evening in,’ he said, draping a heavy arm around her shoulders. ‘Prashant Naidoo appears to be a no show.’

  * * *

  A month later, on the top deck of a night bus propelling them noisily back to campus, Stu, happy and drunk, laid his head in Abi’s lap. They had been to Chinatown for cheap noodles and walked back along the river from Charing Cross almost to Pimlico, taking turns drinking from a bottle of £9 vodka.

  As Abi stroked his hair, Stu let out a soft groan. ‘Do you reckon people can fall properly in love in not that long? Like, a few weeks?’

  Yes, they could. ‘Um, I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘I reckon I would have said no, but now I’m not so sure.’

  Prashant, blissfully forgotten, arrived out of the blue the following day and drew to a close the best weeks of Abi’s life. But Stu continued to seek her out between lectures, and after every shift at Student Services, she would find him waiting on the wall. Abi tried not to let herself expect him, but he was always there. ‘Our man Prashant will be having a huge one at his first Maths Olympiad this evening, and I have a bottle of finest no-label wine. Let’s go.’

  As the weeks wore on and the end of Stu’s term abroad drew closer, Abi began to dread his departure. Stu talked more and more about home, with a degree of nostalgia that Abi felt, at times, was disproportionate to the length of his absence. His accent returned with gusto. ‘Far out, I’ve missed it Abs. The heat, my mates. The harbour. You want to fly in over the Heads one time. Serious, babe, it’s the best city in the world.’

  ‘You sound like you’re returning from the Western Front,’ Abi said as they lay side by side in his bed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Like you’ve been fighting Germans in a trench for three years.’

  ‘Oh right. Yeah, nah. Reckon I’m just looking forward to being back on my own turf.’

  Abi lifted her head onto his chest. ‘What about us though?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘We’ll figure it out. When I’m back and I’ve had a chance to think, we can decide what we’ll do.’

  ‘Okay. That’s okay, I guess.’

  Too soon, the day came. Abi stood with her arms wrapped around Stu’s waist and her cheek against his chest. A yellow crocus had pushed its way through a section of bare, black earth, and she wanted to stamp it back in again. She could not bear to let go, even as the airport bus drew up. It would be stupid, Stu had said, for her to come all the way to the airport and say goodbye when they could just do it here and save £16.50 on the round trip.

  When he heaved his pack onto his shoulder, Abi made a sound, a sort of gah. Stu let her hug him once more. ‘Hey Abi, I love you,’ he said. ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Are we still together and everything?’

  ‘Yes, of course we are,’ Stu said, impatient. ‘Babe, true, you’ve asked me that a thousand times.’

  Abi let him go, and stared at her feet. It was more like only ten. Twenty at the most. ‘Call me when you get there?’

  ‘Yep. Will do.’ Stu pulled her towards him and kissed the top of her head, before bounding up the bus steps. Abi waited for him to appear at the window and wave, but he must have sat on the other side.

  She had never felt so alone. Even though, she thought as she turned back to Student Services, she’d been alone most of her life.

  At home late that night, Abi ran the shower and sat beneath the needles of warm water, missing Stu with a physical longing. It felt like her chest had split open and all the air was hissing out of her lungs. But for three days already, something had been forming in the deepest, most hidden part of her that would one day mean she’d never be alone again.

  7.

  Briggy’s Starving Artist Period

  In one of the thick paper carrier bags was a plastic tray of sushi but Brigitta couldn’t find it. Kneeling on the floor of the combined kitchen-living-sleeping area of her Kentish Town studio, she dug through bag after bag of new towels, crisp sheet sets and goose down pillows, until she turned it up beneath a pair of ready-made curtains for the room’s only window.

  She tore off the lid – gosh, had it really cost £12? – and bolted each oily segment while surveying the loot. It was a lot. But coming back to London and specifically to Kentish Town had been significantly more depressing than she’d anticipated.

  Those weeks in Sydney, as intermittently tense and emotional and lovely and awful as they had been, were enough to alter her memory of what life in London was really like. Compared to the indignity of being told by her older sister that she was clearly emotional and needed an early night, living by herself in a fourth-floor walk-up, in a manageably gritty part of a foreign city, had come to seem quite romantic. Although it pissed her off to hear her mother and sister laugh between themselves about ‘Briggy’s Starving Artist Period’, in a way it was true.

  Then, as the weeks following her father’s death, his funeral and memorial wore on, Kentish Town presented itself as a refuge from her family’s various modes of grief. Her mother’s long slumps followed by febrile bouts of doing; Polly’s ordering everyone about as though domestic tasks were the only thing that would save them; Freddie being alternately frivolous or refusing to talk at all, hiding from all duty in his room.

  Brigitta had longed to be alone, allowed to grieve like a grown-up, instead of the sulky middle child she unavoidably became after prolonged exposure to her family. But the allure of solitary living had evaporated the moment she opened the studio door.<
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  The wicked delay in Singapore had forced her to take the first Tube from Heathrow direct to the Barbican to make the company’s first full Saturday rehearsal. She stayed until the very end, becoming almost nauseous with fatigue during an hour of blocking on stage, under hot lighting, and causing the female lead to remark on how different some people look from their headshots. Her only reward for bearing up had been a moment of meaningful eye contact with the director, the other reason she’d been eager to get back to the life she had carved out for herself.

  Finally, as she made it up four flights with a suitcase, shouldered open the door and flicked on the studio’s only, bare bulb, the room lit up like the set of a very bleak stage play. The soiled dish cloth crisped into board where it had been left on the dish rack, a fresh peppering of mouse pellets across the stove, the sash window milky with grime. In desperate need of a shower, Brigitta dropped her bags by the door, took the three requisite steps to the bathroom and slid its concertina door off its runners.

  The next day was Sunday. She woke at 3 a.m. and lay still, listening to the thickening traffic on the street below. As she contemplated the many empty hours before her bistro shift that evening, a sense of dread began to gather somewhere just beyond reach.

  When it became impossible to stay in bed as she’d planned, she got up, took a taxi to Selfridges and spent the morning buying emergency homewares to assuage her misery. On her way out, Brigitta passed the gently illuminated entry to the Selfridges day spa, deciding it couldn’t hurt to look in, in case there was a therapist sitting around doing nothing, who would be better occupied attending to Brigitta’s complexion, as dry as a cracker from all that economy class air. Also, it would eat up the afternoon and there’d be a pleasant rush about getting to work.

  Her mother would not mind. She should not mind, having raised Brigitta to be so pathetically dependent on comforts. The studio and the bistro job had been part of an effort to cure herself, but so far, they’d only made her slightly more susceptible.

  Brigitta swallowed the last piece of sushi, dropped the empty tray in the sink and took a pair of scissors out of the kitchen drawer to score open her purchases. But as she turned back to the assortment of wares, it was instantly clear they were insufficient for the task of brightening the dreary room. It had all looked so luxurious under shop lighting.

  Why had she bought so much? Without even thinking to check the prices, noticing only now that the sheets by themselves cost nearly £200.

  Against rising shame, she began replacing each item in the stiff carrier bags, but when she came to a bottle of aftershave she couldn’t bear the idea of returning it.

  On her way out of the store, through Men’s Accessories and Cologne, she saw it displayed on a glass counter and recognised the bottle as the one that always sat on her father’s tall bedroom bureau. She spritzed the tester onto her wrist, and the woody musk that rose off her skin was so entirely her father that Brigitta wheeled around, half expecting to see him.

  The counter girl had to offer her a tissue from her own pocket, as Brigitta tearfully explained that her father had passed away unexpectedly just before Christmas and this was his cologne. The girl accepted Brigitta’s card and handed her the tissue-wrapped bottle, in a small carrier bag. He couldn’t really be dead, Brigitta thought as she pushed out onto Oxford Street, at least not in a permanent sense.

  After stowing all the bags in the broom cupboard, Brigitta returned to her unmade bed and saw her purse where she’d tossed it against the pillows. As soon as the idea came to her, she leapt up, removed the credit card and used the scissors to snip it into four jagged pieces. A rapturous sense of freedom came over her as she gathered the pieces up and dropped them, one by one, into the toilet. She yanked the chain and watched exhilarated as they eddied around the rust-streaked bowl. It was only when the water settled and pieces of unflushed credit card floated to the surface that Brigitta realised her error.

  ‘Fuckfuckfuckfuck,’ she said, rolling up her sleeve as she knelt in front of the toilet and, staring ceiling-ward, plunged her hand into the water. With some careful sellotaping, she could still make out the sixteen-digit number and while dialling the bank, Brigitta hoped to God her next emergency was the sort she could pay for over the phone.

  8.

  This ruddy latch

  Brigitta tossed her apron into her locker and left the bistro for the long journey home, footsore and smelling faintly of kingfish carpaccio. At the same moment, halfway around the world, Abi stood in front of the gate, biting the inside of her cheek and trying to thinking above the relentless wail of her hungry baby. The sun seemed to be getting hotter by the minute and for the first time she considered turning back for home.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. The effort of dragging the pram backwards up the communal stairs, returning to the stale heat of the flat. ‘Fuck it.’

  Raising herself on tip toes, Abi lifted one leg and straddled the pickets, trying hard not to impale her private parts, having lately put them through so much. A stumble, a wobbling correction and the other leg followed. In. Easily then, she reached over for Jude and lifted her perfect, furious boy into the sheltered enclosure. Abi held his face to hers, smelling his clean, metallic breath as he howled with an open mouth. The weight of his head in her cupped hand still gave her a twinge in her knicks, it was so real and lovely. Her tiny human anchor; and ever so slightly cross-eyed. Abi kissed his soft forehead and sat down on a wooden bench warmed by sun to resume his feed. Immediately he fell into a fast, silent rhythm, a faint click attending every suck, and Abi allowed herself a minute of tearful relief. Her head dropped to her shoulder and she wished, in no order of preference, for a Twix, a fag, her mother, any mother, something to read, an engagement ring and different shorts.

  All around her was the fragrance of leaf mould, rotting berries and the brine off the harbour. Jude fed on, eyes closed in milky concentration.

  ‘Now that’s better isn’t it?’

  Abi sat up, looking for who had spoken. An older woman was holding loosely to a rung of the ladder, doing a stationary sort of kick, only her head visible above the waterline. ‘What an absolute dot. How old is she?’

  ‘Oh. He. Jude. He’ll be four weeks on Thursday. Unless it’s Thursday already, I’ve sort of lost track of my days.’

  The woman pushed off and floated on her back, working both arms gently underwater. ‘Ah, well, I’m not the person to help you there. I haven’t a clue either. Anyhow, aren’t you doing well, out and about so soon? How darling.’

  Abi felt queasy with pride and could not think how to answer. The woman returned to the ladder and climbed out. Her shoulders were strong and square, her legs long and well-shaped. Only her middle had developed a stoutness, and a heavy bust rested on top of it. Her neat, dark blue swimming costume was the kind cleverly designed to draw the eye away from areas of thickness. Abi guessed her to be in her late sixties although it was difficult to tell, her only measure of similar age being Rae, who had begun a preternatural decline in her late thirties and could have passed for seventy now.

  The woman retrieved a thick terry robe from where it was slung over the fence, pressed it to her face a few times and, toting a French market basket, came over to where Abi sat.

  Her hair, still dry except at the nape, was the soft grey-brown of finished embers, with a starburst of white at its parting. When she raised a hand to smooth it back, Abi saw that her ring finger was stacked to the knuckle with gold bands of different thicknesses, dull and mottled, the most prominent of which had a very large, clear blue stone at its centre.

  ‘And then you will blink and he’ll be quite grown,’ she said.

  While Abi plumbed her shallow well of maternal observations for any sort of reply, the woman threaded her arms into the robe and knotted it around her waist. ‘I’m off then. Have a lovely day, whichever one it is.’

  As the woman reached the gate, she turned back and called out, ‘For next time, dear, this ruddy latch wants a pu
sh in, a little lift up and a good jigger.’

  Abi waved her thanks and watched the woman disappear through the trees. She was so, so sorry to see her go. Like a wave it almost pushed her sideways. She wanted to tell her that she’d already taken him on a plane, how hard it was getting him to open his eyes for his passport photos and filling out two lots of forms, hers and his, in hardly any time and with no help. How, before him, she’d never held a baby and now she could change a nappy in the dark. Abi sat where she was, immobilised by the weight of longing. Jude, nearly asleep, took quick, urgent sucks each time she tried to take him off so she let him stay there, eyelids fluttering, tiny fists clenched.

  Abi lifted her eyes to the harbour, as a ferry droned past on the far side of the bay. The word Friendship was painted squarely across its stern. Abi mouthed it, silently, and then against Jude’s upturned cheek, whispered, ‘If you walked around Croydon in a dressing gown you’d get locked up.’ A faint breeze ruffled his duck-down hair and he opened his eyes.

  ‘I love you so much, Jude,’ Abi said, waiting for the sense of absence created by the woman’s departure to pass, but it yawned open further and further until Abi felt she could fall in. ‘Mummy loves you.’ Dizzy, tired, thirsty, she got up and went home, without touching the water after all.

  9.

  A hundred and ten per cent ready

  Jude slept all the way home and did not wake as Abi bumped the pram backwards up the dark stairs, or when she lifted him out and laid him in the centre of the double mattress that took up most of the bedroom floor. Stu had installed a cot against the wall on Abi’s side and when he mentioned it had been his as a baby, she prayed the lemon paint was not throbbing with lead, and decided to use it only when necessary.

  Still sweating from the walk home, Abi shed her jean shorts, top and bra and put on a T-shirt of Stu’s that hung off her small frame like a dress. She covered Jude with a muslin and went back to the living room.