The Museum of You Page 23

‘Have you been crying more than usual?’

  ‘I don’t – I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you enjoying the things that you used to enjoy before the baby was born?’

  ‘I think I would, if I had time.’

  The health visitor laughed sympathetically as he loitered in the hall, twitching. If he interrupted, what would the health visitor think? Bursting into the room to contradict Becky would be a betrayal. As were her denials. If he interrupted there’d be an argument and Becky would cry. Could they really take Clover away if they knew she was struggling? He waited and pretended a timely arrival when the health visitor commented on the baby’s unusual name.

  A cookery book from Oxfam: Faster Pasta: Good Value Family Meals. No wrapping paper or jokes this time. No words, either: his actions would express things better than he could – I love you, I’ve been thinking of you.

  ‘I know I haven’t been doing much cooking, but –’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘– every time I try to do something she starts crying. I can’t get anything finished –’

  ‘I didn’t mean for you to –’

  ‘– I know I’m not doing enough, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s my fault,’ he said, retrieving the book. ‘I’m sorry.’

  There were purple-brown smudges under Becky’s eyes. If she could get some proper rest he knew she’d feel much better.

  ‘You need to make sure you sleep when the baby sleeps,’ he said.

  She flinched, and although he hadn’t done anything wrong, her response made him feel as if he had slapped her. She was like a cactus, there was no handling her.

  They needed help during the day, he decided. She wouldn’t go out, so he’d provide her with company, someone to keep an eye on things and see that she got some rest. He asked Dad, who was still working at the Philips factory during the week, but potentially free during the weekends Darren had to work. Dad recommended caution: child-rearing was up to women, and if there was one thing women didn’t like, it was interference. Anyway, he’d never fed a baby or changed a nappy. He wouldn’t be averse to giving the garden a bit of a once-over, though, if that was of any use? Darren said he’d get back to him and instead asked Mrs Mackerel if she’d mind popping round for a couple of hours on the odd afternoon. But she was supervising the tiling of her roof, and once that was completed she was having her back garden paved, which meant she needed to be in the house to make cups of tea and oversee everything. Ha! – needed to let them know who was boss, needed to interfere and tell them off at every opportunity, more like. Colin laughed when Darren asked if he’d like to come round and have a go with the baby. In the end he called Maureen.

  ‘I think Becky would really like to see you,’ he said. ‘And you’ve not met Clover yet.’

  Maureen came up from Portsmouth on the train, just for the day. Becky was terribly anxious. Unfinished projects loomed large: the uprooted upstairs carpets, the bare walls and lack of furnishings. He cleaned the bathroom and wiped the kitchen worktops, bought a Victoria sponge and a new one of those plug-in air fresheners Becky liked – Linen and Lilac.

  Maureen arrived laden with carrier bags of newborn clothes. A grand gesture and total waste of money – she could at least have bought different sizes or, better still, bothered to ask whether there was anything in particular they needed. Once she’d cooed over Clover for a few moments, she got stuck in.

  ‘What’s your brother doing in a B&B when you’ve got all this space?’

  ‘We were decorating the front bedroom for him, before.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed, determined to present a united front, though they still hadn’t discussed it properly and Clover’s arrival surely jeopardised the plan – he certainly hoped so.

  ‘It’s going to take us a while to finish things off, Mum. We had to buy baby things. There’s no carpet upstairs and –’

  ‘Of course, if you’re worried you could always take Jim back to Portsmouth with you,’ he said, and Becky’s face fell; he’d promised not to cause trouble.

  ‘Perhaps I should. When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Last week,’ he said. ‘He came round for tea. I cooked. When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘This afternoon, before I came here. And he’s not well. You’d know if you’d been looking out for him.’

  ‘God, he picks his moments.’

  ‘Don’t, Darren.’

  ‘There’s no reason why one of you couldn’t put the baby in her pram –’

  ‘We haven’t got one yet –’

  ‘– and walk down there to check on him. It’d do you good, Becky. Get rid of some of that fat.’

  ‘Cup of tea, Maureen?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer, he left the room as fast as he could, the expletives swimming in the pouch of his throat like fish.

  As Maureen left, she took Becky to one side and, in a stage whisper, hissed, ‘You’d better pull yourself together – brush your hair and get some make-up on. He won’t hang around if you don’t.’

  He’d never felt more like punching her. He wasn’t going anywhere. But later, in the evening, when he was washing the bottles, Clover started to cry and he discovered Becky sitting beside the Moses basket, staring into space, as if the baby was nothing to do with her. He decided he was doing quite a bit more than his fair share and called Colin.

  ‘What’re you up to?’

  ‘I’m on the train, to Liverpool.’

  There was a whoop and a few half-arsed cheers in the background and Darren experienced a stab of self-pity. He should be out having fun too; he hadn’t asked for any of this.

  ‘I’ll wait for you at Moorfields if you like. How long do you think you’ll be?’

  ‘I’m not going on the pull with you.’

  ‘Why not? I used to go with you.’

  ‘We were pulling girls then,’ he said, although what he really meant was I need someone to talk to.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a baby. You’ll love G-Bar, it’s a right laugh, and it’s mixed. Come on!’

  ‘No, you’re all right.’

  He went out by himself. Walked down the road to the Blue Anchor and nursed a pint of cider while checking his watch. Clover should have had her ten o’clock feed. He hoped Becky was all right.

  On his way home he went to Bargain Booze and bought a bottle of Malibu and two litres of Lilt. When he reached the end of The Grove the house was in darkness. He was glad: it meant Clover had gone down after her feed and Becky had followed suit; it made him feel better about leaving them. He watched crap on the telly and drank until he was nicely pissed. He went up to bed clumsily, stood on a pile of Becky’s books, stubbed his toe on the corner of the bed and woke Clover.

  ‘You have no idea how long it took me to get her to sleep.’

  Her voice was weary and he realised that she hadn’t been asleep at all but had, in fact, been lying there, wide awake.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll get her, you’re drunk.’

  ‘Not drunk, just a bit pissed.’

  ‘Pissed, then.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Once she’d changed and calmed Clover, she climbed back into bed. He was half asleep, fuzzy, relaxed.

  ‘I might do something,’ she whispered, her voice so quiet that it felt like he was hearing her thoughts. ‘Something stupid.’

  He couldn’t let it pass without comment. ‘What do you mean by stupid?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You won’t. You’re not stupid.’

  In the morning, when it was light, her words seemed imagined, nightmarish. And he didn’t know how to ask her about them. His dad had talked a man off a bridge – where was his emergency reserve of words?

  He noticed the missing clocks the moment he stepped into the house. The hall looked bare and unfamiliar.

  ‘They were driving me mad.’

  ‘Where did you put them?’

  ‘Back in
their boxes. In the dining room.’

  ‘It looks shit now.’

  ‘Get some pictures like a normal person.’

  ‘There’s no need to be –’

  ‘You try staying here all day with five ticking clocks going off every thirty minutes, an alarm every three hours, and a screaming baby you weren’t planning on having.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll put them back when you’re feeling better.’ And he pulled the nails out, just in case they snagged and hurt her as she passed.

  Later that week he came home from work to find Clover in the basket in the lounge – face scrunched and purple, occupied almost exclusively by her mouth, which had subsided into a wide, raging yowl. He attempted to calm her as he searched for Becky, heart pounding.

  She was in the bathroom, sobbing quietly. She looked strange: there was something odd about her face. No, it was her hair. It was gone. Gone – fuck. It lay on the floor beside her, a bobble fastened around one end, the partially unbraided curls at the other fanning the floor. He cradled Clover in one arm and bent to retrieve the hair, stupidly holding it up to Becky’s head for a moment, as if he might refasten it. Accepting the impossibility of his wish, he laid the hair to rest in the sink and went downstairs.

  ‘Can you come?’ he asked Kelly. ‘With your hair things?’

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Not really,’ he replied, experiencing the relief of making the admission to someone at last.

  Becky sat on the side of the bath, her face mottled and swollen. She’d stopped firing blank, dry after-sobs; Clover, too. The crying over, he allowed himself to feel wronged. He loved her hair, she knew that. Yes, it was hers, but she could at least have told him, let him know what she planned. It was hard not to take it personally, to see it as a protest.

  ‘Hiya, Becky,’ Kelly called as she stepped into the bathroom. ‘Darren says you fancy a – oh, you had a go yourself . . .’ She paused and studied Becky’s lop-sided mop. ‘Not to worry,’ she said, smoothing her own hair, which was elfishly short and pillar-box red. ‘I know the feeling! Sometimes I want a change and I can’t wait.’

  She lifted Becky’s hair out of the sink, getting him to hold the bobbled end while she re-plaited the length. Standing like that, on the holding end of the job, opposite a chatting woman with busy hands and a concentrating face, reminded him of folding sheets with his mother when he was a boy, and he was struck by a bolt of missing her. Once she ran out of hair, Kelly dug in her bag for a bobble and fastened it around the plait so it was secured at both ends.

  ‘You could do something with this, you know? Send it off to a charity, to be made into a wig.’

  He didn’t know what to say. The idea of someone walking around wearing Becky’s beautiful hair made him feel queasy. Becky said nothing; she appeared, for the moment at least, to be past speaking.

  ‘No? Well, you could just keep it, if you like. That’d be fine, too. I’ve got my nan’s plaits. She had her hair cut when she was twelve. Wanted a grown-up style. If you ask me, she ended up looking like Paul McCartney – I’ve seen the photos – but she liked it, that’s the main thing. She went to the hairdressers’ after school and they started by chopping off her plaits. They let her take them home with her. Is there a chair you could carry up, Darren . . . no? Don’t worry. Could you just swizzle round and face the tiles?’

  Becky placed her feet in the empty bath and faced the wall, as if in disgrace.

  ‘I’m going to comb through your hair, just to get rid of any tangles, okay? Anyway, I found them – my nan’s plaits – in a drawer when I was about six. The hair was dark brown. Hard to believe they were my nan’s, because she was white-blonde by then. You know how some people go blonde to cover up the grey? I loved them. Used to play with them all the time.’

  He was so glad to have her there, flattening his fright with her stream of ordinary words. She didn’t know Becky terribly well, but she touched her like a friend, and although her words came fast, her hands were gentle as she smoothed the jagged hair at the base of Becky’s neck in a stroking motion that seemed to say, ‘There-there, there-there.’

  ‘So, I’m thinking that we want to make your hair look uniform, but still hold a nice shape while you grow it out – if that’s what you’re planning?’

  Becky didn’t answer.

  ‘Hair like yours is difficult – I mean, it’s really lovely and you’re very lucky, but it’s tricky. And I haven’t got much experience. You have to cut less than you want because curly hair shrinks. What I need to do is minimise bulk and maximise curl. Then you can wear it back from your face, like Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t worry about all that, Kel. Just tidy it up.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, setting to with her scissors. ‘So, have you got any holidays planned?’

  Becky made a choking noise. ‘Ask Darren,’ she said.

  Kelly glanced over her shoulder at him. He shook his head and she stopped talking and concentrated on Becky’s hair.

  ‘We should take Clover to Peacefields,’ he said. ‘Everyone will want to see her. And they’ll be missing you.’

  ‘I miss it.’

  ‘Well, exactly. That’s what I’ve been saying. That’s why you need to get out, see people –’

  ‘Going there will only make it worse.’

  On his day off they took Clover to the clinic to be weighed.

  ‘She cut her hair,’ he told the health visitor as Becky undressed Clover.

  ‘Looks lovely.’

  ‘But she’s always had long hair.’

  ‘People often fancy a change after they’ve had a baby.’

  ‘She did it herself. With the kitchen scissors.’

  ‘That was brave! No harm done, it suits you, Becky.’

  ‘She was very upset.’ Becky was going to be furious with him, but his worry was finally bigger than his fear of hurting her. ‘She was crying.’

  The health visitor inclined her head. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Tired,’ Becky confessed.

  ‘Emotional?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Are you eating?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He couldn’t understand what food had got to do with it. ‘Tell her what you told me in the night.’

  Becky froze. ‘What?’

  ‘The other night.’

  She looked from him to the health visitor, deciding. ‘You mean when you were pissed?’

  His mouth dropped open and the health visitor inclined her head again, this time addressing him.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke –’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘– or drink around the baby.’

  ‘It was the first time I’ve left Becky alone with her at night, apart from at the hospital. I was a bit tipsy when I came to bed, that’s all. Becky was looking after her.’

  ‘What did she say that worried you?’

  ‘I don’t know what he thinks he heard, but he was pissed.’ Becky placed Clover in the scales. ‘Look at that!’

  ‘Oh, that’s great. I thought she’d put some weight on when I saw her. How many ounces is she having now?’

  And, just like that, his concerns were cast off and replaced by a conversation about Clover’s weight, sleep and bowel movements.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that to me,’ he hissed as they returned to the car.

  ‘The feeling’s mutual,’ she said.

  The black skirt from Dorothy Perkins. It had been in the window, before, and she’d commented on it. ‘That’s pretty,’ or something, she’d said. It wasn’t in the window any more, but it was easy to find: red flowers, floaty, delicate.

  ‘I bought this for you.’

  There was a flicker of something in her expression, and he felt pleased with himself.

  ‘Try it on. Go on.’

  He waited in the lounge, but she returned still wearing her trackie bottoms and T-shirt.

&n
bsp; ‘It’s too small.’ Her voice was small, hurt.

  ‘But the waist is elastic.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And it was the biggest one they had,’ he said, which made things worse.

  Clover had been crying since he’d arrived home at six o’clock, longer if he counted the hour Becky claimed before his return. Fists clenched, knees flexed; two whole hours of screaming. His ears were ringing, his forehead and neck rigid with tension, his throat squeezed by a clenching anxiety.

  There was a knock at the door and he answered, nursing Clover as she howled.

  ‘COLIC!’ Mrs Mackerel shouted. ‘BICYCLE HER LEGS. Put some CAMOMILE TEA in her BOTTLE or get some GRIPE WATER.’

  She turned to leave, changed her mind and stepped, uninvited, into the house. She took Clover from his arms and sat on the sofa with her. There was something in her confident, no-nonsense hands that stopped Clover’s crying. She moved Clover’s legs up and down and spoke to her sternly.

  ‘THAT’S ENOUGH. If you’re going to keep SCREAMING I’ll need some of that CAVITY WALL INSTALLATION.’

  Clover paid attention.

  ‘THERE’S ABOLUTELY NO NEED FOR THIS. Your mother looks AWFUL.’

  Clover listened, eyebrows raised, forehead wrinkled.

  ‘Get the GRIPE WATER and the CAMOMILE TEA. Don’t put all your CHICKS in one BASKET.’

  ‘Eggs,’ he said.

  ‘NO, I DON’T think so. I wouldn’t feed EGGS to a baby THIS SMALL.’

  She passed Clover back to him and strode out of the house. But within moments, Clover was screaming again.

  It’s possible for a loving person not to love their own baby. He saw it, but didn’t comprehend it; couldn’t quite believe it. Becky had got off to a slow start, he decided. It was like the other kinds of love: sometimes it took a while to build. Once she had forgotten her chewed nipples and stopped leaking blood, once she had noticed what everyone else saw, that Clover was her in miniature, perhaps she would be able to forgive her for arriving.

  There were sparks at the edges of his vision as he approached the end of The Grove on his way to the garage. It had been the worst in a series of worst nights. Clover was in the throes of her first cold. When she finally fell asleep the mucus bubbled in her nose and throat, keeping them awake. In the early hours she filled her nappy and the shit oozed past its waistband, right up to her shoulders. He changed and cleaned the Moses basket while Becky dealt with Clover. After her feed, Clover coughed, and the whole lot spouted into their bed. He changed the bedding and wiped the mattress while Becky changed Clover and prepared a second bottle. There were quiet moments during the rest of the night. He’d managed some sleep, dozing off each time Clover calmed down. But Becky hadn’t slept at all. Every time he’d stirred during the previous few nights, she had been wide awake. She needed to sleep.