The Family Trap (6 page)

‘It’s great of you to offer, Mum,’ she says, sniffing, ‘but it’s not just about the money. I still want to go back to work. As soon as possible.’

‘Why?’ I ask again.

She shrugs, stretches out her shoulders, and looks up at the ceiling. A mermaid mobile revolves slowly above her head. I hadn’t even noticed it until now. This room is turning into a nursery by stealth.

‘I just want to, I can’t explain it any better than that. I want to be more than just a mum. Robert doesn’t understand, and I don’t expect you to understand either, but it’s something I realised the minute Phoenix and I came home from the hospital.’

Which was, in fact, less than a week ago. ‘It’s early days, Lipsy. You’ve got to give it time, settle into the swing of it. Get into a routine – remember we talked about that? You need to get to know Phoenix and he needs his mum.’

‘I’m not planning on going back tomorrow,’ she snaps, rounding on me. ‘But I’m not waiting six months either. Everything will have moved on without me, Mum. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that I don’t want life to leave me behind?’

A memory comes to me, unbidden. Lipsy is two weeks old and I’m walking her in the park by my parents’ house in Shenley Church End. In the distance I see two of my old college friends. They are sitting on a bench with their heads close together, brightly coloured shopping bags at their feet. I’m excited – it’s been ages since I’ve spoken to someone my own age, and I’m eager to show off my cute little baby in her pink and white fluffy jacket with bunny ears on the hood.

I start running across the park, holding the pram in front of me like a trophy. I call out when I get close enough, and they look up, as one. I’m still running, and I’m watching their eyes take me in, then move to the pram, then back again. They turn to look at each other, and the one called Serena raises her eyebrows and pulls a disgusted face. I’m slowing down now, confused, another greeting dying on my lips. But before I can reach them, they stand up, grab their bags, and hurry away in the opposite direction.

I could tell my daughter more about watching life move on without you than I hope she will ever have to know. But I could also tell her how fiercely protective it makes you, how you turn into someone who will sacrifice anything to keep your baby safe and happy.

Instead I pull her to me and hold her tight. I can’t tell her anything; she has to figure it out for herself.

‘Will you talk to Rob?’ she asks, her tone half challenging, half pleading. I shake my head.

‘No, sweetheart. That’s for you to do.’

But she mistakes my hands-off approach for not caring and pushes me away.

‘I knew you wouldn’t understand. You didn’t go back to work for years after having me. How could you possibly know how I feel. Just forget it, Mum. Just don’t bother.’

I turn away from her, my eyes tearing up. But I’m not crying for myself; I’ve a tougher skin than that. I’m crying for her, for my strong-willed, fiery daughter, who will one day hate herself for hurting her mother the way I hate myself for being so hard on my dad.

And I’m crying for parents everywhere, who still feel they have to try so hard to get their children’s approval.

*

The Twilight Retirement Home is a converted manor house in Bletchley, right at the very south of Milton Keynes’ city limits. When I took the job last summer I didn’t know I’d be leaving come February. If not for Paul’s decision to embark on a new adventure in the wilds of Derbyshire, I’d probably end up working at Twilight for the rest of my days.

Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if it wasn’t for Velma.

Velma Manley has one aim in life, and it isn’t – as it should be – to keep the residents healthy, happy and comfortable. Velma’s aim is to make me miserable. And as she’s my boss, her situation is one that suits her very well indeed.

‘Evening, Stella,’ she says when I turn up on Saturday afternoon at five minutes past two. She’s trying to be funny. Everyone in reception looks up at the clock. Velma smirks and tells me I’ll have to stay late to make up the time.

Five minutes! She’s the devil incarnate.

‘How’s Lipsy?’ Jean, head of Twilight’s cleaning team, rushes to my side as soon as Velma is out of the way.

‘Do you have any photos?’ asks Martha, leaning over the reception desk and resting her enormous bust on top of it.

I smile and pull out my phone. As there are about a hundred photos of Phoenix on there, this takes quite a bit of time, and I don’t get away from their questions until two thirty. Now I really am late, so I run up the stairs to the staffroom, panting all the way, and change into my overall while looking longingly at the coffee machine.

Lipsy was mortified the first time she saw me in my pale blue tabard. ‘What the bloody hell are you wearing?’ were her exact words. In her eyes I could see I’d reached an all-time low – but at least, she said, it suited me better than the canary-yellow, midriff-exposing shirt I’d donned for my shifts at Cafe Crème.

‘I’ve always worked hard for this family,’ I reminded her somewhat huffily. ‘I wasn’t too proud to take a second job after the fire, and I’m not too proud to wear a uniform now.’

‘You only had to take the second job because you forgot to renew the house insurance,’ Lipsy reminded me right back, ‘and you’re only doing this job because you are too proud to ask Paul for your old one back.’

Quite. Isn’t it wonderful how our children get right to the heart of the matter? And then cheerfully stick a knife into it.

If Paul was surprised or dismayed to find his new girlfriend suddenly working as a care assistant in a run-down retirement home on the fringes of the city, he kept it to himself. But maybe it’s no coincidence that not long after I met him for lunch still wearing the tabard, he proposed and suggested I gave up my job.

I’m only a quarter of the way through my rounds when I hear someone hissing my name from the bottom of the main stairs.

‘It’s Lipsy,’ Martha whispers. Her whisper could shatter glass, and I look around to make sure Velma isn’t in earshot.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘She didn’t say. Just said you need to phone her right away. Grandma,’ Martha adds with a wink and a hefty nudge when I reach the bottom step.

I speed over to the reception desk, breaking rules number one and two in the process: no personal calls and absolutely no running. Lipsy answers on the first ring.

‘Mum, you have to come home.’

‘Why? What’s wrong? Is it Phoenix?’

‘I don’t know what to do with him, Mum. He won’t stop crying.’

I can hear him in the background, exercising his lungs. ‘Have you fed him?’

‘Of course I’ve fed him, I’m not retarded. I’ve fed him, changed him, taken him around the block for a walk. He must be ill. You need to come home right now.’

‘I only left an hour ago and he was fine,’ I hiss, trying to quell my rising alarm. Phoenix’s cries reach mammoth proportions and Lipsy lets out a sob.

‘Where’s Robert?’

‘Gone out,’ she says. ‘He’s sulking about our row.’

For goodness sake. What’s the point of getting together with an older man if he ends up acting like a child?

I bite my tongue. Something you get very good at when you have a daughter like Lipsy.

‘I’ll be fifteen minutes, OK? Keep him warm, but not too warm, and give him lots of fluids, and …’ What else should you do with a sick baby? My mind’s gone blank. And what if he really is sick? ‘I’m on my way,’ I screech into the phone.

Martha looks stricken as I wrench off my tabard and race for the staffroom.

‘What am I going to tell Velma?’ she shouts two minutes later as I run back past her, handbag and keys in hand.

‘The truth, of course,’ I tell her. ‘My grandson is ill.’

Surely even Velma won’t have a problem with that?

*

As soon as I enter the house I can tell something is wrong. There’s no crying baby, for one thing. The house is eerily silent. I stand in the hall for a couple of seconds, catching my breath. All the way here, driving like a lunatic up the A5, I could hear Phoenix’s cries in my head. I have the route to the hospital planned out, and I’ve rushed in ready to grab the car seat and go. The lack of panic alarms me more than anything I could have imagined.

‘Lipsy,’ I cry. ‘Lipsy, where are you?’

Maybe they’ve got a taxi and gone without me. Maybe Lipsy called Robert and he got here quicker than I could. I search the kitchen worktops for a note, check the pin board, and then head back to the hall in case I missed one there.

Nothing.

I’ve just started up the stairs to check the bedrooms when I see Lipsy’s legs descending.

‘Where’s Phoenix?’ I say, backing down again.

She puts her finger to her mouth and shushes me.

‘Is he OK?’

I let her pull me into the lounge and shut the door behind us.

‘He’s fine,’ she says, laughing and shaking her head. ‘I think it was wind.’ Her face is calm, showing more than a hint of pride. My heart is still hammering in my chest. ‘Mum, I was brilliant. I put him up on my shoulder, like this, and walked him all around. Then he just suddenly stopped crying, gave a massive burp, and went to sleep. It was amazing.’

All the life drains from my legs and I flop onto the sofa.

‘So,’ I say with a long sigh, ‘it was just wind.’

‘Yup.’ Lipsy gives a little roll of her eyes, as if to say: What was all that fuss about?

What indeed.

She sits down beside me and starts to inspect her nails.

‘So you dragged me all the way across the city, pulled me out of work, because he had wind.’

‘I didn’t know it was wind when I phoned you, did I? And you didn’t know what it was, either,’ she adds accusingly.

‘How was I supposed to know your baby had wind from listening to him cry down the phone?’

‘Grandma did.’

‘What?’

Lipsy has this look sometimes: sullen and defiant at the same time. I guess teenagers the world over have the same look nailed to perfection.

‘Grandma knew instantly what it was when I called her. She listened to him and said, “Have you tried winding him”, so I did and he was fine.’

‘And you called her when, exactly?’

‘Right after I called you.’

‘So, within a few minutes of calling me – and begging me to leave work and come home immediately – Phoenix was fine and you knew you didn’t need me anymore. But you didn’t phone me back to let me know?’

My daughter has another look, and this is one she employs when she knows she’s in the wrong. It’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s a mixture of hurt and outrage, with a little bit of disgust thrown in for good measure.

‘I can’t believe you,’ she says, jumping to her feet. ‘You should be glad that Phoenix isn’t sick, not having a go at me for dragging you out of your stupid job.’

‘You know what Velma’s like,’ I say, standing too and towering over her. ‘I could get fired for this.’

Silence follows. We stare at each other. I notice that Lipsy has somehow had time to redo her make-up, and that her hair is washed and straightened to within an inch of its life. When I was a new mum, I struggled to clean my teeth each day. I sure as hell hope I’m as together as her when my baby comes along.

Or maybe that’s just one of the benefits of youth.

‘Mum,’ Lipsy says to me, speaking as if to someone very, very stupid, ‘you can’t get fired. You’ve already handed in your notice and you leave on Monday.’

There really is nothing worse than a know-it-all daughter. I sincerely hope next time I have a son.

Chapter 6

By Monday morning I’m fit to burst with anxiety about seeing Paul. I’m on the late shift at work
– my last ever shift – so he’s coming over at ten for breakfast.

This is my first real chance to tell him about the baby. He’ll be full of his holiday, and not a little sheepish about the Sharon debacle, so I’m banking on a good reaction. Scratch that: I’m hoping for a great reaction. After all, this is fantastic news.

There’s nothing to worry about. I keep telling myself this over and over. There’s a Johnny Cash song on the radio, and his voice sounds like a warning, penetrating my calm. I get up and turn it off.

Phoenix is the only thing that can soothe me. He’s lying in his bassinet, fists flung out to the sides, his feet treading against the white blanket as though he’s dreaming of running. Do babies dream? Maybe their dreams are like memories: milk and warm arms and a mother’s heartbeat.

Yes, I’m babysitting. Again. Phoenix is just over a week old, and so far I’ve looked after him for at least three hours a day. Often more. This is on top of my own job, and packing, and tying up all the loose ends before the move. And on top of the last minute details for the reception on Saturday, which is going to be pretty low-key but still needs organising. Lipsy is getting on with her life, as she tells me every time I complain I could do with a little help around here. I don’t blame her, but I do worry how she’s going to manage when next Monday rolls around and Paul and I set off into the sunset together.

‘That’s the understatement of the year,’ I whisper to Phoenix. He stirs but doesn’t wake.

I’m more than worried about next Monday – I’m terrified at the thought of leaving Lipsy and Robert and the baby all alone. In theory, it seemed like a fine plan; in reality, not so. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to miss Phoenix. He’s a part of me now, like some of his essence has been grafted onto my soul, and I know the best moments to come for me will be those Friday night journeys down the motorway to be by his side again.

Paul will reassure me. This was all his idea, after all, and he’s pushed through my fears and anxieties so far. But I can’t get rid of this niggling sense that all is not well in my world. I fry up some bacon and pop bread in the toaster, and I set the kitchen table. And all the while the knot in my stomach gets tighter and tighter.

When Paul arrives I’m a wreck, and his kisses don’t transport me back to happiness the way they should.

‘What’s wrong, baby?’ he says, pulling me down onto his lap and regarding me with serious eyes. ‘It’s not the Sharon thing, is it? Because I can assure you, you have nothing to worry about there. I think after six nights in the freezing cold in the middle of South Wales, Sharon is regretting inviting herself on that trip as much as I am.’