Sleepless Nights Page 2

  As I walked out past the wall of faces through the hall, and swung open the heavy front door, the summer air met me in a warm wave of fine, dusty pollen. I grinned at nothing in particular as I set off down the stoop, red hair fighting its way successfully at last out of its tortoiseshell comb and flying off in all directions. The street was quieter now; a lone Volvo was nosing its way into a parking space as I passed beneath the leering gargoyles, then off along the root-cracked sidewalk to the subway. The unbroken line of brownstones reared above me like an indifferent army. But inside the houses I heard the familiar sounds of families settling in for the night: children playing last games before bedtime; mothers shouting up and down the stairs; fathers whispering a tender “I missed you.”

  I quickened my step. I couldn’t wait to get home.

  2

  Jeanie

  London

  I probably shouldn’t have picked up the bowl. It was the only one I had without a crack so big the milk flows out of it faster than you can spoon the cereal into your mouth. But it was the first thing that came to my hand.

  “Take that, you bastard.” Dave ducked. It hit the wall. No more cereal for me.

  “And that.” This time it was a mug. I think my mother gave it to me. No loss there. It had itsy-bitsy sprigs of lavender on the outside and an indelible brown tea-stain on the inside.

  “If you’ll just listen to me—”

  “And that—” An egg-cup. My flatmate’s. Turns out this is surprisingly painful if it hits the right spot. Dave yowled. “You loon!” he yelled, dancing about clutching his groin when he was finally able to draw breath. “I—didn’t—touch—her!”

  “No, but you were thinking about it,” I shouted, aiming a toasting fork at his foot.

  He skipped out of the way. “I wasn’t!”

  “You were.” I was running out of things to throw.

  “I wasn’t!”

  “You were staring at her cleavage the whole time. I saw you crane to get a better look! And I think you dropped your napkin deliberately so you could get a better look at her chubby legs under the table.” I found a teaspoon in the sink.

  “I didn’t,” he replied, catching the teaspoon neatly in his hand and putting it down on the table.

  “You did,” I said, making for the teaspoon again.

  Dave grabbed my hand deliberately as I entered his orbit and twisted it firmly behind my back. “Stop it, stop it, stop it, Jeanie. You’ve gone bonkers. Okay, I’ll admit it. If you stop throwing things. I did—sort of—maybe a little bit—look at—some bits. Of her. It was hard not to. C’mon Jeanie, they were so—available…owwwww” (as I wrenched myself free and thumped his shoulder). “No wait,” and somehow his arms were around my arms again, and I was held fast. “I looked. I didn’t touch. I’m not going to touch. Ever. I promise.”

  I twisted around to look up into his earnest, stubbly face. He’s not exactly handsome, my boyfriend, but he does have nice gray eyes, and his features-well, you wouldn’t say chiseled, I suppose, but I’ve never really known what that means anyway. “I’m going to be away from London for months, Dave. How do I know you’re not going to chase after Ellen the moment my plane leaves the ground? You’re going to see her every time you go to visit your mum. I can see it now, you’ll be spiritually drawn to the woman who is tending your ailing mother, you won’t be able to help yourself, and then she’ll bend over to change a bedpan and you’ll catch a glimpse of her pink suspenders, and-”

  “Jeanie, I won’t. I promise. She isn’t—I mean, this is cloud cuckoo-land! Really. Have I ever been unfaithful to you? No. Right. And anyway whose decision was it to go halfway round the world for months on end? Seems to me if anyone should be doing the plate-hurling round here, it’s me, love.” I heard the little vibration deep in his voice.

  I stopped struggling and stood still, allowing my head to subside on his hard chest. There was something in his argument.

  “All I did was get a little look at—well, what was on offer. You name a man who wouldn’t have done the same,” he said, reaching out to curl a strand of my brown hair around his finger, then tilting my face up to his. He wiped an imaginary tear from my lashes. “But it doesn’t mean I’ll touch her, love. I might look, but I’ll never touch. I’ll be waiting here for you to come back. While you’re with your sister and the baby in New York, I’ll be here, same old Dave, just like always. Come on Jeanie—” he whispered into my ear, his hands moving down to my tight pink T-shirt, pulling my body roughly into the contours of his jeans, “why don’t you show me a bit of what you have on offer tonight, eh? Then I’ll never think of Ellen again, I promise you…”

  The truth was—I thought to myself, a couple of hours later, hair tied up in a high ponytail, working my way through six sizzling rashers of bacon and a large glass of wine—I felt guilty about Dave. He’d a perfect right to be upset with me. We’d been together for a whole year, now I was going away for four months to America to help my sister, leaving him in London all by himself to cope with his mum’s Alzheimer’s, his dad’s depression, his own job struggles. It was a lot to ask of a boyfriend, no question about it. Why shouldn’t he have a little goggle at Ellen now and again? I was getting to live in New York, he was getting an eyeful of Ellen’s plump thighs. In a sense, it seemed a fair exchange.

  My flatmate Una crashed in about eleven, which was early for her, accompanied by a very tall man called Holly or Solly or something. Three days before she’d had her dark hair cut razor short on a dare; now she looked a bit like an army recruit, although less so in a leather skirt that only just skimmed her ass. She let the strange man feel her up while I explained earnestly why half the kitchen was in pieces on the floor. “To be quite honest, I don’t give a shit,” she said at last, after a cursory examination of the shattered bits, helping herself to a slug of wine straight from my bottle and a rasher of dripping bacon from the grill pan. She was incredibly skinny and ate terribly, grazing most days on leftovers and fast food. “Smash the whole place up if you want. And as for Dave, I think you should just dump him,” she added, somewhat irrelevantly I felt. “Don’t content yourself with maiming the bastard. Kick him out.” The unknown man’s right hand was now inside her black lace top, and for a moment or two our conversation was halted by the fact that his tongue was sloshing around in her mouth. I waited patiently for her to come up for air.

  “That’s just because you don’t like Dave,” I said, when the unknown man paused for a gulp of beer from his bottle. “Because he doesn’t have the hots for you, most likely. I’m not going to dump him for that.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Una replied, irritably, investigating the fridge, carelessly exposing the leaf-green seat of her undies. “I don’t like him because he lectures me about recycling yoghurt pots. Because he’s boring. Because he thinks he’s better than me. Like that sister of yours. You should dump him and find yourself an American rock star, that’s what I think. Or a tortured actor. Or alternatively one of those enormously sexy, ve-ry hot” (this slowly and meaningfully) “ve-ry fuckable basketball players…” At this point, the unknown man of great tallness half-laughed, half-moaned, grabbed her from behind, and started dragging her out of the kitchen, down the corridor, and into the bedroom. Gales of giggling and some screaming ensued, plus a lot of furniture rearranging. I shoved my fingers deep in my ears as the noise crescendoed, discovered that that didn’t help, then grabbed my bag and denim jacket, slipped my toes into bright orange flip-flops, and swung out of the door, down the steep stairs, and into the summer darkness.

  On the whole, I decided, as I flipped and flopped softly along the pavement beside the long row of tall Victorian terraced houses that peered loftily down at me, I regretted the decision to move in with Una a year ago. I answered an advertisement in Loot when I was accepted into my Master’s in Social Work at Kingsbury College, London: “fun chick needed for spacious two-bedroom.” I was a fun chick, I needed a spacious two-bedroom. Check! What could go wrong? What went
wrong was that Una’s idea of “fun” turned out to be incompatible with even part-time, half-hearted studying. Every time I opened a book, or (heaven forfend) switched on my aged computer to do anything other than surf porn sites, she grumped furiously that I was “bringing her down.” She was technically enrolled in a fashion course in south London, but was enraged if her teachers so much as asked her to come in for a seminar (“who the fuck do these people think they are?”). I actually resorted to working in a library. She failed everything, and didn’t give a damn; I just about scraped through, and wished I could do better.

  But a year after moving in, my course was finished, the last piece of course work submitted, when Q offered to pay for me to go out and help with the new baby. When I got back from New York, I determined, I would move out from Una’s hell-hole. I didn’t know where; I didn’t even know how I was going to afford to live anywhere else (the place was heavily subsidized by my flatmate’s surprisingly wealthy, almost invisible father). And I could only hope I’d done enough to get the degree, and that I’d actually be able to find a job. Social workers are both very much needed when the economy goes up in smoke, and horribly susceptible to “cuts.”

  I sat down on a long wooden bench, erected in loving memory of some much-beloved grandma, and got out my mobile phone to ring my middle sister. The brick buildings radiated back the day’s warmth, but there was a cool night breeze prickling my face. I waited three rings; there was a click, and the line opened up into my sister’s elegant white Pimlico villa. I could hear the discreet methodical ticking of the heirloom grandfather clock in the hallway. “What—?” She sounded half-asleep. “Oh, Jeanie, it’s you—”

  “Listen,” I breathed into the phone, “I had to tell you. I just had to. You’ve been right all along. I see it all now. Really. I’ve got to change…”

  3

  Q

  My sister Alison—the one squeezed uncomfortably between Jeanie and me—became, in her early twenties, offensively elegant. Tall, but not too tall, she was slim but not bony, and her wardrobe spanned every shade from beige to taupe. She had flawless mid-length bronze nails, glossy mid-length hair, and inexorably mid-length hemlines. She married a minor aristocrat straight out of college, which surprised none of us. If my mother didn’t have a plausibly precise story of pregnancy and giving birth, Jeanie and I would assume a mischievous cuckoo placed her in our family of long-faced, big-boned women—just to show us up.

  “My darling, I’m just phoning to see how dear Samuel is doing,” Alison announced superbly one morning, a week or so after Caroline’s party. I was, at the time, trying to force a pick through a big clump of hair matted with something indescribable. (Some people have hair that inspires words like “shiny” and “sleek.” Unless I put half the contents of CVS on my head, my thick red frizz could reasonably accommodate a family of goslings.) “And I also wanted to see how you are coping with motherhood,” she went on, as an apparent afterthought. Of course, I saw her agenda immediately. “Thank you, Alison. Samuel is doing extremely well, as it happens, and I’ve taken to motherhood like a duck to water.” (Pace a little too quick, but in other ways quite good.) One tine of the pick snapped off in the goo; I opened my mouth to swear, but caught myself just in time.

  Pause. “Well, I’m very happy to hear that,” Alison replied crossly. “If there are any problems, dear, I hope you know you can always pick up the telephone and ask my advice. After all, I do have two children of my own. I’m a very experienced mother.”

  Alison was indeed the first in our family to procreate, and she never let any of us forget it. Serena and Geoffrey were the kind of children you longed to see covered in paint and mud tumbling backward through a hedge. As things stood, their hair seemed stuck to their little white foreheads, their matching outfits were pressed, their socks clung grimly to knees that seemed unnaturally scrubbed. I’d never seen them with so much as a bruise, and I’d certainly never heard either of them raise a voice—in Alison’s presence, that is. It was a different story when Mummy was out of the way. I took the kids to the Natural History Museum once and I swear I saw the animatronic Tyrannosaurus flinch before Geoffrey’s vicious vociferous onslaught (“I’s goin’ to eat it, I’s goin’ to kill it, lemme at it, auntie Q!”).

  “Thanks for the offer, Alison, but really, motherhood isn’t rocket science!” I laughed uproariously, and felt the barrier at the other end of the line come satisfactorily ringing down.

  “I see,” she muttered, sounding mortified.

  “But if I do have any little problems, Alison, I’ll be sure to ask you, never fear,” I added earnestly, losing yet another tine somewhere in the midst of the knot. “After all, I know Geoffrey and Serena have given you plenty of practice, Alison dear. Now, I must go, Tom and I need to start packing for our Connecticut trip. Did I mention it? Just a few weeks in Paul Dupont’s house…you know, the one from GQ…”

  I put down the phone, picked up a pair of kitchen shears, hacked off the entire offending lump of hair in a burst of impatience, then dissolved into tears.

  It was, in fact, several days after the party before I could bring myself to admit my conversation with Caroline to Tom, my husband, and thus put the plan into action. When my snobbish, superior, all-round-unpleasant in-laws announced their intention to visit, I glimmered the beginnings of an opportunity; time, first, to lay the groundwork. “It will be so delightful to see them!” I said brightly to my husband, and from the moment Peter and Lucille walked in until the second the door banged closed behind them, I was a model of restraint, tolerance, and respect. I affected great interest in Peter’s research papers on cardiac surgical procedures and joined in energetically with Lucille’s perpetual whines about “those careerist women’s libbers.” “Motherhood has improved her,” I heard Peter concede to his wife as they walked off down the corridor. “Although, my God! What’s up with her grooming?”

  This is not to say it was easy to maintain my sweet-daughter-in-law image during the visit. Peter and Lucille came ostensibly to spend time with the baby and “help out,” actually to reinforce the idea that they did everything right and we were doing everything wrong. “The baby sleeps in a bassinet,” Lucille asked, eyebrows disappearing into her expensive blond hairline, “not a crib? It’s so tiny! I’d be worried about suffocation myself…” And later: “Do you think it’s wise to use these disposable diapers? Have you thought about chemical—er—infloration?” Last was the production of a small box of rice cereal from her bag of “useful things for babies” (none of which were remotely useful for a five-week-old. She clearly viewed Samuel’s lack of interest in the spinning-top contraption she produced as evidence of dangerous developmental delay). “Give him two teaspoons of rice cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he will sleep through the night,” she asserted confidently, opening the box and preparing a bowl of the stuff with cows’ milk straight from the fridge. “Guaranteed. It’s a little trick my mother taught me,” she added, smiling beatifically. (She only conceded defeat when he’d smeared half the bowl over her face with a single well-placed kick and thrown up the rest of it into her lap. It was almost worth the visit, I decided, watching puked cereal slowly seeping through the crotch of her beige linen trousers, for that.)

  Then, as we restored order to the place (Peter was one of those people who seemed to imagine that tiny elves picked up towels off the floor), I casually introduced the idea of a few weeks’ vacation away. My tone was as insouciant as I could possibly manage. But for all that, my husband looked at me as if the illusion of a transformed Q was, for him at least, beginning abruptly to fade. “All through your pregnancy you accused me of not spending enough time at home,” he said as he stood in the kitchen with a dishcloth in his hand and a painfully aggrieved expression in his sea-green eyes. “‘What will happen when the baby comes?’ you said. “You need to be a better father,’ you said. ‘You need to watch your son grow up,’ you said. Now the baby’s here, I’ve cut back my night hours at Crimpson in
spite of the recession, I’m nervous every time there’s a knock at my office door, and this is the moment you choose to fly out the door with Samuel and leave me behind…”

  I protested, sweeping the innards of the newspaper into a box (Peter’s strategy is to disembowel the Times, section by section, throwing everything he doesn’t want on the floor). “It’s not that, darling. Hear me out. It’s just that after all the hospitals, the worry of pregnancy, it seems a shame to pass up the opportunity of a little bit of time—”

  “You seem confident that it is an opportunity,” Tom cut in acerbically, dark curly hair standing nearly on end as he rubbed furiously, exhaustedly, at his head, “but I should perhaps point out that Paul hasn’t offered us his house in a year.”

  This, I admitted, as I attacked Lucille’s lipstick-stained teacups, was indeed a small problem. Last summer Paul was warmly insistent that we should go and stay in his summer place, but at the time we were both working too hard; since my pregnancy, we’d hardly seen him at all (Tom was in his office almost around the clock in order to try to make partner at his firm, while I was confined to my bed).

  “Perhaps you could ask him—” I tried not to wheedle.

  “Q,” Tom snapped, staring at me, green eyes narrowed, “really, I don’t understand you!”

  There was a muffled yelp from our son, who was sleeping on the sofa, and we both turned hastily to look at him. His mouth was agape, drool spilling gently onto the cushions; he was a little red around the eyes still, from a bout of furious crying that afternoon. He was beautiful; and he was (everyone agreed, from bejeweled old ladies in the street to the plump cashier at the bank) the spitting image of his father. He had a shock of fine dark hair, black eyes that were turning to green, and hamster cheeks. He was warm and floppy in my arms, a little frog with bandy legs and spread-out toes, and somehow the look of too many fingers on his tiny crumpled hands. Sensing his own wrist near his face, he opened his mouth, cracked his eyes ajar, and began furiously sucking. Slowly, his eyelids turned heavy, then drooped, as his body relaxed again in sleep.