Goosebumps stippled me, and I had to remind myself again that I was thirty-eight, pregnant, independent. I could stop visiting her any time. But I wouldn’t, because she was my mother and I’d already lost one parent and I had no siblings. Sometimes I imagined them, my ghostly allies. She’d lost three that I knew of before me, to stillbirth or very late miscarriage. I had to remember that. I had to make allowances.
She was talking. ‘Oh, it’s been such a nightmare. Next door are having building work done. You know the ones. Foreign.’
‘They’re not foreign, Mum, they’re British.’ What she meant was they were Asian. I changed the subject. ‘We had our first antenatal class at the weekend.’
That amused her, as I knew it would. ‘I never heard the like, really. Paying to be told common sense! What kind of things do they teach you – don’t leave the baby alone with knives?’
‘Well, it’s kind of what to expect at birth, how to look after the baby, that sort of thing.’
‘Load of rubbish. We never had anyone tell us how to do it, and we were fine.’ The irony of this took my breath away for a moment. I suppose in the eighties, you were doing a good job as a parent if your child had all its limbs intact and most of its blood inside its body. There was no awareness of the emotional damage you could do to a baby, like a bomb thrown into a kindergarten. ‘And what are the other people like?’
‘Mum, can we sit on the sofa? I can’t get up on these stools.’
She raised her eyebrows (threaded weekly). ‘Really, Jacqueline, there’s no need to stop exercising just because you’re pregnant. You don’t want to gain even more weight, not at your age.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘Even so.’ Reluctantly, she showed me to the living room as she began to twitter around with cups and saucers. I was strictly on the decaf, no caffeine that might harm the baby, no matter how tired I felt.
‘So go on then, who else is on your course? All ancient, I imagine?’ She was avid for the gossip. ‘I don’t know what it is with these women now, leaving it so late.’
‘One woman is forty-four, yeah.’ Mum loved nothing more than an example of a woman doing a terrible job as a mother. Again, the irony seemed to escape her.
‘Oh. You’re not the oldest, then.’
Thanks, Mum! ‘No. There’s a twenty-two-year-old though. Quite a range.’
She sniffed. ‘Common, then. Where is this group? Can’t you go to a nice one?’
‘Well, it’s a mix, isn’t it, that’s kind of the point.’ I quite liked that, the fact that we had nothing in common except our babies. Not that we all had babies. ‘There’s one woman adopting, from America.’ I felt a bit guilty throwing poor Anita under the bus, but it would take the heat off me.
Mum practically hooted. ‘She’s not even pregnant?’
‘No, her baby’s over there, with this other woman.’
‘It’ll end in tears, mark my words. What’s to stop this American woman holding on to the baby?’
‘I don’t know. Would someone do that?’
Another hoot. ‘You’re too naive, Jacqueline.’
There was a short silence, during which she looked like she might sit down, but then darted to the kitchen to get a cloth and wipe up a small drop of tea I’d spilled pouring it from the pot (which had leaked since 1998 but which she wouldn’t replace). ‘Do be careful.’
‘Aaron’s doing well at his new job,’ I volunteered. Mum never asked after Aaron, but I kept on plugging away. Sometimes I felt like his PR woman.
‘I suppose he’s the youngest father there.’
‘There’s another young one, but he didn’t come yesterday.’
‘No surprise there. She’ll be on her own with that child, mark my words. What does a man in his twenties want with babies?’
I sipped my weak tea, wondering if she thought of these things to hurt me, or if she was just very good at it. ‘Aaron’s really committed. He’s got all the books and everything.’
‘Yes. Well.’
I knew better than to rise to her bait, but sometimes she just pushed me too far. ‘What?’
‘Oh, darling. You know I don’t like to interfere.’
‘Don’t interfere then.’
‘It’s just . . . Darling, he’s very young. You have to be prepared that he might not stick about, when the baby comes. All the dirty nappies and screaming – he’ll want to be out with friends, won’t he?’
I counted to ten, held the tea in my mouth until it burned. ‘I really don’t think he will. He’s not like other twenty-four-year-olds. He had to grow up fast.’
She sat down opposite, taking a dainty sip from her coffee. ‘I just don’t want to see you hurt, Jacqueline. That’s all. I don’t say these things to cause trouble.’
Sure you don’t. It was a struggle to bite my tongue, change the subject. ‘Mmm. So how’s the book group?’
‘Oh goodness, you won’t believe this, but Louise actually suggested we read a chick-lit novel this time? I said, Louise, I think you’ll find this is a club for serious readers. If you want to read trash do it on your own time.’ I wondered if Mum would have been kicked out of the book group long ago if they weren’t all so scared of her, and she didn’t have the biggest living room. I let her catty commentary wash over me, wondering if things might get better when the baby came, when I was a mother myself. Or if they would just be a new person for her to terrorise. The thought of the email rose in my solar plexus again. She must never find out about it.
Jax – nine weeks earlier
The next time we went to the antenatal group, Anita had baked. Gluten-free vegan Bakewell tarts, each individual one glistening and perfect. I wanted to groan at the way women did this, forced ourselves to do extra work, make things nice for everyone. Men wouldn’t even notice if we stopped; we did it for and to ourselves. I also knew that I would eventually end up baking something myself, resenting every second, just because I’d feel bad otherwise. I saw Kelly’s eyes flicking nervously to the tea table as well. There had been a flurry of group emails over the week, about hospitals and sleeping positions and antacids and nurseries, so much so that I’d already muted them. Who had the time to read all that?
When Nina swept in, almost late again, she looked at the tarts as if they were foreign and blinked. She was so slim, she must never eat pastry. I highly doubted if Anita or Monica did either, but maybe the point was not to eat the thing. It was to make other people eat the thing.
Today we were learning baby first aid, which I was glad about, but which also made me anxious, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. Things we didn’t even know to be afraid of when I was a kid. Grapes. Blind pulls. Cots. Nina had a baby doll with an unsettling blue gaze, and she placed it on a mat in the centre of our circle. I noticed that Kelly’s partner wasn’t here again today, and nor was Jeremy. ‘Work crisis,’ explained Anita with her nervy little laugh that made me grit my teeth. The kind of woman who was afraid to take up space in the world. I knew Jeremy was a lecturer, an academic, and wondered what constituted an emergency in that world.