Taking a bottle of wine from the fridge, I pour myself a large glass. I can’t go on like this; the situation is killing me. I’ve become a ghost of myself, haunting a life that never was and can never be. If I had any sense, I’d leave London altogether and start afresh. I even have somewhere to go to.
I should leave Mabel behind too. The trouble is, I’m not sure I can.
Chapter Two
The weekend before
Amber has never been a morning person. Seven months ago, she’d have only countenanced waking at 5 a.m. for a holiday – and even then, she would’ve slept on the way to the airport. But these days it feels horribly normal to be up and about two hours before the sun comes up, doing the all-too-familiar daily chores: sterilising bottles, wiping down the changing unit, hanging countless little sleepsuits over the radiators. She’s already had breakfast; by ten o’clock she’ll be ready for lunch. No wonder she can’t shift the baby fat, she thinks as she takes off her dressing gown and briefly catches sight of her body in the mirror.
On the subject of which, what on earth is she going to wear this evening? She can hardly turn up in her usual sloppy jogging bottoms and baggy T-shirt stained with baby vomit. None of her old dresses fit, and she’s refused to buy a bigger wardrobe on the grounds that it would be accepting defeat. But she feels defeated anyway, so what difference does it make?
She sighs as she gets dressed. It’s all right for George, who’s already got out his best suit and a cool designer shirt and laid them on the bed. He’ll look as gorgeous as ever. Fatherhood has taken no visible toll on him – he doesn’t even have bags under his eyes.
Weirdly, he seems to like getting up before dawn. She can hear him now, singing to Mabel as he baths her. The walls in these maisonettes are paper-thin; he really should keep his voice down so early in the morning. It’s not Mabel’s usual bath time, but she woke up with a full nappy, the contents of which had mysteriously spread up her back, and it was the easiest way to clean her up. Judging by the protests coming from the bathroom, her daughter isn’t a morning person either.
She puts her fingers in her ears as she walks into the kitchen. Please, George, make her stop! Mabel’s cries cut right through her; sometimes they’re so piercing they make her want to jump out of the window.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ her sister Ruby announced a few weeks ago, when she turned up to find Amber sobbing her eyes out while Mabel screamed blue murder in her cot. ‘You need a holiday, just the two of you. A week somewhere exotic. I’ll babysit.’
‘I can’t leave Mabel for that long,’ Amber replied instantly, despite her heart leaping at the idea.
‘Five days, then.’
‘No. She’d miss me too much … And I’d miss her,’ she added, although she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it.
Ruby wasn’t giving up. ‘Okay. How about a long weekend?’
In the end, they settled on just one night away.
One night. It feels simultaneously too long and too short a time. Amber knows that one night without Mabel will not be enough to fix things between her and George, but she’s grateful to her sister all the same. She badly needs a break. But with only a few hours to go before they’re due to leave, she feels nervous and wretched with guilt.
She surveys the table littered with dirty plates and foil trays from last night’s takeaway. There’s so much to do and she doesn’t have the energy even to start.
Mum doesn’t approve of their going away. ‘She’s too young to be without her mummy for so long,’ she declared. Or her daddy, Amber thought, but she didn’t challenge it.
‘The royal family leave their babies behind all the time,’ she argued instead. ‘Nobody accuses them of child neglect.’
Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘That’s because they have full-time nannies who look after them from birth, so they already know them well.’
‘Mabel knows Ruby well – she always smiles when she sees her. They get on brilliantly.’
‘With all due respect,’ her mother replied, showing no respect at all, ‘Ruby knows nothing about babies. And you know what a scatterbrain she is, always with her head in the clouds. She’ll forget to feed her or change her nappy.’
‘Mabel will make sure she doesn’t,’ Amber retorted, irritated by her mother’s lack of faith in Ruby. Why hadn’t she offered to babysit, if she was so concerned for her granddaughter’s well-being?
‘Well it’s not how it was done in my day,’ Mum continued, seemingly oblivious that she was massively guilt-tripping Amber. ‘I never left you to go on romantic weekends. When you and Ruby were tiny, I had no life outside the home, but it didn’t bother me. You were my world. I was so happy to have you.’
Yes, that’s the elephant in the room, reflects Amber as she gathers up the plates and loads the dishwasher. She’s not happy. It makes no sense to her mother, who sees everything only from her own perspective and is consequently not a very sympathetic woman. In her view, there’s nothing wrong with her daughter’s life – quite the contrary. Amber is extremely lucky. She has a decent husband who earns enough for her not to have to hurry back to work, she lives in a nice flat in a just about acceptable part of London, and she’s been blessed with an ‘easy’ baby. It’s annoying how Mabel always behaves so beautifully in front of her grandma.
Although to be fair, she is easy, some of the time. She only cries when she’s uncomfortable or hungry or over-tired or being bathed. It’s me that’s difficult, Amber concludes as she fills the dishwasher with salt. She so longed to have a baby – in fact, she was completely desperate, more than either her mother, sister or even her husband know. She sailed joyfully through her pregnancy, loving every second of it, even her labour, which was an awe-inspiring experience. Then Miracle Mabel, as she secretly called her, popped out, and within days, Amber had never felt more miserable or hopeless in her entire life.
Only Ruby, six years younger and with no experience of motherhood, seems to understand. If she knew the full story, though, she might think differently. Sometimes Ruby’s support makes Amber feel worse, because she’s never kept secrets from her sister in the past, and now there’s this invisible barrier between them that only she knows is there.
Ruby keeps urging her to go to the doctor, or to confide in her health visitor, and Amber has promised to seek help but has done nothing about it. The truth is, she doesn’t feel she deserves to get better. She views her depression as punishment for wanting Mabel too much.
Nevertheless, she knows she has to do something. This night away her mother so disapproves of isn’t a selfish, frivolous act. It is, as Ruby puts it, a lifesaver. Amber and George, who’ve been together since they were teenagers, are in danger. Their relationship has been lost under a pile of dirty nappies. They haven’t been out together as a couple once since Mabel was born, and they never do anything together as a family. The moment George comes home from work, Amber plonks the baby in his arms and goes to lie down, complaining that she’s shattered. They never see their friends. They hardly even kiss any more, let alone have sex. Most concerning of all, in a way, is that they’re both behaving as if this is the new normal. They never talk about it. Not properly.