Sam
21
Sam climbs out of her four-wheel-drive (bought especially to navigate the rough terrain of Gospel Oak's finest streets), unclips George from the backseat, and deposits him safely in a bouncy chair on the kitchen floor before going back outside to collect her shopping.
Organic carrots; organic potatoes; organic broccoli; organic cheese; organic chicken. Chris has already started to question how their monthly food bill seems to have tripled, despite having the addition of one tiny five-and-a-half-month-old baby who eats little more than a few tablespoonfuls. Chris doesn't understand the importance, not to mention the expense, of organic food. To be perfectly honest, Sam doesn't really understand the importance of organic food either, but everyone else seems to be doing it and if everybody else's baby is eating organic, then George will too.
Not that eating nonorganic food as a baby appeared to do Sam—or any of her friends for that matter—any harm, but times change, and although Sam resents the amount of money it costs, she's not prepared to take a risk just in case feeding George “normal” food might result in something terrible.
George is, after all, the love of her life. The apple of her eye. Her very reason for living. She didn't feel it at first, didn't get the whole mother/baby bonding thing. She had never been good at newborns, had never felt particularly comfortable with them, but had relaxed when all her friends told her it would be different when she had her own.
It wasn't.
For three months George was a screaming bundle of colicky sleeplessness. If he wasn't sleeping, he was crying. If he wasn't being fed, he was crying. The only time, in fact, he stopped crying was when Sam strapped him to her chest in the BabyBjorn and took off around the neighborhood.
At least, she would think, striding through the Heath up to Kenwood, I am reaping the benefits of exercise.
Except that, unfortunately, she wasn't. Sam had assumed that breast-feeding would be the perfect way of getting her figure back. Had been told by well-meaning friends that they could zip into their pre-pregnancy jeans within six weeks of breast-feeding.
These same well-meaning friends had said how fantastic breast-feeding was, that you could eat as much as you liked and still lose weight.
Sam threw herself into eating with wild abandon. She found she was starving, could quite happily graze all day, and continue throughout most of the night. She would sleepwalk downstairs, George latched firmly onto her breast, open the fridge door on autopilot, and reach in for whatever came first to hand. Slabs of cheese. Mountains of tuna salad. Ninety-eight percent fat-free toffee yogurts were a particular favorite, particularly as Sam chose to ignore that they were 100 percent pure sugar to make up for the lack of taste.
Sam lost a stone and a half immediately after George was born. Within eight weeks of breast-feeding, she had put it on again. Plus a little bit more for good measure. She has taken to wearing shapeless smocks, and has refused to worry about the excess weight. If being an earth mother means she has to look like an earth mother, then so be it.
At least, she tells herself, smiling as she watches George try to hold his toes, George no longer screams as he did. Not during daylight hours, at any rate. The colic disappeared at around three months, and since weaning him onto solids (she knew she was supposed to wait until four months, but George was so advanced, so strong and healthy, and so clearly hungry, she decided to do it at three and a half) he's been sleeping almost through the night. That's if you disregard the wake-ups at two-thirty, three, three-twenty, and so on until six o'clock every morning when Sam decides she's had enough and goes in to get him up.
She took him to the baby clinic for a checkup, wanted to make sure the birthmark at the back of his neck was not, as she occasionally thought in a panic, meningitis. Sat in the waiting room with bags under her eyes and lank, greasy hair, and wondered whether she looked as terrible as all the other mothers in there, all with the same vacant, exhausted appearance.
One woman shook her head wearily at Sam as her baby started to wail again, and soon the entire room struck up as a background chorus. I hadn't understood, Sam thought as she rocked George back and forth, shushing him softly to calm him down, people who harm their babies. I hadn't understood how anyone could possibly do such a thing. But now, in this waiting room, unable to quiet George, exhausted with frazzled nerves, Sam knew. She also knew she would never do such a thing, but she knew how you could be on the edge, and how little it would take to push you over.
She had reached into the huge black bag (ostensibly a “diaper bag,” despite being the size and weight of a small suitcase filled with rocks) and drew out one of a selection of fourteen pacifiers that were rattling around in the bottom, to silence George's crying. It worked instantly.
A disapproving look from the weary woman, now calmly unbuttoning her shirt as she prepared to breast-feed.
“Do you find,” she said lightly, her tone giving nothing away, “the pacifiers good?”
“They're a life-saver,” Sam said defensively.
“I just think it's such a bad habit, really. Aren't you worried he'll grow up to be a thumb-sucker?”
“No, f*ck off. It's none of your f*cking business,” was what Sam wanted to say. She swallowed hard and heard herself say lightly, “Not in the slightest.”
“Sometimes I wish I could get Oliver to take one,” the woman said, stroking the head of her rather ugly baby, who was now sucking vigorously on her left nipple. “But he's just not interested, and it's probably a good thing.” She smiled indulgently at her baby, clearly lying.
“Oh push hard enough and I'm sure you'll manage to force it in,” Sam said, and laughed, slightly too hysterically. It shut the woman up.
But the pacifiers were causing something of a problem at night. George slept like an angel from seven in the evening until two-thirty, from which time he screamed every time the pacifier fell out of his mouth. Roughly every twenty minutes.
In the early days Chris and Sam would take turns. And on the weekends Sam would put earplugs in and leave Chris to do the night duty while she tried to catch up on her sleep, although it never actually worked. George's screams were far too loud to be blotted out by a couple of balls of wax (even though she did what the instructions tell you never to do: break one earplug into two, roll both halves up and shove them in as far as they'll go). Sam would lie there, rigid, too exhausted to move, pretending to be asleep.
It became a game. Who could pretend for longest. Sam always lost. Always climbed out of bed hissing at Chris that she was exhausted and it was his f*cking turn, and did she have to do absolutely everything around here.
They didn't even fight about it anymore. She didn't have the energy. She just got up, every night, at two-thirty and continued to get up until she'd had enough and she blindly stumbled down to the kitchen to heat the bottle.
“What about sleep-training?” Chris said one night, having spoken to some colleagues who had children, had been through the same thing. “You take away the pacifier and let them cry it out for timed periods.”
They tried it that night. Sam sat cross-legged on her bed and listened to George scream, tears running down her face. Eventually, after one hour and fourteen minutes, she jumped up. “I can't do this,” she explained to a bewildered Chris as she picked up a hysterical, red-faced George, and cuddled him until he calmed down.
“That's the worst thing you could have done,” Chris said calmly. “Now you've taught him that if he cries long enough Mummy will eventually come and get him.”
“Oh f*ck off,” she said in fury. “He's my baby and he needs me. He's a tiny baby. This whole sleep-training's a farce, it just makes them feel abandoned and scared. Poor baby. Poor Georgy. It's okay. Mummy's here. Mummy's here. Ssshhh. I promise I won't leave you again. Ssssh.” She didn't dare admit it, but she'd bought the book and was seriously considering starting again on the weekend.
“Red lentil and cheesy vegetable casserole,” she mutters to herself, as she flicks through the children's recipe book, stuffs a pacifier into George's mouth, and starts unpacking the shopping at the same time.
George drops the pacifier and starts to whimper as Sam tears open a packet of organic unsalted rice cakes and hands him one. He gums down on it and she breathes a sigh of relief as she busies herself in the kitchen, preparing to cook up yet another batch of food. Holding the cookbook open with her elbows, Sam leans down to pick up the rice cake George has just dropped. Five-second rule. It was on the floor less than five seconds, so she shoves it back in his mouth and just sighs when he drops it again.
“Are you not hungry, darling? Georgy? Rice cake? Mmmm. Yum yum yum. Look. Mummy loves rice cakes.” Sam nibbles on it, then takes a bite. “No?” George is now looking past her shoulder at the lights of the digital clock on the microwave. “Oh well. Mummy will just have to have it,” and Sam shrugs as the rice cake disappears in a single mouthful.
“Mummy's making red lentil casserole with cheese. How delicious. Can you think of anything more delicious? Red's a color, isn't it?” Sam babbles as she opens the larder and pulls out ingredients. “Red's the color of the post-box. It's a hot color, isn't it?”
George could not be less interested. Even Sam isn't particularly interested, but she read somewhere that the most intelligent children were ones whose parents had spoken to them constantly, even from birth, whose parents had explained everything to them.
Sam is determined to be the best mother of anyone she knows. She's never been competitive before, has never really known the cut and thrust of the design world, having always had the creativity and ability to shine naturally, but now, as a new mother, she is determined to do everything right.
Already she believes that George is super-baby. My son the genius, she jokingly refers to him, although listen closely to her laughter and you'll hear it's false. Georgenius, she coos, as she rocks him back and forth at night, reading him Where's Spot? (Against her better judgment. She really wanted to start him off on Rudyard Kipling, but Where's Spot? and Charlie the Chicken appealed to George in a way that Kim just didn't.)
“I think he might be quite advanced,” she says, trying to blush with false modesty but failing miserably. “He's definitely going to be walking any second. Look.” And all eyes turn to George, sprawling on his stomach, lifting his head, and looking around happily, but certainly nowhere near the point of standing, let alone walking.
“Did I walk young too?” she asked her mother on one of the rare occasions when she popped in to see her first grandchild.
“Darling, I don't remember.” Her mother looked at Sam as if she were mad. “It was years ago. I do remember you looking ever so sweet with your little pigtails, though,” and she smiled at the memory as she reached for a baby wipe and dabbed a small smear of vomit from her silk shirt with a frown.
“How can you not remember?” Sam tried to hide the disappointment, knowing that she'll never forget these years, never forget George's daily progression, but her mother's tone became irritated as she explained, again, how she had to work in the family business, had no choice, was merely following orders. Sam dropped the subject.
“It's not that I mind about me,” she said to Julia that night, ignoring the fact that these late-night long-distance phone calls were going to send Chris up the wall. “But I mind for George. I'm used to her being a crap mother, but she's supposed to fall in love with her grandson, isn't she?”
Julia sighed. “I do think it's bloody odd that she's not around and not helping, and I completely feel for you. But, Sam. This is your mother. Your mother who is far more concerned with her charity lunches and bloody bridge. You're the one who always says how selfish she is. Maybe you were wrong in expecting her to finally change.”
“But he's so gorgeous.” Sam blinked the tears away from her eyes as she leaned back on the sofa and turned her head to examine one of the many photographs of George now littering every available bit of space in the living room. “How can she not want to spend time with him?”
“I don't know. I know that if I were in London I'd be there every day, and he's not even my relative.”
“Godson's the next best thing.”
“Don't I know it. I just wish I was around a bit more, being godmotherish. As it stands, all I'll end up doing is sending him presents from New York.”
“You know I didn't ask you to be godmother just because I thought you'd buy him expensive presents?”
“I should bloody hope not. Anyway, you wouldn't have asked if that was the case. Not on what London Daytime Television was paying me.”
They both laughed.
“But seriously, Sam, I know you asked me for the right reasons. I know I'm expected to give George moral guidance, and be the person who looks after him if . . . well, heaven forbid . . .”
“Yes, I know. That's exactly why I asked you. But I also want George to be able to come to you when he's older, to ask anything of you.”
“And I want to retain the ability to say no,” Julia laughed. “But Sam, can I just say one more thing about your mother . . . Your mother is your mother, she's not going to change. It's the only certainty in life and you have to stop expecting things from her.”
“I know. I know. It's just that it still bloody hurts. All these years I thought I'd buried all the pain of her not being around, not being interested, not knowing how to mother, for Chrissakes, and now I've had George, all those feelings of resentment and anger feel just as raw as they did ten years ago.”
“Maybe you should think about seeing someone.”
“God!” Sam started to laugh. “How long have you been in New York exactly? A few weeks and you're already buying into all that therapy rubbish?”
“I don't actually think it's rubbish,” Julia said defensively. “I wish I'd been to see someone when I was with Mark. Would have given me the impetus to leave years before.”
“How is Mark?” Sam's tone was tentative. “Have you heard anything?”
“Nope. Have you seen him?”
“Amazingly, no.” Amazing only because Mark lives just a few streets away, but Sam had always known that however much she loved Mark—and she truly did—when he and Julia split up she would have to make a choice, and her loyalties lay with Julia.
There was a long pause before Julia spoke. “The baby is apparently due any day now.”
“Are you okay with . . . everything?” Of course they've talked about Maeve. Sam and Bella both listened for hours as Julia poured out the tears. It took a week. A week of crying and pain, and then Julia professed to be over it. She said the tears were a result of shock, and the pain was for the life she had once thought she wanted, but by the end of the week she had closure. At least that's what she said.
Bella and Sam didn't believe her at first. Couldn't believe that Julia, Julia who had winced in pain at the sight of cooing babies, who could spend hours in Mothercare dreaming of chubby fingers and curling toes, Julia who was convinced the reason for her inability to get pregnant was Mark, could move on so quickly. So easily. So relatively painlessly.
But it seems that Julia had moved on. She still found it hard to accept that there might be something wrong with her after all, but with every day she knew she'd made the right choice. She was exactly where she needed to be, doing exactly what she needed to do.
“The amazing thing,” Julia said after a pause, “is that I think I'm genuinely fine. I wouldn't go as far as to say I'm happy for him, but if you'd have told me this time last year Mark would be having a baby with the woman who replaced me at work . . .” They both snorted with laughter at the ludicrousness of the situation before Julia continued, “I would have either smacked you or screamed with rage. But I'm fine. I'm actually . . . oh God. Am I going to say this? I'm actually relieved it's not me.”
“So children really aren't on your agenda, then?”
“Not yet. I'm having such a blast here. Working like a madwoman, out every night. I wake up each morning with the most astonishing surge of energy. Sam, my feet barely touch the ground in New York, and I love every bloody minute of it. I can't think of anything I want less right now than having a fat stomach, a boring husband, every evening spent in front of the telly, and a screaming baby keeping me up all night.”
Sam absentmindedly stroked her own fat stomach and sighed. “Oh shit,” Julia said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. It's just the whole domestic thing. I thought I wanted it so badly, the whole thing. Husband. Baby. Nice house. And I just don't. I feel like I was dead during all that time with Mark. Not that it's his fault. It was us. We were just so wrong for one another, and I look back at that person and know she wasn't me, just a vague shadow. This is the life I need to lead now, and if things change in the future, I'll deal with them when I get there.”
Sam wanted to ask if Julia had come to terms with the possibility that she might not be able to have children, but she couldn't. Not yet. And she knows Julia. Knows she will, rather like the ostrich, have buried the fear deep, deep enough for her not to have to face it.
“And the delectable Jack?”
“We still see one another, but really as friends.”
“Friends who occasionally have sex, by any chance?”
Julia giggled. “And what, pray tell, other sort of friend is there?”
“You mean, when they're handsome and funny and think you're the best thing since sliced bread?”
“Exactly. I didn't mean you,” she snorted.
“I should bloody hope not. But you and Jack. Definitely not an item?”
“Definitely not. I'm not ready for that, but he's a fantastic friend.”
“And the sex?”
“Why, fantastic!” Julia laughed. “As if you really needed to ask.”
Sam shakes some organic spinach leaves into a bowl and hesitates over the cheese grater. It's definitely clean, but definitely not sterile. Can she be bothered? She hesitates, wonders whether anything terrible would happen, but knows she could never forgive herself if something did. With a sigh she puts the kettle on to boil—again—and dunks the cheese grater in a bowl of boiling water for ten minutes to sterilize it.
“This has become the house of f*cking water,” she said in fury last night, as Chris walked in, dumping his coat in the hall. She had lifted the lid of the sterilizer and dumped it quickly in the sink, but not before it had left a trail of steaming puddles all over the kitchen worktops. This added to the fact that for the past five months she had refused to heat bottles in the microwave, and had heated them in a pan of boiling water, meant that her surfaces were indeed rather liquid. “All I do,” she said in exasperation, wiping the puddles away for the sixteenth time that day, “is mop up f*cking water.”
“My day was lovely, darling, thank you.” Chris chose to ignore her comments. “I'm very tired, and I've had back-to-back meetings with potential stockists all afternoon, but what a pleasure it is to come home to my beautiful wife, and a delicious home-cooked meal.” He leaned forward to kiss her, which she ignored, feeling the rage already building up. Deep breaths, she told herself, chopping celery into smaller and smaller pieces. But the rage was too strong.
“You can make f*cking jokes,” she said viciously, “but you haven't been stuck in all day with a screaming baby. You have absolutely no idea what it's like for me. You have no idea how hard I've been working and I've got no help and then you breeze in here and expect me to be in a good mood when I'm completely f*cking exhausted and I'm fed up with it. I'm fed up.”
“And what do you think I do all day? You act as if I'm leaving the house every morning to go to a party. You're not the only one who's suffering, Sam, you're not the only one who's run off their feet.” Chris thought he understood what Sam was going through, but, really, there was only so much a man could take. And what about him, for heaven's sake? He'd had a nightmare day. He was run off his feet, trying to finish three tables and a sideboard, and he came home only to be completely ignored or screamed at by this wife that he barely recognized anymore.
But it was different for Chris. He couldn't understand why, for three months, Sam had been unable to get dressed. This wasn't because she didn't want to, or because she was too exhausted, but because George screamed solidly. All day. The only time he would be quiet was if he was walked up and down the stairs in Sam's arms, or pushed around the Heath in a pram. And heaven forbid she should stop walking to try to grab a coffee.
Sam was trying to look after George, to keep the house clean, to do the ironing, to cook children's meals for George and grown-up meals for Chris, and to retain some sanity at the same time.
But the worst thing of all was the loneliness. She couldn't remember being independent. Or vivacious. Or fun-loving. She could barely remember ever leaving the house.
“At least you get away from it!” Sam screamed. “At least you get out of this f*cking house. I'm trapped here all day, and I haven't got a minute to myself, and then you come home and crack jokes about home-cooked meals. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Like a takeaway pizza?” Chris said hopefully. Contritely.
There was a long pause as Sam felt the anger start to diffuse. She would give in. This time.
“Make sure there's extra pepperoni,” she grumbled, as she dragged her feet up the stairs to run a bath.