And I was too tired to pursue the subject anyway. We could have that conversation another time.
* * *
Back home I had an endless stream of visitors.
‘I can’t believe you went through with it,’ Shelley said. ‘You’re so brave!’
‘I can’t believe you went through with it,’ Wayne parroted. ‘You’re an unmarried teenage mother. Congratulations!’
But compliments or insults, it was all the same to me. I was so in love with little Lucy Boop that nothing and no one could touch me.
I was exhausted after giving birth – more than I’d ever been before. And as those first days and weeks went by, that tiredness got worse, not better.
Lucy would wake up screaming for milk every three hours 24/7 and on a bad day it could be as often as every two. I was so shattered from lack of sleep that I felt as if I’d been hollowed out and turned into some kind of mothering feeding robot. My brain seemed to have stopped working, and I was left stumbling from room to room like a zombie, the baby clamped to my breast.
Mum and Wayne, who were also constantly woken by Lucy’s nocturnal terrors, were looking pretty red-eyed too. ‘If I fail my exams,’ Wayne told me, ‘It’ll be entirely because you couldn’t keep your legs together, Sis.’
‘Thanks, Uncle Wayne,’ I said flatly. ‘That really, really helps.’
Rob called in roughly every other day, delivering nappies or babygrows or chocolates – I don’t think he once turned up empty-handed.
‘You’re the best husband any woman never had,’ Mum told him.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I try.’
And then, on the last Saturday of June, Mum declared that I needed a break. ‘You’re smelly and so out of it that you’re more hindrance than help,’ she said. ‘Plus, you need a haircut.’
I was so numb from lack of sleep by that point that I couldn’t even begin to think about whether what she was saying was fair. But through the fog I conceded that the smelly part, at least, was true, and that, even though I couldn’t really remember what the point of them was any more, ithadbeen months since I’d had a haircut.
‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure,’ she said, quite literally wrenching Lucy from my arms.
‘But she’ll need feeding,’ I countered, reaching out to try to take her back.
‘I can give her a bottle,’ Mum said. ‘Believe it or not, I do know how.’
I went to my bedroom first for a lie-down. If I could just get twenty minutes’ kip, I reckoned I’d have the energy to at least decide what to do next. But then Lucy started screaming downstairs, and it was a noise that seemed to have been designed by God to be utterly impossible to ignore. It bit into the core of me and the only possible reaction was to run to her.
‘Give her here,’ I told Mum flatly, once I’d resigned myself and returned downstairs.
‘She cries with you too!’ Mum replied, feigning offence.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But still. Give her here.’
‘Just let her cry,’ Mum said. ‘Let her cry inmyear for a change. Run a bath. Put some music on. Or even better, go to Rob’s and do it there.’
‘Rob’s?’ I repeated, frowning at her. ‘Why would I want to go to Rob’s?’
Mum restrained a smirk and nodded sideways at the lounge window, beyond which Rob’s white van was pulling up.
‘Jesus,’ I murmured. ‘It’s a set-up.’
‘Go!’ Mum said, using her special no-nonsense voice. ‘It’ll do you good. It’ll do us all good, believe me. I’m sick to death of the sight of you.’
Separating from Lucy was a form of trauma. Not in any logical way – nothing I could reason with myself about – it was more just physical really. It’s hard to describe that sort of angst if you’ve never felt it, but I’ll try. You know when you have a nightmare that you’ve lost your purse with everything in it, or your passport, or your keys or whatever? Well there’s that moment when you realise it’s gone and the bottom sort of drops out of your stomach. It’s a deep, empty sickening feeling that lasts for a few seconds, and leaving Lucy, even with Mum, felt like that. Only it didn’t last for a few seconds. It was a permanent gaping emptiness that lasted as long as we were apart.
‘She’ll be fine, you know,’ Rob said, patting my knee as he drove.
