And somewhere in that rainbow list of things we don’t have words for there’s a special kind of hormone-swamped love that a mother feels for a man when she sees him curled protectively round her sleeping child. That one’s a particularly nice kind of love. And a bloody powerful one, too.
FIVE
COUNTING IN THREES (BY ROB)
Orange light in the windows, the smell of sausages, a smile looking up at me in the kitchen.Just her presence made me feel happy.
That will sound like a daft thing to say maybe – and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been accused of saying daft things – but it was true. I never knew how much I hated coming back to an empty house until I didn’t have to do it any more.
I’d pull the van up in Dalby Square and walk round the corner to see the orange glow spilling out of our lounge window, and I’d smile.
I’d put my key in the lock and push the front door open and hear Lucy crying, smell Dawn’s dodgy cooking and feel as fulfilled as I ever had.
I’d wanted this from the get-go and only now I had it did I really understand why. Because it was perfect. Not perfect as in some non-existent perfect baby that never cries, and not perfect as in some non-existent woman who isn’t in an inexplicable mood half the time. No, it was all perfect in its imperfection, that was the thing. It was perfect the way the weather’s perfect even though you never know what’s coming next.
Surprisingly, I didn’t much mind that Dawn didn’t love me and I didn’t even care a great deal that she didn’t want sex. My imagination and my right hand managed to plug that gap just fine. I’d become an expert, over the years.
Obviously, either or both of those things would have been nice, but I’ve always been a glass half full kind of guy, me. And if I’m honest, romance-wise, my glass had been empty for so long that I think I’d traded it for a smaller size. So coming home to Dawn and the baby, well, it was enough to make my little glass overflow.
Then, one Saturday night, she let me take care of the baby. Lucy had a cold and colic and was wretched. She’d been screaming herself into a frenzy all week, to the point where I worried she might actually run out of breath at some point and simply, somehow, expire.
I’d had a right shitty week myself, working on a rewire in a posh place over in Broadstairs – supposedly a house that Charles Dickens had once lived in. The snobby old couple who lived there were like something from a Dickens novel themselves. She smoked all the time using a long black cigarette holder, and he wore those silky cravat things stuffed down his shirt.
Anyway, they were never happy with anything I did. They were bored with their lives I reckon, to the point where having someone to hassle made a change. They buzzed around me like a couple of bluebottles and by day three they were doing my head in. Did I really need to run the wires through the walls? Did the carpets really have to come up so that I could run them under the floorboards? Did the drill really need to be so awfully noisy?
It all came to a head on Saturday afternoon when I walked dog-shit over their deep-pile white rug. I cleaned it up, of course I did, but the bloke, who was even worse than his missus, just banged on and on about it until eventually I did something I’d never done before: I packed up and walked out on the job. I suppose, in retrospect, that I was shattered. Lucy’s screaming fits had been mucking up my sleep patterns too.
Not wanting to roll up at home with all that anger, I’d gone for a pint and a pie after work. But Andy had been in a right mood too – there are days like that sometimes, no doubt something to do with the positions of the stars – and he’d gone off on one about the poll tax.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t agree with him, either – the poll tax was clearly a nightmare for just about everyone except the likes of the Queen and Thatcher herself. But it was all over by then, anyway. Thatch had resigned and Major had announced it would be replaced and I just couldn’t see the point of getting het up about it any more. In any case, it was the last thing I wanted to talk about that Saturday.
By the time I got back home I was feeling overly tired – that special tired that makes you wonder if you’re ill. I was even feeling depressed about the state of the world, not something that afflicts me too often. But then I saw the lights on and heard the baby crying and none of that other stuff seemed to matter.
Dawn looked like she’d died and been barely resuscitated. She was losing it over Lucy’s tantrums and I worried she might actually whack her one if the screaming didn’t stop. There was something erratic, almost violent, about the way she kept striding up and down the room. So I offered to take a turn. I was so tired myself that I didn’t think even Lucy could stop me nodding off.
But Lucy calmed down, slowly at first, and then progressively more and more, and within an hour she was fast asleep in my arms. She smelled milky and warm and vaguely of baby poo, and snuggled against her I felt inexplicably happy. I remember wondering how my parents had managed to remain so cold to their own child, because I had no recollection of ever being cuddled, not even as a toddler. And theyarekind of irresistible, toddlers, aren’t they? At any rate you’d have to be a strange kind of person to resist, or even towantto. But then my parentswerestrange kinds of people. Understatement of the century really, that one.
I’d always worried that I’d end up being like them, that I’d be incapable of loving a child. But that cuddle with Lucy felt so wholesome, so natural, that it seemed like proof in a way. Perhaps not everything was genetic after all.
We slept like that for five or six hours solid and by the next morning something had changed. I could see it in the way Dawn looked at me. We never once discussed what had happened, me because I didn’t want to jinx it, and Dawn because I think she was embarrassed. After all, she’d promised repeatedly that she would never ever change her mind.
But the next night she put Lucy down and, for the first time in two weeks, she stayed down. The cold and the colic were over.
I watched to the end of the news and went up to bed, to find that Dawn had gone to sleep in my double.
I slipped in beside her as discreetly as I could and lay there, like a plank, wondering if she’d made a mistake, and then whether it was OK that I was naked, and then wondering if Dawn was naked too.
But Dawn wasn’t asleep after all. ‘Is this OK?’ she eventually asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, too nervous to think what else to say.
‘Don’t sound so keen,’ she said, and the laughter in her voice made me relax a bit.
‘Oh, I’m keen,’ I said, still rigidly lying by her side. It was true too. Every inch of me was rigid, even the bits that are usually squidgy.
‘Show me,’ she said, rolling towards me and slipping her hand across my waist. ‘Show me how keen you are.’
* * *
