People LIke Her: A Novel by Ellery Lloyd

Author:Ellery Lloyd [Lloyd, Ellery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, suspense
ISBN: 9780062997418
Google: vZzcDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0062997394
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Dan

There are some days when everything just seems to go wrong from the start. Take this morning. For some reason, completely out of character, Bear decides to wake up at four thirty and start screaming. I go through and check his nappy and settle him. Fifteen minutes later, he starts screaming again. Emmy goes in. For about half an hour I can hear her through the wall, jouncing him and shushing him and soothing him back to sleep. The instant she tries to put him down, he starts screaming again. From Coco’s bedroom, through the door, I can hear a plaintive voice asking what’s going on. It’s now five fifteen, and since Emmy has a photo shoot later I get up and offer to take the baby for a few hours.

Before Bear came along I think I had forgotten what it was like, having a very young baby. The relentlessness of it. The constant stream of things to worry about. The never-ending to-do list of baby-related tasks. The amount of pressure it puts on you as a couple even at the best of times.

When I get tired, I get cranky and I get clumsy. Not a great combination. The first thing I do when I go down to the kitchen is open a cupboard door to get a bottle out to decant Bear’s milk into, turn to grab something out of the fridge, then turn back to bash myself on the open cupboard door, right between the eyes.

Emmy shouts down to see what is going on. I shout back, “Nothing.” She asks what all the swearing is about then.

It takes me about five minutes to find the empty plastic bottle I got out of the cupboard, which seems to have immediately vanished. Eventually I find it, right in front of me on the counter.

By this time Bear is getting hungry and whiny and irritable.

It’s mornings like this when I find myself reflecting in amazement on how little childcare they did, the men of my father’s generation. Did he ever change a nappy, my dad? Perhaps once, badly. I know he used to complain sometimes about the smell of the nappy bucket, the one by the back door, and there was a family story about the time he was leaving for work in his best suit (I picture it flared, acrylic, with wide lapels) and managed to kick the bucket over or step in it. But I can’t remember ever hearing about him getting up in the night to do a midnight feed with a bottle or pushing a pram around the block to get me to sleep. Or even taking me to the playground or park on his own. And this is the early eighties we’re talking about, not the fifties. My mum had been to college and read The Female Eunuch and had her own full-time job—and she still cooked all the dinners too. I just can’t understand how they used to get away with it, the men in those days.

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