Spilt Milk by Amy Beashel

Author:Amy Beashel [Beashel, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Monday 15th April

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘You might want this.’ The warmth from the cup Kim passes me could be your hands in the morning, Mabel, when they reach over the bars of your cot and the heat of you on my neck is sticky and instant. Though the caffeinated sip’s a subtler hit than your face in my face and the first Mummy Mummy Mummy of the day.

I do miss you, Mabel.

I miss your morning smile, which normally comes no matter what, delayed a few seconds or minutes maybe if I’ve kept you waiting or Flumper has fallen to the floor in the night and is, I’ve thought when I’ve seen you stretch for him, like The Old Me, slightly beyond reach. I pass him to you and, just like that, you’re happy. Simple really, those needs of yours. Or so they seem from a distance.

‘Look that bad, do I?’

‘Not at all, I just —’

‘Takes two cups usually.’ My voice fades as I catch Kim’s fingers agitating her phone. ‘To make me function, I mean. Two cups or I can’t even think abo—’

‘Storant’s written the article, Bea.’

‘What? But I haven’t even …’ I wanted to talk about it with Craig. But when I tried again last night, he was still refusing to take my calls. I hadn’t realised I was fighting a ticking clock.

‘Seems she couldn’t wait.’ Despite the grumble of the coffee machine as it grinds my second cup, I hear Kim’s disappointment, see it too when she passes me the evidence, and I catch the photo of me in Ibiza 2003, post A-levels and pre-uni when I went loco in San Antonio with Della and Lisa. It was a different time, Mabel. A different time and a different place, where I would have looked perverse if I hadn’t been wearing a union jack bikini, fag in one hand, WKD in the other, eyes as blurred as the three, four, five nights before.

My thumb flicks and there are other me’s there too. The early-London me, mini-skirted and high-heeled and headed to our Christmas drinks after-party when someone suggested pole dancing on the tube. There’s Pride-with-Della me, dressed as a rainbow pirate and kissing my best friend who, the night before, had come out to her nan. Granny Barton had been cool with it, by the way. Hence the arms in the air and our peck-on-the-lips elation. There’s blogger me, sitting on the loo with my mobile phone as my baby chews on a cake-battered spatula she’s clearly just picked up from the floor. There’s space-hopper me, astride my bouncy hopper, grinning like a deranged fool. There’s yesterday’s door-stepped me, panicked and running from the house, which will read as running away from my daughter. And, finally, there is Mummy-Mummy-Mummy me, arms held out for you, Mabel, as you run towards me after your first morning at nursery. My grin is as big as your grin. And I remember my heart leaping as high as your heart because it was such a relief – yes, I mean it – to hold you after your few hours away.

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