The Family Way. Tony Parsons

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      When she woke in the early hours she was desperate for water, and wearing just her pants and a white karate jacket snatched from the dirty laundry, she padded her way through the now silent flat to the kitchen.

      When she turned on the light she gasped. Jake and Jude were in their boxer shorts, munching toast.

      ‘Oh, excuse me,’ Cat said, grabbing a bottle of Evian from the fridge, and deciding not to get a glass because going to the cabinet where they were stored would have meant getting closer to all those gawky white limbs of the two teenage boys.

      As she closed the bedroom door behind her, she heard the voice of Jake’s friend Jude, and their graveyard laughter.

      ‘Not bad for an old girl,’ he said.

      

      Michael pushed his smile into his daughter’s filthy face.

      ‘She’s a mucky pup,’ he observed. ‘And she’s a chubby bubba. She is, she is! Ooza lovely chubby bubba? Ooza lovely chubby bubba? Chloe is, Chloe’s a lovely chubby bubba!’

      Chloe stared blankly at her father.

      Then she burped, and the burp evolved into minor projectile vomiting, a milky stream of mashed organic vegetables erupting from her mouth and then dribbling down that dimpled chin.

      And Jessica thought, forced to listen to this mindless gibberish, who wouldn’t throw up?

      ‘Oooh, has Daddy’s chubby bubba got an upset yummy-yummy tum-tum? Has she? Has she?’

      It can’t be good for her, thought Jessica. Talking to a baby as though you have just had a full frontal lobotomy, it just can’t be good for her development.

      But then again, thought Jessica, what do I know about it?

      Nothing, that’s what.

      While Naoko cleaned the bile from her baby daughter’s face and clothes, Michael rushed off to get the £1,000 digital camera that he had bought to record Chloe’s vomiting for future generations.

      Naoko lifted Chloe from her high chair and gently placed her on her feet. Chloe was walking. Well, not exactly walking. More like staggering really, Jessica thought, as she watched her niece shuffle around with the grim purpose of a drunk trying to establish sobriety, her parents on either side of her like kindly, concerned policemen.

      ‘She’ll be adorable when she gets some hair and teeth,’ Jessica said.

      Michael, Naoko and Paulo shot her a look, as if she had uttered some unforgivable blasphemy.

      ‘Even more adorable,’ she added quickly.

      ‘She has hair and teeth.’ Naoko smiled, stroking the light brown bum fluff on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Don’t you, Chloe-chan?’

      Chloe smiled, revealing four tiny white teeth, two up two down, in the centre of her wet pink mouth. And then she collapsed onto her nappy-covered bottom, her brown eyes wide with shock. Four adults rushed to attend to her.

      ‘Come to your Uncle Paulo.’

      But Chloe didn’t want to come to her Uncle Paulo. She clung to her mother and howled with outrage, staring at Paulo as though he had just climbed in through the window with a chainsaw.

      Chloe was changing. A few months ago, when she was still indisputably a baby, Chloe didn’t care who picked her up and gave her a cuddle. But now, one month short of her first birthday, with babyhood already being left behind, she was clinging to her parents and regarding anyone else with suspicion. Not so long ago, she was content to lie back and be admired. But already, she was becoming her own little person, stingy with her affection and wary of the world.

      Paulo was crushed. He had fondly imagined that Chloe would grow up loving him, just as he loved her. But she was dumping him already.

      Jessica was glad that Chloe’s cuddles were off limits. When she had held her as a newborn baby, something strange happened inside her. It was far more than wanting a baby of her own. It was the terrible knowledge that she had been born to give birth in her turn, and that she might never fulfil that destiny.

      For Jessica, there were a thousand humiliations in any visit to Michael, Naoko and Chloe. She couldn’t stand the pity of her brother- and sister-in-law. They were decent-hearted people, but it was bad enough feeling like a defective woman, without having to put up with all the concerned, sympathetic looks at her lack of fertility. The fact that the sympathy was genuine, and meant well, only made it worse.

      She could understand their delight in their daughter – if Chloe were her baby, Jessica was certain she would never leave her side. But where did understandable, unbridled joy end, and unbearable, insufferable smugness begin?

      Yet she had to be the good guest – expressing wonder at how much Chloe had grown since she had last seen her (seven days ago). Listening with rapt interest as Michael discussed developments in Chloe’s bowel movements, or Naoko went on (and on and on) about her daughter’s eating habits, and her apparently whimsical changes of taste.

      Give me a break, thought Jessica. It’s bad enough that I can’t have one of my own. Do I really have to give a standing ovation to everybody else’s baby?

      Jessica knew that Naoko was a good woman, and that Paulo was as close to Michael as she was to her two sisters. And, objectively, she could see that Chloe was a lovely baby – good-humoured, robust and adorable. In a bald, toothless, incontinent-old-geezer sort of way.

      Jessica really didn’t want to come here for Sunday lunch any more. It was just too hard.

      ‘Excuse me,’ she said, with the fixed grin that she wore as protection around other people’s babies.

      She fled the room with Naoko holding the red-faced, crying Chloe, and Michael stroking his daughter’s (when you thought about it) alarmingly large head, and Paulo keeping a respectful distance, like a minor courtier. Nobody even noticed her leave the room.

      Jessica desperately needed to get to the bathroom, but there were these bloody baby gates all over the house. Now that Chloe was on the move, disaster had to be averted on every landing and stairway. Because of an eleven-month-old child who could just about make it from the sofa to the coffee table (the numerous remote controls were a source of endless fascination to Chloe’s sticky fingers), the Victorian terrace had been turned into a maximum-security prison.

      Chloe certainly wasn’t getting through these gates. They were hard enough for an adult. You had to find the little button on top, press it down and lift up the gate all at the same time. Then you had to step over the bottom of the gate without falling flat on your face. Jessica made it through three gates and locked herself in the bathroom, where she confirmed what she already knew. Her period had started.

      One more month of failure. One more month of feeling like she should be recalled by whoever had manufactured her. One more month of seeing that disappointed look in her husband’s eyes, neither of them daring to say what was in their hearts – that this marriage might be childless for ever.

      And, just to rub it in, her period brought one more bout of teeth-grinding pain that would have had a grown man begging for it to stop.

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