The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

through some tough times with her gorgeous baby boy. And Instagram has taken her to its surgically enhanced bosom. Erin is such an inspiration and I’m so proud to be working together. Besitos supermum.

Ghiie288 How do your children ever see you? You’re always mooning around like a teenager. Mums should be at home looking after their children. Disgusting.

11

Erin’s key trips to the side of the lock. It’s seven forty-five and she’s had a premix G and T on the train to celebrate signing with her agent. A couple in fact, on top of the prosecco or two she had at the studio when Grace showed up. She puts her phone back in her coat pocket and tries the door again. The key slides home, but when she goes to turn it, it sticks. For a moment she thinks the locks have been changed before she gives it a wiggle and lets herself in. She drops her bag down onto what was a pile of coats behind the door, but it clatters onto the laminate flooring. The coats have been hung up somewhere else.

The house is charged with the pungent smell of a Middle Eastern souk. Cooking spices mixed with some kind of citrus aroma, lime or lemongrass. The hallway is dark, the living room dimmed. There’s a candle she’s never seen before flickering on the hall table, the mirror behind creating its double. This doesn’t feel like her house.

She hears movement upstairs. Raf must be giving Bobby a bath. His responses to her multitude of texts about leaving the baby with Amanda, checking that he was OK with her doing the podcast, telling him what time she was going to be back, have been uniformly utilitarian. That’s fine, Good luck, Hope journey OK.

‘Whatcha.’ Amanda’s voice from the kitchen. Erin dips into the main room and sees her leaned over the kitchen surface chopping something. She’s wearing Raf’s navy apron over a pale grey dress, hair in two French braids. ‘How did it go?’ She turns, kitchen knife turfed in chopped coriander. ‘Should I ask you for an autograph?’

‘Wouldn’t bother,’ Erin says through a polite chuckle. She looks past Amanda at her kitchen. It’s pristine and a floor lamp has been moved to the side of the bookshelf so, with the spotlights from the kitchen ceiling turned off, the space looks warm and intimate. The sofa that Erin leans her leg into appears to have been hoovered. There are no toys on the rug, no crumpled nappy bags in a pile on the console table by the doorway, no mugs of half-drunk instant coffee filming over on the coffee table.

‘The place looks amazing.’

‘Bobby had a long nap an hour or so after you left.’

‘Here? In the house?’

‘In his room, yeh.’

‘Wow,’ Erin says, through half-clenched teeth. She pinches one of her eyelids together like there’s dust in it.

‘Know you said to take him out in the buggy for naps but with the rain … He was so tired after we’d played for a bit, I thought I’d chance it.’ Amanda turns back towards the pot that’s steaming up the window in front of her.

‘And … ’ Erin can’t quite form the question. Bobby’s never slept in his cot for her, not during the day. He just screams and screams until Erin picks him up and shoves him in the carrier or the buggy and out into the world. ‘Did he not, er, protest? To being left?’

‘We’d had a pretty intense peekaboo session, I read him about three thousand stories, then we practised some standing up against the wall. He was knackered.’ Amanda must see the defeat coming into Erin’s expression because she adds, ‘Between you and me, I think he was sick of the sight of me. Wanted to sleep away the minutes until he could see his mum-bear again.’

Amanda takes the lid off the bubbling stockpot and releases a dry-ice puff of steam that collects underneath the kitchen cupboards. She sweeps the chopping board of herbs into whatever she’s cooking. There’s a thud from upstairs and a sloshing and then Bobby cries out. Erin feels the familiar punch of panic, the relaxation from the booze and the train instantly wrung out like a wet flannel, and she turns towards the narrow staircase, climbing two at a time. As she gets to the top, the cries have gone. Erin pictures Amanda lying on the floor next to Bobby on the Berber-style living-room rug, face in balled hands like a teenager, fascinating Bobby with her games and attention. Not sitting behind him, staring at a phone screen, but actually engaging with him, and she can almost taste how shitty it makes her feel.

Erin stops at the door of their bedroom. In the bathroom she hears Raf shhing their son as he heaves out snotty breaths. She waits, picks at a turned-up corner of wallpaper and it comes away. She scratches at a hole in the plaster, white dust collecting under her nail. The carpet in this upstairs hallway needs replacing. She doesn’t take any photos for her feed up here so it’s still as they bought it. The choices of a pensioner. Concentric shades of brown. Decor that sparks zero joy. The studio near King’s Cross where she recorded with Ally earlier was beautiful. Spotless glass, dark red iron girders on the ceiling, a huge coffee machine so golden and gleaming it could have been from Greek mythology. Ally told her to take her shoes off to experience the carpet, and when she did, it felt like each of her toes were being given a shiatsu massage. An assistant offered her a beer or a gin and tonic. She asked for a sparkling water, professional, and it arrived with a cold frosted glass, crushed ice, a slice of lime and a small bowl of cashew nuts. Ten years of learning lines and recording tapes, sleazy meetings with sleazy nobodies for