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

going to delete it. Sorry. I don’t want anyone to see me like that.’ She stands up and leans forward with a paper napkin to wipe a spoonful of sick that’s dribbling down Bobby’s chin towards the collar of his Eskimo-style bodysuit.

‘It happen a lot? Losing your temper with Bobby?’

‘Never,’ Erin says, a little forcefully. ‘I’d barely slept. He wouldn’t stop screaming.’

‘No judgement here,’ Caz says, bending down next to Bobby’s buggy to pick up the squid he’s dropped. ‘Once, when Stanley was screaming like that, I grabbed his ankle, gave it a squeeze. Pretty hard. Got agonising guilt straight afterwards, questioned whether I was a fucking psycho or whatever, so that’s good at least.’ She wipes the crumbs of tarmac off the toy and hands it back to Bobby.

‘It’s not me at all,’ Erin finds herself saying. Which is something she’s not certain of. In the early stages of her pregnancy she started to feel a constant edge of rage buzzing behind her forehead like an electric flycatcher. When she was out and about, she was good at suppressing it, but at home she wasn’t so successful. She could see Raf’s love for her, his devotion, chip away in tiny fragments every time her anger bubbled over and he found himself scalded by it.

But perhaps this is the real her. The real her that’s shouted at Bobby, that’s twisted his limbs into clothes harder than she should, that’s hissed at him through gritted teeth for him to just stop crying when she desperately needed a moment to reset her head. When she was a kid she’d never dreamed of being a mother and maybe that was her instinctively knowing that she shouldn’t be, that she didn’t have the constitution for it. ‘The idea of it going viral –’ she shudders as she says it – ‘and everyone seeing the sort of person I am.’

‘All parents have lost it once or twice. That’s not who you are.’

‘If something happens in a video that goes up on the Internet, it’s more real than reality.’ An empty nappy bag blows in the wind and sticks to Erin’s leg.

‘Well, no one saw it, not even me. Get some pics up of Bobby in some of those neon dungarees you’ve got, eating avo toast from one of those fancy black plates and watch the “likes” flood in.’

Erin slugs some water from Bobby’s sippy cup, to wash away the oily residue in her mouth.

‘Probably get told avocado’s got too much fat for babies.’

‘Aye, then the Chilean government would send you two thousand avocados so that’d make up for that. You’re very lucky, remember.’ The ice wind swirls into the harbour so Caz gets a blanket out from under the buggy and wraps Bobby up in it like meat in pastry. Her two children are at nursery. Stanley’s four and Imogen’s seventeen months. With her riot of dark curls, wide hazel eyes and her tattoo of an eagle feather on her wrist, Caz is the sort of mother Erin would like to be. Cool, confident, no-nonsense. Happy to laugh at how much of a nightmare her kids are but still rampant with love for them. She’d march through walls for her children. Erin barely puts her phone down for Bobby. The video has affected her, touched a nerve far more than it should have. Caz is right. She’s very, very lucky.

Sunbeams reach around a batch of cumulus clouds that hang above the town in front of them. The dappled sunlight brings out the colours in the painted facades of the old Victorian terraces that overlook the harbour. When the sun shines you can imagine this place, its fish and chip shops, ice-cream parlours, its kiosks and sea-view pubs, teeming with life as it does in the warmer months.

As they walk back up the hill towards their cars, parked on the far side of the restaurant, away from the harbour, Bobby grows bored of being constrained and begins arching his back against the buggy’s strap like Frankenstein’s monster. Caz rounds the buggy and coos into his face, reaching her hand for something. Erin understands she means a snack and panics to find something. She hands over a shard of rice cake from a packet in her rucksack and it placates the boy. As Caz pushes the buggy up the hill, Erin dashes onto her phone quickly. Twenty-three followers just since she left the coffee morning. Bobby has got a great outfit on under his snowsuit, plus fours and a bright green T-shirt like a clown-golfer, and she’d posed him with two giant croissants instead of ears so he looked like Big-Ears from Noddy.

A gaggle of mums, various shades of bright dyed hair, come out of the coffee morning as they pass the restaurant. They stop Erin, though she’s only met them once or twice before. One asks where she’s going to be tomorrow morning. One if she has any tips for day trips. One congratulates her on the new agent. Caz hasn’t stopped walking so Erin tells the women she’ll see them all around before skipping up the cobbles to catch up with her and Bobby.

‘Sorry,’ she says, threading an arm through hers and putting her hand next to Caz’s on the handle of the buggy. She leans her head on her shoulder.

‘Price of fame,’ Caz says. Erin spots an old man with yellowing hair standing on the stern of his boat staring at them. She looks back towards the restaurant, the three mothers are looking up at her, one waves. Erin unlinks herself from Caz, suddenly paranoid about how someone taking a photo of them could spin it. She gets a flash of that angry woman, her, almost launching the same buggy they’re pushing now across the patch of grass. The price of fame.

15

8 January 1999

So now we’re bound.

I want to write it down, everything that happened, so that when we’re old we can