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

stretching it out like a garrotte. Then she looks down at it, Raf’s jumper. Amanda’s cardigan is on the floor outside the room.

She takes a sidestep that puts her in line with the gap in Bobby’s door and looks in. The room’s gloomy, blackout blinds down, nightlight on. The underlying hiss of static. The sound she’s hearing isn’t live. The words come from a recording, they could be Indian or Latin, punctuated by the release of a high sigh, the sound she’d interpreted as a moan. It’s the same passage of words, then the sound, repeated on a loop. A chant.

As she opens the door and steps in she sees a phone on the bedside table that the chant’s playing on. There’s a shape in the single bed, the bed Raf sleeps on when he’s in with Bobby overnight. Erin tiptoes over, breath held. She stands over the bed and there’s Bobby, fast asleep, his features so delicate in repose they could almost be porcelain, lying on his side nestled into Amanda’s chest. Amanda’s sleeping too. Erin watches her breath move Bobby’s wedge of thick hair once, twice, three times.

Amanda’s covered by the duvet but Erin can see she’s not wearing a top or a bra. Her hair cascades down arms that enwrap Bobby, holding him into her. The contrast between Amanda’s pale skin, her freckled shoulders and Bobby’s dark mop of hair, his olivey rolls of flesh, makes the scene look like an image from an Athena poster.

Erin blinks hard, as if there were something stuck in her eye. She feels like she’s intruded on some sacred scene of motherhood, except that’s not Amanda’s baby. The chant continues. Is this how she’s been getting him to sleep so easily? Whenever Erin’s asked, Amanda’s said that he’s not always gone straight off but it’s never seemed to be the twenty-minute screamathon Erin has cope with. This is how she’s being doing it? Chanting MP3s and topless cuddling. She imagines Amanda, this woman who seemed to come along like Mary Poppins, bringing peace to a tempestuous home, someone she thought was becoming her friend, whispering the words of the chant into her baby boy’s ears until he falls asleep, filled with calm, filled with Amanda’s overpowering contentment and something proprietary begins to churn inside her, a heat that expands in her until she thinks her ribcage might pop like a balloon.

Erin steps back, feeling that if she keeps holding her breath, keeps trying to stay still, her legs may crumple beneath her. She loses her balance and knocks into the nightlight, sending it back into the cot behind her with a clatter. One of Amanda’s eyes bursts open. She looks over Bobby’s head, straight at Erin. Her face is blank, no guilt, no concession at being caught in bed nuzzling someone else’s baby. If anything, she looks irritated. The back of Bobby’s head begins to wheedle round and then Erin hears her little boy gearing up to scream but Amanda holds him closer, whispers something into his ears and seems to abate his fury at being woken up. Amanda smiles at her with the side of her mouth that’s visible and raises an eyebrow that seems to be saying to Erin ‘thank God I’m here to save you from yourself’.

20

Erin looks over at the collection of about twenty desks in the middle of a vast poured concrete floor. The Lookout, the co-working space where Raf rents a desk, is in a converted nightclub that’s been stripped back to the brick. Although its members have done their best to conceal it by hanging prints and filling it with house plants, it still has a hint of the building site about it and has barely changed since the only other time she’s popped in to see Raf here six months ago. She’s wanted to come here more, to break up her day with Bobby, but she didn’t get the sense from Raf that a young baby would be particularly popular with the seemingly industrious freelancers.

She looks to the back of the room where there are studio spaces and sees hirsute men in hats, the artists, milling about and laughing at each other’s jokes. Raf’s in the main body of the first floor. He shares the space with a mixture of graphic designers, writers, Amina, who owns an online kids’ clothes shop and who Erin’s become friendly with, and even a landscape gardener. But Raf’s face isn’t squeezed in behind the double monitor where she remembers him being.

There’s some movement at the back of the room and there he is, emerging from where the toilet must be because he’s wiping his hands on a dishcloth. His eyebrows narrow in surprise at seeing her and she locks him with a challenging glare as he swerves through the workspaces towards her.

She’d had to get out of the house and felt she needed to go to Raf but hadn’t really thought why. After Bobby woke, she went and fed him in the living room as Amanda got dressed. Amanda offered to make her a cup of tea but Erin suggested she go and do her own thing after looking after the baby last night and all morning. Erin didn’t reveal how unsettling she’d found it but as she walked into town towards Raf’s workspace, she was shaking.

‘Wasn’t expecting you back till after lunch.’ He leans in to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Bloody hell, boozy one, was it?’ He backs away quickly, wafting his nose. ‘Good night though?’ He’s nonchalant as he leads her by the elbow towards the wide window out to the sea that’s given the space its name. He goes to unclip the sling and get Bobby out but Erin bats his hand away.

‘When’s she going?’

‘What?’

‘Amanda – do you know how long she’s staying?’

‘Is everything OK?

‘Just thought you might have talked about it on one of your walks.’ Raf