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

so people have followed her just in the past couple of minutes. Bar the hashtags, it wasn’t even a good post. She needs to work harder, she thinks, every post has to be as funny, as relatable, as shareable as possible. She’s on the crest of something, she can feel it. She can’t get distracted now, a few bad posts could be enough to undo all her hard work.

She hears singing coming from their garden and glances out the small Velux window at the studio. A sliver of light shows through a gap in the blinds that obscure the world from the glass-fronted box. She reaches over and clicks the window open to listen. It could be Joni Mitchell, high and haunting. Amanda is singing. As she was when Erin first saw her through the window holding her son. She blinks and an eyelash catches a clot of cream getting some of it in her eye. Erin goes back to the sink and rinses her face with cold water.

Raf appears in the door frame and stops for a moment, one eye squinted in the direction of the window. They listen to Amanda for a moment, neither breathing for a good few seconds, but the sound of Bobby coughing through the monitor snaps them back into the room. Raf notices the Instagram app open on her phone in her hand and huffs back into the bedroom. She looks down at the plughole in the sink, sees a coil of her hair in the depths. Her breathing shallowing as the air raid of Bobby’s crying begins to wind up. He’s awake. Three hours, he never sleeps for a longer spell. It’s beyond exhausting. She hears Raf grabbing his dressing gown off the back of the door and leaving, the floorboards of the stairs playing their three-note melody as he descends.

A sharp spike of cold rushes into the room. She looks out the window again and sees a shadow moving behind the garden studio’s blinds. Goosebumps spear up on Erin’s skin and she clunks the window closed, the singing snuffed out like a church candle.

She settles herself into bed and switches off the light. Ten past ten. Bobby’s first feed of the day is 4 a.m. so she’s normally asleep much earlier than this. She listens to see if he’s still screaming down in his room but she can’t hear him. Raf sleeps down there most of the time so she can sleep undisturbed. She misses having him next to her, his pepper-scent, playing her fingers over the network of veins on his arms that stand out so clearly that she can see her thumbnail stopping the blood flowing around his body.

Erin switches the white-noise machine on. A facsimile of a hairdryer fills the room though she can still make out the sound of Amanda’s singing. But the window’s closed. The tune must have got stuck in her head. She closes her eyes and pictures Amanda, cross-legged on the pulled-out sofa bed, eyes closed, singing. Her dress now a brilliant white tunic, a crown of shells in her hair. Erin smiles to herself.

Her mum always used to say that when you’re a parent of young kids, it’s best to have people around as much as possible because it forces you, the parents, to be nice to each other. Perhaps Amanda’s presence, her self-possession, her Zen-calm, will bring a counter-melody into their house that will bring Erin and Raf’s relationship back to some kind of harmony. With a guest around, she might be a bit more judicious with her phone use, something she knows he’s really struggling with. Perhaps having Amanda here will force them to inject some brio into their everyday interactions and sharpen some of the flatness that Raf seems to have projected towards her since Bobby was born. He didn’t seem flat tonight. He seemed heightened, on point.

Erin’s exhausted. She’s been thinking about putting her head to this pillow, of being alone in her bed, since she dragged herself out from under the embrace of the faux-fur coverlet inside her yurt this morning. But she can feel the buzz behind her eyes. The flickering LED dots in her head of all those unanswered messages, all those people demanding she engage with them. She pulls her phone up out of the covers from where it was, clenched in her hand next to her collarbone, sits up against the headboard and sparks it into life.

6

Bobby sneezes and two thick trails of snot spurt out of his nose with such alacrity that the shock makes him burst into tears. Erin apologises to a mum she’s talking to whose name she can’t remember, gets down on her knees and hoists Bobby up from the gym matting into her arms. She wanders away from the people she’d just been telling about her digital detox retreat over to her stuff. She roots around the compartment under her #gifted buggy but she can’t find any tissues. How can she never remember something as fundamental as tissues? She looks over to a circle of bearded dads, a number of whom she knows to say hello to, and wills one of them to sense her plight and come and help, but they’re too busy laughing at their toddlers scrapping in front of them like tiny gladiators.

She glances around the church hall, polystyrene ceiling tiles and walls of corkboards laden with colourful flyers for colourful church events. Bobby’s mewling is obviously not drilling into anyone else’s temples because no one seems to have noticed. Abi, a ruddy-cheeked local mum who lives up near the library, glances at Erin, widens her eyes in sympathy before turning back to a lady who resembles a pumped-up Dolly Parton whose legs two toddlers seem to be trying to topple like Samson in the temple. This group used to be one or two grannies on childcare duty and a dozen or so beleaguered