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

local mothers, but since Erin posted about it a month or two ago it’s become almost unbearably busy with most of the former attendants crowded out by a flood of down-from-London migrants and their exotically named children.

The old dear, Megan, who helps out at the group, arrives at her shoulder with a huge box of tissues. Erin wipes Bobby’s nose despite him trying to dodge the tissue like an amateur boxer, but as she goes again to pinch a rogue trail that she missed before, she clunks the back of his head with her wrist. He arches his body. There’s a moment of deafening silence before he erupts into an indignant scream. Erin swallows and holds her eyelids shut hard for a moment as heat flushes all over her skin.

When she opens her eyes it feels like the whole room is now looking at her. She summons a wide smile and gives eye-rolls to anyone who makes direct eye contact with her. She notices Sophie Delauney (6.4k followers), a heroin-chic twenty-eight-year-old singer with eighteen-month-old Abel and a tiny beach-ball pregnant belly, standing with her gaggle of music-scene friends. One of them, Kristina, glances over at her. Erin puts Bobby up in front of her, tries to make him dance his legs around, just as Amanda did yesterday, but the screams don’t abate. She mimes pulling the trigger of an imaginary gun at her temple for anyone still watching. Kristina grimaces; another mum, Amina maybe, wrinkles her brow in disgust, making Erin instantly regret the gesture.

She cradles Bobby into her and makes a shhing, soothing sound, but she may as well be singing the cucaracha to the boy for all the difference this show of mothering ever makes with him. Bobby screamed when he first came into the world and it feels like he hasn’t stopped since. Erin’s convinced he doesn’t like her. And sometimes, particularly times like this when she just can’t seem to stem the flow of his anguish, she’s not sure how much she likes him. Something for which she wears a near-constant millstone of guilt around her neck. He’s her baby, she loves him, she’s meant to love him. But it’s not easy to love a wailing ball of rage.

Glowing red filament heaters rain artificial heat down on the hall. She wishes her friend Caz was here. Caz used to come to this group with her before it became a cool ‘hangout’. Caz would just whisk Bobby out of the room and somehow bring him back calm. Caz has a son a couple of years older than her daughter Imogen so Caz knows how to be a mother.

Erin decides to do what her friend would do. She grits her teeth as she forces the bucking Bobby into the straps of his buggy. As the screaming carriage parts the Red Sea of people on its journey towards the exit, every parent turns and gives Erin a look of commiserative support. She responds to them with comical eyebrows, apologetic waves at not having had a chance to catch up, an ironic thumbs up. To them she’s breezy, chilled out about Bobby screaming, nailing it, for those that follow her Instagram, very much on brand. They have no idea that, now she’s outside on her own in a battery of cold air and the boy’s shrieks are even louder than before, if someone offered her a flight to the other side of the world right now, she might just hand Bobby to Raf and get a cab to the airport.

She pushes the buggy down the road towards the sea. Clouds sit low in the sky and the air, pregnant with the threat of rain, clenches around her like a cold hand. Erin tries to take her mind to a place of Zen as Bobby’s cries become gurgled up with the phlegm he never seems to be able to shift. Has he got enough clothes on? she thinks. Is this my fault? Do I take him out too much? It’s fucking January by the sea. I’m such a selfish bitch, she thinks. She’s doing the calming breathing she got off a YouTube video someone posted in her comments but it’s having the opposite effect and she feels near hyperventilation and she’s reminded of her panic attack. No, she thinks to herself, I’m fine, Bobby’s just hard, it’s teeth, it’s reflux, it’s a phase, this isn’t me, there’s nothing wrong with me. She looks through the clear window in the buggy’s hood. Bobby’s little round head is beetroot-coloured and he’s thrown his blanket off.

She gets to the promenade, having to shove the right-hand wheel of the buggy hard over a protruding mound of concrete from where someone has driven into a metal bollard, and the jolt, or it could be the sea view, seems to calm Bobby momentarily.

She glances over at the greasy spoon cafe to her left populated by the blue-rinse brigade. The stinking wheelie bin dedicated to dogshit that stands by the steps to the beach. The middle-aged man giving his crumbling beach hut a coat of brown paint. She puts her hand on her phone in her coat pocket. She could do something for her stories. Talk about how challenging Bobby’s being, talk about how when he screams it makes her insides feel like they’ve been thrown into a deep-fat fryer. She could weep into the collar of her coat. But she won’t. Grace Fentiman, an influencer’s agent she’s been talking to, said that her sunny, funny tales of new motherhood by the seaside are exactly what the world needs right now. The sky is grey, the sea is grey, the air is heavy with the stench of rotting seaweed. Sunny, funny.

Bobby rears up his footmuff and coughs out the beginnings of a new bout of crying. Erin pushes the buggy roughly to the right, onto the small bridge that goes over an inlet. Machine-gun bursts of agony still. Maybe his underdeveloped digestive system isn’t coping with the feed