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

she gave him forty minutes ago, but even though she knows it’s wrong, Erin can’t help but blame Bobby for how insane his screams make her feel. Her phone is in her hand now. She scrolls through Instagram. Unreal sunlight of people on holiday, the elegant tones of magazine-worthy interiors, minimalist plates of work-of-art food.

In the distance she sees a woman she knows, Lorna Morgan, walking along the promenade towards them with her mother-ship double buggy and accompanied by her daughter, Clara, bedecked in head-to-toe hot pink, on a Barbie-pink scooter. Lorna, the twins and their older sister are all identical. Very pink skin. The same length straw-blonde hair. Their shoulders go straight into their heads and whenever Erin sees them all together she has to try very hard not to think of Tennessee Williams’s description of children – no-necked monsters.

Erin hides her phone under the buggy’s handle as they approach and puts on a blank expression, a hint of a lazy smile even, as if her son’s screams are water off a duck’s back. As they pass, Lorna creases her face at Erin in some pretence of concern. Erin smiles and walks on. Erin’s pretty sure Lorna doesn’t like her much, but at this moment in time, she’s struggling to care about it.

Thirty seconds onwards she pulls the buggy’s cover back. Bobby’s face almost fluorescent, more and more mucus sludging out of his face. She looks around her before shaking the buggy, hoping to surprise him into silence. Another howl. Stress billows around her head like someone’s set off a flare. Erin swallows, looks round to see Lorna heading away, far in the distance. She darts her eyes around the beach to see if anyone’s looking before picking up the pace, driving the buggy uphill onto a grassy mound, the fronts of her shoes slipping slightly in the mud. She pockets her phone. Both hands on the buggy. Bobby splutters, the cries going to a higher register, more strained now but just as forceful. Her head feels like it’s going to burst. She shakes the buggy again. More screaming. Shakes it again with such ferocity she almost lifts it off the ground.

She stops. Comes round to face Bobby, kneels down on the wet ground and tries to get her hands round her baby to pull him out. But he’s still strapped in. She attempts to twist him around his restraints but he buckles in the opposite direction.

‘Fuck,’ she intones up to the darkening sky. Then someone’s there. A burgundy flash comes between her and the buggy.

‘Have a breather. There you go, lovely boy.’ Erin blinks round to see Amanda clicking Bobby out of the buggy and into her arms. She wraps her maroon coat around the boy, who’s arching his back away from her like Alien trying to burst out of her body. Erin wheels away towards the sea, does exactly as she’s told and takes a moment. In the periphery she can hear Bobby ramping down a little, bursts of pained crying becoming further apart. Erin presses the tips of her fingers into her eye sockets but her skin is still vibrating as the stress courses out into the air.

A black dog races across her eyeline on the beach. She turns back to Amanda who’s wearing tight yoga pants and trainers under her coat. She’s dipping her head behind the collar of her coat, playing a game of peekaboo that’s confusing Bobby into calm.

‘You OK?’ Amanda asks as Erin returns.

‘Fine now, thanks.’ Erin’s embarrassed, not sure how much Amanda saw. There’s warmth in her eyes so hopefully she came along at the end and didn’t see her shaking the buggy. Erin offers her hands to take Bobby back.

‘It’s OK,’ Amanda says, pulling Bobby towards her, going in for a mock bite on his neck. ‘Sometimes you need someone else to take over for a minute. That sort of screeching, it’s so much worse for the mums. It’s evolutionary. Like a bolt of lightning. Meant to make sure mum stops everything she’s doing to help baby.’ Erin thinks of herself scrolling through Instagram, trying to numb herself to her baby’s screams. Guilt pinions her deep in the gut. ‘When we were back in caves though, poor mums had all the other women around to help out when it got too much. Not having to deal with little demons like you, all on their own.’ She nuzzles into Bobby’s nose as she says this to him. ‘Your mumma needs a break I’d say.’

‘I’m fine,’ she says and Amanda nods, examines her, seeming to look at the space around her, weaving her head in the air like a dancing python.

‘I know,’ Amanda says to the boy, with enough meaning for Erin to think that perhaps she saw a bit more than she thought. Rain starts to dot Amanda’s coat. ‘Shall we head back?’ she says, taking control.

Erin clenches her hands, feels nails press into flesh as she and Amanda walk past the three newly built houses where builders call to each other under a flapping blue tarpaulin. She’s lost her temper before with Bobby. She’s never done anything that would hurt him. But being caught at that level of chaos, that pitch where you’ve lost control of what’s considered normal, civil, with your own child, is chilling to experience. Like someone listening in on your darkest thoughts.

‘Are you doing anything for you?’ Amanda asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Acupuncture, meditating, yoga, a hot bath even.’

Erin smiles. ‘No time. Nice idea though.’

‘You’ll be amazed how much more you’ll appreciate him if you’ve had a break.’ Erin clunks the empty buggy up the kerb and onto the pavement of her road, Bobby still cocooned inside Amanda’s coat.

‘Do you have kids?’ Erin asks. She assumed she doesn’t because she’s here on her own, but perhaps they’re at home with her husband or ex-husband.

‘I was a teaching assistant for a while, been a childminder for years, babysitting as well. Even the hardest kids I’ve had, the real