If You're Not the One (16 page)

2008

Max and Jennifer were on a mission. A mission to leave the house, something Jennifer hadn't done for ten whole days now, ever since she'd arrived home from hospital with her second baby girl.

Of course, when you're recovering from a caesarean section there's really no point attempting much. She had, after all, been opened up like a tin of peaches in order to produce her own fruit. The hours leading up to major surgery hadn't exactly been restful either. She'd endured an intense thirty-six hours of ultimately pointless contracting due to the fact Polly's noggin was in totally the wrong position to ever allow a natural delivery. Still, as Max had kept reminding her, it could be worse. If she were a Tudor or medieval woman, she'd be dead. Not that this had come as a massive comfort at the time.

Physically she'd been through an awful lot, but now, thirteen days after the birth, she was getting better in small increments. She was capable of mild shuffling and of getting
in and out of oversize tracksuits and Ugg boots all by herself. Bending down to put tights on still couldn't be contemplated and other small tasks had become huge mountains to climb. Post-op and with a new-born and toddler to cope with, simply finding the time to have a shower for example was a huge deal and her first post-op poo was worthy of a phone call to her mother. So, the whole family attempting to leave the house en masse, dressed, and with everything they needed in order to go shopping, was always going to be a drama of epic proportions.

As she and Max packed bags, cajoled Eadie into getting dressed, changed nappies and generally tried to make it all happen, Jennifer couldn't help wondering what the hell she was going to do when her husband had to return to work the week after. How would she ever cope?

‘I'll never manage,' she whimpered now.

‘Nonsense,' said Max, trying in vain to collapse the new, so far unused double buggy so he could get it into the boot of the car.

‘You can't leave me. Ever. You'll have to resign and go on the dole.'

‘You'll be fine,' he reassured her, albeit absent-mindedly. ‘How on earth does this frigging thing work? Eadie darling, get out of the way please, Daddy's trying not to lose the plot here.'

Eadie looked militant. She had done ever since Polly had arrived, clearly not at all sure how she felt about this young upstart, this pretender to her throne, pitching up and
taking her mum's attention away. Polly was a sucky baby and pretty much never off the breast so it was hard for Jennifer to give her eldest the attention she required.

Jennifer winced as Polly sucked away. The idea was to stuff her to the brim in order to give them all more shopping time. Her nipples were on fire though and the fact she was so exhausted wasn't exactly helping her pain threshold. She'd probably averaged around four hours sleep a night for over a fortnight now. Not that Max was faring much better. Polly was sleeping, or not as the case may be, in their room and Jennifer was insisting he helped out with the odd bottle during the night. Although in reality, whenever she missed a feed her boobs would swell to such gigantic milky proportions she'd end up positively itching to ram them back into the baby's mouth again just to relieve the pain.

Still, they were muddling through, helped by enormous amounts of hormones and the wondrous feeling that they'd pulled off some sort of miracle by producing an actual real-life person. And love. The fact they loved one another and their offspring helped enormously.

Now though, as Max struggled to collapse the monstrous double buggy she suspected their ‘love' was about to be sorely tested.

‘Look, just try and cast your mind back to how they did it,' said Max, looking despairingly at his wife. ‘You must have some idea surely?'

‘Don't call me Shirley,' she retorted, easing Polly off
her boob. Gingerly she stood up and placed the baby casually over her shoulder in order to rub her back and wind her. ‘I told you. I think you pull that lever thing and then sort of bend it backwards.'

Max sighed. ‘I'm not being funny but surely you must have thought it worth finding out how to use it when you bought the bloody thing.'

‘Obviously,' said Jennifer, feeling defensive. She collapsed back onto a kitchen chair. She had been shown numerous times how to do it but for the life of her couldn't remember. ‘I was eight months pregnant,' she said huffily. ‘So it's not like I had a proper working brain. Besides, you need a degree in physics to work it out. Why can't they just make these things simple?'

Almost by way of reply Polly suddenly did the most enormous belch and puked down her mother's back.

‘Oh god,' sighed Jennifer, defeated.

‘OK,' said Max, literally throwing the double buggy to the ground in disgust. ‘Unless we can collapse it we can't get it into the car, so we're going to have to think again. What if we take the sling and Eadie walks?'

‘Can you get me a tissue or something? I'm covered in sick.'

Max raced to the sink and chucked a damp cloth at Jennifer which she caught skilfully with her free hand.

‘It's not going to work,' she said, sponging herself down with one hand, trying not to drop the baby with the other. ‘Eadie will go a few yards and start whinging and
if it's going to take ages we can't go anyway. We need to leave now so that we've got enough time to get there and back before Polly needs another feed. Especially seeing as her tummy's basically empty again and I'm not whacking these udders out in any old place. I'm also not going out only to end up sitting in the car feeding.'

‘Right,' said Max. ‘Well I don't know why you got rid of the old buggy.'

‘Not helpful.'

‘No it wasn't.'

‘I meant your comment wasn't helpful. I got rid of the bloody thing because there wasn't room in the hall for two massive wheeled contraptions.'

‘OK. Look, I'll just put Eadie on my shoulders then, or carry her. Let's just go though, otherwise we'll never get out.'

‘OK,' whimpered Jennifer. ‘Except next week when I've got to get her to nursery on my own what am I going to do? I've got stitches. I won't be able to carry her then. I need a buggy, Max.'

To Max's horror, Jennifer suddenly succumbed to a huge rush of hormones, and started to weep.

‘Right, you stay here with the baby,' Max said, realising how much he needed to take charge of the situation, ‘…and I'll take Eadie with me. Where's the video camera?'

‘What are you on about?' said Jennifer, who wasn't even entirely sure what she was crying about, though
being covered in sick might have something to do with it. Still, by the sounds of it at least she didn't have to go out any more and for that she was pathetically grateful. She wasn't really fit for public consumption and there was nothing she wanted to buy anyway, unless you could buy sleep.

An hour and a half later and Max was back having filmed a slightly bemused and self-conscious sales assistant at John Lewis demonstrating slowly and methodically exactly how the new buggy folded and collapsed.

‘You're brilliant,' said Jennifer, as she watched the footage over and over again. She hadn't been as impressed by anything for ages. ‘A proper evil genius.'

‘No, you're brilliant,' said Max, handling the buggy like an expert, unfolding and folding it repeatedly. ‘There's no way on earth I would have remembered how to do it either. Stupid machine.'

Later that night, Jennifer was sat in the kitchen feeding Polly (for a change), Eadie was fast asleep and Max was washing and sterilising bottles and tidying up.

Jennifer was so exhausted her eyes were practically rolling to the back of her head. Still, as she looked down at her little bundle with her soft, downy cheeks and tiny wrinkled foot which was poking out the end of the blanket she was wrapped in, she felt a huge pang of love.

God her back ached though, the after effect of the
epidural. And she still felt very strange in her undercarriage. Her stitches were particularly sore tonight too. She was due a painkiller and had probably overdone the shuffling today. As for her boobs, they were literally burning.

‘Ow,' said Max, throwing down his tea towel in disgust.

‘What?' asked Jennifer, squinting at him through tired, grainy eyes.

‘My hands are so sore. So dry! Must be from all the washing up. They really hurt.'

Jennifer couldn't believe what she was hearing.

‘I'll have to get some hand cream, they're actually incredibly painful…'

As Max looked up and caught his wife's eye he trailed off.

‘Oh,' he said, not taking long to cotton on as he took in the pathetic state his wife was in.

‘Oh god,' he chuckled. ‘How much of a prat am I? I'm so sorry. Shall I shut up about my slightly chafed fingers?'

‘If you know what's good for you, you big lightweight,' said Jennifer, suddenly finding the whole thing very amusing. She started to laugh. ‘Oh shit, actually don't make me laugh because it hurts my stitches, you know, where I've been
sliced open?'

‘Ha ha, Oh my god don't,' wailed Max, laughing really hard now. ‘Oh poor me, my fingers are terribly dry. I can't bear it. My wife doesn't understand, she's so unsympathetic sitting there with her non-chafed fingers.'

Still laughing, he discarded his tea towel and came to sit next to his wife. ‘Oh Jen, I'm so in awe of you. You've been so brave and so bloody amazing.'

‘Have I?' she said, feeling choked.

‘Oh my god yes, I mean look. Look what you've done,' he said, gesturing to Polly who had fallen asleep on her mum's boob. He bent down to take his daughter, still handling her like she was the most fragile thing in the world and kissed the top of her head. Then he kissed his wife tenderly on the cheek. ‘And you did it with no fuss.'

‘Apart from when I called you the “c” word and threatened to kill you.'

‘Apart from when you called me the “c” word and threatened to kill me,' he agreed, regarding her with real affection. ‘I think you're amazing Jen, you're my hero. I love you so bloody much. And I know sometimes you find it hard being stuck at home and get frustrated but I want you to know that you are doing the most incredible job.'

‘But will you ever fancy me again?' she asked. ‘Look at me, I'm a big fat lactating cow and I look so pale and tired and ugly.'

‘Oh shut up you silly moo. I love you to bits and to me you're the most beautiful woman in the world. I don't care what you're wearing or how tired you are; to me you'll always be my girl in the pink dress.'

‘Really?' squeaked Jennifer.

‘Really,' said Max. ‘You're still the love of my life.
Admittedly I've seen you look better than you do this precise second and you might want to wash your hair at some point, though I've got nothing against dreadlocks per se…'

Jennifer laughed and then gasped as her stitches twinged again.

‘Painkiller?'

‘Please.

‘And then shall we go to bed? Not that there's much point of course,' yawned Max, who had quite impressive black rings under his eyes, ‘given that this little one will be up in a few hours. But we could give sleep a go I guess. And we can also have a cuddle.'

‘That would be nice. But no hanky panky.'

‘What do you take me for?' Max winked. ‘Besides, that tracksuit's good birth control for now. It stinks of sick.'

‘Right, come on then you two,' said Jennifer firmly. ‘It's time for bed and your father clearly isn't going to be finished for hours so Polly will have to go in our bed and I'll move you later.'

‘O-oh,' whined Eadie. ‘That's not fair.'

‘Tough,' said Jennifer.

Once the girls were finally asleep, Jennifer got the chance to tell her husband exactly what she thought of how he'd behaved earlier.

‘Every chance you get you compare me to that bloody woman. Why do you do it?'

‘I don't,' said Max.

‘You do,' said Jennifer, despairing. ‘You bring her name up all the time to the point where at one stage I even thought you might be having an affair with her. Though in reality I think you'd be more discreet about it if you were. As it is you're permanently going on about her or comparing me to her. It's not bloody on.'

‘You're being paranoid,' said Max, just a tad too defensively.

Jennifer leapt on her instinct.

‘What? What is it, Max? What aren't you telling me? Do you have feelings for her or something?'

‘No,' he said, outraged.

‘Promise,' she said faintly, suddenly terrified in case she was about to discover something she didn't really want to confront as a result of her digging.

‘Will you stop going on,' said Max, looking monumentally pissed off.

‘It's just you're being so snappy with me at the moment, Max.'

‘Not this again,' he shouted. ‘Will you stop going on and on about how I've changed. It's driving me mad.'

Jennifer blinked and wondered whether to press the issue further. After all he'd kind of just illustrated her point. Plus she still wasn't wholly convinced there wasn't something to get to the bottom of, and yet if there was, did she even want to know?

Max let out a huge sigh. ‘Look Jen, I'm sorry. I'm tired and grumpy and bored of having the same conversation over and over again.'

Jennifer's eyes filled with tears and she sniffed hard in an attempt to keep them at bay.

‘Look come here, look how keyed up you are. Relax these shoulders,' said Max, coming over and kneading her shoulders with his hands. They were so rigid it hurt but in a pleasurable kind of way.

‘Hmm,' muttered Jennifer, still not wholly placated.
She closed her eyes. ‘That's nice,' she mumbled, giving in to the sensation.

‘Good,' said Max. ‘Maybe that should be your birthday present. A nice massage somewhere.'

‘OK.' A solitary tear escaped and ran down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away.

‘Or perhaps ring Steve and ask him to do it seeing as he was so brilliant with his hands.'

Jennifer pulled away, ready to retaliate but to her relief she could see immediately that Max was only joking.

‘Idiot,' she said softly, playfully hitting him on the chest.

‘Aah Steve,' mused Max, a smug grin on his face. ‘Do you remember the party?'

‘Course I do,' said Jennifer.

How could she forget? It was the day she'd met her future husband and the day poor old Steve had suddenly realised he had major competition. She still felt mildly guilty even now after all these years. Steve had been nothing but lovely to her and if Max hadn't turned up she'd probably still be with him. But Max
had
turned up and ultimately she'd gone for it because she'd recognised a twinkle of something in his eye that she'd suspected Steve would never quite be able to muster up.

She looked at him now, hating how detached she felt from him almost as much as she hated the fact she'd had these suspicions and doubts about him. She'd always trusted her husband but lately it was almost as if she didn't
trust herself. It wasn't that she'd ever do anything but she definitely felt at a bit of a crossroads in general. Recently she'd found herself thinking about the past all the time, about how things had turned out and how things might have been. So perhaps she was projecting her own rubbish onto Max? In which case she needed to stop, because it simply wasn't fair. She sighed. When was she going to shake this miserable feeling of malcontent?