This Perfect World (17 page)

I found myself unable to stop staring at this hair, and was
busy trying to decide if the colour was natural or accidental
when she introduced us to her bag.

‘This is my bag,’ she said, patting the very large weekend
holdall beside her. ‘In here,’ she proudly told us, ‘I have everything
you will ever need for breast-feeding.’

Now I was a little surprised by this because I had been
under the impression that I already had everything I would
ever need for breast-feeding, right there, inside the front
of my shirt. After all, surely one of the big, big advantages
of breast-feeding is that it doesn’t need any paraphernalia
or gadgets at all. But the cabbage-leaf woman had other
ideas.

Out of that bag came a large packet of circular pads –
sanitary pads, in effect, for the leaking nipple. And let’s face
it, once baby was born, there were going to be leaks springing
out from all over. Next came a plastic sombrero-type cap,
much like the one the Mexican mouse in
Tom and Jerry
wore
on his little head, which we all passed around to get a feel
for. This I was to wear on my nipple, should baby and me
not much like the flesh-to-mouth contact. Then there was
the ice-cube tray for us to look at, just in case any of us
were not familiar with such a thing. This we were to fill with
our expressed milk, which could conveniently be frozen and
stored, ready to pop out and defrost when required. Naturally
one would have to take care not to pop a cube out into one’s
husband’s gin in place of the ordinary ice, but the cabbage-leaf
woman did not deem it necessary to mention this. The
contraption for getting the milk out of the breast and into
the ice-cube tray still ranks at about 8.5 on my list of real
and imagined torture implements: the breast-pump, with its
candy-pink plastic trimming, a bit like a sex toy, but with a
nasty twist. The funnel went over the nipple, the pump went
in the hand, the bottle hung off at an angle, waiting to be
filled, all worked by vigorous battery.

‘I had one of those!’ laughs Juliet. ‘I used it all the time!’

‘I didn’t need one,’ boasts Fiona. ‘I expressed perfectly well
by myself.’

‘Well, I just couldn’t get the hang of it,’ I say. ‘I clamped
it to my nipple and I pumped and pumped with my hand
rattling from the vibration, until my whole breast was pointed
and twisted like a Mr Whippy ice cream. And after half an
hour of agony I’d squeezed out only a dribble of milk. It’d
take me a week to fill one cube in the ice-cube tray.’

The girls are laughing simultaneously now, and cringing,
and begging me to stop.

‘The woman was like a travelling salesman,’ I say. ‘She got
these bras out of her bag next. Honestly, you should have
seen them.’

Now everyone knows that you need a decent maternity
bra, but would it be too much to hope for one that was even
slightly attractive? Apparently so.

The cabbage-leaf woman had two choices in design to recommend
to us. God knows where she’d got them from. The
first was designed to cover you up from just below the neck
to a good few inches down the ribcage, and was done up at
front and back by a series of hooks and eyes, much like an
old-fashioned girdle. The bucket-like cups allowed room for
natural expansion, and the front hooks could be undone, with
patience, for what the cabbage-leaf woman took for easy access.

The second bra was similar in material and coverage, but
involved a series of straps that had to be tied around the
body so that the bra was fixed in place all day, with just
the front flaps being opened and shut when feeding was
required. The positioning of the straps meant that you could
not put this bra on unaided. You’d have to enlist your
husband’s help with the strapping in the morning before he
went off to work, and the unstrapping in the evening, when
he came home. And I presume that you just had to hope for
the best that he didn’t notice too much the difference between
this gargantuan ensemble and the lacy black items that he
had previously helped to remove.

As she showed us these bras, I felt a little hormonal hysteria
bubbling up inside me. I saw my womanhood flying out the
window, my femininity and my sexuality competing in the
race to escape my new lot.

And if by any chance your marriage did manage to survive
the keep-off scream of armour-thick nylon, the cabbage-leaf
woman had one final trick up her sleeve. You’ve guessed it:
the cabbage leaf.

‘Oh no, not the cabbage leaf!’ squeals Juliet.

Well actually, she had a whole cabbage in her bag. It was
a big, light-green one with the outer leaves curling away
slightly, though I imagine any variety would do. She took
the cabbage out of her bag and held it in the palm of her
hand, as if weighing it.

‘This,’ she announced, ‘is what you need for engorgement.’

‘But it works!’ interjects Fiona.

‘I thought she was going to tell us that we had to eat the
cabbage,’ I say. ‘Which would have been bad enough, and I
was thinking that perhaps a few lightly dressed salad leaves
would do the same job. I didn’t realize you had to put it
inside your bra!’

‘Not the whole thing!’ cries Fiona. ‘Just a leaf!’

I look around as the girls erupt into laughter, and I laugh
too. After all, what is the point of such experiences if one
cannot turn them into entertainment for one’s friends? In this
moment of social success I am almost tempted to believe that
they might have forgotten my unfortunate appearance in the
local paper. Almost.

‘I can just picture your face!’ Tasha shrieks.

‘I know it’s supposed to help with engorgement,’ I say.
‘But can you imagine it? Your husband comes home from
work to untie you from that hideous contraption of a bra,
and finds you smelling of sour milk and cabbages! What
would that do for your marriage?’ I sip my champagne. ‘And
really, what kind of woman tells another woman to stick
cabbage leaves in her bra?’

‘Oh, all those sleepless nights!’ Tasha moans now. ‘I’m
dreading it.’

‘You’ll have help, won’t you?’ says Fiona. ‘You’ll get a
nanny or something.’

And Tasha says, ‘Rupert says we’ll get a live-in, now we’ve
got the room.’

‘I wish we’d had a nanny,’ Juliet says. ‘We could easily
have put one in the loft. But Andy wouldn’t have it. Didn’t
want to have to stop walking around naked in the mornings.’

And so we move on to talk about our husbands. We all
have them, even those who we all know would rather not.
It is better to be dead than divorced in some circles.

It’s a competition, like everything in our lives. Strip away
the fancy tops and the highlights and we’d be vultures in
any other jungle. Tonight we’re vying for the wittiest-story
award, and social success is such a sweet prize. I eat my large
piece of it, choking myself up on the sweetness, so nearly
lost.

And if I remember what it was really like to feel so alienated
by women bearing cabbage leaves, I keep that very much
to myself. I keep to myself also how I started crying the
minute I got home from that final NCT meeting, and carried
on crying, on and off, for a worrying time after Thomas was
born. They ripped him out of my body in the end, two weeks
after he was supposed to come. Scissors and knives and pliers
and forceps and weird rubbery suction pads and every implement
known to medical man was used to separate Thomas
from me. The shock of it still haunts me.

For months I walked round and round my house with the
horror of it eating me up. I’d have my lipstick on when James
came in from work, but Thomas would be crying, either in
his cot or in my arms, and I would be crying too. I felt like
I’d died and was stuck in that last inch of purgatory before
hell. My self was lost. My self was ruined and ripped out
with the baby.

I wanted James to understand. I wanted him at least to
acknowledge what I’d been through. But he pulled away, and
I felt like I was letting the side down with my endless tears.

‘Do you think you should see a doctor?’ he said to me.
‘Maybe you could get some pills.’

Tonight I laugh along with the girls, but there is a lizard
of chill up my spine. I didn’t go to the doctor; instead I shut
up crying eventually and shoved my mask back into place.
But imagine if I had, imagine if I’d done as James said and
got some pills to blot me out.

I could be stuck in St Anne’s now, side by side with Heddy.

Of course Mrs Partridge gets the local paper, and sees my
little piece.

She phones up, about a week later.

‘Don’t often get a chance to read the paper,’ she tells me.
‘It comes through the door, but mostly I just save them up
and give them to next door for the guinea pigs. Mrs Day
told me we were in it: knocked specially, she did, and showed
me. I must say I was most surprised.’

I can tell by her tone that she’s trying to sound pleased,
but then she pauses for a moment and I am so embarrassed
I can’t think what to say. I mutter something about people
needing to know about Heddy, and people like her, but I feel
like a complete fool.

Then Mrs Partridge carries on, and says, somewhat tentatively,
as if she doesn’t want to offend me, ‘But do you think
it’ll do any good, dear? Do you think they read the
Recorder
over at St Anne’s?’

The thing is, how to help without actually being involved?

I don’t want the Partridges’ problems becoming my problems.
It isn’t fair and it just isn’t possible. I need to find a
way of helping from a distance, as it were. Though, really, I
don’t see there’s much I can do. People have to help themselves,
in the end.

I decide to write a letter to the doctor. Not to the doctor
we saw at St Anne’s that Tuesday, but to Dr Millar, as he’s
supposed to be in charge of Heddy. It must be down to him
in the end, what happens to her.

My desire to be free of the Partridges makes the letter all
the easier to write. I tell him quite simply that a mother’s
place is with her child and that to keep Heddy separated
from her son can only be making things worse. After all, that
is what seems to be the most immediate problem: Heddy’s
combined longing and inability to be a mother to her child.
Surely that longing could be used as an incentive? Couldn’t
it be made clear to Heddy that if she behaved in whatever
way she was supposed to behave, she could soon be back at
home, with Nathan?

It seems to me that she is in the worst kind of vicious
circle at the moment, and that cannot be sustained indefinitely.
Something has to change. So I write to the doctor and
say that, for Nathan’s sake, something must be done while
the child
is
still a child.

It makes me feel actually sick to think of him yearning
for her, and her yearning for him. I try not to think at all,
and get back to practicalities.

I ask what is actively being done for Heddy, in the long
term. What is the prognosis, so to speak? When will it end?

I half don’t expect a reply, but I get one. Almost by return
of post.

Dr Millar is delighted and encouraged by my interest in
Heddy, but all cases are confidential, he tells me, and can
only be discussed with next of kin.

He does, however, assure me that his aim is to have Heddy
back at home as soon as possible and that he and his staff
are working 100 per cent to achieve this. He understands
my concerns, but her welfare, as his patient, has to be his
primary concern. And he is sure that my support will be of
great benefit to Heddy.

Obviously any letters will have to be written through, and
signed by, Mrs Partridge in future. I can feel them all, sucking
me in.

Still, I have other things to tend to, right now.

My cleaner has decided to quit, which means I have to
spend the entire morning cleaning the house myself. Nothing
is guaranteed to piss me off faster than scrubbing my own
bathrooms and sweeping my own floors, especially as I was
planning on spending the morning shopping. But the place
is such a tip that it has to be done.

Tasha and Penny are sympathetic over lunch. This is, after
all, the kind of problem they can relate to.

‘You’ve
got
to have a reliable cleaner,’ Tasha says, all
understanding. ‘I’d offer you mine, but I know she’s all booked
up. I could ask her if she knows anyone.’

‘I’ll ask around too,’ Penny says. ‘It’s one of the three essentials
in life: a good cleaner, a good hairdresser, and a good
bra.’

‘Talking of which,’ Tasha says, subtly patting her enviable
breasts, ‘these little fellows are growing already. At least there’s
one advantage to being pregnant.’

‘Yes, I’m sure Rupert’s very happy about that,’ Penny says,
and we all giggle for a moment, behind our hands.

‘And talking of hairdressers,’ I say, ‘I’m getting my colour
done soon, and I was thinking of going for something a little
warmer this time.’ I pull a few strands of hair forward towards
my face, so that I can see them. ‘A little more honey-coloured,
perhaps. What do you think?’

Thus I launch us into the endlessly riveting topic of hair
colour, which leads us on to skincare, and then shoes, and
fashion in general. And so we lose ourselves in the saccharine
conversation of the fortunate ones, and everything is
giddily fine again, so long as I keep to the rules and steer
clear of mentioning nutters.

But mention her or not, the nutter and her mother are there,
hooked onto the inside of my life like a pair of circus-grade
tapeworms. An irritation, I tell myself. An irritation, nothing
more.

It is the Monday of half-term. I’ve just dropped Thomas at
Fiona Littlewood’s to play with Milo. Arianne and I are going
out to buy new ballet shoes, and we’ve just popped home to
pick up the old pair, to compare them for size. In the few
minutes we’re home, the phone rings and, like an idiot, I
answer it.