Tony Parsons - The Family Way

More than either of her sisters, Cat had seen the reality of a woman’s work. The hard slog, the thankless graft, the never-ending struggle to keep bellies fed and faces clean and bottoms wiped and eyes dried and washing done.

Let Jessica and Megan build their nests. Cat wanted to fly away, and to keep flying. But she was wise enough to know that this wasn’t a philosophy, it was a wound. As a student, emboldened by one term at university, Cat angrily confronted her mother about all that had been stolen from her.

‘What kind of mother were you? What kind of human being?’

‘Your parents ruin –’

‘Ah, change the record.’ Cat was deliberately loud.

Megan stared with wonder at her big sister. Jessica prepared herself for a good cry. They were in a polite patisserie in St John’s Wood where people behind the counter actually spoke French and shrugged their shoulders in the Gallic fashion.

‘You were our mother,’ Cat said. ‘We were entitled to some mothering. I’m not talking about love, Mummy dearest. Just a little human decency. Was that too much to ask?’

Cat was shouting now.

‘Don’t worry, dear,’ her mother said, calmly sucking on a low-tar cigarette and eyeing up the young waiter who was placing a still-warm pain au chocolat before her. ‘One day you’ll have fucked-up children of your own.’

Never, thought Cat.

Never ever.

When she was certain that her husband had settled down in front of the football, Jessica crept into his study and stared at all his pictures of Chloe.

It was turning into a shrine. The few carefully selected favourites were in their silver frames, but there were more propped up on bookshelves, and a fresh batch was spilling out of a Snappy Snaps envelope and fanning out across his desk, burying a VAT return.

Jessica reached for the envelope, and then hesitated, listening. She could hear Bono and U2 singing, ‘It’s a beautiful day’. He was watching the football. For the next hour or so it would take a small fire to get Paulo off the sofa. So Jessica reached for the latest pictures of Chloe, and thumbed through them, frowning.

There was Chloe in the park, in the baby swings, one vicious-looking tooth glinting at the bottom of her wide, gummy mouth. And here was Chloe looking like a beady-eyed dumpling on bath night, wrapped up in a baby version of one of those hooded towelling outfits that boxers wear on their way to the ring. And here was Chloe in the strong, adoring arms of her father, Paulo’s younger brother, Michael, looking ridiculously pleased with herself.

Chloe. Baby Chloe.

Bloody baby Chloe .

Somewhere inside her, Jessica knew that she should be grateful. Other men furtively pored over websites with names like Totally New Hot Sluts and Naughty Dutch Girls Must Be Punished and Thai Teens Want Fat Middle-Aged Western Men Now . Jessica was certain that the only rival she had for Paulo’s heart was baby Chloe – the child of Michael and Naoko, his Japanese wife. Jessica knew she should have been happy. Yet every picture of Chloe was like a skewer in her heart. And every time that Paulo admired his shrine to his niece, Jessica felt like strangling him, or screaming, or both. How could a man that kind, and that smart, be so insensitive?

‘Michael says that Chloe’s at the stage where she’s putting everything in her mouth. Michael says – listen to this, Jess – that she thinks the world is a biscuit.’

‘Hmm,’ Jessica said, coolly staring at a picture of Chloe looking completely indifferent to the mushy food smeared all over her face. ‘I thought all Eurasian babies were pretty.’ Cruel pause for effect. ‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’

Paulo, always anxious to avoid a fight, said nothing, just quietly collected his pictures of Chloe, avoiding his wife’s eyes. He knew he should be hiding these pictures in a bottom drawer, while Jessica knew it hurt him too – the younger brother becoming a father before he did. But it didn’t hurt him in the same way that it hurt her. It didn’t eat him alive.

Jessica loathed herself for talking this way, for denying Chloe’s unarguable loveliness, for feeling this way. But she couldn’t help herself. There was a large part of her that loved Chloe to bits. But Chloe was a brutal reminder of Jessica’s own baby, that baby that hadn’t been born yet, despite the years of trying, and it turned her into someone she didn’t want to be.

Jessica had left work to have a baby. Unlike both her sisters, her career had never been central to her world. Work was just a way to make ends meet, and, more importantly, to perhaps meet the man she would make a life with. He was driving a black cab back then, in the days before he went into business with his brother, and when he stopped to help Jessica with her car, she thought he would be all chirpy cockiness. Going my way, darling? That’s what she was expecting. But in fact he was so shy he could hardly look her in the eye.

‘Can I help?’

‘I’ve got a broken tyre.’

He nodded, reaching for his toolbox. ‘In the business,’ he said, and she saw that slow-burning smile for the first time, ‘we call it a flat tyre.’

And soon they were away.

On her very last day at work, before she set off for her new life as a mother, her colleagues at the Soho advertising agency where she worked had gathered round with balloons, champagne and cake, and a big card with a stork on the front, signed by everyone in the office.

It was the very best day of Jessica’s working life. She stood beaming among her colleagues, some of them never having said a word to her before, and she kept smiling even when someone said perhaps she should go a little easy on the booze.

‘You know. In your condition.’

‘Oh, I’m not pregnant yet ,’ Jessica said, and the leaving party was never quite the same.

Jessica’s colleagues exchanged bewildered, embarrassed looks as she beamed happily, the proud young mum-to-be – as soon as she conceived – examining the card with the stork, surrounded by the balloons and champagne, among all the pink and the blue.

That was three years ago, when Jessica was twenty-nine. She had already been married to Paulo for two years, and the only thing that had stopped them trying for a baby the moment the vicar said, ‘You may kiss the bride,’ was that Paulo and his brother were trying to start their business. It wasn’t the time for a baby. Three years ago, when the business was suddenly making money and Jessica was about to leave her twenties behind – that was the time for a baby. Except nobody had told the baby.

Three years of trying. They thought it would be easy. Now nothing was easy. Not sex. Not talking about what was wrong. Not working out what they might do next. Not feeling like complete failures when her period came around, with a pain that all the Nurofen Plus in the world could not smother.

Those paralysing, indescribable periods. That was when she felt alone. How could she ever describe that white-knuckle pain to her husband? Where would she start? What did he have to compare it with? That was one kind of pain. There were others. Traps were everywhere.

Even what should have been a small, simple pleasure like looking at pictures of her niece had Jessica in torment. One day she found herself weeping in the fifth-floor toilets of John Lewis, the floor where the baby things are sold, and she thought, am I going insane? But no, it wasn’t madness. Swabbing her eyes with toilet roll, Jessica realised that she had never had her heart broken before.

She had been hurt in the past – badly hurt, long before Paulo. But no boy or man could ever hurt her like their unborn baby did.

Jessica had believed that conception was a mere technical detail on her way to happy, contented motherhood. Now, after all this time trying, ovulation came around like a demand for rent money that she didn’t have.