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13 January 2017

London

Ashley

Ashley shifts her daughter from one hip to the other so that she can bend to pick up the mail on the doormat. Holly lets out a cry, a short, sharp sound followed by a wail that makes the muscles in Ashley’s shoulders clench. Every bone in her body is aching. Her hands clasp Holly’s warm body to her own; her daughter’s soft, downy hair brushes against her chest and she feels the familiar aching thud in her breasts. Please, not now.

She feels exhausted; even on days when she’s not at the café it’s as though she’s on a never-ending treadmill of nappies and tantrums, homework and school runs. It’s not as if James is around to help her; her husband has been staying at the office later and later, leaving early each morning before the children are even out of bed. He is pulling the sheets back usually around the time that Ashley is starting to drift off to sleep, having spent the night rocking Holly, trying to calm her red little body as she screams. She has never known anything like it; her third child is by far the most unsettled of the three. It has been nine months and still Holly refuses to sleep through the night; if anything she is getting worse. Ashley doesn’t think it’s normal. James stopped waking up at around the four-month mark, has been sleeping lately as though he is dead to the world. She doesn’t know how he manages it.

Ashley had woken yesterday to find his side of the bed empty and the sound of the tap running in their bathroom. She had put her hand to the space beside her, sat there mutely as her husband gave her a brief kiss on the cheek and headed out the door. As he had leaned close to her, Ashley had had to fight the urge to grip his shirt, force him to stay with her. She hadn’t, of course, she had let him go. Then she had been up, bringing Benji a glass of orange juice, placing Holly in her high chair, making coffee for her teenage daughter Lucy. On the treadmill for another day.

Working a few shifts a week at Colours café is her one respite, her only time when she is no longer a tired mother or a wife, she is simply a waitress. James had laughed at her when she decided to start working at the little café on Barnes Common, with the ice creams and the till and the tourists. He had been amazed when she insisted on continuing work a few months after having Holly, strapping her daughter carefully into the car and driving her across the common to their childminder.

‘You don’t need to now, honey,’ he used to say, before giving her little pep talks on the latest figures of eReader sales, on how well his company was doing. She knows they don’t need the money any more. But the waitressing isn’t for the money – most days she even forgets to pick up the little tip jar that sits at the edge of the counter, ignores the dirty metal coins inside as though they are nothing more than the empty pistachio shells that Lucy leaves in salty piles around the house. Ashley has always been happy to give up her publishing career for her children, but she craves this small contact with the outside world. The easy days at the café give her insights into other people’s lives, a chance to be in an adult environment. Just a few times a week, when she becomes someone else, someone simple, leaves her daughter in the capable hands of June at number 43 and walks back to her car alone, her arms deliciously light, weightless. It isn’t about the money.

June has been a godsend to Ashley in the last six months. A retired schoolteacher, she had been recommended to them a couple of months after Holly was born. Neither of them had been coping very well and the offer of a childminder seemed like a golden ticket, a chance opportunity that might never come again. Neither Benji nor Lucy had ever had a babysitter. Ashley had stayed at home all hours of the day and night, playing endless games of peek-a-boo and living her life on a vicious cycle of nappies and tears. Not that she’d minded at the time, not really, but now that she is older she finds her mind wandering, her energy limited. To be able to work in the café is bliss.

June is unwaveringly kind, and Ashley is overwhelmingly grateful to her for stepping in a few days a week. As far as she knows, the woman lives completely alone, has never had children of her own. Ashley can sense the sadness there, is happy to see the joy in June’s eyes when she drops off Holly. Yes, June really has been a blessing.

Ashley has thought about asking Corinne to mind Holly, but she has the gallery, and besides, Ashley doesn’t want it to upset her. Her sister’s emotions are so close to the surface at the moment, spending all day looking after someone else’s child rather than her own might have been too much.

It took Ashley seconds to make the decision last week. When Corinne had called with the doctor’s news Ashley had gone straight to her laptop and transferred her sister the money for her final round of IVF, thousands of pounds gone with a wiggle of the mouse. Still, it’s for the best. The money would only have been accumulating dust in their joint account. She hasn’t told James yet, has barely had the chance. She can hardly tell him at midnight, when she is half asleep, trying to catch one of her half-hour bursts between the baby’s cries and he rolls into bed next to her, pulls her towards him in the dark and wraps his arms round her stomach. There never seems to be the time.

‘Are you worried?’ her friend Megan had asked her last week. They had been sitting outside Colours café, taking a break from their waitressing duties, huddled against the cold with a pair of creamy hot chocolates.

‘Am I worried?’ Ashley had repeated the question out loud, the words misting the January air.

Megan had nodded, pushed her strawberry blonde hair behind her ears, tucked the ends underneath her purple wool hat.

‘About what?’ Ashley knew what her friend meant, had pretended not to.

‘Well, you know.’ To her credit, Megan had had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable. ‘Why do you think he’s staying late so much?’

‘He’s working, Megan,’ Ashley had told her, and they had finished their drinks in silence, drunk them too fast so that the cocoa burned the top of Ashley’s mouth and scorched the taste buds off her tongue. Megan had apologised later, put her arm around Ashley as they stood behind the counter together.

‘Ignore me,’ she said, ‘I haven’t had any faith in men since Simon left. James is one of the good ones. Don’t worry.’

Ashley had squeezed her friend back, allowed herself the warm flood of relief. The feeling hadn’t lasted. The hot chocolate she’d had coated her mouth, she felt the thick sweetness of it on her tongue, looked down at herself in shame and felt the bulge of her stomach, the way it pressed against her jeans since having Holly. It never used to.

In the kitchen, Ashley sets Holly down in her high chair, humming to her until she begins to quieten down. Holly’s chubby hands reach out for the wooden spoon on the work surface and Ashley hands it to her obligingly, closes her ears to the noise of the daily drumbeat beginning, the sound of her baby hitting the spoon on the table. She begins to sift through the pile of mail, catches the edge of her finger on an envelope and closes her eyes briefly as a slit appears in her flesh. She is so tired; as she squeezes her hand she thinks momentarily how nice it would be to sink onto the sofa and blot everything out, just for an hour, just for five minutes. Three children have knocked the wind completely out of her sails. She thinks of herself as a child, and wonders at how well behaved she was. She and Corinne were good as gold, would spend hours sitting cross-legged in front of the big doll house their dad had made, playing endless games of families in the light of the big French windows that overlooked their garden, the sprawling green jungle that was home for so many years.

At fifteen, Ashley would never have spoken to her dad the way Lucy sometimes talks to James. She would never have wanted to let him down – the disappointment in his eyes if she came home with a less than perfect grade was always heartbreaking, though he’d always pull her into his arms and tell her it didn’t matter. By contrast, Lucy can be so insolent, the harsh words fly out of her mouth like bullets. She apologises, of course, most of the time. Ashley has seen her curl up next to James, rest her head against his shoulder, put on her pink piggy socks so that she looks like a ten-year-old again. With Ashley she is closed off, on guard. Perhaps it’s just a phase. Her friend Aoife’s daughter had come home the other night with a shoe missing, vomiting up vodka in horrible swirls of sick. At least they are not there yet.

Ashley checks her watch. Ten to five. Her eyes meet Holly’s, as though her daughter will speak to her, will offer some advice. Instead she smiles, a big, round-cheeked smile that makes Ashley’s heart melt. Neither of them blink and the moment stretches out, and, just for a second, Ashley feels the rush of love, the energy she used to have. It is all worth it, the exhaustion, it is worth it for this. These moments. Then Holly’s eyelids swoop down to cover her eyes and the moment is gone, lost. The kitchen is humming with everything still to do. Ashley has to pick Lucy up from the school bus in ten minutes, which leaves her about forty-five seconds to spoon some coffee granules into her mouth. She doesn’t bother with the kettle and water ritual any more, there never seems to be time. Still, she’d never eat granules in front of James; it feels shameful, like a dirty secret. As she unscrews the jar of the coffee, the phone begins to ring; Ashley reaches for it automatically, using her other hand to dip a spoon into the brown granules.

‘Hello?’

There is a silence on the other end of the line. Ashley listens, straining to hear. Being a mother always gives telephone calls a new level of anxiety: the children, the children, the children.

‘This is Ashley?’ she tries again but there is still nothing, just the steady sound of the house around her, the receiver pressed to her ear. Behind her, Holly gurgles, she hears the sound of a spoon hitting the floor. Ashley thinks of her husband, wonders where he is, who he is with, what he is doing right this second. There was a time when the only place he’d ever be was right next to her. She puts the phone down, crunches the coffee between her teeth. The taste is bitter in her mouth.