holiday – and even then, she would’ve slept on the way to the airport. But these days it feels horribly normal to be up and about two hours before the sun comes up, doing the all-too-familiar daily chores: sterilising bottles, wiping down the changing unit, hanging countless little sleepsuits over the radiators. She’s already had breakfast; by ten o’clock she’ll be ready for lunch. No wonder she can’t shift the baby fat, she thinks as she takes off her dressing gown and briefly catches sight of her body in the mirror.
On the subject of which, what on earth is she going to wear this evening? She can hardly turn up in her usual sloppy jogging bottoms and baggy T-shirt stained with baby vomit. None of her old dresses fit, and she’s refused to buy a bigger wardrobe on the grounds that it would be accepting defeat. But she feels defeated anyway, so what difference does it make?
She sighs as she gets dressed. It’s all right for George, who’s already got out his best suit and a cool designer shirt and laid them on the bed. He’ll look as gorgeous as ever. Fatherhood has taken no visible toll on him – he doesn’t even have bags under his eyes.
Weirdly, he seems to like getting up before dawn. She can hear him now, singing to Mabel as he baths her. The walls in these maisonettes are paper-thin; he really should keep his voice down so early in the morning. It’s not Mabel’s usual bath time, but she woke up with a full nappy, the contents of which had mysteriously spread up her back, and it was the easiest way to clean her up. Judging by the protests coming from the bathroom, her daughter isn’t a morning person either.
She puts her fingers in her ears as she walks into the kitchen. Please, George, make her stop! Mabel’s cries cut right through her; sometimes they’re so piercing they make her want to jump out of the window.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ her sister Ruby announced a few weeks ago, when she turned up to find Amber sobbing her eyes out while Mabel screamed blue murder in her cot. ‘You need a holiday, just the two of you. A week somewhere exotic. I’ll babysit.’
‘I can’t leave Mabel for that long,’ Amber replied instantly, despite her heart leaping at the idea.
‘Five days, then.’
‘No. She’d miss me too much … And I’d miss her,’ she added, although she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it.
Ruby wasn’t giving up. ‘Okay. How about a long weekend?’
In the end, they settled on just one night away.
One night. It feels simultaneously too long and too short a time. Amber knows that one night without Mabel will not be enough to fix things between her and George, but she’s grateful to her sister all the same. She badly needs a break. But with only a few hours to go before they’re due to leave, she feels nervous and wretched with guilt.
She surveys the table littered with dirty plates and foil trays from last night’s takeaway. There’s so much to do and she doesn’t have the energy even to start.
Mum doesn’t approve of their going away. ‘She’s too young to be without her mummy for so long,’ she declared. Or her daddy, Amber thought, but she didn’t challenge it.
‘The royal family leave their babies behind all the time,’ she argued instead. ‘Nobody accuses them of child neglect.’
Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘That’s because they have full-time nannies who look after them from birth, so they already know them well.’
‘Mabel knows Ruby well – she always smiles when she sees her. They get on brilliantly.’
‘With all due respect,’ her mother replied, showing no respect at all, ‘Ruby knows nothing about babies. And you know what a scatterbrain she is, always with her head in the clouds. She’ll forget to feed her or change her nappy.’
‘Mabel will make sure she doesn’t,’ Amber retorted, irritated by her mother’s lack of faith in Ruby. Why hadn’t she offered to babysit, if she was so concerned for her granddaughter’s well-being?
‘Well it’s not how it was done in my day,’ Mum continued, seemingly oblivious that she was massively guilt-tripping Amber. ‘I never left you to go on romantic weekends. When you and Ruby were tiny, I had no life outside the home, but it didn’t bother me. You were my world. I was so happy to have you.’
Yes, that’s the elephant in the room, reflects Amber as she gathers up