The Family Friend Read online

  ‘Amazing,’ Erin says, trying to catch Raf’s eye but not wanting to seem rude.

  ‘I was going to message you, on the app, to get in touch, set up a visit, but it felt like if I didn’t just book a flight and do it then I might chicken out.’ Bobby comes off Erin’s nipple and then lurches back on, fledgling teeth pinching the skin, making her want to grab him off her and put him on the floor.

  ‘Amanda’s going to stay in the garden,’ Raf says.

  ‘Only if that’s OK.’

  ‘Course,’ Erin says with fabricated gusto. She glances out the window above the sink at the anthracite-grey and glass studio flat that takes up the furthest portion of their narrow garden.

  ‘I’ve got the name of a B&B in town that looks nice so I’m super happy to go there. I didn’t expect you to have space for me.’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ Erin says, Amanda interrogating her with swift eyes to check she’s really as welcome as they’ve said she is.

  ‘That’s the sweetest thing,’ Amanda says, squeezing Erin’s wrist. ‘I’ve wanted to see Europe for years but, you know, big scary world, thought I’d start myself off visiting a friendly face.’ She gives a little shrug before cocking her head to look at Bobby from a different angle, a faraway smile on her face.

  Erin looks into Bobby’s eyes, Raf’s Italian heritage showing in the deep brown of them, and wishes she could feel as misty-eyed when she looks at him as their new guest seems to.

  ‘I’ve got something for you!’ Amanda blurts out, clapping a hand to her throat, excited like a child. If she and Raf grew up together, Erin thinks, she must be a few years older than her, but with her Disney-princess eyes and girlish clothes she seems younger. She skips past the table and out the sliding doors towards the studio.

  Raf comes and leans over Erin to give Bobby a kiss on the top of the head.

  ‘Hello, mate,’ he says. He pulls back and puts his hands on Erin’s shoulders and squeezes. ‘She won’t stay long,’ he says. Erin flips her phone over and looks at the screen, ripe with hundreds of notifications. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she says, fighting the urge to dive onto Instagram. Since she’s got into the tens of thousands of followers, responding to all the messages has become overwhelming and she won’t be able to sleep unless she’s made inroads, but she knows how upset Raf will be if she goes on so soon after getting home.

  ‘Mercury in retrograde. You got the tiniest clue what that’s meant to mean?’ Raf says. She gets distracted by the sight of another message arriving. ‘Ez?’

  ‘Sorry, what?’ she says, placing her free hand on his and craning her neck round to look into his perma-stubbled face.

  ‘You must be tired after all that partying.’ Raf huffs out a sigh as he takes his hands away from her shoulders. The sliding door clicks open and Amanda comes to the other side of the table and faces them like a candidate for an interview. From an embroidered bag covered in Chinese symbols she produces a large pink crystal and places it on the table in front of them.

  ‘Rose quartz,’ Amanda says, making it sound like the name of a person. It’s the colour of coffee cups in trendy cafes, millennial pink they’ve started calling it, but translucent. It’s formed of two columns, alongside each other, like twin towers, that grow out of a mass the shape of a large bread roll. Erin looks over to the shelving unit by the entrance to the room, immediately thinking about where to put it. There’s a stack of books with pinkish spines and a speckle-glazed pot in a similar shade – one of the many primo charity-shop buys that make up her Insta-adequate interior. Although maybe the stone should go somewhere less prominent – she might not want someone seeing it in the background of one of her Insta-stories and making a thing of how she’s into crystals. These are the things she has to think about now. ‘It has a very feminine energy.’ Amanda runs a finger around the base. ‘It opens the heart chakra and I just thought, with your whole positivity thing … Anyway, it’s for you.’ Amanda glances at Raf and looks down, embarrassed. Raf rests two fingers on the large vertebra at the top of Erin’s spine. It makes her feel anchored for the first time since she saw Amanda through the window.

  ‘I love it,’ Erin finds herself saying, feeling bad that she and Raf have given Amanda the sort of reaction to her talk of crystals and energy that’s popped her former bubbliness, ‘you really shouldn’t have because you’ve come all this way to visit, but I love it.’ Amanda’s eyes spark again, pleased. There’s a nervous energy to her, like a skittish animal.

  Bobby reaches over to the crystal but he overbalances out of Erin’s arms and knocks his head on the edge of table. He erupts into a wall-shaking scream as Erin, infected by panic, tries to juggle him back to the safety of her chest. He arches away from her and it seems as if she might drop him before Raf swoops in and takes the baby from her. He jigs the inconsolable Bobby over to the mantelpiece and lowers the boy’s eyes towards the tendrils of a spider plant that he swishes around with his elbow. Bobby’s quickly distracted and the cries disappear as suddenly as they arrived.

  Erin stands paralysed, riven with her own ineffectiveness, a hurricane of self-flagellation beating at the doors in her head, attempting to blow in. She’s been feeling more connected to Bobby recently, not as much as she pretends, but better, and now she’s abandoned him and undone all that progress. Amanda has gone to the kitchen and arrives over at the mantelpiece clutching a bag of frozen edamame beans. Raf tries to put the bag on the baby’s head but it riles him so Raf hands it back. Erin watches as he murmurs his thanks as if he were a surgeon in a hundred-year-old war and Amanda his Florence Nightingale. She turns and sees Erin staring at her.

  ‘You must want to catch up, find out how the little one’s been coping.’ She weaves her neck in the air, halfway between a dance and a stretch. ‘The first time you leave a baby can be incredibly unsettling.’ Erin fingers the spires of the crystal on the table. Amanda swishes the door into the garden open. She’s about to walk out into the darkness when she turns round, her angular face breaking into a beatific smile.

  ‘I can’t wait to get to know you all properly,’ she says, eyes dropping towards Bobby’s head then up to Raf. ‘It’s been too long.’ She sweeps out of the room, sliding the door shut behind her and walks towards the studio in the garden, the lanterns on the pathway lighting up one by one as she passes them.

  4

  14 October 1998

  I talked to him today. I found him in the art department. He told me to call him Donny.

  He started at school about six weeks ago and has smiled at me in the hall four times since. Each one more nourished with meaning than the last. On Monday, we saw each other in the corridor that runs parallel with where the principal’s office is, and he didn’t smile. He didn’t blink. His face did nothing. I know now it was an invitation.

  He told me about a trip he’d gone on with his dad to Kakudu Park to see the Nourlangie cave paintings. He talked about the Lightning Man and his wife and how inspiring he’d found it. He showed me a sketch he’d done while he was there. A huge figure of a woman and a smaller man figure, their skeletons visible, with a crowd of smaller figures below them. He said he found it incredible that these primal people still celebrated the union of two souls over the unconnected rabble below them. The woman the goddess, the man her protector, her devotee.

  Then the bell rang and the spell was broken, but I believe something commenced today. I could feel something vibrating between us. Something small. Something precious. An energy that felt almost divine.

  5

  ‘She got our address from Lydia’s daughter Anya,’ Raf says from their en suite bathroom. Erin’s perched on the end of their bed, stress fluttering in her chest as she scrolls through the seemingly never-ending list of notifications. A mum asking for advice of which mindfulness app to use, another asking where she gets her fake plants from, a few trolls, a few people telling her how beautiful they think she is. What’s become, since she got into Inst
agram less than a year ago, the usual. ‘She said she called her to ask last week and Anya just gave it up to her,’ he says as he squeezes through the narrow bathroom doorway, drying his face on a towel. Erin hums to herself, pleased. Carly Reagan (113k followers) has liked the selfie she took on the train that she posted when she got back on Wi-Fi seconds before she saw them all through the front window.

  Raf knocks into the chest of drawers and a tube of something clatters off it. Erin glances up to see him making his way towards her, craning his neck under the sheer eaves of the room. Raf’s six foot three so the attic room feels tiny when he’s stood up in it. When they moved down to the seaside from Croydon, Erin imagined they’d be able to afford a roomy three-bed but, with her not having a salary and Raf’s earnings as a graphic designer, decent enough to live on but not consistent enough for the tastes of mortgage providers, this converted bungalow was the most they could extend to. Two bedrooms, theirs in the attic and Bobby’s just off the open-plan ground floor.

  Raf sits down next to her and puts his hands over hers, over her phone.

  ‘Please can I look at these?’ she says.

  ‘You’ve had the whole train journey.’

  ‘Had to leave our sim cards at home for this stupid “detox” and the train Wi-Fi wasn’t working.’ She slides her hands out of his. A comment on her post from one of her regular communicators, Florri-Bourne, grabs her attention – You CANNOT be hungover. You look incred. She has to put her tongue on the roof of her mouth to stop herself smiling. Raf, wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts, coils his sinewy arms over each other in his lap, eyes down, radiating his being ignored, so Erin slides her phone face down onto the bed’s coverlet.

  ‘Amanda seems nice.’

  ‘Yeh,’ he says, his tone a shrug almost.

  ‘You don’t seem very excited to see her.’

  Raf puts his hands behind him and spreads them backwards onto the bed.

  ‘I don’t know. She was my dad’s friends’ daughter. We got on pretty well but we didn’t even know each other for that long. After I left Oz, I didn’t give her much thought to be honest. She was a lonely kid, didn’t get on with her stepdad. I probably should have stayed in touch, a letter or something. But, you know, halfway across the world, trying to get over the fallout of the stuff with Dad. It’s just one of those things.’ Raf doesn’t talk much about his life back home and Erin’s had to come to accept it. His father was a serial philanderer and it ground his mum down so much that, when Raf was eleven, she ran away from the family. So he was raised by his dad who, ostensibly, made little effort to hide how much he resented the task. A few years later, it emerged that his father was having a relationship with an undergraduate student. The girl’s parents found out and the ensuing scandal got so combustible that Raf was sent to England where his dad’s old colleague Lydia kept an eye on him. Raf told Erin the whole story one deep and meaningful night soon after they got together, but in the following four years, the subject has never really come up. And with her conventional upbringing in the suburbs of London she doesn’t feel she has the right to drag him through what sounded like a traumatic childhood.

  ‘She’s very – I don’t know – more open than I’m used to. Not very British.’

  ‘No,’ he says, a laugh in his voice.

  ‘Lovely though,’ Erin says. ‘Bit oogly-boogly maybe? With the crystal and stuff.’

  ‘Fair to say she had that in her locker when she was a teenager.’

  ‘And an interesting outfit for January.’ Erin expects Raf to laugh with her but he doesn’t. ‘Suits her though. She’s in great shape – yoga I bet. There’s this “five-minute stretchify” hashtag that’s going around. I should probably get on it.’

  ‘Yeh, for sure,’ he says, reaching his arms out until his right hand rests next to her bum. It’s meant to be affectionate but it only makes Erin aware that her bum spreads now in a way it never did before she had Bobby. She looks at her upper arm in her vest top, not fat but the flesh is looser, less toned than it used to be. Amanda’s arms look like the cables of a lift.

  ‘I don’t know. Doesn’t feel like what we need at the moment,’ Raf says, his fingers moving up onto Erin’s hip, ‘her turning up. For you, it’s not fair on you at all.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You know, with Bobby.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ Heat has poured into her throat. It feels like he sometimes says things like this just to provoke her. She shifts herself away from him, dragging her phone into her pyjama pocket.

  ‘You know, you’re not –’ He hesitates, trying to find the operative phrase, the one that won’t prick the balloon that’s barely containing her anger. ‘You’re still trying to get your head around Bob.’ She shoots him a glare of disbelief before jolting off the bed to the corner of the room where she rifles through a pile of cardboard boxes until she pulls out a heavy obsidian pot of ‘Night Cream enriched with Seaweed and Carbon Chips’ and heads into the bathroom. Although all the free make-up and baby gadgets she’s been sent since passing the 30k follower threshold don’t help much when she’s trying to stretch her weekly budget at the supermarket, she’s loved using premium products again, and spreading the thick blue cream onto her cheeks has the desired effect of cooling her annoyance at Raf’s suffocating concern for her mental well-being.

  About a month before her due date, while sat on a bench on the seafront glancing through tabloid red-carpet shots of a girl, Kara, she’d been friends with at drama school, Erin was hit with the sledgehammer of her impending motherhood and it shook her out of what she now realises was intense denial. It felt like someone had twisted the focus on the lens of a camera and she could look at her life with absolute clarity. She was thirty-three. She had no semblance of an acting career. She’d been bailed out of crippling credit card debt by her fiancé and, with no job in their new town and thus no maternity pay, was now reliant on him for money. She ran her finger down the list of her life choices and found them all wanting. Going to university before drama school so that by the time she emerged she was not only saddled with two lots of student debt but also twenty-five and too old to play the ingénue roles that were the only ones going for new graduates. Trying to keep up with a group of girlfriends with tastes so extravagant they stretched even their corporate pay packets. The last-minute holiday to Ireland she agreed to go on that led to her missing the chance to step in to play the lead in a low-budget movie that went on to be an indie hit and a huge launch pad for a girl called Rhia Trevellick, who looked great but was nowhere near as good an actor as Erin. And then moving down here for a simpler life, crucially, a financially less demanding life, the sort of settled provincial life that she’d never ever wanted. And, as she sat hyperventilating on that bench, these crushing epiphanies brought on a panic attack. She was certain it was her heart and she was dying so she called an ambulance and was rushed to A&E.

  After Raf had brought her home from the hospital, he told her that all of her feelings, all her fears were completely normal. Big life events like having a child often held up a mirror to where you wanted to be in your life and he didn’t think anyone felt like they had everything sorted. He didn’t, he said. But he was happy, he said. He was excited for their future, he said. No one ever feels ready to have kids, he said. But it feels like from the moment he saw her, pale and drawn on the hospital bed, he’s treated her like this, like a Victorian invalid who has to be cossetted and worried over and she finds it exasperating.

  Raf clears his throat. She hears him go over to the boxes to tidy up the mess she’s made with her rifling. She gets her phone out and sees that, as a result of Carly’s like, an additional forty or so people have followed her just in the past couple of minutes. Bar the hashtags, it wasn’t even a good post. She needs to work harder, she thinks, every post has to be as funny, as relatable, as shareable as possible. She’s on the crest of something, she can feel it. She can’t get distracted now, a few bad posts could be
enough to undo all her hard work.

  She hears singing coming from their garden and glances out the small Velux window at the studio. A sliver of light shows through a gap in the blinds that obscure the world from the glass-fronted box. She reaches over and clicks the window open to listen. It could be Joni Mitchell, high and haunting. Amanda is singing. As she was when Erin first saw her through the window holding her son. She blinks and an eyelash catches a clot of cream getting some of it in her eye. Erin goes back to the sink and rinses her face with cold water.

  Raf appears in the door frame and stops for a moment, one eye squinted in the direction of the window. They listen to Amanda for a moment, neither breathing for a good few seconds, but the sound of Bobby coughing through the monitor snaps them back into the room. Raf notices the Instagram app open on her phone in her hand and huffs back into the bedroom. She looks down at the plughole in the sink, sees a coil of her hair in the depths. Her breathing shallowing as the air raid of Bobby’s crying begins to wind up. He’s awake. Three hours, he never sleeps for a longer spell. It’s beyond exhausting. She hears Raf grabbing his dressing gown off the back of the door and leaving, the floorboards of the stairs playing their three-note melody as he descends.

  A sharp spike of cold rushes into the room. She looks out the window again and sees a shadow moving behind the garden studio’s blinds. Goosebumps spear up on Erin’s skin and she clunks the window closed, the singing snuffed out like a church candle.

  She settles herself into bed and switches off the light. Ten past ten. Bobby’s first feed of the day is 4 a.m. so she’s normally asleep much earlier than this. She listens to see if he’s still screaming down in his room but she can’t hear him. Raf sleeps down there most of the time so she can sleep undisturbed. She misses having him next to her, his pepper-scent, playing her fingers over the network of veins on his arms that stand out so clearly that she can see her thumbnail stopping the blood flowing around his body.