‘Ev, I’ll text you my new number when I get it and don’t give it to anyone.’
‘Fine,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’m here for you, for you and Poppy, but I don’t know what I can do.’
‘Be grateful you got a lump sum,’ said Callie bitterly. ‘Seeing as how Jason, Rob and Anka all got magically out of it because they knew what was coming, you’re going to need it, Ev.’
She hung up and looked at Brenda.
‘Have you seen the news?’ Brenda said.
Callie nodded. ‘He left us behind, Brenda.’
‘I heard,’ she said, going to the kettle. ‘I made a few calls last night. We have a lawyer you can talk to. Today, preferably. He’ll want money up front.’
‘Ha!’ Callie said shakily. ‘Does he take frozen plastic?’
‘Unlikely,’ Brenda said. ‘You’ll need money.’
Callie looked down at her hands and realised they were shaking. She had to sit down or she would collapse. Taking a chair at the table, she said: ‘Last night, I was thinking that it was wrong to have taken the jewellery if it truly was part of some awful white-collar fraud. I don’t steal – I’ve never stolen anything in my life – but right now I don’t care. I need to take care of Poppy, we need somewhere to live and we need some money to live on.’
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ said Brenda. ‘Real-world scenario versus pink fluffy unicorn world.’
Callie laid her forehead wearily on the table and spoke: ‘Brenda, if Jason’s been ripping people off for years, I’ve been living on stolen money. I am a – what do you call it?’
‘Accessory to the fact,’ said Brenda. ‘You’ve been watching too many TV detective shows. You were the nice person caught up in all of this with Shitface and his pal, Other Shitface. Not an accessory to anything.’
‘That’s almost worse, though.’ Callie raised her head. ‘I was too stupid to see what was going on. How could I not have known? That’s what I keep asking myself – why didn’t I see what was obviously under my nose?’
Sam
At least, thought Sam, cleaning up another nappy, the black faeces that had frightened the hell out of her had stopped. It was meconium, the nurses had explained to her in hospital when she’d stared aghast at the black liquid coming out of her exquisite little baby’s bottom. ‘This can’t be normal,’ she’d cried, fearing there was something wrong with India.
‘It’s perfectly normal,’ said the nurse talking to her, an old hand at explaining this sort of thing to new, terrified mothers. ‘Meconium is the early excreta and nothing to worry about, although it looks a little bit frightening. Soon the baby’s stools should be a more normal colour.’
Sam wanted this confirmed once more. In fact, she’d really have liked a notebook where she could write all this down and then have it typed up in triplicate and stuck around the house, because she needed to know that whatever her baby was doing was normal.
Plus she was beyond irritated with Ted, who seemed more upset at the scent of India’s tiny nappies – why was he so upset about that? How dare he get upset about it when she was the one in the hospital dealing with the impossible task of taking care of their tiny child, of worrying full-time.
The next difficult step in taking care of the baby was the feeding, or latching on as the nurses called it. ‘Latching on’ was such an innocuous phrase, sort of like hanging a picture frame onto a wall. At no point did the words latching on imply getting a small, bewildered, hungry and increasingly cross baby to attach itself to a nipple that was already painful and then make said baby suck.
That first day, when the lactation nurse had been off and India had had a bottle, had made Sam terrified she’d mess up breastfeeding again. The more terrified she was, the more India sensed it, cried and refused to feed. Sam’s breasts ached. India wailed with misery and Sam’s breasts ached even more at her child’s cries.
‘How is this so hard?’ Sam had said tearfully twenty minutes after her fifth attempt at feeding, when India had just cried harder, pitiful little wails that broke Sam’s heart. The inner voice screamed at her: bad mother!
‘It can take a while,’ said the lactation nurse. ‘Not everyone finds it easy at first, but keep trying, you’ll do it.’
They gave India a little bit of milk that Sam had laboriously expressed earlier from a machine that sounded like it was pumping oil from eight thousand feet beneath the earth.
‘I know you are going to manage this when you go home tomorrow,’ said the lactation nurse, beaming with encouragement, and she left Sam with a sheaf of papers about the right way to do it.
Finally, India slept in her little bassinet, Ted was gone and the ward was mercifully quiet because all the visitors had been sent home by the ringing of a bell.
There was snoring in some corners where exhausted women tried to sleep. There were little murmuring baby noises, the odd small whimper and, sometimes, full-blown baby wailing. And all the while, Sam looked at beautiful India with that precious little face, the fluffed-up dark hair. She looked so like Ted with those huge eyes and all Sam could think was that she had failed her baby because she hadn’t been able to feed her.
The woman next door, Larissa, who was on her third child, had juggled her baby onto enormous bosoms and the baby had grappled on like a mountaineer grabbing a crampon expertly.
‘It’s very easy,’ said Larissa, in a relaxed tone that Sam envied from the bottom of her heart. ‘I don’t know what you need all them bits of paper for. Come here, I’ll show you,’ she said, when Sam had been lying in bed on the verge of tears, still failing to get India to latch on.
‘No, no, I’ll try later,’ Sam had said.
The nurse passed by again and, seeing Sam’s devastated face, said: ‘It can be a little stressful if you have people beside you who are doing it so easily, and remember, Larissa has had two more babies. She’s used to this now, it’s all new to you and it’s new to India.’
‘But it’s new to Larissa’s baby too and he seems to know how,’ said Sam tremulously. ‘India doesn’t know how and that’s all my fault, because if I knew, then India would know and I would be able to transfer that information to her and . . .’
‘She’s not a computer,’ the nurse said kindly. ‘Now get a bit of rest and it will look easier the next time.’
The next time was two o’clock in the morning and Sam did not feel as if it was any easier. She was zombified with tiredness, woken from an uneasy sleep and desperately trying to get India’s tiny little mouth to attach onto her nipple. Another nurse tried to help her, holding Sam’s breast and squashing it up into India’s little mouth, trying to squeeze milk out and get India to suck. But it was no good.