‘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
