Page 60 of Stella is Starting Over

‘You knew that I was struggling with my feelings around her and you went to her instead of talking to me.’

‘You’d turned your bloody phone off!’ I snap.

She picks up her phone and throws it across the stairwell, down the stairs. It hits the wall behind my head and the screen cracks, then it hits the stairs and bounces down to the landing, where it lands precariously between two spindles. ‘I needed a break!’ she yells as she throws it.

I look at her. At the phone. Back to her. She bursts into sobs, tears streaming down her face. What I would really like to do right now is go downstairs, without looking behind me, slam the door on this house and all the privileged, entitled women who live in it, and never speak to her again. But before I’ve got the strength to do it, I look up at her one more time. Her eyes are navy blue against the pinkness of her eyes, still streaming with tears.

‘Will you hold me?’ she says, in a tiny voice.

‘Of course,’ I say.

I traipse back up the stairs, wrap my arms around her and then lift her up, carrying her back into her bedroom. I lie down next to her and stroke her arms and shoulders and hair as she cries.

She twists around and presses her face into my chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s been such a horrible day.’

I nod. ‘It’s okay. We all have our moments.’

Eventually her sobs subside and she looks up at me. Her cheeks are swollen and her lips are fat. ‘Can I ask you to do something for me?’

I nod. ‘Sure.’

‘Please will you stop seeing Stella?’

Everything Florrie has ever told me about her take on ethical non-monogamy (which is a lot) has focused on how having ‘a veto’ (aka the right to ask someone to stop seeing someone else) is not fair. She’s described it as unreasonable, immature, even once as controlling. So it’s hard to take this complete about-face in my stride. But she looks sad. And young. Her face is pinched and she’s looking up at me through her fringe and I don’t want to hurt her feelings, at all.

So I think about it for a moment, wondering if this could be a neat way out of the incredibly stupid situation I brought upon myself. ‘What if Stella and I were just friends?’

She shakes her head. ‘You have chemistry; it doesn’t work like that. I need you to stop seeing her. Completely.’

I hold her a little tighter for a moment. Then, for once in my life, I don’t say the easy thing that will make the other person feel good enough that I don’t have to feel guilty. I say the hard thing, the thing that I don’t want to say, the right one. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘No.’

Stella

When I pictured going back to work, I pictured the bit where I had a coffee in my hand, took part in an interesting discussion, pointed out some amazing new colour trend that everyone liked, and then sat alone at my computer getting to use my brain for the first time in months. I did not, stupidly, give any thought to the process of getting there. This morning I woke up at quarter to six, a calculated move in order to get ready before Rose woke up. Rose then woke up while I was in the shower, meaning that I had to skip the conditioner and go and feed her. She had her bottle while I dripped on her, the floor and everything else, then she played on my bed while I rejected the outfit I’d planned the night before in favour of three other outfits, all of which looked dreadful, and eventually settled – you guessed it – on the first outfit. I then wrestled Rose into the First Day of Childcare outfit I’d picked, took a load of pictures of her, fed her some breakfast, changed her into a new outfit because I’m a rookie who fed their tiny child porridge without a big enough bib, and then I wrestled her into the pram. I walk fifteen minutes to drop her off, then ten minutes in the opposite direction to the station where I narrowly miss a train and wait on the platform, cursing the fact that it’s drizzling and grey despite ostensibly being the summer. By the time I arrive at the office, coffee in hand, I have been awake for four hours and I feel like I’ve run a marathon. It dawns on me that when I finish work I’m going to have to leg it back to collect her, then do her tea, her bath, her stories, her teeth and her pyjamas, then settle her down to sleep and then do the whole thing again tomorrow, and the next day. That I’m going to have to do this basically every day for the rest of my life (or at least until she’s older, if I’m being a bit less dramatic). How the fuck do people do this?

‘How are you finding it?’ Liz – a colleague who started at the magazine around the same time as me – asks, as we take the same lift down to the ground floor at lunchtime.

‘It’s an adjustment,’ I say, through gritted teeth.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s really tough. Let’s go for drinks after work next week and I can run you through the top tips on survival.’

‘That’s so sweet,’ I say, meaning it. ‘But I’ve got to do pick-up in the evenings.’

‘Ah,’ she says, smiling. ‘You’ve got to get hubby doing half the pick-ups and drop-offs – that’s what makes life work. At least twice a week I make sure that I get home after Alex has them in bed – there’s a life hack for you.’

I nod and realise that I haven’t told anyone what happened while I was on mat leave, about Gavin or the divorce or, well, any of the huge life I lived while they were still here, still doing the job that I used to see as the central bit of who I am as a person. ‘That’s a good tip,’ I say, because I don’t know what else to contribute. So that’s how everyone else is managing this. Sharing the load.

By the time Rose is in bed, the prospect of cooking anything is unappealing so I pour a bowl of cereal and watch things on my phone that make me angry: women giving opinions about parenting, men giving opinions about women. It’s all so irritating that I turn it off and sit and spoon the cereal into my mouth in silence. Then I look at my phone. Look at the clock. Try to convince myself that I want to tell someone how awful it all is, and decide against it. It’s 7.45 p.m., and I go to bed.

The next morning, I wake up at six and accept that I’m not going to be able to have great hair and make-up for work any more. I pull on a pair of jeans and a clean shirt, which is what I would have worn before I was trying to convince everyone that I’m still the same person I was pre-kid. I smear tinted sunscreen into my face as I feed Rose her porridge (this time in her pyjamas) and on the way to the childminder, I find a shortcut along a side road, which shaves a full three minutes off the trip. I try to convince myself that this means things are getting better, especially as Rose decides that this morning is the first morning she really does mind about being dropped off.

She starts wailing when she sees the front door at Anna’s, and she clings to me. I have to physically peel her off me and place her on Anna’s chest.

‘It’s fine,’ Anna assures me. ‘They all do this – every single one. She will be playing happily in five minutes. Just go.’

I go. I miss the train again and spend fifteen minutes sitting on a cold, metal seat on the platform, thinking about all the ways that Rose could be injured at the childminder’s, even though I’m fairly sure that Anna is a much safer and more expert child wrangler than I am. As the train pulls into the station, my phone pings and it’s a photo of Rose, red-eyed and puffy from crying, but smiling and playing with a plastic horse. I burst into tears at how brave and resilient she is, and how guilty I feel and how completely unerringly shit this situation is.

For the first time in my entire life, I don’t want to go to work. I mean, I’ve had days where I don’t fancy it and I’ve very occasionally phoned in sick when I could have made it in, or made a last-minute plea to work from home because of a hangover. But for the most part, I’ve liked my work. It’s been close enough to what I actually wanted to do that it’s fun. The people I work with are nice. I mean, we write about wallpapers and lampshades – it’s hardly a coal mine. Only, despite having said I was bored at home, despite having been really ready to go back, I’d rather go and walk around the same park I’ve been walking around for almost a year, having a one-sided conversation with Rose.