Chapter 3
With the arrival of baby Atticus Stax Burnley, a baby brother for Barnaby and Cosima, Francesca is finally on maternity leave and now deep into her My Three life.
Beyond blessed, besotted, madly in love, head over heels.
The desk across from me both a relief and an absence.
On Facebook, she runs out of ways to describe her euphoria, although Christ alive, it is not for the want of trying.
Francesca chucks enough cutesy emojis on to her Facebook wall to constitute actual graffiti.
If Francesca were to appear on Mastermind, her specialist subjects would be:
‘I’m one new dental floss regime away from having a total nervous breakdown!’
Holidaying at Center Parcs
Her first kid
Her second kid
Her third kid, who has only just got here
Francesca’s Facebook is an absolute thing to behold.
There are forty near-identical pictures of Atticus, with a slew of comments underneath each one as though he’s being announced to the world for the very first time.
Amazingly, no one seems sick of him, or of Francesca, yet.
How many times can a person write ‘Wow, congratulations!’ before wanting to punch themselves in the head? A hell of a lot, is the answer to that.
Francesca tells us online that she is clearly elated, but there’s something in her eyes in these pictures, the heavy lids, that scares me.
Fine, it’s a 4 a.m.-feed photo, but the lights in her eyes have gone out.
Far from a glow, there’s a paleness to her.
Maybe this is what new motherhood is. An ongoing battle between the full heart and a body forever in catch-up.
In between heralding the nascent genius of Atticus Stax, Francesca has also managed to remind us that her oldest, Barnaby, is now a philosopher in the making.
There’s not a febrile utterance of his that hasn’t been held to the light and relayed as a gleaming, this-is-good-enough-to-save-mankind profundity.
‘The five-year-old has changed the lyrics of “Barbie Girl” to “Life’s fantastic, my knicks are elastic”,’ she posts. ‘Soon to be top of the charts.’
Overdosed on Francesca, I head over to Brigitte’s Facebook page, which is still untrammelled chaos, and all grainy, badly lit pictures.
She looks scuttered in 94.2 per cent of them and I feel strangely jealous.
I spy Carrie in one of Brigitte’s pictures, glowing from her four pints of aloe vera juice.
So they’re hanging out without me, then.
Something soupy makes itself known in my stomach.
In addition to the life-changing magic of aloe vera, Carrie’s Facebook wall is all cushion slogans and ‘Pass this on to five people’ shite.
‘Delete me if you support the Tories,’ she posts but never says in real life, and Lord knows it is tempting.
The joy of being able to invent and make yourself up from scratch, I guess. It doesn’t always go the right way.
Days like this I hate Facebook and MySpace, but it is handy for keeping in touch with Jilly, one of my oldest Dublin pals.
‘How’s Londinium? The big smoke?’ she writes. I don’t have the heart to tell her we don’t ever call it that.
‘You know yourself,’ I write back. ‘Loud, busy, takes an hour to get a couple of miles down the road. Black snot.’
‘Gerourofit,’ she writes back. ‘Don’t pretend you’re not living the dream, you and that wonderful hubby of yours.’
I don’t feel like disrobing her of the reality she has built up in her own brain.
It’s living the dream all right, except in this airless basement, with a raft of codes I don’t even understand the purpose of, stretched out in front of me every single day like the start of winter, the Dream definitely feels like someone else’s.