Stella
Rose wakes around seven and kneels up in the cot, banging her fists. Her cheeks are flushed and her blonde hair is tufty where she’s rubbed her head against her mattress.
‘Good morning,’ I say and smile. She smiles back and reaches her arms up, showing me the three teeth that cost us so many hours of sleep last month. ‘I love you,’ I whisper, smelling her head.
I have a message from Dom. How was the sex party? he writes.
I ignore it.
He follows up with a string of aubergine emojis.
I ignore that, too.
An hour later, while Rose is having her mashed banana and wholemeal toast, I call Gavin. He is very clearly asleep when the phone starts ringing and only half awake when he answers.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Do you have a minute?’
‘Sure,’ he says. I can hear the bedsheets moving.
‘Are you still in bed?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he lies. ‘I’m on a run.’
‘Must be nice to be having a lie-in,’ I snark, despite the fact that I should be keeping him on my good side.
‘I worked until 3 a.m. in the morning last night, Stella, I needed to restore my reserves.’
‘“a.m.” means morning.’
‘What?’ I can hear him getting up, which means I can picture him in his pants, readjusting himself, getting ready to go inside for his mum to probably make him a full English.
It’s amazing how quickly you can go from loving someone so much that you don’t even really mind if they sneeze on you to finding the concept of them repulsive.
‘Look, I’m just ringing to say that I don’t think you should take Rose this evening,’ I say, ripping the plaster off.
‘Why not?’ He changes our call to a video call.
‘She was really unwell last night. And my mum was watching her and it looked like she might have drunk some Calpol. They took her to hospital, to be cautious.’
He looks horrified. ‘What the fuck?’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘It was awful.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
I’m taken aback by the question. ‘Why would I have called you?’
‘Because I’m her fucking father, Stella.’ I can count on one hand the number of times he’s raised his voice at me, and most them were when I was about to hit something in the car. I’m genuinely aghast. And angry. Angry that he thinks he’s got a leg to stand on here.
‘Yeah, for eighteen hours, once a week, with your mum heavily supervising,’ I snap. His face contorts with hurt. Real, proper hurt. In turn, I flood with guilt. ‘Look, it just didn’t occur to me to tell you. You don’t message me all week, you don’t ask about her—’
‘If something happens to her, you need to tell me.’
Miserably, I concede that he is right. ‘Okay,’ I say.
‘No, I mean legally. You have to tell me, legally.’
My mouth opens but I’m not sure what to say to that. We don’t have a legal agreement. There’s never been any suggestion of courts or custody, or any of that. Is he threatening me? The idea that he might suddenly decide that he wants fifty-fifty smacks me in the chest with horror.
‘Okay.’ Then I force out the words that are appropriate but almost choke me on their way out of my mouth. ‘I’m sorry.’
We stand in complete silence for what feels like an age.
‘She’s eating her breakfast, happy as Larry,’ I say, eventually.
‘Right.’
There’s another long pause. ‘So, yeah, just do next week instead?’ I ask.
‘Uh. No, I think maybe that’s not. . . look, I think we should stick to the plan.’
I press my nails into my fists. ‘Gavin, come on.’
‘Look, she’ll be fine with me, and my mum’s here. You just said she’s fine.’
‘She is fine,’ I say, trying to sound bright and cheerful. ‘But I don’t know if she’s going to get worse again and I’d really like to be with her, just in case.’
‘That’s not how it works,’ Gavin says, in a surprisingly gentle voice. ‘Stel, she’s mine too.’
She’s not his too, though. She’s mine, almost entirely mine, with the tiniest side order of being his. She’s my business and he invested a couple of grand to get it off the ground. He’s a committed viewer, he’s. . . I can’t think of any more metaphors, but she is not, not, not his.
‘Look, I don’t want to be heavy about this,’ he says. ‘But maybe we need a. . . more, I don’t know. Formal, legal arrangement.’
I feel like I might be sick now. ‘No,’ I say weakly. ‘No, it’s fine. Come over as planned. We’ll stick to what we agreed.’ We hang up.
My phone buzzes a minute later, while I’m wiping Rose up and putting her on the playmat.
For a second I think Gavin might have had a change of heart and agreed to skip the visit.
But it’s not Gavin. It’s Richard. Much looking forward to dinner tonight – I’ve been remiss in asking whether you have any dietary requirements for dinner?
Shit. Richard.
In the end I conclude that I have to have dinner with Richard.
I mean I don’t have to, I could cancel, but then I’d be sitting at home while Rose is with Gavin, totally alone, thinking about how he might leave a plastic bag in reach of her crib and she could suffocate.
I don’t want to go for dinner with Richard, but I also really don’t want to be in the house alone.
I take a dim view of mushrooms, I reply. And Marmite.
No Marmite mushrooms, he replies. Car for seven o’clock?
I want to tell him that this car-sending is expensive and indulgent and bad for the environment, but the idea of having to get on the Tube is deeply unappealing. And besides, I’m going to need to take a load of stuff with me because, presumably, dinner means sex.
I put Rose down for her late-afternoon nap and then watch her sleep for a while before creeping out of her bedroom, yanking the volume up on the baby monitor, then turning on the shower.
I strain to hear the faintest noise from her bedroom while I drag a razor over basically the entire surface of my body from below the eyelashes.
I pause when I get to my pubes, foaming up a load of shower gel and then washing my vag multiple times.
Gavin appears, a mere ten minutes late. I hold Rose on my hip while I carry all her bags to the front door.
‘I can help,’ he offers, weakly.
‘No, thanks,’ I say. ‘I’m used to doing things one-handed.’
There’s a pause. ‘You look nice,’ he says eventually.
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you going out?’
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘Oh, nice. Great. Anywhere fun?’
‘Dinner,’ I force myself to respond.
‘With the girls?’ he asks, still standing on the doorstep and apparently not reading anything into the fact that I haven’t invited him in.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not with the girls.’
He seems to be processing this. ‘Right. Well. That’s great. Good for you.’
I don’t respond, so he picks up Rose’s biggest bag. ‘Thanks so much for getting everything ready,’ he says, as if I don’t pack up half her belongings for him every time she goes to stay.
‘That’s fine,’ I say, through gritted teeth.
‘I’m going to bring her back on the dot of seven-thirty tomorrow morning,’ he says, as if he’s being kind. ‘I promise.’
I can’t summon anything, so I kiss Rose and then watch them leave. Then I grab a bottle of ￡11.99 wine from the fridge, shove it into my overnight bag and get into the Addison Lee, which has been waiting outside for half an hour.
Richard’s flat is exactly what I had expected because it’s exactly the flat people get when they have lots of money and neither time nor interest in decorating.
It’s a penthouse overlooking the river, with vaulted ceilings and beams. The floor is polished concrete, everything is open-plan and the brushed-metal stove takes up half the kitchen.
He has an island with stools instead of a kitchen table, and a huge wall-mounted TV.
It’s basically the least child-friendly space that I’ve ever entered, and it looks a bit like a set designer built a flat for a stereotypical bachelor.
‘This is lovely,’ I say, not totally truthfully, as he shows me around.
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit neutral, but I don’t have great taste in interiors so I thought better to err on the side of caution. Plus, I think the view does a lot of the work.’
He’s not wrong there. The entire front of the flat is glass, and the river is like a moving painting. Boats, people, bridges, the sun slowly making its descent. It’s beautiful. ‘I could stand here for hours,’ I say, as he pours a buttery Chardonnay into a huge, sparkling-clean wine glass.
My phone buzzes. It’s Dom.
Is he finally going to put out??? he writes.
I pounce, turning the screen over before Richard can catch sight.
‘I frequently do,’ Richard agrees.
Richard produces two steaks from the fridge, which come wrapped in white paper so presumably came from some deeply expensive butcher rather than the supermarket.
‘Who taught you to cook?’ I ask.
He looks a little embarrassed. ‘When I moved to New York, I took one of those cooking classes for total idiots because I honestly couldn’t make so much as a sandwich.’
‘I didn’t know you’d lived in New York.’
‘Five years,’ he says, grinding pepper onto the steaks. ‘I moved back last year.’
‘How come?’
‘I had a break-up, my lease was up, it just felt like time to leave.’
‘I get that,’ I say, pulling out a stool and sitting down at the island. ‘Why’d you break up?’
He looks surprised at the question. ‘I’d rather not discuss it.’
‘Oh. Sure. No, that makes sense. Of course,’ I stammer, embarrassed to have accidentally asked something that clearly pressed on some tricky territory for him. ‘I guess I’m used to talking about my ex all the time because he’s still in my life.’
Richard looks up at me, pausing his chopping. ‘Because of your daughter?’
‘God, yes. I’d prefer never to see him again, but he has Rose one night a week. Hence me being here.’
‘I see. Well. That sounds like a good thing, I suppose? That she has time with him?’
I nod, privately thinking that it’s not a good thing at all. ‘Yeah.’
‘And as she gets older, do you imagine she would see more of him?’ Richard asks.
‘I guess,’ I say. ‘I don’t really know what we’re doing to be honest. Just kind of finding our way as we go. We agreed some ground rules, like she doesn’t meet anyone we’re dating until it’s long term, and we keep each other in the loop about any major life events.’