Chapter 9 Jules “Hey Ya” #3
“But then I thought it’s too much of a risk,” he says, pulling the tape named Childbirth out and handing it to me, as I look down the list of familiar songs, all of which I love.
I remember Nelly being born to “I’m Like a Bird” by Nelly Furtado.
What a fabulous omen I thought that was and I still hope it’s true.
“What with them being so young,” he says.
“You know, in case we did inadvertently mess something up.”
“Yes. Good point. So maybe a little later?”
“What about around the time of those videos you and the kids were laughing at when I walked in yesterday?” Adam suggests, and I smile, only a little bit disappointed, because I wanted to go back there myself.
“That was, what, 2003?” I say, digging through the box. “How about this one?” I hold up a tape. It says Daddy Day Care ’03 in my writing on the spine.
He gets prepared and puts in the tape and then—click—off he goes, out like a light, with that not-getting-any-less-creepy look of total zombification on his face, while I listen to “Where Is the Love” by Black Eyed Peas and “Sound of the Underground” by Girls Aloud—for which Nelly had a whole little dance I only now remember—all the while imagining Adam back there with the kids for real.
I do Wordle, Connections, the crossword, scroll mindlessly through Instagram, and an hour later, there’s a soft click at the end of the tape and Adam is suddenly back.
Leaping up, he wraps me in a giant hug.
“That was…” He stares down into my face, obviously awed. “Just incredible. I’d forgotten how sweet they were. Oh, Jules, they were so…”
He looks teary, like he’s bursting with love. Why can’t I remember him looking like this after the kids were first born? Was he really this enthusiastic as a young dad? How could I have forgotten something like that?
He starts telling me about his trip. About how I’d been out on one of my first weekend jobs since Liam was born.
Even though Adam was working full-time, he was more than happy to do solo dadding and to take one for the team.
He describes how he’d done this mad, chaotic breakfast with the kids and he opened the tape I’d given him before I’d left that morning and he’d taken it in the portable tape player to the picnic in the park.
How they’d been on all the rides and the kids had feasted on tiny Dairylea sandwich squares and Cheetos and he’d pushed Nelly on the swing and how she’d yelled at him to go higher and higher.
And how he’d almost left Lion Brian, Liam’s favorite toy, on the roundabout.
As he talks, I laugh along, but I’m also aching with a jealous longing to see my babies.
“Right, my turn,” I tell him, hurriedly flicking through the tapes.
“Here, look, Bath Time Mix. That should do it,” he says. “That’s 2004. Just a little bit later.”
“Perfect,” I say, putting it in the machine. “Here goes. I’ll see you soon.”
“Enjoy.”
As I press “Play,” sitting back, “Hey Ya!” by Outkast fills the shed…
***
Bursting out of the whirlwind, I find myself on the Lloyd Loom chair next to the bath, in our tiny terraced house near the station that we moved to just before Nelly was born. Liam and Nelly are splashing in the water and it’s like I’ve got vertigo.
Because here they are: my babies.
Right here.
All noisy and splashy.
I’m swooning with love, like Adam had looked just now.
Nelly, who must be three and a half, dumps a pile of bubbles on little nearly one-year-old Liam’s head. They are impossibly gorgeous. Their little squidgy bodies…their goofy smiles…their fine hair…their little baby teeth and joyful laughter.
My tummy is doing somersaults of joy, except that 2004 Jules is not interested.
My urge to impose, to scoop my arms down into the bath and to pick up the old red dumper truck toy that Liam loved and to pour water over his shiny little body is unbearable.
But tempting as it is, I promised Adam, and I’ve already gone behind his back with Carpe Diem, so I really am just here for the ride this time.
It’s still almost impossible to resist. Because she—the 2004 Jules—is not even looking at our precious babies.
Instead, she’s absorbed in the chunky gray Nokia in her hand and is looking for messages from Adam.
Her emotion is fierce. An indignant fury that she’s doing yet another bath time and Adam is late home from work.
I’m shocked to feel how exhausted and cross she is. She’d rather be working than doing this—the witching hour—at the end of a long day. She wants a glass of wine and not to have to do the bedtime stories.
The kids are giggling now, but she hardly hears. Her thoughts are obsessed with Adam being in the pub with Darius, who says his latest stab at running a tech business might finally be turning a corner and could even be edging out of the red.
By comparison, it feels like all her own plans are on hold.
She’s still getting catering gigs now and then, but not nearly enough, and even with Adam’s salary, it’s impossible to save for their planned big move to Oz—which is still supposedly happening later this year.
Each day she feels it slipping further and further away.
Especially when Adam hangs out in the pub, spending our money on pints, she thinks.
Although is it the spending she resents, or the fact that he’s getting to have grown-up conversations and living a grown-up life?
Her thoughts are interrupted by screeches from the bath as a fight breaks out.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she scolds Nelly, seeing Liam has tipped back. “You’ll bloody drown him.”
She scoops up Liam, wincing as he wails in her ear. He’s red-faced and upset.
“Shush,” she tells him, quickly wrapping him in a towel, then dumping him on the bath rug, while lifting Nelly from the bath, and wrapping her harshly in a towel too, before seeing her trembling bottom lip, and snapping at her to stop being a baby.
Inside I’m silently screaming, But Nelly is a baby! How can 2004 me ignore those big dark eyes? I feel like my heart is being lanced. It takes everything I have not to impose myself and intervene to calm everyone down.
“Cuddle,” Nelly begs, putting her thumb in her mouth, but the awful Younger Jules ignores her, throwing pajamas at her from the towel rail, and telling her to get herself dressed. Grabbing a nappy, she lays Liam on the changing mat.
I watch, disgusted, as Jules now uncaringly rubs cream into Liam’s nappy rash. She should be kneeling down and cuddling them both and showering their perfect bodies with kisses.
But instead she’s hurrying them along to bedtime, like they’re being punished.
Oh, and how I want to weep with nostalgia at the sight of their little room, the smell of baby talcum powder, the walls covered in Nelly’s achingly cute crayoned drawings, the shelf full of sticky, well-thumbed books, and the framed imprint of baby Liam’s foot.
Ignoring it all, huffing through the discarded toys strewn over the rug, Jules winces as she treads on a Lego brick. She fucking hates Lego! She roughly pulls down the blackout blind, the early-evening sun spilling brightly round the sides.
“Say night?” Nelly asks, standing on her pillow and consulting the world map above her bed. Her pride and joy.
I wonder where the hell that precious map went.
“Close your eyes and point,” Jules says, sighing resignedly at this nightly ritual. But she only has herself to blame for teaching Nelly about the world. A knowledge that has bloomed into an endless fascination.
Nelly closes her eyes and points. Then opens her eyes.
“Yep, Melbourne,” Jules says matter-of-factly. “It’s in Australia. But it might as well be on another planet. Now, squidge down.”
Nelly twists away, hurt that she’s not getting more info about the far-flung place she’s picked.
She clearly wants a cuddle on the beanbag between her bed and Liam’s cot where we always read stories, but tonight Jules doesn’t have the patience.
She tuts, waiting for Nelly to finish lining up Mr. Bear, the purple monkey, the little doll we got on holiday the year before in Cornwall that she loves—ready for story time.
Liam is in his cot, kneeling in his sleeping bag, clutching Lion Brian, almost catatonic with fatigue.
I watch as Jules grabs a book off the shelf, choosing That’s Not My Teddy, not because it’s a wonderful storybook, which it is, but because it’s short. And all the time that she reads, “That’s not my teddy, its nose is too rough,” she’s snarkily thinking, That’s not my life, its days are too shit…
I feel sick.
How could I have been so careless, so self-absorbed?
Nelly begs for another story, but Jules just gives her a perfunctory kiss on the forehead.
“Love you, Mummy,” she says, her voice small and insecure.
Jules doesn’t say it back.
She doesn’t say it back.
“Go to sleep,” she tells her instead.
How could I have ever looked down at that angel’s face and not told her a million times over how loved she is?
But just as I’m about to impose myself, finally done with this hideous, callous display from my younger self, the front door slams.
“Daddy!” Nelly squeals, flinging back her duvet, while Liam sits up in his cot, suddenly manically wide awake, holding on to the bars and jumping.
“For fuck’s sake,” Jules mutters under her breath, her bedtime routine now ruined by Adam’s arrival at just the wrong time. He always does this.
She marches out of the room ahead of Nelly, brushing past Adam on the stairs. “They’re all yours,” she says huffily.
Flabbergasted, I piggyback inside Jules as she heads to the kitchen and yanks open the fridge, pouring herself a hefty glass of wine, which she chugs down, almost in one, before pouring another, hoping Adam won’t notice and comment about her increasing wine consumption, as he sometimes does.
Not that he’s got a leg to stand on. She knows him well enough to guess he’s already three pints down.