surely produce a lump the size of a tennis ball was forming, but his eyes were alert and he was no longer crying. She’d just have to keep an eye on him for the rest of the day.
How had she allowed this to happen? Holding back tears for the sake of Toby – who to his credit had gone upstairs to dress without another word – she smiled at Noah and jiggled him around a little on her hip to calm him down. Now she just needed to calm herself down. Her heart was pounding so hard she was surprised it hadn’t come through her pyjamas, and she was shaking uncontrollably.
How she managed to get dressed and both of the children in the car she didn’t know, but she didn’t feel in any fit state to drive anywhere. Should she call Adam? Karen? Bea? Both women would be on their way to work now, and her mum couldn’t drive. Calling Adam would mean admitting to the Xanax, admitting that their children had been in the care of a zombie for days.
‘Mum, are you okay? We’re going to be late.’
Eleanor slid down the window and let the cool air hit her in the face. There was a refreshing autumn bite to the morning that made her feel more awake, more alive. She turned on the motor and put the car in gear. She was fine, she could do this – she’d driven the route a thousand times before.
‘No problem, dude, we’re on our way.’ She pulled away from the kerb, paying extra attention to the road, muttering instructions to herself to compensate for the fuzzy emptiness where her brain should be.
42
Bea
On her birthday last year, Eleanor had sent Bea a card that had a black and white picture of two women talking. ‘There’s this new machine at the gym,’ one was whispering. ‘It does everything. KitKats, Mars bars …’
That was pretty much how Bea felt about the gym. The vending machine was the only machine she had a meaningful relationship with, and yet still she was there, night after night, her mother’s words shoving her forward more effectively than any hand would.
‘Us Barker women have to watch what we eat, or we have to exercise, and I haven’t seen you do either lately. Unless you want to end up with thighs like Auntie Gemma, you need to stop these takeaways and junk food.’
But that hadn’t really been an option, given that Bea was the type of person to eat a Mars bar on the treadmill, so she’d upped her workouts to four times a week and had been pleased to notice a difference. Now she had less time to eat.
‘That’s just Mum’s way.’ Fran laughed when Bea told her what their mother had said. ‘You’re lucky you’re the baby. If I’d told her to bugger off like you did, I’d have been up shit creek and she’d be chasing me with the paddle.’
Bea grinned at the thought of her mum chasing her thirty-nine-year-old sister around the garden with a paddle. Fran was right, though: the house rules had relaxed somewhat by the time Bea had come along, or maybe it was that her mum had just been too busy to notice how many of them she was breaking. The disparity in their upbringing had been part of what had stopped them becoming close until they were old enough not to care any more. Bea had always felt that her mum showed more interest in Fran than in her, and Fran had complained tirelessly that her little sister was the golden child who could do no wrong. Nowadays, though, sibling rivalry had given way to the kind of friendship you only got from sharing bath times and meals every day for the first ten years of your life.
‘You know damn well Mum loves you more.’ Bea continued the age-old joke they’d both become accustomed to. ‘Otherwise why would I have been named after Nanny Beatrice when you get to be named after Nanny Frances? I could have totally rocked a Frankie. The cool name was wasted on you.’
‘Well if you’ve finished sweating, I was thinking maybe I could pop over. Rich and Lewis are at football, Maisy is at a friend’s and I don’t have anything better to do.’
‘Gee, thanks, Fran, how can I resist an offer like that?’
Talking to Fran these days was easy. Sometimes easier than talking to her friends. Bea wasn’t sure if it was her or them, but