The Book of Love Read online

  ‘You were so brave,’ Dom whispered. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

  Erin wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure if their child was yet beautiful but was quite sure that one day she would be. She wasn’t sure if she’d been brave or obstinate and wondered if there would be enough dissolvable thread in the ward, in the world, to stitch both halves of her back together again.

  She was sure of the clear vision she had of Dom as Daddy with his little girl riding her bike without stabilisers for the first time. She was sure of his voice acting out the characters during many bedtime stories. She was sure of the surge of love she felt for this tiny human being who had claimed her body for so long. It was more powerful than any pain she’d endured, more powerful than any pregnancy magazines had reported. ‘Hello, little one,’ she said. ‘Welcome.’

  And Erin Carter was in love for only the second time in her life.

  When she woke, she woke to every part of her hurting. She woke to a stomach so bulging that she wondered if she’d dreamt the whole thing, or if the medical staff had left another baby behind. Dom was sitting in the chair next to her bed, feeding the child from a tiny bottle. Erin felt a pulling ache in her breasts. She willed herself to sit up, to say no, that she wanted to feel her baby latch onto her nipple, but the words wouldn’t form.

  Dom reached across to her. ‘Sleep, my love, you’re exhausted.’ He stood, holding their baby daughter in one arm and stroking Erin’s forehead with the other hand. She felt the rhythmic swipe of his hand on her brow; hypnotic. Seized by a sudden panic, she whispered his name. ‘Dom …’

  ‘You need to rest, love. Your blood pressure’s low.’

  Erin’s breathing only levelled when she reached out and touched their child.

  ‘I’ve got this,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Erin didn’t tell her eyes to close, but they did and underneath her eyelids, she told herself there would be plenty of time for her to feed her baby. There would be time enough to feel her suckle and to nourish her from her swollen milk ducts. For now, all Erin could feel was a flame like heat surging through the bottom half of her body and for the first time since her waters had broken she thought of herself.

  Something was wrong.

  You’re not going to die.

  But something was wrong.

  There’s nothing wrong. Sleep. And stop thinking bad thoughts. You have someone else to think about now.

  ‘You do.’ From nowhere, her own mother’s voice punctured her thoughts. ‘You’re a Mummy now. I’m so sad I can’t be with you.’

  Something’s wrong.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Erin.’

  In her mind, she saw her mother smile, from where she stood just beyond Dom and their baby. She was wearing her favourite dungarees and a colourful scarf rested on her shoulders over a white shirt. Erin’s heartbeat quickened. ‘Relax, she’s fine,’ her mum reassured her. ‘You are going to be a wonderful mother but for now, you need to rest. Dom’s got this.’

  Since opening her eyes, Erin had been resisting the slide back into sleep, fearful she’d never wake up.

  Relax. Dom’s got this.

  And as she fought sleep and worry and joy and pain, tears slid from her heavy eyelids because today of all days she really wanted her mother with her.

  Forty-eight hours later, two days of antibiotics inside her to deal with a postpartum infection, Erin was showered and about to dress when Dom appeared at the end of the bed, his head poking around the curtain. Their daughter slept peacefully, swaddled in a bright lemon woollen blanket.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous.’ Dom came in and leant into the clear hospital cot to kiss their child.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, hugging her gently.

  ‘The nurses fed her in the night so I’m not too bad. I managed a feed yesterday evening and first thing today and we did alright. We need to choose a name,’ she kept her voice low as she pulled on a T-shirt over her maternity bra. ‘And stop ogling my boobs,’ she grinned at her husband.

  ‘I can’t help myself. They’re like one of the wonders of the world.’

  ‘For now, they’re Rachel’s,’ she nodded towards their baby.

  ‘You mean Maisie’s,’ he replied, both hands on his hips. ‘And we should teach her to share from the get-go. Don’t you think Maisie suits her face?’

  Erin smiled. ‘What about Rachel, with Maisie as the middle name?’

  ‘Or just Maisie,’ he grinned. ‘Look there’s something—’

  ‘What?’ Erin’s hand rooted in the bag for some underwear she’d packed right at the bottom, but her hand landed on the thong from the day she’d arrived.

  ‘I know you’re exhausted and I promise it won’t be for long.’

  She frowned, turned her eyes on her husband, sensing what was coming immediately.

  ‘She’s their first grandchild. They haven’t wanted to intrude so far and just want a quick peek, so they’re going to pop in for ten minutes when we get home.

  Erin flopped onto the bed, sighed loudly before placing the thong on her head.

  Dom narrowed his eyes and she sensed him watching as she put on a pair of bigger knickers and bent down to pull the leggings back up her body. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ she said grabbing hold of her middle and jiggling it. ‘I packed my jeans in the bag. A little optimistic, I now realise.’

  ‘You did hear me saying Mum and Dad are popping in?’

  Erin locked eyes with him. ‘I heard you. Ten minutes.’

  ‘That’s all. You do know you have a thong on your head?’ he asked as he sat beside her.

  ‘I do.’ She pulled it down around her neck. ‘I’ll wear it as a necklace until it fits my huge ass again.’ She rested her head on his shoulder and together they stared at their baby.

  ‘You think she’ll always be this quiet?’ he tucked a corner of the blanket that had loosened into its fold.

  ‘In your dreams … She just likes to be swaddled.’

  Dom smiled, and she stared up at him. ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘You know this already,’ he said. ‘Swaddling stuff. You are going to be brilliant.’

  ‘Flattery … I’m still wearing a thong around my neck when your mother calls.’

  Dom laughed, stood and pulled her upright. ‘She either won’t notice, or she won’t say a word. Overnight you’ve been elevated to superstar. No pain relief except gas and air, a healthy eight-and-a-half-pound baby girl. According to Dad, Mum’s knitting needles have been clacking all night – all pink wool, of course.’

  Erin grimaced. She couldn’t imagine Sophie wanting to do anything for her with a knitting needle other than stab her through the heart, but she nodded obligingly, willing to, once again, give her mother-in-law the benefit of the doubt for the sake of her husband.

  ‘I’ll just go and check they’re ready to let you out of here.’ Dom was beyond the curtain before she could tell him she already knew the paperwork had been signed off. They were waiting for her to go. There was likely another woman already screaming in the labour ward who’d need her bed. Erin laid another blanket from her bag on the bed; multi-coloured, made up of small crochet squares – something her own mother had made for her. She had washed it carefully in soft soap, and now halved the square blanket into a triangle.

  Gently she lifted the baby from the cot and placed her in the centre, pulling each corner across her tiny body, thinking Dom was right, she did look like a ‘Maisie’. The child stirred in her sleep, wrinkled her nose and Erin held her breath for a moment before raising her to her chest. She inhaled the heady scent from her dark brown, downy, hair.

  You can do this.

  ‘Everything’s good to go.’ Dom swished the curtain aside. ‘All the paperwork’s been done. You alright, got everything?’ he asked.

  You can do this. Mum’s not here but with Dom by your side, you can do this.

  ‘Everything that matters.’ Erin breathed deep and kissed Maisie’s head.

  4. Dominic
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  NOW – 3rd June 2017

  From The Book of Love:

  ‘I love you because you put a triangle of Toblerone in my suit pocket.’

  ‘You know the expression “a New York minute”? It’s like the shortest measure of time ever but still so much can change within it? Well, that’s what it was like. Forget Cupid and his arrows – I was harpooned by Erin Fitzgerald!’ My eyes narrow. ‘Are you listening to me?’ I’m pointing a finger at a toy elephant. ‘She was dancing,’ I explain, ‘a hippy thing where her body just swayed, and she reminded me of a tree – tall with long, coppery hair, longer limbs, slender fingers.’

  It’s raining outside, gloomy, relentless rain that started late morning and would have any June bride weeping. Our own trees in the back garden, two majestic oaks, a white blossomed japonicus, and a scattering of silver birches are clinging onto their leaves and blooms as the deluge pounds. I’m killing time before Lydia’s party talking to Maisie’s favourite toy, a threadbare, one-eared grey thing that still sits regally on one of the armchairs – I’ve never really understood why.

  ‘Anyway, there she was, this autumnal sycamore rooted firmly in the middle of the old swirly carpet, and all I could think of was what it might be like to feel those fingers rake through my hair or grip my back.’

  I stare at the elephant. ‘I’m boring you …’ My head shakes and I refuse to see this scene as it is. A middle-aged shadow of the man I used to be speaking to a stuffed toy about how he met his wife.

  ‘I called her “Tree-Girl” …’ The elephant is tilting to one side and I straighten him up. ‘And she was Lydia’s new flatmate, so I suppose it’s down to her that we ever met?’

  The beat of the rain makes me think of my sister’s disappointment today when her birthday barbecue has to shift indoors.

  ‘Erin made me a coffee and we ate chocolate from the fridge.’ I’m addressing Elephant again. ‘Toblerone. Hers. But my absolute favourite.’

  My sigh is long. ‘Neither of us ever believed in that love-at-first-sight crap, but …’ I glance behind me. The neon clock on the wall says two more hours until I can leave for the party.

  ‘But,’ I reach for the elephant and slump into the sofa. ‘The thing is, that was then, and this is now.’

  The elephant’s grey glass eyes look up at me from above his curled trunk and dirty tusks and for a New York minute, I think he understands.

  ‘In between we were happy, really happy. Sure, there were times …’ I hesitate, unwilling to confess my part in bad times, even to a soft toy. My eyes land on the leather book sitting on the coffee table in front of me. I never did put it back in the drawer. ‘And even through the shit, we loved each other, you know? And our children couldn’t have asked for a better mother. Honestly, she …’

  The grey eyes seem to stretch, and I reply to the imaginary unasked question. ‘Me? Yes, I’ve been a good dad too. I think they’d both say that. They should be there tonight,’ I add. ‘Yes, I’ll probably see them there tonight.’

  Two more hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. I seem to spend my time waiting for time to pass. Maybe I should just count to seven thousand two hundred.

  ‘Erin always had this thing,’ I’m still addressing the elephant but am mesmerised by the swaying trees outside, ‘she had a thing that I thought she’d trapped me.’ I laugh out loud. ‘Mum thought that for sure, but the idea never crossed my mind. Pregnant or not, all I wanted was to be with her. I think she got it – eventually …’

  Elephant has fallen over. ‘She wasn’t always easy, you know. Back then she worried all of the time. God, she could sweat the small stuff, but managed to hide it well. I suppose we all have our disguises.’ I place him upright again. ‘What I’m trying to say is the good bits far outweighed the bad.’

  I lay my head back on the sofa, try to ignore the fact that I’ve spent the last ten minutes – six hundred seconds – talking to an inanimate object. My eyelids lower.

  In my sleep, I dream. I dream about Erin on our wedding day. I dream of Maisie. And I dream about elephants in the room.

  5. Erin

  THEN – January 1998

  Erin drove … She drove faster than the legal speed limit told her she could, the needle on the dashboard sliding past eighty. It was only Maisie’s waking cry from her seat in the back that made her take her foot off the gas.

  ‘Sssh, darling.’ She reached behind and finding the baby’s lower leg, stroked it. ‘Nearly there, sweetheart.’

  Maisie, the happiest child since the moment she first drew breath, gurgled a giddy response.

  Erin angled the rear-view mirror and sang a nursery rhyme from her own childhood, something about Miss Polly having a dolly who was sick. Indicating off the M3, she smiled at the irony. Sick. Poor Dolly. Poor Erin.

  In the narrow street outside the home she’d been raised in, Erin parked behind her father’s car. Fitz’s Toyota, with its thin layer of overnight frost still in place on the windscreen, seemed as old as him and she struggled to remember a time when he’d had another car. A mechanic by trade, at fifty-seven Fitz still worked full time and maintained that car engines were like human hearts. They needed looking after; loving, nurturing and occasional tuning. The front door to the house was open before her hand was off the wheel. Her father was opening the rear door cooing at the baby and removing her from her seat before Erin even had time to say hello.

  ‘You can go now,’ Fitz said as he walked off with his grandchild. Erin swung the baby bag over her shoulder, locked the car door and as soon as she saw her father’s hand reach back for her, she grabbed it, grateful.

  ‘Joking, of course. It’s always great to see my baby girl,’ he said. ‘Seeing her baby girl too is a bonus. Have you eaten?’

  Erin nodded, her eyes cast downwards, sure that if she looked up she’d be caught in her lie. She’d fed Maisie. That was all that mattered. The thought of food today made her want to vomit.

  They sat in the small kitchen at the rear of the house. Gone was the shiny pine table she and Rob had sat at for family meals and homework. Whoever had purchased it from the charity shop her father had donated it to would have had to sand away its wounds – some pen or felt-tip messages etched in the wood, her name where she had stabbed it for posterity with the point of her compass, the large dent that the frozen turkey had made one Christmas when her mother had dropped it. In its place was a strange-looking desk-like thing with the longer side placed up against the wall. Two odd chairs, one with stuffing oozing through a small hole, were parked at each end. There’s nothing worse, her father had once told her, than eating alone at a big table. Erin took the nearest chair and sat rocking Maisie on her lap.

  ‘Tea,’ Fitz announced, filling the kettle.

  She breathed in the familiar room with its wallpaper of patterned tiles, each ‘tile’ with a different vegetable image. In the corner, a box containing stacks of What Car? magazines stood waiting to either be read again or passed on to someone who might want them. Beside it sat a smaller carton spilling with paperchains and tired tinsel. Relieved to be among her father’s chaos, she took a deep sigh – she was there – safe and sound.

  ‘You heard from Rob this week?’ she asked Fitz.

  ‘He called last night. Everything is going really well.’

  It wasn’t what Erin wanted to hear. Her only brother leaving to live in New York to work for an American bank had come as a shock the previous Christmas. She still wasn’t sure if she’d forgiven him. Maisie, with one fist in her mouth, gnawing at her skin with her cutting teeth, tried to grab at anything in reach on the table with the other hand. Erin’s eyes were drawn to the centre, where a well-thumbed notebook sat. Curious, she leaned forward, holding both Maisie’s hands to limit her reach.

  ‘Ah-a, don’t you touch either,’ Fitz called over. ‘That’s there for explanatory reasons. For my eyes only.’

  Erin nodded as if she understood, but she didn’t. She wiped her brow, thinking she should be at home tacklin
g the never-ending list of things to do. The washing pile would talk to her if it could. Who knew a baby could create so much laundry? Who knew that looking after one small person could fill her day like it did, exhaust her like it did? Yet there she was, watching Fitz pour two mugs of stewed tea from a pot, exhausted.

  ‘Right,’ Fitz sat opposite. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘My mother-in-law is a lunatic,’ she said.

  ‘No. No, she’s not.’ Fitz laughed.

  ‘You’re right but she hates me.’

  ‘Well, that’s a different thing altogether. And I thought things had settled with her since Maisie was born?’

  ‘They have, but … She adores Maisie, adores Dom but she’s still a bit off with me.’

  ‘Having met Sophie, I think she’d be like that with anyone she sees as taking her son away from her. Or maybe it’s because she had to wait such a long time for children – how old was she when she had Dom, forty? And she sees you, Miss Fertile, pregnant and married in months.’

  Erin flushed, rubbed her neck with her hand. ‘I just need to find a way to talk to Dom about stuff. It’s one of the reasons I came to see you.’

  Her father’s forehead creased.

  ‘For example, he’s gambling,’ she blurted. ‘Only small stuff but he doesn’t tell me.’

  ‘Gambling?’

  Erin thought Fitz looked as if he had a sudden headache brewing. ‘Poker games with his mates and bets in bookies, mostly. Stupid arse leaves the stubs in his trousers. It’s just a worry.’

  ‘Have you asked him about it?’

  ‘He waffles.’ She hesitated. ‘I suppose some might call it lies.’

  Fitz sighed, sat back in his chair.

  ‘Then again, I don’t tell the truth when he asks me if I’m alright, whether I’m coping, when he senses I might not be. I don’t tell him when my stomach coils in on itself. Seems that despite the fact we love the bones of one another and laugh together every single day, we both have stuff we … we just don’t seem willing or able to talk about.’