‘And then you’d say, “I just need a wee”, and after a while I’d discover you’d fucked off back out the front door to your own house. It was like a drive-by babying.’
‘I was very tired, and we didn’t have a minder yet.’ Lindy laughed.
It was the kind of thing you could only do to family. You couldn’t benignly abandon a baby on even the closest friends without them freaking out. She’d just needed the occasional breather. Lindy was in love with the baby in that all-consuming, disorientating way, but she also worried constantly. Motherhood had felt to her like a new world had been revealed – a world of infinite love and infinite terror. Finn could always bring her back out of the anxiety spiral. Having Finn around made everything feel lighter, more fun and less on the verge of disaster. This was another thing that made Lindy uneasy about Monteray Valley. She would have no family nearby. No neighbours around that she’d known, however vaguely, all her life.
Lindy and Finn slowed as they reached the little black gate to Finn’s pebble-dashed house with the pink door. ‘Hiya, Mrs Caughlan!’ her sister called to her neighbour as she pulled out her keys. ‘I’ll come over and do the bins for you later.’
When Lindy, Finn and Séamus were growing up, Jean and Liam would dispatch them on a weekly basis to knock in to the older neighbours who lived alone to see if they wanted anything from the shops or had any jobs that needed to be done. It was the kind of thing Lindy’d tried to get Max doing, but it’s hard to trick your famous-on-the-internet son into helping out in return for pocket money. And Adam didn’t back her up at all – he just didn’t get it.
‘We didn’t have old folks in Indiana,’ he’d say with a shrug. ‘Once they hit sixty in the States, they’re shipped to Florida.’
Finn gave Lindy a hug. ‘You sure you won’t come in? We could have tea or more booze?’
‘Nah, I should go home. Booze’ll just make me maudlin.’
‘Linds, you’re already maudlin. I feel like you’ve been maudlin for ages. Just look at what you’re wearing. This is a cry for help!’
‘Shut up! It’s my uniform – I got a style consultant.’ Lindy hated being read so easily. ‘It was a load of wank. She asked me who the different “Lindys” were.’
‘What did you say? Hassled mother? School-run devotee? Soon-to-be suburbanite spiralling emotionally?’ Finn cocked a mocking brow but there was concern in her expression too.
‘I said one Lindy was a supposedly successful CEO who never has to leave her house. One Lindy dislikes waistbands, and one Lindy is an occasional parent–teacher association attendee slash hostage.’
‘And she prescribed bootcut jeans? It’s an act of violence. And maybe a sign that you’re down. Getting someone to dress you? This doesn’t feel like you.’
‘I’m just very under it with work. The Monteray deal is a huge amount of additional content to be planned and, ugh, I dunno, I guess I’m getting … notcoldfeet but chilly feet? It’s hard seeing our entire home being stripped and shipped off. I feel likeI’mbeing disassembled. I knew we’d have to move some time but not so fast. This house opportunity came up and I’d barely blinked before we signed. Adam’s now acting like our own house was thismillstone. Whenhewas the very one who carried me over the threshold when we went to the viewing. Adam told everyone there to take their pathetic offers elsewhere while I was still slung over his shoulder. He hit the estate agent’s face with my foot. It was pretty embarrassing.’
Lindy felt a pang at Early Lindy and Adam. There wasn’t much conspiratorial mischief between them nowadays. ‘Max was a baby in that house,’ she carried on. ‘I cleaned his puke out from between the floorboards with a toothbrush. His height is marked on the kitchen door frame.’ Lindy tried to keep a lid on her rising anguish. She was breaking all her own rules being this honest with Finn. Of everyone, Finn had been the least pro Lindy and Adam’s shotgun wedding and, as such, Lindy hated admitting when things were less than wonderful. ‘Look, I’d really better go. There’s still so much to pack.’
They hugged and Lindy hurried across the street and homeward.
Finn had been very vocal – too vocal – when Lindy had returned from Australia with a tan, Adam and an obsession with Tim Tams dipped in Vegemite that was not the affectation of a twenty-something backpacker but something much more serious …
‘Just because you’re pregnant, you don’t have to marry him, Linds. It’s not the fifties,’ she’d pleaded. ‘How did this happen?’
Another memory swept into Lindy’s mind. She was lying on Adam’s chest on the mattress in the back of the van, the rear doors were open to the still night, and the only sound was the distant crash of the sea. They’d just embarked on a road trip across Australia after the briefest of encounters in a Melbourne karaoke bar. The twenty-five-year-old Adam was explaining the hardships of being a nerd in an American high school.
‘Just like the movies, only worse.’
‘But you’re so ridey! Did that not count for something?’
‘You just think I’m hot compared to potato-faced Irish people.’
‘Adam, you will be stabbed in the face if you ever say that on Irish soil. I’ll be doing the stabbing.’
‘“I’ll be doooing the stahbbing.”’ He was already workshopping his extremely shite Irish accent. ‘I’m just fuckin’ with you. They’re not potato-faced. It’s more of a boiled-ham look.’
‘That’s cos you’re only meeting the Irish abroad right now. We’re not suited to being abroad. We don’t know how to handle ourselves in a dry heat. If you ever come to Ireland, you’ll see us in our natural environment – hair frizzing due to drizzle, souls destroyed by the infernal moistness.’
‘Yah,’ he’d drawled. ‘I geddit. So can I come to Ireland?’
‘Can you come to Eye-er-land? No. But you can come to Ireland, maybe. Some time.’
She hadsonot meant it at the time.
But Adam grows on a person. And then when a piss in a petrol-station loo miles from civilisation en route to Perth confirmed that a bit of Adam was now growinginher – well, it was a done deal.
And now, Lindy reminded herself as she turned left down the lane that led to Orchard Avenue, moving to Monteray Valley was a done deal.
