Only this felt very reminiscent of my first day in sixth form when absolutely everyone else had Doc Martens and I was wearing Converse and I never, ever lived it down.
Things are different now, Angela, I thought to myself. You’re a married woman. Living in New York. You’ve got a cool job in the media, loads of interesting friends and an actual baby. You are a parent. If you can heave a living being out of your vagina and make it home from the hospital in time to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, you can certainly make it through your first day back at work.
I smiled, settling on a desk right by a window that looked out over Lower Manhattan. There, wasn’t so hard, was it? And besides, it wasn’t the first time I’d thrown myself head first into a situation with no idea what I was doing and I’d always survived before. Just barely on occasion but I’d always figured it out, one way or another.
‘This is going to be brilliant,’ I said out loud to the city below. ‘Just you wait and see.’
‘I’m home, I’m home,’ I wailed as I barrelled through the door, closing it firmly on a day I was keen to leave behind me. ‘Sorry, I totally lost track of time and the subway ran local and I had to stop to buy wine and tell me she’s not asleep already.’
Dropping my satchel on the dresser by the door, I kicked off my boots and looked up to see the most gorgeous man to have ever lived, holding Alice Clark Reid, no hyphen, the best baby in existence, standing in front of me. Admittedly, there was a chance I was a little bit biased on both counts because they were both mine.
‘Hey,’ Alex whispered, handing over the milk-drunk bundle of soft, sleepy wonderment. I met his green eyes as I took my daughter’s weight and felt my day fall away. ‘She’s still kind of with us. I just gave her a bottle and we were just about to go to bed. How did it go?’
‘I’ve no idea what I’m doing, Cici is worse than she’s ever been, I forgot to lock the door of the privacy pod while I was pumping and so the entire office has already seen my tits and I dropped my phone in the toilet before I’d even got into the office,’ I replied, checking Alice still had all ten toes I’d left her with that morning. ‘Does she look bigger to you? She looks bigger to me.’ I rubbed my cheek against her fine baby hair.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She waited until you were gone this morning and, boom, she shot up half an inch. It was incredible.’
I flashed him a look but it was a look tempered with a smile. I already felt so guilty for leaving her and it was only one day. Christ, the next twenty-one years were just going to fly by, weren’t they?
‘Sounds like you made a good first impression. Did you say you brought us wine?’
‘Yes but Alice has to wait until she’s fifteen, just like Mummy did,’ I replied softly, tilting my head back for a kiss as I continued to stroke Alice’s hair. I still couldn’t quite believe I had made something quite so brilliant. Admittedly she was occasionally revolting, especially after we gave her avocado for the first time, but for the most part, she was incredible.
‘I can’t believe I married a teenage alcoholic,’ Alex said, grabbing the woodwork around the doorframe and stretching his long, lean body. ‘Let’s hope she takes after Daddy and doesn’t start drinking until she’s twenty-one.’
‘Yes, let’s hope she takes after Daddy and runs away to join a band and shag everything on the Eastern Seaboard for a straight decade,’ I muttered, covering Al’s tiny ears. ‘That’ll look good on her college applications.’
Before we met, it was fair to say my husband had sown an entire field full of wild oats but, against all laws of god and man, I really didn’t care. Alex was a vision. Tall and skinny with perfectly square shoulders that were made for vintage T-shirts, beaten-up leather jackets and holding onto when we kissed. His skin was so pale, it was practically luminous, and the contrast of his jet-black hair only made his green eyes shine even brighter. And if that wasn’t enough to get him laid, he had the uncanny ability to make absolutely everyone he met feel like they were the most important person on earth. Also he was a musician. In a band. In Brooklyn. That made money. Honestly, it would have been more worrying if he hadn’t spent a good decade putting it about.
‘Slut-shaming your own husband,’ Alex said with a dramatic sigh as he leaned against the doorframe. ‘Go put that baby to bed. I’m making dinner.’
‘I always knew you’d make an amazing wife one day,’ I called, doing as I was told and carrying Alice through to her bedroom. Was there anything more erotic than a man making you dinner when you were totally knackered? No, I thought not.
Our Park Slope apartment was easily my favourite place in the entire world. Bloomingdale’s, Shake Shack and that random bodega that stocked Jaffa Cakes on 12th Street all ran a close second but, like, home is where the heart is and – more importantly – it was full of the best people and all my snacks.
Our place wasn’t as swanky as Erin’s West Village townhouse or as cool as Jenny’s new Financial District loft but it was my home; all comfy sofas and soft rugs and prints and pictures and things that made me happy. And right in the heart of it all was Alice’s room, a.k.a. the nursery of dreams. Alex had painted it four times before we found the perfect shade of pale pink, something that was harder to find than you might think. Of all the hills to die on, the colour of my daughter’s bedroom had been a fight so many people had chosen to go to war over. Jenny wanted to paint it blue to defy the patriarchy, Delia said it should be green to stimulate intellectual development, and my mother, despite saying she didn’t think it mattered one way or the other, had fourteen litres of Farrow & Ball ‘Middleton Pink’ shipped over from England in an attempt to instil some regal British backbone into her long-distance granddaughter. Unfortunately, when we got it on the walls, it looked a little bit like we’d dipped a brush into a bottle of calamine lotion that had gone bad in 1987 but, as far as Mum was concerned, Alice was absolutely sleeping in a nursery painted in a random shade of pink chosen by someone in marketing who wanted to make a quick buck off the royal family.
But far and away my favourite part of the nursery was Alice’s wardrobe. It turned out almost all designers made baby clothes. Teeny, tiny versions of their adult togs that were so much more affordable than their grown-up counterparts. There was no way I could spend three thousand dollars on a Gucci sweater for myself but two hundred dollars on a romper for the best-dressed baby in town? Um, yes. Al was already a sartorial masterpiece. Even though all she did was throw up on them. Actually, throwing up was best-case scenario. If I’d done what she did while decked out in head-to-toe Stella McCartney, I’d never have been able to look at myself in a mirror again.
‘But it’s OK when it’s you, isn’t it?’ I whispered, pulling back the sheets and laying her down gently. Crouching down at the side of the cot, I stared at her through the wooden bars of her tiny baby prison. Every night I wondered when I would get bored of this but it hadn’t happened yet. Al turned her head to look at me, fixing me with the same green eyes as her daddy. The spit of Alex, people said – his hair, his eyes, his full lips – but every so often, I could see a flash of myself in there. Usually when she was hungry or angry or both. Which made perfect sense, really.
‘So, do you think you’re going to sleep through tonight?’ I asked with the newfound optimism I’d discovered immediately after pushing eight pounds and six ounces of human being out of my body. Would she sleep through the night? Probably not! Would I keep hoping she might? Yes! For all eternity!
When she didn’t reply, just blinked her long lashes at me and gave a sleepy smile, I pulled the covers up over her little legs and thought of all the things I’d learned in the last year that had never even occurred to me before. Like baby pillows. I’d searched high and low. Looked in the shops, I’d checked online, I’d even turned to Etsy, but it turned out babies don’t have pillows, only a mattress. Who knew? And then it was the quilt. Some people said they