Page 41 of Stella is Starting Over

I press my nails into my fists. ‘Gavin, come on.’

‘Look, she’ll be fine with me, and my mum’s here. You just said she’s fine.’

‘She is fine,’ I say, trying to sound bright and cheerful. ‘But I don’t know if she’s going to get worse again and I’d really like to be with her, just in case.’

‘That’s not how it works,’ Gavin says, in a surprisingly gentle voice. ‘Stel, she’s mine too.’

She’s not his too, though. She’s mine, almost entirely mine, with the tiniest side order of being his. She’s my business and he invested a couple of grand to get it off the ground. He’s a committed viewer, he’s. . . I can’t think of any more metaphors, but she is not, not, not his.

‘Look, I don’t want to be heavy about this,’ he says. ‘But maybe we need a. . . more, I don’t know. Formal, legal arrangement.’

I feel like I might be sick now. ‘No,’ I say weakly. ‘No, it’s fine. Come over as planned. We’ll stick to what we agreed.’ We hang up.

My phone buzzes a minute later, while I’m wiping Rose up and putting her on the playmat. For a second I think Gavin might have had a change of heart and agreed to skip the visit. But it’s not Gavin. It’s Richard. Much looking forward to dinner tonight – I’ve been remiss in asking whether you have any dietary requirements for dinner?

Shit. Richard.

In the end I conclude that I have to have dinner with Richard. I mean I don’t have to, I could cancel, but then I’d be sitting at home while Rose is with Gavin, totally alone, thinking about how he might leave a plastic bag in reach of her crib and she could suffocate. I don’t want to go for dinner with Richard, but I also really don’t want to be in the house alone.

I take a dim view of mushrooms, I reply. And Marmite.

No Marmite mushrooms, he replies. Car for seven o’clock?

I want to tell him that this car-sending is expensive and indulgent and bad for the environment, but the idea of having to get on the Tube is deeply unappealing. And besides, I’m going to need to take a load of stuff with me because, presumably, dinner means sex.

I put Rose down for her late-afternoon nap and then watch her sleep for a while before creeping out of her bedroom, yanking the volume up on the baby monitor, then turning on the shower. I strain to hear the faintest noise from her bedroom while I drag a razor over basically the entire surface of my body from below the eyelashes. I pause when I get to my pubes, foaming up a load of shower gel and then washing my vag multiple times.

Gavin appears, a mere ten minutes late. I hold Rose on my hip while I carry all her bags to the front door.

‘I can help,’ he offers, weakly.

‘No, thanks,’ I say. ‘I’m used to doing things one-handed.’

There’s a pause. ‘You look nice,’ he says eventually.

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you going out?’

‘Yes,’ I reply.

‘Oh, nice. Great. Anywhere fun?’

‘Dinner,’ I force myself to respond.

‘With the girls?’ he asks, still standing on the doorstep and apparently not reading anything into the fact that I haven’t invited him in.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not with the girls.’

He seems to be processing this. ‘Right. Well. That’s great. Good for you.’

I don’t respond, so he picks up Rose’s biggest bag. ‘Thanks so much for getting everything ready,’ he says, as if I don’t pack up half her belongings for him every time she goes to stay.

‘That’s fine,’ I say, through gritted teeth.

‘I’m going to bring her back on the dot of seven-thirty tomorrow morning,’ he says, as if he’s being kind. ‘I promise.’

I can’t summon anything, so I kiss Rose and then watch them leave. Then I grab a bottle of £11.99 wine from the fridge, shove it into my overnight bag and get into the Addison Lee, which has been waiting outside for half an hour.