Dead Lovely Read Online Free PDF Page B

Robbie with a fresh face. Afterwards, she would take him to the park and they would feed crusts to the ducks and play with crunchy red autumn leaves and laugh.
    Shopping was not a success. Krissie had a new body and did not know what to do with it. She collected size tens from the racks in H&M fullyexpecting that most of them would look good, only to find that three of the trousers did not make it past her thighs. She wondered why the hell her thighs had changed shape – the foetus had been nowhere near them.
    Krissie returned to her parent’s house in Kenil-worth Avenue at three that afternoon, determined to implement her good-mother strategy. She packed Robbie into her car and drove to the park. When she got there, Robbie had fallen asleep, but she took him out of his seat and put him in his buggy because that was the plan. She walked a still-sleeping Robbie to the duck pond and threw two bits of bread in the water, which sank. After taking a photo of Robbie sleeping in the buggy with her mobile phone she walked through a soggy scattering of yellow leaves. Then she walked back to the car, put Robbie back in, which woke him up, and drove home to her flat.
    Robbie cried all the way.
    As soon as Krissie got inside, she poured herself a red wine. A clean nappy for Robbie came next.
    Krissie had a sip of her wine and put Robbie into his high chair. She then sat down at the table beside him, drank the rest of the glass, looked at him and put her head on the table in exasperation at herself, her inability to cope, her abject parenting skills.
    Then she felt something on her outstretched hands. She lifted her head and saw that Robbie had grabbed her fingers and was holding onto themtightly. He was looking her in the eye and laughing. The two things were connected – the hand-holding and the laughter. He was talking to her, telling her that he liked her, and asking her to hold his hand.
    But she didn’t hold his hand. She poured herself another glass of wine.
    After the fourth glass, she put the empty bottle under the sink and realised with horror that there were at least a dozen empty bottles there. She told herself that these had taken a long time to accumulate and that it only looked bad because she was saving a bootful for the bottle bins near Asda.
    Then Krissie put Robbie to bed. It wasn’t like in the movies, Krissie thought to herself, when parents kiss a forehead, turn off a light, stand dotingly at the door and then walk away. Putting Robbie to bed was more like storming the shores at Gallipoli: scary and futile.
    She had tried the antenatal mums’ consensus of strict routine: food, stimulation – but not too much, bath, bed. It didn’t work. She’d tried depriving him of sleep during the day. Nup. Tried sleeping with him. (It worked but she made the mistake of telling Fraser’s mum who said: ‘NO! He will die if you keep doing that. Didn’t you hear about the baby who suffocated!’) So Krissie turned to her latest hardback childcare purchase, Controlled Crying, which told her to reassure him, leave him to cry, then return at increasing intervals throughout the evening. ‘Afterone week, your baby will sleep through!’ the book had promised.
    This was day six, and Krissie very much suspected that she might need to ask for her money back. She had left Robbie for two minutes, returned to reassure, then four, returned, then eight, returned, sixteen, returned, and here she was, retreating from the darkened room for the fifth time like a burglar, praying that Robbie would not notice that his mother was decreasing in size and then disappearing out the door for thirty minutes this time.
    ‘Go somewhere far away,’ the book had advised. ‘And be strong!’
    Until now, Krissie hadn’t been able to, but today was the first day of her new life as a resolute, capable, loving, boundary-setting mother, so she was determined.
    Outside the bedroom, Krissie heard music coming from downstairs. She hadn’t heard the boys