Marian Keyes - Watermelon Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn't understand how he could leave this beautiful, perfect little child.

    She cried a lot.

    But I can't really complain because so did I.

    I tried and tried to comfort her, but she rarely stopped.

    After she cried for about eight hours solid on the first day and I had changed her diaper a hundred and twenty times and fed her forty-nine thousand times I became slightly hysterical and demanded that a doctor look at her.

    "There must be something terribly wrong with her," I declared to the exhausted-looking youth who was the doctor. "She can't possibly be hungry, but she won't stop crying."

    "Well, I've examined her and there's absolutely nothing wrong with her, so far as I can see," he patiently explained.

    "But why is she crying?"

    "Because she's a baby," he said. "It's what they do."

    He'd studied medicine for seven years and that was the best he could come up with?

    I wasn't convinced.

    Maybe she was crying because she somehow sensed that her dad had abandoned her.

    Or maybe--major pang of guilt--she was crying because I wasn't breast- feeding her. Maybe she deeply resented being fed from a bottle. Yes, I know, you're probably outraged that I didn't breast-feed her. You probably think that I wasn't a proper mother. But, long ago, before I had my baby, I had

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    thought it would be permissible to have my body returned to me after I had loaned it out for nine months. I knew that I wouldn't be able to call my soul my own now that I was a mother. But I had kind of hoped that I might be able to call my nipples my own. And I'm ashamed to say that I was afraid that, if I breast-fed, I would be a victim of "shrunken, flat, droopy tit" syndrome.

    Now that I was with my gorgeous, perfect child my breast-feeding worries seemed petty and selfish. Everything really does change when you give birth. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd put anyone else's needs before the attractiveness of my tits.

    So if my little sweetheart didn't stop crying soon, I was going to consider breast-feeding her. If it made her happy, I'd put up with cracked nipples, leaky tits and sniggering thirteen-year-old boys trying to get a look at my jugs on the bus.

    Judy, baby and I arrived home. I let us into our apartment and, even though James had told me he was moving out, I still wasn't prepared for the bare spaces in the bathroom, the empty wardrobe, the gaps in the bookshelf.

    It was so awful.

    I sat down slowly on our bed. The pillow still smelled like him. And I missed him so much.

    "I can't believe it," I sobbed to Judy. "He's really gone."

    My baby started to cry also, as if she felt the emptiness too.

    And it was only about five minutes since she'd last stopped.

    Poor Judy looked helpless. She didn't know which one of us to comfort.

    After a while I stopped crying and slowly turned my tear-streaked face to Judy. I felt exhausted with grief.

    "Come on," I said. "I'd better pack."

    "Fine," she whispered, still rocking me and the baby in her arms.

    I started throwing things into a baby bag. I packed everything I thought I would need. I was all set to bring a pile of disposable diapers the size of a small South American country, but Judy made me leave them behind. "They do sell them in Dublin too," she gently reminded me. I flung in baby bottles,

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    a bottle warmer with a picture of a cow jumping over the moon on the side of it, pacifiers, toys, rattles, little socks the size of postage stamps, everything I could possibly think of for my poor fatherless child.

    As I was now a single parent I was obviously overcompensating. "I'm sorry, darling, I've deprived you of your father because I wasn't smart or beautiful enough to hold on to him, but let me make it up to you by showering you with material goods."

    Then I asked Judy to give me back a couple of diapers.

    "What for?" she demanded, holding them tightly to her.

    "In case we have an accident on the plane," I said, trying to grab them from