The Baby Diaries
The hilarious and heart-warming second in the series from the author of The Wedding Diaries."I'd be sick right now, but I never like to reinforce a cliché."A few weeks after Kiki and Thom return from honeymoon, Kiki finds there's a noticeable absence. An extremely serious noticeable absence of something, it turns out, Kiki now realises she was pretty glad about. One pregnancy test later, Kiki's breaking the "good news" (Thom: Wow. We're so… Edwardian.) and rewriting all the plans she'd made before.With an ever-expanding waistline, her nightmare childhood "friend" Annie pregnant too, all the problem authors at Polka Dot Books she could (not) wish for and an army of NW London's Smug Mothers to deal with, these nine months might not be the nine months of blooming relaxation she'd been promised…
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SAM BINNIE
The Baby Diaries
For M and F,
Singers in every weather
Table of Contents
Oh God, now the baby’s arrived and it’s in my house
Finally, my attempt to make this whole parenting thing easier on everyone
October 31st
Have you ever had that feeling you’ve forgotten something? Something nagging away at the back of your mind – until just the right movement in your memory triggers something else, which knocks another thing down, and like some Indiana Jones death trap, you can feel the clank-clunking of motion in the hidden rooms of your brain, gradually bringing the forgotten memory swinging like a battering ram into your conscious mind. You know that feeling?
That’s what I had yesterday.
I’ve been so busy since the wedding. Tony, my boss and head of Polka Dot Books (purveyors of fine supermarket fiction and glittery celeb books) was as good as his word with my promotion, promising me four new authors before disappearing off on a three-month ‘travelling sabbatical’ to God Knows Where, declaring he needed a break to ‘replenish his business strategies’. Of course, I was delighted that he’d kept his promise – even though that was more his mother Pamela’s doing – but soon realised why things had played out that way when I started trying to get details about them. Two were new, so their failure was liable to blow up in my face, one was an author I’d dealt with briefly and reluctantly and the final one I couldn’t get any details on at all.
Thom’s been settling into his new life as a trainee teacher: to no one’s surprise, he’s loving it. But as his enthusiasm has spilled over into our evenings, we’ve spent a great deal of time together marking papers – him, clunky essays on Wuthering Heights, me, swathes of mostly unreadable fiction: thirty-somethings who always dreamed of writing, aiming for Heathcliff and hitting Cliff Richard. So we’ve been dog tired, and when we’ve had time off we’ve been with my parents (with half an eye on my dad to check he was taking care of himself after his heart attack earlier this year), my nearly-new niece Frida, or our friends (those we hadn’t had to un-invite from the wedding). It was still great to be spending any time together where we weren’t arguing about money, or the importance of decorative accessories, or the social rules of such a complex endeavour as a wedding. But something kept nagging at me. Did we pay the register office? Had we thanked everyone? Was anyone still locked in the primary school reception venue? None of these nudged anything, although I worried at it like a tongue at a wobbly tooth. It would give eventually. And when it did, I just had to hope I didn’t have a huge apology to make to anyone.
Then, yesterday morning, Thom and I were comparing our weeks. Thom said he had me over a barrel, since I spent my time lunching authors and picking my favourite colour for a book jacket, while he was at the coal-face, earning every penny trying to hammer basic English in the heads of his students.
Me: You love it really.
Thom: I might love it, but I’m a hell of a lot more tired at the end of the day than I ever was making spreadsheets all day. Surprisingly.
Me: Can it really be that hard?
Thom: Kiki. I dare you to try dealing with a room full of hormonal teenagers.
That was it. Clink, clunk. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Click. Click. Ka-dunk.
BOOM.
I must have just frozen while my brain went into its noisy activity, because Thom stopped laughing at the mental image he’d conjured and looked at me, puzzled. ‘What’s up?’ he said.
I stood completely still, calculating over and over, mentally flicking through the pages of my pocket diary – dates, dates, dates. Dates. When I managed to reconnect my brain with my voice box, I just said, ‘I think we need to go to the chemist.’
Thom got it immediately. We rushed out, no coats, no scarves, into the freezing October afternoon, hurrying to the chemist around the corner. Outside, it felt like Before for a moment – we teased one another about who would go in and buy it, until I remembered what the whole thing was about, and my face collapsed. Thom went in while I read the notices in the window again and again. A Great Time To Give Up Smoking! the sign read. Or indeed, start, I thought. Then he was out, and we were hurrying home again, and I thought, Is this time included in the three minutes you have to count off? If I walk home slowly will I know the result immediately? Then we were home, and Thom was bustling me upstairs, and I went into the bathroom and locked the door. When I took the little test out of the box, the adrenaline was coursing through me and my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t read one word of the instructions.
