The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

the light. She sucks on the bottle, any squeamishness about drinking her own milk miles from her mind. It’s so sweet that she winces as if she’s accidentally drunk neat cordial.

Bobby lurches up and squeals out in anger at her. She shoves the bottle into his hands and he collapses down into her arms and drinks it down greedily.

The taste stays on her tongue, the tangy cloy she gets after drinking Coke, which she hasn’t done for years, but then that liquorice, medicinal taste. Like herbal cough mixture. The row of hessian bags filled with herbs and spices in Amanda’s studio flies into her head. Then she remembers Amanda in the kitchen this evening, while she and Raf were talking to Grace, squirrelling something away into her bag.

Erin grabs the bottom of the bottle and Bobby’s closed eyes jerk open, his hands grip it harder, feeling the tension of her hand. Erin wants to yank it away from him and throw it far away but she can’t have him go ballistic. Whatever it is Amanda’s putting in his bottle, it’s nothing that’s going to harm him, she feels sure of that. But Amanda has put something in her son’s bottle. She’s put something in Bobby’s milk, the milk Erin has sucked out of her by a machine like a dairy cow for forty-five minutes every morning, and not told a soul about it.

She wants to text Raf, to call him back to the house and tell him what she’s discovered, but she can’t. Not with how he left. It would seem desperate, a pathetic excuse to try and get him to overlook what she’s done.

She looks up at a small piece of rock on Bobby’s bookshelf that’s been there for nearly two weeks. It’s a circle, pinkish-white. One of Amanda’s crystals. Erin thought it was a nice gesture when she first saw that it had been placed in here. But now it feels like an invasion, a quiet colonisation of her baby’s space. She swallows a lump in her throat and listens to the regular sucking sound of her son getting to the end of the bottle. The milk, her tampered-with milk, mixing with air so it almost sounds like kissing, as his body becomes limp with sleep in her arms.

34

‘So it’s either deal with angry Houdini in the buggy, or two weeks of agonising hip pain after a morning babywearing. I’ve never seen Sophie’s Choice, but I have to assume that this is way worse.’ Erin stops recording herself. Bobby’s hammering at a toy xylophone as if he’s writing a symphony designed to give her a headache. She googles Sophie’s Choice. It’s about the Holocaust. She’d get slaughtered for that. She deletes the video.

Outside the clouds sit latent in the sky, the heaviness of the air threatens the drizzle that’s been off and on all morning. Erin’s spent the last few hours trying to create content in the house and she just can’t seem to get it right. It’s two days after the photos were posted and although her heartfelt response seems to have worked and the backlash against her has been fairly mild, now she’s been exposed as being a far less breezy and ‘chill’ mum than she’d previously portrayed, she’s overthinking her posts to the point of paralysis.

There are some mums that are popular for being no-holds barred in their parenting journeys. Who cry and confess into their smartphones, locked in the bathroom, while their babies scream outside – people like it, it’s relatable. But there’s no doubt that Erin’s sunny positivity has proved a runaway success in comparison to those. ‘There’s only so much “poor me” grim reality people can handle before they turn off,’ Grace had said to her once. And since Erin first got on any social media, in the frontier days of Facebook, she’s agreed with that axiom. When people would write a status update alluding to something bad that’s happened, a ‘Really tough day today’, ‘Feeling low’ or even an ‘FML’, when everyone else piled on to send messages of sympathy or support, Erin would always be conspicuous by her silence. She could never understand how it would help the person. She found it needy, a pose of vulnerability, of weakness affected to get people’s attention, even if that attention only manifested itself as pity. Her mum was a GP before she retired, very hard-working, very impressive considering she’d not come from an academic family. Her sister, Erin’s Auntie Claire, had been ill a lot as a child meaning their parents had lavished most of their time and affection on her. So Erin’s mum had learned to get attention by being impressive and that need not to reveal the weak parts of her character was drummed into Erin from an early age.

So this morning she’s been trying her best to be ‘authentic’, but failing miserably. In an authentic post she might be warning whichever cowardly shit is taking pictures not to fuck with her or her six-foot-three fiancé, it might feature her calling out Amanda’s gall putting some herbal tincture in her son’s milk, or it could feature her doing an Edvard Munch silent scream at her own stupidity at not telling Raf about the video. Because that’s mainly how she feels today. Furious with herself, frazzled by the barrage of destructive thoughts pluming in her head, and tired, on-the-edge tired.

The night of Grace’s visit she barely slept, trying to solve the thousand-piece jigsaw of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Raf stayed at the studio working that night, which hadn’t been uncommon with him before they had Bobby, but he hadn’t done it since. Then last night he came back long after she’d gone to bed and, although she sat waiting for him, he didn’t come up to her and left in the morning before she got up with Bobby. She’s had moments of being