Sleepless Nights Read Free Page B

if her teachers so much as asked her to come in for a seminar (“who the fuck do these people think they are?”). I actually resorted to working in a library. She failed everything, and didn’t give a damn; I just about scraped through, and wished I could do better.
    But a year after moving in, my course was finished, the last piece of course work submitted, when Q offered to pay for me to go out and help with the new baby. When I got back from New York, I determined, I would move out from Una’s hell-hole. I didn’t know where; I didn’t even know how I was going to afford to live anywhere else (the place was heavily subsidized by my flatmate’s surprisingly wealthy, almost invisible father). And I could only hope I’d done enough to get the degree, and that I’d actually be able to find a job. Social workers are both very much needed when the economy goes up in smoke, and horribly susceptible to “cuts.”
    I sat down on a long wooden bench, erected in loving memory of some much-beloved grandma, and got out my mobile phone to ring my middle sister. The brick buildings radiated back the day’swarmth, but there was a cool night breeze prickling my face. I waited three rings; there was a click, and the line opened up into my sister’s elegant white Pimlico villa. I could hear the discreet methodical ticking of the heirloom grandfather clock in the hallway. “What—?” She sounded half-asleep. “Oh, Jeanie, it’s you—”
    “Listen,” I breathed into the phone, “I had to tell you. I just had to. You’ve been right all along. I see it all now. Really. I’ve got to change…”
    3
    Q
    M y sister Alison—the one squeezed uncomfortably between Jeanie and me—became, in her early twenties, offensively elegant. Tall, but not too tall, she was slim but not bony, and her wardrobe spanned every shade from beige to taupe. She had flawless mid-length bronze nails, glossy mid-length hair, and inexorably mid-length hemlines. She married a minor aristocrat straight out of college, which surprised none of us. If my mother didn’t have a plausibly precise story of pregnancy and giving birth, Jeanie and I would assume a mischievous cuckoo placed her in our family of long-faced, big-boned women—just to show us up.
    “My darling, I’m just phoning to see how dear Samuel is doing,”Alison announced superbly one morning, a week or so after Caroline’s party. I was, at the time, trying to force a pick through a big clump of hair matted with something indescribable. (Some people have hair that inspires words like “shiny” and “sleek.” Unless I put half the contents of CVS on my head, my thick red frizz could reasonably accommodate a family of goslings.) “And I also wanted to see how you are coping with motherhood,” she went on, as an apparent afterthought. Of course, I saw her agenda immediately. “Thank you, Alison. Samuel is doing extremely well, as it happens, and I’ve taken to motherhood like a duck to water.” (Pace a little too quick, but in other ways quite good.) One tine of the pick snapped off in the goo; I opened my mouth to swear, but caught myself just in time.
    Pause. “Well, I’m very happy to hear that,” Alison replied crossly. “If there are any problems, dear, I hope you know you can always pick up the telephone and ask my advice. After all, I do have two children of my own. I’m a very experienced mother.”
    Alison was indeed the first in our family to procreate, and she never let any of us forget it. Serena and Geoffrey were the kind of children you longed to see covered in paint and mud tumbling backward through a hedge. As things stood, their hair seemed stuck to their little white foreheads, their matching outfits were pressed, their socks clung grimly to knees that seemed unnaturally scrubbed. I’d never seen them with so much as a bruise, and I’d certainly never heard either of them raise a voice—in Alison’s presence, that is. It was a different story when Mummy was