The Family Friend by C. MacDonald (love story novels in english txt) 📕

‘He’ll be due a feed,’ he says. ‘He’s done great on the bottles though.’

‘Great,’ Erin says, trying not to feel too aggrieved that Raf seems to have taken his day and a half of solo parenting in his stride while Erin knows how difficult she would have found it. She has Bobby every day during office hours and often during the day at weekends, but Raf’s never been out of the house overnight and she probably wouldn’t sleep a wink if he was. She knew Raf would be fine without her, he never gets het up about anything, but she wishes it didn’t seem like everything had gone quite so well in her absence. She takes Bobby over to the table and tells him in a doting baby voice, ‘Can’t be grabbing at ladies’ dresses, can we? We’re going to have to teach you about consent, aren’t we, Mr Handsy?’ Amanda makes a strange noise and Erin turns to see her catching a laugh in a clenched hand.

‘Sorry, you’re just so funny, Erin,’ she says, shaking her head, amazed. Erin affects a grin at Amanda’s compliment as she sits down and scrabbles for the app that tells her which breast she’s pumped from most recently. It was only just before she got on the train but she’s doesn’t trust her memory for such things at the moment.

‘Shit,’ she says before she can stop herself as she sees that she has more than 400 notifications to attend to on her Instagram.

‘You all right?’ Amanda plonks herself in the chair next to Erin as Bobby’s fingers pincer at her shirt.

‘Yeh,’ Erin says, ‘just, you know, stuff to do.’ She puts her phone face down on the table, squeezes each breast to see which is fullest before pulling her top up and shoving her baby towards her nipple. Amanda leans forward and watches more closely than seems appropriate, as Bobby latches onto Erin’s nipple like a cartoon vampire.

‘You must be so relieved,’ Amanda says.

‘What’s that?’ Erin voice catches, her spit tastes acrid. She needs her bottle of water from her bag.

‘It’s the first time you’ve left him?’ Erin nods. ‘Sometimes they can be a bit fussy, doctors call it nipple confusion but I think babies are cleverer than that. I think it’s their way of saying “I don’t want those toxic-chemical plastic bottles, I like my milk straight from the udder”, but he’s doing fine. Beautiful boy.’ She squeezes the pudge that sits above his elbow. Erin gives her a wary smile.

‘Could you get me my water, babe?’ she says to Raf.

‘I’ll go.’ Amanda hops up from her seat and heads over to the discarded bag by the door. Erin feels ambushed by this woman’s presence. She almost wishes Bobby would tussle away from her nipple, distracted by the light and the hubbub, so she could make her excuses and take him to his room to start tackling the Everest of Insta-messages she knows she’ll have to deal with into the night. She won’t be going on another phone-free weekend, she thinks to herself, regardless of which ex-model turned mixologist is making the cocktails.

‘Amanda,’ Raf says, as he plucks their plates up from the table, ‘had been emailing my old address for years, the stupid “phoneypony” one from back in the day.’

‘We used to be close,’ Amanda says, a sudden thinness to her voice.

‘From when we had to move up to the north for a bit,’ Raf offers from where he stands in the low lights of the kitchen. ‘I will have mentioned Amanda and her mum, Ez, when I gave you the director’s cut of my nomadic teenage years but there was quite a bit of data to take in, Mand, so don’t be offended if she’s forgotten.’

‘Yeh, a lot,’ Erin says, summoning a laugh.

‘Formative years though,’ Amanda says, handing Erin her bottle of water. When was it Raf moved north? Erin thinks. His dad was a doctor who worked at universities so they lived all over Australia, and although she knows the various places he lived, she’s never quite got a handle on when he was where. Amanda sweeps crumbs from the table into her hand and goes over to deposit them in the bin that she doesn’t have to ask Raf the location of. She wears a string of thick brown beads as a belt over her beige dress. With her bare feet and her hair falling in copper waves far beyond her shoulders, she reminds Erin of a goddess depicted on a ceramic pot.

‘Do you still live in Australia?’ Bobby comes on and off Erin’s nipple, pulling it painfully as he does. She rests her hand on the back of her phone, a ticker-tape machine running in her head as she thinks of all the things on there she’ll have to catch up on.

‘I do. I mean, I did. It’s – it’s actually this –’ she goes over to the far corner of the living room and indicates a painting with open hands as if presenting a magic trick – ‘that brought me here. Someone I worked for, she’s really into that social media stuff and she was showing me your Instagram and I saw this.’ Erin looks over Amanda’s shoulder at the painting. It’s a shrouded figure sitting among orange-red rocks with a vivid pink sky behind her. Erin’s never liked it, but Raf wanted it up, it added some colour to a dark recess of the room and, crucially, it didn’t cost them anything. ‘I recognised it from Raf’s dad’s house, used to be in the dining room?’

‘Mm-hum,’ Raf mumbles in affirmation. Erin glances over to him leaning against the kitchen work surface. She knows he’s had the painting for a while but she didn’t know it belonged to his dad and is a little surprised that he’d want something of his father’s up in their house. Perhaps even someone with an unhappy childhood wants little mementoes of it in their adult life. Amanda comes