False Advertising by Dianne Blacklock Read Free Book Online Page A

believed even David would have softened under the circumstances and she went ahead and bought Noah three figures and the DVD. The look on his face as he opened them was enough to convince Helen she had done the right thing.
    Jim and Noreen were invited for lunch in an attempt to makeit a little more festive, but as soon as Noah was absorbed playing with the presents they’d brought him, Jim took Helen aside. They were prepared to look after Noah, he told her, so Helen could go back to work and things could get back to ‘normal’. She’d had enough time off, he declared; she needed to get out of the house, to have something to occupy her. Helen wanted to tell him she had plenty to occupy her. There were lots more surfaces to wipe for one thing; hadn’t they ever read the label on the back of the Spray’n’Wipe bottle?
    The thing Jim should have realised, the thing she shouldn’t have had to explain, was that she cleaned solely for the reason that it gave her something to do during those long, dire hours after Noah was tucked up in bed. There was no one singing out, ‘Put the kettle on while you’re up’; no one to split an after-hours, adults-only chocolate bar with, before hiding the wrapper so Noah wouldn’t discover it in the morning; no one to commiserate with about the abysmal shows on TV while they sat and watched them anyway. There was no one simply to pass the time with.
    So Helen cleaned till midnight, and often much later, because she couldn’t go to bed until she was completely exhausted. If she wasn’t completely exhausted she’d just lie there, staring at David’s pillow, still in the same pillowcase because she couldn’t bring herself to change it, her mind drifting to an image of him, stepping off that kerb, probably daydreaming so he didn’t see the bus coming, didn’t even look. It made her so angry that if he were here she’d want to shake him and tell him what his momentary lapse of concentration had done to their lives.
    And then she hated herself for being angry with him, and hugged his pillow and cried herself to sleep.
    It was better to stay up late cleaning.
    She couldn’t explain it to Jim and Noreen. They had trouble enough understanding why she couldn’t go back to work, yet it was obviously untenable. Nursing meant shifts around the clock, and she had no intention of leaving Noah for whole nights and days with his grandparents. She had no intention of leaving Noah, full stop. Except for preschool, where she hovered long after the other parents had left, and was first back in the afternoon tocollect him. She couldn’t help it: she was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that something was going to happen to him. After all, it was becoming increasingly evident that something bad seemed to happen to everyone Helen cared about. She woke some nights with her heart pounding in her chest, the image of a bus still vivid in her mind’s eye, bearing down on Noah, standing alone, his eyes huge and wide and terrified. Sometimes David was holding him, sometimes Helen was running towards them, but she never made it to them in time. Sometimes Noah was sitting beside her as she drove the bus straight at David, which made her break into a sweat, jumping out of bed and pacing, breathing hard, till there was nothing she could do but go and find the bottle of Spray’n’Wipe and get to work.
    She wasn’t going mad, and despite Jim’s constant nagging she didn’t need a counsellor to tell her that this was not perhaps the most constructive expression of grief and that she had to learn to trust that nothing bad was going to happen to Noah. No. She just needed to be with him at all times to make sure. What harm was there in that? She would get over it in time, and then she could think about going back to work. Not before.
    â€˜And how are you going to live?’ Jim wanted to know, as though he had a