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Overview
The only thing Abi ever wanted was a proper family. So when she falls pregnant by an Australian exchange student in London, she cannot pack up her old life in Croydon fast enough, to start all over in Sydney and make her own family. It is not until she arrives, with three-week-old Jude in tow, that Abi realises Stu is not quite ready to be a father after all. And he is the only person she knows in this hot, dazzling, confusing city, where the job of making friends is turning out to be harder than she thought. That is, until she meets Phyllida, her wealthy, charming, imperious older neighbour, and they become almost like mother and daughter. If only Abi had not told Phil that teeny tiny small lie, the very first day they met…
Imagine the warmth of Monica McInerney, the excruciating awkwardness of Offspring and the wit of Liane Moriarty, all rolled into one delightful, warm, funny and totally endearing novel about families – the ones we have, and the ones we want – and the stories we tell ourselves about them.
'Rare and delightful ... a beautifully crafted novel about female relationships. I couldn't put this book down.' Clare Press, Fashion Editor-at-large, Marie Claire
'You Be Mother is the kind of book you pick up...and never want to put down ... you will fall in love with this book.' Lauren Sams, author of She's Having Her Baby
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780730495338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Sales rank: | 322,512 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Meg Mason began her career at the Financial Times and The Times of London. Her work has since appeared in The Sunday Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written humour for Sunday STYLE, The New Yorker's Daily Shouts and a monthly column for GQ and been a regular contributor to Vogue, ELLE and marie claire.
Her first novel You Be Mother (HarperCollins) was published in 2017. Her second, Sorrow and Bliss (HarperCollins) was first published in Australia in 2020, and the US and UK in 2021. The actress Emilia Fox narrated the audiobook. Now a bestseller in Australia, it has now sold in more than 20 countries and will be published in 16 languages. It has been longlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction book of the year, chosen as the GOOP book club read in March 2021, and been optioned for screen by the US studio, New Regency, producer of Oscar-winning films including Little Women, 12 Years a Slave and Birdman.
She lives in Sydney, with her husband and two daughters.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Good luck getting home
From behind, it looked as though the girl might be trembling, although it could have been the constant up and down movement of her jigging the baby strapped to her front.
Brigitta, next in line, watched as the girl removed one item at a time from the counter of an all-hours chemist. A packet of scented wipes and a Twix were first to go. Next, the travel-size deodorant and two-pack of blue plastic dummies. Each time, she asked the man to try her card again. 'What about now? Or now?'
As her baby's dry, reedy cries gathered force, the girl's rocking motion grew more frantic. Brigitta tried to be patient. Truly though, she only wanted to pay for her water and find some deserted corner of the airport to wait out the night.
She looked at her watch. It was still on Sydney time. She guessed it would be midday in London, and some nonexistent hour here in Singapore. It had been more than forty minutes since they'd all been herded off the plane, after sitting for twice as long on the runway while rain pelted the fuselage and gave the inside of the cabin the quality of a tin shed.
The head steward had come over the intercom at ten minute intervals requesting patience until finally announcing, to jeers from the cabin, that there would be no flights out tonight and they would now begin deplaning. Nobody could exit the terminal, he warned, in case they were required to board again at short notice. 'Shouldn't that be called replaning?' Brigitta said to her rowmate. 74D and E. He shook his head, no English.
Now the terminal heaved with exhausted, grubby-looking travellers and the line forming behind Brigitta began to radiate a restless energy.
'What about just them?' the girl asked. A single packet of newborn nappies remained on the counter. She spoke with a strong Croydon accent, although to Brigitta's ears trained by drama school and a year and a half in a studio flat in Kentish Town, it sounded like she'd gone to some effort to knock the South London out of it. 'How much are those nappies on their own?'
Brigitta could tell she was on the verge of tears now and felt a twist of sympathy. Being stranded for hours on your own was bad enough, but with a tiny baby ...
'Do you sell them in ones then?' the girl pleaded. 'Why are they so much?'
Brigitta shifted her weight from one foot to the other. When the girl's card was declined again, Brigitta leaned forward and tapped her shoulder. She turned, braced.
In normal circumstances or kinder lighting, her face might have been quite lovely. But her pale skin, unblemished except for a hair-thin scar on her forehead, was taut and drained, tinged lilac beneath her dark, sloe eyes. Tears quivered at their rims. Her copper hair was pulled back and tied with a rubber band; two strands escaping from the front had jagged ends, as though they'd been cut with school scissors. Brigitta glanced into the carrier and saw that the infant inside was so small, only the top of a dark, soft crown was visible below the padded rim.
'Could I just put all our things together on my card?' Brigitta whispered. 'Just so we can get out of here?'
'Oh no, I couldn't. Here, you go ahead of me. Sorry.'
She stepped aside as the man behind the counter picked up the nappies and tossed them into a plastic basket at his feet.
'Don't be silly,' Brigitta said, 'you obviously need all those things. Who knows how long we'll all be stuck. Truly.' Then turning to the man, she said crisply, 'We'll have all those things back thank you.' Brigitta handed over a black Visa card. Well, her mother's card, really, for emergencies only, although clearly this was one.
'If you write out your details, I could pay you back when I get to Australia,' the girl said, accepting the bag with a look of immense apology.
'Oh, funny. That's where I've just come from,' Brigitta replied. 'Don't worry, though. I quite like the idea of being the bailer-outerer instead of the bailee for once.' On impulse, Brigitta reached out and squeezed the girl's hand. 'Good luck getting home. If that's where you're going.'
'You too,' she said. They separated at the door and walked in opposite directions to their own flights that, when the weather finally broke, would carry them as far from home as it was possible to go.
CHAPTER 2
I just lie there, really
The gate would not open, but Abi could not turn back now. She pulled hard at the bolt on the other side of its low pickets until its rusty casing lifted a small crescent of flesh out of her thumb. The bolt shifted a promising half-inch, then held. With her other hand, Abi held the handle of Jude's heavy pram to stop it rolling further down the steep path that veered off the main walking track around Cremorne Point and led down to this fenced enclosure ringed by tall trees. She stood in their shade and worked the lock. Overhead, a mob of brightly coloured birds pecked at the hard, black nuts that clustered about the trunks, casting the empty shells down onto the paving. They made a ticking sound like rain all around her.
Abi's need to be in and on the other side rose into a sort of fury. It was so hot. Ferocious in the sun, humid in the shade and so relentlessly stifling in the flat that sweat found a continual course from her neck, through her bra, to the waist of her jean shorts.
*
Before arriving at the gate, Abi had found a small, grassy playground and gone in to feed Jude, feeling certain that although empty now and exposed to blazing sun, other mothers would begin to arrive at any moment. Almost immediately, a little girl greased with suncream had appeared out of nowhere and run towards the swings.
'Two minutes, that's all bubba, it's too hot. No. Emily! Hat stays on,' a woman's voice, high and broad, called after her. Abi straightened her back.
'Scorcher, hey?' the woman said, ambling in and noticing her there. She removed her sunglasses and began cleaning them with the hem of her T-shirt. 'Where's your other one?'
Abi smiled brightly. 'Oh, he's my only one.'
'God.' The woman sounded offended. 'Then why are you at a playground?'
Abi could not think how to reply so after a polite interval, she interrupted Jude's feed, returned him writhing and unhappy to the pram and continued along the path.
*
It was around the next broad curve that flashes of bright, gold light through trees appeared on her right, and Abi skittered down to where she now stood, peering over the gate at what lay on the other side. Even as Jude's crying swelled to suggest a state of near starvation, she could only survey it in silent awe.
A pool. A long, narrow rectangle of deep water, bordered on all four sides by a sun-bleached wooden boardwalk. The far side was cantilevered above the bright, surging water of the harbour, but its concrete edges were painted a municipal blue that somehow turned the water inside a pale, riverish green. Captivated, Abi tried to locate a suitable metaphor, but her tired mind could not think of anything better than Aquafresh toothpaste in the cool mint flavour. There was no one on the other side of the fence, a faint breeze ruffled the pool's surface. The thought of pushing the pram back up the hill, without first touching the water, feeling it wrap around her wrists and cool her blood, concentrated her energy. As Jude's crying reached a pitch, she tried forcing the bolt further into its barrel, in case that was the knack of it.
It wasn't.
'Fuck.'
The knot behind her breastbone tightened as Jude became frantic. Maybe you had to pay someone and they gave you a key? She hoped not, since she didn't have any Australian money yet.
When her next effort failed, a wave of intense fatigue passed through her body. It had been so hard to get here. Each leg, Croydon to Heathrow. Those eight lonely hours stranded in Singapore. To Australia and to a top-floor flat in this unknown suburb.
But her course had been set ever since a weary GP in the Student Medical Centre confirmed her pregnancy. By then Abi already knew but remained so deeply terrified by the prospect of motherhood that when she brought home a Boots own-brand test kit, she found herself unable to provide a single drop of the necessary fluid across three separate attempts. It was only when strangers started giving up their bus seats, and other students eyed her knowingly around campus despite the loose T-shirts and men's duffel coat she had started to wear, that Abi forced herself to make an appointment.
The doctor took out a pamphlet called 'The Three Trimesters', scored through the first two with a marker, and slid it across the desk towards her.
'How could you not know?' she asked, vexed.
'I just thought I was getting fat.' Abi could not meet the doctor's eye.
'But you're so tiny, you didn't notice when you began showing?'
'I didn't show for ages,' Abi said truthfully.
'And anyway I haven't got a mirror you can see your whole self in at home. You have to stand on the loo and then you only get to here.' She made a sawing motion just below her chest.
The doctor took a cardboard dial out of her desk drawer. Two layers turned on a split pin, and shaking her head, the doctor rotated the smaller, inner circle.
'Well, if the dates you've give me are right, you're due in ten weeks. January 13. You really didn't know?'
Abi stared into her lap.
'How long have you been sexually active?' the doctor asked, exhausted by the task of running interference between all the sperm and eggs on the Kingston University campus.
'Oh, I'm not,' Abi said, reddening. 'I just lie there, really.'
The doctor sighed and returned her dial to the top drawer. 'Well, if you know who the father is, I'd let him know quick-smart.'
CHAPTER 3
A saviour is born
Abi sat in the bus shelter outside the medical centre and tried to call Stu but her phone was out of credit. When she got back to Highside Circuit, she shut herself in her room, undid the complicated system of rubber bands that had been keeping her jeans together for some time, and sat down with her thick, ancient laptop. The task could not reasonably be put off any longer. And besides, Abi needed to begin formulating her means of escape. Her baby would not be raised in the ex-council where she had grown up, and still lived in with her mother Rae, who generally speaking, sat sixteen hours a day in her armchair wearing a parka and knit hat against the aching cold of the front room, a mug of Weight Watchers Cream of Veg skinning over on the card table in front of her.
She would liven up whenever Pat from next door came around with her OK! to trade for Rae's Hello and stay on to watch Strictly Come Dancing without ever letting her Parliament Blue lose its salivated purchase on her bottom lip.
Occasionally the pair applied themselves to collages, made from magazine pictures glued into cheap scrapbooks from Poundstretcher. Pat liked proper glamour shots, with hair and makeup and preferably taken in the star's own home. Rae preferred pictures that proved Celebs Are Just Like Us! So they rarely went after the same prize with their scissors.
'Which do you like better, the samba or the rhumba?' Rae would occasionally ask her daughter, one eye on her pasting, the other on the glittering stage.
Nestled into a sleeping bag on the facing sofa, Abi would say she didn't care. Then, guiltily, 'Probably the samba.'
'Ooh, listen to you. Aren't we posh?' Pat would say every time Abi spoke in an accent that wasn't uncut Croydon. Abi had adopted it as a matter of survival when she started at a girl's grammar on the other side of the river. You couldn't get by with a South London accent there, they would know instantly you were a scholarship girl.
'Sahm-ba. Saahm-ba,' Pat would repeat in imitation
'Hear that, Mum? Oooh, I do like to dah-nce the saahmba.'
'Leave her alone, eh Pat. They're about to say the scores.'
Now in the cold of her bedroom, Abi opened Instant Messenger. Stu's status was 'online' and Abi began to type.
Abi.Egan89 Are you there?
She considered adding a surprised face made of punctuation, but did not want to seem flippant. Then came a lengthy pause that Abi knew wasn't due, in this instance, to Stu's need to look down at his hands as he typed. He was a solid, confoundingly dyslexic student of architecture, considerably more able with pen and graph paper. When 'Stu is typing' appeared and disappeared twice more, Abi could no longer bear it.
Abi.Egan89 I just found out today.
Abi lifted her vest and looked down at her stomach as a small ripple passed below the surface. A tiny hand, possibly a foot.
Abi.Egan89 Nope.
After that, Stu moved through an accelerated cycle of anger, denial, grief, acceptance and logged off.
SRKellett Hey. Congratualtoins Abi.Egan89 Oh. thx.
Over the coming weeks, they put together a plan. Stu would finish the academic year in Australia, earn his ticket working split shifts at the pub until Christmas, then fly to London two weeks before her due date. As soon as possible afterwards, they would go back to Sydney and, in Stu's words, make a go of shit.
'You won't be able to stay at mine, is all,' Abi said, during one of their rare phone calls. 'We've not got any room. I'll be packing and my Mum's not been specially well anyway. Do you think you can find anywhere else?'
'Will I ever see your house, do you reckon?' Stu replied. 'I'm worried you're cooking meth in the bath.'
Abi laughed. 'Of course you will. And the meth is for personal use.' They said goodbye and hung up. The plan was made.
*
Two days before Christmas, in the nail care aisle of Superdrug, a hot rush of liquid down the inside of Abi's leg announced Jude's early arrival. An hour later, in the general waiting area of St George's Hospital in Tooting, she gripped a hospital porter by his collar and bore down so hard it began to come away at the stitching. The midwife, crouching at her ankles, begged Abi to please step out of her knickers as the baby pressed headfirst into the soaking gusset.
At the moment Abi received her son's perfect, slippery body into her arms, the lights of a small, artificial Christmas tree beside them spontaneously flickered on. The porter straightened his collar. 'A saviour is born, eh?'
He laughed, but Abi knew in herself it was true. Five hours later, Jude was deemed three days and five ounces clear of official prematurity, and approved for early discharge. She phoned a minicab and that night, on her single bed, Abi taught them both to breast-feed.
On the other side of the room was her sister's bed, long since stripped and deputised for storage. Whenever Jude woke in the night, and Abi needed to keep herself awake while he fed, she whispered into the darkness as though Louise was lying opposite. The 4 a.m. feed was the loneliest, when all the lights were out in the tower block visible through the circle in the frost on the window, which Abi had rubbed with her hand.
When Jude was three weeks old, Abi got them both to Heathrow — the District Line to Earl's Court and a change — with a suitcase full of clothes that would turn out to be too warm and a library copy of First Year with Baby. She had meant to return it before they left but when she ran out of time, the only thing was to make it hers by tearing out the fly-sheet stamped 'Property of Wandsworth Borough Library'.
CHAPTER 4
I think he likes you more than me
All the time, a force that felt entirely outside herself compelled Abi forwards, but now she was here finally, reunited with Stu, she was not sure what she was supposed to do. They had been apart for eight months, twice as long as they were together.
As she grew rounder and rounder, counting the days until she could take her baby to Australia, Abi had tried to imagine what it would be like. The flat his parents had offered, Stu as a father, and Sydney, which she knew then as a composite of nature documentaries, Home and Away, and a Christmas card of Bondi Beach that her mother had acquired somewhere and hung onto because the surfing Santa always gave her a laugh.
Sydney would not have any shit bits, that Abi was sure of. Sydney would be all new and clean, and richly populated with mum friends. Not the sort of pramface girls even younger than her, who hung around outside the Centrale Shopping Centre and let their four-year-olds talk around a dummy, smacked them on the legs until they cried and bribed them to stop with a sip of Fanta. Abi would meet nice, good mothers of the kind she planned to be. In Sydney, her bad habits would be shed like an old skin. Swearing, lying, Red Bull in lieu of breakfast. Biting her nails, sucking her hair. To be sure of that, before she left Highside Circuit for the final time, Abi stood on the lavatory in the tiny bathroom and bobbed her hair with nail scissors, wrapping the uneven ends in toilet paper and flushing them away.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "You Be Mother"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Meg Mason.
Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dedication,
Epigraph,
PART I,
1. Good luck getting home,
2. I just lie there, really,
3. A saviour is born,
4. I think he likes you more than me,
5. Basic meals and snacks,
6. Comprehensively inducted,
7. Briggy's Starving Artist Period,
8. This ruddy latch,
9. A hundred and ten per cent ready,
10. Very English skin,
11. Southbound traffic,
12. I would hang on to those,
13. Clayton's panicking,
14. The pastry will lose its crunch,
15. Absolute steel,
16. There's no need to be vulgar,
17. Baby corn was very big in Gordon in the nineties,
18. A night off the Jude talk,
19. A complete milk food,
20. A first-rate interferer,
21. The longueurs,
22. Their train is stuck at Potter's Bar,
23. Jude, get your wallet,
24. Cohabiting's a bit louche,
25. Dear as he is,
26. Are you on drugs?,
27. It doesn't even hurt,
28. Dust in my flutes,
29. Lettuce can tolerate a setback,
30. One up from dead,
31. Quite the motley crew,
32. Artisanal condiment,
33. A toothbrush for Kentish Town,
34. You must go,
35. Fresh-ish,
36. One of my foremost traits,
37. A stitch of harm,
38. There is no Monique,
39. Bed of peace,
40. Sniffer of nighties,
41. You've made everything worse,
42. No lectures please,
43. Death by toxic towelette,
44. The eternal hairshirt,
45. I'm having a personal crisis, Lawrence,
46. Changi Best Value Pharmacy,
47. One in four's a dry one,
48. Horrible, horrible,
49. Deadly Predators or Arsenal,
50. Brigitta's got herself in the papers,
51. The Cremorne Point Benevolent Society,
52. Advanced Night Repair for tired skin,
53. Lessons in Saltwater,
54. Pantry staples,
55. The tectonics of structural systems,
56. Mate, can babies eat toast?,
57. Currants in the cake,
58. The Siege of Ladbroke Grove,
PART II,
59. September can be full of false promise,
60. Crying, Excessive,
61. Something with explosions,
62. My hands is very sticky,
63. More than you ever will,
64. Let us climb up the rockery,
65. Eggs and soldiers,
66. It won't be nice cold,
67. Owing to my prostate,
68. Brigga's Box of Sad Things,
69. Is she a wreck?,
70. A dead-set waste of time,
71. You've been such a trooper,
72. And crisps,
73. Hosing the green bin,
74. Up and down the highway like a yo-yo,
75. You don't look Korean,
76. We're not exactly badly off,
77. Love-rat director given boot by radio star wife!,
78. The doghouse,
79. Infamous Abi,
80. A slave to your wash cycle,
81. We are awful,
82. Looking a gift horse in the mouth,
83. Such an arse,
84. There is one thing,
85. One adult and him,
86. All our mornings,
87. Well, Merry Christmas then,
88. Mostly it's been torture,
89. Lucky you,
90. It is not a special day for us,
91. I am a fucking social worker,
92. Run to the pain,
93. Conversationally at Southgate Centre,
94. Hello Morris,
95. Let me go now,
96. You look a bit rough,
97. Captain of the Hockey Thirds,
98. I'm three fingers,
99. Crowded with incident,
100. It means we have made it,
Acknowledgements,
About the Author,
Praise,
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Copyright,
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