Page 4 of Kiwi Gold
I picked up little Ava, because, yes, she was wailing again, turned on the white-noise machine once more, cuddled the baby close, and tipped my chin at Oriana, who jumped up, took the little girl from me, and headed over to the changing table while the baby’s cries increased in volume. Ava’s dad sighed and looked at his watch, and I told him, wanting to go check on the girls but somehow managing to keep my voice in the chirpy-but-soothing register, “We’re all good here. It takes a wee while sometimes for baby to settle, but that’s why we have a four-hour window. If you’d like to go have a coffee, though, take a walk, have a break, that’s fine.”
“We’re notleavingher,” Nervy Mummy, Celeste, protested.
“Of course not,” I said. “But you can take it in turns, maybe, on the coffee.”
Bored Dad was standing up, and I thought,finally.Which was when the air was pierced by the unmistakable sounds of somebody retching, and Celeste looked up from her phone in alarm.
“Excuse me,” I said, keeping my cool with a major effort. Half of me wanted to scream, and the sometimes-unfortunate, irrepressible other half, the reason the corporate world hadn’t been for me, wanted to laugh.
Really?Really?A tummy bug? I did not need a tummy bug anywhere around me, not now. And yet here we were. Real life striking once again.
Before I could even turn around, two little girls were in the doorway. One of them, Yasmin, peeping around the edge and hesitating, like she knew she wasn’t supposed to be in the studio when Mummy was working, and her twin standing square in the middle of my workspace, her hands on her hips, her black specs perched on her nose like a prop and all of her looking like an extra-small CEO, saying, “Mummy, the new babysitter is being sick.” That was Amira, who definitelydidthink she should be the CEO.
I might doubt myself. Amira didn’t. Once she could read and write, the power struggle would well and truly begin.
The babysitterwasbeing sick, too. Again.
Somebody else poked his nose around the door now. Somebody with a very hairy white nose, three legs, and a black spot over one eye like a pirate, which was why his name was Long John. For Long John Silver, obviously. Long John knew as well as both girls that he wasn’t supposed to be in here. He probably knewbetterthan both girls, actually. Especially Amira.
I breathed in, breathed out, thought,Not the poor girl’s fault she’s sick,and said, as calmly as I could, “Let’s go check on her, then.” And set out to do it.
The babysitter, a Uni student named Deirdre, came lurching out of the family toilet at the back of the flat, looking so pale that she was nearly green. I stopped a good distance away and said, “Don’t come any farther. Infection, eh. You’d better go lie down in my bedroom until you can get a lift home. Or I’ll drive you, once I’m done here.”
Maybe the girls wouldn’t catch it for a few days, and maybeIwouldn’t catch it until Christmas week. With luck.
There you were. I was wishing for a tummy bug for Christmas. You couldn’t get much more adult than that. Also, I was going to have to cancel all my appointments for the week. Bugger.
I turned, then, because Celeste, the Baby Mummy, was at my elbow, saying, “Excuse me, but if somebody’s ill, we need to take the baby home. I can’t expose her to contagion.”
“Of course not,” I began to say, just as Amira said, “It’s not anythingbad.It’s just her Monday sick. She said.”
Deirdre opened her mouth to say something, then looked like she regretted it and might be running for the toilet again, and I said, “What?”
“She only gets sick on Mondays,” Yasmin volunteered, creeping out into the room a bit farther and looking at her twin, who nodded in confirmation. Long John Silver, dog version, hung back. At least somebody in my house listened to me. Pity it was only the dog.
Yasmin went on, “Usually she drinks coffees and then she feels better. Sometimes I rub her head, though, and we talk very softly, because it helps.”
Deirdre said, “I just have a touch of something, that’s all. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“It’s because she has a hangover on Mondays,” Amira said. “Monday is after the weekend, and people get hangovers on weekends. A hangover isn’t from germs, though,” she told Celeste, like a Girl Who Knew. “It’s from drinking too many drinks of alcohol. Probably in a bar. I don’t think a baby can catch it. You only catch things from germs.”
Deirdre said, “No. That’s not it. It was—” and looked like she had no clue how to finish this sentence.
I said, “How do you know that’s what it is, Amira?”
“Because I asked Grandad, of course,” Amira said. “I know you said not to say,” she told Deirdre, “but I didn’t tell him it was you. I just said I was curious, because being curious is good. Grownups always answer your question if you say you’re curious.” Back to me, then. “And after you drink the drinks, you get sick and you spew. I know it was a hangover because she says it when she’s talking on the phone to her friends. She talks to her friends all thetime.That’s why we have to wait for her so much.”
“And I said it was Mondays,” Yasmin said. “You didn’t remember it was Mondays, Amira.”
“I didtoo,”her twin said. “I just didn’tsay.”
“Why do people want to drink drinks if it makes them sick, though?” Yasmin asked. “I don’t like to be sick.”
Amira sighed. “Because it makes themhappy. Beforethey get sick. Grandad says it’s not really happy, though. He says it justfeelshappy. Also, it’sharam. Even though he has beer in his fridge sometimes, but he says beer isn’t really alcohol, not to a man with Viking blood. But I looked it up online, and it is.”
“You can’t read,” I said. “How could you look anything up?”
Amira sighed again. Clearly, I was dim. “Yasmin spelled it, of course. She typed it and read the part about alcohol. But Isaidto.”
