Playing Nice Read online

  “It’s good for him to work off some of that energy,” Miles says, unperturbed. He lowers Theo to the floor and ruffles his hair. Theo instantly charges into Miles’s legs, wrapping his arms around his calves, and Miles obediently sinks to his knees. “Arrgh! Kick on! Anyway, I can’t think of anything more fun for a two-year-old than having both his dads’ undivided attention in the park.”

  “I’ll make some more tea,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  “ ‘BOTH HIS DADS’?” I say quietly to Pete when they’ve finally gone and Theo is watching CBeebies. “Is that something you agreed to?”

  “I could hardly pull him up on it in front of Theo. But we haven’t discussed what Miles should call himself, no.” He glances at me. “How was Lucy?”

  “Anxious.” I tell him about the photo request. “I think we’re going to need a conversation with them about boundaries.”

  “Really?” Pete sounds surprised.

  “Well…When we were making the decision about the park and whether it was too soon for Theo to be playing…I felt a bit outnumbered. Like there were suddenly four parents instead of two.”

  “They didn’t take any part in deciding to go to the park, though. That was me.”

  “Yes, but you knew Miles wanted you to go.”

  “Okay,” Pete says, a word that somehow contains the sentiment I think you’re overreacting but I’m too supportive to call you on it. “I’ll speak to Miles. I’m sure they want clarity just as much as we do. But we did say that we’d try to make sure Theo’s a part of their lives.” He gets up from the kitchen chair and stretches. “We had a good time today, actually. I’d forgotten how much fun it is just to go and chuck a ball around—it’s something I can’t really do with Theo on my own.”

  “Lucy asked me if I’d booked Easter week off yet. I had to stall her—I had no idea what she was talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. That plan to get together on Easter Day? It’s evolved into a few days down in Cornwall. Miles has found this massive house by the sea.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be stuck with them for a whole long weekend,” I say doubtfully. “I mean, yes, they seem like nice people, and it would be lovely to spend more time with David. But we shouldn’t rush things—this is way too important to risk getting it wrong and having it blow up in our faces. Besides, the way Lucy was talking it sounded like more than just a couple of days.”

  Pete shrugs. “I think it could be fun, actually. And I do get a bit stir-crazy sometimes in London, stuck in this tiny house with Theo. But I’m sure they won’t mind if we say we can only go for a night. I’ll talk to Miles next week.”

  26

  Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 17, retrieved from DadStuff.net.

  HELP! JUST FOUND TODDLER EATING SALT. WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

  Homedad85—Level 5 poster. Member since 2018.

  No idea how much. Big pile of cooking salt from one of those plastic tubs. Given him plenty of water. Should we be worried?

  Actiondad

  NHS Direct

  Darren

  Yeah, dial 111 for NHS Direct.

  Homedad85

  Tried 111, still in the queue. Should we go to emergency?

  Thedadinator

  Give him some water.

  Fourlovelydaughters

  Surely must be self-limiting as tastes so bitter and horrid? Maybe ask if he wants any more—if he says yes, maybe he likes the taste so could actually be in real danger? I would just give LOTS of water.

  Fourlovelydaughters

  Mind you I’m not a medical professional so please don’t rely on my advice.

  Darren

  Out of interest, what did you decide to do?

  Darren

  @Homedad85? Everything ok over there????

  Homedad85

  Sorry, got back from emergency after three hours (basically, all fine but projectile vomiting—nurse said we’d done exactly the right thing) and found visitors waiting. Had to go and play rugby in the park with DS and DS’s new grown-up friend Miles, aka “Moles” as DS calls him. Pretty inspiring story actually—how friendship, positivity, and good communication are making what could have been a really tricky situation into an all-around success.

  Darren

  Sounds intriguing @Homedad85—do tell?

  27

  MADDIE

  “YOU KNOW, THIS MILES and Lucy thing would make a great feature,” Pete says over supper. “I might try to pitch it to a few editors.”

  I look up, frowning. “Isn’t it a bit soon for that?”

  “Well, even if someone does go for it, it’ll take me a while to write it. And I’ll clear it with Miles and Lucy before I send anything out, obviously. But I think it’s the kind of thing an editor might really like—unconventional family dynamics, a beacon of cooperation at a time of global division, all that kind of stuff.”

  “Will you disguise our identities this time?”

  “Of course.” He sees my expression. “I know that was a mistake, before,” he says quietly. “But this is what I do, Mads. I’m a journalist.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER HIS REDUNDANCY, PETE struggled. Not with Theo—he loved being a full-time dad—but professionally. It turned out the articles travel editors really wanted now were the ones their overworked staff writers no longer had time to write, the ones that required actual traveling: fourteen days trekking through Patagonia, say, or a review of a new hotel in the Arctic made entirely of ice. That was out of the question for Pete, of course, with Theo to look after. So he started pitching more general articles to the family sections: pieces about being a full-time dad, mostly.

  He didn’t tell me he was writing about my breakdown, not at first. It was about the NICU, he said vaguely, and what we went through when Theo was born. It was only when he showed me a draft that I realized just how frank he’d been. It was all there—how he’d gotten back from the bike ride and found the TV covered in dried shit, bits of broken phone all over the floor, the gibberish I’d babbled about the doctors who were watching me. “My partner is amazing,” he’d written. “Because, however good the NHS was at keeping our tiny premature infant alive, when it came to his mother’s brain, they were in the Dark Ages. She was left to fight most of that lonely battle by herself.”

  “What do you think?” he’d asked when I’d finished reading it.

  “It’s powerful,” I said doubtfully. “And very well written. I suppose I just wasn’t expecting it to be so…honest.”

  “We always say there shouldn’t be any stigma around mental health,” he pointed out. “How are we going to remove the stigma, if we don’t speak out?”

  “I’m not sure I want to be the trailblazer, that’s all.”

  “You know how hard it is to find stories that haven’t been done to death already,” he said quietly. “I really think this one could get picked up, Mads. It could be the break I need to get me noticed as a freelancer. But if you want me to spike it, I will.”

  Eventually we agreed he wouldn’t use my real name. Because he had a different surname, we reasoned, there wouldn’t be any direct link to me. And he was right about it being picked up. The Sunday Times ran it in the Style section, and it was immediately reposted on various blogs. A well-known yummy mummy with over a hundred thousand Instagram followers posted a link to it, along with a grateful comment about her own struggles after her premature twins spent three weeks in intensive care. I felt good about that—we were doing exactly what Pete had said, starting a conversation around women’s experiences of childbirth and mental health. For a week or so there was the exhilaration of checking the blogs and Twitter every few hours, watching the likes and reblogs pouring in, a cascade of affirmation and solidarity. And praise for Pete, of course. Not many men would have had the emotional maturity or the patienc
e to pick their partner up like that, was the consensus, let alone take over the nurturing of our child.

  Then I realized people at work had read it, some of whom knew Pete through me and so knew exactly who he was writing about. A few made supportive comments, which was nice. Others said nothing, which made me wonder what they thought. Then I heard I had a new nickname on the creative floor: Maddie Mad Dog. I started to feel furious with Pete for not hiding my identity more thoroughly.

  I went to Prague to film a Christmas commercial for a big electrical retailer. This time it was the art director I slipped up with.

  Jenny, my CBT therapist, usually shied away from the touchy-feely stuff, but somehow it came out at our next session. She listened patiently as I spilled all my confusion and self-loathing to her.

  “Did your father have affairs?” she asked when I’d finished.

  I stared at her. Of all the things I’d been expecting her to say, that wasn’t one of them. “Yes. At least three that we knew of.”

  “And your mother accepted them?”

  “Well—not happily. But there was always a feeling that it was up to him whether he left us for the other woman or not. That, if he decided to stay, she’d still be there for him.”

  “Something of a saint, then. Or at any rate, a martyr. And now here you are, the breadwinner of the family, repeating the same behavior. Only this time with the genders reversed.” She left a long pause. “I think you need to talk to Pete. Perhaps with the help of a couples therapist. You’ve clearly got some buried resentment about the way your parenting roles have turned out.”

  Meanwhile, Pete was trying to follow up the success of his NICU story. He discovered that our local pizza place didn’t let men use the baby-changing rooms, which had been designed as part of the female toilets, so he started a campaign to get them to change their corporate policy. It worked, on one level—people were happy to click on the petition when it came up in their Facebook feeds, but they didn’t really care enough to post messages of encouragement, the way they had with the mental health piece. The only newspaper he could interest was a local one, and even then, when the article ran, he discovered the editor had cut it to half its original length.

  Gradually, he talked less and less about ideas for articles and more and more about being a parent. Theo had pointed at the snow and said, “Bubbles!” Theo had been on the roundabout in the playground. Theo had thrown a tantrum in Sainsbury’s. I got used to reaching for a bottle as soon as I got home, letting the red wine take the edge off as I mentally tried to shift gears from the racing-car frenzy that was advertising to the kiddie rides of Pete and Theo’s routine. Sometimes it worked. More often, I was still thinking about a knotty production problem with one half of my brain even as I smiled and nodded along to some story of playground peril.

  So I completely understand now why Pete wants to write about what we’re doing with the Lamberts. It’s a chance to be the old Pete again, the journalist, to have people read what he writes. But it’s also a chance to be NICU Pete, too, Saint Peter: to bask in the affirmation of an online audience, the invisible crowd of spectators who’ll click and like and share and tell him what an inspiration he is.

  I don’t stop him, of course. How can I? But, disloyally, it does occur to me that, in the olden days, saints all had one thing in common. They didn’t have wives or partners to think about.

  28

  Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 18, DRAFT document saved by AUTORECOVER, retrieved from Peter Riley’s hard drive.

  This is a story about two broken families determined to heal.

  This is a story about a bolt from the blue that could have led to discord and hatred—but instead has led to friendship, dialogue, and trust.

  This is a story about four young professionals, trying to figure out a modern solution to an ancient problem.

  In the Bible, King Solomon was famously faced with a nigh-impossible case. Two women both claimed they were the mother of a baby boy. They’d given birth at roughly the same time, but one child had died. Each was now accusing the other of stealing the live infant.

  Calling for a sword, Solomon craftily declared there was only one solution: divide the child and give half to each woman. Immediately, one of the women fell to her knees, saying she renounced her claim. She would rather the child was brought up by someone else than see it die as the result of Solomon’s brutal justice. Solomon then ordered that the baby be given to her, as she had just proved herself the true mother.

  Whatever this tells us about standards of transparency and openness in the family courts circa 900 BC—what would Solomon have done if neither woman had cried out, or both did? Carried out his original judgment, presumably—it speaks to an ancient truth: Our children mean more to us than we do ourselves.

  But what if you are suddenly told that the child you are bringing up—the child you have fed, bathed, played with, taught the letters of the alphabet to, parented for two whole years—isn’t yours? What if you discovered that your child had been mistakenly switched with someone else’s at birth?

  That is what happened to my partner and me…

  29

  PETE

  “OH, PETE. PETEY PETEY Petey.”

  It was Miles, calling on my mobile. I’d emailed him my article, with a request for a couple of quotes. But I could tell from his tone he wasn’t happy.

  “It’s only a first draft, obviously,” I said. “If there’s anything you don’t want me to use, just say.”

  There was a short silence. “It’s not right. None of it. I’m sorry, Pete.”

  “In what way?” I said, confused. “I mean—it’s true, isn’t it? We are working things out between us.”

  “Of course. But eyes on the prize, yes? Think how this is going to read to whoever’s given the job of working out how big a check they should be writing us. This looks like mitigation, Pete. Instead of mental distress and anguish, everyone’s getting along like one big happy family. The way this is written, you’d think we should be paying them.”

  “Ah.” I hadn’t thought of it like that. “So you don’t think I should write anything?”

  “I’m not saying that. In fact, a newspaper article could provide us with a very good paper trail. But you need to recast it. Basically, ever since I knocked on your door, your life’s been a living hell, yes? Every time you look at Theo’s sweet little face, you find yourself staring into another man’s eyes. Your family’s been violated and your relationship with your child upended—”

  “Hang on,” I said anxiously. “Stuff hangs around online forever these days. I wouldn’t want Theo to read it one day and think I found it difficult to love him.”

  “Fair enough,” Miles allowed. “But there might be other ways. You mentioned that Maddie experienced mental health issues after the NICU. Maybe the shock of all this has brought some of her symptoms back.”

  “I’ll have to ask her,” I said. “I have a feeling she might not be too keen on that.”

  “Well, tell her it could be worth an extra half mil. That should be enough to convince her.”

  30

  Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 18B, attachment sent by Peter Riley to several newspaper feature editors.

  This is a story that will strike fear into the heart of every parent.

  This is a story about two broken families, who, just when they were finally recovering from tragedy, heartbreak, and mental illness, were dealt a fresh blow of unimaginable horror.

  Because the shocking truth is that, at any moment, a stranger could knock on your door and announce that the child you have fed, bathed, played with, taught the letters of the alphabet to, parented for two whole years, isn’t yours. And everything you thought you knew about your family could be blown apart in an instant.

  I know, because that is what happened to my partner and me…

  31

  PETE

 
I REWROTE THE PIECE the way Miles had suggested. It wasn’t as good—if I’m honest, part of my motivation for doing an article in the first place had been to celebrate the way we were all dealing with this: It was two fingers up to people like Jack Wilson who thought cynicism and distrust were the only correct responses to a problem like ours. But I could see Miles’s point, and in any case pitching it as an update to my successful mental health article made it easier to place. The Daily Mail picked it up immediately, although they couldn’t say when they’d run it. When the sub who was fact-checking it emailed me back with some queries, I saw they’d added a headline: TWO YEARS AGO, A BOTCHED BIRTH LEFT MY WIFE PSYCHOTIC. NOW A DNA TEST REVEALS: IT ISN’T EVEN OUR BABY.

  I went to see a solicitor at the medical malpractice firm Miles was using, at their gleaming office with a view over Tower Bridge. I’d had a vague idea that no-win no-fee lawyers were all hustlers, but Justin Watts was bright and personable and charming, clearly a product of the kind of expensive private school Miles would have liked Theo to attend.

  He made me go through the whole story again. “Well,” he said when I was done, “as actions go, this one seems pretty straightforward—legally speaking, that is. I’ll get a letter of claim off and we’ll see what they come back with. Presumably you’re aware that St. Alexander’s has had its NICU downgraded to Level Two?”

  I hadn’t been. “Why? What happened?”

  “Their mortality rate last year was nearly two percent higher than the national average. That might sound small, but it equates to a jump from four deaths a year to nine. Something’s not right over there, so Level Three services have been transferred to Guy’s while an investigation’s carried out. It’s good news for you, though. The trust will be hoping they can reopen as a Level Three as quickly as possible, so the last thing they’ll want is you kicking up a stink. This has quick settlement written all over it.” He tapped my article, lying on his desk. “But hold off getting this published for now, yes? The hospital might well prefer to keep the whole episode quiet, in which case this is only useful leverage until you actually run it.”