The Last Anniversary

I’m a good person, Sophie reminds herself. Everybody loves me. I give to charity. I recycle. I buy things I don’t want from door-to-door salesmen. I’ve been a bridesmaid seven bloody times. I’m not the sort of person to manipulate an old lady.

‘NOOOOOO!’

Sophie looks up to see the angelic blond toddler in the middle of a ferocious tantrum, flipping his body back and forth while his mother tries to strap him in his stroller and yells at the other child to ‘STAY STILL, HARRY’. The daddy has escaped, striding back to work, his tie swinging.

Actually, thinks Sophie, as she stands up and brushes crumbs off her skirt, she’s quite looking forward to her meeting on graduate recruitment strategies.

14

Gublet McDublet was a very naughty little elf.

Every day, his mum said to him, ‘Now, Gublet, do you think it’s going to be a Good Gublet day or a Bad Gublet day?’

Every day, Gublet answered the same way, ‘A GOOD Gublet day!’

But guess what? Every day turned out to be a Bad Gublet day.

One day, Gublet said, ‘Oh f**k it, Mum, you’re a boring old hag,’ and he took a knife and lopped off his sweet mummy’s head.

Grace looks at the line drawing she has scribbled of a ferociously grinning elf with blood dripping from a butcher’s knife. Oh dear. It isn’t going to be a Good Gublet day for Grace, is it? Next thing she’ll have Gublet raping his best friend, Melly the Music Box Dancer–ripping off Melly’s sparkly tutu and giving it to her right there on the pink satin music-box floor.

Where are these perverse and strangely bitchy thoughts coming from? They aren’t at all appropriate for a new mother. Her head should be full of lullabies and bunnies, not blood and rape.

Grace pulls the sheet of paper from her sketchbook and screws it up into a hard ridged ball.

It is eleven a.m. on her second day at home alone with the baby. He is asleep upstairs, fed and burped and clean and swaddled (‘like wrapping a burrito’ Callum said when the nurse showed them at the hospital) and, most importantly, breathing. She is successfully keeping him alive and so far she hasn’t broken any important rules or made any fatal errors, but still, every move she makes continues to feel fake and forced, like she’s pretending to be this baby’s mother and the real mother will be along soon to look after him properly. She can’t shake a constant, underlying feeling of terror.

All new mothers are nervous, she tells herself.

Not like this.

Yes, of course they are.

It’s perfectly normal.

I am perfectly normal. I am a new mother sitting down with a cup of tea.

She tries again to draw Gublet’s familiar features. He stares back at her with a new cold, bland expression.

This hasn’t happened to her before. It has always been such a pleasure to work on Gublet. She was never stuck for inspiration; all she needed was time.

Grace has been working on her Gublet McDublet books for over four years now. He started as a doodle. Whenever she was talking on the phone, a wicked elf character would appear on her notebook. She became fond of him and eventually, just for fun, not really thinking too hard about it, she made up a funny story about Gublet’s first day at school. It was Callum who secretly sent it off to a children’s book publisher he’d picked out of the Yellow Pages and, astonishingly, they agreed to publish it as a hard-bound picture book for three-to five-year-olds. So far she hasn’t made enough money to be able to give up her day job as a graphic designer for a company that specialises in beautiful annual reports. There isn’t that much money in the children’s picture-book market unless you are phenomenally successful, and besides which, so far each of the two Gublet books has taken her over two years to complete. ‘Two years!’ people always say with disbelief and a hint of derision. They seem to think she should be able to knock one off in a couple of weeks, when each illustration is actually an oil painting on canvas, a labour of love one generous reviewer described as ‘exquisite works of art’.

When her first book was launched, the local pre-school invited her to read her Gublet book to a group of cross-legged, squirming four-year-olds. She was nervous. Children made her feel huge and awkward and she was never sure exactly how to correctly pitch her conversation for their age group, worrying that she was speaking to them as if they were retarded or deaf. When friends suddenly (bizarrely!) put their heavy-breathing toddlers on the phone to talk to her, Grace would more often than not just sit there in tongue-tied silence. What in the world was she meant to say? ‘So, what have you been up to lately?’ ‘Hear you just learned to walk, hey? How’s that going, then?’

She was convinced the pre-schoolers wouldn’t like her. After all, people generally didn’t. Friends were always cosily informing her how much they’d disliked her at their first meeting. ‘You just seemed so cold and standoffish.’ The children probably wouldn’t hide their dislike like grown-ups. They’d probably boo and hiss. Maybe they’d all suddenly attack her like rabid little rats. Who knew what they’d do? They were another species.

She was sure that she sounded ridiculous as she read her own words to the pre-schoolers, but then she got her first laugh. It was the part where Gublet jumped up and down on his mum’s yucky pumpkin pie like a trampoline. The children whooped. One got up to demonstrate how he would jump in a similar situation. The teacher, sitting at the back of the room, gave her a thumbs-up, as if she knew Grace had been nervous, and the kids sat back down and looked up at her with open flower-like faces, eyes shining expectantly, ready for the next funny part. So this was what people saw in children.

After she’d finished reading, when the teacher asked them if they had any questions, every hand shot in the air, straining high for her attention.

‘Is Gublet so naughty all the time because he wishes he didn’t have pointy ears?’

‘Would Gublet like to come to my party? Do you think he would jump up and down on my cake? My mum would be pretty cross with him!’

‘Gublet is funny when he’s naughty! I laughed so much! I laughed until forever!’

‘That time when Gublet’s mum sent him to the moon for being naughty and he rang up Melly and then they ran away to Mars, well, guess what, that happened to me too! But guess what, it wasn’t real! It was a dream!’

Hearing a client say ‘The CEO was quite impressed with your design concepts’ could never compare with the intense pleasure Grace felt hearing a four-year-old say ‘I laughed until forever!’