“Perhaps,” Priya suggested, “it’d be easier if you didn’t have a baby strapped to your chest?”
“No.” James Royce-Royce flapped his injured hand. “No, I can do this. It’s just we’ve never used the car-seat function because we’re normally walking or taking the Tube.”
Bridge came forward helpfully-slash-hurryingly. “Let me take him.”
With the kind of reluctance you only see amongst new parents and people struggling to kick serious addictions, James Royce-
Royce unbuckled Baby J from his chest and handed him over to Bridge. “Support the head, support the head.”
“Oh, come on, even I know that,” I said. “And I’m the last person you should ever trust with a baby.”
Bridge was already bouncing Baby J in that instinctively calming way that some people have and I definitely didn’t. “But Luc, you and Oliver would make such sweet parents.”
“Would we? He works all the time, and I’ve never had a goldfish last more than two days.”
“Babies aren’t goldfish,” insisted Bridge.
“I just know I’d, I don’t know, forget to feed it or leave it on the bus or something.”
James Royce-Royce looked up from the impossibly complex mechanism from which a car seat was meant to emerge. “That’s hard to do. They make quite a lot of noise.” Something clicked, and a pair of wheels popped down. “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen.
James usually does this.”
“Shift over,” Priya elbowed James Royce-Royce out the way, pushed down on a button, yanked on a lever, and collapsed the shuttle-racer-pod machine into a little tilted basket that looked unmistakably car-seaty. “How do you even survive?”
James Royce-Royce contrived to look both huffy and smug. “I have a very helpful husband.”
Baby J was transferred to the seat, and the seat was transferred to the truck, where it was strapped in securely by people who knew what they were doing. Then we piled in again and were just about to get underway, like we were in a disappointingly middle-aged road movie, when Bridge burst into tears. And I abruptly discovered it was really hard to comfort somebody when they were sitting behind you in a truck.
“Bridge”—Melanie reached over to make the most reassuring physical contact she could make given the whole truck situation —“babe. It’ll be okay. We’ll sort this out.”
Bridge sobbed. “I know. I mean, I don’t know. It’s just the last time I was jammed in a truck doing something silly we were taking Luc to Durham because he was in love with Oliver, and Tom was with me and everything seemed so wonderful.”
“That was not wonderful,” Priya and I chorused.
“Because my relationship had fallen apart,” I went on.
“And,” Priya pushed in, “I had to drive you bunch of ungrateful shits the whole length of the country.”
“And Oliver wasn’t even there.”
“And none of you chipped in for petrol.”
“And then you dumped me on his doorstep in the middle of the night.”
“Even though you always say you’re going to.”
At which point, Baby J started crying, which meant James Royce-Royce had to unstrap him and do parental things to calm him down, and we were still outside Bridge’s flat.
“Sugarplums,” said James Royce-Royce, “I love you but if you keep shouting, you’ll upset Baby J, and if you upset Baby J, he’ll cry all afternoon.”
“I’m sorry, Baby J.” Bridge half turned in an attempt to join in the baby soothing. “It’s just we were so young and hopeful then.”
“It was two years ago,” said Priya. “And I wasn’t hopeful. I was pissed off.”
“I’ve never been hopeful,” I added.
“Well, I was so young and hopeful.” Weirdly, Bridge seemed to have stopped crying. Maybe because it was quite hard to cry and bicker at the same.
Liz leaned forward from the very back seat. “How about we get on the road? It might help you feel better. And your youth and hope might come flooding back to you.”
“Hang on”—James Royce-Royce started bundling and strapping —“got to get Baby J settled again.”
I thunked my head gently against the dashboard. “We are kind of on a clock here, James.”
“Fine. I’ll just leave my child untethered so he flies through the windscreen the first time we brake suddenly.”