Babyccino

Here's a more complete version of an earlier story.

“But why not, Mummy?”

“Because I say so Oliver, and that’s enough.”

She was aware of eyes on her in the cafe as she stood in the queue. She was hot, Lily was needing a feed and now Oliver was tugging at the hem of her dress.

“But…”

“No, darling. Go and sit with Auntie Zoe and Kira.” Oliver stuck out his bottom lip and slouched off to the table. Lily was hanging on her hip and starting to get restless, and the barista was taking an age over the order. She fumbled in the bag for the bottle and started to feed Lily just as the order arrived. She nodded at her mobile on the bar and nudged it towards the barista with her free hip.

“Can you sort it please? And a babyccino as well. Thanks.” The barista tapped the phone to the card reader and waited for the ‘payment approved’.

Juggling the phone, child and bottle she went over to the table and asked Zoe to take Lily while she went back for the drinks. Obviously, Zoe wouldn’t offer to fetch them.

She came back with the drinks on a too small tray: soya latte for Zoe, flat white for herself and a babyccino for Oliver. Nothing for Zoe, who was too busy on her tablet. No thanks from either, as expected. Oliver simply looked at his cup.

“What’s this?”

“That, Oliver, is what’s called a babyccino.”

“A babyccino? You just made that up. It’s silly.”

“Well, it’s that or nothing.”

“Last time, Daddy let me have a real coffee.”

“Daddy let you have a little sip, and only because I wasn’t looking,” Alice said authoritatively. She would have words when she got home. Oliver sniffed at the drink dismissively but the froth and the sprinkles proved too much to resist, then dipped his nose into the froth and began to drink. It would keep him quiet for a while.

Zoe was Alice’s younger sister by a year, and any sibling rivalry they harboured was dormant through lack of interest. Both had husbands with good jobs, two children apiece although Zoe had started a little earlier and her eldest was now in primary school. The children were smart and healthy.

Alice was a woman almost without conflict, which she often thought made her somewhat invisible and uninteresting. Lily was a little saint for the most part, bless her. It was the men in her life that could ruffle her feathers at times. Both Oliver and James had become experts on which buttons to press to wind her up, and they seemed to enjoy pressing them more and more often. Somewhere along the line she had moved from being an equal partner to a maid, though James would be horrified to learn of it. Of course the children made demands, but Oliver was starting to resemble his father a little too closely in his expectation that she must be at his beck and call. Or perhaps James was becoming a little too much like Oliver in his churlishness. A conspiracy of males, like a collective noun, she pictured them circling around her, eyes flashing, but then she would tell herself mentally to snap out of such nonsense. That was easier said than done, especially when you fluctuated between feeling isolated one minute and hemmed in the next.

“Yummy,” Oliver mumbled over the top of his drink, and Alice counted that a victory of sorts.

“You look tired,” Zoe said flatly.

“Thanks. You, on the other hand, are in bloom.”

Zoe gazed at her sister, trying to sift the sarcasm from the genuine compliment. For both of them these occasional meetings were like a chess game, each piece moved with an eye on the next, seldom in the moment. And though neither of them had said anything to the other, they were both getting tired of it. Alice often thought about speaking her mind, while Zoe frequently had to bite her tongue. Was there such a thing as sibling irritation?

Zoe decided to take the high road. “Hmm,” she said. “Make up and caffeine can work wonders.”

Alice smiled, “Not for me. I need a mechanic.”

“What’s up?”

“Oh nothing really. I’d rather like to be back at work, to be honest. I envy you that sense of purpose.”

“Purpose?” Zoe snorted, “seriously?” Zoe was a moderately successful freelance copywriter, something which to Alice meant freedom and creativity, but which smacked of failure to Zoe. They’d had this talk before.

“Routine then.”

“You have routines,” Zoe indicated Lily and Oliver. Alice looked at both her children as if they suddenly didn’t belong to her. “Could be worse, look at this one,” Zoe said, nodding towards Kira, still immersed in her tablet.

“This one can hear you,” Kira said without looking up.

“Well, well, it lives!”

“Ha ha.”

“Teenager in the making,” Zoe muttered. Kira stuck her tongue out but never took her eyes from the screen. Alice looked on wearily. Everything seemed like a battleground, with tiny gains temporarily held before the next defeat. Once upon a time she’d been able to laugh at herself, then she’d laughed at others, and then there came a day when things were no longer funny, for some reason. Blame the pandemic, maybe. Blame something, otherwise it was hard to make sense of it. As if she was either an angel or a demon on her shoulder, Zoe said “Cheer up. You’ll be back at work soon enough, and that’ll give you something else to be angry at.”

She could read minds, and she spoke with an edge that made her sound both wise and irritated, which irritated in turn.

“Charming,” Alice mumbled. But she was not unaware that she came across as angry or miserable these days. Enough people had told her, from her mother, James,  concerned friends, and now Zoe. Snap out of it, she told herself, at least once a day. Not that it worked particularly well. Perhaps she was suffering from depression, although everybody seemed to be self-diagnosing these days - if there wasn’t something wrong with you there was something wrong with you. No, she was just tired.

At which point Oliver let out an almighty belch that woke Lily, made Zoe jump and caused an astonished Kira to look up from her tablet in surprise, before they all burst out laughing.

“My bad,” Oliver said sheepishly.