Mummy Needs a Break
Susan Edmunds
A hilarious story of the ups and downs of unexpected single motherhood, the perfect laugh-out-loud romance for fans of Why Mummy Drinks, The Unmumsy Mum and The Not So Perfect Mum. With a devilish toddler and baby number two on the way, Rachel’s big dream is to one day go to the toilet on her own. So, she’s surprised to discover that her husband has found the time to have an exciting affair while she’s been bringing up their family. Suddenly, Rachel is left wrangling with a child who will only eat crackers and a 35-week bump. She knows even Mumsnet isn’t going to solve this. What Rachel needs is a handsome, good-with-children, single man. But she can barely leave the house without a stain on her top and child on her hip. How on earth can she claim her life back, let alone thinking about dating? What others are saying about Mummy Needs a Break: ‘Oh my goodness! This book is extremely gripping with lots of twists and things I did not see coming… The mummy parts are totally relatable and there are lots of funny moments mixed with sad, emotional ones too. A great easy-to-read book. I really enjoyed it. ’ Reader reviewer, 5 stars ‘This book was excellent!’ Reader review, 5 stars ‘A fabulous read!’ Reader review, 5 stars ‘Read this in one sitting can’t wait for the next book. ’ Reader review, 5 stars ‘This one is for all the women out there busting butt and getting it done! Love this book. Read the whole thing in one day. You will laugh, relate and just love this book. ’ Reader review, 5 stars ‘Had me giggling out loud… If you are looking for a fun, feel good, uplifting read, with a strong female lead, plenty of humour, drama and a dash of romance, then you will love Mummy Needs A Break!’ Reader review, 4 stars ‘This book had me laughing, shouting and also melted my heart’ Reader review, 4 stars ‘Perfect chick lit! I recommend this for anyone looking for a light and fun read!’ Reader review, 4 stars ‘Absolutely fantastic had me gripped!!! Loved it! Can't wait for more from this author. ’ Reader review, 4 stars
MUMMY NEEDS A BREAK
Susan Edmunds
Copyright (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
Published by AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019
Copyright © Susan Edmunds 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © Sara Gerard
Susan Edmunds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008316099
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008316082
Version: 2019-06-15
Dedication (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
To my husband, Jeremy
Contents
Cover (#u465052a5-6033-5991-9398-94d9c5cd17d0)
Title Page (#u78c45329-f667-5a8f-b744-69a70d6f55fa)
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
How to make blue playdough
What you’ll need*:
1 cup water
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
½ cup salt
1 tablespoon cream of tartar
Blue food colouring
1 cup flour
*A sharp eye to catch bits before they’re ground into the carpet
Combine water, oil, salt, cream of tartar, and food colouring in a saucepan and heat until warm. Remove from heat and add flour. Stir and knead like it’s your husband’s head, and he’s just informed you he’s working through the children’s bath time, again. Warning: The kids will eat more playdough than you realise. It will turn everything in their digestive systems a deep shade of yellow. Apt really, when you’re discovering what a coward the man you married has become.
It was a particularly muggy spring evening when my usually uneventful, comfortably boringly suburban life fell apart. I was eight months pregnant, sweaty, grumpy and was working late. Again.
‘So, tell me a bit about what’s happened.’ I had tucked my phone into the crook of my neck, a pen making an indent in my middle finger as I scribbled on my notepad. Somewhere beyond the door to my makeshift home office in our spare bedroom, I could hear my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Thomas, pushing a toy truck or car repeatedly into the freshly painted wall of the kitchen. At least, I hoped it was a car. The way our day was going, it might have been his father’s head.
The woman at the other end of the phone coughed. Could she hear me tapping my pen on my notebook? I eyed the clock: 6.30. My workday was meant to finish at 5 p.m., but the emails from my editor had become increasingly frantic. If we didn’t want yet another front-page story about the unseasonable weather, I needed to get a quote from this woman about her burgled-for-the-fourth-time-in-a-month clothes store.
‘I don’t want to make myself more of a target …’ I could hear her jangling a bunch of keys.
I deployed the most soothing tone I could muster. She sounded about the same age as my mother, but the photos I’d found of her in our files looked as if she was only a decade or so older than me. ‘I’m sure you won’t. You must want something done to improve safety?’
I bit my lip, allowing her silence to spread out between us. She did not take the hint to fill it.
‘More security guards for the mall? Better monitoring?’ I tried. ‘Have you lost a lot of money?’
A wail echoed down the hallway. She didn’t seem to register it. Judging by her breathing and the whir of vehicles in the background, it sounded as if she was hurrying across a car park.
‘Oh, heaps. The insurance excess wipes me out each time. I’m too scared to work late here by myself.’
I swallowed. ‘I’d love you to raise awareness of the problem.’ I had to get the words out before she came up with another excuse to put the phone down. ‘Maybe stop other business owners getting caught out.’
‘I guess.’ The line went silent again.
Thomas howled from the next room. I cringed. Could his father not handle one bedtime alone? ‘Have you any footage? We could post it on social media, see if anyone IDs the guys?’
I nudged the door open with my foot and stuck my head through, gesturing frantically at my husband, Stephen, to reduce Thomas’s noise output by a couple of thousand decibels.
He strode past, throwing Thomas over his shoulder and marching him out of the kitchen, toothbrush clenched in one hand and pyjamas in the other. He shot me a pleading look as he rounded the corner, which I pretended not to see.
‘Just imagine how good it would feel if you found them. Plastered their names and photos around the place a bit.’
A few minutes later Stephen’s voice reverberated through the walls. ‘No more stories. I’m going to sit at the end of the bed while you go to sleep, okay?’ Then more forceful. ‘Thomas. Get back into bed. Right now. I’m not joking this time, buddy.’
I rolled my eyes. Perhaps if my husband hadn’t styled himself as the fun parent, he might not find the process so tough. But then, bedtime wasn’t a breeze for boring-strict-Mum when I did it every other night of the week, either.
The office door opened, and Thomas strutted in. Grabbing my leg, he tried to pull himself up, mountain-climber style, into my lap. Stephen appeared behind him, grabbed the neck of his dressing gown, bundled him up and carried him away. I heard a thump through the door as Stephen dropped him back on his bed. ‘Water!’ Thomas wailed.
‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to call me back.’ The woman at the other end of the phone cut off the call.
I dropped the phone on to my desk and shifted in my chair. A rivulet of sweat gathered between my maternity bra and the top of the stretched skin of my stomach. All I wanted to do was lie on the couch and eat my way through the rest of the packet of chocolate biscuits I had hidden from Thomas in the top of the larder. I checked the desktop calendar lying open beside my notebook. Eight working days until my maternity leave started.
Somehow, less than half an hour later, the story was filed. I tried to push the image out of my mind of the store owner trotting to her car, wielding keys positioned between her fingers. There was still a continuous rhythm of bangs and thuds reverberating from Thomas’s room as he rolled around in his bed, his knees colliding with the wall. I gathered the empty glasses and plates from around my desk and carried them through to the kitchen.
As I placed them in the soapy suds still stewing in the sink, I became aware that Stephen’s phone was buzzing on the counter, the vibration moving it across the shiny surface. It was a rare sighting of his phone in the wild. Stephen’s phone was normally either at his ear, in his hand or his pocket. He had even taken a brief call while I was in labour with Thomas – apparently, there was something more pressing happening that afternoon at the building firm he owned. I hadn’t let him forget that one.
I kept my hands in the water, idly picking away at determined blue playdough under my nails. How long should I hang back before I ventured down the hallway and relieved Stephen? At some point, all kids have to fall asleep, right? Even with dads who were no doubt giving in to requests for one more story or an extra bedtime song.
The phone buzzed again. I turned it over. It was a message, not a call, and from a number that I didn’t recognise.
‘Miss you,’ the message blinked. Surely a wrong number. I swiped to unlock the phone, putting in the date of our wedding anniversary as the security code. It brought up a text exchange with the unsaved contact. Odd.
‘What are you up to?’ Stephen had asked on Monday night. Monday night? I had been contorting myself at a prenatal yoga class, trying to maintain my zen. I’d dragged myself down for a rare class at the studio, though it would have been much easier to just stay home and do another YouTube workout on the LEGO-strewn lounge floor. Stephen had said he was working late, that night. I remembered because I’d had to send Thomas to my parents, where he’d wreaked overtired havoc.
‘Just lying on the couch,’ the mystery number replied.
‘Lucky couch.’ He signed the message off with a heart-eyed emoji. An emoji! Was that meant to be cute?
‘What are you doing?’
‘Sitting here, thinking about you. See you soon?’
‘Of course.’ Whoever the other number was, the message was ended with a heart in return.
Then the exchange had fallen dead for a couple of days. I lowered myself to the kitchen floor, the too-trendy square handle of the cabinet sticking into my back, the cold metal of the phone in my hands. Lucky couch? Thinking about you? I could not get my thoughts to run in order. It was like watching television when Thomas had the remote, zipping forward then doubling back. The blood had retreated from my fingertips, and my stomach had started somersaulting. The tiles were cold under my shins. What was going on?
I shut my eyes. Stephen had been away from home more than usual, blaming work. I’d assumed he was doing extra hours so that he could take some time off when the baby arrived. It had never occurred to me to question whether he might have been somewhere else.
It had been a long time since he had said anything that flirty to me. And what if there was more to it than just messages? On the one hand, the idea was preposterous. This was my clueless Stephen. He once tied himself in guilty knots when a woman at a party gave him her number. Later, we discovered she only wanted him to advise which type of steel she should use for her fence. But on the other, he wasn’t the type to message anyone for the fun of it. I had had to show him how to set up reminders to reply to his work emails, and it had been months since he bothered to respond to any of my texts.
Thomas had finally fallen silent in his bedroom, and I could hear Stephen plodding back down the hallway towards me, blinking like he’d returned from a disappointing all-night dance party. He rubbed his eyes as he emerged into the white LED light of the kitchen but stopped in the doorway when he clocked his phone in my hands. He looked at the illuminated screen, then my face and back again. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Who is this?’ I rose to my feet.
I had to grip the cold floor with my toes to keep myself upright. ‘Who are you texting?’
He spluttered, a mottled flush spreading over his face. He looked as if he’d just swallowed something rancid. ‘What? No one.’
I thrust the phone at him. He snatched it from my hand and looked at the open conversation.
‘What is going on?’ My words were harsh in the balmy evening air.
He pushed the phone away, his hazel eyes sparkling. ‘Nothing is going on. I can’t believe you’re going through my phone.’
I stared at him. An evening chorus of crickets had started up in the garden, highlighting the silence between us. I watched him struggle for words. My flicker of hope that there was a story to explain the messages evaporated. He had always become tongue-tied at the first hint of a lie and would avoid someone for months rather than risk a confrontation. The back of my throat was caustic with heartburn and fear danced on my nerve endings. I had only just finished getting the baby’s room ready, and Stephen still had to put the cot back together. What had he done to us? To me?
He hunched his shoulders and turned away, taking cover from my gaze. ‘I don’t have to stand here and be interrogated by you. Am I not allowed any privacy anymore?’
He flung open the fridge, grabbed a bottle of beer and stalked over to the living room. I heard the TV switch on. Was that it? He was just going to try to ignore it? I had swallowed dozens of minor disappointments for the sake of our little family, but this one wasn’t going to be one of them.
I followed him. ‘You can’t just walk away. Who is this?’
He stared at the television, determinedly avoiding my eyes, his shoulders drawn up to his ears.
‘Talk to me.’ I grabbed his callused hand and pulled him towards me. I could hear my voice becoming more and more shrill. Was he not even going to make eye contact? I stepped in front of him to block his view of the screen. ‘I’m Thomas’s mother. I’m about to have your second child, for God’s sake. I deserve to know what is going on. I’ve given you fifteen years of my damn life.’
He still would not turn to face me. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallowed hard.
‘Just bloody answer me!’ I swiped a thick stack of magazines from the coffee table on to the floor. The clatter as they hit the beautiful grey wood (we had agonised over it when we remodelled a year earlier) seemed to rouse his attention. He grabbed his keys from the coffee table in front of him and stood up. ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’
Pulling a sweatshirt from the back of the couch, he strode towards the front door and marched outside. The door slammed behind him and I stared at it as I heard his boots crunch over the gravel out to his truck. He heaved the driver’s door shut, the wheels spinning on the stones as he took off down the driveway.
I poured myself a glass of iced water, wishing it were wine, my hands shaking. It was only 8.30 p.m. What was I meant to do? I pondered calling a friend but what do you say: ‘Hello, nice evening isn’t it? I think I’ve just caught my husband having an affair.’
If it turned out he wasn’t, it would be witheringly awkward to make small talk with the neighbours at our next barbecue. And if it transpired that he was – but we stayed together regardless – no one would look him in the eye. I could not imagine anything worse than turning up to drinks at my perfect friend Charlotte’s house and having everyone look at me, the scorned wife. Poor Rachel, stuck with a cheating husband and a new baby.
I flicked through the channels on the television, but the sound washed over me like white noise. I drummed my fingers on the faded black of my overworked maternity leggings. My heart was still pumping as if I were running. I muttered a silent apology to my daughter, tucked up with her feet planted firmly in my ribs, who replied with a swift kick.
Stephen had done some stupid things in the time we had been together. There was the purchase of a boat that didn’t run, which was still under a tarpaulin in the garage. He’d only started his own business because he’d stormed off a building site over some minor dispute he’d let fester for months. My reminder that we’d just signed up to our first mortgage wasn’t enough to dissuade him.
But if you’d asked me even the day before if he would chuck away everything we had for a fling with someone else, I would have said categorically not. We had worked so hard.
There were men who slipped their rings into their pockets at work drinks and just needed to be offered a halfway-decent opportunity and the – often clearly misguided – belief they wouldn’t be caught.
But I had always thought Stephen was in the other camp – the stoic, reliable type who dropped their wives into conversation and had cute photos of their kids as screensavers on their phones. He could be charming, charismatic – people liked him. But I knew – or thought I knew – he was loyal.
Who was the mystery number? There was that woman at the supermarket deli counter who always gave him a cocktail sausage for Thomas. She was quite pretty, probably, without the hairnet. There was the bartender at the dodgy bowling club he and the guys from work usually went to – but I was sure she had been flirting with me, not him, the one time we had run into her when she was off the clock.
I scrolled through the photos on my phone. It was a procession of images depicting inane domestic bliss, the sort of thing that teenage-me would have rolled her eyes at. There we were, getting married on the beach in Fiji. Posing with plates of complicated breakfasts and glasses of overpriced wine at various restaurants through the years of married life we had before Thomas. Then some floaty-dress baby bump pictures from the first time around, when I had time for wafting around on a beach with a photographer. Fitting Thomas into his car seat on the way home from the hospital. Him tottering across the lounge as he learnt to walk. Dressing up in Dad’s work clothes.
Thomas had only just learnt how to line up the camera on my phone to perfectly capture all of our double chins.
It was after 4 a.m. when I heard a key rattle in the lock as Stephen returned. I was still sitting on the couch, staring blankly at the almost-silent television, tracing patterns in the textured fabric of the cushions. I held my breath as he neared the living room door. The light was on – he would know I was inside. He paused briefly but then the door to the spare room clicked shut. I sat on the couch, my fingers tracking the movement of blood through my temples. Questions were stomping around in circles in my mind: Was she someone I knew? What was going on? What the hell was I going to do?
I knew our relationship had changed. But whose doesn’t, when you have children? Years ago, I had a stash of hugely impractical, very skimpy lingerie that I brought out every night he stayed at my place. I crept out of bed sometimes before he woke to put make-up on and would go to a yoga class every night after work and twice at the weekends, coming home relaxed and stretchy. It had been a long time since I had crawled into our bed in anything other than my faded grey favourites and my yoga was now done most often in front of my laptop, with Thomas imitating alongside me, until he got bored. Although it wasn’t like Stephen was auditioning for an aftershave advert each night, either – he was still sporting boxers that were dotted with holes.
Our sex life recovered a bit as Thomas got older, and then I fell pregnant with number two. Stephen was surprised if I was even still conscious once Thomas was in bed each night. Then, when the nausea of the first trimester subsided, Stephen remembered how weird he thought it was to have sex when there was a baby ‘right there’. ‘Especially when it starts moving around,’ he complained. ‘It’s like being in bed with two people … but not in a good way.’
Lately, I’d felt like our family had divided into two camps – un-fun Mum wanting vegetables eaten and teeth brushed, and Thomas and his best mate Dad, who came home from work when the hard stuff was done, ready to play. But that was hardly unusual if my circle of friends was representative. We’d all pondered early on how our husbands seemed to regress twenty years with the arrival of a baby, while we aged ten.
Stephen and I had told each other that it was normal, and we would get back on track eventually. We decided there was no point having a regular ‘date night’ – we would prefer to lie in front of the TV and see how many chocolate biscuits we could eat in half an hour, than go out somewhere public where we would have to wear pants and bribe a babysitter.
When had he changed his mind?
I should have been weeping for the loss of my family but, afraid to look into that particular abyss, I was seething for more practical reasons. I barely had time for a shower each day and beat myself up when I had to make a phone call just when Thomas needed me. I was torn between my need to work harder than every childfree twenty-something on my team and to out-parent the stay-at-home mothers I went to playgroup with on a daily basis. I pulled eighteen-hour days juggling my work–life ‘balance’. It was exhausting. Yet he had managed to fit in a sexy liaison with someone else? I could kill him.
I wrenched myself up and started walking towards the spare bedroom. Stephen was still awake, staring at the lit screen of his phone as I pushed my way into the room. He quickly tapped the device to lock it, sending the room into darkness.
‘I need to know right now.’ I lowered myself on to the end of the bed. ‘Are you seeing someone else? Is that what this is?’
He was silent. The air seemed to throb between us. I slapped his leg through the duvet. ‘Stephen! You can’t get out of this one.’
His voice was strangled as he pushed himself up on the pillows as if to get away from me. ‘Yes.’
‘Who is she? Is it someone I know?’ I paused, feeling ill, as I realised the possibility. ‘Have you been there tonight?’
He turned over in the bed. ‘Please, can we talk about it in the morning?’
I took a deliberate breath in, then out, using every drop of my willpower to channel my deep yogi breathing I’d mastered all those years ago. ‘No. We cannot talk about it in the morning.’
He pushed himself up on the pillows. I noticed his lined forehead, his short-cut hair becoming a little more sparse around the temples. ‘Fine. I’ve been seeing Alexa. She didn’t want me to say anything to you until after the baby came. But now you know.’
He flopped back and put his hands over his face. Like it was my fault that I was finding out at the wrong time. I pulled my hand back from where it lay on his leg as if I had been burned.
Alexa. The name cut through my mental fog. The too-perfect interior designer with the TV show and stupidly expensive coffee table books. She’d been working with him a lot. I should have known something was going on when he told me, completely straight-faced, that he was going to a lunch meeting with her about the colour scheme for a pet dog’s bedroom at the big country house he was working on. Instead, I’d just been jealous that he got to have an expensive steak and pricey bottle of wine while I was stuck at home, trying to write a column about a proposed new tax, while I jiggled Thomas on my knee and sang along to Fireman Sam.
Alexa was gorgeous. Of course. If you take the average pregnant person and try to imagine the complete opposite, you have her. Tall, slim, impossibly glossy long hair with gold highlights that bounce around as she wanders about in intricately patterned harem pants. That first night we met, at an end-of-year function for Stephen’s business, she had just returned from a mountain trek and thirteen-day scuba diving course and reeked of the calm confidence that it seems possible to acquire when you have more than fourteen and a half minutes a day to devote to your own interests.
Brought back to the present with a shock, I could taste my dinner bubbling up into my oesophagus at the thought of her. A scream forced its way up. I grabbed the china vase from the bedside table and hurled it at the wall. ‘How could you?’ I screamed. ‘How the hell could you do that?’ I squeaked, more softly the second time. The vase didn’t even break, rebounding with a thud on the carpet.
He stared at me. ‘You’ll wake Thomas. Do you know how long it took me to get him to sleep?’
I stood in shock, then ran for our bedroom. A pile of his clothes lay in a heap on the end of the bed. As I curled up, I realised the whole room smelt of the aftershave I had been buying him for the last ten years.
I woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of Thomas and Stephen in the kitchen, clattering spoons into bowls as they assembled breakfast. I stretched, feeling the bones click back into place in my neck, and barrel-rolled off the bed. My baby seemed to stretch too, contorting as she found her way back to the centre of my upright body.
I edged the kitchen door open. Thomas was perched on his step stool, pouring milk into the bowl, and on to the bench, from which it was dripping on to the floor. The kettle was boiling and our dog, Waffle, nudged her empty water bowl across the tiles with her greying nose. Stephen grabbed the milk bottle from Thomas. ‘I told you to be careful. Let me.’
‘I do it!’ Thomas glared but looked chastened. Stephen rarely snapped at him. His father tried to guide the pour. He looked up as he heard me shuffling in, my legs numb from the baby cutting off my blood supply. He quickly turned his gaze to Thomas again.
I watched the pair of them as Stephen positioned Thomas into his chair at the dining table. More cereal was spilling down the front of his T-shirt. I handed Stephen a cloth to wipe him, but he looked flummoxed, so I snatched it back and dabbed at the mess.
‘I’m going to ask my mum to take Thomas out for a while, so we can talk today.’ I kept my voice calm, channelling the woman who fronted the kids’ TV show that kept Thomas occupied for a sanity-saving hour each Saturday morning. My husband might be trying to ruin our lives, but I was going to keep this from Thomas – as well as everyone else – for as long as I could.
Stephen swallowed, and focused on my hand blotting Thomas’s T-shirt. ‘I have to go to the site this morning. I can come back about eleven.’
I kissed Thomas’s forehead. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’
We were talking to each other as if we were business acquaintances, who didn’t particularly like each other.
He had barely made a dent in his toast when he stood up and stuffed his keys and phone into a bulging pocket, whistling for Waffle to follow him into his truck.
‘Say goodbye to Dad,’ I prompted Thomas, who was watching a shimmer of sunlight dance across the wall. I was not going to miss an opportunity to remind Stephen of what he would be leaving behind. I would have pulled out my sonography scans and dangled them in front of him if I could.
‘You shirt,’ Thomas pointed at my front. I was still wearing Stephen’s baggy grey T-shirt, which I’d had on the day before. There was a saucy smear across the front, where Thomas had wiped his face as I hugged him after a messy afternoon tea. He raised a puzzled eyebrow.
I arranged my face into as neutral an expression as I could manage. ‘I didn’t have time to get changed.’ I shot him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He was frowning. It was time to deploy my best upbeat your-mother-is-definitely-not-falling-apart voice again. If I presented him with the wrong type of jam with his toast, it could throw him off for the whole day. Now I was turning up in day-old clothes and acting like his father was a stranger in our kitchen. ‘Everything is okay, darling. You’re going to Gran and Granddad’s this morning. That will be fun, won’t it?’
By 11.30, there was still no sign of Stephen. I paced the house, watching the driveway. Every time I tried to return to my desk, the words on the computer screen seemed to flitter in front of me. I was scanning a press release for the third time, still with no idea what it said, when my phone vibrated. A message from Stephen at last. I gritted my teeth as I opened it. ‘Can’t make it back this morning.’
I stabbed at the phone to call him. It rang and rang before voicemail clicked in: ‘Hi, it’s Stephen Murchison, I can’t come to the phone …’
‘You can’t or you won’t?’ I growled at it and tried again. And again. At the sixth time, he answered. ‘I cannot talk to you right now,’ he hissed. ‘I’m on site.’
Had I always been married to such a selfish coward? Did he think I could just put my own life on hold until he had time to spare for me?
‘You were meant to be coming back here at eleven.’ My anger reverberated through my body so hard I thought he must be able to hear it down the phone line. ‘I need to know. Is that it for our marriage? For our kids? How long has this been going on for?’ I spat the words at my computer screen.
‘I don’t know.’
There was a sound of movement, a door slammed. He must have gone to sit in his truck.
‘A month maybe. Two. I’ve developed feelings for her.’ His voice trailed off as if I was meant to just accept it. Like, oh you’re in love with her? That’s all right, then. Please carry on. Don’t let me be an impediment to your happiness.
Instead, I let the silence hang between us. He might as well have been speaking a different language. The Stephen I knew thought ‘feelings’ should be approached in the same way as a particularly virulent infectious disease. The first time I’d told him I loved him, he said: ‘me too’. We’d got engaged while on holiday in Hawaii because, watching loved-up Japanese couples exchanging vows on the sand, he’d said: ‘I suppose you want to do that, too?’
At last, he sighed. ‘I’ll move out while we figure out what to do.’
‘You’ll move out?’ I was suddenly shouting so loud it made my throat hurt. ‘Damn right you’ll move out. I never want to see your face again.’
I pressed the button to end the call, my hands shaking as if I had downed twenty-six coffees. A month or two? In that time, I had dragged him to midwife appointments, he had sat with me while I agonised over paint colours for the new baby’s room and we had planned Thomas’s third birthday party. We’d even pored over which species of dinosaur Thomas might like on his cake. All that time he had been talking to someone else, confiding in her? The crushing weight of the loss was overwhelming.
Every aspect of my life had been moulded to fit our family. Before Thomas was born, I had wanted to use an inheritance from my grandfather to set up a little yoga studio but Stephen had argued it was too risky to both be self-employed. Then, I’d passed up promotions so that I could work from home to be there for Thomas. For a while, I’d provided the only income as he channelled everything he earned into growing his business and paying the staff (he’d employed prematurely). We’d even decided the time was right to try for a second baby this year because he’d taken on a big contract that would double his workload in twelve months’ time.
I gritted my teeth. If he wanted to destroy our little family, I was going to make him pay.
CHAPTER TWO (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
How to make a teepee
What you’ll need:
Rope
Dowels
A canvas drop cloth
Screws and washers
Cut a length of rope. Drill a hole near the top of one of your poles and string the rope through it. Tie a knot. Prop your poles up in the teepee position to see where they’ll need to sit to be stable. Drill a hole in your second pole where the two poles meet and feed the rope through. Do the same for the third and fourth poles. Start draping your drop cloth over the poles and secure it where they meet with a screw. If you can wrestle the cloth off your kids, who will want to pretend to be ghosts in it, screw it into each of the poles to hold it in place.
Erect the teepee in your living room or some other high-traffic area of your home where it will be sure to be in the way. You’ll fall over it at least four times a day, and it will soon become a hiding place for toys you can’t find space to put away. Depending on the strength of your construction, you and your kids may even be able to live in it, if you’re giving up on that suburban dream that was never really yours to begin with.
I locked my phone and pushed it away from me on my desk, as if touching it again might prompt another world-destroying revelation. Thomas was still at my parents’ house but there was no hope of me getting any of the work on my to-do list done. What was I meant to do next?
I tapped an email out to my boss. Being very pregnant afforded few luxuries but no-questions-asked sick leave seemed to be one of them.
I was walking aimlessly around the living room when a car pulled up outside. Through the venetian blinds, I could see a woman in sharp stiletto heels, black culottes and a spaghetti-strap pink camisole that did not quite cover her red bra, extracting herself from the driver’s seat. Her long, almost puce hair caught in the door as she closed it behind her. My sister, Amy. She looked as though she was ready for a night out, not an excursion into deepest suburbia to visit me.
My shoulders slumped. Could I face a visit? I was still seesawing between a scream and hysterical laughter. I had had to bury my head in the fridge and pretend I was organising dinner when my parents came to pick up Thomas – and that was before that phone call. My neck was tense all the way down my spine, but I couldn’t even lie flat to stretch out.
I opened the door before she could knock. She swayed slightly, her heels digging into the soft ground as she picked her way across the lawn. ‘Rachel, darling.’
I gestured to her to wipe a spot of pink lipstick from her top teeth. ‘Amy. You didn’t tell me you were coming by.’
She kissed my cheek as she pushed past me. She was still wearing the lanyard and security pass that let her into the double-storey restaurant and bar complex where she worked. ‘Are you on maternity leave yet? I figured you might be bored. Thought we could have a bit of a catch-up. Maybe get some lunch?’
‘I’ve still got a week and a bit. Look, I’ve got something I need to deal with.’ I shot her a look. When we were ten, she’d been able to tell when I had stashed KitKats in the wardrobe. Surely there would be no way I was hiding this one. ‘Now really isn’t a good time.’
She wasn’t looking at me. ‘What are you talking about? It’s been ages since we got together.’
It hadn’t, we’d had lunch last week.
Amy was picking through a pile of magazines on my coffee table. ‘Mind if I take this one?’ It was the latest issue of Women’s Health, promising ten ways to bring on labour. I’d figured if my baby was still tucked up in there the day before my due date, I’d allow myself to read it.
I shrugged. ‘Sure, go for it. Look, can I give you a call a bit later? We can make time for coffee. Is everything okay?’
She collapsed on to an armchair. ‘I’m tired after a long, crappy night at work. Can you believe we didn’t get out of there until 6 a.m.? Then I went to one of the waiters’ houses for a bit … I really need to get a real job.’
She stretched and yawned. ‘None of the losers tipped, either. Can you spot me £50?’
I sighed. ‘My wallet’s on the table by the door. You can take whatever’s in it.’
She raised an eyebrow, seeming at last to notice something amiss. ‘I was joking, mostly. I’m not that skint. What’s up?’
I watched her lean back in the chair and frown at me, twisting her hair around her fingertips. She had always made fun of Stephen and me for our ‘domestic bliss’. She bought me a copy of The Stepford Wives for Christmas one year, and an apron for my twenty-first birthday. But what would she know? Her longest relationship had lasted two years, with an artist named Frank. I couldn’t even remember his last name. She had always seemed to think that the scruffier he was, the more of a genius he must be. I just thought he needed a shower.
‘Stephen and I are having a few problems,’ I muttered at last. The words seemed to stick in my throat.
She blinked. ‘All is not well in this land of domestic harmony?’
I turned away. She scrambled to her feet and was behind me in seconds, putting her arm around my shoulders. Her skin felt vaguely sticky and she smelled fruity, as if she’d had a drink spilt on her. I wanted to offer her a baby wipe.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,’ she murmured into my hair. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
I flinched as she tried to lay her head against mine and smiled thinly. ‘No. Thanks, though.’ I checked my watch. It was almost 1 p.m. ‘I’ve got to go and pick up Thomas before Dad has a hernia.’ I could still remember my father’s face the last time I’d arrived late and walked in on Thomas. He was face down, spread-eagled on the dining room floor, screaming with every bit of breath in his little lungs, because my mother had suggested he might like to change out of his food-soaked T-shirt. It was at least a twenty-minute drive from my place in the suburbs to my parents’ home by the beach. Amy grabbed my hand, twisting her fingers into mine. ‘I’ll come with you.’
I hesitated. This time, she seemed to read my mind. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t make you talk about it if you don’t want to. I’ll keep you company. Tell you some stories about last night’s sleazeballs to make you feel better. You won’t believe what Heidi had to put up with.’
Thomas was doing circuits of the living room when we arrived. Overtired energy coursing through him, he was busy throwing magazines and television remotes into his favourite plastic trolley. Every time he completed a circuit, he would veer off and collide with the side of the couch. My father sat on said couch, his legs tucked up beneath him to avoid Thomas, focusing on the television, with his index fingers tracing circles on his temples.
‘Hi, Mumma,’ Thomas screamed and dropped his trolley when he noticed me at last. He wrapped his arms around my legs and peered up at me. ‘Hello.’ Then he noticed my sister: ‘Auntie Army!’
It was a sweet mispronunciation that no one had bothered to correct because it was too endearing. She scooped him up and placed an exuberant, wet kiss on his cheek.
I noticed something brown smeared across the side of his face. Had my mother been trying to get him to bake again?
As I was pondering, I noticed both he and my mum were staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a streak of mascara on the side of my nose. I hadn’t thought I’d cried that much in the car but perhaps I was wrong. Amy kicked off her heels and nudged Thomas towards the living room. ‘Go and find your new trains to show me, buddy.’
He ambled off obediently, and we heard crashing as he upended a toy box and knocked over a makeshift teepee. ‘It must be somewhere,’ he shouted. It was what I said to him every time he asked me to find the latest toy that had gone missing.
‘New trains?’ I forced a high-pitched laugh as I turned to my mother. Thomas would soon be able to curate an exhibition of toys my parents had collected for him.
She wasn’t buying my attempt to change the subject, took me by the wrists and stared at my puffy, itchy eyes. ‘What’s going on? You’ve been crying. Is something wrong at work? Has something happened to Stephen’s business?’
I tried to choke out the words, but they did not make any more sense on the second retelling than they had when I gave Amy an abridged version in the car. Soon the tears were dripping off my chin. Two days ago, everything was normal. Everything was fine. I was boring Rachel, married to a nice but slightly infuriating man with one exuberant son and a daughter on the way. Not exactly living the dream but doing well enough to pass the Christmas card newsletter test. Now I was separating from a cheating husband who had taken up with a B-grade celebrity interior designer.
‘What? Are you sure? I can’t believe …’ My mother placed a perfectly manicured hand over her mouth.
I cut her off. ‘Yes, I know. It was a surprise to me as well.’
‘But … you’re pregnant! He can’t get away with this, surely.’ She pushed her small square glasses up on her nose and stared at me as if being able to see me more clearly might present a different reality.
I rolled my eyes and gestured to my midsection, where my stomach was doing its best impression of a parade float. ‘I’m aware of that, too. Turns out, there’s no law against it. Thomas!’ I shouted over her head. ‘In the car, please.’
She grabbed my hand again. ‘What will you do? A newborn and Thomas on your own … Can you imagine …’ Her eyes were sparking with anger. ‘How dare he? After everything you’ve done for him.’
I rested my hand on her arm in a way I hoped was reassuring. The last thing I needed was her flying off to fight my cause for me. I still hadn’t recovered fully from the email she had sent to one of my university lecturers when I had failed a paper in my final year.
‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ I took another deep breath, summoning up an image of my first yoga teacher, who’d spent a full session showing me how to move my diaphragm. ‘Sillier people than me manage it. Thomas! What are you doing in there?’
‘Darling, come and stay with us.’
My father gave up his pretence of ignoring us. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said Rachel must come and stay here if she and Stephen are having problems.’ My mother’s voice was unusually firm. ‘We have the spare rooms upstairs. We can help you with the baby. I can clean out the cupboards down here, so you have room for your things. The rooms aren’t big, but they should be fine for the three of you. It’s quite warm in the evening on that side of the house, but I can get you a fan …’
I bit my lip. Would the things that drove me nuts as a teenager – my mother’s anxiety about every decision I had to make, my father’s need for routine – be even more grating twenty years on? Did they think I couldn’t cope on my own?
I cut her off. ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’ Thomas had appeared at my side, stretching his little fingers around two new train carriages.
In the car on the way back to our house, I replayed my mother’s words in my mind. Amy had dozed off in the passenger seat next to me, her phone clasped in her hand.
Could I manage a newborn and Thomas, alone? There were millions of women around the world functioning perfectly well as single mothers. Should I be offended that my mother deemed me unable do the same? I assumed I would need a little longer off work than the roughly four and a half hours I’d taken with Thomas. But it could be done. Perhaps I could get a flatmate. I drafted the ad in my head: Sunny room for single person to share with professional woman and two others, one prone to stomping about in the middle of the night or waking early with a rousing rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.
Perhaps a flatmate was not going to work.
‘Stephen will have to pay some sort of child support, won’t he?’ I realised I was asking the woman with the friendly smile on the billboard opposite us as we waited for the traffic light to change.
‘What, Mumma?’ Thomas’s little forehead crumpled into a frown. His floppy brown fringe needed a trim. I met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nothing, darling. Sorry. Don’t worry, Mumma’s just having a bit of a rough day today. It’s going to be okay.’
He kept watching me, cracker in one hand, as the traffic light went green and I put my foot on the accelerator. The irony was, I had a tower of parenting books on the table beside my bed. Could any of them tell me how to protect a two-and-a-bit-year-old from a sudden-onset paternal midlife crisis?
What would I do if the baby woke just as Thomas was falling asleep, his little arms wrapped around my neck? And would I ever get another shower again, if I had to coax two of them through breakfast first? Thomas stretched his hand out, making a smeary print on the window. I watched him drag his finger through the crumbs left on the glass.
Back at the house, Thomas splashed in his paddling pool in the late afternoon sunshine. The leaves on the tree in the middle of our lawn had curled prematurely, dropping one by one and forming a mushy brown mulch. The lawn looked exactly as I felt. I propped myself on an outdoor dining chair and tracked back through my missed calls. One number had tried me three times already. I pressed the button to call it back.
A woman’s voice answered on the first ring. ‘Rachel.’ She exhaled my name into the phone. ‘Thanks so much for getting in touch. I just wanted to run a story idea past you. I think it’s pretty neat – one of my clients is launching a new business …’
I yelped as Thomas threw a plastic bucket of water at my legs. I held up a finger.
‘Rachel? Are you okay?’ The PR woman was still talking.
‘Sorry, yes. Just working from home with my son today.’ Thomas frowned and backed up for another attempt.
Her laugh tinkled down the phone. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know how that is.’
I would have bet anything that she didn’t. I’d heard from a friend that she had employed two nannies, working in tandem, so that she could carry on with her life fairly untroubled, despite the arrival of twins. It had made me question my life choices.
Thomas took aim with his next bucket-load. I grabbed the pail from his clutches, and with a surge of anger shooting through me, threw it to the far corner of the garden. His face fell as he turned away. A twang of remorse tugged at my chest. I reached to pat his shoulder, but he ducked and darted away to the bucket.
‘So it’s ground-breaking, exciting stuff. Was hoping you might like to do an interview? I could set it up for any time that suits you.’
Thomas pumped his fists in the air as I watched him attempt to kick water at me from the far end of his paddling pool. I turned away from him and huddled over the phone. ‘Do you think you could pop the details in an email to me?’
When the water in the pool was evenly spread across the rest of the garden, Thomas moved to his bike and propelled himself along as fast as his lean legs would permit, heading for the gate. When at last I was able to put the phone down, I stumbled after him. ‘Get back here.’
He shook his head. ‘Leaving.’
I dropped to his height and blocked his path. ‘Sorry for throwing your bucket, darling. I was trying to concentrate on my call.’
He kicked at the ground. ‘Hungry.’
I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Okay, let’s go inside and see what we can find, shall we?’
Of all the parenting things at which I was failing, feeding Thomas seemed the most egregious.
When he was first starting to eat solid food, I would spend every other Sunday evening cooking and freezing nutritious meals with a laundry list of clean foods like kale and quinoa. He invariably turned his nose up, and more went on the floor than in his mouth. Defeated, I’d let the most recent freezer stash run out, and now the chances of me producing more than a plate of fish fingers for his dinner were slim. The most I could hope for was that there was a handful of oven chips somewhere in the bottom of the garage chest freezer to accompany them.
I stripped off Thomas’s wet things and positioned him on the couch with my iPad and one of his favourite YouTube clips, of children unwrapping Kinder Surprise eggs. Before I became a parent, I would not have believed such a thing existed, but he would always find them, even if I dutifully set up something like Thomas the Tank Engine. How could a child who could not read, write, or even reliably use the toilet navigate YouTube on an iPad?
I arranged the fish fingers, chips, some carefully sliced carrot and a spoonful of hummus on to one of those plastic platters designed for fussy kids who don’t like their food groups to touch. I had bought a set thinking they might inspire me to serve up interesting antipasto-style meals for Thomas, with morsels of healthy treats for him to select from. Pinterest mums always provided a selection of examples to follow. But the pressure of having to come up with something for each of the spots was intense. Once I had found myself adding a few cornflakes, just so he wouldn’t have an empty platter segment.
The landline phone jingled and startled me; I’d almost forgotten we still had one.
‘Is this Murchison Contracting?’ The man’s voice was gruff. Stephen must have his work phone off. I pushed an image of him in bed with Alexa out of my mind, dabbing at an unidentified splotch on my shirt.
‘Oh sorry.’ I tried to hit the pitch and tone of a cheery receptionist. ‘Stephen Murchison’s gone out of business. Terrible thing.’
There was a pause. ‘Are you sure? Stephen?’
‘Quite. Allegations of poor workmanship. Awful situation. I’m just taking the calls. Should I take a message?’
The man coughed. ‘Never mind. I’ll try someone else.’
Thomas wailed from the lounge. My iPad had run out of battery. I ushered him in to the dinner table, helping him use my bump as a kind of step stool on to his seat. ‘What you eating?’ He looked at me.
I could not respond. My stomach was still doing an impression of the kitchen blender but if I threw our routine off track, I might never get him into bed. It was only the promise of a bath on my own once he was asleep that was getting me through the evening. I half-heartedly picked a limp fish finger from the oven tray and put it on a bread plate. I slid into the chair next to him and gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
He frowned. ‘You sad, Mumma? Daddy home?’
I had to turn my face away and pinch my thigh to stop a surge of tears. ‘I’m fine, darling, don’t worry. I’m not sure what Daddy’s up to, but you’ve got me tonight, okay?’
I clenched his hand, probably a little too tightly. With three of us around the dinner table, the six-person setting had seemed appropriate. With just us two, it seemed empty. Of course, it would not be long before we would have another person with us in her high chair, throwing her own fish fingers on the ground. Somehow the thought did not make me any happier.
It turns out you can share a house with someone for more than a decade and still not really know them.
I met Stephen as I was finishing high school. It had been what one of my teachers described as a ‘social year’ for me, in which I spent more time getting acquainted with the coffee machine in the common room set aside for seniors than I did in the classroom. We were allowed to come and go as we liked and I duly did, erasing any classes before 10 a.m. from my timetable. Despite that, I had learnt to write an essay florid enough that no one noticed its lack of substance and I was able to squeeze out enough marks to get into a communications degree.
I would like to claim to have been following a lifelong dream, but that would be a lie. I was not good enough at maths to be a doctor, not confident enough for marketing and although I harboured daydreams about being a youth worker, who helped troubled young people find their way, I had finally accepted that it probably wouldn’t all be like Dangerous Minds. I could never pull off a leather jacket in the same way Michelle Pfeiffer did, anyway. Kids would take one look at me and roll their eyes.
Stephen crashed his way into my world at a friend’s party – the kind where for the first time one of your inner circle is finally of legal drinking age. We all felt very grown up that one of us had ventured to the off-licence and stocked up on sugary ready-mixed vodka pops.
Stephen had ended up there by accident because the friend who was meant to be taking him and his mates to the football had drunk too much and could no longer drive. He’d sidled over to me with the confidence of someone on their third beer. Helena, who had been my friend since we were in kindergarten, gave me a knowing look. We had spent ages agonising over my outfit and settled on a pair of bootleg jeans, an off-the-shoulder sparkly black top and an impossibly high pair of stiletto heels that I was not able to walk in without looking like a particularly hesitant fawn but which we decided looked incredibly sophisticated.
Stephen looked me straight in the eye. ‘I snore, sometimes pee in the shower and have been known to turn my underwear inside out to get another day’s wear out of them.’
‘Pardon?’ I wasn’t sure if he had mistaken me for someone else.
He shot me an ear-to-ear grin. ‘I figure if I tell you all the bad stuff about me now, there’s less chance you’ll be disappointed when you get to know me.’
He settled down on to the sofa beside me and put his arm along its back. I could smell his supermarket cologne. He had shaved his head, but you could see the shadow where the hair was growing back, so I knew he was not actually bald. He was sporting the small, under-the-lip tuft of hair that was inexplicably the fashion at the time, particularly among those who needed to prove they had hair to grow.
‘How do you know I’m going to want to get to know you?’ I was impressed by his arrogance.
His eyes were mischievous. ‘Oh, I don’t. But it’s not like you were talking to anyone else.’ He gestured to the boys my age, who were all still milling around on the other side of the room, too nervous to try their own opening lines. Helena looked as though she might be about to rescue one of them.
That was fifteen years ago, and although I found out pretty quickly that his list of negative things was by no means comprehensive, he was correct in his prediction that I was rarely disappointed – in the early years, at least.
Through university, while my friends were ranking the various schools according to the sexual prowess of their male students, I was going home to Stephen. I would still add my cash to the fund we built up each week for jugs of second-rate beer in the campus bar, before they headed off into the night with the latest guy to get their hopes up. Whereas I knew exactly what I was getting with Stephen – and it would come with an early alarm clock the next day as he got ready for work.
He even willingly attended a mock appointment with a friend who was training to be a naturopath and put us through a process in which we were asked to describe the consistency of our faeces. I had felt sick with mortification but he had chuckled at the flowchart of photographs and brought it up when he wanted to make me blush, for weeks afterwards.
There was a period when my friends and I became a bit too invested in Sex and the City, and I decided I needed some time as a single girl to carve my identity, preferably from the comfort of something that resembled an upmarket New York loft apartment. It took about twelve hours before I realised that my rundown flat didn’t have quite the same vibe. The heel of my imitation Manolo Blahniks kept getting stuck in the cracked concrete of the front steps, for one.
Wanting to punish me, he went for drinks with his workmates at the bar I worked at, and gave my colleague a tip that was about three times her nightly wage. I found out later he’d taken out a loan from his father to pay the rent that week.
I responded by going on a blind date offered by one of my flatmates. The standoff lasted about three weeks before I called him, manufacturing a leaking tap that needed his attention. He turned up within ten minutes, not even mentioning that he was a builder, not a plumber.
Our relationship had become so familiar I sometimes had to think twice to remember that he had not always been around. We had become so comfortable that it was not unusual for him to discuss – in detail – the symptoms of the latest tummy bug he had picked up from Thomas or to wander out after a shower to ask me whether a spot on his back was a new addition.
Now, I was working out how best to keep up my energy to read bedtime stories to our son on my own, while he spent the evening – I guessed – entwined with Alexa’s freakishly long, sickeningly smooth limbs. It was as though I had landed in someone else’s life.
Thomas seemed to sense my strength was waning and was a little more compliant than normal as we dragged ourselves through the evening motions. I did not argue when he merely waved the toothbrush in the direction of his teeth, and he only protested for a minute when it was time to turn out the light.
I snuggled down next to him and arranged his little body around the curve of my stomach. He buried his face in my hair, twisting some of it around his fingers. ‘Daddy home tomorrow?’
I kissed his forehead hard. ‘I don’t think so, sweetheart. But I’ll think of something fun for us to do, promise.’
He screwed up his face. I started to draw circles on his back with my finger, counting 187 of them before his breathing started to become slow and regular. I lay as still as I could, next to him, staring at the ceiling. Over the past two and a half years, I had watched him fall asleep so often I could always pinpoint the moment he finally nodded off. His body would give a little jerk and his breath deepened.
I used to count to 100 of those breaths before I started to try to extricate myself from the bed, so there was no chance I would wake him on my run to freedom. This time I allowed myself to enjoy being cuddled up next to him. The world outside his bedroom door might have changed dramatically, but I would cling on to this little cocoon of familiarity for as long as I could.
CHAPTER THREE (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
How to make gloop
What you’ll need:
500g cornflour
Water
Food colouring
In a decent-sized mixing bowl, mix your cornflour and water together in a ratio of one part water to two parts cornflour. When it’s reached the desired consistency, add your choice of food colouring. Perfect for adding splashes of colour to an otherwise perfect-condition white T-shirt. Never mind, though. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to keep up appearances. Worn-in is the new black, right?
The next morning, Thomas woke as the first birds started singing. He slumped out of his bed and stomped down the hallway, dragging his duvet behind him. I pretended to be asleep, complete with a faux snore for effect, as he pushed my bedroom door open. He clambered under the duvet, warm from his bed, and started driving a toy truck up the side of my face.
‘Wake up, Mumma!’ he shouted and giggled when I started. ‘Are you stuck? Tow truck pull you out.’
‘Don’t you want to watch something on the iPad for a little while before we get up?’ I reached for it and waved it desperately. It had taken me hours to fall asleep, battling mental glamour shots of Stephen and Alexa interspersed with little short films of my weakest parenting and marriage moments.
He shook his head and grabbed my hand, pulling me out from under the covers, towards the door. I reached for my bathrobe and tried to arrange it around my bump. The tie would not quite reach so I held it shut with one hand while he wrenched me along with the other. We stumbled out of my bedroom into the living room, where the first weak rays of sunlight were trying to push their way through the crack in the curtains. A steady rhythm of rain pelted the windows. I leant against the wall, willing my still-sleepy brain to catch up.
‘What do you want for breakfast, honey?’
I could probably stretch my culinary skills to produce some toast and Marmite, and there might be a few crumbs of cereal left. I might even be able to find a banana somewhere in the back of the cupboard. I had not been to the supermarket in days.
‘Crackers.’ Thomas was firm.
Thomas would live on crackers if he could. But not any kind of crackers – it had to be one brand, specific to one supermarket that always seemed to stock too few of the things. Sometimes I had to check back with them two or three days in a row before they had a packet on the shelves.
‘You’ll have something on the crackers, though, right? Peanut butter?’
I tried to keep my voice light. Please say yes, I willed him. I needed to at least pretend his breakfast had contained more than just packaged, refined carbohydrates.
‘Just crackers,’ he said solemnly. ‘I sit here and eat them.’
He strolled through to the dining room and pulled himself on to a chair at the table. He looked at me expectantly. I was too tired to try harder. Maybe serving nutritious breakfasts was the domain of people who were not suddenly single-parenting.
‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’ He was fidgeting in his seat.
‘No thank you,’ he said primly, a cracker in each hand.
He wriggled again.
‘Are you sure?’
His eyes widened in alarm. ‘Toilet!’ He jumped from his seat and rushed for the door. There was a banging as he tried to get his pyjamas off and climb on to his step stool at the same time.
He re-emerged a few minutes later, his pants discarded. I shrugged it off. He’d be getting dressed before long, anyway. While he ate his parent-incriminating breakfast, I packed his lunchbox for nursery with an array of relatively healthy snacks – carrot sticks, hummus, a couple of rice crackers, some fruit. I regarded it for a minute. I had better add a serving of yoghurt and a couple of plain biscuits so I could be sure that he would at least eat something during the day.
Crackers demolished, Thomas bumbled off to my bedroom, dragging his fingers along the walls as he went.
‘Where are you off to?’ It was a half-hearted inquiry and I did not wait for a response. He soon started clattering and banging, pulling things down from the bedside table. I tried not to think about it – I had moved everything ‘dangerous’ to a shelf in my wardrobe that even I needed a step stool to reach. Somehow, I needed to get his bag packed, to find clothes for him and something clean and big enough for me to wear. Then I needed to put the dishwasher on, all before we had to leave the house at 8.30.
I figured the worst that could happen would be that he wasted some of my Chanel hand cream – bought for me as a gift and which I was using so sparingly that it was into its second year. On a scale of The Worst Things To Happen, seeing that disappear would be pretty bad – old me might even have cried – but I could sacrifice it in the interests of making it out of the door.
He appeared in the kitchen in front of me. It took me a second to realise what he had in his hand: a vibrator from my underwear drawer, the type that has a head that is attached to the main body of the contraption with a long wire. The batteries had long since gone flat.
‘A skipping rope!’ he shouted. ‘I found a skipping rope in your drawer!’
My horror must have been apparent because he looked at me sideways and put it behind his back, scowling fiercely at my lunge to wrench it from his grasp. ‘Mine! I show Kaskia!’
I could just imagine it. His teachers, one of whom was ‘Kaskia’, who, in fact, was a tiny German woman called Saskia, already seemed to think I was some sort of deviant because I occasionally arrived late to pick him up, usually in my faded activewear, and almost always forgot about their themed ‘wacky days’ – when he was meant to dress up as a superhero or paint his hair green. They would have a field day if he turned up with sex toys in his schoolbag.
I would have to distract him with something else if I was to have a hope of getting it from him. ‘I’ll swap you an M&M for your skipping rope,’ I ventured, pushing half-empty boxes of crackers and muesli bars around in the cupboard as I tried to find them.
‘Two,’ he said, his eyes narrowing.
‘Fine, two,’ I agreed. ‘If you put your raincoat on.’ The deal was done.
The goodbye as I dropped him off at nursery was not the drawn-out film scene farewell that it sometimes was, where he would sit on me and hold my hair, then lean through the fence as I drove away, waving at me as if he was a castaway on an island. This time, his class was engrossed in what looked like a big bowl of blue gloop. They were in it up to their armpits, flicking handfuls at each other. All fifteen of them were filthy.
Thomas pushed through to the middle of the group and plunged in up to his armpits. One of the teachers met my gaze as I quickly tallied up whether we had enough size three clothes to justify throwing this set out, rather than bothering to wash it. Their ‘washable’ paints had taken me at least a week and half a bottle of bleach to budge last time, and even then the shirts had looked like they’d been washed with some vibrant socks. ‘It’s a valuable learning experience. Great sensory exploration,’ she shouted over their heads.
I ignored her and blew a kiss at Thomas, noticing with a jolt how the curve of his face had become that of a little boy, not the round-cheeked profile of a baby. He jostled with his best friend, Nixon. ‘I’ll be back to pick you up after lunch.’ He did not acknowledge me. Instead, he smeared some gloop across the front of his shirt and threw some at Nixon.
The rain had stopped when I returned to my car but the sunshine was not yet sure of itself. I clambered in. Between the baby seat behind me and the steering wheel in front, there was little room left for my expanding bulk. I slammed my hand on the button to turn the car on. The fuel light glared at me. I’d usually have tried to swap cars with Stephen just at the moment when it needed to be filled. But there was a service station on the way home, so there was no excuse.
Even though I’d had this car more than three years, I always drove up to the pumps on the wrong side. The hose reached across the top – just – but left a dingy mark on the white paintwork.
‘Let me help you.’ A woman appeared beside me. With a deft wriggle, she moved the nozzle around so it no longer threatened to snap out and spurt across the forecourt. ‘Go inside, I’ll finish up here.’ She gave me the sort of half-smile I assume most people saved for children and the very elderly.
Behind the counter, another woman was shuffling packs of gum into a display unit. She looked up as I approached and beamed. ‘You don’t have long to go.’
I felt my shoulders sag. I did not have the energy for another of these conversations. The only worse conversation starter was something about how enormous I was. Or a request to touch the bump always asked in the way a small child might approach a petting farm animal.
‘A few weeks.’ I pointedly turned my attention to the display of protein bars and chocolate. It was almost time for second breakfast, a pregnant person’s most important meal of the day.
‘Is this your first?’
I passed her my card and a couple of chocolate bars. ‘No, I have a son. He’s two.’
‘Do you know what you’re having?’
I had promised myself that the next time I had this question, I would reply that I was having a baby. Or perhaps hoping for a small rabbit or chicken. But at that moment, it felt a bit like I’d be telling her that Santa wasn’t real. I sighed. ‘I’m having a girl.’
She half-squealed. ‘You must be so pleased. Daddy’s little girl! Your partner must be over the moon.’
My stomach did a backflip. I backed away, trying to avoid her puzzled gaze as I fumbled my credit card back into my wallet. I could feel tears forcing their way out of the corners of my eyes. ‘Sorry, I have to go.’
When I arrived home, my hands were still shaking, and the blood had left my knuckles from the vehemence with which I had gripped the steering wheel. My feet were on fire, my lower back throbbed and my throat was raspy from crying. I dropped on to the sofa, wincing as I lifted my legs on to the ottoman. I had lost all definition in my ankles, and the bones in my feet were a mere memory.
As I leant back, the wedding photo in a heavy frame on the opposite wall seemed to glint in the sunlight. I had never really liked it – my pre-wedding diet had been overzealous, and my dress ended up a little too big. Every couple of minutes, I had had to hitch it up to cover my bra. My smile was glossy white but forced. It was probably the twenty-fifth photo that had been taken in a row while we stood under a sagging tree branch. Although everyone exclaimed over how happy we looked, with Stephen guffawing at someone over the photographer’s shoulder, I could see in my own face how much I’d worried about the table settings, the accommodation, making sure my parents were not stuck in awkward conversation with Stephen’s boorish newly single uncle and that Amy was not too far into the champagne before she gave her speech.
The photo was only on the wall because I felt it was what we should do when we finally had our – very expensive – delivery from the photographer. Suddenly, I found I could not look at it a moment longer. In two steps, I was across the room and ripping it from the hook. Without thinking, I turned on my heel and strode out to my car. I thrust the chunky frame into the boot. Looking at it lying among the detritus of shopping receipts, some empty lunchboxes and an old picnic blanket, felt apt. I was determined not to stop there.
There were holiday snaps in matching frames on our bedroom wall. A photo of Stephen and his parents, with his niece, was propped on the side table in the spare room. They could all come down too. It was not like he was around to notice.
I worked my way through the house, room by room, pulling photos from their hooks, thrusting the smaller ones into rubbish bags. Only Thomas’s baby photos and one of my family were left in place.
As I walked out after stripping our bedroom, I noticed the door on Stephen’s side of the wardrobe had been left ajar. As usual, his clothes were spilling out, jammed on to hangers and in piles on the wardrobe floor. He would never throw anything out. I grabbed handfuls of material and stuffed them into the top of the big black plastic bags of photos.
Half an hour later, I was driving into the rubbish collection centre in the middle of town, the back of my car laden with the big black rubbish bags, huge photos in frames, T-shirts, hoodies and business shirts. The frames clinked together as I rounded each corner and crashed into the back of the back seat when I stepped on the brake.
The woman who staffed the entrance looked at me quizzically as I drove up. ‘Just a carload of rubbish.’ I gave her my cheeriest smile. My face was probably still streaked with make-up, and my eyes were undoubtedly bright red. She waved me on.
At the edge of the rubbish pit, I stood next to an elderly man who was dropping his own rubbish bags in, watching them flop one on top of each other. The contents of Stephen’s wardrobe landed with a satisfying thump. I hurled the photos one by one, listening to the glass smash on the concrete floor below.
There went our wedding photo. Crash. The time we had lunch on the street in Barcelona. Smash. The evening we spent on the beach in Waikiki after Stephen ‘asked’ me to marry him. The glass in that frame blew apart into a thousand little pieces.
Thomas was swinging on the gate when I arrived to pick him up from nursery, next to a girl in a T-shirt at least two sizes too big for her. They were both filthy from the knees down, with tracks of sand in their hair.
‘Mummy! My mummy!’ he shouted as I hauled myself out of the car.
I pulled his bag out of the cubbyhole by the door, and a plastic bag full of wet, blue clothes came somersaulting down with it. As I had expected, almost everything in his lunchbox was untouched, except for the yoghurt and cookies, which were gone.
He allowed himself to be clipped into the car seat, wriggling as my midsection got in the way while I fastened the buckles. When he was secure, I paused, jangling my keys in my hands. I desperately did not want to go back home – and work could wait. ‘Shall we go to the library?’
‘Yes!’
There was something about the fish tanks, the long staircases and my insistence on quiet that appealed enormously to Thomas when we went to the library. We only had to be nearby, and he started off in the direction of the big grey and glass building. Some of the librarians knew him by name, even though I had been avoiding them and using the self-checkout system for years.
When we arrived, the front sliding doors were emblazoned with posters. Pirate treasure hunt day, dress as your favourite book character … When did libraries become so busy? Then I realised. It was the school holidays. Parents who had forgotten about the library all term suddenly became avid library users, wanting to drop their kids off for a couple of hours, if only to use the free Wi-Fi.
We wandered in. The noise from the kids’ area filtered through, past the reference books, the magazines and the shelves of online orders waiting to be picked up.
‘Can we go and look?’ Thomas pointed at the children’s section and smiled in what I knew he thought was his sweetest way. In truth, it looked as if the dentist had just asked him to show him his gums.
It was some sort of ‘music of the world’ class, led by the same guy who did his best to wrangle a range of kids’ music sessions through the week.
I had started going to one because, in the haze of terrified-new-motherhood, I had been convinced that if I did not have a full week of classes set up for my son by the time he was six months old, I would stifle his mental development. I pictured a thirty-year-old Thomas pipped at the post for the Nobel Prize, demanding to know why I had skimped on baby yoga.
At the music class, parents dutifully, self-consciously, sang the songs and did all the actions – some of the regulars were quite enthusiastic while reluctant stand-ins barely moved their lips.
The teacher was one of the librarians, and he was the one reason I persisted past the initial visit. He was about forty, with dishevelled short, dark hair that was starting to acquire a smattering of grey at the temples and rimless rectangular glasses that slipped down his nose when he launched into a song with particular gusto.
At the beginning of the class, I had not thought much of him. But the longer I watched, the more impressive he became. It’s so easy to seem forced and condescending when you try to make kids laugh, but he had perfectly mastered the magical vocabulary of weird sounds and silly songs that would always get a giggle – even from the adults. He was perennially happy, but not in that fake way that lots of people deploy around kids, and his smile seemed to light up every bit of his face. I would bet the loose change in the bottom of my handbag that he’d never ‘developed feelings’ for someone while his wife was pregnant.
He’d won my devotion completely one morning when Thomas decided he did not want to be there. Rather than being awed by the chirpy music and enchanted by the books, he balled up his little baby fists, threw back his head and started to wail. And wail.
The teacher had stopped, and I’d thought he was going to suggest we leave.
‘We’re having a great time trying out these instruments,’ he’d told the children, ‘but the best noises are the ones that really convey an emotion.’ He’d then pointed at Thomas. ‘Can we all try to make the funniest noise you can think of to help this guy feel a little bit better?’
The older toddlers had responded with raspberries and popping sounds, and it wasn’t long before Thomas was chortling his delicious baby giggle.
This time, the teacher was channelling Elmo for an assembled group of bored preschool-aged kids and a smattering of parents who were trying not to be spotted checking their phones. He brandished a collection of what looked like traditional Mexican musical instruments – bashing out a rhythm on one, waving another in the air. Thomas was transfixed. I tried to guide him to a seat on one of the flashing stairs.
We squeezed into a corner, next to a woman who seemed to be wrangling triplets – three little girls of about four, dressed almost identically, with blue bows in their brilliant blonde hair. She was trying to get them to pay attention but they were more interested in poking each other’s eyes and whacking each other with books when she wasn’t looking. Thomas was clapping to the music and nodding his head out of time. Such is the toddler way. I tried to maintain my zen and pull my best supportive smile – inwardly pleading for the noise to end.
I exhaled heavily as I leant against the glass wall, hoping my top was long enough to meet my leggings at the back. It was unlikely the rest of the library patrons wanted a detailed view of my underwear making a break for freedom over the top of my pants.
I was at peak pregnancy. My legs had ballooned with fluid, as they always did by late morning, and most of my shoes no longer fit. Even my maternity leggings were struggling to cover my bump and the singlets I had bought – that claimed to be perfect for pregnancy and breastfeeding – looked set to be able to cope with neither. I would have taken my wedding rings off, but my fingers had swelled too much. My breasts had leaked through two sets of breast pads, and I already had that distinctive old dishcloth air about me, which surrounds lactating mothers. I know people say pregnancy is beautiful, and I still held out hope that I would turn into some kind of Earth Goddess soon. But, at thirty-eight weeks, I was still waiting.
Thomas stood up and started to edge down the stairs, shaking his arms to the beat as he went.
I pocketed the phone on which I had been tapping out a text telling Stephen exactly what I thought of him. I reached down to put my arm around Thomas to try to draw him back up close to me. I could feel his body zinging with energy. Soon he had ducked out of my grasp and was edging still further forward towards the Very Attractive Man. I tried to shuffle along behind the seated parents to get closer to him, but while the audience seemed happy to let a two-year-old through, they were not so keen on having his barrel-like mother follow.
‘Excuse me,’ I whispered as I stepped on one woman’s handbag. ‘Sorry.’ I ducked my head as a man grabbed his child out of my path.
But soon Thomas was a good couple of rows ahead of me, and still progressing. ‘Thomas!’ I hissed. ‘Come back here, darling.’ Some of the mothers in front of me turned and glared. I rolled my eyes apologetically. Thomas kept working his way forward. Soon, he was in the front row.
The teacher smiled at him as he stamped and clapped, getting closer and closer. Then Thomas’s arms were in the air, trying to grab the instrument in the teacher’s right hand. I attempted to push my way down the side of the crowd to where the man was trying to continue his show, grinning as he stretched to hold his instruments higher and higher out of Thomas’s reach. But Thomas wouldn’t be dissuaded.
The stares of the other parents were boring into the back of my head. I stretched over the row of children right at the front and grabbed Thomas, throwing him over my shoulder in a movement that sent a wrench of pain across my stomach. He shrieked. One of the girls who sat in a perfect cross-legged position in the front row covered her ears and scowled. ‘We are going home,’ I muttered.
‘Don’t feel you have to go.’ The man taking the class had finished his song. ‘Stay, if you’d like to. It’s nice to see someone getting into my warbling.’
I turned, grimacing. ‘He’s a little disruptive.’
‘He’s fine, aren’t you, little man? A bit of enthusiasm is what we like to see. Do you think you could give me a hand? I don’t want you to take my instruments, but I’m sure I can find you some of your own.’
He shuffled over and reached for another stool, pulling it beside him. A woman handed him another set of maracas. Thomas was spellbound. ‘I help.’ He wriggled up. I reached for my phone to snap a picture as he joined in, at the top of his lungs, with a rendition of ‘Wheels on the Bus’. I must have looked puzzled because the librarian caught my eye and grinned. ‘Not exotic, sorry. Finished the song sheet a bit too early.’
I became aware of a woman standing at my elbow, watching them. ‘God, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he?’
‘Thanks, I think he’s pretty lovely.’ I turned to look at her. Her gaze was fixed on Thomas and the teacher. Thomas’s cheeks were flushed from the exertion of bashing along, wildly off-beat. The librarian was monitoring his movements and looked to be biting back a laugh.
‘Oh no,’ she put her hand on my arm. ‘Not him, he’s cute, I mean Luke. I never miss his class.’
It was almost time for dinner by the time we made it home, complete with seven new library books inside the weekender bag I suddenly found I needed to use every day. My breath caught in my throat as we rounded the corner before our house and I saw Stephen’s truck parked outside. What was he doing? Only a couple of days ago he would not pick up the phone. Now he had decided to turn up?
I kept my foot steady on the accelerator. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I was rushing to see him. As we came to a stop, Thomas whooped. ‘Daddy’s home!’ he shouted and started wiggling. I manoeuvred to the edge of the car seat and inched myself out, one hand on each side of the doorframe, in case Stephen was watching. Of all the things that become difficult when you are very pregnant, getting in and out of a car is the most noticeable.
Stephen appeared from around the side of the house, plodding towards us. He would not meet my eye but jiggled on the spot, his hands in his pockets, as I helped Thomas out of the car. Thomas ran for his leg and twisted himself around his father. Stephen reached down and ruffled his hair. Waffle snuffled around our feet.
‘Sweetheart, why don’t you grab your bike and show us how fast you can ride around on the grass?’ I nudged Thomas in the direction of his new toy.
He climbed on, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Watch me, watch me, Daddy!’
Stephen and I followed him, so we were standing side by side under the porch that ran along the front of the house. A few scraggly pansies were fading in the flowerbed opposite. We never had discovered how the irrigation system worked. Not something we were ever likely to solve now. Stephen cleared his throat and swallowed. His voice was strangled with the effort of not attracting Thomas’s attention. ‘Where are my clothes?’
I shrugged. ‘I didn’t think you were coming back.’
He grabbed my arm. ‘That’s ridiculous. I need my stuff. What have you done with it?’
‘Chucked it. You’ve got money. Get her to buy you some more. Bet she’s got better taste than I have, anyway.’
He grimaced. His hand was in his pocket – I knew he would be squeezing the stress ball on his key ring. I had bought it as a gift for him when he first started his business and was struggling to stay calm in difficult conversations with suppliers. We’d run through it together: ‘I’ll pay you (squeeze) on the twentieth (squeeze), but I need a line of credit (squeeze) until then.’
He was grinding his teeth. He looked away from me, at the overgrown lemon tree he had been promising to prune. He was off the hook there, at least. ‘I want to see Thomas. Alexa says I have a right …’
I spluttered. ‘You want to talk about rights?’
A bird took flight from the tree in surprise. ‘I think I have a right not to have a husband cheat on me when I’m about to have a baby.’
Stephen stepped back as if my anger shocked him. ‘I’m just asking if we can arrange for me to have Thomas, maybe a Saturday afternoon.’
Thomas was still zipping happily around the lawn. For the first time, I could understand the urge to spit with disgust.
‘Is that enough for you, is it? Take his dad away but give him just enough to let him know what he’s missing out on. Every Saturday afternoon to show off your awesome parenting to the world. Get some good photos for your Facebook feed.’
‘No one is taking away his dad.’
‘Maybe not, but it’s not going to be the same, is it? You’re not going to be around when he wakes up in the morning and wants someone to rest his head on when he watches cartoons. You’re not going to race around with him on his bike after work. You’ll have your Saturday, or whatever you decide you can fit into your new life, and the rest of the time who cares about us?’
He whirled around, and the fury in his face was shocking. His cold, angry eyes and clenched jaw could have belonged to a stranger. ‘You can feel sorry for yourself,’ he hissed, darting a look at Thomas. ‘You keep making me the bad guy if that makes you feel better. You chuck out all my clothes if you don’t want to look at them anymore. But don’t pretend that this is all my fault.’
Thomas was scooting away down the far end of the lawn.
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘Okay, Alexa and I started seeing each other. I’m sorry, all right? That was a crappy move.’ Stephen crossed his arms. ‘But you’re not perfect, are you?’
I looked at him, open-mouthed, as he blustered on. Not perfect? Probably not – but who could blame me?
He was gesticulating at me in much the same way Thomas did when he was mid-tantrum. I watched him. Was this what I wanted to hold on to? Maybe he was actually doing me a favour.
‘You just want someone around to help pay the bills.’ Stephen was still talking. ‘We never spent any time together. And it was all just going to get worse once this one comes along. I sometimes wonder if you can even remember my name.’
I had to suppress a snort of laughter. He had no idea what it was like for me. Sometimes I could barely remember my own name.
I had assumed that Stephen would pick up more of the parenting as Thomas got older but it had not happened. I had learnt how to respond to a work message on my phone, sliding around the corner of the door so Thomas wouldn’t know I wasn’t paying full attention to his bath-time display. But Stephen would arrive home from work and if we didn’t give him ten minutes alone on the couch with his beer before Thomas requested that he play, he’d look aggrieved. While I worried about finishing meetings and interviews in time to pick Thomas up from nursery, Stephen would casually inform me the night before a trip that he was going away and wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d be.
He was still speaking. ‘What have you got planned for when the baby arrives?’
Did he mean the actual birth? He had rolled his eyes about every antenatal appointment I’d asked him to come to. I could not see why he would suddenly be taking an interest in my birth plan.
‘I still want to be there.’ He folded his arms obstinately.
‘Why would you want to do that? Why would you think I’d let you do that?’ The feeling that I was in an alternate reality was growing stronger with each breath I took. Everything felt so unreal.
‘I’m this child’s father.’
‘Yeah but I’m the one who’s going to be naked, in pain – what makes you even remotely think I want someone there who doesn’t even want me around anymore?’
Giving birth to Thomas had been the time of my life when I had felt the most exposed. There are not many instances where you basically perform every bodily function imaginable on a table in front of a room full of people.
The idea of having this man who was becoming more like a stranger every second watch me go through that, and then go home to someone else, made my skin crawl. Thomas was scooting back towards us on his bike, his eyes wide. I gave Stephen the most withering, dismissive glare I could muster. ‘We will talk about this later.’
I reached out for Thomas and lifted him off the saddle. Avoiding Stephen’s eyes, I pushed past and strode around the side of the house to the front door. His footsteps crunched behind me, but as soon as we were across the threshold, I shut the door and leant against it. It was not long before I heard him whistle for Waffle. His truck door slammed and he drove away.
CHAPTER FOUR (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
How to make a parking garage for toy cars
What you’ll need:
A box
Some tubes (paper towel rolls will do)
Cardboard
Sand down your box to get rid of any rough edges. Cut the tubes until they are just long enough to reach from the back of the box to the front. Glue your tubes on top of each other in rows, and stick the sheet of cardboard on to the back of them so that the cars do not fall out. Now your only challenge is getting your kids to store their cars in the garage and not on the floor where you will trip on them when you are too pregnant to get back up again, leaving you stranded like an upended cockroach on the floor. If you’re suddenly single-handedly parenting, you might consider setting up a playpen in the middle of the living room and sitting inside it. The kids can then create havoc all around your peaceful island of serenity.
It was some time after 1 a.m. when I opened my eyes and saw a shadow standing next to the bed. I squinted. The shadow was short, wearing pyjamas and had hair half-flattened from sleep. ‘Thomas?’
He put his hand on the side of my face. His skin was clammy. I shuffled across the bed. ‘You can hop in with me, honey. Can’t you sleep?’
He put his arms around my neck and squirmed in, searching for the cool spot on my pillow to lay his head. The duvet was almost over his nose when he stopped twisting. ‘Did something wake you?’
He rested his head on the top of my arm. ‘Noise.’
I kissed his forehead. ‘It’s probably just the wind in the trees. Try to go back to sleep – it’s still really early.’
I closed my eyes and focused on my own long, slow breaths. It wasn’t long before I felt him become heavier as he succumbed, my arm pinned awkwardly under his head and his body pressed up against mine. I watched his little chest rise and fall and his eyelids flutter with dreams, in the light of Stephen’s old clock radio. At some point, as the dark gave way to the insipid grey of the first shoots of dawn, I must have fallen asleep for real because he was soon shaking me awake.
‘Mummy,’ he hissed. ‘Daytime.’
I reluctantly opened my eyes and felt for his pyjamas. ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’
He shook his head.
‘I’ll give you a treat if you do …’
He regarded me for a minute. ‘Okay.’
We tumbled out of bed and into the en-suite bathroom. It was the one room of the house that Stephen hadn’t yet finished renovating – the bath and shower had been replaced but the toilet was still dingy avocado, and the new plasterboard was patiently waiting for its paint. I helped Thomas on to the toilet where he perched, looking at me expectantly. ‘All finished,’ he proclaimed a second later, leaping off in mid-stream.
‘Good work, honey.’ I hastily dabbed at the mess on the tiles as he took off out of the room, back towards the kitchen, where he would wait for me to turn on the Saturday morning cartoons while I made our breakfast.
I sat, hands cradling my coffee, as he spooned porridge into his mouth, eyes agog as a cartoon Peppa Pig schooled him in several different ways to be impertinent to your parents. Whoever wrote the series must have had issues similar to mine, I thought as I loaded the dishwasher. You couldn’t trust Daddy Pig with anything.
A bicycle bell trilled in the driveway. I grimaced. There was only one person I knew who would be riding a bike around at that time of the morning with enough enthusiasm to ring a bell about it – my best friend, Laura. I know all the films tell you that the first thing you should do when you’ve been wronged by a man is down a couple of pink cocktails and bitch about him with your girlfriends before pashing an absurdly attractive stranger. But I was still firmly in If-I’m-not-talking-about-it,-it’s-not-really-happening mode.
She knocked but didn’t wait for us to open the door, sliding her own key into the lock and pushing the door open. ‘Thomas, darling?’
‘Auntie Laura.’ He let out a whoop and barrelled across the floor to her. She stooped to kiss his cheek. A pixie-like little girl appeared from behind her long, Lycra-clad legs, fumbling with the clip on her own purple bike helmet.
‘Lila wanted to come over to play.’ Laura nudged her in Thomas’s direction. ‘Why don’t you show her the blocks you were telling me about the other day?’
Laura had a bag of pastries over one arm and a steely look in her eye as she advanced towards me. I discarded my first impulse to convince her that everything was normal. She had once told me that I had distinctive ‘tells’ when I was trying to pretend nothing was wrong. It was when I didn’t want to admit to her I hadn’t been able to get Thomas to sleep more than two hours in a row for six months, while the rest of our antenatal group seemed to be operating on a perfect schedule. One of those giveaway signs was the jiggling from foot to foot that I knew I’d started as soon as she spotted me.
‘I’ve brought you breakfast. I didn’t ring, because I know you’d tell me not to come. You’re not rude enough to tell me to leave now I’m here.’
She was right. I motioned for her to follow me into the living room, where the kids quickly tipped the contents of Thomas’s toy box out across the floor. Both of us pretended that we could not see a pile of Thomas’s energetic artworks that had fallen across the floor and a teetering stack of washing waiting to be folded in the corner of the room.
‘I don’t know what’s happened.’ She sat, back perfectly straight, on the edge of the sofa and stared at me. ‘I saw Stephen at the supermarket last night, and he introduced me to Alexa McKenzie, that designer person …’ She bit her lip. ‘It was all a bit awkward.’
I cast about for something to stall the conversation while I caught up. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Stephen was introducing Alexa to my friends? Already? But he had not outright admitted that Alexa was his girlfriend. I could not decide whether that made me feel better or not. Generally, he went out of his way to avoid talking to Laura at all. He and her husband, Mark, sometimes worked together and, unless she turned up with him, he usually found an excuse to do something in another part of the house whenever she came to visit me.
I had to avoid her gaze. ‘Yep, for some reason, he’s decided he’d rather be with a young, fit interior designer than with his heavily pregnant, hormonal wife.’ I tried to smile. I wanted to be self-deprecating, but I just sounded bitter. Which, I might add, I was perfectly within my rights to be.
Laura pulled me towards her and kissed my cheek. ‘I am so sorry. I didn’t want to believe it.’
We sat in silence for a minute, watching the kids roll around on the carpet together. Thomas was pushing a toy car around Lila, who was trying to land a plane on it.
‘What is he thinking?’ Laura spluttered at last. Her words were staccato as she bit back her anger to avoid sparking the kids’ attention. ‘You’re about to have this baby and he’s off ladding about with someone who probably doesn’t even do her own laundry. What a selfish, narcissistic …’
She was talking too quickly, as she extended her arms in my direction. One of her deliberately mismatched earrings scratched the side of my face as she hugged me. ‘It’s so unfair. Being a parent is so … optional for them, isn’t it?’
Laura and I had met at our antenatal classes three years before. Five wide-eyed, unsuspecting new mothers had assembled on plastic chairs in a hospital meeting room, where graphic descriptions of how our pelvises would have to move to allow our kids to get out into the world caused at least one of us to faint. Laura, a nurse who had spent years in the emergency department, just rolled her eyes.
Laura had been trying to fall pregnant for six months when she insisted on being sent for IVF. She was only twenty-eight at the time but managed to get Mark to do a sperm test the day after he had suffered a particularly high fever. It meant he had no swimmers to show for it, and the doctors bumped her to the front of the queue. She was pregnant with Lila after the first round.
Laura impressed me in class with her immaculate wardrobe and always-done make-up, the kind of clothes I would much rather have been rocking as I bumbled around in maternity jeans and oversized shirts. But it was not until Laura and I locked eyes, trying to quell a giggle when an instructor told us she had been qualified at the National Institute of Baby Massage, that we became friends.
‘I’ll cry mascara on your top.’ I pulled back from her. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a mess.’ I twisted a strand of oily hair around my index finger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed it.
‘I do not care about that one bit. What I care about is how hideous this situation is.’ She rested her head against mine. ‘If you want to kill him, I’ll help you.’
I laughed weakly. ‘It’s bloody tempting, I tell you.’
Her skin was cool and smooth. She looked as though she was wearing perfectly matched foundation, although I would have put money on her being bare-faced. I had never noticed before how oversized her wedding ring was on her slim pianist’s fingers. She pushed a pain au chocolat at me that she’d brought with her. ‘What are you going to do?’
I put my face in my hands. ‘Well, I’ve already signed her up to a lot of email newsletters, for a start.’
Laura coughed as she inhaled a crumb of pastry. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Pardon?’
Alexa’s business website listed her email address in full and I’d signed her up to more than 200 mailing lists, to ensure her inbox was packed with advertising and newsletters, at least until she figured out how to unsubscribe from them all. Stephen would be no help – he still struggled to remember his email password.
There are some surprising benefits to my job. I’d written a story a couple of weeks earlier about a private investigator who told me what some of her clients did when they discovered their suspicions about their cheating husbands were correct. Some of it was genius stuff – hiding anchovies in expensive cars, selling pricey one-off designer suits at no reserve on eBay. Since Stephen walked out, I’d returned to a few of their blogs and chat groups. The inbox email idea had belonged to one of them.
‘Wow.’ Laura’s eyes were sparkling as she leant back against the couch. ‘You’re right. That’ll be very annoying.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, it will keep them occupied.’
Lila returned and burrowed between Laura’s legs. Laura reached down and stroked a stray piece of hair back from her daughter’s face.
I smiled at Lila. She was only three months younger than Thomas, but she seemed so slight compared to his sturdy legs and barrel-like torso. She was wearing one of those sparkly baby pink dresses with layers of petticoat tulle that now seemed to be a daily uniform for small girls, whether they’re going to a birthday party, riding a bike with their mothers, or making mud pies. She ducked back under the insufficient hiding place of Laura’s athletic thighs. I suddenly desperately wanted to change the subject.
‘How’s everything going with you?’
Laura pushed the question away. ‘Oh, fine. If the hospital could learn to fit a part-time shift into part-time hours or had enough staff to cover the workload, that would be fantastic. But otherwise, you know, we’re fine.’
We sat in silence, watching Thomas tip over another box, sending a convoy of small trucks zipping across the floor. ‘Good riddance to him,’ Laura murmured at last. ‘I mean, if you’d left him, he would have been a total disaster. But you without him …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Yeah. I’ll probably survive. I know. I just don’t feel it yet.’
Lila’s head snapped up. She had found some of Thomas’s marker pens on the floor and had drawn on her arms and face. ‘Pretty.’ She smiled at us.
Laura turned back to me. ‘I’m sorry. It’s fine to be angry. Be furious. But can you promise me something?’
I groaned. ‘What?’
‘Can you please call me at least daily? I know you, and now you’re going on leave with no work to think about you’ll just sit around here getting pissed off, and I don’t think that’s going to be helpful for anyone.’
‘Sorry.’ I looked at my hands. ‘I just didn’t want to tell you until …’
‘Yes, I know. You don’t like to talk about these sorts of things until they’re over and you’ve got everything back how you want it. But you can’t get through this one alone. Now …’ She was businesslike. ‘What would you like to do? I know you don’t like a whole day with nothing planned, even when you haven’t got this other stuff going on.’
What did I want to do? I had been so focused on plodding through each minute that I had not allowed myself to think much beyond the most basic necessities of getting the last bits of work done, feeding myself and Thomas, and remembering to shower from time to time. I realised she was still waiting for an answer.
I cast around for something. ‘Shall we go for a little walk? See how far I can waddle along? Some fresh air might be good to clear my head a bit.’
Laura snapped her fingers. ‘We can do that. Come on, children, we’re going on an adventure.’
We returned to the house less than twenty-five minutes later, after Thomas and Lila shrieked at each other in disagreement about which way around the block they wanted to walk. They were horrified when we would not allow them to bring home some bits of old plastic bottles and dog poo they found while conducting a ‘treasure hunt’. I pretended to be exasperated that we were giving up, but I could feel the exertion in my growing varicose veins, and my daughter seemed to have joined in with an intrauterine walk of her own. Amy’s car was in the driveway as we arrived back. Laura glanced at me. ‘We might leave you to it.’
When Amy and Laura had first met, Amy had lectured her – at length – about why she thought all of her customers who claimed to be on a gluten-free diet were insufferable and putting it on to be trendy. ‘Trying to get attention when there’s nothing else interesting about them,’ I think were her words.
Laura, a coeliac with a nursing degree, had hurled a few insults of her own. ‘Uneducated’ and ‘narrow-minded’ were the ones I remembered best. Ever since, Amy had thought it hilarious to joke about what she might have hidden in food that Laura ate at my house.
I kissed Laura on the cheek. ‘Let me go and deal with her. Thanks for visiting.’
Lila gave us a shy wave from the seat Laura had fixed on to her bike for her, just behind her handlebars. ‘Say bye, Thomas,’ I prompted. He returned the wave.
As the bike rounded the edge of the driveway, he dropped to the ground. ‘No! Lila come back. Come back!’ I scooped him up and carried him inside under one arm, his legs still kicking behind me.
Music was blaring from the spare room. Amy emerged, scarves draping and spiky, scuffed stiletto heels sticking out of a half-taped box under her arm. I had not realised that she, too, had a spare key to the house.
‘What are you doing?’ I watched as she returned to her car and pulled out a clothes rack, which she then tried to manoeuvre through the door. ‘What’s going on?’
She stopped and grinned at me. ‘I have a plan.’
I rocked from my heels to the balls of my feet and back again. Heat spread across my lower back. A walk really hadn’t been such a good idea.
‘I’m going to come and live with you.’ Amy dropped a box to the ground. ‘I heard what Mum said to you before you left the other day about staying there. Can you imagine? You’ll be her pet project again before you know it and Dad will want to know what you’re doing every time you’re five minutes late. Torture!’
She patted me on the shoulder as she went to get another bag. ‘You won’t even know I’m here. Promise. I’ll just help you when you need me.’
I followed her out to the car. I could just imagine having her as my permanent house guest. She’d assure me that she would be home to help with dinner at 5.30 p.m., roll in at 7.30 p.m. and wonder why I was upset. No doubt she still sang in the shower at the top of her voice, even in the middle of the night. Dishes would be piled in the sink and skimpy underwear added to my laundry pile. There would never be any mention of rent being paid.
‘It’ll be okay, honestly.’
Her face fell. ‘No?’
‘No. Really. Thanks for the offer, though.’
She bit the rough edge of her index fingernail. ‘The thing is …’
I waited. There was always something.
‘I kind of have to move. We’ve been evicted.’
Amy shared a huge, rundown warehouse apartment with three of her friends. It was barely habitable, with old sash windows that didn’t close properly, floorboards like gappy teeth and holes in some of the walls that had been punched through by a previous tenant. The rent was eye-watering, but she could walk to work, and I suspected she had just been too lazy to get around to moving.
‘Turns out I was paying my share to Laurel but she wasn’t paying the landlord. So I have to get out, anyway. And I can’t get a house anywhere else at the moment …’
I tried to push down a growing wave of frustration. Did I not have enough problems of my own to deal with?
‘Why not? You’ve got a job.’
‘I took out a loan to pay off my credit card last summer but my work’s been so erratic I haven’t been able to make the repayments – bastards sent me to the debt collectors. I won’t pass a credit check for a good couple of years, they say.’
I stood as tall as I could and stared at her, my hands on my hips. ‘How old are you, Amy?’
She looked surprised. ‘I’m thirty-one.’
‘Why are you still doing dumb stuff like this?’
She recoiled. Her voice was timid. ‘I didn’t want to ask Mum and Dad for a loan, so I thought it was the best thing to do. I was doing my best … I want to be self-sufficient.’
She trailed off, her eyes watering. I hadn’t snapped at her in years. But I had already bailed her out of two housing-related messes. The first was when Frank had walked away, leaving her with a lease she couldn’t handle. I’d paid half of it for three months. The second time Stephen and I had paid her insurance excess when someone started a fire in the bathroom at a party.
‘No.’ The force of my fury shocked us both. Too bad – walking all over me seemed to be the pastime of the moment and I wasn’t having it.
‘It’s time you accepted the consequences of your actions. You can’t keep rolling through life like a teenager with nothing to worry about. I’ve picked up after every other stupid mistake you’ve made, and I’ve got way too much on my plate right now to add you to it. Own your own mess for a change.’
She was staring at me, her mouth open.
‘Other people manage to find new apartments. I’m sure you can, too.’
I turned away and directed Thomas through to the lounge, where I propped him on the bean bag. I sank on to the armchair behind him. He leant back against me, his cheek against my shin. I could hear Amy clattering as she threw her clothes back into boxes and hurled them out to the car. She stepped heavily on the accelerator, her wheels screeching as she took off from the end of our driveway.
‘Daddy home soon?’ Thomas looked up. I stroked his head, trying to slow my breathing. I was in danger of getting a little ‘ping’ from the sanctimonious smartwatch app I’d downloaded to help manage my stress. I wanted to slap the old me across the face. What did she have to be stressed about?
CHAPTER FIVE (#uf230a4eb-2d80-58c1-a153-30efe937e869)
How to make a paper doll chain
What you’ll need:
Some paper
Scissors
If you’re using A4 paper, cut it in half lengthwise. Fold the piece into eight equal-sized accordion pleats. With the fold on the left, trace an outline of half a doll on the paper. Then cut around it. When you open the paper up you should be left with four dolls, holding hands. They’ll stick together, even if your family is falling apart – although some days you might wish it would fall apart a little more quickly.
Do you know what drives me nuts? The concept of ‘me time’. You’re meant to have a bath, or go for a massage, eat a whole block of chocolate in bed or skive off for lunch with your girlfriends and feel good about taking time out for yourself. Except I get into the bath and I can’t get out, and even before I got pregnant I couldn’t bear the idea of strangers massaging my body. All my friends are juggling workloads much too heavy, and with childcare far too limited, to break for lunch with me.
Between work and looking after Thomas, I manage to squeeze in a couple of minutes of ‘me time’ for frivolous things such as washing my hair. I can’t bring myself to believe that half an hour of indulgence makes up for the fact that I do 99 per cent of the drudgery the rest of the time.
But try to explain that to anyone else, and they look aghast. ‘No me time? Oh but you must have some me time. Can’t pour from an empty cup …’
So it’s another thing added to my ever-growing to-do list. No one wants to be an empty mother cup.
One thing I still do try to squeeze in between the frantic dash for work deadlines, and the seemingly interminable bedtime battle, is yoga. Although I’ve long since given up my dream of being a teacher myself, I find ten minutes of stretching can turn around many of the aggravations of a day of child-wrangling. I’ll never be a YouTube yoga star – while those women get the tops of their heads on the floor in a forward fold, my palms are still only halfway down my shins (I blame my short arms). But I happily follow them through the motions, and even Thomas is starting to enjoy finding his own tree pose or a comfortable seated position (although sometimes that is in front of the television).
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