Mummy Said the F-Word (22 page)

Darren’s mouth has tightened, his eyes clouded with exasperation. The commotion that had been going on in his snow-white pants appears to have dwindled to nothing. I feel chilled, and horribly underdressed. In one of the jars, Jake’s shiny-backed beetle crawls over a leaf.

Glancing fearfully at Darren, I creep towards the door, trying to silence my breathing as I peer through the spyhole.

It’s a hideous thing that looms there, distorted by a fish-eye lens. It stands with its mouth set in a grim line and its eyebrows swooped down in frustration. The draught teases my bare toes.

It’s Martin.

Something awful has happened. It must be one of the kids. If it was a minor accident or illness, he’d have phoned or dealt with it himself. Martin wouldn’t show up like this unannounced.

‘Go upstairs,’ I hiss at Darren, flapping him away as if he were a wasp. ‘My bedroom’s first on the right. Go up and be
quiet
.’

He opens his mouth as if to protest, then shrugs and trips lightly upstairs. I watch his white-pant-clad bottom until it disappears into my room.

Slowly, I open the door a few inches and poke my head round it. ‘What’s happened?’ I demand.

‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing terrible,’ Martin says distractedly. He takes a step forward as if to come in, but I stop the door with my bare foot.

‘So what are you doing here? It’s nearly midnight—’

‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’ He knows, I’m certain, that I’m sporting nothing but my ancient pink pants that are losing their elasticity and a spotty bra that’s gone bobbly on the cups. I can feel his eyes boring through the three-inch-thick door, mocking me.

‘I’m … I’m a bit busy right now,’ I bluster. ‘If it’s nothing urgent …’

‘It’s just … Travis is really upset. He can’t get to sleep without his hook.’

‘His
hook
? You’ve driven over here for that?’

‘Yes.’ His voice is flat, and faintly accusing. After all,
I
lost the hook. Bad, bad mother.

‘You came for a toy? Jesus, Martin! He’d have gone to sleep eventually. You could have given him something else – doesn’t Poppy have toys? – or lain down with him until …’ I tail off as a
particularly
rancid image flashes into my mind: Slapper cradling Travis and saying, ‘There, there, darling, Mummy’s been silly, but don’t worry, we’ll make everything all right … Off you go, Martin, there’s a poppet, see if that idiot ex of yours can find it.’

I could vomit right here on my doorstep.

‘He
won’t
go to sleep,’ Martin insists. ‘He’s beside himself. Wet the bed and everything.’

‘Wasn’t he wearing his night-time pants?’

‘He was too distraught for night-time pants!’

‘Too distraught for night-time pants!’ shrieks a boy on the opposite pavement, and his girlfriend’s laughter ricochets down the street.

‘All right,’ I snap. ‘I’ll see if I can find it.’

‘Can I come in, for God’s sake? It’s raining.’

Fine droplets are speckling the shoulders of his suede jacket.

‘Just a minute,’ I mutter, groping the overloaded coat hooks for something with which to cover myself. Lola’s stripy poncho drops to the floor. I snatch Jake’s despised orange Pac-a-Mac – a waterproof garment that Bev insisted on donating to us in a bulging carrier bag of cast-offs, ‘Because I imagine times are pretty hard for you, Caitlin, and you must be stretched financially.’ I pull it over my head and yank it down with difficulty. It’s age nine to ten. It barely covers the gusset of my knickers. Transmitting a desperate plea to Darren (Please, please stay up there until Shagpants has gone), I let Martin in.

His mouth twitches with mirth as he appraises my nylon covering. ‘Interesting attire, Cait. Going somewhere special?’

‘It’s raining,’ I mutter.

‘Yes, but not inside. It’s quite dry in here. Were you about to have a shower but didn’t want to get wet?’ The guffaw explodes out of his nose as he tails me into the living room. It would be no trouble at all to turn round and slap him. I’m horribly aware that my arse is sticking out below the Pac-a-Mac.

Martin settles himself on the sofa, his eyes lighting upon the tumble of clothes strewn all over the floor. Darren’s socks are bunched up, clearly having been pulled off in haste. They are
large
, fluffy-soled, obviously man-socks. There’s a T-shirt, his jeans, his jacket flung on to the table. Why should I explain? Why?

‘Wait here,’ I say sternly, ‘and I’ll have a rummage through the toybox in the kitchen.’

I leg it downstairs, upend the box – ‘Can’t your children keep their toys in their bedrooms?’ Bev once enquired, when she’d barged in and demanded coffee – and rake through the mountain of tat. No hook. A gorgeous, sexy young man waiting upstairs in my bedroom and no fucking hook.

Think. Think. When did Travis last have it? Please, please let him not have left it at Sam’s. No, he’d worn it on the way home. I’d pointed out that it would get scratched and ruined if he kept running it along walls, and then it had fallen off and nearly been run over by a car. He’d poked Lola in the bottom with it as we’d come into the house. Then I’d packed the kids’ weekend bags, and they’d been squabbling in the kitchen, except … Travis had gone out into the garden. That was it. He’d been using it to rake through the soil to find worms. Shit, that means going outside in the dark and the rain – we have no outside light – and stumbling through the borders.

I scan the kitchen for suitable footwear, but all I can find are Lola’s size-11 denim sandals with plastic daisies on the front.

Barefoot, I unlock the back door and creep out, squinting into the gloom. My mild drunkenness has worn off, my libido scooted away to find some other woman to attach itself to – a proper grown-up woman who deserves to be pleasured in bed. I tread on something hard and spiky and let out a squeal. It’s the tusk of a small plastic elephant. My hair hangs limply around my face, and the damp Pac-a-Mac feels disgusting against my bare flesh.

‘Caitlin? Is that you?’ A reedy voice wavers over the fence.

‘Oh, hello, Mrs Catchpole. I was just, er …’

‘Isn’t it a bit late to be gardening?’

‘Yes, ha, ha. I, er, think I left something out here.’

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘A … a hook.’

‘A book? What sort of book?’

I sense her raisiny eyes on me, and an unspoken voice: ‘For God’s sake, woman, where are your trousers? Are you trying to make a spectacle of yourself? Behaviour like this can bring house prices down. This used to be a respectable area, and now look at it. You never flaunted yourself when your husband lived here – that charming young man who screwed the legs on to my flat-pack table.’

Her face juts over the fence like a puppet’s. ‘Why don’t you look for it in the morning?’ she suggests.

Why don’t you go back inside? I think desperately.

‘I, I really need it now.’

‘Must be an important book,’ she rattles on. ‘Is it yours or one of the children’s?’

‘Mine.’ I flash a tight smile, my head flooding with a terrible image of Darren tiring of lying in wait in bed, venturing downstairs in his snow-white pants and coming face to face with Martin in the living room. It would be awkward at first, then there’d be some blokeish hur-hur-ing, and Martin would nip down to fetch some beers.

Darren: ‘So you were married to Caitlin?’

Martin: ‘Still am, at least legally, ha, ha … So, thought your luck was in tonight, did you?’

Darren: ‘Yeah, can you believe it? Have you seen what she looks like in that raincoat thing?’

Much hilarity, further cracking open of beers.

How I despise men. All men, Sam included, drifting back to Amelia like an untethered boat.

Trying to blot Mrs Catchpole from my vision (she’s wearing a candlewick dressing gown, is she trying to bring on pneumonia or what?), I rummage desperately through straggly lupins and sections of broken toy garage, cursing myself for letting the garden run wild. When Martin was here, it was tidily pruned. He’d spend hours snipping and tweaking, and had started to make noises about acquiring a shed. I plunder a weed-infested hebe, urging the wretched accessory to reveal itself. Is Toys ’R’ Us open at this hour? Maybe Martin might consider making an emergency detour.

Then I spot it. A glimmer of silver behind the dwarf rhododendron
that
Mum donated several years ago, and which has never produced a single flower although it had been
smothered
in blooms in her garden, so I can’t have looked after it properly. I snatch the hook and try to wipe it clean on the front of my Pac-a-Mac – it has become
my
Pac-a-Mac – and wave it gaily at Mrs Catchpole before hurtling back into the house.

Martin is standing stiffly in the middle of the living room with his hands clasped behind his back. ‘Here.’ I jab the hook at him.

‘Thank you.’ His gaze drops to my bare, muddy feet.

‘So you can go now,’ I add.

He twitches with the effort of making no further comment. I march to the hall, beyond caring about my appearance, and open the front door for him.

‘Caitlin!’ comes an eager male voice. ‘Are you coming to bed? Has he gone yet?’

I stare up. So does Martin. We both gawp at Darren, who – realising now that we still have company – has frozen, naked, at the top of the stairs.

‘Ah,’ Martin says.

‘Jesus.’ Darren slams his hands over his genitals.

‘Just … just go, Martin,’ I mumble, overcome by nausea.

He steps out into the night, clutching the hook, with an infuriating spring to his step. ‘Bit young for you, isn’t he?’ is his parting shot.

I sink on to the bottom stair. No amount of grinding my knuckles into my eye sockets can erase the terrible scene. I’m sweating profusely under the nylon, and my toes are gunked together with mud.

‘I assume that’s the ex,’ Darren says gently, parking himself beside me. Mercifully, he has snatched a towel from a radiator and swathed himself in it.

‘Yes, that’s Martin.’ My voice is emotionless. I could happily stab myself in the heart with Travis’s cutlass if that, too, hadn’t been lost.

‘Come on, don’t worry about him. Let’s go upstairs.’ Darren gives my shoulder a friendly squeeze and kisses my cheek.

‘OK,’ I say wearily, although the last thing I feel capable of is lashings of energetic sex. We trail upstairs, and I perch on the edge of my bed, trying to summon up a smidge of that lovely tipsiness that had made me feel so sparkly on the walk home. But no – I am utterly sober.
Beyond
sober in fact. My faded bed-spread, my pallid legs – everything looks horribly drab, as if we’re inhabiting some bleak reality-TV show. Any glimmer of desire whooshed off to another continent the second Martin pressed the bell. Being confronted by his fish-eye face through the spyhole acted like some newfangled sober-up pill.

‘Maybe you should wash your feet,’ Darren remarks with a chuckle.

‘God, yes. Won’t be a minute.’ I head to the bathroom to de-mud and try to dredge up some saucy thoughts. Sluicing each foot under the bath tap, I flinch under the cold water. There are no saucy thoughts. Nothing. My head’s too full of shame to accommodate anything sexy or fun. I attempt to substitute Darren for Sam, but all I can visualise is him marauding his naked ex, which makes me feel even more desolate. It’s as if some joker has slammed down a gigantic lever – the kind you find in cobweb-strewn cellars – rendering me sexless, destined to die alone, surrounded by piles of yellowing newspapers.

It wasn’t always like this. In the early years of Martin and me, I’d only had to climb into bed with him for my pyjamas to fly off. ‘You’d better buy some stronger pyjamas,’ he’d joked, and I’d told him that I’d searched London for the strongest pyjamas known to womankind – made from cast iron, impregnated with willpower – but nothing could stop me from wanting him. ‘Good,’ he’d said, smothering me in kisses.

By the time I return to the bedroom, Darren is reclining, minus towel, on my bed. ‘Come here,’ he murmurs, patting the space beside him.

‘Let me take this thing off,’ I murmur, starting to hock the Pac-a-Mac over my head.

‘No. No. Keep it on.’ He smirks.

‘What?’ I almost laugh.

‘Leave it on. It’s kind of … sexy.’

‘Are you joking? I’m all sweaty inside and—’

‘Good,’ he growls, beckoning me closer. I sit awkwardly beside him, and a hand worms up the front of the Pac-a-Mac. We start kissing, and I try to relax, but all I can hear are the amplified sounds of rustling nylon. My head fills with Pac-a-Mac thoughts – of camping, trying to put up the tent and blow up the airbeds and ripping the foot pump. I pull away and turn my back on him.

‘Hey,’ he says softly.

‘I’m sorry, Darren. This doesn’t feel right.’

He runs a finger down the back of my neck. ‘Relax, Caitlin. You’re so pretty, you know. I’ve always liked –’ he clears his throat ‘– older women.’

Older women? I swing round to face him. He wants to sleep with me because I’m
older
? ‘What do you mean?’ I ask weakly.

‘Older women. I just like older women.’ He tries the neck-stroking thing again, but I shrink away.

Jesus. Maybe I should be flattered, but it doesn’t seem right – like being found attractive because you’re a size 24 or a dwarf or something. It feels
freakish
. When men make lustful noises about ‘mature’ women, they’re usually referring to Joanna Lumley or Susan Sarandon, but I am barely of the same species.

I am Caitlin Brown, clammy from the Pac-a-Mac, with the tops of my thighs sticking together.

‘You older women,’ Darren continues, his eyes glazing alarmingly, ‘really turn me on. You’re experienced, you’ve been around, you know your onions.’

Oh, save me.

‘You’ve seen
life
…’

Hot breath gusts into my ear, and an arm slides round my waist.

‘Darren,’ I announce, scrambling up from the bed, ‘I think you should go home.’

The instant he’s gone, I rip off the Pac-a-Mac, scrunch it into a ball and fling it across the room. My entire upper body is pink and clammy. The zip has left a livid imprint on my décolleté.