Mummy Said the F-Word (28 page)

We have a brief chat about something nonsensical – the weather, thank God for British weather to talk about – while Bev and Marcia gawp openly from the gate. I want to grab Jake – to have him all to myself, if only for a few seconds – and ask, ‘So what did you watch on TV last night? Did you sleep OK under that horrible stiff duvet? Did you do your homework, and has anyone checked it? What did you have for breakfast? Have they bought Cheerios, or d’you have to make do with those nasty little square things that Poppy has?’

Oh, and, ‘Do you miss me?’

There’s no opportunity to do this. ‘Hi, Mum,’ Jake says flatly, briefly tweaking his weird hair.

‘Hello, darling, how’s things?’

‘All right.’ And that’s it. He’s gone, and Lola has scampered away with her schoolbag all grubby at the bottom, and Travis is crying hot tears because Daddy has hurried to his car, barely saying goodbye. That’s the extent of our 9 a.m. exchange. It’s not exactly what the magazines call ‘quality time’.

I suppose I should be grateful, as at hometime I don’t get to see Jake at all. My only opportunity would be to drag one of the huge wheelie bins to the furthest window, clamber on to it and peer into the classroom that serves as the afterschool club. Which might not go down too well with the caretaker.

When he lived at home – at his
real
home – Jake refused point-blank to attend the club. Anyone would have surmised that it’s run by members of a sinister sect who sacrifice kittens and force the children to eat stones. Now, it seems, it’s non-stop party time, as Jake goes there every day, seemingly without complaint. Some days Slapper picks him up. Mostly, though, it’s Martin. I stalked them a couple of days ago, an act which made me feel lowly and pathetic, but I couldn’t stop myself. No Most Controlled Being Award that day either.

Travis was playing at his mate Eddie’s house, and I’d just dropped Lola at her gym class. I’d intended to spend the hour picking up some shopping and realised, as I was passing school, that afterschool club would be ending. I loitered behind a florist’s delivery van, pretending to admire the cornflowers in the shop window. I kept poking my head round the van and spotted parents and children emerging from school. Marcia and her daughter, Genevieve, came out, giggling together and swinging hands like the mother-daughter duos you see on perky TV shows. The kind that try on kooky hats together in department stores. Finally, Martin and Jake emerged, looking relaxed and happy – looking
normal
. Jake certainly didn’t look distressed or malnourished.

Rather than heading along the street where I presumed Martin would have parked, they took a swift turn down the narrow alley that leads to the playing field. The way they did that, with no obvious discussion, made me realise that they’d done this lots of times before. The late-afternoon sun cast an amber glow, and Jake was doing a jolly kind of skip-walk. Martin had a football tucked under his arm.

How very pleasing. How thoughtful-daddyish. A quick kick-around in the park on a summer afternoon before heading home
to
that Lego flat that looks like it would crumble to dust if you so much as farted in it. I wanted to stalk them to the playing field, and wished I had some kind of disguise – like a balaclava, or Lola’s Scooby Doo outfit. Their voices faded, and I skulked around the shops and picked up Lola from gym. I tried to chat happily as we walked home, but I couldn’t get Jake out of my head. If I learned to play football, would that bring him back? We’d go to the playing field every day. Football, pancakes – anything.

So I stop buying peach yoghurts and I try not to miss Jake. Instead of phoning constantly, which I know he’d resent, I offload to R, who listens no matter what.

Sometimes, though not always, that helps.

‘Guess what!’ Millie announces, like a child. ‘Our survey results are back and your page has come out as most popular. Way more than Harriet’s ever was. We need you to stand up and do a little talk.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Stand up
where
?’

‘At a reader event we’re planning. Nothing too daunting. You’ll answer readers’ problems, just like you do in the magazine, so it’ll be no different really.’

My heart lurches. It’s Monday morning. Having rejected his breakfast before we took Lola to school, Travis is now mashing his Shredded Wheat with such gusto that milk slops over the side of his dish.

‘Millie, of course it’s different,’ I protest. ‘I can’t
see
anyone when I’m working. It’s just me and the computer in our kitchen. I’m not being … looked at.’

‘Yeah, well …’

‘And I can’t answer questions on the hop. I need time to mull them over. It takes me ages, you know, to do your page.’

Millie’s snigger rattles out of the phone. I grip the handset with my shoulder while wrestling Travis’s spoon from his grasp. In a small act of mutiny he dunks a fist into the gunk. Toddler behaviour that he should have outgrown a year ago. ‘Hello,
readers
, I am Caitlin Brown,
Bambino
’s, new agony aunt. You might think I can assist with your problems, but it’s quite clear that I know not a damn thing. My three-year-old son still tries to eat Shredded Wheat with his hands, squeezing it gently so the milk drips through his fingers, and my daughter remains firmly attached to the Scooby costume she’s had since she was four. As for my other son … well, he can’t even bear to live with me. So you can see that we are juggling a few “issues”.’

‘Surely you can predict the kind of stuff they’ll ask?’ Millie insists. ‘Don’t the problems follow certain themes?’

‘Well, yes,’ I admit.

‘And what are they?’

‘Relationship problems, mostly. Things not being the same since they had a child. Being knackered, snappy, irritable. Blaming each other for not helping enough. No sex. Having nothing to talk about apart from the kids. Being paranoid about a partner having affairs, then actually
having
affairs. Oh, and kids’ behavioural problems. I get lots of those: tantrums, sleep problems, faddy eaters, terrible manners.’ Travis sticks out his tongue. A tiny Shredded Wheat nest is perched on it.

‘See,’ Millie gloats, ‘you do know your stuff. Come on, we’re only talking a couple of hundred readers.’

A couple of hundred? However you look at it, that’s a heck of a lot. It’s not a PTA fundraising meeting. Those 200 readers will know, at a glance, that it takes me hours to formulate my replies, that I mull them over on the walk home from school, in the bath, in bed – anytime I have a spare moment. It doesn’t come easily. I’m too anxious of getting it wrong, of fouling up someone’s life. Sometimes I even ask R for suggestions, which probably isn’t ethical – confidentiality and all that – but, hey, any port in a storm.

‘It’ll be great for your profile,’ Millie adds in a gentler tone.

‘I don’t want a profile!’

She sighs dramatically. ‘I’ve already told the big cheeses that you’ll be there, OK? Please, Cait. It’ll be painless.’

I watch bleakly as Travis picks up his bowl and slurps mush
from
its rim. ‘It won’t be a huge all-singing, all-dancing thing, will it?’

She laughs throatily. ‘It’s just a tiny, miniscule, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it thing.’

We finish the call, her almighty fib shimmering in the air.

Hi, Cait,

Been thinking about you and wondering how your second week’s going since Jake moved in with his dad. Did you see him at the weekend? Hope all went well.

Love, R x

Dear R,

Thanks for asking. It wasn’t so bad, actually, though I’d been dreading it in case he’d reverted to his old, loving self (in which case I am clearly the problem) or, worse, I got the cold-shoulder treatment. In fact he was pretty … in-betweeny. Normal, I suppose.

I took the three of them swimming to the new place with flumes. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure that Jake would want to come. But he did and I was ridiculously grateful – how tragic is that? He showed me the touch-turns that Martin’s taught him to do. Martin’s always been better with stuff like that than I am. I consider it a major achievement just to get them all changed and in the water without losing anything.

I realised, when Jake was queuing up for the flume that he’s changing – physically I mean. He’s no longer kid-shaped. He looked taller and has long, strong legs like his dad’s. I wondered if there’s been other stuff that I haven’t noticed. Surely a parent should be aware of everything that’s happening to their kids? I felt ashamed, R. As if he’s slipped from my grasp without me seeing it happening.

Anyway, we had fun. Jake and I had a swimming race and he beat me hands down. We also went to the park and threw stale bread for the ducks, which I worried that Jake would find boring, but it seemed to be fine. He even
reminded
Travis to tear up the bread into tiny pieces for the smaller birds. It brought a lump to my throat, seeing them bread-ripping together, Jake being the kind big brother.

I wanted to ask him so many questions, to interrogate him about how things are going and ask what the hell that gunk is that he puts in his hair now, but I remembered what you said and managed not to.

As it turned out, I only had him for the day. Jake had made it clear that he didn’t want to stay overnight at our house, even though I’d cleaned his blasted room until it reeked of Mr Sheen Lemon Shine and developed RSI of the entire body from all the scrubbing. Anyway, your advice was really helpful and I think it made things more relaxed and natural between us. So a huge thank you.

Love, Cait x

And it’s true: I
am
grateful. R’s regular dispatches are forming a kind of operator’s manual for a ten-year-old boy. It doesn’t matter that Millie thinks I’m a crackpot for involving myself with him, or that I am the one who’s supposed to be
au fait
with this parenting lark.

R is always there for me, at any time of day or night, and it feels as if he cares. Anyway, for the moment he is all I have.

‘I’m coming to your
Bambino
thing,’ Rachel announces. ‘So are Bev, Marcia, Charlene … everyone, really. All the PTA lot and the gymnastics crowd. Paula tried to get a ticket, but it was sold out.’

‘My’
Bambino
thing? ‘That’s great,’ I manage as we march around Leoni’s Larder, a judderingly expensive deli-cum-mini-supermarket where a goat’s cheese salad costs something like five thousand quid.

‘I know they can be bitchy,’ Rachel ventures, ‘but everyone’s on your side, Cait. They’re being supportive.’

‘Of course they are,’ I mutter darkly.

‘It’s exciting for them,’ she continues, ‘and for me. We’ve never met anyone famous.’ She giggles, and I muster a smile as she examines a carton of chicken and couscous. Naturally, it’s no ordinary chicken. It’s probably been marinated in goji-berry juice and chargrilled over the smouldering embers of rare Peruvian bark.

‘I hope everyone’s not disappointed,’ I tell her. ‘I mean, I’m not used to … you know …
performing
. I’m just going to stand there shaking with a purple face, probably peeing myself.’

‘Oh, hon, you’ll be fine,’ she insists, giving my arm a reassuring squeeze. Travis and Lola are, as usual, scampering around the aisles. Like a well-trained hound, Eve is strolling mutely at her mother’s side. I must ask Rachel how she programmed her to behave in such a pleasing manner. It’s my fault we’re in this preposterous shop at all. The plan had been to have a picnic on the playing field by the sports centre before Eve and Lola’s gymnastic display, but my afternoon was gobbled up by numerous
calls
from Nadia, Millie’s secretary, to run through endless details about the reader event.

‘What are you planning to wear?’ she’d wanted to know. Did she really assume that I plan my outfits a week in advance? I blustered that I was ‘considering a few possibilities’.

‘Could you perhaps email me your script?’ she asked, which nearly made me vomit in panic.

So I’m here, in Leoni’s, trying to locate foodstuffs that will be deemed acceptable by my children. Eve, meanwhile, will doubtless be propelled to gold-medal stardom by Rachel’s home-made sourdough, which takes three days to ‘ferment’.

‘Can I have this?’ Lola asks, snatching a bottle of elderflower infusion. (Judging by the cost, said elderflowers were fertilised with rare yak dung and trampled by Tibetan monks.)

‘OK, but you’ll need something to eat or you won’t have any energy for gym.’

‘I don’t like anything.’ Lola glares into the chill cabinet as if it contains dead rats.

A pointy-nosed woman swishes past us in a dress of crinkled indigo silk. Leoni’s is frequented by the gorgeous of face and willowy of frame – women who have so many food intolerances they’d be safer sticking to water.

‘Don’t want samwich,’ Travis chirps.

With a sigh, I flick my gaze over the delicacies on offer. You used to be able to buy ordinary things around here, like plain sandwiches without juniper berries nestling inside. Being in Leoni’s makes me feel like an impoverished oik. I don’t know who Leoni is, but assume that her hobbies include chartering helicopters and purchasing Caribbean islands.

‘Want cookie,’ breathes Travis, lurching towards a display of rough-hewn biscuits.

‘OK, you can have one if you choose a sandwich.’

‘We
always
have sandwiches,’ Lola bleats, and I catch Rachel’s sympathetic glance.

‘No you don’t—’

‘We have them in our lunch boxes,’ she says triumphantly, ‘every day of our lives.’

‘Yes,’ I snap, ‘because you won’t have school lunches, even though they’ve done that improvement programme and now it’s all baked artichokes and fillet of venison or whatever it is.’

‘School lunches are stinky.’ She shudders.

‘We’ll have to hurry,’ Rachel cuts in, ‘if we’re going to have time for a picnic … Won’t that be lovely, kids, a picnic in the park while the sun’s still shining?’

My duo gazes bleakly at the shelves.

‘And we can all have a play,’ Rachel chatters on, ‘then it’ll be gym time and …’

I have stopped listening. Someone is watching us. He was perusing the olives and has now half turned to observe us. Six-footish, slim verging on rangy, nicely put together in a slightly rumpled white T-shirt and faded jeans. A little boy of around six or seven wanders towards him and tugs at his hand. ‘Daddy,’ he says, ‘come on, I’m hungry.’