Mummy Said the F-Word (3 page)

‘So,’ I growl, ‘where are you taking her?’

‘Um, Thorpe Park.’

‘Jesus.’ So many bad words swirl around in my head I fear they’ll burst out of my ears.

‘That’s what she wants,’ he adds. ‘She’s been looking forward to it for ages.’

‘So have ours,’ I hiss.

‘I’ll take them another time. We’ll sort—’

‘I know!’ I blurt wildly. ‘Take ours on Saturday, when it’s not Poppy’s birthday, and take Poppy on Sunday, when it
is
her—’

‘I can’t go to Thorpe Park twice in one weekend!’ Martin blusters.

Lola sucks a tendril of hair fretfully.

‘Why not?’ I ask.

‘Bloody hell, Cait. I hate those places. They’re full of screaming, hyperactive kids dosed up on cheap sweets. They do my head in.’

‘Do they? I thought you enjoyed your jolly days out with our children.’

A pause. ‘You have to twist everything, don’t you?’

I picture Martin’s neck, with the tufts of fluffy hair growing down the back – greying a little now, I’d been pleased to note – and how I’d like to give that a damn good twist. Right round, until his eyes bulged and his veins stuck out. That would make a pleasant change from being so bloody mature and let’s-be-reasonable-for-the-kids. I’m so controlled at kiddie-handover time that sometimes I fear that my heart will judder to a halt from the effort.
That
would show him.

‘Or,’ I continue, skirting round his remark, ‘you could take all of them together and split up – so Daisy takes Poppy to one part, and you take ours to another, and the two families go around separately …’ I tail off, overcome by the awful realisation that Martin doesn’t view himself as belonging to a separate family from Daisy and Poppy. Of course he doesn’t.

‘Space issues’ – his term – mean that he is unable to accommodate his own offspring more frequently than every other weekend. Daisy and Poppy are with him virtually all the time. He’ll have read billions of bedtime stories, the way he used to with ours.
They
are Martin’s family now. A woman with a glossy black bob, pert young-person’s breasts and a precocious daughter who won’t let Lola lay a finger on My Little Pony’s mane brush. Over eight months on, when I’m supposed to have recovered from the break-up and be moving on, making a new life for myself – all the overly positive crap that fills magazines like
Bambino
– and I still yearn to stab him between the eyes. We’re not even going through a divorce. I haven’t set anything in motion, for the pathetic reason that being no longer married to me might make life easier for him. Martin hasn’t dared to suggest it.

I finish the call, mentally totting up our scores: Martin, 1; Cait, O.

Lola gazes up at me, her dark eyes gleaming like Christmas-tree baubles. ‘Why won’t Daddy take us to Thorpe Park?’ she asks.

‘He says he’ll still take you,’ I babble, ‘and he’s really looking
forward
to it, but he can’t do it this weekend because something else is happening.’

‘Oh. What’s happening?’

She knows, of course she does. She just wants me to say it. I scrabble for the least hurtful answer, my tongue flapping dryly in my mouth. ‘He didn’t say,’ is all I can dredge up.

‘He’s taking Poppy instead, isn’t he?’ A tear wobbles dangerously, and I bend down to pull her close.

‘It’s her birthday,’ I say softly. ‘She just wants a special time.’

She fixes me with a stoic look, her brave face. ‘So do I,’ she mutters.

‘Listen, we’ll do something special too. I’ve just got to finish my work, OK? Then we’ll pop out and pick up the boys and come back for tea. We’ll have pancakes for afters, all right?’

‘With lemon and sugar?’

‘We’ll buy a lemon on the way home. You can make the batter all by yourself.’

Lola musters a weak smile and plonks herself on the rug. I don’t have it in me to go on about the buggered TV, not after her disappointment over Thorpe Park. Summoning every ounce of concentration, she draws a perfect crown on the biggest zebra’s head. No matter what Martin does, or how often he lets her down, he’s still King Daddy as far as his daughter’s concerned. Which strikes me as more than a little unfair.

Down in the bowels of the house – our shadowy basement kitchen – I try to switch back into work mode, but it’s useless. I can’t face the tongue thing again, let alone corn creams and blackhead exterminators. Martin’s calls often have that effect. It’s as if he’s hatching a plot to make me lose my Vitalworld job on top of everything else.

It’s not that I want us to get back together. The thought of Martin touching me – or, indeed, inhabiting the same page of the A–Z – makes me want to vomit. No, what concerns me these days is his effect on the kids. It churns my insides to see Lola struggling to be brave and good. Jake has taken to cleaning his
bedroom
with alarming vigour. The first time I caught him lugging the Hoover upstairs, I assumed he needed it for a game.

‘I want my room to be nice,’ he’d muttered.

‘But I make it nice!’ I’d protested.

‘It’s not nice. It’s horrible and dirty.’

Shortly afterwards, he’d bought a can of Mr Sheen (Spring Fresh fragrance) with his own pocket money. Whenever he uses it, its smell seems to permeate the entire house. Sometimes I can even taste it.

And Travis? He’s too young to grasp the ins and outs, but is patently aware that Daddy no longer lives with us, and that another adult female plus offspring now feature in his life.

He knows that Dad used to put out his breakfast cereal and pour the milk from a great height, making sploshy white waterfalls. And now he doesn’t.

I check my inbox. There’s an email from Ross at Vitalworld.

Hi, Cait,

Hope all’s good with you and the brood.

He always says ‘brood’; it makes me feel like a plump hen.

Sorry to be a pain, but could you try a slight change of tone with your new batch of copy and make it bouncier? I’ve had feedback from the big cheeses and they’d like it more upbeat, hard sell – you know the kind of thing. I’m sure you won’t find it a problem. Hope you haven’t done too much work on it already.

Cheers, Cait, and have a great weekend,

Ross

I glare down at my product list:

• Gloss ’n’ Gleam Anti-Dandruff Conditioning Masque

I start to write, ‘Is anything worse than spotting a snowstorm on your shoulders?’ and think, Yes! Lots of things are far worse than that. Like your husband announcing that he and his girlfriend are moving to a fancy new flat in Canary Wharf, as they want
somewhere
that feels like ‘theirs’ instead of just ‘hers’. (Despite the fact that his extortionate maintenance payments – which, being Athena Daddy, he is
quite happy to make
– have rendered them bankrupt. Allegedly.) A flat with not one but two – count’em! – roof terraces.

• pile ointment

• Fresh Zone halitosis pills with extract of liquorice and clove

• Blackhead-Removal System

• Redeem Hair-Recovery Programme for Men

• Corn Care with natural beeswax. Also effective for heels, elbows and other scaly areas.

Who the hell buys this stuff? Lizards?

• Wind-Away tablets, to ease the discomfort of flatulence and trapped wind.

God, the human body can be terribly embarrassing sometimes. Having lost momentum with the tongue thing, I move on to the fart pills, trying to muster every upbeat cell in my body.

Maybe it’s time I found myself a proper job.

This is all Martin’s fault. I’d have nearly finished by now if he hadn’t cancelled and thrown me off track. All it would need is a little ‘bouncing up’.

Thorpe Park. It’s opening weekend, to coincide with February half-term. For all I care, he can spend the entire weekend with Daisy and Poppy on the spinny rides he so hates. The kids and I will have a fantastic time doing, er … I’m sure I’ll conjure up something.

As for Martin choosing birthday girl over his own flesh and blood, I won’t utter one more word about it. Let them have their damn one-to-one. I’ll rise above them like a dignified cloud.

Thorpe Park is as gaudy as the contents of an upended toy box.

‘Come on!’ Travis yelps, tugging his mittened hand free and tearing away.

I grab him by his dungaree strap. ‘We’ll have to stick together or we’ll lose you. Look how busy it is here.’

‘Wanna go on that!’ he rages, indicating a terrifying roller coaster looping the loop.

‘That’s for bigger children, Travis. There are lots of other things you can go on.’

‘Don’t want baby things. Want big-boy things.’ He juts out his bottom lip like a ramp.

Sam catches my eye and grins. I am part of a ‘we’ again – albeit temporarily – as, to my surprise and delight, my single-dad friend offered to come with us. Sam’s ex-wife, mother to their ten-year-old son, Harvey, apparently swished off some years ago to ‘find herself’ in Cornwall with an old flame. Like me, Sam has been dumped on with ten tons of horse shit. Unlike me, he doesn’t – as far as I’m aware – harbour resentment and hatred. Things seem to be terribly grown-up and respectful between Sam and Amelia. I once spotted a hand-drawn birthday card on his mantelpiece, in which she’d written, ‘Happy birthday, babe. Love, Melly xxx,’ which hardly hinted at mutual hatred.

‘Aren’t you worried we’ll bump into them?’ he asks, as our group straggles through the throng.

My plan had been to do precisely that, as a kind of up-yours gesture. I know – neither big nor clever. And now I’m not so sure I want to be here at all.

‘I don’t think it’s likely,’ I tell him, ‘but if we do, I can handle it.’
I’ve got you
, I want to add.

He drapes a reassuring arm round my shoulders. Sweet, kind Sam. He’d be immensely fanciable – dark, dark eyes, lithe, slender body – to any woman whose libido hadn’t been utterly quashed, as mine has.

‘I just don’t want you getting upset,’ he says.

‘Sam –’ I turn to face him ‘– I really don’t give a stuff about them. Come on, let’s find the water-ride thing.’

My spirits have risen – probably due to Jake looking happy for once, instead of wearing his usual droopy ‘yeah, yeah’ face. We spend the morning milling from ride to ride, braving the Rumba Rapids and the tamest of the roller coasters, where two women in the car in front steal lusty glances at Sam when they think I’m not watching. I first met him a year ago, but we’ve been hanging out with the kids for six months or so, since Sam and Harvey moved into the next street and our sons became firm friends at school. Sam has hauled me out of a pit of depression, stopping me from feeling like a crushed eggshell at the bottom of the pedal bin of life. I am now a baked-bean can, roughly halfway up. Naturally, Bev and Marcia and the rest of the PTA mob assume that we’re enjoying a rampant affair, based on the evidence that we hang out together and our sons are friends – plus, single mothers are gagging to shag the pants off anyone, of course. I ran into Marcia in the supermarket last week. She gave the contents of my trolley a quick once-over, as if expecting to glimpse ready-meals and gallons of gin.

After our café lunch, Sam whisks Travis to the toddler rides, while I jam myself on to the big wheel with the others. Big wheels I can handle. And it’s from there, at its highest point, that I spot him. Martin, wearing a yolk-coloured T-shirt, with a child perched on his shoulders.

My stomach tightens and I grip Lola’s hand. I shouldn’t have brought them here, at least not today. Now there’s no escape. My kids are about to be faced with their father and Poppy on her special day, and it’s all my stupid, blundering fault. I gawp at
Poppy
. All I know about Daisy’s little darling has been gleaned from the kids following Daddy Weekends. Poppy has a ‘special’ chair at the table on which no one else is allowed to sit. She shuns any foods that are deemed ‘soft’. She has a dolly’s cot, high chair, buggy and camper van – and probably a timeshare in dolly’s holiday villa in Mauritius. Because Martin ferries our children to and from his new pad, I have yet to have the pleasure of meeting her. Lola has told me that she refuses to wear anything non-pink, hence my private nickname for her, Pink Princess.

Martin looks utterly at ease with her. Poppy keeps twisting round excitedly, her legs dangling against his chest. He is gripping her ankles, keeping her steady and safe. Anyone would think he was her dad. On top of the dolly’s high chair and timeshare, this child now has our children’s father – albeit in a sick-making yellow T-shirt. Is he trying to look like a children’s TV presenter, or a tub of margarine? The T-shirt is a precise match for those butter-substitute tubs: Utterly Butterly, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter – of course it’s not butter, you thick twit.

Frantically, I plot our escape route to avoid confronting the charming birthday tableau. What was I thinking, hauling the kids here today? I’d wanted to make a point. (
He
might feel fine about disappointing our children. I most certainly do not.) I’d wanted to scream out the message: ‘
You
might think you’re the only one who’s allowed here on Poppy’s birthday … but here we are! We’ve paid our entrance fee and we’re going to damn well enjoy ourselves!’ And I hadn’t considered how wretched they’d feel, seeing Martin with his shiny new family. I am despicable. Imagine using your own children to make a point. They should be removed from my care.

If only we could escape without being spotted. I know – once we get off the ride, I’ll tell Sam we have to leave immediately. I’ll feign illness, a fainting fit – even death. Anything to get the hell out of this damn place. Fuck, the margarine blob is edging closer. As our big-wheel chair descends, I can see the back of Poppy’s head, her ash-blonde curls clumped up with numerous hairclips and ribbons – a fine example of accessory overload.

‘Mummy,’ Lola protests, ‘you’re hurting my hand.’

‘Sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t realise.’ I let go and wipe sweat from my palms on to my jeans. I am sweating all over, even though it’s chilly enough for our breath to form pale clouds. Mercifully, there’s no sign of Slapper. I have met her only once, a couple of months ago, when I ran into her and Martin Christmas shopping in Covent Garden. They’d been clutching each other’s hands and had sprung apart as soon as they saw me. At least she had the decency to look horrified. My teeth were so tightly gritted I’d feared that they’d crumble to dust. I’d been so shattered by the effort of being
reasonable
and
mature
that I’d dived into a pub and ordered a glass of white wine, which I’d downed virtually in one. If I wound up in the Priory, I would be forwarding the bill to Martin.