The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (12 page)

‘Shall we go home?’ he asks tiredly. ‘By the time we get to the restaurant they’ll be shutting down the kitchen.’

So I call Cathy again to deliver what I anticipate is further bad news. Blind dates are a thorny enterprise at the best of times, and at least if we had been there, we could have filled in the silences.

‘I’m so sorry, Cathy, I know we’re really landing you in it, the traffic was dire. We’ve been at a standstill for the past hour and we might as well head home,’ I say. ‘Hope it hasn’t been too tortuous with Tom’s architect.’

‘Look, it’s fine, in fact, it’s better than fine,’ she says. ‘In fact, it’s so fine, it’s probably a good thing that you’re not here. There’s a lot of heavy flirting and it would be embarrassing to have witnesses. He’s in the loo at the moment and we’re about to go to Soho House together.’

‘That’s great, just as well we didn’t come then. So what’s he like?’ I ask.

‘Great. One of those coke-and-pope types,’ she says.

‘Sounds very wholesome, apart from the caffeine, of course,’ I say.

‘Lucy, you need to get out more. What I mean is that he enjoys the party lifestyle, but then gets guilty about it afterwards. It’s a heady combination. I’ve met these types before. Anyway, he’s gorgeous, say a big thank-you to Tom, won’t you? Look, he’s coming back, don’t call me too early tomorrow morning, I’ll let you know what happens,’ she says.

‘How’s it going?’ asks Tom looking slightly worried.

‘Fine. Better than fine. I think they are probably going to sleep together,’ I say.

‘Well, there’s an idea,’ he says. ‘It’s been nice spending time alone, anyway.’

‘Not what I’d describe as quality time,’ I say. ‘I mean, a night out in the shadow of the Westway is not what I’d choose.’

‘No, but I feel as though we’ve reconnected. Sometimes it feels as though you are drifting away from me, Lucy, into an impenetrable world of your own. By the way, I think you should text Cathy and tell her not to sleep with him on a first date.’

‘That’s a bit hypocritical isn’t it?’ I say.

‘The bread never falls but on its buttered side’

I NEVER APPRECIATE
Tom more than when he is away. Without him, the domestic pressure cooker is perpetually pitched at boiling point. I miss his ability to simultaneously pour cornflakes and milk into bowls at breakfast, the way he lines up three coats, each with a packed lunch on top, by the front door, and his uncanny ability for locating my keys. Today it is the latter that I miss most.

Tom left for Milan very early this morning and, as instructed, reluctantly double-locked the door behind him.

‘It is unfathomable to me that the same person who left her keys in the front door not once but twice this week can be so paranoid about early-morning break-ins,’ he said, whispering in my ear as he bent over the bed to kiss me goodbye. ‘Good luck with the vote. If you win, at least you will have scored so many points that the school has to let Fred through the door.’ Then he reconsidered. ‘Of course, if you are a disaster, the reverse might prove true. There’s a good incentive.’

At ten past eight, ten minutes before the usual deadline, I line the children up by the front door, feeling quite self-congratulatory. Not bad. Library books. Check. Shoes. Check. Coats. Check. House keys. Nowhere to be found. At the outset, I refuse to panic. After all, it seems thus far in the day that the augurs are favourable. I search in the usual places: coat pockets,
handbag, kitchen drawer. They yield nothing. ‘Don’t forget to look in the fridge,’ Joe shouts downstairs. ‘That’s where they were last time, Mum, remember?’ The fridge is bare.

‘Maybe you should look in your hippocampus,’ says Sam. ‘That’s where your memories are stored.’

‘How do you do that?’ I ask, suitably impressed.

‘We need to open up your brain,’ he says.

I make the children turn out their pockets and question Fred closely, because he is the natural culprit. He looks down at his feet and shuffles them guiltily. The children follow me downstairs into the kitchen and I tip the rubbish bin out over the floor in case he has disposed of them there. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The smell is overwhelming. The stench of rancid meat and the sickly sweet smell of rotting fruit compete for supremacy. The children put their hands over their mouths and stare in shocked silence at the sight of their mother scrabbling though the detritus of the past few days, shaking a malodorous chicken carcass upside down in case the keys are stuck inside, sorting through mouldy bits of bread and fruit that disintegrate in my hands. I hold my breath for as long as I can and then run over to the cooker, exhale and then breathe in again and return to the fray. My hands are covered in damp tea leaves from a broken tea bag.

‘Do you know that in poor countries children pick through rubbish on enormous dumps, looking for bits to sell and food to eat?’ I say, looking up at the three pairs of eyes watching me. ‘We are very lucky.’ They don’t look convinced.

‘Mummy, can I ask you something?’ says Sam. ‘When we die can we all be buried in a mausoleum, like the Egyptians, then we can always be together?’

‘Sam, that’s a very interesting concept. Do you mind if we talk about it later?’ I say.

‘Then we could make a special place for the keys,’ suggests Joe.

I stop the search and sit for a moment on my haunches, the bits of rubbish scattered around me like some sort of still life. I have to face up to the realities of the situation. My house keys are lost, and because Tom has double locked the door, I am incarcerated inside with the children. I say it several times, out loud, like a mantra, holding the sides of my head, hoping for divine intervention.

In desperation, I phone Cathy for advice. ‘Climb out the sitting room window,’ she says. ‘Phone the school and tell them you are going to be late, because you have forgotten something. That is credible. This isn’t. Don’t elaborate, that’s always a give away.’

‘What happened with the architect?’ I ask. ‘Just the abbreviated version.’ I have resisted phoning her for two days.

‘We went back to his flat and I ended up spending the whole weekend with him, but I am feeling dreadful today. I don’t think I’ve slept more than about eight hours the past three nights, all chemically fuelled. Also I’m worried about having er, exotic sex on a first date.’ There’s one detail I won’t pass on to Tom, who through the weekend was still pontificating on the benefits of abstinence for the first month.

‘I’ll give you the gory details later,’ Cathy says.

‘Actually, I think I’ve heard enough already,’ I say, retrieving the spare car key from the kitchen drawer.

The children are very excited to receive orders to climb out through the sitting-room window, this being exactly the sort of game usually outlawed by parents. I hope that no one is
watching, particularly opportunistic burglars, because I have to leave the window open until I come back from Fred’s nursery. The same goes for the neighbours, who have children at the same school, because this is not behaviour befitting a highly organised stay-at-home mum, who is about to be elected to play an important role in the running of the school and by definition a minor role in the future of education in this country. I’m never more than one step behind the bigger picture.

‘This is better than
Mission Impossible
, Mum,’ says Sam, sliding through the narrow gap at the bottom of the window down on to the grass. They stand in the front garden, all holding hands, because they sense this is one of those rare occasions when a family really needs to pull together, and watch me struggle to slide through to the other side. I have pulled my shirt and T-shirt up around my ribs in order to reduce the area around my middle. I wriggle through in slow bursts, stopping periodically to suck in my stomach.

‘We should have rubbed butter round your tummy, Mummy,’ says Sam, pulling my arms. ‘I’ve seen them do that on
Blue Peter
.’

‘To get mummies through windows?’ asks Joe.

‘No, to help beached seals off the coast of Scotland,’ Sam says thoughtfully, as I scramble through into the flower bed.

Feeling elated at my cool head in a crisis, I agree to play
Best of Bond Theme Tunes
very loudly in the car on the short journey to school. We will hardly even be late. At around fifty metres from the playground, my luck runs out and the car grinds to a halt in the middle of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun.’ We are stranded. The petrol gauge is on empty. Traffic starts to back up from the front and behind. I have one of those out-of-body
experiences, where I feel as though I am an observer watching someone else’s life.

‘Mum, you can’t pretend this isn’t happening,’ says Sam, sensing what is going on. So I phone Tom on my mobile and coolly explain the situation to him.

‘What do you expect me to do about it? I’m on my way to Milan,’ he yells down the line.

‘What would you do in this situation?’ I plead.

‘I wouldn’t be in it,’ he says.

Impatient drivers, including Yummy Mummy No. 1 two cars back, start hooting rhythmically. I get out of the car, pointedly open the Peugeot’s bonnet and start poking around the engine. ‘Must be a flat battery,’ I shout to no one in particular. ‘Anyone got any jump-leads?’

I would be good in a war zone. I would be great doing front-line medical interventions. I would be brilliant at dealing with natural disasters. I’m just not good at the small stuff, I think to myself, as I take a few plugs off the engine and clean them with a duster. Unfortunately, it is these small details that now define my life. I search in my pockets for something that might qualify as a sharp object, because at this particular juncture, piercing the engine is an option I am considering. Anything to avoid admitting that I have run out of petrol.

Sexy Domesticated Dad appears, strolling down the road, away from school. His arm is out of plaster. ‘Got a problem?’ he says, coming over to peer into the engine, walking like a cowboy in that way that urban men do when they sense a rare chance to show off manly qualities. He is even wearing a plaid shirt. This is north-west London, not Brokeback Mountain, I want to say. Words like gasket, spark-plug and carburettor trip off his tongue. But his hands remain firmly in the pockets of his jeans,
which are so loose that I can spot a hint of grey underpant spewing out the top. We both peer under the bonnet.

Yummy Mummy No. 1 joins us the other side, leaning over the engine to reveal perfect cleavage, firm but not pneumatic.

‘That’s unnatural,’ I say unthinkingly.

‘What is?’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad.

‘Lucy, I will say just three words,’ Yummy Mummy No. 1 replies, staring straight at me over the engine. ‘Rigby and Peller.’

‘Is that a law firm?’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad, looking puzzled. He seems unmoved by the view. Then he starts to get down and dirty, pulling rubber caps off bits of the engine. I’m still unconvinced that he knows what he is doing. But at least he is offering good cover. He passes something oily to Yummy Mummy No. 1. Her perfectly manicured hands are smeared with grease.

‘It’s a bit like one of those Micheline Arcier paraffin-wax oil treatments,’ she says, looking down at them dubiously.

Alpha Mum approaches. She is trying to twist her features into an expression of faux sympathy, her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth slightly open, but she can’t smother her underlying smugness. ‘Oh, poor you,’ she says, looking up and down the road at all the traffic. ‘Of course, you live so close that you could easily walk.’

‘But then you can’t wear high heels,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, clicking the heels of a pair of Christian Louboutin boots together in irritation.

‘How do you drive in those?’ asks Alpha Mum.

‘I don’t. I wear a pair of cashmere slippers and put the boots on when I get here,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1.

The headmistress appears to investigate the noise and general chaos, and begins to order cars to reverse back down the road in both directions. ‘Hello, Mrs Sweeney,’ she says. ‘I recognise your car from the other day.’

‘What are you doing, Mum?’ yells Sam, winding down the window. I have forgotten that the children are in the car.

‘I’ve found the keys to the house hidden down the back of the seat. That’s good, isn’t it?’ yells Joe from the other window.

‘Wonderful, darling,’ I shout.

The road is filled with the sound of ‘Nobody Does it Better’. ‘Say, “Baby you’re the best”,’ Joe shouts back.

‘What helpful children,’ says Alpha Mum dryly. I can tell she is making a mental inventory of these incidents.

‘Turn the music down, we can’t hear ourselves think,’ I shout in forced jolly fashion.

‘But you don’t need to think, you just need to go and get a can of petrol from the garage,’ insists Sam, who is nothing if not rational.

They all stop in their tracks. ‘You mean you’ve run out of petrol?’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad, holding his head in his oily hands.

‘This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about,’ says Alpha Mum, her voice laced with sarcasm. ‘It would be disastrous to have her as class rep. Unsafe.’

‘Look, I’ll take the children into school,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad.

‘Thank you,’ I mumble as Sam and Joe cheerfully climb out of the car.

‘And I’ll take you to the garage,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1.

‘And I’ll organise people to push the car into a space on the side of the road,’ says the headmistress.

‘And I will go and plan my victory speech for tonight,’ says Alpha Mum, walking away, nose in the air, leaving the rest of us standing in the street.

‘Well, you still get my vote,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, as I bundle Fred into a car seat in the back of her vehicle. ‘School life would certainly be a lot less boring with you in charge.’ It’s one of those double-edged compliments, but I am too busy absorbing the full range of activities in the back of the car to mind. First of all, there are the television screens on the backs of the seats and a range of DVDs, each stored in the correct case, in a small compartment at the back of the handbrake. Also on the back of each seat is a transparent storage unit with pockets in various shapes and sizes. One contains pens. Another paper. Then there are age-appropriate books. It is all straight lines and symmetry. Very pleasing to the eye. ‘It’s more Piet Mondrian than Tracey Emin, I think,’ she says, smiling at me as I climb into the front beside her. ‘Actually, it’s all my nanny’s work.’