The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (19 page)

‘We never got far enough with our marriage to reach that point, so maybe you should consider it an achievement,’ says Cathy.

‘Besides, we’re never alone in bed,’ I continue. ‘Sometimes it’s like musical chairs. We wake up in the morning and none of us are in the same bed that we went to sleep in.’

‘Can’t you put them back in their beds?’ asks Emma.

‘You can, but often we’re too knackered to get up, and besides, they are wise to that one, so they sneak in and lie at our feet so we don’t notice them, like dogs.’

‘What about trying something different like tantric sex?’ says Emma.

‘Takes too long. Whatever we do, it mustn’t take longer than twenty minutes,’ I say. ‘It’s top of my long-term to-do list though.’

‘What is?’ asks Cathy.

‘Having sex with Tom,’ I say.

‘What else is on that list?’ asks Cathy, looking incredulous.

‘Well, there’s the issue of my credit card debt,’ I say. ‘Finding a cleaning lady who can actually do the washing and ironing. Inventing a part-time job. And scattering my grandmother’s ashes at her birthplace. I forgot to do it when we went to Norfolk.’

‘So where are they now?’ asks Emma.

‘In the airing cupboard,’ I say. ‘It seemed like a good place to keep them. Cosy and safe. Like her.’

‘But those all sound like priorities,’ says Emma, momentarily distracted from her own problems. ‘Death, debt, dirty clothes, no sex. No wonder you’re unnerved by your own existence.
And actually, they are so easy to sort out.’

‘But if I sort them out, then what will be left?’ I ask. They look at me in genuine confusion.

‘What I mean is that if all those things were resolved, then I might discover that actually they are the glue sticking everything together and that everything just disintegrates,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to be counter-intuitive.’

‘That’s so irrational, Lucy,’ says Cathy. ‘You might feel more in control if you sorted them out.’

‘Maybe I want to be out of control,’ I say recklessly. But when I see the worried expressions on their faces, I relent. ‘Or just out of control for a defined period of time, to remember what it feels like.’

‘What sort of things are on your short-term list?’ asks Cathy. I hand them my diary and point to a couple of grubby pages at the back. The pages are worn through. The corners are missing and the ink has soaked through from the other side. It looks like hieroglyphics with strange words written in different-coloured pens.

‘Is this a kind of code?’ asks Emma. I start to read down the right-hand page.

‘Nit shampoo, birthday party Sam, toothbrush Fred, MMR, smear test, bikini wax . . .’

Emma is scratching her head again.

‘It’s because it says nit shampoo. If you have a suggestible personality, simply seeing those words can make your scalp itch,’ I say.

‘Why do you need a bikini wax in the middle of winter?’ Emma asks.

‘That has been on the list since May,’ I say.

‘Don’t try and distract me, I know your tactics for avoiding
a conversation,’ says Emma, counting the number of things on the list. She stops when she reaches twenty-two.

‘I can’t understand how it can all be so complicated. Surely you could do one of these things each day, and then within a month, it would all be over and you could turn to the long-term list,’ she says.

‘Every day, there are new things to add to that list,’ I say. ‘There’s another list on the fridge with other, even more urgent things. And you’re not including the things that need to be done routinely, like making packed lunches, cooking industrial quantities of bolognese sauce, doing homework, washing . . .’ I am about to mention the mess that I have left behind in the sitting room when I see that she is beginning to look bored.

Just before I left, I discovered that I had paid a heavy price for those ten minutes spent sorting through the post, because Fred had taken all the puzzles and games from the toy cupboard and was using them to load up his collection of trailers. His lorries were filled with pieces from a combination of Monopoly, Scrabble and Cluedo. Hundreds, possibly thousands of pieces that need sorting. Hours, even days, of work that won’t even make it on to a list. Devastation on a grand scale, all generated in less than ten minutes. Does this qualify as two steps forward and one backwards, or does it leave me with negative equity, I wondered, as I pushed everything under the sofa before walking out the door? This is why I will always be one step behind.

Sometimes during my early-morning insomnia, I make lists in my mind of The Lost Things. The current one includes a plastic hammer from Fred’s tool kit, the battery cover for a remote control car, an extra large dice from Snakes and Ladders, and a rook from the chess set.

I imagine myself, like a forensic pathologist, covering every inch of ground in the house, searching down the backs of chairs, underneath wardrobes, inside shoes, even underneath floorboards, to locate all these things and restore order. It will never happen, partly because there is never enough time, but mostly because I know that within a few days the chaos ante will rule once again.

One of the telephone handsets has also gone missing and a key from the door into the garden, but I haven’t mentioned this to Tom yet, knowing he will hold me responsible. He doesn’t spend enough time at home to realise that children are like ants without a system, constantly on the move, carrying things from one room to another and secreting them in places invisible to the adult eye.

If Petra hadn’t been staying, I would have resorted to one of those larynx-aching rants that purge me of my anger and make Sam refer to the NSPCC ads that tell you that shouting is tantamount to child abuse. Whoever devised those should be sent to come and clean up the carnage.

Fred came over to nestle in my lap, hoping for clemency, and my eyes stung red with the effort of neutralising my anger. For Fred had done this before, less than two weeks ago. I imagined the vessels in my brain, bulging with the pressure of the blood coursing into my head, struggling not to burst their banks like tiny river ways during a heavy rainstorm. All it would take is one tiny point of weakness, and my brain would flood like the Okavango delta in the rainy season, leaving my children motherless.

I shut my eyes and breathed in the smell of the soft skin of Fred’s neck, the soft fleshy part underneath the long curls at the back of his head that I can’t bear to cut because they represent
the last vestiges of his babyhood. He giggled, because it tickled, but allowed me my moment of wistfulness. He smelt of a sweet blend of clean pyjamas, soap and the unsullied pureness of recently washed toddler and I felt myself melt. Waves of nostalgia for the baby he will never be again swept over me, and for a moment I thought I might cry. Sometimes it is a question of getting through the days, but then from nowhere come those moments that you want to preserve for ever.

‘I think, Lucy, that you might have lost sight of the value of certainty in your existence,’ says Cathy. ‘You might lose out on the extremes, but they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. You don’t realise what a privilege it is to be sure of things.’

‘My eighteen-year-old babysitter told me the other day that we are too fixated on the idea of happiness as an end in itself,’ I say, suddenly remembering a conversation with Polly. I am poring over my diary, struggling to decipher my own lists. ‘She said that our dissatisfaction is based on the belief that we have a fundamental right to be happy, and that if we could accept that anything beyond vaguely awful is a bonus, we would all be more content. So maybe I need to acknowledge that it isn’t possible for a relationship to contain everything.’

‘God, I hope you pay her well,’ says Emma.

‘Perhaps the key is to embrace the grey areas and view extremes with suspicion,’ says Cathy.

‘I mistrust anyone who believes anything too much,’ says Emma. ‘That’s why I’m going to a funeral next week. Tony Blair and his divine belief that he is right. We’re all paying for that. It’s a long-term debt.’

She gets up from the table and heads towards the three enormous sofas at the other end of the vast room. We follow,
then all sit bunched up on a single sofa with another bottle of wine and drunkenly settle into a game that we invented years ago, which involves holding up pages of shoes from glossy magazines and seeing who can identify a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes from around three metres. Although I have never possessed a pair of Jimmy Choos of my own – even when I worked full-time I was in the trainer league – I have always managed to beat them at this particular game, and tonight is no exception.

We are on the third round, and I have opened up a substantial lead, even though I have no peripheral vision because I am once again wearing my faithful National Health glasses.

‘Lucy, this is a particularly difficult conundrum,’ says Emma, holding up a page from
Vogue
’s party season issue. ‘I’m not going to say anything more than that.’

Cathy is looking in the fridge for yet another bottle of wine for us to open. ‘It’s the pair on the far right of the bottom row,’ I say, pushing the glasses high on the bridge of my nose and looking long and hard at the nine pairs of shoes. ‘And there’s another pair, top row in the middle,’ I crow triumphantly.

‘How do you do that?’ asks Cathy, impressed as always.

‘It’s a mathematical skill, there is an exquisite relationship between the heel and sole, an indefinable ratio, that makes them truly elegant. I can only do it with Jimmy Choo,’ I say, lying back on the new sofa, precariously balancing a full glass of wine in my hand and wondering how my self-esteem has become dependent on such useless endeavour. ‘Unfortunately, it won’t make me my fortune.’

‘Just out of curiosity, Lucy, what has Sexy Domesticated Dad got that Tom is lacking?’ asks Cathy.

‘I suppose he’s unfamiliar, so there’s a lot left to the imagination,’ I say. ‘And I think he’s probably wild at heart. Irresponsible.’ And then I feel disloyal for saying that.

‘Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper’

WHEN I FINALLY
get home it is almost two o’clock in the morning. I am regretfully counting how many days it will take to recover from the evening’s excesses, an equation that involves adding up the glasses of wine consumed and subtracting the number of consecutive hours of sleep I manage to clock herein.

To my surprise, Tom is sitting downstairs at the kitchen table, staring into the distance at the portrait of his mother. The radio is on. He is listening to a programme on the World Service about a Mexican architect called Luis Barragán and doesn’t hear me coming down the stairs.

A model of his library in Milan sits on the kitchen table and he has a proprietorial arm around its side, like a man with his hand resting on the buttock of a new girlfriend. He is dressed in a pair of blue striped pyjamas that he must have bought in Milan. They are so stiff that they remain static when he moves his body. The collar is sticking in the air so that it looks as though he is wearing a ruff. The overall impression of Elizabethan courtier is exacerbated by the fact that he hasn’t bothered to shave for the past week and now has a fair covering of black beard, making it difficult to gauge the expression on his face.

I look at the portrait from the bottom of the stairs and try to
imagine what Tom might be thinking. In an effort to steady myself, I particularly focus on Petra’s hair. There has been no evolution in her hairstyle since I first met her. In fact, her overall appearance has barely changed. The colour palette of her uniform of neat twinsets and sensible flat Russell and Bromley shoes might have become less muted, but the sensibility is the same.

Her hair has been permed to oblivion in the same style every week for so many years that it no longer moves, even when she bends over. I have never touched it, but I imagine it would have the same quality as a wire brush. Even in a brisk wind, it remains as still as a bed of artichoke heads on a frosty morning, unchanged since the day she married Tom’s father.

Yet in this picture, painted less than a year before she got married, her face is framed by long brown hair that falls in lazy waves like a pair of curtains either side of her beautiful limpid blue eyes. Her expression is soft, every tiny facial muscle is relaxed. She looks languorous, like treacle. Then in a moment of drunken lucidity it comes to me. She is sated.

‘What’s wrong, Lucy. You’re staring at me as though you’ve have seen a ghost,’ says Tom, interrupting my reverie. ‘I’ve only been away for five days.’

‘It’s that picture of your mother,’ I say. ‘Did you ever meet the man who painted it?’

‘He was a professional artist. She posed for him way before I was born, you know that,’ he says, getting up to come and plant a slightly resentful kiss on my cheek. The beard tickles, and I rub the spot where the bristles scratched my cheek and then I sneeze. Perhaps I’m becoming allergic to my husband.

‘But why would he give her the picture then?’ I ask, rubbing my nose, struggling to appear sober.

‘I’ve got no idea. It was up in the attic for years. The first time I saw it was when she arrived here with it. Why are you asking all of these questions? I thought you might be interested in my library,’ he says, sounding slightly hurt. ‘I was hoping you might be here when I arrived, actually.’

There used to be a time when we would sit in silence and then, when we spoke, we were both saying the same thing. We were synchronised. Of course, old clocks never keep the correct time. Perhaps I should be content that we agree more than we disagree, although it would be better if there was less up for discussion. But perhaps if you agree about everything, then any discrepancy seems even more insurmountable.

‘I went to see Emma’s new loft. Your mother offered to babysit and I needed to get away from her,’ I say. ‘Sorry. I didn’t think you would wait up.’

‘She’s going tomorrow morning,’ he says. ‘She’s acting a little strangely. She kept saying that she didn’t know when she would be coming back. I hope you haven’t had an argument.’

‘No, I was remarkably restrained,’ I say, hoping to avoid a discussion about Petra.