The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (6 page)

‘You talk about living dangerously, Lucy. We are not at a stage in our life where that applies any more. We are creatures of habit that should embrace the familiar. Like old sofas.’ I must have looked sceptical because he became more expansive.

‘The sofa in our sitting room has a loose spring in the right-hand corner. There is a sticky patch at the back in the middle, from a sweet that got stuck there years ago – I think it’s a lemon sherbet – and there is a hole on the side that gets bigger and bigger because one of the children is using it to store money.’ I could not believe that he noticed all these things.

‘Even though all this should be mildly annoying, it isn’t, because the familiarity of these imperfections is comforting. Don’t you notice that I no longer say anything when you lose your credit card? Eyes face forward. Breathing normal. Eyebrows stationary. All facial tics under control.’

‘I thought you’d begun to understand that losing your credit card is simply not a big deal,’ I muttered, but he was impervious.

‘Once you realise that you’re not immortal, there is reassurance in routine, Lucy. Think how upset you were when Cathy’s husband left her. Floored. You never complained about being early then. In fact, Lucy, you really don’t like change. You would hate it if I suddenly started being late.’

And, as usual, I ended up agreeing with him. Because he was probably right.

Tom has slept the entire night in exactly the same position, on his front, legs splayed and his arms hugging the pillow. I, on the other hand, have dealt with the usual nocturnal visitations. Lying in bed, my ear is roughly at the same height as Fred’s head and at around one-thirty I woke with a jump, to hear a deep raspy voice whispering in my ear. ‘Want my cuddles. Want them now.’

Then roughly an hour later, Joe came in to announce tearfully that he was shrinking. ‘I am smaller than I was when I went to bed,’ he said, gripping my arm so hard that there are still tiny finger marks in the morning.

‘I promise you are the same size,’ I replied. ‘Look at your hand, it fits into mine in exactly the same way it did when we walked to school yesterday.’

‘But I can feel that my legs are shrinking,’ he said with such conviction that I wondered momentarily whether he might be right.

‘It’s growing pains,’ I said, the stock response for any inexplicable night-time aches. ‘Daddy and I used to get them too.’

‘How do you know it isn’t shrinking pains?’ he insisted. ‘Granny is smaller than she used to be. By the morning I will be so small you won’t be able to see me any more,’ he said, his voice getting quieter and quieter. ‘And then I might get eaten by a dog on the way to school.’

So I got out of bed and took him downstairs to the kitchen door, where Tom periodically records the height of our children.

‘Look, you are even taller than when we last measured you,’ I showed him.

He smiled and hugged me and I took him back up to bed
and managed to fall asleep until the early-morning insomnia kicked in.

I make the mistake of starting to calculate exactly how many hours of sleep I have had during the night and then give up at five and three-quarters. Caught in that nether land between deep sleep and being fully awake, I am conscious of a pit in my stomach, a reminder of anxiety that I carry in my body without being fully aware of its provenance. I start to run systematically through the usual scenarios that creep up at this time of day. I haven’t missed my period. I know where I have parked the car. I have hidden my cigarettes. Yesterday’s knickers lurk, but I have already managed to file that particular debacle away in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. Some things are so truly dreadful that there is nothing to be gained from analysis.

Then I remember what it is I have forgotten. Sam’s ‘Six Great Artists of the World’ project has to be handed in this morning. Three down, three to go. I spring from the bed in a single motion, surprising lazy muscles with unaccustomed intent.

Bad but not irredeemable. To avoid disturbing Tom, I rush into the spare bedroom and pull on the dressing-gown that is hanging on the back of the door. It is the same one that I wore the first time I met him, the dressing gown equivalent of a shag-pile carpet, long, hairy, and impossible to clean, given to my husband by my mother-in-law when he was a teenager. Its presence therefore predates even my arrival on the scene, and it is now called into action only during times of great uncertainty. Thinking of Tom before he met me used to make me feel jealous of all the things we never shared together. Now it is something I relish. Because there is a point in a marriage when the unknown becomes more interesting than the known. I try
to persuade him to take me through sexual exploits with the women who preceded me, but he is too honourable to indulge my prurience.

There are stains and rough patches down the side of this dressing gown, which I imagine are the residues of furtive adolescent skirmishes, bits of unidentifiable food stuck deep inside the pile, and inexplicable bald patches. It is a better record of Tom’s teenage years than any of the endless slides and blurred photos taken by his mother.

It hails from an era of Laura Ashley prints and records by Status Quo. I feel something in the pocket and half-expect it to be a crumpled and stained page of a favourite big-breasted model torn from a 1978 edition of
Playboy
. But I couldn’t be more wrong. It is a page from an old edition of Mrs Beeton. I skim read a couple of sentences: ‘I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways. Men are now so well-served out of doors – at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses – that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home.’

Mrs Beeton has a lot to answer for, I think to myself, moodily stuffing the piece of paper deep into the pocket of the dressing gown. How it came to be here I cannot understand, and I try to recall when the dressing gown was last called into commission. My mother-in-law stayed in this room most recently. I make a note to myself to reflect upon this discovery later, wondering whether Petra is trying to send subliminal messages to me, but right now there
are other priorities. Within minutes I have forgotten its existence.

Outside the spare bedroom I bump into Fred, stumbling along the passage and rubbing his eyes. At this stage, he could be persuaded back into bed. But he senses my stress levels and notices that I am swaddled in an unfamiliar, floor-length ensemble and protests that he wants to come downstairs. Down in the kitchen I assess the situation while searching for paintbrushes and paint, opening and shutting cupboards forcefully and muttering under my breath, ‘Degas is done. Goya is done. Constable is done.’ Fred repeats each phrase, excitedly appreciating that this unexpected change in his early-morning routine might prove favourable to him. I seat him on the stool beside Tom’s drawing table and hand him scissors and pots of paint and other forbidden treats. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes, I repeat to myself. For there are many times, even in households where television is allowed only at weekends, that mothers resort to dirty tactics to claw back those few minutes that will define the success or failure of not just the rest of the day but even the rest of their lives, because sometimes tiny things seem to have enormous resonance. It’s the butterfly effect.

I must be making more noise than I think, because during the course of this flurry of activity, Tom wanders into the kitchen.

‘I’ve got to do Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Matisse,’ I say, waving tissue paper in his face, ‘all by eight o’clock.’

‘What are you doing, Lucy? Go back to bed, both of you. You’re having some kind of nightmare about abstract painting,’ he says. Then he notices Fred wielding a pair of large scissors. ‘Why have you woken him up too?’

‘Of course I didn’t wake him up. It would be much easier to do all this on my own. He’s cutting bits of tissue paper to do a Matisse collage,’ I explain.

‘That might sound logical to you, but from where I’m standing that does not qualify as any rational explanation for all this.’

‘Sam has an art project. He’s done half of it, but luckily I have remembered that the rest has to be handed in today. And if Sam doesn’t finish this, then it is me who will be held responsible.’

‘But Sam isn’t finishing it, you are doing it for him.’

‘It’s quicker and less messy this way. If he were involved it would never get done. Most importantly, if he doesn’t hand it in, that means I have failed as a mother.’

‘Lucy, that is ridiculous, nobody judges you for something like this.’

I put down the paints and take a deep breath.

‘That is where you are wrong. If Sam fails, it is a reflection on me. It’s just the nature of mothering in the new millennium,’ I say, jabbing a paintbrush in the air to illustrate my point.

‘Put that down, Lucy. Look what you’ve done to my pyjamas,’ says Tom. They are covered in tiny spots of red paint. Fred puts his hand over his mouth and giggles in that way children do when they sense a parent is losing control.

‘There are people, mostly mothers but some fathers, who will arrive today with their child’s “Artists of the World” project already turned into a PowerPoint presentation on a CD-ROM.’

‘But it’s not the parents’ project,’ he says, taken aback. ‘Anyway, you could never do that. Actually, nor could I.’

‘Precisely. So the very least I can do, the minimum, is to ensure that Sam finishes the project.’

‘We’ll have verisimilitude, because this one here is about to cut his ear off,’ he says, pointing at Fred, who is engaged in some dangerous air cutting.

Then Tom sees the blotches of paint all over his table and on the wall.

‘How did that happen? How do you make such a mess?’

‘We were trying to do Jackson Pollock,’ I explain. ‘Actually, it looks quite good.’ I present him with an earlier work. ‘It could have been worse, Sam could have chosen Damien Hirst.’

‘Pickling the goldfish would have been less messy than this. Lucy, if you wrote these things down it would all be so much easier.’

‘You don’t realise how many things I remember in a day, you only focus on what I forget.’

‘We’re not living in a state of siege, where it is difficult to plan ahead because we might be under attack at any moment, and our food and water supply has been cut off.’

‘You are not, but I am,’ I say. ‘I’m besieged. That’s how it feels.’

‘Surely you are doing the same thing day in, day out? I know it’s a bit of a treadmill, but isn’t it simply a question of repeating the same formula every morning?’

‘You can’t imagine how many things need to get done in a single day just to tread water. You know that you won’t achieve everything and that at any moment the whole thing could tumble like a house of cards.’

‘In what way?’ he asks warily.

‘Fights break out like wildfire, there are spillages,
inexplicable illnesses, breakages, losses, eventualities that you can never prepare for,’ I explain. ‘Things that set you back months. Like chicken pox. Remember that? I couldn’t leave the house for weeks. Even worse, there is a part of me that relishes the unexpected, because at least it breaks the routine and adds a bit of excitement to my life.’

He looks taken aback.

‘You mean that an element of latent chaos is appealing to you?’ he asks, struggling to understand what I am saying. ‘There is no hope then.’

He stares at me with this funny sideways look, mouth slightly open as though he is making an effort not to say anything else. This is not something that comes naturally to a man who enjoys having the last word.

Sam wanders in. He is fully dressed in his school uniform and carrying a cricket ball, which he repeatedly throws in the air and then catches. His pockets are stuffed with football cards. I make him toast – jam no butter – and tell him at least five times to stop throwing the ball while he is eating. Then I wonder whether it is perhaps a good thing to encourage a boy to multi-task in the hope that he will grow up to be the kind of man who can cook broccoli, change a nappy, and have a conversation about work all at the same time. After a couple of slices of toast, he obligingly writes a short piece to go with each work of art. I read the one closest to hand.

‘Vincent was a man of great passion,’ it reads. ‘If he had followed the cricket he probably wouldn’t have cut his ear off. Matisse undoubtedly was a cricket fan.’

I decide to drive to school so that the paintings can dry on the heater, and because there is comfort to be drawn from being enclosed in a cosy space after the exertions of the morning.

‘Does getting this finished qualify as a small step for man but a giant leap for mankind, Mum?’ Sam asks from the back of the car.

‘Is Sam talking about Major Tom?’ asks Joe.

‘Something like that,’ I say, in response to both questions.

‘Why do you always say, “Something like that”? Aren’t things either right or wrong?’ asks Sam.

‘Life is largely grey,’ I tell him. ‘There are few moments of black and white.’

‘Unless you are a zebra,’ says Joe. He pauses, but I know there is something else he wants to say. ‘Maybe Major Tom made it onto the moon and it was so beautiful he stayed there.’

I notice the roads are very quiet. Sealed in the car with the heaters blowing wildly it is easy to feel cut off from the rest of the world. When I stop at the next junction, I see a large number of parents walking their children to school with unnaturally cheery expressions of bonhomie and collectivism. I remember with a sudden lurch that I have forgotten it is Walk to School Day. I will have to suffer ignominious associations with childhood obesity, global warming and congested roads. I switch down the heating and explain the situation to the children.

‘By driving to school, we are releasing bad chemicals into the atmosphere. Today, lots of children in London are walking to school to show that they care about this. I have forgotten, we are late, and so we are going in the car. But if you get into the boot and lie on the floor until I tell you to get out, we might be able to get away with it.’