Mummy Needs a Break

Brought back to the present with a shock, I could taste my dinner bubbling up into my oesophagus at the thought of her. A scream forced its way up. I grabbed the china vase from the bedside table and hurled it at the wall. ‘How could you?’ I screamed. ‘How the hell could you do that?’ I squeaked, more softly the second time. The vase didn’t even break, rebounding with a thud on the carpet.

He stared at me. ‘You’ll wake Thomas. Do you know how long it took me to get him to sleep?’

I stood in shock, then ran for our bedroom. A pile of his clothes lay in a heap on the end of the bed. As I curled up, I realised the whole room smelt of the aftershave I had been buying him for the last ten years.

I woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of Thomas and Stephen in the kitchen, clattering spoons into bowls as they assembled breakfast. I stretched, feeling the bones click back into place in my neck, and barrel-rolled off the bed. My baby seemed to stretch too, contorting as she found her way back to the centre of my upright body.

I edged the kitchen door open. Thomas was perched on his step stool, pouring milk into the bowl, and on to the bench, from which it was dripping on to the floor. The kettle was boiling and our dog, Waffle, nudged her empty water bowl across the tiles with her greying nose. Stephen grabbed the milk bottle from Thomas. ‘I told you to be careful. Let me.’

‘I do it!’ Thomas glared but looked chastened. Stephen rarely snapped at him. His father tried to guide the pour. He looked up as he heard me shuffling in, my legs numb from the baby cutting off my blood supply. He quickly turned his gaze to Thomas again.

I watched the pair of them as Stephen positioned Thomas into his chair at the dining table. More cereal was spilling down the front of his T-shirt. I handed Stephen a cloth to wipe him, but he looked flummoxed, so I snatched it back and dabbed at the mess.

‘I’m going to ask my mum to take Thomas out for a while, so we can talk today.’ I kept my voice calm, channelling the woman who fronted the kids’ TV show that kept Thomas occupied for a sanity-saving hour each Saturday morning. My husband might be trying to ruin our lives, but I was going to keep this from Thomas – as well as everyone else – for as long as I could.

Stephen swallowed, and focused on my hand blotting Thomas’s T-shirt. ‘I have to go to the site this morning. I can come back about eleven.’

I kissed Thomas’s forehead. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’

We were talking to each other as if we were business acquaintances, who didn’t particularly like each other.

He had barely made a dent in his toast when he stood up and stuffed his keys and phone into a bulging pocket, whistling for Waffle to follow him into his truck.

‘Say goodbye to Dad,’ I prompted Thomas, who was watching a shimmer of sunlight dance across the wall. I was not going to miss an opportunity to remind Stephen of what he would be leaving behind. I would have pulled out my sonography scans and dangled them in front of him if I could.

‘You shirt,’ Thomas pointed at my front. I was still wearing Stephen’s baggy grey T-shirt, which I’d had on the day before. There was a saucy smear across the front, where Thomas had wiped his face as I hugged him after a messy afternoon tea. He raised a puzzled eyebrow.

I arranged my face into as neutral an expression as I could manage. ‘I didn’t have time to get changed.’ I shot him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He was frowning. It was time to deploy my best upbeat your-mother-is-definitely-not-falling-apart voice again. If I presented him with the wrong type of jam with his toast, it could throw him off for the whole day. Now I was turning up in day-old clothes and acting like his father was a stranger in our kitchen. ‘Everything is okay, darling. You’re going to Gran and Granddad’s this morning. That will be fun, won’t it?’

By 11.30, there was still no sign of Stephen. I paced the house, watching the driveway. Every time I tried to return to my desk, the words on the computer screen seemed to flitter in front of me. I was scanning a press release for the third time, still with no idea what it said, when my phone vibrated. A message from Stephen at last. I gritted my teeth as I opened it. ‘Can’t make it back this morning.’

I stabbed at the phone to call him. It rang and rang before voicemail clicked in: ‘Hi, it’s Stephen Murchison, I can’t come to the phone …’

‘You can’t or you won’t?’ I growled at it and tried again. And again. At the sixth time, he answered. ‘I cannot talk to you right now,’ he hissed. ‘I’m on site.’

Had I always been married to such a selfish coward? Did he think I could just put my own life on hold until he had time to spare for me?

‘You were meant to be coming back here at eleven.’ My anger reverberated through my body so hard I thought he must be able to hear it down the phone line. ‘I need to know. Is that it for our marriage? For our kids? How long has this been going on for?’ I spat the words at my computer screen.

‘I don’t know.’

There was a sound of movement, a door slammed. He must have gone to sit in his truck.

‘A month maybe. Two. I’ve developed feelings for her.’ His voice trailed off as if I was meant to just accept it. Like, oh you’re in love with her? That’s all right, then. Please carry on. Don’t let me be an impediment to your happiness.

Instead, I let the silence hang between us. He might as well have been speaking a different language. The Stephen I knew thought ‘feelings’ should be approached in the same way as a particularly virulent infectious disease. The first time I’d told him I loved him, he said: ‘me too’. We’d got engaged while on holiday in Hawaii because, watching loved-up Japanese couples exchanging vows on the sand, he’d said: ‘I suppose you want to do that, too?’

At last, he sighed. ‘I’ll move out while we figure out what to do.’

‘You’ll move out?’ I was suddenly shouting so loud it made my throat hurt. ‘Damn right you’ll move out. I never want to see your face again.’

I pressed the button to end the call, my hands shaking as if I had downed twenty-six coffees. A month or two? In that time, I had dragged him to midwife appointments, he had sat with me while I agonised over paint colours for the new baby’s room and we had planned Thomas’s third birthday party. We’d even pored over which species of dinosaur Thomas might like on his cake. All that time he had been talking to someone else, confiding in her? The crushing weight of the loss was overwhelming.

Every aspect of my life had been moulded to fit our family. Before Thomas was born, I had wanted to use an inheritance from my grandfather to set up a little yoga studio but Stephen had argued it was too risky to both be self-employed. Then, I’d passed up promotions so that I could work from home to be there for Thomas. For a while, I’d provided the only income as he channelled everything he earned into growing his business and paying the staff (he’d employed prematurely). We’d even decided the time was right to try for a second baby this year because he’d taken on a big contract that would double his workload in twelve months’ time.

I gritted my teeth. If he wanted to destroy our little family, I was going to make him pay.

CHAPTER TWO

How to make a teepee

What you’ll need:

Rope

Dowels

A canvas drop cloth

Screws and washers

Cut a length of rope. Drill a hole near the top of one of your poles and string the rope through it. Tie a knot. Prop your poles up in the teepee position to see where they’ll need to sit to be stable. Drill a hole in your second pole where the two poles meet and feed the rope through. Do the same for the third and fourth poles. Start draping your drop cloth over the poles and secure it where they meet with a screw. If you can wrestle the cloth off your kids, who will want to pretend to be ghosts in it, screw it into each of the poles to hold it in place.

Erect the teepee in your living room or some other high-traffic area of your home where it will be sure to be in the way. You’ll fall over it at least four times a day, and it will soon become a hiding place for toys you can’t find space to put away. Depending on the strength of your construction, you and your kids may even be able to live in it, if you’re giving up on that suburban dream that was never really yours to begin with.

I locked my phone and pushed it away from me on my desk, as if touching it again might prompt another world-destroying revelation. Thomas was still at my parents’ house but there was no hope of me getting any of the work on my to-do list done. What was I meant to do next?

I tapped an email out to my boss. Being very pregnant afforded few luxuries but no-questions-asked sick leave seemed to be one of them.

I was walking aimlessly around the living room when a car pulled up outside. Through the venetian blinds, I could see a woman in sharp stiletto heels, black culottes and a spaghetti-strap pink camisole that did not quite cover her red bra, extracting herself from the driver’s seat. Her long, almost puce hair caught in the door as she closed it behind her. My sister, Amy. She looked as though she was ready for a night out, not an excursion into deepest suburbia to visit me.

My shoulders slumped. Could I face a visit? I was still seesawing between a scream and hysterical laughter. I had had to bury my head in the fridge and pretend I was organising dinner when my parents came to pick up Thomas – and that was before that phone call. My neck was tense all the way down my spine, but I couldn’t even lie flat to stretch out.

I opened the door before she could knock. She swayed slightly, her heels digging into the soft ground as she picked her way across the lawn. ‘Rachel, darling.’

I gestured to her to wipe a spot of pink lipstick from her top teeth. ‘Amy. You didn’t tell me you were coming by.’

She kissed my cheek as she pushed past me. She was still wearing the lanyard and security pass that let her into the double-storey restaurant and bar complex where she worked. ‘Are you on maternity leave yet? I figured you might be bored. Thought we could have a bit of a catch-up. Maybe get some lunch?’

‘I’ve still got a week and a bit. Look, I’ve got something I need to deal with.’ I shot her a look. When we were ten, she’d been able to tell when I had stashed KitKats in the wardrobe. Surely there would be no way I was hiding this one. ‘Now really isn’t a good time.’

She wasn’t looking at me. ‘What are you talking about? It’s been ages since we got together.’

It hadn’t, we’d had lunch last week.

Amy was picking through a pile of magazines on my coffee table. ‘Mind if I take this one?’ It was the latest issue of Women’s Health, promising ten ways to bring on labour. I’d figured if my baby was still tucked up in there the day before my due date, I’d allow myself to read it.

I shrugged. ‘Sure, go for it. Look, can I give you a call a bit later? We can make time for coffee. Is everything okay?’

She collapsed on to an armchair. ‘I’m tired after a long, crappy night at work. Can you believe we didn’t get out of there until 6 a.m.? Then I went to one of the waiters’ houses for a bit … I really need to get a real job.’

She stretched and yawned. ‘None of the losers tipped, either. Can you spot me £50?’

I sighed. ‘My wallet’s on the table by the door. You can take whatever’s in it.’

She raised an eyebrow, seeming at last to notice something amiss. ‘I was joking, mostly. I’m not that skint. What’s up?’

I watched her lean back in the chair and frown at me, twisting her hair around her fingertips. She had always made fun of Stephen and me for our ‘domestic bliss’. She bought me a copy of The Stepford Wives for Christmas one year, and an apron for my twenty-first birthday. But what would she know? Her longest relationship had lasted two years, with an artist named Frank. I couldn’t even remember his last name. She had always seemed to think that the scruffier he was, the more of a genius he must be. I just thought he needed a shower.

‘Stephen and I are having a few problems,’ I muttered at last. The words seemed to stick in my throat.

She blinked. ‘All is not well in this land of domestic harmony?’

I turned away. She scrambled to her feet and was behind me in seconds, putting her arm around my shoulders. Her skin felt vaguely sticky and she smelled fruity, as if she’d had a drink spilt on her. I wanted to offer her a baby wipe.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,’ she murmured into my hair. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

I flinched as she tried to lay her head against mine and smiled thinly. ‘No. Thanks, though.’ I checked my watch. It was almost 1 p.m. ‘I’ve got to go and pick up Thomas before Dad has a hernia.’ I could still remember my father’s face the last time I’d arrived late and walked in on Thomas. He was face down, spread-eagled on the dining room floor, screaming with every bit of breath in his little lungs, because my mother had suggested he might like to change out of his food-soaked T-shirt. It was at least a twenty-minute drive from my place in the suburbs to my parents’ home by the beach. Amy grabbed my hand, twisting her fingers into mine. ‘I’ll come with you.’

I hesitated. This time, she seemed to read my mind. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t make you talk about it if you don’t want to. I’ll keep you company. Tell you some stories about last night’s sleazeballs to make you feel better. You won’t believe what Heidi had to put up with.’

Thomas was doing circuits of the living room when we arrived. Overtired energy coursing through him, he was busy throwing magazines and television remotes into his favourite plastic trolley. Every time he completed a circuit, he would veer off and collide with the side of the couch. My father sat on said couch, his legs tucked up beneath him to avoid Thomas, focusing on the television, with his index fingers tracing circles on his temples.

‘Hi, Mumma,’ Thomas screamed and dropped his trolley when he noticed me at last. He wrapped his arms around my legs and peered up at me. ‘Hello.’ Then he noticed my sister: ‘Auntie Army!’

It was a sweet mispronunciation that no one had bothered to correct because it was too endearing. She scooped him up and placed an exuberant, wet kiss on his cheek.

I noticed something brown smeared across the side of his face. Had my mother been trying to get him to bake again?

As I was pondering, I noticed both he and my mum were staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a streak of mascara on the side of my nose. I hadn’t thought I’d cried that much in the car but perhaps I was wrong. Amy kicked off her heels and nudged Thomas towards the living room. ‘Go and find your new trains to show me, buddy.’

He ambled off obediently, and we heard crashing as he upended a toy box and knocked over a makeshift teepee. ‘It must be somewhere,’ he shouted. It was what I said to him every time he asked me to find the latest toy that had gone missing.

‘New trains?’ I forced a high-pitched laugh as I turned to my mother. Thomas would soon be able to curate an exhibition of toys my parents had collected for him.

She wasn’t buying my attempt to change the subject, took me by the wrists and stared at my puffy, itchy eyes. ‘What’s going on? You’ve been crying. Is something wrong at work? Has something happened to Stephen’s business?’

I tried to choke out the words, but they did not make any more sense on the second retelling than they had when I gave Amy an abridged version in the car. Soon the tears were dripping off my chin. Two days ago, everything was normal. Everything was fine. I was boring Rachel, married to a nice but slightly infuriating man with one exuberant son and a daughter on the way. Not exactly living the dream but doing well enough to pass the Christmas card newsletter test. Now I was separating from a cheating husband who had taken up with a B-grade celebrity interior designer.

‘What? Are you sure? I can’t believe …’ My mother placed a perfectly manicured hand over her mouth.

I cut her off. ‘Yes, I know. It was a surprise to me as well.’

‘But … you’re pregnant! He can’t get away with this, surely.’ She pushed her small square glasses up on her nose and stared at me as if being able to see me more clearly might present a different reality.

I rolled my eyes and gestured to my midsection, where my stomach was doing its best impression of a parade float. ‘I’m aware of that, too. Turns out, there’s no law against it. Thomas!’ I shouted over her head. ‘In the car, please.’

She grabbed my hand again. ‘What will you do? A newborn and Thomas on your own … Can you imagine …’ Her eyes were sparking with anger. ‘How dare he? After everything you’ve done for him.’

I rested my hand on her arm in a way I hoped was reassuring. The last thing I needed was her flying off to fight my cause for me. I still hadn’t recovered fully from the email she had sent to one of my university lecturers when I had failed a paper in my final year.

‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ I took another deep breath, summoning up an image of my first yoga teacher, who’d spent a full session showing me how to move my diaphragm. ‘Sillier people than me manage it. Thomas! What are you doing in there?’

‘Darling, come and stay with us.’

My father gave up his pretence of ignoring us. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said Rachel must come and stay here if she and Stephen are having problems.’ My mother’s voice was unusually firm. ‘We have the spare rooms upstairs. We can help you with the baby. I can clean out the cupboards down here, so you have room for your things. The rooms aren’t big, but they should be fine for the three of you. It’s quite warm in the evening on that side of the house, but I can get you a fan …’

I bit my lip. Would the things that drove me nuts as a teenager – my mother’s anxiety about every decision I had to make, my father’s need for routine – be even more grating twenty years on? Did they think I couldn’t cope on my own?

I cut her off. ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’ Thomas had appeared at my side, stretching his little fingers around two new train carriages.

In the car on the way back to our house, I replayed my mother’s words in my mind. Amy had dozed off in the passenger seat next to me, her phone clasped in her hand.

Could I manage a newborn and Thomas, alone? There were millions of women around the world functioning perfectly well as single mothers. Should I be offended that my mother deemed me unable do the same? I assumed I would need a little longer off work than the roughly four and a half hours I’d taken with Thomas. But it could be done. Perhaps I could get a flatmate. I drafted the ad in my head: Sunny room for single person to share with professional woman and two others, one prone to stomping about in the middle of the night or waking early with a rousing rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.

Perhaps a flatmate was not going to work.

‘Stephen will have to pay some sort of child support, won’t he?’ I realised I was asking the woman with the friendly smile on the billboard opposite us as we waited for the traffic light to change.

‘What, Mumma?’ Thomas’s little forehead crumpled into a frown. His floppy brown fringe needed a trim. I met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nothing, darling. Sorry. Don’t worry, Mumma’s just having a bit of a rough day today. It’s going to be okay.’

He kept watching me, cracker in one hand, as the traffic light went green and I put my foot on the accelerator. The irony was, I had a tower of parenting books on the table beside my bed. Could any of them tell me how to protect a two-and-a-bit-year-old from a sudden-onset paternal midlife crisis?

What would I do if the baby woke just as Thomas was falling asleep, his little arms wrapped around my neck? And would I ever get another shower again, if I had to coax two of them through breakfast first? Thomas stretched his hand out, making a smeary print on the window. I watched him drag his finger through the crumbs left on the glass.

Back at the house, Thomas splashed in his paddling pool in the late afternoon sunshine. The leaves on the tree in the middle of our lawn had curled prematurely, dropping one by one and forming a mushy brown mulch. The lawn looked exactly as I felt. I propped myself on an outdoor dining chair and tracked back through my missed calls. One number had tried me three times already. I pressed the button to call it back.

A woman’s voice answered on the first ring. ‘Rachel.’ She exhaled my name into the phone. ‘Thanks so much for getting in touch. I just wanted to run a story idea past you. I think it’s pretty neat – one of my clients is launching a new business …’

I yelped as Thomas threw a plastic bucket of water at my legs. I held up a finger.

‘Rachel? Are you okay?’ The PR woman was still talking.

‘Sorry, yes. Just working from home with my son today.’ Thomas frowned and backed up for another attempt.

Her laugh tinkled down the phone. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know how that is.’

I would have bet anything that she didn’t. I’d heard from a friend that she had employed two nannies, working in tandem, so that she could carry on with her life fairly untroubled, despite the arrival of twins. It had made me question my life choices.

Thomas took aim with his next bucket-load. I grabbed the pail from his clutches, and with a surge of anger shooting through me, threw it to the far corner of the garden. His face fell as he turned away. A twang of remorse tugged at my chest. I reached to pat his shoulder, but he ducked and darted away to the bucket.

‘So it’s ground-breaking, exciting stuff. Was hoping you might like to do an interview? I could set it up for any time that suits you.’

Thomas pumped his fists in the air as I watched him attempt to kick water at me from the far end of his paddling pool. I turned away from him and huddled over the phone. ‘Do you think you could pop the details in an email to me?’

When the water in the pool was evenly spread across the rest of the garden, Thomas moved to his bike and propelled himself along as fast as his lean legs would permit, heading for the gate. When at last I was able to put the phone down, I stumbled after him. ‘Get back here.’

He shook his head. ‘Leaving.’

I dropped to his height and blocked his path. ‘Sorry for throwing your bucket, darling. I was trying to concentrate on my call.’

He kicked at the ground. ‘Hungry.’

I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Okay, let’s go inside and see what we can find, shall we?’

Of all the parenting things at which I was failing, feeding Thomas seemed the most egregious.

When he was first starting to eat solid food, I would spend every other Sunday evening cooking and freezing nutritious meals with a laundry list of clean foods like kale and quinoa. He invariably turned his nose up, and more went on the floor than in his mouth. Defeated, I’d let the most recent freezer stash run out, and now the chances of me producing more than a plate of fish fingers for his dinner were slim. The most I could hope for was that there was a handful of oven chips somewhere in the bottom of the garage chest freezer to accompany them.

I stripped off Thomas’s wet things and positioned him on the couch with my iPad and one of his favourite YouTube clips, of children unwrapping Kinder Surprise eggs. Before I became a parent, I would not have believed such a thing existed, but he would always find them, even if I dutifully set up something like Thomas the Tank Engine. How could a child who could not read, write, or even reliably use the toilet navigate YouTube on an iPad?

I arranged the fish fingers, chips, some carefully sliced carrot and a spoonful of hummus on to one of those plastic platters designed for fussy kids who don’t like their food groups to touch. I had bought a set thinking they might inspire me to serve up interesting antipasto-style meals for Thomas, with morsels of healthy treats for him to select from. Pinterest mums always provided a selection of examples to follow. But the pressure of having to come up with something for each of the spots was intense. Once I had found myself adding a few cornflakes, just so he wouldn’t have an empty platter segment.