Mummy Needs a Break

The landline phone jingled and startled me; I’d almost forgotten we still had one.

‘Is this Murchison Contracting?’ The man’s voice was gruff. Stephen must have his work phone off. I pushed an image of him in bed with Alexa out of my mind, dabbing at an unidentified splotch on my shirt.

‘Oh sorry.’ I tried to hit the pitch and tone of a cheery receptionist. ‘Stephen Murchison’s gone out of business. Terrible thing.’

There was a pause. ‘Are you sure? Stephen?’

‘Quite. Allegations of poor workmanship. Awful situation. I’m just taking the calls. Should I take a message?’

The man coughed. ‘Never mind. I’ll try someone else.’

Thomas wailed from the lounge. My iPad had run out of battery. I ushered him in to the dinner table, helping him use my bump as a kind of step stool on to his seat. ‘What you eating?’ He looked at me.

I could not respond. My stomach was still doing an impression of the kitchen blender but if I threw our routine off track, I might never get him into bed. It was only the promise of a bath on my own once he was asleep that was getting me through the evening. I half-heartedly picked a limp fish finger from the oven tray and put it on a bread plate. I slid into the chair next to him and gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

He frowned. ‘You sad, Mumma? Daddy home?’

I had to turn my face away and pinch my thigh to stop a surge of tears. ‘I’m fine, darling, don’t worry. I’m not sure what Daddy’s up to, but you’ve got me tonight, okay?’

I clenched his hand, probably a little too tightly. With three of us around the dinner table, the six-person setting had seemed appropriate. With just us two, it seemed empty. Of course, it would not be long before we would have another person with us in her high chair, throwing her own fish fingers on the ground. Somehow the thought did not make me any happier.

It turns out you can share a house with someone for more than a decade and still not really know them.

I met Stephen as I was finishing high school. It had been what one of my teachers described as a ‘social year’ for me, in which I spent more time getting acquainted with the coffee machine in the common room set aside for seniors than I did in the classroom. We were allowed to come and go as we liked and I duly did, erasing any classes before 10 a.m. from my timetable. Despite that, I had learnt to write an essay florid enough that no one noticed its lack of substance and I was able to squeeze out enough marks to get into a communications degree.

I would like to claim to have been following a lifelong dream, but that would be a lie. I was not good enough at maths to be a doctor, not confident enough for marketing and although I harboured daydreams about being a youth worker, who helped troubled young people find their way, I had finally accepted that it probably wouldn’t all be like Dangerous Minds. I could never pull off a leather jacket in the same way Michelle Pfeiffer did, anyway. Kids would take one look at me and roll their eyes.

Stephen crashed his way into my world at a friend’s party – the kind where for the first time one of your inner circle is finally of legal drinking age. We all felt very grown up that one of us had ventured to the off-licence and stocked up on sugary ready-mixed vodka pops.

Stephen had ended up there by accident because the friend who was meant to be taking him and his mates to the football had drunk too much and could no longer drive. He’d sidled over to me with the confidence of someone on their third beer. Helena, who had been my friend since we were in kindergarten, gave me a knowing look. We had spent ages agonising over my outfit and settled on a pair of bootleg jeans, an off-the-shoulder sparkly black top and an impossibly high pair of stiletto heels that I was not able to walk in without looking like a particularly hesitant fawn but which we decided looked incredibly sophisticated.

Stephen looked me straight in the eye. ‘I snore, sometimes pee in the shower and have been known to turn my underwear inside out to get another day’s wear out of them.’

‘Pardon?’ I wasn’t sure if he had mistaken me for someone else.

He shot me an ear-to-ear grin. ‘I figure if I tell you all the bad stuff about me now, there’s less chance you’ll be disappointed when you get to know me.’

He settled down on to the sofa beside me and put his arm along its back. I could smell his supermarket cologne. He had shaved his head, but you could see the shadow where the hair was growing back, so I knew he was not actually bald. He was sporting the small, under-the-lip tuft of hair that was inexplicably the fashion at the time, particularly among those who needed to prove they had hair to grow.

‘How do you know I’m going to want to get to know you?’ I was impressed by his arrogance.

His eyes were mischievous. ‘Oh, I don’t. But it’s not like you were talking to anyone else.’ He gestured to the boys my age, who were all still milling around on the other side of the room, too nervous to try their own opening lines. Helena looked as though she might be about to rescue one of them.

That was fifteen years ago, and although I found out pretty quickly that his list of negative things was by no means comprehensive, he was correct in his prediction that I was rarely disappointed – in the early years, at least.

Through university, while my friends were ranking the various schools according to the sexual prowess of their male students, I was going home to Stephen. I would still add my cash to the fund we built up each week for jugs of second-rate beer in the campus bar, before they headed off into the night with the latest guy to get their hopes up. Whereas I knew exactly what I was getting with Stephen – and it would come with an early alarm clock the next day as he got ready for work.

He even willingly attended a mock appointment with a friend who was training to be a naturopath and put us through a process in which we were asked to describe the consistency of our faeces. I had felt sick with mortification but he had chuckled at the flowchart of photographs and brought it up when he wanted to make me blush, for weeks afterwards.

There was a period when my friends and I became a bit too invested in Sex and the City, and I decided I needed some time as a single girl to carve my identity, preferably from the comfort of something that resembled an upmarket New York loft apartment. It took about twelve hours before I realised that my rundown flat didn’t have quite the same vibe. The heel of my imitation Manolo Blahniks kept getting stuck in the cracked concrete of the front steps, for one.

Wanting to punish me, he went for drinks with his workmates at the bar I worked at, and gave my colleague a tip that was about three times her nightly wage. I found out later he’d taken out a loan from his father to pay the rent that week.

I responded by going on a blind date offered by one of my flatmates. The standoff lasted about three weeks before I called him, manufacturing a leaking tap that needed his attention. He turned up within ten minutes, not even mentioning that he was a builder, not a plumber.

Our relationship had become so familiar I sometimes had to think twice to remember that he had not always been around. We had become so comfortable that it was not unusual for him to discuss – in detail – the symptoms of the latest tummy bug he had picked up from Thomas or to wander out after a shower to ask me whether a spot on his back was a new addition.

Now, I was working out how best to keep up my energy to read bedtime stories to our son on my own, while he spent the evening – I guessed – entwined with Alexa’s freakishly long, sickeningly smooth limbs. It was as though I had landed in someone else’s life.

Thomas seemed to sense my strength was waning and was a little more compliant than normal as we dragged ourselves through the evening motions. I did not argue when he merely waved the toothbrush in the direction of his teeth, and he only protested for a minute when it was time to turn out the light.

I snuggled down next to him and arranged his little body around the curve of my stomach. He buried his face in my hair, twisting some of it around his fingers. ‘Daddy home tomorrow?’

I kissed his forehead hard. ‘I don’t think so, sweetheart. But I’ll think of something fun for us to do, promise.’

He screwed up his face. I started to draw circles on his back with my finger, counting 187 of them before his breathing started to become slow and regular. I lay as still as I could, next to him, staring at the ceiling. Over the past two and a half years, I had watched him fall asleep so often I could always pinpoint the moment he finally nodded off. His body would give a little jerk and his breath deepened.

I used to count to 100 of those breaths before I started to try to extricate myself from the bed, so there was no chance I would wake him on my run to freedom. This time I allowed myself to enjoy being cuddled up next to him. The world outside his bedroom door might have changed dramatically, but I would cling on to this little cocoon of familiarity for as long as I could.

CHAPTER THREE

How to make gloop

What you’ll need:

500g cornflour

Water

Food colouring

In a decent-sized mixing bowl, mix your cornflour and water together in a ratio of one part water to two parts cornflour. When it’s reached the desired consistency, add your choice of food colouring. Perfect for adding splashes of colour to an otherwise perfect-condition white T-shirt. Never mind, though. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to keep up appearances. Worn-in is the new black, right?

The next morning, Thomas woke as the first birds started singing. He slumped out of his bed and stomped down the hallway, dragging his duvet behind him. I pretended to be asleep, complete with a faux snore for effect, as he pushed my bedroom door open. He clambered under the duvet, warm from his bed, and started driving a toy truck up the side of my face.

‘Wake up, Mumma!’ he shouted and giggled when I started. ‘Are you stuck? Tow truck pull you out.’

‘Don’t you want to watch something on the iPad for a little while before we get up?’ I reached for it and waved it desperately. It had taken me hours to fall asleep, battling mental glamour shots of Stephen and Alexa interspersed with little short films of my weakest parenting and marriage moments.

He shook his head and grabbed my hand, pulling me out from under the covers, towards the door. I reached for my bathrobe and tried to arrange it around my bump. The tie would not quite reach so I held it shut with one hand while he wrenched me along with the other. We stumbled out of my bedroom into the living room, where the first weak rays of sunlight were trying to push their way through the crack in the curtains. A steady rhythm of rain pelted the windows. I leant against the wall, willing my still-sleepy brain to catch up.

‘What do you want for breakfast, honey?’

I could probably stretch my culinary skills to produce some toast and Marmite, and there might be a few crumbs of cereal left. I might even be able to find a banana somewhere in the back of the cupboard. I had not been to the supermarket in days.

‘Crackers.’ Thomas was firm.

Thomas would live on crackers if he could. But not any kind of crackers – it had to be one brand, specific to one supermarket that always seemed to stock too few of the things. Sometimes I had to check back with them two or three days in a row before they had a packet on the shelves.

‘You’ll have something on the crackers, though, right? Peanut butter?’

I tried to keep my voice light. Please say yes, I willed him. I needed to at least pretend his breakfast had contained more than just packaged, refined carbohydrates.

‘Just crackers,’ he said solemnly. ‘I sit here and eat them.’

He strolled through to the dining room and pulled himself on to a chair at the table. He looked at me expectantly. I was too tired to try harder. Maybe serving nutritious breakfasts was the domain of people who were not suddenly single-parenting.

‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’ He was fidgeting in his seat.

‘No thank you,’ he said primly, a cracker in each hand.

He wriggled again.

‘Are you sure?’

His eyes widened in alarm. ‘Toilet!’ He jumped from his seat and rushed for the door. There was a banging as he tried to get his pyjamas off and climb on to his step stool at the same time.

He re-emerged a few minutes later, his pants discarded. I shrugged it off. He’d be getting dressed before long, anyway. While he ate his parent-incriminating breakfast, I packed his lunchbox for nursery with an array of relatively healthy snacks – carrot sticks, hummus, a couple of rice crackers, some fruit. I regarded it for a minute. I had better add a serving of yoghurt and a couple of plain biscuits so I could be sure that he would at least eat something during the day.

Crackers demolished, Thomas bumbled off to my bedroom, dragging his fingers along the walls as he went.

‘Where are you off to?’ It was a half-hearted inquiry and I did not wait for a response. He soon started clattering and banging, pulling things down from the bedside table. I tried not to think about it – I had moved everything ‘dangerous’ to a shelf in my wardrobe that even I needed a step stool to reach. Somehow, I needed to get his bag packed, to find clothes for him and something clean and big enough for me to wear. Then I needed to put the dishwasher on, all before we had to leave the house at 8.30.

I figured the worst that could happen would be that he wasted some of my Chanel hand cream – bought for me as a gift and which I was using so sparingly that it was into its second year. On a scale of The Worst Things To Happen, seeing that disappear would be pretty bad – old me might even have cried – but I could sacrifice it in the interests of making it out of the door.

He appeared in the kitchen in front of me. It took me a second to realise what he had in his hand: a vibrator from my underwear drawer, the type that has a head that is attached to the main body of the contraption with a long wire. The batteries had long since gone flat.

‘A skipping rope!’ he shouted. ‘I found a skipping rope in your drawer!’

My horror must have been apparent because he looked at me sideways and put it behind his back, scowling fiercely at my lunge to wrench it from his grasp. ‘Mine! I show Kaskia!’

I could just imagine it. His teachers, one of whom was ‘Kaskia’, who, in fact, was a tiny German woman called Saskia, already seemed to think I was some sort of deviant because I occasionally arrived late to pick him up, usually in my faded activewear, and almost always forgot about their themed ‘wacky days’ – when he was meant to dress up as a superhero or paint his hair green. They would have a field day if he turned up with sex toys in his schoolbag.

I would have to distract him with something else if I was to have a hope of getting it from him. ‘I’ll swap you an M&M for your skipping rope,’ I ventured, pushing half-empty boxes of crackers and muesli bars around in the cupboard as I tried to find them.

‘Two,’ he said, his eyes narrowing.

‘Fine, two,’ I agreed. ‘If you put your raincoat on.’ The deal was done.

The goodbye as I dropped him off at nursery was not the drawn-out film scene farewell that it sometimes was, where he would sit on me and hold my hair, then lean through the fence as I drove away, waving at me as if he was a castaway on an island. This time, his class was engrossed in what looked like a big bowl of blue gloop. They were in it up to their armpits, flicking handfuls at each other. All fifteen of them were filthy.

Thomas pushed through to the middle of the group and plunged in up to his armpits. One of the teachers met my gaze as I quickly tallied up whether we had enough size three clothes to justify throwing this set out, rather than bothering to wash it. Their ‘washable’ paints had taken me at least a week and half a bottle of bleach to budge last time, and even then the shirts had looked like they’d been washed with some vibrant socks. ‘It’s a valuable learning experience. Great sensory exploration,’ she shouted over their heads.

I ignored her and blew a kiss at Thomas, noticing with a jolt how the curve of his face had become that of a little boy, not the round-cheeked profile of a baby. He jostled with his best friend, Nixon. ‘I’ll be back to pick you up after lunch.’ He did not acknowledge me. Instead, he smeared some gloop across the front of his shirt and threw some at Nixon.

The rain had stopped when I returned to my car but the sunshine was not yet sure of itself. I clambered in. Between the baby seat behind me and the steering wheel in front, there was little room left for my expanding bulk. I slammed my hand on the button to turn the car on. The fuel light glared at me. I’d usually have tried to swap cars with Stephen just at the moment when it needed to be filled. But there was a service station on the way home, so there was no excuse.

Even though I’d had this car more than three years, I always drove up to the pumps on the wrong side. The hose reached across the top – just – but left a dingy mark on the white paintwork.

‘Let me help you.’ A woman appeared beside me. With a deft wriggle, she moved the nozzle around so it no longer threatened to snap out and spurt across the forecourt. ‘Go inside, I’ll finish up here.’ She gave me the sort of half-smile I assume most people saved for children and the very elderly.

Behind the counter, another woman was shuffling packs of gum into a display unit. She looked up as I approached and beamed. ‘You don’t have long to go.’

I felt my shoulders sag. I did not have the energy for another of these conversations. The only worse conversation starter was something about how enormous I was. Or a request to touch the bump always asked in the way a small child might approach a petting farm animal.

‘A few weeks.’ I pointedly turned my attention to the display of protein bars and chocolate. It was almost time for second breakfast, a pregnant person’s most important meal of the day.

‘Is this your first?’

I passed her my card and a couple of chocolate bars. ‘No, I have a son. He’s two.’

‘Do you know what you’re having?’

I had promised myself that the next time I had this question, I would reply that I was having a baby. Or perhaps hoping for a small rabbit or chicken. But at that moment, it felt a bit like I’d be telling her that Santa wasn’t real. I sighed. ‘I’m having a girl.’

She half-squealed. ‘You must be so pleased. Daddy’s little girl! Your partner must be over the moon.’

My stomach did a backflip. I backed away, trying to avoid her puzzled gaze as I fumbled my credit card back into my wallet. I could feel tears forcing their way out of the corners of my eyes. ‘Sorry, I have to go.’

When I arrived home, my hands were still shaking, and the blood had left my knuckles from the vehemence with which I had gripped the steering wheel. My feet were on fire, my lower back throbbed and my throat was raspy from crying. I dropped on to the sofa, wincing as I lifted my legs on to the ottoman. I had lost all definition in my ankles, and the bones in my feet were a mere memory.

As I leant back, the wedding photo in a heavy frame on the opposite wall seemed to glint in the sunlight. I had never really liked it – my pre-wedding diet had been overzealous, and my dress ended up a little too big. Every couple of minutes, I had had to hitch it up to cover my bra. My smile was glossy white but forced. It was probably the twenty-fifth photo that had been taken in a row while we stood under a sagging tree branch. Although everyone exclaimed over how happy we looked, with Stephen guffawing at someone over the photographer’s shoulder, I could see in my own face how much I’d worried about the table settings, the accommodation, making sure my parents were not stuck in awkward conversation with Stephen’s boorish newly single uncle and that Amy was not too far into the champagne before she gave her speech.

The photo was only on the wall because I felt it was what we should do when we finally had our – very expensive – delivery from the photographer. Suddenly, I found I could not look at it a moment longer. In two steps, I was across the room and ripping it from the hook. Without thinking, I turned on my heel and strode out to my car. I thrust the chunky frame into the boot. Looking at it lying among the detritus of shopping receipts, some empty lunchboxes and an old picnic blanket, felt apt. I was determined not to stop there.

There were holiday snaps in matching frames on our bedroom wall. A photo of Stephen and his parents, with his niece, was propped on the side table in the spare room. They could all come down too. It was not like he was around to notice.

I worked my way through the house, room by room, pulling photos from their hooks, thrusting the smaller ones into rubbish bags. Only Thomas’s baby photos and one of my family were left in place.

As I walked out after stripping our bedroom, I noticed the door on Stephen’s side of the wardrobe had been left ajar. As usual, his clothes were spilling out, jammed on to hangers and in piles on the wardrobe floor. He would never throw anything out. I grabbed handfuls of material and stuffed them into the top of the big black plastic bags of photos.

Half an hour later, I was driving into the rubbish collection centre in the middle of town, the back of my car laden with the big black rubbish bags, huge photos in frames, T-shirts, hoodies and business shirts. The frames clinked together as I rounded each corner and crashed into the back of the back seat when I stepped on the brake.

The woman who staffed the entrance looked at me quizzically as I drove up. ‘Just a carload of rubbish.’ I gave her my cheeriest smile. My face was probably still streaked with make-up, and my eyes were undoubtedly bright red. She waved me on.

At the edge of the rubbish pit, I stood next to an elderly man who was dropping his own rubbish bags in, watching them flop one on top of each other. The contents of Stephen’s wardrobe landed with a satisfying thump. I hurled the photos one by one, listening to the glass smash on the concrete floor below.

There went our wedding photo. Crash. The time we had lunch on the street in Barcelona. Smash. The evening we spent on the beach in Waikiki after Stephen ‘asked’ me to marry him. The glass in that frame blew apart into a thousand little pieces.

Thomas was swinging on the gate when I arrived to pick him up from nursery, next to a girl in a T-shirt at least two sizes too big for her. They were both filthy from the knees down, with tracks of sand in their hair.

‘Mummy! My mummy!’ he shouted as I hauled myself out of the car.

I pulled his bag out of the cubbyhole by the door, and a plastic bag full of wet, blue clothes came somersaulting down with it. As I had expected, almost everything in his lunchbox was untouched, except for the yoghurt and cookies, which were gone.

He allowed himself to be clipped into the car seat, wriggling as my midsection got in the way while I fastened the buckles. When he was secure, I paused, jangling my keys in my hands. I desperately did not want to go back home – and work could wait. ‘Shall we go to the library?’

‘Yes!’

There was something about the fish tanks, the long staircases and my insistence on quiet that appealed enormously to Thomas when we went to the library. We only had to be nearby, and he started off in the direction of the big grey and glass building. Some of the librarians knew him by name, even though I had been avoiding them and using the self-checkout system for years.

When we arrived, the front sliding doors were emblazoned with posters. Pirate treasure hunt day, dress as your favourite book character … When did libraries become so busy? Then I realised. It was the school holidays. Parents who had forgotten about the library all term suddenly became avid library users, wanting to drop their kids off for a couple of hours, if only to use the free Wi-Fi.