Mummy Needs a Break

I laughed weakly. ‘It’s bloody tempting, I tell you.’

Her skin was cool and smooth. She looked as though she was wearing perfectly matched foundation, although I would have put money on her being bare-faced. I had never noticed before how oversized her wedding ring was on her slim pianist’s fingers. She pushed a pain au chocolat at me that she’d brought with her. ‘What are you going to do?’

I put my face in my hands. ‘Well, I’ve already signed her up to a lot of email newsletters, for a start.’

Laura coughed as she inhaled a crumb of pastry. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Pardon?’

Alexa’s business website listed her email address in full and I’d signed her up to more than 200 mailing lists, to ensure her inbox was packed with advertising and newsletters, at least until she figured out how to unsubscribe from them all. Stephen would be no help – he still struggled to remember his email password.

There are some surprising benefits to my job. I’d written a story a couple of weeks earlier about a private investigator who told me what some of her clients did when they discovered their suspicions about their cheating husbands were correct. Some of it was genius stuff – hiding anchovies in expensive cars, selling pricey one-off designer suits at no reserve on eBay. Since Stephen walked out, I’d returned to a few of their blogs and chat groups. The inbox email idea had belonged to one of them.

‘Wow.’ Laura’s eyes were sparkling as she leant back against the couch. ‘You’re right. That’ll be very annoying.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, it will keep them occupied.’

Lila returned and burrowed between Laura’s legs. Laura reached down and stroked a stray piece of hair back from her daughter’s face.

I smiled at Lila. She was only three months younger than Thomas, but she seemed so slight compared to his sturdy legs and barrel-like torso. She was wearing one of those sparkly baby pink dresses with layers of petticoat tulle that now seemed to be a daily uniform for small girls, whether they’re going to a birthday party, riding a bike with their mothers, or making mud pies. She ducked back under the insufficient hiding place of Laura’s athletic thighs. I suddenly desperately wanted to change the subject.

‘How’s everything going with you?’

Laura pushed the question away. ‘Oh, fine. If the hospital could learn to fit a part-time shift into part-time hours or had enough staff to cover the workload, that would be fantastic. But otherwise, you know, we’re fine.’

We sat in silence, watching Thomas tip over another box, sending a convoy of small trucks zipping across the floor. ‘Good riddance to him,’ Laura murmured at last. ‘I mean, if you’d left him, he would have been a total disaster. But you without him …’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Yeah. I’ll probably survive. I know. I just don’t feel it yet.’

Lila’s head snapped up. She had found some of Thomas’s marker pens on the floor and had drawn on her arms and face. ‘Pretty.’ She smiled at us.

Laura turned back to me. ‘I’m sorry. It’s fine to be angry. Be furious. But can you promise me something?’

I groaned. ‘What?’

‘Can you please call me at least daily? I know you, and now you’re going on leave with no work to think about you’ll just sit around here getting pissed off, and I don’t think that’s going to be helpful for anyone.’

‘Sorry.’ I looked at my hands. ‘I just didn’t want to tell you until …’

‘Yes, I know. You don’t like to talk about these sorts of things until they’re over and you’ve got everything back how you want it. But you can’t get through this one alone. Now …’ She was businesslike. ‘What would you like to do? I know you don’t like a whole day with nothing planned, even when you haven’t got this other stuff going on.’

What did I want to do? I had been so focused on plodding through each minute that I had not allowed myself to think much beyond the most basic necessities of getting the last bits of work done, feeding myself and Thomas, and remembering to shower from time to time. I realised she was still waiting for an answer.

I cast around for something. ‘Shall we go for a little walk? See how far I can waddle along? Some fresh air might be good to clear my head a bit.’

Laura snapped her fingers. ‘We can do that. Come on, children, we’re going on an adventure.’

We returned to the house less than twenty-five minutes later, after Thomas and Lila shrieked at each other in disagreement about which way around the block they wanted to walk. They were horrified when we would not allow them to bring home some bits of old plastic bottles and dog poo they found while conducting a ‘treasure hunt’. I pretended to be exasperated that we were giving up, but I could feel the exertion in my growing varicose veins, and my daughter seemed to have joined in with an intrauterine walk of her own. Amy’s car was in the driveway as we arrived back. Laura glanced at me. ‘We might leave you to it.’

When Amy and Laura had first met, Amy had lectured her – at length – about why she thought all of her customers who claimed to be on a gluten-free diet were insufferable and putting it on to be trendy. ‘Trying to get attention when there’s nothing else interesting about them,’ I think were her words.

Laura, a coeliac with a nursing degree, had hurled a few insults of her own. ‘Uneducated’ and ‘narrow-minded’ were the ones I remembered best. Ever since, Amy had thought it hilarious to joke about what she might have hidden in food that Laura ate at my house.

I kissed Laura on the cheek. ‘Let me go and deal with her. Thanks for visiting.’

Lila gave us a shy wave from the seat Laura had fixed on to her bike for her, just behind her handlebars. ‘Say bye, Thomas,’ I prompted. He returned the wave.

As the bike rounded the edge of the driveway, he dropped to the ground. ‘No! Lila come back. Come back!’ I scooped him up and carried him inside under one arm, his legs still kicking behind me.

Music was blaring from the spare room. Amy emerged, scarves draping and spiky, scuffed stiletto heels sticking out of a half-taped box under her arm. I had not realised that she, too, had a spare key to the house.

‘What are you doing?’ I watched as she returned to her car and pulled out a clothes rack, which she then tried to manoeuvre through the door. ‘What’s going on?’

She stopped and grinned at me. ‘I have a plan.’

I rocked from my heels to the balls of my feet and back again. Heat spread across my lower back. A walk really hadn’t been such a good idea.

‘I’m going to come and live with you.’ Amy dropped a box to the ground. ‘I heard what Mum said to you before you left the other day about staying there. Can you imagine? You’ll be her pet project again before you know it and Dad will want to know what you’re doing every time you’re five minutes late. Torture!’

She patted me on the shoulder as she went to get another bag. ‘You won’t even know I’m here. Promise. I’ll just help you when you need me.’

I followed her out to the car. I could just imagine having her as my permanent house guest. She’d assure me that she would be home to help with dinner at 5.30 p.m., roll in at 7.30 p.m. and wonder why I was upset. No doubt she still sang in the shower at the top of her voice, even in the middle of the night. Dishes would be piled in the sink and skimpy underwear added to my laundry pile. There would never be any mention of rent being paid.

‘It’ll be okay, honestly.’

Her face fell. ‘No?’

‘No. Really. Thanks for the offer, though.’

She bit the rough edge of her index fingernail. ‘The thing is …’

I waited. There was always something.

‘I kind of have to move. We’ve been evicted.’

Amy shared a huge, rundown warehouse apartment with three of her friends. It was barely habitable, with old sash windows that didn’t close properly, floorboards like gappy teeth and holes in some of the walls that had been punched through by a previous tenant. The rent was eye-watering, but she could walk to work, and I suspected she had just been too lazy to get around to moving.

‘Turns out I was paying my share to Laurel but she wasn’t paying the landlord. So I have to get out, anyway. And I can’t get a house anywhere else at the moment …’

I tried to push down a growing wave of frustration. Did I not have enough problems of my own to deal with?

‘Why not? You’ve got a job.’

‘I took out a loan to pay off my credit card last summer but my work’s been so erratic I haven’t been able to make the repayments – bastards sent me to the debt collectors. I won’t pass a credit check for a good couple of years, they say.’

I stood as tall as I could and stared at her, my hands on my hips. ‘How old are you, Amy?’

She looked surprised. ‘I’m thirty-one.’

‘Why are you still doing dumb stuff like this?’

She recoiled. Her voice was timid. ‘I didn’t want to ask Mum and Dad for a loan, so I thought it was the best thing to do. I was doing my best … I want to be self-sufficient.’

She trailed off, her eyes watering. I hadn’t snapped at her in years. But I had already bailed her out of two housing-related messes. The first was when Frank had walked away, leaving her with a lease she couldn’t handle. I’d paid half of it for three months. The second time Stephen and I had paid her insurance excess when someone started a fire in the bathroom at a party.

‘No.’ The force of my fury shocked us both. Too bad – walking all over me seemed to be the pastime of the moment and I wasn’t having it.

‘It’s time you accepted the consequences of your actions. You can’t keep rolling through life like a teenager with nothing to worry about. I’ve picked up after every other stupid mistake you’ve made, and I’ve got way too much on my plate right now to add you to it. Own your own mess for a change.’

She was staring at me, her mouth open.

‘Other people manage to find new apartments. I’m sure you can, too.’

I turned away and directed Thomas through to the lounge, where I propped him on the bean bag. I sank on to the armchair behind him. He leant back against me, his cheek against my shin. I could hear Amy clattering as she threw her clothes back into boxes and hurled them out to the car. She stepped heavily on the accelerator, her wheels screeching as she took off from the end of our driveway.

‘Daddy home soon?’ Thomas looked up. I stroked his head, trying to slow my breathing. I was in danger of getting a little ‘ping’ from the sanctimonious smartwatch app I’d downloaded to help manage my stress. I wanted to slap the old me across the face. What did she have to be stressed about?

CHAPTER FIVE

How to make a paper doll chain

What you’ll need:

Some paper

Scissors

If you’re using A4 paper, cut it in half lengthwise. Fold the piece into eight equal-sized accordion pleats. With the fold on the left, trace an outline of half a doll on the paper. Then cut around it. When you open the paper up you should be left with four dolls, holding hands. They’ll stick together, even if your family is falling apart – although some days you might wish it would fall apart a little more quickly.

Do you know what drives me nuts? The concept of ‘me time’. You’re meant to have a bath, or go for a massage, eat a whole block of chocolate in bed or skive off for lunch with your girlfriends and feel good about taking time out for yourself. Except I get into the bath and I can’t get out, and even before I got pregnant I couldn’t bear the idea of strangers massaging my body. All my friends are juggling workloads much too heavy, and with childcare far too limited, to break for lunch with me.

Between work and looking after Thomas, I manage to squeeze in a couple of minutes of ‘me time’ for frivolous things such as washing my hair. I can’t bring myself to believe that half an hour of indulgence makes up for the fact that I do 99 per cent of the drudgery the rest of the time.

But try to explain that to anyone else, and they look aghast. ‘No me time? Oh but you must have some me time. Can’t pour from an empty cup …’

So it’s another thing added to my ever-growing to-do list. No one wants to be an empty mother cup.

One thing I still do try to squeeze in between the frantic dash for work deadlines, and the seemingly interminable bedtime battle, is yoga. Although I’ve long since given up my dream of being a teacher myself, I find ten minutes of stretching can turn around many of the aggravations of a day of child-wrangling. I’ll never be a YouTube yoga star – while those women get the tops of their heads on the floor in a forward fold, my palms are still only halfway down my shins (I blame my short arms). But I happily follow them through the motions, and even Thomas is starting to enjoy finding his own tree pose or a comfortable seated position (although sometimes that is in front of the television).

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