The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

Her arms started to shake and she experienced an almost vertiginous nausea as she tried to remember the names of familiar sights and sounds. This had been happening to her at least twice a day since Flo was born—the first time, slumped in a hospital bed at King’s, she had been staring past the mass of bouquets on the table at newborn Flo, in her Perspex hospital tank, and there, right in front of her, her daughter turned into a piglet.

Findlay, sitting on the end of the hospital bed, pushing a small fire engine with a broken ladder along the railings, became a centipede, and Robert became a bear—a huge bear clumsily trying to pull the blue curtains round the bed for some privacy.

Now, all she wanted to do was hurl Flo over Mary’s shoulder through the silver spirals and into the wall behind her, where the impact would no doubt make various bits of Flo burst open and trickle over Wimmer-Ferguson’s impervious black and white faces. Then everybody—including Mary—would be able to see that Flo wasn’t a human baby after all; she was in fact nothing more than a tiny pig.

Kate stood with her arms shaking, listening to Mary give her a rundown on all Flo’s bowel movements since 8.30 a.m.

Then it passed, and after it had passed, she remembered to smile adoringly at Flo—like the woman on the front of the Johnson & Johnson’s wet wipes packet—and nod and say ‘great’ in response to Mary’s monologue.

Mary looked surprised, indicating that ‘great’ wasn’t quite right.

‘Everything okay?’ she asked.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Kate said, hoping she was still smiling.

‘I saw Findlay today—he’s a big boy now—he’ll be leaving us soon?’

Kate was aware of Mary—who had been Findlay’s primary carer as well—watching her.

‘I know,’ she said vaguely.

‘Where’s he going?’

A pause. ‘St Anthony’s.’

‘That’s good—a good school. A lot of my friends—their children, they all went there and now they go to university.’

Mary was smiling at her.

‘And Findlay—he told me Flo had an accident this morning. He told me she fell off the bed.’

‘I know,’ Kate said again, sounding as though she was confirming gossip she’d heard about another person’s child. ‘She did sort of roll off—onto the duvet, fortunately. Our duvet was on the floor.’

Mary carried on smiling, and carried on watching. ‘I think she has a bump, just on her left temple. There’s a swelling.’

Mary’s finger hovered over the pink and green protrusion.

‘But the duvet was on the floor,’ Kate insisted, taking in Flo’s swollen forehead.

Mary nodded. ‘I didn’t put her to sleep this morning.’

‘She hasn’t slept?’

‘I didn’t want to—not with that swelling. It’s not good for them to sleep after a head injury.’

‘Head injury?’

‘I think she should see the doctor,’ Mary said calmly.

Kate watched her take hold of Flo’s hand and balance it on her finger and for a brief moment it became a tiny trotter she saw balanced on Mary’s index finger before the tiny trotter became a tiny baby hand again. After reassuring Mary that she would take Flo to the doctor’s that afternoon, she finally managed to exit the sensory room with the A4 sheet of paper she was given every day, accounting for Flo’s dietary and excretory highs and lows.

Findlay was retrieved from the Butterfly Room and coaxed into his coat. It was all looking normal—no sign of pigs or centipedes. She even managed a breezy smile—in case Mary was still standing in the corridor behind them, watching—and a light-hearted, faux commander’s, ‘Okay, people, let’s move out,’ for Findlay.

Ignoring his retort—‘We’re not people, I’m Spiderman’—she propelled them across the playground past the nursery’s chicken coop, and through the security gate. There, on the pavement by the Audi that they were two instalments behind on, was Ros Granger, mother to Lola and Toby Granger.

‘Kate!’ Ros called out, dismounting from her Dutch-style bicycle, ‘I’ve been trying you all morning—where’ve you been? Did you get my message?’

Kate nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and wondered how it was that, despite the rain, Ros didn’t look bedraggled. Her skin was tanned and the white T-shirt advertising her company, Carpe Diem Life Classes, was still white. Ros was somebody other women wanted not only to emulate, but to become, and here she was walking towards Kate, her eyes glistening with an obscene wellbeing she just couldn’t keep to herself. The overall effect was pathologically upbeat. She looked as if there wasn’t a thing in existence she wouldn’t be able take succour from—not even mobile-phone adverts that used Holocaust survivors to imply that global communications had the ability to wash away all tears.

Ros was the postcode prototype of a young, successful mother. Within their group—the PRC—she’d gained herself a reputation for originality that was, if you looked closely, nothing more than a highly evolved form of plagiarism. When Ros dropped her wheat intolerance for lactose intolerance, everybody followed suit because—as Ros pointed out—if you were still wheat intolerant it was because you weren’t buying sourdough bread. So then everybody had to buy sourdough bread from the deli and—after the lactose intolerance phase—make sure their fridge was full of soya milk.

‘So -.’

‘So—what?’ Kate managed to say cheerfully back, pretending not to understand while knowing exactly what was coming next, exactly what question she was going to be asked.

Here it was—in Ros’s clear, ecstatic diction: ‘Did—Findlay—get—in?’

The letter was crackling in the pocket of Kate’s suit jacket just above her heart -, as if it was about to start talking. With an effort, she managed a slow up and down nod and the sort of smile somebody recovering from a minor stroke might produce.

Ros couldn’t quite work out what was going on.

Kate, who had never seen Ros’s eyes darken with doubt before, saw them darken now, and had a sudden apocalyptic vision of just how lonely her future in the postcode would be if she were ever excommunicated from the PRC. She would become Jessica—and nobody wanted to become Jessica. Suddenly terrified, she threw the arm that wasn’t holding Flo up into the air and screamed an evangelical, ‘YESSSS!’, walking for no reason whatsoever into Ros’s arms.

The next minute the two women were hugging and Ros was the first to pull away. This unexpected physical contact with a woman she didn’t even particularly like provoked an unexpected, almost uncontrollable urge in Kate to cry, and to counteract this she started mumbling, ‘I can’t tell you how…how…’

‘…relieved,’ Ros put in, letting out one of her light-hearted laughs.

‘Relieved—that’s it—I am about the whole St Anthony’s thing.’

‘And now you’ve got Findlay in, getting Flo in won’t be such a hassle.’

‘Exactly,’ Kate said heavily, while thinking, who the fuck’s Flo? Then remembering, and patting her on the back, hoping this wouldn’t make her posit anymore.

‘So—everybody’s in,’ Ros said.

Apart from me, Kate thought, staring at her. ‘Everybody?’

‘Evie, Harriet, me, you…everybody in the PRC.’

‘What about Jessica?’ Kate asked.

Ros’s pause suggested that this question wasn’t strictly necessary given that Jessica wasn’t a fully acknowledged member of the PRC, but she showed magnanimity by shrugging and responding with, ‘I can’t get hold of her.’

‘Me neither,’ Kate lied.

A strobe-like frown flickered over Ros’s face, then she was smiling again because life really was unbelievably good—apart from when you had to run past people in mobility aids. Although, in her darker moments, she had to admit that the thought of the cripple’s eyes on her honed body as she streaked past, fully functioning legs pounding, did thrill her.

‘You wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on the bike for a minute, would you? Just while I nip in and get Tobes—saves me locking it up. Bless you,’ she said, squeezing Kate’s arm and jogging past her through the security gates and into Village Montessori.

Kate put Flo, in her car seat, down on the pavement next to the railings and got Findlay into the car, pushing on a nursery CD whose tracks she now heard in her sleep. Satisfied that Findlay’s head was bobbing in time to the music, and that his laughter wasn’t hysterical, merely effusive overflow from some complex childhood game, she scanned the contents of the Sainsbury’s Organic Bag bulging out of Ros’s bicycle basket, and had just managed to uncover a tub of natural cherries and a bar of Valrhona chocolate, some luxury Jersey cream and a gluten-free swiss roll, when Findlay’s window whirred down and Findlay called out, ‘That’s not yours.’

‘I know that, Findlay—I wasn’t looking in it, I was looking after it,’ Kate explained as Findlay swung his head out the window. ‘There’s a difference.’

Findlay grinned, nonplussed.

What did that grin mean? Was Findlay being ironic?

‘My bike’s got four wheels,’ he said.

‘Four?’ she said, uninterested, but relieved he’d changed the subject. Her mind swung back to the natural cherries and gluten-free swiss roll…she was sure there’d been something heavy at the bottom of the bag as well—potatoes? Keeping her eyes on Findlay, she gave them a quick squeeze. Definitely potatoes. Was Ros making tortilla for the PRC that night as well?

Kate had, she realised—staring into the abyss of perfectly honed merchandise in Ros’s bicycle basket—set her heart on tortilla for the PRC that night, and making something else instead just wasn’t an option at this stage. She had eggs in the fridge—in fact eggs were about all she had.

Findlay was saying, ‘Soon it’s only going to have two.’

‘Two what?’ Kate asked, preoccupied.

Findlay was staring at her and there was a baby whimpering somewhere nearby. ‘Wheels,’ he said after a pause, still staring.

Did she have time to get up to the allotment this afternoon? If Ros was making tortilla as well, wouldn’t home-grown potatoes give her tortilla the edge? Kate let out a sharp, involuntary chuckle: a home-grown tortilla.

Behind her, the nursery security gate clanged shut, the sound searing through her cranium as her entire head continued to pulsate with migraine.

‘Thanks for that,’ Ros called out, and was soon strapping Toby and Lola into the child-carrier attached to the back of her bike.

Toby sat staring blankly through the PVC window at Findlay—who was still hanging out of the car—as if he’d never seen him before. Kate thought Toby Granger might be autistic, but even if he was—or ever turned out to be—Ros would somehow manage to turn her son’s autism to her advantage. As Ros always pointed out, whenever she had an audience—even a non-paying audience: everything you do, right down to whether you decide to pick up that piece of litter on the pavement or just walk on past, defines you. So why, with a maxim like that, didn’t Ros look more exhausted—surely there were only so many definitive moments one person could sustain in the course of a lifetime, let alone on a daily basis.

‘Harriet wants us there by eight tonight,’ Ros said, as she tucked in the ends of the Sainsbury’s bag that Kate had undone and forgotten to push back down again. ‘A Labour councillor’s meant to be turning up.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘To talk to us about getting speed bumps on Prendergast Road. It was Evie’s idea.’ She paused, adjusting the Sainsbury’s bag again. ‘You know Evie’s been campaigning for speed bumps? I mean—I’m thrilled about the speed bumps, it’s just the focus of tonight’s meeting has to be the street party: it’s less than two months away now.’

‘My digger,’ Findlay started to yell, ‘I want my digger.’

The digger was in the boot of the car and Kate was about to get it when she remembered that the Pampers extra-value pack she’d picked up in the chemist that morning on the way to work was also in the Audi’s boot. Members of the PRC didn’t do Pampers or Huggies, and they never did supermarket own brand. They bought Tushies, Nature or the German Umweltfreundlich brand, Moltex Öko, which looked as though they’d been made by young offenders as part of some community project. Ros, of course, used non-disposable nappies. Buying Pampers was on a level with buying nonorganic food or Nike baby trainers or getting Flo’s ears pierced or naming your children after luxury goods. Getting Findlay’s digger out of the boot was out of the question because it would give Ros, perched on her ergonomic bike saddle, a bird’s-eye view of the Pampers value pack…and Ros mustn’t see the Pampers value pack.

‘My digger,’ Findlay carried on yelling. ‘I want my digger.’

‘Seems like he wants his digger pretty badly,’ Ros said with an indulgent smile.

Kate was about to answer when she heard a car door open behind her and, turning round, saw Findlay climb out and make his way towards the boot. ‘Findlay…Findlay!’

Findlay stopped short in his tracks, his hand on the catch for the boot.

‘Get back in the car—now!’

Aware that the request for his digger was entirely reasonable, Findlay—taken aback—didn’t move.

Kate tried to say it more calmly, ‘Get-back-in-the-car-now.’

Findlay still didn’t move so she crouched down in front of him, beside the wheel arch, and grabbed hold of his arm, which was difficult to find inside the Spiderman suit’s foam musculature.

Ros was staring at her. Kate saw her glance at the stain on the lapel of her suit jacket as well. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Fine…fine. Just work. Work stress,’ Kate said, folding herself up rapidly and getting into the car they were defaulting on. ‘See you later.’

‘Eight o’clock,’ Ros reminded her.

Kate nodded, started up the engine, put the car into gear and pulled away, trying to ignore Findlay who was yelling at her to do up his straps. Her phone started to ring. It was Ros.

Ros?

Looking in her rear-view mirror, she watched Ros put her mobile away and swerve off the pavement onto the road in pursuit of the car.

Despite all precautions, Ros must have somehow seen the Pampers extra-value pack in the boot after all—and now she wanted to lecture Kate on disposable nappies and the death of the world.

Kate accelerated.

At the crossroads the Audi hit a red light and she seriously thought about jumping it, then panicked and ended up slamming on the brakes at the last moment. Findlay thudded into the back of her seat and screamed something sanctimonious about Kate not strapping him in and how he was going to die one day. ‘So—die,’ she yelled, wrenching up the handbrake and getting out of the car as Ros, shaking, came to a halt beside her.

‘Okay—so they were out of Moltex Öko at the chemist’s, and I was in a rush. I grabbed the first thing to hand and…it wasn’t Moltex Öko because they were out,’ she said.

‘Flo,’ Ros grunted, out of breath and still shaking.

‘Flo?’

‘Flo—she’s back there—on the pavement. You left Flo in her car seat on the pavement.’ Ros fell over her handlebars, sweating and gasping. ‘I tried phoning you.’ Toby stared out, expressionless, through the child-carrier’s PVC window.

Kate peered around the interior of the car. The passenger seat where she usually put Flo’s car seat was empty.

The light changed to green and the cars behind were leaning on their horns as drivers pulled angrily on their steering wheels and tried to circumnavigate the parked Audi and the woman on the bike, inadvertently digesting the slogan on the back of her T-shirt: You deserve to be happy.

Kate stared blankly at Ros for another ten seconds before getting into her car, executing a three-point turn into oncoming traffic and driving back down the road to the patch of pavement outside Village Montessori where she’d left Flo.

Chapter 10

By the time they finally got back to Prendergast Road, it was after two and Kate couldn’t get the door open because Margery had put the chain across.

‘Margery!’ she yelled.

Further down the street, the Down’s syndrome boy at No. 8—David—was in his front garden, smiling happily as he hugged the loquat tree growing there. The next minute, he started to sing—a series of loud, prolonged wails that started to make Kate panic.

‘Margery,’ she yelled again.

‘Who is it?’

‘Kate. Margery—come on, it’s starting to rain again.’

The chain was taken off and the front door opened to reveal Margery standing in the hallway with Robert’s old hockey stick raised above her head.

Findlay ran past her without comment.

‘I heard someone at the door—wasn’t sure who it was,’ Margery said, without lowering the stick.

‘It’s us.’ Kate stared at her. ‘I work half-days Thursdays—I told you.’

Tripping over the same recycling bag in the hallway that she’d tripped over earlier, she navigated the unmoving Margery and reached the kitchen, where she was confronted with a row of pies.

‘Once I got started, I couldn’t stop,’ Margery said behind her, the hockey stick still in her hands. ‘He’s got corned beef and onion, cheese and onion and potato to choose from,’ she carried on more to herself than Kate. She’d been keeping up a steady patter of conversation with herself most of the morning since Martina left.

‘Potato pie?’

Margery nodded.

Her eyes bouncing off the mound of carbohydrates, Kate said, ‘Can you keep an eye on Flo for me while I go up and change?’

‘Off out again?’

‘I thought I might go up to the allotments.’ She paused, and with an effort added, ‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘It’s raining.’

Kate glanced out through the kitchen window but didn’t say anything.

‘You don’t want to take them up there in this weather. Findlay won’t want to go,’ Margery insisted, raising her voice so that Findlay who was playing in the lounge would hear.

‘What are you talking about me?’ he called out. ‘Where won’t I want to go?’

‘The allotments,’ Margery shouted back.

‘I don’t want to go to the allotments,’ Findlay moaned.

Margery’s eyes skittered triumphantly over Kate as Findlay appeared in the kitchen doorway, his shoulders pushed forward and his arms hanging loose—a posture he often assumed to denote despair.

‘Half an hour, that’s all—I need you to help me dig.’

‘Digging stinks.’

‘Findlay…’

‘I don’t want to go—my suit’ll get wet like it did last time then it won’t fit.’

‘He can stay here with me,’ Margery put in.

‘Yes, yes,’ Findlay started to shout, gripping onto the doorframe and using it to jump up and down.

‘Findlay, calm down—if you stay here there won’t be any TV.’

The last time she’d left Findlay with Margery for an afternoon they had watched a documentary on the Milwaukee cannibal.

Findlay stopped jumping.

‘He can help me with my Tom Jones jigsaw.’

Findlay remained silent, considering this, as Flo started to cry.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Margery said, irritably.

‘Hungry. Could you heat her up a bottle?’

Margery grunted something Kate chose to ignore as she made her way upstairs, running the rest of the day’s schedule through her head. She couldn’t stay up at the allotments for more than an hour—she had to leave herself time to pick Arthur up from nursery, take him and Findlay swimming then get back to make the tortilla. Pausing at the top of the stairs, she made another mental note to phone Robert and remind him to pick the boys up, before disappearing into the bathroom and swallowing 400 mg of Nurofen.

She took a quick shower in the Philippe Starck shower room they’d remortgaged the house for—along with the Philippe Starck en-suite—before it finally dawned on her that nobody they knew would know the fixtures and fittings were Philippe Starck…unless she told them.

On the way to the bedroom she stuck her head over the banister as the microwave she’d finally capitulated to—which Margery had brought in triumph at Christmas when Flo was barely two months old—let out a resounding bling. The constant bling, bling, bling of the microwave had become one of the signature tunes of Margery’s brief Christmas reign at No. 22 Prendergast Road. The entire Christmas, in fact, had been a nonstop triumph for Margery, who found her usually challenging daughter-in-law captive in a postnatal world where sleep deprivation and hormone imbalance sent her careering between vegetative trances and hysterical ranting. For the first time in their relationship, Margery had been able to control Kate. Robert no longer knew how to and, anyway, needed all the help he could get when he realised that the two weeks’ paternity leave granted him by the government wasn’t nearly long enough to construct the illusion that the Hunter family was a happy, thriving unit.

The Christmas dinner Margery insisted on buying was entirely microwaveable. Everything, including the turkey, was nuked—the bell kept blinging, the door kept opening and shutting and there was so much packaging stacked against the kitchen window that it blocked out entirely the drab, drizzling festive daylight.

Kate only finally came alive to the fact that Margery’s selfdefined role as douala was a smokescreen for total takeover when Robert started mumbling something about getting the spare room properly fixed up so that Margery could be on hand to give round-the-clock help. Enough was enough. Margery was dispatched swiftly but messily back to Leicestershire. This was the first time since the post-Christmas dispatch that Margery had been to stay at Prendergast Road.

In the bedroom, Kate changed into jeans and her new boutique wellies by Marimekko—black daisies on a white background—that Evie had insisted she had to buy on one of their shopping trips, and that Kate had only been able to afford because the family allowance had just gone into the account. Sometimes it felt as though her libido had been sacrificed to Marimekko, Orla Kiely, Philippe Starck…along with the Reverend Walker’s Sudanese orphans and other people she didn’t know.

Dressed in the postcode’s requisite uniform for young mothers, which basically consisted of suggesting rather than revealing your female anatomy, she sat down on the bed and thought about having two minutes’ lie-down, but knew if she did that she’d never get up, so straightened out the creases she’d made on the throw and stood up again.

Through the broken blinds, she saw a woman standing at the same window as her in the house opposite. She was wearing a Disneyland Paris T-shirt, but didn’t look as if she’d ever been to Disneyland. She was holding back the curtains that were usually drawn and was staring intently at the Hunter house. Kate made out black hair hanging down either side of the woman’s face, then she started to flap her right hand.

It took Kate some time to decipher the flapping hand.

The woman was waving at her.

Kate was about to wave back when she remembered the St Anthony’s letter, Harriet and Evie’s ecstatic voicemails, hugging Ros—and was overcome with a sudden nausea she didn’t think she could control. Everybody was in apart from them, and it had something—she was convinced—to do with the woman waving at her from the house opposite. The brothel. Evie, Ros and Harriet didn’t live opposite houses whose curtains remained permanently shut. The woman opposite, still waving, was the flaw in their lives.

Kate was about to turn and leave the bedroom when she saw that the woman was now holding up a sign—plees help 02081312263—written in blue on what looked like the inside of a cereal packet.

Kate, startled, stood back and let the blinds fall.

Forgetting about the discarded suit, still on the bed, she went downstairs.

Margery was nursing Flo awkwardly in the crook of her arm, and Findlay was shuffling the pieces of the Tom Jones jigsaw.

‘I don’t want to get my suit wet,’ he said morosely.

‘Well, if you don’t come to the allotments, you won’t be able to go swimming.’ She paused.

That stumped him.