The Yummy Mummy (19 page)

“So, er, how’s it going?” I say to Jasmine, who is glazing over, surveying the pub for other social opportunities.

“I’ve broken it off with Janet,” she says starkly.

Janet? Janet is a girl’s name.

“My girlfriend,” she spells out. “I’m a little concerned she may turn up here. If you see a crazed six-foot redhead stalking me, do tell.”

Gosh, you never do know, do you? I always assumed Jasmine was straight. She does have a baby.

“I’m sorry.” I can’t think of anything else to say.

“Nah! Don’t be sorry.” Jasmine exhales Pinot Grigio. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”

“Oh?” All these secret lives, possibilities.

“Commitment. Settling down with another woman who wants to borrow my shoes and discuss issues the whole time is not my idea of fun. I’m too busy. And call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want Marlon growing up with two mummies.”

It strikes me that I’m likely to die without experiencing a curves-on-curves encounter, which is perhaps rather old-fashioned, the twenty-first-century equivalent of dying a spinster. Admittedly, it was not something I ever particularly wanted to do when I had the chance, but now that the future seems to lie ahead as flat, solid, and predictable as a Dutch landscape I almost wish I had.

“Anyhow,” Jasmine continues, eyes lighting up, “I’ve met someone else.”

Alice suddenly breaks back into the conversation. “Your knees. Go on, show her your knees,” she whispers to Jasmine, who dissolves into giggles.

Both Nicola and I immediately seek out her knees. They are raw, pink as steak.

“Fuck wounds,” explains Alice solemnly. “Jasmine is having better sex than any of us. She’s shamelessly come straight from the long grass in Kensington Gardens.”

“Cool,” says Nicola dryly. “I find that scooping up toys on the floor on all fours achieves the same look.”

Jasmine tries to pull her minidress down, knowing that it misses the mark by about four inches. “
New
lover,” she confides to the entire pub.

“Married!” titters Alice indiscreetly.

Having sex with someone else’s wife? How modern. Jasmine blushes. Nicola frowns.

“Not intentionally, he didn’t tell me at first.” Oh, a he. “But now I wouldn’t have him any other way. I can walk away whenever I like,” whispers Jasmine, obviously enjoying the rapt audience. “It’s great.” Suddenly she grabs Alice’s sleeve, face paling. “Alice, we’ve got to go. There’s Janet! Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Alice mouths “sorry” as she is tugged through the crowds by a panicking Jasmine, her wine splashing onto legs and handbags.

Nicola pulls deeply on her cigarette. “Beats NCT meetings.”

“Yup. Drink?”

I dive into the squirming mass of people—it’s getting busier and busier by the minute—and edge toward the bar, worming past tanned fragrant flesh to the beer-splashed bar top. I rest my feet on the brass footrest, ready for a wait. I’m always the last person to get served. But not this time. The bartender ignores both man and woman on either side of me and zooms straight in for my order. The man standing next to me, good-looking, dark, messy hair, shrugs and smiles, his elbow a patch of warmth against mine. Then the crowd surges and I’m sandwiched, arms pushed flat by my sides, cleavage squeezed together, bursting out of my neckline. Another man, glimpsed between pint glasses and gesticulating hands, grins, too. His eyes are glued to my chest. Then he’s gone, swallowed by the crowd. I cross my arms self-consciously. And it is then that I realize. Something has changed. A slight rise in temperature. Gulp. Could it be that I am no longer invisible?

Twenty-four

I TAKE OFF MY TOE-PINCHERS AS SOON AS I GET INTO THE
house, pairing them neatly at the bottom of the stairs, and put the bags discreetly beside the sofa armrest.

The door opens and Joe pushes a big bunch of pink waxy tulips into my arms. “For you.”

“What? Wow. Thank you . . .” Joe rarely buys me flowers. It’s one of those things I’ve come to accept. “What a lovely surprise.”

Joe takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I acted like a jerk. I fucked up with Alice,” Joe says. “I just saw you in those trousers . . .” He sits down heavily, the weight of our relationship cleaving the sofa.

“Hey, it’s okay.” The argument seems like decades ago already. Retail therapy has worked wonders.

“I felt she was pissing on our past. But I overreacted. Amy?” Joe clears his throat nervously. “This . . . it’s not really me, you know that. It’s not really us. What’s happening?”

“Let’s just forget it.” I swipe the subject away like a nasty outfit on a shop’s clothes rail.

“Don’t you want to talk it through?”

“No, honestly, it’s okay. I probably overreacted, too.”

“Tea?” He stands up and steps onto a corner of crunchy shopping bag. And that’s when he sees it. The big fat mountain of dizzy consumption.
“What,”
he thunders, “are
they
?”

Suddenly there does seem to be an absurdly large number of absurdly expensive-looking bags. It seems rather unlikely that I bought them. I will them to disappear. They don’t.

“Bags.”

“Amy . . .”

“Okay, clothes.”

“New clothes?” His face drains of contriteness. “Have you gone stark-raving bonkers?”

“Oh come on, Joe. I haven’t been shopping in months. You suggested I buy myself something new.” My argument is weak. Without Alice it’s hard to keep the conviction afloat.

“Something.
One
thing. Not a Paris Hilton trawl. Amy, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re skint. You haven’t received any money for over a month. Your maternity allowance has finished. Nada.”

“But . . .”

“How much have you spent?”

“About five hundred pounds,” I say, knocking off 50 percent.

“Five hundred pounds! Jesus, Amy!”

Oh dear. If only I’d put the bags upstairs first, then I could have siphoned the clothes out gradually. “Joe, wait until I show you. I’ve got these cellulite-burning trainers . . .”

“What? Why don’t you just buy spells and be done with it? What are . . .”

“. . . and beautiful clothes. You’ll love them. . . .”

“Like your hair,” he hisses.

“Like my hair.” Of course he’s not going to be pleased for me. Joe wants to keep me frumpy and fat in the kitchen while he dazzles off to work and God knows where else with his Prada briefcase full of important nondomestic things and sexy little secrets. No, flowers aren’t enough. “You may as well say there’s no point in it. Go on, say it.”

“As you’ve said it, well, you know what? You’re right. I look forward to seeing you at the farm zoo in that designer haul.”

“Joe, you are not the only one who needs nice clothes. You may remember that I did once have a social life. And you know what? I am determined to reclaim it.”

“Oh.” Joe looks a little stunned, as if the idea that I could pick up my old life again where I left off is incomprehensible. He’s got used to seeing me at home, in tracksuit bottoms. He’s got used to a fridge full of food and dinners rustled up and laundry put away. Until recently, he never knew he wanted a housewife, mistakenly believing he liked the ambitious undomesticated modern woman. But now he knows otherwise. He can have a fun freestyle woman outside of these walls, but in the house? This arrangement suits him rather well. Of course, I am no domestic goddess—my main culinary trick involves pureeing carrot—but I am at home, at the family’s service, awkwardly forced into the role of housewife. And Joe perhaps revealed more than he intended when he wistfully mentioned last week how wonderful it was that time (it was only once) he came home to find all his freshly laundered socks paired up.

“Oh come on, Joe. Don’t be such a killjoy!” I try to pick up all the bags at once in order to dramatically stomp upstairs with them but in the fluster of the moment and with a handful of tulips I can’t. Bags fall to the ground. A top flops out. I shove it back in roughly. This rather undermines the theater of my exit. And then the doorbell goes. We both wait for the other to get it. But there is no need. There is a rattle of key in lock.

“Your mother, letting herself in,” groans Joe. “Timing spot-on as usual.”

I hear Mum’s footsteps, a kind of fast two-step shuffle. As a child I’d recognize her footsteps instantly. She never surprised me with her entrance. Peter Pan’s ticking crocodile, I told Dad.

“Coooeeeeeeeeeee! Anyone home?” she squeals, unnecessarily loudly in the hallway before blasting into the sitting room. “Amy! Joe! You’re both here, how lovely.” Mum takes off her cream linen jacket, folds it neatly in half, and places it on the sofa. Joe completes this ritual by picking it up, shaking it down, and hanging it on a coat hook. “Where’s the lady of the house?”

“Asleep?” I ask Joe, who nods.

“Gosh, you two don’t half look peaky. Coming down with something?”

Joe is mute. I’m left to join the conversational dots. “A bit tired, probably. Everything okay? What can we do for you?”

Mum notices the catch in my voice and looks a bit wary. She pauses and in this pause I can see her brain whirring. No, she decides the tension will pass and to persevere with the purpose of her visit, not that one needs a purpose to visit one’s daughter.

“Well, you remember I mentioned my new neighbor, Norman, you know, the one who moved into number forty-three? I told you all about him last time I was here, didn’t I, Joe?”

Joe twists out a smile.

“Well, the strangest thing happened. Yesterday morning I’d just finished hanging out the washing and was wondering whether it was an okay time to phone your brothers in Australia and thinking how I’d like to go on holiday but it’s so hard when you’re single and older and I couldn’t bear to go on an organized group holiday but just a change of scene would be nice. . . .” She sits down on the sofa and smooths down her floral dress. “And the doorbell went.” She looks at me and Joe for a reaction. “It was
Norman
! My new neighbor. He said, ‘I would like very much to invite you on a picnic.’ I was floored, Joe, floored. I didn’t know what to say, it’s been so long since anyone’s asked me out. . . .”

“That’s great, Mum. When are you going?”

Mum winces slightly. “I said no.”

“That’s a shame. Why? Is he spooky?”

“No, Amy, he’s a nice man, A Very Nice Man. But you know my thoughts on all that. I’m too old. I don’t want to get involved again, not when everything runs pretty smoothly on my own, except for holidays perhaps.”

“Mum, he didn’t ask you to marry him. He asked you for a picnic.”

Evie starts to whimper upstairs. Relieved, Joe excuses himself.

“I kind of realize that.” She sighs. “It’s all very awkward and to make matters worse my washing machine is playing up and I feel I can’t ask him to have a look at it now.” Mum twiddles the worn-down gold wedding ring on her finger. She never took it off after Dad left. It’s been quite an effective dating deterrent over the years. “So I was trying to think of a way in which to open up relations again but make it clear to him it is just
as friends
. You follow? And I thought, perhaps you could do me a favor here.” She smiles her fakest breeziest smile, the one she turns on when stressed. “Perhaps you could lend me Evie?”

“Evie? She’s not a pair of shoes.”

“I thought I could ask him for a walk. I won’t wear my best or anything. And I’ll take Evie. That spells out very clearly that it’s not a date. That it’s a friendly neighborly walk.” Mum’s throat flushes.

“Suppose so.”

“And then I can ask him about my washing machine.”

Suddenly there is a loud rumble, a thud, and a “fucking fucking hell” coming from the hallway. Shit. Joe. I run into the hall and find Joe lying on the ground at the bottom of the stairs, eyes shut. Oh fuck.

“Joe? Are you all right?”

Nothing.

“Has Joe had a little accident?” inquires Mum. “Dear me.”

Then Joe’s hand moves. Slowly, creakily, he pulls a blue Marc Jacobs shoe from beneath his lower back. “Things can only get better,” he mutters, lifting a leg, an arm, then staggering his huge frame up slowly as if erecting a badly designed tent.

Twenty-five

JOSH IS SO DAMN PHYSICAL, NOT ONE FOR POLITE BOUNDARIES
. He’ll arch his whole body—“a communal tool”—over mine if it increases my back stretch. There’s no ceremony about it, no “Do you mind if?” And his touch, rather inappropriately given the circumstances, still thrills me. I try my best to hide any reaction, usually with a very technical question or self-deprecating comment, but I’ve noticed Josh often has a smile playing around the shallow curve of his lips like he knows anyhow. And I probably thank him more than is necessary. But he is giving me back my figure. Day by day it emerges from the baby blub, like a statue from a block of stone.

“Have you time for a coffee, babe?” Josh stops tying his trainer laces.

“What?”

But I heard him the first time. Blythe and Alice have gone. (Annabel’s so big she’s sofa-bound, Jasmine’s got a mid-morning rendezvous with her married lover.) And I’m shocked. We’ve never taken this teacher-student relationship out of the studio. Is this part of the practice?

“Coffee. Beer if you’d prefer.”

“Um. Think I have to go and . . . er . . .”

“Please. I really could do with a break,” he implores. “I won’t make you roll like a ball along the coffee counter, I promise.”

Curiosity and the eyes clinch it. “Oh, okay.”

We trip down the stairs to the hallway. It is narrow but rather than walking single file something compels us to walk side by side, each with one arm dragging along the corridor wall, shoulders bumping. Then we head into the grubby urban cool of West London, up litter-strewn streets, past the tilers, the Spanish food wholesalers, the ancient tailors, and the “new antiques” shop that sells extraordinarily horrible velveteen sofas. We stop at a café that spins bacon and white toast smells out of whirring fans embedded in its greasy window. It’s the kind of café that fashion photographers like to use as an ironic London set. There’s a fat old woman behind the till, dark, perhaps Greek. (Too much feta, Mum would say.) Her eyes—black, the whites pinked by hot stoves—light up when she sees Josh.