Separate Lives (25 page)

The thing about me is that I'm very decisive. Except when I'm not. Or rather, I'm very decisive when I've actually made a decision—no looking back then—but until that point I'm about as decisive as . . . as . . . no, sorry, I can't decide on a simile. Or even a metaphor.

Thus my decisiveness about ending things with Alex was uncharacteristically decisive. I'd beaten myself up a lot, of course, conducted endless internal dialogues berating myself for bailing on something—specifically Project Random—that had only just begun. But this mood didn't last long. Instead, I focused on how to get out, and where to go. Meanwhile, Alex and I were attempting to live separate lives under the same roof, which, I hardly need point out, was 10,000 kinds of incredibly difficult, especially as the kids knew something was up—particularly Lula, who is a bit of an emotional sponge. I mean, they're not stupid. Mummy and Daddy were sleeping in different bedrooms, and then when they weren't sleeping apart they were arguing or being elaborately polite, as if caught up in some kind
of overly complicated eighteenth-century dance in which neither partner knew who was leading or where they were headed, much less when and how it would end.

Then there were the practical problems. For example, if I was to be the one doing the leaving (and apparently I was), then Alex would have to buy me out of my half of the Dream Home—not entirely straightforward given he was effectively unemployed. And then there were the emotional “issues”—dizzyingly multi-layered and almost entirely unexpected, at least by me. When communications first broke down I was disarmed by how little was said by either of us. Which makes me sound like an idiot, given that non-communication involves a great deal of not communicating, but in a long relationship you just get used to the low-level domestic hum of day-to-day communication and when that starts to disappear the silence that replaces it is particularly heavy and surprisingly silent.

In between the silences we tried to conduct our lives “as usual.” I had work to do, as ever, and that was OK; it was safe and easy to navigate. The things I found I couldn't handle quite so well were things I hadn't expected to have to: people's responses to the news, for example—baffled, brisk, dismissive, overly empathetic, the works. And then there was the way the landline stopped ringing almost overnight. And the fact that we now received individual non-couple-ish calls on our mobiles, which necessitated leaving rooms and speaking
sotto voce
, which just exacerbated the separateness.

I'd wondered how to tell people. And who to tell? I called my dad and Cathy on their landline and decided that whoever picked up would be the one I'd spill it to. And I got Cathy, which was a relief because she's better on the phone than Dad—she's a woman—and I knew she'd be kind instead
of inadvertently judgmental. Not that my dad isn't kind in his own way, just that he invariably manages to make me feel as though anything that goes wrong in my life is entirely my fault. He's probably right, but sometimes you don't want home truths seeping down the line from your parents, you just want through-the-ether hugs.

“Oh sweetheart, I'm so sorry,” said Cathy, emphatically and sincerely and through-the-ether-hugging. “Is there anything we can do?”

I assured Cathy that bowls of homemade chicken soup were not required, mostly because I had my own small stockpile in the freezer. It was a terrible oversight by both our fathers not to have married Jewish women. I was always intensely jealous of my primary school best friend, Rachel, whose otherwise exceptionally welcoming house I could never visit after school on Fridays, but where, nonetheless, I acquired a lifetime's addiction to
cholla
. Anyway, once I'd assured Cathy I was OK chicken-wise, everything she said, and the way in which she said it, was the right sort of thing to say. Often that's all you need.

Then I phoned my mother. You'll have noticed that my mother makes only a fleeting appearance in this narrative, largely because she's made only a fleeting appearance in mine. If your mum goes to live at the opposite end of the earth when you're a teenager and returns only occasionally, to cuddle a grandchild while suggesting that the color of your living room walls leaves something to be desired, or that those jeans really don't suit you, or that teething is best dealt with by rubbing brandy on baby's gums, then her innate sense of maternal entitlement—undimmed by distance or time—may not be matched by your own desire for her input. To put it politely.

After all this time, my “relationship” with my mother had become a bit like that between a child and a fondly remembered godparent or aunt. Sometimes I found it very hard to remember how life had been when we had lived together. And though I could effortlessly recall our flat—the smell of the kitchen (with its Aga ours would have been in a minority of London mansion flats, I'd imagine), the texture of the carpets under bare feet, the faded patterns on the cork tiles in the kitchen, the color of the bathroom walls (Cadbury's Dairy Milk, so stylish with the avocado suite), my mother herself had become a slightly vague and spectral figure, though in real life she was far from either.

I'd last seen her shortly after Chuck had been born. She'd swooped in, piled high with presents and, inevitably, unsolicited advice about breastfeeding and naps, despite the fact that my having given birth twice to her once automatically conferred upon me 100 percent more experience in the art of baby management. No matter, my mother was—is—a capital M sort of Mother. And, occasionally, a Mutha.

So I phoned Mum on a weekend when Alex had spontaneously decided to take the kids to Careless, during which he was planning to break the “bad” news. I'd packed a bag with three spare pairs of trousers for Chuck, just in case, and thought to myself that the kids had never been away from me for a whole weekend, much less “alone” with Alex for that long. But this was how the future would inevitably be so they—we?—may as well start getting used to it.

I'd expected to find Mum at home, busily smiting red-back spiders among the bottlebrushes in the arse-end of New South Wales, but instead I got Bruce. And was surprised to discover that my mum was in Byron Bay, the best part of 1,000 miles away, “enjoying a long weekend of girly spa pampering,
with your friend Bells.” None of these words sounded right coming from Bruce, who was probably reading them from a Post-it note crib-sheet helpfully left by my mother.

And she was with Bells? Who, as it happened, had been next on my list of people to call. Perhaps I shouldn't have been quite so surprised by this, particularly as I'd put them both in touch with each other when Bells had emigrated, but I was. Of course it made perfect sense, Bells bonding in Byron with my “daughterless” mother, but still, it felt wrong. Obviously I didn't have a sister but this news made me feel as though I did and, what's more, that she was the favorite. I made a mental note to maybe call Bells's mum, Jane, at her home in Lancashire. Or had she moved to Yorkshire? And then I thought “as if . . .”

Instead I had a little chat with Bruce, with whom I'd always got on, inasmuch as you can get on with someone you barely know any better than, say, the bloke in the newsagent's. And then Bruce is your archetypal Aussie male—smiley and monosyllabic. And I sort of flagged up the fact that Mum might want to give me a call about, like, stuff—but made sure that Bruce didn't think it was very pressing because I'd decided that a call from my mum at this point may end up opening a can of worms I'd rather stayed very firmly shut, at least until I'd got my head around the Mum-and-Bells situation.

Then I called Heinous, who didn't pick up either her mobile or her landline so I texted:
give us a call! S x
. Nothing. And then I checked Facebook and saw that she and Phil were away for the weekend and had posted some “lovely” pictures of Chesil Beach. And I wondered why she hadn't told me.

Then I considered calling Bridge. Undesirable though that conversation probably was in almost every conceivable
way, I definitely owed it to her to do the right thing. I'd left a couple of messages and sent a breezy text or two in the last couple of weeks but full contact was now uncomfortably overdue.

“Hello, is that you, Susie?” Bridge sounded breathless and (I very much hoped this was not the case) possibly on the brink of tears.

“Yes, look, Bridge, I'm so sorry for being a crap friend and not calling and stuff. But I've had . . . and I know it's no excuse really, but . . . I've had a bit on my plate too.”

“No problem, Susie, I know you have. It's really nice of you to call now though. Really nice.” There was quite a big pause.

“So Bridge, I'm really sorry about Phil. Men can be so crap sometimes.”

“It's OK. I'm fine. We're fine. Really we are. We're just cracking on. It'll all come out in the wash.”

“I'm sure it will. But still. If there's anything I can do? Or if you want to meet up for a, like, coffee or a drink?”

“That's so kind of you, Susie. And . . . well . . . I don't know what you're doing now but, um, if you wanted to come over?”

This is the point where the horrible, selfish part of me wanted to say “Sorry, actually I'm in Papua New Guinea,” but then the nice bit of me prevailed and asserted itself: “You know what? Alex is away with the kids at his parents so I'm sort of at a loose end, if you really wanted me to come over.”

“That would be lovely, Susie. And could I ask you a massive favor? Would you mind bringing some milk? I'm sorry but we've run out and I can't seem to get dressed and round to the Co-op. Is that pathetic?”

“Not pathetic at all. Anything else?”

“No, no, thanks. We're fine for wine.”

On first impressions, Bridge's place was like a glimpse into some sort of twenty-first-century Farrow-and-Balled Rectory-bound version of Bedlam, a seventh circle of domestic middle-class marital breakdown hell. It was also a heads-up for the kind of single-parenting potential future I sincerely wished to avoid.

Bridge answered the door wearing an “outfit” that unless she were in her first week post-partum, should've given even a recently dumped former fashion editor pause for thought. On her gray marl hoodie there were the sort of stains that have nothing to do with living alone with five-year-olds—maybe not even vomitous newborns—but instead hinted at the dread phrase, “letting herself go.” Bridge looked as though she hadn't slept for a week and her hair made being-dragged-through-a-bush-backward look fashion-forward. On the upside, she had easily lost a stone on the failsafe Misery diet. Nonetheless, it's sisterly to lie in such circumstances, so:

“Hey Bridge, you look well! Milk.”

“God, you're sweet, I look like a wreck, but thanks for the milk.”

The kitchen recalled the aftermath of New Year's Eve.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Bridge, half-heartedly removing a few bottles from work surfaces and dropping them into black bin-bags. There were an extraordinary amount of bottles.

“OK, let me give you a hand with this!” I said brightly. “Where are the kids?”

“Stagecoach. Another pushy would-be stage-mum has kindly taken them, so I have precisely two hours to get my
shit together. Which is about twenty-two hours less than I need. Coffee?”

As Bridge boiled a kettle and located a used cafetiere in the dishwasher, I busied myself with bottle removal.

“Lots of bottles, Bridge. Looks like a party.”

“It kind of was a party. It seemed like a good idea. Sorry you didn't get an invitation—it was quite spontaneous.”

It felt wrong to probe the circumstances of a recently separated mother-of-young-triplets throwing a spontaneous party, so I decided to walk gently over the domestic eggshells. And there were actually a lot of eggshells, on the floor, near the bin-bags.

“But it's great that you felt up to having a party. And, uh, are you in touch with Phil at all?”

“Sort of. He's away with the Mad Bitch this weekend, right?”

“Is he? I'm not up to speed. My friendship with Harriet seems to have faltered.”

“Well, I think they're in Dorset. Phil's parents live there . . . Oh hi, Vladimir. This is my friend Susie. I was just telling her about the party.”

I turned. And then I had to stop myself doing a Looney Tunes-style picking-up-of-a-jaw-from-the-floor. For there, standing in the doorway, was a young man of such intensely stupendous physical perfection that, at least for a moment, I couldn't speak. Six-foot-ish, wearing boxers and a wife-beater vest, “Vladimir” leaned against the doorframe, yawned and raised his arms—his strong, lightly tanned, well-muscled arms—in an elaborate stretch, which, in turn, revealed a taut six-pack and a curly whorl of jet black hair just above the waistband of his boxers. As my blush rose, I really wished I wasn't wearing . . . whatever I was wearing, even if whatever
I was wearing made me look like Cheryl Cole in comparison to Bridge. I couldn't really think straight.

“Susie, this is Vladimir, from the Ukraine. He's our new ‘manny.'”

“Wow. Yes. Hi. Blimey.”

“Hi Susie,” said Vladimir, extending a (big, strong) hand. Mine felt limp and dead-fishy, but he squeezed it and then balled my hand in his before uncoiling his fingers and fist-bumping my flaccid appendage. There was nothing remotely flaccid about any of Vladimir's appendages. And I had clearly come over all
Carry On Au-Pair
. I thought I might faint.

“So, that's great. How long have you been, er, helping Bridget?”

“I am here being four weeks already. I am learning English. I love children. In my country I am learning to be—how you say?—a kindergarten teacher of children.”

“Wow. That's great. I always think it's such a shame there aren't more men teaching in primary schools. Especially for the boys.”