The Only Boy For Me (22 page)

Mack stares at me with his mouth slightly open. He’s about to launch into a counter-attack but he misses his moment because I storm out of the restaurant, holding Charlie’s hand, which slows me down a bit. The waiters all throw me looks of undying devotion, and the manager gives me a beaming smile. He’s been hovering by the door listening intently.

‘Supper in your room perhaps, madam? I’ll take care of it, on the house; it will be our pleasure. Just go right on up and we’ll be with you in a moment.’ And then he bows.

Christ. I’ve really done it now. I settle Charlie down, and explain that grown-ups argue sometimes and everything is fine. And no, he cannot use the F-word just because I did. He seems to accept this but still looks worried until the supper turns up, and he spots the puddings: huge ice-creams. There is also Coke to drink, and an enormous bowl of chips. He launches into the food as if he’s not eaten for days, and seems perfectly happy. I have a large gin and tonic, and then give him a bath and lie in his bed reading him stories. Mack seems to be taking a very long time, and I can’t work out what I’ll actually say to him when he does turn up. I lie on the bed trying to read to Charlie and think of possible conversations with Mack at the same time, which affects my reading ability rather badly and Charlie complains so I have to concentrate harder. I end up falling asleep, and I’m woken by Mack gently shaking my arm.

I follow him out on to the balcony. Alfie and Daisy are asleep: Mack says he wanted to get them settled before he woke me up. It’s nearly midnight and he looks exhausted.

‘I’m sorry, Annie.’

‘So you should be.’

‘I’m not very good at apologies.’

‘So I noticed. Anyway, there is some good news. If you let me do the ordering from now on I think you’ll find the hotel staff have adopted me as their favourite guest. The manager nearly kissed me when I stormed out earlier. Were the kids OK?’

‘Well, yes, after a bit. Oh, and by the way, what on earth possessed you to let Daisy paint her nails? They look awful.’

‘Yes I know. But it’s part of my bribery and corruption plan to get her to stop telling me that my bottom is much bigger than Laura’s.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Don’t worry, it’ll come off. I’ll make sure she isn’t wearing full make-up and heels when you take her home.’

‘That might be best. Laura is pretty fierce about that kind of thing. Do they do homoeopathic nail varnish by any chance?’

‘I don’t think so. But it’s a bloody good idea. It’d sell like hot cakes in Harvey Nichols.’

‘Anyway, I am sorry. I just get a bit jumpy sitting about for days on end with nothing to do.’

‘I’ve noticed. But you can’t take it out on other people, you know, especially not your own children.’

‘I know. Look, can we stop talking about my faults now; I’m not really enjoying it, to be honest. Let’s talk about your big bottom instead.’

Mack behaves perfectly for the rest of the holiday. The hotel staff tend to tiptoe round him as if they’re close to some sort of unexploded bomb, and the manager continues to treat me like a long-lost friend, rushing over to greet me every time we walk through reception. Daisy continues to wear silver nail polish, and moves on to purple for the last day. I have to spend ages getting it off before the journey
home, but she accepts this quite happily. Alfie and Charlie become best friends and spend hours stalking round the hotel grounds with their fishing nets trying to collect insects. Charlie confides to me as we are packing that he’d quite like to take Alfie home with us, and Mack can come too, for a bit, but not that Daisy because she’s a girl.

I’m very glad to get home. The holiday has been lovely, apart from the blazing-row episode which I could really have done without. I confide in Leila that although Mack is delightful, apart from the occasional outbursts, it was a bit of a strain spending so much time with him and all the children, and somehow I wish we were still at the stage of an occasional night in town. Leila points out that the first few dates are always the best, but real life is not like that, and anyway Mack is perfect for me. Apparently everyone has hideous rows on holiday, and the added bonus of children is bound to cause tension. She and James had a huge fight at a monastery in the middle of nowhere, and Leila drove off in the hire car and left him because he was annoying her, and then got back to the villa and calmed down. Then she went all the way back to collect him only to find that he’d called a taxi and spent a small fortune getting back to the villa. According to Leila, he sulked for three days. We agree that holidays are actually quite hard work, and really we should all try to remember this when we start packing the factor 20.

I sort out Charlie’s school uniform ready for next week, and the start of the new term. He no longer fits into half of it, and I search in countless shops but they’ve all sold out. Marks and Spencer only have trousers for four year olds, and one jumper, in the wrong colour. Apparently all the organised mothers bought up everything weeks ago, and it hasn’t occurred to M&S that less-organised parents might
want to purchase school uniform during the week before term starts. Bastards. I finally track down two pairs of trousers, and get the sweatshirts with the school logo on from the poor woman who volunteered to do the uniform for the PTA and now has a house full of sweatshirts and PE kit.

I make a huge mistake and tell Mum about my recent shopping difficulties. Two days later a large parcel arrives with a pair of enormous school trousers made out of some special indestructible material. She bought them in the same shop where she used to buy uniform for Lizzie and me, and says that she got them nice and big so he’d have room to grow into them. I spent years at school in dresses that were three sizes too large, so there would be room to grow, and am determined Charlie will not suffer the same fate, and have to wear trousers which flap round his knees, so I hide them. I ring her up to thank her, and it turns out there’s even worse news: she’s found some lovely navy wool and is knitting him a school cardigan. I explain that I tried to get him to wear a cardigan last winter, because I found a fleece one and thought it would be warm as the school heating had packed in and the children were wearing hats and coats in class. But he refused point blank to even consider it, and announced very gravely that boys do not wear cardigans.

Mum takes this news surprisingly well and says she’s only done one sleeve, and can easily turn it into a jumper. So that’s alright, and lucky I called, really. Do I want a V-neck or round neck? I settle for a V-neck because the tiny round-neck jumpers she made for him when he was a baby were so tight I practically had to give him a local anaesthetic to get them on. It’s very kind of her really, and a knee-length jumper with arms three foot too long will no doubt come in very handy if it snows. She moves on to telling me, in
graphic detail, about the latest operation on the man next door, which sounds appalling until I realise it was actually an operation on his dog. I agree with her that it’s amazing how quickly animals heal, and then get off the phone before she can launch into an update on the woman opposite and her recent hysterectomy. I already know far more about it than I ever wanted to.

Autumn has definitely arrived. The weather has bypassed the season-of-mists-and-mellow-fruitfulness stage and gone into freezing mornings and evenings, with rain during the day. Mack is in Tokyo, pitching for an intergalactic car campaign. He’s dreading it because he says the potential clients tend to disappear into huddles and rattle off torrents of Japanese while you stand there like an idiot. And he never knows when to stop bowing – apparently it’s vital that you stop at the right moment or it can go on for hours.

Leila is in New York trying to land a big American client and Kate is trying to cope with both James and Phoebe having rotten colds. They’ve taken to lying on the sofa shouting requests for drinks and titbits. I feel shivery and very bad-tempered, which is always a sign that I’m about to get a mammoth cold which Charlie will catch, just when I can least cope, and I’ll be forced to rise from my sickbed and tend to him. Great.

Charlie develops his version of the cold overnight, so I keep him off school and he spends the day draped on the sofa moaning and watching videos. He spends the night in my bed, kicking the duvet off every ten minutes and
occasionally surfacing to demand a drink – but not just any drink; only warm juice will do, apparently. So I get up, make warm juice and by the time I get back to bed he’s fast asleep again. I end up stamping round the kitchen in frustration. He’s no better the next morning, so we go to see the GP at the surgery in the next village. He makes the usual speech: it’s a virus, keep up the fluids, give him Calpol, there’s no point in having antibiotics, and please bugger off now as I have thirty-eight OAPs in the waiting-room and want to get home before dark. Charlie sleeps, fusses and whines and generally irritates the hell out of me. I am not cut out for this nursing lark, and spend ages on the phone with Kate who agrees that children with colds are unbearable.

The next day he’s still not well, and is very hot and sleepy. He doesn’t even complain when I give him Calpol – which he usually manages to turn into his version of the suffragettes being forcibly fed in Holloway. I have a long and heated discussion with the GP’s receptionist and she finally agrees to book a home visit if I promise not to ring her ever again. The GP arrives mid-morning, and I explain that Charlie seems really unwell. He pokes him about a bit and then gives me a short lecture about how being a parent includes looking after ill children and I just have to get on with it. I thank him profusely for being so understanding; he looks at me like I am mad, and then rushes off muttering about home visits being for emergencies, not children with perfectly ordinary colds. I wish with all my heart that Charlie had been able to muster a bit of projectile vomiting all over the GP when he was poking him, but the poor little thing just lay there being pathetic.

By lunchtime Charlie is still sleeping on the sofa, but he now looks a pale-grey colour. I keep poking him to see if
he’s all right, a technique I developed when he was a baby. During one of my prodding sessions I see what look like two tiny dots of purple Biro on his neck and I’m gripped by a terrible panic. I keep trying to convince myself that they’re paint or felt-pen marks, but deep down I know they are not. I have a strong desire to simply pretend I haven’t seen them. It’s almost like a physical pain; the minutes are ticking away and I’m gripped by a blind panic and can’t decide what to do. It feels like I’ve been hit by a huge invisible object. Finally I decide that I must call the doctor and need to hold Charlie close, so I put my arms round him to move him on to my knee and he throws up all over the sofa, but doesn’t wake up. This really terrifies me: he normally makes a tremendous fuss about being sick.

I stagger to the phone, half dragging Charlie as I don’t want to let go of him. He still doesn’t wake up, and I realise he’s semi-conscious, maybe even in a coma. I have visions of sitting by his bedside playing
Lion King
tapes for the rest of my life, willing him to wake up. I telephone the surgery, but the receptionist is not interested until I begin shouting. Then she puts the phone down. I ring back and say as calmly as I can that I think Charlie is unconscious and if she doesn’t put me through to a doctor in the next five seconds I will drive over there and slap her. Hard. This does the trick and she puts me straight through to the doctor.

Luckily it’s the same one who came out this morning, and I tell him Charlie now appears to be unconscious; this panics him and he says he’ll come right away. It’s only about a ten-minute drive, but I keep thinking I should be doing something, some vital piece of first aid that I can’t remember. So I sit on the floor holding Charlie and enter a kind of chasm of fear and pain, like a huge black blanket smothering us both. The doctor arrives, takes one look at
Charlie and the two purple dots and gives him the biggest injection of penicillin that I’ve ever seen. It’s like an injection from a comedy sketch: he uses a huge needle and syringe, full of pale liquid. He sticks the needle straight into Charlie’s thigh, and pushes really hard, but Charlie doesn’t even stir. He begins rummaging around in his bag, finds his mobile phone and calls for an ambulance, stressing that this is a GP referral, an emergency, and then he gives very detailed directions on how to get here. Hearing him give our address is really strange. His voice sounds scared, and I notice his hands are shaking.

We sit on the floor, me clutching Charlie and rocking him backwards and forwards, and the doctor holding Charlie’s hand and trying surreptitiously to check his pulse. I ask him if he thinks it’s meningitis, which is the word that’s been lurking in the back of my brain although I’ve been too frightened to realise this until I actually hear myself saying it. He nods and looks at me, and I can see the fear in his eyes. We don’t speak after that. Charlie’s still in his pyjamas, pale blue with white stripes, and I count the stripes again and again as we sit in silence for what seems like hours until we hear the ambulance siren. There are seventeen white stripes, and sixteen pale-blue ones. The ambulance arrives, and the driver and the doctor begin a whispered conversation. I carry Charlie down the drive. He’s so heavy I can hardly manage but I don’t want anyone else to hold him.

Sitting in the ambulance is really strange. The ambulance man doesn’t touch Charlie but gives me an oxygen mask to hold close to his face, so I sit with him in my arms and try to avoid falling on the floor each time we go round a corner. No one speaks: just blank faces and silence. Maybe there’s nothing he can do, maybe he’s just a crap ambulance man,
but I really wish he’d say something reassuring. We turn off the main road into the hospital and head towards Casualty, and I expect to see an expert team jogging on the spot waiting for us to arrive, but instead the doors are shut and the place looks deserted. They stick Charlie on a trolley and park it in a corridor. A nurse eventually wanders over and says Cubicle Three, but when we open the curtains a man’s lying on the bed. He glares at us. I glare back, and we stand in the corridor again while the nurse dithers about. Minutes are ticking away, and Charlie looks even worse than he did at home.