The Only Boy For Me (3 page)

‘Oh, Charlie, you know you shouldn’t go in the deep end. What was Miss Pike doing?’

‘Oh, she was helping Laura who’d swallowed a lot of water and was coughing, and Jack Knight’s dad took our group swimming and me and James swam off on our own and it was great and then the man stuck the pole in but I was fine. And then Jack’s dad said, “Thank Christ,” and got me and James and made us go right down the shallow bit and James said he was a sod, but he said it quiet so I don’t think he heard.’

‘Well, James was being very rude. Jack’s dad was quite right to keep you safe.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Well, he was.’

Oh God, I’ve just remembered I’m on the swimming rota next week. A tactical error in the playground: I stood too close to Mrs Harrison-Black without back-up, as Kate was late. Probably emergency sausage shopping.

‘Anyway, next week I’m coming swimming, so I’ll be able to keep an eye on you.’

I can hear distinct sounds of muttering involving swearing, but decide to ignore it as we’re nearly home. If we get caught up in an argument now we may have a replay of last week when he refused to get out of the car, and demanded to be driven to the local branch of the NSPCC, because ‘Cruelty to children must stop, you know, Mummy’. All because I had suggested we might do homework before television. I was reduced to screaming through the window, ‘Yes, but what about cruelty to parents?’, and then a woman came round collecting for the Red Cross and gave me a very funny look.

‘I’m very starving. What’s for tea?’

‘You can choose. Tuna, or pasta.’

‘Sausages.’

I come up with an inspired plan and make tuna sausages by mixing tuna with mashed potato and squidging the resulting mess into sausage shapes. Covered in grated cheese and grilled for a couple of minutes, they’re a huge success. Actually they taste rather revolting, but Charlie eats without complaint. Then we move on to a mad homework sheet on fractions, and I come up with a very clever idea of drawing a cake and then dividing it up into quarters etc. Which really helps until we get to sixteenths and then it all gets rather fraught and I snap my pencil in half. I manage to avoid a huge tantrum on my part when I’m told I should just sit quietly and let him get on with it, because ‘To be honest, Mummy, I don’t think you really know what you’re doing’. I could have told him this for free, almost from the minute he was born. But instead I lie on the sofa sulking, and he finishes off his worksheet without my ‘help’.

We embark on the required twenty minutes of reading with his school reading book. There’s nothing quite so nice as having your small child read to you, even if it is from the most boring school reading book in the world.

Bathtime goes well, without the usual bathroom flooding. In retrospect, having a submarine and a battleship as bathroom toys was not a good idea: the battles always involve huge tidal waves that threaten to float the bath mat along the corridor. While we’re putting on his pyjamas, doing his teeth and generally trying to waste as much time as possible before going to bed, he starts his Random Chatting Routine – always guaranteed to take up at least half an hour.

‘I think it’s a good idea that the Gherkins get pensions now, Mummy. It was on the news, don’t you think it’s good?’

‘The Gherkins? Who are they, sweetheart?’

I’m frantically trying to imagine why pickles are now getting pensions, whereas I, according to my financial woman, will get nothing if I don’t start chucking 150 per cent of my income into a pension starting yesterday, and will have to recycle string and live on cat food.

‘You know, those soldiers.’

‘I think you might mean Gurkhas.’

‘Yes, them. It’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes, marvellous, darling. You don’t need that much toothpaste, you know, it will fall off. You see, just like that. Now that’s wasted.’

‘No it’s not. Look, I’ve got it back on.’ He shoves his toothbrush down the plughole so it bends alarmingly, retrieving a tiny bit of toothpaste. ‘And anyway I hate this toothpaste, it’s too tingling. James has nice toothpaste.’

‘Don’t tell me, sausage flavour.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mummy, his is strawberry.’

‘Well, you said the strawberry tasted like sick.’

He ignores this, as he does all contradictory factual evidence.

‘If I have a terrible dream tonight, can I come in your bed?’

‘Yes, but start off in your own bed.’

‘But sometimes I’m so scared I can’t get up. Isn’t that awful, Mummy, to be so scared you can’t get up?’

He pauses for the full horror of this to register.

‘It would be much better if I started off in your bed and then I would already be there.’ He grins, very pleased with this logic.

‘Yes, but then I’d only have four inches of mattress to sleep on, with a tiny bit of duvet. You should start off in your bed and you’ll probably have lovely dreams.’

‘I won’t. I’ll have horrible dreams and it will be all your fault. Actually I’m starving, Mummy. Can I have a satsuma in bed?’

‘No, because last time you sat on it and made a terrible mess.’

I’m shoving him along the corridor now and succeed in getting him into bed, where he instantly transforms into an angelic vision in pyjamas and does his special pleading look, but I manage to stand firm and he eventually agrees to stay in bed if a) I stroke his back for five minutes in circles, not lines because they itch; b) he can have his little light on; c) he can have a satsuma for breakfast, with all the peel taken off and all the white bits; d) if I see a werewolf on the stairs I will smack it sharply on the head.

I check on him again after twenty minutes and he’s fast asleep, doing that thing that only small children do where they look like they fell asleep unexpectedly, in the middle of doing something else. His arms and legs are stretched out and he’s clutching bits of Lego in one hand and a small dagger in the other. I realise, not for the first time, that however much you love them you always love them that little bit more when they’re asleep.

I wake up early the next morning, because Charlie has crept into my bed at some point during the night so I’m freezing cold with a small bottom pressed into my neck. He has taken up the entire duvet, my head is bent into a weird shape, and I’m marooned on the furthest edge of the mattress. It’s extraordinary how one small boy can take up so much room, and he could do it even when he was a tiny baby. I know it’s useless to try to get back to sleep, so I get up, make some tea, and refill the bird feeder which
hangs outside the kitchen window. Then I spend ten minutes watching the birds get hysterical in a bid to eat as much food as possible and still be able to fly. A bit like children’s parties, really, but with no jelly.

Breakfast goes very well, the satsuma is a big success, and we set off for school thankfully minus the milkman slowing down progress. Everything is fine until we spot a pheasant wandering in the woods at the side of the road. Pheasants are Charlie’s favourite, and we have to stop the car and chat to it or he will descend into a sobbing fit and cling on to the car door when we arrive at school. We’ve discovered that pheasants run like hell if you try to get near them, but if you stay in the car they obviously feel safe and will peck about quite near. Presumably it’s considered bad sport to actually shoot them whilst sitting in your car. I feel very foolish, but Charlie is thrilled, and I am so busy watching him I lose track of time.

Finally the bloody thing moves off into the distance and Charlie agrees we can now drive on – a good job because we are now late. The headmistress, Mrs Taylor, is standing by the gates looking pointedly at her watch as we walk in. Charlie, as usual, makes the whole thing much worse by saying, ‘Oh, hello, Mrs Taylor, we’ve just seen a lovely pheasant so we stopped to have a chat,’ which makes her look at me like I’m a complete moron. Which she already suspected, because she still hasn’t got over Charlie insisting he will not go to Assembly any more because he is a Pagan. I don’t know where he got the idea of pagans from: he insists they did it on
Blue Peter,
but somehow I can’t quite imagine this.

I get home to discover the man who does the garden, Bill, has got his pruning shears out and is looking at the trees in the front garden with a smile on his face. This is very bad
news. What he’s supposed to do is mow the lawns and generally dig things, and stop the weeds reclaiming the garden entirely, for an hour a week for a fiver. Brilliant. What he must not be allowed to do, as various villagers have impressed upon me with great force, is prune anything or the garden will end up like theirs: a curious mixture of traditional English cottage garden meets bonsai. I have to make tea, and generally divert his attention, and then ask him to tidy up the herb garden to avoid him reducing the apple tree to a stump.

He potters off eventually and makes the herb garden look pristine, so we’re all happy. The garden is not really that big and I could just about cope with doing it myself. But mowing the grass takes hours in the summer, even though both the lawns are tiny, and last time I tried it I managed to mow over one flip-flop and half the paddling pool so it seems safer to leave it to Bill. I feed the rabbits, and wonder if I should ring the vet and ask if it’s OK for them to spend so much time humping each other. Let them out in their run, and the bastard things begin digging a burrow in the middle of the lawn. Bill is outraged by this and has them back in their hutch in thirty seconds flat. It usually takes me at least half an hour to catch them, and I think they rather enjoy diving about and watching me fall into flowerbeds. But they are furious at Bill’s more assertive technique, and begin a mammoth sulk in their hutch. I’m longing for Charlie to get bored with them so I can put them in a cab and send them to Rolf Harris or the producers of
Pet Rescue.
It’s all their fault anyway, because the endless barrage of pet programmes meant Charlie was desperate to adopt everything from a donkey with three legs to a foul-looking lizard.

He tried to hold out for a St Bernard, or possibly an Irish wolfhound, but I made it clear if he wanted to be dragged
through the mud by a large stupid animal he could go horse-riding like everybody else. So rabbits were the easiest solution to the I-Must-Own-A-Pet-Or-I’ll-Die crisis. They’re very sweet, but make a terrific noise at night leaping about. I keep thinking they’re being eaten by foxes and have to rush out into the back garden with a torch. Last week I staggered out into the pitch black clutching a fish slice to ward off predators, only to find them perfectly happy in their hutch, staring at me, and smirking. I feed the goldfish in the pond, who are my kind of pets. A bit of food every now and again, and they’re happy. They managed to have babies last summer so there are lots of tiny little fish hurling themselves about. Very sweet. Realise with horror that time is getting on: I need to fix up meetings for next week when I’m in the office, sort out childcare, and there are sausages to buy. I can’t really afford to spend half the morning pretending to be Dr Dolittle.

Wake up early, and plan a relaxing day mucking about until I remember I’m on the bloody swimming rota. Charlie wakes up, and is not pleased. He makes me promise not to wear my swimming hat, and then moves on to his new campaign for me to buy more exciting breakfast cereal – preferably a brand which makes the milk go an unusual colour. I ring up Leila for sympathy, but she is having none of it, and says she’d love to go swimming, as it’s bound to be much nicer than the day she’s going to have: she’s got a big pitch for a new account, and the client is famously neurotic and demanding.

Leila is Charlie’s godmother, and she’s been my best friend for years, ever since we worked together at a huge advertising agency which is thankfully now defunct as it was crap. She takes her godmotherly duties very seriously, and was most put out when I refused to have a proper christening. She wanted to publicly renounce the devil: apparently she’d seen it in a film, and had already bought the perfect hat. She turned up at the hospital when Charlie was born with a beautiful silver spoon from Tiffany’s, engraved with the words ‘For Charlie’. Apparently Tiffany’s were rather anxious about this until she reassured
them that it was for a two-day-old baby, and not illegal substances. She’s MD of a huge advertising agency, earns bucketloads of money, and is very good at spending it. But she does have to work incredibly hard and is always threatening to quit and go off and live a different life. Her latest fantasy is that she’s going to be a crofter on a remote Scottish island. The plan is to buy a few sheep and a spinning wheel, and knit wonderful jumpers. She’s started on a scarf, but it’s gone a bit triangular.

I wish her luck with her meeting, and she says if the swimming gets too tough I should just go off and have a sauna or a massage or something. I’m not sure she’s entirely grasped the range of facilities on offer at the local pool. Perhaps she is thinking of her gym, which has every bit of kit going, a restaurant, a juice bar, and comfy leather armchairs in reception. The reception area of our local pool consists of cracked lino and one metal bench.

Charlie refuses to put on his school uniform and wants to go to school in his pyjamas, but I have a flash of inspiration and divert his attention by suggesting that he might be able to have soup in a flask as part of his packed lunch. He is thrilled with this unexpected news, and spends ages choosing which soup he’d like, and then the trip to school is accomplished in record time, and I’m back home and out in the garden before I know it. Start digging the flowerbed which I plan to turn into a mini vegetable patch so Charlie can grow some carrots. After digging for about five minutes, it gradually dawns on me that the ground is frozen solid so I abandon the spade and poke about in the herb garden for a bit and chat to Buzz and Woody. I’m tempted to let them out for a run, as they are being so amusing, but know this would be a big mistake as it took nearly an hour to get them back in at the weekend, and I
don’t think missing swimming because I was chasing rabbits round the garden will be deemed an acceptable excuse.