The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (2 page)

When I went into the bathroom, I screamed. He was underwater with his eyes shut, completely still. I thought he had fallen asleep and drowned. I felt a real sense of loss that I would never have sex again with this man, because it had been very good. Then I imagined phoning the police and trying to explain what had happened. What if they thought I was involved in some way? All the forensic evidence would point in that direction. For a moment I thought about running. Then I remembered that I didn’t have any clothes. So slowly, trying to keep my breathing under control, I went over to the edge of the bath, stared at him for a few seconds noting the waxy hue of his skin, and pushed my index finger very hard into that soft cleft between the eyebrows to see if he was conscious. Relief at the force of his head pushing back against my hand was quickly replaced by shock when he grabbed my upper arm so hard that I could see the skin going white between his fingers and he shouted, ‘God, are you trying to kill me? Because I thought it was a pretty good night myself.’

‘I thought you had drowned,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find my clothes.’

He pointed to a chest of drawers on the landing just outside the door, where they lay in a neatly stacked pile. Yesterday’s knickers, lovingly folded in half on top of a bra that had seen better days and an old pair of Levi 501s.

‘You did that?’ I asked nervously.

‘Attention to detail, Lucy,’ he said, ‘that’s what it’s all about,’ and then sank back under the water.

The conversation was over, but no one could say that I didn’t know from the outset what lay ahead. And yes, we did go back to bed.

As he sprawls in the bath and I brush my teeth, I run through a critical inventory of his body starting at the top. Hair, still dark, almost black, slightly receding, but only to the expert eye. Laughter lines and worry lines fighting for supremacy around his eyes. A slight frown between his eyebrows that ebbs and flows depending on the progress of his library project in Milan. Chin area a little jowly because he eats more when he is worried. Fewer sharp angles all round, his stomach and chest softer, but surprisingly lovely. I must remember to tell him that. A reliable man, who promises comfort and conventional lovemaking drawing on a well-practised repertoire. An attractive man, so my friends tell me. His head pops out of the water and he asks me what I am staring at.

‘How long have we known each other?’ I ask him.

‘About twelve years,’ he replies, ‘and three months.’

‘At what point in our relationship did we both start wearing pyjamas in bed?’

He considers the question carefully. ‘I think it was the winter of 1998, when we were living in west London and we woke up
one morning and the window was frozen on the inside. Actually, you used to borrow mine.’

He was right, in the early days I had adopted an intimate and easy approach to sharing that I felt reflected the depth and breadth of our relationship. But after the first year together he sat me down at the kitchen table and told me it wouldn’t work unless I stopped using his toothbrush. ‘Do you realise how many germs we carry in our mouths? Any self-respecting dentist will tell you that there are more in your mouth than in your arse. Saliva transmits all sorts of illnesses.’

‘I just don’t believe that,’ I said, at a loss to say anything else.

‘Hepatitis, Aids, Ebola, they can all be transmitted orally,’ he insisted.

‘But you would catch them anyway because we are having sex,’ I rationalised with him.

‘Not if you use condoms. When you lick your contact lenses before you put them in your eye you might as well stick them up your arse and then put them in.’

It was apparent that this conversation had been brewing for some time. I acquiesced on both issues and it was never a problem again. I still borrow his toothbrush and lick my contact lenses but never in front of him, although occasionally he runs his finger over the bristles in the evening and eyes me with suspicion, wondering why they are damp.

‘What were you thinking about underwater?’ I ask him with genuine curiosity.

‘I was calculating how much time we would save in the morning if we put Rice Krispies in bowls the night before. Could be as much as four minutes,’ he says before sinking back under.

But he re-emerges after a few seconds to announce, by way
of apology for his earlier outburst, that he will take Fred to his new nursery. ‘I’d really like to,’ he says. ‘Besides, you might not find the way.’

And I am glad, because although I should feel relief that Fred is starting nursery, and for the first time in eight years I will have time for myself, the day is tinged with a heavy sense of loss, and I know that I might cry.

And so it is that I find myself, half an hour later, meandering along the pavement with my hand on Sam’s shoulder, in what I hope is a motherly fashion, on our way to school. ‘Are we late?’ he asks, already knowing the answer because just at the point when we were about to walk out the door, Joe scurried past the kitchen table, and knocked a carton of milk all over his school uniform and my jeans, causing a critical ten-minute delay in proceedings. Despite the best-laid plans, packed lunches prepared the night before, uniform stacked neatly on chairs, shoes lined up in pairs by the front door, breakfast already on the table, toothbrushes sitting beside the kitchen sink, you cannot mitigate against unforeseeable disasters. Getting to school on time is as finely tuned as air-traffic control at Heathrow: any slight change in plan can throw the whole system into chaos.

‘Nothing disastrous,’ I say. It is utterly baffling to me that I used to be able to put together the lead package on
Newsnight
in less than an hour but am so singularly unable to meet the challenge of getting my children ready for school every morning.

It seems unbelievable that I could persuade cabinet ministers to come to the studio late at night to be grilled by Jeremy Paxman, but cannot convince my toddler to keep on his clothes.

‘Is God bigger than a pencil?’ asks Joe, who worries far too much for a five-year-old. ‘If he isn’t, could he be eaten by a dog?’

‘Not the kind of dogs that wander these streets,’ I tell him reassuringly. ‘They are too polite.’

And it is true. We are roaming through upper-tax-bracket territory in north-west London. There are no pasty-faced chisel-headed boys walking pit bulls here. No William Hill. No turkey twizzlers. No teenage pregnancies. We are in the heart of dinner-party land.

It is the first day of term and already standards have slipped. As they walk along the pavement the children are supplementing bits of toast with fistfuls of cereal from a couple of those variety packs.

My vision is reduced by myopia to the most impressionistic strokes, and I recall a moment two weeks ago on a beach in Norfolk, when I stood before the North Sea with a woolly hat pulled down over my eyebrows and a scarf wrapped around my neck just below my eyes. An easterly wind, uncharacteristic for the time of year, blew into my face, making my eyes water. I had to keep blinking to stop the view from blurring. It was like looking through a prism. No sooner had I focussed on a seagull or a particularly lovely stone than the scene fractured into a spectrum of different shapes and colours. It struck me then that this was exactly how I felt about myself. Somehow over the years I had atomised. Now, faced with the prospect of my youngest child starting nursery three mornings a week, it is time to rebuild myself, but I can no longer remember how all the pieces fit together. There is Tom, the children, my family, friends, school, all these different elements but no coherent whole. No thread connecting everything together. Somewhere
in the domestic maelstrom I have lost myself. I can see where I came from, but I’m uncertain where I am going. I try to cling on to the bigger picture but can no longer remember what it is meant to be. I gave up the job I loved as a television news producer eight years ago, when I discovered that thirteen-hour days and motherhood were an unstable partnership. Whoever suggested that working full time and having children equated to having it all wasn’t very good at maths. There was always something in deficit. Including our bank balance, because there wasn’t much change from what we paid the nanny. And besides, I missed Sam too much.

What I should do in the here and now, with the playground looming in the distance, is think up a few stock replies to those friendly inanities that mark the beginning of the new school year. Something sketchy, because most people aren’t really interested in the detail. ‘The summer was hard graft, culminating in a disastrous holiday on a Norfolk campsite, because we are short of cash, during which I slid into my current introspective mood, reappraising key areas of my life, including – in no particular order, because my husband is right, I can’t prioritise – my decision to give up work after we had children, the state of my marriage, and our lack of money,’ I imagine saying, miming the words and using my right hand to illustrate my depth of feeling. ‘Oh, and did I mention that my husband wants us to rent out our house and move in with my mother-in-law for a year until our financial situation is more secure?’ The holiday was a watershed, we both knew that. But its repercussions were less immediately obvious.

‘Mum, Mum, can you hear me?’ demands Sam.

‘Sorry, just dreaming,’ I tell him, and he asks me if he is like a guide dog.

‘Something like that,’ I say, squinting down the road.

I spot the blurry outline of one of the fathers from school walking down the road towards us. He is talking on his mobile phone and running his fingers through his thick dark hair in a gesture familiar to me from the previous school year. It’s Sexy Domesticated Dad, with his disarming opinions about what constitutes a nutritional lunch box and a penchant for mothers’ coffee mornings. But it’s not those characteristics which fix him in my mind. It is the way he looks and the way he moves. Something much more primeval. In fact, the less he says, the greater his appeal.

Even from a distance I can recognise his shape. In that strange juxtaposition of random thoughts, it suddenly occurs to me that in appearing at this moment, he has inadvertently become part of the bigger picture I was just thinking about. I curse my hastily thrown together second choice of outfit: tartan pyjama bottoms under a long, grungy coat in what I’d hoped would pass for casual chic in underwear-as-outerwear fashion. But it’s too late to hide in the hedge with my pint-sized sons, so I surreptitiously check for yesterday’s unremoved eye make-up in the wing mirror of a stationary 4 × 4.

I jump as the automatic window slides down and someone looks over the passenger seat to ask what I am doing. ‘My God, you look like a panda,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, my sartorial nemesis. She opens her glove compartment to reveal spa-like contents including a half-bottle of Moët, Jo Malone candle, and eye make-up remover pads.

‘How do you do this?’ I ask her, wiping my eyes gratefully. ‘Do you have systems?’ She looks puzzled. ‘No, just staff,’ she says.

‘Good summer?’ I ask her.

‘Wonderful, Tuscany, Cornwall. How about you?’

‘Great,’ I reply, but she is already glancing down the road and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel.

‘Must go or I’ll be late for my astanga class. By the way, are you wearing tartan? How directional.’

Sexy Domesticated Dad ambles down the street towards me. I can see him waving one arm in the air and have no choice but to speak to him. Then I notice the other arm is in plaster. Oh happy fate, an obvious subject for conversation.

‘You’ve broken your arm,’ I say, a little too enthusiastically.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I fell off a ladder at a friend’s house in Croatia.’

He looks at me expectantly. Then he smiles and I hear myself say in an unnaturally slow voice, ‘That must be really . . . relaxing.’ Except I say it in a slow throaty way that makes me sound like Mariella Frostrup.

His smile fades slightly. This doesn’t conform to the predictable pattern of social niceties among parents that he was expecting.

‘What could possibly be relaxing about breaking your arm? Especially in Croatia.’

Sam looks at me, equally perplexed. ‘He’s right, mum.’

‘Actually, Lucy, it’s really . . . painful.’ Sexy Domesticated Dad is mimicking my intonation. ‘And I don’t think that my wife would agree that it’s relaxing. I’m not much use at the moment. Can’t get any work done, it hurts too much to type.’ He smiles. I suddenly think about the chance encounters of premarital existence and their infinite possibilities, and images of a previous life gatecrash my thoughts. Striped knee-high socks with individual toes, Sony Walkmans, winkle-pickers. I
remember buying a copy of an album by The Cure in Bristol from a boy who wore really tight black drainpipe jeans and a mohair jumper and smelt of patchouli oil. I can even remember the words of most of those songs. I remember a flight to Berlin when a man asked me if I wanted to go back to his hotel with him and I agreed and then his wife turned round from the seat in front and smiled. I remember being in love with someone at university who never unpacked his bag and had three pairs of identical Levi’s jeans and three white shirts, which he rotated each day. Tom would have approved of him. Why have these memories stayed with me while others are lost for ever? If this is what I remember now, will that be what I remember in twenty years’ time?

Mention of Sexy Domesticated Dad’s powerhouse wife brings me up short, because I have never considered him in the plural, and I arrange my features into friendly but businesslike mode. ‘How is she, did she manage to unwind?’

‘She’s never very good at doing that, she’s got too much energy. Look, do you want to grab a coffee after you’ve dropped off the kids?’

‘Great,’ I say, trying to appear composed in the face of this unexpected incursion into my daydreams. Then I notice him looking suspiciously at my feet.

‘Are you wearing tartan pyjamas under that coat?’ he asks. ‘Maybe we should do coffee another time.’

‘Coming events cast their shadows before’

DESPITE THE MIXED
messages and tiny humiliations of that encounter it causes some geological shift inside me. Plates stirring after a long dormant spell. How else can I account for the renewed feelings of excitement that I experience over subsequent days? This is how natural disasters happen, I think. A series of imperceptible movements at the core, culminating in a catastrophe way down the line. I feel the way I do when I smoke a cadged cigarette while the children aren’t looking, reconnecting momentarily with feelings of liberation associated with a different period in my life, when pleasure was there for the taking.