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CHAPTER THREE

How to make gloop

What you’ll need:

500g cornflour

Water

Food colouring

In a decent-sized mixing bowl, mix your cornflour and water together in a ratio of one part water to two parts cornflour. When it’s reached the desired consistency, add your choice of food colouring. Perfect for adding splashes of colour to an otherwise perfect-condition white T-shirt. Never mind, though. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to keep up appearances. Worn-in is the new black, right?

The next morning, Thomas woke as the first birds started singing. He slumped out of his bed and stomped down the hallway, dragging his duvet behind him. I pretended to be asleep, complete with a faux snore for effect, as he pushed my bedroom door open. He clambered under the duvet, warm from his bed, and started driving a toy truck up the side of my face.

‘Wake up, Mumma!’ he shouted and giggled when I started. ‘Are you stuck? Tow truck pull you out.’

‘Don’t you want to watch something on the iPad for a little while before we get up?’ I reached for it and waved it desperately. It had taken me hours to fall asleep, battling mental glamour shots of Stephen and Alexa interspersed with little short films of my weakest parenting and marriage moments.

He shook his head and grabbed my hand, pulling me out from under the covers, towards the door. I reached for my bathrobe and tried to arrange it around my bump. The tie would not quite reach so I held it shut with one hand while he wrenched me along with the other. We stumbled out of my bedroom into the living room, where the first weak rays of sunlight were trying to push their way through the crack in the curtains. A steady rhythm of rain pelted the windows. I leant against the wall, willing my still-sleepy brain to catch up.

‘What do you want for breakfast, honey?’

I could probably stretch my culinary skills to produce some toast and Marmite, and there might be a few crumbs of cereal left. I might even be able to find a banana somewhere in the back of the cupboard. I had not been to the supermarket in days.

‘Crackers.’ Thomas was firm.

Thomas would live on crackers if he could. But not any kind of crackers – it had to be one brand, specific to one supermarket that always seemed to stock too few of the things. Sometimes I had to check back with them two or three days in a row before they had a packet on the shelves.

‘You’ll have something on the crackers, though, right? Peanut butter?’

I tried to keep my voice light. Please say yes, I willed him. I needed to at least pretend his breakfast had contained more than just packaged, refined carbohydrates.

‘Just crackers,’ he said solemnly. ‘I sit here and eat them.’

He strolled through to the dining room and pulled himself on to a chair at the table. He looked at me expectantly. I was too tired to try harder. Maybe serving nutritious breakfasts was the domain of people who were not suddenly single-parenting.

‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’ He was fidgeting in his seat.

‘No thank you,’ he said primly, a cracker in each hand.

He wriggled again.

‘Are you sure?’

His eyes widened in alarm. ‘Toilet!’ He jumped from his seat and rushed for the door. There was a banging as he tried to get his pyjamas off and climb on to his step stool at the same time.

He re-emerged a few minutes later, his pants discarded. I shrugged it off. He’d be getting dressed before long, anyway. While he ate his parent-incriminating breakfast, I packed his lunchbox for nursery with an array of relatively healthy snacks – carrot sticks, hummus, a couple of rice crackers, some fruit. I regarded it for a minute. I had better add a serving of yoghurt and a couple of plain biscuits so I could be sure that he would at least eat something during the day.

Crackers demolished, Thomas bumbled off to my bedroom, dragging his fingers along the walls as he went.

‘Where are you off to?’ It was a half-hearted inquiry and I did not wait for a response. He soon started clattering and banging, pulling things down from the bedside table. I tried not to think about it – I had moved everything ‘dangerous’ to a shelf in my wardrobe that even I needed a step stool to reach. Somehow, I needed to get his bag packed, to find clothes for him and something clean and big enough for me to wear. Then I needed to put the dishwasher on, all before we had to leave the house at 8.30.

I figured the worst that could happen would be that he wasted some of my Chanel hand cream – bought for me as a gift and which I was using so sparingly that it was into its second year. On a scale of The Worst Things To Happen, seeing that disappear would be pretty bad – old me might even have cried – but I could sacrifice it in the interests of making it out of the door.

He appeared in the kitchen in front of me. It took me a second to realise what he had in his hand: a vibrator from my underwear drawer, the type that has a head that is attached to the main body of the contraption with a long wire. The batteries had long since gone flat.

‘A skipping rope!’ he shouted. ‘I found a skipping rope in your drawer!’

My horror must have been apparent because he looked at me sideways and put it behind his back, scowling fiercely at my lunge to wrench it from his grasp. ‘Mine! I show Kaskia!’

I could just imagine it. His teachers, one of whom was ‘Kaskia’, who, in fact, was a tiny German woman called Saskia, already seemed to think I was some sort of deviant because I occasionally arrived late to pick him up, usually in my faded activewear, and almost always forgot about their themed ‘wacky days’ – when he was meant to dress up as a superhero or paint his hair green. They would have a field day if he turned up with sex toys in his schoolbag.

I would have to distract him with something else if I was to have a hope of getting it from him. ‘I’ll swap you an M&M for your skipping rope,’ I ventured, pushing half-empty boxes of crackers and muesli bars around in the cupboard as I tried to find them.

‘Two,’ he said, his eyes narrowing.

‘Fine, two,’ I agreed. ‘If you put your raincoat on.’ The deal was done.

The goodbye as I dropped him off at nursery was not the drawn-out film scene farewell that it sometimes was, where he would sit on me and hold my hair, then lean through the fence as I drove away, waving at me as if he was a castaway on an island. This time, his class was engrossed in what looked like a big bowl of blue gloop. They were in it up to their armpits, flicking handfuls at each other. All fifteen of them were filthy.

Thomas pushed through to the middle of the group and plunged in up to his armpits. One of the teachers met my gaze as I quickly tallied up whether we had enough size three clothes to justify throwing this set out, rather than bothering to wash it. Their ‘washable’ paints had taken me at least a week and half a bottle of bleach to budge last time, and even then the shirts had looked like they’d been washed with some vibrant socks. ‘It’s a valuable learning experience. Great sensory exploration,’ she shouted over their heads.

I ignored her and blew a kiss at Thomas, noticing with a jolt how the curve of his face had become that of a little boy, not the round-cheeked profile of a baby. He jostled with his best friend, Nixon. ‘I’ll be back to pick you up after lunch.’ He did not acknowledge me. Instead, he smeared some gloop across the front of his shirt and threw some at Nixon.

The rain had stopped when I returned to my car but the sunshine was not yet sure of itself. I clambered in. Between the baby seat behind me and the steering wheel in front, there was little room left for my expanding bulk. I slammed my hand on the button to turn the car on. The fuel light glared at me. I’d usually have tried to swap cars with Stephen just at the moment when it needed to be filled. But there was a service station on the way home, so there was no excuse.

Even though I’d had this car more than three years, I always drove up to the pumps on the wrong side. The hose reached across the top – just – but left a dingy mark on the white paintwork.

‘Let me help you.’ A woman appeared beside me. With a deft wriggle, she moved the nozzle around so it no longer threatened to snap out and spurt across the forecourt. ‘Go inside, I’ll finish up here.’ She gave me the sort of half-smile I assume most people saved for children and the very elderly.

Behind the counter, another woman was shuffling packs of gum into a display unit. She looked up as I approached and beamed. ‘You don’t have long to go.’

I felt my shoulders sag. I did not have the energy for another of these conversations. The only worse conversation starter was something about how enormous I was. Or a request to touch the bump always asked in the way a small child might approach a petting farm animal.

‘A few weeks.’ I pointedly turned my attention to the display of protein bars and chocolate. It was almost time for second breakfast, a pregnant person’s most important meal of the day.

‘Is this your first?’

I passed her my card and a couple of chocolate bars. ‘No, I have a son. He’s two.’

‘Do you know what you’re having?’

I had promised myself that the next time I had this question, I would reply that I was having a baby. Or perhaps hoping for a small rabbit or chicken. But at that moment, it felt a bit like I’d be telling her that Santa wasn’t real. I sighed. ‘I’m having a girl.’

She half-squealed. ‘You must be so pleased. Daddy’s little girl! Your partner must be over the moon.’

My stomach did a backflip. I backed away, trying to avoid her puzzled gaze as I fumbled my credit card back into my wallet. I could feel tears forcing their way out of the corners of my eyes. ‘Sorry, I have to go.’

When I arrived home, my hands were still shaking, and the blood had left my knuckles from the vehemence with which I had gripped the steering wheel. My feet were on fire, my lower back throbbed and my throat was raspy from crying. I dropped on to the sofa, wincing as I lifted my legs on to the ottoman. I had lost all definition in my ankles, and the bones in my feet were a mere memory.

As I leant back, the wedding photo in a heavy frame on the opposite wall seemed to glint in the sunlight. I had never really liked it – my pre-wedding diet had been overzealous, and my dress ended up a little too big. Every couple of minutes, I had had to hitch it up to cover my bra. My smile was glossy white but forced. It was probably the twenty-fifth photo that had been taken in a row while we stood under a sagging tree branch. Although everyone exclaimed over how happy we looked, with Stephen guffawing at someone over the photographer’s shoulder, I could see in my own face how much I’d worried about the table settings, the accommodation, making sure my parents were not stuck in awkward conversation with Stephen’s boorish newly single uncle and that Amy was not too far into the champagne before she gave her speech.

The photo was only on the wall because I felt it was what we should do when we finally had our – very expensive – delivery from the photographer. Suddenly, I found I could not look at it a moment longer. In two steps, I was across the room and ripping it from the hook. Without thinking, I turned on my heel and strode out to my car. I thrust the chunky frame into the boot. Looking at it lying among the detritus of shopping receipts, some empty lunchboxes and an old picnic blanket, felt apt. I was determined not to stop there.

There were holiday snaps in matching frames on our bedroom wall. A photo of Stephen and his parents, with his niece, was propped on the side table in the spare room. They could all come down too. It was not like he was around to notice.

I worked my way through the house, room by room, pulling photos from their hooks, thrusting the smaller ones into rubbish bags. Only Thomas’s baby photos and one of my family were left in place.

As I walked out after stripping our bedroom, I noticed the door on Stephen’s side of the wardrobe had been left ajar. As usual, his clothes were spilling out, jammed on to hangers and in piles on the wardrobe floor. He would never throw anything out. I grabbed handfuls of material and stuffed them into the top of the big black plastic bags of photos.

Half an hour later, I was driving into the rubbish collection centre in the middle of town, the back of my car laden with the big black rubbish bags, huge photos in frames, T-shirts, hoodies and business shirts. The frames clinked together as I rounded each corner and crashed into the back of the back seat when I stepped on the brake.

The woman who staffed the entrance looked at me quizzically as I drove up. ‘Just a carload of rubbish.’ I gave her my cheeriest smile. My face was probably still streaked with make-up, and my eyes were undoubtedly bright red. She waved me on.

At the edge of the rubbish pit, I stood next to an elderly man who was dropping his own rubbish bags in, watching them flop one on top of each other. The contents of Stephen’s wardrobe landed with a satisfying thump. I hurled the photos one by one, listening to the glass smash on the concrete floor below.

There went our wedding photo. Crash. The time we had lunch on the street in Barcelona. Smash. The evening we spent on the beach in Waikiki after Stephen ‘asked’ me to marry him. The glass in that frame blew apart into a thousand little pieces.

Thomas was swinging on the gate when I arrived to pick him up from nursery, next to a girl in a T-shirt at least two sizes too big for her. They were both filthy from the knees down, with tracks of sand in their hair.

‘Mummy! My mummy!’ he shouted as I hauled myself out of the car.

I pulled his bag out of the cubbyhole by the door, and a plastic bag full of wet, blue clothes came somersaulting down with it. As I had expected, almost everything in his lunchbox was untouched, except for the yoghurt and cookies, which were gone.

He allowed himself to be clipped into the car seat, wriggling as my midsection got in the way while I fastened the buckles. When he was secure, I paused, jangling my keys in my hands. I desperately did not want to go back home – and work could wait. ‘Shall we go to the library?’

‘Yes!’

There was something about the fish tanks, the long staircases and my insistence on quiet that appealed enormously to Thomas when we went to the library. We only had to be nearby, and he started off in the direction of the big grey and glass building. Some of the librarians knew him by name, even though I had been avoiding them and using the self-checkout system for years.

When we arrived, the front sliding doors were emblazoned with posters. Pirate treasure hunt day, dress as your favourite book character … When did libraries become so busy? Then I realised. It was the school holidays. Parents who had forgotten about the library all term suddenly became avid library users, wanting to drop their kids off for a couple of hours, if only to use the free Wi-Fi.

We wandered in. The noise from the kids’ area filtered through, past the reference books, the magazines and the shelves of online orders waiting to be picked up.

‘Can we go and look?’ Thomas pointed at the children’s section and smiled in what I knew he thought was his sweetest way. In truth, it looked as if the dentist had just asked him to show him his gums.

It was some sort of ‘music of the world’ class, led by the same guy who did his best to wrangle a range of kids’ music sessions through the week.

I had started going to one because, in the haze of terrified-new-motherhood, I had been convinced that if I did not have a full week of classes set up for my son by the time he was six months old, I would stifle his mental development. I pictured a thirty-year-old Thomas pipped at the post for the Nobel Prize, demanding to know why I had skimped on baby yoga.

At the music class, parents dutifully, self-consciously, sang the songs and did all the actions – some of the regulars were quite enthusiastic while reluctant stand-ins barely moved their lips.

The teacher was one of the librarians, and he was the one reason I persisted past the initial visit. He was about forty, with dishevelled short, dark hair that was starting to acquire a smattering of grey at the temples and rimless rectangular glasses that slipped down his nose when he launched into a song with particular gusto.

At the beginning of the class, I had not thought much of him. But the longer I watched, the more impressive he became. It’s so easy to seem forced and condescending when you try to make kids laugh, but he had perfectly mastered the magical vocabulary of weird sounds and silly songs that would always get a giggle – even from the adults. He was perennially happy, but not in that fake way that lots of people deploy around kids, and his smile seemed to light up every bit of his face. I would bet the loose change in the bottom of my handbag that he’d never ‘developed feelings’ for someone while his wife was pregnant.

He’d won my devotion completely one morning when Thomas decided he did not want to be there. Rather than being awed by the chirpy music and enchanted by the books, he balled up his little baby fists, threw back his head and started to wail. And wail.

The teacher had stopped, and I’d thought he was going to suggest we leave.

‘We’re having a great time trying out these instruments,’ he’d told the children, ‘but the best noises are the ones that really convey an emotion.’ He’d then pointed at Thomas. ‘Can we all try to make the funniest noise you can think of to help this guy feel a little bit better?’

The older toddlers had responded with raspberries and popping sounds, and it wasn’t long before Thomas was chortling his delicious baby giggle.

This time, the teacher was channelling Elmo for an assembled group of bored preschool-aged kids and a smattering of parents who were trying not to be spotted checking their phones. He brandished a collection of what looked like traditional Mexican musical instruments – bashing out a rhythm on one, waving another in the air. Thomas was transfixed. I tried to guide him to a seat on one of the flashing stairs.

We squeezed into a corner, next to a woman who seemed to be wrangling triplets – three little girls of about four, dressed almost identically, with blue bows in their brilliant blonde hair. She was trying to get them to pay attention but they were more interested in poking each other’s eyes and whacking each other with books when she wasn’t looking. Thomas was clapping to the music and nodding his head out of time. Such is the toddler way. I tried to maintain my zen and pull my best supportive smile – inwardly pleading for the noise to end.

I exhaled heavily as I leant against the glass wall, hoping my top was long enough to meet my leggings at the back. It was unlikely the rest of the library patrons wanted a detailed view of my underwear making a break for freedom over the top of my pants.

I was at peak pregnancy. My legs had ballooned with fluid, as they always did by late morning, and most of my shoes no longer fit. Even my maternity leggings were struggling to cover my bump and the singlets I had bought – that claimed to be perfect for pregnancy and breastfeeding – looked set to be able to cope with neither. I would have taken my wedding rings off, but my fingers had swelled too much. My breasts had leaked through two sets of breast pads, and I already had that distinctive old dishcloth air about me, which surrounds lactating mothers. I know people say pregnancy is beautiful, and I still held out hope that I would turn into some kind of Earth Goddess soon. But, at thirty-eight weeks, I was still waiting.

Thomas stood up and started to edge down the stairs, shaking his arms to the beat as he went.

I pocketed the phone on which I had been tapping out a text telling Stephen exactly what I thought of him. I reached down to put my arm around Thomas to try to draw him back up close to me. I could feel his body zinging with energy. Soon he had ducked out of my grasp and was edging still further forward towards the Very Attractive Man. I tried to shuffle along behind the seated parents to get closer to him, but while the audience seemed happy to let a two-year-old through, they were not so keen on having his barrel-like mother follow.

‘Excuse me,’ I whispered as I stepped on one woman’s handbag. ‘Sorry.’ I ducked my head as a man grabbed his child out of my path.

But soon Thomas was a good couple of rows ahead of me, and still progressing. ‘Thomas!’ I hissed. ‘Come back here, darling.’ Some of the mothers in front of me turned and glared. I rolled my eyes apologetically. Thomas kept working his way forward. Soon, he was in the front row.

The teacher smiled at him as he stamped and clapped, getting closer and closer. Then Thomas’s arms were in the air, trying to grab the instrument in the teacher’s right hand. I attempted to push my way down the side of the crowd to where the man was trying to continue his show, grinning as he stretched to hold his instruments higher and higher out of Thomas’s reach. But Thomas wouldn’t be dissuaded.

The stares of the other parents were boring into the back of my head. I stretched over the row of children right at the front and grabbed Thomas, throwing him over my shoulder in a movement that sent a wrench of pain across my stomach. He shrieked. One of the girls who sat in a perfect cross-legged position in the front row covered her ears and scowled. ‘We are going home,’ I muttered.

‘Don’t feel you have to go.’ The man taking the class had finished his song. ‘Stay, if you’d like to. It’s nice to see someone getting into my warbling.’

I turned, grimacing. ‘He’s a little disruptive.’

‘He’s fine, aren’t you, little man? A bit of enthusiasm is what we like to see. Do you think you could give me a hand? I don’t want you to take my instruments, but I’m sure I can find you some of your own.’

He shuffled over and reached for another stool, pulling it beside him. A woman handed him another set of maracas. Thomas was spellbound. ‘I help.’ He wriggled up. I reached for my phone to snap a picture as he joined in, at the top of his lungs, with a rendition of ‘Wheels on the Bus’. I must have looked puzzled because the librarian caught my eye and grinned. ‘Not exotic, sorry. Finished the song sheet a bit too early.’

I became aware of a woman standing at my elbow, watching them. ‘God, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he?’

‘Thanks, I think he’s pretty lovely.’ I turned to look at her. Her gaze was fixed on Thomas and the teacher. Thomas’s cheeks were flushed from the exertion of bashing along, wildly off-beat. The librarian was monitoring his movements and looked to be biting back a laugh.

‘Oh no,’ she put her hand on my arm. ‘Not him, he’s cute, I mean Luke. I never miss his class.’

It was almost time for dinner by the time we made it home, complete with seven new library books inside the weekender bag I suddenly found I needed to use every day. My breath caught in my throat as we rounded the corner before our house and I saw Stephen’s truck parked outside. What was he doing? Only a couple of days ago he would not pick up the phone. Now he had decided to turn up?

I kept my foot steady on the accelerator. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I was rushing to see him. As we came to a stop, Thomas whooped. ‘Daddy’s home!’ he shouted and started wiggling. I manoeuvred to the edge of the car seat and inched myself out, one hand on each side of the doorframe, in case Stephen was watching. Of all the things that become difficult when you are very pregnant, getting in and out of a car is the most noticeable.

Stephen appeared from around the side of the house, plodding towards us. He would not meet my eye but jiggled on the spot, his hands in his pockets, as I helped Thomas out of the car. Thomas ran for his leg and twisted himself around his father. Stephen reached down and ruffled his hair. Waffle snuffled around our feet.

‘Sweetheart, why don’t you grab your bike and show us how fast you can ride around on the grass?’ I nudged Thomas in the direction of his new toy.

He climbed on, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Watch me, watch me, Daddy!’

Stephen and I followed him, so we were standing side by side under the porch that ran along the front of the house. A few scraggly pansies were fading in the flowerbed opposite. We never had discovered how the irrigation system worked. Not something we were ever likely to solve now. Stephen cleared his throat and swallowed. His voice was strangled with the effort of not attracting Thomas’s attention. ‘Where are my clothes?’

I shrugged. ‘I didn’t think you were coming back.’

He grabbed my arm. ‘That’s ridiculous. I need my stuff. What have you done with it?’

‘Chucked it. You’ve got money. Get her to buy you some more. Bet she’s got better taste than I have, anyway.’

He grimaced. His hand was in his pocket – I knew he would be squeezing the stress ball on his key ring. I had bought it as a gift for him when he first started his business and was struggling to stay calm in difficult conversations with suppliers. We’d run through it together: ‘I’ll pay you (squeeze) on the twentieth (squeeze), but I need a line of credit (squeeze) until then.’

He was grinding his teeth. He looked away from me, at the overgrown lemon tree he had been promising to prune. He was off the hook there, at least. ‘I want to see Thomas. Alexa says I have a right …’

I spluttered. ‘You want to talk about rights?’

A bird took flight from the tree in surprise. ‘I think I have a right not to have a husband cheat on me when I’m about to have a baby.’

Stephen stepped back as if my anger shocked him. ‘I’m just asking if we can arrange for me to have Thomas, maybe a Saturday afternoon.’

Thomas was still zipping happily around the lawn. For the first time, I could understand the urge to spit with disgust.

‘Is that enough for you, is it? Take his dad away but give him just enough to let him know what he’s missing out on. Every Saturday afternoon to show off your awesome parenting to the world. Get some good photos for your Facebook feed.’

‘No one is taking away his dad.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s not going to be the same, is it? You’re not going to be around when he wakes up in the morning and wants someone to rest his head on when he watches cartoons. You’re not going to race around with him on his bike after work. You’ll have your Saturday, or whatever you decide you can fit into your new life, and the rest of the time who cares about us?’

He whirled around, and the fury in his face was shocking. His cold, angry eyes and clenched jaw could have belonged to a stranger. ‘You can feel sorry for yourself,’ he hissed, darting a look at Thomas. ‘You keep making me the bad guy if that makes you feel better. You chuck out all my clothes if you don’t want to look at them anymore. But don’t pretend that this is all my fault.’

Thomas was scooting away down the far end of the lawn.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Okay, Alexa and I started seeing each other. I’m sorry, all right? That was a crappy move.’ Stephen crossed his arms. ‘But you’re not perfect, are you?’

I looked at him, open-mouthed, as he blustered on. Not perfect? Probably not – but who could blame me?

He was gesticulating at me in much the same way Thomas did when he was mid-tantrum. I watched him. Was this what I wanted to hold on to? Maybe he was actually doing me a favour.

‘You just want someone around to help pay the bills.’ Stephen was still talking. ‘We never spent any time together. And it was all just going to get worse once this one comes along. I sometimes wonder if you can even remember my name.’

I had to suppress a snort of laughter. He had no idea what it was like for me. Sometimes I could barely remember my own name.

I had assumed that Stephen would pick up more of the parenting as Thomas got older but it had not happened. I had learnt how to respond to a work message on my phone, sliding around the corner of the door so Thomas wouldn’t know I wasn’t paying full attention to his bath-time display. But Stephen would arrive home from work and if we didn’t give him ten minutes alone on the couch with his beer before Thomas requested that he play, he’d look aggrieved. While I worried about finishing meetings and interviews in time to pick Thomas up from nursery, Stephen would casually inform me the night before a trip that he was going away and wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d be.

He was still speaking. ‘What have you got planned for when the baby arrives?’

Did he mean the actual birth? He had rolled his eyes about every antenatal appointment I’d asked him to come to. I could not see why he would suddenly be taking an interest in my birth plan.

‘I still want to be there.’ He folded his arms obstinately.

‘Why would you want to do that? Why would you think I’d let you do that?’ The feeling that I was in an alternate reality was growing stronger with each breath I took. Everything felt so unreal.

‘I’m this child’s father.’

‘Yeah but I’m the one who’s going to be naked, in pain – what makes you even remotely think I want someone there who doesn’t even want me around anymore?’

Giving birth to Thomas had been the time of my life when I had felt the most exposed. There are not many instances where you basically perform every bodily function imaginable on a table in front of a room full of people.

The idea of having this man who was becoming more like a stranger every second watch me go through that, and then go home to someone else, made my skin crawl. Thomas was scooting back towards us on his bike, his eyes wide. I gave Stephen the most withering, dismissive glare I could muster. ‘We will talk about this later.’