Buch lesen: «Mummy Needs a Break», Seite 4

I reached out for Thomas and lifted him off the saddle. Avoiding Stephen’s eyes, I pushed past and strode around the side of the house to the front door. His footsteps crunched behind me, but as soon as we were across the threshold, I shut the door and leant against it. It was not long before I heard him whistle for Waffle. His truck door slammed and he drove away.

CHAPTER FOUR

How to make a parking garage for toy cars

What you’ll need:

A box

Some tubes (paper towel rolls will do)

Cardboard

Sand down your box to get rid of any rough edges. Cut the tubes until they are just long enough to reach from the back of the box to the front. Glue your tubes on top of each other in rows, and stick the sheet of cardboard on to the back of them so that the cars do not fall out. Now your only challenge is getting your kids to store their cars in the garage and not on the floor where you will trip on them when you are too pregnant to get back up again, leaving you stranded like an upended cockroach on the floor. If you’re suddenly single-handedly parenting, you might consider setting up a playpen in the middle of the living room and sitting inside it. The kids can then create havoc all around your peaceful island of serenity.

It was some time after 1 a.m. when I opened my eyes and saw a shadow standing next to the bed. I squinted. The shadow was short, wearing pyjamas and had hair half-flattened from sleep. ‘Thomas?’

He put his hand on the side of my face. His skin was clammy. I shuffled across the bed. ‘You can hop in with me, honey. Can’t you sleep?’

He put his arms around my neck and squirmed in, searching for the cool spot on my pillow to lay his head. The duvet was almost over his nose when he stopped twisting. ‘Did something wake you?’

He rested his head on the top of my arm. ‘Noise.’

I kissed his forehead. ‘It’s probably just the wind in the trees. Try to go back to sleep – it’s still really early.’

I closed my eyes and focused on my own long, slow breaths. It wasn’t long before I felt him become heavier as he succumbed, my arm pinned awkwardly under his head and his body pressed up against mine. I watched his little chest rise and fall and his eyelids flutter with dreams, in the light of Stephen’s old clock radio. At some point, as the dark gave way to the insipid grey of the first shoots of dawn, I must have fallen asleep for real because he was soon shaking me awake.

‘Mummy,’ he hissed. ‘Daytime.’

I reluctantly opened my eyes and felt for his pyjamas. ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’

He shook his head.

‘I’ll give you a treat if you do …’

He regarded me for a minute. ‘Okay.’

We tumbled out of bed and into the en-suite bathroom. It was the one room of the house that Stephen hadn’t yet finished renovating – the bath and shower had been replaced but the toilet was still dingy avocado, and the new plasterboard was patiently waiting for its paint. I helped Thomas on to the toilet where he perched, looking at me expectantly. ‘All finished,’ he proclaimed a second later, leaping off in mid-stream.

‘Good work, honey.’ I hastily dabbed at the mess on the tiles as he took off out of the room, back towards the kitchen, where he would wait for me to turn on the Saturday morning cartoons while I made our breakfast.

I sat, hands cradling my coffee, as he spooned porridge into his mouth, eyes agog as a cartoon Peppa Pig schooled him in several different ways to be impertinent to your parents. Whoever wrote the series must have had issues similar to mine, I thought as I loaded the dishwasher. You couldn’t trust Daddy Pig with anything.

A bicycle bell trilled in the driveway. I grimaced. There was only one person I knew who would be riding a bike around at that time of the morning with enough enthusiasm to ring a bell about it – my best friend, Laura. I know all the films tell you that the first thing you should do when you’ve been wronged by a man is down a couple of pink cocktails and bitch about him with your girlfriends before pashing an absurdly attractive stranger. But I was still firmly in If-I’m-not-talking-about-it,-it’s-not-really-happening mode.

She knocked but didn’t wait for us to open the door, sliding her own key into the lock and pushing the door open. ‘Thomas, darling?’

‘Auntie Laura.’ He let out a whoop and barrelled across the floor to her. She stooped to kiss his cheek. A pixie-like little girl appeared from behind her long, Lycra-clad legs, fumbling with the clip on her own purple bike helmet.

‘Lila wanted to come over to play.’ Laura nudged her in Thomas’s direction. ‘Why don’t you show her the blocks you were telling me about the other day?’

Laura had a bag of pastries over one arm and a steely look in her eye as she advanced towards me. I discarded my first impulse to convince her that everything was normal. She had once told me that I had distinctive ‘tells’ when I was trying to pretend nothing was wrong. It was when I didn’t want to admit to her I hadn’t been able to get Thomas to sleep more than two hours in a row for six months, while the rest of our antenatal group seemed to be operating on a perfect schedule. One of those giveaway signs was the jiggling from foot to foot that I knew I’d started as soon as she spotted me.

‘I’ve brought you breakfast. I didn’t ring, because I know you’d tell me not to come. You’re not rude enough to tell me to leave now I’m here.’

She was right. I motioned for her to follow me into the living room, where the kids quickly tipped the contents of Thomas’s toy box out across the floor. Both of us pretended that we could not see a pile of Thomas’s energetic artworks that had fallen across the floor and a teetering stack of washing waiting to be folded in the corner of the room.

‘I don’t know what’s happened.’ She sat, back perfectly straight, on the edge of the sofa and stared at me. ‘I saw Stephen at the supermarket last night, and he introduced me to Alexa McKenzie, that designer person …’ She bit her lip. ‘It was all a bit awkward.’

I cast about for something to stall the conversation while I caught up. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Stephen was introducing Alexa to my friends? Already? But he had not outright admitted that Alexa was his girlfriend. I could not decide whether that made me feel better or not. Generally, he went out of his way to avoid talking to Laura at all. He and her husband, Mark, sometimes worked together and, unless she turned up with him, he usually found an excuse to do something in another part of the house whenever she came to visit me.

I had to avoid her gaze. ‘Yep, for some reason, he’s decided he’d rather be with a young, fit interior designer than with his heavily pregnant, hormonal wife.’ I tried to smile. I wanted to be self-deprecating, but I just sounded bitter. Which, I might add, I was perfectly within my rights to be.

Laura pulled me towards her and kissed my cheek. ‘I am so sorry. I didn’t want to believe it.’

We sat in silence for a minute, watching the kids roll around on the carpet together. Thomas was pushing a toy car around Lila, who was trying to land a plane on it.

‘What is he thinking?’ Laura spluttered at last. Her words were staccato as she bit back her anger to avoid sparking the kids’ attention. ‘You’re about to have this baby and he’s off ladding about with someone who probably doesn’t even do her own laundry. What a selfish, narcissistic …’

She was talking too quickly, as she extended her arms in my direction. One of her deliberately mismatched earrings scratched the side of my face as she hugged me. ‘It’s so unfair. Being a parent is so … optional for them, isn’t it?’

Laura and I had met at our antenatal classes three years before. Five wide-eyed, unsuspecting new mothers had assembled on plastic chairs in a hospital meeting room, where graphic descriptions of how our pelvises would have to move to allow our kids to get out into the world caused at least one of us to faint. Laura, a nurse who had spent years in the emergency department, just rolled her eyes.

Laura had been trying to fall pregnant for six months when she insisted on being sent for IVF. She was only twenty-eight at the time but managed to get Mark to do a sperm test the day after he had suffered a particularly high fever. It meant he had no swimmers to show for it, and the doctors bumped her to the front of the queue. She was pregnant with Lila after the first round.

Laura impressed me in class with her immaculate wardrobe and always-done make-up, the kind of clothes I would much rather have been rocking as I bumbled around in maternity jeans and oversized shirts. But it was not until Laura and I locked eyes, trying to quell a giggle when an instructor told us she had been qualified at the National Institute of Baby Massage, that we became friends.

‘I’ll cry mascara on your top.’ I pulled back from her. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a mess.’ I twisted a strand of oily hair around my index finger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed it.

‘I do not care about that one bit. What I care about is how hideous this situation is.’ She rested her head against mine. ‘If you want to kill him, I’ll help you.’

I laughed weakly. ‘It’s bloody tempting, I tell you.’

Her skin was cool and smooth. She looked as though she was wearing perfectly matched foundation, although I would have put money on her being bare-faced. I had never noticed before how oversized her wedding ring was on her slim pianist’s fingers. She pushed a pain au chocolat at me that she’d brought with her. ‘What are you going to do?’

I put my face in my hands. ‘Well, I’ve already signed her up to a lot of email newsletters, for a start.’

Laura coughed as she inhaled a crumb of pastry. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Pardon?’

Alexa’s business website listed her email address in full and I’d signed her up to more than 200 mailing lists, to ensure her inbox was packed with advertising and newsletters, at least until she figured out how to unsubscribe from them all. Stephen would be no help – he still struggled to remember his email password.

There are some surprising benefits to my job. I’d written a story a couple of weeks earlier about a private investigator who told me what some of her clients did when they discovered their suspicions about their cheating husbands were correct. Some of it was genius stuff – hiding anchovies in expensive cars, selling pricey one-off designer suits at no reserve on eBay. Since Stephen walked out, I’d returned to a few of their blogs and chat groups. The inbox email idea had belonged to one of them.

‘Wow.’ Laura’s eyes were sparkling as she leant back against the couch. ‘You’re right. That’ll be very annoying.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, it will keep them occupied.’

Lila returned and burrowed between Laura’s legs. Laura reached down and stroked a stray piece of hair back from her daughter’s face.

I smiled at Lila. She was only three months younger than Thomas, but she seemed so slight compared to his sturdy legs and barrel-like torso. She was wearing one of those sparkly baby pink dresses with layers of petticoat tulle that now seemed to be a daily uniform for small girls, whether they’re going to a birthday party, riding a bike with their mothers, or making mud pies. She ducked back under the insufficient hiding place of Laura’s athletic thighs. I suddenly desperately wanted to change the subject.

‘How’s everything going with you?’

Laura pushed the question away. ‘Oh, fine. If the hospital could learn to fit a part-time shift into part-time hours or had enough staff to cover the workload, that would be fantastic. But otherwise, you know, we’re fine.’

We sat in silence, watching Thomas tip over another box, sending a convoy of small trucks zipping across the floor. ‘Good riddance to him,’ Laura murmured at last. ‘I mean, if you’d left him, he would have been a total disaster. But you without him …’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Yeah. I’ll probably survive. I know. I just don’t feel it yet.’

Lila’s head snapped up. She had found some of Thomas’s marker pens on the floor and had drawn on her arms and face. ‘Pretty.’ She smiled at us.

Laura turned back to me. ‘I’m sorry. It’s fine to be angry. Be furious. But can you promise me something?’

I groaned. ‘What?’

‘Can you please call me at least daily? I know you, and now you’re going on leave with no work to think about you’ll just sit around here getting pissed off, and I don’t think that’s going to be helpful for anyone.’

‘Sorry.’ I looked at my hands. ‘I just didn’t want to tell you until …’

‘Yes, I know. You don’t like to talk about these sorts of things until they’re over and you’ve got everything back how you want it. But you can’t get through this one alone. Now …’ She was businesslike. ‘What would you like to do? I know you don’t like a whole day with nothing planned, even when you haven’t got this other stuff going on.’

What did I want to do? I had been so focused on plodding through each minute that I had not allowed myself to think much beyond the most basic necessities of getting the last bits of work done, feeding myself and Thomas, and remembering to shower from time to time. I realised she was still waiting for an answer.

I cast around for something. ‘Shall we go for a little walk? See how far I can waddle along? Some fresh air might be good to clear my head a bit.’

Laura snapped her fingers. ‘We can do that. Come on, children, we’re going on an adventure.’

We returned to the house less than twenty-five minutes later, after Thomas and Lila shrieked at each other in disagreement about which way around the block they wanted to walk. They were horrified when we would not allow them to bring home some bits of old plastic bottles and dog poo they found while conducting a ‘treasure hunt’. I pretended to be exasperated that we were giving up, but I could feel the exertion in my growing varicose veins, and my daughter seemed to have joined in with an intrauterine walk of her own. Amy’s car was in the driveway as we arrived back. Laura glanced at me. ‘We might leave you to it.’

When Amy and Laura had first met, Amy had lectured her – at length – about why she thought all of her customers who claimed to be on a gluten-free diet were insufferable and putting it on to be trendy. ‘Trying to get attention when there’s nothing else interesting about them,’ I think were her words.

Laura, a coeliac with a nursing degree, had hurled a few insults of her own. ‘Uneducated’ and ‘narrow-minded’ were the ones I remembered best. Ever since, Amy had thought it hilarious to joke about what she might have hidden in food that Laura ate at my house.

I kissed Laura on the cheek. ‘Let me go and deal with her. Thanks for visiting.’

Lila gave us a shy wave from the seat Laura had fixed on to her bike for her, just behind her handlebars. ‘Say bye, Thomas,’ I prompted. He returned the wave.

As the bike rounded the edge of the driveway, he dropped to the ground. ‘No! Lila come back. Come back!’ I scooped him up and carried him inside under one arm, his legs still kicking behind me.

Music was blaring from the spare room. Amy emerged, scarves draping and spiky, scuffed stiletto heels sticking out of a half-taped box under her arm. I had not realised that she, too, had a spare key to the house.

‘What are you doing?’ I watched as she returned to her car and pulled out a clothes rack, which she then tried to manoeuvre through the door. ‘What’s going on?’

She stopped and grinned at me. ‘I have a plan.’

I rocked from my heels to the balls of my feet and back again. Heat spread across my lower back. A walk really hadn’t been such a good idea.

‘I’m going to come and live with you.’ Amy dropped a box to the ground. ‘I heard what Mum said to you before you left the other day about staying there. Can you imagine? You’ll be her pet project again before you know it and Dad will want to know what you’re doing every time you’re five minutes late. Torture!’

She patted me on the shoulder as she went to get another bag. ‘You won’t even know I’m here. Promise. I’ll just help you when you need me.’

I followed her out to the car. I could just imagine having her as my permanent house guest. She’d assure me that she would be home to help with dinner at 5.30 p.m., roll in at 7.30 p.m. and wonder why I was upset. No doubt she still sang in the shower at the top of her voice, even in the middle of the night. Dishes would be piled in the sink and skimpy underwear added to my laundry pile. There would never be any mention of rent being paid.

‘It’ll be okay, honestly.’

Her face fell. ‘No?’

‘No. Really. Thanks for the offer, though.’

She bit the rough edge of her index fingernail. ‘The thing is …’

I waited. There was always something.

‘I kind of have to move. We’ve been evicted.’

Amy shared a huge, rundown warehouse apartment with three of her friends. It was barely habitable, with old sash windows that didn’t close properly, floorboards like gappy teeth and holes in some of the walls that had been punched through by a previous tenant. The rent was eye-watering, but she could walk to work, and I suspected she had just been too lazy to get around to moving.

‘Turns out I was paying my share to Laurel but she wasn’t paying the landlord. So I have to get out, anyway. And I can’t get a house anywhere else at the moment …’

I tried to push down a growing wave of frustration. Did I not have enough problems of my own to deal with?

‘Why not? You’ve got a job.’

‘I took out a loan to pay off my credit card last summer but my work’s been so erratic I haven’t been able to make the repayments – bastards sent me to the debt collectors. I won’t pass a credit check for a good couple of years, they say.’

I stood as tall as I could and stared at her, my hands on my hips. ‘How old are you, Amy?’

She looked surprised. ‘I’m thirty-one.’

‘Why are you still doing dumb stuff like this?’

She recoiled. Her voice was timid. ‘I didn’t want to ask Mum and Dad for a loan, so I thought it was the best thing to do. I was doing my best … I want to be self-sufficient.’

She trailed off, her eyes watering. I hadn’t snapped at her in years. But I had already bailed her out of two housing-related messes. The first was when Frank had walked away, leaving her with a lease she couldn’t handle. I’d paid half of it for three months. The second time Stephen and I had paid her insurance excess when someone started a fire in the bathroom at a party.

‘No.’ The force of my fury shocked us both. Too bad – walking all over me seemed to be the pastime of the moment and I wasn’t having it.

‘It’s time you accepted the consequences of your actions. You can’t keep rolling through life like a teenager with nothing to worry about. I’ve picked up after every other stupid mistake you’ve made, and I’ve got way too much on my plate right now to add you to it. Own your own mess for a change.’

She was staring at me, her mouth open.

‘Other people manage to find new apartments. I’m sure you can, too.’

I turned away and directed Thomas through to the lounge, where I propped him on the bean bag. I sank on to the armchair behind him. He leant back against me, his cheek against my shin. I could hear Amy clattering as she threw her clothes back into boxes and hurled them out to the car. She stepped heavily on the accelerator, her wheels screeching as she took off from the end of our driveway.

‘Daddy home soon?’ Thomas looked up. I stroked his head, trying to slow my breathing. I was in danger of getting a little ‘ping’ from the sanctimonious smartwatch app I’d downloaded to help manage my stress. I wanted to slap the old me across the face. What did she have to be stressed about?