How to Be Second Best

by Jessica Dettmann

  ‘Mayall.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mayall, the teacher is Mrs Mayall, not Mrs Miles.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘What’s Lola got? She was fine at swimming. Are Tim and Freya all right?’

  There’s a pause. ‘What? Tim and Freya?’

  I can almost hear the gears cranking in his head. He’s breathing faster now.

  ‘Yes, your other two children. Since you’re at home I presume you’ve noticed that they are also there, with Lola and Helen.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Troy? Are you there?’

  I hear a quiet shaky breath.

  ‘You’re not at home are you?’

  ‘What? Sorry, the phone keeps cutting out.’

  ‘No it doesn’t, I can hear you breathing. I said, you’re not at home, are you? If you were home you would know that all the kids are there because my dad cancelled on babysitting Tim and Freya. And as of about fifteen minutes ago everyone in that house was perfectly healthy. So what the fuck is going on?’

  All I hear is more quiet breathing. A familiar feeling shoots through me. It’s nausea. It’s the feeling I had when Troy confessed his affair with Helen. It’s the feeling I get when I’m between six and twenty weeks pregnant. I’m fairly certain I know which of the two situations is being repeated here. It strikes me as unfair that my body is reacting in the same way to Helen being cheated on as it did when I was the one being wronged. I wonder who’s he’s shagging this time.

  ‘I’m not home, no. No one’s sick. I just can’t make it to parent– teacher night. Sorry. I shouldn’t have lied.’

  ‘Why can’t you come? What’s so important? Is there some sort of juice crisis?’ It all comes flooding back: all the calls like this I had from him when I was pregnant with Freya; all the delivery drivers who went AWOL; the catastrophes with labelling that only Troy could solve.

  ‘Emma, I’m at a doctor’s appointment. She is running very late.’

  Now a jolt of worry surges through me. He never sees doctors. This must be serious. I don’t want Troy back but I don’t want him to die. On the other hand, this could easily be another lie, the cover for another affair. ‘A doctor?’ I say. ‘What kind of doctor? Are you all right?’

  He doesn’t reply and in the background I hear a woman’s voice say, ‘Sir? You can’t use your phone in here.’

  Either his new lover is very strict about phone etiquette, or he really is in a medical establishment.

  ‘Troy?’ I ask again. ‘What is the matter? Why are you seeing a doctor?’

  ‘Look, I really don’t want to talk about it.’

  It clicks. He’s not sick. He’s seeing a therapist. Finally.

  ‘Is the doctor a psychologist? A therapist? Are you finally seeing someone?’

  ‘Yes!’ he almost shouts. He sounds relieved I have guessed. ‘Yes, that’s it, I’m at my therapist’s and she is running late. Shit, Emma, I just wanted this to be private. Can’t a bloke have any bloody privacy?’

  I speak more gently now. ‘Sure, Troy, of course. Sorry. Don’t worry about tonight. I’ll fill you in on what she says about Tim. Tim’s great. He’s a wonderful little boy and everyone knows that. And for what it’s worth, I’m really proud of you for doing this. It’s a healthy thing to do. I wish you’d done it a long time ago.’

  ‘Thanks, Emsie,’ he says. That’s what he used to call me. Emsie. Hearing it now makes me feel a very confusing mix of sorrow, love and rage.

  So I tell him, ‘Next time, don’t bloody lie about everything. That might be something your therapist will tell you too, but don’t disregard it automatically just because it’s also something I’ve suggested.’

  I hang up. I take a deep breath and stare at my phone. I’ve just wasted three of my ten minutes.

  ‘Have you been sent out of class for having your phone on?’

  I look up. Adam. Of course. Right now.

  ‘Hey, no, I’m just . . . I was just talking to my ex-husband, who is, as you can see—’ I gesture around me ‘—not here where he is supposed to be.’

  ‘Oh, that’s shit. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks. I’d better get back in and explain to the teacher. I don’t think she approves of divorced parents.’

  ‘I don’t think Bon’s teacher approves of absent mothers. I just got eight minutes of questioning about my wife’s whereabouts and two minutes of telling me Bon’s fine.’

  I’ll bet you did, I think. I know Bon’s teacher, Miss Fairley. She’s very fond of the dads, or so I’ve heard. Maybe I should pick her brains.

  ‘Text me, though, or call, you know, if you want to chat or anything,’ he says awkwardly.

  ‘Yeah, I will, thanks,’ I say. I’m still distracted by Troy’s nonsense, but a spark of joy flashes inside me nonetheless. And sure, our conversations are awkward, but so were Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy’s to start with.

  * * *

  On my way to pick up the kids, I mull over whether I’ll have to explain to Helen why Troy isn’t with me. I’m not going to lie to his wife for him, even if he is getting some therapy, finally.

  But he’s thought ahead, it seems.

  ‘Poor Troy!’ she says as soon as she opens the door to me. ‘I can’t believe the new driver would just not show up like that for his shift. I mean, who does that? So irresponsible. Now Troy has to miss parent–teacher night and spend the next however many hours doing deliveries? That’s so unfair.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I agree. ‘So unfair. Poor Troy.’ It’s not a bad excuse, as they go. It’s not original, by any means, but it’s effective. There were constantly delivery drivers failing to show up for shifts in the last year of Troy’s and my marriage. I’m just not entirely sure why he’s lying about going a therapist. Stubborn pride, I expect.

  It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, but maybe that’s the issue. Maybe even admitting he needs help is so mortifying for Troy that he can’t bring himself to be honest about it. I don’t know, and frankly it’s not really my business any more, thank God. And there is, obviously, still the other possibility — that Troy is not seeing a therapist but having it off with someone else, again — but I don’t think that’s it.

  Tim and Freya are lying on the sofa, still in their school uniforms, still stinking of chlorine. Beside them, Lola is in her pyjamas, her freshly washed hair damp and neatly combed. They all look exhausted, and they’re staring at the huge TV on the wall. It’s not switched on, because Helen doesn’t believe in screen time, but that doesn’t seem to worry the kids. They are resigned to their fate.

  ‘Sorry,’ Helen says. ‘They didn’t want a bath here. They said they’d wait and have one at home.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I tell her. ‘Thanks for having them. I was really stuck.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ she says. ‘I’m always happy to help.’

  I know she doesn’t mean it, but still, it’s a nice thing to say. I’m torn between hoping Troy’s having an affair and hoping he’s not. That wasn’t really the sort of problem I was wishing on her.

  ‘Come on, gang,’ I tell Tim and Freya. ‘Let’s head off.’

  ‘Will you carry me?’ asks Freya.

  ‘No, you’re a big girl, you can walk. It’s so close.’

  ‘But I can’t walk because my legs hurt and they are too tired,’ she moans.

  ‘Well, I suppose I could carry you, but if you’re too tired to walk then you’re probably too tired for books when you get to bed.’

  She knows this trick and scowls at me. ‘I’ll walk. But I need extra books.’

  ‘Deal,’ I say. ‘Timbo, say “goodnight and thank you for having me” to Helen.’

  ‘Goodnight and thank you for having me,’ he mumbles.

  ‘You’re welcome, sweetie,’ she says. ‘Any time.’

  Yeah, right.

  * * *

  When we’re all washed, de-chlorinated and tucked up in our beds, I pick up my phone. Text me, he said. Or call. I’m obviously not
going to call. Calling is awful. No one likes talking on the phone. Even Jane Austen never wrote anything approaching as awkward as a phone call between two people who may or may not fancy the pants off each other. Especially when one of them is me.

  I hate phone calls. Always have. If I could have a phone that does everything else — internet, texts, email, Instagram, Facebook, and the What Bird Is That app — with no actual phone? It would be a dream come true.

  I put an episode of The Devil’s Heirs on my laptop. I go back about fifteen minutes because I fell asleep watching it last night. Tilde is arguing with the forensic pathologist during an autopsy. She knows not to take anything at face value, that one. She’s always questioning.

  Chapter Eight

  The dripping tap has had precisely no impact on Helen and Troy’s life. The next time I visited their house, it wasn’t dripping any more, which meant one of them simply went to the cupboard, took the appropriately labelled tools and repaired it, with no fuss.

  That’s quite disheartening. I was sure it would just drip away, causing an almost imperceptible irritation in their days that would, slowly but surely, infect other parts of their lives until the whole relationship imploded, but apparently that was not the case. To be honest, I don’t even know if it made a blip on their radar.

  It’s Tuesday — ballet day for Lola — so after I drop Tim at school, Freya and I stop in at Helen and Troy’s house to collect their daughter.

  The front door is open, so we knock and walk straight in. Helen is standing at the gleaming kitchen island, her laptop open in front of her. She’s standing on one leg, with the other foot tucked neatly into the top of her toned thigh. Balanced there, like a Lorna-Jane-clad blonde flamingo, she scrolls with the trackpad.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ she says, not looking up from the screen. ‘Isn’t this a funny thing? I think I might have just gone viral!’

  ‘What?’ I ask. ‘What have you done that’s gone viral?’

  ‘Well, I just popped up a little video on my Instagram last night — did you know you can do videos on Insta, by the way? I always thought it was just photos. Anyway, Troy’s new social media girl at work showed him, and he showed me, and he filmed me doing, like, a four-minute routine, just on the mat, and he sped some parts of it up, and this morning I’ve got nine thousand new followers.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I say pleasantly. ‘Is that a lot?’ As if I don’t know. As if I don’t realise that’s an enormous number of followers to jump on after one video. There must be a lot of shots of her Lycra-clad bum in the video.

  ‘I sort of think it might be a lot of followers,’ Helen tells me. ‘How funny is that? I didn’t even try! I mean, I already had seven thousand-ish, so that’s almost double.’

  ‘Funny, yes.’

  ‘And just now I’ve had five messages from PRs, wanting to work with me on some, gosh, I don’t even quite understand it, but I guess you’d call them sponsorship deals? Like, they’ll pay me to wear their clients’ activewear in my videos, and then I just have to tag them or mention them or something. Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘Where’s Lola?’ I ask. I’ve heard enough about this viral business.

  ‘She’s just in her room. Lola!’

  ‘Oh good,’ I say, ‘you’ve had that tap fixed. I saw it was leaking last week.’

  ‘What tap?’

  ‘The kitchen tap, just there. It was dripping. It’s so annoying when they do that.’

  Helen furrows her brow slightly. ‘Was it? Troy must have just fixed it. He’s great like that. I never even have to ask him to do those types of little jobs. He just seems to notice what needs doing and does it.’

  It takes an inner strength I didn’t know I had not to shout ‘He fucking what?’ at Helen’s perfect face.

  When he was married to me, Troy never lifted a finger until I had asked him at least twenty times to fix anything around the house. He’d look at me like I was the fussiest, naggiest shrew if I ever mentioned anything about how perhaps he could nail back down the floorboards he left unattached to the joists after he prised them up to see if he could find what was causing the rotting dead animal smell coming from under the house.

  For as long as I’ve known Troy, he’s been a world class unfinisher. He’ll start anything you suggest, after about six requests, but completing the task? That’s too boring, too pedestrian. He’s moved on to bigger and better things. Every cupboard he’s ever opened would still be open if it hadn’t been for me. His bath water was always still there in the morning, and if the police had ever needed to retrace his steps, their job would be have been made simple by a quick walk through our house. Keys and wallet dumped on the table; shoes in front of the couch; beer bottle top on the coffee table, next to the empty beer bottle; dirty clothes on the bathroom floor; damp towel on the carpet in front of his chest of drawers, which would be open to reveal he had taken out a T-shirt, shorts and undies. If they had gone on to discover his body, bludgeoned to death by his wife, driven to her wits’ end, I think the jury would have been sympathetic.

  What has Helen done to turn him into such a Stepford husband?

  Maybe it’s sexual. It must have started that way, at least. I try very hard not to think about Helen’s Pilatified body and how slim and bendy and leggy she is. Isn’t it remarkable how calling someone ‘leggy’ is always a compliment, but venture slightly further up the body and you get hippy, which is never a positive thing. I’m hippy; she’s leggy. So she’s the winner.

  Before I can fall deeper into my rage spiral, Lola appears, kitted out in the palest pink tights, leotard, gauzy skirt and little wrap cardigan.

  ‘Hello, gorgeous!’ trills Helen. ‘You look perfect! What a beautiful ballerina you are.’

  ‘Memma, can you do my bun, please?’ asks Lola.

  Helen finally puts her other leg on the ground and darts over to her daughter. ‘I’ll do your bun, my sweet, no need to bother Emma.’

  ‘It’s no bother,’ I say, secretly thrilled to be asked. ‘I’ve got a little trick, haven’t I, Lols, that helps it stay up when you do all that twirling?’

  ‘Yes, Mummy, can Memma do it?’

  I catch a flicker of hurt crossing Helen’s face, but she almost instantly replaces it with a convincing smile.

  ‘Of course she can — we can’t have your hair falling down during the twirls, can we?’

  ‘Right, I’ll do it when we get to ballet, Lola, so it isn’t uncomfortable in the car seat. Let’s all go hop in the car now.’

  It’s probably best if I don’t reveal here that my ‘secret’ to the stay-up ballet bun is around ninety seconds of spraying very cheap and almost certainly toxic hair lacquer all over Helen’s child’s head, while telling her not to breathe too deeply. The girls love it — they say it makes their hair crunchy and they spend an hour or so after Lola’s ballet class scraping the hairspray out with their fingernails, like little chimps in a beauty pageant.

  Freya, of course, doesn’t do the ballet class, but she does like me to put her hair in a crunchy bun too. I did once take her in for a trial class, but when she realised ballet lessons involve a lot of being told what to do while standing still holding onto a barre and bending your knees a hundred times in a row, and very little leaping around in free-form interpretive dance pretending to be a tiger, she decided she’d rather just hang out in the foyer with me during Lola’s lessons. I respect that.

  Helen’s back on one leg in front of the computer again, which I take as my cue to remove her child.

  ‘We’ll see you later then,’ I say. ‘I’ll bring Lola back about twelve, shall I?’

  ‘Oh there’s no rush. Keep her as long as you like. I’m going to be flat out here on the phone, by the looks of all these crazy offers that just won’t stop flooding my inbox! She’ll have more fun with you and Freya. She can even stay for the afternoon and dinner, if she wants.’

  Oh, can she? I think. How very generous of you to offer. I should say no. I should say, ‘How about y
ou look after your own kid, Helen? How about you stop using me as a free nanny?’ Next time she does this, I promise myself, I’ll say something. We’ll see how much time she has to go viral and get clothing sponsorships when she’s got a bored three-year-old underfoot all day long.

  In the car, I mull over how this would work. If I tell Helen I’m not going to look after Lola any more, I have a horrible suspicion the only ones who are going to suffer are Lola and Freya. Helen will just get Lola a real nanny. It will be slightly inconvenient, for a few days, but they’ll throw money at the problem, and then Lola and Freya will be separated and bereft. Because they’re almost like twins, these two. Sisters from the same mister, but other mothers.

  Even though it’ll look to the rest of the world — and by that I mean my judgemental, unsupportive sister and dad — like I’m being a martyr, to use their own delightful word, I think I’m just going to have to go on with this set-up, for the moment, being the best stepmother to Lola that I can be. Except that’s not the word. I’m not her stepmother. I’m her out-of-stepmother.

  * * *

  Lola’s ballet class is held in a church hall two suburbs away. It’s too far for the girls to walk, so each week we drive there, and each week we do battle with the parking gods on the street outside.

  We’ve been doing this for close to a year now, and I’m yet to understand what causes the extraordinary demand for parking spaces within walking distance of this church hall, at precisely this time every week. There are only twelve kids in the class, and none of them come with motorcades or extra security vehicles in their convoys.

  It’s mostly residential, and none of the houses appear to have garages, but surely some of these people must drive their cars away from their houses during the day? Do none of them have jobs to go to? There are a few shops nearby, which would account for some of the demand, but not to the level of difficulty that we have every week when we spend upwards of twenty minutes cruising around, trying to wedge the car into spaces that are too small or too illegal.

  Every week it gets more and more stressful as ten-thirty approaches. The ballet teacher, Miss Annabelinda, does not take kindly to latecomers. Even three-year-olds need to be on time, she has stressed to me on more than one occasion. It’s how they learn respect and discipline, which are the cornerstones of a dancer’s practice. Miss Annabelinda is a twenty-three-year-old who has clearly failed to become a professional ballerina and has been reduced to creating a hybrid of her real first and middle names in order to assume the appropriately la-di-da persona of a ballet teacher. She likes nothing more than telling off women almost twice her age who bring children late to class and don’t seem to even care.