One day I’m going to have a nice white kitchen with a stainless-steel dishwasher. I’m going to have a built-in microwave cupboard and a rangehood with an extractor pipe up through the ceiling. One day those builders are going to finish the job, and I won’t be looking out the kitchen window onto a junkyard piled high with lumber and lengths of rusty pipe and chipped blocks of old concrete. After all, they’ve got to finish that bedroom one of these days, haven’t they? They can’t keep pouring the foundations forever. And once the bedroom’s done, they’ll be able to tackle the kitchen, and I’ll be happy.
That is, if I still have a husband by then.
I groaned at the prospect of having to sell up and get divorced before the builders had finished their renovations. What kind of a price would we get, in that eventuality? About enough for a down payment on a caravan in a trailer park, that’s how much.
No, no, I thought, madly sloshing water about. No, that won’t happen. It won’t. This is crazy. I should just—just . . .
What? Turn a blind eye?
Out of the question. I had made arrangements with Jim McRae, and those arrangements were set in stone. There was no way on earth that I could change my mind, not again. Feeling the pressure of yet more tears, I whipped off my rubber gloves and grabbed a couple of chocolate biscuits, which I consumed in about three seconds flat. I would have eaten more, if there had been more to eat. That’s the trouble with kids. Wherever there are kids, there are also chocolate biscuits and cartons half-full of rice custard and bits of leftover mashed potato and all kinds of other nursery food that you always crave when you’re feeling down. No wonder I’ve put on so much weight in the last four years. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people who go off their food when they’re under stress. On the contrary, I eat like a pig, because I’m pathetically weak when it comes to sugar-laden food groups. My only strategy for weight loss is to keep out of the way of temptation— and how am I supposed to do that when I’m surrounded by Honey Jumbles and paddle-pops? Especially when they’re distributed around a kitchen like this one. It’s the sort of kitchen that would send anyone groping for comfort food. I mean, you can clean the whole room, from the kickboards to the cabinet-tops, and it won’t look much better. What’s more, as soon as the family surges in, you’ll end up back where you started. Within half an hour there’ll be more crumbs on the floor, more greasy marks all over the refrigerator, more dirty dishes piled high in the sink. Talk about a woman’s work is never done.
It’s heartbreaking.
It’s also unavoidable, however—the murky underbelly of every family’s life—so I took a swig of cold coffee and set to work once more, buoyed somewhat by a rousing, kick-ass song from Alanis Morissette which I’d put on the stereo. (Nothing like Alanis Morissette to get you feeling both empowered and victimised simultaneously.) After I finished the kitchen I even had a stab at the living room, where the kids had dumped most of their toys. Putting away toys is a very time-consuming occupation. It’s not just a matter of tossing them in a toybox—not when a kid reaches Emily’s age. By the time a kid turns four, he or she generally has a squillion toys, all of microscopic proportions, which someone has to keep track of. So every doll’s shoe, every Lego block, every miniature plastic giraffe has its own box or bag or drawer, in order that it can be easily found when a child wants it (urgently). And that means endless sorting through tangled piles of discarded toys, making certain that the giraffe goes into the small animals drawer, the Lego goes into the Lego box, the shoe goes into the tin full of dolls’ clothes . . .
And don’t even talk to me about the doll’s house. That’s a whole second kitchen I have to clean.
‘Mummy!’ Emily burst through the door just as I’d finished untangling a knot composed of plastic pearl necklaces, toy parachute strings and frayed hair ribbons. She was followed by Matthew, who was carrying Jonah under one arm and a bundle of wet towels under the other. ‘Mummy, look what I’ve got!’
I looked. It was a lollipop.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘Look. I bited it.’
‘You bit it. Don’t do that, Emily, you’ll break your teeth. You’re supposed to suck it.’
‘No, I didn’t! I didn’t break my teeth! Look!’
‘All right, all right.’ I wasn’t going to argue. Instead I turned to Matt. ‘You smell of bath gel. Did you have a shower there? That was smart.’
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to go to work smelling of chlorine.’
‘What about the kids?’
‘They came in with me.’
‘Oh good.’
I was pleasantly surprised. A shower at the pool meant no baths in the evening. But before I could express my appreciation, Matt disappeared into the bedroom to change. He emerged looking very sleek and deadly in black jeans, a white shirt and a pair of sunglasses.
Dressing up for Her?
‘I’m running late,’ he said, all grim around the mouth. He headed for the front door, jangling his keys. ‘See you tonight.’
‘You’re not late. You’re fine. You’ll—’
Bang! The door shut. No kiss, no nothing.
My eyes began to smart.
‘Mummy,’ said Emily. It’s hard to ponder your problems when there are kids around. (Which is one of their many attractions, I suppose.) ‘Mummy, Jonah dropped his lollipop, and he put it in his mouth again.’
‘Never mind.’
‘But it’s dirty now. He’ll get sick.’
‘No he won’t. I just washed the floor in the kitchen.’
‘But he dropped it in the lounge room. He got hairs on it.’
‘What hairs? From where?’
‘From there.’
The Persian rug, needless to say. Our only Persian rug— the only decent thing in the living room, apart from the TV and stereo system. Why couldn’t he have dropped it on the scuffed leather sofa? Or the grubby chintz armchair covered in baby puke? Or the second-hand sixties coffee table?
Ah, well. What did it matter, when my marriage was on the skids?
‘Never mind,’ I said, just as Jonah hurled himself at me, complaining that he had hairs in his mouth. ‘Don’t spit on the carpet, Jonah, stop it.’
‘It’s yukky, Mummy, yuk! Get it out!’
‘Say please.’
‘Please.’
And then the builders arrived.
I’m not much good at craft. Not like Mandy the Wholefood Mother. At our playgroup, she does basic origami and marbling and potato stamps while I’m fumbling around trying to stick one piece of playdough onto another. She keeps on resurrecting these strange, ancestral pursuits like dried-apple dolls and cotton-reel knitting, while my only contribution to the children’s entertainment has been Rorschach ink-blot butterflies. Early this year, she even had a project going where every child in the group drew a house, and each house was stuck onto a big piece of paper (in a sort of streetscape) and then Mandy arranged to have the streetscape reproduced by a muralist friend of hers on the wall of the church hall where playgroup is held. I mean, will you please tell me how this woman finds the time? Let alone the energy. Needless to say, her own kids are absolute founts of creativity; Jesse even draws his own designs onto his T-shirts.
As for Lisa, while she couldn’t draw an elephant to save her life, she has a creative mind when it comes to conceptualising. If Liam wants fake tablets to fill up an old pill-box, Lisa will suggest cutting up a drinking straw. If Brice wants a drum, Lisa will burst a blown-up balloon and fasten one of the broken pieces over the end of an empty coffee tin with a rubber band.
As for me, I’m the sort of person who dreads Play School. On the one hand, it’s great to dump the kids in front of the TV for half an hour, while you hang out the washing. On the other hand, by exposing the kids to Play School, you also risk exposing them to a segment about creating a slippery dip from a toilet roll, a milk carton and piece of string. I can’t count the number of times that Emily has come running up to me, after an episode of Play
School, and asked me to make a mobile phone or a spaceship. It’s something I can’t do even when I’ve seen the program— especially since I don’t happen to have a bottomless supply of egg cartons, pipe cleaners, cotton reels, plastic lids and cardboard boxes sitting around the house. I mean, I’ve already got a storage problem. Despite valiant efforts, I really can’t keep every single paddle-pop stick that walks through the door.
I once asked Mandy the Wholefood Mother about this— knowing that she was a craft expert—but she wasn’t very helpful. Apparently, she won’t allow paddle-pop sticks through the door, because they’re usually attached to paddle-pops. Similarly, her kids are denied access to plastic drinking straws (because they’re not biodegradable), the plastic net bags that onions often come in (because she grows her own onions) and the tiny, plastic tables that you sometimes get holding up the lids of pizza boxes. ‘I believe in allowing children a lot of space for creativity,’ she explained, in an earnest fashion, ‘but not at the expense of the environment.’
Isn’t it always the way? You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. No sooner do I start stocking up on empty little mini-Nutella tubs and plastic ice-cream containers than it turns out I’m ecologically irresponsible. For God’s sake, it’s recycling, isn’t it? In a manner of speaking.
Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that I’m a bit of a washout when it comes to craft. And that’s an especially big problem on days when we’re all stuck inside. If I could whip up a dinosaur cave out of papier-mâché, or a finger puppet out of an old rubber glove, there wouldn’t be nearly as much whining and moaning on days like today. We had to stay at home this afternoon, you see, because I was waiting for Jim McRae to show up. And that meant we hit the inevitable moment when every toy had been rejected, every healthful snack had been consumed, and every drop of enjoyment had been wrung from watching the bricklayers at work in the garden. To distract Jonah from his desire to actually get in and help the bricklayers, using his own toy trowel and unrivalled expertise, I had to break out my copy of Fun Crafts for Little Fingers. This, in turn, meant raiding my personal supply of cotton-wool balls and typing paper, so that we could make (or attempt to make) a clutch of fluffy little chicks, as well as the three nests to put them in. I tell you, it wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted. Jonah, being a perfectionist, gets enraged very easily—and Emily can be rather patronising when her chicks’ mouths (or flowers’ petals, or boats’ sails) turn out better than mine.
I could hear the builders snickering as she kindly offered to cut out my little paper diamonds ‘the right way’. ‘It’s a bit hard,’ she generously informed me. ‘But you can colour them in, okay?’
‘Okay. Thanks, Emily.’
I don’t like playing to an audience. It’s hard enough pulling off a convincing mummy act in front of the kids; it’s doubly hard when you know that someone else is listening. Not that Mike and his mob spend all their time with their ears glued to cracks in the walls. Mostly they’re hammering away with their radio turned on. But sometimes they need to use the toilet, or to borrow an old towel. Sometimes they take a break, and sit drinking bottles of water under the kitchen window. That’s when they always manage to overhear me explaining to Emily why poos are brown, or what rainbows are for. (They’ve got to be for something; Emily’s convinced of it.) Sometimes I don’t realise that Mike’s been eavesdropping until a frantic search for a lost plastic spade suddenly ends when he sticks his head through the kitchen door and waves the missing item under my nose, informing me that it was sitting in the clothes basket—which has been left by the Hills Hoist, in case I was wondering.
These days it’s got to the point where I feel uncomfortable hanging my underclothes on the line. But what can I do? It’s silly to use the dryer just for my underclothes. And really, there’s nothing objectionable about Mike or his mates. They’re cheerful and friendly, they work hard (when they finally get here) and they always remember to wipe their big, dirty Blundstones on the mat before they come in. Perhaps their taste in radio stations leaves a lot to be desired, but even there I can’t fault them entirely, because they hardly ever listen to whatever program they select. They just seem to like a bit of background music as they haul bags of dry cement around in the broiling sun—and who can blame them?
Mike’s a nice bloke. He’s slow but he’s careful, never taking short cuts or making guesses. I generally see him standing around in khaki shorts and a mortar-smeared T-shirt, peering intently at a truss or rivet over the top of his coffee cup, his tool-belt heavy with screwdrivers and tape measures and nails lined up like bullets in a bandolier. He doesn’t say much. Nick, on the other hand, likes to talk. He’s a hairy little guy who’d be quite happy discussing health insurance or his son’s asthma or the fishmarkets with me all day long, if Mike would let him. Lars is very young; you can hear his laugh punctuating Nick’s monologues, occasionally, and he’ll sometimes sing along with the radio when he’s by himself. Yusef hardly ever shows up. I don’t know much about Yusef. Nick once told me that Yusef has a daughter with Crohn’s disease. (Don’t ask me how we got on to the subject.)
Anyway, there I was, surrounded by little cotton-wool balls studded with paper beaks, and there were Nick and Mike, mucking around with sandstock bricks and spirit levels right on the back step, and next thing you know, Jim McRae arrived. He timed it pretty well, actually, because I’d just put Jonah to sleep. Thank God bricklaying isn’t a very noisy pursuit, or I never would have managed it; as it was, I had to give Jonah a bottle of warm milk. You’ll probably shriek when you hear that. You’ll probably say, ‘Don’t you know how bad milk is for his teeth, before bedtime?’ Well, the answer is: yes, I do know how bad milk is for his teeth before bedtime. And I also know that if Jonah ends up with dentures, it will be all my fault. But frankly, there comes a time when you just don’t give a shit— and this was one of those times.
I mean, I had a cold. How could I pat him off to dreamland? Every cough would have woken him up again.
So Jonah was in bed asleep, looking like an angel with his arms flung out and his eyelashes making feathery half-moons on his flushed cheeks. (If you’re ever cross with your kids, just look at them when they’re sleeping; it puts you right every time.) As for Emily, she was still raring to go, flipping eagerly through Fun Crafts for Little Fingers, stopping every so often to raise big, pleading eyes and ask if we could do the steam train . . . the glove-puppets . . . maybe the Egyptian princess costume?
‘No, sweetie,’ I replied, appalled at the complexity of some of the instructions. (‘For moulding, you need to make paper pulp.’) ‘We don’t want to do anything without Jonah, do we? He’d be really cross.’ I was trying to persuade her that we should take a break from craft, and perhaps do a puzzle, when someone tapped at the kitchen door. Expecting it to be Mike, I said, ‘Come in!’, my voice sounding snubbed and hoarse. Then I stared in confusion as a totally strange man entered the room.
‘Helen?’
‘Yes?’ I blinked. He was very well dressed, for a builder.
‘You told me to come around the back,’ he offered, and suddenly I recognised his voice. ‘So I wouldn’t wake the baby.’
‘Oh!’ I leapt to my feet. ‘Yes, of course. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I was just—I was miles away. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘Um—right. Yes.’ I tried to think. Where would we talk? The builders were outside. Emily was inside. ‘Emily, I’m going to put a video on. What about The Little Mermaid?’
‘No! I want to do a puzzle!’
‘You can do a puzzle and watch The Little Mermaid.’
‘Will you help me?’
‘Not just now.’
‘Please?’ The Magic Word. I was impressed.
‘Mummy’s got to do something for a while, Emily,’ I explained, ‘so why don’t I put on The Little Mermaid, and you can have some chocolate ice-cream? How about that?’
‘Yay!’
‘But you’ll have to be ca
reful, because I don’t want you spilling it all over the rug.’
Another bribe. I’m hopeless. But at least it did the trick; in fact Emily was so excited about my unprecedented offer of icecream in the middle of the afternoon that she didn’t really notice Jim McRae. If she spared him even a passing thought, she must have assumed that he was another builder—because we’ve had a lot of unfamiliar men passing in and out, over the last few months, and they’ve all been builders (or architects or plumbers or that kind of thing). She sat herself down in front of the TV without much fuss, and I was able to leave her there for half an hour.
But then I was faced with the problem of where I would take Jim. We couldn’t talk in the living room. We couldn’t talk in the kitchen or the enclosed verandah, because Mike and Nick were bound to overhear. Jonah was sleeping in the kids’ room, so we couldn’t talk in there; we couldn’t even talk out the front, near his window, or we’d probably wake him up.
‘It’s either the bathroom or our bedroom,’ I whispered, wiping my nose. (We were standing in the hall, and Jonah was too close for comfort.) ‘I’m sorry. It’s just these bloody builders—I didn’t think they’d be coming today. They never show up, normally.’
‘It’s okay,’ murmured Jim. His appearance was a bit of a disappointment. He had such a nice voice that I’d been expecting someone big and impressive, with possibly a bloodhound’s face, all wise and craggy under a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, or perhaps something a bit more along the lines of Sherlock Holmes, sharp and finely drawn. But Jim was nothing like that. He was quite young, for a start. (Maybe even—horror of horrors—younger than me?) He was also quite short, and his face was instantly forgettable: fair-skinned, clean-shaven, with full cheeks and small features. His eyes were brown. His hair was brown. He looked like—I don’t know, a chemist or something. An accountant. Mister Bland. He certainly didn’t look like an ex-copper.
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