Souper Mum

by Kristen Bailey

  ‘Of course, I wanted my children with me. I wanted to make amends. The doctors told me I might have six months max so you think about putting things right and saying your goodbyes. You think about meeting your grandkids. Even if I hadn’t been ill, I still think about my grandkids every day.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Ben. I can’t believe you’d fall for her bullshit, her emotional blackmail.’

  Dad is speechless. The wonderful thing about Dad is that he’s never said a bad word against the woman in all these years, well, not to our faces at least. Even when Adam was launching into one of his tirades when she’d forgotten a birthday or we weren’t celebrating Mother’s Day, Dad would be silent to look at him, his face contorted with rage. He stares at Ben a lot who’s a big mess of tics, tears, and general all out confusion.

  ‘But Adam, it’s been so long. And life is just too short for us not to …’

  Adam doesn’t even let him finish.

  ‘What? Meet up with her? Play happy families? This article changes nothing. If she wanted to meet us and the kids, then all she had to do was show up, not go to the press.’

  I have to agree with Adam here, but Ben slumps into his seat. His loyalty straying over the line, he can’t quite bring himself to say anything to Dad yet nor look him in the eye. I say nothing. Half my brain, the half that has coped so well thus far without a mother, thinks this is not my problem. We are as much family as I am related to Mrs Pattak next door. Yet there is that other half of my brain intrinsically linked to hers, still fit to burst with questions and conjecture over the sort of woman she is, dreaming of that one-to-one confrontation we were meant to have that would solve any wrongful effects from twenty-odd years of her not being there. Dad sits down and puts a hand on Ben’s shoulder while I look at Adam. If it were possible, this is where comedy fumes would come from his head. But he is angry, indignant.

  ‘What are you trying to say, Ben? You want to meet her?’ I ask.

  Ben shakes his head and looks down at his hands.

  ‘I don’t know. I think so, yes.’

  I look up at Dad, still looking at his socks to try and mask what he really thinks. Adam is so against the idea that he says nothing but leaves the room, slamming doors as he goes. Ben grabs my hand.

  ‘Jools, I’m sorry. I don’t want to start anything but this article makes me realise I know nothing about her. I just feel if I don’t talk to her, see her at least once, then I’ll always wonder. I’ll really properly regret it.’

  Christ, he’s serious. He really wants to meet her. Dad is doing very well with the banal patting of the knee.

  ‘Dad, what do you think?’ I ask.

  He again doesn’t look up but hopes his knees will provide the answer. I repeat Ben’s question.

  ‘Dad?’

  He looks up.

  ‘At the end of the day, kin is kin. You’re a part of her. You’re an adult so I’m not going to tell you what to do.’

  I look over at Ben. Little Ben. He can’t do this alone. She’d take advantage of him and his vulnerability, she’d turn him into a big ball of emotion. I take his hand, trying hard to make the words that are coming out of my mouth sound convincing on some level.

  ‘Well, I’ll talk to Luella. Maybe she knows who wrote the article and can get us in touch with her. Because if you’re going to see her, I want to be there too.’

  It’s only then that Dad looks up and straight into my eyes. The same look he gave me when I first told him I was pregnant all those years ago. Not anger, not shock. Some type of resigned disappointment. I’m not going to fight you on this one. But I always thought you’d do things differently. It stakes through me to see those eyes again, my own glazing over to think he thinks I’ve betrayed him. I then watch as he gets up and excuses himself to go to the loo as I grab Ben and let him bury his head on my shoulder, all the while my tears dripping onto his chocolate brown hair.

  By the time it gets to evening, conversations about my mother have formed a cloud over the house that refuses to clear, almost like that stale milk smell in the car. Adam left soon after for work, Dad after that. Ben stayed around to help Gia wash up but moved the sponge around slowly, the way he does when things prey heavy on his mind. Now it’s 7 o’clock and the kids are upstairs with them and Matt listening to stories, while Luella quizzes me on types of mushrooms and the benefits of eating goat. Luella has known not to pry too much about what happened earlier but she every so often squeezes my knee and puts two thumbs up at me. Either that or she stares at the raw space in between my eyebrows, studying her attempts at preening me. Not that it’s made much difference. Now I’ve spent the last two hours grappling with the twins and trying to get Millie to eat any dinner, I look like the Gruffalo. Had the Gruffalo liked to wear badly fitting denim and an old nursing bra.

  ‘So Jools? Did you know that forty-five per cent of children under the age of eighteen do not eat breakfast? What say you about this scandal?’

  I’m staring at a browned patch of wallpaper below the sofa. It’s either a drink, a leaking radiator, or very possibly wee.

  ‘Jools?’

  Luella looks up at me, doing her best BBC News presenter impersonation.

  ‘Oh, ummm, yeah, that’s terrible.’

  She pulls her best fake smile and suddenly falls out of character.

  ‘A bit more enthusiasm, Jools? You need to have some witty opinions on the world. Spice it up a bit. The difference between you and McCoy is that you’re relevant and can be pretty funny when you want to be.’

  I nod, cupping my head in my hands. Luella comes over and puts an arm around me.

  ‘It’ll be all right, you know? Ten-minute segment, nothing can really go wrong.’

  She’s right. Yet if the past few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that a few seconds of a misplaced comment, an obscurely angled piece of body contact and it can turn into twenty inches of column space. Never mind ten minutes.

  ‘What about the kids? Getting them to school and stuff? I think I’m missing an assembly tomorrow?’

  ‘Gia and your dad have it covered. You shouldn’t worry.’

  It’s like telling the sea not to be salty. It weighs heavy in my heart to think that I’m missing a recorder recital to take on a wanky TV chef. Will they remember such incidents and take them with them into adolescence to use against me? Luella looks just as fraught as me. When she hasn’t been cornering me today just to inform me about battery hens, she’s been holding clothes up to my slouched frame trying to cobble something together for me to wear. Even on the school run, she was trying to accessorise me as I drove the car.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking. You said before that McCoy paid Johnno Elswood to do some digging. You think he planned this too? To waylay me before the BBC thing.’

  It was a thought which came to me today when I was thinking of how well timed this all seemed. Given all he’s done so far, I don’t think it’s beyond Tommy McCoy to stoop so low. Saying that, I’m now worried that he’d involve my mother in the conversation tomorrow so as to rile me and get a more virulent response. Luella shakes her head from side to side.

  ‘Kind of. The papers wanted to draw out the story with your mum a little anyway but I’m sure McCoy would have had a hand in the timing.’

  ‘Then why don’t we ever bring this up? I don’t get why we can’t just drag this bastard’s name through the mud.’

  Luella looks up, sympathetic.

  ‘Because that’s not how to play things. Trust me, I have enough crap we can throw at the McCoys if we want but people have been far more impressed that we’ve been restrained and not been in the public’s face the whole time – nobody likes a try hard.’

  I shrug my shoulders. My whole life feels like I’m always trying way too hard. Luella looks at her watch.

  ‘Now I have to go. I am confident this will be fine tomorrow. Please trust me. Just remember about those cooling eye-pads for tomorrow. You think people won’t be able to see but HD is a real sod.�
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  I don’t want to tell her that they’ll probably be useless given I will hardly sleep tonight. She also points to a carefully stacked mountain of literature on the coffee table.

  ‘And if you have the time, please. As much as you can. Great articles there on the great organic hoax and something to keep you up to speed on Tommy’s work with pigs. I just don’t want him to bring all this stuff up and have you not knowing what to say.’

  I stare at the pile and back at her in disbelief.

  ‘I will send a car for five in the morning. Just dose yourself up on caffeine but not too much. Last time you were all jittery.’

  She’s packing Tupperware into her bags because Gia has taken it upon herself to cook for everyone involved in my life at the moment. Luella is more than glad to take it and slings her bag over her shoulder. Her hair still remains very fixed in style and doesn’t seem to frizz into a huge mane during the day like mine.

  ‘You’ve got the Spanx?’

  I nod, accompanying her to the door.

  ‘Then one less thing to worry about. Look, I have to get back to my bambini so tell everyone I said bye and … you can do this tomorrow, I know you can. I have every faith. Bye, bye, bye.’

  I close the door on her and take a deep breath. Like a huge hyperventilation of air, my will to live seeping out of me as I exhale, hearing small twins upstairs leaping off bunk beds. I back onto the door and curl up into a small ball. Like a small distressed hedgehog. Suddenly, I look up. Matt stands at the top of the stairs and sees me. He edges his way down and comes to sit next to me. We say nothing for two whole minutes. Then he points to the dress hanging on the living room door.

  ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’

  I nod. A black tea dress with some canary yellow shoe boot things that will apparently draw the attention away from my misshapen hips.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Matt eyes them up curiously.

  ‘You’ll look like some large fashion-forward cooking elf.’

  I punch him in the arm and for the first time, we laugh. Together.

  ‘I like the casual look on you. Trainers and jeans and stuff.’

  He looks down at his hands. It was very me at Uni. My Converse and jeans were like a second skin, the stomach was flatter, the hoodies a little trendier. My hair used to be bundled atop my head stylishly, unlike now where most of the time it looks like a small squirrel’s drey. Not sure Luella would let me get away with such scruffery. There’s a moment of silence between us before I speak.

  ‘We need to talk, eh?’ I’m not sure why I say this now. Sleep, a long bath, and a bottle of rosé would be nice. To pick at a scab that is still raw and bleeding is not going to be productive. Matt buries his head in his hands.

  ‘I didn’t want to if you were still fretting over your mum.’

  His courtesy jars with me a little, to suggest our relationship was less of a priority.

  ‘How are you over that? Ben mentioned something about youse all meeting up with her.’

  I shrug my shoulders and stare at him. I want to tell you so much, I want to pour my soul out to you over my mother but I can’t. I’m not sure why.

  ‘I’m sorry I threw that mug.’

  I shrug it off. If a broken IKEA mug is a measure gauging my husband’s reactions, then it’s a small price to pay. I’d drive over to Croydon and buy a whole case load of crappy porcelain if it meant he got to air his true feelings with me.

  ‘I should have told you Richie got in touch. I’m not sure why I didn’t.’

  Knowing the conversation might drift upstairs, Matt gets up off the doormat and walks into the living room. I follow him reluctantly.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Stuff. He was sorry about the article.’

  ‘Did you … I don’t know, Skype, swap photos … you know …’

  My response is impressively quick. ‘No! Jesus, it was just talk. He brought up all that stuff about you hitting him. I told him it was a load of crap.’

  Matt turns to face me, his expression looking exactly like Jake’s when he’s about to own up to something monumental. Though I suspect this has little to do with joining up his sister’s freckles like a dot-to-dot puzzle. He fiddles with the loose threads on the end of his Kings of Leon T-shirt then looks up at me, square in the eye.

  ‘Well, not complete crap.’

  My eyebrows, raw and pink like carpaccio, arch into my forehead.

  ‘He did come around when he heard you were pregnant, he was worried and wanted to see you.’

  I am speechless, a little tired, a little confused. So they did meet? Well, at least the universe didn’t implode.

  ‘He said youse two had unfinished business, all sorts of things about having history and I was just this bloke you’d met. He was so cocksure, so bolshy. It kind of blew up.’

  ‘Blew up how?’

  I picture fisticuffs over our paisley sofa and mismatched curtains, a lot of swearing.

  ‘He was adamant that you and I were just some passing phase. He came in checking me out like he still had power over you, like he still had feelings for you, that you did for him. I panicked. I …’

  I wait for the punchline, quite literally.

  ‘I had words with him. I told him to sod off for a start but he was pushing to see you. So I did what I thought was right at the time. I mean, you know I’m not a violent person, I don’t hit people. And even then it was only his nose …’

  ‘You did what?’

  At this point, my mind is fuzzy with disbelief. I’m trying to get my head around Matt hitting someone and the fact I stood up for him against Richie looking like some stupid, clueless wife.

  ‘I just, I mean, he just left after that. He didn’t report it to anyone so I left it and we never saw him again so …’

  This is where I should say some word of disbelief, but air just pours out of my mouth.

  ‘Did you apologise?’

  Matt gives me a similar look of disbelief and shakes his head.

  ‘I told you what he said, I panicked. It was a moment of madness.’

  I think about Richie and his broken nose, not that I’m actually too bothered about that, but there is something inside me that is also extremely hurt.

  ‘But you thought … what made you think I’d choose him? Or go off with him? What the …? Matt, I was pregnant with your baby. I would never have … you thought I would have left you … for him?’

  His eyes glazed over, he looks up at me.

  ‘I was confused. I was young, I knew you’d dated for quite a while, right? It was just the thought of you going back to him was so …’

  ‘Never going to happen. I can’t believe you had that little faith in me.’

  Matt nods. I want to sleep, I want to throw up, I want to throw something heavy at my husband. I slump myself on the sofa while he stands by the window watching stationary cars.

  ‘Well, I was fighting for your honour, I wanted to be with you. Some women would be flattered by that.’

  ‘Some women would wonder why you’ve hidden this information from them for nine years. Why did you never say anything? Why did you never tell me he came back?’

  ‘Well, what was I supposed to think? This man knew you far more than I had did at that point. I didn’t know you well enough back then.’

  Then we both pause, looking at each other. No, he didn’t. All I knew was that he was a cute Scotsman who had good taste in coats. I was a Southern girl in a hoodie without a mother. Nine years together, something happened. I just can’t tell what it was – nothing and everything changed and looking at my husband now, and everything we’re deciding to bring up, I wonder if we’ve just had nine years of telling each other the rubbish needs taking out.

  ‘Everyone thought that, not just me.’

  I pause realising who he’s really talking about.

  ‘By everyone, you mean your mother. Is that what we were jabbering on about with her the other morning?’
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  I semi-translate what she must have been saying. I tried to see past the fact she was a harlot with cooking skills nowhere as good as mine but I was obviously right! I always have been!

  ‘Can we just leave it? I really don’t want to talk about him.’

  And this is where I stand up, indignant.

  ‘Well, I want to. If it’s something that pisses you off, then it’s something we need to talk about. Did you even read the article? It was a load of crap.’

  ‘I read your Facebook messages.’

  ‘You what?’ My face acts offended but to be honest, I’m almost a little glad that he can see they are not as salacious as he might have thought.

  ‘You’re not happy?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You never said you were.’

  I pause to look at his face, so defeated, so serious.

  ‘So this cooking thing, you think this might make you happy. It could give you something me and the kids aren’t giving you?’

  I shake my head. ‘That wasn’t what it was about at all. I resent that you think I don’t know how lucky I am.’

  ‘But your life could have been different. You could have been with him.’

  ‘Or not? I might not have ended up with either of you and joined a cult and changed my name to Steve.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘He was your first love. That means something.’

  ‘It means nothing.’

  I say that knowing that, despite any frisson of emotion I may feel for him, a past love means nothing when you’ve made the decisions I have. You don’t turn your back on four children because you picked the wrong box. You don’t doubt that life is far more important than a whim about someone you once loved.

  ‘Then why be friends with him on Facebook?’

  ‘It’s Facebook. He’s not my friend-friend. You know how it is.’

  ‘I know it’s you stalking him to see how differently your life could have been.’

  Damn you, reading me like a book. Thing is, it’s a lie. I stalk everyone on there, not just him.

  ‘Jools, play it down all you like but that bloke’s always going to have a hold over you and I’m entitled to feel a little jealous. I mean, supposing you and I hadn’t got pregnant when we did. Supposing we’d just been shagging casually and going out. You think we’d still be here?’