by Sue Margolis
“How’s he been?” Stephanie said to Mrs. McCreedy.
“Not a moment’s trouble. He slept until four, though. He’s not going to be ready for his bed in a hurry.”
Poor Mrs. M. sounded so apologetic—she must have seen Stephanie’s face fall ever so slightly. She adored Jake, was always desperate to see him when she got in from work, but what she wanted more than anything right now was a long soak in the bath and an early night.
“Now then,” said Mrs. McCreedy, “how’s about a nice cuppa?”
“No, you sit down. You’ve been on your feet all day. I’ll get it. On second thought, I think I’d rather have a glass of wine. What about you?”
“Ah, go on, then.” Mrs. McCreedy smiled, pulling out a kitchen chair. “Twist my arm. It is the festive season, after all.” She landed heavily on the chair. Then she leaned over to where Jake was sitting on his digger and gave him a gentle, conspiratorial nudge in the ribs. “But you’re not to go telling on your mammy and me. Understand?”
Jake gave a solemn shake of his head and Mrs. M. rewarded him with another Marmite soldier.
“So,” Stephanie said, pulling the rubber wine stopper out of a half-finished bottle of Jacob’s Creek, “the darts team in good shape for tonight?” She was referring to the Duke’s Head pub ladies’ darts team. Mrs. M. had been a member for fifteen years. Tonight they were taking on the team from The Crooked Billet.
“The best we’ll ever be. Not that it’ll get us very far. That other lot—crooked by name, crooked by nature.” She lowered her voice. “Two of them are bloomin’ whatyoumacallits. Trans something. That’s it, transsexualists. Apparently they look like women, but according to my friend Audrey, they’ve still got their willies and everything. I always say, live and let live, but what chance do we stand with them and all their male hormones still raging?”
“I get the point,” Stephanie said, battling to keep a straight face. She handed Mrs. McCreedy a glass of wine and sat down next to her at the long kitchen table. Whenever Stephanie thought about Mrs. McCreedy, she couldn’t believe her luck. She was Ballykissangel meets Mary Poppins—except she had a good fifty years on Ms. Poppins, couldn’t sing a note and had a dodgy hip. She was, however, magic. At least where Jake was concerned. Nobody could bring him down from a tantrum like Mrs. M. Or get him to eat like Mrs. M. Her methods would have caused Penelope Leach to take a Valium and lie down in a darkened room, but they worked. Mrs. M., who had raised nine children of her own back in Cork, was a firm believer in bribery. This took the form of cakes. Mr. Kipling Fondant Fancies.
“Eat your dinner, Jakey,” she would say, “and I’ll see what I can find.” He would clean his plate and she would pull a Day-Glo pink Fancie out of her handbag the way Mary Poppins produced a hat stand. Stephanie suspected he had already developed a three-a-day habit.
On the one hand, Stephanie lived in fear of Jake starting school with a full set of dentures; on the other, she was loath to confront Mrs. M. in case she got offended and left.
Jake adored Mrs. M. as much as he adored his grandmother. In fact, they adored each other. It was true love. Stephanie couldn’t risk losing her. Plus she was cheap. On what Stephanie earned a month, she couldn’t begin to afford a proper nanny.
Mrs. McCreedy always said she didn’t look after Jake for the money, she did it for the company. After her husband died, she moved to England to live with her widowed sister. When the sister died a couple of years ago, she realized she needed something to fill her days. She refused to go back to Ireland to live with her children because “they had their own lives” and it would mean leaving her friends on the darts team. Stephanie knew she would have to say something about all the sugar, but not just yet.
Of course, there was a much more serious issue with Mrs. M.: her arthritic hip, which had gotten much worse over the last few months. It had been barely noticeable two years ago when she first came to look after Jake, but now she walked with a heavy limp and Stephanie could see how she struggled to chase after Jake. Suppose she slipped on the stairs? At least Jake did the stairs on his own these days, so she didn’t have to carry him. She also insisted on a leash when Mrs. M. took him out for a walk, but this didn’t stop Stephanie having nightmares about Jake running into a busy road and Mrs. M. being too late to catch him. Something had to be done. But sacking Mrs. M. was unthinkable. She lived for the time she spent with Jake. Stephanie took a huge glug of wine. She would think about it again after Christmas.
“Right, I’ll be off, then,” Mrs. McCreedy said. As she stood up, they both noticed Jake over by the kitchen cupboards. He had poured half a packet of flour onto the floor and was jumping up and down in it. “Oh, darlin’—not the flour.”
“Jakey! No.” Jake hated being shouted at and burst into tears.
“Oh, now then, now then,” Mrs. McCreedy soothed, limping over to him. “Stop your tears. Let’s see what I’ve got in my bag, shall we?”
Jake sniffed and took Mrs. M.’s hand and the pair of them proceeded back to the kitchen table, Jake leaving a trail of floury footprints. Stephanie looked on as Mrs. M. said the magic words: “Issie wizzie, let’s get busy.”
“Ooh, I know,” Stephanie said, attempting to interrupt, “why don’t I—” She was about to suggest reading him a story to calm him down, but she was too late. Mrs. M. had already dug into her bag and, with a flourish, produced a fluorescent yellow Fondant Fancie. Jake yelped with delight.
While he sat on his digger demolishing the Fancie, Stephanie swept up the mess, but not before Liberace had come mincing in. Before she could stop him he’d walked through it and left a mixture of wet mud and flour prints all over the floor.
In the end it needed a complete mop and Mr. Clean. Then, because it was an expensive wood floor, she had to get out Jimmy’s electric polisher, which was huge and unwieldy, the kind that required wearing a sports bra to operate. It was well after eight by the time she’d finished. She decided they might as well take their evening bath together. Jake laughed to the point of hiccups as she deposited clusters of bubbles on his nose and head and made shampoo horns with her hair.
As they played, she found herself thinking about Frank and Anoushka—how hugely successful they were and how she longed to be part of some smug self-satisfied couple with their own Web site. Since having Jake, she’d had a couple of short-lived relationships, but nothing serious. The last one had ended just before she moved into the house. She was getting to the stage when, hard up as she was, she would hand over a winning lottery ticket for one single night of passion. The last time she’d slept with somebody had been after her fat cousin Miriam’s wedding. At the reception she’d been put next to a bloke called Lewis, who was in dried fruit. She could tell he fancied her because all through dinner he kept on and on about how a cross section of a dried pear resembled a vulva. He was cute enough, but much as she tried to steer the conversation off dried fruit, somehow they always came back to the pear thing or to EU fig quotas. The only light relief came when they spent half an hour discussing the ins and outs of his impending laser eye surgery. Apparently he was blind without his lenses.
That night she went home with Lewis. It was more to end her sexual drought than anything else. Jake was spending the night at Stephanie’s friend Lizzie’s. Normally, she never slept with men she had just met, and it occurred to her that Lewis might be some mad pervert. She decided it was unlikely, though, since he was cousin Miriam’s boring, straight-as-a-die husband’s best mate.
She’d expected him to be from the “brace yourself” school of foreplay, but he wasn’t. He spent ages getting her warmed up. Finally he suggested getting some K-Y jelly. She insisted she didn’t need it—what was it with this bloke and the dried pear metaphor?—but he insisted. He returned from the bathroom, said he’d run out of K-Y jelly but had found a jar of Vaseline. Then he asked her in a rather naff, doctorish way, which she found herself rather enjoying, to open her legs. She let her knees fall apart and waited, heart thumping. A momen
t later she was screaming, but not with delight. It wasn’t a jar of Vaseline poor, myopic Lewis had found in the bathroom, it was Vicks VapoRub.
As well as sex, she desperately wanted a decent singing gig. When she left drama school her mates and her tutors all said that if anybody was destined to make it in musicals, she was. But it just hadn’t happened. There had been the small solo part in Chicago, but mainly all she got was chorus stuff. Occasionally she was called in to do a TV advertising jingle, which was always good news because ads paid top dollar. What with that, the theater and the odd stint playing the piano in hotel lounges and department stores, she just about managed to pay the bills. The Blues Café paid virtually nothing, so it didn’t count. She did it for pleasure and in the hope that one day she might get discovered by some hot impresario.
The Billie, Ella and Peggy stuff was in her soul. Her dad was a fanatic and their music—those melting, melancholy melodies—formed some of her earliest memories. She’d lacked confidence as a child, and her parents thought singing lessons might help. Not only did she find her confidence, she found her voice—a deep, velvet, practically black voice, her singing teacher said. Had she ever thought of singing blues? The first time she sang in public—“Summertime” at a school do—and she felt the adrenaline, saw how she could touch an audience, she knew she wanted to do it for a living.
Her parents and teachers urged caution and she did the sensible thing and went to university—Leeds—and carried on singing in local clubs. Then she joined the drama society and discovered that she could act too. After she graduated from university, three drama schools offered her a place. These days, plenty of people—apart from her mum, dad and grandmother, who were clearly biased—said she should be doing better professionally. Nobody could understand why she hadn’t landed a lead part in a musical. Sheer bloody bad luck, they said. But she could understand it perfectly. She knew the way show business worked, and that it was perfectly possible her luck might never change. She was thirty-two. When she went back to work six months after Jake was born, she gave herself two years to land a decent part in a musical or get some kind of recognition as a solo jazz singer. Her time was up. For weeks now she’d found herself looking at courses in teaching English as a second language in The Guardian.
From time to time she’d thought about changing agents. Eileen Griffin, who was in her sixties, had represented her for years and was starting to lose her edge. Not that she’d ever had much of one. The booze had seen to that. Two or three years ago Stephanie had even made a demo CD to send out to other agents. Then just as she was about to do the deed, Eileen would get her six weeks in Chicago or Les Miz and she would put it off. Maybe the time had finally come to send out that CD. If nobody else was interested, then she would think about giving up. At least then she could say she’d tried everything.
Of course Jake wasn’t remotely tired even after the bath and they had to go downstairs to make Play-Doh green eggs and ham. Then he had a tantrum because she put the eggs and ham on the same plate, when he had apparently made it abundantly clear that they were to go on separate ones. By nine she insisted they go upstairs to his brand-new “big boy’s bed” and read stories.
“Do Fatapillow,” he shouted, bouncing on the Thunderbirds duvet. “Do Fatapillow.”
This meant she should sit on the bed reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Jake’s all-time favorite read, over and over again while he lay in bed and “zizzed” his label. Other kids went to bed with bits of smelly old blanket. Jake had a grubby Mothercare label torn out of an old T-shirt, which he rubbed, or, in Jake argot, “zizzed,” between his fingers. Every time her voice faltered or her eyes started to close he would prod her. “Read, read. Read, read.” Four rounds of Fatapillow later and he was still wide awake. “Sing, sing. Sing, sing.”
“Jake, Mummy’s totally knackered,” Stephanie pleaded, virtually on the point of offering him an entire box of Fondant Fancies if he would only go to sleep and let her go to bed with the telly, the wine bottle and a Be Good to Yourself lasagna.
“Sing, sing. Sing, sing.”
“OK … Your baby has gorn down the plughole / Your baby has gorn down the plug …”
“Not that one. Not that one.” She looked at her beautiful, innocent child and felt instantly guilty.
“Say night-night Daddy now,” Jake said. He picked up the picture of Albert from his bedside table and licked it. “Jake, you know that’s not a kiss. Now I have to clean all your slobber off Daddy.” She wiped the glass with her sleeve.
“My daddy come for Christmas from ’merica?”
“I hope so, darling, I hope so.”
Albert had this habit of saying that he was coming for a visit, then a job would come up and he would cancel at the last moment. To give him his due, though, he always turned up eventually, laden with guilt presents. Of course, the timing never mattered much when Jake was a baby, but now he was old enough to understand about daddies and to be hurt by broken promises.
“Come on, Jakey, sleep time.” She pulled the duvet up over his shoulders.
“Sing, sing, Mummy. Sing, sing.”
“All right.” She turned off the bedside light, slipped in bed beside him and began stroking his head.
“There were birds, on a hill / But I never heard them singing … Till there was you.”
Chapter 2
Stephanie went back downstairs to the kitchen and topped off her wineglass. She was pricking the cellophane film of her microwave lasagna when the phone rang.
“Hello, darling.” It was Grandma Lilly—her mother’s mother. She was seventy-nine and lived at The Haven, a small complex of warden-assisted flats in Hendon.
“Hi, Gran. How you doing?”
“Oh, you know. Can’t complain.” She sounded down, which was unusual. Despite her age, Grandma Lilly was one of the most energetic and upbeat people she knew.
“Gran, is there something the matter?”
“No, not really.”
“Come on. There is. I can tell by your voice.”
“Well, it’s a bit difficult. You know, a bit personal.”
“It’s OK,” Stephanie said. “You can tell me.”
A pause. Then: “I’m seeing a man.”
“Wow, Gran. Good for you.”
“Anyway, the point is, I’ve had to give up sex.”
Stephanie nearly choked on her wine. “Omigod.” She hoped it hadn’t come out as “Omigod, do people of almost eighty actually still have sex?”—which is what she meant, of course. What she vainly hoped it sounded like was: “Omigod, what a shame.”
Lilly said her chap’s name was Maury, that he was eighty-three and had made a fortune in vacuum-packed matzo balls. “You must have heard of him: Maury Silverstone. His balls are massive.” Lilly chuckled at the joke. “And it’s not just his balls that are big. He’s also got a great body and this absolutely huge—”
“No, Gran. Stop! Too much information.”
“I was going to say,” Lilly said, “he’s got this absolutely huge villa in Marbella.”
“Oh, right. I see,” Stephanie replied. “But what’s happened? Why have you had to give up sex?”
“Why do you think? The pacemaker.” Lilly’s heart rate had become a little irregular lately, and she’d had the pacemaker fitted at the Charing Cross hospital a couple of weeks ago. “I don’t understand,” Stephanie said.
“I’m frightened—you know—that when I reach the moment of ecstasy, I might overload the circuits and electrocute myself.” Hang on. Her seventy-nine-year-old grandmother was not only still having sex, she was having “moments of ecstasy”? “The thing is,” Lilly went on, “I can’t talk to your mother about this. She wouldn’t approve. She thinks I spend my spare time playing board games. But there’s more to life than a triple-word score in Scrabble. You’re young and modern, though. Your generation is much more open about these things. I feel I can talk to you. I didn’t want to mention it to the doctor. He was some old fuddy-duddy in his sixties.
”
Stephanie hadn’t the foggiest idea what to say. She was still processing “moment of ecstasy” and trying to rid her brain of the picture of her grandmother and her herring breath, writhing naked on her orthopedic bed. Did she keep her teeth in? “OK, Gran. Look, don’t worry. I’ll check it out with a doctor friend of mine, but I’m pretty sure you’re safe to carry on life just as you always have and I’m certain you can’t possibly electrocute yourself.”
“You reckon?”
“I’m certain. But I’ll double-check, OK?”
“Thank you, darling. I appreciate it. Look, I haven’t said anything to your mother about Maury. You know how she likes to interfere. I know she wouldn’t approve, particularly if she knew I was still, you know, active in the bedroom department.” That was probably an understatement.
“Promise. I won’t say a word,” Stephanie said.
No sooner had she put the phone down than it rang again.
“Hi, it’s me.” It was Stephanie’s mother, Estelle. She was phoning to check that Stephanie was still bringing Jake over in the morning.
“Course, he’s really looking forward to it.” Every other Sunday, her parents would look after Jake, and Stephanie’s two best friends, Lizzie and Cass, would come over for one of her famous fry-ups.
“Oh, by the way,” Estelle said, her tone low and conspiratorial, “I think your grandmother is seeing somebody.”
“What? As in a man?”
“Yes. I bumped into that Pam the other day, you know, the warden at The Haven. Nothing gets past her. Anyway, apparently your grandmother’s got ‘a gentleman caller.’ Been seeing him for quite a while.”
“Really? Good for her,” Stephanie said.
“No, don’t get me wrong, I totally agree. Your grandfather’s been gone three years and it’s companionship for her. Somebody to play Scrabble with, or to sit in the other armchair and watch Countdown. I mean, it’s not as if they get up to anything at that age. God, can you imagine?”