‘So, I’ll see you on Saturday.’
I nodded. We stood staring at each other. Ali would be back in about half an hour. I think I made the first move, and before we knew it, we were grinding on each other up against the side of the van in broad daylight, his mouth kissing my entire face.
‘Inside,’ he said brusquely. ‘Now, before I have an accident.’
We just about made it up the stairs, stopping once on the middle landing to rip clothes off. I urgently pulled him down onto me in the corridor outside the airing cupboard.
‘What about Ali?’
‘She’s out. Just do it.’
‘God, you’re bossy.’
‘Don’t waste time talking!’ The cheap nylon carpet chafed like sandpaper against my shoulders as I arched greedily towards him while he peeled down the condom.
‘You trumped Rampant Rabbit,’ I said afterwards, his face hidden in my neck, both of us out of breath.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He gives good orgasms, but that was amazing. A real collywobbler.’
‘That sounds like something my nan would say.’
‘What was that?’ I could hear the jangle of keys in the front door. ‘Fuck! Ali’s back early.’
‘Hellooooo! I’ve brought some left-over cake. I see Woody’s still here.’
‘Fuck fuck fuck. Quick, in my room. Grab your clothes.’ We hastily scrambled from the landing and managed to get dressed and downstairs in less than three minutes.
‘Hey! Ali, we were just checking the pipes in the airing cupboard,’ Woody said nonchalantly, kissing her on the cheek. She stared at me keenly, her eyebrows raised.
‘Why is your top on back to front, Amanda?’
*
I lay on my side, sucking in my doughy mummy tummy, watching Woody’s hairless chest lift and fall in time with his breath. He was conked out. I envied people who just decided that they would submit to sleep. Childhood sleepless nights had been littered with monsters creeping into my bedroom as soon as Mum switched off the light. Headless chickens and dinosaurs would wrestle for space upon the ceiling and, as I grew older, silent black spectres towered in the corner of the room. The pervading fear that I would be dead in the morning never disappeared.
At some point that Saturday night I fell asleep, only to wake what felt like five minutes later, sweaty and disorientated because someone was on Sam’s side of the bed. Woody was watching me.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘How’s your head?’
‘Erm, OK, I think. How’s yours?’
‘Totally fine! I’m as hard as old boots.’ He certainly was. He had revealed his own brush with rock bottom the evening before in the pub, after he’d spent the afternoon painting my kitchen ceiling.
‘When I came home from the incident on the boat when I nearly drowned, Mum locked away all the alcohol, all the drugs, anything I might take, even the cough syrup.’
‘Would you have raided it?’
‘NO! She has no idea about drugs. Cocaine isn’t heroin. She thought I was going to start bartering with her for my fix of Calpol, selling the house from under her to feed my habit. I didn’t. I wanted to sleep and I wanted to change.’
‘But you still do them, Woody,’ I baldly stated.
‘I do occasionally, not every day like my old normal.’ He smiled at me and leaned over and kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
When the children arrived back that evening, it was obvious something was wrong.
‘What’s going on?’
Isla stormed upstairs and didn’t even say hello, her bags dumped in the hallway.
‘She’s been funny all weekend. She won’t talk to me and she’s ignoring Carrie as well. Being quite rude.’ Sam’s injured tone made me want to throttle him.
‘She’s upset, Sam. About your baby. What do you expect? A ticker-tape parade?’
‘Thanks for the understanding.’
‘Sorry, but I don’t understand. It’s not exactly the world’s greatest news for any of them. They need lots and lots of time to adjust. And reassurance. They’ll feel usurped.’ And I know how that feels I wanted to add, but just glared at him. ‘Acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight.’
‘I know that!’ he sounded frustrated. How did he think they felt?
‘Maybe Isla can get some help with dealing with it, like Meg is? I can look in to it.’
‘That would be great, thanks.’
‘You’re just clearing up his mess, aren’t you?’ Ali said once he had gone. ‘He has no idea how this feels for them. How hard they might be finding it.’
Isla walked into the kitchen and silently handed me a folded piece of paper. It was addressed to Daddy. It wasn’t a traditional letter; it was a drawing. In the centre, surrounding a tiny baby, was a broken heart with knives sticking out of it (spookily like the Three of Swords Tarot card). Around the outside of the heart Isla had sketched pictures of herself, Sonny, Meg and me all crying. She stood defiantly in front of me, almost daring me to be cross. I gravely handed it to Ali to look at.
‘Isla, if this is how you feel, you have to speak to Daddy about it. Do you want me to give him that letter?’
‘Yes!’ She exploded into a fit of tears. ‘I hate him!’
I hugged her hard and Meg somehow squeezed in, too.
‘How can he have another baby, Mummy? He has us!’
‘I know. But these things happen when people split up. Look at Grandpa Scotland. I wouldn’t have my sisters if Grandma Susie hadn’t had them and the thought of them not being there makes me feel really sad. I love them so much.’
*
Fortuitously, I received a phone call from the rescue centre that very week and while the children were at school and nursery, I visited Pets at Home and stocked up on cat necessities, including a dreaded litter tray. I wasn’t keen on anything doing a steaming turd in the kitchen, even if it was a cute fur-ball kitten.
‘How would you feel about getting a kitten this weekend?’ I asked at teatime.
‘Mummy! Do you mean it?’ Isla shouted above the screeching of the other two.
Meg immediately burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably, her face burning red. I feared we were about to experience a force-five hurricane taking down the house in some kind of titanic emotional conflagration. I hadn’t anticipated this.
‘Oh, Meg. Oh, no. Don’t you want a cat? I’m sorry, I should have warned you before.’ She jumped up from the bench where she was eating her macaroni cheese and hurled herself at me a mass of raging tears.
‘Mummy, I’m so happy. You’ve made my dream come true. I’ve always wanted a cat.’ And she continued to sob into my chest. Her reaction set me off and soon we were all bawling our eyes out at the dinner table.
‘Oh crap, what’s happened?’ Ali cried in dismay as she brought Grace through for her tea.
‘Nothing, we’re all just so happy to be getting a cat!’ Isla said, smiling through her tears. ‘Mummy, is this to stop us feeling sad about the baby?’
I looked at Ali, who raised her eyebrows.
On Saturday morning, Ali, Grace, the children and I stood in the back room of the Celia Hammond Cat Rescue Centre. Wall-to-wall cages ran all around us, housing all kinds of cats, some in pairs and some solitary. A few were meowing and one or two were cowering at the back of them.
‘It’s between these two,’ the lady explained, and pointed to a ginger cat pacing his enclosure like a tiger in captivity, and a black one who wouldn’t look at us. We had been told they were male, about six months old and just neutered. They were still technically kittens but just looked like small cats.
‘That one!’ Meg cried, pointing at the ginger cat.
‘Good choice,’ the woman remarked. ‘He was found abandoned in a cardboard box a month ago. Someone must have got him for Christmas and no longer wanted him.’
‘I wish we could take all of them,’ Isla whispered. ‘I feel so sad for the ones left behind.’
�
��Don’t worry,’ the woman assured her, ‘they will all find nice homes.’
‘Cat!’ Sonny shouted with glee.
‘Wow, another word,’ I laughed ironically. ‘At this rate, Grace will be talking before him.’
The newest member of the Single Mums’ Mansion joined the commune. At last Sonny had a boy to play with.
‘What will you call him?’ Ali asked as we crawled back through the freezing rain in gridlocked traffic, the cat mewing dejectedly from the back in his brand-new portable prison.
‘Ginger!’ Meg beamed, her cheeks fit to burst with happiness. ‘I lub him already!’
‘Wow,’ Ali said softly next to me, ‘I’ve never seen her so animated. This cat already seems like a good idea.’
Ginger distracted the children from properly noticing that Woody was spending a bit more time at the house as ‘Mummy’s Friend’. We hadn’t officially stepped out on a first date, we’d just slipped into something vaguely familiar, like catching an episode of your favourite TV comedy show then getting sucked into the subsequent ten episodes without coming up for air. We kept it low key if the children were in the house, and he would sleep in the office, where I had now hoovered and changed the bed linen, but the boxes and junk remained shoved in piles. It felt scarily easy and yet constantly strange at the same time. Especially when Sam’s unwelcome baby news hit the papers a week later.
Carrie Has a Bun in the Oven!
one of the more original headlines blasted.
TV’s Carrie Carrying Married Lover’s Fourth Child!
That one made it sound more sordid than it actually was. I was so glad the children were too little to read newspapers or look on line. It meant they couldn’t be teased about it at school. But it also meant I was fair game.
Uncommonly, the house phone rang at seven in the morning that week. It was Ali.
‘I’m in the car outside. Is Woody still there?’ I was supervising Grace’s Olympic try-outs for the toast javelin while Ali went to work. Sonny was still in his cot babbling to his diggers and the girls were attempting to get dressed without me corralling them in their rooms and forcing school uniform over heads like horses’ tack. It wasn’t going well.
‘What’s going on? Have you broken down?’
‘No! The press are outside.’
‘How can you see? It’s still dark.’
‘They tried to ask me something. One of them has a camera, too. They want a picture of you looking heartbroken and downtrodden. Bloody prove them wrong!’
‘What about Woody? They’ll take a picture of him!’
‘Who will?’ he asked as he wandered into the kitchen in his work gear.
‘I’ve got to go, thanks for the tip-off.’
‘The press are outside.’
‘To stalk me?’
‘No! Me! I don’t want the children being subjected to it, or you either.’
‘Do you want me to go and tell them to fuck off?’
‘No! That’ll make it worse. You need to stay here until they leave.’
‘I can’t. I have to get to work! I have to be in the East End by eight thirty.’
‘OK, well, they mustn’t see you leaving here. I haven’t told anyone we’re, you know…’ Oh, I hated this! Having to have the ‘What is this called’ conversation before we’re even ready to know what it was ourselves.
‘Are you embarrassed about me?’ he asked in a wounded manner.
‘No!’ I didn’t sound convincing even to myself and inwardly cringed. I just wanted Sam to find out when I was ready to tell him, not when the Daily Fail splashed it across page ten. Woody came with so many conflicting connotations attached to him, like fruitless warnings stuck on an innocuous bottle of cough medicine. Do not mix with children. Do not take on a full moon. Do not have when under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Do not ingest with wine. Years of his drug taking and self-obsessed partying hadn’t really won him any fans in my camp. Rob hated him and that made it all the more difficult to tell him we were kind of together.
‘Shall I leave by the back gate?’
‘There isn’t one.’
‘Believe me, I will find one,’ he said in a tone that set me on edge. How many times had he had to do this?
I texted Philippa and asked if Woody could escape through their back garden and out through the front door.
Of course! Tell him to knock on the door and we’ll let him in.
Good old Philippa, she just wasn’t the curtain-twitching type.
‘Will you be OK getting over that fence?’ I asked him, worrying he would snap a leg on the imposing Leylandii that bordered the rickety leaning fence on Philippa’s side.
‘Yep, don’t stress. I can jump off the shed roof. It’s all good. I’ll see you soon. Remember: no comment!’ He kissed me on the lips and, like the Milk Tray Man, slipped silently out of the back door into the ink-black morning still masquerading as night. I turned back to Grace and jumped. Isla was staring at me from the doorway.
‘Woody kissed you, Mummy!’
I groaned bringing my hands up to my face in the vain hope that they could wipe the evidence clean away.
19
Am I Normal Yet?
As winter ploughed on regardless, even though it was technically spring and bulbs were thrusting their imprudent fresh green shoots up through the ice-tipped clods of sodden earth, foreboding cast its capricious net upon me once more. We were all awaiting the birth of the prodigal child with no star to guide us. Even the arrival of Ginger couldn’t quell the building tension in the house, though Meg had really blossomed in the last month as we drew to the end of her allotted free therapy sessions.
‘I think the main concern with Meg is that she struggles to communicate her emotions,’ Elley quietly explained in one session while Meg coloured in a picture she had lovingly drawn of the cat. ‘She also desperately wants to please people, and when she can’t, it stresses her and she retreats inside herself, lashing out instead. She has a deeply entrenched lack of self-confidence.’
I felt awful. Elley was right. Meg had been trying to please me from birth and couldn’t, because I had been buried under the perplexing shroud of post-natal depression. My eyes brimmed with tears.
‘This isn’t your fault.’ Elley patted my arm kindly. ‘What’s important is she’s coming out of herself now. Spending time exclusively with you here, talking about feelings and parenting, is what she’s obviously needed. The addition of the cat has given her a focus point, too. Cat’s love no matter what; she doesn’t need to prove anything to him.’
This rang true. Since Ginger, she engaged more, she cared for him, making sure he had enough food and drink. It was like his very presence had completely recalibrated her. He was beginning to feel like part of our patchwork family.
*
‘Look,’ Ali hissed, one night when Dara was round to take her out. ‘He’s like the Pied Piper.’ Jacqui and I poked our heads round the living-room doors from the kitchen, and Dara was sitting in the middle of the sofa, a picture book open in his hands, Grace on his knee, Sonny under one arm, Joe squeezed in next to him, and the girls with Neve on the other side, Ginger in Meg’s arms, all craning necks to watch him turn the pages.
‘It’s his voice,’ I whispered. ‘It’s like liquid chocolate, especially with his posh accent and autocue skills. He could make boiling an egg sound enthralling.’
‘It makes my womb contract,’ Ali sighed sadly. ‘I want another baby.’
‘With Dara?’ Jacqui asked. She shrugged. ‘Hypothetically?’
‘Yes. Just looking at him with the children, I want to have that. Be with someone who shares things, helps, reads stories, cares as much as I do about our baby. I never had that. I want to have a chance to do it properly.’
I squeezed her arm. ‘I know, and that’s what’s so shit. Well, see how it goes with Dara. Take it slow, but so far so good!’
Sam had met the news about Woody with scarcely concealed mirth.
‘So, y
ou’re actually dating him? Like he’s your boyfriend?’ His eyebrows almost disappeared into his hairline.
‘Yes.’
He whistled through his teeth in that way I knew meant he thought I was mad.
‘Is he still as nuts as ever?’
‘No. I wouldn’t let him near the kids if he was. He’s calmed down massively and doesn’t party like that any more.’
‘Glad to hear it. Well, be careful.’
‘Of what?’
‘In case he does go mad again.’
‘What, like you did and leave me with three kids?’
‘Oh, yes, I walked right into that one. Ha ha.’
You haven’t earned that levity, fuck-face, I silently fumed. Just for today I will not be angry…
By ten o’clock that same night, Woody, Jacqui, Will and I arrived at the bar where I normally DJ-ed, free drinks on the house to commiserate Jacqui’s divorce being finalised, when Dara and Ali came bowling in after their romantic dinner date.
‘Loo, ladies, now!’ Ali hissed as she thundered towards us leaving Dara with the boys, an uncustomary glacial expression upon her face.
‘So, what’s going on?’ I asked as we three squeezed into the doll-sized cubicle.
‘Dara’s moving to Hong Kong.’ Ali’s face crumpled, tears spurting out of her scrunched-up eyes.
‘Fuck, I can’t even hug you. My arms are trapped by my sides. Sorry,’ I commiserated. ‘That’s truly shite.’
‘It is, especially after he’s met Grace and she liked him. All the kids liked him. She held her arms up to him the other day when we were at home. She walked for the first time when he was there in the kitchen, remember?’ I nodded. ‘Just when I felt like I was moving on, and that shit face didn’t have such a hold over me. I really like Dara.’
‘I know you do,’ Jacqui chipped in. ‘But can you keep it up over long distance? Does he want to?’
‘He said he does. And he’ll be back to visit his dad and sisters. And for work stuff, too. He’s got a promotion. The channel is massive over there.’
‘When does he go?’
‘June.’ Ali tilted her head up towards the light and fiddled about in her coat pocket. ‘I’ve got this.’ She managed to bend her arm into the centre of the huddle.
The Single Mums' Mansion Page 13