My Life On a Plate

by India Knight

  And off we drive, in convoy, mothers both, surrounded by other mothers, in other cars, going to have other coffees. I feel like an ant. I feel like jumping out of the car and running. Whenever this happens, I Count My Blessings, like this:

  I am A MARRIED WOMAN. Everybody wants to be married. Don’t they?

  I have divine children, even though they make a habit of getting right on my nerves 90 per cent of the time.

  I have regular sex. Ish.

  I have a large, complicated, but ultimately supportive family. It’s very charming, really – sort of fashionably Irish. What are a few drug problems and the odd instance of kleptomania between (step) siblings?

  Everybody gets bored sometimes. Better to be bored with a partner than bored by oneself. No?

  My Blessings reassure me less and less these days, especially Blessing Number 5.1 must think up some new ones.

  3

  Robert’s birthday is organized: twelve of us at Oliver Peyton’s newest restaurant, 8 p.m. next Tuesday. He comes home from work and I inform him of this joyful fact, and he appears to be pleased.

  Robert’s working hours are ludicrous. He edits a women’s glossy magazine and is forever hanging out at the printers’, or having drinks with advertisers, or going to ghastly shop openings where C-list semi-celebrities drink bad champagne and show too much cantilevered cleavage.

  I used to go with him, years ago, in the mistaken belief that these events were somehow residually glamorous, but I wised up. Also, I discovered that celebrities, C-list or otherwise, tend to be unfeasibly short. Kate Moss: minuscule. The Spice Girls: micro-beings. Tom Cruise: your actual, real-life dwarf. Bless them, and everything, and I know it’s not their fault, but there’s nothing like a really short person to make one feel gigantic, a huge, clumsy, lumpen oaf of a creature. Of course, Robert isn’t terribly tall either. If I wear heels, I tower over him. Robert, in fact, has a smaller waist than me; better cheekbones, too. I will, I accept, never be one of those women in ads who look all Sunday-morningish and sexy in their husband’s loose 501s and white shirts. I could wear Robert’s 501s as legwarmers, if I unstitched the crotch, but that’s about it. The sweaters he thinks of as ‘baggy’ are the ones I wear skin-tight, 1950s-starlet style. I can’t help sometimes wondering what it would be like to be with some strapping six-foot-three-er.

  Robert parks his briefcase on the sofa, kicks off his shoes, pecks me perfunctorily, but not unaffectionately, on the nose and asks what’s for dinner. It’s 9 p.m. and the children are in bed. I was drinking white wine before Robert arrived, with so much enthusiasm that I forgot to tidy up the kitchen, although I did manage to bung a chicken in the oven. The kitchen floor, though, is strewn with Play-Doh and odd bits of Lego; the dishwasher sits unemptied; plates are piled up in the sink; this morning’s papers are scattered all over the table.

  ‘Clara, it’s a tip in here,’ Robert states unemotionally (please assume that everything my husband says is stated unemotionally unless I indicate otherwise). ‘What were you doing all day?’

  As I keep saying, we’ve been married eight years. In that time, I have trained Robert to desist from yawning like a woman (by emitting a high-pitched scream at the end of the yawn), from baring his teeth to check for plaque when looking in the mirror, from blowing his nose in the most disgusting, probing, exploratory way, from wearing really ugly underpants with piping. But I haven’t yet managed to convince him that I don’t lie around all day eating grapes, being massaged by oiled Nubians. So my voice is a little bit terse, with just a hint of sourness, when I say, ‘Oh, you know. Picking fluff out of my belly-button. Trying on shoes. Eating crisps. What do you think, Robert? Taking the boys to school and nursery. Organizing your birthday. Hoovering. Making beds. Buying a present for Charlie’s friend Alex, who’s having a party on Saturday. Collecting your dry-cleaning. Answering the phone every thirty seconds. Mopping. Collecting the children from school. Making their tea…’

  ‘All right,’ Robert says, smiling, but I haven’t finished. I can’t help but notice that, as well as smiling, he is looking distinctly bored by my litany.

  ‘… Playing Killer Penguins for an hour, giving them their bath, practising Charlie’s reading – he’s really getting quite good – reading them stories, running up and down the stairs for a bit because they wouldn’t settle, cooking your bloody chicken…’

  ‘Chicken?’ says Robert, yawning. ‘I had some for lunch. I had lunch with Richard, did I tell you?’

  ‘And then, and then, I sit down for a nanosecond with a glass of wine, for the first time all day, and you ask me what I’ve been up to?’ I am really pretty annoyed, not least because this is tiresomely familiar territory.

  ‘He’s having an affair.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Richard. He’s having an affair.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Acne Girl.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘YES!’

  This is what I love about Robert: he is the world’s best gossip, almost feminine in his relish of detail, horrendously bitchy. Acne Girl is Richard’s PA and, as you might expect, she has bad skin. I have a thing about bad skin: it makes me feel sick. Acne Girl is what my mother might call a slattern. She always looks like she’s just had sex, possibly because she just has – especially with this exciting new development to consider. Her clothes are the kind that inevitably look slept-in. Her hair is tousled. She is undeniably sexy, in a dirty way. But she does have appalling skin for a twenty-three-year-old.

  More to the point, Richard is Naomi’s husband. I am longing to hear about why Richard has decided to have an affair at this late stage, but I feel sick thinking about Naomi. I know she’s ridiculous, but her heart is kind and she tries so hard, with her Shaker kitchen and polished wooden floors and her incessant stew-making and her children who look like they’ve been picked out of a catalogue.

  ‘Her pelvic floor!’ I cry. ‘It’s too poignant.’ And it is. Who will notice its marvellous resilient elasticity now?

  ‘He’s doing it for sex, apparently,’ Robert says, lighting a cigarette and settling into an armchair.

  ‘But so is she! She doesn’t want to pee when she comes! She wishes not to leak, Robert, and who can blame her?’

  ‘Who indeed? Apparently,’ Robert continues, ‘sex with Naomi is like going to the gym. It’s very much doing it by numbers.’

  ‘What about me?’ I cry.

  ‘Clara, I can’t keep up. What about you? I thought we were talking about Richard.’

  ‘Is it like numbers with me?’ Unattractively neurotic, I know, but there you go.

  ‘Sex with you? No, it’s not like numbers.’ Robert is sort of smirking. I hope very much that he is remembering some hot and heavy action, and possibly even getting a stiffy at the unbearably erotic recollection. There is an opaque sort of silence while Robert stares at me, still smirking. ‘It’s the opposite of by numbers, I’d say,’ he opines languidly. ‘It’s messy. Like you, darling. Like the kitchen floor.’

  ‘Is it hot?’

  ‘The floor?’

  Why is he being deliberately obtuse? Why?

  ‘No, the sex. With me.’ I need to know. I mean, it seems absurd to me to spend so much of one’s life having sex with the same person without ever really talking about what it is like, past the first flush of passion. I suddenly sit bolt upright, having had the most terrible thought: maybe sex with me is disastrous, catastrophic, vomit-making.

  ‘Hot?’ says Robert. ‘Sometimes. It can be. Shall we eat?’

  4

  I’ve woken up fat. But of course. It’s Robert’s birthday, after all, and his birthday party is tonight, and it might have been nice to look a little bit glamorous. But no, I’ve woken up fat. Worse, I’ve woken up fat for absolutely no reason at all. Did I stuff my face at dinner last night? No, I did not. Did I help the children demolish that tea-time packet of Jaffa Cakes? Nope. I controlled myself, because I didn’t want to wake up fat. And I did anyway. I can’t be
lieve it. I can’t believe that today, of all days, I have woken up with the face of a pig.

  I stagger into the bathroom, fatly, on my trotters, and peer at my face in the mirror. I could oink with disappointment. The face is about twice the size it was yesterday; not to mention suspiciously shiny. And – oh, treat of treats – I have two spots lurking near my hairline. What is going on? I am closer to the menopause than I am to puberty. Surely acne and sudden nocturnal weight gain ought to be behind me now? Poor Robert, earlier on, being given a birthday snog by his shiny-faced, pustulant porker of a wife. No wonder he didn’t have time for a quickie. I remember when every spare minute was devoted to quickies, or at least I think I do. It seems improbable somehow, and sometimes I think I suffer from an exceptionally acute case of False Memory Syndrome.

  That’s put the kibosh on the natural look, then. My newly obese face calls for extreme measures, for panstick and concealer and all the trickery I can muster up. But really, what is the point of a shelf full of inordinately expensive creams and unguents if I’m going to wake up looking like a corpulent teenager? After staring at myself, sighing loudly, for ten minutes, I resolve to let my face be for the time being. It needs to breathe. It needs to settle. It might benefit from some fresh air. I might go for a walk later and blast the old pores for a while. (This is a very unappealing thought. Walking, to me, constitutes exercise, and I am not big on exercise. I am the kind of person who has longed for a Stannah stairlift since I was sixteen.)

  Meanwhile, I splash my face with cold water and tie my hair back. I hate doing this. It always becomes painfully apparent that I am not naturally a raving beauty. Devoid of make-up, hair bunched weirdly on top of my head, I look like a cross between an old potato and a diesel dyke. I don’t know anyone who looks as hideous as I do in the morning. Robert wakes up looking like a skincare ad from GQ, which I find unsupportive. No wonder I spend so much of my life in a furious bad mood.

  The problem with waking up fat is that a small part of you always thinks, Ah, sod it – I’ve woken up fat, so I might as well spend the day eating. I am trying very hard to keep a grip here, but I managed to do a big Sainsbury’s shop yesterday and the fridge is groaning with deliciousness. I don’t think one smallish bacon and egg sandwich would hurt much, do you? And I’m going for that walk later. I’ll just walk a bit longer and get rid of it.

  Scouring through the papers, a gentle dribble of mayo-drenched bacon juice winding its way down my chin, I feel utterly content. I even start looking forward to dinner. It’ll be nice to see Flo and Evie, and I haven’t seen Tom for a couple of months, so there’ll be lots to catch up on. My mother adores Robert, so she’ll be on her best behaviour. It looks like it might be a fun evening. Except, of course – and here I drop my bacon sarnie in horror – that the dress I want to wear, a dry-clean-only little black number, cleverly cut to hide excess stomach, is dirty. I must, must, must remember to take it to the two-hour dry-cleaners as soon as I’ve finished breakfast. Speaking of which, the children have left a couple of half-eaten muffins behind…

  It’s 7.30 p.m. The boys are murdering each other. I forgot the dry-cleaners, inevitably, and so am squeezing myself into an old, but forgiving, stretchy black number. I only had time to shave my legs from the knee down, which gives a kind of goaty, centaur effect (to match my star sign), but who cares – it’s hardly as if anyone is going to be examining my legs. I spent an hour doing my make-up – I bribed the children with chocolate, which was successful, unless you count the fact that half of it is smeared over the sofa – and I look okay. Less fat-faced than this morning, though hardly sculpted of cheekbone. I can’t find any clean knickers. Charlie and Jack keep stealing them to give to the hamster ‘for nests’. I stole them back a couple of times, only to have to run to the loo in public places to whip them off, suddenly disgusted at the idea that a rodent, albeit a sweet-looking one, had nestled in my gusset.

  Robert is ready to go, in his impeccably tailored, classic-with-a-twist Richard James suit, pink-shirted, wearing a groovy tie. He looks handsome. He says, ‘I thought you were wearing the black see-through number,’ with a tiny moue of disappointment. I feel a little kick of indignation. Surely ‘You look hot, baby’ would be a more morale-boosting comment. But Robert, I realize with a stab of something approaching sadness, has never called me ‘baby’. He has never called me anything sexy. ‘Clara’ and ‘darling’ is as affectionate as he gets.

  ‘Why don’t you ever call me sexy things?’ I ask, cramming my feet into my only pair of Manolos while slipping my arm into my trusty grey coat. (I really must buy a new coat next winter – this one is years old and beginning to show it. Five years ago, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to put on something so desperately unfashionable – I’d have rather frozen to death. Five years more and I’ll no doubt be pioneering the return of the shell suit as part of my ongoing Comfort At All Costs, Even If It Makes You Look Really Plain campaign.)

  ‘Clara, what are you banging on about now?’ Robert says, checking his reflection before peering distractedly at his watch. ‘What do you mean, sexy things? Like what?’

  ‘Like, like, like, oh, “tigerbum”,’ I say rashly, not really having thought very hard about it.

  ‘Tigerbum? Tigerbum? Are you seriously suggesting you would like me to call you “tigerbum”?’ Robert is grimacing, and I can tell he is trying not to laugh.

  ‘Well, no – not necessarily “tigerbum”, which sounds a bit like I have a stripy behind because I don’t, you know, understand how to wipe myself…’

  ‘Clara!’ Robert practically shouts, the smile wiped off his face. ‘You say the most grossly unattractive things.’ He wrinkles his nose up at my verbal bad smell and looks around him fastidiously, as if I were about to reveal my excrement-smeared posterior at any moment. Sometimes Robert gets right on my nerves.

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? I don’t want to be a stripe-bot. No, I meant things like “baby” or “sweetheart” or “sugar”. Sweet names. For sweet me.’

  Robert sighs. He looks perplexed. ‘Sour-sweet,’ he mutters to himself, adding, ‘We have to go,’ and tossing me my pashmina. (See what I mean? I am Last Season Woman.) ‘We’re going to be late. Come on. Snookums. Fluffkins. Sweet One.’

  I didn’t mean the names people called Kylie give their teddies, I want to say, and why does he have to sound so sarcastic? Never mind. I cheer myself up with a last glance in the hall mirror and thank Monsieur St Laurent for the world’s best concealer. I look quite attractive, in a dishevelled kind of way. In my head, I say to myself, ‘Heyyyyy – lookin’ good.’ I don’t know why I say this, since I am not the Fonz, but there you go. The prospect of an evening en famille does strange things to me.

  5

  My family are very well dressed. Prada shifts and Jimmy Choo shoes and Ozwald Boateng suits with Technicolor linings: they’re a well-groomed lot. Their hair is sleek. They do that thing of always looking perfectly finished: no snagged tights or chipped nail varnish or flecks of spinach on the front teeth for them. Their skins are taut and polished, their dentistry impeccable. They look expensive, all of them. Except me. They always make me feel like a cheerful, simple-minded wench, skirt tucked up into my knickers, arms weighed down with ales.

  I don’t know why this should be, although it is definitely bosom-related in part. If you have largish bosoms, which I do, they often form a robust sort of shelf half-way up your torso. This shelf, helpfully, acts as a receptacle for any stray debris resulting from a meal: crumbs, drips of sauce, even the head of a prawn once, which made me scream. The other women in my family are relatively flat-chested, and their clothes hang properly. They’d no more find a giant prawn perching on their décolletage, staring at their face in a sinisterly intense black-eyed way, than they would wear American Tan tights with a reinforced gusset.

  I brush my dress down self-consciously; as usual, I’ve managed to get toothpaste on myself, and the damp stain still shows. I can see Flo, in her wispy little Tocca s
lip. I can see Evie, tossing her lowlights and looking edible in a Dolce & Gabbana number that shows her Wonderbra. And I can see Kate. Kate is regal in navy Prada (‘so simple’). She is already berating the waiter over something or other – probably the bad feng shui of the room. I sigh. I gulp. I take deep breaths.

  ‘Clara!’ A friendly hand snakes itself around my waist. It belongs to Tom, my thirty-six-year-old stepbrother, who ‘works’ as a fashion photographer, although he only ever seems to take actual pictures once in a blue moon. ‘You look gorgeous,’ he says sweetly. ‘Have you met Tarka?’

  He points to an absurdly emaciated beanpole standing reverently a few paces behind him. Another model, obviously, and American by the sounds of it. She looks like a sexy insect.

  I say, ‘Hello, Tarka. Otterly delighted to meet you.’

  Tarka looks blank and says to Tom, ‘I didn’t know Clara was Irish.’

  Tom winks at me and says to Tarka, ‘Actually, hon, she’s Japanese.’

  Tarka says, ‘Wow! That’s, like, so cool. I do a lot of work in Tokyo. Your English is so good!’

  I bow solemnly, less geisha than sumo champion.

  ‘Another record-breaking simpleton… Where do you find them?’ I hiss at Tom, not unaffectionately. I couldn’t look less Japanese if I tried. It’s like mistaking an African tribal chief for Benny from ABBA.

  Tom shrugs. ‘Dunno,’ he retorts. ‘Can’t remember. She’s a crap cook’ – Tom is obsessed with food, which is paradoxical since he seems to favour women who appear not to need any – ‘but she, er, has other qualities.’ We snigger companionably. I wouldn’t call Tom nice, exactly, but he does make me laugh.