Cuckoo in the Chocolate

by Chris Longden

  “Gosh, I don’t know, Lydia. I suppose… Well. In the House of Commons – when the other side are talking rubbish. We sort of shout ‘Bah! Bah!’ at them.”

  “Ha yes, they do, Lydia,” I said. “I’ve seen it myself when I used to work with the government in London. You can see it on the TV too. They go Baaaah Baaaah. At the people in the other parties.”

  Lydia eyeballed us both warily. “Like sheep, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Sheep at parties? I dunno. And you’re supposed to be the grown-ups.” She shook her head. Matthew was knocking out ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ at a decibel that threatened to rival the power of the best Marshall amp.

  “Pack it in, Matthew,” I said. “We don’t sing at mealtimes.”

  There was silence for a few minutes whilst we all ate. Michael took the opportunity to murmur in my ear;

  “So… do they always act like this in restaurants?”

  “I’ve no idea,” I muttered back. “This is the first time I’ve let them out in one. Why? Do you think that they’re being really awful?”

  Matthew was now fishing ice cubes out of his drink and lobbing them at Lydia, who was shrieking with laughter. I wondered whether ice cube attack could be counted as hitting, if the other child seemed to be enjoying it. No, I would ignore this one. Choose your battles wisely, as they say.

  “It’s just that… I’ve noticed two other groups of people now move tables. Away from us.”

  I sniffed. “Well, you should be glad of that then. Less chance of people recognising you and associating you with an unruly family”.

  He finally twigged that I was getting pissed off.

  “I’m sorry, Rachael. Apologies. I imagine that there’s nothing more irritating than someone who doesn't happen to have children – commenting on your chosen… parenting style.”

  “Ha!” I exploded – halfway through a mouthful of food. “Style? In my dreams.”

  “Eew, Mum!” Lydia commented. “You just spat rice on the table. So, don’t you have any children, Michaelmas?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why?”

  “Lydia!” I warned. “It’s rude to question adults about things like that.” (Although at least Lydia had the guts to ask the question that I had been wondering myself.) But she carried on with another, 'Why?'

  “Well,” Michael offered. “Some adults – like me for example – only like children if they’re served on hot, buttered toast. Yum yum!”

  Lydia gave him a look.

  “You really are weird sometimes, Michaelmas.”

  Matthew shoved his knife and fork to one side, lifted his plate up and began to lick it. I took it off him and gave him some of my food to finish.

  “Were they boys?” Matthew suddenly asked Michael in between mouthfuls. “Did they like Star Wars?”

  “Did who like Star Wars?” Michael frowned.

  “Your children. Before you ate them.”

  “He’s serious!” Lydia squealed. “Matthew thinks that you really did eat your children up! You two are both total freaky-deaky-pants together! Oooh, Mum! I need to wee!”

  I scolded Lydia for - yet again - not pacing her bladder effectively enough and then led her away from the table. A few minutes later we returned to find Michael informing my son;

  “The thing is, Matthew… there are several tribes in the remotest parts of the world where it’s considered to be an act of the highest honour to eat the elders of the community. Now, we – you and I - might consider this to be a detestable atrocity – a hideous, barbaric act – but cannibalism is one of the…”

  Matthew had his hands down his pants and was busily scratching his bum. He interrupted Michael with;

  “So, when you ate your children – did you put brown or red sauce on them?”

  Teen-waitress had followed us to the table with the desserts and was standing behind us, two plates in hand and two balanced on her forearms. And despite this, she was still managing to flirt unashamedly with a group of army cadets at the table next to us.

  The waitress promised, “Laters, maybes see yers up Matley Lane?” to the lads and then plonked our plates down with an; “Oosdeathbychoclut?”

  I translated. “Michael – you ordered the Death By Chocolate, didn’t you?”

  “Ah yes. And I see that the three of you have plumped for boring old vanilla ice cream. Does anyone want to try some of mine? It looks scrummy!”

  “It looks like runny dog poo!” said Matthew.

  “We don’t eat bad chocolate, in our family. I told you that before, Michaelmas!”

  Michael looked at Lydia and then at me. “Really? Is she having me on? Do you really refuse to eat chocolate that’s…”

  “That kills kids down mines and makes African children shoot people with guns,” finished Lydia.

  “Cool!” said Matthew. “Kids have guns in Africa? Can I go there, Mummy?”

  I shrugged. “Well. As you know – it’s what we do at Sisters’ Space. We’re all about fairly-traded chocolate. I mean, ever since we made the link with the women in Ghana… it’s just been making me think a lot more. And I do believe that I should be practising what I preach at home – as well as at work.”

  “Gosh.”

  “Yeah. I know that I’m a laid-back parent when it comes to a lot of things… food wise – diet wise and all of that. But I do like to think that I have some principles that are of importance. That challenge the consumerist society. That help us – to support others out there in the world who have nothing like the standard of living that we enjoy. That’s what I think. Anyway.”

  Michael gulped a wedge of his desert. “Well, thinking’s dangerous when it comes to chocolate.”

  “Eeew!” said Matthew. “You just ate dog diarrhoea!”

  Even though my children couldn’t have been more obnoxious if I had asked them to try their damnedest, Michael gave me a fleeting kiss in the car park (whilst the kids weren’t looking) and said;

  “Please stop apologising. It’s been fine. Come round tomorrow night – as planned. I might manage to have a conversation without a small person finishing the end of my sentences for me. Oh no – perhaps not. You’ll be there though, won’t you?”

  “Ha. You calling me a short arse?”

  “Precisely.”

  ('Short arse' happened to be another one of Shaun’s nicknames for me.)

  The next day I drove over to my parents and dropped both kids off for the night. When planning over the phone for babysitting logistics with my mother the day before, I had finally admitted to her that I had a Saturday night ‘date.’ She had sounded surprised and even quite upbeat about it. But both of my parents were uncharacteristically quiet when I arrived at theirs. Although Dad didn’t beat about the bush.

  “So, who is this bloke then?”

  “Oh, just someone I know from work.”

  True. All true. I hoped that they wouldn’t ask any further questions. And whilst I knew that tomorrow they wouldn’t be asking me, ‘So did you make it home last night then?’ or ‘Did you get any?’, I did suspect that they would probably try and press Lydia for some details as to whether Mummy Has Any Nice New Man-Friends. I hoped that Lydia would rise to the occasion and prove to be enigmatic. She could be annoyingly mysterious and evasive when she sniffed the whiff of desperation from any adult who was clearly trying to extract information from her.

  CHAPTER 20

  Michael was still trying to persuade me that it had been a bit of a heady week in politics, what with the new oil crisis, a renewed West African conflict and the Prime Minister 'accidentally' saying ‘Fuck’ when he gave a speech at an Evangelical Alliance conference. Michael told me that he had deliberately done this, to prove to them once and for all that he wasn't a fundy.

  I just rolled my eyes and said;

  “Don’t believe you. Your claiming to be too knackered to take me out is a thinly-veiled excuse. You’re actually too tight to want to spend a few bob on buyi
ng me a couple of pints down in Stalyvegas.”

  Michael had stretched out on the sofa and invited me to snuggle under the crook of his arm.

  “Hah. More like I’m scared of being seen in public with you in these parts, after the experience with your two in the so-called ‘restaurant’. The way that the other people were looking at us! Must have dropped me a couple of dozen votes, at the very least.”

  Thankfully we were distracted from our lack of common policy on parenting matters when Michael’s phone rang. Again. He had told me that he wanted a peaceful night in – no phone calls other than 'urgent matters' - just chilling out and watching a few films, but despite the promise of ‘No interruptions this evening, eh?’ his mobile trilled out some eleven times (I counted). And his latest conversation seemed yet again to be ‘urgent business,’ requiring him to spend over half an hour discussing the history of block voting at party conferences. I mean – sure - I've always retained a very real interest in politics, but towards the end of the conversation when he was regaling facts from the 1970s about percentage shares of independent votes versus constituency, I ended up waking with a start, from a semi-snooze. Which unfortunately had involved me drooling a red wine stained patch onto one of the more expensive looking cushions.

  As he hung up, I chucked the soggy cushion behind the back of the sofa, repositioning myself so that he could lie across my lap, as I played with his hair. It was more salt and peppered these days, than in past photographs that I had seen of him, but it was still shot through with strong, sandy shades. I wondered at the fact that he hadn’t lost more of his hair by now. The stress of political life and all of that. And then I began to chuckle to myself. It had been so long – far too long - since I had found myself fondling another grown-up person’s barnet, versus a kiddy's.

  “What’s up?”

  “Oh. My chimp tendencies. I've just realised that I’m sitting here, doing the ‘nit-sectioning’ stroke that I have to do on Lydia and Matthew when we get an outbreak of too-busy mothers who can't be arsed to check their kids regularly.”

  “Found anything?”

  “No. You’ve been a good boy and managed to avoid too much head-to-head contact with the grubbier members of the Cabinet this week.”

  “I thought that you only got head lice if your hair was clean?”

  “Not true. They’ll go for anyone really. Mucky or not. But – fascinating fact here - they especially like red-heads. So, watch it.”

  “Another reason to be keeping your children at arm’s length from me.”

  “Thanks for the reminder. Anyway. I bet you, you’ve never had a lady-friend who automatically does this kind of thing for you, have you? Voluntary delousing, I mean.”

  “No. Can’t say that I have ever had anyone in my life, quite so… offbeat as you are.”

  “Well, 'offbeat' isn't the worst so-called compliment that I've ever been paid.”

  “Yes, it's true,” said Michael, reaching over me to grab a handful of popcorn from the side table “All my ex's were… shall we say… rather conventional. In comparison to you.”

  He proceeded to tell me about them. The girl that he met at Oxford and very nearly married; “Her father was very high ranking in the forces and it was a time in my life where I'd fallen in love with the military. But less so her, I'm afraid. Thankfully she did me a favour and ran off with a good friend of mine.” He skated over a few dalliances that he had had during his army career; “No hamsters, no Arab prisoners – nothing too fruity” and then told me about Miranda – a New York fashion designer. They had shared a place in London for a couple of years just after Michael had left the forces. I asked him why it had ended.

  “To be honest,” he replied, wiping a trickle of beer from his chin, “Sorry - Christ, it's hard to drink whilst lying down, isn't it? Well, I’d seen – done – a lot of stuff. In various parts of the world. Of course, the army puts you through de-compression and all of that, but civilian life can hit you hard. And so… my head was rather messed up. Miranda wasn’t... Well. She wasn’t interested in what I had experienced. And she wasn’t really the kind of person kitted out for living with a bit of a basket case. Which I probably was, back in those days.”

  “So… did you have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder then?”

  “Perhaps that’s what we’d call it today. But back then it wasn’t… But, no.” He trailed off and fiddled with the remote control, trying to pause the film that we had been trying to watch. Leonardo DiCaprio’s face was now frozen in mid-rant at a suspected Indonesian terrorist. Poor Mr DiCaprio. I could never take him seriously in grown-up films after 'Titanic.' And he had always reminded me of a lad who worked at the petrol station in Stalybridge. Too youthful looking to threaten to cut someone’s bollocks off. But might give you a good ticking off if you didn’t put your hose back in the pump properly.

  “I'm sure,” he continued, “That I wasn't too much fun to live with at that point in time. Suffered terribly with insomnia. But...” he tried to balance a half-empty bottle on his chest and frowned at it, daring it to topple over as he tried to conjure up the right words. “Miranda’s attitude didn’t really help, I suppose. I overheard her on the phone to one of her friends one day.” He mimicked a mid-Atlantic accent;

  “' Well, Cherry - when I hooked up with Michael I really hadn’t anticipated that I was signing myself up for never-ending sleepless nights with a nut-job wreck of an ex-soldier. ’”

  I pulled a face. Shocked that someone could be so callous. He carried on;

  “Hearing her say that, did me a favour actually. Jolted me out of my temporary lack of direction in life. After leaving the forces I had been feeling completely rudderless. Army life – the non-stop travelling. Being stuck in London - it truly had knocked me out of kilter.”

  “Whereabouts did you serve?”

  “Oh – all over the bloody show. Name me a country with a dodgy dictator where I didn’t end up doing my thing. But anyway. Back to Miranda. I asked her to leave. She packed her Prada suitcases and trotted off back to New York City.”

  He picked up the bottle again and laughed quietly;

  “So – once she was out of the door, I grabbed the phone and made an appointment to see a top-notch psychiatrist in Harley Street. And I discovered that my problem was less about any underlying mental health issues – but that it was more about a lack of career direction. The psych helped me to unearth a childhood passion of mine. Politics. My family had always been political. I’d always been a member of the party. But in the forces, ideological affiliations are quite obviously discouraged whilst you’re serving.”

  “Apart from the fact that the army exists solely to defend rampant capitalism, by reliance on weapons of mass destruction…”

  “Oh, you’re so old-fashioned, Rachael.”

  But he grinned. I was relieved that he clearly thought so very little of cold fish Miranda. But my curiosity still hadn’t been fully satisfied. Especially in relation to the scarring on his back; of how he had ended up with those white welts – those ripples. I wanted to ask him about it.

  But then he grabbed a handful of popcorn again and sighed.

  “But enough of me. Let's talk about you. Potted relationship history, please.”

  So, I told him about Adam. How we had met in one of the biker pubs that I often hung out at with Kate and Bob. How Adam had caught my eye and approached me with; “I like your handbag. Did you stencil that Judge Dredd motif on it yourself? Or did you get it off some crap market somewhere? ‘Cause it looks a bit dodgy.” Kate and Bob had brought along a friend of theirs; a bloke that they were angling to fix me up with. I was into guys with long hair at the time, but this one didn’t do it for me at all (he reminded me of an old English sheepdog) and to Kate’s horror, Adam had just proceeded to muscle right in on her nicely planned little foursome and continued with trying to chat me up. We had had our first date a few days later. A bike rally in Matlock; fish and chips and Nescafe. And after a bit we moved in together
and had five years of marriage. All happy. All good.

  “And then the children came along?”

  “Yes. Quite soon after we got married really. I guess that I’m supposed to say that Lydia and Matthew were our finest achievements. Although after yesterday’s performance, I’m not quite so sure…”

  His dimples danced at me and he replied;

  “Well, producing those two indicates that Adam must have had a great sense of humour. As well as excellent taste in women. But what about before Adam? After Adam… perhaps?”

  I coloured. Flooded with a sense of foolishness.

  “Well. A few casual boyfriends and one-nighters before I met Adam. But I guess really the main relationship that I had – in terms of length of time – was with Shaun. Who you've already heard of. Before. And after Adam. I'm sorry to say...”

  Michael glowered.

  “Ah yes. Mr Hotshot Knight of his own Tinpot Municipal Realm. Fascinating.” He tried to half-sit up, propping himself on one elbow so that he could look at me more directly. Which I didn't particularly want him to. “So,” he carried on; “don’t you think that there could be a bit more to all of this 'posturing' then? Moaning in the media about my heartless government department? Trying to blackmail you the other week, over the photographs? Don’t you think that this is all getting a bit too personally directed at me?”

  “Er, no. This has nothing to do with the past. You're making it sound like some kind of ‘Who’s Got The Biggest Willy Contest’.”

  “Oh, don’t underestimate yourself. Perhaps you’re a bit of a Helen of Troy figure. History shows us that men have waggled their willies at each other, over women a lot more unpleasant looking – and much less charming – than you are.”

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Yeah, right.