Why Mummy Drinks

by Gill Sims

  ‘Jesus, Ellen, shut up about your fucking app, all right? How many have you sold? A hundred? Or have you gone global and reached the heady heights of two hundred yet? Your precious app is not going to get us out of this financial hole, okay? At least I am trying to save money. I have ordered some smart light bulbs that will use much less electricity and energy meters to monitor how much electricity we are using.’

  ‘Oh right! Right. Fucking marvellous, Simon, just fucking marvellous. You always have to be the smug, sanctimonious arsehole, don’t you? It’s all MY fault we’ve no money, you tell me, while informing me of how YOU are economising by SPENDING MORE MONEY!’

  ‘I wasn’t the one who spent a fortune on Christmas, Ellen. That’s all I’m saying. If you could just plan ahead a bit better, and shop around for better value, I’m sure we wouldn’t have needed to spend nearly so much. If you would just organise your life, things would be much easier. And yes, my light bulbs will save us money in the long run, actually, so they’re an investment, unlike you spending £180 in some health food shop. On what? What do you even buy in a shop like that? Lentils? Only you could be so fucking profligate to spend that much on lentils when we don’t even eat lentils!’

  ‘It was your bastarding sister that spent that! Because she’s such a special snowflake that she can’t be expected to eat my toxin-loaded supermarket food. And the other reason why the bills were so high over Christmas is because we had EIGHT EXTRA PEOPLE TO FEED FOR A WEEK! Which is not cheap, because I’M NOT THE MESSIAH, SIMON, I CAN’T ACTUALLY FEED THE FIVE FUCKING THOUSAND ON FIVE LOAVES AND TWO FISHES, and even if I could, your sodding sister would turn up her nose at it because it wasn’t organic, gluten-free or FUCKING VEGAN! Ditto, unfortunately I can’t turn water into wine to satiate her endless thirst nor my own need to anaesthetise myself against all her bullshit. And when exactly am I supposed to trail around six different supermarkets so I can get 5p off a bag of carrots and then go to another shop for the potatoes because they are 10p cheaper? Tell me that? I work; I look after your fucking children; I clean this house; I cook, and what do you do? You work one day more than me and apparently that means that you get to spend all weekend sitting on your arse while I still run around after the children and cook and clean and do the laundry, while you do exactly fuck all squared to help me –’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m very sorry that I’m too tired after working a sixty-hour week to do the ironing, darling!’ spat Simon. ‘I’m very fucking sorry that I had the nerve to ask for a bit of time for myself, and while you’re blaming MY family for the expense of Christmas, can I remind you that YOUR family came too?’

  I wanted to kill him. I actually had visions dancing through my head of how immensely satisfying it would be to hit him over the head with Peter’s cricket bat and then bury him in a shallow grave in the woods. Or maybe I could use a frozen leg of lamb like in that Tales of the Unexpected story? I didn’t have any lamb in the freezer, though. There was a big piece of topside, I wondered if that would do? Probably not, you probably need something like a leg of lamb to get a good swing on it – with topside you’d probably need to get them on the ground first and it would be more like trying to bash their head in with a rock. Instead of murdering him, I took a deep breath and said, ‘Simon, do you remember the pigeon?’

  ‘What the fuck are you on about now?’ said Simon. ‘I’m trying to talk about saving money and sorting our lives out and you are wittering on about pigeons?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it. Just fuck off and leave me alone, since everything’s all my fault, like usual. I’ll just start shopping in frozen-food shops, will that make you happy? Frozen lamb? Hmm?’

  He’s right about one thing, though. What’s the point in constantly checking for emails to see if another ten apps have sold? It’s never going to happen, despite me sending it off to various websites that review and recommend apps. It was a stupid idea.

  We are not speaking now, after the row. Well, I am not speaking to him and I am mainly relying on flouncing round the house and slamming doors and passively aggressively crashing round the kitchen to prove my point. I have a horrible feeling that despite the door slamming and passive aggression he is quite enjoying the peace and quiet. Maybe I should start speaking to him again, just to spite him. Ha! It is very difficult to keep up anyway, when every fibre of my body is screaming ‘AND ANOTHER THING …’

  Saturday, 16 January

  In an effort to avoid Simon, because I am Still Not Speaking To Him, I decided to take Peter and Jane on an outing to a free art gallery and museum. This trip had two advantages: firstly, not having to look at fucking Simon and hear him tutting if he discovered a tub of houmous with a smear left at the bottom that went out of date yesterday, and thus having to endure another of his lectures on ‘wastage’, and secondly, being free, it was an excellent way of demonstrating my great frugality and fiscal prudence.

  In a further attempt at economy, I also decided we would not drive my gas-guzzling 4x4 into town and then pay a king’s ransom to park; we would get the bus, which would be both cheap and fun.

  Using public transport regularly instead of driving would also mean that we were not straying into the Perfect Atkinsons’ territory, as Lucy’s Perfect Mummy once told me that they have a ‘Public Transport Day’ each year, when they leave the Range Rover Overfinch at home and pick a destination and then have to work out how to get there and back by only using public transport. This is, Lucy’s Mummy informed me, ‘tremendous fun’.

  Unfortunately, it turned out the bus cost a bloody fortune and it would probably have been cheaper driving. The free museum and art gallery is crammed to the rafters with treasures and artefacts from the four corners of the earth but Peter and Jane only wanted to look at the dinosaur poo, and pay the obligatory visit to the Egyptian Room, as it is the law that at any given time when you have primary school age children at least one of them will be doing a project on the Egyptians.

  Afterwards I dragged them to look at the Art. They were underwhelmed, until they found a nude, at which point they sniggered and pointed and then, unable to contain themselves any longer, burst out with ‘BUM! BOOBIES!’ and cackled loudly.

  ‘Stop being so childish!’ I hissed, to which they replied in confusion, ‘But Mummy, we are children? How do we stop being childish?’

  My attempt to refresh my mind and soul by standing in silent contemplation of the Impressionists was rather spoiled by Peter standing behind me chanting ‘Bums bums bums, I want to see more bums’, and the always worrying realisation that Jane was silent. A small part of me hoped that she was dumbstruck by the beauty around her, but in my heart I know her better than that, and in fact she had sidled into the next room and found a cabinet of rare and priceless jewellery and was trying to work out how to pick the lock.

  In fairness, I wasn’t too devastated by the children’s distractions as I have spent a lot of time in my life standing in art galleries, trying to ‘feel’, to absorb and drink in and understand art, but mostly I only feel self-conscious and awkward, but having stopped, I have to stand for a suitable amount of time before walking on, in case people judge me and think me a philistine for not showing suitable appreciation – a bit like when you realise you are walking in the wrong direction and you can’t just turn around and walk the other way, because then People Will Know, so instead you have to pretend to go into a shop and then come back out and go the right way.

  I caved after that and took them to the gift shop like they had been asking me to ever since we arrived. I still refused to shell out £35.99 for a ballerina brolly for Jane, even though it was now in the sale reduced to a mere £22.99.

  On the bus on the way home I made the mistake of sitting upstairs on the basis it would be ‘fun’. I have not been upstairs on a bus since they stopped you smoking on buses. It was not ‘fun’, it was very loud with screaming teenagers excitedly Snapchatting each other and then discussing the messages they’d just sent across the bus at the tops of th
eir voices with much squealing and shrieking. On the plus side, they drowned out the noise of Peter and Jane squabbling about how the other was cheating at I Spy.

  I had forgotten what a wonderful view the top deck of a bus affords into other people’s homes and lives, though. It was dark by then, and the houses were lit up as people came home, and I watched all the scenes passing – the couple standing in the kitchen, chopping things for dinner, a woman in her sitting room with a glass of wine and a magazine, an empty room, full of books and paintings, with a fire lit, the occupants obviously about to come in and fling themselves down on one of those big squashy sofas.

  It always astounds me, passing all these houses, all these windows, that behind every one of those front doors is a story; a family that think and feel and shout and argue and eat pasta and watch TV, just like we do. Do people think the same when they pass my house? Do they look in my windows and see a nice house, a woman who has everything she could want, two beautiful children and a husband who loves her?

  That’s what I see, through all those windows – the good stories. The couple are cooking in companionable quiet, not silent and tense-jawed, chopping aggressively after a massive row as she wonders whether to dice the onion or plunge the knife through his heart. The woman with the wine is enjoying a well-earned bit of me-time after a busy day in her glamorous job, not drinking herself to oblivion to try to forget the fact that her married lover has decided to go back to his wife. That empty room is waiting to welcome a loving family for a convivial evening, it’s not empty because someone has gone into the hall to answer a phone call bringing them terrible news.

  When people pass my house, they don’t see a woman who wonders if she has made the right choices in life, who is sure she is a terrible parent, who doesn’t know if her husband loves her anymore – because he certainly doesn’t seem to like her very much right now and they barely talk or have anything in common these days – and who doesn’t know how long she can keep plastering on the bright smile that says to the outside world that everything is fine, it’s fine, it’s all marvellous, before she cries drunkenly into the dog’s ears because nobody understands her.

  Or maybe it’s all much more ordinary than that. Maybe the couple just have nothing more to say to each other as he wishes he had bought a sports car and toured the South of France instead of spending all their money on a ludicrous wedding and a mortgage they can’t afford, and she thinks about the boy who once kissed her on a beach on the Mull of Kintyre. I wish I could remember that boy’s name, as that kiss was possibly the second most intensely romantic moment of my life.

  Simon was responsible for the most romantic gesture anyone has ever made for me, and also the most ridiculous. We were in Edinburgh, we hadn’t been going out for very long and we were walking through The Meadows when we saw these pretty pink pigeons pottering around on the path in front of us. I was quite delighted by the notion of pink pigeons (at a distance), so when Simon said ‘We’ve got some of those at home,’ I exclaimed, ‘How lovely! Bring me one next time you go home, I want a pink pigeon.’

  We carried on our way and I forgot all about the pink pigeons. A few weeks later, Simon went home for some family celebration. We weren’t at that stage where I was invited as well, so I stayed in Edinburgh and probably went out and got drunk.

  On Sunday night, Simon appeared at my flat, clutching a cardboard box and insisting I come outside with him. He hustled me into the gardens of the square opposite the flat and handed me the box. He was grinning like a little boy on Christmas morning, he was so very pleased and proud of himself.

  I opened the box, screamed at the top of my lungs, dropped it and fled.

  Simon had gone and caught a pink pigeon from the dovecote at his grandmother’s house, brought it on the train with him all the way from Hampshire (getting very odd looks when he opened the box to give it food and water) and finally lugged the sodding thing halfway across Edinburgh to give to me, because I had once expressed a whim for a pink pigeon.

  Poor Simon was not to know then that I am utterly phobic of birds and moths and bats and anything else that flaps or flutters, and short of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head, literally the worst thing I could possibly open a box to find was an irate pigeon. I screamed so much people thought he was trying to mug me and a Big Issue seller tried to perform a Citizen’s Arrest.

  It was the single most lovely thing anyone has ever done for me, and once everything had calmed down, I had stopped screaming and Simon had been released from the headlock, the pigeon had flown off (and Simon had assured me that it was definitely a homing pigeon and it would be fine, so that I would stop crying about the poor, lonely, country pigeon all by itself in the big city, because just because I am shit scared of pigeons didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about the horrible, flappy, terrifying bastard), then, with dusk falling in an Edinburgh garden, Simon put his arms round me and told me he loved me for the first time. (What he actually said was ‘I love you, even though you are mental’, but we will leave that last bit out for the sake of the story.)

  Now he moans if I ask him to bring the washing in. I don’t think he’d bring me a pigeon again.

  FML, these January blues are a killer. No wonder people say public transport is depressing.

  Sunday, 17 January

  I was looking through old photos today, pretending I was sorting them out, but actually I was just rifling through them and marvelling at how young we all were. There was a terrible one of Hannah and I at a Vicars and Tarts party, dressed up as slutty vicars in dog collars with fishnet stockings and suspenders and far too much burgundy nineties’ lipstick.

  I think that was the night I broke my wrist while being spun enthusiastically round the dance floor and I refused to go to A&E dressed as a tarty vicar for fear of what they would think, so instead I self-medicated heavily with cheap gin and woke up with an agonising wrist and a very bad hangover. It might have been a different night, though – there were an awful lot of Vicars and Tarts parties back then.

  What happened to Vicars and Tarts? Was it just a flash-in-the-pan nineties’ thing, or are they still going on amongst younger, cooler people than us sad old farts? For a moment I thought I should have a Vicars and Tarts party, maybe for my fortieth, but then I realised that it was not the easiest look to pull off when one was nineteen and lithe and slender let alone now, after two children and too many crisps. The flab oozing through the fishnets would not be a good look. Most of us would have to go as the Vicar of Dibley now. Even back then it was galling how the boys would borrow my slutty dresses and hot pants and (from the back anyway) look so much better in them than me – even then I struggled somewhat with my ‘curves’ and was only as slim as I was due to mainly living on cheap white wine, vodka and Diet Coke, an endless supply of Marlboro Lights (God, I wish I could afford to smoke that much now) and the occasional kebab from the Istanbul or sausage rolls from the all-night bakery on my way home from clubbing.

  Then I started looking through photos of Simon and I, from the obligatory photo-booth strips to parties with me striking silly poses and Simon being Mr Cool behind me, but always with his arms around me. And then I got onto our wedding photos and I started crying, partly because we were so young and full of hope and looked so happy and partly because my dress was so awful.

  Seriously, what was I thinking? Mile upon mile of stiff, shiny, white taffeta, puffed sleeves (très Anne of Green Gables), the odd ruffle and flounce. Given the eighties had been over for some time when we got married, I still wouldn’t have looked out of place in Dynasty. The only consolation was Hannah’s equally awful bridesmaid dress.

  Simon, the bastard, got to be all timeless classic elegance in a morning suit, which frankly is just unfair, like how boys get to buy one dinner suit that lasts their whole lives provided they don’t get too fat (which in fairness, Simon hasn’t), whereas women are supposed to have a different dress for every ‘do’ they go to, and heaven forbid if someone else should turn up in the same dress as you
, even though the men are all dressed identically.

  I was still sniffling a bit and muttering to myself about double standards while trying to find Hannah’s and my first ball photos, because if my wedding dress was bad, my first dance dress back in the early nineties was truly the stuff of nightmares – emerald-green, be-ruffled and be-bowed taffeta with a bolero jacket (what has happened to taffeta, while we are on the subject – has it gone the same way as the Vicars and Tarts parties?) when Simon came into the bedroom and saw I had been crying.

  They say women marry their fathers, and certainly my dad and Simon’s most striking characteristic in common is their inability to cope with emotional women. My father used to deal with this by offering us money to stop crying, which Jessica and I soon worked out was an excellent source of revenue in our teenage years – a wobbling lip was worth at least a fiver, but if you could squeeze out some actual tears, you were in for a tenner, sometimes even twenty if you could manage a few sobs. We didn’t even need to come up with a reason why we were crying, we could just wail we were sooooo saaaaaad about the divorce and the resulting emotional blackmail would open his wallet even wider. Jessica used to put half her windfalls in her savings account and use half to buy Premium Bonds, whereas I used to spend mine on vodka, fags and clubbing. This difference in our fiscal prudence is possibly why Jessica now has a big house, lots of money and a proper pension and I cannot afford the Botox I need for all the lines round my mouth caused by years of smoking.

  Simon’s approach to crying women is sadly less generous, he tends to just hide in his shed until such a time as he thinks the storm has passed, so I was surprised when he carried on into the room and sat down on the bed. I assumed he had come in to pack, as he is leaving tomorrow on a work trip for a week, and I was braced for him to start moaning about the mess of photos over the floor.

  Instead he picked up a photo of us together, the background too dark to make out if we were in a pub or at a party. I am laughing up at him and he is looking down at me in a way that he hasn’t looked at me in a long time.