Happy Birthday and All That

by Rebecca Smith

  ‘Or Poppy or Tom,’ said Posy. ‘Tom’s age go too.’ She pulled a desperate face.

  ‘Look,’ said Frank. ‘They don’t need or want tennis lessons. They should be out climbing trees and poking around in ditches with sticks by themselves. What’s important here, Posy?’

  But she wouldn’t let it drop. ‘And some of them are Beavers, I found that out last week. And Badgers.’

  ‘Well ask James then. Ask him if he wants to do any of this stuff. As long as it’s less than one pound a week.’

  When she asked him James said, ‘Mum, I would go to the football, even though I’m not as good as Duncan. But what I really want is for us all to go skiing.’

  ‘Ah, skiing. You’ll have to ask your dad about that one.’

  ‘George’s been five times and he wants to know when we’re going. He said we could go in half-term like he is.’

  It had been the same after September 11. After the initial horror, people’s concerns seemed to turn to family-preservation. She imagined that this was yet another thing that she wasn’t up to speed with. The families with wetsuits were certain to have chemical and biological warfare protection suits stashed in the back of their MPVs. This she didn’t discuss with Frank.

  She’d bought a six pack of Evian and put it in the cupboard under the stairs with a carrier bag full of plasters, tins of beans, nappies, baby wipes, a torch and some biscuits. That would have to do. She had wondered about keeping a can of petrol for emergency escapes by car (Frank was always driving around with the tank practically empty) but decided it was too much of a fire risk.

  But the suits. What could she do about the suits? Was there a local stockist? How would she manage to breastfeed? Did they come in little sizes? She thought of them coming in little sizes and then had to stop herself thinking about it. This way lies madness. Better to hope for a nuclear strike and all perish in the initial blast.

  Flora came round on her way back from sorting out somebody’s computer.

  Poppy let her in.

  ‘Hello Aunty Flora. It’s Friday. Sweets Day.’ Poppy hugged her. Flora held on to her for a long time, stroking her hair.

  ‘Hello best niece.’

  ‘Would you like some liquorice, Aunty Flora? It’s quite a required taste.’ Poppy politely offered her bag of mini Liquorice Allsorts.

  ‘Yes please. Mmm. Yum yum.’ Flora chose a small black chimney. She calculated that this would have the lowest sugar and awful things content.

  ‘Mum’s in the kitchen.’

  ‘Thanks sweetie, and for the sweetie.’ Poppy returned to CBBC. Flora found Posy scrubbing potatoes.

  ‘Hi. Finished that installation thingy already?’ Posy asked. She was constantly amazed at how much Flora managed to fit into her days. All Posy managed to do was to get through each day and make a stab at preparing for the next one.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why people buy these things if they don’t know how to use them. She didn’t even know how to use e-mail.’

  ‘I expect that’s why she bought it,’ Posy said.

  ‘What? And the companies that sell them should install them free of charge. They tell people that it’s simple. But that’s only if you’re confident and competent.’

  ‘Stay for tea?’ Posy asked.

  ‘Just a cup. No cakes. I’m on my way to the gym. I missed it yesterday.’ This was very unlike Flora.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Rush job on a house move. Emergency help with packing. This poor woman, eight-and-a-half months pregnant and about to move house. Her skinflint husband had insisted that he and “this mate” would do it all. Of course the mate’s van is suddenly “unavailable”, and the husband does his back in. He was lying on the floor watching Sky Sport whilst this poor woman and I worked. Very fishy. I found her some movers but it was too late for any packers.’

  ‘That sounds like harder work than going to the gym.’

  ‘I know, but I have to cover all the muscle groups.’

  ‘Well you must be right, and you know what Madame would say, said Posy, quoting Ballet Shoes, ‘Miss your practice for one day, and you’ll know it. Miss it for two days, and your teacher will know it. Miss it for three days and the whole world will know it!’

  ‘Too true,’ said Flora, looking critically at her long, lean legs in their cropped blue jersey sweatpants.

  ‘I wish I could come with you. I’d love a swim and a steam.’

  ‘Then do.’

  ‘Oh I can’t.’ This was what Posy always seemed to say. With a wave of her hand she indicated the chaos of the kitchen. ‘I’ve got to make their supper.’

  ‘Can’t Frank?’

  ‘Oh he’s off somewhere with Al. I think they were meant to be helping someone move actually, in the van.’

  Flora, like Posy, thought that she might never measure up, or that if she did now then she mustn’t let things slip. She felt as though they were always upping the stakes. She was naturally slim, always at the gym, she swam fifty lengths three times a week, but still it wasn’t enough. There was always room for improvement. The mid-thirties was no time for sliding. She had her nails done sometimes; did them herself most of the time, not quite to New York standards, but still. She had pedicures and tried to stay on top of her feet. But she remembered how when she was younger, nobody had even thought about upper arms. Now there were endless articles devoted to them. Upper arms just hadn’t existed. Now new standards had been introduced. And the latest thing was shoulders. She was astonished. New guidelines were on the way. It was thanks to the dresses at award ceremonies. How could you tell if your shoulders passed muster? And now she had read, it was beyond contemplation, that people were having plastic surgery, cosmetic enhancement Down There. What would Aunt Is say if she read about it? Flora thought that there really ought to be limits.

  Posy didn’t tell her, couldn’t tell anyone, that the reason she wanted a swim and especially a steam was that she was now permanently unclean. That morning she had woken early. The house was quiet. She was wide awake, full of energy, happy. Isobel might sleep for another hour yet, they all might. She tiptoed downstairs. If she used the downstairs bathroom there was no danger of waking anyone. She made herself a cup of Lapsang Souchong and sipped it standing by the open back door whilst her bath ran. This was what her life was meant to be like. It was going to be a warm, beautiful day, Indian summer. She had a magazine to read (thank you Flora). She slid down into the lavender foam (thank you Flora). She could stay there for forty minutes at least, and wash her hair, and maybe paint her toenails before they all got up. Oh bliss, oh silence, oh joy. She quite liked her body when all she could see of it was her hands holding the magazine and her knees sticking out of the foam. She might just drift off for a while.

  Eventually after two extra blasts of hot water, the magazine exhausted, her skin shrivelled but very soft and scented, she got out. She thought she could hear voices upstairs. 7.40. She’d had hours to herself. Dry, relaxed, restored, the last of the water drained away, she stooped to clean the bath and put her shampoo where the children couldn’t reach it. Then she saw it. A huge, bloated, orange, very dead slug. She was too horrified even to scream. She picked it up in a wad of loo paper and threw it out the window. Someone was banging on the door.

  ‘Mum. I have to go to the loo.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said in a cracked voice.

  ‘No I have to go NOW.’

  ‘Go upstairs.’

  ‘I can’t. There’s no loo paper left. Muuuum.’

  ‘OK. OK.’

  She had to have a shower. She seized her packet of cleansing wipes (they said that they would remove waterproof mascara, but slug contamination?) and fled upstairs. Isobel was screaming. Poppy and Tom were arguing. Frank was still asleep. She locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and tried to wipe everywhere. She used the whole packet. She had saved so many tokens from Special K Red Berries for them, and now they were all gone. She couldn’t get that slug out of her mind.
Had it been there for her whole bath? Had it been lurking there before she ran the water and been scalded, drowned or bubble-bathed to death? Might it have been on her, gone on to her foot when she looked out the back door, and she herself had carried it into the bath? Where had it been all the time? Might it have been on her? Under her? Ugh. Maybe it had been lurking under one of the children’s flannels and had fallen in, perhaps quite near the end of her bath. Maybe, oh maybe, it had been under the plug, and so hadn’t been in with her at all, had only come up into the bath when she pulled the plug out. She could hope, but she would never know. Now she would always be The Woman Who Bathes With Slugs.

  Frank was amazed at the way that Posy could blend with the crowd in the school playground. She could really pull the wool over their eyes and look like one of the mums. Then he realised that she was one of the mums, and that was clearly how she intended to look. He wondered if they had all been kitted out at some secret nearly new sale, perhaps run by the NCT. Invitations were given out on the maternity wards, with special shopping privileges for people who had home births. There were regulation sandals, special bendy ones from M & S. There must be forty pairs of them (navy, black or ill-considered white) in the school playground on any morning from May to October. They were indestructible.

  And boy had she changed! One minute she was dancing around the kitchen in a slinky black dress, smoking Camels and drinking huge goblets of white wine on ice; and the next she had stopped completely, just like that. No gum, no nothing: no turning back. And she’d expected him to as well, just because it was something she was doing. The black dresses had disappeared, and instead all these shapeless things arrived in the post.

  ‘Since when did you wear pale pink sweatshirts?’ he’d asked, and she had burst into tears. He hadn’t added that they were pig colour. Perhaps he didn’t need to. He supposed that she could see for herself, and she was getting pretty enormous. And the stripy tops! It was as though she had gone undercover. Secret Agent Pregnant Posy. He was still waiting for the real one, if there was a real one, to come back to him.

  Once he had found her reading Junior magazine. He’d said, ‘Isn’t it bad enough having children without having to read about them too?’

  ‘Oh Kate gave it to me. There’s an article about nut allergies,’ she’d replied, looking up, hurt; but he had already left the room.

  He knew that she worried, but he had no idea how anxious she really was, that she couldn’t cross the road with the pram without thinking ‘I hope there isn’t an invisible car coming…’

  Frank had never really thought about the long-term, or about long-term compatibility. ‘It’ll all pan out’ could have been his motto, or perhaps his epitaph. He had just drifted into the whole thing with Posy because she was so damn pretty. He’d never really wanted a relationship. How he hated that word. Relationship. And people saying that they couldn’t relate to things and people going to the gym and stage one and two car seats … It was all a load of shit as far as he was concerned.

  It had all just happened, her money and the house, which had once been a place for parties and band practice. Not any more. She couldn’t be doing with all of those trailing wires. He had once been allowed to store the PA in one of the bedrooms. The Seaside Bunnies had put paid to that. She was still on at him because he hadn’t ever finished putting up the border. As if a baby cared how its room was decorated. The border was so high up that it would just be a blur to it anyway. It wasn’t his fault that it had cost £20.75 a roll from Designers Guild. It coordinated with the musical mobile that Posy had hung above the cot. A boy and a girl rabbit danced forever around an apple tree. Round and round they went in their perfect world, but they would never meet.

  She was trying to turn him into someone with a Brita water filter, someone who used Domestos anti-bacterial lemon-scented wipes. He knew that there was one piece missing from her ‘Perfect Family - Perfect Lives’ jigsaw puzzle: a high-earning Daddy. Well he couldn’t measure up to that.

  But he did love her, whatever that meant. He figured that it was just a phase, just her latest incarnation. Existentialist to Mummy. He would stick with it and hope that she’d get more reasonable once the prolactin wore off again.

  Things hadn’t turned out like this for Al. When he’d quit his teaching job, Caroline had quit him. Frank and Al agreed that she was a hard, hard woman. Al had been really struggling. Teaching English to fifteen-year-olds was no picnic. A few months after Finn was born he suddenly just couldn’t take any more. He decided to leave before the stress destroyed him. Caroline had known he was unhappy at the school, but even so, she went ballistic. Where did it all leave her? That was what she wanted to know. OK, so he could walk into a supply job the very next day (although he chose not to) but he hadn’t even consulted her, just upped and done it. The ice entered her heart.

  Al eventually got a part-time job with the scrapstore, driving their van, picking up junk from companies to be used by adventure playgrounds and playgroups and so on. The pay was pretty crap, but he was bringing in a bit with the band, and he thought he would be happier, have more time with Finn. Caroline thought differently. In her plan he was soon to be a Departmental, then a Deputy, and then a Head. The pay in teaching really wasn’t bad once you got out of the sergeants’ mess. She was going to have to go back to work part-time now. Until Al had decided to backslide, back pedal, whatever, things had been looking rosy for them.

  Al said that he was writing a comic thriller called Filed Away, about an evil pensioner who attacks people with his incredibly long and sharp poisonous toenails. The police are baffled until one day a bright young cop goes back over some unsolved cases that are languishing in the files … Caroline didn’t find any of this funny.

  ‘The thing you have to watch out for,’ Al told Frank, over their fourth pint, ‘is when they start talking in all this made-up emotional language, as though they’ve secretly been reading Men are from Mars.’

  ‘They probably have,’ said Frank.

  ‘All this daytime TV crap about “meeting needs”.’

  ‘They do watch daytime TV, when they aren’t reading magazines and self-help books.’

  ‘But there was nothing I could do. I was doomed. Once she switched into that mode I was done for,’ Al went on.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Frank told him. ‘Posy would do anything before she would appear on Trisha. She’s too buttoned up. Not a “spill the beans” kind of a girl. She just wants everything to appear perfect and calm.’

  ‘You wanna watch out, mate,’ Al said. Frank didn’t appreciate what he still had. ‘It’s contagious. Divorce and discontent. There was this study in Sweden …’

  What Al didn’t tell Frank was what Caroline had really said.

  ‘The thing is, Al, I just don’t love you any more.’

  There was no answer to that.

  One thing that had interested him throughout the proceedings was how colloquial the breaking of hearts turned out to be, how mundane.

  ‘It’s like, gone beyond the point of no return,’ she had said. He’d thought, ‘Shit, shouldn’t the language be, like, like Shakespeare, for something like this?’ If this was a ‘life event’ then he could do without them.

  He swirled the last of his beer around and around in his glass, first one way, then the other: rough seas.

  Frank had drained his own glass.

  ‘Fancy another?’

  Now each Thursday, thanks to Aunty Flora, James, Poppy and Tom had a swimming lesson at an ancient pool, a swimming baths really, just south of the Common. The pool belonged to a college that had once been run by nuns. Posy liked to think of the nuns taking a swim. Nuns and Swimmers - good title for a book or a painting. It was the Parousellis’ kind of pool, all cracked blue tiles, keyless lockers, no flumes or jets or even a tea machine. The water was bath hot, but the college had problems with its heating and when the oil didn’t arrive the parents who sat at the poolside watching their offspring were in a thick fog. Condensation
dripped onto their heads. ‘If only we were at Kew Gardens,’ Posy thought. Tom had to sit through his older siblings’ lessons, half an hour each, once his own had finished. She and Frank bribed him with Wotsits or Teddy crisps to make him sit still. It was also the occasion of his weekly carton of Toothkind Strawberry Ribena. If things got desperate they gave him white chocolate buttons.

  Posy liked watching the children swimming, liked knowing that they would be able to do it in an emergency, that they were enjoying it, that they were getting some exercise. Frank found it depressing.

  ‘Oh can’t you take them, Pose? You know I hate it,’ he begged.

  ‘How can you hate it? It’s lovely seeing them make progress.’

  ‘No it’s not that. ‘Course I like them swimming. But don’t you just find it a bit bleak, all those children struggling, getting told off if they put their feet on the bottom?’

  ‘Can’t you try to see it differently?’

  ‘And so many of the children are fat. Here’s all the evidence they need that we’re becoming obese as a nation.’

  ‘They aren’t that fat,’ said Posy.

  ‘Open your eyes, Pose! Remember when you were at school? Only one or two kids in a whole school would be overweight. Now it looks like half of them.’

  ‘Well, I never noticed,’ said Posy. Actually she had noticed but she would never have said anything; she had much too big a complex about her own body to comment on other people’s. Frank had no such complex and no qualms about stating what he saw as harsh truths.

  ‘Well, I hope none of the other parents ever hear you say anything like this.’

  ‘Do them good if they did. It’s all their fault. They’re the ones loading up the trolleys.’

  ‘Maybe swimming’s not typical,’ said Posy, trying to excuse the nation’s children and their parents.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ said Frank. ‘Swimming probably is the exercise of choice of the urban fatty. You can imagine the parents saying, “Well, he won’t be any good at football, he won’t be a runner, I know … swimming!”