The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

  And I knew from that moment on the benefits of keeping a secret. I never felt the need to share my curdled adolescent emotions with anyone. I just knew that one day it would all make sense. Whatever happened to Simon Miller, I wonder. If I logged on to Friends Reunited I could probably email him by the end of the day and find out that he has become a dentist in Dorking with two children and a wife with perfectly straight teeth. Some things are best left as memories.

  Fred fidgets on my knee and I get hotter and hotter.

  ‘Hungry, Mummy,’ he says. I pull out a packet of raisins from my jacket pocket.

  From the seat behind, Alpha Mum leans over so close that I can feel the collar of her wrinkle-free white shirt tickle my neck.

  ‘Do you know that they contain eight times more sugar than grapes?’ she whispers in my ear.

  ‘Er, no,’ I whisper back.

  ‘Do you know that she is eight times more acidic than the average mother?’ whispers Yummy Mummy No. 1 conspiratorially.

  I remember with a jolt that I have forgotten to bring ‘a taste of autumn’ for Show and Tell and rummage around my bag in search of anything that might qualify. In a stroke of luck I find a rotten apple core, which seems to sum up perfectly the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in all its decaying glory. All I need to do is tell Joe that it is a crab apple. In new-found good humour at my resourcefulness I turn to speak to Yummy Mummy No. 1. ‘Have you brought anything with you?’ I ask her, wondering whether she ever forgets Show and Tell days.

  She points to an obviously attractive, twenty-something man slouching at the back of the hall and he waves back at us. ‘New term, new personal trainer,’ she smiles. ‘Kick boxing, he swears by it.’

  ‘He’s too big for the autumn table,’ I tell her. ‘He might slip on a conker.’

  ‘Oh my God, I’ve forgotten Show and Tell,’ she says lazily. ‘I’ll send my housekeeper with a bag of chestnuts from the tree in the garden later.’

  I ponder the fact that I have never seen her with her youngest children or her husband. They might be the nuclear family, but the molecules are spread quite thinly.

  ‘The thing is,’ she says, choosing her words carefully and looking back across her shoulder at the personal trainer, ‘you need a good incentive to go to the gym every day and there is something sublime about working up a sweat for this man, even if all he talks about are muscle groups and the importance of porridge. A dose of sublimity every day is very important, don’t you think? And as you get older it matters less and less what a man says.’

  ‘Do you think about him when you’re not with him?’ I ask, curious to gauge the breadth and depth of this relationship.

  She looks at me bemused. ‘Only when I’m reaching for a packet of biscuits and I imagine him wagging his finger at me and saying, “That is very naughty,” and then I don’t eat them.’

  I try to sit up straight and suck in my tummy but it refuses to cooperate. Instead the relief of relaxing the shrivelled muscles that struggle to maintain some kind of decorum causes a ripple of flab to escape over the top of my jeans. Of course, no one can see it, but it is an act of rebellion nevertheless. There is a lot of tucking in to be done once you have had children and your body is never loyal again.

  ‘You should come too, it would be lots of fun,’ she says in friendly rather than critical fashion, although she is most likely being insincere. I would like to explain to her that we live in a different financial stratosphere and that apart from an arthritic cleaning lady who can no longer reach the floor, I am the staff, but it would all take too long and besides, she is a woman who likes to live in a rosy world where people can avoid rucksacks on the underground by taking cabs everywhere, and Third World debt can be solved by a biannual three-course charity dinner with free champagne.

  Fred falls asleep on my lap, pushing my lower leg to rest cosily against the calf of Sexy Domesticated Dad, and I am suddenly grateful for the imprecision of Tom’s bedtime routine. Be grateful for simple, cost-free pleasures, I think to myself. I try to live in the moment, but my mind starts to wander and to my disquiet I find myself hoping that he will press against me with the full authority of his upper thigh. Then I can’t stop looking at his right leg. For minutes his foot rests still, the rubber sole of his Converse trainer firmly stuck to the floor. But as the piano teacher strikes up he starts to tap his foot and then it seems as though his leg moves closer to my own. At least I can feel its warmth. When the music ends, his thigh is definitely closer than it was at the outset. At this point it starts to get complicated. I think that I should move my leg in deference to his, just in case he thinks that I am responding, but then decide that it might look rude if in fact he hasn’t consciously moved his leg closer to mine at all. As if I am accusing him of too much physical intimacy.

  I try to peer over his knees to see whether his other leg is equally snugly pressed against the father who sits the other side of him and then feel dispirited when I note that it is. Perhaps he swings both ways. That brings me up with a jolt: how have I reached this point? I think about Tom at work, trying to resolve his bureaucratic impasse with the Milanese planning department. I imagine standing beside his desk, using my middle finger to iron out the furrow in his brow as he speaks to a colleague in Italy about the latest stumbling blocks to plans finally being approved. But he wouldn’t want me there. I know because when I call him at work, he can’t get me off the phone fast enough. I sympathise with his stress, but resent the way his work has consumed him. At least thinking about Tom brings back a restored sense of reality.

  Just as I start to behave like a sensible adult again, contemplating what to cook for lunch and whether to go to the park with Fred on the way home, Sexy Domesticated Dad completely repositions himself and crosses his left leg over his right knee and suddenly I find that I am joined not just with the top part of his thigh but a large part of his buttock too.

  He leans and says sotto voce in my ear, ‘Just as well you didn’t wear your pyjamas today, it’s really steaming in here.’ I look at him and for a moment wonder whether he is thinking about illicit pleasures in hotels in Bloomsbury, which Emma tells me are full of people having torrid affairs.

  ‘Must be all those little teapots.’ I look for sexual innuendo in the word ‘teapot’ but can find none. I am now up to speed on iPods, Rabbits and wireless zones, but there could well be something that I have missed in the intervening years. The children in year one, including our own, have stood to sing very sweetly about being short and stout and do a rendition of ‘I’m a little teapot’. Then it is straight into ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways’, and any incipient fantasy quickly unravels.

  After the hymn the headmistress asks for volunteers to accompany the class on a trip to the London Aquarium.

  ‘I’m doing this one,’ whispers Sexy Domesticated Dad.

  ‘Could anyone interested please put up their hand and then come to the front for more details?’ asks the headmistress, waving an envelope.

  I leap from the seat as best I can with Fred in my arms, and wave.

  ‘Lovely to see such enthusiasm,’ she says, and everyone turns round to stare at me, attempting to gauge whether I am a guilt-ridden full-time working mum trying to compensate for never being there, or one of those over-earnest pushy types who give their children alphabet pasta for tea so that they can practise their spellings. The truth is far more shallow: I am going simply because Sexy Domesticated Dad is and I think he knows it too. What could be the harm in that?

  I lean forward and start to get up to go to the front when I glance down to check whether I am wearing the jeans that promise to lengthen your legs or the ones that lift your bum. I note with horror that it is not my leg resting against Sexy Domesticated Dad but a large bulge protruding from my left calf. Yesterday’s knickers. I feel my breath quickening, but there is no way I can extricate myself from this unforeseeable turn of events. I inwardly curse the return of skinny jeans – not even a pair
of tweezers could remove these through the foot hole.

  ‘What is that?’ asks Yummy Mummy No. 1, who can deconstruct an outfit like a flock of vultures stripping a carcass. She looks down at my leg with suspicion.

  ‘It’s a device,’ I hear myself say, beads of sweat forming on my brow. I wipe my forehead on the back of Fred’s coat.

  Sexy Domesticated Dad looks interested. ‘Not one that you can detonate, I hope,’ he says.

  ‘To reduce stress. If you feel anxious you squeeze it,’ I counter, frantically squeezing yesterday’s knickers.

  ‘Like a stress ball?’ he says dubiously.

  ‘Exactly,’ I say confidently.

  They both lean over Fred to have a feel, Sexy Domesticated Dad’s plaster-cast arm resting heavily on my knee. In any other situation this invasion of my personal space would definitely qualify as a moment of sublimity. ‘Well, I feel more relaxed already,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad, his voice laced with sarcasm.

  ‘I’m not sure I do,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1.

  ‘Mrs Sweeney, would you like to come and get this?’ says the headmistress, emphasising each word slowly and shifting from side to side to get a better view of us. Hundreds of eyes bore into me. Then redemption. All the manhandling has shifted the offending knickers down towards my ankle and the M&S label is beginning to show. I bend over, feel the blood rushing to my head and carefully grip the edge of the label. With skill I pluck them out in a single pull, get up, put them in my handbag nonchalantly and move down through the row of parents, holding sleepy Fred in one arm, to go and pick up my envelope. I am dizzy from leaning over for too long and steeped in sweat, but the thought of a whole day at the aquarium with Sexy Domesticated Dad fills me with optimism.

  But when I walk back to my seat, I see him looking at me with an expression familiar from the early years of my relationship with Tom. His eyes are wary, his mouth half-smile, half-grimace, taut with the tension of maintaining the inherent contradictions of such confused emotions. His body has folded in upon itself. His legs and arms are crossed and he is leaning forward over his knees, taking up as little space as possible, an air of quiet disbelief hanging around him. He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he gingerly lets me past, taking care to ensure that no part of his body touches my own.

  ‘That is the stuff of nightmares,’ Yummy Mummy No. 1 whispers in my ear as I sit down. ‘I mean, a pair of M&S knickers, not even my mother wears those any more. But don’t worry, I’m sure no one else noticed. Besides, they might have thought the M was for Myla.’ She is trying to be comforting, which is gratifying, but I have no idea who Myla is.

  When we stand up to leave the gym, I am impressed by how neat she looks in her wraparound print dress and calf-length boots with impossibly high heels, as she picks her way along the row of chairs. She does a graceful sidestep when it gets too narrow and I note that she is so paper-thin that she has almost lost any three-dimensional quality. She bobs along confidently. No danger of her capsizing, despite the weight of a long brown sheepskin coat which she has kept on throughout the proceedings. ‘Joseph. It was a present from my husband, to say sorry for being away so much over the summer,’ she says, when we come to a stop, recognising envy. But actually what I covet isn’t the coat, but its cleanness. There are no marks on it, nothing betraying what she gave the children for breakfast, no jam stains, no leaks from pens left without lids in pockets, no rips or blemishes of any kind. Her lipstick and mascara are applied to understated perfection. She even smells polished, not in a glossy kind of way, but with a timeless elegant formula perfected over the generations. She is untouchable, encased in perfection. Oh, the effort that goes into looking effortless. And Sexy Domesticated Dad. Well, he rushes away in the opposite direction, even though it is a more circuitous route. The last I see of him, he is cycling as fast as you can with a broken arm down Fitzjohn’s Avenue.

  4

  ‘One man may steal a horse while another may not look over a hedge’

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning the following week, I abandon all hope of any more sleep and lean over Tom to look at one of his clocks. The one on the left of his bedside table is electric and wakes us up by saying repeatedly, ‘Tom, get out of bed,’ in a slow mechanical voice. The one on the right he took from Sam, when he was too young to notice, and runs on batteries. It has a rabbit’s face and if left to ring for too long will rock to the edge of the table and fall on the floor, such is the force of the bell.

  It is fair to say that since we have been together, we have never overslept. Neither of the clocks has ever failed, and on the rare occasions that our children allow us to sleep beyond seven o’clock in the morning, we are awakened by a chorus of alarms. There have been times when I have been tempted to turn the clocks backwards by an hour, to show Tom that the world won’t end if we do everything an hour later.

  Insomnia gives you a lot of time to run through old arguments. Of course, in the morning, any conclusions are forgotten and all that is left is a bad taste in your mouth, but those dogged disputes that never give up on you make great nocturnal replays. Today I return to an old favourite, the dowager aunt of disputes, which revolves around my lateness and Tom’s belief that all is well in the world if everything is done on time. A great quality in an architect, but less appealing in a husband.

  The most recent round took place in the larder at my parents’ home in the Mendips, a few weeks before the ill-fated camping trip to Norfolk. If you were plotting a chart of significant events in my family, the larder would feature disproportionally as a backdrop. It is where, years ago, I’d told my mother I was marrying Tom and she had congratulated me with tears in her eyes, before saying, ‘you do realise that if you were a chemical experiment you would explode.’ And my father had come in at that moment, muttering about unstable elements and the value of explosion over implosion as a recipe for a stimulating marriage. ‘There’s no attraction without reaction,’ he had said sagely.

  I can’t remember exactly how the row between Tom and me had started, but I can recall that the tiles underfoot were so icy that my bare toes started to go numb, and yet even through the cold I could smell the festering odour of an old piece of Stilton abandoned there the previous Christmas. We were looking for a jar of coffee.

  ‘I can’t understand how your parents could run out of something so essential as coffee,’ said Tom, jumping out of the way as a mousetrap sprang at his shoe. ‘It should be a staple of any larder, especially one of this size.’

  ‘They have other things on their minds,’ I replied, in an effort to distract him.

  ‘Like their inability to do anything on time, even at our wedding,’ he said.

  ‘There are so many worse things in life than being late,’ I told him, unsure whether I should feel gratified that the discussion had moved beyond coffee or dispirited at its new direction. Because I knew that criticism of my parents was ultimately about me and not them. Then, when he ignored me, I added, ‘Actually, it’s rude to be early. Why don’t we live a little dangerously and for the next four weeks, as an experiment, start arriving half an hour late?’

  ‘You talk about living dangerously, Lucy. We are not at a stage in our life where that applies any more. We are creatures of habit that should embrace the familiar. Like old sofas.’ I must have looked sceptical because he became more expansive.

  ‘The sofa in our sitting room has a loose spring in the right-hand corner. There is a sticky patch at the back in the middle, from a sweet that got stuck there years ago – I think it’s a lemon sherbet – and there is a hole on the side that gets bigger and bigger because one of the children is using it to store money.’ I could not believe that he noticed all these things.

  ‘Even though all this should be mildly annoying, it isn’t, because the familiarity of these imperfections is comforting. Don’t you notice that I no longer say anything when you lose your credit card? Eyes face forward. Breathing normal. Eyebrows stationary. All facial tics under control.’


  ‘I thought you’d begun to understand that losing your credit card is simply not a big deal,’ I muttered, but he was impervious.

  ‘Once you realise that you’re not immortal, there is reassurance in routine, Lucy. Think how upset you were when Cathy’s husband left her. Floored. You never complained about being early then. In fact, Lucy, you really don’t like change. You would hate it if I suddenly started being late.’

  And, as usual, I ended up agreeing with him. Because he was probably right.

  Tom has slept the entire night in exactly the same position, on his front, legs splayed and his arms hugging the pillow. I, on the other hand, have dealt with the usual nocturnal visitations. Lying in bed, my ear is roughly at the same height as Fred’s head and at around one-thirty I woke with a jump, to hear a deep raspy voice whispering in my ear. ‘Want my cuddles. Want them now.’

  Then roughly an hour later, Joe came in to announce tearfully that he was shrinking. ‘I am smaller than I was when I went to bed,’ he said, gripping my arm so hard that there are still tiny finger marks in the morning.

  ‘I promise you are the same size,’ I replied. ‘Look at your hand, it fits into mine in exactly the same way it did when we walked to school yesterday.’

  ‘But I can feel that my legs are shrinking,’ he said with such conviction that I wondered momentarily whether he might be right.

  ‘It’s growing pains,’ I said, the stock response for any inexplicable night-time aches. ‘Daddy and I used to get them too.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t shrinking pains?’ he insisted. ‘Granny is smaller than she used to be. By the morning I will be so small you won’t be able to see me any more,’ he said, his voice getting quieter and quieter. ‘And then I might get eaten by a dog on the way to school.’