The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

  ‘But couldn’t you choose one over the other?’ I ask her.

  ‘Or have a baby with one and then the other?’ says Emma.

  ‘Then I’d have three children with three different fathers,’ says Cathy. ‘How trailer trash is that? Anyway, it’s not an option. I think that the deal is that you either go out with both of them or neither of them, although we never analyse the situation in any depth. Actually, together, they make the perfect man.’

  ‘So what do you talk about then?’ I ask.

  ‘Football, films, restaurants, where to go on holiday, books we’re reading, the usual,’ she says. ‘Within its strangeness it’s all quite normal. I just find it a little exhausting. It’s great having so much sex and being adored by two men, but it’s a bit like eating too much chocolate. You can have too much of a good thing.’

  ‘So when Ben is with his dad and you spend the weekend with them, how do you decide whose bed to sleep in?’ I ask.

  ‘We all sleep in the same bed,’ she says.

  ‘Very cosy,’ says Emma.

  ‘Actually, it’s a bit too hot at the moment,’ says Cathy.

  ‘So at what point does the other one know that he can join you?’ I ask, imagining the kind of bell system that you find in some country houses. The great thing about spending time with Cathy and Emma is that their situations are invariably more diverting than my own.

  ‘Well, that is the only part of the relationship that has evolved,’ she says. I am struck by how the two men have fused. ‘Without entering into too much detail, it all sort of happens at the same time.’

  ‘So there is a gay element,’ says Emma triumphantly, because she considers her original theory to be proved.

  ‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ says Cathy. ‘I think they get off on seeing each other have sex with the same woman. And there’s a competitive element to it all.’

  ‘There always is with men,’ says Emma.

  ‘God, I’ll have to tell Tom,’ I say.

  ‘I want to rediscover the joys of vanilla sex,’ says Cathy.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask, imagining a scenario that involves ice cream, not a prospect that I would ever entertain on the grounds that it would exacerbate my precarious laundry situation.

  ‘I mean straightforward common-or-garden sex,’ she explains. ‘We never seem to get to that “slumped in front of the television with a takeaway” zone.’

  ‘There’s years in front of you of that kind of stuff,’ I say wearily.

  ‘And there’s not much companionship. Your brother says that loyalty and a loving nature are important traits in a man and that in our twenties we tend to dismiss men who exhibit them. Then, in our thirties, those men are taken and we’re left with the rest just at the moment when our priorities change.’

  ‘Does he include himself in the rest?’ I wonder.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘He describes himself as a classic commitment-phobe, unable to sustain a relationship with any woman beyond two years.’

  ‘Oh. Have you seen him then?’ I ask, because this is not the kind of conversation that people have over the phone.

  ‘I bumped into him a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve had lunch together a couple of times,’ she says.

  A waiter comes over with another bottle of champagne.

  ‘Would you like a ginger beer?’ he asks me after greeting Emma.

  It is the same waiter from my last visit, and I congratulate him for his impeccable memory and glance down enviously to review his apron. Since Petra left, the washing landscape has evolved slightly. I have found a laundry service to do Tom’s shirts, and the babysitter is earning extra money sorting out the rest. Things have progressed, but it is still one of those perennial problems.

  To my surprise, the apron is wrinkled and covered with stains. There are so many that it looks like a world map. I search for the outline of different countries and find a patch of red wine that looks like Australia and a series of small red islands alongside a larger stain, all formed I imagine from tomato sauce, that could be mainland Greece and a few islands, possibly Crete and Corfu. He sees me looking and shakes his head sadly.

  ‘He left me,’ he says. ‘I kept leaving the fridge door open. I came down one morning during this heatwave and everything had started to go off and that was it. Three years of starched aprons dissolved in less than five minutes over a pint of curdled milk.’

  He shrugs, pours me another glass of champagne, and then walks away.

  ‘I can’t believe that couples break up over such minor issues,’ says Emma.

  ‘They sound minor if you consider them in isolation, but they are almost always precipitated by a chain of events,’ I say.

  I tell Emma and Cathy about my most recent domestic row with Tom.

  ‘After lengthy discussions, he finally gave his approval to purchase a hamster for Joe’s sixth birthday, on condition that I assumed total responsibility for its wellbeing,’ I explain.

  ‘I don’t want it running loose, chewing through wires and making a mess,’ he’d said.

  ‘It’s not as though you need to take them out for walks or anything. They are tiny little things. You won’t even notice,’ I told him.

  I explain how I went to a local pet shop with the three boys and chose an orange hamster, which they decided to call Rover, because what they really wanted was a puppy. A displacement pet, Mark would call it. Cathy laughs loudly at this.

  By the time we arrived home, Rover had chewed his way out of the shoebox and was missing in action somewhere in the car. The children were inconsolable and so we returned to the pet shop to buy an immediate replacement, which I transported home in a fish bowl strapped in the front seat of the car and transferred immediately into a high-security cage in the garden.

  The next morning, as we got into the car to go out, I discovered that Rover had taken up residence there. He had found his way into the glove compartment and chewed through some red and white wires. He had eaten a broken breadstick and apple core and left his calling card everywhere. Tom tried to put on a CD, but it didn’t work. Nor did the light in the glove compartment. He peered inside and pulled out a chewed chocolate bar.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I would say those teeth marks belong to a rodent,’ he said suspiciously.

  ‘Well, Rover is safely in his cage,’ I said. ‘You saw him there.’

  ‘Who is Rover?’ he asked. ‘I thought the hamster was called Spot.’

  ‘That’s his middle name,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t talk about it, because there was a fight over what he should be called.’

  Tom unearthed the A to Z on the floor behind the passenger seat. He lifted it into the front of the car and tiny pieces of paper fluttered around. Clearly Rover was nesting.

  ‘Lucy, what on earth has happened to this map?’ he asked. ‘Something has eaten half of Islington.’

  Fortunately he was so busy trying to piece together the page that he didn’t notice a small hamster staring at him from the back of the glove compartment. Unfortunately, the children did.

  ‘Mummy, look, it’s Rover, he’s been resurrected,’ said Joe. Rover leapt from the glove compartment on to Tom, who jumped in his seat swearing loudly.

  ‘Daddy said the F-word, Daddy said the F-word,’ started a chorus from the back.

  Rover disappeared into the back of the car.

  It took us another half-hour to catch him and return him to captivity, partly because we were arguing so loudly that Rover refused to come out.

  ‘You are useless at subterfuge,’ said Tom, as we shut the cage door. ‘I suppose at least that means you’ll never have an affair or at least if you do, you’ll never manage to keep it secret.’

  ‘Well, he’s right about that,’ says Emma. ‘You’re so transparent.’

  ‘The point is that in three months, the hamster might be seen as a defining moment,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘The tipping point.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks Cathy warily.


  ‘Nothing explicit,’ I say. ‘All I mean is that it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that you can see how one event impacts on another. Chain reactions.’

  ‘You mean like when Archduke Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo?’ says Emma.

  ‘Exactly,’ I say. I have finished my glass of champagne and Emma pours me another full glass.

  ‘So what’s the state of play with Sexy Domesticated Dad?’ enquires Cathy.

  ‘I lost interest,’ I say, ‘We became friends. It evolved from distracting fantasy to banal reality.’

  ‘What about him?’ she asks.

  ‘Not even a frisson,’ I say so convincingly that I almost believe what I am saying.

  ‘I wish I could switch off the sexual current with Guy,’ says Emma. ‘It’s the most difficult part of the process.’

  ‘So what’s the overall prognosis?’ I ask her.

  ‘It is almost resolved in my mind, and I can guarantee that it will be completely finished before the weekend is over,’ she says mysteriously. ‘Actually, I’m meeting him later. I promise that I will give you every detail once I have done it, but I don’t want to talk about it now because I might get stage fright.’

  ‘I can’t go on lying to Isobel indefinitely,’ I say. ‘It makes me feel awful.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how uncomfortable it must be,’ says Emma.

  ‘Perhaps you should try a little harder,’ says Cathy firmly. Emma has ignored the fact that this is the same territory that Cathy roamed a couple of years ago when her husband left her. ‘If you lack conviction about Guy, you have a moral duty to finish the relationship now. Children are almost always losers if their parents split up. They grow up and get into relationships without any blueprint to follow. Look at you, you’re still so affected by your father walking out on your mother, that you only go out with men that never want to get domestic.’

  ‘But Ben seems fine,’ says Emma, after a disconcerting silence.

  ‘He is, in part. We try to present the fact that his parents no longer live together in a positive light. I tell him he is lucky to have two bedrooms, two houses, two Christmas presents, double the amount of holidays. But even as I’m saying it, I don’t really believe it.’

  ‘Look, I’m almost there,’ says Emma. ‘Every time I’m with him, I find something new to dislike, and eventually I’ll feel strong enough to give him up completely. Basically, I need to find a replacement.’

  ‘Any possibilities?’ asks Cathy. I am glad for her intervention in the conversation. Emma’s ability to see things only from her point of view is at its most frustrating in this kind of situation.

  ‘I have started a good flirtation with someone at work,’ she says.

  ‘So what’s the stumbling block?’ asks Cathy.

  ‘He works in the New York office,’ she says. ‘But he’s not married. An ocean is easier to bridge than a marriage.’

  Whether she knows this is an effective way of cauterising our line of questioning, or whether she has really come up with a master plan to withdraw from Guy, is uncertain. I decide, however, that whatever happens, next week I will tell Isobel the truth as I know it.

  I finish another glass of champagne. Already I feel a little shaky on my legs. The heat, the tiredness, the alcohol and the lack of air in the wood-panelled room are a heady combination. I shut my eyes. The world has started spinning. When I open them, my brother is standing by the table.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, bemused by his unannounced arrival.

  ‘I’m speaking at a conference tomorrow morning, and they’ve put me up in a hotel. So I won’t be long, because otherwise I’ll drink too much. Cathy told me that you were coming, so I thought I would join you. Do you want another drink?’ He walks towards the bar and I go with him. ‘You don’t mind me barging in on your girls’ night out, do you?’

  ‘As long as you don’t sleep with any of my friends,’ I joke, wondering just how many times he has bumped into Cathy.

  ‘I’m too old for that,’ he says. ‘Where’s Tom?’

  ‘At home with the children. A reluctant babysitter,’ I tell him. ‘The kind that makes you wish you had paid for someone. Although, whenever we do pay someone, it sort of increases the pressure to have a good time. But he’s already called twice and I only left the house an hour ago.’

  Mark orders a bottle of beer from the barman.

  ‘And the library project?’ he asks.

  ‘All back on track. Unbelievable. It has become such a part of us that I can’t imagine life without it. Tom’s got some other good commissions on the back of it, so our financial situation suddenly looks much better than it did,’ I tell him.

  Normally, I can’t imagine anything more relaxing than being with my brother. Growing up on the edge of a tiny village meant that, for most of our childhood, we were dependent on each other for entertainment. While he purported to find me irritating when his friends came round, I knew that it was an acquired attitude to avoid losing face. Being a teenager is complicated enough on your own, without being responsible for a younger sister. I understood this and I didn’t mind because their teenage conversation was limited to three main subjects: girls, sex and how to make that equation work for them. My brother always had girlfriends and his friends would look to him for advice.

  ‘Talk to them and treat them like goddesses,’ I remembered him telling his friends. ‘Then everything is up for grabs. Analyse, they love to analyse. And oral sex. That’s crucial.’

  Mark liked women. And so women liked Mark. Even if they knew that he was structurally unreliable. He made friendships out of messy relationships, because he was always willing to talk things through.

  There is very little that I censor in conversation with him, and I think he would say the same. But tonight I feel uncomfortable being alone with him. He has sat down on a bar stool, his head leaning on his arm, and is clearly not planning an imminent return to our table. His chin is covered in stubble and his shirt is grubby. In the way that you intuit with family, I understand that he is here on a specific mission.

  ‘Did you come straight from work?’ I ask him.

  ‘Mmm,’ he says dreamily, leaning back his head to drink a couple of swigs of beer from a bottle. He holds on to the bottle and I notice him glancing over at our table, smiling slightly and then taking another gulp of beer. ‘And how are my lovely nephews?’

  ‘They’re great. Over-enthusiastic puppies,’ I say. ‘They roam around the house, make the most appalling mess, even when they try to clear up, wrestle and fight at least a couple of times a day, eat more or less constantly and talk non-stop, mostly asking me questions all at the same time and then accusing me that I love one of them more than the other when I prioritise one question over another. I’m looking forward to the summer holidays.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks suspiciously. ‘You normally find the holidays exhausting. In fact, the summer is the only time that I have heard you seriously entertain the possibility of going back to work full-time.’

  ‘Funny, how people talk about going back to work as though looking after three children isn’t work,’ I say. ‘Work is much easier than looking after children.’

  ‘I read an interview with John McEnroe and he said that it was easier to play a Wimbledon final than look after his children,’ says Mark. ‘Mothers beat themselves up about things much more than most other people, apart from elderly Catholic women.’

  ‘Actually, motherhood and guilt are so entwined that it is difficult to see where one stops and the other starts. The guilt just becomes second nature. Although since I have given up work there is a guilt vacuum looking to be filled,’ I say, knowing that he is treating me like one of his patients, gently lobbing questions in ever-decreasing circles until the subject that he wants to tackle is finally in focus. But he forgets that I was once a journalist who spent a lot of time watching politicians wriggle away from awkward questions.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got lots of things planned,’ I say. ‘I might
go and stay with a friend in Dorset, then go on to Mum and Dad, and we’re going to Italy.’

  ‘Who is the friend in Dorset? Have I met her?’ he asks.

  ‘You mean have you slept with her? The answer to both questions is no. Actually, she is a mother at school and the wife of Emma’s boyfriend,’ I say.

  ‘That sounds complicated,’ he says.

  ‘It’s a difficult situation. My friend Isobel knows her husband is having an affair and she is close to identifying Emma, but Emma doesn’t want me to tell her until she has extricated herself from the relationship with Guy,’ I explain. ‘And the extrication process is taking longer than I anticipated.’

  I think of Isobel. I have rarely encountered someone so utterly convinced of the way her life is constructed. In all the time that I have known her, she has never demonstrated any shred of doubt. And yet her husband has spent the past year systematically drilling through the foundations so that the whole edifice threatens to crumble around her. I wonder what she will be able to retrieve from the wreckage.

  ‘So how’s your crush?’ he asks, ordering another beer and checking his mobile phone for messages at the same time. Mark is one of the few men I know who can genuinely do two things at once. ‘You haven’t mentioned him for ages. In fact he is conspicuous by his absence.’

  ‘That’s very Jonathan Ross to throw in a question like that. Whatever happened to subtlety?’ I say, hoping to head off the conversation.

  ‘You’re being evasive,’ he says.

  ‘He’s fine,’ I say. ‘We don’t talk much any more.’

  ‘So why is that?’ he asks.

  ‘We lost interest in each other, I suppose,’ I say benignly. ‘How are you enjoying celibacy? Life alone isn’t one of your strengths.’

  ‘Lucy, I don’t believe that you woke up one day and found each other unattractive,’ he says. ‘You can only do that if there has been no declaration of intent.’

  ‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ I say, standing up.

  ‘You’ve slept with him, haven’t you?’ he says. ‘You’ve got that air of abstraction about you.’ It’s an outrageous provocation and I fall straight into the trap.