Between You and Me

by Margaret Scott

  “Well, Mark, I don’t know.” I wasn’t for letting him off the hook too easy, so with a tone that even I found absurdly confident, I said, “It’s very hard to instill discipline without the parent’s support.”

  “You have my support.”

  “Well, I didn’t have it last night.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure? Because there’s a lot of stuff round here that needs to change.”

  “Of course.”

  “You need to be sure.”

  “I am. It’s just that,” he paused, looking back at Amber’s bedroom door, “I’m not very good at that sort of thing, you know? Her mother, well –”

  “Did all that,” I finished for him without thinking. “I know, it can’t have been easy –”

  The soft look on his face vanished, and his voice was instantly cold. “With respect, Holly, you couldn’t possibly know.” Then he stopped and, sighing, said, “But that’s not your fault. I’m sorry, I’m just tired, and it’s been a long day.”

  “You’ve eaten, I suppose?” I asked suddenly.

  “I ate with the kids earlier, yes.”

  “I could fix you a chicken sandwich?”

  “Yes, that would be lovely actually.” He smiled although the weary look was still in his eyes. “Thank you.”

  I have to say, as I followed him downstairs, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of elation. At last I had free rein to get Project Amber underway. And Mark’s change of heart gave me a strange kind of confidence. I felt vindicated by the fact that he’d obviously seen something in the way I took charge of her the previous night. Then it occurred to me that maybe she’d behaved fantastically well today as a result. Yes! That must be it, I thought, and I let the new sense of power wash over me.

  A little later I dropped into Jamie’s room to tuck him in.

  “Holly?” he said.

  “Yes, love?”

  “What does ‘get your act together’ mean?”

  “Oh,” I said, still not used to him actually speaking to me, “well, it means get better at something. Why?”

  “Well, today at Nana’s, Amber was being really bold –”

  Well, that blew that theory out of the water then.

  “And Nana shouted at Daddy that she was a nightmare of a child and that he needed to get his act together.”

  Well now, that put a whole new slant on things.

  “Really? And what did your dad say?”

  “He said he was doing his best. But he’s a bit rubbish, isn’t he, Holly?”

  “No,Jamie,” I smiled as I tucked him in, “your dad is doing his best. We just need to help him, that’s all.”

  Mark Fielding, you sly, sneaky coward!

  Chapter 22

  The next morning my clock went off at six thirty and I bounded out of the bed. Organisation was key in my mission to bring order to the house and, to be organised, I had to be up at least an hour before the children.

  – Get up an hour before the children – tick!

  God, it felt good to be achieving again.

  The previous evening I had spent an hour drafting out a timetable for our day, complete with scheduled naps, meals and activities all broken into fifteen-minute timeslots.

  In true Supernanny fashion, my first task was to tape this masterpiece to the newly cleared fridge door.

  – Tape daily routine to fridge – tick!

  Then, humming softly to myself, I put the kettle on. I then started my stock-take on the fridge and food cupboard as a big grocery shop was pencilled in for 12.45p.m.

  – Stock-take of fridge & store cupboard – tick!

  “Hi!”

  Holy shit.

  I jumped, smashing my head off the top shelf of the fridge, causing it to dislodge and upend its contents onto the kitchen floor.

  “Shit!” I said, rubbing my head and looking at the mess.

  “Sorry, I thought you knew I was here.”

  Mark was leaning against the kitchen door, steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Clearly not.”

  “Well, sorry.”

  “No need to apologise – it is your house after all.”

  “Indeed.” He smirked as he handed me a dishcloth, then added, “You’ve, eh, got something in your hair.”

  “Oh, thanks.” I pretended not to care while inwardly wishing he would just bloody well bugger off and go to work.

  “It’s a strange time of the day for fridge-cleaning – or is that one of your new routines?” He was still smirking.

  I drew myself up to my full height, suddenly thanking God that the fridge was still wide open which meant he couldn’t see the new routines in all their glorious Technicolor stuck to its door.

  “I’m changing the children’s diet. I need to see what you do and do not have.”

  “Oh.”

  “Diet has a huge effect on behaviour, you know.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He threw the rest of his coffee in the sink and, still smirking, put on his coat.

  “Yes. You do that.” I tossed my head and went back to my fridge-cleaning, mentally adding another task to the list.

  – Put smile on other side of Mark Fielding’s face

  God, but I couldn’t wait for that “tick”.

  Two hours later I was leaving the house, the kids having had their very last breakfast of Chocco Krunchies.

  Dawn looked surprised to see Amber dressed and with a clean face.

  “New week, new us!” I told her confidently.

  “Oh. Well, good luck with that!” she grinned.

  “Thanks. Oh, I need to ask you, where’s the best place to get paints and stuff?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re doing up the house too?”

  I had to laugh at the mixture of shock and admiration on her face.

  “No way! Though I’m thinking of suggesting to him that the good front room is a complete waste and should be turned into a playroom.”

  “Does he not use it at all?”

  “No, it’s literally just sitting there. The door is even locked. But anyhow, it’s paints for Amber I need and, you know, other stuff for her to play with, educational stuff like, well, you know, stuff . . .” I trailed off lamely . . . ‘paints’ was as much thought as I’d given the idea.

  By now we’d reached the school gates, and Dawn went to greet the other mothers. Then she beckoned to me.

  “You remember Ellen,don’t you?”

  I looked blankly at the lady she was standing with.

  “From the Mother and Toddler Group?”

  My eyes searched frantically for some clue, then lit on the lime-green buggy at her side.

  “Ah yes, Ellen, of course!” Mentally I was doing the maths. If she was at the school gate, then she clearly had a child in school. I presumed there was another in the Day-Glo contraption, but what stunned me was that there seemed to be yet another on some kind of step attached to its rear.

  “You have your hands full!” I couldn’t help but comment.

  “Oh I know, busy busy.”

  “Ellen was telling me about just the shop for you, for the paints,” said Dawn.

  “Yes, you need Johnson’s, down near the church. They sell all that sort of stuff – crayons, wall charts – it’s a kind of teachers’ supply store but they sell to everyone. They only take cash though, so have plenty with you when you go. So how are you finding it at the Fieldings’?”

  “Great,” I answered with a wide smile.

  “Jessica and Amber were born about a week apart,” Ellen continued, gesturing towards the cherubic-faced toddler clinging to the back of the buggy. “I remember being pregnant at the same time as Emma – such a lovely girl.”

  “So I believe,” I said automatically.

  “A wonderful, wonderful mother.”

  “Yes, again, so I believe.”

  “And you know that child,” she indicated a glowering Amber, “never made it easy for her.”

  “
Well, I don’t think –”

  “Not a bit like our Jessica, who was always so – willing.”

  “She’s not that –”

  But she’d moved on already. “Oh yes, Jess is just such a sweetheart, and it’s not easy for her, you know, not with Robert crying half the night –”

  “Robert?” I asked.

  “My son, he’s only eleven months younger than Jessica.”She gestured towards the child sleeping in the lime-green pod. “I think we took our eye off the ball on that one. But, anyway, for the life of me I can’t get him down in the evening.”

  “Obviously you’ve tried Controlled Crying?” I asked without thinking.

  “Controlled what?”

  Shit. What did I say anything for?

  “Crying, you know, where you keep going in at regular intervals, reassuring him until he drops off.” I racked my brains to try and think what else I’d read about it.

  “Never heard of it, sounds a bit harsh.”

  “Nonsense. Make sure you wind him down first – stories, bath, whatever –” I started to recite what I knew while inwardly cursing my stupidity. “After a few nights he’ll see that you’re serious.”

  “Well, I don’t really believe in those strict rules. I think he just needs reassurance that Mummy and Daddy love him and that we’ll be there when he wakes up.”

  “Nonsense,” I said briskly. “Children need boundaries – you’ll find that’s sometimes all the reassurance that they need. Anyhow,” I continued, “thanks for the tip about the school shop – we’ll head that way now.”

  “You’retaking Amber with you?” Ellen looked incredulous.

  “Of course,” I answered confidently.

  “I can’t bring mine to any shop,” she sighed. “It’s just not worth it – they’d drive me mad.”

  “Oh, we have a system, don’t we, Amber?” I cooed. “Amber is my special helper. It’s called the ‘Involvement Technique’. I give her little jobs to do and it all gets done in jig time. Now we must go – Amber is scheduled to have her nap at ten thirty sharp and we must be home by then!”

  I swung the buggy confidently around, feeling quite pleased with myself. A quick stop-off for some educational toys and then maybe I’d treat myself to a takeaway latte on the way home to sip at my leisure while Amber slept.

  That would mean two more ticksfor the list.

  Sure enough we found the shop, which lived up to Ellen’s recommendations. Crammed full of art materials, wall charts, wooden toys and puppets, it didn’t take long for me to realise that I hadn’t a clue what children Amber’s age played with. All I did know was that the first thing she picked out, an incredibly uneducational-looking sword, wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. Luckily for me, the owner was a kindly faced man who clearly knew a fish-out-of-water when he saw one. A man on a mission, he soon had my arms full of paints, flashcards, wooden blocks and jigsaws and had even managed to wrestle the sword away from a very determined Amber, replacing it with a giant purple parrot puppet.

  This job was costing me a fortune. But then I was getting very used to putting the whole money issue to the back of my head. For starters my ‘salary’ was a joke. I’d known it wasn’t going to be in any way comparable to what I’d been earning in Grantham Sparks but like seriously? People lived on that amount of money? And I was getting over the usual rate. Incredible. Thank goodness, due to my workaholic tendencies (and my rent-free accommodation in New York), I’d built up a nice little reserve for myself over the years. Which was just as well – these new purchases were on me too – a gift to the kids, I told myself.

  By the time I struggled home with the load, it was almost eleven. I consoled myself with the fact that the timetable was not going to go completely to plan on the first day and thirty minutes was not too far to be behind.

  However, I reckoned without Amber who had absolutely zero intention of leaving her new toys and going upstairs to bed.

  We faced each other. Me, rapidly cooling latte in hand, her with two chubby arms full of purple parrot, two jigsaws and a bag of bricks.

  I sighed. And opened the first jigsaw.

  Forty-five minutes behind schedule would be fixable. Just.

  Sixty minutes behind schedule was not as fixable.

  One hour and fifteen minutes behind schedule was fast becoming a disaster.

  At one hour and thirty minutes behind, I decided that the paint-spattered Amber didn’t need a nap and that stifling her creativity would be far more disastrous.

  And voilà! We found ourselves back on schedule. This routine thing was a piece of cake: you just removed the items that you didn’t get a chance to do.

  And so at 1.30, bang on schedule, we found ourselves in the supermarket.

  Me, Amber, the giant purple parrot puppet and my list.

  But as the first whiff of freshly baked bread wafted in my direction, I remembered, with a sinking feeling, that neither of us had had lunch.

  Thirty minutes later, there was no escaping the fact that grocery shopping with a hungry, tired toddler was a recipe for disaster. I could practically sense Supernanny watching me on her stupid laptop, shaking her head and tutting, “I left her to her own devices for one morning and look what happens!”

  Up and down the aisles we went. I threw items into the trolley, Amber threw them out. As I went to pick them up, she replaced them with random items off the shelves. When I took her stuff out of the trolley, she went insane.

  Not quite the serene shopping trip I’d had in mind.

  There was nothing for it, though, but to keep going. Get the key items I needed and then get the hell out of there.

  Ah yes, the key items I needed.

  The book had made it look so simple but they’d reckoned without the stock of a rural supermarket. I hadn’t expected it to be quite like the Food Emporium on 68th and Broadway, but come on! Okay, so they had plenty of rice that you could boil away merrily in a bag – but wholegrain basmati? Quinoa? Buckwheat? Their fruit and veg looked dull and tired and chicken that had seen any kind of fresh air throughout its life was an exorbitant price. The only fish to be had was breaded, and the bread itself came in two varieties – white or used-to-be-white-before-it-was-dyed-brown. It was futile. I needed a trip to a better supermarket but that would necessitate borrowing a car, a complication I couldn’t resolve that simply.

  By the time we got to the checkout, I was exhausted and Amber was roaring. In desperation I grabbed a neon bag of crisps from the shelf and shoved them at her. I knew that they were probably steepedin saturated fat and dredged with salt but if she didn’t stop crying soon I was going to start wailing myself.

  Then behind me I heard a voice.

  “Cooeee!”

  It was Ellen. Fresh-faced and beaming from ear to ear.

  “Somebody doesn’t look very happy,” she said, looking at Amber’s blotchy red face and teary eyes.

  Thanks for pointing that out, you silly bitch.

  “No. But you know how they are at that age,” I forced through gritted teeth, noticing the cherubic Jessica was sitting up in her seat, nibbling away delicately on a small box of raisins.

  “Yes, well, you can never rely on them not to show you up, that’s for sure.”

  Oh, pissoff!

  “Boundaries,” she said sweetly, looking directly at the crisps. “You’re right – sometimes that’s all they need.”

  Chapter 23

  “One spoon, Amber, like a good girl.”

  “No.”

  I sighed. I really needed this morning to go well. My ecstatic high from Sunday had taken a severe bashing in the supermarket yesterday and had by now well and truly vanished. I looked across at Jamie who was quietly swallowing the last spoonful of porridge-scattered-with-delicious-ground-flaxseed into his mouth. Which was great, don’t get me wrong, but there was just something very peculiar about that child. Even with our new early-morning start, he still managed to be sitting on his bed, dressed for school, every time I went up to wak
e him.

  “Oh, feck the whole lot of ye ungrateful psychotics!” I muttered to myself.

  Here I was, shovelling mucky porridge into the most belligerent child in Ireland, when I should be – I stopped. What would I have been doing?

  Let’s see, Tuesday morning – I even had to think about that for a minute – one day of mindless domestic drudgery was hard to distinguish from the next. I looked at my watch: 8.20 a.m. Well, if I was in Dublin I’d be just coming back from the gym that was attached to my apartment complex. There’d be a spinning class, or Pilates, or else I’d just speed-walk 5k on the treadmill. I froze for a moment, as I realised how little physical exercise I’d done lately. The last thing I wanted was to start piling on the pounds. Then it occurred to me that the relentless pushing of a hefty toddler the length and breadth of a small village was probably giving me better arm definition than a whole season of Grunt & Grind.

  Anyhow, after the gym, I’d come back to the Dublin apartment and have a light breakfast of poached egg, and one slice of grilled bacon – Size 10 figures didn’t maintain themselves, you know. And coffee, proper coffee from proper freshly ground coffee beans.

  I’d then put my plate and cup carefully into my dishwasher-for-one, run a cloth over the marble worktop and give the sink one last shine. I prided myself on the fact that my kitchen looked like that of a show house permanently.

  Then, after my carb-free breakfast, I’d pad, barefoot, across my cream carpet to the shower where I’d stand under its needle-sharp jets and let the Molton Brown shower gel infiltrate my senses. I’d check my legs for the first signs of stubble and tweeze any stray hairs from my eyebrows. My clothes, usually a suit/shirt combo still in plastic from the dry-cleaner’s would have been laid out the night before, so I’d sit for five minutes after my shower, wrapped in my snow-white dressing gown and read the financial pages on my laptop.

  Life in New York had been slightly different.I was happy to live in Monica’s Perry Street apartment, as to afford somewhere on my own would probably have meant moving out to the Boroughs. As it was, Monica’s apartment was three doors down from Carrie’s ‘stoop’ in Sex and the City and, every time I walked past the tourists queuing for photographs on the famous steps, I couldn’t help the thrill of feeling I’d arrived. In Manhattan, I made a point of walking to my office at least three mornings a week, chucking my sneakers in my bag when I reached the building. I got such a kick from that city. I really hadn’t thought I’d ever, ever move anywhere else.