Mind Games and Ministers

by Chris Longden

  I opened my car windows. In my book, the scent of wet pavement and damp earth after a hot spell very nearly beats the whiff of Marmite and Ralgex.

  The rain only lasted for fifteen minutes and had petered out by the time I arrived back in Stalybridge, where I said farewell and many a thank you to my parents. Or, more precisely, to my mother (“ Your dad’s still hiding in the allotment shed. ”)

  I bustled the children into the back of the car as Mum presented me with various carrier bags. The first contained a collection of Lydia’s home-made buns ( “All made by me, Mum! Matthew was useless. All he did was lick the kitchen worktop.” ) The second consisted of a selection of fresh soups made by mother ( “Well, I don’t know how you can abide that packet soup, Rachael. It gives me the trots. Home-made is best. You just have to get yourself a little bit more organised.” ) The third held a dozen paintings by Matthew-Picasso-On-Ritalin-Russell ( “He says that you never have time to make paintings with him at home…” ) and the fourth and largest bag was “the ironing that I noticed last week at your house. I took it home with us and did it properly, because the children look scruffy enough at the best of times.”)

  Driving home, I began to feel at a low ebb. Down. Double-down. It wasn’t because of my mother’s words. Yes, the woman should have a First Class Degree in Backhanded Remarks, but I was learning to live with it. So why the sudden drop in spirits? The children were happily listening to a Famous Five audio book, which allowed me some time to think. But I knew what it would be. Just the usual. Guilt. Which we all know is the most unproductive and negative of emotions. But, for me, a familiar old chum.

  It was guilt. Guilt because I had enjoyed an entire twenty-four hours away from the children, without missing them at all. Guilt because I had just engaged in hot, sweaty sex with a bloke who I was taking a bit of a shine to. Guilt because of Adam, who, yes, might be operating on a different time and space continuum to the rest of us these days, but who was still my husband, the father of my children. And finally, the most illogical, most uncomfortable flush of feeling of all. Guilt because of Shaun. Not just because of what happened with him previously, but because I knew that he wouldn’t like the idea of the Michael thing. About Rachael moving on.

  All this was a crazy recipe for thinking. So I topped it all off with an additional sprinkling. Guilt because I’m shit at making soup and I can’t be arsed to iron. The Rebellion Against Real Motherhood thought cheered me up and took the edge off the black clouds. Meanwhile, an argument had erupted on the back seat of the car over whether The Five should allow Timmy the dog to eat ice cream ( “He’ll get diarrhoea and then all of their mystery solving will be ruined by runny dog-poo” ) and whether George is a girl or not.

  “Matthew keeps shouting ‘Boy’ at me, but Mum, I say that she’s a girl. She’s a funny sort of girl, though, isn’t she? More like a boy. There’s a word … what is it? The word for a girl who acts like a boy?”

  “I think it’s ‘butch’, Lydia,” came my offhand answer.

  “Yes. OK. So, I’m going to be a butch girl just like George!”

  That’s the problem with being a lone parent. The kids just don’t get the nuances of conversation in the same way that adults do.

  A few hours later and we were engaged in the usual Sunday night bath and bedtime ritual. Lydia had quickly hopped out of the bath, claiming that she didn’t want to share it with her brother ( “He wees in it. Even if he says he doesn’t. And then he drinks the water. He’s a disgusting little chimpy-chops.” ) Wrapped in a towel, she had taken herself off to my bedroom to finish her school reading book. Matthew was howling as I tried to remove what looked like a lump of peanut butter cemented into one of his ears. Although it could well be a nasty case of ear wax discharge. We didn't keep peanut butter in our house. Still, he might have been exposed to some at my parents’. I sighed. Another small, but telling frustration. No other adult about to confer with on the “is it peanut butter or is it ear wax?” question.

  Whilst rinsing Matthew’s ear out, I smiled to myself. Imagining how Adam would have tackled this. He would have offered Lydia extra pocket money to taste the substance extracted from her brother’s ear and to tell us what it was. At first she would have squealed in horror, but then her little brain would have started working overtime. A quick risk assessment of Daddy’s proposal. The situation would end in Adam grabbing Lydia and tickling her until she threatened to wet her knickers. I would be droning on at him.

  “Oh, Adam! Why do you always have to get them all giddy just before bedtime?”

  Sometimes, conjuring up an amusing image of family life with Adam still in tow did the trick for me. But this time the smile only lasted a few seconds. As I rinsed the soapsuds from Matthew’s hair, I also tried to flush away the unbearable sadness. That Adam had never had the chance to discover his little boy’s personality. That his Matthew was, in fact, growing up to become the kind of lad who would quite happily experiment with eating random substances lodged in his ear, without any form of monetary bribery.

  I turned away from my musings. Matthew finished his screeching fit and I hoisted him out of the bath, ruffled a towel round him and scooted him towards his own bedroom. I went to check on Lydia. She was lying on my bed in her bath towel with the alleged reading book cast to one side, and for some reason various bras of mine had been draped along the rumpled duvet. With one hand behind her head and the other clasping my mobile phone to her ear, she was chattering away. She registered my sudden presence and then waved me away with a gesture of irritation.

  “I’m talking!” she hissed. A perfect impersonation of my most ferocious Satanic Mother voice, accompanied by a conspiratorial whisper into the phone.

  “She’s been such a moody-pants tonight. Oh, and guess what else? I'm stark naked under this towel! I am! I’m a naked baby! That’s what we always called Matthew when he was a tiny baby in the bath. ‘Naked bay-bee’, we’d sing at him…”

  I marched over to her, demanded the phone and pointed to her room. She skulked away.

  “Hello?” presuming that it would be my mother or my sister. But it was a man’s voice. Michael’s.

  “Ah, Rachael. At last!” Michael said. “I’ve been forced to participate in the most erudite discussion with your daughter. She tells me that she’s ‘nearly seven’. Going on seventy is more like it. Does she always talk that much?”

  “Oh, God, Michael. Sorry. What’s she been saying?”

  “Nothing too dangerous. I asked to speak to you and told her that I was a friend from work. She told me that you were bathing a very revolting sibling called Matthew. Who ‘drinks his own wee’, apparently? And that she was supposed to be doing her reading book from school but ‘stories about fairies are so boring and for total spannerheads’. So she decided to try your bras on instead.”

  “Right.”

  “And then it was ‘Do you know what some ladies do? They get their boobies sliced open in a special hospital and a doctor puts a balloon in each one, and sews it back up again. To make the boobies look bigger. So that men will like her more’.”

  “Oh dear. Sorry. That’s my fault. Well, Kate’s, too. My best friend. We were talking about implants, for some reason. Lydia overheard and wanted to know what they were. Kate decided it would be a good chance to educate her goddaughter on the power of the media and how women are increasingly being oppressed in terms of their appearance. And this turned into chit-chat in general about body fascism.”

  “Hm. This Kate sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

  “Ha – no. She’s fab, is Kate. But she’s got twin boys. And they’re rather different to Lydia. Liddy hyperfocusses. And she ended up becoming rather too interested in terms of the physiological, rather than the socio-political impact. We tried to backpedal, but Lydia was asking us things like, ‘What kind of a knife would they use? Could they use those crinkly craft scissors so that the lady could have a nice pattern on her boobs?’ And then last week I caught her explaining breast-impla
nt surgery to a little boy when we were in a shoe shop. She probably traumatised the lad for life …”

  I tailed off, remembering that Michael was a man of rather loftier preoccupations when it came to the great scheme of things. A man who had only recently emerged from a meeting with the prime minister. A man who didn’t seem to be too enamoured with the overall concept of children in general. And to whom I was now relating my hilarious exploits with a small child in Stalybridge Market’s ‘Shooz 2 Chooz’.

  But he replied, “Oh, I doubt it. The lad would probably have just dismissed her as some daft little girl wittering on about a load of feminist-induced tosh.”

  “Hmm. Given your remarks there, should I take it that your meeting with the PM wasn’t about him offering you the job of minister for the Department of Women and Families?”

  “Ha. Very good. But that would fill me with even more horror than if he’d asked me to head up the Department for Work and Pensions! Or God forbid, Transport.”

  Shrieking from next door. An ominous crash.

  “Hang on a minute,” I broke off, and threw the phone down. A squabble had broken out between a naked Matthew, who had dared to venture into Lydia’s room and was trying to steal her ‘box of precious things’.

  I picked the phone back up and apologised to Michael, who replied, “Look, I’ll call you back if it’s a bad time.”

  “No, honestly. They’re sorted now. I threatened them with muesli for breakfast. So tell me about this meeting. Did you get your knuckles rapped for losing Trevor yesterday? Was Alex the Twat there too?”

  His laughter boomed down the phone line.

  “Oh, I like that, Rachael! Yes. That’s perfect. Alex the Twat. A name that suits him down to the ground. But actually, that wasn’t why I was summoned. Have you caught the news today at all?”

  “No. I try to avoid it when I can. Too depressing.”

  “Ah, well. The PM and Alex wanted to talk through a bit of a scandal that hit the papers this morning. Yesterday while we were on Brindleford, they had a tip-off. It’s one of my junior ministers, Ben Hardy. He’s been having an extra-marital affair. And News Of The Nation – well, I’m sure you know that they’re the worst of the gutter press – have managed to procure some pictures. But it’s even juicier than that. Turns out that Ben is gay. Fella has a wife and four kids and has been leading a double life.”

  “Oh. Oh, crap. Not good news for anyone, then?”

  “No, not great. Of course, there have been similar precedents in government in terms of politicians being outed, so you’d think that we can ride the storm. But the prime minister is fretting about our ratings in the polls and the last thing we need is a sex scandal right now. So tomorrow morning I’ve got to get out there and do some damage limitation. Press conference at ten o’clock. Try to watch it if you can.”

  “Oh. Shame. I’ll be at work.”

  “But I thought that you were in charge of the place?”

  “I am. I suppose. But …” I paused. “Actually. I think I’ve seen quite enough of you for one week.”

  He chuckled. “Well, I definitely haven’t seen enough of you … and I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind Skyping with me later and being a certain ‘naked baby’ under a towel?”

  I was about to reply when Lydia came charging into the room to inform me, “Matthew has gone into the garden with no clothes on and says he’s going to eat one of my pet woodlice ’cause he hates me!”

  “Got to go, Michael,” I said. “I have to liberate some garden insects from being devoured by homo toddlerus .”

  “Ah, Rachael. You’re a woman always on a mercy mission. Let’s speak tomorrow, eh? Goodnight.”

  Chapter 9

  AMAZONS IN AGREEMENT

  Any frivolous fantasies of checking out the news headlines in order to catch the Ben Hardy coverage were soon snuffed out, thanks to a bit of a spat over whether both kids had brushed their teeth that morning.

  “Why should we bother?” my daughter groaned. “I mean, I’ll be having toast at Breakfast Club in a minute. And Matthew’s baby teeth will all fall out soon. What’s the point? Who cares?”

  Parcelling the kids into the car, I made the silly error of switching Radio 4 on. Matthew launched into a piercing screech.

  “I hate that! I hate that!”

  Accompanied by Lydia.

  “Boooring! Put our Disney music on, Mummy. This is rubbish. Turn it off!”

  It was only 7.30 a.m. and I was already kiddy-sick. Sure, wanting to listen to the news was hardly worth getting so het up about in the great scheme of things. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I couldn’t remember the last time that I had been allowed to listen to grown-up stuff without a small person attempting to ruin it for me.

  Matthew was parroting Lydia now: “Turnitoff!”

  Peevishly, I hiked the volume up to an excruciating level. Trying to deafen them into submission. And then, after a quick side-glance, I turned it off altogether. At the traffic lights, the man in the car next to us was staring blankly at me. Perhaps wondering why I was attempting to inflict death by ‘The Today Programme’ on two small children. Now that silence reigned in the car, Lydia whispered to her brother (not-so-quietly), “She’s the meanest mummy in the world, isn’t she, Matthew? Like that nasty old bag Miss Hannigan in Annie .”

  I yelled at her.

  “For God’s sake, Lydia! Can’t you just put a sock in it for once?”

  Yes, I know that my positive parenting manual would have advised me to ignore the more trivial backchat, but there had been far too many Annie allusions of late. The most recent one had occurred when I was buying a bottle of wine in the local Co-op. For the benefit of random shoppers, Lydia had declared in her most am-dram voice across the aisles, “Uh-oh. Mummy’s buying beer again! She's just like Miss Hannigan!” And then she proceeded to inform the girl at the checkout, “Our house is as dirty as an old orphanage, you know. And it’s full of children locked in the cellar!”

  So that morning I gladly deposited Lydia at Breakfast Club (where I was reminded of outstanding fees for last term) and moved on. I happily left child number two at his nursery (where I was politely asked, “Could you return the spare underpants that Matthew had to borrow?”) And I finally made a beeline for Medlock, experiencing a twinge of remorse for the fact that heading to a workplace full of women who had been attacked by brutal men seemed a much more cheery prospect than having to look after my own children day in and day out.

  I switched the radio on again, but by now I had missed any news coverage involving Michael.

  After arriving at Sisters’ Space, I swiped my card through our security system. It wasn’t a bad little techno-contraption given that we survived on a shoestring, and the door-entry system buzzed me into the centre. As I hung my coat up, Gillian, our most senior case worker, cornered me. Not usually the nervy sort, my shaven-headed deputy was a tad tetchy today. Telling me that she had heard on the jungle drums that there were rumours of even more funding cuts across the Greater Manchester local authorities. I spoke to her in the kind of language that she understood best, ladling on the sympathy.

  “Nah. Get a grip, Gillian. I’ve heard nothing. Go take a chill pill. I need to get the staffing schedules sorted.”

  Three women had been hanging around outside the centre when it opened its doors to the public at 9 a.m. Each had been a visitor to Sisters’ Space in the past, but all had experienced fresh assaults over the weekend and we were usually their first port of call. Less than a third of women experiencing domestic violence report it to the police. Believe me, I know my facts on this kind of thing. Can rattle it off in my sleep (and frequently do – Adam once left the marital bed for a night because I kept shouting “Mitigating circumstances – my arse!” in the wee small hours.) And today, none of these particular women – Jade, Gemma and Jean – had been in touch with the bizzies. Probably because they knew that very few reported cases actually lead to a charge being made against the perpetrato
r (seven per cent, in fact.)

  All this meant that trying to get a woman to officially log an attack often felt like a waste of time to the staff at Sisters’ Space. Of course, nudging women to seriously weigh up the pros and cons of going for the legal jugular was something that we felt obliged to do. But often it made more sense to focus our energies on going all out with the support needed to extract them from the abusive cycle of a destructive relationship pattern.

  So I’ve never minded delivering any form of rant that touches on the fact that one-third of local authority areas in England still offer no service for women experiencing domestic violence. This was one of the statistics that I immediately flagged up to Michael on our very first encounter. Michael Chiswick happened to be a government minister, but he was also the constituency MP for Sisters’ Space and we wanted to tap him for some support with our new cafe and chocolate shop initiative. I’d never met him before and Gillian had been the one to liaise with his local constituency office in order to arrange the visit to the centre a few Fridays ago in mid-August.

  “Is that so?” was Michael’s response to the beginnings of my spiel about the pathetic lack of help available for women across the country. “But don’t you think that walk-in GP surgeries or the family support centres would be better placed to provide the advice that women need? I mean, one-stop shops are the government’s preferred approach, you know. Rather than having to shell out for yet another service and all the accompanying overheads.”

  The notorious Dee, one of our gobbier service users at Sisters’ Space, had been standing alongside Gillian and me as we were discussing this with Michael. I caught Gillian rolling her eyes at Michael’s response. Dee just yawned, displaying silver fillings. Now, I hadn’t expected the minister for communities to be out there with pom-poms and performing high kicks in celebration of domestic abuse services across the land, but he could have sounded a bit less obstructive. Following on from his previous comments, Michael then asked me whether our service would refuse to help men who were victims of domestic abuse at the hands of female partners. The kind of stuff that I was used to being challenged about. But irritating, nonetheless.