More Than Just Mum: A laugh out loud novel of family chaos and reinvention

by Rebecca Smith

  ‘They are important!’ screams Benji, already over the edge. ‘Miss Brown said that every test we do is important. They’re just as important as your GCSEs and Dylan’s A Levels.’ He turns to me. ‘Aren’t they, Mum?’

  I am absolutely not in the mood to get into this conversation for the millionth time.

  ‘Nobody is getting any decent results if you don’t all get ready for school. Now hurry up or there’ll be no time for breakfast.’ I turn to look at Nick. ‘Have you got time for a coffee before you go?’

  Nick nods. ‘I’ll just get some clothes on and then I’ll be straight down.’ He walks out of the room and I follow him, pausing as I reach our bedroom door. Today is the day I will begin my book. Today I will be a writer. And writers do not need to worry themselves with petty, trivial things like getting dressed. No – instead, I will fling on my dressing gown and drive the kids to school in my pyjamas and nobody will bat an eyelid because that is just how us creative, bohemian types like to roll.

  *

  It turns out that it is exceptionally hard to write a book. I had absolutely no idea. I thought that I had everything ready – I’ve done some research and my laptop was on charge all night so that I can avoid the trauma of running out of battery just as I’m getting into my stride. I have got dressed and made myself a cup of tea and I’m sitting at the kitchen table, prepared to create something brilliant.

  But things keep on not being right.

  First of all, it’s the temperature of the room. I don’t normally have the heating on when it’s just me here on my own, but my feet are really cold and they’re distracting me. I type the words Chapter One onto my screen, but I can’t stop thinking about my freezing cold toes. So I get up and then spend five minutes deliberating over whether a real writer would wear anything as uncool as a pair of slippers, before deciding that a real writer wouldn’t actually care if they were being cool or uncool because they can write their own definition of cool, and my definition absolutely includes having warm feet.

  And then, just as I’m figuring out my first sentence, the postman rings the doorbell and I have to sign for a parcel and somehow, while I’m signing my name, the conversation slips into how I’m actually writing a book and how it’s incredibly difficult but also amazingly rewarding, and the postman is genuinely interested because it turns out that he is writing a book too and he wants to know what my book is about, but I suddenly remember that I’m supposed to be incognito and I don’t really want to tell the very jolly postman that I am writing erotic fiction, so I quickly make up a whole new book and spend ten minutes outlining the plot for a children’s book about a dog and a hamster and their hilarious antics, and by the time he leaves, the jolly postman is looking a bit confused.

  And after that, I think that I should probably figure out an author signature that looks professional and confident and avant-garde and a bit maverick, while in no way looking like my own actual signature so that I can maintain my anonymity.

  And then it’s time for some lunch, and the house is in quite a state and I don’t think I can write while the floor is so dirty, so I do some vacuuming and then dig out the mop that hasn’t been used in at least eighteen months and give the tiles a good once-over.

  And then I have to collect the kids and explain to Benji that no, Fluffy Rocket has not reappeared, while simultaneously hoping that I didn’t inadvertently hoover the damn thing up when I was cleaning the house.

  So by the end of my first day as a real writer, I have a word count of twenty-three, a house that is sparkling and a newfound respect for E.L. James.

  Chapter 18

  Despite the continuing upset over the missing hamster, I am feeling buoyant as I enter the kitchen. The sun is shining and there is a real hint of spring in the air. The house is cleaner than it has ever been and I am ready to embark on my writing, just as soon as I’ve had some coffee and deposited my offspring at school with a cheery goodbye and a positive attitude. This is a new beginning for us all and I intend to put my money where my mouth is, starting right now with the kids’ packed lunches. No more dry cheese sandwiches and a boring apple, chucked into a plastic Tupperware that is probably leaching nasty hormones and chemicals into my darling children’s food.

  Today I am a new person.

  I am not merely surviving – I am living.

  I stand in the middle of the kitchen and think hard, remembering an article I saw online recently about the gentrification of the packed lunch. It involved using Mason jars and quinoa and spinach leaves and it all looked rather lovely and exactly the kind of thing that an aspiring author would send her children to school with. I imagine the scene in the hall at Benji’s school, as the lunchtime supervisors coo and gasp at his nutritional-yet-delicious lunch. The Headteacher might even feature it in this week’s newsletter. Despite the fact that I have had three children go through primary school, I have never managed to reach the heady heights of being selected for the What’s in Your Lunchbox? column.

  I am thoroughly committed to my reinvention and that can include becoming an efficient, twenty-first-century mummy if I want it to.

  I march purposefully across the room and fling open a cupboard door, revealing a selection of glass jars. They’re not exactly Mason jars, but they’re a decent size and when I give them a quick sniff, you can barely smell the pickled onions and cabbage that used to be inside. I remove three of them and then spend several minutes trying to find matching lids, which is a bit of a pain but I get there in the end.

  Then I line the jars up on the counter and open the fridge, trying to remember exactly what the article suggested using. I haven’t got any spinach but there’s a bag of salad at the back of the fridge and when I open it up, it’s only a tiny bit limp looking. I grab a couple of handfuls and ram it into the jars before chucking in a few cherry tomatoes and standing back to admire the results. The jars are looking quite colourful but I don’t think that three tomatoes and a bit of lettuce are going to sustain my growing children. I need some protein.

  I head back to the cupboards and eventually manage to hunt down a packet of quinoa. Dusting it off, I check the small print and see that it went out of date more than five years ago. I have a healthy disregard for sell-by dates but even so, I think the quinoa may have seen better days. I throw it in the bin and go back to the fridge. For some reason we are out of cheese apart from a couple of Babybels, and their red wax packaging will completely ruin my aesthetic so they aren’t an option. Pushing the yoghurts to one side, I strike gold. Rammed at the very back of the shelf is a packet of the insanely cheap, nasty-looking little cocktail sausages that I buy whenever I need to get Dogger to take her worming tablet. It always works a treat – one cocktail sausage to lull her into a false sense of security, followed by the tablet and then another sausage to make her forget the entire incident.

  I open the packet and insert a few sausages into each jar, hesitating briefly before telling myself that I’m being ridiculous. They aren’t actually food for dogs and I’m not really about to worm the kids.

  I screw the lids onto the jars and put the kettle on, a sense of maternal bliss spreading through me. I’m particularly excited to see Scarlet’s reaction to my hipster-worthy lunch effort. She’ll probably want to Instagram it to show all her friends.

  I’m just reaching for a couple of mugs when I see it. It takes a few, long seconds for my brain to process what I’m actually looking at and when it does, I really, really wish that it hadn’t.

  ‘Nick!’ My voice comes out in a throaty whisper that can’t possibly be heard outside the kitchen. There is no way that I want to alert the kids to this new turn of events. ‘Nick!’

  ‘Is the coffee ready?’ My husband walks into the room, doing up his tie. ‘I’ve got a meeting with the new contractors and I can’t be late.’

  ‘Look at this.’ I stand back and point to the kitchen counter. ‘Can you see it?’

  Together we stare at the surface and the speckled bits of green dust t
hat are scattered across it.

  ‘Isn’t that–?’ begins Nick.

  ‘Rat poison,’ I finish.

  We look up at the wooden box that runs diagonally along the length of our kitchen wall, housing the water pipes that lead from underneath our upstairs bathroom to the drain outside. The same wooden box that had a rat problem when we first moved here two years ago. The same wooden box that now contains an industrial quantity of rat poison and rat traps that are large enough to break the back of the largest rodent.

  In our darkest hours of rat-gate we always knew that they were scampering about, because a) they made a terrible noise, equivalent to that of a huge man in hob-nailed boots stamping around inside the walls, and b) they would dislodge the dust and the green poison inside the box would fall out through the joints, forcing me into a clinical level of cleanliness with our kitchen counters. Which means one of two things is now happening. The rats are back, or Fluffy Rocket’s Most Excellent Adventure has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  I think that I might be sick.

  Nick throws himself into action. ‘Get my screwdriver!’ he whispers loudly, pulling off his suit jacket. ‘And don’t let the kids come in here.’

  I sprint into the hall and grab his toolkit from the shelf. At the same time, footsteps come pounding down the stairs.

  ‘Do not come down!’ I hiss at Dylan. ‘Take your brother and sister and lock yourselves in your room! Don’t look back, Dylan – whatever you do, do not look back!’

  Dylan flings himself round the banister. ‘Are we being home invaded?’ he yells. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  I realise that I am not calming the situation and make a monumental effort to slow my breathing.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, backing away from him towards the kitchen. ‘It’s the H – A –M – S – T – E – R.’

  Dylan looks at me like I’ve completely lost the plot, but he does what I ask and I hear him calling to Scarlet and Benji, telling them to come and listen to his latest remix in his room.

  In the kitchen, Nick is tapping gently at the box. He turns when I walk in, his face pale. ‘I think I heard something,’ he tells me. ‘Pass me that screwdriver.’

  He works in silence, while my heart beats a tattoo against my chest. Visions of mangled hamster dance in my head and I grip the worktop, trying to be brave and cursing the day I brought the poor, doomed, stupid animal into our house. The circle of life should not have to involve this kind of thing.

  Nick removes all the screws and gently lifts the wooden access panel out. I hold my breath as he peers inside, steeling myself for scenes akin to something from The Silence of the Hamsters.

  ‘I can see something!’ he calls. ‘I can see Fluffy Rocket.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ I swallow hard. ‘Is he in one piece?’

  ‘He’s alive.’

  Two small words that change everything. I close my eyes and smile, saying a silent thank you to whoever it is that spared the life of my child’s beloved pet.

  ‘But he’s caught in a rat trap. Oh shit, Hannah – it’s snapped completely closed.’

  I stop humming ‘Hakuna Matata’ and come crashing back down to reality.

  This cannot be happening.

  ‘Can you bring the trap out?’ I ask. ‘Then we can figure out what to do?’

  Nick shakes his head. ‘There’s another trap in the way. If I move this one then I risk setting that one off and I could break my finger. I can’t see clearly into the gap.’ He moves back and looks at me. ‘You’re going to have to help me.’

  My legs start twitching. I do not want to help. I do not want to go anywhere near a rat trap, and I do not want to see the state that the miserable hamster is in.

  But I am a mother, and like all the other emergency services, it is my job to run in when anyone sane would run out.

  Courageously, I nod at Nick. ‘Tell me what you need me to do.’

  Which is how I end up crouching on the kitchen counter wearing the thickest gardening gloves that I could find, directing Nick towards the snapped trap and hoping that this isn’t one of those occasions where I mix up my left and right.

  ‘Move your hand a few centimetres forward,’ I say. ‘Careful! Not there, for the love of god!’

  ‘Bloody hell, Hannah,’ growls Nick, sweat beading on his forehead. ‘Can you be a bit less dramatic please?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I huff. ‘Just trying to stop you losing a finger. Now move to the left, just a tiny bit. Now slightly down … and you’re there!’

  Nick grips the trap and pulls on the metal spring. ‘It’s really hard to move it,’ he grunts. ‘I can barely make it budge.’

  ‘He just twitched!’ I call. ‘Do it for the hamster, Nick! Come on!’

  And with the Herculean strength that mothers exhibit when moving huge buses off their small children, Nick eases the wire up a tiny bit and I reach in and grab Fluffy Rocket.

  Nick drops the trap. I stand very still, not daring to look at what I’ve picked up.

  ‘Can you see any injuries?’ I whisper.

  Nick peers closer. ‘He looks fine.’ I can hear confusion in his voice. ‘There’s not a mark on him apart from here.’

  I take a breath and look down at my gloved hand. The cause of all this distress is looking slightly dazed, but not anywhere near as squashed or splatted or squished as I had imagined. In fact, he resembles the same hamster that he’s always been apart from a bald patch, right on his bottom.

  ‘I think he got trapped by the fluff on his arse,’ murmurs Nick, his voice filled with awe. ‘Talk about a lucky escape.’

  I cup him between my gloved hands, trying to be as gentle as possible.

  ‘Can you get me a shoebox?’ I ask. ‘I need to get him to the vet. He might have eaten some of that rat poison.’

  Nick scrabbles around in the cupboard underneath the sink, the dumping ground for everything that I can’t bear to get rid of, and passes me a box. I lower Fluffy Rocket inside.

  ‘I don’t think there’s a lot the vet can do for him if he has,’ Nick tells me. ‘Is it really worth the bother?’

  At that moment, Benji comes hurtling into the kitchen with Dylan and Scarlet hot on his heels.

  ‘Have you found Fluffy Rocket?’ he yells. ‘Did you save his life?’

  Nick catches my eye and nods. We both know that it’s worth the hassle, if not the eye-watering bill that we’re about to get landed with.

  *

  After Nick has dashed off to work, I leave Dylan in charge of the shoebox while Scarlet pours cereal into three bowls. I sprint upstairs to throw on some clothes. I may be a fledgling writer but even us arty types draw the line at visiting the vets in our tartan flannel pyjamas. Then I run back downstairs, thanking the heavens that at least I managed to get lunch sorted.

  ‘Here you are!’ I say, passing a jar to each child. ‘Put these in your bags.’

  There is silence as my delightful offspring examine the offerings that I have placed before them.

  ‘What’s this?’ Benji is the first to break. ‘Where are my sandwiches?’

  ‘This is instead of sandwiches,’ I say brightly. ‘Aren’t you lucky? Everyone else has boring old sandwiches and you get to take in this delicious salad!’

  ‘I want the same as everyone else,’ Benji mutters, mutinously. ‘They’ll all laugh when they see this.’

  ‘I can’t take this to school.’ Scarlet stares at me with a look on her face that would suggest I have committed some kind of culinary crime. ‘Do you seriously think I’m going to carry a jam jar around all day?’

  ‘It’s a pickled onion jar, for your information.’ This is not how I imagined my thoughtful lunches would be received. ‘And I’m sure it’s no heavier than your lunchbox.’

  ‘Is that Dogger’s sausages in there?’ Dylan is peering closely into his jar, his face suspicious. ‘Have you given us dog food for lunch?’

  I sigh loudly. ‘They are not dog sausages. They are human sausages that I happen to buy for
Dogger.’

  ‘I don’t want to eat human sausages!’ wails Benji, looking stricken. ‘That’s horrible, Mum.’

  I look at the clock, wondering if the vet might be persuaded to write me a prescription for a tranquiliser. Just something to take the edge off.

  ‘There’ll be a riot if I take this into the school canteen,’ states Scarlet. ‘Honestly, you’ve got no idea, Mum. You sit up there in the staffroom where it’s all nice and cosy but it’s like a warzone down in the hall. I’ve seen the damage that Ashley Dunsford can inflict with a Tupperware. Believe me, you do not want someone like him getting his hands on anything made of glass. It’ll be carnage.’ She pauses and gives me a strange look. ‘Also, is it true that if someone dies in the middle of an exam then everyone else gets an immediate A grade?’

  I’ve had enough.

  ‘Take the jar or go hungry.’ I pick up the shoebox. ‘I’m getting in the car and I will be leaving in two minutes. And I am deadly serious when I say that if you’re not all sitting in your seats then I will leave you behind.’

  The drive to school is subdued. None of us are much in the mood for talking. I drop the older two at the main entrance and then head across to Benji’s school next door.

  ‘I’m taking Fluffy Rocket to the vet now,’ I tell him. ‘Just to get him checked out.’

  ‘Thank you, Mummy.’ Benji strokes the top of the shoebox before leaning across and giving me a hug. I haven’t been ‘Mummy’ for a while now and even though I know it’s because he’s upset, part of me rejoices in hearing my old name.

  *

  I tell our tale of woe to the vet’s receptionist, who listens with her jaw gaping open, especially when I spin out the part where we found the hamster stuck in the rat trap. She whisks us straight through to the vet’s room where I repeat the whole sorry saga.

  ‘… trapped only by the fluff on his backside,’ I finish. ‘So I thought it’d be good to get him checked out, given the fact that there is an awful lot of poison in the walls.’