Mummy Said the F-Word

by Fiona Gibson

  ‘What kind of animal is steak?’

  ‘Cow.’ Very expensive cow, I want to add.

  ‘It doesn’t look like cow,’ Lola chirps. Mum glares down at her plate as if surmising that Lola is right and I’m probably trying to poison them all with braised roadkill.

  ‘That’s because it’s stew,’ I explain. ‘It’s cooked in a kind of gravy.’

  ‘What makes it thick?’ Jake enquires.

  ‘Cornflour. You make a little paste with—Just eat it, would you?’

  Mum’s eyebrows shoot up. Christ, when will we emerge from this stage in which every ingredient and cooking method must be explained in brain-juddering detail? Every time we sit down to eat it’s like a bloody cookery exam.

  ‘Why are there cakes in the gravy?’ Lola asks.

  ‘They’re not cakes. They’re dumplings.’ My patience is stretched taut and could twang at any moment.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ she says.

  ‘That’s because you haven’t tried them. Look, they’re lovely!’ Fixing her with a challenging stare, I fork in a whole dumpling, which plugs my entire mouth. It has the texture of teddy-bear stuffing. Mum has pushed hers aside and dumped her cutlery on the table. What was I thinking, bringing her here? She didn’t want to come. She has barely eaten a thing; doesn’t she like my cooking, or does she need feeding these days? Should I have cut up her meat into smaller pieces? I could never do Helena’s job. That woman is a saint.

  With difficulty, I manage to gulp down the dumpling. I can feel it shifting lumpenly to my stomach.

  ‘Well,’ Mum announces, ‘I’d better be getting the bus.’ She shoves back her chair with a scrape.

  ‘Mum, there’s no bus. I’ll drive you home when the photographer’s finished. Are you sure you can’t manage any stew …?’

  She flings me a beseeching look. ‘I want to go home. Don’t want no photos.’ She struggles up from her chair and totters across the kitchen with the kids gawping after her.

  ‘Bye!’ Travis calls out, waving his spoon.

  ‘What’s wrong with Granny?’ Lola cries.

  I fly after Mum, putting an arm round her shoulders, but she brushes me off angrily.

  ‘What have you done with my hat?’ she asks.

  ‘You didn’t have a hat, Mum.’

  ‘Someone’s taken my gloves!’ Her eyes are startled, and her bony hands are trembling. She’s scared of me – her own daughter. If only Golden Boy Adam were here, Adam the computer whiz, whose farts receive rapturous applause. He’d never force dumplings on anyone.

  The bang on the front door makes all of us jump. Shit, it must be Adrian. Lunch has been such a trial I’ve lost track of time. Guiding Mum upstairs to the front door by the hand, I open it and find Adrian laden with tripod and numerous silver cases. So much for a quick shoot.

  ‘Hi, Adrian, this is my mum.’

  ‘Oh!’ Mum brightens. ‘It’s your fella.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Mrs, um …’ He tails off distractedly.

  ‘Jeannie. Jeannie Brown.’ Mum flashes her teeth at him and straightens the collar of her brown cardigan. The bus has, apparently, been forgotten.

  We shuffle through to the living room. The kids have raced up from the kitchen and are at our heels.

  ‘I thought this room would be best,’ I explain, ‘being bright and airy and spacious.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Adrian scans it. Through his eyes I take in the light-sapping pistachio paint that Martin chose, the fading armchairs, the assortment of stuff the kids have made – birthday cards, collages, clay owls, jam jars painted with wobbly strokes – which teeter on the mantelpiece. I am incapable of throwing anything away that they have produced. At some point our collection will reach critical mass and burst into the street in an explosion of glass fragments and owl beaks.

  ‘It’ll do, I suppose,’ Adrian says briskly. He rolls his eyes at Mum. ‘Last shoot didn’t really work out, Mrs, um, Jeannie. Wasn’t the look they wanted.’ His tone suggests that this was my fault. That I’d insisted on eight layers of lipstick and winged iridescent eyeshadow.

  ‘Oh,’ Mum says, clearly baffled.

  ‘Maybe you could get ready, Caitlin,’ he adds, ‘while I set up the lights.’

  ‘I am ready.’ I grin at him in readiness. Fuelled by my irresistible dumplings, which now lie in my stomach like bricks, I have never felt more ready in my damn life.

  He frowns, and his eyes skim my carefully chosen floral-print dress and cardie, a look I’d hoped suggested kindness and empathy. Surely I couldn’t possibly look scary in a floral dress. ‘Oh,’ he says blankly. ‘So we’re going for a casual look.’

  Casual? Even with that dratted stew bubbling away on the hob, I’d managed to blow-dry my hair, polish my shoes and apply light make-up. Maybe he prefers the Carmen school of cosmetics? A little back-combing, perhaps? Violent blusher stripes?

  ‘I can change if you like,’ I tell him, but Adrian has lost interest and is hunting around at skirting-board level for sockets.

  ‘Don’t want my photo taken.’ Jake thrusts his hands into his jeans pockets.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I insist. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘Yeah, it is. It’s for a stupid ladies’ magazine.’

  ‘It’s not just any old ladies’ magazine. It’s for parents, all about bringing up your children properly.’

  ‘Ha!’ he says bitterly, briefly touching the bump on his head. ‘Well, I won’t be in it. I’m going upstairs.’

  ‘No, Jake,’ I hiss.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  I stare at him, trying to simultaneously plead and instil fear into his heart. After all the goddamn things I have done for him, the interminable years I’ve spent helping him to construct Meccano. (I am tragically inept at construction.) All the dirty pants I’ve washed and trainers I’ve scrubbed and he won’t do this one piddling thing to help me out.

  ‘Please, Jake,’ I say weakly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Horrible meanie!’ Lola elbows him in the chest. ‘We’ve got to help Mummy.’

  ‘Ow! Don’t touch me, pig!’

  His roar shocks all of us and causes Mum to jolt in her chair in the corner. She’ll probably have a heart attack and it’ll be all my fault. Travis waves his Captain Hook’s hook excitedly. Lola’s bottom lip trembles, and her eyes wobble with tears.

  ‘Hey, kids,’ Adrian announces like some jolly uncle, ‘I’m sure if you cooperate, Mummy will treat you to some enormous, wonderful thing when we’re done. Won’t you, Mummy?’

  I’m not your mummy, I want to sneer. ‘Yes, um … of course I will.’ I smile savagely.

  ‘What?’ Lola asks. ‘What will we get?’

  ‘Can I have a GameBoy Advance?’ Jake enquires.

  Jesus Christ.

  ‘Or an Xbox? Everybody’s got an Xbox. Jamie Torrance has an Xbox and a PlayStation 3.’ He folds his arms triumphantly.

  Adrian is grinning at me. The ‘you-poor-fucker’ smirk of the child-free.

  ‘You can choose a book,’ I mutter.

  ‘A book?’ Jake carps. ‘That’s not an enormous, wonderful thing.’

  I could happily stamp on his foot, verrucas or no verrucas.

  Mum is gazing adoringly at Adrian with her head tipped to one side. ‘Glad to see you’re back,’ she announces. ‘That woman hasn’t been the same since you went off with that other girl. Doesn’t know if she’s coming or going. Look at the state of these poor kids.’

  I chuckle inanely, wondering if it’s possible to dissolve through mortification.

  ‘They look fine to me, Jeannie.’ Adrian positions us on the sofa, as if we’re incapable of independent movement. Incredibly, and probably visualising Xboxes, Jake allows his legs to be crossed neatly at the ankles.

  ‘You’ve got to work at a marriage,’ Mum rattles on. ‘Young people today expect everything on a plate.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Adrian murmurs, a small tic appearing beneath his left eye.

 
; ‘Are you married?’ she snaps.

  He blinks at her. One minute he’s being welcomed back into our family fold, the next he’s being quizzed on his marital status. I forget that not everyone is accustomed to Mum’s tangled thoughts. ‘Um, well, I live with—’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Mum demands.

  Adrian smiles stoically. ‘Um, Lewis.’

  Mum’s forehead crinkles.

  ‘That’s a man’s name,’ Lola retorts.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I say, hoping, as Adrian starts shooting, that my grin doesn’t make me look unhinged.

  ‘It’s the least you could do,’ Mum snaps at him.

  ‘What’s that, Jeannie?’ Adrian asks.

  ‘Make an honest woman out of her.’

  Adrian smirks, casting me a look over his camera. Jake sits stiffly by my side. I wonder if the cloud of simmering resentment around him will show up in the pictures, like a Ready Brek glow. While Lola is a model of obedience, Travis – who’s plonked on my lap – refuses to take off his hook.

  ‘That hook thing makes him look a bit, um … deformed,’ Adrian mumbles.

  No one has the will to prise it off him. He could sport a fake wooden leg for all I care.

  It’s over. Adrian is packing up, slamming precious equipment into cases and displaying a distinct eagerness to escape.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Mum shouts the instant he’s gone. ‘Where’s my bus?’

  To my relief, by bedtime Lola at least seems to have forgotten about the enormous wonderful thing. She snuggles close to me in her bed, smelling sweetly of bubblegum foam from her bath.

  I start to read her story. There’s a small shuffling noise behind her half-open door. ‘Jake?’ I call softly. ‘Is that you?’

  He ambles into view in rumpled checked pyjamas and stands awkwardly in the doorway.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask gently.

  He nods.

  ‘Want to sit with us? We’re reading The Water Babies. D’you remember that from when you were little?’

  I feel silly for asking. Ten-year-olds aren’t interested in The Water Babies.

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiles. ‘I remember it.’

  I’m surprised, and pathetically grateful, when he ambles over and joins us on the bed.

  ‘Move up,’ I urge Lola. ‘Make room for your brother.’

  Begrudgingly, she shuffles along about a tenth of an inch. Jake squeezes in beside me and I start to read. We’ve reached the part where Tom falls in the river, but it isn’t really Tom – just the shell he’s left behind as he enters the Water Babies’ world.

  ‘Mum,’ Lola cuts in, ‘did Tom die?’

  ‘Yes, but he was unhappy and now he’ll have a better life.’

  ‘How can he have a better life if he’s dead?’

  ‘It’s … a sort of afterlife,’ I tell her.

  ‘You get reincarnated,’ Jake explains, which isn’t what I mean, but I don’t correct him. It takes me back, with him snuggled up at my side, to the old days before everything unravelled.

  ‘Will you die?’ Lola asks.

  ‘Everyone dies sometime, sweetie, but I hope it’s not until I’m very old.’

  She bites her lip. ‘Will you be like Granny when you’re old?’

  I laugh and stroke her hair. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Mum,’ Jake murmurs, and I brace myself for more questions of a life-and-death nature, ‘I don’t really want you to buy me a GameBoy Advance.’

  The tension that’s gripped me all day subsides a little. ‘That’s good. I’m really proud of you for helping me today, Jake. I know you didn’t want to be in the photos, but you did it anyway.’

  He nods thoughtfully. ‘I really want a GameBoy Advance, but I know we don’t have much money and can’t afford it.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  He grins, breathing out spearmint. ‘So I’m gonna ask Dad for one.’

  The house is blissfully silent as I creep downstairs to check my emails. My new Bambino account is up and running and I have mail – real mail from real Bambino readers who, despite my terrifying man-face, seem to be under the illusion that I can help them.

  The first one reads:

  Dear Caitlin,

  Is it so wrong of me to fantasise about leaving my little boy strapped in his buggy and legging it to the train station to somewhere like, I don’t know, Paris, and never coming back? I had my passport photos taken yesterday …

  And the next:

  This morning, while trying to coax my bickering kids out of the car, I had an overwhelming urge to slam the boot down on to my head. Am I normal?

  Berserk Mother, Wakefield

  And another:

  Since our little boy was born seven years ago, my husband has changed from being a reasonably attractive man and keen squash player to an overweight, hygienically challenged slob who hasn’t cleaned his teeth for several months. Do you think I should have an affair?

  Suzanne, Bucks.

  I feel ridiculously chuffed that they have chosen to contact me, out of all the agony aunts on the dozens of magazines out there. I pull out a notebook from my desk drawer and start to make notes.

  Another email pings in.

  Dear Caitlin,

  I was delighted to see that that dreadful Pike woman has been replaced and was hoping that you, as the new agony aunt, might offer more balanced and sympathetic advice to parents. (I am a single father.) But no, you come across as so terribly earnest, going all out to convince us that you understand what normal parents are going through.

  With all the make-up you’re wearing, and your hair done up into some kind of bouffant, I can’t help suspecting that you don’t really have children at all. If you do, you are obviously nannied up to the hilt. How can you possibly know what it’s like in the real world when all you have to do all day is preen yourself in your posh office?

  Yours in anger,

  R

  I glare at the screen. How dare this creep insult me without knowing the first thing about why I took this job? Millie begged me to do it. I only agreed because I can’t bring myself to ask Martin for more money.

  How bloody dare he?

  ‘Never reply to emails personally,’ Millie advised me. ‘You’ll only encourage lunatics with too much time on their hands.’ She’s right; why bother acknowledging this jerk when I barely have time to communicate with my own kids?

  But I can’t help myself. With my heart juddering furiously, I fire off a reply:

  What the hell do you know about my life?

  17

  It’s a gloriously sunny late-April afternoon when Sam and I bring the kids to the park to run riot with their water guns. His sleekly muscled legs, clad in baggy shorts, are already lightly tanned. His chest bears a faint suggestion of hair and is infinitely touchable. Even his feet are quite fetching, as men’s feet go – no gnarled nails, no toe-hair sproutings. (Martin may be head-turningly handsome in your smooth, DFS-sofa-model kind of way, but his weirdly skinny feet let him down tragically. Ha.)

  I catch myself appraising Sam’s body and quickly rearrange my face. ‘You’re burning,’ I warn him. ‘Better put on some sunscreen.’

  ‘Never use it,’ he protests.

  I laugh and pluck the garish orange bottle from my bag. ‘What is it about men and sunscreen? Martin was like that. Look – your shoulders are a tiny bit pink.’

  ‘I’ve never had sunburn in my life,’ he protests.

  ‘God,’ I splutter, ‘that’s such a man thing. Being immune to burning. Refusing to ask for directions when they’re lost.’

  He smirks. ‘OK, boss. Slap some on.’ And he plonks himself before me with his beautiful bare back in my face.

  I hesitate. Heck, for a graphic designer who spends great swathes of his time holed up in front of a computer, he is extremely well honed. Slathering on his sunscreen will involve touching his bare, naked flesh. Help. I do this in the most non-sexual manner possible, rubbing briskly as if removing a stain. ‘There,’ I
say in a businesslike voice.

  ‘Thanks,’ he purrs. ‘That was really … sensual.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I mutter, silently cursing my hot cheeks.

  We sit in silence for a few moments, watching the kids charging through the paddling pool. A vision of loveliness in miniscule cut-off shorts – they’re smaller than most of my knickers – rollerblades past us. I check to see if she registered with Sam. He watches her for a moment, then flicks his eyes back to me.

  ‘Cait … there’s something I want to tell you.’

  My breath tightens. Lola is complaining loudly that Jake squirted the back of her head, but I block her out. ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  He runs a hand through the grass. ‘I, um …’

  Oh, God. This is it. Shooting-stars night – he felt it too. Like me, he’s tried to push his feelings aside for the very reasons I have. Because our sons are friends, and we are friends, and it’s all too entwined and embarrassing—

  ‘I, um … It’s about Amelia,’ Sam murmurs.

  No, I don’t want to hear this. ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘We slept together,’ he says flatly.

  I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Some brat squirts my neck, but I ignore it. Cold water dribbles down the back of my T-shirt. ‘Did you?’ I say finally.

  ‘I don’t really know why I’m telling you,’ he adds.

  Neither do I, I think bitterly. Does this mean they’re getting back together? I daren’t ask. ‘When … when did it happen?’ I manage.

  Lola and Jake are squabbling about whose turn it is to be armed with the Super-Soaker, rather than the substandard ordinary water gun.

  ‘In Cornwall during the Easter holidays.’

  ‘Just before we went camping?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Why didn’t you say? I want to ask. Why did you lie there with me on your blanket and let me believe something special was happening? I curse myself for being so ridiculous. Sam hadn’t made me believe anything. It was me. My ridiculous malfunctioning brain had dreamed up the whole thing. Caitlin idiot Brown.

  ‘I … I thought you’d stayed at your sister’s hotel?’

  Sam nods. ‘Amelia came over for a night. She’d had some row with her boyfriend, called me to sound off about him.’