Читать книгу Mummy Needs a Break - Susan Edmunds - Страница 9

I locked my phone and pushed it away from me on my desk, as if touching it again might prompt another world-destroying revelation. Thomas was still at my parents’ house but there was no hope of me getting any of the work on my to-do list done. What was I meant to do next?

I tapped an email out to my boss. Being very pregnant afforded few luxuries but no-questions-asked sick leave seemed to be one of them.

I was walking aimlessly around the living room when a car pulled up outside. Through the venetian blinds, I could see a woman in sharp stiletto heels, black culottes and a spaghetti-strap pink camisole that did not quite cover her red bra, extracting herself from the driver’s seat. Her long, almost puce hair caught in the door as she closed it behind her. My sister, Amy. She looked as though she was ready for a night out, not an excursion into deepest suburbia to visit me.

My shoulders slumped. Could I face a visit? I was still seesawing between a scream and hysterical laughter. I had had to bury my head in the fridge and pretend I was organising dinner when my parents came to pick up Thomas – and that was before that phone call. My neck was tense all the way down my spine, but I couldn’t even lie flat to stretch out.

I opened the door before she could knock. She swayed slightly, her heels digging into the soft ground as she picked her way across the lawn. ‘Rachel, darling.’

I gestured to her to wipe a spot of pink lipstick from her top teeth. ‘Amy. You didn’t tell me you were coming by.’

She kissed my cheek as she pushed past me. She was still wearing the lanyard and security pass that let her into the double-storey restaurant and bar complex where she worked. ‘Are you on maternity leave yet? I figured you might be bored. Thought we could have a bit of a catch-up. Maybe get some lunch?’

‘I’ve still got a week and a bit. Look, I’ve got something I need to deal with.’ I shot her a look. When we were ten, she’d been able to tell when I had stashed KitKats in the wardrobe. Surely there would be no way I was hiding this one. ‘Now really isn’t a good time.’

She wasn’t looking at me. ‘What are you talking about? It’s been ages since we got together.’

It hadn’t, we’d had lunch last week.

Amy was picking through a pile of magazines on my coffee table. ‘Mind if I take this one?’ It was the latest issue of Women’s Health, promising ten ways to bring on labour. I’d figured if my baby was still tucked up in there the day before my due date, I’d allow myself to read it.

I shrugged. ‘Sure, go for it. Look, can I give you a call a bit later? We can make time for coffee. Is everything okay?’

She collapsed on to an armchair. ‘I’m tired after a long, crappy night at work. Can you believe we didn’t get out of there until 6 a.m.? Then I went to one of the waiters’ houses for a bit … I really need to get a real job.’

She stretched and yawned. ‘None of the losers tipped, either. Can you spot me £50?’

I sighed. ‘My wallet’s on the table by the door. You can take whatever’s in it.’

She raised an eyebrow, seeming at last to notice something amiss. ‘I was joking, mostly. I’m not that skint. What’s up?’

I watched her lean back in the chair and frown at me, twisting her hair around her fingertips. She had always made fun of Stephen and me for our ‘domestic bliss’. She bought me a copy of The Stepford Wives for Christmas one year, and an apron for my twenty-first birthday. But what would she know? Her longest relationship had lasted two years, with an artist named Frank. I couldn’t even remember his last name. She had always seemed to think that the scruffier he was, the more of a genius he must be. I just thought he needed a shower.

‘Stephen and I are having a few problems,’ I muttered at last. The words seemed to stick in my throat.

She blinked. ‘All is not well in this land of domestic harmony?’

I turned away. She scrambled to her feet and was behind me in seconds, putting her arm around my shoulders. Her skin felt vaguely sticky and she smelled fruity, as if she’d had a drink spilt on her. I wanted to offer her a baby wipe.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,’ she murmured into my hair. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

I flinched as she tried to lay her head against mine and smiled thinly. ‘No. Thanks, though.’ I checked my watch. It was almost 1 p.m. ‘I’ve got to go and pick up Thomas before Dad has a hernia.’ I could still remember my father’s face the last time I’d arrived late and walked in on Thomas. He was face down, spread-eagled on the dining room floor, screaming with every bit of breath in his little lungs, because my mother had suggested he might like to change out of his food-soaked T-shirt. It was at least a twenty-minute drive from my place in the suburbs to my parents’ home by the beach. Amy grabbed my hand, twisting her fingers into mine. ‘I’ll come with you.’

I hesitated. This time, she seemed to read my mind. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t make you talk about it if you don’t want to. I’ll keep you company. Tell you some stories about last night’s sleazeballs to make you feel better. You won’t believe what Heidi had to put up with.’

Thomas was doing circuits of the living room when we arrived. Overtired energy coursing through him, he was busy throwing magazines and television remotes into his favourite plastic trolley. Every time he completed a circuit, he would veer off and collide with the side of the couch. My father sat on said couch, his legs tucked up beneath him to avoid Thomas, focusing on the television, with his index fingers tracing circles on his temples.

‘Hi, Mumma,’ Thomas screamed and dropped his trolley when he noticed me at last. He wrapped his arms around my legs and peered up at me. ‘Hello.’ Then he noticed my sister: ‘Auntie Army!’

It was a sweet mispronunciation that no one had bothered to correct because it was too endearing. She scooped him up and placed an exuberant, wet kiss on his cheek.

I noticed something brown smeared across the side of his face. Had my mother been trying to get him to bake again?

As I was pondering, I noticed both he and my mum were staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a streak of mascara on the side of my nose. I hadn’t thought I’d cried that much in the car but perhaps I was wrong. Amy kicked off her heels and nudged Thomas towards the living room. ‘Go and find your new trains to show me, buddy.’

He ambled off obediently, and we heard crashing as he upended a toy box and knocked over a makeshift teepee. ‘It must be somewhere,’ he shouted. It was what I said to him every time he asked me to find the latest toy that had gone missing.

‘New trains?’ I forced a high-pitched laugh as I turned to my mother. Thomas would soon be able to curate an exhibition of toys my parents had collected for him.

She wasn’t buying my attempt to change the subject, took me by the wrists and stared at my puffy, itchy eyes. ‘What’s going on? You’ve been crying. Is something wrong at work? Has something happened to Stephen’s business?’

I tried to choke out the words, but they did not make any more sense on the second retelling than they had when I gave Amy an abridged version in the car. Soon the tears were dripping off my chin. Two days ago, everything was normal. Everything was fine. I was boring Rachel, married to a nice but slightly infuriating man with one exuberant son and a daughter on the way. Not exactly living the dream but doing well enough to pass the Christmas card newsletter test. Now I was separating from a cheating husband who had taken up with a B-grade celebrity interior designer.

‘What? Are you sure? I can’t believe …’ My mother placed a perfectly manicured hand over her mouth.

I cut her off. ‘Yes, I know. It was a surprise to me as well.’

‘But … you’re pregnant! He can’t get away with this, surely.’ She pushed her small square glasses up on her nose and stared at me as if being able to see me more clearly might present a different reality.

I rolled my eyes and gestured to my midsection, where my stomach was doing its best impression of a parade float. ‘I’m aware of that, too. Turns out, there’s no law against it. Thomas!’ I shouted over her head. ‘In the car, please.’

She grabbed my hand again. ‘What will you do? A newborn and Thomas on your own … Can you imagine …’ Her eyes were sparking with anger. ‘How dare he? After everything you’ve done for him.’

I rested my hand on her arm in a way I hoped was reassuring. The last thing I needed was her flying off to fight my cause for me. I still hadn’t recovered fully from the email she had sent to one of my university lecturers when I had failed a paper in my final year.

‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ I took another deep breath, summoning up an image of my first yoga teacher, who’d spent a full session showing me how to move my diaphragm. ‘Sillier people than me manage it. Thomas! What are you doing in there?’

‘Darling, come and stay with us.’

My father gave up his pretence of ignoring us. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said Rachel must come and stay here if she and Stephen are having problems.’ My mother’s voice was unusually firm. ‘We have the spare rooms upstairs. We can help you with the baby. I can clean out the cupboards down here, so you have room for your things. The rooms aren’t big, but they should be fine for the three of you. It’s quite warm in the evening on that side of the house, but I can get you a fan …’

I bit my lip. Would the things that drove me nuts as a teenager – my mother’s anxiety about every decision I had to make, my father’s need for routine – be even more grating twenty years on? Did they think I couldn’t cope on my own?

I cut her off. ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’ Thomas had appeared at my side, stretching his little fingers around two new train carriages.

In the car on the way back to our house, I replayed my mother’s words in my mind. Amy had dozed off in the passenger seat next to me, her phone clasped in her hand.

Could I manage a newborn and Thomas, alone? There were millions of women around the world functioning perfectly well as single mothers. Should I be offended that my mother deemed me unable do the same? I assumed I would need a little longer off work than the roughly four and a half hours I’d taken with Thomas. But it could be done. Perhaps I could get a flatmate. I drafted the ad in my head: Sunny room for single person to share with professional woman and two others, one prone to stomping about in the middle of the night or waking early with a rousing rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.

Perhaps a flatmate was not going to work.

‘Stephen will have to pay some sort of child support, won’t he?’ I realised I was asking the woman with the friendly smile on the billboard opposite us as we waited for the traffic light to change.

‘What, Mumma?’ Thomas’s little forehead crumpled into a frown. His floppy brown fringe needed a trim. I met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nothing, darling. Sorry. Don’t worry, Mumma’s just having a bit of a rough day today. It’s going to be okay.’

He kept watching me, cracker in one hand, as the traffic light went green and I put my foot on the accelerator. The irony was, I had a tower of parenting books on the table beside my bed. Could any of them tell me how to protect a two-and-a-bit-year-old from a sudden-onset paternal midlife crisis?

What would I do if the baby woke just as Thomas was falling asleep, his little arms wrapped around my neck? And would I ever get another shower again, if I had to coax two of them through breakfast first? Thomas stretched his hand out, making a smeary print on the window. I watched him drag his finger through the crumbs left on the glass.

Back at the house, Thomas splashed in his paddling pool in the late afternoon sunshine. The leaves on the tree in the middle of our lawn had curled prematurely, dropping one by one and forming a mushy brown mulch. The lawn looked exactly as I felt. I propped myself on an outdoor dining chair and tracked back through my missed calls. One number had tried me three times already. I pressed the button to call it back.

A woman’s voice answered on the first ring. ‘Rachel.’ She exhaled my name into the phone. ‘Thanks so much for getting in touch. I just wanted to run a story idea past you. I think it’s pretty neat – one of my clients is launching a new business …’

I yelped as Thomas threw a plastic bucket of water at my legs. I held up a finger.

‘Rachel? Are you okay?’ The PR woman was still talking.

‘Sorry, yes. Just working from home with my son today.’ Thomas frowned and backed up for another attempt.

Her laugh tinkled down the phone. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I know how that is.’

I would have bet anything that she didn’t. I’d heard from a friend that she had employed two nannies, working in tandem, so that she could carry on with her life fairly untroubled, despite the arrival of twins. It had made me question my life choices.

Thomas took aim with his next bucket-load. I grabbed the pail from his clutches, and with a surge of anger shooting through me, threw it to the far corner of the garden. His face fell as he turned away. A twang of remorse tugged at my chest. I reached to pat his shoulder, but he ducked and darted away to the bucket.

‘So it’s ground-breaking, exciting stuff. Was hoping you might like to do an interview? I could set it up for any time that suits you.’

Thomas pumped his fists in the air as I watched him attempt to kick water at me from the far end of his paddling pool. I turned away from him and huddled over the phone. ‘Do you think you could pop the details in an email to me?’

When the water in the pool was evenly spread across the rest of the garden, Thomas moved to his bike and propelled himself along as fast as his lean legs would permit, heading for the gate. When at last I was able to put the phone down, I stumbled after him. ‘Get back here.’

He shook his head. ‘Leaving.’

I dropped to his height and blocked his path. ‘Sorry for throwing your bucket, darling. I was trying to concentrate on my call.’

He kicked at the ground. ‘Hungry.’

I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Okay, let’s go inside and see what we can find, shall we?’

Of all the parenting things at which I was failing, feeding Thomas seemed the most egregious.

When he was first starting to eat solid food, I would spend every other Sunday evening cooking and freezing nutritious meals with a laundry list of clean foods like kale and quinoa. He invariably turned his nose up, and more went on the floor than in his mouth. Defeated, I’d let the most recent freezer stash run out, and now the chances of me producing more than a plate of fish fingers for his dinner were slim. The most I could hope for was that there was a handful of oven chips somewhere in the bottom of the garage chest freezer to accompany them.

I stripped off Thomas’s wet things and positioned him on the couch with my iPad and one of his favourite YouTube clips, of children unwrapping Kinder Surprise eggs. Before I became a parent, I would not have believed such a thing existed, but he would always find them, even if I dutifully set up something like Thomas the Tank Engine. How could a child who could not read, write, or even reliably use the toilet navigate YouTube on an iPad?

I arranged the fish fingers, chips, some carefully sliced carrot and a spoonful of hummus on to one of those plastic platters designed for fussy kids who don’t like their food groups to touch. I had bought a set thinking they might inspire me to serve up interesting antipasto-style meals for Thomas, with morsels of healthy treats for him to select from. Pinterest mums always provided a selection of examples to follow. But the pressure of having to come up with something for each of the spots was intense. Once I had found myself adding a few cornflakes, just so he wouldn’t have an empty platter segment.

The landline phone jingled and startled me; I’d almost forgotten we still had one.

‘Is this Murchison Contracting?’ The man’s voice was gruff. Stephen must have his work phone off. I pushed an image of him in bed with Alexa out of my mind, dabbing at an unidentified splotch on my shirt.

‘Oh sorry.’ I tried to hit the pitch and tone of a cheery receptionist. ‘Stephen Murchison’s gone out of business. Terrible thing.’

There was a pause. ‘Are you sure? Stephen?’

‘Quite. Allegations of poor workmanship. Awful situation. I’m just taking the calls. Should I take a message?’

The man coughed. ‘Never mind. I’ll try someone else.’

Thomas wailed from the lounge. My iPad had run out of battery. I ushered him in to the dinner table, helping him use my bump as a kind of step stool on to his seat. ‘What you eating?’ He looked at me.

I could not respond. My stomach was still doing an impression of the kitchen blender but if I threw our routine off track, I might never get him into bed. It was only the promise of a bath on my own once he was asleep that was getting me through the evening. I half-heartedly picked a limp fish finger from the oven tray and put it on a bread plate. I slid into the chair next to him and gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

He frowned. ‘You sad, Mumma? Daddy home?’

I had to turn my face away and pinch my thigh to stop a surge of tears. ‘I’m fine, darling, don’t worry. I’m not sure what Daddy’s up to, but you’ve got me tonight, okay?’

I clenched his hand, probably a little too tightly. With three of us around the dinner table, the six-person setting had seemed appropriate. With just us two, it seemed empty. Of course, it would not be long before we would have another person with us in her high chair, throwing her own fish fingers on the ground. Somehow the thought did not make me any happier.

It turns out you can share a house with someone for more than a decade and still not really know them.

I met Stephen as I was finishing high school. It had been what one of my teachers described as a ‘social year’ for me, in which I spent more time getting acquainted with the coffee machine in the common room set aside for seniors than I did in the classroom. We were allowed to come and go as we liked and I duly did, erasing any classes before 10 a.m. from my timetable. Despite that, I had learnt to write an essay florid enough that no one noticed its lack of substance and I was able to squeeze out enough marks to get into a communications degree.

I would like to claim to have been following a lifelong dream, but that would be a lie. I was not good enough at maths to be a doctor, not confident enough for marketing and although I harboured daydreams about being a youth worker, who helped troubled young people find their way, I had finally accepted that it probably wouldn’t all be like Dangerous Minds. I could never pull off a leather jacket in the same way Michelle Pfeiffer did, anyway. Kids would take one look at me and roll their eyes.

Stephen crashed his way into my world at a friend’s party – the kind where for the first time one of your inner circle is finally of legal drinking age. We all felt very grown up that one of us had ventured to the off-licence and stocked up on sugary ready-mixed vodka pops.

Stephen had ended up there by accident because the friend who was meant to be taking him and his mates to the football had drunk too much and could no longer drive. He’d sidled over to me with the confidence of someone on their third beer. Helena, who had been my friend since we were in kindergarten, gave me a knowing look. We had spent ages agonising over my outfit and settled on a pair of bootleg jeans, an off-the-shoulder sparkly black top and an impossibly high pair of stiletto heels that I was not able to walk in without looking like a particularly hesitant fawn but which we decided looked incredibly sophisticated.

Stephen looked me straight in the eye. ‘I snore, sometimes pee in the shower and have been known to turn my underwear inside out to get another day’s wear out of them.’

‘Pardon?’ I wasn’t sure if he had mistaken me for someone else.

He shot me an ear-to-ear grin. ‘I figure if I tell you all the bad stuff about me now, there’s less chance you’ll be disappointed when you get to know me.’

He settled down on to the sofa beside me and put his arm along its back. I could smell his supermarket cologne. He had shaved his head, but you could see the shadow where the hair was growing back, so I knew he was not actually bald. He was sporting the small, under-the-lip tuft of hair that was inexplicably the fashion at the time, particularly among those who needed to prove they had hair to grow.

‘How do you know I’m going to want to get to know you?’ I was impressed by his arrogance.

His eyes were mischievous. ‘Oh, I don’t. But it’s not like you were talking to anyone else.’ He gestured to the boys my age, who were all still milling around on the other side of the room, too nervous to try their own opening lines. Helena looked as though she might be about to rescue one of them.

That was fifteen years ago, and although I found out pretty quickly that his list of negative things was by no means comprehensive, he was correct in his prediction that I was rarely disappointed – in the early years, at least.

Through university, while my friends were ranking the various schools according to the sexual prowess of their male students, I was going home to Stephen. I would still add my cash to the fund we built up each week for jugs of second-rate beer in the campus bar, before they headed off into the night with the latest guy to get their hopes up. Whereas I knew exactly what I was getting with Stephen – and it would come with an early alarm clock the next day as he got ready for work.

He even willingly attended a mock appointment with a friend who was training to be a naturopath and put us through a process in which we were asked to describe the consistency of our faeces. I had felt sick with mortification but he had chuckled at the flowchart of photographs and brought it up when he wanted to make me blush, for weeks afterwards.

There was a period when my friends and I became a bit too invested in Sex and the City, and I decided I needed some time as a single girl to carve my identity, preferably from the comfort of something that resembled an upmarket New York loft apartment. It took about twelve hours before I realised that my rundown flat didn’t have quite the same vibe. The heel of my imitation Manolo Blahniks kept getting stuck in the cracked concrete of the front steps, for one.

Wanting to punish me, he went for drinks with his workmates at the bar I worked at, and gave my colleague a tip that was about three times her nightly wage. I found out later he’d taken out a loan from his father to pay the rent that week.

I responded by going on a blind date offered by one of my flatmates. The standoff lasted about three weeks before I called him, manufacturing a leaking tap that needed his attention. He turned up within ten minutes, not even mentioning that he was a builder, not a plumber.

Our relationship had become so familiar I sometimes had to think twice to remember that he had not always been around. We had become so comfortable that it was not unusual for him to discuss – in detail – the symptoms of the latest tummy bug he had picked up from Thomas or to wander out after a shower to ask me whether a spot on his back was a new addition.

Now, I was working out how best to keep up my energy to read bedtime stories to our son on my own, while he spent the evening – I guessed – entwined with Alexa’s freakishly long, sickeningly smooth limbs. It was as though I had landed in someone else’s life.

Thomas seemed to sense my strength was waning and was a little more compliant than normal as we dragged ourselves through the evening motions. I did not argue when he merely waved the toothbrush in the direction of his teeth, and he only protested for a minute when it was time to turn out the light.

I snuggled down next to him and arranged his little body around the curve of my stomach. He buried his face in my hair, twisting some of it around his fingers. ‘Daddy home tomorrow?’

I kissed his forehead hard. ‘I don’t think so, sweetheart. But I’ll think of something fun for us to do, promise.’

He screwed up his face. I started to draw circles on his back with my finger, counting 187 of them before his breathing started to become slow and regular. I lay as still as I could, next to him, staring at the ceiling. Over the past two and a half years, I had watched him fall asleep so often I could always pinpoint the moment he finally nodded off. His body would give a little jerk and his breath deepened.

I used to count to 100 of those breaths before I started to try to extricate myself from the bed, so there was no chance I would wake him on my run to freedom. This time I allowed myself to enjoy being cuddled up next to him. The world outside his bedroom door might have changed dramatically, but I would cling on to this little cocoon of familiarity for as long as I could.