Mummy Said the F-Word (5 page)

‘Anyway,’ Millie says, stopping herself mid-flow, ‘what have you been up to?’

‘I did a stupid thing at the weekend,’ I admit. ‘Remember how Martin couldn’t take the kids to Thorpe Park because he was going with – I flick my gaze at Travis ‘– you-know-who?’

Millie nods and pops a sliver of fish into her mouth.

‘I went anyway, with the kids and Sam. We ran into them. It was so awful and I’m such a bloody berk …’

She clasps a hand over mine. ‘Oh, sweetie, what did you do that for?’

‘I don’t know.’ I prise the pepper-grinder from Travis’s grasp.

‘You’re not a berk, Cait. You feel pissed off and angry, and that’s fine – that’s
allowed
– but you’ve got to stop obsessing over—’

‘I don’t obsess! Why does everyone think I’m obsessed?’

‘OK. Listen, I know what you need …’

‘Don’t set me up,’ I hiss at her. ‘I’m not interested.’

Over the past few months, Millie has attempted to match me up with various males. Sad and desolate scenes with one or both of us desperately trying to dredge up excuses to go home.

‘I’m not talking about men,’ Millie cuts in. ‘I mean work. A new job. That thing you do, writing about arse disorders and stuff – it can’t take up all of your time …’

‘It’s not just arse disorders,’ I say defensively. ‘I do health features and daily tips for the site.’

‘That doesn’t sound too arduous.’

‘I don’t want arduous,’ I say, laughing. ‘I only work part-time, remember?’

Millie flicks a glance at Travis, who is extracting a lightly nibbled penne tube from his mouth.

‘Don’t want it,’ he grumbles.

She winces as I pluck it from his fingers and casually drop it on to my plate. ‘Wouldn’t you like more work? Something to take your mind off … all the Martin stuff?’

‘Not really. I don’t want to put Travis in nursery more than two days a week.’

Her look says, ‘Why ever not?’

She really doesn’t get it. Most women need to earn a living, and even those who don’t tend to yearn for something more challenging than swilling out lunch boxes and pairing up children’s socks – even if it only amounts to writing about foul breath and haemorrhoids. Yet we still want to spend time with our kids, despite their shoddy table manners.

‘Here’s a suggestion,’ Millie announces. ‘Harriet’s been ill for a couple of months now, and my PA’s virtually been doing her job for her, sorting through all the letters and emails and choosing the five she needs for her page every week. To be honest, she’s not too happy about it. I mean, it’s not in her job description …’

‘Which page does Harriet do again?’

‘Problem page. Agony aunt. You know, Distraught of Durham, Pissed off of Penzance …’

Ah, yes. I remember: ‘Can’t you find it in your heart to forgive
your
philandering swine of a man? The poor darling couldn’t help himself.’

‘I’m sure I’ve told you about Harriet,’ Millie rattles on. ‘She’s the loony who’s always chopping bits off herself and sending them away for analysis.’

‘Ugh, which bits?’ I hope this won’t prove too gruesome for Travis’s tender ears.

‘Her hair, I think.’

‘That doesn’t sound too bad. It looks pretty shiny and healthy in her photo, doesn’t it? Surely she’s not about to drop dead …’

‘God only knows,’ Millie says with a shrug. ‘Anyway, it’s a pain in the butt. I think Harriet needs a proper break, so I need to sort out a temporary replacement. Trouble is, agony aunts aren’t exactly easy to find. They’re hardly crawling out of the woodwork.’

I snigger, picturing women with there-there smiles slithering out between gaps in the restaurant’s panelled walls. ‘Do you need one? Couldn’t you just drop the problem page until she’s better?’

Millie looks aghast, as if I have suggested she invites Travis for a sleepover at her flat. On his sole visit there, Travis jettisoned a box of Lil-lets into her toilet. ‘It’s the most popular part of the magazine,’ she insists. ‘It’s providing a valuable service to our readers.’

I splutter and Travis cackles with delight. ‘No it’s not. It’s a chance to gloat over other people’s misfortunes.’

Millie grins, and her eyes glint mischievously. ‘Well, there is that. Anyway, we can’t do without problems. The readers would have a fit.’ She pushes back a swathe of hair that’s escaped from its tortoiseshell clip and is swinging jauntily over one eye. Millie is an absolute beauty: all honeyed hair which gleams as if illuminated from inside, coupled with disarmingly wrinkle-free skin. That’s the child-free for you. They look about fifteen years old. They have their cuticles oiled and their bums scoured with Dead Sea minerals. They don’t know the names of the Tweenies.

‘Well,’ I say firmly, ‘I’m sure you’ll find someone. D’you honestly think I’d have the first idea of how to help people?’ I omit to mention that
Bambino
’s poncey attitude sends me incandescent with rage. All those pristine children scampering through buttercup fields in Mini Dior dresses. I could hurl all over its glossy pages.

‘That’s why you’re ideal,’ Millie insists.

‘I don’t see why …’

‘Because you’ve had …’ she struggles for a diplomatic way to put it … ‘plenty of
life experiences
.’

‘Jesus, Millie. You mean I’ve been dumped.’

‘It’d be really high-profile,’ she charges on, ‘and it’s regular work. Regular
cash
. I bet you’re skint, aren’t you? When did you last have your hair cut?’

‘The summer of 1942.’

‘Honestly, it’s money for old rope. You’re a mother and a writer, aren’t you?’

‘That’s debatable,’ I say.

‘And your kids are healthy and well balanced, so you must be doing something right. You must
know
stuff …’

‘That doesn’t mean I’m qualified to advise other people.’ I decide not to mention Jake’s decidedly unbalanced cleaning fetish.

‘Neither is Harriet! You don’t need qualifications to be an agony aunt. Anyone with half a brain can do it. You just need common sense, a good turn of phrase and sound like you know the answers to everything.’

‘Is that all?’ I edge a wine glass away from Travis’s grappling hands. ‘I’d feel like a fake,’ I add flatly.

‘Don’t you feel like a fake when you’re writing those health tips? I mean, what d’you really know about fungal feet and premature baldness?’

‘Um, nothing …’

‘And look at me, editing a parenting magazine when I’ve never changed a nappy in my puff and wouldn’t want to, thanks. We’re all fakes, Cait, when you think about it. We’re all bluffing.
Unless
you’ve spent years training as a surgeon and you’re doing a
real
job like fixing people’s insides.’

I laugh and she flashes a blinding smile while taking the bill from our waiter. ‘My treat. I’ll stick it on expenses.’

‘Thanks, Millie. I’ll get it next time.’

‘Will you think about it? The agony thing?’

‘OK,’ I fib.

While I attempt to de-sauce Travis with a paper napkin, Millie stuffs her purse back into her bag. It looks exclusive, the kind of bag that can only be purchased via a waiting list and certainly doesn’t boast a dusting of cookie crumbs inside. She checks her watch, kisses my cheek fleetingly and announces, ‘Got to run. Let me know, will you? I’m serious about this.’

‘OK,’ I murmur.

She pauses. ‘I’m … I’m really proud of you, you know. I could never do it. After all you’ve gone through, dealing with the kids on your own …’

‘Thanks.’ My smile wavers.

‘All I have to worry about is deadlines and crap like that. I think you’re amazing.’

The snort bursts out of my nose as she turns to go.

Travis waves and cries, ‘Bye, Billie!’ but all that’s left is a gust of her Gucci perfume.

While Millie zips off to instruct the British public on the Correct Way to Raise Children, Travis and I take the bus to Mimosa House. This is the optimistically named care home where Jeannie, my seventy-seven-year-old mother, is currently bickering with a fellow inmate (sorry, resident).

‘I only asked how old you are,’ protests the woman in the neighbouring chair.

‘None of your business,’ my mother snaps, failing to register that her beloved daughter and youngest grandchild are traversing the day room to bestow her with kisses and news from the outside world.

We pause a discreet distance away, waiting for the spat to subside. The TV is blaring –
The Flintstones
, the colour cranked up to the max – and two carers are dispensing tea and biscuits from a squeaking trolley. Behind us, in the corridor, nurses are cackling over something in the newspaper. Despite its purpose – and the fact that my mother lives here – the atmosphere at Mimosa House is reasonably jolly. There is no mimosa, though, as far as I’ve been able to detect. Just a few dusty dandelion leaves piercing the gravel at the front.

‘Whose child is this?’ Mum’s neighbour asks eagerly, craning forward to inspect Travis. She tips her head to one side and smiles benevolently. ‘Pretty girl,’ she adds. ‘Doesn’t look like you, Jeannie, with your heavy jaw.’

‘Shut your face,’ Mum thunders, drawing in her lips to form a thin line.

‘I’m not a girl!’ Travis protests. ‘I’m a boy.’

‘Needs his hair cut,’ Mum adds.

‘Hello, Mum.’ I bend to kiss her papery cheek.

‘Where’s my breakfast?’ she demands.

‘It’s me, Mum, Cait, your daughter. There isn’t any breakfast. It’s the afternoon – tea and biscuit time. Look – I’ve brought Travis to see you. Your
grandson
.’

From her vinyl-covered chair, she scans his face with flinty eyes. Then she slides a bony hand into her brown cardigan pocket and extracts a fistful of Fox’s Glacier Mints. For a moment, I assume she’ll hand one to Travis. She unwraps one, pops it in her mouth and stuffs the rest back into her pocket.

‘Granny, can I have—’ Travis starts, but I shush him.

‘These people,’ Mum mutters, ‘they come in the night and take my purse and my eiderdown.’ She slides a hand beneath her seat cushion as if the thief might have stashed said items there.

‘Mum,’ I say gently, crouching down to her level as there are no seats free for visitors, ‘I’m sure no one’s taken your things. You said that last time, remember? And we found your purse in your handbag. I’ll ask Helena if she’s seen it.’

Helena, Mum’s key worker, is warm and comforting, like a milky pudding. Sometimes I wish she was
my
key worker.

‘That witch,’ Mum hisses, spraying minty spittle. ‘She thinks I don’t know.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I murmur.

Travis totters away and stands in front of the TV.

‘Thinks she’s better than us with her dad a chemist and not having to join the army,’ Mum rattles on. ‘Bone bloody idle! The things they get on the black market – the lamb and the chocolate – and of course she makes her own lemonade out of chemicals from the hospital …’

Here we go.

‘Some of us,’ she growls, with an angry crunch of her mint, ‘know the meaning of hard work. Building ships with our bare hands. Riveting steel plates. Manning the furnace.’

La-di-da.

‘We worked hard in them days, you know.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you did.’

I scan the day room as Mum chunters on. She truly believes that she ran a Clyde shipyard single-handedly, operating enormous cranes and ripping steel plates with her teeth. When these shipyard rants started, I knew that things weren’t right. My heart would plummet as she tailed off, scrabbling for words. As far as I’m aware, the only jobs Mum had were working in her father’s tobacconist shop in Glasgow’s East End and terrorising my brother and me. She had me at forty-two years old, when my brother, Adam, was thirteen, which was considered beyond ancient back then. I was a mistake, obviously. ‘An accident,’ she’d delight in telling me, when her words still made sense. ‘You half killed me. I got pleurisy after giving birth to you and I was never the same, ’cause they sewed me up wrong.’ She made herself sound like a defective handbag.

‘And her,’ she rages now, causing her downy-haired neighbour to drop her digestive, ‘she’s got a damn cheek!’

‘Mum, no one’s doing anything to you.’

My head is starting to ache. Travis has yanked off his shoes and left them on the carpet where anyone could fall over them and smash a hip. As I force them back on to his feet, I wonder what Millie is doing right now. Having her eyebrows threaded, or her breasts exfoliated? I doubt if she has tended her own brows for a decade.

‘Granny,’ Travis announces, swinging round from the TV, ‘we went to Forpe Park. Daisy got wet. We saw boobies.’

Mum frowns. ‘Whose boobies?’

‘Daisy’s,’ Travis explains. ‘Daddy
ger
-friend.’

Mum glowers at me. ‘Haven’t you found yourself a nice man yet?’

‘No, Mum, but I’m working on it, and I’ll report my findings as soon as there’s anything to tell.’

‘I’m not surprised, you being that stout.’

Stout? She always does this – implies that I’m morbidly obese. I’m a size 12, for crying out loud. Hardly gym-honed, a tad spongy round the middle from three pregnancies – three pregnancies, Mother! – but not quite two-seats-on-an-aeroplane-sized
either
. Who does she think she is? Eva Herzigova? In line for the next Calvin Klein underwear campaign?

Mum grins savagely at me. A fragment of mint gleams on her lip. How did Dad manage to stay married to her without moving permanently to the attic? Perhaps her vitriolic streak is why he decided to depart from this earth almost twenty years ago. He’d willed that fatal heart attack to happen, brought it on by piling thick slabs of butter on to his toast. It was his only escape from Jeannie’s ill humour.

Mum and I slump into silence, as usually happens during my visits. Some of the inmates are chatting idly, but their conversations take so many unexpected twists and turns that most look utterly lost. I keep trying to coax Travis away from the TV, but it draws him in by some powerful magnetic force. The woman beside Mum is gazing so fondly at him I can’t bring myself to tell him off. Mum takes another mint from her pocket and flicks its wrapper on to the floor.

To test me – or maybe to amuse himself in a perverse way – Martin once suggested that Jeannie move in with us. ‘Jake and Travis could share a bedroom,’ he said. Never mind their seven-year age gap; didn’t families of fifteen used to cram together in a room the size of a cutlery drawer?