The School Gate Survival Guide (22 page)

‘I’m Maia, we met once before, a while ago now. I’m looking after the children because Clover’s at parents’ evening.’ I didn’t think this was the moment to tell him that the kids and I had arrived with our suitcases the second his back was turned.

‘I know she’s at parents’ evening. That’s why I came now. Get a few things without any drama. Thought she might have got her mother in to babysit as a last resort, so I was trying to creep out without getting spotted. Wanted to sidestep a bit of earache.’ He shrugged in apology.

‘She’ll be back soon. I’m expecting her any minute.’ I tried to think of a way to keep him there but since I’d nearly taken his eye out with a wooden hoof, I wasn’t sure he’d want to party with me.

‘As I said, I don’t want any aggro, so I’ll be on my way. Just tell her I popped in. Give my love to the kids. I miss them.’ He looked quite watery-eyed for a moment. Then he nodded, looking round. ‘House looks amazing. Have the burglars been and tidied up?’ He indicated the bin bag. ‘Couldn’t find my clothes. Didn’t think to look in the drawer at first.’

With that, he walked off towards the kitchen. I heard him talking to Weirdo before the back door slammed. I slumped down onto the stairs. At least he’d noticed that the house was clean. It was a step in the right direction. I was still replaying the embarrassment of threatening Lawrence in his own home when Clover came bowling through the door.

‘What are you doing sitting on the stairs?’ she said.

‘Lawrence was here. I thought he was a burglar and I went for him with the giraffe.’

Clover looked around, puzzled. ‘Lawrence was here? What for? Had he come to see me?’

‘No, he knew you were at a parents’ evening. He came to get some clothes.’

Clover’s face crumpled. I could hear the sound of pedals whizzing backwards as I rethought my Diplomat of the Year approach. ‘He seemed a bit upset, sort of sad. He did say he missed you all.’ I was sure he meant to include Clover with the kids. If he didn’t miss her, we’d find out soon enough.

‘Did he? Did he look okay?’

‘No, he had a beard and looked like an East End hoodlum.’ I filled Clover in on my encounter.

God love her, she had the good grace to laugh. ‘Fucking Jennifer. If she hadn’t cornered me, I’d have been here. She came over to do her “I’m sorry to hear your bad news, do tell me all the gory details.” Sorry, my arse. I bet she’s loving it. I’ve no doubt she’ll be scouring the
Surrey Mirror
every week to see if the house is on the market. And then she’ll be trapping me in the playground with “It’s probably for the best. A new start in a more manageable house will do you good.” I couldn’t get away from her. She was doing that hand on the arm thing, you know, that “I feel your pain”, patting away like I had some terminal disease rather than a terminal divorce.’

‘You don’t know that he wants a divorce. Until you speak to him, you can’t know what he’s thinking. He didn’t look like a man with a mistress tending to his every need though.’

Clover chucked her coat on the end of the banister. ‘Doesn’t mean that he’s not shacked up with some bimbo with a nutcracker arse, does it? Maybe he’s gone for the great sex rather than the great cooking, cleaning or ironing?’

‘He did notice that the house was looking good, so that’s something.’

‘I need a drink,’ Clover said. ‘At least if he doesn’t come back, I’ll have had the satisfaction of emptying his wine cellar.’

Halfway through her second bottle of champagne and every Thorntons chocolate in the box except the nut brittle ‘too hard on my poor old teeth’, Clover saw the light. ‘Right. I am going to compete with any li’l nutcracker arse. I’m gonna get my own pair of perfeck buns. I’m gonna get down that gym of yours.’ Then she dug into the next layer for a butterscotch fudge, nodding wisely, while I wondered how soon I could creep off to bed to stand any chance of waking up for my 5 a.m. shift at the gym.

Clover didn’t turn up to the gym the day after she’d discovered the answers to life in a bottle of Dom Pérignon. I got home after my early morning shift expecting to find her slumped on the settee in her dressing gown eating fried egg butties but she met me at the door all triumphant. ‘Sorry, Maia. Thought I might vomit if I went near a running machine. I was so dehydrated I would have turned inside out like a slug sprinkled with salt, but I haven’t been totally useless.’ She pointed into the garden. ‘See that compost heap?’ I nodded, wondering what that had to do with transforming Clover into a lean, mean, fitness machine.

‘I’ve buried the key to the wine cellar in the bottom of it. So now if I want a drink, I’ll have to go excavating amongst the rotting bananas and rancid eggshells. Should be an incentive to keep off the pop. It’ll be smashing to wake up without a hangover.’

I didn’t share her enthusiasm for a champagne-free lifestyle. I was going to miss that ‘pop, glug, fizz’ thing that was quickly becoming part of my life.

‘I am very impressed,’ I said, secretly disappointed.

From then on, though, for a woman who said herself that she’d had it easy all her life, Clover showed a will to give Maggie Thatcher a run for her money. I’d expected her to come to the gym once, see all the teeny tiny girls with their sit-up-and-beg breasts and feel the immediate need for a jam doughnut and a siesta. I don’t know whether it was because she was desperate to lose weight or because she needed aching limbs to blot out her aching heart, but whenever I had a shift at the gym, she raced in, raring to go, shortly after I finished at 8 a.m. Life was so much easier for me now that Clover did the school drop-off in the mornings. When I finally went back to Colin, it would be a shock to my system to have to rally drive across Sandbury again to grab the kids and squeak up to Stirling Hall seconds before the bell went.

When they’d told me I could use the gym as a perk of the job, I’d thought I might have a ten-minute pedal on the bike every now and then, or a quick wave around of those kettle things when no one was looking. What I got, thanks to Clover, were regular hour-long sessions with a personal trainer. ‘I’ll never keep it up if I’m messing about by myself. I need someone to make me suffer but I’d feel ridiculous on my own,’ she said.

I came to see it as a rent payment, a straight swap – short-term agony for what was looking like long-term lodgings – the week time limit I’d set myself for staying at Clover’s had already stretched to ten days but no one seemed to care. Whenever I mentioned leaving, she threw her hands up theatrically and said, ‘Stay forever!’

In the meantime, she’d dug up a blond monster of a man, who introduced himself as ‘Tristram, but everyone calls me Ram’. Clover laughed out loud but got the joke about ‘Is that in or out of bed?’ out of the way. Ram looked like he should have been shouting, ‘About turn’ on a parade ground except that he spent more time flexing his muscles in the mirror than the army would have allowed.

So that was how we came to have our arses in the air, bunny hopping up and down the gym, when Jen1 came strolling in, wearing black Lycra leggings and a green thong leotard which separated her tiny butt cheeks like a Christmas ribbon. She did the whole ‘Hey, Ram, just a quick question about my heart rate, would you mind looking at my food diary, is soya better than milk for losing weight …’ before making a big palaver out of pointing to some invisible bits of chub she reckoned were love handles. Personally, I didn’t think someone as bitchy as Jen1 was in danger of getting love handles.

She didn’t spot me at first. ‘Clover! So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

Tristram wasn’t going to allow Clover to stop so she panted out a hello between her legs. ‘Punishment for talking! Star jump squats.’ I laughed, because as a result of Clover’s boot camp regime, we could barely walk up the stairs, let alone do star jumps. No woman who’s had a baby should have to do that. I was concentrating very hard on holding my pelvic floor in but Clover yelled, ‘Oh my God, I’ve wet myself.’ Ram backed away and pointed in the direction of the loos. Jen1 pulled a face and trotted onto the treadmill, her spindly little spaghetti legs going like a baby deer on speed.

When Clover returned, Jen1 tried to ignore her, avoiding her eye in the mirror but Clover kept laughing and saying, ‘A lot to be said for having one child, Jennifer. Those bloody twins have done for me. Maybe I need to get some of those love eggs. They’re supposed to be good for your pelvic floor, aren’t they? Kill two birds with one egg as it were.’ Jen1’s eyes flew open so wide she looked like a child’s drawing. She was obviously a curtains drawn, strictly missionary kind of girl.

We finally got off the subject of incontinence pants before Ram banned us from his gym. Ram came up with yet another method of torture that involved Clover and me pulling on a stretchy band behind our backs. I could feel Jen1 watching us, smirking her face off every time the bands pinged out of our hands while she pedalled away as though she was leading the Tour de France. But Ram believed in teamwork. Every day he made me sprint five hundred metres on the running machine while Clover did the plank, some disgusting Pilates move that made time stand still and your belly muscles rip open. I ran as fast as possible to minimise Clover’s misery. I’d only done fifty-five metres when she started screaming for me to hurry up. By two hundred and fifty, she was swearing and by four hundred metres, it was impossible to make out anything other than her favourite F-word.

When she finally caved in, squirming in agony, Jen1 pranced by and patted her on the back. ‘Good for you. I must tell Lawrence that he won’t recognise you next time he sees you.’

‘That’s the fucking plan,’ Clover said through clenched teeth. I was pretty warm myself but Clover was so purple when we left the gym that I tried to remember what to do when people have heart attacks.

That evening Clover munched her way through a huge pile of alfalfa shoots, lentils and chickpeas. When I came in from my shift at the posh offices where I’d left everything smelling of lavender and furniture wax, I walked into a kitchen smelling of horse manure. I honestly thought that Weirdo had left a turd somewhere in the room, but given that Clover – miraculously – had kept the kitchen spotless, anything out of place was easy to see. I wrinkled my nose. It was hard to believe that one woman could produce such a terrible smell without a dead rat actually decomposing somewhere about her body.

‘Sorry. I think it was better when I ate junk food. The kids are threatening to make me sleep in the pool house.’ Clover didn’t look the slightest bit bothered.

‘I’m going to light some candles.’ It still gave me great pleasure to open up her kitchen drawers and find everything from Sellotape to string and matches neatly arranged.

‘Why? Are you Catholic? Is it a feast day for gym babes?’ Clover flexed her arms like Popeye.

‘I am Catholic, lapsed, obviously. But candles get rid of awful smells.’

Clover picked unenthusiastically at a bowl of pumpkin seeds.

‘God, Maia, you are the font of all knowledge. How will I survive when you leave?’

‘You’ll have Lawrence back by then, so you won’t need me.’

Clover’s eyes filled. ‘I don’t know about that. Even when he does answer my phone calls, he won’t talk about us, only the children. I’ve no idea what he’s thinking but I know that if I demand answers or back him into a corner, he’ll close down and won’t tell me anything. I’m too scared to ask him if he’ll ever come back.’ She fidgeted. ‘I could murder a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.’

‘Gooseberries,’ I said, obediently.

‘Brilliant!’ said Clover, clapping her hands. I’d made it my mission to teach her about cleaning. She’d made it hers to teach me about wine. She was just looking as though digging deep into the compost heap for the wine cellar key might become a possibility when there was a loud banging on the front door. A bailiff-type thump. I was glad to be in a home where the ownership of the toaster was never in doubt.

Clover looked at her watch. ‘Who the hell’s that at ten o’clock at night?’

‘Maybe it’s Lawrence.’ I prepared to disappear.

‘Nah. He’d let himself in through the back door. He had a thing about the front door. Said he was more comfortable with the tradesman’s entrance.’

Clover obviously worried a lot less about headless axemen than I did and opened the door without asking who it was. There in all his glory stood Colin. He stumbled towards us stinking of booze and looking as though he hadn’t bothered to light the boiler in the three weeks I’d been gone. What was it with these men? Did they need a wife or girlfriend to remind them to shower? By the smell of Colin, the answer was yes.

‘Colin.’ Clover was very clipped.

‘I’ll handle this.’ I wasn’t sure I would but it would be rude not to try.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said. Pity, fear, embarrassment, distaste. They were all shaking around like some multi-coloured cocktail.

‘You gotta come back. You’s my wife. You b’long with me.’

‘I’m not actually your wife. You could never be bothered to marry me. But anyway.’ It wasn’t a time to be splitting hairs.

‘You always was a lippy cow. Where’s me kids? I wanna see the kids.’ He tried to get through the door.

Clover stood in his way. ‘Listen, Colin, I don’t want to be inhospitable but it’s late and you’ve obviously had the odd sherbet or two, so why don’t you get along home and Maia will talk to you in the morning?’

‘Wossit got to do with you? If it weren’t for you, she’d be at home with me.’

Clover wasn’t having any of it. Oddly enough, she reminded me of my mother, who always liked to give people a piece of her mind. Or her ‘brain’ as Mum liked to say. ‘No, Colin. The reason she is here with me, is that you punched her in the face. So I suggest you leave, sober up and buck up your ideas. Then you might stand half a chance of getting her back.’

I could see Colin weighing up the pros and cons of forcing his way in. He had that ‘I’ll pretend I’m listening’ look on his face as he swayed from one foot to the other, one eye closed.

In her bare feet Clover only came halfway up Colin’s chest. But she wasn’t about to back down. She stood, arms folded, square in the doorway – though a lot less square since her gym sessions with Ram-alam-a-ding-dong. Colin didn’t look like he was leaving anytime soon. He was trying to talk to me over Clover’s head. In an undertone, she said, ‘Shall I get rid of him?’ I nodded. I couldn’t see the point of having the serious conversations we should have had over the last ten years when Colin could see two of me.