The Yummy Mummy (10 page)
“Options? I’m thirty-five years old. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s hard for someone who’s got a baby to understand what it’s like.”
Checkmate. “Of course, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s very hard. No one understands,” Kate says. “He may not be the love of my life but . . .”
“He’s not?”
Kate straightens up, reins herself in. “Oh God, what am I saying. Yes, of course Pete is the love of my life. Well, he was.” She jiggles the pram fiercely. “And let’s be practical here, Amy. Even if he wasn’t, what the hell am I going to do about it? I am too old to be misty-eyed about meeting someone new. It’s too tricky, too uncertain a science to risk it. All my friends are in couples. The free man pool is just pitiful. I don’t want to date. I couldn’t bear all that waiting for the phone to ring nonsense.” She tucks a wedge of brown hair behind her ear and looks at me intently. “I’m going to play with the cards I’ve got.”
I want to scream at her—this is how I feel too sometimes! I understand! But I can’t. Kate is not just my friend, she is
our
friend, perhaps Joe’s more than mine. She’s almost family. I can’t say one thing without explaining everything and unraveling the whole sorry tale. So I don’t mention the hotel booking.
She sniffs indignantly. “There’s no point feeling sorry for myself all the time, doesn’t get me anywhere.”
Kate does feel sorry for herself a lot of the time these days. But I can’t imagine what baby-ache must be like. I never had it and then I had a baby. And, unlike me, Kate is used to getting what she wants, when she wants. She’s generally been rather successful. Husband, house, vast decorating budget, and an opportunity to paint watercolor landscapes while everyone else has to do shitty jobs to pay the mortgage. And nobody resents Kate her success because she is nice and friendly and not threateningly beautiful. They feel the underdog has lucked out. As if! Kate leaves nothing to chance. When she was single she shamelessly demanded that friends set her up on blind dates, frequented bars patronized by rich single men, and threw fabulous parties to which she got all her single girlfriends to bring their most eligible single male friend. (No gays.) It worked. Well, she got Pete.
“Let’s go in and get you sorted,” says Kate. “A leg wax, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I’ve cultured an ecosystem above my ankles.”
As we open the door two tiny Pekinese dogs with pink gingham bows tied around their collars yelp and spring up at our ankles. If they so much as sniff Evie I’ll boot them.
“Moussy and Henna! Stop it. Stop it now!” screeches a frosted-blond muppet mop behind the desk. The dogs continue. Evie starts to cry. “Right.” The woman beneath the mop, craggy fifties, picks them up and tosses them into a dog basket, growling. “Little rascals. What can I do for you?”
“Er, a leg wax, please. Haven’t booked.”
“You haven’t booked? Oh, we’re very busy,” she croaks, as if she’d just gargled with peroxide. Bar a young Asian woman sweeping up and an old lady in rollers under a space-helmet dryer, I can’t see anyone else in the salon. “Sit down in the waiting area and I’ll see if I can possibly fit you in.”
The waiting area is two plastic padded chairs the color of black pudding, opposite her desk.
“Not exactly Bliss Spa, is it?” whispers Kate.
“It’s fine, used it once a couple of years ago. Now, what were you saying before we got devoured by the Pekinese?”
“Oh, whinging on.” Kate studies her nails. “Ignore me. What’s been going on with you?”
I take a deep breath. “Oh, er, things have picked up. I was getting to a bit of a loose end, you know, just me and the baby . . .” I have to be careful here. I can’t complain about motherhood. I did once before. I said that I felt a bit lonely. Kate got angry: “How can you be lonely with Joe and Evie in your life?” I didn’t mean to be insensitive. “. . . and I’ve met some new mothers to hang out with. Alice . . . you must meet her. She’s great, really funny, very glamorous. She’s kind of taken me under her wing, God knows why.”
Kate laughs, doesn’t contradict my self-deprecation.
“She has loads of highly entertaining friends. They look like supermodels, have pots of money and armies of nannies. They’ve got motherhood down to a fine art, like shopping.”
“They sound awful.” Kate imagines that when she gets the children she deserves she’ll be an Earth Mother type who’ll want to be with her little darlings 24/7. That will be enough for her. I once told her that Evie was more than I’d ever hoped for but not enough. She looked shocked and didn’t get it.
“I don’t know that many other women with babies.”
The woman behind the desk stands up. She is wearing a white overall splattered with pink, like a butcher’s. A letter has fallen off her white plastic name tag so it reads _rish. “Five minutes.” An umbilical cord of smoke twists from her mouth.
Kate rocks Evie’s pram with her loafer. “What about your old friends?”
“Oh, we chat on the phone, of course. But they’re at work. I can’t really do evenings that easily, and when I do I’m knackered. . . .” Excuses. Why don’t I see other people? Because I’ve got nothing to say. My brain feels like it’s been Hoovered. Easier just to grunt at Joe and coo over the baby. Primitive, self-limiting communication is a lot easier than a conversation with someone who has got a life.
“You see me.”
“You’re different.”
“Don’t your other friends want babies?”
“Not enough to have them right now.” The single ones are still going to drug-fueled parties and on yoga holidays. The more desperate ones are Internet dating. The ones in relationships are agonizing about where the relationship is going and still trying really hard to give killer blow jobs so that the man might consider them settle-down material.
“Silly things. If only they knew. Ovaries wait for no one.” Kate picks up a stained
House & Garden
magazine from the coffee table. June 1999, exactly six years old. She flicks through absentmindedly. “And what about work?”
“Work.” Baffling idea. “Dunno. Got a few months before I have to make a decision, so, well, you know me, I’m sitting on it. Obviously I need to halve my body weight before I start dealing with clients again. Alice, the mother I mentioned, Alice is going to help.”
“You look fine.” “Fine” never sells to me. Kate doesn’t like new people, especially new friends of mine. She made all her friends years ago, mostly at school and university. Anyone she met after the age of twenty-five isn’t easily trusted. “Well, I wouldn’t change too much. Joe likes you as you are.”
Kate and I sit in easy silence for a few moments. The dogs grizzle in the basket.
“When’s he back?” She looks at her watch.
“About seven, eight.”
“Oh shit. That late, really? I’m not sure I can hang around until then.”
Kate sounds disappointed and I wonder if it’s me she ever wants to see. She’s not a woman’s woman, not in the way Alice is. At university Kate was the girl who had her mafia of men friends—gay, straight, bookish. She had one for every occasion. She needed their reassurance. A compliment from a woman didn’t count.
“Everything okay with Joe?” Kate asks suddenly.
Actually, he is booking hotel rooms without telling me and I have good reason to suspect he’s having an affair. But I can’t say anything. I’m not entirely convinced that, with misguided well meaning, Kate wouldn’t try to interfere. “Fine.”
Kate’s face drops, a flash of disappointment. In a blink, I get it. She wants other people to be having difficulties, too. There’s nothing worse than being the only one who’s sinking.
“Things could be better,” I clarify. “We’re both very tired.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she says, looking slightly relieved. “Things could be better with me and Pete, too.”
“Nip in and take your trousers off,” shouts the beautician.
“See you in a sec, Kate. And thanks.”
The door of BEAUTY ROOM NO. 1—I can’t see any others—is painted a pale peppermint green, the color of a maternity-ward toilet. There are no windows. The walls are grubby, sprayed in parts with wax and other unidentifiable substances. There are scummy bits of equipment on trolleys, a beige electrolysis machine that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since the seventies, scary steel instruments languishing in cups of purple liquid, lotions in big industrial bottles, labeled by beauty companies I’ve never heard of. The stretcherlike bed is covered in white kitchen roll; beneath it is a dog bowl. I kick off my trousers, clamber onto the bed, and lie there shivering under the strip lighting. I seem to have to wait for an eternity. I’ve forgotten the etiquette. Do I say, “ready”?
The door swings open. The old woman under the hairdryer looks straight into the room, straight between my legs. I close them and give her an embarrassed smile. “Hi, I’m Trish,” growls the beautician. “Right. Let’s have a look, then. Been here before?” She leaves the door slightly ajar.
“Ages ago.”
“Hmmm, can see that.” She runs nicotine-tipped fingers down my hairy shins, glops the wax onto her plastic spatula, and spreads it on my legs as if they were toast. Argh, searing pain!
“It’ll cool,” she says, violently ripping the wax off my legs with bandage strips.
“Ugh!” She pulls at my rogue thigh pubes with tweezers. “Done! That’s a bit better, no?” She squints at her work, then shamelessly stares at my crotch. “That’s not going to get his pulse racing.” Yes, there are pubes curling over the knicker elastic. “Bikini line?”
For a moment I am tempted, but can’t face the thought of Trish’s yellow fingers rooting around down there. Besides, it’s not really necessary. No one will see it. “Not today.”
“Suit yourself.” Trish walks away. A fluff of dog hair wakes behind her slipper. I jump off the bed. My legs are covered in livid red pimples and a sticky residue of wax. But they are hairless. First bit of Project Amy done! I get dressed.
“
Sans
hair!” I throw open the door. But Kate and Evie are not there. The dogs growl at me as I walk over to the window.
“Oi, missy, that’s fourteen pounds, please.”
“Sorry, just trying to locate my baby.”
Trish drums the counter impatiently. I pour change out of my purse and give her a pound tip because I don’t dare not. Where the fuck is Kate? The dogs frenziedly start barking: Kate backs into the salon with the pram, pushing the door open with her bottom.
“Where have you been?” I say, relieved and cross.
“Evie started crying so we went for a little walk.”
“Oh, right.” But I know Evie didn’t cry. The beauty room door was ajar and I can distinguish her cry in a room full of babies. But I let it go. Because that’s just Kate. And sometimes she likes to pretend that Evie is hers.
JOE GETS BACK FROM WORK EARLY. A CLIENT CANCELED
.
“You’ve just missed Kate,” I say. “She’s been trying to get a hold of you.”
“Kate? She’s gone?”
I nod.
“Oh good. I’m so not in the mood for a Kate and Pete marriage analysis right now.”
“Not very nice.”
Joe helicopters a squealing Evie above his head. I take a deep breath.
“Joe. There’s a message from a hotel receptionist on the answering machine.” Joe looks blank. “Said you had a reservation.”
Joe levers up from the sofa and saunters over—deliberately casual?—to make coffee. Standing at the island unit, Evie on his hip, he positions his back to me so I can’t see his face. He puts his left hand in his back jeans pocket, like he needs to put it somewhere or it might start tapping.
“I thought it could be a nice night away for some of the new design team. A thank-you for all those late nights last month and the Cucumber Project. But anyhow it’s . . .”
Joe’s thrown these thank-you sessions before. They went to Cornwall last year. They spent the weekend surfing and drinking and smoking dope. I spent the weekend sleeping and practicing breathing exercises and wishing I could go out and get properly drunk.
“But why Saturday, bang in the middle of our weekend?” My voice is high-pitched, needy. It’s not my voice. I hate him for making me sound like this. And I’m not convinced by his explanation: He won’t meet my eye.
“Thought you might like a night free of me. You could get Alice or someone round for a . . . Chardonnay playdate. But as I was saying . . .”
Okay, he’s struggling. Only yesterday he declared Alice “a bit shallow.” He thinks it’s despicable that she left the father of her child. Now he’s encouraging me to see her?
“But you don’t . . .”
“Amy!” Joe snaps. “If you’ll let me get a word in edgewise, I’m trying to explain that it’s been canceled. Loads of them can’t go that weekend. Let’s do something nice together instead.” He rattles the biscuit tin. It’s empty. I finished them off last night when I couldn’t sleep. “Never any bloody food in this house.”
“You do the shopping, then.”
“You’re at home all day . . .”
“Just sitting on my arse!” I snap. “You try hoofing round Sainsbury’s with Evie having a meltdown and everyone staring at you like they’re going to report you to the social services while weighing up the comparative merits of Digestives or HobNobs. . . .”
“Okay, okay.” Joe picks up his coffee and buries his head in
Design Week
. “I get the point. Sorry.” He stabs at the crumpling paper, shakes it out. “Oh, yes. Forgot to say, Alice phoned. Says she’s booked you in for some beauty appointment or something in town. Bumped you up the waiting list. I’ve written down the details on a Post-it.”
Ah, eyebrows.
“Amy?”
“Hmmm.”
“Don’t burn money. Tweezers in the bathroom cabinet.”
AT THE PELICAN CROSSING, EVIE LETS RIP, EMITTING A
noise totally disproportionate to the size of her lungs. A middle-aged woman tut-tuts into the pram. “She’s hungry,” the woman says tersely, as if it were any of her business.
I stamp on, from Kilburn to Queen’s Park. The high-rise council blocks disappear from view. In their place, rows of pretty Victorian houses, clouded by magnolia trees. While the perimeters of the two areas blur a little, Queen’s Park has distinguished itself from its less salubrious neighbor in the last few years. With neat avenues radiating from its eponymous lush green park, it is what estate agents call a bijou “urban village,” populated by wealthy, trendy Londoners—media, music industry, the odd actor—who downshifted from Notting Hill when they had families. They recycle. They drive gas-guzzling SUVs. Their children do yoga. They also get extra tutoring to give them the edge on their classmates. Oh yes, and the local boutique sells out of UGG boots within days of their arrival on the shop floor.