The Yummy Mummy (16 page)
After the class, I walk home, feeling somehow denser, more significant. There is an unfamiliar hum between my legs, white noise. Could my libido finally be waking from its long afternoon nap?
A STICKY HOT JULY DAY. I STIR GRAVY, MIND ELSEWHERE
. Since my last class, my body has become what Josh might call “present.” But not spiritually present. No, if anything, life’s become a bit bawdy. I keep catching the swell of my breasts in mirrors. Parsnips make me smile. And I look at the banisters and imagine myself sliding down them, naked.
“Oh, it’s just not fair. . . .” Kate wipes a tear from her eye with a napkin that I used earlier to wipe Evie’s nose, and I’m jolted back to normal life. Kate has invited herself over for Sunday lunch. She’s not happy. She has had an argument with Pete.
Kate
wants to fill in the swimming pool and create a landscaped Japanese garden.
Pete
wants to keep the pool. Not that bad? Oh, it is. You see it’s not about the pool at all. No, there’s a subtext: babies. Pete doesn’t want to do any more work on the house because he doesn’t want to have any more ongoing commitments to Kate because she has not produced an heir to his father’s trash bin empire. He won’t admit this, of course. It’s a big mess. Joe, what do you think?
“I think,” says Joe, exasperated, “you need to take a deep breath and pull yourself together.”
“Oh Joe . . .” Kate dissolves into the snotty napkin again, shoulders shaking.
I look at Joe sharply. “Bit harsh,” I mouth over Kate’s head. “There, there, Kate. It’s going to be fine. Wine? A lump of garlic bread?”
“Atkins,” she sobs, shaking her head. Then with a guttural gasp she sucks the sobs back in, fans herself with her hand. “I’m being silly. This is ludicrous. God, sorry for causing such a scene on such a lovely sunny Sunday.” She shoots Joe a long apologetic look. “I know you don’t want to hear about me and Pete.”
Joe smiles weakly. “Don’t be silly.” He slices into the honey-roasted chicken carefully, smiling at its perfect honeyed crackle. Joe’s a good cook. That was one of the things I first liked about him. He’d fry me pancakes in the morning, big American ones stained with berries and syrup. He didn’t really like them—he’s more a savory man—but he knew I did. Previous boyfriends always stopped cooking food—and exhausted their recipes—by about date five. Then they’d expect me to do the cooking.
Joe mashes Evie’s roast potato with a fork. She thumps her fist on her high chair table, sending bits of food flying onto Kate’s fawn cashmere jumper. Joe flicks it off, apologizing. Kate tells us about The Nook, how she’s wallpapered the annex off the main guest bedroom for Evie in the best Osborne & Little paper.
“AMY? HELLO?” KATE WAVES A FORK IN MY FACE
.
“Sorry, miles away.”
“I was saying that you and Joe must come and stay. August? The seventeenth would be good for us. We’re pretty booked up this summer. It should be really great weather by then.”
“Lovely, don’t you think, Joe?”
Joe frowns. “Um, I think I’ve got a work thing,” he says. Right. My heart sinks. Please not another one. “I’ll have to check.”
Then I suddenly remember. “No. That’s the weekend you
were
going to go away.” I dagger Joe across the table. He studies the slick of gravy embracing the carrots. “The thing you canceled.”
Kate catches the slice in my voice and looks at me quizzically. Joe looks moody.
“Oh, come on!” exclaims Kate, with the exuberance of the just-stopped-crying. “The seventeenth it is.”
“Let’s speak nearer the time,” says Joe. Why can’t he just commit to arrangements? What’s the better option he might miss out on? “It’ll probably be just the Friday.”
Now Kate daggers Joe. She doesn’t like her hospitality refused. It’s not unconditional.
Luckily we have Evie as distraction and peacekeeper. I fuss, pick up the plastic cutlery that Evie jettisons from her high chair, mash her banana, and mix her milk, pretending I’m on planet infant while actually, perversely, living on planet Josh. The lunch drifts on for another couple of hours in a brothy cloud of chicken and babies and private dangerous thoughts.
“Amy? You’re really not all here today.” Kate snaps the lid on to her lipstick. “Joe has kindly offered to drive me to the station. The Range Rover is being serviced after the collision with my neighbor’s bloody free-range goat.”
“Hmmm. No, you don’t look quite yourself,” says Joe, concerned. “A bit wild-eyed and pale.”
“Thanks.”
Joe helps Kate into her light cashmere Joseph coat, the kind I’ve always wanted but that costs more money than I could ever justify now. (Joseph coat = ninety packets of nappies.)
“Why not sleep?” Kate says.
“Would love to. But in case you haven’t noticed, I have a baby to look after.” Shit! Wrong thing to say. Kate winces.
Joe puts a
shush
hand on my arm. “I’m going to pop into town after the station if that’s okay.”
“Really?” Another little absence.
“Selfridges. Ashak at the shoe menders says these old boys are beyond repair.”
The door slams. Kate’s perfume hovers over the kitchen table. I wave it away with my hand, move the tulips back to the sideboard and Joe’s black media TV glasses off the table. I mentally reclaim my house. Mine, all mine. How I miss living alone.
I change Evie into a fresh nappy, ready for her sleep. Her skin is so soft it feels damp. Her eyes are locked into mine, following me around the room. Sometimes this dependency makes me dizzy with love. Other times, like today, it brings on a strange, cloying claustrophobia. I have to push down the clawing desire to break free, to run, to dance, into the pit of my stomach. And there it stays, a silent creature spitting up disorienting vapors, tastes of freedom.
JOSH SLIPS STRAIGHT INTO MY MIND AS I SURFACE INTO
consciousness; curls trembling around his face, breath hot, arms outstretched as he falls toward me against a block of Yves Klein blue sky.
The radio alarm flickers 4:05 P.M. Does the screening of a Pilates instructor rom-com (in privacy of own head) make me a bad mother? Does motherhood really require a complete sublimation of the self, or just the bits that are public? Hmmm. I swing myself off the bed, in that wobbly sleep-in-the-afternoon way, feet slapping the waxy white floorboards. Check Evie. Asleep, good. Food. Mum filled the house with “men’s rations”—bacon, eggs, sausages—last time she was here. Armory for me to keep my man. I pick at some salami on the sofa, chewing the flecks of white fat like gum. I turn on the baby monitor. Evie, purring. Sinking into a fake-fur cushion—dreadlocked by regurgitated breast milk—I conjure back the warm sugar-rush of my dream. And for the first time in months, naughty thoughts streak, trip, and cartwheel through my head, the head of no-sex-please Amy Crane! How ridiculous.
Then I get an idea. It’s a silly idea. It’s a harmless idea. But it’s a challenge. Astonished at my audacity, I go upstairs, face my chest of drawers, take a deep breath, and plunge my hand into the deepest recess of the top left drawer, lair of bras that no longer fit and odd socks. No, not it. No. No. Oh? My fingertips stick to something rubbery and vegetal. I pull it out. No batteries? I scamper into the kitchen and disembowel the cappuccino frother. Back in the privacy of the bedroom, I slide the batteries into my dusty, much-unloved Rabbit. Despite its age and lack of use it leaps into alarming life, purring and pulsing like a Magi mix. I can’t. I must. I need to know if I still can. So mother and machine meet, somewhat awkwardly, with not a little performance anxiety. I wait for my Meg Ryan moment. Nothing. Nothing. I think about Evie sleeping next door—such a sordid mother—and check the time on the radio alarm. Three minutes already. Takes its time. A twitch? Yes, yes. Definitely something. Yes, this thing is persuasive. Concentrate. Succumb. Close my eyes.
Oh! I can.
Spent, exhilarated, and as thrilled as I was when I had my first orgasm at age seventeen, I lean back on the pillows with a satisfied sigh. A milestone.
A shout. “Amy? Are you okay?”
Back already? Christ. “Er, fine. Down in a sec.”
I yank on my knickers and jeans, throw the offending object to the back of the drawer, and hurtle downstairs, red-faced, a bit wobbly in the knees.
“Hi, love. You okay? Haven’t hurt yourself?”
“No, why?”
“Baby monitor.” He points to the loudspeaker. “I have ways of hearing what you do. . . .”
LAST NIGHT EVIE WENT OFF LIKE A SMOKE ALARM. I LETHER
cry for a bit, “controlled crying,” as recommended by Hermione, but gave in after the second five-minute stint because Evie sounded like she was dying. Cue me rocking her like a madwoman, tunelessly wailing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” while Evie chewed on my little finger with her pink teething gums. Both of us collapsed in a bundle of exhaustion on the spare bed at about five. I feel truly dreadful. Some kind of punishment for my selfish encounter with the Rabbit?
I squint out of the fume-misted bus window. Could that be it? My eyesight is worse than ever. Squint again. Big plates of sparkling glass. Women shaking out shiny hair as the doors swing behind them, hailing cabs. LUIGI’S picked out in black sans-serif letters against a sage-green background. I’m not feeling up to this. I haven’t been to a decent hairdresser in more than two years.
I leap off the bus into the path of a cursing cyclist, who narrowly misses amputating my toes. Luigi’s doors are so heavy I must lean all of my bulk against them. Then, unexpectedly, at about a forty-degree angle, they fling open easily, flipping me across the hall to the reception desk like a skittle. I brake with my elbows, sending leaflets flying.
“And how can I help you?” snaps a tight, lipsticked mouth, curtained behind conker-brown hair. Her long thin fingers scrabble sideways like crabs, gathering together the leaflets.
“Highlights. Trim,” I say. “With Luigi, I think. Then I’m seeing Mia for a cut.”
“Your name, please.”
“Amy Crane.”
She suspiciously double-checks her notes, lightening somewhat when she sees confirmation. “Please get an overall from Judith and take a seat.”
Judith, the middle-aged posh lady in the coat cupboard, holds my three-year-old Kookaï coat at arms’ length and hands me a complicated-looking gray overall, trailing ribbons. I plunge my arms in what are possibly armholes.
“No, the other way, madam,” she corrects. “It ties at the back.”
Sinking into a leather chair—too low for elegant entry or exit—I eye my fellow customers. A model-type giggles into her mobile phone, cupping a mini-me dog in the other hand. Two Chelsea middle-youth types—the clothes and hair of thirty-year-olds, faces ten years older—study magazines intently, searching for that husband-keeping beauty tip. No one looks at me, off-radar. I flick through a price menu. What? It costs how much?
OhMyGod
. Ridiculous! Surely it never used to cost so much. I’m out of here.
I’ve almost finished untying the Houdini-thwarting overall when the doors blast open. A gust of fumy warm air. A clatter of colliding studded belt, bag, and bangles. “And where are you going?” says Alice. Getaway foiled.
“Um, nowhere.” I’m humbled by the sight of Alice’s legs, tanned, with strappy Roman sandals coiling up them like snakes. She is by far the most glamorous woman here and everyone else knows it. They study her discreetly over the tops of their magazines and double-take when Alice hugs me.
“I was just round the corner and after brow-gate thought I’d better check in. How you getting along?”
“Oh, just realized my entire life has been a bad-hair day.”
“Tracy!” Alice calls over to a sulky, tanned teenager fingering a hairbrush aimlessly near the reception desk. “Two cappuccinos please. Thanks, sweetie.”
“You look so well, Alice. Radiant.”
“Thanks. Shouldn’t, had about two hours’ sleep. . . .”
“Really? So have I.”
“After a night of shagging.” She giggles. I notice her lips are all puffy, almost bruised. “You?”
“My insomniac daughter.”
“That won’t be the reason for long. Luigi is going to turn you into a sex goddess. Joe won’t be able to keep his hands off you.”
“Who with?” I’m not letting this one go.
“What?”
“Who is the fellow shagger?”
Alice blushes. She must like him. “No one you know. Now where are those cappuccinos?” It irritates me that Alice is so private about her private life while being so invasive when it comes to mine. “We thought Annabel had started the big push last night.” Alice peers over her cappuccino, which is served in a cup the size of a breakfast bowl.
“It’s coming? Early?”
“No. Only pretending, apparently. Fake contractions. But it does suggest she may not stay pregnant forever, as we were all beginning to suspect. So, after some serious procrastination, the baby shower has been scheduled at last. You’re invited. A week Friday. We should just be able to throw it before the baby crowns.”
“I am?” This is the invitation I was dreading. What the hell do you buy the mother who has everything?
“I’m worried about her, actually,” says Alice, suddenly serious.
“Oh?” I wouldn’t put Annabel on any kind of At Risk register.
She groans. “That bloody doula, Ms. Marhajessh of Belsize Park. Annabel is disregarding most of the expert, and hugely expensive, medical staff at St. John and St. Elizabeth’s and instead following Ms. M’s bizarre pregnancy diet and fanny-stretching practices.” I’m lost. Alice laughs. “Annabel is not allowed to eat sugar. . . .”
“My pregnancy would have been inconceivable without it.”
“Or bread or anything with a white grain in it, which is fine for the rest of us—including you, Miss Crane—but even I draw the line at the pregnant woman denying herself. And then she spends most of her evenings stretching her fanny. I’m not joking, while the rest of us are considering fanny tucks, Annabel’s lying flat on her back, pulling down on her perineum to make it wider! She’s lost it.”
“LADIES!”
shrieks a high-pitched voice over my left shoulder.
“Oh, ladies.”