The Yummy Mummy (32 page)
“Fuck you.”
“And too . . .” Kate’s face darkens. Something shifts. A look in her eyes I haven’t seen before. “. . . smugly pregnant.”
I flinch now. Smug? How could she ever have thought that? I hated being pregnant!
“We were getting close, Amy.” Kate steps out into the room again, more confident of her line now. “Very close . . .”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I got stung by a wasp,” she continues. “He kissed my arm, to make it better. And he tried to go further but”—her voice softens to a whisper and she looks down at the floor—“well, I stopped him for
your
sake.”
“You stopped him?” I am shaking properly now, tight little spasms. “For
my
sake?”
Kate walks to the other side of the kitchen table, putting its pine bulk between us. She’s red in the face and beginning to cry. “He . . . he . . . loved me. He always did! But . . . but . . . Joe’s a good man. He
wanted
to do the right thing by you.”
“You are evil.”
“Joe was my ex, remember?” spits Kate. “You don’t fucking go out with your friends’ exes! Not the ones they really loved.”
“He was a fling!”
“You know that, do you? You know nothing! And you’ve rubbed it in my face all these years.” I don’t recognize the woman who is speaking. “You thought you fucking had it all, didn’t you? Poor old Kate stuck with boring Pete, can’t even get pregnant. Well, I tell you this now, Amy Crane, Joe loves me, not you!” My stomach is curdling again. Breathe. Don’t be sick. Don’t be sick. “And if it wasn’t for you . . . maybe I would be with Joe. Maybe
I
would be pregnant right now. . . .” All the features of Kate’s face scrunch up to a central snarling point.
“So that’s what it’s about. . . .”
“We would have made great parents. Then you . . . you came along!” I am dumbstruck. “No, you can’t say anything, can you? Because you saw it. With your very eyes. You saw how he loved
me
. I can’t pretend anymore. I can’t pretend it’s all all right anymore! He should be with me!”
“Get out! Just fucking get out!” I shout.
Kate lurches toward me and I wonder, for a brief second, if she’s going to attack me. But she grabs my sleeve. “This is such a mess. Let’s talk. . . .”
“Don’t touch me!” I scream. “Just leave me alone. Leave . . .”
“But I
didn’t
sleep with him out of . . . out of loyalty to you. I really didn’t. I wanted to wait until he’d extricated himself.”
“Shut up!” I headphone my ears with my hands.
“I can’t help who I love. Please, Amy . . . I’m telling you this for your own good. You must let him go.”
“Out!” I push her to the door, along the hall. She trips on a baby bouncer and yelps as she falls down the front step, bag and legs and glossy hair flying, whimpering in a heap. “Listen, please listen to me, Amy. . . .”
I pick up one of my huge bricklike MBT trainers from the hall floor and toss it at Kate. It hits her thigh.
Whoomp!
I slam the door: Life as I know it bangs shut, too.
I vomit violently into the baby bouncer.
“ALICE.” I OPEN THE DOOR, BLEARY-EYED, TWENTY-FOUR
hours later. You don’t expect someone like Alice to make a cameo appearance in your nightmare.
“Gosh, you look exhausted,” Alice says, crinkling her tiny nose. “Eew. What’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
“Bins? Nappies?”
I’m immune. The mess has become like wallpaper. Surprising how much Joe obviously did do around the house. The evidence is accumulating. He always said I didn’t appreciate his inner domestic goddess. “Probably the baby bouncer.”
“You need to get a cleaner around, honey, one with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.” She picks up Alfie from his pushchair.
“Yes, must.” Ah, there’s my shoe. I bend down behind Alice, scoop my MBT trainer from the doorstep, and pair it neatly in the hall. “Er, um, tea?” Surreal how life just marches on. You imagine it might stop, out of sympathy, for a few days, just enough time to get your head together, to replot life to these new coordinates. Or something spectacular might happen. Like a newsworthy storm. A flood. Something to reflect the implosion inside, like in romantic novels. But no, London presses on with its mild, gray weather. Nappies need changing. Alice drops round. I offer her tea. While inside I’m cracking and splintering, like an old chair jumped up and down on by an angry child.
“Thanks, herbal if you have some.” Alice is in morning-mother mode: furry knee-high boots over jeans, face scrubbed bare of everything bar her tan. She has an air of hurried mission and throws her beige monogrammed Louis Vuitton bucket bag down abruptly. It falls over, spilling its contents onto the kitchen floor with a clatter. She sets the baby down. “Damn, damn,” she says, agitated, scraping up a BlackBerry, Tampax, Juicy Tube gloss, and an arsenal of baby cold medicine sachets. I try to help her but she bats me away.
“You need to rest.” She closes the bag and hugs it protectively on her knee like a small baby. “Now, how
are
you, sweetheart?” Alice asks, like she means it more than anyone else might mean it.
“Um . . .” The enormity of the story pulls down heavy on my body like a sleepless night the following afternoon. I don’t know where to start. Alice doesn’t know Kate. “I’ve just found out . . .”
“He isn’t back yet?” Alice interrupts.
I shake my head.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Alice purses her rosebud mouth like a geisha’s and twitches it from side to side. “It’s hard on your own, at first, but it gets . . .” She trails off, losing conviction in the rest of the sentence.
“It makes a real difference knowing I’m not the only one, you know,” I say softly, meaning it, so grateful to have her single-mum tonic around me at this time. “That someone understands . . .”
Alice closes her eyes. There’s a faint white Chanel sunglasses mark over her temples.
“That I’m not the only single mother around here.” God, there, I’ve said it! Single mother. Fuck Kate. Fuck Joe. Me and Alice, girls together!
“Amy . . .” Alice suddenly looks terribly serious and terribly beautiful. “I need to talk to you.” She studies her tea bag intensely, fingers fiddling its string. “This is not great.”
“It’s a bit
Extreme Makeover
, isn’t it?”
“I’ve been thinking hard about . . .” She looks up, eyes flat and green as lawns. “If there’s anything I can do.”
“Thanks.”
Alice bites her cuticles. “But I wanted to tell you. Well, there’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and in a funny way your situation has been a wake-up call, it’s put everything in perspective.”
“Oh?”
“I’m getting back together with John.”
“John?”
“Alfie’s dad.” She smiles brightly, obviously unburdened by telling me. “We’re moving to the country, Devon. Starting again. . . .”
Whoomp!
The air is vacuumed out of my lungs. “But . . . but Alice.” I feel dizzy. Tears, ready tears well up, already so close to the surface. Alice in Devon! Alice, my gateway to a life outside Joe. “But you are so happy, such a yummy mummy. So sorted. You said it’d never work.”
“Me a yummy mummy! Sorted?” Alice smiles. “Well, that’s very sweet of you to say but I’d beg to differ. The reality is a bit more complicated. And I’m so over crappy noncommittal men, I can’t tell you. Actually, it hasn’t been all that easy. I just don’t want to do it on my own anymore.”
“That’s . . . that’s great, Alice,” I say, trying to mean it. Part of me feels like she encouraged me to relocate to the other side of the world and then left when I got there.
“You look like you’re about to cry.”
“Sorry.”
“You can come and stay.” Alice shifts uncomfortably.
“Of course, just being wet. I’ll miss you. . . .” I can’t tell her that every time someone leaves, it’s like a little bit of Dad, a little bit of Joe, leaving all over again, the rejection, that hollow feeling in the chest.
“Come on, things aren’t all bad.”
“They’re not?”
She looks at me brightly. “Well, you’ve lost tons of weight. You pulled off Project Amy.”
“Project fucking Amy?” Rage whooshes open like an umbrella. “Look where it got me!”
Alice starts back, defenses immediately rising. “That’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.” She stands up from the table, flushed, reaching for Alfie. “Don’t blame me. I only ever tried to do what I thought best.”
“You told me to leave Joe!”
“Come on, Amy, I know you’re upset. But when did I ever use those words?”
And I try to think. I can’t remember the exact moment she said them, although I’m certain she did. If she didn’t actually say them, then the insinuation had the same effect.
“Those words never came out of my mouth. You hear what you want to hear!” says Alice. A tremble starts in my knee, moves up my thigh. I clamp my legs shut tight to control them. “It’s in your head, Amy. You live in your head!” Alice, shaking her curls crossly, packs Alfie into his pushchair and wheels him toward the door. “I’m not your life coach!”
“God, I’m sorry, Alice, I didn’t mean . . .”
Alice looks down at the floor and swallows hard. “I wanted to help you reinvent yourself. That was all I ever tried to do.”
7:07 A.M. A NOISE DOWNSTAIRS. SINCE JOE’S LEFT I HEAR A
lot of noises—burglars, rapists, and baby-killers scuttling around the house like rats. Or perhaps it’s Kate coming to pour sour milk across my face as I sleep. Heart slamming, eyes crusty, I drop out of bed and take up my hair dryer—with extra-large diffuser nozzle—as a weapon (where are the MBT trainers when you need them?) and creep softly down the stairs, cringing every time they creak. Peering through the banisters, I squat down, whiffy with sleep smells. A crash. A scuffle. I tighten my grip on the hair dryer. Then . . . a head. A scruff of hair.
Joe! Nut brown, muscular in a T-shirt. He crashes quietly around the sitting room, like a loud whisper, picking up his spare mobile-phone charger, a notebook, an old
New Yorker,
and shoving them into a big black sports bag. I crouch on the stairs, hug my knees tight. How could he? How could he have kissed Kate? I hate him completely.
Joe picks up a photo of Evie from the bookshelf, studies it, and smiles before putting it back, carefully adjusting its angle to the room. Then he stoops down and picks up the pink nightdress that Mum bought, dumped after my bath yesterday morning, sniffs it, and bunches it to his face like a hankie. He flumps down on the sofa, head bent to his knees, face covered by the nightie, making strange snorting noises like he might be crying or foraging for truffles. He stays there for what feels like forever. And I love him completely.
“Joe?” He looks up, doesn’t see me at first. “It’s me.”
I unfold myself and stand tall, proud, hand on the banister. Then I realize I’m wearing my midriff-exposing L.A. Hottie T-shirt (which should come with a “not to be worn over the age of twenty-five” warning) and immeasurably unsexy navy knickers, so hands-off they’re usually worn only during menstruation. No, not the grand staircase entrance I had envisioned.
“Hi,” he says, startled, dropping the nightdress onto the sofa.
We stare at each other awkwardly, greenish morning light bouncing off the mirrors, the whites of his eyes china against his tan. I pull my teeny T-shirt down but it still doesn’t cover the knickers. I want him back so much and yet cannot bear to look at him, his mouth, his lips. Did they use tongues?
“How is Evie?” he says.
“Asleep.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s your daughter.”
While Joe is in Evie’s bedroom I check my reflection, for the first time in days. I’m relieved that there seems to be little evidence of a drooping Botox eyebrow, which I feared would be my Dorian Gray– style punishment for Josh. But I do look a state. Perhaps that hairbrush wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
It’s funny how the men you make the biggest effort for in the early days—push-up bra, Hollywood wax, Atkins—are the ones who leave you looking the most raddled by the end of the relationship. Emotional toxins, they should come with a warning. This one’s Tom. He’ll come along when you’re twenty-six and encourage you to fall in love with him, then say he doesn’t want commitment and leave you with a nice dose of chlamydia as a parting gift. What about Jesse? Good-looking with a small but skillful dick, he’ll explain that he likes only black women because they don’t have that wobbly bit under their upper arms but it’s been an interesting experience nevertheless. This one, Joe? Joe will say he loves you, get you pregnant, and then . . .
Joe reappears. “I’ve missed you both horribly,” he says, voice barely a whisper.
Missed?
“I should have let you explain, not run away.” He digs his hands in his pockets and looks at the floor. “Maybe I jumped to conclusions. . . .” He shakes his head and asks warily, “Did you miss me?”
How I long to say yes. “I found a postcard.”
“A postcard?” Joe looks puzzled. “What about a postcard?”
“It’s there.” I point with a trembling finger to the offending object on top of the TV.
He twizzles it in his hand, reads the back. “This!”
“I was there, Joe. I went to meet you that day in the park when I was pregnant and I . . . I . . . saw you. I saw you kiss her arm. . . .”
“Amy, what
are
you talking about?”
“Kate.”
Joe pales. “Kate?”
“She told me everything! How could you?” I step forward and pummel his chest pathetically, like a bad movie actress, partly because I just want to touch him, even now. All the hours of waiting for him, dreaming of him, heave out of me in big sobs. Joe holds my hands, then my shoulders, and I want to collapse into him, exhausted, spent, but can’t, because something’s clawing inside.
“Kate said what?” he says slowly.
“That you went for walks, without me. That you were close.
Very close
, she said.” I look him directly in his eyes, which are fever bright now. “Why . . . why . . . were you kissing her arm?”
“Because she was stung by a wasp,” he says gently, as if trying to calm a hysterical child.