The Yummy Mummy (38 page)
“O-kay. Well, how about this little playground here?”
“If I can’t get rid of you any other way.”
“You can’t.”
Josh carefully sweeps leaves off a graffiti-tattooed bench and gestures for me to sit down. “You look glum.”
“The father of my child, my fiancee”—the word sounds even more ludicrous in this context—“he’s left. You heard right. I’m a bit gutted, as you might be able to imagine.”
“Wanker!” says Josh, rather inappropriately, considering. “No wonder you look pissed off.”
Tears prick my eyes. Seeing Josh brings the whole nasty episode back. I pick Evie out of the pram and cuddle her on my knee, calming myself with the infinitely soothing smell of her scalp.
“Have you got a channel for it? This anger.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You must release it or it’ll warp you inside.” Josh rests a hand on my arm. It sits there like an improbable object, a stranger’s hand. There is no buzz. No heat. Josh shuffles toward me on the slatted bench and strokes Evie’s hair. I instinctively pull her away. I don’t want him to touch Joe’s baby daughter.
“Like that, is it?” Josh says, looking a little put out. “I never wanted you to hate me like this.”
“I haven’t got the space in my head to hate you right now,” I say wearily. “I don’t even know you.”
Undeterred, he sighs dramatically. “I’ve been reflecting a lot.”
“That’s a start.”
Evie grabs a toggle on Josh’s sweatshirt. Relieved to have something to look at, I stare at her busy toggle-rolling fingers.
Josh smiles. “I want you to know that my feelings for you go way beyond my little deal with . . .” Evie tugs sharply at the toggle. Josh, not quite sure what to do, leans toward her. “Alice.”
“Deal? I’m not with you.”
Josh crushes his hand to his mouth. “You know, our little . . . Oh God, you don’t know, do you? Shit, shit, I thought she’d told you. She told me she was going to come clean.”
“No. Josh. Tell me.” I start to warp inside.
He squirms on the bench. “Shit, I can’t believe I have to tell you this. Well, thing is, er, Alice asked me to make a pass at you, all those weeks ago, to cheer you up.”
Evie pulls the toggle hard, then releases. It pings sharply into Josh’s jaw.
“Alice what?” I hiss.
Josh rubs his chin. “She wanted you to feel sexy again . . . kind of a favor to a mate.”
Oh God. Alice. What a stupid fool. All those “you’ll feel visible” comments from Josh, all secondhand from Alice. To think that I thought . . .
“Don’t look like that, Amy.” Josh puts his hand on my knee. “You weren’t some charity case. I really fancied you. Honestly, I was more than happy to help.”
I flick his hand off. “Help? You fucking ruined my relationship!”
“Hey, don’t overreact, babe. Alice just thought it’d be a bit of fun, to build your ‘sexual self-esteem,’ she said. I’m sorry. Joe was never meant to find out. But . . . look on the bright side. . . .” He beams. “It got us together.”
I push him away. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”
Josh shuffles closer, still convinced he’s got a starring role to play in my life. “I never stopped thinking about you. About you and me.”
“Oh, shut up!” I shout, everything bubbling up at once. “There is no you and me. There is no me and Joe! It’s about me and Evie now.” Despite trying desperately not to, I dissolve into furious sobs into Evie’s ducktail of hair.
“Hey, hey.” Josh slides his arm over my shoulders and pulls me toward him. “It’s okay. It’ll all be okay, I promise, babe.”
I can feel my tears wet on his neck. He bends his head toward mine, cradling my sobs in a cave between our bodies.
“I’ll be there for you. I promise. I fucked up before, Amy, even when I knew that you and I had something special. But I ballsed it.” What is he talking about? Josh clears his throat. “I didn’t have faith, treated it like just a bit of fun. But it wasn’t. It was more than that. And I’m not going to balls it again.”
I sit back, smearing the tears off my cheeks. “Again? What on earth do you mean?”
“I think we should give it a proper go, Amy. Me, you, and Evie.”
Suddenly the absurdity of the last few months hits me and from deep within my tummy comes a loud, contracting, madwoman’s laugh so explosive snot flies from my nostrils like geysers. “No, that’s too funny. . . .” I breathe deeply into Evie’s neck, trying to calm myself. “It’s all too funny.”
Josh looks hurt, mouth slack. “Funny?”
“Alice. Unbelievable. Now this. Oh, I’m sorry. But Josh, you’re not serious? What would you want with us two?”
Josh bends forward, rests his elbows on his knees. “I’ve always wanted a family. And I’ve helped cause some of this shit, so let me make it better again, babe. I don’t want any bad karma.”
Is there no end to this man’s self-delusion? “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I mean it. I don’t mean many things, but I mean this,” he says gravely.
A cold damp wind trembles the leaves. I pull Evie close and think of our dark little house, its pockets of sadness, ghosts, and odd testosterone-free air. I wonder, will I get any more offers like this?
Then I come to my senses.
“It’s not as sudden as you might think,” Josh says, defenses considered and covered. “Basically, when you said you were engaged I thought I’d lost you.” Lost me? Had he been conducting a phantom relationship with me in his head? He’d never had me, not really. I realize that now. “And when I heard that Joe had left I . . . I thought maybe I was in with a chance again.”
Josh strokes a strand of hair off my face tenderly. “I could love you. I could fall in love with you.”
“Could?” The laughs are back again, odd intense cackles not spouting from any source of joy. “I’m sorry. You’re sweet.”
Josh looks puzzled, as if he’d anticipated a far more agreeable reaction. “Will,” he says, adjusting his declaration. “Will love you.” He strokes my hair again. “What are you thinking?”
I am thinking that I know, completely and utterly, that I cannot possibly ever love Josh. That even if I had to stay single for the rest of my days I would never be able to love Josh like I loved Joe. He would forever compare unfavorably; his fickleness to Joe’s solidity; his shallowness to Joe’s depth. He’d be a constant reminder of what I’d lost. Josh squeezes my hand tight and smiles patiently, biding his time for my acquiescence.
“It’s not going to happen, Josh. Sorry.”
He looks bewildered rather than upset. “Maybe in time . . .”
“No really, it’s not.”
“It’s not the Alice thing, is it? Because that isn’t relevant now. . . .”
“No, it’s not that, really. I just love Joe.”
We stand up from the bench silently. I put Evie back in her pram. Josh picks up his bike and we walk to the gate. He kisses the top of my head. “Guess this is it,” he says resignedly. “Good-bye, beautiful.” He throws one leg over the saddle and pedals away fast, a flash of rainbow shrinking into the gray street, like a kaleidoscope twisted and twisted until the color is just a pinpoint against the black.
LEAVES, THE COLOR OF ORANGE SMARTIES. THE GRASSIS
chewed and the dry dust of summer that crunched under my flip-flops is now mulch. It’s hard to believe I was ever intimidated by this park. Today, a few lone mothers sit at the outside café tables, UGG-booted feet tapping the babies in their prams to sleep. No midriffs, little laughter. It seems strange remembering how terrifyingly glamorous they appeared in the summer heat. How other I felt, an unlikely mother, not quite with the program. Now it strikes me there is no program, just a collection of women muddling along, improvising, huddling together, because if they don’t, there is just the echo of a baby’s cry in a rather empty house. I kick the leaves and imagine they’re Alice, silly, controlling, childish Alice. More leaves, up, up in the air. A woman in a fur cape waves. A familiar face from the sandpit—we’ve shared spades—smiles shyly, and an unexpected warm rush of belonging spreads through my solar plexus.
“Over here!” Nicola walks speedily up the path from the children’s play area.
“Not late!” I say, amazed.
Nicola laughs. “Work discipline.” She stretches open her arms like wings.
We hug. I notice that she is wearing perfume, a light floral scent, and a new coat, sharply tailored, soft gray. “Nice coat.”
“Joseph. A treat from Sam, I kid you not. As he officially is the Man with No Taste, I have no idea how he managed it.”
“You, Nicola, are a Yummy Mummy, a M.I.L.F.!”
“At last! Who would have thought it?”
“Work suits you.”
Nicola grins. “A lot easier than motherhood. I needed a rest.”
“Despot editor?”
Nicola tucks a sheaf of glossy bob behind her ear. “Realizes I’m still the best editor on the desk even though I’ve got working ovaries. Now I’m allowed to leave early to pick Thomas up, which really makes all the difference.”
Thomas picks his nose happily in his pram. “And how’s he surviving it?” I ask, with trepidation. Evie and I have got an appointment at our local nursery, Sunrise Smile, next week. I worry about no one picking Evie up when she cries. I worry about untrained nursery staff and nonnutritious lunches and separation anxiety. Mine mostly.
“The master and commander loves it. As he should,” laughs Nicola. “The nursery is like a second mortgage.” Nicola’s eyes zigzag as they follow a yellow leaf whirling to the ground. “I’ve stopped beating myself up about it, though.”
“You? Guilty? Never.”
“Well, I confess I had a niggle,” she admits. “It did occur to me I might lack a maternal gene because I didn’t want to slip into a Cath Kidston apron and embrace full-time motherhood.” Nicola drums her fingers on the table. “Now what do you fancy? I’d love coffee and a . . . a . . . actually
not
a cigarette. Stopped, two weeks so far, can’t pop out for cigarette breaks as well as leaving early, can I? Back in a sec.”
Evie sticks her finger into Thomas’s ear. He pushes her off with a boy’s brute impatience. Thomas looks like he’s doubled his body weight since last time I saw him. Gosh, they are no longer helpless teeny babies. Despite appearances to the contrary, life moves forward. Nicola returns, clatters the tray down, and tea splashes her Joseph coat. “Shit, I really am the anti-chic,” she tuts, dabbing with a paper napkin. I pick blueberries out of my muffin.
“News, news . . . ,” she says, trying to think. “Afraid I can’t top yours.”
We’ve already analyzed Alice—aka the-devil-wears-UGG-boots—to death on the phone, and my outrage has dulled to disappointment. Because I did like Alice. And, now I’ve calmed down a bit, I do think she genuinely liked me. We were unlikely friends and would probably never have hooked up had it not been for the bond of babies, but we certainly had a rapport of sorts, certainly more than I ever had with other accidental baby friends such as Sue. But, sadly, Alice is one of life’s meddlers, an egotist, handicapped by a lack of self-doubt. She probably can’t help herself. Yes, I can be big about this. Compared to the loss of Joe and Evie’s ER audition, Alice’s actions seem childishly trivial.
“Missed the last NCT meeting, didn’t you?” Nicola grins.
“On Thursday? No, couldn’t face it, all that chamomile tea with thank-fuck-it’s-not-me sympathy on the side.”
“Well, it was probably the last.”
“Surely not? The world as we know it . . .”
“Yes, the group is splintering into factions! It’s civil war, Amy! Hermione has . . . wait for it . . . joined
another
group, for her new pregnancy, because of ‘the different timings.’ Can you imagine the betrayal? Sue, as you can imagine, is deeply wounded.”
“Michelle?”
“Wasn’t there. Probably busy breast-feeding in the most public place she could find.”
So that era has gone, already! The scones, the cradle cap, the assumption that we had lots in common just because we’d reproduced at the same time, I couldn’t see an end to it. But that’s the thing about life with a baby, you lurch from one phase to another, convinced each will last forever. “But how will Sue cope without coffee mornings to pull together?”
Nicola raises a plucked eyebrow. “Aha! Sue and Alan are officially Trying for Another Baby.”
“No!”
“Yes! She informed us in gruesome detail, bless her. Exact stage in the ovulating cycle, the special-occasion White Company bed linen.” Nicola rocks back on the bench as if recoiling from the image stirred. “I’m not sure if Sue’s trying to catch up with Hermione and using a quick conception as a stepping-stone into this new NCT group or whether it’s Alan’s attempt to rescue his marriage.”
“But Sue didn’t know.”
“Something she said, something about a new baby being a new start got me thinking.”
We sit in easy silence for a few moments, then Nicola looks up at me, eyes sharp beneath her bob. “Joe’s back, isn’t he?”
“You reckon?” I look at Nicola: She shrugs. “Well, not to
my
knowledge he isn’t. But”—I check my watch—“any minute now.”
“How exciting!”
“Except he’s picking up his stuff.” I don’t elaborate. I’m a little Joe-talked-out by my mother, who just about survived hearing the whole story (“you silly, silly girl”) with a few amendments. I stare silently out at the leaf-stripped trees, the zigzags of trikes, and the muddy pram tracks crisscrossing the park like lines on the palm of a hand.
“I bumped into Alice,” Nicola says abruptly.
“I’m sorry.”
“At the zoo, of all places.”
I study my muffin. There seem to be only three blueberries left, buried too far in the dough to gouge out. “Caged, I hope.”
“She looked gutted, actually.” Nicola shifts on the bench. “Although she behaved despicably, Amy, I do think she’s genuinely sorry.”
“Yeah . . . well, whatever.” Got it! I skewer the blueberry on my index fingernail.
“She thinks you hate her. She’s too scared to get in contact.”
“So she should be.” I pull the tea bag out of the cup with my fingers. “So what’s happening on Planet Alice, then? New shoes? New life to ruin?”
“Oh, you know, deciding whether to import her nanny to the country at great cost, worrying about the local mobile phone mast near the paddock. Yes, I know, the paddock. I imagine it’s not some crumbling rural shack.”