Love... And Sleepless Nights MAY 2012 (23 page)

I have completely run out of options.

My sleep deprived brain cannot think of anything else to stop her.

As it’s mid-morning on a Tuesday all the friends I would ring and ask for help are at work. Even Melina – the person I always turn to first on baby matters – isn’t available. She’s on holiday in Tenerife for the week… the utter bitch.

I’m definitely not going to the doctor for advice. I just couldn’t bear the humiliation.

There’s no-one I can ask for help!

…then one name springs to mind, making me grimace.

Jane.

Jamie’s mother.

Without you here Mum, she’s the only parental unit who might be able to offer some advice. After all, she’s raised three kids of her own, so she must have some nuggets of useful information tucked in that bear-trap that passes for her mind.

My relationship with Jane has been incredibly strained ever since the night we announced the pregnancy. Jamie tried his best to mend fences for a while, but he gave up eventually, once he realised he was on a hiding to nothing.

The simple fact of the matter is some women just don’t get on – and never will. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; we just have the ability to rub each other up the wrong way and create animosity that can never be overcome.

Jane is the second such person I’ve encountered in my life. The first being Susan Bleakley, who I first developed an instant dislike to at infant school. We ended up following each other right through to the end of our college years and I still want to punch her in the face whenever I catch sight of her when I’m out shopping.

The thing is, if you asked me to give a reason why we hate each other, I couldn’t give you one – and neither could she.

A similar situation exists between Jamie’s mother and me. The mutual dislike was there the first time we met and it’s never gone away since.

…me calling her a bitch probably didn’t help the situation I have to admit.

Nevertheless, on this particular Tuesday morning I’m desperate, so I pick up the phone and call her…

Bugger
.

No answer.

Jane doesn’t work and Jamie’s moaned on several occasions about her relaxed, care-free lifestyle courtesy of his father, so I have to wonder where she might be.

As their house is only ten minutes drive away (unfortunate in other circumstances, but handy today) I elect to take the gamble that Jane didn’t hear the phone and strap Poppy into her car seat, intent on driving round to find her.

The car engine makes Poppy scream even more, so I spend ten minutes with my teeth gritted during the drive to the palatial five bedroom house Jamie’s mum and dad own near the waterfront, just outside the city.

I pull into the driveway and am relieved to see Jane’s car.

‘Poppy?’ I say to my red-faced daughter. ‘You stay here for a moment while mummy just checks to see if grandma’s home, okay?’ She can’t understand a word I say of course, but she responds anyway with a fresh bout of screaming.

I’d never normally leave her in the car like this, but it’ll take me mere moments to ring the bell – and I could frankly do with a few seconds peace, if I’m honest.

At the front door there’s no answer when I press the doorbell.

I rattle the letterbox, with similar negative results.

It seems very strange that Jane’s car would be in the driveway, but that she would not be home. Jane drives everywhere. Michael Newman earns a damn good wage as a chiropractor and she intends to spend every penny of it she can, damn it.

I trot round to the side of the house, open the gate and wander through into the garden. I can still hear Poppy - and the driveway is very secluded - so I’m not worried about her being kidnapped by one of the hoards of paedophiles the papers keep telling us are hiding behind every bush in the neighbourhood.

‘Jane?’ I call, passing the heated swimming pool and rounding one corner of the massive conservatory.

‘Jane?’ I repeat and reach the conservatory double doors. ‘Jane? Are you ho - ’

Oh my God.

Oh my actual God…

There are sights no person is meant to see. Visions of such magnificent terror it would quail the hearts of the gods themselves.

A German soldier sitting on the beach in Normandy on June 6th 1944 for instance, seeing the five thousand ships of the allied assault descending on him like the wrath of mankind…

Or a Japanese woman, tending her garden on March 11th 2011, seeing the wall of water created by the awful tsunami coming straight at her…

How about an American businessman, buying a bagel on a New York street on September the 11th 2001, looking up to see a plane fly into the World Trade Centre building?

To these please add Laura Newman, looking through a patio door on this very day in history, seeing her sixty three year old mother-in-law bent over a rattan sofa – her wrinkly arse exposed for the world to see, while a man twenty years her junior and dressed in neon Lycra, thrusts into her from behind - a look of aggressive delight on his face.

I feel the universe shift on its axis.

Existence itself teeters on the brink of an abyss.

I must stop looking…

I must turn away and run for my very life.

I must leave before Jane looks up and sees me standing –

Oh fuck it, she already has.

I’ve never seen a woman move so fast.

With a shriek that would rival one of Poppy’s finest, Jane jerks upward. This produces an equally loud squeal of agony from her paramour, thanks no doubt to the fact his penis is bent back painfully as she does so.

Jane then pushes herself backward, sending the muscle-bound squealer stumbling. He falls, crashing into the forty inch plasma screen TV Michael Newman had bought as a treat to himself, because Jane hogs the fifty inch LCD screen in the living room.

Jane pulls up her trousers, her eyes never leaving my shocked, ashen face.

She ignores Lycra boy’s wholesale destruction of the conservatory and rushes in my direction.

My heart hammers in my chest.

She’s going to murder me.

As sure as eggs are eggs, Jane Newman is going to throw open her patio doors and come at me like an enraged honey badger.

She does indeed throw open the patio doors, but I’m spared a hideous mauling.

Instead, Jane tries to smile.

She fails miserably. It looks more like someone’s electrocuting her.

‘Hello Laura!’ she says in a voice several octaves above the norm.

‘Jane,’ I answer warily. ‘What’s going on?’

This is a bloody stupid thing to ask. It’s obvious what’s going on. Jane has been getting rather too friendly with her gym instructor. In fact, to borrow a rather unattractive phrase Jamie seems to enjoy trotting out just to irritate me every once in a while, the gym instructor was ‘balls deep and going for gold’ in my mother-in-law – of this there is no doubt.

I know it.

Jane knows it.

The gym instructor - who’s penis I can still see poking out from the zipper in his Lycra shorts – knows it too.

Jane’s face drops. ‘Oh God Laura. Please don’t tell Michael!’ Her face drops even further. ‘
Please
don’t tell Jamie! I beg you!’

Most of me is in deep shock.

I’m still trying to process what I’ve just stumbled across and the fact that Jane is begging me for mercy doesn’t register for a few moments.

I stare at her dumb-founded, trying to marshal my thoughts. I’m disgusted, repulsed and horrified in equal measure.

I’m also entirely unsurprised.

The whole situation borders on the clichéd: bored older woman married to successful but dull man, has an affair with attractive younger gym instructor.

It’s a bloody miracle the guy isn’t the pool cleaner, really.

‘I don’t know what to say, Jane. This is a pretty upsetting thing to see.’ I grimace and look at Jane’s love monkey. ‘And so is your penis, matey-boy. You want to tuck the little champ away now?’

‘Nigel!’ Jane shrieks.

Nigel looks down and realises his penis is still waggling freely in the wind. I have to grudgingly admit that from the size of it Jane has chosen her partner in this sordid little exchange quite well.

Once Nigel junior is safely tucked away, his owner looks up at me with a sheepish expression on his face. ‘I’m very sorry about this.’

‘Not as sorry as you’re going to be if you don’t sod off right now, Nigel,’ I order with a stern expression.

‘Yes, you’d better go Nigel,’ Jane says in a meek tone of voice. I have to say it’s one I thoroughly approve of.

Nigel rushes past me, turning as he leaves. ‘Will I see you at the gym tomorrow, sweetheart?’ he says to Jamie’s mother.

It’s all I can do to not throw up my breakfast.

Jane has the decency to go bright red. ‘I don’t know Nigel. After this, I doubt it. Just go away will you!’ The waspish tone with which she dismisses him is far more the Jane I’ve come to know and loathe.

The gym instructor does as he is bid.

Once he’s gone I turn back to my mother-in-law. Now the initial shock has passed, I’m formulating some opinions that Jane Newman isn’t going to like one little bit, but sure as hell is going to listen to. What she’s done here is awful. I may not like Michael much either, thanks to his obsession with my breasts, but he doesn’t deserve this.

And what kind of mother does this to her son as well? Jamie’s going to be heartbroken when I tell -

Poppy!

I’ve left Poppy in the fucking car!

Here I am mentally berating Jane for being a bad parent and I’ve left my baby in the car like a dog.

‘You stay right there!’ I bark at Jane.

Five seconds later I’m opening the car door to find my daughter fast asleep. There’s not a paedophile in sight.

I carefully unbuckle her and carry her back to the rear of the house.

Jane starts to babble as I return, but I silence her with a finger to my mouth, holding the car seat up for her to see her sleeping granddaughter.

What follows is a strange pantomime of me asking Jane where I can put the baby, her eventually cottoning on to what I’m saying, and me tip-toeing through to a downstairs guest room, where I leave Poppy sound asleep.

I close the door as quietly as possible and slowly walk back through to the conservatory, where Jane awaits.

With the baby safely squared away for the time being I can deal with the horrors I’ve just witnessed. ‘What the hell are you playing at Jane?’

She sinks into the couch she was so recently being penetrated over and looks at the broken TV.