Spinning Around (7 page)

Anyway, as I said, Mandy came by with two of her three in tow. Mandy is the wholefood mother I was talking about. You know? The one without television? I tell you, she depresses me so much. There she was, looking slim and pretty, with her three-year-old Hamon walking quietly beside her and the baby, Isoline, hanging from her neck in a pouch. (I could never master those pouch things. They always gave me a sore back.) And there was I, overweight and dishevelled, pushing a grizzly Jonah as Emily dawdled along three metres behind me, making patterns on the shiny floor with her sticky feet. Needless to say, Mandy's trolley was full of wholefoods: rolled oats, dried apricots, tofu, bean sprouts, soya milk, tuna in springwater. The fabric roof of my stroller, in contrast, was piled high with chocolate biscuits, pretzels, tinned peaches, cheese crackers, Ovaltine and jelly crystals. Oh—and the chicken nuggets, of course. Don't let's forget the chicken nuggets, which Mandy always says aren't made out of chicken at all.

Then, just to top it off, Mandy started talking about her eldest, Jesse. Apparently he wasn't happy at his current school. It was chaotic, she said, and the teachers were all disillusioned. Rather than have him travel long distances to a Steiner school— one in which a child's individual talents were nurtured and acknowledged, rather than ignored—she was considering the benefits of home schooling.
Home schooling
. This, mind you, from a woman who has two other kids under four, a bloody vegetable garden, and a job making children' clothes that she sells at local markets. (Her children, needless to say, are always beautifully dressed in casual, stylish gear that she whips up herself out of thick-weave cottons and fake linens in shades of stone, wine, denim, watermelon and buttercup.)

I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.

‘Well,' she said at last, dismissing the subject with a little smile and a wave of her hand, ‘I don't know yet. There's the social aspect I have to consider. Anyway, how are you? You look well.'

‘I'm fine.' Wild horses wouldn't have dragged the truth out of me. ‘What about you?'

‘Oh, I've been having a terrific time. Remember that book club I told you about? Well I went to it, last night, and I took Jesse and Hamon and Isoline, and it was
wonderful
. Just wonderful.' She fixed me with her mild blue gaze, and smiled her pleasant, gentle, earth-mother smile. ‘You ought to come,' she urged me. ‘Bring the kids. They'd love it.'

Oh sure, I thought. They'd love to loll on my knee during a discussion of the latest Peter Carey.

‘They have their own book club,' Mandy continued, ‘where someone reads to them, and asks them questions afterwards.'

I could just picture it: Jonah trying to wrest the book from this literary person's hand (being under the impression that every book on earth is his personal possession—he loves his books with a vengeance), while Emily wanders off to check out the bone-meal biscuits in the dog's bowl.

Terrific.

‘Sounds great,' I mumbled, wondering how soon I could tear myself away without looking rude. Jonah was starting to grizzle again, while the angelic Hamon looked on in wonder. He'd probably never seen anyone grizzling before—certainly not in his own family.

‘I'm sorry I missed playgroup yesterday,' Mandy went on. ‘Iso was a bit under the weather.'

‘Oh dear.' Of course my instant reaction was: Christ! Germ alert! And I immediately set about obtaining a run-down of the symptoms. ‘What was it? Not that tummy bug that Jonah had?'

‘No.'

‘Liam's throat virus?'

‘No, no.'

‘Don't tell me it was something new.' I tried to be jovial, though it was no joke, believe me. You have to be alert for the latest illnesses when you're a mother, or you spend your life in a permanent panic. When you know that scarlet fever's going around, you don't run the risk of mistaking it for meningococcal meningitis, and completely losing your mind. Similarly, if you know that it's chickenpox season, you won't miss any telltale rashes. ‘Lisa told me about that friend of hers, whose baby got whooping cough—'

‘Oh no, it's nothing like that,' Mandy reassured me. ‘Iso was just a bit fretful. So I gave her a massage with essential oils and let her sleep most of the day. She's fine, now.'

Just a bit fretful. Shows you, doesn't it? For Mandy, fretfulness is a bloody
disease
, instead of a way of life. Like a bout of bronchitis. As for the baby massage—well, don't talk to me about baby massage. Mandy tried showing me how to massage Jonah, once, but it wasn't a success. He squirmed about in his coating of oil until he managed to wriggle straight off the change-table. Just as well Mandy caught him in time.

‘You didn't miss much,' I said. ‘At playgroup. Just as well you weren't there, in fact—Lisa and I were doing the food.'

‘Oh, now Helen.' She laughed fondly. ‘Don't be so hard on yourself.'

‘No, really. I mean it.' The news was bound to get back to her, so I bravely confessed. ‘It was all chips and green cordial. Hamon would have starved.'

Her expression shifted, slightly. But she was very kind.

‘It's hard, isn't it?' she said. ‘So many children, and some of them so picky. I had a terrible time myself.'

Which was a barefaced
lie
, but I didn't argue. When it was Mandy's turn to provide the playgroup morning tea, she had rolled up with home-made bran-and-banana muffins, a choice of three (freshly squeezed) juices, home-baked sourdough bread, a dried fruit platter featuring mango and papaya as well as apple and apricot, carrot sticks from her own garden, and a dip she'd whipped up out of honey, yoghurt, wheatmeal, soy flour, pumpkin and all kinds of other things that have escaped my memory, though she must have given me the recipe about four times. Playgroup hasn't been the same, since then. There's always been a bit of competition when it comes to socialising skills and toilet training, but Mandy's Morning Tea was like a gauntlet thrown down. People have taken to turning up with great slabs of carrot cake, pinwheel sandwiches, prune mice, orange jelly baskets, banana bread, muesli crunch biscuits . . . you name it.

I feel like a total failure whenever I shamefacedly break open a packet of party pies, or start sloshing the peanut butter around.

‘Anyway, we did some macaroni necklaces,' I continued, as Jonah drummed his heels against the footrest of his stroller, making it perfectly clear that his view of the laundry detergents was getting extremely dull. ‘And Harlan bashed Nicole over the head, and that pedal car lost a wheel. Big crisis. In fact they were all a bit ratty yesterday, so you were well out of it.'

Mandy clicked her tongue. But before she could gently raise the subject of sugar-induced hyperactivity, I raised a hand.

‘Well, gotta go,' I said, ‘or Jonah will strangle himself in his own harness.'

‘Yes, of course.' Mandy was most sympathetic. ‘It must be because he's so bright that he needs constant stimulation—'

‘Right. Absolutely. Well, bye!' And I took my leave, hurrying away from her serene aura as if it were poison gas. I don't know how she does it, I really don't. How do they do it, these natural-born mothers? I guess it's genetic. I bet Mandy never had any problems with breastfeeding. I bet Mandy was never under the impression that you only have to strap older babies—more mobile babies—into prams. I bet she never suffered the embarrassment, in consequence, of pushing a laden pram up over a high kerb and seeing her newborn slide out of the bottom, feet-first, into a gutter.

What's more, I bet that if she had done such a thing, her first instinct would not have been to look around nervously, lest someone had witnessed her potentially fatal mistake.

It has to be said, I'm not much of a mum. Though it also has to be said that I was quite proud of the way I managed to make breakfast, wash up, wipe down, do laundry, change nappies and dress small bodies this morning while in a state of shock so severe that I actually went to bring in the garbage bin, even though the garbage is usually collected on Wednesdays. But I'm afraid that I screwed it all up when I came home from the shops, opened a cupboard door, and saw that I had forgotten to buy dishwashing liquid. Then I burst into tears like a little kid, and had to be comforted by Emily.

‘Don't cry, Mummy,' she said. ‘It doesn't matter.' I despise parents who do that sort of thing to their children. I despise parents who behave like five-year-olds, and expect their kids to mother them. And yet there I was, crouched on the kitchen floor, doing what I most despise.

Emily is such a gorgeous little girl. She doesn't deserve the sort of terrible things that go hand in hand with a divorce.

Should I just shut up, and ignore my suspicions?

I finally managed to cast my eye over the phone bills after I got Jonah to sleep, at one o'clock. He generally sleeps for about two hours in the middle of the day, unless the builders are here. When they are here I gnaw my fingernails and flinch at every hammer-blow, every squeal of the electric drill, every roar of bricks being tipped out of a wheelbarrow. Sometimes these noises wake Jonah; sometimes they don't. I can never pick what he's going to do. He has nerves like violin strings, that boy.

Today, however, I didn't have to worry about builders, and Jonah went down pretty well. He had my old Rubik's-cube key ring to amuse him as he drifted off. Not that he was trying to solve it, or anything, don't get me wrong. He may be bright, but he's not
Mensa
material. (At least, I don't think he is.) He's just one of those children that you can boast about—you know what I mean. ‘Jonah loves his little books.' ‘Jonah adores his Rubik's cube.' ‘Jonah is infatuated with his Meccano set.' There's a downside to this as well, needless to say, because he doesn't eat, he's a lousy sleeper, and he's moody as hell, but at least he's a genius. That's been Matt's and my little joke, throughout all the sleepless nights and endless grizzling. ‘At least he's a genius,' we'll say to each other, because it was something a friend once said to us about his kid, in all seriousness. ‘He's a genius,' this bloke announced, straight-faced, after we had complimented him on the child's highly developed language skills. I was also told by a well-meaning female friend that moody children who don't sleep are often highly intelligent. It's the reward, apparently, for all the suffering that goes with an infant who already finds the world a bit of a bore.

Jonah, I'm sure, is often bored rigid; hence the screaming fits when he tries to draw a horse, and can't. Or when he tries to reach a shelf, and can't. His fine motor skills obviously haven't caught up with his ambitions, which seem to be a bit unrealistic, poor kid—you can't help sympathising when he fails to stack ten pieces of macaroni on top of each other, end to end. How can you explain to a child who isn't yet two that some things just aren't possible? Not that Jonah's slow, when it comes to language. I was changing his nappy the other day when he suddenly announced wistfully, as he gazed out the window: ‘I like the pink flowers against the blue sky.' It was creepy, I can tell you. Sometimes I wonder if he's channelling some grownup dead person: a bridge builder, perhaps. A Chairman of the Board. If he
does
have a channelling gene, though, it's definitely not from my side of the family. I know exactly where it comes from, and that's Matthew's Nonna. Matthew's Nonna claims to be in contact with several deceased members of her family, praying to them constantly and always remembering their birthdays. There are little altars set up all over Matt's family home, studded with photographs and statues and old pennants and trophies and bronzed baby shoes. You get used to them, after a while. (Jonah loves them, actually.) Matthew says he used to get worried about bumping into the ghost of his uncle Fabbio on the stairs, when he was a kid—or having to share a bath with his dead grandfather—but he's over that now. In fact the channelling gene must have skipped a generation, because he never remembers the birthdays of his
living
relatives, let alone his dead ones.

Anyway, Jonah fell asleep, and I deposited Emily in front of a
Barney
video with chocolate milk and a muesli bar. We call this time of day the ‘quiet time'; it's when Emily has to amuse herself, without running around, while Mummy has a stab at doing some work for an hour. Today I didn't do any work. Today I sat down and trawled through the phone bills for any numbers that might not correspond to the numbers in the family address book.

I found six.

One of them was the number of a discount CD store. One belonged to the chemist up the street; I remembered phoning it after five o'clock several weeks before, when I desperately needed rehydrating iceblocks (Jonah had gastro), and wanted to find out if it was open late. One was answered by a machine with a male voice: ‘Hello, you have reached Paul, Marcus and Joe, we can't come to the phone right now, so please leave your name and number and we'll get back to you. In the meantime, party hard!' One was the number for the local railway station— a timetable query, no doubt.

That left two more. But I didn't have time to call them, because Emily started getting restless, and I had to break out the sultanas, the self-raising flour and the margarine, and make some scones with her. She likes cooking, does Emily. I suppose I should be encouraging her to play football as well, but I can't be bothered, somehow. I can't seem to dredge up the energy.

At one point I left my daughter happily slopping dough around, and in a fit of despondency called the nearest estate agent—the one who sold us this house. I asked the secretary who answered the phone if she could send me some information on flats to rent in the area, though I was careful not to tell her that I wanted to get an idea of what it might cost to split up with Matthew. Because we wouldn't want to move, not if we could possibly help it. Not with kids so happily settled at the local day care centre. Not with everything so handy. Oh God, I thought, as a sense of panic began to rise in me again, oh God, what if it really happens? What if this is
for real
?