The Yummy Mummy (34 page)
“I regret not trying again, if just for you and your brothers’ sake. I want you to know that.” She sips her tea dreamily. “Marriage is tricky. If you expect different you’ll be disappointed. It’s not like the movies. . . .”
“Thanks. I’d never have guessed.”
She clicks her tongue. “Let me finish. What seems like the end now, well, it’s not, not if you don’t want it to be. You’ve got to fight for the relationship.” Mum’s hands claw tight around her cup. I’ve scared her. She’s concerned about me. I’m her baby. “And yourself.”
“A lost cause.” I laugh weakly.
“Rubbish!” She grips my hands. My nails are still chipped with last month’s manicure, which strikes me as strangely macabre. “I didn’t bring you up to roll over and accept defeat and sit in front of daytime TV all day moping about with unwashed hair. Goodness me, you’ve got these wonderful expensive highlights, what a waste!”
“Well, that’s the clincher.” I manage a smile. “The show must go on, right?”
Mum grins: Message received! Because no, she was never paralyzed by loss. She put on her makeup, curled her hair, and remained the slick engine of the family. She filled the space Dad left. She baked bread for the lunch boxes, negotiated the first sanitary towel, the first condom, and secretly followed me on my paper route on dark winter mornings just to make sure I was safe. I don’t ever remember her having a lie-in.
More tea arrives. I take Evie. Mum pours and the steam clouds around her face like a wedding veil. Placing the pot down, she readjusts herself on the chair, sitting up straight, as if silently reminding herself of the importance of posture. “Right. What’s your action plan?”
“Action plan?” Other people just live their lives. I lurch between action plans.
“You need to take control again, Amy. Gosh, you’ve always been the most stubborn, headstrong girl.” She sniffs indignantly at the memory. “The baby thing knocked it out of you. Now this. Okay, it’s been tough. But it’s about time you got your stuffing back. You’ve got a job waiting for you, more than I ever had. And, Amy, you’ve got a life to live.”
As she says this, glossed fiftysomething mouth pursing and working, a figure—me, pre-pregnancy—darts across my brain in high red wedges, skinny sequined scarf flying behind like the tail of a shooting star. She’s rushing to a meeting late, always late, too much going on: boyfriends, mates, work. She sits down breathlessly at the gleaming wenge table next to her colleagues and compensates for her lateness by making jokes and arguing her point against toxic Pippa, winning her point, smiling graciously, steel in her veins. That was me?
WHEN I GET HOME IT IS QUIETER THAN EVER. JUST THE SICKENING
whir
of history repeating itself: I have taken away Evie’s daddy. Feeling as worthy as a foot fungus, I bathe Evie. She pops bath bubbles with her fingers, looking up for applause with each successful pop. She is so intoxicatingly beautiful, I could examine her for hours, the pudding-bulge of her belly, the perfect round of her bottom cheeks. Why is it that mothers despise their own fleshiness but can’t get enough of their babies’?
Evie begins to dimple like an apricot. I pick her up. She squeals, berserk with pleasure, fat pink legs pumping water all over the floor. Having settled her into the cot, I stroke her damp hair and sing lullabies in my terrible tuneless voice, which she adores.
Finally Evie sleeps, eyes pulsing beneath their silky lids, dreaming of nappy-shaped clouds and bottle teats big as air balloons. I sit down on the floor, face pressed against the bars of her cot, watching. An irrational part of me fears that if I leave the bedroom the last best bit of my life will vanish, too, and I’ll wake in the morning to find a dribbly baby-shaped imprint on the sheet. So I hover on the landing. Check her. Linger. Then I can’t bear to be separated by hard inhuman brick walls any longer. So I pick Evie up, still sleeping, and tuck her into my bed, a habit it took many painful weeks to break. She opens one eye sleepily, registers her approval of the new sleeping arrangements, slumbers back off.
Ding dong.
I open the door. Mum. “I couldn’t leave you alone tonight. I just couldn’t.”
“But . . .”
She wipes away a tear from my cheek with Nivea-scented fingers. “Come on, you silly thing. Let me in.”
That night Mum sleeps in my bed in a peach satin nightie and hugs me (in faux-satin pink nightie) into her doughy arms like a little girl. Evie lies beside us, a soft sighing lump. And I sleep my first proper night’s sleep in two days.
IN JOE’S ABSENCE, IT’S EASIER TO SEE WHO HE IS, FEEL MY
way around each particular contour of the Joe-shaped hole. It’s a big, surprising hole. Some photos arrived by post yesterday, addressed to Joe, an old roll he must have sent off just before this unfolded. The photos are mostly of me, on the bed, cushioned on the balcony. In all of them I’m asleep. They’re not mouth-open-snoring pictures either, but sweet, gentle, even beautiful. They break my heart. So does the lavender and rosemary bath oil he bought me. Did I ever thank him for it? I don’t think so. Nor did I thank him for fixing my electric toothbrush, or taking my coat to the mender’s. Or fishing my hair ball out of the plug hole. No man apart from Joe ever did the little things like that for me, without making a big deal out of it, without being asked. I once thought those things boring, humdrum, anal even. Now I miss them horribly.
I lie down on the rug, Evie parked on my tummy, and run over it all for the umpteenth time. But I get muddled about what he’s said and what I’ve said and suddenly all that matters is that I find him. Mum’s right. I need to fight for this. I’ve got to
do
something. I can’t just let him walk away. This may be my life, not some piss-poor soap opera, but it still needs direction. Okay, he’s in Cornwall. Leo’s ex-girlfriend’s house.
Tucking Evie onto my hip, I open my address book. Evie yanks out two pages and flutters them about like flags. I scan the L section. No. Nothing. I rummage through Joe’s boxes. Nothing. But I do have a vague recollection of Leo’s having a girlfriend—Sandy? Sara?—who had a house. Penzance? Polzeath? Gut says Polzeath.
The train takes hours. Evie’s head wobbles like an antique doll as she squidges wet fingers on the window, trying to catch the fleeting flecks of sheep and cows. She’s quiet, a little out of sorts. But I tell myself that fresh seaside air can only do her a world of good, paint pink back in those perfect convex cheeks. Passengers come over to coo and I swell with pride. Others give
me
funny looks, stare a little too long, like you might do at a face that resembles a criminal photo fit.
One woman, who’s plonked herself opposite, won’t stop chatting. A fiftysomething in a beige Burberry mac, she’s not wholly unlike my mother. She does the same thing with her hair, combing it smooth with her fingers, shamelessly using the train window as her mirror. Her presence makes me feel vaguely uneasy because I know Mum would be furious to see me hurtling to Cornwall on a chilly September morning armed with only three jars of baby food, milk, and a tube of Pringles.
At Plymouth station, a man with an overeager head, cocked forward just like Joe’s, walks down the platform munching crisps. How I want to see Joe eating crisps, doing something normal. I wipe an eye on my sleeve. The woman offers a tissue. She’s heading right down south, too. Polzeath, such a lovely beach. I ask her to keep an eye on the pram while I go to the loo. And I see myself in the scratched square mirror.
Christ! A gaunt woman, older than me, nosing her mid-thirties, stares back with hollowed eyes. Hair sprouts at weird angles from her head. Her neck looks like an anatomical drawing. Her cheekbones—cheekbones!—are banana-shaped shadows and, somewhat incongruously, her forehead is as smooth as a shell. Aha, Project Amy! This is the look I wanted! And I look dreadful.
I get a taxi quickly from Bodmin Parkway station, leaving before mac-woman has time to surface from the ladies’ and suggest we share one. There are enough conversations going on in my head as it is. Evie has no car seat so I squeeze her tight and gasp every time a truck passes or we take a fast corner, certain our moment is up, imagining the headlines.
The driver stops in the Polzeath beach car park. This is as far as we can go without an amphibious vehicle, he jokes. I clamber out into a whipping wind. Assembling the pram is an Olympic wrestle. The tide is out and there is just one slab of blond sand as far as I can see, cupped between low crags of rock, polka-dotted with dogs. The sky is vast, swollen with heavy clay-gray clouds, the sea a crust of black on the horizon. Occasionally a surfer runs past with a board, bare feet slapping, kicking up sprays of water. The surfers remind me of my brothers. I miss them. My family is too disparate, too complicated. The things that make twenty-first-century life so exciting to the single and childless—cheap air travel, freedom from geographical and genetic ties—aren’t that helpful when you have a baby. It would actually be far nicer if my family lived within a one-mile radius and met around an open fire every night over a hog roast.
The pram doesn’t move easily, the wheels sinking and jamming in the sand. The best way is to pull it, facing forward, wind whistling into the bonnet. Evie’s hair flutters like lots of tiny wings. She smiles dutifully, as if I’ve conjured up the seaside as an amusing sideshow for her benefit but, rather disappointingly, have forgotten to cast any sunshine. We scar the sand from east to west, past rocky dunes and back up to the car park. From there I head into the town, if you can call a few surf shops and holiday rents a town. I try to phone Joe on his mobile, gauge his voice for its level of warmth before declaring that yes, I am here, in Cornwall! But it is difficult to get a signal. I eventually get one, swaying on a bench like a drunk, wind fly-swatting hair across my face. His phone is switched off.
We trail a couple of streets. No sign. He could be anywhere, in any of those salt-lashed, modern, rather ugly houses, gazing out to sea. My legs ache with the drag of sand. What next? I cry a little out of frustration, then wipe the tears away crossly. Yes, he’ll come to the beach today. Of course he will. I’ll wait. I’ll surprise him, run toward him, surfy wind in my hair, like a model in a Tampax ad. That’ll move him. Then he’ll forgive me.
Back to the beach. I drag the pram to a sheltered spot behind a rock, prickling with long thin grass. After draining a bottle of milk, Evie sighs sweetly and stares at the cloudscape above, her lids reluctantly closing as she drifts off. My mouth is dry. I curse myself for not buying a bottle of water earlier. It’s easy to forget that I need looking after, too. My nostrils are rimmed with a crust of salt like a margarita glass. The sky darkens. The temperature drops. Seagulls roar dementedly. I pillow my head into the rock; it’s warmer than the wind. Gosh, I’m tired, so bone-shatteringly tired. What the hell am I doing here? It was Polzeath, wasn’t it? No, shit, Penzance. Or Polzeath? My mind skits. So Joe didn’t have an affair? All those months of worrying about his loving someone thinner, all for nothing. So he got close to Kate for a moment? I can cope with that. Because aren’t our lives full of such wobbly moments when, for a few heart thumps, someone offers a shinier reality, one that reflects back our funnier, handsomer, pre-parent selves? He wobbled, but he pulled back. Unlike me.
Grass cotton-buds my ear. But it feels like it’s scratching someone else. When I close my eyes, only my interior life feels real. Obscure memories and images I thought I’d forgotten—Dad burying my hamster in a coffin he’d made from a cornflakes packet, Joe putting a cool wet cloth on my forehead when I had a fever—engulf me, then retreat, waves of water over a sinking ship.
No, I am not the victim here. Even if Joe did work late or went out drinking or didn’t tell me he loved me as much as I needed, he stood by me in those difficult early months, while I retreated into myself, lost in new motherhood, in that lonely twilight zone of leaking breasts and bladder problems and anxious exhaustion, certain my life was over. Truth is, he probably needed a pint or two. I was remote. I was angry and paranoid. I couldn’t bear him anywhere near me. And no, he didn’t leave. He could have. Kate would have had him. Lots of women would have had him. But Joe is not my dad. Not all men are like my dad. In fact it transpires not even my dad is like my dad. Oh dear, it’s all gone so very wrong.
I reach out and grip Evie’s pram, feel it shake reassuringly as she turns in her sleep. And a rush of love for her judders through my entire body like a small electric shock. She is the best thing that ever happened to me. Why has it taken me so long to accept the unalterable reality of life with a baby? Instead I have fought against it, unable to understand that my old life had died, like a war widow who refuses to grieve for her husband until she’s seen his dead body.
Fade to black.
OW! THAT HURT
.
“Wake up! Wake up!” Another sharp slap against my cheek.
“She’s conscious!”
Well, I am now. A dog’s wet cold nose snuffles my neck. I open my eyes slowly. The first thing I see is my diamond ring, flashing like a lighthouse. Then, a pair of orange thermal socks turned over the top of hiking boots. “She’s okay. Yes, I think she’s okay, Sandra,” says a man’s voice.
“Thank heavens! Are you all right, duck?” A blond lady bends down to me. The busy-body mac-woman.
“Evie . . . the baby . . .”
“In her pram,” says mac-woman. “Fast asleep, warm as toast. It’s you we’re worried about. You’re not wearing a coat. Here . . .” She shrugs a strange-smelling fleece around my shoulders. “I thought you looked a sad little thing.”
“Oh dear, I must have dozed off.”
“We thought you’d fainted! Come on, we’ll walk you back—” She stops. “Back to where, dear?”
She pulls me up far too quickly. Blood rushes from my head. My limbs are so heavy and my head still so light, full of polystyrene beanbag balls. But I must find him. I must find Joe. “To the town. . . .” I start walking. Oh! The draining whorls in the sand are disorienting, like walking backward on a conveyer belt. Oh dear, my jelly legs buckle and—
whoomp!
—I stumble onto my knees, poised to propose to the orange thermal socks. “Better make that the train station,” I gasp.