The Yummy Mummy (5 page)
“Make yourself. You’re breast-feeding. Think of Evie. She needs this stuff.”
Joe makes me feel like a force-fed foie gras goose.
“Actually, I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I say. Deep breath. “I think . . . the time has come for me to stop breast-feeding.” I stroke Evie’s head, pilled with soft down like well-loved cashmere.
Joe’s face slams shut. “You’re not serious? She’s only five and a half months! I was really hoping you would do it until she was at least one. The baby book says . . .”
“To hell with the baby book! I want my boobs back.” Joe rakes his hair with his hands, brow knitting. “Alice is very funny,” I add more jovially, realizing this needs defter delivery. “She says breast-feeding is like liposuction . . . fantastic in the right amounts, but you’ve got to know when to stop.”
“Alice says what?”
“Brilliant for losing weight, although I’m not sure it worked like that for me. Point is, if you carry on doing it”—I push my boobs flat—“hello walnuts in socks!”
Joe clears his throat. “Some Things Are More Important,” he says, enunciating each syllable for polemical import. “Besides, you’ve got great boobs.”
“Boosted to a C cup by a pint of full-cream milk,” I hiss so as not to wake Evie, who has slumbered off to the reassuringly familiar sound of her parents rowing.
“Don’t be silly. You look great.” He looks at me disapprovingly. “Although not today, but that’s your own fault.”
A particularly low shot. “Not today? Not fucking ever!” Suddenly I’m angry, boiling angry. This happens sometimes. Everything’s bumbling along fine and then feelings spurt out sideways. “I’m falling apart, Joe. I’m the kind of woman that people with clipboards stop in the street and say, ‘Can I ask you about your hair?’ or hand out ‘Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days’ leaflets to. I’m fat, Joe! I’m the same weight I was when I was five months’ pregnant except that I’m not pregnant anymore.”
“You’re not fat. You’re curvy.”
“Oh please.” He strokes my hair. I flick him off. “Careful! My hair is falling out! Have you not seen it in the drain? The tufts that are left have gone curly. Straight shiny hair for thirty years then, baby! Bingo! Frizz! I look like a lost member of Led Zeppelin. And . . . and . . . my right arm is more developed than my left on account of picking up Evie all the time. My bum has dropped five inches since I stopped going to my classes. I’ve got a fold of flab that won’t shift on my belly. I’ve aged about five years in as many months. My breasts are way beyond the help of a push-up bra . . . not that I would ever have cause to wear one now anyhow.” I refuel with a gulp of air. “My feet have spread like a barefoot African runner’s because I’ve worn nothing more constricting than flip-flops or trainers for a year. I’m still wearing my Hennes maternity T-shirts because they only get covered in sick so what’s the point of not! I’m wearing big pants because they’re comfortable. I dance like my
mother
. . . .”
“Whoa! Amy, calm down.” His hands brake my shoulders. “What do you mean you dance like your mother? You don’t go dancing.”
“Funnily enough I rarely rumba around the nappy mat.”
“You can if you like. I’d still fancy you.”
Fancy me? Sure. “Then . . . then . . . why?” The words catch. I can’t actually say it, too humiliating.
Joe sits next to me. The bed dips. He traces a big red finger across the uncertainty of my jawline.
“Listen.”
His hand, large as a dinner plate, is on the small of my back, warm where it aches. “We need to inject a bit of romance back into our relationship. Part of the problem is sleep. We’re both so tired, I know I am, and it becomes harder to find time or the—” He stops short.
“Inclination?”
“That’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say energy. It’s hard to find the energy. And it’s hard to feel romantic when surrounded by nappy bags.”
“But even when I was pregnant, it . . .” I search his face for a flicker of something, like the eye fall or nose stroke of guilt. Nothing.
“Okay, I found it freaky.” He raises his hand in glib resignation. “Like my dick was tapping the baby’s cranium.” Well, I have breasts! I have lips! “I did buy you that underwear,” he says, as if that should keep me going for months. “And it’s not an uncommon situation, you know. I was talking to Kate and she said that . . .”
“It’s none of her business.” Mention of Kate at this juncture grates disproportionately, like a strand of hair trapped in a toothbrush. What the hell would Kate know about postpartum passion?
“Come on, it’s only Kate I was talking to and
not
about all the intimate details, don’t worry. She’s on your side anyway. . . .” He trails off, on slightly shaky ground.
“I wasn’t aware that we needed Kofi Annan to negotiate this one.”
“Amy, please don’t go into one of your moods.”
Kate is an old friend, partly responsible for this mess because she introduced me and Joe years ago, my final week at Bristol University. Joe was her ex-fling, actually, which wasn’t much of a recommendation. I don’t rate her taste in men. When we first met, Joe was a graphics student wearing complicated glasses and an exhilarated caught-out look, like you’d walked in on him masturbating. He asked me out but I declined, being totally stuck on a handsome drama postgrad with commitment issues and an obsession with Diane Keaton. Nothing happened until years later (by which time he’d lost the glasses and that look) at one of Kate’s soirees held at the Notting Hill mews house she shared with Pete, an overbearing merchant banker whom she eventually marched down the aisle.
We all had a good time together, in what seemed like an endless youth. Many weekends, after a big night out, Joe and I would stay in Kate and Pete’s spare room with the white waffle linen, making love, giggling, trying to stifle our rude orgasmic grunts, slightly smug that we were obviously having the best sex in the house. Kate and I would swap bags and heels and jewelry. We’d abuse our livers in the local bars, playing at being Notting Hill hipsters. But in truth we were outsiders who didn’t quite have the style—I couldn’t understand why the locals with so much money wanted to look so scruffy—or the connections. Kate was a suburban girl at heart who’d lucked out with a rich husband. Pete had seen the film
Notting Hill,
found the property prices reassuringly expensive, and got a little rush from saying where he lived when someone asked at work. Sadly, after the Berkshire wedding—held at Pete’s parents’ vast damask pelmet of a house—Kate and Pete moved to the country. Kate wasn’t keen, but Pete decided that he wanted his children to grow up somewhere “real,” away from the fashionable urbanity that had attracted him to Notting Hill in the first place. Two years later, the children still haven’t arrived. The nurseries have been redecorated twice.
Joe leans back onto the bed, arms crossed beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. “Shall we take Evie round to your mum’s and spend the afternoon in bed scoffing crumpets?”
I can’t help but smile. This is the kind of thing we used to do. Crumbs stuck to sweaty flesh. Fingers slick with butter. “Mum’s not there. She’s visiting Aunt Lou.”
“Oh well.” Is that relief in his voice? He doesn’t come up with an alternative, but leaves the bedroom. “I’m off to the gym, then.”
I’m about to ask why it never occurs to him that I can’t just drop everything and go to the gym when I hear the front door bang and he’s gone. The afternoon begins to yawn ahead. There is a limit to the number of times I can trot around a park on my own, pointing out Mr. Pigeon to a sleeping baby. Sometimes my days are just about the journeys, the getting from A to B, the rhythmical roll of the pram. That kills time nicely, breaks up the formlessness of my day. Take more than two journeys, and then, oddly, despite how little I seem to achieve, I’m busy.
Okay, Primark. A vast cut-price no-frills mall of a shop. Being a fifteen-minute weave through the back streets of Kilburn, past the tightly packed Victorian houses filled with families who can’t afford the more upmarket adjacent Queen’s Park area, it’s a journey. Evie sleeps. I people-watch pedestrian traffic as the white wannabe Queen’s Park thirtysomethings give way to the multicultural crush of the Kilburn High Road and its endless belch of discount shops and traffic. I used to prefer Bond Street or Brompton Cross, with their posh intimate boutiques and attentive shop assistants. But now I find them a bit intimidating, too intense. I never know when Evie is going to go into atomic meltdown mode. And I’m not really dressed for it these days: I get followed by security guards.
No, oddly, the brutal neon cut-price bustle of Primark appeals. Evie likes the lights. And everything is astonishingly cheap. I can buy new tracksuit bottoms—my need for anything more formal these days is limited—for under a fiver. Hard to believe I am the same woman who spent £367 on a pair of Jimmy Choos for the wedding of a friend I was once in love with.
IT’S MOSTLY WOMEN IN HERE. MANY ARE MUSLIM, MOVING
slowly in their great black tents, flashing trainer-clad feet, eyes averted. Then there are the council mothers, shrill, pale, trailing children wearing gold jewelry. And, increasingly, there are the fashion-savvy twentysomethings, foraging for a must-have at a boastfully low price because they once read “Primark is the new Prada” in a newspaper and don’t know any better. And then, of course, there are those like me, stripped of signatures of class by the raw shock of motherhood. We look similar, hair with three-inch roots pulled back into scruffy ponytails, no makeup, not slim, badly mismatched clothes because the baby was crying when we were getting ready and we’re only going to Primark after all.
Fifty percent off. Buy two, get one free. G-strings. Beach towels. Vest tops. Flip-flops. High summer gear in the fresh slap of spring. I fish arbitrary things I don’t need out of bargain bins: a new pair of slippers, a cheap canvas bag that I persuade myself resembles a Chloe one (three seasons ago, of course, last reference point), a new wash bag.
The checkout queue snakes toward a line of tills like an airport check-in. An Operation Desert Storm of prams, poised to battle to the first available till. By this stage, the thrill of the cheapness has palled and everyone wants to get the hell out. The queue takes forever. (You pay with your time at these places.) My turn. The shop assistant, an overweight lady in her forties with a tidal mark of orange foundation around her jaw, is brisk, surly. Well, I suppose you would be. She studies my signature scrawl, unsure if it matches up with my card. My signature varies according to my sleep quota, and last night I got five hours, interrupted twice. “It’s dodgy,” orange jaw is thinking. But she can’t be bothered with the hassle of querying it. She passes me the bag.
“Next!”
Something sparkles at the corner of my vision. Glinting buckles, a creamy tan leather handbag saddled to the shoulder of a woman so out of place I can’t believe I didn’t notice her before. Blond spaghetti-straight hair. A caramel trench coat, tied around a neat waist. She looks to the side. Little upturned nose. Tan. Even in this cadaver lighting her skin glows. I pan down from highlights to . . . heels. She is wearing heels!
The woman puts an armful of white T-shirts down by the till. Her hand stretches back and clasps her pram. French-manicured fingernails on the handle. I can’t see inside. The surly shopkeeper shoves the T-shirts into a plastic bag. Her eyes warily flick from the bag to the lady, lady to bag. The battalions in the queue study her, too, suspicion and disapproval twitching at the corners of their lips. Who is this glossy interloper making them feel worse about themselves?
“Thank you.” Irish? The lady types a number into the credit card machine, takes her bag, bends down, and slides it into the basket of her shiny pram. No roots.
Click click click
go the heels. Whisper of perfume. And she is gone.
Something niggles, a constricting and irritating niggle, like a too-tight waistband.
She
is the mother I thought I would be but am not. If things had been different I’d be coping better, more like her. Or would Joe rather I was invisible, grateful? Because that’s what I’ve become. When I saw him in the park with that woman, self-esteem rushed out of me like air from an untied balloon at a toddler’s party. I’ve been circling to the ground ever since.
REALITY CHECK: REASONS I AM NOT WOMAN IN PRIMARK
. Or Alice.
1. Comedy mustache eyebrows.
2. Skin of forty-year-old. Dehydrated. Sucked dry by Evie.
3. Whites of eyes, pink. No makeup, no point.
4. Head, multisplit ends like forks of lightning.“Honey blond” now green. Roots.
5. On legs, new wiry pubelike things growing on backs of thighs. Measured: 1.7 cm.
6. Arms. Unsightly underhang. Need to wave good-bye to.
7. Belly. Stretch marks. Curdled custard texture. Crooked smile scar. Etc., etc.
8. Clothes. Maternity. Last fashionable thing bought one and a half years ago and now too small.
9. Pubic hair. Still not recovered from nail scissor attack two weeks ago.
10. Breasts. Pencil test: failed. My boob grips the pencil tight beneath its sag.
“MUM? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
”
“Not a very nice welcome.”
Mum sits proprietarily on my sofa. She’s rearranged the cushions to suit today’s ailment, “a twinge in the lower vertebra,” and rests her rubber-soled “casual” shoes on my coffee table. She buys these neat, elasticized shoes in bulk from the back page of newspaper magazines, the ones advertised by a woman of a certain age golfing.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean that, just wasn’t expecting you. I thought you were at Lou’s today.”
“No. She got an emergency appointment at the chiropractor. Bunions playing up again. Anyway, do
I
need to book an appointment to see my daughter?”
Hardly. Since Evie was born Mum has forsaken knocking. Why bother when she has a spare key and a sweet little granddaughter waiting inside? Any notion of privacy has become redundant. There’s nothing Mum hasn’t seen. She had a good look at my cervical dilation and shoved my bruised nipple indignantly into Evie’s newborn mouth for the first suck. Life has come full circle. After years of my going out and not phoning enough and missing family get-togethers in favor of trysts with unsuitable young men, she is now back on firm ground: She’s needed. I’m her little girl again, in desperate need of firm guidance.