The Single Mum's Wish List

by Charlene Allcott

  Undeterred83: :) No, it’s Nathan but my friends and family sometimes call me George, because I was always asking questions when I was a kid.

  George?! Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I go on the date with Tom because I know now that there may be some truth in the concept of one true love and I will definitely need a dummy date before I meet mine, and also because there’s still a chance I’m certifiable and crazy people don’t go on dates.

  I sneak into Moses’s room to kiss him goodnight before going. He’s still awake and pulls the covers over his face when I come in. I pull them down and tuck them around his body. ‘It’s not playtime, silly,’ I whisper. He reaches out and I hold his hand. I stand in silence and after a minute I can feel his grip relax. I let his arm fall and watch him as he loses the battle to keep his eyes open.

  As I leave, a floorboard creaks and Moses stirs and says, ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Shhhh,’ I say. ‘Mummy will be back soon.’

  I try to get out of the house without my mum seeing me. I told her I was going to yoga with Leanne. I shout goodbye from the hallway but just before I can get out she calls my name. ‘What time do you think you’ll be back?’ she says.

  ‘Not late,’ I say quickly. ‘We might go for a drink afterwards.’ I can feel her behind me and turn my head to say bye as I open the door.

  ‘You’re wearing heels to yoga?’

  ‘You don’t wear shoes, Mum, and like I said we might get a drink afterwards.’

  Mum takes the door from me. ‘Be careful,’ she says.

  ‘Yep, promise,’ I say, as I walk away.

  Tom picks Côte; this is good. Tom arrives wearing burgundy cords; this is bad. Tom pulls out my chair (despite my feminist protestations); this is good. Tom clicks his fingers at the waiter; this is very, very bad. I decide it’s unfair to compile a catalogue of Tom’s flaws before the first course and so channel my energy towards the story he has been telling me since we got settled. It’s something about how you can work out how many people can fit on a boat by multiplying its length by its width, so I know that now.

  Tom orders us both steaks, insisting they’re divine. I don’t really like eating steak – it feels like cardio – but I decide that I should save our first disagreement for dessert at least. I ask Tom how he knows James and he tells me that they both attend the same monthly meeting about sanitation and I think, so you don’t really know him, and then I start to panic about how this date came to pass. Did James send out some sort of company-wide memo imploring anyone with a little time on their hands to take out his wife’s crazy, loser friend?

  ‘What do you do?’ asks Tom, which is of course the question that everyone hates. What the hell does it even mean? The real answer is almost always, ‘Barrel through life attempting to function as a semi-responsible human being and read the Mail Online more than I should.’ The reason the question is so disconcerting is because it appears so innocent, but in reality it’s quite aggressive. It’s the small talk equivalent of folding your arms, leaning back and saying, ‘Impress me.’

  ‘I work in finance,’ I say.

  ‘Ah, that’s cool,’ says Tom. ‘My uncle works in finance. Where do you work?’

  ‘In Hove,’ I say as I pick up the drinks menu. ‘Another glass of wine?’

  ‘Yes, but who do you work for?’ asks Tom. I drain my glass.

  ‘It’s a small company, you wouldn’t know them. We’re basically the client support team.’

  ‘So that means you do what?’ asks Tom. What is this, a police interrogation?

  ‘I answer the phone,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Tom.

  ‘Customers call and I take those calls,’ I say.

  ‘Right, so it’s like …’

  ‘A call centre. It’s a call centre.’

  Tom clears his throat. ‘That must be … interesting.’

  The waiter arrives with our steaks. ‘Well done?’ he asks.

  ‘Here,’ says Tom.

  The waiter places the meal in front of him before putting the other plate down in front of me. ‘More wine?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  As the waiter leaves Tom says pointlessly, ‘Well, this looks well done.’

  We eat our food in uncomfortable silence. After a few minutes Tom asks me how my steak tastes. It tastes like dead cow but I make some agreeable noises.

  ‘Yeah, it’s great here,’ says Tom. ‘My ex discovered it.’ I want to tell him Côte is a chain, that his ex discovered Google, but he looks so pleased that I just nod. ‘Yeah, she loved eating out. One of these girls that always wants to go places. To be honest it was exhausting. After a hard day’s work the last thing you want to do is go dining … Sorry.’

  I’m not sure what he’s apologizing for – for bringing up his ex, for revealing himself to be a rubbish partner or for being terminally boring.

  ‘Why did you break up?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think maybe we stopped trying.’

  I catch his eye and we share a smile, one that says, we may hail from different planets but some things remain the same. I think this moment is what resuscitates the date – no longer restricted by the pressure to present a flawless facade, we commiserate about our overbearing mothers and swap stories about the not-so-hilarious-at-the-time bullying we endured at school. There’s one uncomfortable moment when Tom discloses that he voted UKIP but he takes great pains to make clear that it was a protest vote. I think it helps that our waiter keeps the booze coming, perhaps sensing with his professional intuition that these two very out of practice thirty-somethings would need a helping hand.

  I insist we split the bill since Tom didn’t really ask me out and he tells me that that sounds ‘very reasonable’. As he walks me to the bus stop he says, ‘I would ask you to come for another drink but I think we’ve had enough.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ I say, but he doesn’t ask again.

  ‘I’m here,’ I say at my stop.

  ‘OK. I’m just round the corner so I’m going to walk back.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. He kisses me then and it’s surprisingly nice. I could stand there for hours snogging under the gaze of all the passengers making their way home on the 21A.

  When I get home I feel really positive for the first time in weeks, if not years. Perhaps I should not concern myself with a hypothetical future with a guy from the internet I have yet to lay eyes on, when I could be enjoying the here and now with a man who wants to kiss me goodnight in the moonlight. I can’t help it; as I brush my teeth I imagine Tom doing the same beside me.

  I’m unsurprised to find a text message from him as I climb into bed. But when I open it, it reads, ‘THANKS FOR TONIGHT BUT I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN. I’M SURE YOU ENJOY YOUR WORK BUT I THINK I NEED SOMEONE WITH MORE AMBITION.’

  He works with James and I don’t want to offend him, so I think I’m pretty restrained when I reply, ‘YOU PRICK.’

  One thing is certain: before I meet George, I need a new job.

  8

  SOFT PLAY CENTRES sum up parenthood perfectly – loud, chaotic, a little bit musty and yet for some reason they feel safe. I appreciate its familiarity and the way I blend in there. It’s more than a week since the date with Tom but the shame still feels fresh. Leanne, Lucas, Moses and I take up a spot in the corner of the ball pool. The boys entertain each other by throwing the brightly coloured plastic balls at each other’s heads, and Leanne tries to help me make sense of my life as we work our way through the bag of Revels she has brought for us to share.

  ‘Why were you seeing a therapist?’ asks Leanne, before waiting for a moment when Lucas is distracted to slip another chocolate in her mouth and return the packet to its hiding place underneath a yellow ball.

  ‘Do you think it’s weird?’ I ask in return.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Leanne. ‘You see a doctor for your body and a therapist for your mind.’

  ‘Have you been in therap
y?’ I ask. I watch Leanne watching our children and reconsider what I know about the world. Is it possible that my beautiful friend, with her picture-perfect life, has been struggling too?

  ‘God, no,’ she says. ‘Like I said, I don’t have anything against it but I tend to just get on with things.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, and then I shove a handful of Revels in my mouth.

  ‘We’re all different, hun,’ says Leanne. ‘Seriously, no judgement. I guess I just wondered why you thought you couldn’t come to me.’ I finish my mouthful and release all the breath in my body.

  ‘Because there wasn’t anything I could come to you with really, nothing I could properly articulate.’ I think about the nights when I couldn’t sleep, my mind numb. I longed for tears or anger or something that could direct my sense of unease. ‘I had everything I’d ever wanted but I was still so unhappy and I didn’t even know how to be happy.’

  ‘Did you talk to Alexander about it?’ says Leanne. I know, for her, it would be this easy, that she and James would just speak about things, make time to work through it; have urgent, hushed conversations late at night as their children were sleeping. I try not to envy her for this.

  ‘I tried but I just got …’ I sweep my palm in front of my face to indicate the invisible wall that Alexander had created between us. ‘He didn’t get it and he got frustrated with me. It was him who suggested counselling.’ Leanne looks at me carefully, as if I am something fragile and the wrong words might break me.

  ‘Did it help?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Look at my life now.’ I wink at Leanne to make clear that I understand how crappy my circumstances are; if I didn’t then I would really need to be in therapy.

  ‘I know it probably all feels a bit of a mess right now. That’s why you need to take control,’ Leanne says. ‘Don’t let him make you feel like your life is over, he’s taken enough.’

  I start to bury my legs under the balls. ‘It’s not even about him,’ I say. ‘It’s about me. I’ve forgotten who I am.’

  Leanne turns to me sharply. ‘It is about him. You can’t let him get away with this. Why is he still living in the flat? He’s probably shacked up there with some bimbo. I’m sorry to say it but that’s what they’re like.’

  I asked Alexander about Poppy and he told me she was there to help him organize his end of year files. He told me he couldn’t even think about another relationship yet.

  ‘His office is there,’ I say.

  ‘You’re still accommodating him!’ Leanne snaps. ‘He has your cat, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Why are you angry with me?’ I snipe back.

  ‘I’m not,’ says Leanne. ‘I’m angry for you. You need to make him step up to the plate.’ I’m unsurprised by Leanne’s attitude; she has a zero-tolerance stance towards exes in general. Her own former lovers are not even permitted to have names – they are known as the tall one, the stupid one and the one with no job.

  ‘He’s called me a couple of times, to make arrangements for Moses. We decided it’s probably best we don’t see each other for a while.’ This is not strictly true. Alexander spoke; Alexander decided. His voice, at the time, had this stoic quality that I resented deeply. As if speaking to me was a heroic act. Moses crawls over to me and lies on his back before pushing his feet towards my face.

  ‘Stinky,’ I say, and he giggles. ‘He’s agreed to take Moses every other weekend.’

  ‘How good of him,’ Leanne says.

  ‘And he’s still paying for nursery,’ I add in a rush. For some reason I feel the need to defend him; some habits are hard to break, I guess.

  ‘Have you thought about a solicitor?’ asks Leanne. Moses rolls towards Lucas, who is arguing over ownership of a lost sock with a vengeful-looking little girl. I lie down in the balls; they feel cool against my head.

  ‘Can’t. Too scary.’

  Leanne grabs my hand and pulls me back up to sitting. ‘Living with your mother for ever is far, far scarier.’ I feel my face contort in horror. ‘Right?!’ says Leanne. ‘Get the ball rolling. As soon as you take action you’ll feel really empowered.’

  ‘You sound like Tashi,’ I say.

  ‘Another therapist?’ asks Leanne.

  ‘No, this girl at work. She’s trying to convince me to go on a retreat with her. You know, learning how to breathe and whatnot. She’s always going on about empowerment.’

  ‘She’s right,’ says Leanne. She claps her hands together several times and in response Lucas stops trying to drown Moses in the sea of plastic. ‘I think it’s a great idea to get some headspace. You need to get a serious plan together. You remember when I moved from audit to tax?’ I don’t want to lie so I keep my face very still. ‘I had a week in Greece and it completely cleared my head. Do you want the details for my career coach?’

  ‘What exactly did she do?’ I ask. I imagine someone screaming at me as I type up covering letters.

  Leanne shrugs. ‘She helped me to identify my strengths and create a two-year plan.’

  ‘Did you achieve it?’ I ask. Leanne raises her right eyebrow and I laugh. ‘OK, of course you did.’ I notice Moses has a trail of snot hanging from his nose. I beckon to him but he’s too busy trying to bend over and look through his legs. ‘So, you think that could work for me?’

  Leanne pulls a face I can’t interpret.

  ‘What? You don’t think I can do it?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ says Leanne. ‘I know you can. I got an orange-flavoured Revel – you know I hate them.’

  I laugh again; it feels good. ‘Why do you even buy Revels when you don’t like half the flavours?’

  Leanne wrinkles her nose as she considers this. ‘I’m a realist. Life is like a bag of Revels: you have to put up with the orange ones because it makes it so much better when you get a nutty one.’ I try and think of my marriage as one big orange-flavoured piece of confectionery. It helps. Leanne slips another chocolate in her mouth. ‘See, nutty,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry,’ she continues. Her gaze is lowered and she is speaking so softly, for a moment I am not sure she is addressing me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, with more conviction, as if the first time she said it was a rehearsal. ‘I shouldn’t have set you up on that date.’ She grabs my hand. ‘You need to be working on you. I meant it when I said you were brave. You’ve done the hard part – now you’ll make your life amazing, without him, without any man.’

  I squeeze her hand and then pull my own away. I was going to tell her about George – I’ve already felt my phone vibrate twice in my pocket and I am desperate to see if it’s him reaching out – but she looks so proud of me, so sure I can make it alone, that I hold back. I sort of want to believe her too. It’s not that I don’t think a single woman can have a happy existence; I’m just not sure that happy woman would be me.

  ‘I’m gonna nip to the loo,’ I say. I make my way out of the pit, carefully avoiding the limbs of small children, and then I hurry to the toilet. I want to savour the moment, so I don’t look at my phone until I’m seated. The messages are from Greg asking me if I want to join the work Christmas party planning committee.

  ‘IT’S GONNA BE EPIC’, he’s texted in a follow-up to the question. I relax my body, and pee and anticipation drain out of me.

  ‘THE PARTY OR THE COMMITTEE?’ I reply.

  Greg immediately shoots back, ‘HAR DE HAR.’

  The thought of Christmas is like receiving a kick when I’m already in the foetal position, defeated by blows. I’m not a fan of the holiday as it is – the jolliness is overwhelming – but to help give Moses and Alexander a proper family Christmas, I could pretend. There would be no more pretending now; Moses will never have a real Christmas again.

  Back at the pit the boys have started piling balls on to Leanne and she is doing a valiant job of pretending to enjoy it. I wade over and join in with their endeavour.

  ‘No! Not you as well!’ Leanne shouts. The boys squeal with delight.

  ‘OK, truce,’ I say. I grab Luca
s, who has two balls poised above his head. ‘Let’s calm down and go for a walk.’ We gather up our children and strap them into their pushchairs. They’re too tired to put up a decent fight and within a few minutes of strolling along the seafront the two are asleep. Leanne and I keep walking and when we reach the pier I suggest we get some soft scoop. Even though it’s October and chilly, it’s bright and if you look towards it you can feel the sun on your face; so we park the children next to a couple of deckchairs and look out to the water as we slowly work through our ice creams. Leanne bites the end off her cone and sucks the last of the ice cream out, just as she did when we were kids.

  ‘Do these taste better than I remember?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘I think they do.’

  9

  LEANNE SENDS ME the details of her career coach. Her glossy website outlines the achievements of her former clients in intimidating detail. In a video introducing herself, Grace Fermin explains how she will help me to ‘rise through the ranks of my current career’. Rising through the ranks of my current career would mean becoming Bob; I don’t know what I want but I know I don’t want that. Grace also says a lot about investing in yourself, which I understand as code for spending money that I don’t have. I’m not willing to give up, though; I know Leanne believes in me and Moses needs me and that knowledge gives me enough motivation to scour the internet for careers advice deep into the night. Just before my brain bails out on my enthusiasm, I come across an ad that reads, ‘Are you stuck? Are you unmotivated? Worried you’ll never achieve the life of your dreams? We can help.’ I think yes, yes and resoundingly yes and so I use the online booking system to claim an appointment for the next morning.

  The Live the Life You Love business mentor scheme’s office is located above a hot yoga studio in the centre of town. I climb the stairs, squeezing past a couple of dozen Lycra-clad yogis on their way out of class; I can’t quite believe that so many people would pay to start their week that way. At the top I reach a tiny stairwell/waiting room with a grey polypropylene chair and a very artificial-looking plant. I sit and look for a mint in my bag. Before I locate one, a short woman with a generous bosom opens the door. She has a very sharp, expensive-looking bob, underneath which is a face so round it verges on spherical. She introduces herself as Patricia.