Time Out

by Emma Murray

  ‘It’s just a phase,’ I have explained to him over and over.

  ‘Phase, my bollocks,’ he replies angrily. ‘It’s been going on for two years! If we were living in the US, she’d be on prescription drugs and have her own therapist.’

  ‘So, do you think I should the pitch for the book?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ he says in a nonchalant way that makes me want to start throwing things.

  ‘Have you not been listening to me? It’s a fucking disastrous topic – motherhood, for fuck’s sake!’ I hiss, the day’s stress accumulating so now I’m ready to explode.

  ‘Don’t swear in front of Anna!’ David says in his most self-righteous tone. This only fans the flames as, out of the pair of us, he is definitely the more sweary.

  ‘Fuck off, David, you hypocrite. Anyway, she’s on the iPad – she can’t even hear us!’ I say.

  As if on cue, Anna looks up with big sparkly eyes and says, ‘Fuck!’

  David and I look at each other, and with well-practised neutral expressions, reply, ‘That’s a grown-up word, Anna.’

  Anna stares at us with utter contempt, and returns to her essential viewing of two small Canadian girls re-enacting the story of Frozen with three tubs of slime and a shopping trolley with eyes.

  ‘Anyway, you were saying about the pitch…’ David says, his voice muffled as he bends over to rearrange the cutlery in the dishwasher. Flash!

  As patiently as I can, I explain to my husband why my experiences of being a mother are not something I want to share with the world.

  ‘But you’ve been a mother for four years. You must have something to say!’ David answers, carefully washing his hands in the kitchen sink with half the hand wash, before plucking the yellow towel from its place on a hook above the sink for drying off his hands.

  Every towel is colour-coded in our house according to its function. Green is for placing vegetables on after they have been washed (and, for the record, I had never washed a vegetable in my life before I met David); white is for drying the surfaces; blue is for mopping up the odd spill on the floor; and yellow is for drying our hands after we wash them in the kitchen sink. Don’t get me started on what goes on inside the cupboards. It’s like Sleeping with the Enemy on speed.

  ‘Yes, I am a mother in the technical sense, but I’m shite at it,’ I say through gritted teeth, so Anna doesn’t hear. ‘How can I write about something that I’m no good at? I would be like a travel writer who is afraid of public transport, or a mountain climber with a fear of heights, or a prostitute who has taken a vow of celibacy.’

  But what I really mean is that I’m afraid – absolutely fucking terrified – to reveal how hard I find being a mother; how every day of my life is an enormous test in patience, love and restraint, and how ashamed and guilty I feel when I fail that test over and over again.

  David crosses to the oven, straightens the oven gloves, which are dangling at a slight angle, and seemingly satisfied that order has been at last restored, turns back and looks at me thoughtfully.

  ‘How much does it pay?’ he asks.

  I tell him and his eyes light up.

  ‘But this isn’t about the money!’ I say, pleadingly.

  ‘Listen, Saoirse, I know this isn’t the book you thought would have your name on, but sometimes it has to be about the money,’ he says.

  I know he is right. We need the money. With salaries slashed and lay-offs sweeping through David’s company, and my rainy-day savings all but gone, I know we need the extra cash.

  To top it all off, our ‘compact’ three-bedroom house is located in what estate agents call ‘a black hole’ when it comes to schools. This means that getting Anna into a decent local primary school is nigh on impossible, leaving us to face the horror of sending her to the ‘special measures’ school down the road – the one beside the chippy, where all the parents light up their joints under the ‘No smoking’ sign in the playground – or, even worse, the prospect of private-school fees.

  Anna scuppers any chance of further conversation with a shriek of panic. ‘No Wi-Fi!’ she screams over and over, and then, ‘Dadd-eeee!!!’ With a superhuman leap, David crosses the kitchen and takes the iPad off her to remedy the situation as fast as he can, clearly grateful that Anna actually wants him for something. Within seconds, Wi-Fi has been restored and all is right with the world (‘You can go now, Daddy’). Clearly forgetting what we have just been discussing, David announces that his mother has been in touch and wants us to visit this weekend.

  Irritated by the dismissal, I say, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, do we have to?’

  And he says, annoyed, ‘Yes, Saoirse, she hasn’t seen Anna in weeks, and we should visit her. She’s my mother.’

  And with every fibre of my being, I bite back my knee-jerk response, which would have been, ‘Well, she’s not your real mother.’ Instead, I just take a deep breath and look away.

  I don’t hate many people – for long periods, anyway – but Rose is one of those people that I struggle to relate to on any level. While David admits to not having a close relationship with his adoptive mother, he still feels duty-bound to visit her, especially since his father died a few years ago. Rose, now in her mid-seventies, is still in annoyingly good health.

  So once a month we all pile into our clapped-out Ford Focus and drive the two hours to Rose’s damp, cream pebble-dashed semi in Oxfordshire to go through the charade of pretending we all like each other.

  I watch this little charade play out every few weeks; the polite greeting at the door, the impatient smile thrown at Anna whenever she has the nerve to speak or, God forbid, cry or scream; the endless offers of cups of tea; and finally, after an excruciating two hours, the curt farewell, the door closing firmly behind us before our goodbyes have faded from our lips.

  After I begrudgingly agree to visit my mother-in-law, a tense silence follows, only to be broken by David complaining about the amount of mouldy fruit in the fridge. Flash! Being around him is getting harder and harder. It never used to be this way. In fact, it’s hard to believe we have been together six years. It’s becoming more difficult to reconcile the man I first met with the one he has now become.

  Things were different before Anna came along. We were different. In fact, I am struggling to remember how we fell in love in the first place.

  5

  London, Six Years Ago

  I first met David in my local curry house, which handily happened to be right underneath the East London flat I was living in. It was a cold, rainy night, and I was dressed only in my favourite crimson fleecy pyjamas. I had popped downstairs to Vinda-YOU for my usual Friday-night curry and this time I had decided to stay and eat in its lovely velvetiness and soft lighting, rather than getting a takeaway. My achingly trendy flatmate, Joss, had a ‘friend’ round, and the creaky bed springs and over-exaggerated moans (him) were getting to me.

  I threw a long coat over my pyjamas, grabbed my laptop and popped downstairs for some food and inspiration.

  A year before, I had broken up with my boyfriend, Hugo, the man I thought I would marry. Hugo was a sparkly blue-eyed Cambridge graduate who came from the type of family who wore wellies and tweed caps, and holidayed in the Lake District. After a year of being together, I was 80 per cent sure Hugo was ‘the one’, and as I’d never been 80 per cent sure about anything I felt those odds were good enough.

  When I told Hugo I was going to leave my fancy banking job to pursue my dream of being a writer, he was horrified and spent weeks trying dissuade me. After all, we were the ‘power couple’ that were ‘going places’. I tried to listen, but while I had thought my future was with Hugo, I couldn’t see my future without me as a writer.

  After I left Hugo and chucked in my lucrative job, I gathered up all my savings, answered an ad on Gumtree and moved into a tiny two-bedroom flat above a curry house, Vinda-YOU, in East London.

  My new flatmate, Joss, was the first hipster I had ever met. Young and trendy, she wore a uniform of legging
s or skinny jeans, with long-sleeved tops underneath T-shirts emblazoned with clever messages that I didn’t understand. On her feet she wore a range of battered ankle boots. Her dyed-red hair was perpetually piled on top of her head and sometimes she wore thick-rimmed glasses to offset the look. To my eyes, she was fantastically dressed but utterly unemployable, so I was surprised to hear that she worked for a government research centre, in the missing persons department.

  As she was too cool to hang out with the likes of middle-aged me, save for the odd Monday night when we both crashed out in front of the TV, our paths rarely crossed. It was the perfect arrangement, apart from the sagging couches, creaky beds and the perpetual smell of curry.

  So, there I was, in my mid-thirties and single, living in a dingy cheap-as-chips flat, sharing with a ‘young person’. As for my love life, I wasn’t going to give it another thought. Besides, the Hugo episode had taught me that 80 per cent of being ‘the one’ wasn’t enough, and perhaps one day I should try to find that extra 20 per cent. Little did I know that I was about to meet the man who would fast become the love of my life, my 100 per cent.

  When I pushed open the heavy glass door of Vinda-YOU, I was relieved to see only one other customer there: a man sitting by himself. He looked up briefly as I walked in and then went back to his poppadoms. Good. I could do without the distraction of loud conversations. I deliberately sat down at a table for two in the far corner of the room, just in case this other customer started yabbering on his phone.

  Vijay, the manager, came by with his notepad and pen, greeted me by name and asked me if I wanted ‘the usual’. I made a mental note to stop coming here so often – he’d be sending me a Christmas card next.

  While I was waiting for my food, I started to type, content to feel the smooth keys under my fingertips. And just as I was getting into the flow, to my intense irritation I was interrupted.

  ‘Is this seat taken?’

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  I looked up to find the same man – the other (and only) customer – standing by the chair opposite me.

  So annoyed was I by the interruption that I really didn’t take him in. Instead I just glared at him in response, hoping he would take the hint and piss off. But he just kept standing there, calmly waiting. I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to reply in some way.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m really busy,’ I said, and waved my hand violently at the laptop screen just to reinforce how busy I was. He remained unfazed.

  ‘I see that,’ he said. ‘But I make it my business to eat with complete strangers in restaurants, and it would be disappointing if you are the first one to turn me away.’

  I laughed. I don’t know why. I think it was the way he said it: as if he was making the most reasonable and logical request and I was the one who was being the stick-in-the-mud. Besides, when I looked at him more closely, I saw he had nice brown eyes, neatly cut dark brown hair, and dimples. I’m a sucker for dimples. Hugo was blond with no dimples. So I thought, why not? I gave in, and agreed he could join me for dinner. His name was David Addington and he was intense. Looking back, I would say that he wrenched rather than swept me off my feet. Our first conversation wasn’t so much small talk between strangers as an interrogation. Every time I answered a question I felt like he was ticking off some sort of mental wife-suitability list in his head. He quizzed me on my age, my job, my living situation, boyfriends/husbands/ex-husbands, kids, religion, and family background. At one point I wondered if he was considering me as a candidate for surrogacy. But there was something sexy about this first exchange – it had been a long time since someone took such an interest in me – and I found myself responding to him, almost daring him to see how intimate our conversation would become.

  Then it was my turn, and with every answer he gave, I ticked off a mental list of my own. Age? Thirty-eight. Job? Works in technology for a social media company, i.e. not a loser – tick! Lives by himself in a house in south-west London (homeowner – tick!). Several exes but has never made it up the aisle. When I asked why, he gave me an intense look and said, ‘I have very high standards,’ which made me feel a bit wobbly.

  When the topic of kids came up (this was a bit of a deal breaker, as I did want kids, eventually), he said he would like just the one. As I hadn’t really given the number much thought, I didn’t go into this further. I remember just feeling relieved that he was open to the idea, which was ridiculous, given that this was the first time we had met. We were the same religion (this would please my mother no end – tick!), but he regarded himself as a committed atheist (this would not please my mother – I vowed to keep that one to myself) and I was a lazy Catholic.

  The family background part took some time to explain. Mine was pretty straightforward (only child, father died when I was little) but his was more complex: adopted as a baby by Derek, an engineer, and Rose, a primary school teacher, a middle-class couple living on the outskirts of Oxfordshire.

  At the time I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so drawn to him, but later on I figured that it was a mixture of charisma and fragility. He exuded charisma from every fibre of his being. Not conventionally good-looking – medium height, receding hairline, lips too-full for his angular face – his attractiveness lay in his single-mindedness. He was a man who knew what he wanted.

  We talked until the lights dimmed and the chairs were placed on the tables. When Vijay’s polite coughs turned into impatient hand gestures, we finally got the hint and left. At the bottom of the stairs to my flat, David took my number as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  After that, things moved pretty fast, mostly because we were both older and couldn’t be bothered with ‘playing the game’. David couldn’t give a toss about the ‘three-day rule’, and texted me first thing the following morning to arrange another date. I found his keenness flattering and refreshing – how nice to meet a guy who was above all the gameplay bullshit.

  From the get-go, we saw each other as often as we could.

  One of the things I loved most about David was his sheer fearlessness and impulsivity. We could be on our way to a restaurant, and he’d take my hand and lead me into some beautiful, historical building that I’d never seen before, or dance me into a salsa class that he had happened to find out about the previous day. He had a keen love of art, theatre, food and music, and during that happy period we really made the most of what London had to offer. Being a stay-at-home-and-reading-a-good-book kind of person, I found his enthusiasm opened my eyes. I had gone from being a resident to a tourist, and I loved every moment of it.

  Everything was new with David. The food – who knew I liked Korean food, and spicy sushi, or even spicy anything? – the music, the theatre… everything was fun and spontaneous, and I loved it. I used to be a korma girl and now I was a vindaloo. He was just so refreshingly passionate about everything, including my career change. I had been so used to people like Hugo telling me I was crazy to fulfil my dream as a writer that it came as a pleasant surprise when David told me how much he admired me for pursuing my ambition. Because of him, I became even more driven, determined to make a success of it.

  Another thing I liked about him was how he took care of me. I had always been fiercely independent. With Hugo, I was always the one who took charge, made dinner reservations, organised nights out and so on. But now David insisted on doing all those things instead. It was a relief for someone else to take charge for a change, for me to be at the centre of someone else’s universe.

  To my surprise, even Joss liked David, calling him ‘not too bad for a geek’, which was the ultimate compliment, coming from her. When David was over, the two of them would start all these tech conversations, which I couldn’t give a shit about, so I wasn’t really surprised when they ended up exchanging business cards on the day I finally moved out of the flat.

  Living with David was hard in the beginning. While he was kind, protective, funny, and a good chef, it turned out that he was a ne
at freak, and frankly, it was killing me. Everything I touched seemed to send him into a frenzy: the dishwasher was wrongly stacked, the dish towels were being used for the wrong function, and the groceries were not being put in the right part of the fridge.

  Following one spectacular row about the socks that had come out of the wash furled rather than unfurled, I’d had enough. I gave him two choices: to stop being so bloody anal, or to be single for the rest of his life.

  Following that episode, David started to ease up (in David terms) a little around the house. This meant that he sort of went underground when it came to the tidying. In other words, he became a stealth control freak. Instead of whingeing about the disorderly dishwasher, he rearranged it when I wasn’t around, or at least would wait until I had left the kitchen. The same went with his wardrobe, the exact alignment of the bathroom towels, and a whole host of other household items that I didn’t give a shit about.

  This arrangement suited us both: he still had the freedom to exert his control-freakishness, and I didn’t have to deal with the nagging. In return for these small allowances, I tried to make more of an effort to use the right dish towel for its specific function, unfurl the socks before washing, and of course take my shoes off in the house. But the biggest concession David made was to allow me to have my bedside table the way I wanted it –messy and cluttered. This meant I could stack up my books to toppling point, bring my work notes to bed to read, and display my box of tissues without fear of retribution.

  For a time, there was peace. Instead of spending every single moment together, we became more independent. A major foodie, David would take off on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to browse London’s trendy food markets, and I would trot down to our local café with a good book; both of us perfectly happy in our own company for those few hours.