Man of the Month Club

by Jackie Clune

  “OK,” sighed Joe.

  She leaned precariously on the vanity sink and took a deep breath.

  “There’s this boy at school and I really love him I don’t mean love love him but he really makes me laugh he does this really brilliant impression of the donkey from Shrek and he’s got dead long hair longer than Laura’s and even though he smells of mince he’s really nice but he’s not as bright as me ’cause he has to go with Mrs. O’Flynn and that’s for people what struggle. End of sentence.”

  “Who.”

  “Charlie.”

  “No, who struggle.”

  “Sorry, who struggle. I always get them mixed up.”

  And with that, she turned abruptly and rattled back down the stairs, off to embrace some fresh mini-drama.

  This was a new thing, this interest in boys, however grudging. Just a year ago, they’d both have made dramatic vomiting noises if anyone so much as suggested they’d been in the same room as a boy. They’d react with horror and revulsion at the suggestion that they even liked a boy, denying it as vehemently as any war criminal. He tried not to think about the inevitable day that they actually brought boyfriends home. Before he’d had his girls he could never understand his own father’s silent fury when his sister Enza had brought her first beau back. He’d sat steaming as they all exchanged pleasantries over Limoncello in the good room at the front of the house, and his mother had hissed at him in Italian to be nice. And Enza had been twenty-six! But now all he had to do was think about some hairy, horny young guy discovering the little brown mole on the inside of Cesca’s left bum cheek that she’d had since birth, and he knew he’d want to rip the boy’s throat out. Though he hated to admit it, he was as much a doting father as his father had been. He sat anticipating the next onslaught—where one had been, the other also had to mark her scent. It was the way of twins. He counted quietly to himself.

  “One, two, three, four . . .”

  Thump thump thump up the stairs came the heavier tread of Laura, who’d inherited her mother’s roundness.

  “Dad . . .” she began as she faltered at the door, unsure of the rules if it was actually open, and not really knowing what she wanted to say anyway.

  “Yeees?” said Joe, smiling gently at her obvious panic. What to say now that she was here?

  “You know my sister?”

  “Er, yes, I think I know who you mean.”

  “Well, she keeps on singing this song and it’s really annoying me ’cause I’m trying to watch The Bill.”

  “Oh, dear. Do you want me to go and beat her?”

  A giggle.

  “No, but it’s really annoying. It goes, ‘I know a song that will get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves, I know a song that will get on your nerves, all day long.’ And she sings it over and over.”

  “Just ignore her.”

  “I can’t! She just sings it louder if I ignore her!”

  “Then try a bit of reverse psychology.”

  “What?”

  Laura was so innocent, he wanted to eat her. It would never occur to her to be anything other than one hundred percent genuine. If something annoyed her, she shouted. If she hurt, she cried. If she was happy, she’d sing at the top of her voice.

  “Next time she starts singing it, turn and face her and look really interested. When she gets to the end say, ‘That’s a great song, please sing it again! It’s really relaxing!’ ”

  Laura smiled slowly, understanding the ploy. She turned and thundered back down the stairs, ready to practice her new psychological management skill.

  Joe sat and waited. Without missing a beat, Cesca started up again.

  “I know a song that will get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves, I know a song that will get on your nerves, all day long.”

  As she paused for breath, he heard Laura interject quickly.

  “That’s a great song, Cesca. Please sing it again!”

  “I know a song that will get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves—”

  “Cesca, shut up! I’m trying to watch The Bill!”

  Joe laughed out loud. Cesca would always win in a battle of wits.

  “You shouldn’t be watching The Bill anyway. And that’s on at night.”

  “It’s on video!” they shouted in chorus up the stairs.

  “Since when did you start videoing soaps?”

  “Trish taped it for us,” shouted Laura, unconcerned by the implied parental censorship.

  “And it’s not a soap, it’s a serial drama!” shouted Cesca.

  Trish. He’d always hoped that the children would be playing chess with the nanny during those long nights he was on duty. Instead, they had developed a passion for trash TV. They would become rapt in awe upon hearing the theme tune to Emmerdale Farm. They would race from the garden, where he had been instructing them on the fascinating ins and outs of photosynthesis, as soon as they heard the opening bars of EastEnders, and they would scream with excitement at the very mention of Coronation Street. He would watch them as they stood slack-jawed in front of the telly, occasionally jostling each other for the best position. And although he’d gently suggested to Trish that perhaps the children watched a bit too much TV, she had made him feel that familiar sense of guilt.

  “Yeah,” she’d said, “you’re probably right,” but she had given the clear impression that nothing was going to change. And how could he insist? He couldn’t enforce a regime of piano practice and private study if he was barely there, could he? He’d seen several of his friends struggle with the whole nanny vs. parent battle of wills, and the parents always came out the more bruised. It seemed to Joe that a whole generation of urban middle-class parents were slowly losing control over their offspring, no matter how hard they all tried to insist on organic lunch boxes and lessons in home baking; despite their best efforts at remote parenting, the nannies would always have the upper hand, because they were actually there.

  “Daaaad?” came the cry again. Forget the Guardian Weekend magazine on the toilet, his weekly attempt at a moment’s peace.

  “Yeessss?” Laura was at the door again.

  “You know Harrods?”

  “Yeeessss.” He knew what was coming.

  “Can we go there? Pleeeaaasse, Daddy, pleeeaaasse, can we?”

  Oh, Christ, thought Joe. He was so tired he could sleep for a year right there on the toilet.

  But it was Saturday, and when he wasn’t working, he always tried to take the girls out for the day. It didn’t really matter where they went, so long as it wasn’t educational. He’d long since given up on the museums—they’d fought, sighed, and groaned their way around the Natural History, the Science museum, and the V&A last year and he’d vowed to give it up as a bad job. They were far happier trawling round the Trocadero with a bag full of neon jelly sweets, gawping at foreign teenagers spraying each other’s hair pink and snogging on the escalators.

  Harrods was a new thing, too. Ever since Amber—the recent bane of his life—had gone into school with photos of her new baby brother, Laura had become gaga about all things baby. And whatever Amber had, the girls became passionate about—sparkly jeans, Girl’s World, an electronic dance mat, a baby—it was all one and the same to the girls. Laura’s bedroom had come to resemble a dwarf crèche. Miniature prams, plastic baby dolls in various states of undress, a pint-sized nappy-changing unit, and, bizarrely, a pregnant Barbie lay strewn all over the floor. Barbie’s baby was detachable, and left its mother with a celebrity-flat tummy moments after birth. If only all births were as simple, perhaps he wouldn’t be so drained and weary. As if that wasn’t bad enough, both girls had begun nagging him about having another baby. Morning, noon, and night—and especially night—they would set up a relay of badgering. When one tired, the other would pick up the baby baton and run full-pelt at his wall of resistance. They weren’t fussy about how he got hold of a baby—that was adult stuff they felt was his responsibility as a grown-up to sort
out—just so long as he got one. As if babies just fall out of the sky! Laura had even begged him to steal one from work. He knew it had been a mistake to take them into the maternity ward one day, an error of judgment second only to telling them about that foundling a few weeks ago. (That had been a strange day. He’d never actually been through that procedure before, receiving an abandoned baby. He wondered what had become of the child. In good care, he hoped. And what of the woman? The guy she was with—husband or just boyfriend? She’d been pretty shaken, but he’d seen something very attractive in her attempted nonchalance. He loved girls who toughed it out but were secretly mushy inside. . . .) He’d gone home and told the girls all about it, and they were so moved (Laura even forgot to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) that they’d written maudlin poems for the anonymous child and stuck them on the fridge door. Francesca, perhaps embarrassed by a rare outburst of feeling, had distanced herself with a witty title (“Who Loves Ya, Baby?”), while Laura’s had been called simply “Baby.” They had not yet forgiven him for not bringing the baby home for the weekend—as though it were the school hamster or something. Ever since then, they’d demanded to be taken to all manner of baby-related retail outlets. His weekends had been spent in aircraft hangar-sized Mothercares, and the Babies “R” Us section held a new fascination in their favorite toy shop. In an unfocused moment, he’d made the mistake of telling them about Harrods’s nursery department, where you could buy a toddler-scale Bentley or a solid silver rattle. Needless to say, it had become their new Mecca, eclipsing even John Lewis’s fourth floor in their minds’ eyes. He knew it was pointless telling them that he was tired, that he’d been on his feet for twelve hours overseeing the delivery of babies—one breech, two emergency C-sections, and an overoptimistic water birth with complications—and the last thing he felt like doing was trekking into town to rub shoulders with overprivileged parents-to-be cooing over Louis XIV cot beds.

  “OK. But put your coats on! No coats, no Harrods.”

  “Yes!” came the jubilant response, and for once they didn’t even try to argue about the weather.

  . 5 .

  The front of Harrods always made Amy smile. It made every day like Christmas in Knightsbridge, regardless of rain or shine. Huge and glittery, it was like an ostentatious bauble plonked in the middle of an otherwise tasteful Christmas tree. Its portals promised much and, in Amy’s experience, always delivered. She loved everything about the place, from its self-consciously themed window displays to the afternoon bagpipers employed by Al Fayed to roam the store. The first time she’d heard the unmistakable drone of the pipes, she’d been in the jewelry department and had asked the nonplussed assistant if it was Burns’s Night.

  “No,” she’d replied. “Mr. Al Fayed just likes them.” What a fabulously mad millionaire.

  Entering the store now, she felt the familiar frisson of expectation. She didn’t have anything to buy in particular, but that was the best time to go. She generally did Man Shopping (identify need, research market, go to specific shop, and purchase—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred sundry, useless items), but Harrods was a different story. She often came here and just wandered around, feeling fabrics, touching surfaces, and comparing designs with her own. Its baby department was second only to its pet section, where you could buy a chaise longue for your pussy, or a diamanté harness for your lapdog. Amy winced and fought off a tear as she remembered how she’d once spent more than a hundred quid on a rhinestone collar for Germaine. It was so nice she’d worn it herself a few times, and it had gotten more admiring remarks than her Theo Fennell crucifix.

  Resisting the urge to go and see what puppies they had in stock today, she made her way up to the nursery, pushing her way past the tourists clutching their “cheapest thing in Harrods, but I had to get something in that bag” purchases. The place was mobbed. What was she doing here on a Saturday afternoon? Only out-of-towners and bored rich people went shopping in London on a Saturday. Amy convinced herself that it wasn’t because she was feeling blue—she’d bounced back from worse things than a wasted egg and a knock-back from a weird, posh bloke—but because she needed to be thinking ahead. OK, she was taking a bit of time off from the shop, but that was no excuse to let her creative juices dry up. She should still make sure that she was keeping up with the competition, and besides, she suddenly had a bit of baby shopping to do. What a bizarre situation. Out of her close circle of friends, three were now pregnant. Ang, fair enough, that was her life’s work, and Soph had always wanted a child, but Jules? That had really thrown her. And if she was honest, it had had some influence on her recent little plan. Damn them all for messing with her head. She would never have guessed that her conviction that she would remain childless could be so easily rocked. Except it hadn’t felt like a bolt from the blue; it had felt as though the universe, whatever that was, was screaming out to her. The magpies, Germaine dying like that, the three sudden and simultaneous pregnancies of her closest female friends—surely not just coincidence? Surely some kind of sign that she too should enter the Pudding Club? She smiled quietly to herself. Who was she trying to kid? Maybe this was what she had wanted all along. How humiliating to be human after all. She brushed off the chagrin and turned to the matter at hand. She knew her friends had seen all her own baby stuff, and anyway, she couldn’t give them her own stock for their little blobs of cells, so Harrods it was. It would give her a chance to have a look at their preschool toys—an area she was hoping to go into more. She took the lift, squeezing herself between a large American couple and an entire Japanese family dressed from head to toe in Burberry. The liveried lift attendants did their best to avoid the crushing so often found in the lifts of lesser stores—one shouldn’t have to crush in Harrods—but Saturdays were a lost cause. This lift was packed, and on every floor more people got on. It was hot and sticky, she was sure someone had farted, and every time the lift lurched up a floor, her port-drenched stomach lurched with it. Everyone stood, eyes fixed firmly on the doors ahead, terrified that some unwanted intimacy such as a smile might occur between them and their neighbors.

  “I know a song that will get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves.”

  Stifled giggles erupted from the front of the lift. The American couple smiled indulgently.

  Brats in the lift. That’s all I need, thought Amy.

  Why don’t people teach their kids to keep quiet in confined spaces anymore? Their parents are probably frightened they’ll stamp on their children’s spontaneity or some such bollocks.

  “I know a song that will get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves.”

  Amy craned her neck, hoping to catch the eyes of the offending kids and give them her best terrifying strange-adult stare—it always worked on screaming toddlers, shocking them into silence. All she could see were the backs of two girls’ heads bobbing backward and forward as they shoved each other from side to side, totally oblivious to the old lady next to them. Bad behavior made Amy so cross. Why didn’t whoever they were with do something?

  A loud fart noise broke the third-floor silence, and both girls screeched with laughter. Clearly one of them was the culprit, although it had sounded like an underarm faked fart to Amy.

  “That’s more than enough of that,” said a quiet, defeated voice just behind the girls. A tall man in a good coat stood right in front of Amy. Was he their dad or just another irritated stranger?

  Another fart noise and near-hysterical giggles. Clearly, he was their dad. Only a parent could fail so spectacularly to exercise control in a public place. Poor bloke. What was she thinking, letting herself in for this a few years down the line? Amy shot a glance at the woman who stood next to the man and wondered why, if she was their mum, she failed to take any disciplinary measures. Perhaps it was Dad’s duty, or perhaps they’d had a domestic. He certainly had a defeated air about the set of his shoulders. Amy consoled herself with the fact that if she did eventually have a child, at least the nightmar
e of bringing it up would not be shared with the drudgery of a relationship gone silent and sour. In some respects, single parents had it easier. At the fourth floor, the man pushed forward and guided the girls out of the lift. Amy followed and noted that the woman had stayed behind. Either a very bad domestic or she wasn’t the girls’ mum. The man bent slightly to address the girls.

  “Right, you two—you’ve got ten minutes and five pounds each, and no amount of begging, bargaining, or pleading is going to change those two facts, OK?”

  Amy stopped and stared. She knew she had recognized the back of his head, but even now she struggled to place him. Her brain took a few seconds to catch up with her pulse, which for some reason had begun to race a little.

  The doctor. From the hospital. The one who had been so nice to her. Seeing him out of context had thrown her momentarily, but now she couldn’t believe she didn’t recognize him straight away—he’d played such a huge role in such a formative event. Amy found herself blushing inexplicably. She felt oddly exposed—silly, even—as though she had just dropped her towel on a nudist beach. What now? What was the protocol for bumping into an attractive near-stranger who had helped you rescue an abandoned baby and who was now out shopping with his own children? Amy hated such chance meetings, even with people she knew very well. She had once actually crossed the street to avoid Greg because she always panicked if it wasn’t planned. She always felt shy and unprepared. Best to avoid it altogether and pretend not to have seen them. Without thinking, Amy ducked behind a display of wooden toys. They’d be gone in a minute, and she could run to the nearest exit. From her vantage point, she could get a good look at him now. He was taller than she remembered, and even more handsome in his civvies. So it wasn’t just the stethoscope and the white coat then. Pity about the brats. Not just married but fully sprogged, too. If she could just stick it out here for a few minutes, then a potentially excruciating encounter would be avoided.