Of course he’d thought it was a joke. That’s what she’d felt, hadn’t she? At first. But she’d started to see it differently. Watching herself on video had been like watching someone else. Someone who needed to rehearse a lot more – but a person with natural talent. An engaging voice. Maybe it was actually a chance to show off a skill that she’d never shared with anyone. Nobody read poems much did they? But raps were another thing altogether.
Could she actually get herself heard?
Later, sipping her final pre-bed cup of tea, she drew the scrap of paper from her pocket, with the beginnings of her next rap scribbled on it.
Yo, I’m Martha, Martha B.,
Part of the Eezee Family,
I’m the mother, the one in charge,
Lovin’ life and livin’ it large!
What a load of rubbish.
Dan had convinced her about the ‘Eezee Family’ bit – and she hadn’t minded that.
But the last thing she was doing was ‘livin’ it large’. If anything, she was living life under the radar.
And if she was going to be brave enough to rap in front of an audience, she might as well do it from the heart.
Yo, I’m Martha, Martha B.,
Yeah, I see how you look at me.
Not your normal rapping star,
More like your sister, or your ma.
But just ’cos I don’t look street and cool,
It don’t mean I am a fool.
I’m older right, but wiser too,
I’ve got some things I could teach you …
She crossed out the lines and turned to a clean page.
This was going to be hard work.
Chapter Nineteen
Clare’s legs were still aching the following morning as she went downstairs. Katie was already up and dressed, and Toby had been whisked away an hour before. Alfie was nowhere to be seen. Sighing, she made him a cup of tea with two sugars. The boy who had once woken her every day at 5 a.m. had suddenly become nocturnal and never seemed to want to leave his bed in the mornings.
‘Alfie?’ Clare took a deep breath of clean air before pushing open her son’s bedroom door. As she’d suspected, he was still in bed – a tousled head just visible above the mound of tangled duvet. ‘Alfie?’ she repeated. ‘You’re late.’
He sighed with such force that she was surprised the duvet didn’t levitate. ‘OK, OK,’ he groaned resentfully, as if she was responsible for inventing concepts such as time, and sleep, and the necessity to function like a human being and get up in the morning.
‘I’ve made you a cuppa,’ she said, stepping into the room and feeling a strange prickling sensation beneath her stockinged foot.
‘Ouch!’ She placed the cup of tea on the tiny space she managed to find on his messy desk and inspected the bottom of her foot. It was peppered with half-yellow nail clippings. ‘For God’s sake, Alfie! I’ve told you before, don’t cut your nails onto the carpet! Use a bin.’
Her son grunted indistinctly.
She stepped back, her foot touching something mushy – a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. She picked up the plate, involuntarily, to take to the kitchen, then looked around the rest of the room.
There was barely a patch of carpet visible amongst the scattered debris of teenage boy. Crumpled T-shirts and pants surrounded his empty washing basket. His desk was covered in wrappers and plates and cups with fungus growing in them. His school bag lay on the floor, spewing forth his books into the mess. She breathed in – the room smelled of socks and mould and stale farts. ‘For God’s sake, Alfie. You’re fourteen!’ she said. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you cleared up after yourself?’
Another grunt.
Katie was fully dressed and eating Weetabix on the couch, balancing the over-full bowl dangerously on her knees, when Clare arrived downstairs with half a dinner service worth of dirty plates.
‘Dad left a note saying bye,’ Katie said.
‘Right, thanks,’ Clare replied, eyeing the mess that her husband had left in his wake.
She didn’t mind doing a bit of cleaning; it was the fact that, it seemed, her family assumed it was her job to do it and no one else seemed to consider the idea of pitching in. This was what had prompted her to hire a cleaner a couple of mornings a week for a bit– but Toby’s excess spending (and now hers, admittedly) meant they couldn’t afford any help these days. Somehow, everyone else seemed to be carrying on as normal, leaving her to pick up the slack: to remove crusted bowls of cereal and scrape the leftover contents into the bin; or pick up tissues and teacups and toenail clippings from whatever floor they saw fit to scatter them on.
‘You all right, Mum?’ Katie asked. ‘You look all weird.’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’
Because, she’d had an idea. The only way to show them exactly how disgusting they were was to leave everything they abandoned in their wake exactly as she found it. The question was, who would notice first? Would she be able to cope? And would her family all die some horrible bacteria-infested death before they realised they had to take responsibility for themselves?
She self-righteously piled Alfie’s plates next to the sink, before pointedly rinsing out her own coffee mug and setting it on the side. Then she called, ‘Bye kids – school bus in twenty minutes!’ before leaving the house and settling into her car.
‘Seat belt,’ Claudia reminded her.
‘Thanks Claudia,’ she replied. At least someone seemed to care about her wellbeing. Even if it was a borderline psychotic on-board computer.
‘Searching for thanks,’ said Claudia.
‘Cancel, thanks.’
‘Cancelling.’
‘You know, Claudia,’ she said, as she turned out of the drive. ‘I think you and I are going to become good friends.’
Clare had barely arrived in the office before Nigel poked his head around the door of her coat-cupboard. ‘Morning, Carol,’ he said. ‘Bit soggy today.’
‘It’s Clare, actually’, she replied automatically, resisting the urge to tell him that she wouldn’t know what the weather was like seeing as she DIDN’T HAVE A WINDOW.
‘Oh, really? Well, um. Good news!’ he replied, in an offhand way. ‘Anyway, I noticed you hadn’t signed up for the after-work class and I wanted to see whether you might consider coming along – it’ll be a fascinating experience.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘I, well … I’ve got a lot on as you can see.’ She gestured at the pile of files she had just started working on.
‘Ah, yes, but you see …’ Nigel said, stepping fully into the room, then checking himself and spreading his feet a little wider apart, filling the entire sum of her empty floorspace. ‘One of the principles of Hans’s philosophy is working smarter, not harder,’ he said, treating her to air quotes to emphasise that this was a saying worth committing to memory.
‘Yes, but, you know, I think I’ve got …’
‘Will’s been preparing for weeks,’ Nigel continued, trying to shuffle his feet further, then clearly thinking better of it and bringing them back together. ‘He’s … I think it would be a good show if some of our more senior colleagues demonstrated that they had something to learn too …’
‘It’s just …’ She lay down her pen and looked at Nigel. ‘Nigel, it’s not really my thing, and you know I do have rather a lot of clients.’
‘Ah,’ Nigel said, ‘but are you corporately sexy?’
‘Am I what?’
Her boss’s cheeks flushed. ‘You know,’ he said, slightly less confidently, ‘corporate sexiness, the ah … the method of appearing attractive, in a business sense.’
‘Right.’
‘I mean … ah, well, Will understands it more than I do, of course. It’s a young man’s game these days, eh! But the formula really does work, apparently.’
‘I see.’ A small part of her began to feel sorry for Nigel.
‘So you’ll come?’ he continued, having established that her corporate sexiness was clearly in need of further instruction.
‘I’ll pop in,’ she said, at last.
‘Excellent, excellent.’ He finally left the room, limping slightly, and she was left with the files which proved, if evidence were needed, that whatever corporate sexiness was, she already had it in buckets.
Her phone pinged around lunchtime and she had a quick look.
STEPH: Feeling a bit shit, actually.
CLARE: What’s up?
STEPH: Just my entire life.
CLARE: What?
STEPH: Yeah, my life sucks. Basically.
The phone rang twice before Steph answered.
‘Hi.’
‘Seriously, Steph. Are you OK?’
‘I’m OK,’ Steph’s voice sounded teary. ‘Just you know, having a moment I suppose. About my joke of a life.’
‘Oh, Steph. Don’t be silly.’
‘Is it silly though? All I do is sit at home with Wilbur – who I love, by the way.’
‘I know you do, of course you do.’
‘And clean up the house, wash the nappies, change the nappies, clear the house again, make the dinner, forget to eat my own, go to bed and it all starts again.’
‘Oh, Steph …’ Clare remembered those days of early motherhood so vividly. Where the rest of the world cooed over your baby but forgot about the struggle that comes hand in hand with tiny fingers and toes. ‘Do you want me to come over?’
‘Oh no, no … it’s not that bad. I just needed to … well, tell someone.’
‘Steph, you know, it’s totally normal to feel like this.’
‘I know, but …’
‘It sucks sometimes. It’s wonderful other times. Then they grow up a bit, and it gets a bit easier. Things sort of … well, open up a bit more.’
‘They do?’ Steph sounded just a tiny bit hopeful.
‘Yeah. And you don’t have to wait till they’re as old as my two. A couple more months and he won’t want to be in your arms all the time. And he’ll be sleeping better.’
‘God, I hope so.’
‘Honestly, I felt completely exhausted with Alfie for about eight months, then things sort of … you begin to see gaps in the clouds.’
‘Right.’
‘And you know, there’s always lovely Aunt Clare to come and babysit if you need a proper break.’
‘But you’re so busy.’
‘Never too busy.’
‘And it gets better? You promise?’ Steph sounded like a hopeful child, asking for reassurance.
‘I promise. Mind you, then they become teenagers and start cutting their nails and leaving the clippings on the bedroom carpet.’
‘They what?’
Clare told Steph about her morning, about Alfie and Katie and the disgusting mess her house was in. ‘I’ve decided, no more,’ she concluded.
‘You’re not leaving?’
‘Oh, no, not that drastic. I’m just going to stop. Stop cleaning up after them all and see how long it takes for them to notice.’
‘Oh, Clare,’ Steph laughed briefly, ‘you always manage to make me giggle.’
‘Maybe,’ Clare grinned, ‘but this is deadly serious.’
Clare hung up the phone. Poor Steph. It was easy to get wrapped up in her own gripes and forget there were other people struggling. She made a note in her diary to ring her sister tomorrow to see if she felt any better. Then felt bad for having to diarise what should be such a natural thing to do.
Five hours later, she was standing outside the conference room reading the words ‘Corporate Sexiness Seminar’. With a deep breath, she entered to find a smattering of reluctant-looking colleagues who’d also been coerced into taking part. The group included a clearly motivated Mike from IT, who’d already donned a pair of shorts in readiness, and judging by the collection of paper cups and Mars Bar wrappers around him, had been waiting in the room for quite some time. She slipped into the seat next to Ann. ‘This should be fun,’ she said quietly.
Five minutes later when they were all glancing at their watches and hoping that the meeting had been cancelled, Will entered the room.
The murmur of conversation that had built up fell away as they collectively stopped to look. Because Will was not wearing his characteristic suit, with its fashionably tiny collar and pencil-thin tie. He was not even wearing a dress-down version of his usual look – perhaps a pair of coloured jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.
In fact, Will was – to all intents and purposes – naked. He’d shed his suit and instead had pulled on some sort of shiny, gold-coloured Lycra body stocking. Every lump, every contour and even every hair of his naked form was accentuated – each one shone out in the harsh light of the meeting room. It was the last place she wanted to look, but Clare couldn’t seem to take her eyes from the very graphic bulge between his legs. It was like going to the Royal Ballet all over again.
Nigel followed, nodding at staff members as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Clare was just going to offer a prayer of thanks that her boss had decided to stay in his usual attire when he turned to face them all, and she saw the shimmer of shiny red material under his suit jacket.
‘Good afternoon!’ Will said, as if everything was completely normal and he wasn’t standing, legs akimbo, giving them all much more information about his anatomy than was completely necessary. ‘Glad you could all make it.’
‘Good afternoon,’ they murmured, like schoolkids in assembly and with the same level of enthusiasm.
‘So, you might ask, Will, why are you wearing gym gear?’ he continued.
Gym gear?
Admittedly, Clare hadn’t been to the gym for a while. But she was pretty sure that what Will was wearing wouldn’t be acceptable in any of the sports centres she’d graced in the past.
‘Well, today’s seminar is all about trust. And what better way to trust than to be honestly and authentically ourselves. Nigel?’ Will looked pointedly at his boss who at least had the good grace to blush a little before dropping his trousers, removing his jacket and revealing a red body stocking that accentuated every curve and fold of his flesh. Thankfully, his belly hung pretty low, shielding his Lycra-clad crotch area.
‘Good grief,’ Ann whispered to Clare. ‘He looks like a cherry on a cocktail stick.’
‘Stop it!’ Clare hissed, holding back the giggles.
The two men at the front of the room continued, as if there was nothing unusual about any of this. They turned and faced each other.
‘I am Will,’ Will said to Nigel. ‘I live with my mum in Stevenage. I’m twenty-five years old. I worry that my eyes are too close together. I hope one day to run my own successful law firm.’
‘I am Nigel,’ replied Nigel. ‘I am fixty-six years old and I live on my own. I’m divorced. I have a son who lives in Edinburgh. I already run a successful law firm, but I hope to make it even more successful. When I was twelve I wanted to be a dancer. I worry that women no longer find me attractive.’
Clare felt a sound bubble up in her throat – a mixture between a laugh and a hysterical scream. She forced it back down and avoided eye contact with anyone else in the room. Bill, in the corner, was barely supressing his laughter – his shoulders trembled with the effort.
‘OK, so in the bag under your chair you’ll each find a similar suit – Hans calls them “honesty suits” as when we wear them, we have nothing to hide,’ continued Will. ‘I want you to change into the suit. Then, with a partner, admit your deepest fears and desires. The idea is that this total honesty opens up the lines of communication.’
Yep, so would a glass or two of wine, thought Clare, looking into the bag under her chair to find that her outfit was flesh-coloured, meaning, if
it were possible, she’d look even more naked than the rest of her colleagues.
I’m Clare, she imagined saying. I’m married with kids, but nobody in my life seems to notice me. I have an alter ego called Martha B. I hope to get through the rest of my life without ever having to wear a Lycra all-in-one.
Panicking slightly, she glanced at Ann, who looked equally horrified. Thinking on her feet, Clare grabbed her mobile phone. ‘Hello?’ she said to no one. ‘This is Clare Bailey.’
A couple of people glanced at her.
‘Oh, Mr Camberwaddle!’ she said loudly, making sure she caught Nigel’s eye. ‘Of course. Yes, right away.’
She held the phone against her chest as if to muffle the sound and spoke to Nigel. ‘Really sorry, but some sort of conveyancing emergency with Mr …’
‘Of course, of course …’ her boss nodded. ‘You can always take the costume with you.’
‘And,’ Clare added, catching Ann’s pleading gaze, ‘I’m going to have to ask Ann to come with me.’
‘Right … OK, well don’t forget.’
The pair of them scrambled to their feet and virtually raced out of the room.
‘So, what’s the emergency?’ Ann asked, looking at her sideways as they walked along the corridor.
‘The emergency,’ Clare said, holding open the door to the stairs, ‘is that I can think of better ways to spend my time than parading my flaws in front of half the office.’
‘Oh my god,’ her friend said almost slumping against the wall with relief, ‘I was hoping that was it. I completely and utterly owe you one. Thanks for rescuing me.’
‘No problem,’ Clare smiled. ‘What are friends for if not to rescue each other from parading around the room in Lycra onesies in front of the senior legal team.’
‘You know, you should put that out on Twitter as an inspirational quote,’ giggled Ann.
‘I might just do that.’
Chapter Twenty
Dan was delighted when Clare called a few minutes after leaving the meeting to say she could make the teatime rehearsal after all. When she’d phoned to tell him that she’d be staying late for a work thing and wouldn’t make their arranged time, he’d been quite down. ‘We’ll still be practicing when you’re done,’ he’d told her. ‘Maybe come by after?’
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