Souper Mum

by Kristen Bailey

  R: Jools? Hon, how are you? We def need to talk.

  I have no instincts at this point. I’d even forgotten I added him as a friend all that time ago. I just stare at the computer screen, at the stamp-sized picture of one Mr Richie ‘Love rat’ Colman.

  R: Jools? You there?

  I haven’t even read the story he sold to the papers. With all the emotional fuss and confusion over my mum, it seemed irrelevant to even bother. We def need to talk? Intrigued, I scramble through the papers on the table and flick through to the article. In the meanwhile, I reply in the most nonchalant way I know how.

  J: Hi

  I finally find him, relegated to page ten and eleven. A double spread where a picture of us from college is used as the centrepiece. I gag a little to see it – mainly because my jeans seem to be halfway up to my chest but also because of how young and happy I look. He looks like he always did – kind of like Ryan Giggs with brown, curly hair that I thought at the time was luxurious and cute but in truth, made him look like a spaniel.

  ‘… when we finished she just found the next bloke, the first bloke who came along, and the next thing I hear, she’s pregnant. I tried to meet up with her, tried to make sure she was all right but her bloke, Matt, warned me off. He was really angry, like we had a proper fight about it; he even hit me. To be honest, from that point I was just worried about the sort of bloke she was now with …’

  My eyes fizz with tears as I read on:

  ‘I mean, I knew when we were going out that was what she wanted, to have the family and be the mother she never had. But she did it all really young and then she got married well quickly. I knew her heart wasn’t in it. I knew she still had feelings for me …’

  I freeze for a moment to process everything.

  R: You must be so angry with me. Really I can explain.

  My fingers hover over the keys. How dare you insult my husband like that? How dare you assume so many things about my life, about my family? But the thoughts don’t process themselves as such.

  J: What do you mean Matt warned you off? You came back? You tried to meet up with me?

  I press enter and see my haste there on the screen. Part of me is simply curious, thinking that Matt and Richie were always separate threads in my life never destined to meet. Had they done, the universe might have imploded. I wait for his reply and scan through the rest of the article, the photo of him now. He looks different: receding hairline, in double channels down the front, and yes, yes, yes – quite a sizeable paunch – an affliction many of our male comrades from university seemed to have fallen victim to given they seem to have survived for the past ten years on combinations of takeaways which slower metabolisms won’t forgive them for. I click on his profile. He’s working for some top-notch engineering company that his photo albums seem to suggest send him around the world. Other albums suggest nights out in exclusive London bars, a flat in Putney, and a flashy hairdresser’s sports car. He still likes the same dance music, his favourite film is still Back to the Future, and his favourite quote is from Terry Venables circa Euro ’96.

  R: Do you remember that girl I was with?

  J: Dawn the Biochemist.

  Pause. I maybe shouldn’t have remembered her name with such speed.

  R: Yep. It didn’t work out with her.

  Not surprised.

  R: When it didn’t I tried to get in contact to patch things up but Matt and you were already together and you were pregnant.

  I’m not sure how to reply.

  J: Yes, I was.

  R: I mean it happened so quickly, of course, I was worried about you. When I called round yours to check on you, Matt went off on one. It got pretty nasty.

  J: I don’t believe you. Matt’s not like that.

  R: So he never told you.

  J: Why are you lying like this? The article is a joke, Richie.

  Why would you talk about Matt like that? Why would you

  trash me like that?

  R: I’ll admit, a lot of it was twisted about. That Elswood

  journo bloke wrote a load of crap but that stuff about us

  fighting was pretty true.

  I don’t reply. If it is the truth, I half hope that Matt left a great big imprint in his face. On the other hand, I’m now asking myself why I didn’t know about this – why the secrets? Was I too emotional and pregnant to have not sensed the furore going on around me?

  R: BTW, no one’s called me Richie for a long time. It’s Rich

  now

  I still don’t reply. I stare at the screen and the picture of him in the paper on the table.

  R: How are you anyway? This stuff with McCoy and your mum must be getting to you. I know you.

  I re-read those last three words.

  J: You knew me.

  I remember a time when I was a lost teenager without a mother and Richie Colman persuaded me to go to Leeds with him. He’d look after me, he said. He knew all the angst and turmoil her absence had caused and knew it was deeply embedded in my psyche. We used to sit in his bedroom on his Argos bed sheet set and talk tearfully about loss and aching and wishing one day she’d come back into my life. To know he knows as much is both heartbreaking and a tad disconcerting.

  J: You knew a very different person then. I’ve changed a lot.

  For a start, even if you and Matt had a fallout all those years ago, I think it’s highly inappropriate you go and tell a national paper about it.

  That’s good. That’s conveying my annoyance with him and a loyalty to the man I’m now with. And I am a very different person to the high-waisted denim girl I was back then.

  R: Why did you think we fought?

  J: If you did ever have this ‘fight’ …

  R: Maybe we fought over you.

  J: Really? *sarcasm* Pistols at dawn to win the lady was it?

  R: I just didn’t get how quickly you jumped into that. You and this guy. I guess I just assumed it to be a passing phase, that maybe I could win you back.

  J: But I was pregnant. … with his kid?

  R: How was I to know the baby wasn’t mine?

  I’ve never moved my fingers so fast over a keyboard in my life.

  J: Because she isn’t. Hannah is most definitely Matt’s daughter. You got an A in Biology – I thought you knew how that all works.

  I’m slightly unnerved to think I’ve never given that another moment’s thought. They were sexual partners at least five months apart when we found out I was pregnant.

  R: Crumbs, A Level Biology. Blast from the past there.

  Didn’t we have sex in one of those labs in the science department?

  I simultaneously want to blush and throw the computer out of the window. How do you respond to that? Yes, we did. Thank you for having fond memories of the occasion but if I remember correctly I ended up with ladders down my new tights and I’m not sure it was entirely pleasurable from where I was perched. I don’t reply. I should log off because this is bordering on weird. This was supposed to be a distraction from mothers, from emotions, from the shittiest day I’ve had since this all started. I should be angry with you. I should be laying into you; about the way you unceremoniously dumped me, the way you forgot about four years of a relationship we’d cultivated over sixth form discos and exam halls. The way you’re talking so lightly about something as important as my daughter’s parentage. The way you’ve talked to a newspaper when we were done a very long time ago. But instead I’m shocked into silence, unable to take any more information into my little brain.

  R: Do you ever think about the what ifs?

  Don’t look at it. Don’t respond.

  R: I’m sorry I treated you the way that I did. I loved you very much – I was just young and stupid. I wish things could have turned out differently.

  And that’s when I do slam the laptop shut, my heart pounding like it could fall out of my mouth. But an ache. Like a very tiny heartstring being plucked. The what ifs? As much as I hate him right now, how he wishes me all the fri
gging best, I hate how the sentiment pokes at that little bit of my heart that thought life would end up differently. With him, maybe. With a mother. It’s what this whole day has been about – greener grass, a life different to the one I have now. The emotion yo-yos inside me, playing tag with my insides.

  Matt. Think about Matt. Good, dependable Matt who could have easily buggered off eight years ago but didn’t. I think about when he’d stay up with Hannah in our crappy Leeds studio apartment and play her Zero 7 CDs to try and get her to sleep. I think about someone who would carry me to bed even though I was six months pregnant and probably weighed the same as a small walrus. Think about your kids. Think about how life wrote you another ending and in the greater scheme of things, you ended up with the better lot in life. Think about your own mother, how she went with her different ending and it ended up hurting so many. Think, think, think. But all I can see is my life having veered off the beaten track, a life over which I’ve never had much control. Fricking Richie Colman. On the other side of the fence waving at me. It makes me wonder, it makes my heart beat a little faster. Think, think, think. But not too much or Matt will tell you off for ruining the laptop with your tears.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  So you learn a new thing every day. Green rooms are not actually green. This one is white with hints of broccoli green. And they have cappuccino makers with little dispensers of cinnamon and chocolate next to them, posh German chocolate biscuits and all you can eat croissants. I know about the cappuccinos as I’m on my fifth one. When you’ve lived with Nescafé Gold Blend for the past five years, you grab any opportunity you can to have a bit of real, from proper beans-style coffee. Of course, now I look properly wired, like I’m in a state of drug withdrawal. My hands shimmer, I can feel every inch of my fingernails, and my eyes are very big. Or maybe that’s all the eyeshadow the make-up people put on me. Lilac? It makes your eyes look bigger, I’ve been told. I think it might make me look a little intergalactic. I feel the make-up as well. I feel like my face has been set in sand for all the foundation they put on me to cover up the rings under my eyes, twenty-something acne, and, well, the list could go on. Luella storms about with a clipboard and keeps asking questions to people dressed head to toe in skinny black. I sit with my coffees wondering how one should sit in a dress. I think about the last time I wore a dress. Do nightdresses count? Maybe it was in the summer. Matt made a joke about legs coming out from hibernation. Matt. Matt would be good right now. I think about what I did the other night – my very mild online flirtation – and my mind starts to race again with guilt and questions. Did they really have a fight? Like a Fight Club-style free for all? Who threw the first punch? I think about what would have happened had Richie fought harder for me, had I not got pregnant. But then there wouldn’t be a Hannah, or twins, or Millie. I ponder such things as I attempt to cross my legs and nearly fall off the sofa.

  After the McCoy bonfire as it’s come to be known in my house, Luella got in touch with This Morning and, lo and behold, here I am on a Monday morning at an unfeasibly early hour. In the corner of the room is Phillip Schofield in colour and literally fifty feet away from me. I want to tell him I once got through to a phone-in on Going Live. But I won’t. The idea is to tell Phil and Holly what happened in Sainsbury’s, talk about my life, and correct all the mistakes that have come to print in the past twenty-four hours. That said, I always have my secret weapon. She’s small, ginger, and dressed in purple. Millie. Luella said that if I get nervous or can’t think what to say, then talk about the baby. She says she hasn’t given them any subjects to avoid as that speaks volumes about celebs even before they walk through the door, so the field is wide open. Mothers, babies, McCoy, they could pick my brains about the state of the NHS for all she knew, so the idea was just to go out there and speak my mind and speak it well. When she said that I gave her a look, realising this woman obviously didn’t know me too well.

  So now I’m sitting here while Millie is fast asleep. It breaks my heart that soon I’ll have to wake her so I can use her as a shield. I spy the pastries and biscuits but I am wise to that game. No crumby chests or pastry-style wart things again. I just go up to the machine and make myself another coffee, attacking the foam with both cocoa and cinnamon sprinklers but dispensing a bit too much given my hands can’t seem to stop shaking. A wrist appears at me from the side grabbing mine. Luella.

  ‘God, you’re not nervous, are you?’

  I laugh, ‘Of course not. Just me in front of two million people while my life is being analysed. What’s there to be nervous about?’

  Luella laughs back. I’m not getting the humour.

  ‘Just relax. I could have put you in front of Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton if I wanted. They’d have ripped you to shreds. These two are pussy cats.’

  When do I tell her I’m allergic to cats?

  ‘Anyways, you’re on in five. They’re talking about spring wedding fashion then going to a break and then you’re on the sofa. We’re OK, yeah? I’ll be right by the cameraman if you need me.’

  She’s nice. Unfeasibly nice. I want to ask her whether she’ll do the interview instead but I just take a deep breath and lift Millie from her pram and follow her out of the room, feeling a little like someone else should be here. Matt. I definitely miss his hand right now.

  When we take a right out of the room, all eyes are on me and the baby who’s still asleep and drooling a large patch of wetness onto my left shoulder. For some reason this doesn’t feel like it’s of any great concern. I’m in black today. A black shirt dress over some skinny jeans and ballet pumps. The skinny jeans are a new thing to me. Aren’t they just leggings made out of denim? They’re not entirely that comfortable either but Luella has told me they’ve shifted pounds. They’ve shifted them over the waistband into a tyre of flesh. But the shirt dress does wonders to hide that. Just don’t breathe out. Or in. Maybe don’t breathe at all then you can collapse and the interview will have to be postponed. Or not.

  As I sit down on set, the first thing that strikes me is how I can’t see Luella at all. The studio lights blind me so much that all I can see are faceless black figures roaming around the background like ghoulish pixies. The second is that this microphone pack sticks out of my back but under my dress like I’ve got some horrific hunchback growth. Millie finally wakes up and perches her chin on my shoulder wondering where I’ve brought her now. She always has this look about her like I’m not showing her the world but simply dragging her along behind me. Phil and Holly come over to introduce themselves and pat Millie on the head, they’re nice enough. Holly is incredibly pretty but I’m reminded in the back of my head of all those mornings Matt would spend watching Saturday morning television with Hannah, pretending he was bonding with her but secretly was just ogling Holly’s bosoms. People are waving limbs about in the shadows and then a light starts to flash. I’m squinting a lot until I realise Phil and Holly have started talking.

  ‘So one week ago, our latest guest became an unlikely household name after a clip of her on You Tube received over one million hits. Jools Campbell, a mother of four, was filmed ranting to TV chef Tommy McCoy after he accosted her in the supermarket and tried to attack her lifestyle. And we have her here today…hello, welcome and you’ve brought a friend I see …’

  I’m still squinting reading everything he just said off an autocue. Shit, that’s me he’s talking to then.

  ‘Yeah, this is Millie. Thank you for having us here.’

  Holly makes cooing baby noises and there are comments about the hair. Poor little Mills has received such a commentary that I’m half tempted to dye it or shave her head. Millie looks over at them, not too impressed as always.

  ‘So one week and you’re in every paper, your name is on everyone’s lips. How have you coped with this deluge of commentary on your life?’

  I find myself adjusting Millie’s position on my lap as I can see a large roll of fat in a small screen to the right.

  ‘Ummm, it’s been a bit
crazy. I … I guess when it happened I just assumed it’d be this one crazy event in my life and nothing would come of it, but everything has blown up to crazy proportions. My family have been put under the microscope, my life, my kids … crazy.’

  Crazy? I can see the look in Holly’s eyes. This woman is crazy. I smile a lot but I feel my head is sweaty under the lights and hope all this makeup can soak it up. Time to stop saying crazy.

  ‘I just … I think mums today have a hard enough time. We don’t need reminding when we’re not doing the best job in the world. I think I was just trying to defend myself that day. I just can’t believe everything’s got to this stage.’