‘Why is it in a wine glass then?’
‘Er, to make it feel a bit more exotic.’
She nodded. ‘What’s a cunt?’
Ali spat out the last mouthful of wine, spraying the clean washing.
‘I don’t know, Isla, but I think Daddy knows. Ask him.’
*
At three a.m. my phone pinged with a text. Three a.m. was danger time for me anyway. Sleep only graced me with a faint veil every night. The slightest breeze ruffled it – a child coughing, a dog barking, foxes shagging. Alison was in labour. Now I was wide awake, willing the phone to herald more news. Jim said she was in the bath and the labour was fast, already eight centimetres dilated. I wondered if he was drunk. I got up and made a cup of tea, careful not to creak the eighth step as I stole down the steep stairs. Chug’s bat ears would know I was up. He could probably feel his belly button stretching as I pulled the cord further away.
As I sat in the cream and mauve living room, I switched on the TV, immediately muting it, staring at the screen while an old episode of Everybody Loves Raymond played out in silence. I’d seen it before. I used to watch hours and hours of banal crap to while away the prison sentence of new-born breastfeeding. I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew, yelling belted out from upstairs. Sonny was awake, broadcasting to the world that he was ready to participate in this thing called life. Once he was ensconced in my bed with his bottle, I checked my phone. There was a text from Jim. Grace arrived safely at five thirty a.m. Seven pounds two. No word about Alison. I asked. She’s fine was all he said. No words about what a hero she was. I didn’t like the sound of that. But I pushed it to the back of my mind as my day spread out before me: another, the same as the one before. The dull ache in my chest, the realisation I was in sole charge of these three and the buck stopped here. What was it Sam announced hours after I had birthed Isla, surviving a gruelling twenty-four-hour labour? ‘I don’t understand how anyone can leave their wife after they’ve seen her give birth. I don’t get it.’ I hoped Jim was having that thought right now and meant it.
2
The Would-be Mansion
My bedroom, the living room and the kitchen were the only parts fully finished in the house. My favourite feature of the living room was the Shrine of Tat. I had curated all sorts of random junk from travelling, weddings, days out, charity shops, and displayed them in a floor-to-ceiling grid-frame bookcase between the two chimney breasts, which Sam had built for me when we moved in. It was an organic collection, swelling each year, as people donated things they thought I might like from their travels. A mini gold-sprayed Vatican imperiously overlooked a diminutive naked clay man with huge bollocks. It was all about the inappropriate juxtaposition.
Originally, when the estate agent handed us a bunch of property details to browse through, this house had been rammed at the back of the pile.
‘What’s this?’ I’d asked her, fanning through all the paper. She was about nineteen and probably still lived at home.
‘Oh, that? It’s er… a bit of an erm, what do you call it, white elephant, I think Gavin said. But I thought you might like it, with you wanting a project.’
‘It’s out of our budget, though, and it’s massive.’
‘Let me see,’ Sam had asked, and I handed him the brochure. ‘Oh, wow, it’s like a mansion.’
‘It’s a single-fronted Victorian villa,’ the girl said. ‘It was originally the main house on the road before the others were built around it, when a lot of this land used to be grazing pastures.’ She may have been young, but she knew her stuff. ‘I think it’s beautiful, but it needs so much work and it’s been putting some people off. You might be able to make an offer.’
When we pulled up outside the house I was bowled over.
‘It towers over the other houses,’ Sam observed, obviously impressed, the façade playing to his showy nature. The rusty curly wrought-iron gate was pushed back against a tide of pea gravel, jammed permanently open. Weeds sprouted up intermittently through the shingle, which could almost house a car. A small lawn hid behind the low brick front wall, also overgrown and reclaimed by weeds. The villa boasted a porticoed entrance, the flaking cream pillar sentinels straddling the peeling black front door set to the left of the house, a wide sandstone step laid down before it. To the right of the grand entrance, a roomy bay window protruded with another one stacked directly on top serving the floor above. As part of the seventies makeover, all original wooden sash windows had been ripped out and replaced with aluminium frames, a host of mould creeping round the rubber seals.
‘Oh my God!’ I cried on being assaulted by the hall wallpaper. ‘I need sunglasses!’
The rest of the house didn’t fare any better, with outdated décor, damp on outside walls, woodworm burrowing through all the floorboards. The huge garden overlooked a graveyard and would need some serious taming. The stone patio, outside the barely working sliding doors in the Formica-clad kitchen, was badly cracked, the edges of some of the broken slabs at odd angles, like wonky tombstones revealing clods of London clay beneath.
‘We would need to tear everything out, apart from the bedrooms – they could be done one at a time – and perhaps we could just tart up one of the bathrooms, as long as they both work. I can have an office for all my camera equipment and show reel tapes.’ Sam’s eyes were far away, making plans, thinking outside the box. I loved it, but it would leave us with no contingency fund. I felt it was too ostentatious for a first house. ‘What do you say, Mands? We could take our time because it’s a ‘For Ever’ house…’
And now I was left living alone with our children in this working mausoleum of our life, not sure whether eventually to sell; trapped because no bank would give me a mortgage – freelance writing wasn’t renowned for its riches or reliability – and we were plummeting into the worst recession for decades. I either had to move miles away from my circle of friends and support to somewhere affordable, ripping the kids from their home, or stay, see it through and ask Sam to help me financially. He had moved out into a modern two-bedroomed flat and professed he didn’t want to get divorced, yet, leaving me stuck in marriage no man’s land, knowing the real end was coming, but not sure how or when.
Sam’s old office on the middle floor now resembled a crime scene – one box spewing its contents all over the bare boards where I had ransacked it, ferreting for evidence of why he had left. Old work notebooks, diaries, scraps of paper scrutinised, books pulled off shelves so I could frisk them for clandestine notes or receipts. I hadn’t entered the room for months, not since he’d retrieved all his camera equipment, computers and office furniture. The single bed (from his childhood, gifted to us by his dad) remained against the left-hand wall, the bright red and navy check bedspread dulled under a layer of dust like Miss Havisham’s decaying shrine, and his wooden bookcase resembled a mouth with missing teeth, the surviving books carelessly abandoned in his desperation to leave.
I found no indication of an affair, but I did find the speech he wrote for his brother’s wedding two years before and, stuck to it, a prophetic joke he had scribbled down on a dog-eared Post-it.
What do marriage and hurricanes have in common?
They both start off with a lot of sucking and blowing, but in the end, you lose your house.
Even drowning in my sea of grief, the joke had elicited a sardonic smile.
‘All grief counsellors say you should never move straight away after something like this. Stay put and see how the land lies,’ my oldest friend, Mel, advised. ‘Or move back here with me and we can have a commune!’ But I didn’t want to move back to Sussex where I had grown up – each of my parents had moved hundreds of miles away and it felt like admitting defeat. I knew I was lucky to have a choice at all, so chose to stay put, all the while hoping for some kind of miracle.
*
‘He’s gone.’ Ali was sobbing down the phone at seven in the morning four days after Grace’s arrival.
Chug was nestled in nex
t to me, his slurping building up to a noisy climax as the milk squirted into his mouth; bubbles bursting inside the bottle as he sucked furiously. I girded myself for the scream that predictably followed the realisation there was no more. I imagined him aged twenty-five, still addicted to milk, surreptitiously drinking it under his desk at work like a crack addict.
‘Sorry, Ali, what happened?’ The crying kicked in and I cuddled Sonny, wrapping his baby blanket around him so he toned it down to a whimper. He smelled of warm skin and fluff.
Greeting cards can’t predict your reaction to motherhood. With their idealised messages depicting bundles of joy and happiness, they flood onto your doormat on a cloud of optimism. But what happens when the father ups and leaves? It’s shit enough without that happening. When Isla was born, I felt like someone had purloined my life whilst dropping this howling ball of energy on me until the end of days. Walking aimlessly round Peckham Rye Park with Sam and Isla a week after she’d arrived, I escaped across the road to the pub pretending I needed a wee and broke down in the toilets with sheer terror that I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life. How could I have had a baby when no one had told me how frightening and how relentless it was? Why hadn’t I read any books? I had stupidly trusted my mum’s rose-tinted version of my blood-free birth where she coughed once and I slipped into the world after her labour was spent reading a book to pass the fucking time. ‘I would have killed for you there and then,’ she reiterated yearly on my birthday.
As I stared at my pasty sleep-deprived face in the toilet mirror (perilously close to my post-clubbing face, but with irises), I had my first ever real gut-wrenching fright that Sam would leave. I had to step up, had to pretend that I was OK. Walking back out to the sun-drenched park I noticed a bus thundering towards me and fleetingly wondered if it would hurt as much as labour if I just stepped out in front of it. I stepped off the kerb as the bus ploughed on towards me, but reality hit me first and I hastily pulled back, the red blur puffing up my skirt like Marilyn Monroe, shocking me out of my black dog moment.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Sam said, and hugged me close when I returned. ‘It will get better, Mands. She won’t be this little for ever.’ But I realised it wasn’t just that. Never again would we be just us two. Now we were three and he wasn’t just mine any more, I had to share him with a baby. After the turmoil of Isla’s birth, Sam had produced a bottle of champagne and a stunning platinum diamond eternity ring and presented them to me in the delivery suite in a touching show of unity and love, prompting the midwives to cry. I still couldn’t comprehend how we’d hit the wall in such a short space of time.
‘The love will come, don’t worry,’ Mum had tried to reassure me when fear had me by the short and curlies. ‘You can’t expect too much after that long labour.’
‘But what if it never comes?’
‘It will.’ It took four months, leaving me wanting and terrified, every day asking myself: Will I love her today? Eventually after a plane ride where Isla howled incessantly, I was steamrollered by a tornado of love that felt completely out of control and just as frightening as its absence. Now I was consumed with it, how would I ever love Sam like I had before? What if Isla died? I couldn’t live without her so would obviously have to jump in front of the bus properly this time. And what about the other children we had planned? How would I ever love them this much? I felt inadequate all over again.
‘Jim has left us,’ Ali wept down the phone hauling me back into the present.
‘Gone for good?’ I asked tentatively, possibly unnecessarily, but you never know with a woman who has just given birth.
‘Yeeeerrrrrrrsssssss.’ Fuck.
3
The Birth of Beardy Weirdy
‘Have you got anything for stress?’ I had asked the man in the health food shop just before Sam left.
‘What kind of stress?’ he’d asked studiously, his eyes searching my anxious whey-coloured face.
‘The worst kind. Stuff going on at home,’ I had mumbled, my cheeks burning with shame.
‘You need balancing to get you through it.’ He offered me some Bach Flower Remedies and then paused. ‘I have a crystal that might help centre your solar plexus, stop the anxiety.’
‘Yes, anything,’ I begged, desperate to quash the seesawing uncertainty pulsing through my chest. He disappeared upstairs and then moments later came down and opened his palm, displaying various yellow stones.
‘Pick the one that talks to you,’ he said like it was a normal request. I pointed at a satisfyingly smooth teardrop-shaped yellow stone.
‘Good choice,’ he said kindly.
‘How much is it?’ I asked.
‘No charge.’
‘Really?’ I questioned, thinking I had misheard him.
‘Really. It’s from my own collection, so no charge. Lay it here at night,’ and he indicated below my boobs. ‘Imagine white light around you.’
‘Thank you,’ I managed to squeak out, the dreaded tears trying to creep up my throat and humiliate me.
‘Some men can’t see what’s in front of them, eh?’ he said so imperceptibly I wasn’t sure he had said it at all. I looked quizzically at him and he nodded, closing my hand round the crystal. I will never forget his kindness, and so in his honour I named anything to do with crystals, mediums, meditation, spirituality, self-help, anything vaguely witchy after him: Beardy Weirdy.
*
A month before Sam left, I visited Mel down in deepest Sussex. She still lived in Bingham, the tiny South Downs market town where we grew up. Bingham was pretty in that quintessential English way, cobbles, wisteria, higgledy-piggledy architectural styles ranging from Tudor right though to eighties facsimile Georgian cul-de-sacs. Mel, her husband, Colin, and daughter, Imogen, had gone to live in Dubai for two years when Imo was six months old, because of Colin’s work. Mel hated it and was lonely, but they knew it was just for two years and would pay off their mortgage in Bingham. She had not returned to work in recruitment, instead becoming a stay-at-home mum, something she struggled with. I went out to Dubai before I had the children and found her addicted to day-time soaps and gin. She would have her first drink at eleven thirty in the morning.
‘Just to take the edge off. Everyone does it here.’ By the time they came home and she was pregnant with Ashley, she had stopped drinking altogether and the Shelf of Self-Help appeared in the downstairs toilet.
‘I scared myself. I actually had one day where I could not tell you what I did because I was so out of it.’ It didn’t make sense – she was always so level headed.
‘Post-natal depression doesn’t make sense, though,’ she said when I had questioned her. ‘Here you are with this baby that you desperately wanted, and Mother Nature decides to turn you mad as some sort of punishment for bringing another human being into the world via your vagina. It’s shit!’ Yes, it was, as I found out for myself when a year after Meg was born I woke up feeling normal, having had no inkling I had behaved like a hormonal hag for twelve months.
Sonny was installed at my feet chewing a Matchbox car in Mel’s living room, and the girls were scouring through the vast collection of Lego that Imogen and Ashley had spilled out for them. Mel’s kids were older than mine, with Ashley now frequenting our former senior school. We had been chatting aimlessly about nothing in particular when out of the blue I blurted: ‘I think Sam’s having an affair.’ It just impulsively shot out. I clapped my hands over my mouth in horror and tears instantly filled my eyes.
‘What on earth makes you say that?’ Mel had hissed, clearly shocked. ‘Surely not Sam, he of the perfect marriage and saintly husband status.’
‘I don’t know,’ I had squeaked, wanting to punch my eyes to stop them leaking.
‘Well, you must have some sort of idea. You’ve never ever mentioned this to me before.’
I took my hands away from my face, wishing I could snatch back the words.
‘Think back, Amanda, what sparked this?’
&nb
sp; ‘Oh God.’
‘What?’
‘It’s his eyes. They’re not here. They haven’t been here for years, not since Meg was born.’
‘That’s three and a half years ago!’
‘I think I just accepted it’s what it’s like when you have small kids. You lose your way a bit.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean. I was a complete nut job when mine were little. But that doesn’t mean he’s having an affair.’
‘I know. Just lately we’ve lost our connection completely and it’s getting worse. I find myself saying the most awful things, just to get a reaction. I’ve become such a moany bitch. He isn’t there at all and it’s hideous. It’s like he’s checked out. And he’s changed his aftershave. The one I love has been banished to the back of the bathroom cabinet. He’s got this new one I’ve never even heard of or seen before. He’s worn the same thing for over ten years – why the change?’
‘I think you’re reading too much into it. Your subconscious will have dragged up that scenario as a way to make sense. There could be another explanation?’ Mel was always the more sensible of the two of us. Whenever I saw a disaster, she would always pragmatically see the other side, and she loved playing devil’s advocate. We were completely different in so many ways and not just physically, with our different hair colours (Mel was blonde to my raven) and body shapes (Mel had tits and arse, I just had arse). I was always a bit on the wild side at school, getting drunk at fourteen, different boys, parties galore; whereas she would be the one cleaning up the vomit from behind the sofa so the parents didn’t find out. Even now she was more grounded than me, the proof being she possessed a salad spinner. Only real grown-ups bother with one of those.
I shrugged and was about to let it go when a suppressed memory from my childhood stepped up to the witness box.
‘Dad always used to change his aftershave with each different woman he had an affair with. That’s how I always guessed. It was excruciating. Remember?’
The Single Mums' Mansion Page 2
