‘What are you asking?’
‘What’s about to happen.’ I shuffled the cards and tried not to second guess what it might be… ‘Oh, shit.’
‘What? It’s not Death, is it?’
‘Death would be preferable. It’s the Three of Swords. Most commonly known as heartbreak.’ In fact, you couldn’t get away from it when you studied the picture. A man lay prostrate underneath a giant hovering red heart with three swords viciously slicing it through the middle.
‘But what are the other meanings? It might not mean that.’
‘OK, a selection of meanings are: getting to the heart of the matter, torn between two lovers, feeling hurt inside, feeling let down, being cheated on – well, that’s already happened! Discovering a painful truth. And various others, all on a similar theme.’
‘Well, maybe Sam will regret the divorce, beg to come back and you will be with mad boy Woody at the circus.’
‘I’ve not even heard from him since he scarpered from the kitchen last weekend.’
‘Do you like him? Be honest.’
‘I don’t know. One minute I do and feel affronted that he ran off. And then I don’t blame him because I brought the shutters down the minute we’d shagged.’
‘Yeah. I would run away after that! Well, there’s only two things that Sam could do now that would hurt you even more.’
17
A Bun in the Oven
Wednesday nights were my favourite. It was a weekly oasis in the desert of bedtime sand storms. As I opened the front door to Sam, eagerly anticipating an industrious evening of writing (or in reality checking Facebook twenty times a minute) his face knocked me off balance.
‘What is it?’ I asked before he even spoke. The shorthand of reading someone you know inside out endured.
‘Can I talk to you, in the car? Is Ali in?’
I nodded, my resigned heart cowering in my chest, fending off the three inauspicious swords. As he shut the car door, me in the passenger seat staring straight ahead, hands trembling, he spoke.
‘I need to tell you something.’
‘I already know.’
‘How could you already know?’
‘Carrie’s pregnant.’
‘Who told you?’
‘No one, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’
‘God, you freak me out with your witchy ways. Yes, Carrie is pregnant. Three months.’
‘Congratulations. Thanks for telling me in the car. Makes me feel really great.’
‘I’m trying to do the right thing by telling you before we tell anyone else. I haven’t told the kids yet. Where did you want me to tell you? In the pub?’
Just when I thought I couldn’t break any more. Just when I thought nothing could hurt as much as when he left, in he swooped with the second battalion, trampling over any progress I’d made.
‘When will you tell the kids?’ I croaked.
‘Tonight.’ I opened the car door and ran back to the house, hurtling straight up the stairs to my bedroom and throwing myself on the bed. I lay there, ears buzzing, trying to digest his words. A sob crept up from my belly, dragging others with it. I could hear Sam in the hallway rounding up the children. Isla and Meg came in to see me.
‘Mummy, what’s the matter?’ Isla cried, and burst into tears, setting Meg off, too. I sat up against my pillows and hugged them as they climbed on the bed.
‘I’m just not feeling well. I’m OK. Honestly.’
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ Isla protested. ‘Can we stay here?’
‘No, Daddy wants you to go to his. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Don’t want to,’ Meg joined in, her cheeks wobbling. ‘Can we sleep with you?’ Sam appeared right then. I switched the bedside lamp on and scrabbled around for a tissue. He handed me the box.
‘Hey, girls! I have pizzas and ice cream at home. I think Carrie had made your favourite cake, too.’
Both girls looked contritely at me; I could tell they wanted the cake, but deep down they knew it might hurt me. It drove a skewer through my already lacerated heart, a fourth sword.
‘Oh, girls, a cake! You love cake. I bet it’s amazing. Carrie makes lovely cakes. Remember to say thank you.’ And the award for best actress goes to… Sam smiled at me and mouthed ‘thank you’. It wasn’t for you, I silently seethed.
‘How do you know?’ Isla asked suspiciously. ‘You’ve never had one of her cakes.’
‘I just know. They look amazing on the telly.’ Isla didn’t look convinced but hugged me anyway. The front door banged and I sank back and howled. I could hear footsteps running up the stairs.
‘What do you want? To twist the sword even further?’ I gasped between sobs at Sam as he lingered on the threshold of the room.
‘Amanda… I feel awful.’
‘Good. You can’t feel as awful as me. We’re still married, Sam!’
‘I know,’ he said wretchedly. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen. It was an accident.’
‘Well, you should have been more careful if you didn’t want another child.’
‘I do, but didn’t expect it to be now. I wanted to wait until after the divorce.’
‘Just go. I don’t want to talk to you,’ I growled, fighting more tears.
‘Amanda, look, I—’
‘Just leave me alone. GO AWAY!’
He continued to stare at me, audacious tears in his eyes, his face contorted in some kind of remorseful grimace. I turned my head and he left. Footsteps returned and the door pushed open again.
‘I told you to leave,’ I cried.
‘Oh, sorry, ‘Ali said embarrassedly, shuffling out of the doorway.
‘No, Ali, come in. I thought you were Sam.’
‘He just flew out the door. What the fuck’s going on?’
‘Carrie’s pregnant,’ I exploded rather loudly, surprising myself and Ali at the same time.
‘Oh, Mands.’ Ali promptly burst into compassionate tears. ‘Oh, you poor thing.’
‘It hurts so much,’ I cried, sounding like a child.
Ali leaped over the bed and pulled me in for a hug. ‘What a dick,’ she sighed. ‘He’s just made his life so much more difficult. You’re still married!’
‘I know.’ I pulled back and grabbed more tissues to stem the snot. ‘Have we got any wine?’
‘No, we drank it all at the weekend. Let’s go to the pub. I’ll go and get ready.’
‘Ali, you’re forgetting Grace.’
‘Oh shit, yes, she’s downstairs in the high chair. Fuck, she better still be alive.’
*
‘What I don’t understand is how he’s affording all these kids!’ Ali said, waving her sherry glass around as Grace splashed in the bath next to her. ‘I mean, four kids is a lot of kids.’ We’d decided on the dregs from the Cupboard of Badness next to the fridge where vodka, ouzo, Calvados, Tequila and other piquant alcoholic orphans waited patiently for a desperate situation like this.
‘She’s rich, she must be. Book deals, TV deals,’ I reasoned, perched on the closed loo seat sipping a sickly glass of Martini Rosso. ‘She’s having a moment. You get well paid for having a moment.’
‘Do you think she tricked him into it?’
‘Maybe. Who knows? I don’t care. All I care about are the kids. I think they’ll hate the idea of a baby.’
‘You know you’ll get door-stepped again as soon as this breaks in the press. You better start wearing those clothes I gave you instead of looking like a bag lady. Standards have slipped, Amanda!’
‘I will face the press and moon them. Show them what I really think of it all.’
*
Meg and I started therapy in November just before she turned five. It mostly consisted of her playing with dollies or drawing about how she felt, with me remaining in the room along with Elley the extremely young and presumably childless therapist. Sometimes I had to talk about things that had happened, how I parented (like a fucking idiot compared to the perfect non-shouty parent hando
uts Elley foisted on me where everyone looked like they were auditioning for The Joy of Sex manual with beards and earnest do-gooder faces). I honestly didn’t get how this was helping, but somehow it did. Her tantrums had abated dramatically. We fell into a little routine where I picked her up from school (she had started in September), took her to see Elley, then afterwards, we would sneak to the French Café at the end of the road for hot chocolate before I returned her to lessons.
‘I lub you, Mummy,’ she would say every time I dropped her back at school, making me wish I could spirit her away for the day.
‘Sometimes having an animal can help young children who have real difficulties expressing themselves,’ Elley suggested in one session. ‘Would that be an option?’
I knew that Meg loved gorillas to a point of obsession. She slept with Jimbo every night, tucked up in her bed, her arm clutching him fiercely to her chest. But I wasn’t going to get a simian playmate for her.
‘She was talking about a cat earlier.’
‘Yes, next-door have one. She loves it.’
Elley smiled encouragingly at me. I recklessly signed up for the Celia Hammond Rescue Centre the minute I got home.
‘We should have a kitten for you in the new year,’ the cat lady brightly chatted on the phone. I decided to keep it a secret until the day we went to collect it, to avoid fending off on the hour, every hour ‘Is it today we get the cat?’ questions. Or unless I came to my senses and realised what a completely foolhardy idea this was. I was not a cat person.
*
‘Jesus! Look at this!’ Ali screeched the next morning while I was loading up the terminally busy washing machine. She shoved her phone in my face open in Facebook messenger.
Dear Alison
I am so sorry I never rang you, but I really couldn’t make up what happened. Right after you went home, I followed you out to get a cab and was beaten unconscious to the ground by a mugger who stole my phone, and ultimately your number. I woke up in hospital and had to stay in for a few days because my injuries were so bad. I wasn’t allowed to present the news for a few weeks because I looked like Shrek on a bad day. I also didn’t want to see you while I looked like this. I scared myself in the mirror. Anyway, rather than go through Justin and have him asking loads of questions, I found you on here. I hope this is you! You look like I remember, even after the head injury! So, what I am asking in a roundabout way, is would you like to go for a drink? My number is…
Dara
‘Can you believe it?!’ Ali laughed, a sliver of Schadenfreude dampening the revelation. We had joked after a few weeks that maybe he’d had his phone stolen and that was why he hadn’t called.
*
‘I hate the thought of her with Grace,’ Ali seethed, the morning of her third date with Dara. After spearing an aggrieved Jim with some hard-nosed lawyers’ letters and threats of being chased relentlessly by the CSA, Ali had finally retrieved her money just before Christmas. But as part of the new deal, Grace now spent every other weekend with Jim as well as a midweek night. ‘It makes my blood boil.’
‘I know, it’s a double-edged sword, but just think of the nice time you will have tonight. You’re going out with a lovely man who you like. You do like him, don’t you?’
‘I do, but it isn’t the same.’
‘The same as what?’
‘The same as when I met Jim. There’s no stomach churning, butterflies, will he won’t he call, will we have sex, or won’t we?’
‘That’s because Jim was married to Diane! It was subversive and naughty, and that makes it more exciting.’
‘Not just that. I was mad about Jim from the moment I met him. This feels different. There isn’t that instant connection, that shared something that I can’t put my finger on. I just knew Jim and I were something. What that something was I don’t know, but something… I do like Dara, though, and he is kind.’
‘I get it. I really do, and I have no idea how I will ever let someone in again. I knew my first boyfriend was something, but we were best friends for years, but I also knew Sam was something straight after our first date. I just felt it to the tips of my split ends.’
‘Gosh, Mands, you and Sam were a proper love story. You know we all used to look at you and think, God, I want that. He loved you so much. What happened? Look at us. Are we going to have a happy ever after?’
‘Yes!’ I cried, grabbing her hands. ‘Instead of waiting for it, we just have to live in the moment – that is the happy ever after. It doesn’t need to involve a man. Time will eventually erase the insanity of loving someone who doesn’t love you back – that’s why it feels like we need a man to fix the hole they left. But what happens if we’re happy on our own? My mum was, after my dad. I don’t know whether I will ever love someone like I loved Sam because he is the father of my children. Maybe one day it will be different, but good different, more equal. I didn’t love me enough.’
Except in the deepest darkest night of my heart, I believed that love doesn’t totally die. Like energy, it just burns somewhere else, a snuffed-out soul, seeking pastures new. I felt like the teeniest of flames still flickered for him, and that was what I needed to get over. Not by shagging someone else, but by feeling at peace with who I was and setting that love inwards like my own knight in shining armour…
18
DIY SOS
‘Water’s pouring through the ceiling!’ Ali screamed from the kitchen as I changed Sonny’s nappy in his bedroom.
He would be three in a few months’ time and continued to refuse to use the toilet. He was also not speaking properly, only using occasional words, and I was still ‘Dad’. I knew it was considered normal, but doubts rumbled in the back of my mind. Jacqui said that little boys gleaned their developmental pointers from their fathers – she was having similar speech difficulties with Joe. Sonny saw his dad properly only every other weekend and one night a week. The rest of the time he was constantly surrounded by women, even when he went to nursery twice a week.
I barged into the kitchen and found Ali had placed the mop bucket underneath the leak and moved one of the Habitat chairs from its path.
‘The ceiling’s bulging,’ she observed unnecessarily. As we helplessly stood there, dazed by the unfolding catastrophe, other damp patches emerged like a fairy mushroom ring popping up on a damp summer lawn.
‘Fuck, the ceiling’s going to collapse,’ I cried, finally galvanised into action. ‘We need loads of towels.’ Ali tore upstairs to the airing cupboard on the middle floor while I shepherded Grace and Sonny away from the potential tsunami and into the living room to watch In the Night Garden. ‘Get the mop!’
Ali scattered the towels all over the crash site and handed me the mop. I raised it to the ceiling.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Helping it on its way.’
I pressed the mop head on the swelling plasterwork, and it didn’t take much pressure before it split like blistered skin and a torrent of water smacked down onto the waiting towels. The patch of ceiling that had been harbouring the water followed suit and collapsed onto the floor with a resounding thud. Sonny ran back in to investigate the noise, leaving Grace to crawl her way in. Ali inspected the jagged hole where an exposed joist held up the rest of the plasterboard and a network of brass pipes criss-crossed through the space between the floor above and the kitchen ceiling: the concealed workings of a house.
‘There’s no more water pouring out. I wonder if it had been collecting there for ages and finally decided to escape? It must be from the bath; it’s directly above it. Look, you can see the bottom of it.’
‘Shitting cunt sticks. I could ring the house insurance but they just up your premium for shit like this.’
‘It’s such a shame my dad is out in Spain. He would sort it in a jiffy.’
‘I don’t know anyone who can do this. It’s such a small job, yet it isn’t at the same time. It’s plumbing and building.’
I despondently kicked the bucket, almost
upending the contents and adding to the mess.
‘I know a man who can,’ Ali said brightly.
Three days later, after the hell of forcing children to have showers instead of baths, I opened the front door, a combination of apprehension and culpability whooshing round inside me. Woody was here because we needed his skills, but when he towered over me all tanned, his hair bleached blond at the tips, looking the picture of health after his Christmas sailing trip, my groin executed a perfectly swift U-turn, leaving common sense quaking in its wake.
‘Hi!’ he said, and leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, refuelling the dormant desire. His aftershave was surely catnip. ‘How are you? Apart from having a hole in your ceiling?’
‘I’m good. Come through. Tea?’
‘Yes, never say no to tea.’
Woody set about fixing everything, starting with the pipes in the bathroom.
‘How do you know what you’re doing?’ I asked as he stood on a ladder, his head immersed in the gap. I passed him tools when he asked me and his hand grazed mine, sending an electric shock right down into my nether regions. Everyone was out, this being the middle of the day and nursery for Chug and school for the girls. Ali was at a baby group coffee morning.
‘Oh, you know, I’ve been doing this on and off in between sailing now for a few years. The gaffer my dad employs has taught me loads.’
‘So how much do you charge?’ He withdrew his head from the hole and turned to look at me.
‘Amanda, you’re a mate. I’m not charging you.’
‘But I must pay for something! The materials, at least?’
‘I have all the stuff just lying around at work. No one will notice. Look, I have to fix the leak and then we’ll test it and I can patch up the hole, but I’ll have to come back at the weekend and sand it down and paint it so it matches.’
‘Well, I am kid-free this weekend. I could treat you to dinner to say thank you. I’m not doing anything.’
‘Don’t feel you have to. Honestly, it’s fine.’
‘I want to.’
‘Why don’t you cook me dinner instead and then we can go out for a drink?’
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