The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

  So I got out of bed and took him downstairs to the kitchen door, where Tom periodically records the height of our children.

  ‘Look, you are even taller than when we last measured you,’ I showed him.

  He smiled and hugged me and I took him back up to bed and managed to fall asleep until the early-morning insomnia kicked in.

  I make the mistake of starting to calculate exactly how many hours of sleep I have had during the night and then give up at five and three-quarters. Caught in that nether land between deep sleep and being fully awake, I am conscious of a pit in my stomach, a reminder of anxiety that I carry in my body without being fully aware of its provenance. I start to run systematically through the usual scenarios that creep up at this time of day. I haven’t missed my period. I know where I have parked the car. I have hidden my cigarettes. Yesterday’s knickers lurk, but I have already managed to file that particular debacle away in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. Some things are so truly dreadful that there is nothing to be gained from analysis.

  Then I remember what it is I have forgotten. Sam’s ‘Six Great Artists of the World’ project has to be handed in this morning. Three down, three to go. I spring from the bed in a single motion, surprising lazy muscles with unaccustomed intent.

  Bad but not irredeemable. To avoid disturbing Tom, I rush into the spare bedroom and pull on the dressing-gown that is hanging on the back of the door. It is the same one that I wore the first time I met him, the dressing gown equivalent of a shag-pile carpet, long, hairy, and impossible to clean, given to my husband by my mother-in-law when he was a teenager. Its presence therefore predates even my arrival on the scene, and it is now called into action only during times of great uncertainty. Thinking of Tom before he met me used to make me feel jealous of all the things we never shared together. Now it is something I relish. Because there is a point in a marriage when the unknown becomes more interesting than the known. I try to persuade him to take me through sexual exploits with the women who preceded me, but he is too honourable to indulge my prurience.

  There are stains and rough patches down the side of this dressing gown, which I imagine are the residues of furtive adolescent skirmishes, bits of unidentifiable food stuck deep inside the pile, and inexplicable bald patches. It is a better record of Tom’s teenage years than any of the endless slides and blurred photos taken by his mother.

  It hails from an era of Laura Ashley prints and records by Status Quo. I feel something in the pocket and half-expect it to be a crumpled and stained page of a favourite big-breasted model torn from a 1978 edition of Playboy. But I couldn’t be more wrong. It is a page from an old edition of Mrs Beeton. I skim read a couple of sentences: ‘I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways. Men are now so well-served out of doors – at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses – that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home.’

  Mrs Beeton has a lot to answer for, I think to myself, moodily stuffing the piece of paper deep into the pocket of the dressing gown. How it came to be here I cannot understand, and I try to recall when the dressing gown was last called into commission. My mother-in-law stayed in this room most recently. I make a note to myself to reflect upon this discovery later, wondering whether Petra is trying to send subliminal messages to me, but right now there are other priorities. Within minutes I have forgotten its existence.

  Outside the spare bedroom I bump into Fred, stumbling along the passage and rubbing his eyes. At this stage, he could be persuaded back into bed. But he senses my stress levels and notices that I am swaddled in an unfamiliar, floor-length ensemble and protests that he wants to come downstairs. Down in the kitchen I assess the situation while searching for paintbrushes and paint, opening and shutting cupboards forcefully and muttering under my breath, ‘Degas is done. Goya is done. Constable is done.’ Fred repeats each phrase, excitedly appreciating that this unexpected change in his early-morning routine might prove favourable to him. I seat him on the stool beside Tom’s drawing table and hand him scissors and pots of paint and other forbidden treats. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes, I repeat to myself. For there are many times, even in households where television is allowed only at weekends, that mothers resort to dirty tactics to claw back those few minutes that will define the success or failure of not just the rest of the day but even the rest of their lives, because sometimes tiny things seem to have enormous resonance. It’s the butterfly effect.

  I must be making more noise than I think, because during the course of this flurry of activity, Tom wanders into the kitchen.

  ‘I’ve got to do Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Matisse,’ I say, waving tissue paper in his face, ‘all by eight o’clock.’

  ‘What are you doing, Lucy? Go back to bed, both of you. You’re having some kind of nightmare about abstract painting,’ he says. Then he notices Fred wielding a pair of large scissors. ‘Why have you woken him up too?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t wake him up. It would be much easier to do all this on my own. He’s cutting bits of tissue paper to do a Matisse collage,’ I explain.

  ‘That might sound logical to you, but from where I’m standing that does not qualify as any rational explanation for all this.’

  ‘Sam has an art project. He’s done half of it, but luckily I have remembered that the rest has to be handed in today. And if Sam doesn’t finish this, then it is me who will be held responsible.’

  ‘But Sam isn’t finishing it, you are doing it for him.’

  ‘It’s quicker and less messy this way. If he were involved it would never get done. Most importantly, if he doesn’t hand it in, that means I have failed as a mother.’

  ‘Lucy, that is ridiculous, nobody judges you for something like this.’

  I put down the paints and take a deep breath.

  ‘That is where you are wrong. If Sam fails, it is a reflection on me. It’s just the nature of mothering in the new millennium,’ I say, jabbing a paintbrush in the air to illustrate my point.

  ‘Put that down, Lucy. Look what you’ve done to my pyjamas,’ says Tom. They are covered in tiny spots of red paint. Fred puts his hand over his mouth and giggles in that way children do when they sense a parent is losing control.

  ‘There are people, mostly mothers but some fathers, who will arrive today with their child’s “Artists of the World” project already turned into a PowerPoint presentation on a CD-ROM.’

  ‘But it’s not the parents’ project,’ he says, taken aback. ‘Anyway, you could never do that. Actually, nor could I.’

  ‘Precisely. So the very least I can do, the minimum, is to ensure that Sam finishes the project.’

  ‘We’ll have verisimilitude, because this one here is about to cut his ear off,’ he says, pointing at Fred, who is engaged in some dangerous air cutting.

  Then Tom sees the blotches of paint all over his table and on the wall.

  ‘How did that happen? How do you make such a mess?’

  ‘We were trying to do Jackson Pollock,’ I explain. ‘Actually, it looks quite good.’ I present him with an earlier work. ‘It could have been worse, Sam could have chosen Damien Hirst.’

  ‘Pickling the goldfish would have been less messy than this. Lucy, if you wrote these things down it would all be so much easier.’

  ‘You don’t realise how many things I remember in a day, you only focus on what I forget.’

  ‘We’re not living in a state of siege, where it is difficult to plan ahead because we might be under attack at any moment, and our food and water supply has been cut off.’

  ‘You are not, but I am,’ I say. ‘I’m besieged. That’s how it feels.’

  ‘Surely you are doing the same thing day in, day out? I know it’s a bit of a treadmill
, but isn’t it simply a question of repeating the same formula every morning?’

  ‘You can’t imagine how many things need to get done in a single day just to tread water. You know that you won’t achieve everything and that at any moment the whole thing could tumble like a house of cards.’

  ‘In what way?’ he asks warily.

  ‘Fights break out like wildfire, there are spillages, inexplicable illnesses, breakages, losses, eventualities that you can never prepare for,’ I explain. ‘Things that set you back months. Like chicken pox. Remember that? I couldn’t leave the house for weeks. Even worse, there is a part of me that relishes the unexpected, because at least it breaks the routine and adds a bit of excitement to my life.’

  He looks taken aback.

  ‘You mean that an element of latent chaos is appealing to you?’ he asks, struggling to understand what I am saying. ‘There is no hope then.’

  He stares at me with this funny sideways look, mouth slightly open as though he is making an effort not to say anything else. This is not something that comes naturally to a man who enjoys having the last word.

  Sam wanders in. He is fully dressed in his school uniform and carrying a cricket ball, which he repeatedly throws in the air and then catches. His pockets are stuffed with football cards. I make him toast – jam no butter – and tell him at least five times to stop throwing the ball while he is eating. Then I wonder whether it is perhaps a good thing to encourage a boy to multi-task in the hope that he will grow up to be the kind of man who can cook broccoli, change a nappy, and have a conversation about work all at the same time. After a couple of slices of toast, he obligingly writes a short piece to go with each work of art. I read the one closest to hand.

  ‘Vincent was a man of great passion,’ it reads. ‘If he had followed the cricket he probably wouldn’t have cut his ear off. Matisse undoubtedly was a cricket fan.’

  I decide to drive to school so that the paintings can dry on the heater, and because there is comfort to be drawn from being enclosed in a cosy space after the exertions of the morning.

  ‘Does getting this finished qualify as a small step for man but a giant leap for mankind, Mum?’ Sam asks from the back of the car.

  ‘Is Sam talking about Major Tom?’ asks Joe.

  ‘Something like that,’ I say, in response to both questions.

  ‘Why do you always say, “Something like that”? Aren’t things either right or wrong?’ asks Sam.

  ‘Life is largely grey,’ I tell him. ‘There are few moments of black and white.’

  ‘Unless you are a zebra,’ says Joe. He pauses, but I know there is something else he wants to say. ‘Maybe Major Tom made it onto the moon and it was so beautiful he stayed there.’

  I notice the roads are very quiet. Sealed in the car with the heaters blowing wildly it is easy to feel cut off from the rest of the world. When I stop at the next junction, I see a large number of parents walking their children to school with unnaturally cheery expressions of bonhomie and collectivism. I remember with a sudden lurch that I have forgotten it is Walk to School Day. I will have to suffer ignominious associations with childhood obesity, global warming and congested roads. I switch down the heating and explain the situation to the children.

  ‘By driving to school, we are releasing bad chemicals into the atmosphere. Today, lots of children in London are walking to school to show that they care about this. I have forgotten, we are late, and so we are going in the car. But if you get into the boot and lie on the floor until I tell you to get out, we might be able to get away with it.’

  I pull on Joe’s Spider-Man hat and shrink below the level of the dashboard to drive within two hundred metres of school. Then we all sit there, quietly waiting for a break in the cloud of parents wafting along the pavement.

  I note Alpha Mum, striding down the road in a pair of heavy walking boots and wearing a rucksack. She lives miles away. She can’t have walked here, but judging by the zealous look on her face she has. Just as she is level with the car, Fred gets up and starts banging on the window. ‘Help, help,’ he cries.

  I try to pull him away, but he is rubbing the steamed-up window with his tiny hand. A nose appears, pressed against the glass, one of those turned-up, slightly superior noses that never has freckles because it is always protected from the sun with wide-brimmed hats and factor forty. Then a pair of eyes, wide open and blinking, tries to focus on the tiny face inside. The overall impression is ghoulish and Fred starts to cry louder. It is Alpha Mum. ‘Someone has left a child locked alone in this vehicle,’ she shouts loudly down the street. Clearly she is a woman who enjoys taking charge in an emergency. ‘I’m going to inform the school. Will you stay here and try and comfort it?’

  I hear Alpha Mum’s walking boots stomping along the pavement out of earshot and shut my eyes, practising deep-breathing techniques that I hope will keep the car steamed up. Then I hear another voice on the side of the car facing into the road. ‘Look at that rubbish on the front seat, there’s apple cores, melted chocolate buttons, clothes, plastic plates, it’s unbelievable. And what are all those weird paintings on the dashboard?’ It is Yummy Mummy No. 1. Another voice, male and under different circumstances now generally welcome, joins the conversation.

  ‘I recognise some of these things. Isn’t this Lucy’s car?’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad.

  Alpha Mum rejoins the group with the headmistress. ‘Mrs Sweeney, are you in there?’ I open the car door and step out with a flourish. ‘We were practising a Tracey Emin installation for the “Artists of the World” project. It’s called “An Unmade Car”,’ I say excitedly. The headmistress claps her hands in joy. ‘How clever of you. We must arrange for some photos, so that the whole school can see it. Well done, Mrs Sweeney. That is so imaginative.’

  She takes the two eldest children by the hand and leads them towards the school. Then Sam comes running back. ‘Mum, remind me what I mustn’t say,’ he whispers.

  ‘Don’t tell the teacher that I did three of your paintings and don’t tell anyone that the car always looks like that. I’m not asking you to lie, I’m asking you to be economical with the truth.’

  ‘Is this a grey situation?’ he asks.

  ‘It is.’

  As I stand on the pavement, holding on to the hood of Fred’s coat, I shut my eyes briefly and hope for a moment of reprieve. It is not even nine o’clock. When I open them, Fred has his trousers down round his ankles and is peeing against the wheel. ‘My wheel,’ he says proudly and I bundle him back into the Peugeot.

  I look up to see Sexy Domesticated Dad sitting on his bicycle beside the car. He is leaning back, legs splayed, and slightly bent at the knees, to stabilise him on the pavement. His helmet hangs from his broken arm. He is wearing a pair of jeans and looks satisfactorily dishevelled and wild, a white T-shirt hanging below a slightly too-small green straight-cut jacket. I would like to say that he is unconscious of the overall effect, but I think there is a hint of vanity there, because he always is careful to remove his cycling helmet and run his fingers through his hair before he goes into school.

  I notice the suggestion of a paunch where the coat doesn’t do up and the T-shirt wrinkles over his stomach.

  ‘It’s my wife’s,’ he says apologetically when he sees me scrutinising him, and smoothes down the jacket over the ripples. But despite all this, and despite his north London obsessions with borlotti beans and cycling as a replacement for religion, there is something inescapably raw and dirty about him.

  ‘You’re good at thinking on your feet,’ he says, getting off his bike by lifting his right leg over the bar at the front. I’m unsure whether it is a compliment or a challenge, and I know that I should go home right now, because even that small comment will resonate much longer than it should until, by endless replay, it is invested with meaning that he never intended. And then I realise that my mother-in-law has it slightly wrong. The imagination involved in loving your husband is less than the imagination involved in elaborating a
n unreciprocated fantasy. Attempting to end rather than begin a conversation, I reply, ‘Years of practice, Robert,’ in what I hope is a dry, laconic tone.

  It is one of those early-autumn mornings when it is cold enough to see your breath, and he is now so close that when I speak, our breath becomes entangled. I am not wearing any make-up and I feel my cheeks go red in the chill.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to rush off yesterday,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad. ‘I’m having a bit of a work crisis. Can’t seem to find the right structure for this book and the Americans want to launch it before the Sundance Film Festival next year.’

  It could sound as though he is showing off, but he isn’t. He is trying to engage.

  ‘At the moment I’m writing about Zapata Westerns,’ he says. ‘Those are the ones that were set during the Mexican Revolution like A Fistful of Dynamite, but although they were inspired by Mexican history there wasn’t much other Latin American involvement . . .’

  I nod knowingly.

  But I am exploiting this unusual verbosity to make a thorough appraisal of his right forearm, which has suddenly been freed from his wife’s jacket, as he uses his arm to emphasise a point.

  To my mind, there is no other part of a man’s body that so perfectly summons up the promise of what lies within than the forearm. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you see a man’s forearm, you can define pretty accurately what the rest of his body will look like and he will have no idea of how much can be extrapolated from even the briefest glance. You can gauge tone, texture, length of limbs, how much time he spends in the gym, whether he has been abroad recently. Sexy Domesticated Dad has a near-perfect forearm, medium range, strong without being chunky, enough hair to seem manly, but light enough and thin enough to pretty much guarantee no back hair. I smile at him.

  ‘What do you think?’ he says.

  ‘Promising,’ I say emphatically. ‘I love Sergio Leone.’

  ‘Good,’ he says, pushing the sleeve of his jacket back down, ‘except that is not what I was asking. I changed tack when I could see your eyes glazing over. Doesn’t matter. It happens all the time, unless I start talking about Benicio Del Toro, then women generally pay attention. I was asking whether you are going to put yourself up as class rep. I’ll help you, but I can’t run it myself because of deadlines. I want to do my bit to help the school.’ He pauses. ‘You look surprised.’