by Emlyn Rees
Contents
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1. Amy
2. Jack
3. Amy
4. Jack
5. Amy
6. Jack
7. Amy
8. Jack
9. Amy
10. Jack
11. Amy
12. Jack
13. Amy
14. Jack
15. Amy
Copyright
About the Book
MEET JACK
Dadness. Women have a sixth sense for it. To them, you’re like an old bull in a field at the side of the motorway, harmlessly chewing the cud, watching the world race by, nothing like the wild buffalo stock from which you came. And that’s how it should be, of course, after seven years of marriage to the woman you love. But, lately, as I’ve looked around, all I’ve seen is temptation. From random women in the pub, to my foxy new boss … they’ve left me doubting whether I’ve really been put out to pasture at all …
MEET AMY
Motherhood, I’ve discovered, is the great leveller. I could be a celebrated fashion designer (instead of the finding, cleaning, bum-wiping domestic robot I’ve become), but having kids automatically makes me the same as all the other mums in ‘The Coven’ up the park. And being ‘the same’ makes me want to do something terribly rash – like rediscover the impulsive person I used to be. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jack and our son, but everyone else seems to be having so much more fun than me – and so much more sex …
The pressure’s on.
Can they resist The Seven Year Itch?
Can you?
And if one of them cracks? Will it be Amy or Jack?
It’s time to find out …
About the Authors
Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees each had novels of their own published before teaming up to write bestsellers together. Their work has been translated into twenty-six languages. They are married and live in London with their three daughters.
Also by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees
The Boy Next Door
Come Again
Come Together
Love Lives
The Three Day Rule
We Are Family
The Seven Year Itch
Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees
For everyone who read Come Together
Acknowledgements
Firstly many thanks to our wonderful agents, Jonny Geller and Vivienne Schuster, Carol Jackson and everyone at Curtis Brown. Also to our fabulous supporters at Random House, in particular Susan Sandon, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, Claire Round and Cassie Chadderton for all their hard work. Congrats to Kate and Faye! As usual, we are extremely grateful for the invaluable input from our friends – you know who you are – and the ongoing support of our family, particularly our two little angels.
The important thing about the social phenomenon known as the Seven Year Itch is not whether this urge towards marital infidelity is universal, or whether it really is most likely to strike seven years into a marriage, or even whether you actually believe in it at all. No, the only truly important thing about it is this: if you do feel the Itch, will you choose to ignore it, or will you start to scratch?
1
Amy
The Vipers
When I was eight, my grandfather wrote in my autograph book: When three or four women come together to chat, God help the first woman to leave.
I never truly understood what he meant until I joined the Vipers.
It’s our bi-monthly meeting and I’m late. Personally, I don’t think of them as vipers, more as a close group of fellow first-time mothers, but Jack’s always referred to them as that, or the Coven, which is just as bad. It’s fair enough, I suppose. My poor long-suffering husband bears the brunt of the processing I have to do, to get over the veiled comments and insinuations made each time the Vipers meet.
Jack, of course, doesn’t understand why I still see them at all, but it’s like the Mafia: once you’re in, you’re in for keeps. I know these women and they know me. We’re bound together by pain and ugly scenes of uncommon emotions. If I did leave, I’d be a traitor forever. They’d spurn me in the park and not invite me to birthday parties, and before long, I’d wake up with a severed horse head – well, a My Little Pony head at the very least – in my bed.
I hurry through the gates of Queen’s Park and take the short cut past the tennis courts. It’s a cloudless May day and the horse chestnuts are loaded with cones of blossom, but I hardly have time to notice. I’m sweating as the buggy rattles over the grass.
There’s a young guy playing tennis with his coach on the court. His legs are tanned and supple and there’s an athletic spring in his step. As a peal of his laughter reaches me on the breeze, I’m reminded of how Jack once was, before too much work, parenting and our ongoing financial crisis made him so serious.
Back then, Jack and I always used to talk about how we’d meet up at lunch time to play tennis once a week together. Being able to do just that was part of the reason we chose to buy a flat as near to the park as we could afford. But in the three years that we’ve lived here, we haven’t once met up for lunch, let alone played tennis, and now we’ve stopped talking about it altogether.
Before I get within sight of the playground area, I stop and pull out Buster’s Bedtime, my son Ben’s favourite book. I open it at the bit where Buster cleans his teeth. The illustration has a tinfoil mirror in it. I search my own distorted reflection for any signs of the illicit croissant I had earlier, or yesterday’s smudged eyeliner. I’m clear, but even so, I wish that I’d washed my hair. And wish that I’d had my roots done. And wish I didn’t look like one big frown. And, as I chuck the book back into the netting at the bottom of the buggy, along with the rancid assortment of banana skins and sandy nappy wipes, I wish most of all that my appearance didn’t matter. But it’s the Vipers and it does.
Believe me, with them everything gets exaggerated. You put on new heels, you might as well be wearing stilts. You put on lipstick and you’re having an affair. And if you put on a pound, you might as well have put on a stone.
It’s like playing spot the difference for a living, and every difference spotted involves a judgement or a criticism of some sort. Which is why I take out the book again and carefully touch up my lip gloss so that it looks like I haven’t got any on. Because I hate coming away from these meetings feeling crumby. It leaves me feeling downtrodden, and I just don’t think I can face it today.
The Great Female Conspiracy
Of course, it wasn’t always like this. At first being with the Vipers was great, because when I fell pregnant with Ben, the initial euphoria of the thin blue line on the pregnancy test quickly wore off, and the terror I felt at the prospect of giving birth equally quickly kicked in.
Of course, I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel like that. I was supposed to be all earth mother and smugly proud, but inside I felt like Sigourney Weaver facing the drooling alien, and as I got bigger, I started to feel like the alien had impregnated me and it was only a matter of time before its offspring punched its way out.
So when I joined the local group of expectant mothers and found that I wasn’t alone in my fears, I clung on to them like a life raft. They made me feel normal. They talked to me like I still had a brain and wasn’t just a walking brood mare, and in no time at all, we were bonding over the horrors we tried to hide from our menfolk: varicose veins that crawled like feeding worms across our groins, and piles that a mole would be proud of; stretch marks that appeared on our bellies like contours on a map, and aching hips that made
us hobble like little old ladies. Not to mention tits that leaked like Mr Whippy ice-cream dispensers, warts and beauty spots that went weird and itchy and our unfeasibly bushy bikini lines (less Brazilian, more Cuban – as in Fidel Castro’s beard).
We learned to laugh about it all, just the same as we did about how fat our faces felt and how we regularly got stuck in the bath, whilst assuring one other that we were just ‘all bump’ and hadn’t put any weight on at all.
But then came the births in quick succession and, ashen-faced, we clung to each other with renewed neediness, glad that there were others out there who also felt like they’d narrowly survived a terrifying car crash. (‘Vietnam.’ That’s how film-crazy Jack described Ben’s birth. ‘Like spending a night on Hamburger Hill.’ He was right, in a way. We did feel like war veterans.)
It was the betrayal that was the worst. The discovery of the Great Female Conspiracy. I guess it exists to keep the human race going, but the fact is, that nobody – especially other women – tells the truth about giving birth.
They never tell you about the full gynaecological horror that involves delivering another human being into this world. They never prepare you for the moment when you discover that you’re made of meat, not make-up; that you’re actually more butcher than Body Shop; and that this epiphany changes you for ever.
So in the weeks that followed these birthing experiences, we comforted each other, us Vipers. We shared in horrified whispers the gory details of what we’d been through. We cried on each other’s shoulders as we tried to come to terms with stitched perineums, cracked nipples and sleepless nights, whilst we pretended to the rest of the world that we were glowing with maternal serenity.
But the problem with any group of women (as any woman knows) is that over time it becomes a hornets’ nest of covert competitiveness. And once our babies stopped being newborn? We were on bitchy quicksand.
It shifted from being about how we were feeling, to how we were doing. We started sizing each other up, scrutinising and comparing our new mothering skills – and found each other lacking.
A Test Of Faith
I take a deep breath and smile brightly as I approach our usual tables by the toddler sandpit. They’re the wooden type you get in pub gardens with the benches attached. I remember that Jack had one in the garden of the house he shared once with his best mate, Matt. Only this one is a lot less enticing, of course, on account of a deficit of peanuts and ice-cold lagers, and a surfeit of tasteless breadsticks and sticky juice cups.
In the sandpit, I can see several of the kids I’ve known since they were born tearing around. One of the biggest surprises about becoming a parent is that, despite all the gumph they tell you on the TV, it really is nature not nurture. These kids were all born with their own personalities. The cute ones are cute, right from the start, and the mean ones are mean. Not that you can ever say this out loud, of course, any more than you can say that it’s possible to really loathe other people’s kids.
Don’t get me wrong; some of these offspring I love. I really mean it when we joke about dancing embarrassingly at their twenty-first birthdays. But between us all there are eight kids. Statistically, one of them is going to turn out to be a nasty crim of some sort.
The Vipers are all present and correct, surrounded by a protective shield of buggies. Camilla is holding court. I swear she’s had a fake tan. She’s wearing a pretty summer skirt and Converse trainers and she’s sitting astride the bench, one hand rocking her Bugaboo Buggy (the most expensive in the range) where demon Tyler is mercifully asleep. Her other hand (complete with diamond-studded eternity ring, presented at her bedside in the private maternity hospital, by BBC exec hubby, Geoff) is resting ostentatiously on her swollen belly. She’s sixteen weeks already. She laughs up at Sophie.
Sophie does combat yummy mummy. She’s pretty in a freckly, turned-up nose kind of way – all khaki pants and headscarves and glimpses of her flat midriff and the top of her tattoo. ‘Womb Raider’ Jack’s always calling her with a worrying twinkle in his eye, the same as when he watches the real Angelina Jolie on the screen. I’m not losing any sleep over it, though. Jack may wonder, but he’s not the type to wander. Not these days, anyway.
And patting the space beside her, when she sees me, is overenthusiastic Faith. Fashion-wise, Faith seems to have stuck in the nineties, with an original Rachel-from-Friends barnet, but today I notice that she too is wearing new Converse trainers. It crosses my mind that she might have actually followed Camilla and bought the same trainers in secret. Put it this way: Camilla isn’t copying her.
‘Ah, there you are, Amy,’ Camilla says, smiling. We do kisses all around and I climb into the space next to Faith.
I’ve been kind of looking forward to today. Let’s face it, there’s not much in my day-to-day diary to get excited about. So little, in fact, that I don’t actually use a diary any more. There’s the ongoing activities that fill up my time: the rota of dishwasher emptying, food shopping, nappy changing, cooking and washing-machine filling. Then there’s my routine with Ben: Aquababies at the pool on Monday, Boogaloo Bunnies on Tuesday, Monkey Music on a Wednesday and Park Pranceabout on Thursdays. (Fridays, obviously, we go wild and crazy.)
And then there’s these occasional get togethers with the Vipers.
But the second I’m subsumed into the group, I remember what I loathe about it. Motherhood, I’ve discovered, is the great leveller. I could be a brilliant lawyer, or an architect, or yes, even a celebrated fashion designer (as I once thought I would be by this age), but it counts for nothing here.
Apparently, because I have a child the same age as Faith’s, that makes me the same as Faith – and call me a snob, but Faith is really quite thick. Being ‘the same’ as Faith makes me want to break free and do something terribly rash. Like telling her that I find her constant bonhomie false beyond belief and her annoying assumptions about my life ignorant and inaccurate. Or that beneath the virtuous veneer, I suspect her of being the most venomous viper of all.
‘Aw. He’s still got that nasty skin rash then,’ is Faith’s opening gambit, pointing down at Ben, who’s asleep, wrung out from the eye-rolling, toy-tossing, tonsil-tearing tantrum he had earlier about being strapped into his buggy. (Anyone would have thought he was an innocent death-row prisoner being dragged to the chair.)
I reach out and protectively cup my darling boy’s angelic face. A few hysteria-induced blotches are hardly a nasty skin rash. I feel my heart flip with guilty love for my little boy. In the WWF-style wrestling match I had with him, I wish now that I hadn’t lost my temper and called him a ‘little fucker’ for making me late.
‘He’s fine,’ I state, in the kind of tone I hope will kill this line of conversation dead.
But Faith is to empathy what Stalin was to public relations.
‘Could be the start of chickenpox,’ she speculates.
She really hopes it is, clearly. I’d never dream of criticising her daughter Amalie, or keeping tabs on her illnesses, as if they were weaknesses. I wouldn’t dare offer an opinion on the fact that Amalie looks – in Sarah’s words – ‘slightly touched’.
‘It’s understandable really though, isn’t it,’ Faith continues. ‘Poor Little Ben’s probably got low resistance after that horrible cough he had last time . . . it’s going around.’
I smile as blandly as I can. ‘Or maybe it’s bird flu,’ I suggest. ‘You never know . . .’
For a moment, I hope Faith might see this statement for what it is: a joke. No such luck. She leans in close.
‘I’ve got some Tamiflu,’ she confides. ‘I’ve been stockpiling for months. I’ve got enough to give you a box or two. Or I could give you the website, if you like?’
I’m at a loss as to how to respond, because my first instinct is that if Faith is the kind of person who’s going to survive a pandemic, I’d rather perish with the masses.
Fortunately, our attention is drawn to Camilla, who leans in conspiratorially and rattles a pink bottle of
pills, and glances at Sophie, eliciting giggles and coos from the group. Of course, that’s what Camilla and Sophie are looking so smug about: Sophie’s pregnant.
Then it turns out, in a sudden splurge of confessions, that Faith, Linda and Abby are all actively trying for ‘number two’ as well. Lan simply holds up two hands with her fingers crossed and stares down at her belly (although it’s so tiny, it’s a wonder that anything as big as an olive, let alone a foetus, could fit in it). Camilla squeals with delight and starts handing out folic acid vitamin pills like a teenager dealing Ecstasy.
And they’re off.
The Second Coming
Over the last two and a half years, many topics have been aired and debated at these very tables. Some of them, looking back, have been ridiculous. Like the endless pre-birth pain-relief-versus-natural-birth debate. Laughable now. The moment we went into labour, we were all screaming for drugs. Abby’s water-birth pool stayed in the boot of the car, Linda drop-kicked the hired back-massage machine against the wall, Lan stabbed Phil in the balls with her acupuncture needles when he suggested they might help, and Sophie screamed hysterically over her Yogic-Breathing-Through-It tape.
Post-birth, of course, the Vipers’ conversational topics became much more specific. There was will-he/she-take-a-bottle? month, followed by how-do-I-know-if-he/she-is-ready-for-solids? Then we were on to is-it-too-early-for-potty-training? And the ongoing nanny-or-nursery-or-me? debate.
These conversations are so inane, they make me want to shoot myself.
And this one is no different. Soon, we’re past dates of last periods and on to the justification for having another child. The big question is, why do it all over again?
‘What about you, Amy?’ Camilla asks, eventually. ‘You’re very quiet. Any thoughts on number two?’
