by Poppy Dolan
Pete tries a brittle smile, forgiving but wary. ‘Nearly two years.’
‘Any kids?’ This is spat out with a tiny speck of lamb fat.
‘No, not yet.’ He remains calm. Pete is good with unreasonable drunks. He should have been an ambulance driver.
‘Huh. Wise move. Gives you time to move your money into a secret account before it goes on Start-Rite shoes and Pony Club and Mandarin classes.’
‘Hmmm,’ Pete manages to neither agree nor disagree, smile nor frown, but moves things along all the same.
‘Hey, steady on, Josh.’ Jules forces a nervous laugh. ‘Um, crumble? Crumble, anyone?’
This could be the most portentous pudding choice ever.
‘Yesss,’ Josh whinges reluctantly, as if he’d just been asked to tidy his room. His eyes seem to gain back focus for a moment and he says quietly, ‘Lovely to be eating with friends like this, actually, new friends,’ he holds his empty glass aloft in our direction, ‘my lovely cuz and his lovely family.’ Josh’s face goes the white of an undercooked egg. ‘Eating alone isn’t much cop, I can tell you. Not when you’ve been used to the clatter of tiny spoons against yoghurt pots and the way Will laughed when his spaghetti hit the window … Bloody M&S Fuller for Longer and Match of the Day 2. Not the same. Gah.’ Forgoing the glass, Josh necks his Pinot Noir straight from the bottle.
‘Hey, buddy,’ Seb gently removes the bottle from Josh’s grasp and shoves a bowl of steaming crumble into his hands instead. ‘A bit of carbs, for you, I think. And rhubarb from the garden.’
‘Hahaha! Of course!’ Josh laughs maniacally. ‘Of course it is. Because it’s all rosy, all peachy, lovely lovely.’ And with a huge gulp, he bursts into tears. ‘You’ve got rhubarb and I don’t even have a full Sunday with my kids.’ His top half seems to collapse on to the dining table, head first, as the sobs take over.
‘We’ll just … check on Emmeline!’ I splutter out, taking Pete’s hand and legging it up the stairs, as Seb puts his arms round his gelatine cousin, wobbling away on the polished oak.
Pete shut the door softly behind him, the glow from a little porcelain cottage nightlight throwing the room into wholesome shadow.
‘Before you say a word,’ I semi-hiss, ‘I have seen far too many sitcoms to fall for this trap.’ I pick up the baby monitor on a changing table just by the crib and push the switch from ‘Transmit’, across ‘Two way’ to ‘Listen’. Then I let out a long, silent whistle of relief and put my arms around Pete’s middle.
‘You’re not allowed to divorce me,’ he whispers into my ear. ‘Ever.’
‘Neither are you. No upgrading me for a leggy twenty-three-year-old when I’m forty-seven. No midlife crisis, no discovering yourself. Just stay lost like everyone else.’ I squeeze him harder.
‘Imagine having one of those and then not being able to see it every day, every moment.’ I turn within the hula hoop of Pete’s embrace to look at the little person in the crib, making snuffly noises like a piglet’s snores. Emmeline’s eyelashes twitch just a millimetre against the apricot fuzz of her cheek and we both freeze. I give the army hand signal to Pete which I think means stay down, but then I never was big on war movies. It could mean ‘disarm rifles’. In any case, he stays still. For a moment we just watch.
Her hair is thin and floaty – the sort of hair anyone over thirteen would hate but on anyone under thirteen months looks Christmas-card cute – her fingers are so fat they have dimples on the knuckles and dimples on those dimples, and there is an almost imperceptible line of drool running into her ear from her puckered lips. She is perfect. And I know that if I had one, let alone two, of these little perfect specimens and someone took them away, I’d be howling over my lamb shanks too. Poor Josh. I don’t know why his marriage broke up – and the break up must have been lethal enough as it was – but to start life again without your babies must feel like a dagger to the softest, fleshiest bit of your heart.
And those tissue-paper thin eyelids, those tiny nails and snuffly breaths: such a fragile little thing, so easy to love but also so easy to damage, even just incidentally. The pain that could overflow from a relationship split would land heavy on a little set of shoulders and they might never shake it off. OK, so I have plenty of friends from families that went through a divorce and there isn’t a serial killer, sex addict or cold caller amongst them. But at the same time, it’s not like they ever go misty-eyed and tell happy tales of the summer they first got two bedrooms. To a kid, a divorce is your home falling down around you, even if those two loving parents do the very best they can. It’s scary enough when you really love your other half to know there is the tiniest grain of a chance that they might one day break your heart. It’s a whole other thing to know that if that happened, more hearts, softer hearts, would be torn up too.
A shiver slips down between my shoulder blades. Pete pulls me closer to him. The strength of his arms and his breath passing over the tops of my ears puts a welcome pause on my brain. I can be still in Pete’s arms in a way I can’t be anywhere else. His mum shouldn’t call him Sunflower, she should call him Oak: he doesn’t flap in the wind, he doesn’t bend, he’s not going anywhere.
‘I’d never leave. You, or them. I want a family, Ells, you know that, right?’ His eyes are wide and I want to run my hand along the firm set of his jaw. ‘Because if you’re in any doubt about how I feel—’
He’s interrupted by a sobbing Josh being walked up the stairs and into the spare room by a calm and comforting Seb. ‘Come on then, cuz. An early night will do the trick. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
But I seriously doubt he will.
Jules was wringing her hands at the teapot. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry. We are giving you the greatest hits of family life so far, aren’t we? Crying babies, rowing spouses, bitter divorcees … Well, it was nice to know you.’ She shrugs and laughs helplessly. ‘Let me give you some tea and Green & Black’s at least, before you delete me out of your phone’ We take seats back at the table around the box of mini chocolate bars; it calls cosily to us in our emotional befuddlement.
‘Is he OK?’ Pete asks.
‘No,’ Jules says blankly. ‘I wish he was, but it’s so raw, he can’t see anything else at the moment. This isn’t the first social event he’s ended up drunk in our spare bed at nine-thirty.’ Jules’s mouth pulls down into a half-grimace on the left side of her face. ‘The thing is, you hear so much about divorced parents, single parents, and it’s almost commonplace these days. But then you see it up close in your family and it’s grievous. I can’t imagine what he’s going through. Shit.’ She breaks a ninety per cent dark bar in half. ‘I always really liked his wife, the few times I met her, thought she was so sweet. But things got a bit strained, then she found a dodgy text on his phone and it all …’ Jules makes the universally recognised hand mime of a bomb exploding. ‘I mean, you can unmarry someone, can’t you, but you can’t extract their DNA out of your kids. You’re going to be seeing them across a parents’ night, across a graduation ceremony, across your grandchild’s heads. Forever. You think you know someone …’
And as if picking up on the gloomy vibes, Emmeline starts to wail.
‘Christ, I’d better wade in.’ Jules puts down her tea and climbs the stairs.
None in the Oven
Do you know the father of your child?
You probably do. You probably know his name, where he lives, what he does for a living, his shoe size, his mother’s name, his favourite toast topping.
I know lots of things about my other half: he doesn’t think fruits and chocolate should mix; he’s only really bothered about international football matches where he can get all patriotic; he despises the photo of himself at aged four in crocheted dungarees that his mum keeps pinned up in the kitchen. And I know that he loves me and he looks after me and he’s my own hero.
But will I know the ‘him’ in five years’ time, when we’ll maybe have two toddlers pulling at us in body and soul, and he’ll have the pre
ssures of breadwinning on his back and a wife that looks more like Jack Duckworth than Megan Fox? What if he doesn’t like the version of me then?
If we squish our zygotes together (yes, I did GCSE Biology) and create a permanent bond between us, what if we fall out of love? Worse, what if one of us gets hit by a ten-tonne truck and dies, a pancake on the pavement, and the other has the constant reminder of the spouse they’re missing by looking into the urchin faces of their children (for we survivors will be living on the street, naturally)? Babies are cute, but they are permanent.
I know what you’re thinking, or what you’re even maybe about to type into the comments box: who knows? I didn’t have a 100 per cent guarantee that my marriage would last before I got married. I don’t have a 100 per cent guarantee that I won’t eat a dodgy prawn sandwich tomorrow and die on the loo six hours later. I have no guarantee that by 2045 the Kardashians won’t be our mighty overlords. But still I got married, I eat prawns, I follow Kim on Twitter. Things happen, and sometimes they don’t.
Still this big pressure sits on my stomach, making my morning digestive biscuit taste like ash: if I take the gamble on a baby, I can’t ever cash in my chips. I can’t ever fold. That’s my lot, no going back.
Can I just go back to the time when hair dyes lasted four washes, please? When exams were just an hour long? When no one counted calories? I don’t know when that time actually was. It sounds like an episode of Grange Hill.
Sorry, guys, I’m going to pull my head out of the sand, stop wittering my life away and do something constructive. Anyone got a good flapjack recipe?
Sprogless x
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Chapter Seventeen
‘I don’t know, really.’ A few golden oats rest on Lydia’s neon-green floaty scarf as she talks and eats. The scarf isn’t really effective in keeping out the November cold but it’s very good at showing off her screen-printing skills – this textile jewellery thing is actually a lot more developed than I first thought. The scarf has a repeating pattern of skeleton birds flying all over it. It’s frankly, weirdly mesmerising. ‘The festival has, like, something to do with eggs and branches of trees and braided hair. And they sing a lot. Anyway, it was very important so she went back for it.’
‘But where? Where did Matilda go back to?’
Lydia shrugs. ‘Don’t know. I don’t like to pry: she’s very reserved, and snappy. But thanks a mill for coming to help out, Smells. Isn’t this fun?’
I look up and down Portobello Market. I look at the ground sparkling with frost and my blue fingers. I look at the zero shoppers crowding round us.
‘Super fun, love. I mean, I think this tingling feeling is fun. Or hypothermia.’
‘Come here then!’ Lyds runs her hands all over me in order to give some friendly friction heat. ‘Ooooh baby!’ She’s turning heads amongst the seventeen other people in the market, and actually it is helping. I’m warming up through the power of blush.
When she steps back, she asks, ‘So how’s worky life, anyway? You said you had that new intern bird starting.’
‘Yup, she’s in. And she’s pretty nifty. I mean, she’s always there early, she stays late, comes up with some good ideas.’
‘Does she make you coffee?’
‘Yes, she makes me coffee.’
‘Fucking hell, Smells, you’re living the dream! Sounds cushy to me, having an assistant who fetches you drinks while you’re building your business empire.’ She paws a hand at her delicate throat and coughs lightly.
‘Man, you are so subtle. Shall I get us some coffee then?’ It’s only 10 a.m. but I’m on my third cup. We had to set up at 7 a.m. Not sure I’ve been up this early on a Saturday since I got married and the make-up woman insisted on starting on me six hours before the wedding. It meant I had to greet all my bridesmaids by saying, ‘Hi! Isn’t it exciting? Oh my God, I’m getting married! DON’T TOUCH MY FACE! DON’T TOUCH MY FACE!’
‘Let’s push the boat out and have a hot choc and one of your scones, eh hun? That flapjack has made me greedy hungry. Hope the cream hasn’t frozen in its tub. Ah, the life of a fashion entrepreneur.’ Lydia always pronounces ‘entrepreneur’ in a sexy French accent, and it always makes me laugh.
Later, I toddle back from the tea stall with our burning-hot styrofoam cups and rearrange some Scrabble tile necklaces while Lyds doles out the scone rations. (I dug out some hotel jam pots I’d made Pete bring home from a business trip to Swindon. I think on some level he is still annoyed about that.) I’m holding up one necklace that says CANT SPEEL and comparing it to another that reads PROPER NAME. I give PROPER NAME prominence on the blood-red felt while Lyds is fiddling away on her iPhone.
‘Sexting, are we?’
‘Nooooooo!’ She bats her lashes at me. ‘I’m updating the company blog, which is, in turn, updating the Twitter feed and the Facebook group. Matilda got us all set up and some nice banner bits designed and now we are harnessing a community!’ She shouts this last bit, like a maniacal preacher. ‘We’ve got five hundred likes, and they’re not all from friends either. I think I might, like, make some money from the stall this month. It’s an exhilarating feeling, paying your phone bill on time.’
I give her a high five and then a hug. ‘And there I was, assuming you were being a dirty sex pervert again.’
‘Well, obviously I’m still finding time for that,’ she cackles, wiggling her eyebrows and nodding to her right. Down the way, Guy the potato guy is stoking his little oven thing and sending sly looks Lydia’s way.
‘So is Joe a total no-go?’
‘Joe being …?’
‘The baking love god? The chocolate milkshake you couldn’t wait to drink? Chelsea buns of steel? The guy I went to the baking class for, so you could meet him.’
Lydia twists her mouth over to one side and still looks elfin-cute. ‘Oooops. Sorry, have you been going all this time? You can totally sack it off now. Though, your flapjacks and scones have both gone up a notch, I must say.’
‘I put sour cream in the scone mix, but don’t go off-piste. Are you sure you don’t even want one drink with Joe? He’s tall and funny, very sweet, especially about his little niece … and his baking is really improving. The first week he nearly cremated his Victoria sponge and now he’s fitting pie lids with the best of them. He’s a catch.’
‘Why don’t you buy him a drink then?’ Lydia guffaws and nudges me in the ribs. ‘Sounds like you’ve got yourself a little married lady crush.’
The words ‘little married lady’, in any context, are medically proven to really tick me off. I snap back, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I can appreciate that a guy is attractive without planning on jumping his bones. They don’t confiscate your eyes when you get your marriage licence, you know.’
‘So you are admitting he’s fit?’ Lydia keeps poking the bruise.
‘Yes! But you were the one who thought that first and sent me to the bloody classes! That was the whole point. Don’t make me out to be some married letch now. Look, I can say Jon Hamm is fit and you think that’s OK. But if I said, “Oh, I don’t even a smidge think that Jon Hamm is the physical embodiment of all things sexual because I am married now” you would have me declared legally insane. Or legally dead. It’s not weird that I think Joe is an attractive bloke. He is. And if you’re not bothered, I’ll set him up with another friend …’ I taper off, twiddling with a ring made of varnished jelly sweets.
‘Hey hey hey!’ Lyds shuffles round the table to me, ‘Don’t go that far. I saw him first, after all. And things with Guy are good but it’s early doors. You never know when I might discover that he collects model trains or doesn’t own a telly. Friends?’ Her bottom lip curls out in a pathetic little show that always always wins me over.
‘Yes,’ I huff back, just as my bag starts to ring from underneath the table. As I answer it, I swear Lydia is humming ‘Part-Time Lover’ under her
breath.
‘Oh hi, Mum.’
‘Hello love. I’ve just had some lovely news! Mike’s coming back for a week. He’s been asked to speak at a digital conference in Bradford, so Estelle thought they should come over and make a holiday of it. So we’ll get to see the twins! Isn’t that lovely?’
‘Ooooh, yes,’ I coo with practiced conviction. I worshipped my little nephew and niece when they were born four years ago, but somewhere along the way – maybe after they moved to Estelle’s French hometown or maybe because their twinness became more pronounced as they got older – something about their perfect neatness and almost-mirror image has started to unnerve me. I mean, it’s not Village of the Damned level, not even close, but I don’t think a four-year-old should come out of a spaghetti bolognese dinner looking cleaner than Cliff Richard’s autobiography. Let alone a four-year-old that’s been sitting next to another four-year-old with the God-given right to unleash stain hell that all children have.
I still love the heck out of them; I still go completely bonkers at Christmas and on their birthday when it comes to buying them overcomplicated toys. But I prefer someone else to be in the room with me when they come to visit. Just in case.
I try and FaceTime with Mike every couple of weeks to say hi and catch up. As he’s a web design guy, he can work anywhere and his French wife couldn’t ignore her cravings for ‘real’ cheese and the rural life she grew up with, so they sold their Brixton flat and bought, in exchange, what is basically a huge villa in the South of France. It’s like actually being in an episode of Relocation, Relocation. Except that Pete and I eventually have to admit it’s not our real life and go back to eating rubbish cheese in a smoggy, expensive, awesome city after a holiday with them.
‘So you’ll come for Sunday lunch then? With Pete? Oh good,’ Mum chortles on without me even replying. ‘And if you could bake something for pudding I’d appreciate it. I want to make sure I have enough time to get the jus just right. Last time there was definitely too much red wine. It nearly took the enamel off your dad’s teeth. That reminds me, I need to clean the loo. Bye love!’
