by Poppy Dolan
‘Do some food, you mean? I can dig your wedding bunting out, you know. Do people put bunting up in January? I suppose it can’t hurt.’
‘That might actually be nice, thanks. But no, not food, more of a finance thing. Pete’s going to … see what he can do to help with the funding. But,’ her mouth is already starting to form the words ‘bad idea’, I can tell, ‘we’re happy to do it, it will only set us back a little in our deposit. The house can wait a while.’
Mum’s nostrils are narrowing. She is sizing me up for a conversational tackle, as if I am that massive Kiwi rugby player and she’s got to use all her wiles to fell my twenty-three stones. ‘That money wasn’t just for a house though, was it?’
‘Hmmm?’ I put the tea down and tuck my leg under me on one of the dark wood chairs.
‘Well, I imagined it was more of an all-round family fund. Money for the house, yes, but also the furniture you’ll need, decorating, money to help keep things afloat when you’re not working or not on full pay, things for the baby. When it comes.’
I feel some of my baking buzz diminish.
‘Mum,’ I start as neutrally as I can, ‘there is no baby. Right now.’
She looks into her tea, assuming an innocent look. ‘But one can’t be far away. Can it?’
There so much hope buried in those two little words. So much. More than you hope for sunshine on a bank holiday, more than you hope for an A grade on an exam, more than you hope your soufflé will rise like it’s full of helium.
‘Mum …’
‘What? I’m just saying. Pete is a planner, he thinks ahead. I’m just surprised he didn’t want to hold onto that “family money” a little more.’ She shrugs in a perfected expression that is one third nonchalance and two thirds passive aggression. No one can guilt you like your mum.
‘Well, he did.’ And then it hits me: he really did. He wanted me to say we should keep the money for our future plans; he needed me to be the one to put my foot down as he could never say no to his own family. He’s the one that makes their plans, saves the day, has all the answers, does the right thing. I had to help him say the wrong thing for once. And I didn’t. The future didn’t really cross my mind. I just thought, yeah, we can save it up again. No biggy. But I have basically just spelt out ‘DEFINITELY NO TRYING FOR A BABY FOR AT LEAST SIX MONTHS, IF NOT LONGER’.
‘OK, well then.’ Mum stands up, puts her hands on her hips and starts making a sandwich to clear the air.
She wanted a different answer and it’s written all over her lovely face: she wanted me to say, ‘Here’s the plan: so many months to conception, so many months till you have a new grandchild on British soil, so many months until I call you at three a.m. saying I desperately need you to come and tell me the ins and outs of potty training.’ But I have nothing to give her. How can I, when I don’t even have an answer for myself yet? I loved having Emmeline all to myself the other day but now thinking about the financial side of family life has a new set of cogs whirring in the faulty gearbox that is my brain: what if disaster strikes and we’ve used all our money on White Company baby bed linen and I’ve lost my earning power? What if Pete loses his job? What if the baby learns how to use an iPad and spends £5000 on Angry Birds downloads? It can happen.
‘What makes you think I’m even ready for a baby, Mum?’ I blurt it out before I’ve really thought it through. I could be asking for a whole lorryload more of emotional blackmail but on the other hand this is a clever, capable woman who has raised two children of her own and built a great career. Maybe she can tell if I’ve got the balls for it. Or the boobs, or whatever.
Mum looks at me carefully. She slowly puts the sugar away in the cupboard then looks at me again. ‘Ever since you were a little thing, you’ve been thoughtful. Clever, kind. Full of energy.’
It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-five years since you last gave her a pasta necklace, it’s still amazing when your mum tells you you’re lovely.
‘But that’s by the by. In answer to your question, I’m going to ask you one: What makes you think anyone is ever ready?’
I’ll admit that is a good question, but I was kind of hoping for a concrete answer. I mull this over as we store away our sugar paste creations. I pretend I’m happy with my snowpeople but really they still look like rejects from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ll probably leave them on the terrace for the birds back at the flat. I try and bury the feeling that I’m disappointing Mum by not having a baby plan. Though I think she’d be the first person to point out that getting knocked up to make other people cheery isn’t the best life choice, so I hope she can be patient with me. To be honest, I’m running out of patience with myself.
None in the Oven
I’ve got the eggs, you’ve got the sperm, let’s make lots of babies.
Babies cost money. I don’t mean like on a black market (though I’m sure they’re not exactly cheap in that situation either) but from the moment you make the magic happen in the bedroom – or in the shower, if you live in a film – that little fertilised tadpole is going to cost you. Just the pregnancy-test price is enough to make you gasp (I had a scary week when I was twenty-three and thought I was duffers. The Boots receipt is still imprinted on my brain. Ouch), then you’ve got to take vitamins, supplements, rub expensive creams into your skin. Yes, you are saving money on booze and shellfish but I would argue the mental price of going without these essentials is very high.
Then you’re buying the baby’s clothes, its toys, its crib, its car seat, its first toddler-sized keyboard. Imagine your household expenditure like a spreadsheet – if my husband wrote or even read this blog he’d say that a great many people, us included, do put their household expenditures on a spreadsheet, but you really can’t take an accountant’s word for what’s normal here – you have to mirror this ever increasing ‘Outgoings’ column with a conversely shrinking ‘Incomings’ one. Because the lucky mum’s pay is about to take a nosedive for anything up to a year. And then if she can make it back to work she might have to go part-time or just sobbingly hand over her entire wage slip to the nursery. What fun.
Don’t get me wrong: I’d rather spend money on a baby than on some shoes, or even a fancy pasta machine. I’d rather have a baby than a trip to Barbados (besides, I get really terrible heat rash). It’s not the luxuries I’d miss, it’s the rainy day fund. It’s the feeling that if everything went wrong, I could probably still just about scrape by. But what if a horrible domestic drama hit me like a thunderbolt and I was powerless not just to take care of me but also the little one(s) I brought into the world?
Ooooh, I’ve gone very negative, very end-of-the-world. I should get myself a sandwich board that says: Don’t have babies, the sky is falling in! I know that worrying about things won’t prevent them, but knowing a worry is pointless doesn’t make it any less of a worry.
I think I’m just starting to understand what ‘responsibility’ means. And it’s scaring the bejesus out of me.
Tremblingly yours,
Sprogless x
Chapter Thirty-Two
Something needs to break this vicious cycle. I’m angry at myself for thoughtlessly letting Pete down by agreeing to lend our money, which then leads me to imagine us huddled in cardboard boxes with five grubby urchins after the twenty-third Tory recession in 2024, which spurs a desire to withdraw all our cash and make a den of it in the living room, that would block out the real world and my foghorn-loud biological clock. But that then makes me feel even worse for letting Pete down and not rugby tackling him to start making a baby as soon as humanly possible. Something needs to snap me out of it. I’d even settle for ‘slap me out of it’ right now: all this worrying and self-doubt is getting me precisely nowhere in the Sorting Out Eleanor and Being Nice to Pete plans. This big black cloud over my head won’t let me see straight; I can’t look Pete in the eye for fear of burning up in shame, and he’s keeping politely busy and away from me. It’s crazy to think that I can tell Pete anything, he
knows all my stuff and vice versa, but this is the big prickly hedge between us: we both know we could take the secateurs to it, chop this secret down and expose it down to the root. But it’s thorny and deep and would we really like the truth of what’s underneath?
Pete’s arranging the transfer of some of our ISA money to his dad and has long, sober conversations with Rich about savings accounts. No one does ‘Passive Aggressive Under the Radar’ like an accountant – he has the perfect, logical excuse to be calm, busy and head-down at his laptop and not engaging with his maternally flat and empty wife, who it seems would rather go to a well-catered wedding than bring her first child into the world.
So something major needs to lift me out of the dustbin of my self-esteem and into a recycling box of hope and purpose. And that something is the Play Kitchen.
It’s not an Early Learning Centre affair, much as it might sound like it. It’s the test kitchen of a very fancy food chain (let’s just say husky, food-porn voiceovers in their ads and a Dine in Meal for two deal that rocks my world) where Crumbs have agreed a part-time share so we can do photo shoots for recipes and special features on trendy ingredients. (They did something really fancy with samphire a few years ago, making it look like huge seaweed strands in an underwater scene, with a cooked lobster on the ocean floor, dripping in melted butter.) It saves us renting expensive studios each time and our test cooks can actually get to know the ovens here and roast up a perfect leg of lamb without unnecessary wastage or swearing. The ‘Play’ bit comes from the fact that, to your average Crumbs staffer, visiting the Play Kitchen is the most dreamy excuse to nibble leftover treats from the shoots, raid the retailer’s ‘Help Yourself’ sample bins on the floor of the office above and, perhaps most crucially, the kitchen itself is over the other side of the town from our King’s Cross office, in Fulham. So going there guarantees a whole day out of the office, stuffing your face and idly sending an email from your work BlackBerry every forty-five minutes, so technically no one can complain you’re skiving.
When Sam dropped by my desk to catch up on our maternity special she suggested us trialling some recipes she’d had a freelance home economist working on – the ‘craving cure-alls’, she was calling them. I had to admit that was pretty good. The moment she said the words ‘Play Kitchen’ my eyes lit up and I felt the foodie joy part of my heart blink to life like a public toilet strip light. I had to virtually bat Gina away with a rolled up back issue.
‘I need you here, manning the ship,’ I repeated, when she made a second plea to come and ‘be helpful’. Luckily Sam backed me up on this point, or I’m not sure I’d ever have heard the end of it. Gina has been a whizz with the invoices and managing the department admin, but her hunger worries me. I think she’s going to bite off more than she can chew and I’ll ultimately be responsible when she chokes. I’ve calmed her down over her proposed Cow & Gate deal – I’ve yet to read through the notes she gave me on it – but I can still see that twinkle in her eye. She’s angling for a job, and fair play, but I’m hearing grumblings around the office that she’s running before she can walk. But today is not the day to worry about Gina. Today I am playing.
So here we are: Sam, me and the lovely home economist, Ros. Ros is the aunt I wish I’d had – warm, encouraging and can tell to the last second how long you should cook a chicken for just by looking at it. She’s been cooking up recipes from scratch that can sate the most common – and even most bizarre – of pregnant cravings: salty, sweet, sour, crunchy, even something to meet that bonkers taste for soil some women get with a huge heap of roasted beetroot.
Right now we’re all attacking a plate of grilled cherry tomatoes, sprinkled with feta cubes and the odd rosemary leaf, on a lovely crunchy bit of toasted sourdough and with the ubiquitous olive oil drizzle. It has that lovely salty hit from the crumbly feta but also a comforting tang of tomato and olive oil. It’s quick, easy and nourishing: just what our preggy readers need.
‘This is sho goof, Rosh,’ I say through my very hot mouthful. ‘Jush righ.’
‘Mmm mm mmmm.’ Sam nods in agreement, giving a thumbs up with her fork still in her fist and soon after going in for more. As she swallows her mouthful, she says, ‘I only wish I’d eaten this well when I was pregnant the last time. I was completely obsessed with quinoa and supplements and pomegranate with my first born, but with Francesca, my second, I was so rushed off my feet that I was mainlining refined sugars like nobody’s business.’
This is the other great thing about the Play Kitchen: away from the call-centre-like arrangement of our open plan office, and all the discussions about reader engagement, social media gateways and the cost of FSC accredited paper, here in the Play Kitchen we can just talk. We’re still talking about food, but it stops being just about the product we’re selling, into something that we all really really love. We can just revel in the taste of excellent ham, or really fresh eggs, or a lemon mousse so light and heavenly that makes you feel like you could fly. We Crumbers remember that we’re selling a special feeling, a unique experience, and we walk out of the Play Kitchen holding our heads a little higher: after all, we’re not a fridge maintenance magazine, or Wig Collector Weekly. We write about culinary perfection. And amongst these shiny steel splashbacks and black marble countertops we get to shove that perfection down our necks.
Ros bustles about at the fridge as I load the utensils she’s used for the tomatoes and feta into the dishwasher. There’s something so unbelievably swish about this kitchen that it makes you want to leave not so much as a greasy fingerprint behind you.
Up next we’re doing a deli sandwich to die for; crunchy, sour pickles on salt beef. In the recipe we’re going to add suggestions for bringing a fiery touch to the sandwich too, for any mothers-to-be that find themselves addicted to jalapenos all of a sudden and need a midnight fix. I’ve never been pregnant but I have had late-night munchies so bad that I’ve stood with the fridge light showing up my smudged eyeliner as I spread butter onto a piece of bread, chop a hunk of cheese off the block, fold the bread in half and eat it in three gulps, before I’ve even shut the door. So, yes, I know about munchies. And I happen to know of a French company that specialises in upmarket pickles and other assorted things in brine, who are looking to break into the British market. I’m sure I could sell them some add space near this feature, not to mention tapping up some bread machine brands. Maybe even antacid tablet makers, if I was feeling super cynical.
I break off to make a note of that on my iPad – Rennies? Bit wrong? Sam catches me, over my shoulder, and laughs quietly.
‘Nothing wrong with a little commercial thinking, Ellie, you know that.’ She hops up on to a bar stool, crossing one leg over the other, her charcoal cigarette pants hitching up just a little. In a low voice, she goes on, careful to stay out of earshot of Ros who is now slicing long, frog-green pickles at the other end of the counter, ‘I’m pleased to see you getting to grips with this project.’
I smile and file away the compliment for dark, stroppy Martin-filled days.
I came up with this idea, goddamit, and I’m getting my teeth into it, and not just in the usual literal sense of hoovering up all the sample meals. I’m even going to start to work late one night a week, two or three hours solely devoted to packing so much content into this project that our website will look like one of those turkeys stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a quail. The sponsors will be able to gorge themselves on our unique hit numbers, my new, bigger targets will be met, Crumbs will be safe and Martin will have nowhere to look but at his chequebook when I ask for a rise. This is within my grasp. I just need to shake the fuzz out of my head – leave weddings, babies and ISAs at home, where I can focus on them separately – and get to it.
‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask if you’ve heard of this new The Great British Bake Off spin-off that’s being filmed soon? Best Dishes.’ She shakes her head but looks interested, so I prattle on, ‘It could make a nice little feature to start
with – something about cookery shows taking back the TV listings from dancing dogs and warbling grannies. It won’t fit in with our pregnancy project but it’s good and timely. And if we could perhaps get an official link-up with them, feature some of the recipes they use, we’d benefit from the publicity and SEO the TV show generates.’
Sam’s eyes are a little wider now so I take this as a good sign to carry on with my land-grab idea. Gina can suck it. ‘Actually, I know one of the entrants, so I could set up an interview. And he’s very … promotable,’ which is business speak for handsome, ‘and, you know, male, so that mixes things up a bit from our usual interview subjects.’ Most of the artisan producers we ran profiles of were either slightly earnest and crusty-looking or closer to their pensions than was strictly sexy, so to have someone as young and fit as Joe in the pages of Crumbs can only be a good thing. And if we can ride the coattails of the BBC’s success: cha-ching. No one needs to eBay the Crumbs posh coffee machine just yet.
‘I like it,’ says Sam, ‘and it sounds like you’re getting in there early. We can file the interview till just before the air date and make the most of their publicity machine kicking in. I’ll get Cassie to contact their PR person, send someone from editorial over to meet your guy in action, get a few photos—’
‘Or I can do the interview,’ I blurt. I say it before I’ve really thought it through, but maybe this is just what I need, if Sam is considering me for a Creative position. I can show I’m not just a space filler and an invoice chaser. Plus, I know Joe – he’d be more likely to say yes to me than a random features editor. I could barter him an interview for help with his stout and walnut bread. ‘I’ve actually got tickets to the first-round show, so it makes a lot of sense. If you think about it.’
Sam scrutinises me and I try not to flinch. ‘OK,’ she says at last. ‘But read plenty of back issues before you do, use them as a guide. And make sure the BBC publicity people know you’re doing it. See if you can interview a few more of the other entrants too. I like how you’re approaching this, Ellie, but small steps, yes? I don’t want Martin accusing me of rearranging the company behind his back.’ She adds very quietly, with a smile, ‘Not that I couldn’t if I wanted to,’ and the tension is broken.
