Why Mummy Doesn't Give a ****! Read online

  ‘Of course I do,’ I protested. ‘I wouldn’t be going through all this if I didn’t, would I? Don’t you want our marriage anymore?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I know I’m unhappy, and I have been for a long time, long before all this. I know I can’t say sorry any more than I have, but it doesn’t make any difference. I know I can’t keep trying to change the past, I can only change the future, but as things are, you won’t let me, because you can’t move on from the past. So, I think we need some time apart.’

  ‘What, like you going away for the weekend or something? Another jolly?’

  ‘No, some proper time apart. Geoff at work is moving to New York for three months and doesn’t want to leave his flat empty all that time. I’ve said I’ll move in and look after it. Gives us both some space, some time to think, some time for us to consider what we really want. I’m going to move in there tonight. I had one final hope that this evening with Christina might have helped you start healing, but it didn’t, so something has to change.’

  ‘You’re leaving me?’ I whispered. ‘After all that, after everything you put me through, you’re leaving me? And you’re doing it using all those old clichés of “I love you but I’m not in love with you” and “I just need some space”? Could you not even have come up with an original line? Christ, all that’s missing is “My wife doesn’t understand me.”’

  ‘Well, I do need some space, OK, and some time. And you don’t understand what it’s like for me. I can’t stay with you if I’m always going to be the bad guy, living with your constant anger. It’s destroying us both.’

  ‘And there we go. Well done, you’ve hit the hat-trick of how to leave your wife. So you’re just walking away, moving into Geoff’s nice little bachelor pad and living the life of Riley, leaving me to pick up all the pieces – again? Because you’re not happy that I’m a tiny bit pissed off about how you’ve behaved and you, what? Want to find yourself?’

  ‘Ellen, please, it’s not like that.’

  I drained my wine. ‘It’s exactly like that.’

  ‘I just want to find out who I am again, that’s all. Apart from a father and a husband!’

  ‘I’ll tell you what you want. You’ve had a taste of freedom and fun, and you want a bit more of it, because suddenly the wife and kids feel a bit millstoney round your neck. Especially as the ball and chain won’t shut up like a good girl and turn a blind eye and let you have your cake and eat it. So you’re going for the easy option and giving up. You get the single life, and I get to keep being a drudge and bring up your children. Well, fine. It’s fine. If that’s what you want, go ahead, no one’s going to stop you. If you thought I was going to sit here and beg you to stay, you were wrong. Have a nice life, Simon. Actually, I don’t mean that. I hope your knob falls off. Goodbye.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you, I just need –’

  ‘Do kindly go fuck yourself. Or whoever else it is that you “need”.’

  ‘Ellen, please –’

  I walked out of the bar with my head held high, and made it as far as the little play park round the corner before I collapsed on a bench, sobbing. Thank God it was evening and there were no tots bouncing merrily on the seesaw to be alarmed by the mad woman wailing all on her own. All the hours I’ve spent sitting on benches like these, watching Peter and Jane play (and fight), freezing my arse off, wishing it was time to go home, and never once did I think I’d end up sitting on one crying because Simon had left me. I thought we’d grow old together. I’d never considered a future that didn’t involve him.

  I dried my eyes on an extremely dubious tissue I found in my coat pocket (at least back when the children were small there would have been several half-eaten jelly babies stuck to it that I could have consoled myself with), and resolved that that was it. I wasn’t relying on anyone else for anything, ever again. Well, apart from getting the number of a bloody good divorce lawyer from Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy.

  It was a shame, I thought pathetically to myself, that I could never go back to that very nice bar and take photos for Instagram, as it would now be forever known as The Bar Where Simon Left Me. If he was going to leave me, he could at least have done it in a dive, and not spoiled somewhere nice for me. Selfish bastard.

  APRIL

  Friday, 6 April

  I woke up in a panic, dry-mouthed and heart racing, convinced I’d slept through the alarm and that the removal men were here already. They weren’t, of course, because it was only 3.43 am, but as it was the sixth time I’d woken up like that, the chances of me actually sleeping through the alarm increased every time, and thus so did the panic. It didn’t help that in the brief snatches of sleep I’d managed in between waking up I’d dreamt that the removal men turned up but nothing was packed and so we couldn’t move, and then in another much, much worse dream, that they turned up, that everything I owned was neatly boxed up, that I was smoothly and seamlessly directing operations as they loaded their lorry, only to make the hideous discovery, while I was standing in the front garden watching two burly sorts lug out the sofa, that I was stark bollock naked, and everyone had been too polite to say anything, but there was every chance the removal men were traumatised for life by the sight of a forty-five-year-old woman standing in the street, tits jiggling, reminding them to be careful with the sideboard as it was a family heirloom.

  Actually, I don’t even know why the sideboard was in my dream. I don’t have it anymore. It was Simon’s granny’s, so he’s got it. Admittedly, he didn’t really want it and had harboured an unreasonable hatred for it ever since I’d attempted to ‘shabby chic’ it up and painted it a lovely eau de nil, but I was determined to be fair, and so I insisted he took the sideboard. It was definitely fairness that made me let him have the sideboard and not a malicious amusement at thinking how pissed off he’d be every time he looked at it, nor a sadistic pleasure in thinking how it would ruin the minimalist effect he could finally achieve in his new flat but, because it was his grandmother’s, he’d be stuck with it.

  After Simon’s announcement that he was moving out to ‘give us some space’, I didn’t hang around. I’ve seen too many friends and colleagues put in the same position, with their partner buggering off, assuring them it was ‘only temporary’ to give them ‘time to think’. They went off to ‘think’, and then a month down the line the joint accounts were emptied, there was a lawyer’s letter on the doormat and an estate agent at the door announcing they were there to do a valuation, because the ‘temporary thinking time’ was just a ruse to allow them to move out with minimal hassle while sorting out their financial affairs to their own benefit.

  I wasn’t going to be caught on the hop like that. The next day, when I checked our bank accounts and found that Simon had withdrawn a considerable sum – apparently to cover the rent on Geoff’s flat, as it had turned out that Geoff wasn’t letting him house sit rent free, as Simon had implied – and after listening to Simon’s excuses that the joint account was ‘living expenses’ and me pointing out that it was his choice to move out into an expensive flat and why the fuck should I be part-funding that, I called the estate agents and the lawyers, removed my share from the remains of the joint accounts and got the ball rolling. Unfortunately, our house turned out to have gone up in value since we bought it, and neither of us could afford to buy the other out, so it had to be sold, all while Simon bleated on that I was being too hasty and he hadn’t meant this to be permanent.

  Competitively priced family homes in catchment areas for decent schools tend to sell fast, though – rather faster than I’d expected, leaving me without much time to find somewhere for me and the children to go. And so, I find myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, contemplating a future where I’ll not be growing old with Simon in a little stone cottage with roses round the door. However, on the plus side, I will be growing old in a little stone cottage with roses round the door. That i
s what I need to focus on – the positives, not the negatives. The fact is that Simon had always baulked at my visions of quaint and rustic cottages, and muttered darkly about energy efficiency, and lack of double glazing, and low ceilings (surely the low ceilings would make it easier to heat, as I used to point out). He’d tut and point out all the flaws in the survey reports of the Dream Houses I showed him, sighing over wet rot and dry rot and rising damp and crumbling pointing, crying, ‘Money pit! Money pit!’ as I cried, ‘Character and soul! IT HAS CHARACTER AND SOUL! What’s a little mildew compared with THAT?’

  As an architect, Simon was always able to trump me (a mere ‘computer person’, as he used to refer to my job) on all things house by hurling technical words around and citing the terrible costs of a new roof (according to him, every house I fell in love with would need a new roof, despite the clearly functional and vintagely slated roof having done perfectly well for over a hundred years), and so, one by one, my dreams were crushed under the weight of tedious practicalities.

  But now, Simonless, with no unfaithful naysayer crushing my visions of stone-flagged kitchens and mullioned windows anymore, I’ve found the cottage of my dreams, and we’re moving in today. Well, it’s possibly not quite the Cottage of My Dreams. My finances didn’t entirely stretch to that, despite a small stroke of luck in my batshit-mental ex-sister-in-law Louisa deciding her latest blow struck against the patriarchy would be to become a lesbian and move to a women’s commune with her new lover Isabel, thus finally vacating the house I’d been emotionally blackmailed into buying for her several years earlier. My lingering resentment at being forced to bankroll Louisa’s feckless lifestyle with the profits of the one financially successful thing I’ve ever achieved, my lovely app called Why Mummy Drinks, obviously in no way contributed to the breakdown of things with Simon at all. But she’s gone, her (my) house is sold, and the resulting cash injection added to my share of the Marital Home meant I was able to afford to buy a Vaguely Dreamish Cottage, with not too crippling a mortgage. Hurrah! It will be magical. If you overlook the damp. Which is probably nothing that can’t be painted over. And the fact that I didn’t have much time to wait around for the perfect house to come on the market so, to afford a house with a garden for Judgy Dog and three bedrooms for the children and me, I’ve had to move miles out of town.

  But anyway. I shall have a vegetable garden, and look adorable in wellies and an unfeasible amount of Cath Kidston prints (well, probably not real Cath Kidston, as it’s very bloody expensive and I’m a Single Mother now, but I can probably find some affordable knock-offs on eBay). I’m going to keep chickens – Speckled Sussexes, I’ve decided, because I liked the name and when I googled them they were described as very chatty chickens. Who even needs a man when you have chatty chickens? I just have to hope that Judgy Dog does not attempt to eat my chatty chickens. I’ve had stern words with him to this effect, but he just gave me one of his ‘I’m paying no attention to your foolish witterings, woman, and I shall do as I please’ looks. Luckily, Judgy being my dog, having got him somewhat against Simon’s will, despite Simon coming to love him almost as much as I do, there was no question of who got Judgy in the divorce. I’d probably have let him have Peter and Jane if he’d really wanted, but I’d have fought tooth and nail for sole custody of Judgy …

  Peter and Jane are not entirely enamoured of my Splendid Plan to move to the country. Although in actual fact we’re not moving that far into the country, we’re still (just) within the catchment area for their school, so they’ll not be further traumatised by changing schools, as well as being from a Broken Home (do people even still say that? I just remember, in Coronation Street, Tracy Barlow shouting about coming from a Broken Home at Ken and Deirdre when they had one of their frequent divorces – not that it really mattered with Ken and Deirdre, of course, as they’d be back together again by the Omnibus).

  Despite this, the children were still horrified at living ‘out in the sticks’ and the lack of late buses to transport them home from parties and bouts of underage drinking. Well, at fifteen, I suspect Jane at least has been dabbling somewhat with the Bacardi Breezers, or whatever over-sugared shit the Youth of Today drink. Peter is only thirteen, so hopefully I’ve a year or so’s grace before he too starts on the path of depravity. I live in hope, however, that they might both yet declare themselves to be teetotallers, as I’ve been a Terrible Warning rather than a Good Example when it comes to the Evils of Drink. I attempted to placate them with rash promises of providing plenty of lifts home, and brightly reminded them that every second weekend they’d be staying over at their dad’s flat in town, and so it would be a) his problem and b) nice and easy to get home from parties and the dubious pubs that serve underage teenagers. Simon was there when I announced this, and I must say he did not look entirely thrilled at the prospect.

  He has meanwhile found his Dream Flat, the minimalist White Box he’s hankered after for years. He’d practically drool while watching Grand Designs whenever anyone built one of those spare, modern cubes as a house, as he looked round our cluttered sitting room and sighed in despair. There were some rows about his flat too, because, as I pointed out, he could not buy an open-plan loft, because he needed somewhere for his CHILDREN to sleep when they came to stay – something that did not seem to have occurred to him. He finally grudgingly compromised on somewhere that had one decent-sized bedroom, one small room he announced he’d use as a study and put a futon in for Jane (I didn’t know you even still got futons – I thought they had vanished after the Nineties, along with my youth and the perkiness of my tits), and what he optimistically called a ‘boxroom’ for Peter, which Peter and I called a ‘cupboard’. Apart from having to shut his only son and heir in a cupboard every second weekend, from the photos it looks like an annoyingly nice flat, although the sideboard will look bloody awful there, so ha!

  Anyway, I might as well get up and have a cup of tea in peace, before starting the lengthy and painful process of trying to prise two teenagers from their pits. There’s a part of me that wonders if it would be easier to just leave them in their beds and let the removal men load them onto the lorry and install them still slumbering in their new rooms at the other end. And also, how long would it actually take them to notice they were in a different house? In fairness, Peter would notice almost straight away when he walked towards the fridge on autopilot, ready to inhale the entire contents in the name of a ‘snack’, and found it in a different location, thus delaying his ‘snack’ by an essential and life-threatening thirty seconds.

  It’s a strange feeling to think that this is the last time I’ll wake up in this house. There have been a lot of ‘last times’ over the previous few days. Some of them have been quite sad, like the last time I’d say goodnight to the children in the rooms they’ve slept in since they were tiny. Peter and Jane were less moved by my tearful attempts to tuck them in last night, saying that I was being weird and telling me to go away. Other last times were less sad. The last time I had to adjust the rug to hide the mark on the floor where Judgy puked and his stomach acid stripped the varnish from the floorboards. The last time I’ll ever bang my hip on the stupidly placed cupboard in the kitchen. The last time I’ll have to wipe the countertops and ignore the large chunk out of the surface where Jane threw a knife at Peter in a fit of rage, probably because of some heinous transgression such as looking at her.

  But this isn’t the time to dwell on last times. It’s a time for FIRST times, for new beginnings and fresh starts! I hope Judgy Dog isn’t too outraged by the upheaval and settles into his new home all right.

  Saturday, 7 April

  Well. We’re here. And I’m slowly getting to grips with the chaos and trying to tackle the mountains of boxes!

  Yesterday was … interesting. As predicted, Peter and Jane were almost impossible to shift from their beds. Once they were up, they wandered around aimlessly, getting under everyone’s feet, as Peter attempted to unpack bowls and ce
real so he could have another breakfast and Jane screamed that I’d ruined her life by having the Wi-Fi disconnected in the old house, and what did I MEAN, it might not be connected in the new house until Monday, and how did I not know about the strength of the 4G signal at the new house, and WHY WOULD I EVEN DO THAT TO HER, and Peter drank all the milk so I couldn’t even give the removal men a cup of tea, so I had to send him to the shop to get more, while he looked at me pityingly and explained that we were meant to be moving and getting rid of stuff, Mum, not buying more, and I howled that if he didn’t get on his bike and get to the shop and return with a pint of milk in the next three minutes, I was taking all his carefully boxed-up possessions, including all his games consoles, and giving them to a charity shop, and if he answered me back one more fucking time I might give him away too, in the unlikely event of anyone actually wanting him. The removal men meanwhile observed all this, expressionless, until Peter muttered something about ‘Don’t mind her, it’s probably her age, and the Change of Life’ as he huffed out the door in search of milk and the removal men all sniggered. Bastards.

  Finally – finally – everything was loaded onto the lorry, despite my helpful suggestions about the order in which they might want to put it on, and that maybe if they put the sofa on the other side they could pile more boxes around it. The Chief Removal Man finally said, ‘Look, love, we do know what we’re doing. We do it every day,’ and I quietly seethed about being called ‘love’ because it’s one of my pet hates, especially from an unfamiliar man who is talking down to me (although I suppose he might have had a point about knowing how to pack his lorry better than me), but I didn’t dare say anything in case they decided that they wouldn’t move all my worldly possessions after all on account of me being a snowflake feminist bitch and then I’d be left sitting in the middle of the road with a big pile of boxes and two angry teenagers.