Why Mummy Drinks Page 5

  Peter was always a cuddly baby, who loved nothing more than nestling into me for hours, but once he started walking he suddenly found that there was a whole new world out there waiting to be discovered, and dismantled, and sitting on his mother’s knee interfered terribly with his important plans to stick his fingers into plug sockets and remove the washing machine filter. As he got older, he found even more things to do, and cuddles became rather passé – not helped, of course, by Jane, who at the grand age of eight has declared cuddles to be ‘babyish’ and takes great delight in pointing this out to Peter on the rare occasion that he does want a hug. Jane, it must be said, was never a cuddler; even as a baby she hated to be held and screamed to be put down, before becoming the most fiercely independent toddler in the world. ‘MY DO IT!’ and ‘NO!’ were mostly all she yelled for the first few years.

  So all in all, even if it took my darling son being poleaxed by illness, it was awfully nice having someone to cuddle again, especially since it was a sore throat and not a vomiting bug, so I could relax safe in the knowledge that he was unlikely to puke down my cleavage while he was burrowed in next to me.

  Wednesday, 21 October

  Peter is still too unwell for school but is clearly on the mend, as today when I snuggled up on the sofa with him he fidgeted wildly, and instead of lying quietly watching the film he argued vociferously at the end of Up that it was a very silly film, because the man needed his house, and what was he going to do without his house? Meanwhile I was sobbing that all anyone needed was love, just love, to which Peter insisted that no, you need a house as well. When I wailed, ‘Come and give Mummy another hug, darling’ he claimed to need the loo and wandered off, still muttering about the need for bricks and mortar, not stupid love. I am glad he is getting better, of course, but I am rather missing my cuddly little boy.

  Jane, meanwhile, although apparently in rude health, has been googling obscure and archaic diseases and is still threatening to come down with the plague, because she was even more incensed that Peter got a second day off school. Her claims of feeling faint and her self-diagnosis of ‘quinsy throat’ were somewhat spoiled by her eating an enormous breakfast, and by the fact that her capacity to argue about everything has not been diminished one little bit. I rather regret reading What Katy Did to Jane recently, as ever since she has rather fancied herself as a tiny domestic tyrant, lolling in her bed and ruling the house, commanding all below to come and pay homage at her court. This scenario is doubly alarming, as I fear I may be cast as Aunt Izzie, and I’m pretty sure Jane would have no qualms about bumping me off, the better to seize control of the household. She seems to have somewhat overlooked, a) the whole bit where Katy is paralysed for several years, and b) our complete lack of any domestic staff to facilitate this vision once she has done away with Aunt Izzie/me and taken to her bed to rule the roost. God help us all once she’s old enough to read the Brontës.

  I would obviously feel dreadful if Jane does get ill, especially after accusing her of faking it, so I spent the day anxiously checking my phone to make sure the school hadn’t called me to come and collect my poor ailing moppet, but so far she is soldiering on, probably to her great indignation.

  Monday, 26 October

  It is half term. How is it half term already? They have barely been back at school for two minutes and now they are off for a whole week. Simon has refused once again to take any time off for half term, as he is Far Too Busy And Important and claims the moral high ground by dint of earning more money than me, somehow overlooking the fact that the only reason he earns more money than me is because we, not just me, but we, looked at all the childcare costs involved in us both working and decided that it made much more financial sense for me to work part-time to reduce the childcare needed, rather than working full-time just to pay a childminder or nanny.

  Starry-eyed and optimistic, we agreed that we would both spilt the childcare in the holidays, but somehow Simon always has a very important work trip to go on, or project to complete when they are off school, so it’s my bloody annual leave that gets eaten up with holidays, school concerts, open days and Christmas shows because he is so Super Busy. I don’t believe he is that super busy, I think he is just cunning. I need to be more cunning.

  Sadly, my boring office IT job doesn’t allow me jaunts the way being an architect does, what with ‘site visits’ and conferences, so he has buggered off to Barcelona and I am here with the children, who are very hungry. So very hungry … Every five minutes they appear, wailing that they are hungry, especially Peter, who consumes an obscene amount of food every day and never puts on weight. I occasionally wonder if he has a tapeworm. If he did have a tapeworm, he could at least share it with me. I would love to eat as much as he does and stay that skinny, to the point that I did once google whether or not you can buy tapeworms on the internet. (You allegedly can, but only from very dubious websites which are not to be recommended, not least for the viruses they will probably fill your computer with, let alone what horrors they are passing off as ‘tapeworms’. Assuming they don’t just skim your credit card and sit there laughing at the poor, deluded, lazy, fat women.) Occasionally I wonder if I should worm him, but I fear the results and being summonsed to view them. It’s disgusting enough when I worm the dog. Peter is entirely foul enough that he would probably want to keep his worms as pets.

  Foolishly, I had had high hopes that this week ‘off’ would allow me some time to sort out the house, clear out the fridge, find the source of the ever-present stench of stale urine in the bathroom and generally turn our home into a clean, tasteful, elegant and Pinterest-worthy living space. Sadly, though, I had forgotten that there is no such thing as an actual week off with the precious moppets. Aside from the constant lurking threat of potential starvation to be staved off, there are fights to be broken up, lost treasures to be found and entertainment to be provided.

  When did entertaining children become so expensive? At the risk of sounding rather like the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch, my mother would have told me to bugger off if I had spent every day of the holidays whining at her ‘What are we going to do today?’ and demanding to go to the cinema, or soft play (dear God, let me not become so desperate this holiday that I succumb to the fetid, overpriced charms of soft play. Let me stand strong against the lurid, shit-smeared, Padded Cells of Doom).

  The fridge was full yesterday, and now it is almost empty. Peter is only six, how on earth am I going to afford to feed him when he is a teenager? I remember when they were little and I used to suggest to my friend Claire that we went for coffee/to the park, etc. Claire had a teenage son as well as a little girl of Jane’s age, and she often used to insist that we went to her house if she had just been to the supermarket because she had to guard the fridge against her son, otherwise he would eat everything if she went out and left him. I thought she was exaggerating, but then I encountered Peter and his tapeworm and now I see the hungry future staring at me.

  Wednesday, 28 October

  Oh God, I crumbled. We went to soft play. My ears are ringing and my head is thumping and I want to scrub myself and both children from head to toe with Dettol and a wire brush, and there is not enough wine in the world to ease the pain. Peter got into a fight with a terrifying skinhead child, who had an equally terrifying mother who had ‘Juztin Beebor 4ever’ tattooed on her neck. I thought we were all going to die, then Jane managed to stand in a puddle of piss in the toilets and get stuck at the very top of the bastarding climbing frame thingy, leaving me with the option of clambering up there to try to rescue her and getting my arse stuck in the foam rollers again, thus having to endure the indignity of the bored teenage staff trying to extract me like Pooh Bear from the rabbit hole, or standing at the bottom shrieking at her in my shrill middle-class voice as I tried to coax her down with cries of ‘Please darling, please just crawl through there and come down the slide, darling, and then we can all go home and have a nice pain au chocolat’, all the while clutching my handbag to
my chest and hoping no one stabbed me. Fuck wine, I’m going straight for gin. Lots of gin. All the gin.

  Friday, 30 October

  Simon is home, hurrah! AND he brought me a present. I like presents. The present, and the fact the demented budgie children are wittering at him instead of me and demanding that he puts them to bed almost, almost makes up for him sighing about how exhausted he is by a week in a nice hotel, eating hotel breakfasts and delicious tapas, and then saying in a pathetic voice that he would just like something really simple for dinner, like lasagne. Lasagne takes many pots and pans. It is not simple. But I am making it anyway for him, even though it is Fuck It All Friday, because I am a good wife and I quite missed him and it does give me a legitimate excuse to hide in the kitchen drinking the dubious Spanish gin he also brought home, while the children jump up and down on him and jabber inane questions in his ear – although I had forgotten just how long bastarding lasagne takes, and am muttering darkly to myself over the number of pots used. Also, if Simon tells me one more bloody time about how staying in hotels is not as exciting as you might think, I will not be responsible for my actions.

  Saturday, 31 October

  Well, that was a fun Halloween. It actually turned out that having to make Peter a last-minute vampire costume out of an old pair of my lace knickers because he changed his mind about being a bat approximately fifteen minutes before we left to go Trick or Treating (or, as I like to call it, ‘begging door-to-door like starving Victorian urchins’ while swearing under my breath at the ridiculous Americanisation of an ancient pagan tradition) was the high point of the evening. Jane managed to escape my watchful eye at the Halloween party organised by a kind neighbour for after the begging expedition, and succeeded in stuffing her own body weight in sweets down her throat before I caught her. Trying to contain the screaming rubber ball that used to be my daughter from bouncing off the walls was bad, but I really thought I was home clear once I finally calmed her down and got her into bed, along with Sophie, who had come for a sleepover. However, just as I had sat down with a tiny (enormous) glass of lovely, restorative red wine (I decided I was keeping in the spirit of Halloween by giving myself ‘vampire fangs’ if I knocked it back in big-enough mouthfuls), there was a plaintive howl from Jane’s bedroom.

  Jane and I have spoken several times about how, if she is going to be sick, I would really, really appreciate it if she could manage not to just lie in her bed and vomit over it. This lesson had evidently sunk in, because instead she had leaned over the side of her bed and puked over Sophie, who was sleeping on a camp bed beside her. All. Over. Sophie. Sophie has very long, thick hair.

  Simon is quite good with sick. I am very bad with sick. He dealt with the vomit-covered bedding (because despite her attempt to not puke on her bed, Jane had still got quite a lot of it over her duvet) and sleeping bag and carpet, while I shoved a hysterical Jane and a sleepy and confused Sophie under the shower and attempted to get all the sick out of Sophie’s hair, while gagging to myself and alternately muttering ‘FFS’ and ‘FML’ to myself. So much sick. It was worse than the time Peter spewed off the top of his cabin bed and the resultant splashback made me very much regret the decision to put laminate flooring in his room. I threw away a lot of Lego that night.

  I can still smell sick, and I daren’t even drink my wine in case Princess Pukesalot strikes again. Luckily Sophie was very nice about it, though I’m not sure she was actually awake enough to fully take in what was going on, but I am mortified at the thought of having to tell Sam in the morning.

  NOVEMBER

  Thursday, 5 November

  Bonfire Night, hurrah! The smell of woodsmoke and crackling fires. Baked potatoes and sausages. Excited little faces glowing with awe in the light of the fireworks. What’s not to love? Well, for a start, one’s darling husband decreeing that there was no need to go to an official display because he was going to indulge his inner pyromaniac by setting off our own fireworks in the garden. What larks, I thought, and promptly invited all the neighbours for a fireworks party so that they too could enjoy the munificence of the woodsmoke/baked potatoes/glowing faces, etc.

  Alas, foolishly, Simon entrusted me with the buying of the fireworks and I got a bit distracted because I had filled up the car with petrol before I went to the supermarket to buy them and had managed to spill petrol over my boots and was wondering whether they would even sell fireworks to someone who was reeking of petrol or whether they would just call the police to report a deranged fire-starting maniac in their shop. I was so excited that no one mentioned the eau de petrol aroma drifting from me that I got very carried away and bought many boxes of the biggest fireworks they had (in my defence they were also on sale as three-for-two, and I cannot resist a special offer).

  No one noticed (including me), until it was too late, that I had managed to buy several boxes of display fireworks which carried stern warnings that they MUST NOT be set off within 100 metres of any buildings or people. Our house does not in any way have 100-metre clearance around it from any other buildings (aka ‘the neighbours’ houses’), and it was now too late to return to the shop and buy more fireworks (and anyway, these ones had already cost a bloody fortune, ‘special offer’ my fat arse).

  Nothing daunted, Simon and I decided to press ahead with the party and the fireworks, as Simon airily assured me that the warnings were just a precaution, so you couldn’t sue the fireworks manufacturers if you were the sort of idiot who managed to accidently burn your shed down with a sparkler. And of course it was perfectly safe, supermarkets didn’t actually sell display-size fireworks (do fireworks have a size? Strength? How are fireworks scaled? By ‘bang’?) so it would be fine, we would be the wonder of the street.

  The neighbours duly assembled, I merrily doled out sausages and baked potatoes and imagined I was some sort of Nigella Lawson, domestic goddess, fantasy hostess.

  The children all waved sparklers around, at which point I abandoned my serene Nigella impression in favour of screaming ‘Gloves! Gloves! You must have gloves for sparklers! Don’t touch the hot part! Don’t set your sister on fire! Please be careful! Be careful! Be careful! BE FUCKING CAREFUL WITH THAT, IT IS FIRE!’

  And then Simon began the firework display. In an effort to prove he could put on just as good a show at home as one could see being jostled in a muddy park or field with several hundred other people, he had carefully arranged all the fireworks in the garden in advance and ran around lighting them all at once, so they would go off one straight after another, like a proper display …

  So it turns out that supermarkets DO sell display-strength fireworks. It also turns out the stern warnings are not just a precaution.

  The initial ‘Ooooohs’ and ‘Ahhhhhs’ and happy faces bathed in the light of the fireworks very quickly turned to mutterings of ‘Is that safe?’, ‘Fuck, that was really near my house’, ‘Should someone call the fire brigade?’ and ‘Holy shit, this maniac is going to burn the street down!’ Small children were sobbing, and there was talk of forming a chain of buckets to try to douse the conflagration we had potentially started.

  Instead of everyone mingling happily around the bonfire afterwards, sipping mulled wine and exclaiming about the marvellous fun we were all having, the neighbours started to leave hastily to go and check if we had set their house on fire, until there was only Simon and I, and Peter and Jane, huddled at the far end of the garden, watching us turn our quiet suburban street into an effective re-enactment of 1980s’ Beirut. The children were highly impressed. So far there have been no sirens, suggesting that we have not actually burned anyone’s ancestral home to the ground, nor have the police appeared to enquire exactly what we thought we were doing with our rocket launchers and grenades.

  When the fireworks finally finished, Simon wandered sadly around the blackened wasteland that was once his lovingly tended lawn, muttering darkly to himself about the scorch marks.

  Apparently this is all my fault, but I blame the shop – what do they expect will
happen if they sell eleventy billion fireworks to people who smell of petrol?

  On the plus side, we are probably off all the neighbours’ Christmas card lists now, so that is one less thing to do, and I got to drink all the mulled wine and am quite pissed, due to my misplaced belief that really, mulled wine is hardly even alcoholic.

  Saturday, 7 November

  I feel almost like an actual person with an actual life! Having two divorcees as friends mean their other halves (BASTARDS) have the children every other weekend so they get to go out and Do Things. Obviously the breakdown of their relationships is very sad for Hannah and Sam, and their children, but it is very good for me, as I get to go to the pub with them.

  Tonight, once we had covered the many shortcomings and wrongdoings of the exes, except for Hannah or Sam shouting the occasional random ‘BASTARD’ as some other iniquity happened to occur to them, Sam finally admitted that I had been right about his pursuit by the Bloody Perfect Coven. Apparently Sophie had told Perfect Lucy Atkinson that she had two daddies and Lucy’s Mummy has now asked Sophie round to play no less than five times this week, only Sophie is having none of it, because apparently she hates Lucy Atkinson ‘because her face is stupid’, which seems as valid a reason as any. The rest of the Coven have also been hovering, suggesting he ‘pops in for coffee’; pressing terrifying homemade ‘health muffins’ on him and, with a staggering lack of tact, even by Fiona Montague’s standards (I haven’t forgotten the time she told me how ‘brave’ I was to go out without putting my makeup on especially when I was ‘under the weather’, despite the fact I was perfectly healthy and wearing a full face of slap), attempting to set him up with her hairdresser ‘Because I’m sure you chaps have lots in common.’

  ‘They’re like ninjas,’ said Sam. ‘I feel like I’m in some sort of a computer game on the bloody school run, ducking behind hedges to avoid them hurling their disgusting baking at me and demanding I come to their jewellery parties. I’m fucking gay, I’m not a bloody drag queen, why would I want to spend the evening cooing over their shitty costume jewellery?’