Always and Forever

Mel knew she should have come up with some better explanation as to why she wouldn’t be at the zoo but she just couldn’t. Her energy had drained away.

‘Sarah, I can’t go with you. Dawna is going and you love Dawna.’

For a brief second, mother and daughter’s eyes met, the same candid blue with glints of darkest violet near the irises giving them remarkable depth. In that moment, Mel thought her daughter looked old and knowing, as if she could see the exhaustion and guilt in her mother’s eyes, and knew that Mel would have done anything to be in two places at the one time if it would make Sarah happy. Then it was gone, replaced by the childish incomprehension that Mummy was once again choosing work over Sarah’s world. Mel wondered why Adrian told the children she was a super mum. She was a crap mum.

‘You were a long time,’ Adrian remarked when she finally arrived downstairs at ten past eight, carrying dirty clothes, wet towels and a half-eaten baby rusk that she’d found squashed into the landing carpet.

‘Sarah didn’t want to go to sleep,’ muttered Mel. She dumped the laundry in the basket, which managed to look horribly full again, and headed for the fridge and a glass of wine. There was none. Hadn’t that been last week’s plan? No wine was to be opened during the week because then she had a glass every evening and surely it was bad for her. Bad, schmad. Where was the corkscrew?

The booze was locked in a cupboard in the dining room. Mel took out a bottle of the expensive Chablis that Adrian loved. She handed him a glass, which he took without looking up from his books. A plate of half-finished beans on toast lay beside him. His exams were in May and he was studying hard.

‘Lovely wine,’ he muttered, head back in his coursework.

‘Mm,’ she said, taking a deep gulp. Better than the old screw-top bottles they used to drink before they both had good jobs. There had to be some compensations for work. A thought drifted into Mel’s mind: was that what her job was all about – making money? She went out to work and paid someone else to bring up her children so that she and Adrian could afford good wine?

Mel had eaten her beans on toast and was half reading the paper and half waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle so she could put on another load, when Adrian said, ‘Oh, forgot to tell you but Caroline phoned when you were doing the baths to remind you that you’re all meeting up in Pedro’s Wine Bar at half-eight on Thursday night, and if you’re driving can you pick her up?’

‘Oh, damn,’ muttered Mel. ‘It’s the last thing I feel like this week. And she should know I don’t drive to work.’ Caroline was a very old friend who lived in Dublin’s suburbia, and the party was their delayed Christmas get-together with a group of other old friends – cancelled so many times that they’d finally decided to have it in January. Once, Caroline and Mel had shared an apartment and worked in the same company, going on wild nights out, comparing notes on unsuitable men and planning how they’d run the world when their time came. Now Caroline was a full-time mother of three and dedicated herself to the job.

She was, as Mel and everyone else recognised, fabulous at it. Being a mother was her true vocation, and not drinking triple vodkas in shady clubs, as Mel loved to tease her.

Mel knew that her friend’s three small sons had never eaten a single thing out of a jar when they were babies. If this had been anyone else but the tactful Caroline, Mel would have been made to feel hideously guilty. Her plans to mush up organic carrots had fallen by the wayside when she went back to work and discovered that huge organisation was involved in buying and mushing organic stuff, when it was easier to just buy cute baby jars with nice pictures on the outside. Anyway, the kids liked the jars more than they’d ever liked any of her painstakingly sieved mush.

It was all down to choice, Caroline said serenely. She liked being at home with her children making fairy cakes and having other rampaging toddlers round for tea, but that wasn’t for everyone.

‘You’re out there talking the talk and walking the walk, Mel,’ she said. ‘One of us has to be a captain of industry, and since it isn’t going to be me, I’d like it to be you. Just don’t forget us humble old pals when you’re getting the Nobel Prize for Services to the Business Sector or whatever.’

‘Stop it,’ begged Mel. ‘You’re making me cry.’

What she didn’t quite understand was why Caroline hadn’t gone back to work now that the boys were all in school. Not that she’d ever said that to Caroline, she thought as she tapped out her friend’s number.

‘Hi, Caroline, sorry I missed you. I was on bath duty.’

‘Mel, I know, I phoned at the wrong time. It’s just that I didn’t want to bother you at work. So, how are you?’

Caroline sounded relaxed and happy, and for some reason this vexed Mel more than she could say. Caroline had given up her high-powered job to sit at home and watch the Disney Channel – she should be bored and irritable, not happy.

‘We’re all great,’ Mel lied. ‘Just great.’ She paused, hoping that a sudden change of plan meant that the night out on Thursday had been cancelled. She daren’t cancel again, although she longed to. How could she have agreed to a night out mid-week, such a horribly busy week at that? She’d have to go straight to the restaurant from work, then get the late train home, and she’d miss seeing Sarah and Carrie.

‘About Thursday night…?’

‘Val’s coming, and Lorna’s dying to get out,’ Caroline said. ‘You’d think she never left the house when I know for a fact that they were away for New Year. It’ll be fabulous. I think I’m going to wear my new pink shirt – you know, the one I told you about. It’s gorgeous, but it’s a bit silky, so I probably should wear a camisole under it because if I wear a normal bra, you could see it through the shirt. I’ve tried it on twice already today and I’m still not sure. Although I tried on that cream printed one I told you about, and that might do. It’s not as dressy but…I do love the pink one, though.’

Briefly, Mel imagined what it must be like actually to have time to decide what to wear on a night out instead of having the usual, last-minute panic in the morning where she ran upstairs and hastily dragged something sparkly from the wardrobe to take into work so she could brighten up her office clothes later.

‘Would the pink be OK or will I be totally mutton dressed as lamb?’ Caroline was asking.

Did other people ever want to kill their friends with their bare hands or was it just her? Mel thought. Had she turned into a fearsome old harpy now that she had all the things she’d said she’d ever wanted, like children and a good job?

‘What do you think? Pink might be the navy blue of India or whatever, but baby-pink silk on a woman of thirty-nine, is it asking too much?’

‘Pink sounds great,’ Mel said evenly.

‘OK, I’ll wear it. I’m really looking forward to it, I can tell you. Sometimes you do need to get out of the house and realise there’s a whole world out there, don’t you?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Mel, ‘absolutely.’

‘Any wine left?’ asked Adrian when she hung up.

‘Yes, but we shouldn’t have too much mid-week. We can finish the bottle tomorrow,’ Mel said, and realised in a horrified moment that she was using the same placating voice she used for the children. Worse, Adrian didn’t appear to notice.

Pedro’s Wine Bar was the type of place where the people in Lorimar Health Insurance went on their lunch breaks when they wanted more than the usual half an hour for a snatched sandwich. It was a modern Italian establishment with shadowy candle-lit tables where plots were hatched, affairs were conducted, and people occasionally ordered too much wine because of their job/their home life/their credit card bill/all of the above.

Caroline, Lorna and Val loved it because it reminded them of their lives pre-children when they’d gone for long lunches in town and planned coups with their colleagues while handsome young waiters hovered in the background wielding bottles of Frascati and scenting large tips. All of which was exactly why Mel didn’t like it.

‘Ooh, cocktails,’ squealed Lorna, as soon as they got through the door on Thursday evening. Grasping the laminated cocktail menu, she read out the list excitedly. Halfway down it, she began to laugh.

‘Who wants a Slippery Nipple?’ she said with glee.

Caroline and Val joined in the laughter.

‘Wine for me,’ said Val ruefully. ‘Or I won’t get up in the morning.’

‘And me,’ said Caroline, mindful of doing the school run.

‘Oh, go on, let your hair down. Have a…’ Lorna scanned the list, ‘Vodkatini, Manhattan, no! a Pink Lady, to match your shirt. What about you, Mel? I’m sure you’re out at events all week with your job. What’s the fashionable drink now for us boring old mums?’

Mel found that she was still holding on to her handbag very tightly, the tendons in her hands standing out like vines. She was keyed up after the stress of the day with no numbingly familiar train journey to soothe it away. Gently, she put her bag on the seat beside her and tried to enter into the spirit of the night. She would not let Lorna get to her.

‘Corporate events are few and far between these days,’ she said evenly. ‘And I never drink at them, so I’m the wrong person to ask advice about the hip new drinks. I’ll have wine too, but only one glass. I’ve got an early meeting –’

‘You executive types don’t know how to let your hair down,’ interrupted Lorna. ‘Just one cocktail each and then we’ll be sensible, OK?’

After the cocktails arrived, the conversation moved on to schools. Lorna was heavily involved in the parent/teacher association in her children’s school and over their second cocktail, Mel was astonished to learn that Caroline had joined a national group who were lobbying for greater parental input in primary schools.

‘You’re so good to do that,’ said Val guiltily, stirring her White Cranberry Ice, a lethal concoction that slipped down too easily. ‘I should but…’ she looked at Mel as if they were in this together, ‘it’s so hard to find the time, isn’t it? I’m so busy with everything. I’m still going to Weight-Watchers, and I’ve only half a stone to go.’

Everyone raised their glass to her and told her she looked wonderful.

‘Thanks,’ beamed Val. ‘But I’ve got to fit in a long walk three times a week and what with all the extracurricular activities the kids are doing, like gymnastics – did I tell you Maureen’s taken it up? Twice a week it is – there isn’t the time for anything else.’ She flashed another gaze of complicity at Mel.

Mel didn’t return the look. She couldn’t. There was no comparison between her and Val. Val was a twenty-four-hour mother and if she didn’t manage to fit in the parents’ association because she was busily baking additive-free carob cookies and keeping herself fit, then it was hardly a crime.

What was more, Mel was a non-mother during the hours of nine to five – or, more accurately, between half-seven in the morning and seven in the evening – and if Carrie or Sarah one day decided they wanted to do gymnastics, then how the hell would it be managed?

‘How are Carrie and Sarah?’ asked Lorna, turning her attention to Mel. ‘Sarah must be going to school soon. It’s such a milestone, isn’t it?’ She sighed. ‘One minute they’re babies, the next they’re in school.’

Mel waited to see if Lorna would make the usual remark about how she was so glad she’d given up work when Alyssa was born because childhood went so quickly and you had to be there for it. She did it every single time they were out. Sometimes, to add insult to injury, she mentioned how hard it must be on Mel to have to miss all the important moments in her daughters’ lives.