Home Truths

Tuesday (#ulink_52a05497-079e-51cc-aa4b-5b2f053ff137)

Fen McCabe used to enjoy looking in the mirror. Far from it being a vanity kick, she’d found it an affirming thing to do. In the scamper of a working day, to grasp a private moment to nod at her reflection was sustaining. Hullo you, she’d sometimes say, what a busy day. And in the heady period when Matt Holden had wined, dined, wooed and pursued her, she’d frequently nip to the loo in some restaurant or bar, for a little time out with herself. He likes me, she’d beam at her reflection, you go girl! She’d wink at herself, give herself the go-ahead to party and flirt and charm the man who, soon enough, wanted to be with her for life.

Since having a baby six months ago, Fen has hated looking in the mirror. Not because she finds the sight depressing but because she finds the sight so strange. She doesn’t so much wince away from the sight of a few extra pounds, the limp hair, the sallow skin, the dark and puffy eyes, as glance bewildered and wonder who is that? How can this be my reflection when I don’t actually recognize the person staring back? And mirror mirror on the wall, wasn’t I once a damn sight fairer than this? So it’s something of a relief not to have the time during the day and to be too tired in the evening to face the facts staring back from the looking glass.

The phone is ringing, the baby is crying. Fen is nearer to the phone and Matt is nearer to the baby. Matt knows that Fen can find little wrong with the way he answers the phone so he’s happy to swap places here in the kitchen.

‘Hullo?’ he answers. ‘Well hullo!’ He looks over to Fen. She’s wearing truly awful pyjamas. Even if they’d been a matching set they’d have little to commend them. The bottoms have polka dots on a sickly lilac background. The top is littered with cutesy cartoon animals, a strange hybrid love child of a dog and a rabbit and even some teddy bear chromosomes somewhere along the line. ‘Hold on, I’ll just pass you over.’ He holds out the receiver.

‘Who is it?’ Fen mouths but Matt will only cock his eyebrow and grin. As Fen shuffles over to the phone, the placated baby at home on her hip, Matt notes her slippers. The grey, felted monstrosities he once termed ‘eastern-bloc lesbian clogs’. He’d had her in stitches at the time, she’d done a bastardized folk dance in them and had him in hysterics, before she’d banished them under the bed. For good, so he’d thought, until just then.

‘Hullo?’ says Fen.

‘Boo!’ says the voice.

‘Cat?’

‘I’m back! We’re in a cab, on the M4. Heading for Clapham.’

Matt watches the smile warm her face. He thinks how clichéd it sounds to say that the sun comes out when Fen smiles. But in his eyes, it does. And suddenly he forgives her the pyjamas and the clogs and he feels bad for having felt irritated with her and now he wants to go to her and put his arms around her and kiss the asymmetric dimples on her cheeks, brush her overlong fringe away from her forehead and kiss her there too, scoop her hair into a pony-tail and bury his nose in her neck. She’s hanging up the phone and he thinks that, though he’s now ready to leave for work perhaps there is time for a little spontaneity, for affection, for physical and emotional contact. The baby can stay on Fen’s hip. They’re a family after all. Group hug and all that. So he crosses the kitchen and he’s about to reach for her when her nose wrinkles.

‘Gracious,’ she’s saying to the baby, ‘how can someone so little and cute make such a revolting smell.’

‘I’ll change her,’ Matt offers.

Fen falters. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, ‘I’ll do it. I want to check that her nappy rash has cleared.’

She may only be six months old but Cosima Holden-McCabe has decided, quite categorically, that she will not be eating anything unless it is orange in colour. Fen is fretting over whether puréed carrot and mashed sweet potato for the fourth day running – and currently for breakfast – might give her baby carotene poisoning. Or have caused the nappy rash. Or created the current extreme pungency of the nappies.

‘Wouldn’t you rather have a nice squidgy banana? Are you OK, pumpkin?’ Keeping her eyes on her baby, waggling a spoon loaded with orange mush, Fen speaks to Matt. ‘Does she look orange to you?’

‘Pumpkins are orange – you’re probably giving her this complex.’

Fen looks at him for a loaded moment.

‘Joke?’ Matt says with a sorry smile. ‘She looks bonny – she has a lovely glow to her fat little cheeks.’

‘She’s not fat!’ Fen protests.

‘It was a compliment,’ Matt assures her. ‘I meant it affectionately.’

‘But do you think the glow to her cheeks is a bit orange?’

‘No, Fen, I don’t.’ Matt peers in close to his baby and kisses her cheek. ‘She looks fine.’ He glances at his girlfriend. ‘I think Cosima is happy and healthy and that carrot-and-sweet-potato mush is her favourite food of the moment. I reckon it’s because you look peaky in comparison, Fen.’

‘If I do look peaky,’ Fen says defensively, ‘it’s because I’m so bloody tired.’

‘I know you are,’ Matt says and it irritates him that Fen heard an insult instead of the concern intended. He wants to say, I’m tired too, you know; but he hasn’t time for a petty dispute over who is the more exhausted. ‘Why don’t you ask your sister if she’s around today? You can have a little time to yourself?’

‘She’s only just got off the plane!’

‘I meant Pip.’

Somewhere, Fen knows Matt’s intention is sweet. But lately, unbridled sensitivity has lain far closer to her surface than sense. ‘You don’t think I’m coping, do you?’ she says.

‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ Matt says, because the books and the magazines have instilled the sentence in him and advised him to ignore the ironing mountain, piles of toys and general debris. ‘I’m late. What are you doing today? Is it Musical Minis?’

‘No, that’s Thursday.’

‘TinyTumbles?’

‘No, that’s tomorrow. I may meet up with the baby-mums this afternoon.’

‘That’ll be nice.’

Fen shrugs. ‘I always come away feeling a bit insecure,’ she confides. ‘Their babies apparently sleep through the night and most have at least one tooth. And I’m not really sure about the women – I can’t find a connection apart from the babies being the same age. They’re forever trying to out-purée each other with increasingly exotic organic recipes. But all my baby wants is orange stuff.’

‘You’re being unnecessarily hard on yourself,’ Matt says, ‘and on Cosima. And possibly on that bunch too. Stop being silly. You’re wondermum and we love you.’

Fen can’t hear the last sentence. Her ears are ringing with the fact that Matt says she’s silly. She wants to say, Well fuck you. But they’ve made a pact not to swear in front of their child.

‘I’m late.’ He gulps his coffee. ‘Work is mental at the moment – I’ll try and leave early, cook us something nice.’ He kisses the top of Fen’s head and brushes his lips over the peach fuzz adorning Cosima’s. ‘Bye, girls. Have fun.’

* * *

Tom Holmes likes Tuesdays very much. He doesn’t like the fact that at school Tuesdays mean dictation followed by football. Tom finds it difficult to coordinate hearing a word, then assessing its meaning in context and having to write it down, all in the space of about two seconds. It thus seems entirely logical that instructions for rigging a yacht could well be ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’. It frustrates him that he never does well in dictation and that there’s no opportunity in dictation to saliently reason that ‘Pacific’, taken contextually, is just as appropriate as ‘specific’. He’s slightly taken aback that Miss Balcombe won’t at least acknowledge that ‘Pacific instructions for rigging’ sounds fairly logical. He doesn’t like it that there’s no room for manoeuvre with meaning where dictation is concerned.

Football makes Tom miserable, more so because he’s acutely aware that a nine-year-old should never admit to being miserable in the context of football. He supports Arsenal, which has won him friends at his North London prep school, but he hates playing the game. He hates playing because his limbs are often sore from eczema. Mud can actually sting but tracksuit trousers can catch and snag on chapped skin. Though his teammates are pals enough not to comment, Tom still catches them glancing at his body, unintentionally repelled. However, what makes dictation and football bearable is that, on Tuesdays, he stays with his dad and stepmum at their cool place in Hampstead.

They actually only live a mile or so from his home in Swiss Cottage and, though Tom spends every Tuesday, Wednesday and every other weekend with them, and any time in between that he fancies, the novelty value is still high. His dad’s place is closer to school than his other home so instead of his mum slaloming her Renault through the school run (which has its plus points because she appears unaware how much she swears) Tom strolls down Hampstead High Street with his stepmum. And, without actually holding hands (he’s nine now, someone might see), Tom can still subliminally tug her into a detour to Starbucks for hot chocolate.

Tom’s had Pip for nearly four years. Her presence at the school gates continues to provide much intrigue. Being a clown by trade, Pip is well known to many of Tom’s classmates from the birthday-party circuit of their younger years. She’s also been to assembly to talk about the other work she does, as a clown at children’s hospitals. She did the splits and a flikflak on the stage, bonked the headmaster on the head with a squeaky plastic hammer, made a motorbike from balloons in four seconds flat and Tom was the centre of attention all that day. His friends still make a point of saying hullo to her when she collects him. Invariably, she has rushed to school from the hospital, with her hair still in skew-whiff pigtails and traces of make-up on her face. Far more exotic than the widespread Whistles and ubiquitous Nicole Farhi worn by the other mums.

*

This Tuesday was no different. There was Pip, eye-catching in orange-and-purple stripy tights and clodhopping boots, chatting amiably with the other Hampstead mums.

‘Hi, I’m starving. It was shepherd’s pie for lunch. Heinous,’ said Tom, keen to drag her away.

‘Dear oh dear,’ said Pip, ‘heinous shepherd’s pie? I’d turn vegetarian, if I were you.’

‘No way, José,’ Tom retched. ‘The veggie option is always vomtastic.’

‘Vomtastic,’ Pip marvelled, planning to use the word in her clowning. ‘How was football?’

Tom gave a small shrug. ‘Cold.’

‘Are you angling for a brownie and hot choc?’ Pip nudged him.