Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****

‘I only asked. Don’t we even get fed now?’

‘Jane, you’re fifteen, you can make yourself something to eat. I’m trying to fix the fucking boiler right now.’

‘Can I go to Dad’s? I hate it here, I want you to drive me to Dad’s.’

‘I’m not driving you to your father’s because I’m trying to fix the boiler and if you want to go there so badly, call him to come and get you.’

‘He didn’t pick up. So you need to take me.’

‘I don’t need to do anything, except fix the boiler.’

‘You NEVER do ANYTHING for me. I bet if Peter wanted to go to Dad’s you’d take him.’

‘I’m not taking anyone anywhere. This is our first night in our new home and it would be nice if we spent it together. Now please give me peace while I try to fix the fucking boiler. PLEASE!’

‘Mum, when will the Wi-Fi be connected? Can you call them and find out?’ said Peter.

‘I’M TRYING TO FIX THE BOILER!’

‘When can you call them, then?’

I kicked the scullery door closed and leant my head against the piece of shit broken boiler. I was only one person, trying to do the job of two. At least if Simon had been here, he could have been the one swearing at the boiler while I dealt with the children’s incessant demands for food, lifts and internet access. But Simon wasn’t here, I reminded myself, as those tears threatened again, and I wasn’t going to be beaten by a bloody boiler. I could do this. I gave the boiler a tentative whack with a wrench. It had not responded to me hitting it with a pair of pliers, but I was working on the basis that boilers came under plumbing and wrenches were plumbing tools and therefore it might work better. I was quite proud of my logic, but the boiler remained stubbornly lifeless. Finally, I had one last idea before I spent the GDP of Luxembourg on an emergency plumber. I stumbled out to the oil tank (too country for gas) and, by the light of my phone torch, found a valve on the tank that looked suspiciously like it was pointing to ‘closed’.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ I muttered, as I barked my shin on a stupidly placed piece of wall, and turned it to open. Either the boiler would burst into life, or I’d burn the house down. I went back inside, stubbing my toe on an abandoned plant pot and surveyed the boiler once more. It still sat there lifeless. I went through the process of pressing all the buttons again, and miraculously, on pressing the reset button, it finally roared into life. I’D DONE IT! I’D FIXED THE FUCKING BOILER!

‘MUUUUM!’ yelled Peter.

‘MOTHER!’ howled Jane.

I flung open the scullery door in triumph.

‘I’VE FIXED THE BOILER!’ I announced, expecting at least a fanfare of trumpets and a twelve-gun salute. ‘I was right, Jane. They had turned it off. Outside!’

Jane snorted. ‘I bet Dad would have known that hours ago.’

‘I didn’t need a man, I fixed it myself.’

‘Whatever. Can I go to Millie’s?’

‘NO! We’re going to have a lovely night together. I’ll light the fire and we’ll have a picnic dinner in front of it.’

‘Isn’t this fun?’ I said brightly later on, sitting with Judgy Dog before the rather smoky fire.

Jane snorted from beside the window, where she’d discovered an intermittent 4G signal.

‘It’s quite fun, Mum,’ said Peter carefully. ‘But it would be more fun with Wi-Fi, if you could phone them in the morning and see when we’ll get the broadband connected?’

The fire went out.

Judgy made a snorting noise rather akin to Jane’s, and something scratched suspiciously behind the skirting boards.

‘It’s fun,’ I said firmly. After all, as the saying goes, sometimes you just have to fake it till you make it.

Saturday, 14 April

My first weekend here without the children. In fairness, Simon had offered to take them last weekend so they were out of the way while I moved, but foolishly I’d laboured under the impression that they were old enough and big enough to make themselves useful – I’m nothing if not an eternal optimist …

Last week passed in a blur of desperate attempts to find work clothes from the general jumble of boxes, days at work mainly spent lining everything up on my desk in beautiful straight lines and appreciating the general tidiness and order of the office, before returning home to demand what the children had been doing all day (lounging around, eating and making a mess – such are the joys of teenagers in the school holidays), stomping round shouting about the mess the children had made, hurling the trail of plates and glasses left around the house in the dishwasher, and bellowing about who had drunk all the milk again, before spending the evenings in a whirl of unpacking boxes, wishing I could go to bed because I was knackered, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of boxes needing to be unpacked and wondering why the fuck I’ve so much stuff.

When Simon and I first moved in together, every single thing we owned in the entire world BETWEEN US fitted in his rusting Ford Fiesta, with room left over. Over twenty years later, and it took two vast removal lorries to distribute our possessions, not to mention the skip full of crap, the innumerable bags to the charity shops and several runs to the local dump. I’d packed everything up in a tremendous hurry, flinging things into boxes and promising myself I’d sort it all out at the other end (this rushed packing also led to some raised eyebrows from the removal men as they looked askance at my boxes labelled with things like ‘kitchen crap’, ‘general crap’ and – this was one of the last boxes I packed – ‘more fucking shit’), but this was proving harder than I thought, as I pulled out Jane’s first baby-gro – so tiny, and rather faded and yellowing now, but even so, I couldn’t possibly get rid of it.

I had rather a lump in my throat, when I found a box of photos of me in hospital holding a newborn Jane in the same baby-gro, Simon beaming proudly beside me. These must have been some of the last actual photos we ever took, before we got a digital camera. Beneath the box of photos were red books filled with their vaccination records. Did I need them? What if at some point they needed to prove they had been vaccinated? Would that ever happen? I set them to one side in the ‘maybe keep’ pile, and then I found Peter’s first shoes. So tiny! I remembered the day we bought them. There should be a photo of that too – I dug through the box, and there it was, a Polaroid taken by Clarks of a small, furious and scowling Peter, clutching his blanky, who had been unimpressed with this momentous day. Did he still have his blanky, I wondered? We’d gone to the park after he got his shoes and he’d been so pleased with himself as he tottered across the playground on his own for the first time, me hovering anxiously by his side, ready to catch him if he fell. The shoes were definitely for the ‘keep’ pile. And what was this? A box full of tiny human teeth? Well, of course I was keeping that, even if at some point the children’s teeth had got jumbled up and I no longer knew whose were whose.

Jane wandered in at that point. She looked at my little box of teeth that I was gazing at fondly and said, ‘You do know, Mother, that one day you’re going to be dead and we’re going to have to clear your house out and it’s going to be like totally gross if we have to come across things like boxes of human teeth.’

‘But they’re your teeth,’ I protested. ‘It’s not like I’m a serial killer and I’ve kept the teeth of my victims as a souvenir. They are keepsakes from your childhood.’

Jane gave another one of her snorts. ‘It’s still gross,’ she insisted. ‘In fact, it would be less weird if you had killed people for their teeth. Why do you have them?’

Once upon a time, that special moment had been quite magical, when Simon and I first tiptoed into Jane’s room, as she lay there, all flushed and rosy-cheeked in her White Company pyjamas, sleeping innocently, dreaming of the Tooth Fairy and the spoils she’d wake up to. We slid a little pearly tooth out from under her pillow and popped a (shiny shiny) pound coin in its place. We stood hand in hand and gazed down at her, still slightly in awe of this perfect little person we’d made together. We put that tiny little tooth into the special box I’d bought for it, and marvelled at how grown up our baby girl was getting. I wondered if Simon and I would ever do anything together again like that for the children?

Of course, the standards slipped in later years – any old pound coin would do – and quite often I’d forget, and when an angry child burst into my bedroom complaining the Tooth Fairy hadn’t been I’d have to hastily rustle up a pound coin and pretend to ‘look’ under their pillow before triumphantly ‘finding’ it, and accusing them of just not looking properly. Luckily they fell for this every time, and I still constantly complain about them never looking for anything properly. Now though, looking into the box filled with yellowing little teeth, several of them still bearing traces of dried blood where, the sooner to get his hands on the booty, Peter had forcibly yanked them out, it did seem a rather macabre thing to keep. But on the other hand, a) I wasn’t actually going to admit that to Jane, and b) I’d really gone to rather a lot of effort to collect those teeth and so I wasn’t quite ready to part with them just yet. Anyway, they might come in useful for something.

‘Useful for what?’ said Jane in horror. ‘Seriously, Mother, what exactly do you think a box full of human teeth might be useful for? Are you going to become a witch or something? Eye of newt and tooth of child? Is that why you’re getting chickens – you claimed it was because they were chatty, but actually you’re planning on sacrificing them and reading the portents in their entrails while daubed in their blood? I’m not having any part of that. I’m going to go and live with Dad if you do that. That’s just going too far, Mother.’

‘What?’ I said in confusion. ‘How did you get from your baby teeth to me becoming some sort of chicken-murdering devil worshipper? I’m not going to sacrifice the chatty chickens. The chickens aren’t even here yet and you’re accusing me of secretly wanting to kill them!’

Simon chose that moment to arrive and collect his darling children.

‘Dad, if Mum becomes a Satanist and kills the chickens, I’m coming to live with you, OK,’ Jane informed him by way of a greeting.

‘Errr, hello darling,’ said Simon. ‘Why is your mother becoming a Satanist?’

‘I’m NOT,’ I said crossly.

‘She collects human body parts,’ said Jane darkly.

‘I BLOODY WELL DON’T!’ I shouted.

This wasn’t the scene I’d envisioned for Simon seeing me in my new home for the first time. I’d lost track of time, and instead of being elegantly yet casually clad in a cashmere sweater and sexy boots, perhaps with some sort of flirty little mini skirt to remind him that actually my legs really weren’t bad still, while reclining on a sofa in my Gracious Drawing Room, I was in my scabbiest jeans, covered in mud from walking Judgy earlier, with no make-up, dirty hair and clutching a box of teeth, with the house looking like a bomb had gone off and boxes everywhere. Simon meanwhile appeared to have finally cast aside his scabby fleeces in favour of tasteful knitwear and seemed to be attempting to cultivate some sort of designer stubble. Or maybe he just hadn’t bothered to shave. Either way, it suited him. Bastard. I glared at him.

‘Right …,’ he said, wisely deciding the best thing to do would be to ignore this whole conversation and pretend it had never happened. ‘Jane, are you ready? And where’s your brother?’

Jane looked surprised. ‘Ready? What, now? Like, NO, I need to pack. How should I know where Peter is? I’m not his mother!’

I sighed. ‘I suppose you’d better come in then, Simon. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Could I get some coffee?’