Chapter 7
7
Drew was feeling less than pristine the following morning. He paced the platform, waiting for the train to arrive so he could sit down and sort himself out. He had slept well enough, got out of bed with his alarm, and the kids had been reasonably cooperative while getting dressed. Eva had been in an exceptionally giggly mood, and while George had insisted on wearing his sister’s pink unicorn socks to school as they were hidden under trousers – meaning his sister wouldn’t notice – Drew decided there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. In general terms, most of the morning had gone far smoother than usual. The problem was with the cereal.
It was now evident why Fyberflakes breakfast cereal was not only on offer but also cheap to begin with. Fyberflakes, Drew was now aware, tasted of nothing except pure, unadulterated dryness. Every mouthful was like having all the moisture sucked directly from his mouth and tongue, made worse by the fact that every half-filled spoonful lasted approximately 200 chews. Only two spoonfuls in, and his jaw had started to seize up. But Sarah had been watching him with her hawk eyes since the moment he poured his overly generous helping, so he’d had no choice but to finish it. Still, there was no way he could eat two boxes of the stuff. Not a chance. He would have to start putting them in the outside bin when she wasn’t home.
On the platform, the tannoy dinged above him. His train was on time too. At least that was another good thing. Grabbing one of the free magazines as he boarded, Drew selected a seat at the back of one of the carriages. He sorted out his backpack and checked his phone before settling into the seat and flicking open the magazine, ready to read.
Despite the image of an OAP in suspenders and a leather corset being at the centre of the double-page spread, it was the title of the article upon which he’d landed that caught Drew’s eye.
Naughty Nanny Makes 10K a Month was written in a bold font that crossed the double page. Naughty Nanny, dressed in a black leather ensemble, winked at the camera. ‘Ridiculous,’ he said, starting to turn the page to find an article on the housing situation in London. Hesitating, he cast a quick eye around him before turning back to Naughty Nanny and beginning to read. His immediate feeling of absurdity at the title began to change into something else. Ten grand a month? That was an unthinkable amount of money. And it certainly sounded like Naughty Nanny had more fun making ends meet than Drew did.
As they passed stop after stop, Drew read the article twice, word for word, including all the picture captions. If what this article said was true, then six months beforehand, the Naughty Nanny had opened up her laptop and penned her first erotic novel. Now she had bought a brand-new car, treated the grandkids to a fortnight trip to Disneyland and set herself up for a retirement of luxury. At the end of the second read, he took one more lingering gaze at the image before rolling the magazine up and slipping it into his backpack. It was brilliant, he thought, leaning back in his seat. Perfect. This would give Sarah everything she wanted: financial security, a chance to explore her creative side again, and an ability to forge an identity for herself away from the children. All day long, he was buzzing at the thought of telling her his new master plan. She would love it.
‘Are you insane?’ During the split second of silence that followed, Sarah considered if there was anything else she should add to the comment, but it seemed to sum up her thoughts succinctly enough, so she said it again with only a minor addition. ‘Are you completely insane?’
Drew stood in the kitchen, the top buttons of his work shirt undone, his tie loose, and the magazine in his hand, clearly unable to respond. Rolling her eyes, Sarah simultaneously shook her head and massaged the small of her back. It had been a frustrating day, to put it mildly.
With her house now smelling continually of damp and certain that some form of toxic mould was quite likely lurking in the paintwork, she had tried to rectify the broken tumble dryer situation by finding a second-hand one online. Despite her low expectations that she would find anything within a reasonable distance, it took only a few minutes of searching the internet to discover exactly what she was after only a couple of streets down.
‘Come on, Eva,’ she’d dragged her daughter away from her mid-morning bowl of cereal, despite it being only half-finished. ‘Let’s go. The nice lady with the tumble dryer said she’s only going to be home for twenty minutes, so we need to move.’
Still pulling Eva’s coat on as they had walked out the front door, Sarah raced around to the house. However, when she arrived, she quickly discovered that the nice lady’s tumble dryer was in no better condition than her own.
‘I thought you said it was working? It says in the advert it is working.’
‘Well, it could work,’ the woman had shrugged. ‘You just need to get it fixed.’
‘If it was that simple, don’t you think I would have done that with my own?’ Sarah had seethed.
The owner shrugged again.
Back home again, with forty minutes of her day completely wasted, Sarah attempted to get on with the housework. Eva trundled along behind her, helping , which ostensibly meant creating a wake of destruction, pulling clothes out of the drawers, and plastering sticky fingerprints over clean surfaces. Essentially, undoing all of Sarah’s hard work. The day went from bad to worse when she picked up George from school. With his bag strapped to his shoulders, he thrust an A5 paper notice into her hand.
‘Someone’s got nits,’ he had announced proudly. ‘We all have to shampoo our heads.’
‘Why do you all have to do it? Surely just the person with nits should have to do it?’
‘We all have to do it. That’s what the teacher said.’
Sure enough, the letter clearly stated that it was the new school policy. All children to be treated for lice on the discovery of an infestation. It also went through the procedure of what you were expected to do if your child was found to have nits, including contacting the school nurse and ensuring they were not sent into school until the situation had been fully rectified. ‘Great. More money.’
After a back and forth debate in her head, and a thorough scour of George’s scalp, Sarah was still undecided about forking out ten pounds unnecessarily on nit lotion when her phone vibrated.
Need a break from work. Come for coffee.
After three years as university housemates, Nelly was the closest thing Sarah had to a sister.
‘Try not to break anything. And if you need the toilet, make sure you flush it properly,’ Sarah had warned the children as she pulled up outside the only individualistic house on an estate of 300 carbon copy new builds. ‘And we are not staying for food, so don’t even start asking.’
‘Pretty. It’s so pretty.’ Eva clapped her hands at the rainbow-coloured fence outside her car window.
‘Why doesn’t our fence look like that?’ George asked, climbing out of his car seat and grabbing his LEGO action figures. ‘Our fence is rubbish.’
A small smile curled on the corner of Sarah’s lips. It was a truly spectacular fence, perfectly painted in a full array of colours. There was also a wide variety of garden gnomes, in various undignified postures, occupying the small patch of grass that was the front garden, and a large welcome mat saying, I like it dirty outside the front door.
‘I like to think of it as in-law repellent,’ Nelly had told Sarah on her very first visit to the house.
‘In-law repellent?’
‘Uh-huh. They said they’d only lend us the money for a deposit if we moved to somewhere around here. They’re a three-minute walk away, you see. When we moved in, they were doing my nut in, popping in whenever they fancied it. Even got themselves a bloody key cut.’
‘So you painted your fence?’
‘Genius, right? It’s the effect of the whole vibe, really. They’re terrified of being seen here. That mat worked a treat too. Now they’re seriously worried we could be swingers.’
Sarah had chuckled to herself. No matter how bad her day seemed, at least she had never gone to those kinds of extremes to avoid people.
‘Ask your dad,’ Sarah said to George, unclipping an orange gate and pushing the children past a pair of fornicating gnomes. ‘Ask him if he’ll paint it for you.’
‘But Dad can’t paint anything.’
‘Then I guess you’re stuck.’
‘Do you want a drink?’ Nelly said as Sarah took off Eva’s coat and hung it with hers on the back of an armchair.
‘I’d love one.’
Nelly disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with two mugs of tea and a selection of nibbles on a garish pink plastic plate which she placed on the table next to a pile of magazines. Sarah glanced at one of the cover stories:
I Married My Uncle, Now My Child is My Cousin
For all Nelly’s intelligence, and the fact she managed to run her own successful graphic design business out of her spare bedroom, she did have the trashiest taste in magazines.
‘I’ve only got plastic plates. Jeff and I are both boycotting the washing up. Until one of us caves, it’s like we are on a permanent picnic.’
George was busily helping his LEGO figures torment Nelly’s cat, and Eva was sitting in front of the iPad, playing a German-language game that Drew had downloaded for her. Sarah was 100 per cent certain not a single word of it was going in – and currently, the only German word Eva had picked up was a very aggressive, very determined sounding, nein – but it made her feel less of an awful parent than when she just let her watch YouTube.
‘God, I can’t wait till I can have a real drink again,’ Sarah said as she put down her tea and helped herself to a second biscuit. ‘What kind of person advertises a broken tumble dryer as working?’
‘Someone who is too cheap or too lazy to get it removed.’
‘I really hate people sometimes.’ She took another bite. ‘And I got a triple dose of Justine yesterday. School gates, toddler group, and the supermarket in the evening. Do you think she’d have me arrested if I slapped her?’
‘Depends what she’d said.’
‘I don’t think she’d have to say anything, to be honest.’
‘Go for it. I’ll be right behind you.’
Sarah laughed and cast her eye over at Eva and George.
‘So how are you and Jeff doing now?’ Sarah asked, having finished her second biscuit and reaching down for her tea. ‘Are things any better?’
Nelly half shrugged, half nodded.
‘He’s trying. I’m trying. I’ve been making an effort not to spend so much time working when he gets home, and he has agreed to try and get home a little earlier. We’ve made a list of chores too, so we both know what needs doing around the house.’ She gestured toward the plastic plate. ‘As you can see, that is going brilliantly.’
A slight pause interrupted the conversation.
‘So,’ Nelly sat back in her seat, smile firmly back on her face; every indication needed to show that the conversation about her failing marriage was over. ‘What about you and Drew? Has he finally accepted that you need to move to a new house?’
‘I don’t think he even notices. By the time he gets home in the evening, I’ve tidied away all the kids’ things, put away the washing, cooked dinner, and done the washing up. The house doesn’t feel that small if you’re not trying to do anything in it.’
‘But you’ve spoken to him about it?’
‘What’s the point? He’s still convinced that it’s fine. We’ll live in that damn house our entire lives if he gets his way. I dread to think what it’s going to be like when the new one comes along. He’s decided he’s not going to come to the birthing classes this time.’
‘What?’ Nelly slammed her drink down with such force that it spilled out over the edge. The children looked up momentarily. Nelly smiled at them, and they returned to what they were doing. ‘He knows how you feel about it all, right? After everything you went through with Eva?’
With her fingers running around the edge of her mug, Sarah inhaled a noisy breath through her nose. There were very few things Sarah got truly mad at Drew for, but the way he was handling the whole birth of number three was probably highest on the list. ‘He thinks going to classes will just make things worse. That it’s better if I don’t think about it until the time comes, otherwise I’ll just spend my time working myself up into a state.’
‘That’s rubbish, and you know it.’
‘You know what he’s like. Once he’s set his mind on something, that’s it.’
Nelly reached over and placed her hand on Sarah’s knee.
‘Look, you need to sort this. If you’re terrified, he needs to know.’
Sarah dipped her chin in the most minuscule of nods. ‘It’s just when I think of what nearly happened with Eva…’ she started.
‘You know what? So what if he doesn’t want to come to birthing classes. You don’t need him there. You don’t. You’re the one who pushes the damn thing out. You could do that whole damn birth by yourself in the back of a bus if it came down to it.’
‘I don’t think that’s exactly true.’
‘Trust me. You’re going to be fine. And this stuff with you and Drew is just a blip. You’ll work your way through it. I’m sure you will.’
‘Why would you think this is something I would want to do?’ Open mouthed, Sarah glanced back down at the article about the Naughty Nanny. They had made it deliberately provocative. In the photo, Nanny was sitting in an armchair, glasses on the end of her nose, her grey hair in tight curls around her scalp, a whip hung over the back of the chair. Resting on her stockinged thighs was a laptop. The title could have just as easily read Porno for Pensioners .
‘This is it, don’t you see?’ Drew jabbed his finger at the page. ‘This could be the answer to everything.’
‘Have you lost your mind?’
Drew took her by the hand and stared earnestly into her eyes.
‘Only yesterday you were saying how you wish you had more time to be creative and do the things you love. Things like writing. This woman makes a fortune writing naughty novels. And I bet they’re not even that great. I bet even you could write them.’
‘Even me?’ Sarah’s eyebrows arched towards her hairline. ‘Wow, thanks for the compliment.’
‘You know what I mean.’ He took the magazine from her. ‘I’m serious about this, Sah. I really think it could work. There’s a massive market out there. What’s to stop us from giving this a go?’
‘If this is about the fact that I’m not earning anything, that was a joint decision, remember? You were the one who said it was better if I stopped work completely when Eva came along.’
‘This isn’t just about money, Sah.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Then what is it about?’
‘You. Us. Doing something creative together.’
‘Really?’ Sarah’s arched brows took on an even more impressive curve. ‘Well, if that’s all you want, George has got a whole box full of colouring pencils and watercolours we can use.’
There was no way she was entertaining this. It was ridiculous. With one final glance down, she took the newspaper, folded it shut, and handed it back to her husband.
‘I’m going to head to bed,’ she said, taking a moment to kiss him on the cheek despite the fact she didn’t feel like it at all. ‘You’re most welcome to join me once you rediscover your sanity.’
‘Just think abo?—’
‘Honestly,’ Sarah stopped him before he started again. ‘Me writing erotic fiction. Like I have the time to do that.’