Chapter 3
Sunday Dad
My mouth is open. What has happened to everyone today? Why are they all coming out with the most preposterous nonsense?
“Dana,” I say slowly, as if explaining to a child. “I don’t love him.”
“So?”
The wine must have gone to her head. Dana and I have different attitudes to my love-life.
She thinks I need one; I think I don’t. Shortly after Max’s birth, Dana had run into the back of another car at a junction.
As she stood shaking in the centre of the road, incapable of stopping the tears streaming down her face, the woman she hit handed her Max, still blissfully asleep in his car seat, moved both cars safely off the road and then sat them all down in a café with a hot, sweet tea.
Two teas, an egg salad sandwich and a chocolate brownie later, she left, having exchanged contact details purely for insurance purposes.
The woman texted that evening to make sure Dana and Max had made it home.
And she called the next day to check both of them were still okay.
She had a brother, she said, who would fix her car for peanuts, cannibalising a write-off for parts, so there was no need to go through the insurance.
Dana had cried once again. A single mum off work on maternity, money was tighter than skinny jeans after Christmas.
The woman, Fiona, had then offered to see if her brother could fix Dana’s car too.
A meeting turned into coffee, which turned into an afternoon in the park until Fiona, a chef, had to go to work.
The following week, she cooked for Dana.
The meal was divine, as was the kiss that followed.
I heard the story as it unfolded. By the time I finally got to meet the fabulous Fiona, I was pre-disposed to love her, especially as she worked Friday evenings.
But ever since Dana found love, she’s been angling to pair me up too. As if her good fortune should naturally extend to me. That must be the source of her excitement over Anders’s proposal. I consider how to make my point, organising my arguments before I start to lay them out.
“You love Fiona.” A simple statement of fact. Dana nods. “But how do you feel when she leaves the cap off the toothpaste?”
“I want to kill her. She knows I hate it.”
“Now imagine that feeling when there isn’t even love to stop you screaming at your partner?”
Dana takes another sip of her wine. “Okay. Point taken. But you could grow to love him. He’d be on his best behaviour during the honeymoon period. That should be enough time to fall in love. And it wouldn’t take long from the look of him.”
Effie comes into the kitchen and looks forlornly at the empty plates. She’s only tiny, but she eats like a teenage boy. It amazes people when she tucks away an adult-sized portion.
“I can’t believe you think this could work,” I say, closing the lid on the laptop before my daughter sees anything.
Effie walks up to Dana. “I’m hungry,” she says.
Dana ignores her and focuses on me. “I can’t believe you think it couldn’t. But even if it didn’t, how would you be worse off?”
Effie, tired of being ignored, raises her hands. They clamp, one on each side, bang on Dana’s tits. Then Effie jiggles them. That gets our notice.
“Effie!” I exclaim, mortified. But Dana looks down and calmly says, “What do you want, sweetie?”
I stop her with a wave of my hand. “No, Effie. You cannot do that. If you need to get someone’s attention, you touch their arm or their shoulder. Nothing else. And most especially not their breasts.”
Effie’s brow furrows. “But last time, Auntie Fiona did it to Auntie Dana. And she said she could have whatever she wanted.”
The logic takes a bit of figuring out but then my head swivels, and Dana has the good grace to blush. “That’s something only mummies can do to mummies,” I try to explain. Then, in the interests of impartiality, because sometimes Effie requires explicit instructions, I add, “Or daddies to mummies.”
“So, Daddy can do it to you?” she asks.
This is getting complicated. “No. Not your daddy. Only daddies who live with mummies.”
Effie is silent, thinking. Then, “What about Mr Carter? He’s a daddy. He told us his son won a prize for running very fast. And he lives with a mummy.”
“No. He can only do it to the mummy he lives with.” I struggle to refine the premise in terms Effie might understand.
“But no mummy or daddy lives with us?” It is part question, part comment. “Should we get one for you?”
I am rescued from further verbal contortions by Dana, who correctly guesses Effie’s desire. “Do you want this?” She flashes another chocolate brownie in front of my daughter’s eyes. Effie nods. “Take one for Max, too,” Dana reminds her.
As Effie leaves the room, I stare at Dana, eyebrows raised.
“Yes, we’ll be more careful in the future. Max wouldn’t even have noticed. Sometimes I forget Effie can be so observant. Especially when she’s so often obtuse about people.”
Then she winks at me and says, “But out of the mouths of babes, hun.”
“Anders is a workaholic.” I say this as if it explains everything.
Dana’s apparently comfortable with that. She shrugs. “Some men are. But at least he’s a rich workaholic. And he’s building a company. Of course, he works hard. Unlike that tosspot, Mike. I’ll never understand what you saw in him.”
“He had great taste in music. What can I say? I was young, and at the time that seemed crucially important. I never expected him to become the father of my child. That was an accident. But that’s exactly my point.”
“That Mike is a loser?”
“That Effie already has one disengaged father, who’d rather spend time anywhere else than with her. She doesn’t need another.”
Dana purses her lips. She’ll regret that habit when she’s sixty but at least it’s a sign she’s accepted my argument. Except she tries a different tack. “She doesn’t need another or you can’t take another?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve been emotionally closed off since Mike pulled his stunt.
And who could blame you? What he did was shitty.
But now it’s almost five years later, and here is someone saying he wants a committed relationship, knows about Effie and is willing to take her on and you turn him down flat?
Is that protectiveness or is that fear?”
I don’t answer her because I can’t. I cannot distinguish.
“Look at him!” She gestures to the closed laptop. “Can you honestly tell me you’ve never fancied a piece of that arse?”
Maybe. When I first went to work for him.
Of course, I noticed he was hot and there was a kind of glamour about him.
But I was still a mess, full of worries and disrupted sleep, at that time.
I just ignored any attraction, and it disappeared, worn away by constant exposure and familiarity, probably.
Dana takes my silence as acquiescence.
“You can’t waste all of that hotness. If you won’t marry him, how about a roll in the hay? You haven’t been with anyone since Mike!”
“Yeah, well. It was a roll in the hay that ended with Effie. It put me off another. Besides, a quick tumble wasn’t on the agenda.
Anders was very clear. He wants marriage and children.
And I’m a single mum. Sleeping with my boss would jeopardise everything.
I would be risking my job, my future and my ability to pay the rent, all for a quickie. I don’t have that luxury.”
“Alright, not Anders. But there’s this new sous-chef working with Fiona. He’s single.”
“Oh, how the bar has dropped,” I point out.
“From a well set-up businessman offering marriage to any bloke whose sole qualifying attribute is singledom. Let me say this very clearly, Dana. I’m not looking for any man, not a one-night shag nor a sugar daddy.
One day, maybe, when Effie is more settled. But not now.”
Dana finally capitulates, although I’m sure there is a tiny part of her that hasn’t quite given up hope.
I don’t think she’s reached the stage where I’ll find the sous-chef lurking in her kitchen one day but it’s not far off.
But even taking Fiona into account, if I were to consider having a fling with anyone, the very last person I would choose, apart from Anders, would be a chef.
They work appalling hours, evenings and weekends.
Dana and Fiona make it work, but only because Dana is freelance and has flexible hours. I don’t.
For all I tell myself I’m doing okay as a single mum, watching how Dana and Max’s lives improved so dramatically after moving in with Fiona has been an eye-opener.
It’s not only the security that comes with having two incomes in one home that has melted away the worry lines from Dana’s face.
Having another person to pass the baton of childcare to when you’ve just had enough is a massive benefit.
And I’d love to have someone who’s interested in me and wants to talk over my concerns, the way Dana can talk with Fiona.
Friendship helps, but nothing substitutes for partnership.
If only I could fall over a perfect partner the way Dana crashed into Fiona.
But the men I actually find attractive are thin on the ground.
Add in the necessity they be kind, patient and Effie-friendly and we are in endangered species territory.
Sunday rolls around, bringing its normal uncertainty.
Effie is an early riser, so I am too. Another reason not to date.
After nine in the evening, I morph into a pumpkin, and no-one wants one of those.
Any helpful souls who suggest I keep Effie up late so she sleeps in have never experienced the horror of an overtired child, who still rises at the same time every morning but is then bad-tempered all day.
My lie-in will have to wait a year or three.
Opening my eyes from a dream where Anders is about to kiss me, I’m disconcerted to find Effie’s face an inch from mine, her breath feathering my cheek.