Authors: Rowan Coleman
“Break
down
more like,” Natalie mumbled as Sandy left the room.
“Your mother certainly is a force of nature,” Gary said with a small smile.
“Trust me, there is nothing natural about that woman,” Natalie told him bluntly.
“You two always like that with each other?” he asked her, lifting one eyebrow rather rakishly, Natalie thought. Gary was quite attractive after a glass of wine. Possibly even before it if you liked muscular, capable-looking men. It would certainly be hard to find a man who was more different from Jack. Whereas Jack was long-
legged and lean, Gary was possibly only a few inches taller than her, with broad shoulders and a muscular torso and arms. He must be little bit vain, Natalie decided, otherwise he wouldn’t wear his T-shirts quite so tight, but in Gary she found it quite a charming quality. Jack had a surprisingly fair complexion despite his dark hair and eyes, while Gary’s skin was darker, a lightly tanned tone that contrasted well with his light gray eyes. As Natalie’s wine swilled around her momentarily empty head, she decided she liked the look of Gary. He could be the perfect antidote to almost thin, stringy Jack—a broad, well-muscled, uncomplicated antidote.
“I suppose we are,” she answered with a one-shouldered shrug. “I haven’t really seen her that much since I was old enough to be able to escape her. It was because of Tiffany that I rang her. She made me realize that there was a vague possibility that I didn’t have the worst mother on the planet, after all. Do you know how Tiff got on with the social worker today, by the way?”
“She’s getting it all sorted out, I think,” Gary said. “But it’s a lot for her to manage on her own. She says she’s coping, but how can she be when she’s just a kid herself? Actually, I was thinking that maybe you could keep an eye on her if she needs an older woman to talk to?”
Natalie was surprised and rather touched that Gary had thought to ask her to watch out for Tiffany, even if he did irk her with the “older woman” comment.
“Of course I will,” she said. “The alarming thing is that technically I am actually old enough to be her mother.”
“You don’t look it,” Gary said quietly, instantly redeeming himself from his previous minor indiscretion. “You look really great.”
Natalie couldn’t help but beam at the compliment.
“Well, I think I’m doing quite well as long as I remember not to turn into her.” She nodded at the silenced baby monitor.
“I quite like your mother in a way.” Gary, who had visibly relaxed since Sandy had left the room, leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms over his head, not like the rather formal and shy man she was used to at all. “She’s very…ah…friendly,” he added, pulling one corner of his mouth down on the last word. Natalie laughed.
“Well, Gary, if I can promise you one thing about my mom it is that at some point before you finish working here she will ask you to have sex with her. That’s a given. You are exactly her type: younger, muscular, strong, and good-looking…” Natalie trailed off as she realized her list of compliments had caused Gary’s shyness to return.
Natalie was warming rather dangerously to Gary. She hadn’t noticed any of those things about him before tonight—in fact, if anyone had asked what she thought about him, she would have told them he was nice-looking, in that he looked “nice.” Nothing more than that. But now as she looked at him she found herself imagining the weight and mass of him under her hands.
“The thing is,” Natalie continued, “I don’t think Mom sees her prey as younger. I worked out a few years ago that she somehow got mentally stuck at her peak, somewhere in her forties, I think. And since then whenever she looks in the mirror she still sees that woman, not the wizened old crone she is in reality.”
“She looks all right for her age!” Gary said gallantly.
“Careful, Gary,” Natalie teased him. “She’ll lure you into her boudoir yet!”
The pair of them laughed, and Natalie felt quite floaty and mellow. Quite confident and womanly again. She had almost forgotten the still-sore place where her stitches had been, and the fact she was still wearing her stretch, wide-legged trousers from the gym that did absolutely nothing to restrain her failing tummy muscles. In fact, she felt quite good about herself when Gary
Fisher smiled at her, and the specter of Jack Newhouse that had haunted her all this time briefly diminished.
“It’s nice that you stayed,” she told Gary, hearing the drop in the tone of her voice, feeling the flutter of her unmade-up lashes and sensing that she was perilously close to flirt mode. “Thank you.”
Gary looked down at the tabletop.
“Thanks for having me,” he said, apparently enormously interested in his place mat. “Besides, although I’m quite a good cook, it’s nice to be cooked for now and again. And it would have been a shame if you and your mom had fallen out on her first night here.”
“Oh, there’s still time,” Natalie said, glancing at the clock and then back at Gary. The two of them looked at each other across the table, and Natalie thought she must really be drunk because she felt the irresistible desire to lean across the table and kiss her electrician.
“So, when will you be finished?” she said instead, forcing herself to sit back in her chair and wondering if Gary had noticed her moment of desire for him.
“Another week and a half?” Gary hazarded a guess. “Maybe even a bit sooner.”
“Oh really?” Natalie was surprised. “That soon?”
“I’ll miss coming here,” Gary told her, tipping his near-empty wineglass around and around so that the remnants of the liquid inside circled the bottom of the glass.
“You will?” Natalie said smoothly, almost flirtatiously, finding herself on the edge of that now so familiar precipice, the one she always seemed to climb just before she flung herself into some new, needless complication.
“Yeah, I’ll miss this lovely old house. I hardly ever get to work
on places like this. It’s really great that you’ve kept it as a house. If a developer had got his hands on it…”
And then all at once Natalie was free-falling again, plummeting downward without any hope of reversing the action she was about to take, even though she knew in the seconds before she spoke that it was doomed to fail.
“But the real question is,” she said, hearing her soft purring voice as if it were an entity entirely detached from her brain, “will you miss
me
?”
And then she leaned across the table, put her hand on the back of Gary’s neck, and tried to pull his head, his lips, toward hers.
Eyes wide with fearful mortification, Gary resisted. His neck and shoulders were rigid with horror.
Two or perhaps three seconds of excruciatingly perfect embarrassment passed as Natalie gradually came to her senses and realized too late what it was that she had done. It seemed to take an age for her to remove her hands from Gary’s person and sit back down in her chair.
For the first time in her adult life she was glad to see Sandy walking through the door.
“No, it’s no good, he needs feeding,” her mother said, stopping short as she entered the room as if she could somehow smell the atmosphere.
Natalie blinked to clear her vision and saw the look of naked terror still frozen on poor Gary’s face. She saw her mom trying very hard to stifle a giggle.
“Oh well, thanks for trying, Mom,” she said quickly, getting up from the table with a little stagger. “I’ll settle him.”
Gary stood up too.
“And I’d better be going. Thanks for dinner, Mrs.—”
“Sandy, darling, and please—stay for coffee. I could use some company.”
Natalie was horrified to hear her mother use almost exactly the same tone with Gary that she just had. Sort of drunken and lecherous, with a definite edge of needy desperation.
“Ah no, I really have to go and feed the…fish. I’ve got fish.” Natalie heard Gary mumble a succession of hurried and worried excuses as she left the heat of the kitchen and felt the cool sobering air of the hallway soothe her blazing cheeks.
“I can’t believe that I’ve just made a pass at the help,” she said to Freddie as she lifted him out of his cot. “I mean, he’s not even my type really. I don’t even fancy him and he certainly wouldn’t fancy me at the moment. The Blob from the Fat Lagoon, that’s what I am, little man.” She unhooked her nursing bra and put Freddie to her breast, desperately wishing that she could somehow undo the last few minutes of her life.
What
had
she been thinking? She had not been thinking clearly at all, that was the problem. The wine had temporarily magnified her unresolved feelings about Jack, and for a minute or two there she had wanted somebody, anybody who was not Jack, to want her. It couldn’t have backfired worse. When she had touched him Gary had looked as if the thought of her advances had shriveled his manhood entirely.
“Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I think,” Natalie muttered, settling back in the feeding chair. “I mean, perhaps I didn’t come off as a sleazy desperado, just a friendly employer.” She remembered her hand on the back of Gary’s neck and the mortified look on his face.
“Oh, who am I kidding?” she said to Freddie. “It wasn’t as bad as it looked. It was worse. It’s my mother’s fault. She’s only been here five minutes and already she’s turning me into her. She’s a witch, Freddie. Your ‘Nana Sandy’ is a witch.”
Natalie looked down at her son, who had stopped suckling and was fast asleep, his tiny mouth a newly opened rosebud. “This has got to stop. I’m not just me anymore. It actually
does
matter now what sort of trouble I get myself into. I might not feel like a grown-up but I have to act like one.”
Natalie put the palm of her right hand over her heart. “From now on, I, Natalie Louise Curzon, absolutely promise you, Freddie…um…Mercury Curzon, here and now, that I will
not
turn into my mother and I
will
break free from the cycle. I
will
be the kind of mother you are not ashamed to have pick you up from school. I will
never
either have sex or attempt to have sex ever, ever again. And”—Natalie took a deep breath—“I will deal with Jack Newhouse in a mature and rational way for your sake. I
will
be a good mother to you, Freddie Mercury Curzon, this I solemnly do swear. I absolutely
will
be the very best mother you can possibly have, considering you’ve got me.”
Natalie raised Freddie’s forehead to her lips and kissed him gently, breathing in his scent as she did so and finding that small oasis of peace that was always present whenever she and Freddie were alone and relaxed like this.
“What I’ll do is just go downstairs,” she told her son in a whisper as she laid him neatly back in the cot, “and act as if nothing happened. Like that time I accidentally had sex with the silk salesman in the stockroom. Then we can both forget about it and everything will all be fine again.”
But just as Natalie was at the top of the stairs, she heard the front door gently closing as Gary made his escape.
“He’s gone,” Sandy said, appearing at the bottom of the stairs.
“I can see that,” Natalie said irritably.
“The thing is, darling,” her mother called up as Natalie turned on her heel, deciding that now was a good time for the oblivion of
sleep, “if you’re going to have a fake husband it’s probably not a good idea to try to seduce your real-life electrician. Do you see?”
Natalie would have happily slammed her bedroom door shut, except for the fear of waking Freddie.
Somehow a really quiet and careful push did not achieve nearly the same satisfaction.
I
t had taken Natalie a long time to leave the house the next morning. It wasn’t because she wasn’t ready in time. Despite only getting to sleep just before three, she was up at seven again and in the shower shaving her legs, plucking her eyebrows, and washing her hair with enjoyable thoroughness, knowing that there was somebody else in the house to see to Freddie should he wake early after his busy night. Natalie decided that today was going to be fun because it was the first day she had been out anywhere without Freddie since his birth, and as much as she loved him she knew she would relish her few hours of freedom. Indeed, she thought, as the first signs of spring seemed to take the edge of the cold, she felt like a butterfly escaping from its grungy cocoon and spreading its glorious wings in the sunlight.
Dressing had not been quite so freeing, though, and she had approached her wardrobe with considerable trepidation. After all, today was a Saturday shopping trip to town. Such an expedition
was not to be undertaken in sweatpants or milk-stained sweatshirts. She had to wear proper clothes, clothes with seams not necessarily containing Lycra. But would any of her proper clothes still fit her? That was the question that had threatened to dent her determination to enjoy the shiny new day, that and the prospect of having to buy clothes one, possibly even two, sizes bigger than she was accustomed to.
It was possible, Natalie supposed, that her pre-baby figure had not been as magnificent as she remembered it, but even if she was looking back with rose-tinted spectacles she was still finding it hard to feel quite the same love for her physical self these days. No wonder poor Gary wanted to run a mile from her literally heavy-handed advances.
As the thought popped unbidden into her head, a wave of excruciating embarrassment passed over Natalie. Still, she had vowed to herself and to Freddie that she was going to put the incident behind her, move on and be a proper adult. And this time she was determined to do it.
She opened her wardrobe doors, looked at the row of neatly hanging clothes from another lifetime, and wondered which of them might possibly fit her. She was determined to select exactly the right garment. She was resolute that she would not try on anything that she would have to take off again because she could not get it over her thighs. Subsequently it took her several minutes to select, perhaps optimistically, a pair of wide-legged trousers and a top that didn’t have buttons with the potential to gape over her cleavage. She held her breath as she gingerly pulled on the trousers, and discovered after the brief celebration of doing them up that it was probably a good idea to try not to breathe out ever again. The stretch top was better; Natalie was pleased to see that her deepened cleavage actually looked quite fetching in it. A hip-covering long jacket followed and then she examined herself in her
full-length mirror. On the highly unlikely off chance that she might meet the love of her life while out on her mission to save the sexual lives of Jess and Meg, she thought she would not scare him off completely. At least not with her clothes on, anyway, and as she had sworn to never ever take them off in front of a man again, she didn’t have to worry about that.
So she was feeling relatively good about herself by the time she found her mother in the kitchen.
It all went downhill from there.
As she walked in, Sandy hung up the phone quickly without bothering to say good-bye to the person on the other end of the line.
“Who was that, your dealer?” Natalie asked her, only mildly interested.
“Just a friend…from Spain who is watering my plants while I’m away,” Sandy said slowly, as if she were considering telling Natalie more.
“And?”
Sandy thought for a moment and then shook her head. “And I’ve asked them to drop the crack off at the back door, is that all right with you?” she quipped with a sunny smile.
“Ha, ha,” Natalie said mirthlessly, and then a frown slotted between her eyebrows. “You are joking, aren’t you, Mom?”
Sandy tipped her head on one side and examined her daughter. “You look well,” she said, as Natalie poured herself a coffee.
Natalie took a deep breath and counted from ten backwards and then forwards for good measure. But still she could not stop herself from asking the inevitable question, “What do you mean,
well
?”
Sandy looked perplexed. “I mean you look…well,” she said, gesturing with her unlit cigarette as she sipped her coffee. “What else would I mean?”
“You couldn’t just say ‘nice,’ could you?” Natalie felt her insides wind up a notch tighter with every word. “Or even ‘good.’ You have to say something cruel.”
The rational part of Natalie’s brain was telling her that she was being a little hypersensitive, not to mention a touch unreasonable, but when it came to her mother Natalie seldom heard the rational part of her brain.
“I’m sorry, dear.” Sandy spoke gently, as if Natalie was still about six years old. “I really don’t see how ‘you look well’ is cruel. I mean it’s not as if I told you you look fat, is it?”
“Well thank you very much!”
Natalie bellowed at her mother.
“What have I done?” Sandy said guilelessly. “And anyway, I thought you said your weight problem never bothered you,” she added.
Natalie sat down on a kitchen chair with a thump and began counting backwards from one hundred until she realized there was no number high enough to calm her fury.
“Right,” she said bitterly. “That’s it. I can’t go now.”
Sandy looked deeply perplexed.
“What on earth do you mean?” she said. “Honestly, Natalie, what kind of mother are you going to be if you can’t take a joke—you are far too highly strung for your own good…”
“Joke!” Natalie spluttered in amazement. “And anyway I am
not
highly strung.” She forced herself to keep her potentially hysterical tone in check. “In any case I am not going out and leaving my infant son with you. It would be like leaving a bunny rabbit in a cage with a crocodile. I’m going to give Freddie the chances you didn’t give me and one of those is the chance to grow up without being totally messed up by you!”
Sandy took a deep drag on her cigarette before remembering it wasn’t lit and dropping it on the table.
“You are being ridiculous,” she told Natalie. “And I know
why—you are under a lot of pressure, love. Hasn’t it occurred to you that I of all people might be able to understand what you are going through? We are a lot alike, you and I…”
“We are not alike,” Natalie said, her voice so low with barely restrained fury that Sandy did not register it.
“You’re frustrated being stuck in here day after day,” Natalie’s mother went on. “Go out and have a break. After all, I brought you up, I’m sure I can manage a baby for a couple of hours.”
“Brought me up!” Natalie exclaimed. “Well, yes, if you call checking me in and out of a record number of hotels, schools, and trailer parks for fifteen years bringing me up—then I suppose you did!”
“Not this again.” Sandy sank back in her chair and dropped her head.
“I’m not having you do the same thing to Freddie as you did to me,” Natalie said, slamming her palms down so hard on the table that they stung for several seconds.
“I don’t know what you think I did to you, Natalie,” Sandy said, leaning across the table. “But I can tell you that what I
did
do was my very best. I was only a kid when your dad got me pregnant. A single mother back then didn’t have a lot of options—not like today—but at least I kept you. At least I didn’t put you up for adoption.”
“I wish you had,” Natalie said under her breath.
“Well.” Sandy bit her lip, and waved her hand across her face, unable to find anything to say. Natalie knew she had got under her mom’s usually impenetrable defenses and at once felt a mixture of triumph and guilt.
“Whatever you think of me as your mother,” Sandy managed to say after a while, “you have to acknowledge that even I can’t ruin a baby’s life in the few hours you’ll be out.”
Natalie stared at her until she felt the glare of her anger dull a
little. Was it possible that her mom was actually trying to be nice? On this occasion perhaps had she jumped the gun just a fraction?
“I haven’t left him before,” she said awkwardly, not sure how to climb down from her habitual attack mode.
“He will be fine,” Sandy reassured her on a deep breath. “He was up so much of last night that I doubt he’ll wake up before you get back, but if he does, nappies and creams are on his change table, there’s a bottle of milk in the fridge, to be warmed to room temperature, and I’ve got your cell phone number.” She offered a conciliatory smile. “And I’m not taking him out so the chances of me forgetting where I’ve left him are really small. It will be okay, Natalie. Please trust me. If you won’t let me help you, then what’s the point of me being here at all? I want to help, please let me do this for you.”
Natalie looked at her mother for a long time. In the morning light, without the benefit of her potions and makeup, she looked old, almost frail. The dark roots at the base of her hair had begun to show through, and the shadows under her eyes looked deeply ingrained in the paper-thin skin. She had a smoker’s mouth, circled with an aurora of tiny radiating lines, and jowls that had given up the fight against gravity long ago.
She was fading, Natalie suddenly realized with a shock. Her mother wasn’t immortal, after all.
She had hoped that the point of Sandy being here might be that the two of them would reach some understanding at last, find that connection a mother and daughter should surely have. But perhaps her mother was right. Perhaps Sandy’s sole useful purpose could be to give her a few hours off here and there. Maybe expecting anything more was asking more of her than she was capable of giving. And then at least they would have
something
between them.
“You’ll take care of him properly, won’t you?” Natalie asked her mother seriously.
“Of course I will,” Sandy said. And for once, Natalie was surprised to find, she believed her.
It was clear to Natalie that Meg and Jess hadn’t spent quite so long agonizing over what to wear on their shopping trip as she had. Meg because she was wearing what she always wore, a baggy old skirt and shapeless sweater, and Jess because in her jeans and jacket it was plain as day that she had shed any extra baby pounds she might have had quite quickly. Natalie tried hard not to feel jealous of Jess, concluding rather churlishly that it was only because Jess worried too much and didn’t eat nearly enough cake.
“You managed to persuade Robert to spend a bit of quality time with the kids then?” Natalie asked Meg as they stood at the bus stop on Newington Green. She was scanning the horizon for a black cab on its way to the West End to begin a day’s work, in the hope of being able to avoid traveling on a bus.
“Well, no, actually, I didn’t.” Meg grimaced. “He said if I wanted him to be home by seven tonight, then he had to go to the office for the morning.” She didn’t mention that that morning’s short and stilted conversation was more or less the only communication they had had since he had said…what he had said.
“Who’s got the kids then?” Jess asked.
The bus stop was nearest to her flat and every few seconds she glanced up at her kitchen window and thought about going back. From the moment that Natalie had persuaded her to come out on their expedition, she had been looking forward to a few free hours, imagining that somehow they would be hours free of the constant gnawing fear she held so tightly in the pit of her stomach. But if
anything that feeling had intensified from the moment she left Jacob in Lee’s arms at the front door, both of them looking as if they hadn’t got a care in the world.
“The kids are with Frances,” Meg said. “Poor little ones. But the worst thing is I had to tell her this massive lie so that she wouldn’t feel left out. You know what she’s like.”
Natalie and Jess exchanged glances—they were starting to know.
“What was the lie?” Jess asked.
“I told her I had women’s problems!” Meg said, partially covering her mouth with her hand like a naughty child. “That I was seeing a private gynecologist.”
“Well, it’s halfway true,” Natalie said, spotting a black cab approaching from the other side of the green and waving her arm frantically to catch the driver’s attention. “You do have women’s problems. Woman’s biggest problem, in fact—man.”
“Now,” Natalie told the others as they stood outside the Soho-based head office of Mystery Is Power. “We should be all right, there shouldn’t be anyone in the office. My partner, Alice, has got this big thing about work-life balance. No one is allowed to get into work before nine or to stay after six, and especially not on weekends. So just in case anyone sees us, we’re dropping by to pick up a…book I left in my desk drawer.”
“But why, if there was someone there it would be all right, wouldn’t it?” Jess asked, looking skeptical. “I mean, you are the boss, right?”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “Yes, I am. It’s just that Alice is slightly more of a boss than me, and besides, I promised not to come near the office until Freddie was six months old. Alice takes this work-life balance thing very seriously. She’d murder me if she caught me.”
The others looked a little bemused, not surprisingly, Natalie thought.
What they didn’t know was that Alice blamed her divorce on the business. In recent months she had come to the conclusion that she would rather have the business than her husband, but still she knew that if she and Natalie had not been working twenty-hour days in the start-up period of Mystery Is Power, she would probably still be married to Frank. She sometimes told Natalie that she was relieved it was just a business she had created and not a baby, because she was certain that Frank would have been as jealous and resentful of a child as he had been of her career. But whether or not the divorce had been the right thing in the end for Alice, she was determined that the business would not be responsible for anybody else’s family problems. As a result, she and Natalie made sure that all employees divided their home and work life equally.