Year of Being Single (12 page)

Ted enjoyed being served, despite the terrible food. He was a very quiet man. Well, he had to be. There couldn’t be two overpowering, hysteria-prone people in that relationship; they would detonate each other and explode in an almighty mushroom cloud over Essex. And that would be a worry.

The
blasted modern age
, as Pam put it, gave her cause for lots of worry. She had an abject fear of the internet, for example, and was always cutting snippets out of the paper (i.e.
The Daily Mail
) about its dangers and popping them in the post to Frankie. While she was at it, mobile phones, iPads, iPods, games consoles, the ‘Wee’, the ‘Wee You’, Gameboys, DVDs and satnavs were also the work of evil, and if she found any evidence of this in the paper, she would also let Frankie know, via a pair of pinking shears and Royal Mail. Frankie was never sure if all this hysteria was down to genuine, loving concern for her family, or whether Pam just enjoyed sitting astride a very high, old-fashioned horse. And slipping things into envelopes.

As she let them in, Frankie felt slightly sick, and not just because her mother was thrusting yet another sodding pot plant at her she knew she would kill within days. Did she
really
have to tell her mother she and Rob had split up? She just knew what her mother would say.

‘Oh, Francesca!’

There it was. Her mum’s constant lament. She’d said it all the time when Frankie was young: if she fell over; if she dropped an ice cream on the ground; if, as a teenager, she was upset over a boy, failed an exam or attempted to go out the front door in a too short skirt and a pair of white stilettos…and it appeared Pam couldn’t give it up.

‘Oh Francesca!’ Pam was perched on the sofa; she never sat back properly. It was as if she always had somewhere she’d rather be, something she really should be getting on with, instead, usually some badly done, martyr-ing domestic task.

Her bag was also perched, on her lap. It was ready for every eventuality, that bag, like a cracked yellow leather version of Mary Poppins’ carpet bag. Everything was rammed in it: a tape measure; a jumbo box of plasters; scissors – paper and nail; tweezers; anti-bacterial hand wash; two hankies; three carrier bags made into micro size by clever knotting; a ball of string; emergency Murray Mints; a packet of chocolate digestives; a Mills & Boon; spare keys, socks, pants and one of dad’s vests; and a vacuum-packed cagoule and matching rain hat. It was as busy and as crowded as Pam’s mind. Frankie thought both needed a good emptying out.

‘What on earth have you done that for?’ exclaimed Pam. Her chins were rippling above her expansive body. ‘Rob’s done everything for you!’

‘Has he? Like what?’

‘He married you and gave you four children!’

‘Yes, I see.’ Frankie nodded. ‘Or, you could argue, I married
him
and gave
him
four children.’

Pam wrinkled up her nose in disgust and incredulity. ‘But he’s your right-hand man!’ she said.

What planet was her mother on? Dad had never been
her
right-hand man! She would never let him. Her parents’ life was a ship that Pam captained alone.

‘Well, that’s it, Mum, really – he’s not, is he? He’s not a right-hand anything! Or a left-hand anything.’ He was the back end of a pantomime horse, more like. ‘He was a hindrance, Mum. You really have no idea.’

Right-hand man! She couldn’t get over that. Why was her mother talking as though husbands and wives were a team? She and Dad weren’t a team. Pam wore the trousers and Dad did as he was told. He ate up all his dinner up like a good boy, took out the bins every Friday and turned all the electrics off at night, including the sockets for the television, the Teasmaid (defeating the object, surely), the kitchen appliances and the ancient trouser press he’d used religiously since 1975. You can never be too careful, you know. Mrs Godfrey next door, well, her sister-in-law said there was a woman on her street who once forgot to switch the plug off from behind the toaster when she went to bed and when she woke up the next morning the whole house had burned down…

Pam clasped her handbag to her breast, as though for dear life. ‘But at least he was
there
, dear! You need him, don’t you? Oh poor man, chucking him out like that! Now you’ll be one of those terrible single mothers – I feel quite ashamed!’

‘Oh, Mum. Please don’t feel ashamed. There’s nothing wrong with being a single mother.’

‘You’ll be the first one in the family!’ exclaimed Pam. She was right. Both Frankie’s brothers were happily married with no signs of unrest and no one in Pam’s generation had ever done anything so mortifying as kicking a husband out. ‘How do you think that will
look
?’

‘I couldn’t really care less.’

Pam looked absolutely horrified. ‘Oh Francesca! And poor,
poor
Rob.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be okay,’ said Frankie, without a smile. Poor Rob was probably enjoying his nice, new flat. He could eat Pot Noodles to his heart’s content and never have to put the empty pot, or the lid, in the bin. He could leave a trail of clothes on the floor from here to Timbuctoo without anyone nagging him about it. He could even bring women back, if he wanted.
Was
he bringing women back, she wondered? ‘He can live in a pit. He’s probably loving it. He found a flat really quickly,’ she added, hoping it would turn the tide of consternation.

The lady was not for turning. ‘I think you’ve made a dreadful mistake, Francesca. What do you think, Ted?’

Ted said nothing. He’d once been a managerial type, commanding a staff of hundreds in a shoe factory, and a very strict parent who took no nonsense. Now, he was just prone to rueful shrugging and the odd conspiratorial wink at Frankie and her brothers, who had both escaped Up North.

‘It’s just what I have to do,’ said Frankie. Despite her bravado, she was cringing. Frankie still didn’t like being told off by her parents or, solely these days, by her mother. It made her want to retreat. If she was a turtle and had a big old shell, she’d be in it. She tried valiantly to change the subject.

‘How’s Mrs Peacock?’

Pam loved nothing more than wobbling her chins, putting her hands on her hips and telling her daughter in great medical detail all about the ailments, diseases and sudden deaths of people Frankie had never met in her life. The tactic worked. Pam rambled on about Mrs Peacock for a good ten minutes, the final two of which Frankie was gradually steering her to the door, handing her her jacket and handbag and saying she’d got things to do and she really must be getting on with them. Ted trailed behind.

Pam managed one more ‘Poor Rob,’ as she squeezed into the passenger seat of the Panda, and Frankie firmly closed the door. She returned to the sitting room and sat in silence for a bit. She was relieved her parents had gone but now she just felt…flat. Friday evenings when the kids were here were noisy chaos, now there was…nothing. No MTV, no video games, no Mario cart, FIFA 15, iPads, Wii’s, Wii U’s, television or YouTube videos…all the things that gave her mother the horrors.

She turned the telly on but nothing caught her eye. She checked her phone again. Nothing. She leant over to her magazine rack and pulled a selection of magazines onto her lap.
Heat,
Marie Claire
,
Chat
. Amongst them was a craft magazine she’d bought in a mad moment. There was a pretty bag on the front that you could make. A bag she’d never be able to produce in a million years.

She flicked idly through the magazine. The bag was beyond her, but maybe there was something she could try and do. Rob had a hobby – his stupid kit car. Imogen had all her plays and stuff, although strictly speaking that was work. And Grace had started some crazy martial arts nonsense. Maybe
she
could have a hobby.

The magazine was a riot of pastels and full of girly, arty farty ‘makes’ but on closer inspection, not for the faint-hearted or the thick of thumb. Everything looked quite tricky, complicated. Knitting? Not a chance. Crochet? It looked way too intricate and time-consuming; she knew she wouldn’t have the patience. Upscaling furniture? – oh Lord, that was far too much of a stretch. She was rubbish at painting; she’d ruin whatever it was and consign it to the tip.

What else? Making sugar flowers for cakes? She’d be hopeless. She wasn’t really a baking, cake-y, cake decoration person. She’d tried to make cakes for the kids a couple of times but something always went slightly wrong. There’d be one layer that went all wonky, or she would misread the recipe and not make enough icing, or make icing that tore off half the cake with it when she tried to spread it on. Or she’d make a cake that looked perfect, but when she’d get it out of the tin there’d be a large, uncooked crater in the middle of it.

Often things had to be glued and patched together with the icing there was never enough of. If there was a missing or burnt bit, she’d put a mark on the plate so if Rob’s mother came over Frankie would know which side of the cake to avoid when cutting it.

Ah, here was something. Cutting things out to make a pretty bird mobile. Alice would like that for her room. She read further. Perhaps not. There was a lot of talk in the magazine of ‘die-cutting’ pieces of paper and it was mentioned again here – whatever it was, it sounded utterly hellish. Sorry, Alice, she thought. God, she missed her. She felt a horrible lump in her throat whenever she dared think about her.

She quickly turned the page. Découpage? What on earth was that? There was a kit that came free with the magazine – fifteen thick printed papers in squares with pretty, shabby chic patterns on them. She detested shabby chic. Rubbing paint off the corners of things to show a grubby bit of something underneath, ditsy, dolly frilly things with polka dots on, floral cabbage print cushions and ‘toil of no joy’, or whatever it was called. Still, some of these papers were quite pretty. The one with the butterflies was nice.

The instructions suggested gluing the papers onto a wooden box. Did she have one? Her jewellery box. She went upstairs to get it. It was one of those ones where you pull out descending drawers on metal-concertinaed hinges, which could potentially make it quite complicated. Still, how difficult could it be, sticking bits of paper to some wood?

Forty minutes later, Frankie was muttering and shoving tiny bits of cut-up paper in the bin. The jewellery box was also in a bin – the big black one that lived down the passageway next to the garage. She’d shoved it in a Tesco carrier bag and buried it under a bag of rubbish in a tantrum-y rage. There was glue everywhere. And biscuit crumbs. And a lot of it was on the floor.

Sod hobbies. She wouldn’t be attempting them again. She ambled to the kitchen to replenish the biscuit tin. The sofa was the only place for her; the television her only pursuit.

She lay there for a while. After the sixth biscuit she felt revolted with herself. She was overweight and underfit. She’d turned into a slob and kicking Rob out had made no difference.

Before she’d had Alice, she’d been doing okay. Her eldest was nine, her youngest was four; the baby days were done and all the children were at school. She had been able to relax a little bit. She still had all the housework, chores, running around and general chaos to cope with, but she also had six free hours to herself every day. Six hours! In time, she’d thought, she would maybe get a job. In the meantime, she’d get a bit of her life back.

She’d sorted out her hair, her nails, her knackered skin; she smartened up, toned up (exercise DVD at home, thank you, Davina) and had time to breathe and regroup. She had begun to feel on top of things again. She’d even started dressing up and going out, dinner with friends, nights out with Rob. Things were settled, great even, and she felt excitement, for the first time in ages, about the future. She wondered what job she might do. Before having kids, she’d been a PA at the technical college, then at a pharmaceutical company. She’d thought she could contact that company again. Or somewhere else. If you were a PA you could PA anywhere.

Then, despite well-intentioned but fairly mediocre once-a-month sex and Rob having had a vasectomy (she
knew
he should have sent his sample to the lab to prove it had worked; he’d said it must have done – his ‘nuts’ had been on fire for five days), she got pregnant again. With the arrival of Alice – who of course she
adored
– everything had gone belly up, although belly
down
would be a better description, along with everything else that could no longer fight gravity.

She had shifted all her ‘baby weight’ three times over, fairly easily. (What a stupid expression, she thought. The babies had only weighed eight pounds each – it wasn’t their fault she had taken pregnancy as an excuse to eat her body weight in cake for nine months.) This time, she could not. Was it an age thing or had she just lost the will, with four children to look after? (Including Rob, make that five).

Whatever, after Alice, a fat tummy, wobbly thighs, chubby arms and horrid-looking back fat stubbornly refused to depart. Everything just sat there, mocking her, and she felt powerless to do anything about it. She was fit for nothing except lying on the couch and eating biscuits.

The couch. Wasn’t there a new thing? Couch to 5k, or something. She’d read about it on a blog she sometimes read: Beautiful Mummy World. It was a blog she read with acute sarcasm, scoffing – and often scoffing chocolate – at perfect mummy Lucinda Del De’Ath (Frankie liked to shorten her to Lucy Death: the death of all sense), in her wafty linen outfits and her Chihuahua seed suppers and her organic lemongrass colonic cleansing shakes. It gave her a good laugh. Lucinda had mentioned Couch to 5k when talking, as she did extensively, about fitness. Of course Lucy Death
didn’t do it – it was far too pedestrian and working class; she did yoga in five hundred degree heated rooms wearing five hundred pound designer fitness tights – but it had been mentioned, with a slight sneer, as something the plebs might enjoy. If they couldn’t afford to fly to LA for a Soul Cycle class, or have the will to be suspended upside-down from the ceiling in Cirque du Soleil-style purple strips of cloth whilst doing a Downward Dog, they might like to consider it.