to be seventy-five?’ Fen said, arranging a beer mat in front of each of them and removing the ashtray to the window sill with a look of utter distaste.
‘It sounds so old,’ said Cat. ‘ Seventy-five .’
‘He is a grandpa,’ Fen defined, ‘though actually he likes to be called Gramps.’
‘Tom calls him that,’ Pip explained to Cat. ‘Tom calls him Django Gramps which is weird really, because He's even less of a real grandfather, in the literal sense, to Tom than he is to Cosima.’
‘I laughed when you told me in that e-mail that Django refers to Tom as his “step-grandsonthing-or-other”,’ Cat told her.
‘I wonder if our children will be confused that they have a grandpa for an uncle, but a non-existent grandmother?’ Fen mused.
‘They have other grandmas,’ Pip said. ‘Matt and Zac's mums.’
‘It's odd,’ said Fen and then she stopped. ‘Nothing.’
‘What?’
‘It's just that, having really thought of her so rarely, just recently I've thought of her more.’
‘Who?’
‘Our mother,’ Fen shrugged. ‘Now that I have my baby. I just can't figure out how a mother can leave.’
‘That's why we'll all make grade A mummies,’ Cat said. ‘we'll be automatically compensating for the fact that our mother was sub-Z grade.’
‘It struck me recently that the only person I've ever called “Mummy” is myself,’ Fen said. It quietly struck her sisters that they hadn't called anyone ‘Mummy’ at all.
‘I can't wait to be called Mummy,’ Cat said dreamily. ‘Do you realize I was pretty much Cosima's age when our mother left?’
‘It's only since having Cosima that maternal instincts, in all their crazy hormonal cladding, have made sense,’ Fen continued, ‘and to be honest, though previously I never much cared about her, it now makes me shudder. A woman ran off with a cowboy from Denver and left behind three girls under the age of four ? How could she do it? How can amother not have maternal instincts? It's criminal . They're chemical .’ Fen looked at her sisters. ‘I gaze at my daughter and I think of us three. Three tiny little girls. How could she have walked out?’
‘I reckon life would still have been better under Django than under her if she hadn't left,’ Pip reasoned. ‘His maternal instincts more than made up for her lack of them.’
‘It never bothered me before, really, because there were never situations when we wished we had her,’ Fen reiterated quietly, ‘but now, recently, It's made me utterly bewildered. Indignant too. That's why I don't like to be separated from Cosima. That's why I hold her so tight.’ Pip and Cat regarded her and felt bad about before. ‘I don't like missing a minute with her – not because I'm a hormonal fruit cake, though you probably think I am. But because, in my book, there cannot be such a thing as an overprotective mother.’
‘Do you want another?’ Cat asked Fen.
‘God no,’ said Fen, ‘this one's gone to my head already.’
Cat laughed. ‘I meant another baby – not vodka.’
‘That would necessitate Matt and me having sex,’ Fen said glumly.
‘Oh God, does all that really go down the nappy-bin?’ Cat asked.
‘Pretty much,’ Fen admitted. ‘To be completely honest, we prefer that extra hour's sleep to banging away for an orgasm.’
‘The royal “we”?’ Pip asked. ‘Do you speak for Matt?’
Fen blinked a little. ‘You know blokes,’ she laughed it off but didn't elaborate. ‘The weird thing is, it all seems a bit irrelevant. As if Cosima has shown us what life's all about. It's like, in retrospect, it was all a means to an end. Fancying Matt, falling in love with him, rampant sex, domestic daydreams – It's as if all that was a preamble, all a clever cloak to ensure the continuation of the species. HavingCosima has shown us that life is about going forwards with her, rather than backwards trying to cling on to pre-baby days.’
‘Us?’ Pip questioned. ‘The royal “us”? Do you
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