Mummy Said the F-Word by Fiona Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

rule. By giving in to nagging, you’re fuelling a child’s greed. Try instead to switch the focus from buying to actually
doing
things with your daughter, like reading together, making collages or baking cookies. Such activities should distract her from rampant materialism.
    Perhaps you and your partner are setting a poor example in always craving the latest laptop or plasma-screen TV? Remember that children often pick up on and mimic our most unappealing traits …
    Poor Desperate! She spills out her fears and what does she get in return? A verbal slapping. Rampant materialism, for God’s sake. What are we talking – a hairband and a bottle of Matey? Never a trip to Boots goes by without Lola bleating for a fish-shaped soap or a box of ‘boutique’ tissues in a flower-sprigged box. One time she nagged for a bottle of Listerine, thinking it was some newfangled drink that turned your tongue blue. Anything with a barcode on it, basically. Does this mean that she, at seven years old, is a rampant materialist too?
    ‘Don’t take your daughter shopping,’ Harriet concludes, ‘until she stops expecting you to succumb to her every whim.’
    And what should Desperate do when she
needs
to go shopping? Lock up her daughter in the airing cupboard? There’s no mention of a husband or boyfriend. She writes ‘I’, not ‘we’. Perhaps she, too, has been binned by her husband in favour of some young slapper with pert breasts. I slam
Bambino
on to the side of the bath. Clearly, Harriet Pike has never produced children of her own. It’s generally the child-free who glower at you as your kid drops his pants by the sensory garden for the sight-impaired and starts peeing.
    I loom over
Bambino
and scowl at Pike’s picture. You can tell from her face that she believes you’ll cause irreparable damage by allowing your children to watch more than four minutes of TV a week, and that their pleas for a hair bobble are – of course! – all your fault for not locating vast expanses of pristine snow for them to frolic in. No doubt Pike would reckon that I shouldn’t be lying in this bath, but filling it with non-GM grapes and jumping on them to make juice for my deprived babies. Adam and I were raised on boxed Vesta curries. By rights, we should be dead.
    I clamber out of the bath, skewering my heel on Travis’s plastic pterodactyl. As I dry myself, I realise that blood from my foot is blotting the towel and dripping on to the chequered vinyl floor. There are wine-coloured daubs, like evidence at a crime scene. Cursing under my breath, I try to clean the floor with a spongy wipe, but the blood keeps oozing out so I concentrate on binding my foot in loo roll. Thus bandaged, I hobble upstairs and peep in on the kids, who are all zonked out in their beds, then slip gratefully into my own.
    Things could be worse. I could be Desperate of Plymouth with her wilting hair and murky shadows under her eyes. All she did was go to the chemist’s, probably for something innocuous – a box of plasters or a packet of Rennies. Normal stuff that you don’t stop needing just because you’re a mother. Like me, she’ll be lying in bed right now trying to calm her racing heart and reassure herself that the terrible scene in the shop wasn’t really her fault. What do agony aunts know about real people’s lives?
    My heel throbs urgently. I want to phone that Pike woman this minute and tell her to take a damn hike.

5
    ‘Sorry to land this on you, Caitlin. I know things are difficult at the moment.’ Ross attempts to beam sympathy across his cheap-looking desk. What he’s actually landed on me is the fact that vitalworld.com has gone bust, thus rendering my latest batch of copy surplus to requirements and sending my outstanding invoices into some weird, shadowy zone involving creditors’ forms and court. Then, after some unspecified period, I ‘might’ get paid ‘eventually’.
    The Vitalworld offices are in Camden. As I was summoned here at