The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill Read Free Book Online Page A

the bell.
    It is fair to say that since we have been together, we have never overslept. Neither of the clocks has ever failed, and on the rare occasions that our children allow us to sleep beyond seven o’clock in the morning, we are awakened by a chorus of alarms. There have been times when I have been tempted to turn the clocks backwards by an hour, to show Tom that the world won’t end if we do everything an hour later.
    Insomnia gives you a lot of time to run through old arguments. Of course, in the morning, any conclusions are forgotten and all that is left is a bad taste in your mouth, but those dogged disputes that never give up on you make great nocturnal replays. Today I return to an old favourite, the dowager aunt of disputes, which revolves around my latenessand Tom’s belief that all is well in the world if everything is done on time. A great quality in an architect, but less appealing in a husband.
    The most recent round took place in the larder at my parents’ home in the Mendips, a few weeks before the ill-fated camping trip to Norfolk. If you were plotting a chart of significant events in my family, the larder would feature disproportionally as a backdrop. It is where, years ago, I’d told my mother I was marrying Tom and she had congratulated me with tears in her eyes, before saying, ‘you do realise that if you were a chemical experiment you would explode.’ And my father had come in at that moment, muttering about unstable elements and the value of explosion over implosion as a recipe for a stimulating marriage. ‘There’s no attraction without reaction,’ he had said sagely.
    I can’t remember exactly how the row between Tom and me had started, but I can recall that the tiles underfoot were so icy that my bare toes started to go numb, and yet even through the cold I could smell the festering odour of an old piece of Stilton abandoned there the previous Christmas. We were looking for a jar of coffee.
    ‘I can’t understand how your parents could run out of something so essential as coffee,’ said Tom, jumping out of the way as a mousetrap sprang at his shoe. ‘It should be a staple of any larder, especially one of this size.’
    ‘They have other things on their minds,’ I replied, in an effort to distract him.
    ‘Like their inability to do anything on time, even at our wedding,’ he said.
    ‘There are so many worse things in life than being late,’ I told him, unsure whether I should feel gratified that thediscussion had moved beyond coffee or dispirited at its new direction. Because I knew that criticism of my parents was ultimately about me and not them. Then, when he ignored me, I added, ‘Actually, it’s rude to be early. Why don’t we live a little dangerously and for the next four weeks, as an experiment, start arriving half an hour late?’
    ‘You talk about living dangerously, Lucy. We are not at a stage in our life where that applies any more. We are creatures of habit that should embrace the familiar. Like old sofas.’ I must have looked sceptical because he became more expansive.
    ‘The sofa in our sitting room has a loose spring in the right-hand corner. There is a sticky patch at the back in the middle, from a sweet that got stuck there years ago – I think it’s a lemon sherbet – and there is a hole on the side that gets bigger and bigger because one of the children is using it to store money.’ I could not believe that he noticed all these things.
    ‘Even though all this should be mildly annoying, it isn’t, because the familiarity of these imperfections is comforting. Don’t you notice that I no longer say anything when you lose your credit card? Eyes face forward. Breathing normal. Eyebrows stationary. All facial tics under control.’
    ‘I thought you’d begun to understand that losing your credit card is simply not a big deal,’ I muttered, but he was impervious.
    ‘Once you realise that you’re not immortal, there is reassurance in routine, Lucy.