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

Think how upset you were when Cathy’s husband left her. Floored. You never complained about being early then. In fact, Lucy, you really don’t like change. You would hate it if I suddenly started being late.’
    And, as usual, I ended up agreeing with him. Because he was probably right.
    Tom has slept the entire night in exactly the same position, on his front, legs splayed and his arms hugging the pillow. I, on the other hand, have dealt with the usual nocturnal visitations. Lying in bed, my ear is roughly at the same height as Fred’s head and at around one-thirty I woke with a jump, to hear a deep raspy voice whispering in my ear. ‘Want my cuddles. Want them now.’
    Then roughly an hour later, Joe came in to announce tearfully that he was shrinking. ‘I am smaller than I was when I went to bed,’ he said, gripping my arm so hard that there are still tiny finger marks in the morning.
    ‘I promise you are the same size,’ I replied. ‘Look at your hand, it fits into mine in exactly the same way it did when we walked to school yesterday.’
    ‘But I can feel that my legs are shrinking,’ he said with such conviction that I wondered momentarily whether he might be right.
    ‘It’s growing pains,’ I said, the stock response for any inexplicable night-time aches. ‘Daddy and I used to get them too.’
    ‘How do you know it isn’t shrinking pains?’ he insisted. ‘Granny is smaller than she used to be. By the morning I will be so small you won’t be able to see me any more,’ he said, his voice getting quieter and quieter. ‘And then I might get eaten by a dog on the way to school.’
    So I got out of bed and took him downstairs to the kitchen door, where Tom periodically records the height of our children.
    ‘Look, you are even taller than when we last measured you,’ I showed him.
    He smiled and hugged me and I took him back up to bedand managed to fall asleep until the early-morning insomnia kicked in.
    I make the mistake of starting to calculate exactly how many hours of sleep I have had during the night and then give up at five and three-quarters. Caught in that nether land between deep sleep and being fully awake, I am conscious of a pit in my stomach, a reminder of anxiety that I carry in my body without being fully aware of its provenance. I start to run systematically through the usual scenarios that creep up at this time of day. I haven’t missed my period. I know where I have parked the car. I have hidden my cigarettes. Yesterday’s knickers lurk, but I have already managed to file that particular debacle away in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. Some things are so truly dreadful that there is nothing to be gained from analysis.
    Then I remember what it is I have forgotten. Sam’s ‘Six Great Artists of the World’ project has to be handed in this morning. Three down, three to go. I spring from the bed in a single motion, surprising lazy muscles with unaccustomed intent.
    Bad but not irredeemable. To avoid disturbing Tom, I rush into the spare bedroom and pull on the dressing-gown that is hanging on the back of the door. It is the same one that I wore the first time I met him, the dressing gown equivalent of a shag-pile carpet, long, hairy, and impossible to clean, given to my husband by my mother-in-law when he was a teenager. Its presence therefore predates even my arrival on the scene, and it is now called into action only during times of great uncertainty. Thinking of Tom before he met me used to make me feel jealous of all the things we never shared together. Now it is something I relish. Because there is a point in a marriage when the unknown becomes more interesting than the known. I tryto persuade him to take me through sexual exploits with the women who preceded me, but he is too honourable to indulge my prurience.
    There are stains and rough patches down the side of this dressing gown, which I imagine are the residues of furtive adolescent skirmishes, bits of