The Yummy Mummy by Polly Williams Read Free Book Online

night out, Joe and I would stay in Kate and Pete’s spare room with the white waffle linen, making love, giggling, trying to stifle our rude orgasmic grunts, slightly smug that we were obviously having the best sex in the house. Kate and I would swap bags and heels and jewelry. We’d abuse our livers in the local bars, playing at being Notting Hill hipsters. But in truth we were outsiders who didn’t quite have the style—I couldn’t understand why the locals with so much money wanted to look so scruffy—or the connections. Kate was a suburban girl at heart who’d lucked out with a rich husband. Pete had seen the film
Notting Hill,
found the property prices reassuringly expensive, and got a little rush from saying where he lived when someone asked at work. Sadly, after the Berkshire wedding—held at Pete’s parents’ vast damask pelmet of a house—Kate and Pete moved to the country. Kate wasn’t keen, but Pete decided that he wanted his children to grow up somewhere “real,” away from the fashionable urbanity that had attracted him to Notting Hill in the first place. Two years later, the children still haven’t arrived. The nurseries have been redecorated twice.
    Joe leans back onto the bed, arms crossed beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. “Shall we take Evie round to your mum’s and spend the afternoon in bed scoffing crumpets?”
    I can’t help but smile. This is the kind of thing we used to do. Crumbs stuck to sweaty flesh. Fingers slick with butter. “Mum’s not there. She’s visiting Aunt Lou.”
    “Oh well.” Is that relief in his voice? He doesn’t come up with an alternative, but leaves the bedroom. “I’m off to the gym, then.”
    I’m about to ask why it never occurs to him that I can’t just drop everything and go to the gym when I hear the front door bang and he’s gone. The afternoon begins to yawn ahead. There is a limit to the number of times I can trot around a park on my own, pointing out Mr. Pigeon to a sleeping baby. Sometimes my days are just about the journeys, the getting from A to B, the rhythmical roll of the pram. That kills time nicely, breaks up the formlessness of my day. Take more than two journeys, and then, oddly, despite how little I seem to achieve, I’m busy.
    Okay, Primark. A vast cut-price no-frills mall of a shop. Being a fifteen-minute weave through the back streets of Kilburn, past the tightly packed Victorian houses filled with families who can’t afford the more upmarket adjacent Queen’s Park area, it’s a journey. Evie sleeps. I people-watch pedestrian traffic as the white wannabe Queen’s Park thirtysomethings give way to the multicultural crush of the Kilburn High Road and its endless belch of discount shops and traffic. I used to prefer Bond Street or Brompton Cross, with their posh intimate boutiques and attentive shop assistants. But now I find them a bit intimidating, too intense. I never know when Evie is going to go into atomic meltdown mode. And I’m not really dressed for it these days: I get followed by security guards.
    No, oddly, the brutal neon cut-price bustle of Primark appeals. Evie likes the lights. And everything is astonishingly cheap. I can buy new tracksuit bottoms—my need for anything more formal these days is limited—for under a fiver. Hard to believe I am the same woman who spent £367 on a pair of Jimmy Choos for the wedding of a friend I was once in love with.
    IT’S MOSTLY WOMEN IN HERE. MANY ARE MUSLIM, MOVING slowly in their great black tents, flashing trainer-clad feet, eyes averted. Then there are the council mothers, shrill, pale, trailing children wearing gold jewelry. And, increasingly, there are the fashion-savvy twentysomethings, foraging for a must-have at a boastfully low price because they once read “Primark is the new Prada” in a newspaper and don’t know any better. And then, of course, there are those like me, stripped of signatures of class by the raw shock of motherhood. We look similar,