Souper Mum Read online

  ‘Shit, I’ve missed the 7.47. Remember the Sky man is coming today. You need to pay the Vodafone bill and there was something else …’

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘No. But yeah. I’ll text you.’

  I watch Matt as he swears at his socks then stands at the mirror and smoothes down his ruffled blond hair, exhaling loudly into a resigned sigh as he studies his badly fitting white collar uniform. He then turns to me and there’s a moment between us – we don’t have to say it any more – no goodbyes, no kisses. We just look: a look which kind of says good luck. Let’s go do this.

  By the time I get downstairs, Matt is gone and it’s 7.55 a.m. Time to move this up a gear. It’s a school dinner kind of day, so I frantically count change, wrangle book bags, and scan the calendar for important events/deadlines I’ve probably missed. There is no time for coffee so I down some warm lemon squash, bundle Millie into her jacket, then rally the troops. Hannah sits on the last but one step doing her shoes while her topless brothers use the sofa as some sort of high jump mattress.

  ‘But the question is, will Ted clear three metres?’

  I then watch as he jumps from coffee table to sofa, twisting his body around until his head gets wedged in between the sofa cushions. Hannah rolls her eyes while I balance Millie on my hip and grab his ankles, trying to dislodge him. Jake sits to the side, laughing hysterically.

  ‘A bit of help, Jake?’

  ‘That was … awesome!’

  Ted re-emerges, hair covered in old sofa lint but looking no worse than most mornings.

  ‘Boys! Shirts! Shoes!’

  They shuffle to the front door as I slip on my Converse. No time for socks.

  ‘My shoes aren’t here, Mum.’

  ‘Well, where are they?’

  Jake does what he does best, which is to shrug nonchalantly as he slips a sweatshirt over his head. I go into search mode, jogging between different areas of our small downstairs space, reaching under sofas and into black hole cupboards only to be assaulted by the vacuum cleaner and to find the remote for the DVD player which has been missing for three months. Then I go in the garage. Shoes! Yes! But … shit.

  Seriously?

  Bloody bastard shitty bollocks fuck.

  ‘WHY IS THERE PAINT ALL OVER THE GARAGE FLOOR?’

  Breathe, Jools. Just breathe. I squint my eyes and read ‘gloss’ on the side of the paint tin. My shoulders slump down so hard I swear my boobs bounce off my stomach. Jake grabs his shoes and is ushered out of the house by his sister. Silence. Why, little people? Why why why? I look at myself in the mirror. Don’t scream and go hysterical and make your eyes bulge. Don’t scream. It adds wrinkles and sounds horrible. They are but very little people. Your little people. I lock up the house, strap Millie in, and go and take my place in the car. Don’t scream. Hannah turns her head around from the front seat, gesturing to her brothers in the back.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

  I don’t respond. Ted’s eyes glaze over.

  ‘I’m sorry too.’

  ‘They’re both learning about road safety at school so we thought we needed a zebra crossing,’ adds their big sister.

  ‘IN THE GARAGE?’

  I turn around to give the last authoritative word on the matter. No going in the garage! Stop devaluing our house! The only paints you’re allowed to use in the house are the crappy Crayola ones that wash out! But as I lurch my head around, I notice Jake’s hand clawed around something contraband, something pink. Ted chewing. Silence must be broken.

  ‘What the … where did you get those?’

  ‘We found them in the back of the seat.’

  I grimace. Now I must also clean the car, must throw up a little in my mouth, must get to school. I grab at half-eaten sweets and start the engine. I sigh heavily. I run over the recycling crate, hearing shards of plastic crunch under the wheels. Don’t scream. I rub sticky sweet hands down my jeans and notice a tyre of flesh poking out where two buttons are supposed to be on my shirt. Pray Millie hasn’t eaten them. I turn on the radio. Hannah sings along to a One Direction song which makes my heart break a little. School. Just bloody get to school.

  ‘Sweets are not breakfast, guys.’

  ‘Well, we were hungry,’ Ted informs me. ‘There was no bread this morning. Or cereal, so we had Nesquik.’

  Bet Matt was thrilled by that.

  ‘Daddy was going to make Choconana shakes but the blender was being a bastard,’ pipes up Jake.

  I swivel my head around.

  ‘So in the end he just gave us the bananas and told us to dunk them in the milk.’

  The b-word still out in the open, and me just being too tired and speechless to deal with it, I miss a gap in the traffic and a car behind flashes me. Someone else is being a bastard this morning. I swivel round and shout something I shouldn’t. Millie laughs.

  We pull up outside school with four minutes to spare and I stand by the car until all three are safely deposited, nipples on end in the drizzly cold as I forgot to wear a coat. And a bra.

  ‘Jools? Hi! Good weekend?’

  Paula Jordan leaps in front of me wearing head to toe hot pink Nike with toned abs and a thong on show. All our kids are in the same classes so it means a friendship has been forced upon us. She peers into the car. Millie has a moist Percy Pig covered in fuzz stuck to her forehead.

  ‘Not bad. You?’

  ‘Are those sweets for breakfast? That can’t be good – all those refined sugars.’

  I try to put my body in between her and the window.

  ‘Oh no, it’s one of those Play-Doh thingymajigs. You look well for a Monday morning.’

  Her ponytail swishes with the compliment.

  ‘Yogalates. Amazing class in the park. You get to breathe in that morning air, reset your chakras, really sets you up for the day.’

  It’s like she’s speaking a different language. I scan down to her abs to inspect if they might be real or those spray on ones I’ve seen in magazines. The real test surely would be to punch her in the stomach. But I don’t.

  ‘The kids do it too. Actually, it has really focussed Harriet and Toby’s energies – maybe it’s something your twins could benefit from.’

  Hidden insult #1. I nod, thinking how they usually focus their energy by running around in circles until they pass out and the energy ceases to exist. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So I’ll get to yours for 6.30?’

  I nod again. It’s my night for entertaining the Jordan children at my house, post-swimming club. Not that I mind, but I await the inevitable.

  ‘Just to remind you again, the kids are allergic to gluten and dairy. But you knew that, right?’

  I go into auto-pilot smile and nod mode. I know because you tell me every week, it’s engraved into keyrings on their school bags, and you’ve even written me a laminated list for my fridge detailing everything they’re not allowed to consume.

  ‘It’s just when they come to your house – no offence or anything but they always come back a bit … giddy. It’s just things like food colourings, flavourings – even cocoa. They just don’t agree with those things.’

  Hidden Insult #2. She has the habit of making it sound like I pour bottles of tartrazine down their necks when they come over. The fact is, she goes around school telling everyone how delicate her kids are, how the gluten we’re giving them is poison, but little Harriet once came round telling me their dad lets them secretly feast on Peperami and Wagon Wheels in the shed when their mum’s having her weekly colon cleanse.

  ‘I mean, if you have nothing in, I have a bag of millet in my car. The kids love it steamed with red chard.’

  I nod again. A bag of grain in your car. I look down at Millie who’s found a lightsaber on my back seat. Different languages, different planets.

  ‘We’ll be fine. I’m just popping to the supermarket now.’

  ‘Waitrose?’

  ‘Sainsbury’s.’

  Then silence. I should have said Lidl.

  CHAPTER
TWo

  Time to take a deep breath. In and out. And close your mouth, fool. Too late, coffee dribbles down my chin and onto my checked shirt. Millie looks at me, ponderous as to which of us is the infant at the table. We’re sitting in Caffè Nero beside Sainsbury’s having breakfast: double shot cappuccino with two sachets of sugar for Mummy, bad croissant for Millie; the sort of shrivelled-up pastry that would make the French weep and brick up the Channel Tunnel. Crumbs stick around her face like crusty cold sores and I spend half my time dusting them off. She giggles and dusts my mouth off too. I feel a level of guilt given this is probably the only time Millie and I will get to bond today. Too often these times I’m supposed to be feeding her and looking her deeply in the eyes to build the maternal attachment, I’m usually multitasking: reading a story, applying Savlon to battle wounds, stirring a dinner. Yet she’s one of those babies who doesn’t seem to mind. Sitting there just taking it all in, ginger curls, doughy cheeks like Marlon Brando.

  The ginger doesn’t come from me. With a blonde eight-year-old and twin boys with chocolate hair, I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. Not ginger, that’s for sure. I just remember the look the midwife gave me when she was in our front room, my legs akimbo as Matt filled up the birthing pool. I froze, thinking something was wrong. The baby was stuck, she saw feet, my bikini line was so overgrown she’d have to tackle that first with a hedge trimmer. But all she did was comment about how many carrots I’d eaten in this pregnancy. I didn’t put two and two together until a tiny, copper-headed missy was placed on my stomach. Gorgeous. But her head aglow like a pumpkin.

  I write a shopping list on the back of a napkin with an old pen from the Manchester Team Building Exercise 2004 I found in my handbag. Matt always brings me the best souvenirs. First, the Holy Trinity: milk, bread, and eggs. As long as I have those in the house then we can survive anything. We definitely need cereal, wipes, and a plan for tonight’s dinner. After Paula Jordan left me at the school gate choking on the back draft of fumes from her Nordic silver Honda CRV, I started to wish I’d asked for that bag of millet. What to cook, what to cook, what to cook? It’s like the mantra around which my day revolves; a subtle equation whereby you have to balance the contents of your freezer with what the supermarket shelves have to offer and what your patience and time constraints will allow. And today, I have to balance in the added variable of the Jordan kids. Do I go raw? Paleo? Lacto-vegan? I think about Paula on her sanctimonious foodie bandwagon looking me up and down. I think about my garage floor. It’s Monday. Time to go pescatarian; time for fish finger pie. An age old recipe of my dad’s, it involves a box of fish fingers, a tin of tomato soup, lashings of grated cheese, served with cheap white buttered bread. It’s comfort food at it’s very best; starchy and dayglow and I have a fondness for it given my dad used to cook it for me once a month when I was on my period – his way of trying to offer a teenage girl solace.

  I served it once to the Jordan kids on a day when Paula asked me when I was thinking about losing my baby weight. I remember Toby hoovering it up without actual cutlery. Yes, today is definitely a fish finger pie day.

  As I scribble down the rest of my list and stop Millie eating lumps of butter like cheese, I hear the two baristas chatting. One checks her hair in the milk steamer, the other is restocking wooden stirrers.

  ‘So it’s today! Shit, you think we can get in on it? Pop up in the background?’

  ‘Man, he is so fit. We have to at least get an autograph.’

  I crane my neck to help with the eavesdropping while remembering we also need sugar and I need tampons.

  ‘Didn’t you see all them vans outside? They’ve got lights and cameras, it’s well flash.’

  I simultaneously correct their grammar while looking out of the window. Vans, lots of them. I had assumed it was the mobile library doing the rounds. There’s a lot of action. People in baseball caps mill around, trying to keep the drizzle off with their clipboards. A commercial, maybe? Photo shoot? My gawping is cut short as my phone rings and I attempt to find it in the cavern that is the change bag.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mrs Campbell? Juliet Campbell?’

  I always sit up straight when I hear my name in full. Definitely not Dad. It can only be a teacher, a policeman, or my mother-in-law.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Clifton Primary School here. I’m Mrs Terry, the school secretary. I’m afraid Ted isn’t very well. He threw up during assembly. Could arrangements be made for him to be picked up this morning?’

  Half-arsed banana smoothies and mouldy Percy Pigs would do that to young stomachs. Poor little mite. Bad Mummy. I look at my list. If I rush and pick him up now, then we’ll have no food for the others when they get home. I’ll have to give the Jordan kids tuna served out of the tin like cat food. I’ll need white spirit to try and cover the twins’ tracks from their father. We’ll definitely need milk. I start crossing things out and look at the clock on the wall.

  ‘Ummm, yes of course. I’m just in the doctors’ at the moment. Could you give me half an hour?’

  ‘Sure.’

  There’s a condescension in her voice that suggests she knows I’m lying. It’s a ‘he’s sick and you don’t even care’ voice.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  Few people shop on a Monday morning bar elderly couples stocking up on pork pies, rice pudding, and newspapers, which makes trolley dashing far easier given the circumstances. Pensioners are left for dust as we race around, Millie enjoying the lively pace, my boobs not too happy about the lack of support. When we get to the freezer section, fish fingers are on special at £1 a box (get in) so I dump three boxes in the trolley and get some plain crackers for Ted’s poorly tummy. I emerge from an aisle to see mini muffins fresh out of the in-store bakery. Will I have the time to bake my own later? Will I bugger. I cave. This is going well. Maybe I’ll only be twenty minutes. Next bread, eggs, tinned soup, locating the white spirit next to the lightbulbs, and then the milk aisle, scanning the lids for blue and green, the right amount, something that isn’t leaking (this has happened before, the smell has still not left the car). I see a new product – toned milk. From cows with slim calves and flat stomachs? I laugh at my own joke and Millie looks like she’s worried for me. Given it’s Monday and the theme for today is comfort food, I also treat myself to a pack of mini scotch eggs. Damn the consequences. I head for the counters slightly smug, also worryingly out of breath. Behind me I hear crates rattling to get past so I stop hogging the aisle and move to one side, cupping my hands under each armpit as the icy fridge air hits me. But no one passes me. I turn around only to find a great, giant light in my eyes. For some reason I assume it’s fallen from the ceiling and bend at the knee. But then, a face. Shitting mother of …

  ‘Hello, darling. Right, don’t be too surprised. I’m Tommy, it’s lovely to meet you. And what’s your name?’

  I’m not wearing a bra. I’ve actually got a boob in each hand. I’m blinded by a light behind Tommy’s head and a camera is pointed square in my face. Tommy McCoy. He puts an arm around me as I wave into the camera for some unexplained reason.

  ‘Shit. Sorry, I mean … yeah, you are …’

  Tommy and his cohorts all cup their mouths and laugh at my speechlessness. Millie glares at me wondering why we deserve such attention, her chin shiny with drool. I notice they’re leaving a gap wide open for me to talk.

  ‘I’m Jools.’

  ‘Like Jools Holland?’

  ‘Yeah. But I can’t play the piano.’

  That was funnier in my head. The blank expressions in front of me assure me that’s the case. A couple of elderly ladies stop to ogle. Staff in uniform pinnies and fleeces emerge to stare at me. I’m still not wearing a bra.

  ‘And who is this little carrot top here?’

  Millie, who has heard this term of endearment a lot since her birth, looks immediately quite insulted. I urge her to throw up on him.

  ‘This is Millie.’

&nbs
p; ‘She your only one?’

  ‘Nope. I have three others.’

  ‘Cripes, love. You’ve been popping ’em out haven’t ya?’

  How the hell do you respond to that? Yes? Indeed, I have! Like cannonballs! I smile back. He’s very glossy in real life. His hair looks like it’s been dipped upside down in wax, and with his face close up you see the shimmer of face powder. The light blue eyes might be a redeeming feature if you could look past the distressed jeans, the slogan T-shirt, and the orange suede trainers. He hops about on his feet, addressing the camera every so often by winking at it, presuming his fame and looks give him licence to squeeze my shoulders.

  ‘So tell me about yourself, love?’

  Love? I’m not sure what he wants to hear. I’m also not sure how to stand. He’s considerably taller than me so every time he grabs my shoulder for a one-armed hug, I end up in his armpit. I’m also wholly aware that in my current ensemble of comfy student chic, I’m going to appear ever so dumpy. I hover on my tiptoes.

  ‘I’m a mum of four. I live here. Not in the supermarket … but in Kingston. I … errrm, I’m married to Matt as well.’

  I hope Matt doesn’t see this and wonder why I added him as an afterthought. Lots of beady expectant eyes watch me, taking in the short and meagre speech that is my life story.

  ‘And do you work?’

  ‘I’m a home … mother … housewife?’

  I pause as I say it. I hate that term and the pitiful looks that come with it. Is that all? You’re just a housewife? I’m tempted to tell him I’m an astronaut on Sundays. But I don’t. Tommy continues.