Thomas woke as the first birds started singing. He slumped out of his bed and stomped down the hallway, dragging his duvet behind him. I pretended to be asleep, complete with a faux snore for effect, as he pushed my bedroom door open. He clambered under the duvet, warm from his bed, and started driving a toy truck up the side of my face.
‘Wake up, Mumma!’ he shouted and giggled when I started. ‘Are you stuck? Tow truck pull you out.’
‘Don’t you want to watch something on the iPad for a little while before we get up?’ I reached for it and waved it desperately. It had taken me hours to fall asleep, battling mental glamour shots of Stephen and Alexa interspersed with little short films of my weakest parenting and marriage moments.
He shook his head and grabbed my hand, pulling me out from under the covers, towards the door. I reached for my bathrobe and tried to arrange it around my bump. The tie would not quite reach so I held it shut with one hand while he wrenched me along with the other. We stumbled out of my bedroom into the living room, where the first weak rays of sunlight were trying to push their way through the crack in the curtains. A steady rhythm of rain pelted the windows. I leant against the wall, willing my still-sleepy brain to catch up.
‘What do you want for breakfast, honey?’
I could probably stretch my culinary skills to produce some toast and Marmite, and there might be a few crumbs of cereal left. I might even be able to find a banana somewhere in the back of the cupboard. I had not been to the supermarket in days.
‘Crackers.’ Thomas was firm.
Thomas would live on crackers if he could. But not any kind of crackers – it had to be one brand, specific to one supermarket that always seemed to stock too few of the things. Sometimes I had to check back with them two or three days in a row before they had a packet on the shelves.
‘You’ll have something on the crackers, though, right? Peanut butter?’
I tried to keep my voice light. Please say yes, I willed him. I needed to at least pretend his breakfast had contained more than just packaged, refined carbohydrates.
‘Just crackers,’ he said solemnly. ‘I sit here and eat them.’
He strolled through to the dining room and pulled himself on to a chair at the table. He looked at me expectantly. I was too tired to try harder. Maybe serving nutritious breakfasts was the domain of people who were not suddenly single-parenting.
‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’ He was fidgeting in his seat.
‘No thank you,’ he said primly, a cracker in each hand.
He wriggled again.
‘Are you sure?’
His eyes widened in alarm. ‘Toilet!’ He jumped from his seat and rushed for the door. There was a banging as he tried to get his pyjamas off and climb on to his step stool at the same time.
He re-emerged a few minutes later, his pants discarded. I shrugged it off. He’d be getting dressed before long, anyway. While he ate his parent-incriminating breakfast, I packed his lunchbox for nursery with an array of relatively healthy snacks – carrot sticks, hummus, a couple of rice crackers, some fruit. I regarded it for a minute. I had better add a serving of yoghurt and a couple of plain biscuits so I could be sure that he would at least eat something during the day.
Crackers demolished, Thomas bumbled off to my bedroom, dragging his fingers along the walls as he went.
‘Where are you off to?’ It was a half-hearted inquiry and I did not wait for a response. He soon started clattering and banging, pulling things down from the bedside table. I tried not to think about it – I had moved everything ‘dangerous’ to a shelf in my wardrobe that even I needed a step stool to reach. Somehow, I needed to get his bag packed, to find clothes for him and something clean and big enough for me to wear. Then I needed to put the dishwasher on, all before we had to leave the house at 8.30.
I figured the worst that could happen would be that he wasted some of my Chanel hand cream – bought for me as a gift and which I was using so sparingly that it was into its second year. On a scale of The Worst Things To Happen, seeing that disappear would be pretty bad – old me might even have cried – but I could sacrifice it in the interests of making it out of the door.
He appeared in the kitchen in front of me. It took me a second to realise what he had in his hand: a vibrator from my underwear drawer, the type that has a head that is attached to the main body of the contraption with a long wire. The batteries had long since gone flat.
‘A skipping rope!’ he shouted. ‘I found a skipping rope in your drawer!’
My horror must have been apparent because he looked at me sideways and put it behind his back, scowling fiercely at my lunge to wrench it from his grasp. ‘Mine! I show Kaskia!’
I could just imagine it. His teachers, one of whom was ‘Kaskia’, who, in fact, was a tiny German woman called Saskia, already seemed to think I was some sort of deviant because I occasionally arrived late to pick him up, usually in my faded activewear, and almost always forgot about their themed ‘wacky days’ – when he was meant to dress up as a superhero or paint his hair green. They would have a field day if he turned up with sex toys in his schoolbag.
I would have to distract him with something else if I was to have a hope of getting it from him. ‘I’ll swap you an M&M for your skipping rope,’ I ventured, pushing half-empty boxes of crackers and muesli bars around in the cupboard as I tried to find them.
‘Two,’ he said, his eyes narrowing.
‘Fine, two,’ I agreed. ‘If you put your raincoat on.’ The deal was done.
The goodbye as I dropped him off at nursery was not the drawn-out film scene farewell that it sometimes was, where he would sit on me and hold my hair, then lean through the fence as I drove away, waving at me as if he was a castaway on an island. This time, his class was engrossed in what looked like a big bowl of blue gloop. They were in it up to their armpits, flicking handfuls at each other. All fifteen of them were filthy.
Thomas pushed through to the middle of the group and plunged in up to his armpits. One of the teachers met my gaze as I quickly tallied up whether we had enough size three clothes to justify throwing this set out, rather than bothering to wash it. Their ‘washable’ paints had taken me at least a week and half a bottle of bleach to budge last time, and even then the shirts had looked like they’d been washed with some vibrant socks. ‘It’s a valuable learning experience. Great sensory exploration,’ she shouted over their heads.
I ignored her and blew a kiss at Thomas, noticing with a jolt how the curve of his face had become that of a little boy, not the round-cheeked profile of a baby. He jostled with his best friend, Nixon. ‘I’ll be back to pick you up after lunch.’ He did not acknowledge me. Instead, he smeared some gloop across the front of his shirt and threw some at Nixon.
The rain had stopped when I returned to my car but the sunshine was not yet sure of itself. I clambered in. Between the baby seat behind me and the steering wheel in front, there was little room left for my expanding bulk. I slammed my hand on the button to turn the car on. The fuel light glared at me. I’d usually have tried to swap cars with Stephen just at the moment when it needed to be filled. But there was a service station on the way home, so there was no excuse.
Even though I’d had this car more than three years, I always drove up to the
