The Godmother Page 3

  “No, it’s worse than that,” she said. “I know his friends, they’re not as bad as he is.”

  “Isn’t it normal for kids to behave in other people’s houses and be utter shits at home?”

  “He barely speaks to me, Tessa, and he won’t look me in the eye.”

  “What does Nick say?”

  “He wants to thump him.”

  “Nick. Hippy, Green Party, university activist Nick?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Must be bad,” I said.

  “It is. Look, I hate to ask you this, but would you mind talking to him? He thinks the world of you, as you know. He won’t help at Katie’s party tomorrow and now he’s refusing to come to his own birthday lunch next Saturday.”

  “He’d better come. I planned my flipping retreat around his desire to go to Sticky Fingers to eat expensive chips.”

  “I know. You’ve never missed a birthday. You are the best godmother in the world. Will you do this? Will you come over tomorrow and talk to him?”

  There were two catches. One meant going to a children’s party, which I detested but stomached for the sake of good godmothering. The second was more complicated, but was a good way to get out of going. I put on a stern voice. “I’m not going to report back to you about what Caspar says.”

  There was a long pause from Francesca. “Unless it’s really bad,” she said.

  “When Claudia, Al, Ben and I went through it, Mum said it was like watching us enter a glass tunnel—she could see us, she could wave at us, but she couldn’t talk to us. He’ll come out the other side. It’s his hormones, Francesca.”

  “I think you’re confused. That’s motherhood you’re describing. Inside no one can hear you scream.”

  I laughed.

  “Please, Tessa, he’ll talk to you.”

  I hesitated. I found children’s parties less appealing than the Victoria line at 8:15 in the morning. I would rather face a panel of judges than a huddle of yummy fucking mummies looking down their noses at me. “I sort of promised myself that I wouldn’t put myself through any more Bob the Builder balloon artists…”

  “I’m begging you. I’ve tried everything else.”

  “You calling me a last resort?”

  “No. I’m admitting maternal defeat.”

  I gave in. This was unlike Francesca. She was an extremely proficient mother. That’s not to say cold and calculating; more that she managed to see everything a moment ahead of time. In the same way she could spot a spilt drink before it tipped, she could head off sibling rivalry before it came to fruition. “All right, all right, I’ll come to Katie’s party.”

  “And if it isn’t just hormones—and I really think it isn’t—you’ll tell me?”

  “If it is serious,” I said, having considered the request a moment, “I will get him to tell you himself.”

  “Deal,” she said. I could hear the relief in her voice. “Sorry to disturb you on your first night back—I really thought you’d be out.”

  “I was just leaving,” I lied.

  “Lucky you. Have fun.”

  Samira had not called while I was on the phone to Francesca, so I tried again. For the fourth time. Again there was no answer. So much for dying to see me. Offended, I switched off the phone and retired hurt to my bathroom. It didn’t matter that I was clean, I wanted to lie in expensive oil and sip decadently from a large wine glass. I ran the bath, put my iPod on its speakers, lit candles and cradled myself in the hot water. The room I had designed for sex had become the place I locked myself away in. The place I didn’t need a brave face to walk into. There is a narrow slit window in the bathroom that doubles up as a ledge. Through it the river can be seen; it’s one of the things I love best about the flat. I lay in the bath for twenty minutes, watching London’s cauldron boil and bubble below me like liquid chocolate orange, pretending that I didn’t know why I was crying. But that was a lie.

  Having a break like the one I’d had was a double-edged sword. I’d read books, I’d slept, I’d got fit, but I’d also had a great deal of time to think and I’d started to feel increasingly uncomfortable about where those thoughts were taking me. I’d hoped that as soon as I was back, my busy life would take over again and I’d leave these thoughts behind. But no one else had time to spare for the prodigal child’s return. What had taunted me on the beach was the thought that maybe it was all too hard to go back. Maybe the greasy pole was too greasy. I certainly felt I’d slipped a long way down it. Did I really have the energy to claw my way back up? Getting married and having kids was beginning to look a darn sight easier. I had always wanted to go down that path at some point, I just hadn’t met anyone to go down it with. Which begged another question: why hadn’t I? What was wrong with me? Oh yes, I knew exactly what I was crying about. It was the fear of being a last resort. Of missing out. And not just on one Saturday night of partying with people I didn’t know. On life. The life that everyone else seemed to find so easy to have.

  I sunk lower in the bath. I was beginning to feel that I might finally have arrived at the right bus stop just after the last bus had left. I could see its tail lights, but even if I ran, I could never catch it. I wrapped my hand around the stem of the wine glass, took a sip and closed my eyes.

  I knew what that sinking feeling was.

  It was never going to happen to me.

  It was never going to happen to me.

  It was never, ever going to happen to me.

  2

  suicide watch

  If a child’s first taste of anarchy is in the playground, then children’s parties are their first taste of revolution. Teachers can do what parents cannot. Crowd control. Not even the clown was up to the job. The adults were outnumbered ten to one. I should have run for the hills. I should not have worn white. And, according to the other mothers, I should not have been there. This was about the only thing that I agreed with them on, but I was there on official duty and it had nothing to do with the princesses that ran amok in flammable outfits.

  I stood like a misfit on the outskirts watching for a while, a smile fixed to my face, but no one appeared keen to welcome me into the fold. I had met criminals with less trepidation. I tried smiling directly at a couple of the other women when I caught them eyeing me suspiciously, but they looked away. Obviously, since they hadn’t seen me at the school gate, I didn’t count. I hate how these people make me feel. I hate that I let them. I want to jump up and down and stamp my feet screaming, “No, I don’t have kids. But I am still a person in my own right you bastards!,” since that sort of behavior seems to be the only kind that gets their loving attention. In fact, I have noticed that the worse the behavior in the child, the more mollycoddling and affirmation it receives from its mother. Maybe this is why I am excluded; maybe I haven’t been whining loudly enough. Then again, maybe it’s because I refer to the little darlings as “its.”

  There is only so much gore one can handle, so I’ll keep this short. Katie, THE birthday girl, pushed a little boy of unknown parentage off the slide. She claimed it was down the slide, she just missed. But I knew Katie. Nick and Francesca’s eight-year-old is an excruciatingly confident child who likes to get exactly what she wants. There was blood. A woman rushed past, treading on another child, who screamed, scaring a third so much that she careered into a table, upsetting the preservative-laden paper plates that were supposed to remain out of reach until the little darlings had eaten their vegetable sticks. I saw an insipid-looking boy make a dive for a rolling Whopper. His mother grabbed him by the foot and pulled him back, his outstretched hands creating a sweaty squeak along the laminated floor. The mother eyed every single slowly rolling chocolate as fearfully as if it were a miniature grenade. The boy managed to catch one and throw it into his mouth. I gave him a silent hurrah before watching him being returned to his home-made picnic of tofu and green beans.

  Nick passed, a child under each arm. “She wouldn’t even give him raisins,” he whispered. “Poor kid.”


  This woman was one of the reasons why I didn’t accept dinner party invitations any more. Too many mothers like this one discussing the delights of finding handipacks of antiseptic wipes and the evils of inoculation. Like smallpox was a good thing? I watched the kid reach breaking point. He’d had enough and threw the tofu at his mother. She yanked him up by the arm and headed for the door.

  “He doesn’t like parties,” she hissed as she passed.

  And who could blame him? The packet of Whoppers was winking at me from the counter. I couldn’t help myself. While the mother said effusive goodbyes to Francesca, which she clearly didn’t mean, I bent down to the miserable little boy and slipped the sweets into his Spiderman backpack. I put my finger to my lips and winked. When he smiled I felt vindicated. God, are you watching? I’m a natural.

  I downed my warm white wine and stepped into the fray. Two women were deep in conversation about the devil’s juice, Kool-Aid, so I veered around them and found another woman sitting on the sofa, staring out into the middle distance.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she managed.

  So far so good.

  “So which one is yours?”

  “None,” I replied, forcing an even, light-hearted tone into my voice. She looked at me. A “wrong answer” buzzer resounded round my head. “I’m Caspar’s godmother.”

  “Oh. You have older children?” In other words, was I a slut who got herself knocked up in her teens?

  “No. I have no children.”

  The woman suddenly stood up. “So sorry. Ben! No! Put that down! I’ve just got to…” She moved away from me in a hurry. Was it catching? Or was her child’s life really being threatened by the balloon she took off it? Him, I mean, him.

  I tried a few more times. They all started the same: “Which one is yours?” swiftly followed by “Excuse me one moment, I must (a) remove a plastic item from my child’s mouth, (b) stop my child biting another child, (c) stop another child pinching mine, (d) go and talk to my wife because she is summoning me over because we are having too much fun out in the garden, (e) get away from you because you are a childless potential husband-stealing woman who cannot talk about MMR or the school run, which means I have fuck-all to say to you…” Perhaps it was jet lag, or too much apple juice, but I had a terrible urge to jump on the table and show everyone my panties. But I did not want to embarrass Francesca more than she was already doing herself.

  The seventh time I was asked which one was mine and was met with the same curious suspicion when I said none of them, I grabbed a pizza and ventured upstairs. Since Caspar was clearly not going to come down, I would have to enter into the terrifying world of the teenage boy’s bedroom. I didn’t much enjoy it when I was a teenager; I was bound to find it even more disturbing now.

  The first thing to hit you is the smell. Man, it smelled bad in there. Do boys ever wash? Or open a window? I have to be honest, I instantly recognized the smell. Sweat. Spunk. And cannabis. Nothing changes, except my boy was growing up.

  Poor sod.

  “Hello? Smeeeeeeeegal? Anyone at home?”

  I heard a panicked clutter from the tiny en-suite shower room. Nick had built it for him in the corner of the room to save his son from Barbie bubble bath. I listened with a smile on my face to the telltale spray of deodorant. Teenagers, bless ’em. They always think they’re the first.

  “I bring pizza.”

  Caspar emerged fully dressed and told me he’d been having a shower.

  “About to have a shower?” I ventured.

  “Yeah.”

  “How much of that stuff are you smoking?”

  “I don’t smoke,” Caspar insisted.

  “Right. And I don’t have one-night stands.”

  “Tessserrrrr.”

  “Casparrrrr. The least you could do is share the spliff that you’re not smoking.”

  “It’s not called spliff any more.”

  “Oh, sorry. What is it called?” I felt a bit put out. I wasn’t that old, was I? “What about puff?”

  “God no, that’s even worse.”

  “Enlighten me,” I said.

  “Zoot. Draw. Weed.”

  “Weed, then,” I concluded.

  “What about Mum and Dad?”

  “They won’t even know we’re missing. Come on, hand it over.”

  “You got that right,” said Caspar, opening up a tin and passing over the half-smoked “zoot.”

  “I never thought I’d be dunning draw with a grown-up.” Dunning? A grown-up? The words reminded me how very young he was, and that was why the glimpse I caught inside his tin should have alarmed me. The fact that Caspar was smoking at four in the afternoon in a house full of people should also have warned me. But I chose to ignore everything in the quest for more information. I, the grown-up, settled down on a beanbag and lit up. One inhalation and I knew that it was strong stuff. After the initial booming head rush, I decided to fake it. So, in the presence of my fifteen-year-old godson, I bum-sucked, held the smoke in my mouth, then forced it out of my nose. Caspar, on the other hand, sucked away long and hard and didn’t seem any more affected than me.

  Liberated by drugs, Caspar told me about the girls he’d failed to snog. The boys who always got the girls. And the girls who liked him whom he didn’t like. Nothing ever changes. We giggled stupidly about nonsense and then attacked the cold pizza as if it were cordon bleu. I started to think Francesca and Nick were being a little harsh. The cannabis aside, Caspar seemed back to his lovely normal self to me. We were still snuggled up on the beanbag when Francesca walked in.

  “Jesus, what’s that smell?” she said, wafting her hand in front of her face.

  I have to admit it, I panicked. But Caspar was as slick as they come. “Tessa brought me joss sticks from India.”

  “Oh. Thanks, Tessa.”

  Little rat. But I didn’t deny it. I didn’t want to get into trouble with Francesca. Or burn my bridges with my boy.

  “I brought you some masala tea,” I said. Truthfully.

  “How long have you two been hiding up here?” There was a slight edge to her voice that I couldn’t place.

  “I did try,” I pleaded. “But those women talk of nothing but children, so I found myself talking to the dads, which was more of a laugh because they didn’t talk about their children, but the women kept coming over and reclaiming their husbands by sending them off on some bogus Kool-Aid run, so I came and found Caspar.”

  “What do you expect, turning up in designer white, all flat stomach and blond hair? Women who have had children don’t have stomachs like yours. Not normal women, anyway. You make them nervous, Tessa. You make them feel dowdy.”

  “They are dowdy,” said Caspar.

  “He speaks,” said Fran. Which I thought was quite annoying, so it didn’t surprise me when Caspar rolled his eyes.

  “I thought you hated them too,” I added, unhelpfully.

  “I’m just trying to explain it from their perspective. Anyway, they’ve all gone.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s seven o’clock.”

  Caspar and I looked guiltily at each other. How the hell did that happen?

  “We’ve had a lot of catching up to do. I haven’t seen him for ages.”

  “Well, you look all caught up now.”

  I got to my feet and followed Francesca out into the corridor. Caspar would have no idea I’d been spying on him after that little scene.

  “As the coast is clear, I’ll come down and make you some masala tea,” I said.

  “I’d prefer a big fat spliff, actually. Or a mallet.”

  Was that Fran’s subconscious playing tricks on her, or was she telling me that she’d not fallen for the joss-stick story? I decided to bluff it out as I walked behind her.

  “It’s not called spliff any more,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “These days it’s zoot, draw, or good old-fashioned weed.”

  “Zoot? How the hell do you spell
that?”

  “Z-o-o-t—I think. I’ll check with one of my friends.”

  Francesca stopped walking, turned on the worn carpet and, in the narrow hallway, studied me. “It must be so easy being you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No wonder Caspar adores you. Look at you. Stylish. Relaxed. Free…”

  “Fran,” I said, a note of incredulity in my voice, “you were the one who asked me over to talk to him. I’m just doing what you asked me to do.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just this is…Oh, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s fine, Fran. Just a fraction on the rebellious side, but Caspar underneath.”

  “Are you sure I don’t have anything to worry about?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “He hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you, you silly girl. You are a great mother and if Caspar doesn’t know that, then he is a fool. Please don’t take this personally; it’s just hormones. Repeat after me: it’s just hormones.”

  But she wouldn’t. She felt she knew him better. Turned out she was right.

  Nick was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Francesca with a glass of wine in his hand. He handed it over to Fran.

  “To survival,” he said, then kissed her on her head. They walked arm in arm to the sofa and collapsed together into a heap. As I said, they just fit, those two. Always have. Could Francesca not see how jealous I was of what she had? Not that it had always been that way. In the beginning I’d felt sorry for her.

  That day Francesca appeared on my doorstep in tears was when our paths irreversibly split. Still clutching the pregnancy test in her sweaty hand, she pulled it out of her cheap blue anorak pocket, and showed me the way a child shows their friend a half-sucked gobstopper: two innocuous blue lines that signified so much more than we could ever have imagined.

  Nick was as worthy back then as he is now. He marched and protested then. Now he works for a non-profit organization, ensuring large corporations like Nike and Gap don’t use child labor during manufacturing. But Francesca was brighter than both of us put together. She wasn’t only top of her school, she got a letter in the post about being top of the region in three subjects. Her place at the best law firm was affirmed even though we hadn’t done our finals. When she decided to keep the baby they said they’d hold open the place, but she never went back and eventually the offer of articles dried up as new waves of talent swept even her special mark away. They had been so careful, they didn’t know how it happened. And in the end that was what swung it. If a child can be so determined to be born that they can overcome condoms, withdrawal and the rhythm method, then perhaps that child had a right to live. It is a testament to Francesca’s mind that she got a first in her degree because eight days after her last exam she went into labor. Caspar was born a healthy eight and a half pounds. Even that was done with top marks. Ten out of ten in the APGAR test.