Any Way You Want Me Read online

  ‘Molly, go and find your shoes.’

  ‘I want my wellies.’

  ‘I said shoes, not wellies.’

  ‘I want my wellies!’

  ‘OK, fine, get your wellies, then.’ Get your sodding bollocking wellies, see if I care.

  There, one small boy de-greened. ‘Right, let’s get the buggy out,’ I said. ‘Here’s your coat, Molly. Oh, you put your wellies on all by yourself, well done. Do you want me to put your coat on?’

  ‘I do it.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, fingers twitching as I watched her stuffing one arm down the wrong sleeve, upside down. ‘Shall I just start you off . . .?’

  ‘I do it, Mummy! Let I do it!’

  ‘Right, fine, you do it. Let’s go.’

  We were ten minutes late for Tumble Tots in the end. Not exactly a crime against humanity, although you might be forgiven for thinking so if you’d seen some of the arched eyebrows, and heard the tutting.

  A couple of the other mums waved knowingly across the hall and I smiled gratefully back. Not everyone was in the motherhood mafia, at least.

  ‘You’d better join this group,’ Debbie, the Marlboro-voiced, scarily tattooed Tumble Tots leader told me, pointing to one corner where ten or so toddlers were dementedly rampaging up and down climbing frames. ‘Hello, Molly – been drawing, have we?’

  I tried to smile but couldn’t remember how to do it. Instead, I grabbed Nathan and followed my daughter, who was pelting towards another group of kids altogether, having seen her friend Ella whizzing down a slide.

  ‘I go with Ella,’ she was shouting.

  Ella’s mum, Anna, elbowed me as I went over. ‘Remember, we’re pleased we’ve got feisty daughters, really, Sadie,’ she told me. ‘We’re glad we’ve got independent, free-spirited . . .’ She caught sight of the look on my face. ‘All right, we’re wishing they were obedient, passive little flowers, then, I admit it.’

  We watched as our obedient, passive little flowers started bouncing alarmingly high on a mini-trampoline, holding hands and singing. ‘WIND the bobbin up! WIND the bobbin up! Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap.’

  ‘Wind the mummy up, wind the mummy up,’ Anna sang softly.

  ‘Pull, pull, smack, smack, smack,’ I added, with feeling.

  *

  I stopped off for a coffee at Anna’s on the way home. I’d met Anna when we’d both been hugely pregnant with our second babies, while breathlessly chasing our first ones around at a music class in Clapham. Ella was every bit as strong-willed as my own daughter, and Anna became an ally immediately. Nathan and Theo had been born within weeks of each other, and our friendship had deepened as we’d weathered the hellish early months together through coffees and large sugary doughnuts and plenty of crying.

  ‘Anna, do you ever wonder if there’s more to life than this?’ I asked. We’d left the girls to trash Anna’s sitting room while we sat in the relative peace of the kitchen. Nathan squirmed on my knee, brandishing a teaspoon with an air of triumph, and I wrestled to keep hold of him with one hand, clutching my coffee cup with the other.

  Anna was frowning and sniffing Theo. ‘Have you just . . .?’ she started asking him. Then she pulled a face. ‘Do you mean, is there more to life than stinking nappies and wind the bloody bobbin up and arguing about why your daughter can’t wear her new coat in the bath?’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.’

  She looked at me as if I was mad for even asking. ‘God, yes, of course I wonder. Last night, I found myself trying to work out how much money I’d be earning now if I hadn’t given up my job and had kids.’ She gazed down at the table, and traced a pattern in the spilled sugar with her finger. ‘It was so depressing and I felt so guilty for finding it so depressing that I went to bed instead.’

  ‘Quite.’ I took another slug of hot coffee. ‘And it’s not just the job and money stuff, it’s the what’s-happened-to-me? thing that I can’t bear. The where’s-my-life-gone? feeling.’ I sighed and kissed Nathan’s head, feeling bad for even saying the words out loud.

  She was nodding. ‘I know. It’s like, what happened to the Anna who used to have a packed diary, gym membership, exciting sex-life, amazing career prospects? Where the hell is that woman? I really used to enjoy being her.’ She swilled her coffee around. ‘It was like she just melted away. She disappeared.’

  I stared at Nathan as he patted my hand, his fingers closing around my thumb. ‘Do you think our mums ever had this sort of conversation?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No way. Not mine, anyway. My mum always says it was the happiest time of her life when me and my brother were tiny. The happiest time! Some days it feels like this is the worst thing that ever happened to me.’ She bit her lip. ‘Only some days. I mean, most of the time, it’s great and lovely, but . . .’

  There was a moment’s silence. She didn’t have to say the ‘but’. We both knew what the ‘but’ was.

  ‘You know, the stupid thing is, if I didn’t have kids now, in my mid-thirties, I would be desperate for them,’ I said, to spare her having to finish the sentence we all avoided saying. ‘And here I am, with them, and all I can think about is how I want to feel like . . . like a sex kitten again.’

  Anna spluttered, but then stopped as she realized I wasn’t joking. ‘Seriously?’ she asked. ‘Blimey, I wish I had the energy to even consider sex these days. What’s got into you? Are you mad?’

  She was smiling at me but I couldn’t smile back. ‘Anna, the other night, I went out and I ended up pretending to be someone else, just because the thought of my own life was too boring to think about.’ I grimaced. ‘And also because I really enjoyed talking to this guy. You know what, it was great to be talking to a man where the conversation didn’t revolve around why no one had paid the gas bill and how the mortgage was going to be a struggle this month. It was just . . . fun. And flattering.’ I looked across the table at her. ‘Does that make me an awful person?’

  A scream of rage interrupted us then and we rushed into the sitting room to find Ella and Molly both clutching the same fairy wand and shrieking at the other one to let go, even though there was another wand, exactly the same, on the carpet next to them.

  ‘Molly, give it back to her!’

  Ella, let her have it!’ Anna and I shouted in unison.

  CRACK! The wand promptly broke in half and both girls fell over and started sobbing.

  ‘Come here, Ella, love, you’re all right,’ Anna said, trying to cuddle her two children at once and nearly toppling over as she lost balance. Then she looked at me, her hazel eyes serious for once. ‘It doesn’t make you an awful person at all. You’re a mum. We all feel like that.’

  You’re a mum. We all feel like that. Her words kept coming back to me as I heaved the double buggy back home. Did being a parent automatically mean you couldn’t be the complete package of the person you wanted to be? Why couldn’t you be sexy as well? Why couldn’t you be a high-flying career woman without the guilt? Why did you always have to give something up?

  I looked down at my children and felt like weeping as I saw Molly trying to hold Nathan’s hand. ‘Hello, little babe,’ she was saying. ‘Hello, little fella.’

  They were so lovely but they were so bloody exhausting. Surely there had to be some kind of middle ground, one where you didn’t necessarily concede your whole life to these small tyrants who deafened you with their cries and smothered you with their love – or was that just wishful thinking?

  Two

  On Saturday night, my mum came over to babysit, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure if I wanted to escape the kids any more. Nathan was full of mashed potato and milk, and snoring contentedly in his cot, but Molly was tired and clingy. ‘I be little baby,’ she kept begging, crawling up onto my knee. ‘I go back in Mummy’s tummy.’

  ‘Let’s find your pyjamas, Molls,’ my mum suggested. ‘Do you want the Tweenies ones or the pussy-cat ones?’

  ‘Pussy-cat,’ she decided, leaping off my knee again. �
�I put them on all by myself!’

  I watched them go. My mum was one of those supercapable women whom children automatically seemed to obey. She had a way with them, as my dad was always saying proudly. She’d brought up me and my two sisters with a tidy two years between each of us and, like Anna’s mum, professed to have loved every minute of it. She was either lying, deluded or suffered acute memory loss; I wasn’t sure which.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Alex said, checking his watch. His eyes flicked to the door. ‘Your mum can manage now.’

  ‘I’ll just say goodnight.’ I raced upstairs, half-anxious, half-ecstatic at the prospect of us both leaving the kids. I stroked Nathan’s hair softly and watched as his eyelashes fluttered mid-dream. Then I went into Molly’s room and kissed her goodnight.

  ‘You got your beautiful top on, Mummy,’ she said approvingly.

  I hugged my mum. ‘Thanks for this. Ring us about anything, won’t you? Anything. We’ll come back straight away if you need us. And . . .’

  My mum put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Relax!’ she told me. ‘These two will be a doddle compared to my year tens.’

  I smiled faintly. ‘Giving you grief, are they?’ I asked.

  She cocked an eyebrow. ‘They try their best,’ she said. ‘They think all of us dinner ladies are fair game, but I tell them—’

  ‘SADIE! Taxi’s here!’ Alex bellowed from downstairs.

  ‘OK, coming. Bye, darling. Bye, Mum. See you later.’

  ‘Have a great time,’ my mum said, holding Molly up to wave.

  A great time? I wasn’t too sure about that. Dinner with Alex’s new boss and some other people he worked with . . . It wasn’t exactly what I’d have chosen, but still. We were going out, just the two of us, for an evening of good food – that I hadn’t had to cook – and sparkling, intellectual, adult conversation. That was the main thing.

  ‘Come in,’ the man said, waving us inside. He was tall and square-shouldered, with neat, dark hair, and eyes so blue I wondered if they were colour contacts. ‘You must be Alex and Sadie.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Alex, putting out a hand to shake. ‘You must be Mark.’

  ‘Hi, Mark,’ I said. He looked as if he’d stepped out of a Paul Smith shop window with his white linen shirt and dark jeans. ‘Nice to meet you.’ He kissed me on the cheek and I breathed in his spicy scent. His skin was warm, soft as a child’s.

  ‘Come on in,’ he repeated. ‘Let me take your coats.’

  Alex and I stepped inside onto the cream hall carpet. Thank God we weren’t there with the kids, was my automatic first thought. Pure wool, I reckoned, trying to work out how much it must have cost. I shuddered, imagining the same carpet in our house. It would have lasted ten minutes before a trashing from Molly’s muddy boots, or an explosion of carrot-coloured sick courtesy of Nathan. My children, arch-destroyers of anything remotely tasteful. I raised my eyebrows a fraction to Alex, and his grin told me he was thinking the same thing.

  The immaculate carpet ran all the way along the hall and up the stairs. There was not a miniature-sized welly or snowsuit or woolly hat to be seen on the coat pegs – just several well-cut winter coats, in black, charcoal and camel colours, a couple with glistening raindrops still on the shoulders, plus – oh God! – what looked like a Lulu Guinness handbag. There were four or five lighted church candles on the windowsill at the bottom of the stairs, flames wobbling as Mark closed the front door. And the house smelled fantastic – of vanilla, beeswax polish and the drenching perfume from a vase of white lilies on a side table. Their elegant, wide trumpets splayed out rakishly, showing the golden filaments within.

  ‘What can I get you to drink?’ Mark asked. He hung up my coat – my shabby, two-seasons-old Gap coat – and it looked like the scruffy kid in class next to the fawn cashmere number swanking on the neighbouring peg. ‘We’ve got gin or vodka, red or white wine . . .’

  ‘A gin and tonic would be great,’ I interrupted eagerly. A bit too eagerly maybe, because Alex gave me a look, and Mark grinned at me.

  ‘One of those days?’ Mark asked.

  ‘It’s been one of those years,’ I replied, trying not to blush.

  ‘Gin, for me, too, cheers,’ Alex said, squeezing my hand.

  Even though I’d lobbied hard all week for dinner à deux somewhere expensive and luxurious, I was starting to think Alex had been right to talk me into coming here. It was going to be like stepping into someone else’s life for an evening.

  ‘You know we’ll only bang on about the kids all night if it’s just the two of us,’ Alex had reasoned. ‘We do enough of that at home. At least when there are other people around, we’ll have to talk about other things.’

  Other things? I’d thought at the time. What other things? Alex had a whole raft of ‘other things’ aside from family life, yeah – he had football and stag dos and a social life for starters. His ‘other things’ hadn’t stopped, whereas my whole life was meshed together with Molly’s and Nathan’s. We had become a three-headed beast, a triptych. As a separate entity again, what did I have to talk about?

  Three years ago, I used to say things like this:

  No, I agreed with the judges. He definitely deserved to win the Booker. He has such an original voice.

  And six years ago, I might have said:

  I’ve been to every single shoe shop in the King’s Road today and I still can’t find the right shoes for Saturday night. My life is in ruins!

  These days I say things like:

  I tried Nathan with sweet potato today – he loved it!

  Or:

  Molly had a full-on, lie-on-the-floor-screaming tantrum in Sainsbury’s this morning. It was so embarrassing!

  Still, I was sure I could get back in the swing of adult conversation – especially after I’d downed a couple more of Mark’s kick-arse G&Ts. Hmmm . . . Quick, Sadie, think.

  Topics of conversation that had gripped me over dinner in the past . . .

  Who was shagging who ( friends).

  Who was shagging who (celebrities).

  What happened on EastEnders last night.

  Office gossip.

  Other people’s office gossip.

  Shoes.

  ‘Hello, Alex, so glad you could make it,’ a woman said, appearing in the hallway. Alex’s new boss, Julia, presumably.

  I eyed her over my glass, and mentally rejected the whole list. She looked far too scary to swap gossip with and not exactly the kind of person who would willingly discuss EastEnders’ plotlines unless forced to do so at gunpoint.

  As she walked closer, I found myself wishing I had bothered doing more post-natal sit-ups. All right then, any sit-ups at all in the last five years. She was tall and slim-hipped, with long, thick, chestnut hair that lay obediently waved on her shoulders. She had cheekbones you could cut your finger on, and clear green eyes. I wondered uneasily why Alex hadn’t mentioned how good-looking she was.

  ‘And Sadie, hello!’ she smiled, looking me up and down. I could see her teeth, neat as a string of pearls, apart from a couple of wolfish-looking incisors. ‘Nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’

  ‘You too,’ I lied, returning the smile in all its fakeness. I’d heard she was a bitch in the boardroom, yeah, but I hadn’t heard that she had long hair and great boobs and dressed in what looked like Dolce & Gabbana. ‘Pleased to hear that someone’s kicking Alex and the team into shape.’

  ‘I do my best,’ she said. Her tone was light-hearted but I noticed her squaring her shoulders as if preparing for another business meeting. She practically radiated power. My heart sank.

  I was definitely going to need a few drinks to see me through this one.

  We followed the trail of Julia’s musky perfume down the hall. Entering the living room was like stepping into a photograph straight out of Elle Decoration magazine – everything in tasteful neutrals. A sleek brown-leather sofa stretched along one wall with cream-coloured mohair cushions artfully arranged at the ends. My fingers itched to strok
e them; my mind fought against mentally pricing them up. Heavy linen curtains hung in swags at the window and there was a fluffy pale carpet underfoot.

  ‘What a gorgeous room,’ I said to Julia, trying to keep the envy out of my voice. I was already feeling a creeping dread at the thought of having to throw a return dinner party and invite her round to our own bearpit. Julia, would you prefer a Bob the Builder yoghurt, or a Petit Filou? I could imagine myself saying. Oh, and our starter tonight is lukewarm Tweenies spaghetti, served on toast – don’t worry, the crusts have been cut off. Now, would you like a pink fork, or would you prefer to shovel it in with your fingers?

  Julia put a hand lightly on my arm, and I looked at her rouge noir nails, long and polished. No chips. ‘Alex, you know Matthew, of course. This is Alex’s wife Sadie and Matthew’s wife Chloe.’

  ‘Partner,’ I said, correcting her. ‘We’re not married. Hello,’ I added to Matthew and Chloe.

  There was just a tiny flicker in Julia’s eyes at my words, but the rest of us had launched into the round of hellos and how-are-yous, and she didn’t comment. Was it that she didn’t like being put right or that it made Alex even more interesting? I wondered.

  I vaguely recalled meeting Matthew at one of the newspaper’s infamous office parties. He was the sports editor, whereas Alex worked on the literary section, subbing and writing occasional book reviews. Julia had been brought in as managing editor, and had promptly deleted half the senior members of staff with a single lash of her red pen. Half-admired, half-feared, she was the kind of boss who made grown men cry, according to Alex.

  Matthew was tall and broad-shouldered with a broken nose and sandy-coloured hair. He had a face like a boiled ham, and piggy eyes with a devilish, roaming glint. Alex had once told me that he was a legendary womanizer. I’d have to watch what I said, I vowed hastily. I had a bad habit of blurting out bits of office gossip that Alex had told me. We’d had previous evenings of don’t mention the bottom photocopying, don’t mention the lesbian kiss, don’t mention the whisky in the filing cabinet. With Matthew, I had a feeling it was a case of don’t mention the nineteen-year-old secretary from Features.