Any Way You Want Me Read online

  Like a long-lost memory surfacing in my body, I came sharply and unexpectedly, and I cried out Alex’s name, pressing my fingers into his back. It was almost as if I was trying to convince myself of something.

  Three

  The next day started like every other day: a wail over the baby monitor, a blur of small people in pyjamas, the smell of Weetabix and a brightly coloured Tweenies video on the box. The difference was that this morning had the added bonus of the most brutal of all hangovers clobbering my senses.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ I moaned, trying not to barf as I poured Molly’s warm milk into a cup. I felt utterly shit. My guts churned alarmingly. My head was bound too tightly by my own hot skin. Embarrassing things I’d said the night before kept flashing up in my brain, making me cringe and shudder. Adult conversation? Ha! I was a pleb. I was a philistine. I was never going to be invited anywhere again.

  The weak February sun crept up into the sky, casting a faint light across the kitchen floor. The magnolia tree still shivered leaflessly outside in the garden. I pulled my dressing gown tighter around my waist and switched on the radio, skipping quickly through noisy pop stations to find one playing melancholy classical music, in the hope that it would soothe both children and me. Ahh. A dirgy piano piece. Perfect.

  I couldn’t help thinking about Julia and Mark’s kitchen, imagining it full of morning sunlight and silence, in contrast to ours. I’d carried some plates through there last night, ostensibly to help but really so I could have a good old nosey around it and torture myself with comparisons. It was, of course, stunning, with a flagged floor and real oak units. Hand-made, I guessed gloomily, eyeing up the clean lines and clutter-free worktops. And all those gadgets! There was so much chrome, it was like being in a hall of mirrors. (Actually, maybe being mirror-free was best, after all. Seeing fifteen reflections of pasty-faced moi this morning wasn’t going to do anybody any favours.)

  Our kitchen, by contrast, was what you might call cheap and cheerful – all IKEA and B&Q, with a few home-made things chucked into the mix. I looked at it critically through the squinty eyes of a hangover. The lightshade Alex had made looked great – all parchment and copper wire and undulating curves. He’d given it to me for my birthday, soon after we’d met. We had an antique pine dresser, and the shelves were high enough that all my Clarice Cliff crockery remained unsmashed, even if it was rather undusted. I had mosaicked a splashback at the sink – a Celtic, interweaving design in blue and cream. And the room did at least smell good, for once – of coffee and toast and the intoxicating perfume spilling out from the hyacinths on the windowsill.

  It was the small-children thing, really, that was what set us apart from the likes of Julia and Mark. The swirling finger-paintings on the fridge door, and the collages largely made up of pink tissue paper and glitter. The lone blue sock on the dresser along with several stray Tweenies jigsaw pieces, two white baby vests, some Playmobil men frozen in uncomfortable-looking contortions and a small wooden banana. Then there were the 30p coupons on the noticeboard, the unloaded washing machine with its red light winking like an accusing eye. And – oh, there was a new one – the small white plastic horse that was poking his nose over one pouch of the oven gloves, for some reason known only to Molly.

  My shoulders slumped. It was a bloody tip. I wasn’t just an embarrassing old lush; I was a slut on the cleaning front as well. I was a lazy, slovenly, unhygienic . . . Oh, bollocks to it. I didn’t even have the energy to think up the adjectives.

  We trailed back to the front room, where Fizz and Bella were still skipping around on the telly far too colourfully and loudly for my liking. Very obligingly, Nathan fell asleep in his baby chair within two minutes, and Molly crouched on the floor, half watching, half sorting out her dolls’ house. I lay on the sofa, soothed by the high-pitched trills from the TV. I’d just close my eyes, maybe catch a few minutes’ sleep . . .

  ‘Mummy, I sit with you. Mummy! Wake up!’

  Three hours later, Alex joined us. The skin on his face was sagging and his eyes were bloodshot. Dark stubble grazed his chin like a bruise. I poured him a coffee without asking, passed him the Nurofen and tried to prise Molly’s insistent body away from him without success.

  ‘Daddy read Mr Bear book, Daddy read Mr Bear book,’ she chanted, waving one of her library books at him. One corner of the plastic covering scratched a red line on his cheek and I winced on his behalf.

  ‘In a minute,’ Alex said feebly. Molly had wrapped both arms around his head and was clinging from it, shrieking like a two-foot banshee.

  ‘Gently, Molls,’ I told her, trying not to snigger at Alex’s face. ‘Daddy looks even more poorly than Mum. In fact, Daddy looks absolutely dog-rough.’

  ‘Yeah, because you’re looking so special yourself,’ Alex replied sarcastically. ‘With your greasy hair and that new spot on your chin.’

  I glared at him. Nathan chose that moment to grab a hank of hair and tug experimentally, as if testing its cleanliness for himself.

  ‘Mummy got geesey hair,’ Molly shouted. ‘Honk honk goosey gander . . .’

  ‘Greasy, not geesey,’ Alex said. ‘God, how much did we drink, Sade? Do you feel like this? You must do – you were really . . .’

  What?’ I put in, trying to unwind Nathan’s fingers from my hair. ‘I was really what?’

  He looked taken aback at the fierceness of my voice. ‘Really . . . er . . . talkative. And entertaining.’

  My shoulders slumped. ‘I was a nightmare, wasn’t I?’

  ‘No! You . . .’

  I didn’t want to think about it. ‘I’m going for a bath,’ I told him. ‘Here’s our son. Your turn to look after them for a bit.’

  I ran upstairs before he could complain, as I knew he would. I felt slightly mean, leaving him to it when he so obviously felt terrible, but then I remembered just exactly how god-awful I felt, actually, and the fact that I’d been up for hours already, and . . .

  I sat on the edge of the bath and tried to stop the flood of complaints that were streaming through my mind. Sometimes, I hated the way that the children had turned us into completely different people. Overnight, it seemed, we’d transformed from being adults with careers and social lives into these knackered, shambling grown-ups with . . . whisper it . . . responsibilities.

  Once upon a time, Alex and I had had such a romantic relationship. We snogged in public. We held hands when we walked down the street and swung them, like kids. He took me to Florence, I took him to Las Vegas. We had all-day breakfasts in bed with the Sunday papers and Alex’s marmalade-coloured cat. We said witty, flirty things to each other and had sex in outrageous places. He made me blush. I made him horny. We discussed for hours how gorgeous we both were, and how great our lives were going to be, and made idyllic roses-round-the-door plans for our wonderful, romantic future.

  How come, then, we’d ended up like this?

  I turned on the hot tap and poured in my most expensive bubble bath, a present from my older sister, courtesy of her husband’s gold Amex card, no doubt. It was so bloody hard, this parenting thing. It went on and on being hard, that was the worst part. You couldn’t phone in sick and have a day off on the sofa watching crap daytime television if you fancied it. No holiday pay, no sick pay, no praise or promotions, no one letting you go early on a Friday because you’d worked so hard all week . . .

  Alex appeared at the door, Nathan tucked under one arm. For a second, I thought he was going to ask me to have him in the bath with me, and my eyebrows were just seizing into a frown, mouth pursing into an automatic ‘no’, when he passed over the phone instead. ‘For you. It’s Becca.’

  I looked at my watch in surprise. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. ‘What are you doing up so early?’ I asked her. Normally she didn’t crawl out of her pit until at least midday at the weekend – I should know, she’d bollocked me enough times for calling at earlier hours before now.

  ‘I haven’t been to bed yet,’ she said. ‘Just about to. I had to tell you
about my school reunion night though – it was completely mental. You’ll never guess who was there.’

  ‘Your what? School reunion? Who?’ I wiggled my pyjama bottoms and knickers off with one hand, started unbuttoning my pyjama top.

  She laughed. ‘Only Gary Taylor. Gorgeous Gary from Mrs Baker’s form! Remember? My first love?’

  I dredged through my memory and vaguely recalled the wistful look in Becca’s eyes as she’d told me about him, and the dodgy photos of a skinny fifteen-year-old with a Clash T-shirt. ‘Wow. What was he like?’

  ‘He was old,’ she wailed. I could hear her suck on a cigarette, as if the disappointment was hitting her all over again. ‘Well, obviously not that old, he’s the same age as me. But my God, you wouldn’t notice him in the street. He was just . . . like someone’s dad. Well, he is someone’s dad. Four kids!’ She sounded half-regretful, half-relieved at the thought. ‘Beer belly, terrible shoes, bad hair. Cartoon socks! And he wore a jumper to the nightclub – I mean . . . Need I say more? Still, he was loaded, though. Went on and on about golf. Drove an Audi, he said. Big house in Hampstead, blah blah.’

  ‘It could have been you, Bec,’ I said, as I stepped into the bath. I was joking but there was a tinge of sadness in her reply.

  ‘It could, couldn’t it? Mrs Gary Taylor, with my four kids and Land Rover.’

  ‘Thank your lucky stars it isn’t,’ I told her firmly. ‘So how did this school reunion come about, anyway? How did you all get in touch?’

  ‘Through Friends Reunited. Sukie Clarke organized it – although she was Swotty Susan when I knew her.’ She gave a long, stretching yawn. ‘God, I’d better go to bed. Just wanted to say hello anyway cos I’m going to crash out for the rest of the day now. Are we still meeting up on Wednesday night?’

  ‘Yeah. Cat’s going to come, too, I think. Night night. Sweet dreams of Gary,’ I said.

  I put the phone down carefully on the floor, trying to keep it out of splashing range. A school reunion – how weird that would be. All those people I hadn’t thought about for so many years – what were they up to now? I could still remember the start of our class register all the way through comprehensive school: Jane Bilbie, Alison Bradbury, Robert Butts, Michael Castledine . . . And Danny Cooper – what would he be doing?

  Danny Cooper. Now there was a name. If Gary Taylor was the one who did it for Becca, Danny Cooper was my very own fifth-form dynamite. He was so cool, and oh, just so-o-o gorgeous. He’d been a fan of The Jam, like me, and one week we’d both come to school with matching Jam logos painted on our school bags. It was definitely fate.

  Of course, we got talking – shyly, first of all, about our favourite songs (mine: ‘That’s Entertainment’, his: ‘Going Underground’) and what we were each taking for our O levels, but before long, we moved on to more interesting subjects. We talked about the Falklands War and Thatcher and about how cool Tony Benn was, about our favourite books (mine: Catcher in the Rye, his: On the Road), about my sisters and his stepdad. We got into the habit of walking to school together because he lived two roads away from me. All of a sudden, we were best friends. We were the centre of each other’s universe, the most fascinating people alive.

  And then, at the school Christmas disco, we were dancing to New Order and he kissed me.

  I rubbed the soap between my hands, remembering. Danny Cooper! We had been so in love it hurt. All the way through sixth form we were inseparable. We bought matching eternity rings from Greenwich Market, and I practised signing ‘Mrs Sadie Cooper’ all over my exercise books. And then one day – one dank November day that smelled of wet leaves and new gloves – we bunked off school and did it, right there and then, in my mum and dad’s bed. It wasn’t the greatest introduction to sex, what with having to keep half an ear out for my younger sister Cat skiving off (Lizzie, the eldest, never would have done – she never crossed my mind), or worrying about my parents just happening to pop back from work to get something. And the guilt of smelling my mum’s lily-of-the-valley cologne on the pillows, and the horror of thinking, this is what they must have done to make the three of us, and trying not to think about that.

  And his concerned face, asking if it had been OK, and telling me how lovely I was . . .

  And stuffing the wet sheet in the washing machine and hoping nobody would notice . . .

  It hadn’t been OK – it had been painful and weird, him lying on top of me, being inside me – but that didn’t matter. I loved him even more when I’d seen the fierce ecstasy on his face as he came. I wasn’t a virgin any more, anyway. I’d done it. That was something to feel smug about when we sneaked back into school later that afternoon. All the way through my double French lesson, I felt wicked and dirty and grown-up and proud.

  Things went on and the sex got much better, thankfully. I was part of a couple, smug and safe and explosively happy.

  Then he had dumped me.

  I scrubbed between my toes, remembering. It had been a languorously hot day in the post-A-level summer and I was desperately trying to bake myself brown in our square-lawned back garden, when he turned up at my house and told me it was all over. He’d got a place at Manchester University, whereas I was going to Brighton. He didn’t want to have any ties. He wanted a clean break.

  It had tipped my life upside down.

  I squeezed my eyes shut in the bath. I could still feel the devastating horror of his words. The smell of sun-tan cream, sweet and oily, catching in the back of my throat, my abandoned magazine flapping on the sun lounger in a sudden breeze; every detail had crystallized in my memory. I had heard each solemn, halting word, but I wasn’t able to comprehend, to take on board the idea that he didn’t want me any more. Surely he didn’t mean . . .? Surely he wasn’t saying . . .?

  I had watched him walk out of my life, the sun dazzling me, and had pulled down my sunglasses with shaking fingers as the tears came skidding over my greased face. There I stood, a small ponytailed figure in a pink halter-neck bikini, with the world crashing in around my sunburned shoulders. The tears had dripped off my chin onto my bare feet.

  I touched my face. Even now, I could still remember his teenage fingers on my skin. I could see his soft brown eyes, his longish hair that curled so cutely at the back of his neck.

  Danny Cooper. What the hell would he be doing these days?

  A loud crash from downstairs shoved Danny to one side in an instant. There was an ear-splitting wail from Molly seconds later, followed by sobs. Oh Christ. I got out of the bath and leaned out of the door, dripping and naked. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She fell off the table,’ Alex called up. ‘All right, love, come here.’

  She fell off the table? What the fuck was she doing on the table?

  ‘I want bump cream!’ I heard Molly crying. ‘BUMP CREAM, DADDY!’

  ‘She means the arnica cream,’ I yelled. ‘Drawer next to the sink.’ I dried myself hurriedly. What was Alex thinking, letting her go up on the table anyway? For God’s sake, I couldn’t leave him for five minutes without something happening. I just knew he must have been checking the teams for today’s football match on teletext, or something. Something completely un-child-related anyway. Why couldn’t he just entertain them for a bit so that I could have a break? Was it really too much to ask?

  ‘Let’s see if this homeopathic nonsense can work its placebo magic on you, eh?’ I heard him saying to Molly. He always spoke to her as if she was fifteen, rather than two and a half.

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly gulped, her sobs slowing down and finally stopping.

  Crisis over. I looked at my bubbly sanctuary regretfully. The moment was gone, punctured with a single cry. I untied my hair from its tight hairband, and a handful of shining dead strands fell out through my fingers, as usual. This had to be what it was like to go bald for a man, this post-natal hair loss thing. Like traitorous lovers stealing away in the night, my hair was deserting me too, slipping out silently to rest on my pillowcase, clog up the plugholes or sprawl across the carpets.
At this rate, I’d have less of the stuff than my baldy five-month-old boy, whose first blond wisps were just tufting out of his scalp.

  I looked in the mirror and sighed. The cruelty of the female body is relentless: after the heroic exertion of pregnancy and childbirth, you might expect some relief, but no. Forget it, sweetie! The reward for continuing the human race was nothing more than a roadmap of purple stretchmarks charting the expansion of a formerly bikini-worthy belly, and aching, hot breasts pumped up to bursting point with milk. And then, just as you thought you could rightfully reclaim your body, the hair thing. Mother Nature sure knew how to kick a gal when she was down.

  I slapped on some moisturizer, trying not to look too closely at the disturbing wrinkle thing that was going on under each eye, and brushed my teeth hurriedly. I put on underwear – matching, for once – pulled on some old jeans and grabbed a jumper. I wondered what Danny Cooper would say about me now, if he saw me at a school reunion. Would I have been relegated to middle-aged minger status, like the luckless Gary Taylor, or would he still be able to see some last traces of the seventeen-year-old Sadie in my face? My green eyes and dark lashes and snub nose were all still the same. My lips looked a bit thinner and paler than they had once been, admittedly. Teeth weren’t bad. All still there, at any rate. It was my tired, aged, sleep-deprived skin that really let the side down . . .

  ‘WAAAAAHHHH!’

  And there was Nathan, bellowing for his next feed. Time to return to the front line.

  Danny Cooper was forgotten about for a few hours while both children were fed and put down for naps, and then Alex and I sat down with sandwiches and coffees and crackling newspapers in a rare oasis of calm.