The Yummy Mummy (17 page)

“Luigi! Baby!” Alice wraps herself around Luigi like a bendy hair roller. They smother each other in kisses.

Luigi is a fiftysomething in cowboy boots, leather trousers, and an open suit jacket, flashing a fuchsia silk lining and lipo belly. His black (dyed) hair poufs above his forehead like a wave about to break, trickling into a ponytail at the back.

“This is my friend Amy. The one I wanted you to meet.”

“Oh, niceshhhh to meet you, Amy,” says Luigi, looking vaguely disappointed. “You gonna stay, Alice?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. Got to pick up Alfie from his celebrity playdate.”

“Networking already?”

“Ah, get away!” Alice laughs.

I wish desperately that Alice would stay. The thought of having to make small talk with Luigi for hours is excruciating.

Another cappuccino and three glossies later (I’m kept waiting; as soon as Alice left, my stock fell), I’m finally ensconced in a swiveling leather chair, Luigi foiling up my hair. The small talk I feared hasn’t materialized. Luigi is saving his voice for more important customers. And I am desperate for the loo, made worse by my view of the salon’s centerpiece, a sheet of shimmering water tumbling onto a pile of white stones. But it seems the master cannot be interrupted mid-flow because when I mention the loo he ignores me as if I’ve mentioned something unspeakable, like vaginal dryness.

“How do ya know Alice?” he asks eventually, breaking his metallic crunch-and-fold rhythm.

I swivel my head round to face him. But he continues addressing my reflection in the teak-framed mirror. I forgot about the hairdresser-client refractive relationship. Discombobulating, I think suddenly. Josh’s smile, his Bowie teeth flashing again.

“Babies. Similar ages, hers a bit older.”

“Okaaay. Divine girl. If I were the marrying kind, she’d be mine by now. Just wish she’d pick a nice man, though. Every time I see her there’s another d-r-a-m-a,” Luigi whines. “Alice comes in here and she’s like, ‘Luigi honey, Tom’s so sweet.’ Ten weeks later, it’s like, ‘Tom’s an arse. Andreas is just a darling. . . . I think he might be the one.’ And so on. If she could just find a man that outlasted her roots I’d be happy.”

This smarts. Why doesn’t Alice talk about men with me? There are whole compartments of Alice I never knew existed, which are walk-in to everyone else.

“Who’s the latest?” I sleuth.

“Sheeete, what was his name?” Luigi rubs his belly. “John? No. Jeff? No, God, I don’t know. But you should. Sounds like you ladies talk about everything. Enough to make a man blush. Now, sweetie, you’re done.”

My head looks like a scrap yard.

“Tortoiseshell gold. Divine.” He pats the crunchy folds of his work. “Tracy!” he shrieks. “Where
is
Tracy?”

The doleful Tracy appears and attempts to install me under a helmet heater. No. I leap up. I
have
to go to the loo.

“Just down there on the left,” monotones Tracy, nail-bitten finger pointing vaguely.

I finally find the loo in the maze of mirrors and basins and swiveling chairs. And it is the most beautiful loo I have ever seen, gleaming white marble, rows of orchids, individual soft towels. I’m moved, almost to tears, by its beauty. It’s been so long, a different life, since I stepped into this kind of candle-scented world of pampering.

I fight through my overall, squat, and pee. Check myself in the mirror. I look washed out against the silver of my highlight wraps. Pale lilac butterflies have settled under my eyes. I pull my overall ribbons to tie the waist. Wet. They are wet. I sniff them: pee. Oh God! I have peed on my overall ribbons! The shame! I try to run them under the tap but the stainless steel proboscis is so minimalist I can’t figure out how it works. I push and pull it in different directions and no water seems to come out. Then finally, like the door, it gives in suddenly and easily, water spurting loudly, splashing my overall. I could have spilt a glass of water, I tell myself, walking out, fast and flustered, into the halogen sparkle of the salon.

“Ooops,” says Tracy, eyeing my overall and pushing me under the heater with the briskness of a negligent care worker. She clicks some switches and wanders off. I sit there for forty-five minutes, head hot with highlights and images of Josh’s feet and thinking how wonderful it is not to be dealing with the poos and possets of a small baby and trying not to think of the cost, which looks like it might amount, shamefully, to the same figure as Evie’s recently received government baby bond.

Foil removed, Luigi appears. “Gor . . . geous,” he drawls, clinking his cowboy boot toe against the chrome chair leg. “You love it?”

If I didn’t I wouldn’t dare say so. But I do. For the first time in years my hair doesn’t look like it needs a wash. I am a different color. I am a blonde. Not mousy. Not green-tinged. I am a real-life honey-blonde! It does make a difference. Alice was right. Project Amy is working! I am getting there. My reflected self breaks into a sunshine smile.

“You look happy,” says a woman’s voice behind me without introduction. “I’m Mia.” A tiny woman with red corkscrew curls tugs at my hair with marmoset hands. “You’re a bit wet.”

“Spilt water.”

“Funny smell. Must be the peroxide.”

Unexpectedly, I am not crucified by this observation. My new blond hair has emboldened a little of a new self, the kind of self that would think, Never confess, never apologize.

“Must be,” I say.

Mia lifts up a shaft of hair with a comb, different lengths and feathery split ends haloed by the light.

“Dear me. Who last cut it?”

Oh, what the hell. Deep breath. “My mother.”

Twenty

JOSH LOVES MY HAIR. HE BENT OVER MY BLUE MAT YESTERDAY
evening and, breath fragrant with roasted pumpkin seeds, whispered, “Your hair is stunning. I adore your new hair.” I blushed from my ears to my toes and my rolling-like-a-ball went skew-whiff.

Joe doesn’t love it. “Not really, Amy, no,” he says, leaning against the white penguin-enclosure wall.

Evie fell asleep within ten minutes of arriving at Regent’s Park Zoo. Real animals don’t match up to her
Baby Einstein
DVDs. But Joe and I are persevering in order to justify the extortionate ticket price.

“Everyone else likes it.”

“Okay, it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, other than now you have presumably enrolled in the hairdresser-every-month club. It’ll be like a second mortgage.”

“You’re a misery,” I spit, looking anywhere but at him.

“Amy, your hair was fine
before
. Especially when brushed. Why do you have to change everything?”

“Brushed! You sound like my mother. And what do you mean by ‘everything’?”

He ignores me and points at Evie. “Shall I wake her up? She’ll enjoy this lot.” The penguins shuffle and huddle like toddlers.

“What am I changing, Joe?” I pick at this one, not because I particularly want it to go anywhere, but because it’s a shitty cloudy day and he’s pissing me off and I had a terrible night’s sleep and we’re obviously standing downwind of an elephant turd and I’ve never had a rapport with creatures that live on ice floes. Besides, the bench, the ponds, the boating lake, the kiss, the betrayal, the hurt, lie just northwest from where we’re standing, on the other side of the park. Too close for comfort.

“Little things. I just get the sense that you feel you aren’t good enough, that we aren’t good enough, and that the solutions lie in changing your hair and getting skinny again, which is kind of shallow.”

“So I am fat now. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Argh.” Joe puts his hands to his face. “There you go again. It’s this fucking Alice, isn’t it? Putting these ridiculous ideas into your head.”

“What has Alice got to do with it?”

We both instinctively stamp away from the penguin enclosure, fueled by adrenaline, needing to exert ourselves in some direction other than inward. We follow a painted green zoo arrow trail along a Tarmac path and it strikes me that I’m just as trapped as any of these animals, but trapped by responsibilities rather than sheets of glass.

A camel sits just on the other side of the fence, legs bent beneath him at odd broken angles, calloused knees. He chews a mouthful of grain with an air of captive disappointment, like a diner at an overrated restaurant.

“Fucking miserable creatures, aren’t they?” says Joe.

“He’s trapped in a zoo. You’d be miserable, too.”

“Depends if he was born here. If he was he won’t be fantasizing about sand dunes.”

“Bet he is.” Even a camel must suspect there is more to life.

“If all you’ve known is a zoo then you’d be happy in your zoo. You wouldn’t know any difference. You’d accept the boundaries without questioning. It’s only when we throw ourselves against them that they hurt.” He shoots me a poignant I’m-not-talking-about-camels look. “And if the camel escapes, what’s he going to find? Another zoo if he’s lucky. The lion’s cage if he’s not.”

We leave the grumpy camel dreaming of sand dunes and continue along the trail, peering behind fences and glass walls for signs of life. Happier, noisier families bustle past. I can see other mothers looking at us, thinking, “They’ve just had a row.” You can always tell.

“Typical. We come to the zoo and all the animals decide it’s time to go on Trappist retreat.”

Joe grabs my arm excitedly. “Look! Tigers!”

Less than five meters away is a tiger who looks through us as if she were surveying a horizon rather than a group of people huddled behind a curved Perspex riot-shield of wall.

“Look at that regal reserve, that coat, the eyeliner. She’s the Joan Collins of Regent’s Park,” grins Joe.

“But she shouldn’t be here. She should be free.” And suddenly I’m hit by the tiger’s incarceration and her dignity and I feel my eyes filling with tears.

“Do you remember the one we saw in India?” Joe says softly.

“Of course.”

How could I forget? Two years ago, our first holiday. We were precariously perched atop an elephant, and the tiger snarled at us from a rock no more than a meter away, so close I could see saliva foaming around her mouth. Blew me away. India was Joe’s idea. I was rather hoping for a dose of Delhi Belly to lose some weight. (As it happened, I suffered acute constipation.) And I had no idea that India would rattle my world. That I’d not care about flushing loos. That Joe’s navy eyes would flash sari-bright in the fierce Indian sun. That I’d have orgasms that would sweep through my body like a raging Ganges. That I’d fall dizzy in love. That I’d see a tiger from the back of an elephant. What happened to that intensity?

“I can’t bear to watch. It’s just so sad.”

“Protecting the species,” he mumbles.

“Please, let’s go.”

“You do look pretty today, and it’s not your hair,” he says suddenly.

“You can’t just patch it all up that easily.”

Joe rolls his eyes.

“Where were you last night?”

“Not this again. I told you, working late, a quick drink with Leo.”

“With your mobile turned off? What if I needed you? What if something had happened to Evie?”

“I turned it off in a meeting, forgot to put it on again. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, okay . . .” I shrug, distancing myself from him, from the potential for hurt. “Evie’s stirring. Let’s go.”

We walk the green arrows in silence, following them uphill past the vultures, the parrots, the baboons, before stopping opposite a gorilla cage, as good a spot for her to wake up as any. There is only one gorilla out of his shack, muscles pulsing beneath his dark brown coat.

“Why is what I say not enough?” Joe demands suddenly. The gorilla fixes him with intelligent brown eyes. “If I say you’re pretty you brush it off. If I say your hair is great it doesn’t count. But if Alice says it would look better dyed blue you’d do it. You don’t listen to me, everything you do is for other people.”

The gorilla gulps down a banana in much the same manner as Evie. But we’re dulled to its wonder by our own fight for survival.

“It’s not for other people, Joe. It’s for me. I didn’t think my hair was great before. I didn’t think anything about it and that’s the point. I’ve become numb to myself since having Evie. I want some . . . some vanity back.”

Joe exhales a huge sigh and leans against the thick pane of glass that protects gorilla and man from each other. Our relationship could use the same thing.

“Jesus, sometimes I wish I still smoked.”

“Look at the gorilla, he’s just behind you, sizing you up.”

Joe turns round and, startled at his proximity, steps back. Man and beast eye each other for a few moments, then the gorilla scratches his armpits and bounds forward confrontationally, fist-foot-fist, toward the glass. Joe bows his head and instinctively pulls the pram away. “Nope, I’m no silverback.”

Twenty-one

I THINK MY DIET HAS MORE IN COMMON WITH THAT OF the Hungry Caterpillar than the GI diet. I munch on fruit all week but by Saturday I’ve given in, snacking on cake and salami sausage and sweets. By Monday I’ve disciplined myself back to a nice green leaf. It’s working, I’m losing weight. I know this because my fat jeans are now baggy around the waist. A full night’s sleep couldn’t give me more pleasure.

I’m not there quite yet, still require a low-watt when I’m undressing, but seen by the Vaseline glow of my side light (cunningly draped with a pink silk scarf), I’m passable, improved. Of course there are bits that will be forever wrecked by my darling daughter: the lattice of stretch marks along my lower back, the flop of my bust, thickening where a waist used to be. I think these bits are permanent, like reckless tattoos. (I spent years going to the gym, treading and spinning, and it was pretty much all destroyed in nine months.) And I’d have to sleep for years to lighten the dark shadows beneath my eyes. Even on those days when she’s woken up only once or twice I look knackered. But I’m trying not to dwell on the tiredness anymore. Instead I’m learning to just get on with it, sometimes with limbs so heavy I could be wading through baby rice. Life can’t stop. Nor can Project Amy.

Where is that damn box? I have various boxes and dusty things on wheels below the bed, full of old clothes. I check Evie’s room.