Chapter 7

Joey looked disdainfully at the blue and white plant pot holder shaped like a clog. I’d dug it out from the back of a cupboard for his school bazaar’s tombola.
"Ashley’s mum does cakes, and cheese straws," he said accusingly.
He stood there, arms akimbo with a scowl on his face, then, wrinkling up his nose and pursing his lips, he gingerly picked up the offending object from the kitchen table. He examined it closely as if he were an expert from Sotheby’s, before discarding it with disgust.
"It’s rubbish."
It was difficult to disagree. The clog was crap. Nevertheless, I felt obliged to defend the wretched thing and my magnanimity and generosity in donating it to a good cause.
"It’s from Holland," I said defensively, as if this automatically increased its value. "Aunty Thelma bought it back full of tulip bulbs, from Delft."
Joey pondered on this piece of information thoughtfully and then announced, "It’s still rubbish. You say everything in aunty Thelma’s house is rubbish. You say she’s got a heart of gold but the style and taste of a chav."
Why, when I'm in a hole do I unwisely keep digging?
"Never," I exclaimed in an artificially high falsetto voice. "Aunty Thelma’s house reflects her personality, it’s, it’s original." I floundered, waving my arms vaguely in the air as if searching for inspiration, "and it’s full of, of...."
"Kitsch," interjected Joey.
I glared.
"You’ve said it lots of times," he reminded me. "And anyway, if all her stuff’s so nice and priceless, why are you giving it away?"
I stood there flummoxed. My shoulders sagged and I conceded defeat. ‘We could fill it with sweets," I implored. "And it wouldn’t take five minutes to make some flapjacks."
Sensing victory, Joey decided to push home his advantage to see if he could secure further strategic gains.
"Okay," he sniffed. And then, looking decidedly smug, he overplayed his hand.
"Maybe we could make a fancy dress costume as well. Ashley’s mum’s made him a hobbit’s outfit." He studied my impassive face. "It’s got papier mache feet and pointy ears."
I rubbed my hands wearily across my eyes, tired and red-rimmed from the copious weeping fit following my speed-dating cock-up.
"Ashley’s mum’s got a cleaner, a gardener, a husband, she doesn’t go out to work and she has all her ironing delivered in a van," I said in a voice laced with envy.
Then a thought suddenly struck me. "Anyway, how long have you known about this fancy dress costume lark, I can’t remember having a note about it from your teacher?"
Joey squirmed.
"It couldn’t by any chance be lurking about in the bottom of your school bag, could it?" I asked archly. "The temporal vortex where things just mysteriously disappear?"
"Whatever," he said, shrugging nonchalantly as he wandered over to the pantry.
"I suppose Ashley’s mum could rustle you up a fancy dress costume out of thin air," I said. I felt well peeved, trust me to be the only mother at the bazaar with a fancy dressless child.
"Bet," said Joey.
I felt the familiar wave of a grave sense of injustice overwhelm me. It reminded me that despite the fact that Ashley’s mum is a thoroughly decent, kind and inoffensive woman, I often wish that she were dead. At least three or four times a week in fact. Whatever feeble efforts I make at motherhood, Ashley’s mum always does it better. Heaps. I simply can’t compete. She is to me what an Olympic athlete is to a contestant running in a local marathon with the stamina of a truss-wearing octogenarian suffering from a hernia.
I followed Joey into the pantry and scanned the shelves for the necessary ingredients; "syrup, flour, sugar, salt, margarine, oats," I muttered as I grabbed stuff from the shelves and the fridge.
I passed Joey the ingredients as I found them, but it soon became obvious that there were no porridge oats.
"Oats, oats, please God let me find some oats," I muttered beseechingly. My search became more and more frenzied as it slowly dawned on me that I hadn’t got any.
My pantry is like my life, I thought, smiling bitterly at the cruel analogy, it’s an oats-free-zone.
"What’s so funny?" asked Joey.
"Life," I said.
"Does that mean I can’t take any flapjacks to the bazaar?"
His bottom lip began to wobble and his big blue eyes started to swim with ushered tears.
"Of course not ," I said with more hope than conviction
How odd that a child should sense the correlation between comedy and tragedy I thought as I smoothed back his hair from his forehead. "But, if you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, we are not going to make any flapjacks unless I drive like a bat out of hell to the shops in Downmarket. The problem is it would waste too much time driving around looking for a non-existent parking space."
Joey’s eyes widened in fear.
"Or," I said suddenly inspired, "you could pop round to aunty Thelma next door to see if she’s got any."
Joey was out of the door like a flash.
If anyone’s got a spare box of porridge oats floating about I thought, Thelma’s the most likely candidate, because despite the fact that she lives alone, her weekly shop is so huge it could be delivered in a skip. I’m sure she’s got a reinforced trolley reserved for her at the Co-op.
"You never know when you might get caught short," is a favourite aunty Thelma maxim. Any potential world crisis such as a war in the Middle East, or a radioactive leak from a nuclear power station, spurs her into buying industrial quantities of toilet rolls and bottled water, and the first flakes of snow acts as a trigger to fill her three freezers to bursting point. She’s got bottled runner beans going back to the 1970s.
"I lived through the war," she explained to me once. "We used to have to recycle our sanitary towels, scrub them clean with scraps of boiled soap. If the Germans had reached Ruddlesex my dear, we would have been totally unprepared. Mother wasn’t a planner."
The only drawback with Thelma’s food stash I remembered as I saw Joey running joyfully up the garden path with a packet of oats under his arm, is that everything’s usually well past its sell-by-date.
Joey burst into the kitchen bringing with him the scent of autumn and the chill of the dying year.
"I’ve got some Mum," he panted, "and aunty Thelma says she will be across soon to help."
I quickly grabbed the clog and shoved it under the sink before getting out the mixing bowl and scales. Joey blew a layer of dust off the top of the packet before handing it to me. I studied it carefully, only six weeks out of date, insignificant in the circumstances. Surely, any weevils or fungi bits will be incinerated in the oven. Anyway it was a balance between the negligible health risks and my sanity if I didn't get the blasted things made.
Soon the kitchen was a hive of frantic culinary activity with the ingredients being weighed and stirred while Flossie zoomed round hoovering up the crumbs from the floor, wagging her stubby tail with unashamed ecstasy. When aunty Thelma’s head popped round the door it was followed by a pile of folded cereal boxes, coloured paper and a bag of old plastic margarine boxes balanced precariously in her arms.
Within a couple of hours thirty-six delicious flapjacks lay resplendent on the kitchen table and, as if by magic, Joey was transformed into a cardboard pterodactyl complete with a mask and margarine pots slung round his arms like plastic vertebrae sporting magnificent glued-on wings.
"Nigh on thirty years teaching in a primary school comes in handy sometimes," said aunty Thelma as she surveyed her handiwork.
"You’re a star," I said as I kissed her, before rushing out the door laden down with two biscuit tins full of flapjacks.
"You’re bad," said Joey as he manoeuvred his wings into the car.
"What makes you say that?" I queried innocently as I pulled out of the drive.
"You’ve got aunty Thelma’s clog hidden in your bag."
I took a deep breath and frantically tried to think up a suitably impressive excuse but failed miserably.
"Do you think we should keep it then?" I asked him.
He shook his head so vigorously in affirmation that his wings rattled.
"Aunty Thelma’s kind and it would be rank to chuck it."
I felt truly chastened by the time we arrived at the school to queue with crowds of bored parents and excited children to get into the main hall. We were confronted with the familiar ragbag assortment of games and stalls selling recycled junk, while teas were being served against a backdrop of the school orchestra screeching like a cacophony of tom cats being castrated simultaneously.
Joey flapped around excitedly in his fancy dress costume begging for a ticket for the bran tub and a go on the rubber coconut shy.
I was suddenly overcome with a massive sense of ennui as the noise and an overwhelming smell of wax crayons and stale pee seeped into my brain. I handed over a fiver telling him to spend it wisely and then sank gratefully onto a hard wooden chair to enjoy a cup of tea and a bun.
As I watched him run over to Ashley to show off his fancy dress costume my mobile phone rang.
"Hi, it’s Mervin. We’ve got to talk."
My heart sank as I switched to automatic pilot as his plaintive drone bored into my brain like a pneumatic drill. He launched into an epic emotional saga charting my speed dating betrayal. I visualised him, a quivering mass of indignant bristly jelly and distinctively shuddered at the thought.
I gave a yawn as wide as the channel tunnel as I listened to the predictable self-indulgent rant I’d heard from so many men over the years; the palpable sexual chemistry between us thwarted only by my refusal to face up to my repressed sexual urges, how, if I’d only let go I could climb to untold heights of ecstasy and achieve shuddering multiple orgasms that would make my teeth rattle.
"I’m prepared to give you a second chance," he said, pausing for breath.
"I’ll let you know," I said as I turned the phone off and slung it in my bag with more force then was necessary. Dream on, I thought.
Mind if I sit here?" said a voice suddenly.
I turned to see Julia, Ashley’s mum had sat down next to me, her usually placid and perfectly made-up face drawn with school-bazaar-induced stress.
Feel free," I said grateful for a distraction from Mervin's drivel.
We chatted away about the humdrum issues that fixate parents, the iniquitous injustice of SATS, and the progress of the PTAto raise funds for basic school equipment. And then, in the middle of a conversation slagging off the naughtiness of other people’s children in an attempt to delude ourselves that our kids were perfect little angels, she suddenly dropped a bombshell of nuclear proportions."You know I envy you," she said.
"Me?" I squeaked with incredulity.
"Yes, Ashley’s always going on about you, how you’re such a fun mum, so trendy and with-it compared to me. All I hear is ‘Joey’s mum said this, or Joey’s mum said that.’ I feel really dowdy and inferior by comparison."
She look puzzled as I started to laugh and then helpfully thumped me on my back as bits of bun went down the wrong way as I doubled up with mirth.
"I bet you’ve secretly wished that I would disappear from the face of the planet," I said when I’d recovered my breath. I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes. She looked sheepish and blushed so I relieved her of her embarrassment and explained about my own seething jealousy at her apparent mythical status as ‘the perfect mum.’ We both realised we’d been ‘had’ and decided that the best thing to do was to play along with it.
"Mum’s the word," I said as we parted the best of friends.
I was positively jaunty as Joey and I drove home in the car despite the fact that he’d blown his fiver on the bran tub and accumulated a useless heap of tat worth about 50p.
But nothing could dispel Joey’s joy as he’d won the fancy dress competition, judged by the Downmarket mayor.
"She’d got a long chain made out of real gold," said a wide-eyed Joey to aunty Thelma, as he proudly showed off his winner’s badge.
"Did you get anything nice dear?" she said turning to me.
"She won a prize on the tombola," interjected Joey.
I held up an orange Gerbera plant for inspection and offered it to her.
"I’d like you to have it actually as a ‘thank you’ for bailing us out in our hour of need."
"I wouldn't dream of it my dear," she replied. "I don’t expect a present every time I give you a hand. I enjoy it."
Turning to Joey she asked if he could find a nice plant pot to put it in. Joey looked at me inscrutably. "We’ve got just the thing aunty," he said as he ran from the room. He returned triumphantly with the clog and placed it slap bang in the middle of the coffee table.
"Perfect," said aunty Thelma as she popped the plant inside. Just perfect."