Sophie Hannah: The Wrong Mother

‘I’m outside, in the car,’ I tell him. ‘The kids are both asleep. Turn the news off and come and help.’

If I were Nick, I would be outraged to find myself on the receiving end of a command like this, but he is too good-humoured to take offence. When he appears at the front door, his dark curly hair is flat on one side, which I know means he has been lying on the couch since he got in from work. On my phone I can still hear Jon Snow.

I lower my window and say, ‘You forgot to put the phone down.’

‘Jesus, what happened to your face? And your dress? Sally, you’re covered in blood!’

That’s when I know I’m going to lie. If I tell the truth, Nick will know I’m worried. He’ll be worried too. There will be no chance of pretending it never happened.

‘Relax, I’m fine. I fell over in town and got a bit trampled, but it’s nothing serious. A few scrapes and bruises.’

‘A bit trampled? What, you mean people actually walked over you? You look a state. Are you sure you’re okay?’

I nod, grateful that it never occurs to Nick not to believe me. ‘Shit.’ He sounds even more concerned as his eyes move to the back seat of the car. ‘The kids. What shall we do?’

‘If we let them sleep, we could be sitting in the car till nine o’clock and then they’ll be up bouncing on the sofa cushions until midnight.’

‘If we wake them, they’ll be a nightmare,’ Nick points out.

I say nothing. I would rather have the nightmare now than at nine o’clock, but for once I don’t want to be the one to decide. One of the main differences between me and Nick is that he goes out of his way to put off anything unpleasant, whereas I would always prefer to get it over with. As he regularly points out, this means that I actively seek out the problems he sometimes gets to avoid altogether.

‘We could order a takeaway, bring a bottle of wine outside and eat in the car,’ Nick pleads. ‘It’s a warm night.’

‘You could,’ I correct him. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re married to someone who’s too old and knackered and grumpy to eat pizza in her car when there’s a perfectly good kitchen table within reach. And why only one bottle of wine?’

Nick grins. ‘I could bring two if that’d swing it.’

I shake my head: the party-pooper, the boring grown-up whose job description is to spoil everyone’s fun.

‘You want me to wake them up.’ Nick sighs. I open the car door and ease my wounded body out. ‘Jesus! Look at you!’ he shouts when he sees my knees.

I giggle. Somehow, his overreaction makes me feel better. ‘How did an alarmist like you ever get a job working in a hospital? ’ Nick is a radiographer. Presumably he would have been sacked by now if he made a habit of startling prone patients by shouting, ‘Jesus! I’ve never seen a tumour that size before.’

I open the boot and start to gather together the children’s many accessories while Nick makes his first tentative advance towards Zoe, gently urging her to wake up. I am a pessimist by nature, and guess that I have about twenty seconds to get through the front door and well away from the danger zone before the children detonate. I grab all the luggage and my house key (Nick has, of course, forgotten to put the door on the latch and it has swung closed), and head for shelter. I sprint up the path with nursery bags and blankets trailing in my wake, let myself in, and, gritting my teeth against the pain that I know will come when I try to bend and unbend my stinging knees, begin my ascent.

Number 12A Monk Barn Avenue has one extraordinary feature: it consists almost entirely of stairs. Oh, there’s a strip of hall, and a narrow stretch of landing, and if you’re really lucky you might stumble across the odd room, but basically what we bought was stairs in a good location. A location, crucially, that we knew would guarantee places at Monk Barn Primary School for Zoe and Jake.

Perversely, I already resent the school for making me move house, so it had better be good. Last year it was featured in a television documentary, the verdict of which was that there were three state primaries-Monk Barn, one in Guildford and one in Exeter-that were as good as any fee-paying prep school in the country. I’d have opted to pay, and stay in our old house, but Nick had a miserable time as a teenager at a very expensive public school, and refuses even to consider that sort of education for our children.

From our bathroom window there’s a good view of Monk Barn Primary’s playground. I was disappointed when I first saw it because it looked ordinary; I’d uprooted my family to be near this place-the least they could have done was carve some scholarly Latin texts into the concrete.

I wince as I drag my battered, stiffening body up the first stretch of stairs, past the downstairs loo, the bedroom that Zoe and Jake share, and the bathroom. The centrepiece of our flat is a large rectangular obstruction that looks as if it might have been sculpted by Rachel Whiteread. Inside this white-walled blockage is the house’s original staircase that now leads to flats 12B and 12C. It annoys me that there is a big box containing someone else’s stairs inside my home, one that eats up half the space and means I keep having to turn corners. When we first moved here, I kept leaping to my feet as I heard what sounded like a stampede of buffaloes on the landing. I soon realised it was the sound of our neighbours’ footsteps as they went in and out, that the thudding wasn’t coming from inside my new home-it only sounded as if it was.

As I limp past the kitchen, I hear screams from the road. The children are awake. Poor Nick; he would never suspect that I rushed inside to avoid having to deal with the mayhem I knew was coming. I turn another corner. Nick’s and my bedroom is a few steps up on the left. It is so small that, if I stood in the doorway and allowed myself to fall forward, I would land on the bed. The idea appeals to me, but I keep going until I get to the lounge, because that’s the only room that has a view of the street, and I want to check that Nick is holding his own against the combined forces of Zoe and Jake.

Tutting at the browning banana skin that perches like an octopus on the arm of the sofa, I walk over to the lounge window. Nick is on his knees on the pavement with a wailing Zoe tucked under one arm. Jake is lying in the road-in the gutter, to be precise-red in the face, screaming. Nick tries to scoop him up, fails, and nearly drops Zoe, who screams, ‘Dadd-ee! You nearly dropped m-ee!’ She has recently learned how to state the obvious and likes to get plenty of practice.

Our neighbours Fergus and Nancy choose this moment to pull up in their shiny red two-seater Mercedes. Roof down, of course. Fergus and Nancy own the whole of number 10 Monk Barn Avenue in its original form. When they pull up in their sports car after a hard day’s work, they can go straight inside, pour themselves a glass of wine and relax. Nick and I find this incredible.

I open the lounge window to let some air in, put the phone back in its holder, and turn off the TV. The best way to stop my wounded skin from stiffening is to keep moving-this is what I tell myself as I quickly repair the lounge: cushions back on the sofa, TV guide back on the coffee table, Nick’s jacket to the wardrobe, race down to the kitchen with the banana skin. If I ever leave Nick for another man, I’m going to make sure it’s someone tidy.

Back in the lounge-our only large room-I unpack the nursery bags, sorting things into the usual five piles: empty milk bottles and juice cups, dirty clothes, correspondence that needs attention, junk that can be binned, and artwork that must be admired. The children are still howling. I hear Nick trying, as tactfully as possible, to fend off Fergus and Nancy, who always want to stop for a chat. He says, ‘Sorry, I’d better…’ Jake’s yelping drowns out the rest of his words.