Michele Gorman - The Second Chance Café in Carlton Square

‘Wow, seventy-five years.’ Mum whistles. ‘What’s that in anniversaries? Diamond is sixty. Of course you couldn’t have been married so young!’

‘We’re not married now either,’ Carl says.

‘Carl is my brother-in-law,’ Elsie adds.

Which does make me wonder why they’re holding hands. ‘You’ll come back when we’re open, won’t you?’ I ask. ‘Maybe you’d like to sit in your old booth for a cup of tea.’

Where I’ll be able to winkle their story out of them. A café is the perfect business for a nosey person like me to run.

‘We’d like that, thank you,’ Carl says. ‘You’re keeping the booths, then? It would be nice for someone to take account of history around ’ere instead of tearing everything down to build flats.’

‘The booths are staying,’ I assure them.

Carl’s words stay with me after they leave. It would be a shame to strip the pub of its history if we don’t have to. Except for the carpet. The history of spilled pints and trodden-on fag ends will have to go.

‘Daniel’s out tonight,’ I tell Mum as we pull up the rest of the carpet together. Despite my promise to myself, the words are out before I can stop them.

She halts her ripping to glance at me. Her gingery bob has come loose from its hair tie and she keeps swiping it back behind her ears. She is pretty, though she doesn’t usually wear much make-up. Only when she’s doing things like trying to impress Daniel’s parents. Then she goes for full-on slap, even though my mother-in-law doesn’t bother with it herself.

‘And you hate him a bit, right?’ she asks.

Instinctively I want to deny it, even though I’ve just brought it up. ‘I’m trying not to, Mum, and I know you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t.’

But Mum shakes her head. ‘I was going to say that I understand. After you were born, when your father got to go out in his taxi every day, I wanted to puncture his tyres. I wanted to puncture him sometimes. He used to complain about how hard it was driving around all day. I would have bloody loved to trade places. Believe me, you ’aven’t got the monopoly on resentment.’

Resentment. Is that what I’ve got? ‘It’s just so hard,’ I say.

‘I know, love, but it gets easier when they’re in school.’

‘Nursery?’

‘University,’ she deadpans.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Mum understands. She and Dad didn’t wait long after their wedding to have me either. Everyone keeps telling us how lucky we are to be young parents. We’ve got more energy, they say. We’ll still be youngish when the children are grown. But what about the decades in between? At the moment, it looks like a long time between now and then.

Mum gathers me into a carpet-dust-filled hug. ‘It’s always harder than you think it’s going to be. Thank goodness I had your Gran and Auntie Rose. Your Granny Liddell was no help.’

‘Thank goodness I’ve got you and Dad and Auntie Rose now,’ I say.

Mum nods. ‘Your Dad’s a dark horse, isn’t he? He’s so much better with the twins than he ever was with you. He’s got more confidence now than he did then. He was terrified of making a mistake with you.’

‘Weren’t you terrified?’ I’m constantly worried that I’m doing it all wrong or that I’ll damage the twins somehow. I could be feeding them too much, or not enough, leaving them to get too hot or too cold, smothering them with cuddles or not paying them enough attention, pushing them to learn new things or being too laid back, letting their faces get too dirty or wiping them so much that they’ll end up with allergies. They might be underdressed or overstimulated, under-cuddled, over-coddled, disgruntled or disappointed. Just off the top of my head. I could give you another ten lists like that every single day.

‘Of course I was afraid to mess up,’ Mum says, ‘but I didn’t have a choice. You had to eat and be held and changed. If I didn’t do it, who would?’

That’s exactly how I feel. It’s not that Daniel can’t do it too. He’s just not as good at it as I am. And lately he’s seemed to leave more and more to me while he gets on with his life.

I always seem to have toddlers hanging off me when I try getting on with my life. Just try being glamorous with ladies who lunch when you’re saying, ‘Get that out of your mouth,’ every two minutes.

Not that I’ve ever been glamorous. And my friends aren’t ladies who lunch, but you see my point.

Today it’s my turn to host everyone at the house, so despite having had to shove most of the toys under the sofa and the unfolded laundry into the closet, I’ve got the easy part. Just try going anywhere with the twins. Trying to move a circus is less challenging.

‘Maybe if they didn’t act like they’d invented nuclear fusion every time they changed a nappy, I wouldn’t mind so much,’ my friend Melody says, talking about husbands as she shifts her child to her other breast. Speaking of having children hanging off you.

Melody and Samantha, Emerald and Garnet – four women who at first had no more in common with me than leaky boobs and sleepless nights – are the reason I’m holding on to my sanity. But when your world has shrunk to leaky boobs and sleepless nights, that can be enough.

We’re covering our usual ground – what we’ve done since we saw each other last week and who’s aggrieved about what – and, also as usual, I’ve got to keep my eyes glued to Melody’s face and away from her feeding daughter. Not because breastfeeding embarrasses me. Not at all. When I was breastfeeding my boobs came out anywhere the twins needed to feed, and we’re only in my house anyway. When they legislate against boys wearing their jeans so low that you can see their bollocks from the back, I’ll agree that we should be hiding feeding babies under tea towels and tablecloths to protect the public’s sensibilities.

It would be perfectly normal for Melody to feed her toddler, Joy. Which she does. She just happens to also like to feed her five-year-old, who’s not even sitting in her mother’s lap. She’s got her own chair. Her feet nearly touch the floor.

‘Because it’s such a huge favour to care for his own child,’ Samantha throws in.

I’m not the only one who thinks that nearly school-age children really ought to be drinking milk from cups. Samantha doesn’t bother trying to hide her eye roll. Melody doesn’t bother pretending to ignore it. Samantha won’t say anything with Melody’s daughter here, though. She may be one of the toughest women I’ve ever met, but she’s never cruel.

‘Well, that’s not really fair,’ Emerald points out, brushing a non-existent speck of something from her pristine top. Not that a crumb could have come from any of the food on the table. She never eats the buttery croissants or packets of biscuits that the rest of us scoff. ‘The men do work all day.’

I wince at her terrible choice of words. What is it that we’re doing all day – and night – if not working? But Garnet, Emerald’s sister, nods, adding, ‘My Michael works late into the night sometimes.’

‘Boo hoo,’ Samantha bites back.

‘Not to mention weekends.’ Emerald ignores Samantha’s dig at her sister. ‘Anthony’s a workhorse too.’

When Emerald and Garnet sit beside each other they look like someone has taken the same drawing and just coloured them in differently. Their eyes are almond shaped and they have identical long slender noses, angular faces and full lips. But Garnet’s got nearly black eyes and her thick straight shoulder-length hair is cut in a heavy blunt fringe and coloured a russet red. Emerald has the same haircut but her colour is even darker than mine – almost a true black – and her eyes are nearly black too. It’s very striking against her pale skin.