LITMIR.BIZ

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out after a shower to ask me whether a spot on his back was a new addition.

      Now, I was working out how best to keep up my energy to read bedtime stories to our son on my own, while he spent the evening – I guessed – entwined with Alexa’s freakishly long, sickeningly smooth limbs. It was as though I had landed in someone else’s life.

      Thomas seemed to sense my strength was waning and was a little more compliant than normal as we dragged ourselves through the evening motions. I did not argue when he merely waved the toothbrush in the direction of his teeth, and he only protested for a minute when it was time to turn out the light.

      I snuggled down next to him and arranged his little body around the curve of my stomach. He buried his face in my hair, twisting some of it around his fingers. ‘Daddy home tomorrow?’

      I kissed his forehead hard. ‘I don’t think so, sweetheart. But I’ll think of something fun for us to do, promise.’

      He screwed up his face. I started to draw circles on his back with my finger, counting 187 of them before his breathing started to become slow and regular. I lay as still as I could, next to him, staring at the ceiling. Over the past two and a half years, I had watched him fall asleep so often I could always pinpoint the moment he finally nodded off. His body would give a little jerk and his breath deepened.

      I used to count to 100 of those breaths before I started to try to extricate myself from the bed, so there was no chance I would wake him on my run to freedom. This time I allowed myself to enjoy being cuddled up next to him. The world outside his bedroom door might have changed dramatically, but I would cling on to this little cocoon of familiarity for as long as I could.

       CHAPTER THREE

      How to make gloop

      What you’ll need:

       500g cornflour

       Water

       Food colouring

      In a decent-sized mixing bowl, mix your cornflour and water together in a ratio of one part water to two parts cornflour. When it’s reached the desired consistency, add your choice of food colouring. Perfect for adding splashes of colour to an otherwise perfect-condition white T-shirt. Never mind, though. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to keep up appearances. Worn-in is the new black, right?

      The next morning, Thomas woke as the first birds started singing. He slumped out of his bed and stomped down the hallway, dragging his duvet behind him. I pretended to be asleep, complete with a faux snore for effect, as he pushed my bedroom door open. He clambered under the duvet, warm from his bed, and started driving a toy truck up the side of my face.

      ‘Wake up, Mumma!’ he shouted and giggled when I started. ‘Are you stuck? Tow truck pull you out.’

      ‘Don’t you want to watch something on the iPad for a little while before we get up?’ I reached for it and waved it desperately. It had taken me hours to fall asleep, battling mental glamour shots of Stephen and Alexa interspersed with little short films of my weakest parenting and marriage moments.

      He shook his head and grabbed my hand, pulling me out from under the covers, towards the door. I reached for my bathrobe and tried to arrange it around my bump. The tie would not quite reach so I held it shut with one hand while he wrenched me along with the other. We stumbled out of my bedroom into the living room, where the first weak rays of sunlight were trying to push their way through the crack in the curtains. A steady rhythm of rain pelted the windows. I leant against the wall, willing my still-sleepy brain to catch up.

      ‘What do you want for breakfast, honey?’

      I could probably stretch my culinary skills to produce some toast and Marmite, and there might be a few crumbs of cereal left. I might even be able to find a banana somewhere in the back of the cupboard. I had not been to the supermarket in days.

      ‘Crackers.’ Thomas was firm.

      Thomas would live on crackers if he could. But not any kind of crackers – it had to be one brand, specific to one supermarket that always seemed to stock too few of the things. Sometimes I had to check back with them two or three days in a row before they had a packet on the shelves.

      ‘You’ll have something on the crackers, though, right? Peanut butter?’

      I tried to keep my voice light. Please say yes, I willed him. I needed to at least pretend his breakfast had contained more than just packaged, refined carbohydrates.

      ‘Just crackers,’ he said solemnly. ‘I sit here and eat them.’

      He strolled through to the dining room and pulled himself on to a chair at the table. He looked at me expectantly. I was too tired to try harder. Maybe serving nutritious breakfasts was the domain of people who were not suddenly single-parenting.

      ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’ He was fidgeting in his seat.

      ‘No thank you,’ he said primly, a cracker in each hand.

      He wriggled again.

      ‘Are you sure?’

      His eyes widened in alarm. ‘Toilet!’ He jumped from his seat and rushed for the door. There was a banging as he tried to get his pyjamas off and climb on to his step stool at the same time.

      He re-emerged a few minutes later, his pants discarded. I shrugged it off. He’d be getting dressed before long, anyway. While he ate his parent-incriminating breakfast, I packed his lunchbox for nursery with an array of relatively healthy snacks – carrot sticks, hummus, a couple of rice crackers, some fruit. I regarded it for a minute. I had better add a serving of yoghurt and a couple of plain biscuits so I could be sure that he would at least eat something during the day.

      Crackers demolished, Thomas bumbled off to my bedroom, dragging his fingers along the walls as he went.

      ‘Where are you off to?’ It was a half-hearted inquiry and I did not wait for a response. He soon started clattering and banging, pulling things down from the bedside table. I tried not to think about it – I had moved everything ‘dangerous’ to a shelf in my wardrobe that even I needed a step stool to reach. Somehow, I needed to get his bag packed, to find clothes for him and something clean and big enough for me to wear. Then I needed to put the dishwasher on, all before we had to leave the house at 8.30.

      I figured the worst that could happen would be that he wasted some of my Chanel hand cream – bought for me as a gift and which I was using so sparingly that it was into its second year. On a scale of The Worst Things To Happen, seeing that disappear would be pretty bad – old me might even have cried – but I could sacrifice it in the interests of making it out of the door.

      He appeared in the kitchen in front of me. It took me a second to realise what he had in his hand: a vibrator from my underwear drawer, the type that has a head that is attached to the main body of the contraption with a long wire. The batteries had long since gone flat.

      ‘A skipping rope!’ he shouted. ‘I found a skipping rope in your drawer!’

      My horror must have been apparent because he looked at me sideways and put it behind his back, scowling fiercely at my lunge to wrench it from his grasp. ‘Mine! I show Kaskia!’

      I could just imagine it. His teachers, one of whom was ‘Kaskia’, who, in fact, was a tiny German woman called Saskia, already seemed to think I was some sort of deviant because I occasionally arrived late to pick him up, usually in my faded activewear, and almost always forgot about their themed ‘wacky days’ – when he was meant to dress up as a superhero or paint his hair green. They would have a field day if he turned up with sex toys in his schoolbag.

      I would have to distract him with something else if I was to have a hope of getting it from him. ‘I’ll swap you an M&M for your skipping rope,’ I ventured, pushing half-empty boxes of crackers and muesli bars around in the cupboard as I tried to find them.

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