The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy Read Online Free PDF Page B

sat for the picture, although to me it seems obvious that it is her. ‘If you don’t take it, Lucy, I will give it away,’ she said when she handed it over during a visit. It was then that I asked her whether she was in love with the man who painted it. After all, she got engaged to my husband’s father only a few months later, which I would describe as a classic rebound relationship. ‘If you imagine hard enough, you can love anyone, Lucy,’ she replied, looking at me intently.
    I go up the stairs barefoot, zigzagging from one side of a step up to another in a well-rehearsed manoeuvre to dodge loose floorboards that might give my presence away. In the bedroom, I avoid switching on the light and put out a hand, knowing that I will find the corner of the chest of drawers four paces into the room on the right-hand side. I carefully open the wardrobe door and hide the cigarettes I bought earlier in a pair of leather boots.
    I whisper soothing words to Tom when he mutters, ‘You’re back already,’ although it will soon be getting light outside. I listen to the radiators gurgling disapproval and forgive them their inability to heat the house properly.
    Then I edge into the bed using a technique of slow imperceptible movements, remaining absolutely still when I sense any reaction across the other side so that I don’t wake Tom. When I am close enough I put an arm across his chest, and lie there on my front, feeling his warmth, allowing sleep to come to me just at the moment that I want it most. Only a true insomniac or a mother with years of sleep deprivation under her belt knows the pleasure of that.
    There is no logical reason why a combination of lack of sleep and too much alcohol should add up to anything more than a day of mood swings and a tendency towards weepiness. Yet, somehow, it doesn’t happen that way. The following morning, I attend an assembly in the overheated gym to celebrate the new school year. Skittery Joe is always alarmed if he doesn’t spot my face in the crowd, so I forsake my own breakfast in order to get to school on time, to grab a good seat near the edge.
    ‘Somewhere mid-field on the wing, you mean,’ Joe says, looking up at me hopefully as we walk through the school gates. I know what is coming next.
    ‘Can we play Jens Lehmann when I come home?’ I try to explain to him that a school afternoon consists of cooking tea, clearing tea, making sure homework gets done, bath time, stories and bedtime and that it is a miracle that all this can be condensed into four hours already. Then relent when I see his little face start to scrunch up.
    ‘Shall we do cricket instead?’ I gently suggest. ‘I can be Shane Warne and you can be Freddie Flintoff. Just for ten minutes.’ He jumps in the air excitedly. It’s so easy to please a five-year-old.
    As Fred and I walk into the playground with my pushchair loaded up like a packhorse, I pause, as I always do, waiting for silent applause for once again having made it before the nine o’clock watershed. I see the busy headmistress greeting parents on the steps. ‘Congratulations, Mrs Sweeney,’ I imagine her saying. ‘Well done, not just for making it here this morning on only four hours sleep and a hangover, but also for bringing two fully fed boys in the correct uniform, and your toddler, still eating toast but nevertheless dressed and partially fed, two nut-free packed lunches, and one pair of named gym shoes. You and all those other mothers and some of those dads – although I know it’s the mothers that remember everything really – are true heroes.’ Although no one cheers I feel a strong sense of elation.
    Feeling the worse for wear, I long for early-morning anonymity but soon find myself flanked in the gym on one side by Yummy Mummy No. 1 and then unexpectedly on the other by Sexy Domesticated Dad. I try to work out whether there are other chairs that he could have sat in and note there are plenty of spaces elsewhere. My heart starts