M is for Mummy Read online

  Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Katy Cox, 2022

  The moral right of Katy Cox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 313 3

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 314 0

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 315 7

  Design and typesetting benstudios.co.uk

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For J-boy, Jimmy and Mr Belafonte.

  In the words of Michael Bublé,

  ‘You’re my everything.’

  Prologue

  It started with a fart. Not any ordinary fart, but a fart with purpose. A fart that was to change our lives forever.

  It was 6.30 a.m. and Ed had already left for work, as he had to be there early for hair and make-up. He was going to be playing live on Good Morning Britain, strumming his guitar behind Josh Groban, whilst I was stuck at home, cutting a banana into identical semicircles, hoping that they’d pass Stanley’s thorough inspection. But then came the fart, and with it came a gush of fluid which exploded all over the floor with the force of a burst water main.

  There was no time to process what had just happened because Stanley had already appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Excuse me, but where is W?’ he said as he walked in clutching a letter V in one hand and a Y in the other. ‘I need it. I need it. Need it. Need it,’ he chanted four times because he was four years old and, in his mind, every demand had to be made exactly four times.

  ‘Stan, Mummy is having a bit of a problem here. Can you wait a second?’

  But of course, he couldn’t.

  ‘Need! Need!’ he continued, the hysteria in his voice rapidly escalating. ‘Need! NEED!’

  There was little choice but to ransack the flat looking for the letter W to complete his treasured alphabet puzzle. So, whilst the floor became saturated with the birth waters of his unborn brother, I tore the living room apart and, eventually, I found it wedged between the sofa cushions. A crisis was thankfully averted.

  With Stanley entertained lining up his letters in the lounge, I threw a towel down on the wet kitchen floor, stuffed a pad in my pants and grabbed my phone to call Ed. As usual, he didn’t answer, so next on the ‘in case of emergency’ list was my best friend, Charlie.

  ‘Charls. It’s me. My waters have gone. Ed is at ITV and I’m alone here. Can you come?’

  A simple but shrill ‘Fuck’ flew out of her mouth and, after pausing briefly to collect herself, she said, ‘Okay. Let me just stick on a bra, cancel my gig and call in the cavalry. I’ll be over in ten.’

  ‘Haul ass!’ I said. ‘Promise you won’t faff about?’

  ‘I won’t! I won’t.’

  But she would, and she did.

  After checking that Stanley was still happily engrossed in his puzzle, I hurried to the bathroom to remove nine months’ worth of body hair in preparation for my impending showcase of nakedness. I hadn’t actually seen my fanny since conception and I was determined that, this time, she was going to look her best (unlike when I gave birth to Stanley and wound up in hospital with a seventies Disco Bush-ferno grooving out of my pants).

  Climbing carefully into the bath tub, I set to work with Ed’s razor in one hand and a magnifying mirror in the other, but it very quickly became too much. My back was on the verge of spasm, I had pins and needles in the most delicate of places and my contorted wrist felt like it was about to snap. So, after two minutes, I gave up.

  Au naturel would have to do.

  I heard the key in the lock at around 7 a.m. Charlie had arrived and was dashing down the hall calling out my name along with a mixture of colourful expletives. She threw open the bathroom door and found me totally naked, one leg up on the toilet seat, frantically spritzing every inch of my body with Marc Jacobs’s Daisy.

  ‘Luce!’ she gasped. ‘You okay? Sorry I took so lo—’ She paused abruptly and the panic in her tone instantly dispersed when she clocked the bottle in my hand. ‘Ooh, Marc Jacobs?’

  ‘It sure is, my friend.’ I winked. ‘It may not look that pretty down there, but at least it smells divine.’

  ‘Good call.’ She nodded in approval. ‘Hand it over, will you?’ She snatched the bottle out of my hand and gave her cleavage a healthy spritz whilst I reached for a towel to cover myself up.

  ‘Right, so, I’ve nailed it,’ she said. ‘Jen and Will are on their way. She’ll stay here with Stan, and Will and I are driving you to hospital. And don’t panic, I’ve already left several strongly worded messages on Ed’s voicemail telling him to meet us there.’

  ‘God, I love you, Charls,’ I gushed and threw my arms around her.

  ‘I know. I’m, like, fucking incredible.’ She patted me gently on the back of my head, then withdrew from my arms. ‘So, what now? Want me to rub your back or get you a shot of vodka or something?’

  ‘Zero rubbing required, pal. Or vodka for that matter.’

  She looked disappointed. ‘But doesn’t it hurt?’

  ‘Hardly at all – I’d say it’s only a two right now. But when it hits a ten and I’m begging to be put down, you’ve got to promise me that you’ll do whatever it takes to get me all of the drugs.’

  She flexed her muscles and planted both hands firmly on her hips. ‘That I can do, my friend.’

  I sent her in to the lounge to hang out with Stanley, then threw on some comfy clothes and called the hospital. I was expecting to be told to take a paracetamol and wait at home for two days to writhe around in agony on a yoga ball. But no.

  ‘Mrs Wright, if you’re thirty-six weeks then you’re not quite full term and must come in immediately to be examined,’ said the midwife with a tone of urgency.

  Anxiety levels were suddenly cranked up a few extra gears, but when I turned around and caught a glimpse of my hideous reflection in the bedroom mirror, all I could hear were my mother’s words: ‘You need a wee bit of lipstick there, love.’ Since my early teens, I’d been trained to apply a ‘wee bit of lipstick’ at all times – family parties, weddings, trips to the dentist and for routine smear tests – and in my mum’s mind, giving birth would certainly be an occasion that warranted a splash of colour across my lips. So, I dug out my make-up bag and got stuck in just to make her proud.

  As I was smearing an extra thick layer of foundation across my cheeks, Stan wandered into the room wearing nothing but his Thomas the Tank Engine slippers.

  ‘Excuse me. Excuse me.’

  ‘Stan, where are your pyjamas?’

  ‘But I want my shapes puzzle.’

  ‘It’s on the big table in the living room. Go and ask Auntie Charlie to find your pyjamas, please.’

  He stood totally still, staring at the floor, so I tried again in a way that I knew he would comprehend. ‘Stan. I need you to do f
our things. Number one, go to the living room; number two, ask Auntie Charlie to put on your pyjamas; number three, get your shapes puzzle off the big table; number four, play. Okay?’

  He nodded stiffly then left the room in silence.

  The buzzer sounded, marking the arrival of Jen and Will; the rest of the cavalry had arrived.

  ‘Whatever you do, Luce, do not give birth all over Will’s new car,’ Charlie called out from the other end of the flat. ‘He’s only had it a few days and Jen said he’s really precious about it.’

  Before I could respond, Jen came bounding up the stairs and into the bedroom with her arms fixed wide open and tears streaming down her cheeks. She pounced on me, nearly knocking me clean off my feet.

  ‘I can’t believe it, Lucy!’ she sobbed into my earlobe. ‘We’re going to have another baby!’

  In followed her boyfriend, Will, who hovered awkwardly in the doorway with his eyes glued to his phone.

  ‘All right, pull it together, Jen!’ said Charlie firmly as she pushed past him. ‘There’s no time for hysteria. And don’t you freak out either, Will. You can look – there are no heads hanging out just yet,’ she said reassuringly as she ushered him over to join in the group hug.

  Then, BOOM! I was smacked in the guts by an invisible cricket bat and dropped to the floor in agony. Just as I began to clamber up, another hideous blow came to the uterus, then came another: thick and fast, like being repeatedly pounded in the guts by a sledgehammer.

  ‘Ten! Charls, I’m a ten!’

  Sobbing followed, then the swearing: ugly words that I’d only ever heard spewing from the lips of Charlie when she’d overdone it on the Stella Artois.

  Stanley wandered into the room. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, oblivious to the fact that my insides were rupturing directly in front of his eyes.

  ‘Call me “Mummy”, Stan, not “excuse me” – Mummy. What. Is. Iiiiiit?’

  ‘Excuse me, Mummy. Excuse me, but did you know that a dodecahedron has twelve sides?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Go and put on your pyjam—’

  ‘A nonagon has nine sides …’ he continued as the tears rolled down my face and hit his slippers.

  ‘Fuck! Get the car, Will! She’s a ten!’ yelled Charlie frantically as she pulled me off the floor.

  Within minutes, I was mooing on the driveway on all fours like a heartbroken cow as Will screeched to a halt in his fourteen-year-old Fiat Panda. He emerged from a thick black cloud of exhaust fumes looking as proud as punch, then he promptly stuffed my suitcase in the boot. Using Charlie’s arm as a crutch, I pulled myself up and leant down to kiss Stanley, who was standing on the drive, still wearing nothing but his slippers.

  ‘Goodbye, my darling, I’ll be back home soon with your baby brother.’ I smiled. ‘Auntie Jen will take good care of you and Daddy will be back later.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, looking directly into my eyes for the first time in weeks.

  ‘Yes, my darling?’

  ‘But what does “fuck” mean?’

  1

  The Flabalanche

  My day starts the way that every other day has for the last six months: at 5.01 a.m. with Stanley’s foot wedged under my chin, Jack hysterical and demanding milk, and Ed snoring like a jackhammer smashing through tarmac. The man doesn’t flinch, even when in a moment of rage I push Stan’s foot away from my jugular, then lift Jack and press his screaming mouth up to Ed’s ear to jolt him into action. It’s his turn to feed him, after all.

  Ed wasn’t this useless when Stanley was born. I remember him being pretty crap to start with, but by the end of the first year, I’d transformed him into Mary Poppins with a penis – a Gary Poppins, if you will. Under my rigorous guidance, we tag-teamed the night feeds, passing Stanley back and forth through the night to each other like he was a baton in a relentless relay race. We shared the explosive nappy changes, spurred each other on through the milky vomit attacks and embraced the crippling exhaustion together.

  But now that Jack has come along, the novelty has totally worn off. Ed has developed a ‘been there, done that’ attitude, and since becoming busier at work, his enthusiasm for burping a baby in the middle of the night has waned significantly. This time around, he doesn’t hear Jack cry at all. A marching band of topless trombone-blowing models could parade through our bedroom and he probably still wouldn’t stir.

  When I can take no more, I attack him repeatedly with a feather pillow until he falls out of the bed onto all fours like a startled cat.

  ‘Okay. I’m up. I’m up!’

  ‘It’s your turn,’ I say, seething. ‘Take the baby. His bottle is there ready. I need to get Stan his breakfast.’

  ‘Just give me a sec,’ he says, before disappearing for one of his epic twenty-five-minute-long sessions on the toilet seat, as he does every single morning like clockwork.

  I am perhaps less patient with him than usual because today isn’t a regular day, but an important one: I am officially going back to work. Miguel, my agent, has been in touch with the offer of a gig and finally, for the first time since last July, I’ll get to leave the flat with just a cello on my back.

  A gig for Miguel is exactly the sort of gig that I need to gently ease me back in to playing the cello again. He exclusively books what we in the music industry call ‘background gigs’, which typically involve bashing out tunes to shitfaced business men at their fancy company dinners. Such gigs aren’t exactly artistically satisfying, but they’re an easy source of income for most musicians and they’re essential if you want to keep the bailiffs from breaking down your door.

  On a background gig, our job is solely to create a sophisticated ambience – to be seen, not heard. Easy-fecking-peasy! There will be no TV cameras zooming up my nostrils, no picky audiences, no brutal critics or fiendishly difficult music to prepare. And what’s more, I’ll probably squeeze a free glass of champers out of one of the waiters if I play my cards right. This particular gig will be a goodie because Charlie and Jen have been booked on violin. The ‘A Team’, as Miguel calls us, will be reunited at last and I simply cannot wait!

  These past few months, I have been cooped up inside with two small kids, wading through an endless tunnel of soiled babygros, mucus showers and 2 a.m. wake-up calls. This has been taxing enough, but I’ve also had to cope with Stanley’s explosions every time I serve him his dinner with my right hand and not my left. In short, I’m ready to get back out there and remind my fingers that they’re not just skilled in smearing Sudocrem on a tiny bumhole, but they are also capable of playing some Mozart in the dark corner of a chandelier-filled ballroom.

  The main concern that has kept me awake most of the night: I don’t have anything to wear. Two kids later and my formerly upstanding boobs now hang down over my belly button like a pair of deflated balloons, and my nipples are the size of helicopter landing pads.

  My gut is even more troubling. An avalanche of flab (a ‘flabalanche’, as I’ve christened it) has descended over the top of my high-waisted pants, the flimsy elastic straining under the force of it. After stuffing down a three-course Christmas dinner and an entire box of Celebrations last month, I ended up in tears when I caught sight of it smiling back at me in the bathroom mirror. All saggy and misshapen, my gut has developed a wicked grimace that strongly resembles the Grinch, only not green.

  In Miguel’s email, he stated in block capitals that we have to wear ‘SHORT BLACK DRESSES’ for this gig – a most unusual request, as full-length ballgowns are the norm for black-tie events. I’d banked on throwing on my trusty black maternity gown, but with that no longer being an option, I spend most of the morning wading through my wardrobe in a blind panic trying to find something suitable.

  ‘Ed, what does this look like?’ I say, twirling around in a tight jewelled dress that has been gathering dust in the wardrobe for the best part of three years since I last wore it. He is engrossed in an episode of Thunderbirds and doesn’t look up.

  ‘Ed!’ I snap. ‘I said, what does th
is dress look like?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean my dress! What does it look like?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘But do I look fat in it? Be honest.’

  ‘Um,’ he pauses, ‘a bit.’

  ‘No need to be so honest. Damn, taking a bullet to the heart would be less painful!’

  ‘What? You said be honest.’

  I sigh heavily, then squeeze my flabalanche into several more sparkly garments like some sort of amateur contortionist. Puffing, panting and fearing that I may have cracked a few ribs, I return to the lounge to seek his approval once again.

  ‘You looked the thinnest in that one,’ he says, pointing to an off-black beach dress that cost four pounds in Primark a few years earlier. It’s a casual cotton slip designed to go over a bikini and has clearly been tumble-dried over a hundred times, given that it’s greyish and has small fuzzy balls stuck all over it.

  ‘But that’s a beach dress. Is it posh enough?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But do I look nice in it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  All other options have been exhausted. I don’t have the patience to compete with Lady Penelope for his attention, so I chuck it in a bag along with my stilettos and devote the rest of the day to preparing to leave the flat.

  This solitary gig has caused me to lie awake several nights in a row in an anxious mess, thinking about everything that needs to be done before leaving the kids for just a few hours. I put Jack’s nappies, wipes and bum cream in a neat pile on the changing table. I lay out clean pyjamas for both of them, then sterilise bottles and dummies and type out Stan’s meticulous routine in bullet points so that it’s easy to follow. Then, most importantly, I double check that all the pieces to Stan’s new Russian alphabet puzzle are in place and put it safely on the kitchen counter so he can find it with ease. Only when all of this is done can I even consider setting foot out of the door.

  What has fuelled my anxiety the most about working tonight is the thought of leaving the boys with Ed’s mother, Judith, who is due at 5 p.m. From experience, I just know that I’ll get home from work and have to spend the whole night rocking Jack back to sleep after the woman has ignored all of my instructions. It’s a definite that she won’t do what I’ve asked because she’ll be too busy rummaging through our cupboards, searching for more evidence to justify why her beloved son should never have married me.