Actually, I never watch that programme. The minute the theme music starts I have to switch over, because a feeling of crushing guilt comes over me even though I know that I don’t own a balaclava and I was nowhere near the Kensington Post Office three weeks ago last Thursday at 10.24 a.m.
Still, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was bugging me. It was just another normal Monday morning. And up until that point, everything had been pretty much uneventful. My husband, Mark, had risen at some ungodly hour, staggered to the bathroom, peed with his eyes still shut, shaved with one eye open, returned to our bedroom and dressed in the dark. Due to this well-practised regime, all his business clothes were of the same colour to avoid ritual humiliation and ridicule.
He tripped over his briefcase at the bottom of the stairs, before picking himself back up, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl and checking his reflection in the hall mirror. At that point, by some power of cosmic wonderment, his transformation was complete. Gone was the zombied, scruff-ball dosser who couldn’t even manage to pee in a stationary receptacle without leaving splash marks on the surrounding area; and in his place was Mark Barwick, corporate lawyer and all-round babe-magnet.
He then got into his flash sports car, flicked on the flash radio and set off on his mind-numbing commute from our Richmond semi to his flash office in a flash tower block in a flash area of London.
Of course, I’m assuming all of the above because it would take medical intervention and explosives to wake me at that time in the morning. But his routine hadn’t varied in the seven years we’d been together so I doubt that he somersaulted out of bed, had a quick espresso and a chocolate croissant then spent twenty minutes deciding which tie suitably expressed his mood that day.
And anyway, Mark only has one mood–stable. No ecstatic ups. No wrist-slitting lows. Just…stable. Which is a good thing. Great. Fantastic. How I love having a stable, dependable guy who is the perfect balance for my rather more changeable disposition. I do. And never, ever have I been tempted to call him a boring, predictable git. At least not out loud. Oh, okay, but only to my pals.
I took another bite of the Danish and realised that gnawing, restless feeling was still there. That ruled out hunger then. I ran through the other possibilities.
Kids. One deposited at preschool, and the other one had just started nursery that very week. Mac, the oldest at four, was in his third month of preschool and he loved it. Touch wood, I hadn’t yet been called up to the headmistress for a dressing-down, primarily, I suspected, because I’d endeavoured to keep him on the non-violent side of Power Rangers by telling him that cameras in the lampposts around the school allowed me to watch his every move via the internet. I’m sure the teachers must wonder why he keeps looking heavenwards and shouting, ‘I didn’t mean it, Mum, honest!’
Mac definitely has his mother’s genes. His vocabulary is starting to broaden now but they’ll be ice-skating in hell before it includes the word ‘stable’.
Mac’s little brother, however, is a whole different splash in the gene pool. When I was pregnant for the second time I told Mark that I wanted to name the new baby Big. I figured we were a shoo-in for a McDonald’s sponsorship deal. But in the end we settled for Benny, and he’s the cutest, most adorable little thing on earth. Not that I’m biased. But honestly, he should be doing the conga in a cowboy suit in a nappy advert.
Anyway, my kids were fine, so I crossed them off the ‘Why am I discontented today?’ questionnaire. They were wild, mad, crazy, and no doubt destined for borstal, but for now they were fine.
Maybe career? I find it difficult to discuss my career in isolation as it’s actually inextricably linked to my family background. You see, I am not, as appearances, birth certificates and DNA suggest, the daughter of a haughtily superior schoolteacher and a woefully inadequate finance salesman who shared every penny the family ever had with his pals Johnnie Walker and Jack Daniel’s. I am, actually, the secret love-child of Jackie Collins and Sidney Sheldon. I haven’t quite worked out how I managed to find my way to a Scottish maternity ward all those years ago, but I’m sure that Jackie had a good reason for giving me up for adoption. Maybe the Mafia were after her and she feared for my safety. Perhaps she didn’t want me to grow up spoiled and superficial and thought I’d become a more grounded, soulful person if my childhood was spent in an area of urban deprivation on the outskirts of Glasgow (in which case, Mom, I can assure you that it worked–I’m lovely, now please come and get me). Anyway, whatever the reason, for my whole life I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer, just like my real parents. I’d write a ton of salacious best sellers, go to live in LA, have a kidney-shaped swimming pool and do dirty things to brooding Italian studs.
Sadly, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. My first book, Nipple Alert, did pretty well for a debut. Fab! magazine even said it was a ‘riotous romp’. Okay, so they say that about everything with a pink cover, but it’s a start. My second book, Pre-Mental Syndrome, sold pretty well too. Not Marian-Keyes-oh-my-God-let’s-buy-a-Ferrari well, but it sold out its first and second print run. So I should be loaded, right? Wrong. Why did no one tell me that unless you sell ten gazillion books the dosh doesn’t trickle in until about 347 years after you’re dead?
So to keep the bank manager off my back and my secret credit card in the black, I write a pathetically pretentious weekly column on the joys of motherhood for Family Values magazine. Which should really be called OK Ya!, because it’s nothing but an upmarket, incredibly naff suck-up to upper-class and celebrity mothers. Excuse me, my gag reflex is trembling again. The magazine demands that it’s written from the perspective of the perfect mother, so to write it I need a massive stretch of imagination and a sick bag on hand for the really nauseating bits. But hey, I’m a mother with a Tonka-truck of bills so I’ll take the money and keep on churning out the gospel according to a mother that I’d want to kill if I ever met her.
Life hasn’t exactly turned out how I imagined, has it? Sunny Beverly Hills? Great career? Kidney-shaped pool? Italian studs? I got pissing-down Richmond, a ridiculous job, a puddle out the back door, and I suppose if Mark clutched a pizza and kept his mouth shut he might just pass for someone who once spent half an hour in a transit lounge in Rome.
I opened the back door and lit a Benson & Hedges. Filthy habit. I’m so glad I stopped doing it in public years ago. Far better to freeze one’s arse off in secret in the valiant pursuit of an iron lung than to acknowledge to your husband and children that you have the willpower of Pavarotti in Pizza Express.
I could hear music coming from next door. I use that term loosely. It sounded like the greatest hits from the Nepalese panpipe charts. Then I caught sight of two feet dangling upside-down in midair, through next-door’s kitchen window. There’s only one thing bloody worse than a neighbour who listens to Nepalese panpipe music, and that’s a neighbour who listens to Nepalese panpipe music while they’re doing yoga. How’s a girl supposed to enjoy toxic free-radicals and poisonous chemicals destroying her skin and clogging her lungs when the neighbour is spoiling the environment with spiritual music and invigorating exercise?
It shouldn’t be allowed. Especially when the neighbour is supposed to be your best friend. If she were any kind of pal she’d be out here with a sneaky Silk Cut and a Bakewell slice.
Friends. In the past I’d have waged my worldly goods on at least one of them having a situation that could be responsible for this gnawing feeling, but nope, nothing dramatic, disgraceful or worrying sprung to mind there either. Kate next door is nauseatingly happily married to an architect called Bruce, a nauseatingly great mother to a Walton-like brood, nauseatingly toned and together, and has a nauseatingly glam part-time job as a fashion stylist. Just as well I love her a nauseating amount really. Although, I do realise that it breaks the solemn code of friendship: thou shalt not have a friend that’s skinnier, smarter or more successful, as envy giveth thou frown lines and wrinkles.
Kate and