Page 1 of Such a Good Couple
CHAPTER 1
‘Are youstill bloody in there, Ollie?’
Clara stood jiggling on the small landing of her house and hammered on the toilet door while her children continued to play around her legs, oblivious to her plight.
‘Are you alive? Has something prolapsed? This wee issecondsaway from simply falling out of me.’
‘I’m coming,’ came Ollie’s completely unruffled reply. ‘I just want to be thorough.’
‘Shutup! No additional information,please.’
Clara bent over and squeezed her thighs together. When they weren’t feuding over the one and only toilet in the house, she and Ollie called this stance ‘assuming the position’. Now two of the boys, the older two she reckoned from squinting at them – she needed to put in her contacts – were using her legs as an obstacle around which to chase each other.
‘Get away,’ she hissed, inching a leg out to bat them off while continuing to clench every muscle in her body. Unfortunately the tiny movement of her leg was enough to compromise her, sending a tiny, depressing trickle of piss into the gusset of her knickers.
‘Have you packed my goggles?’ Ollie asked from the other side of the door. It was Wednesday the 2nd of July, and instead of them both being in work, they were getting ready to escape on holidays.
Ignoring him and still bent over with legs fused, Clarashuffled towards the top of the stairs. She needed a receptacle fast. Initially the three kids – the youngest had now joined – tried to come with her but she managed to shunt them in the other direction towards the two bedrooms.
‘Play. Up. There. You. Madzers,’ she muttered. ‘Mummy has to go and stoop to the lowest of the low.’
Her boys, ten-year-old Josh, six-year-old Tom and three-year-old Reggie, duly moved, though still scrapping and thumping each other.
‘I’ll just be a couple more minutes,’ Ollie announced airily from the loo.
Clara couldn’t even roll her eyes at this – she needed all her focus on not pissing herself. She quickly eased herself down the stairs and into the pokey little galley kitchen that was filled to bursting with dirty breakfast plates, lunch plates and snack plates. It was 3 p.m. She had less than forty minutes before they needed to leave for the airport.
Think about that in a minute, she thought, tearing through a cupboard looking for the big plastic bowl they used for popcorn and (weirdly) the occasional vomit – did every family have the vom-popcorn bowl? Was it just an Irish thing? Or athemthing?
She pulled it out, then paused.
‘You know what?’ she announced to Reggie, who had just ambled in. ‘This bowl has been through enough.’
Instead of the bowl, she grabbed the large pot they used for soup and Bolognese. And now urinating, apparently. She reefed her pants down to her knees and wedged the pot between her thighs. Unfortunately she hadn’t accounted for the power of her piss stream when calculating the proximity of the pot, and the backsplash of the piss immediately started to go everywhere.
‘What are you doing?’ Ollie arrived in time to witness the latest of Clara’s humiliations.
Life just seemed to be back-to-back indignities once youhad kids (though perhaps only if you were a person who had cavalierly ignored all advice to do the pelvic floor exercises).
‘Obviously, I’m pissing,’ Clara replied.
‘Badly, I see.’ Ollie leaned languidly against the doorframe to observe her. Immediately the toddler commenced scaling his body.
Clara laughed. ‘Shite off!’ She briskly dried her inner thighs with a tea towel and pulled up her knickers and leggings. ‘Now.’ She held up the pot. ‘Will we make soup?’
‘I’m just glad you didn’t use the vomit-popcorn bowl.’
‘Right.’ Clara put the kettle on, opened the back door and poured the pee directly down the drain outside. Next she grabbed the anti-bacterial spray and went back out to give the pot a liberal dousing.
‘Holy water would be better,’ Ollie called from inside, where the other two boys had found him and were dragging him to the ground for one of their customary wrestling sessions. He was so used to being under siege at all times that he could easily scroll his apps and send texts while they clambered all over him.
Clara was similarly unfazed by the violent affection of their kids. Each one had come out of her vadge madder than the last and Clara had pretty much been speaking at screaming pitch for nearly ten years now. They still never listened unless she said she was running them a bath. They were allergic to being cleaned so all she had to do was whisper ‘I’m running the bath’ and they would flee. Running a bath could buy her up to ten minutes of sitting in the loo basking in some lovely scrolling-on-my-phone alone time. If Ollie hadn’t beaten her in there first, of course.
‘Fuck me, we need another bathroom,’ she said aloud to no one in particular.
‘We need another house, one that actually fits us,’ Ollie piped up from the floor, just as a child’s foot got him in the jaw.
Clara flung the pot into the dishwasher and began chucking in other random items after it.
