Page 21 of Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
‘To be honest, I’ve never seen you like this, Smeggers. You had your tits all up in Jeff’s face.’
‘Who the monkeys is Jeff?’
‘The bloke sat next to you.’
‘That was Jeron.’
He laughs and guides me over a manhole cover. ‘Mind yourself. Well, you made Jeff’s night. Quite rare to see you letting your hair down though.’
‘Are you calling me uptight?’
‘No.’
There’s a small period of awkwardness as I ponder what Stu implied. I like to go out and have a drink. I dance and stuff and know many people who’d say I’m good fun, people usually too drunk to know the difference but still. Stu is next-level fun which includes three-day benders, drugs and waking up in a field on the other side of the United Kingdom. But in the back of my mind, I wonder if it means motherhood and age have turned me into a shadow of my former self. I’d become a boring old hag who’d forgotten how to walk in heels. A tear forms in the corner of my eye.
‘We had that house party at the Embassy once. I made cocktails and climbed on the roof. That’s not uptight.’
‘You were good value that night.’
‘I’m still good value, right?’
I lose my footing. Stu puts me back in a vertical position but remains silent. I’m not deluded enough to know what I’m laying out in front of my brother-in-law here. Stu has just turned thirty, a slave to his wanderlust, bronzed and still vaguely handsome and interesting. I only have to catch my reflection in a shop window to see what I was putting out there: a woman in her late thirties, drowning in liquor, having squeezed her post-natal body into a dress a size too small, in black bobbly tights and her brown eyes racooned with mascara. This was not good value. This smacked of desperation, of very sad desperation. I pretend to smile knowing my value has slowly depreciated over the last ten years and it’s only now, on today of all days, that I’m slowly being shamed for it. I stand there for a moment too long.
‘Danny… you reckon Danny still thinks I’m good value?’
Stu looks confused now. I’m not sure if it’s from the repetition or my gentle swaying. He puts his arms out as if he might have to catch me.
‘I mean I know I’ve let myself go in some departments but I’m still a catch, right? You still think he fancies me?’
Stu doesn’t read into it. He takes it as being lumbered with the drunk one at the end of the evening; the one who’s delving into the emotionally lost and philosophical. Soon, she’ll be crying to herself, hyperventilating and saying no one loves her and he’ll have to feed her chips and water so she doesn’t choke on her own vomit when she passes out. Instead he wraps his arms around me, something he’s never really done before. I hug him back.
‘Let’s get you home, pisshead.’
We do make it home eventually, even though Stu has to piggyback me over some cobbles and there was a point where I thought I was going to throw up outside an Indian takeaway but instead let out the loudest drunken burp known to man. When we get to the house, the babysitter, Kayleigh, an eighteen-year-old from two doors down, opens the door.
‘Oh, Kayleigh… such a sweet girl…’ I hug her and hold her face in my hands. She is visibly scared and amused. ‘You know, I shouldn’t say these things but you are so pretty and just hold on tightly to that. Not that you’ll get ugly. I’m just saying the time goes so quickly. I used to have a belly button ring like you and I could just snap into a size 10 and I thought I could get away with it but then things go wrong and… gluten. Gluten was part of the problem and lack of sleep and eye cream.’ I take off my shoes and missile them towards the kitchen. ‘When I worked in magazines, they always told me about eye cream and I should have listened because I didn’t and now there’s all this loose skin around my eyes like a sad little puppy.’
I pull at the skin for demonstration purposes. Kayleigh nods and looks at me with that youthful disbelief a teen exhibits when an older person gives them advice; standing there like it’ll never happen to her. This doesn’t deter me. ‘And I know I shouldn’t say this but go out there and get some. Like, look after your vagina but have fun. Real fun. Don’t wait until you’re twenty-one to have your first orgasm. Play around down there, let men know what they need to do.’
Kayleigh looks horrified. I feel a pair of arms around me.
‘Right, Kayleigh. And that’s Mrs M done for tonight,’ interrupts Stu. I kiss Kayleigh’s hand, hoping she’s not one of them religious sorts who’s saving herself. Stu is literally having to separate us.
‘I’m not kidding, Stuart. She needs to know, she is of age.’
Stu de-coats me and takes my handbag, looking for my purse. ‘I’ll settle up here and you go upstairs and I’ll put you on a brew. Go on now before you scare this poor girl off sex for life.’
Kayleigh looks at me humoured but with a distinct look of pity. No, don’t do that Kayleigh. I’m just Mrs Morton, Meg from up the street! Don’t look at me like an old mare on the pasture who’s past her prime. Please. The eye cream thing is so important too.
I walk up the stairs like a sullen child, one step at a time as I hear Stu usher her into the kitchen and the click of the kettle as it hums into action. Bloody tea. They all think the world’s problems will be solved by tea. I get to the top of the landing and poke my head around the girls’ bedrooms, watching their bodies lain over pretty patchwork duvet covers, clutching at blankies. Eve, as normal, her mouth fully agape and hair in starburst patterns over the pillow, Magnum the cat nestled into her; Tess sleeps straight like she’s a princess waiting for a prince to come and awaken her; Polly crawls to the corner of her cot and nests there like a kitten. I stand over Tess for a while in her top bunk, watching her chest rise and fall. We found out we were pregnant with her when we were living in London. We’d been married for about a year and were no longer in the flat share but a rented maisonette in West London which we thought was a step up in the world but in reality it had a shower that was placed directly over the toilet. Danny sat with me in the loo when we did the test. It was neither planned nor a shock but the natural progression of things. When the second line appeared on the stick, he cried. He lifted me up off the floor; a rare moment of exuberance for Mr Morton, someone who was normally the straight man, not dour and unlikeable, but who never really broke through the emotional barrier unless really necessary. I liked how straightforward that made him, how it was easy to work him out. When he hugged me in that bathroom, the happiness felt purely sincere, it felt so very real. You were real, Tess. You are real. How could he have done this? To us, to you.
I stand in the middle of the girls’ room for a while, drenched in the glare of the street light outside and look about at all the other very real stuff in there: the little clothes, the creased books, the drawings, the McDonalds Happy Meal toys of which we own far too many, the shoebox full of mismatched hair ties. I then stumble out, stepping on a toy which makes it talk, scaring the crap out of me and I shush it with my finger. I go to the bathroom and turn on the light and shush that too. I then take a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Wow. Who the hell is that jagged up wench? I take off my dress and peel off my tights. They are the decent stomach flattening ones but as I roll them down, I feel my gut expand out of them and regain a capability to breathe fully that had been lacking before. I look in the mirror.
Nothing is more sobering than looking at yourself in your underwear under a fluorescent bathroom glow. My stomach looks like a collapsed cake. My thighs look like rolled pork joints. I poke at them to see if I can carve out a thigh gap. What is more worrying is that my pubes do not seem to be contained within my knickers. I remember when Tess was little and she called them my ‘spider legs’. Well, tonight the spiders look like they’re escaping en masse.
I can jump in the shower now and neaten up. I take off my knickers, grab my Venus, straddling the side of the bath. Baby shampoo, that’ll do. I lather up and shave and rinse off. Is that straight? Meh. Look at this Danny, I’ve done pits, legs and now lady garden. Does your new lady friend go to this much effort? I attempt to lever myself out, slip and fall on my arse. Ouch. But funny. I laugh. I hear footsteps on the stairs.
‘Are you alright in there?’ Oh, go away, Stu. I remember a time when he was so drunk in our shared flat that he fell down two flights of stairs and slept on the landing. I laugh and tell the heated towel rail to shush.
