Friday the 13th of March. Unlucky for some, dead boring for others. It was only Friday night but Frankie was bored already. She had absolutely nothing to do this weekend, and the novelty of the children being with Rob was beginning to wear off. She was fed up with having literally no one to play with.
She missed the children. The last couple of weekends they’d gone to Rob and his buy-to-let she’d stuck on a happy face but had had a little cry after the car had pulled away. She missed them. It was so quiet once they’d left the house. She was beginning to hate the weekends they weren’t with her.
They’d been gone about fifteen minutes; Rob had a day off and had picked them up at four. He was pretty chipper these days, she thought. There’d been no snarling recently, no barbed comments; he just picked the children up on a Friday and returned them on a Sunday, usually with a smile on his face. She didn’t get any complaining texts from him now, either.
She texted Imogen at work but got no reply. It was Friday. Frankie bet she was going out after work… There’d be a play, or a drink somewhere with those young girls in her office. Imogen still liked her nights out even though she wasn’t dating. Grace was also out tonight, at a Taekwondo class of all things! She’d told Frankie now she was single she wanted to take up some new hobbies and as Daniel already did it, Taekwondo was the poison of choice. It takes all sorts, thought Frankie. (‘Poison of choice’ were her words, not Grace’s.) It wasn’t something she fancied.
Bored, bored, bored. She felt at an utter loss. The weekend loomed before her dull and empty.
She lay on her bed and looked out the window at the sky. That cloud over there looked like a sausage dog. The one just above the telegraph pole resembled Boris Johnson’s hair. She heard a car pull up outside. She hoped it was someone exciting. She hoped it was Rob bringing the children back and saying he couldn’t have them after all this weekend.
Oh no, she thought as she clambered to the window and looked down at the street. A black Fiat Panda was parked at the kerb and her parents were climbing out. She’d been avoiding them since she and Rob had split. She knew it was awful, but she couldn’t bear to tell them. She’d kept contact to a few truncated telephone calls and prayed they wouldn’t pop round.
Frankie’s mum and dad were Old School with a capital O and a capital S. Pam had been wearing print floral dresses on her self-confessed ample frame since the age of thirty, hadn’t worked since the Dark Ages (last known employment: the broken biscuit counter at Woollies) and firmly believed that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, or sometimes, the garden, butchering laburnum bushes, or sometimes, the living room, where she enjoyed looming over Ted and his nightly tea on a wicker tray, making sure he had enough salt and pepper or mustard or brown sauce, and was the gravy hot enough, or should she throw the whole thing back in the microwave for another five minutes? Pam was a terrible cook, a lover of shop-bought Battenburg and she liked things how they used to be; she took no truck with new-fangled gadgets or ‘women’s lib’ (interchangeable), and she believed men were to be served.
Ted enjoyed being served, despite the terrible food. He was a very quiet man. Well, he had to be. There couldn’t be two overpowering, hysteria-prone people in that relationship; they would detonate each other and explode in an almighty mushroom cloud over Essex. And that would be a worry.
The blasted modern age, as Pam put it, gave her cause for lots of worry. She had an abject fear of the internet, for example, and was always cutting snippets out of the paper (i.e. The Daily Mail) about its dangers and popping them in the post to Frankie. While she was at it, mobile phones, iPads, iPods, games consoles, the ‘Wee’, the ‘Wee You’, Gameboys, DVDs and satnavs were also the work of evil, and if she found any evidence of this in the paper, she would also let Frankie know, via a pair of pinking shears and Royal Mail. Frankie was never sure if all this hysteria was down to genuine, loving concern for her family, or whether Pam just enjoyed sitting astride a very high, old-fashioned horse. And slipping things into envelopes.
As she let them in, Frankie felt slightly sick, and not just because her mother was thrusting yet another sodding pot plant at her she knew she would kill within days. Did she really have to tell her mother she and Rob had split up? She just knew what her mother would say.
‘Oh, Francesca!’
There it was. Her mum’s constant lament. She’d said it all the time when Frankie was young: if she fell over; if she dropped an ice cream on the ground; if, as a teenager, she was upset over a boy, failed an exam or attempted to go out the front door in a too short skirt and a pair of white stilettos…and it appeared Pam couldn’t give it up.
‘Oh Francesca!’ Pam was perched on the sofa; she never sat back properly. It was as if she always had somewhere she’d rather be, something she really should be getting on with, instead, usually some badly done, martyr-ing domestic task.
Her bag was also perched, on her lap. It was ready for every eventuality, that bag, like a cracked yellow leather version of Mary Poppins’ carpet bag. Everything was rammed in it: a tape measure; a jumbo box of plasters; scissors – paper and nail; tweezers; anti-bacterial hand wash; two hankies; three carrier bags made into micro size by clever knotting; a ball of string; emergency Murray Mints; a packet of chocolate digestives; a Mills & Boon; spare keys, socks, pants and one of dad’s vests; and a vacuum-packed cagoule and matching rain hat. It was as busy and as crowded as Pam’s mind. Frankie thought both needed a good emptying out.
‘What on earth have you done that for?’ exclaimed Pam. Her chins were rippling above her expansive body. ‘Rob’s done everything for you!’
‘Has he? Like what?’
‘He married you and gave you four children!’
‘Yes, I see.’ Frankie nodded. ‘Or, you could argue, I married him and gave him four children.’
Pam wrinkled up her nose in disgust and incredulity. ‘But he’s your right-hand man!’ she said.
What planet was her mother on? Dad had never been her right-hand man! She would never let him. Her parents’ life was a ship that Pam captained alone.
‘Well, that’s it, Mum, really – he’s not, is he? He’s not a right-hand anything! Or a left-hand anything.’ He was the back end of a pantomime horse, more like. ‘He was a hindrance, Mum. You really have no idea.’
Right-hand man! She couldn’t get over that. Why was her mother talking as though husbands and wives were a team? She and Dad weren’t a team. Pam wore the trousers and Dad did as he was told. He ate up all his dinner up like a good boy, took out the bins every Friday and turned all the electrics off at night, including the sockets for the television, the Teasmaid (defeating the object, surely), the kitchen appliances and the ancient trouser press he’d used religiously since 1975. You can never be too careful, you know. Mrs Godfrey next door, well, her sister-in-law said there was a woman on her street who once forgot to switch the plug off from behind the toaster when she went to bed and when she woke up the next morning the whole house had burned down…
Pam clasped her handbag to her breast, as though for dear life. ‘But at least he was there, dear! You need him, don’t you? Oh poor man, chucking him out like that! Now you’ll be one of those terrible single mothers – I feel quite ashamed!’
‘Oh, Mum. Please don’t feel ashamed. There’s nothing wrong with being a single mother.’
‘You’ll be the first one in the family!’ exclaimed Pam. She was right. Both Frankie’s brothers were happily married with no signs of unrest and no one in Pam’s generation had ever done anything so mortifying as kicking a husband out. ‘How do you think that will look?’
‘I couldn’t really care less.’
Pam looked absolutely horrified. ‘Oh Francesca! And poor, poor Rob.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be okay,’ said Frankie, without a smile. Poor Rob was probably enjoying his nice, new flat. He could eat Pot Noodles to his heart’s content and never have to put the empty pot, or the lid, in the bin. He could leave a trail of clothes on the floor from here to Timbuctoo without anyone nagging him about it. He could even bring women back, if he wanted. Was he bringing women back, she wondered? ‘He can live in a pit. He’s probably loving it. He found a flat really quickly,’ she added, hoping it would turn the tide of consternation.
The lady was not for turning. ‘I think you’ve made a dreadful mistake, Francesca. What do you think, Ted?’
Ted said nothing. He’d once been a managerial type, commanding a staff of hundreds in a shoe factory, and a very strict parent who took no nonsense. Now, he was just prone to rueful shrugging and the odd conspiratorial wink at Frankie and her brothers, who had both escaped Up North.
‘It’s just what I have to do,’ said Frankie. Despite her bravado, she was cringing. Frankie still didn’t like being told off by her parents or, solely these days, by her mother. It made her want to retreat. If she was a turtle and had a big old shell, she’d be in it. She tried valiantly to change the subject.
‘How’s Mrs Peacock?’
Pam loved nothing more than wobbling her chins, putting her hands on her hips and telling her daughter in great medical detail all about the ailments, diseases and sudden deaths of people Frankie had never met in her life. The tactic worked. Pam rambled on about Mrs Peacock for a good ten minutes, the final two of which Frankie was gradually steering her to the door, handing her her jacket and handbag and saying she’d got things to do and she really must be getting on with them. Ted trailed behind.
Pam managed one more ‘Poor Rob,’ as she squeezed into the passenger seat of the Panda, and Frankie firmly closed the door. She returned to the sitting room and sat in silence for a bit. She was relieved her parents had gone but now she just felt…flat. Friday evenings when the kids were here were noisy chaos, now there was…nothing. No MTV, no video games, no Mario cart, FIFA 15, iPads, Wii’s, Wii U’s, television or YouTube videos…all the things that gave her mother the horrors.
She turned the telly on but nothing caught her eye. She checked her phone again. Nothing. She leant over to her magazine rack and pulled a selection of magazines onto her lap. Heat, Marie Claire, Chat. Amongst them was a craft magazine she’d bought in a mad moment. There was a pretty bag on the front that you could make. A bag she’d never be able to produce in a million years.
She flicked idly through the magazine. The bag was beyond her, but maybe there was something she could try and do. Rob had a hobby – his stupid kit car. Imogen had all her plays and stuff, although strictly speaking that was work. And Grace had started some crazy martial arts nonsense. Maybe she could have a hobby.
The magazine was a riot of pastels and full of girly, arty farty ‘makes’ but on closer inspection, not for the faint-hearted or the thick of thumb. Everything looked quite tricky, complicated. Knitting? Not a chance. Crochet? It looked way too intricate and time-consuming; she knew she wouldn’t have the patience. Upscaling furniture? – oh Lord, that was far too much of a stretch. She was rubbish at painting; she’d ruin whatever it was and consign it to the tip.
What else? Making sugar flowers for cakes? She’d be hopeless. She wasn’t really a baking, cake-y, cake decoration person. She’d tried to make cakes for the kids a couple of times but something always went slightly wrong. There’d be one layer that went all wonky, or she would misread the recipe and not make enough icing, or make icing that tore off half the cake with it when she tried to spread it on. Or she’d make a cake that looked perfect, but when she’d get it out of the tin there’d be a large, uncooked crater in the middle of it.
Often things had to be glued and patched together with the icing there was never enough of. If there was a missing or burnt bit, she’d put a mark on the plate so if Rob’s mother came over Frankie would know which side of the cake to avoid when cutting it.
Ah, here was something. Cutting things out to make a pretty bird mobile. Alice would like that for her room. She read further. Perhaps not. There was a lot of talk in the magazine of ‘die-cutting’ pieces of paper and it was mentioned again here – whatever it was, it sounded utterly hellish. Sorry, Alice, she thought. God, she missed her. She felt a horrible lump in her throat whenever she dared think about her.
She quickly turned the page. Découpage? What on earth was that? There was a kit that came free with the magazine – fifteen thick printed papers in squares with pretty, shabby chic patterns on them. She detested shabby chic. Rubbing paint off the corners of things to show a grubby bit of something underneath, ditsy, dolly frilly things with polka dots on, floral cabbage print cushions and ‘toil of no joy’, or whatever it was called. Still, some of these papers were quite pretty. The one with the butterflies was nice.
The instructions suggested gluing the papers onto a wooden box. Did she have one? Her jewellery box. She went upstairs to get it. It was one of those ones where you pull out descending drawers on metal-concertinaed hinges, which could potentially make it quite complicated. Still, how difficult could it be, sticking bits of paper to some wood?
Forty minutes later, Frankie was muttering and shoving tiny bits of cut-up paper in the bin. The jewellery box was also in a bin – the big black one that lived down the passageway next to the garage. She’d shoved it in a Tesco carrier bag and buried it under a bag of rubbish in a tantrum-y rage. There was glue everywhere. And biscuit crumbs. And a lot of it was on the floor.
Sod hobbies. She wouldn’t be attempting them again. She ambled to the kitchen to replenish the biscuit tin. The sofa was the only place for her; the television her only pursuit.
She lay there for a while. After the sixth biscuit she felt revolted with herself. She was overweight and underfit. She’d turned into a slob and kicking Rob out had made no difference.
Before she’d had Alice, she’d been doing okay. Her eldest was nine, her youngest was four; the baby days were done and all the children were at school. She had been able to relax a little bit. She still had all the housework, chores, running around and general chaos to cope with, but she also had six free hours to herself every day. Six hours! In time, she’d thought, she would maybe get a job. In the meantime, she’d get a bit of her life back.
She’d sorted out her hair, her nails, her knackered skin; she smartened up, toned up (exercise DVD at home, thank you, Davina) and had time to breathe and regroup. She had begun to feel on top of things again. She’d even started dressing up and going out, dinner with friends, nights out with Rob. Things were settled, great even, and she felt excitement, for the first time in ages, about the future. She wondered what job she might do. Before having kids, she’d been a PA at the technical college, then at a pharmaceutical company. She’d thought she could contact that company again. Or somewhere else. If you were a PA you could PA anywhere.
Then, despite well-intentioned but fairly mediocre once-a-month sex and Rob having had a vasectomy (she knew he should have sent his sample to the lab to prove it had worked; he’d said it must have done – his ‘nuts’ had been on fire for five days), she got pregnant again. With the arrival of Alice – who of course she adored – everything had gone belly up, although belly down would be a better description, along with everything else that could no longer fight gravity.
She had shifted all her ‘baby weight’ three times over, fairly easily. (What a stupid expression, she thought. The babies had only weighed eight pounds each – it wasn’t their fault she had taken pregnancy as an excuse to eat her body weight in cake for nine months.) This time, she could not. Was it an age thing or had she just lost the will, with four children to look after? (Including Rob, make that five).
Whatever, after Alice, a fat tummy, wobbly thighs, chubby arms and horrid-looking back fat stubbornly refused to depart. Everything just sat there, mocking her, and she felt powerless to do anything about it. She was fit for nothing except lying on the couch and eating biscuits.
The couch. Wasn’t there a new thing? Couch to 5k, or something. She’d read about it on a blog she sometimes read: Beautiful Mummy World. It was a blog she read with acute sarcasm, scoffing – and often scoffing chocolate – at perfect mummy Lucinda Del De’Ath (Frankie liked to shorten her to Lucy Death: the death of all sense), in her wafty linen outfits and her Chihuahua seed suppers and her organic lemongrass colonic cleansing shakes. It gave her a good laugh. Lucinda had mentioned Couch to 5k when talking, as she did extensively, about fitness. Of course Lucy Death didn’t do it – it was far too pedestrian and working class; she did yoga in five hundred degree heated rooms wearing five hundred pound designer fitness tights – but it had been mentioned, with a slight sneer, as something the plebs might enjoy. If they couldn’t afford to fly to LA for a Soul Cycle class, or have the will to be suspended upside-down from the ceiling in Cirque du Soleil-style purple strips of cloth whilst doing a Downward Dog, they might like to consider it.
Frankie grabbed her phone and googled Couch to 5k. She had run once, a million years ago, before she had kids. She and Rob used to run. She’d had an iPod and some Nike trainers and they’d pounded the streets in the evenings after work. She missed it, she realised, though she hadn’t thought about it for years.
Couch to 5k: here it was. Week One, a five-minute walk followed by twenty minutes of alternate running and walking, leading all the way up to Week Nine and a thirty-minute run. It didn’t look too bad.
She rooted through her wardrobe. There, at the back, under an old breast pump and a bright orange T-shirt from the 90s, which said ‘Stupid Girl’, was a very creased pair of pink, Lycra leggings and her battered pair of Nike trainers. It all came flooding back to her: the sound of rubber on tarmac, Nirvana in her ears, her boobs wobbling in her largely ineffective sports bra. She could do it again, couldn’t she? She could run. Of course she could! In fact she was such an old pro, she was pretty confident she could skip straight to Week Six.
She stripped off her skinny jeans, revealing a knotted sock secreted up the left leg she’d failed to notice all day, and pulled on the leggings. Boy, they were tight. She’d been a size ten in those days, not the chunky size fourteen she now was. They stretched over her bottom and thighs to the point of see-through, but they were just about okay, she supposed. She had nothing else. She added socks, the trainers and the 90s T-shirt. It was chilly out but she remembered how quickly running warmed her up, and it wouldn’t get dark until seven. She was going to do this!
As she shut the front door behind her, she suddenly felt a little silly and utterly self-conscious. There would be people staring at her, small children pointing and laughing. Oh God. She nearly went back in again and slammed the door. Instead, she went through the gate, into the back garden and out to the back alley that ran behind her row of houses. She’d go to the end then head along the river. If she was going to look ridiculous there would be fewer witnesses that way.
She ran. At first her earphones kept coming out, everything was wobbling, the lack of sports bra was a bad idea. The back alley was full of nettles and brambles and she spent a lot of it hopping over doggie do’s and broken glass. But, as she headed down the path that snaked next to the river, she found her feet. She had the wind in her hair, the road beneath her steadily plodding trainers, ‘Sounds Like Teen Spirit’ in her ears…
She’d been going about ten minutes when she had to stop by a tree and catch her breath. She had a stitch. She couldn’t remember having one of those since school. Clutching at the tree’s gnarly trunk, she staggered against it, gasping.
Moments later she realised she wasn’t alone. ‘Are you all right?’ said a voice.
She looked up, embarrassed. She probably had been making a too-theatrical job of bending over at the hip, clutching her side and grimacing. Well, if you’re going to have a stitch, you may as well make sure it’s a good one. Life-threatening.
Standing there was a man, also in running gear, but far from looking an utter fool in his. He had on navy shorts, a navy hoodie and white socks and trainers (Rob had those trainers, she noted) and he looked great in them. This man didn’t look like he was trying to out-neon an 80s go-go dancer. He was also very good-looking. He had shaggy sort of nineteenth-century hair and blue eyes that looked like they’d had a manly lick of the mascara brush. Incredible eyelashes. He wouldn’t have looked out of place up on a Jane Austen horse, in military uniform. He was far too good-looking a man to see her looking like this.
‘Oh, I’m fine, thanks,’ she puffed. ‘Just a stitch. A runner’s occupational hazard.’ She stood up and did what she hoped was an athletic-looking lunge-type stretch. ‘You know what it’s like.’
He looked like he didn’t. ‘First run?’
What? How the hell did he know that? And it wasn’t her first ever run. She suddenly realised her leggings had gripped themselves up her bum in an enormous wedgie and she had an unbearable urge to prise them out, which of course she couldn’t do. She wriggled a bit to try and dislodge the wedgie but it stayed firmly in place.
‘No, course not. Is it yours?’
‘No. I run 4k every day.’
‘Oh right. Show-off,’ she said and she now had an irresistible urge to stick her tongue out at him, so she did.
He looked surprised, then to her surprise, he burst out laughing. ‘I like your spirit,’ he said. ‘So are you following a programme?’
‘Couch to 5k.’
He nodded. ‘That’s a brilliant programme. I actually run a local Couch to 5k meet-up, if you’re interested. We meet in the Tesco car park, Sunday mornings. Ten o’clock.’ He pointed over to Chelmsford’s main Tesco’s, the other side of the river.
‘Oh right, thanks,’ said Frankie, staring at his bicep. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Great. Well, nice meeting you.’ There was a beat as he looked at her with his ridiculously long-eyelashed eyes and she enjoyed looking back into them.
‘You too.’
Right. Should she set off at a casual, nonchalant jog, or go straight into an authoritative power run? Hang back and let him go off first? She didn’t know which way he’d come from and which way he was going. He smiled at her, turned and broke into a run. Phew; she was going in the opposite direction.
As she got into some sort of stride, successfully avoiding the random giant swan that had decided at that moment to amble from the riverside and cross her path, she wondered what his bum looked like in his shorts and turned her head. To her horror he had turned back too and was grinning at her.
Damn. The see-through wedgie. How embarrassing.