‘WHO’S FREDERICK?’ Will was in the kitchen waving my phone at me. He must have arrived back from the office while I was upstairs changing.
‘I work with him, and funnily enough his daughter is at nursery with Gigi. You know Florence? The sweet, quiet one?’ I walked over to Will and took the phone out of his hand. ‘Why? What’s he saying?’
‘I just saw something about a password for a phonics website.’
That message was sent a day ago during the Platform Eight invasion.
‘You’ve been going through my messages?’
I thought with a start how lucky it was I’d deleted the many post-funfair WhatsApp messages from Shona and Frankie grilling me on Frederick.
Will shrugged. ‘I was bored waiting for the kettle to boil. You seem to get a lot of junk mail.’
‘Sorry my phone doesn’t have more interesting information for you.’ Whereas I thought going through Will’s phone would be an admission that I didn’t trust him, he clearly had no such qualms.
‘Come on, finish that coffee, we need to go.’
Will gulped it down and followed me out the kitchen. ‘So where are you taking me?’
Anita, our neighbour’s nineteen-year-old daughter, was already slumped on the sofa in the sitting room with Geordie Shore playing loudly on the television.
‘The hottest ticket in town.’ I handed him a leaflet.
He looked down at it: Ms Yvonne’s Introduction to the Early Learning Syllabus.
‘Are you kidding me? This is what we’ve booked a babysitter for? Why do I have to come?’
‘Because we’re both her parents. Because anything that’s deemed important enough for a letter from her headteacher we should go to. Especially considering since BiteGate we have some making up to do.’
‘She hasn’t chomped on anyone else, has she?’ Will couldn’t keep the laugh out of his voice. He didn’t seem to take Gigi’s violent lashing out as seriously as me.
‘Thankfully not.’
‘Will Rochelle be there?’
I turned round to look at him. ‘Why? Do you want her to be?’
‘You jealous?’
‘Please. I’d like to think you’d have better taste than a fawning lapdog.’
‘Because of course men hate it when women tell them how brilliant they are and make them feel good about themselves by being transfixed by everything they say.’
‘Right.’
‘Yes, what we really love is being mostly ignored, never getting a straight answer and being left alone for long evenings while they’re out doing who knows what with who knows whom.’ He pulled on his coat and headed out the door.
It seemed we continued to be in a bad place. And Will now thought it was OK to go through my phone looking for answers to questions he hadn’t asked me yet.
*
Upon arrival at Gigi’s nursery we were immediately accosted by Ms Yvonne telling us that we were not to leave without Gigi’s runner bean plant. ‘These plants teach the children important lessons about nurturing and growth.’
I took in the plastic cup with a wilted bit of greenery stuck in some soil and kitchen roll and resisted the urge to add, ‘And the inevitability of death.’
We headed through to take our seats. I noted how Rochelle was, of course, seated right at the front. She cut off her conversation with the woman next to her to give an enthusiastic wave to Will, and a less enamoured one to me once I walked in front of him. I looked round the pokey Portakabin packed full of parents crouched into small children-sized chairs and spotted Camilla in the row behind Rochelle. No Frederick. I was relieved. I tried not to think too much into why I didn’t want Will and Frederick to meet.
The only empty chairs left were a few over from Rochelle in the front row. So now not only did we have to sit through the talk but we were right in front of Ms Yvonne and couldn’t get away with checking our emails in the boring bits.
*
After an excruciating hour, where I mostly learned I had no idea how to pronounce the alphabet phonetically, the Early Learning talk was finally finishing. We were all getting up to make a break for the door when Weather Mum put up her hand.
‘As we’re all here, Ms Yvonne, we were wondering if we could make a request for the children to be read more of the classic fairy tales they all love at home.’ Weather Mum smiled round the room.
Yvonne’s face remained impassive. ‘We do not believe in reading children horror stories.’
Weather Mum looked startled. ‘That’s not what I . . . Ms Yvonne, we are talking about fairy tales. You know, all the favourite classics like Cinderella or—’
‘Cinderella?’ Yvonne cut her off. ‘I cannot support a political story re-imposing beliefs of “us” and “them”.’
Weather Mum frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Cinderella is an allegorical depiction of how we treat immigrants. She’s the invisible help maligned and living in rags and doing all the work no one else wants to. The Prince symbolises benefits and the help that our great country can offer. Yet in order to receive it the needy are forced to dance around numerous bureaucratic applications and only if the glass slipper fits, if they tick all the boxes, can they be fully assimilated into the United Kingdom.’
‘Right,’ said Weather Mum.
‘But what about Sleeping Beauty?’ asked Felix’s mum. ‘My son loves that one, even though it’s about a princess.’
Yvonne shook her head. ‘Sleeping Beauty is a tragic story. I mean, the whole pricking of a finger on a spinning wheel, we all know what that really means.’
‘We do?’ I asked.
‘She was raped,’ Yvonne announced.
I looked round the room at parents struggling to hold it together. Will actually looked up from his phone.
‘What the fuck?’ is all he breathed into my ear.
Yvonne sighed. ‘The poor girl spiralled into a towering depression from which only medication – symbolised by a kiss – could rescue her from. It’s a terrible story where even if you don’t understand the deeper message it perpetuates some pretty disturbing ideas about consent.’
Rochelle raised her hand. ‘I guess you feel the same about Snow White? I do agree that fairy tales really shouldn’t romanticise the idea that it is acceptable for men to kiss unconscious women.’
Weather Mum shot her a filthy look.
Yvonne nodded at Rochelle. ‘I’m afraid it goes so much deeper than that with Snow White. It’s really a commentary on how the patriarchy represses women.’
Will chuckled. ‘I thought it was all just nice songs and little people.’
Yvonne ignored him. ‘The talking mirror is male – the evil queen’s actions are in response to toxic masculinity ranking women by their looks and pitting them against each other.’
We were all silent as we digested this.
‘So . . . so . . . the evil queen is not a baddie?’ asked Rochelle, pen poised over her notebook.
‘The man behind the mirror twisted and turned the evil queen’s insecurity on looks and age into a weapon. Young and old, Madonna and whore – society wants us women to fit neatly into boxes. Snow White is a symbol of the male ideal of purity, youth and beauty that the evil queen cannot measure up to and so she tries to destroy her. With an apple. Just like Eve.’
The fact a nursery teacher had just said ‘whore’ in a nursery was the least surprising takeaway from that speech.
‘And why does the evil queen fail to kill Snow White? Because another man sexually dominates her incapacitated form, egged on by seven small men who are clearly a personalisation of the seven deadly sins.’
‘I just . . . I . . . what?’ Will looked around the room. ‘What’s going on?’ I gave him a sharp jab with my elbow. He swivelled to me. ‘She’s nuts, right? We let this woman look after our child and she’s totally nuts.’
Yvonne continued, ‘So, you see, women can try and take control of the narrative, take charge of their own image, yet the overwhelming power of the patriarchy means they will fail. The man in the mirror belittles the evil queen and turns her against the sisterhood, yet when she tries to destroy this male concept of female perfection she cannot succeed because a woman is no match for a man’s virulent sexuality. The evil queen is ruined twice over by two different men.’
We all sat in silence for a minute. A respectful quiet to mourn the loss of fairy tales’ innocence.
‘On reflection,’ said Weather Mum weakly, ‘the books you read are fine. Totally fine.’
The coup was crushed.
‘Please do feel free to stay for a drink,’ trilled Yvonne as we all got up to charge for the exit. We passed by her, heads down, muttering about needing to get back for the babysitter.
Halfway back home I realised in the rush to exit I’d left Gigi’s runner bean plant under my chair. I relayed this disaster to Will and we analysed just how much not having the plant she’d been talking about all week would screw up our morning.
Will sighed. ‘You go on. I’ll get it.’
‘You’re my hero,’ I said to his departing back.
*
By the time Will walked in, wilted plant in hand, the kitchen table was unpacked with Chinese takeaway.
‘Ta-daa. Look, honey, I ordered.’ Deliverooing on the walk home was a mark of genius on my part.
Will dropped the plant on the kitchen counter, went to the fridge and took out a beer.
‘Rochelle was still there when I got back to the school.’
Shit.
‘She couldn’t stop talking about how funny it was seeing you and Johnnie Mac being dropped off in a chauffeur-driven limousine.’
‘He’s actually an old friend.’
Will stared at me. ‘You know that his music is on every bloody playlist I have. And you’ve never thought to mention you’re actually mates with him?’
‘It’s a bit awkward.’ I walked past him to the drawer for the bottle-opener. ‘We had a bit of a thing. It was years back.’
‘You. And Johnnie Mac.’
‘Yes. Well, kind of.’ I took the beer out his hand, opened it and handed it back. ‘It wasn’t anything serious.’
‘Jesus. That song. “Lady.” It’s about you, isn’t it?’
‘I . . . Well . . . Not necessarily.’
‘The three freckles were a pathway to heaven. A heaven that’d torment me to hell.’ He quoted one of the lines of the song. ‘You really think there are others out there with three freckles underneath their hip bone leading down to—’
I cut him off. ‘He’s a rockstar. He’s probably slept with hundreds of women. Odds are, when talking about such vast numbers, there could be one or two, maybe even three with freckles round there.’
‘Who are you kidding? God, to think I used to chuckle when I heard that song and thought about my own little pathway to heaven. And now I find out it’s a fucking well-trodden road as this guy has slept with my wife.’
‘Look, it’s not that big a deal.’
‘I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t mention it. I mean, it’s pretty amazing. Even in an anecdotal kind of way. How was it that at no point when we were in our getting-to-know-you stage, that lying in bed discussing exes, you felt any desire to say, “‘Hey, funny story – I screwed around with a rockstar and it messed him up so much he wrote a song about it?’”
‘I just found it a bit embarrassing. You know I don’t care about celebrities and all that showbiz stuff.’
‘How did you even meet?’
‘It was through work. He was assisting us on an intelligence matter. Look, you know I can’t say more. National security.’
‘How. Convenient.’
‘Come on, Will, it’s not that big a deal.’
‘And what the hell were you doing with him a few days ago? Being driven back from a bloody lunchtime quickie?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We were at the same work meeting. You don’t have anything to be jealous of.’
‘Don’t try and make me out to be some crazy, jealous husband. Look at Jake – I’ve never said a word about whatever history there clearly is between you two. I like the guy, I even let you make him godfather to our child. It’s a little different when it’s some rockstar who, up until today, I thought the closest we both got to was drunk dancing to his music. What the hell else don’t I know about you?’
He stormed out of the kitchen holding his beer. I sat down at the table and looked at all the food laid out. I was positive he’d come back and I’d hand him a plate of his favourite noodles and his anger face would drop and we’d have a little giggle about how his hunger had ruined his big exit.
But he didn’t come back.