She was firmly wedged in for now, though, so I dashed downstairs where the last stragglers were leaving, reassured Maisie that Poppy was fine and that I’d stay with her, received abject apologies from Donkey’s father, who was attempting to load his son into the car as Donkey kept shouting, ‘Peter’s Mum’s a fucking legend, Dad, a fucking legend MILF,’ and he hissed, ‘Just get in and shut up, Aidan, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I FUCKIN’ LOVE YOU, PETER’S MUM,’ bellowed Donkey, as his father slammed the door in relief and scuttled round to the driver’s side, saying, ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Russell, I don’t know how he got himself in such a state or thought it was appropriate to use language like that!’

  I went back inside with a dejected Peter, to find various other teenagers sprawled asleep over the furniture.

  ‘Their taxi cancelled,’ Peter explained. ‘So I said they could stay.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, removing a still-full can of lager from the hand of one sweetly slumbering oaf and a vape from between the lips of another. ‘Well, I don’t think we could wake them up, even if we wanted to.’

  ‘Is Poppy OK?’

  ‘Yes, she’ll be fine. Hungover, probably, but she’ll be fine. Though you weren’t that concerned about Poppy when I saw you going outside with that other girl?’

  ‘Oh that was nothing. That’s just Lola. She fancies Donkey, and I fancy Poppy, and we were just trying to make them both jealous since they were more interested in doing shots with you.’

  ‘Cockblocked by your own mother,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, darling. I’m glad to hear you weren’t doing anything with Lola. That is very bad form, two girls in one night.’

  ‘Well, so’s giving the girl I was trying to get off with shots and ruining my chances with her!’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. Anyway, I need to go and check on her.’

  After a fairly sleepless night on Jane’s floor, waking with a jolt every twenty minutes or so to check Poppy hadn’t moved and was still breathing, I tottered downstairs at 9 a.m. when I heard Simon get up, having reassured myself that Poppy was now just sleeping and not paralytically comatose.

  I found him in the sitting room, looking at the recumbent bodies and gazpacho-splattered walls in dismay.

  ‘What the hell happened, Ellen? Was there some sort of massacre? Is that blood? Are they dead?’ he whispered in horror.

  ‘No, gazpacho and no.’

  ‘Gazpacho? Why is there gazpacho all over the walls and windows and curtains?’

  ‘I ran out of fruit juice,’ I explained.

  ‘And this?’ Simon picked up an empty tequila bottle. ‘I thought you said there were to be no shots.’

  I looked at it. ‘That’s not even mine,’ I said indignantly. ‘I couldn’t be everywhere at once, and you’d gone to bed and abandoned me.’

  ‘I took the dogs; they were getting overexcited. Also, after two glasses of that punch, I was buggered, and it was bed or pass out on the sofa surrounded by the Youth!’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said doubtfully, looking round. ‘I mean, a good Hoover will sort it.’

  ‘Burning the house down would sort it!’ said Simon grimly. ‘I told you this was a bad idea. And I told you the punch was a really really bad idea.’

  Peter staggered into the sitting room at this moment and looked around. ‘Shit. It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? But thank you. It was a really great party, and everyone had an amazing time. You’re both legends, ’specially you, Mum.’

  I smirked at Simon. ‘See? How is bringing festive joy to our son and the younger generation a bad idea?’

  ‘Someone’s been sick under the Christmas tree,’ Simon announced.

  ‘Fuck. Right, well, let’s start clearing up. These oafs can wake up and help, for a start,’ I said, gesturing at the happily sleeping teens draped over every available surface. ‘COME ON! WAKE UP! There’ll be bacon sandwiches for everyone who helps!’

  The Youth turned out to be quite amenable to assisting once they were conscious, and the tidying up was going nicely, though it was unfortunate that someone had also been sick in the boots that Simon had left in the hall – he took that quite badly. About an hour into Operation Clear-Up, a sheepish Donkey knocked on the front door, clutching some drooping petrol station flowers.

  ‘My dad said I was a bit much last night, Peter’s Mum, so I’ve come to apologise and help with the mess. These are for you!’ he said, thrusting the dying chrysanthemums at me.

  ‘Thank you, Aidan,’ I said graciously (I couldn’t call him Donkey in the cold light of day). ‘You can call me Ellen, you know. You don’t have to refer to me as Peter’s Mum.’

  Donkey’s face lit up. ‘Can I? Thanks, Ellen. What can I do?’

  ‘Who is that callow youth following you round with a stupid expression on his face?’ Simon demanded shortly afterwards.

  ‘Oh, that’s just Donkey,’ I whispered. ‘I think he’s got a tiny crush on me.’

  ‘What? That’s not appropriate. Are you going to go all Mrs Robinson on me?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just a crush, kids get them all the time. Anyway, I’ve made him clean the downstairs loo, which was in an awful state, so I don’t think the crush will last. Oh God, who is that at the door now?’

  It turned out to be a furious Jane, who’d got a lift home from university a day early instead of getting the train the next day as we’d arranged, and had left her house keys in Edinburgh. This was supposed to have been a lovely surprise for us, but Jane was highly unamused to find that we had let Peter have a massive party, which of course was Not Fair as she had never had a party like that, and worse, that Poppy was still sleeping happily in her bed.

  ‘Honestly Mother, I’ve only gone to university and you’re letting my room out to strangers,’ she shouted. ‘And not only did he get to have a party, but he gets to have girls stay over? You never let me have boys to stay when I was at school. He might have done it in my bed. Oh God, I feel sick. You’ll have to burn the bed.’

  I attempted to soothe Jane by pointing out that Poppy spending one night in her room was hardly ‘letting it out to strangers’, and also that Peter had most certainly had no shenanigans going on with Poppy due to the state of her as well as me having to sleep in there with her, while Peter shouted that what boy would want to shag Jane anyway and she yelled her favourite insult that he was to ‘die in a hole’. Donkey came out of the downstairs loo to see what all the fuss was about and gazed in open-mouthed awe at the bellowing Jane.

  ‘Pedro, mate!’ he said. ‘Who the fuck is this?’

  ‘My stupid sister.’

  ‘She’s PROPER fit. Like even fitter than your mum. I’m Donkey.’

  ‘Fuck off, Donkey,’ said Jane in disgust.

  ‘I’m definitely in there,’ beamed Donkey, trailing after Jane, the devoted love light in his eyes that so recently had shone for me being shamelessly transferred with the fickleness of youth.

  ‘Happy now?’ I said to Simon. ‘There’ll be no chance of Mrs Robinsoning!’

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever get the smell out the house?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Which one? The sick, the Malibu, the gazpacho, the Lynx Africa, the aftershave, the perfume, or the stench of rampant and frustrated pheromones?’

  ‘All of them. The curtains are definitely ruined.’

  ‘So’s my Home Bargains punchbowl. I can never use it again after Poppy puked in it.’

  ‘Oh well, at least Jane’s home, which is nice, and Peter’s happy,’ Simon sighed, as we heard Jane from the kitchen shrieking, ‘Peter, tell your weird fucking sex-pest mate to FUCK OFF, all right,’ and Peter screamed back that he wished Jane had never come home and a sleepy Poppy stumbled down the stairs looking mortified.

  ‘They’re all in the kitchen.’ I pointed her through, wishing I still had the cast-iron constitution of eighteen-year-olds, which enables them to still look gorgeous even when they’ve puked their guts up and are wearing last night’s dress with mascara halfway down their cheeks. Further anarchy broke out with Poppy’s arrival in the kitchen, because as far as we could work out from the screaming, Jane had taken it upon herself to strike a blow against the patriarchy by warning Poppy that her loser brother was a twat and to steer well clear.

  Donkey meanwhile turned up love struck on the doorstep every day that Jane was home, apart from Christmas Day. Jane ignored him resolutely, but it turned out Donkey was a far more obliging soul than either of my children or their other friends, so I made shameless use of him to take the bins out, feed the chickens, help me take the tree down, and do other jobs my own children deemed beneath them unless I nagged and shouted. I rather missed him when Jane went back to Edinburgh. Possibly more than I missed Jane. And with neither of the children home this year, I’d definitely have no Dogsbody Donkey, either.

  Present day

  ‘God,’ I said to Simon as I got ready for bed. ‘We were really quite lucky with Peter’s party.’

  ‘How?’ said Simon, looking at me in horror.

  ‘Well, Dad always said the mark of a good party is a divorce, a fight and an unplanned pregnancy. There were no fights, I did think for a minute you might divorce me over the gazpacho, but luckily you saw the funny side, and how we avoided an unplanned pregnancy with all those drunk, randy teenagers around, I don’t know!’

  ‘Can you imagine?’ groaned Simon. ‘Especially if Peter was involved. I’m not ready to be a grandfather, so no unplanned pregnancies here, please!’

  I’d just started brushing my teeth and I froze.

  ‘What?’ said Simon in alarm. ‘Ellen, what’s wrong?’

  I spat in the sink and dashed back to the bedroom to dig out my phone and count back the weeks. Six weeks. More than six weeks since my last period finished.

  ‘Ellen?’ said Simon again, following me through.

  ‘Count,’ I said desperately. ‘Tell me how many weeks it is between now and October 24th.’

  ‘Nearly seven,’ said Simon. ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s when my last period was,’ I wailed.

  ‘But didn’t you notice you’d missed one?’ said Simon in horror. ‘I thought you had one of those period tracker apps?’

  ‘I did, but I deleted it because I read about how it sends all your data to tampon companies and stuff so they can bombard you with adverts at the right time of the month, and I’ve been so busy, I didn’t even notice I’d missed one, and now I’m late again. And now I come to think of it, my boobs are sore. And I feel a bit sick.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not talking yourself into the other symptoms?’ said Simon anxiously. ‘You never mentioned anything about sore tits, and you had a lot of wine and a lot of dinner for someone who feels sick.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. But what if I am, Simon? What if I’m pregnant?’

  ‘Surely not? At your age? You’re on HRT. You’ve got a bloody coil!’

  ‘An unbloody coil,’ I said grimly. ‘It happens. You can still get pregnant with a coil. You can still get pregnant on HRT, though it’s not terribly recommended, and a few women still get pregnant well into their fifties!’

  ‘Really?’

  We stared at each other for a long moment.

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,’ I said hopefully. ‘We’d know what we were doing this time. Oh just think, this time next year we could be having Christmas with a tiny new baby. Baby’s First Christmas. Again.’

  Simon was ashen. ‘No. No, we’ve done Baby’s First Christmas. Twice. This is our time. We’re past all that, we’re too old. You’d be like that woman you thought was the granny at Baby Music who turned out to the mother. If thirty is classed as a geriatric mother, what would they call you?’

  ‘Experienced? Mature? I don’t know. We could make this work.’

  ‘How? This is a disaster; how will we make it work? We’ll be dead by the time it’s eighteen.’

  ‘No, we won’t.’

  ‘We will, we’ll be dead with stress and exhaustion,’ Simon insisted. ‘We barely coped the first time round.’

  ‘Yes,’ I breathed. ‘But this will be different. We’ve more time, more money. Like I said, we’d know what we were doing.’

  Inside, as the initial shock wore off, I thought, ‘It’s another chance. A chance to put right all the mistakes.’ A chance to be a relaxed, chilled-out mummy, who bakes and laughs and doesn’t shout because they’ve broken the eggs all over the floor instead of in the bowl. I could learn to like Play-Doh. We’d do crafts, and I’d proudly stick up their potato-print pictures over the kitchen instead of putting them in the bin and claiming I’d filed them in a special drawer to keep forever. I could buy teeny tiny outfits and marvel at little shoes, and if it was a girl, maybe we could wear matching, impractical, white cheesecloth dresses to stand barefoot together in golden Instagrammable fields, which was something Jane had been very resistant to, but I could get this baby Instagram-ready from birth!

  I’d always regretted missing out on the phase on Facebook where every bloody smug mummy seemed to be photographing her darlings dressed in floaty white clothes, ethereally backlit in some kind of delightful meadow. Naturally, mine refused to comply, and my attempts at meadow-frolicking resulted in Jane breaking out into a hideous rash from some kind of pesticide and Peter falling face first smack into a cow pat. Why were there no cow pats and no DDT in everyone else’s meadows? Of course, even before that, they’d been arguing and screaming at each other and refusing to hold hands for my perfect picture to post with the obligatory #HappyMemories. But this time it would be different. Already, I could feel a sticky little hand slipping into mine, a tired head heavy on my shoulder, as we wafted home from the cornfield. This time I damn well would enjoy it, and #TreasureEveryMoment.

  ‘Simon?’ I looked at him, pleading.

  ‘Ellen, I’m not discussing anything until we know for sure. This could be something and nothing. Don’t you have any tests left?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve not had a scare in so long. I’ll look in the bathroom.’

  I found an ancient packet at the back of the cupboard, and to my astonishment, they were still in date – well, as good as, dated November this year.

  I went back through to the bedroom.

  ‘I found some.’ I held them out to Simon.

  ‘Well, they’re not much use to me,’ he pointed out. ‘Don’t you think you should do one?’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Simon whistled and looked the other way while I peed on the stick, and then we sat down to wait. There are no minutes so long as those spent waiting to see how many lines show up on a little piss-covered stick. Oh, but just imagine, a little stocking hanging over the mantelpiece next year, and yes, either a tiny velvet dress, or a little bow tie and pretend suit to dress Baba in. I wouldn’t eat all the pies when pregnant this time, and next Christmas I’d have my figure back and be radiant, as I tossed my hair, still thick and shiny with pregnancy hormones because I’d take ALL the supplements so it didn’t go dry and frizzy and fall out, yes, I’d toss my shiny shiny hair, while bouncing the baby on my hip and laughing merrily about oh yes, how easy it is third time round, you really know what you’re doing and the baby just slots into your life.

  I could get one of those backpack thingamajigs, and Simon could carry the baby as we crunched across frosty fields etc, etc, while the bells rang out and then I might get a sheepskin rug for the baby to lie on in front of the fire on Christmas Eve for those all-important Instagram photos. Judgy had pissed on the last sheepskin rug I’d tried putting in front of the fire, but surely even he wouldn’t piss on a baby? He had peed on Peter, several times, but Peter had retaliated by trying to pee on him right back, so that was just about even stevens. I’d appeal to Judgy’s better nature. Maybe he’d lie on the rug with the baby, and the photos would be so adorable they’d go viral and I’d become an Instagram influencer for later-in-life mothers. What could I call myself? ‘MatureMama’? Balls, that was taken. What about ‘MatureMumma’, much though I loathed the word ‘Mumma’? Oh God, that was a sex account! Nooo! Well, I could give the name more than three minutes’ thought later on anyway.

  Simon meanwhile paced up and down anxiously, while I scrolled through Instagram for the perfect name for my new career. He stopped mid-pace and gave me an anxious look.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said, only hyperventilating slightly. ‘Whatever it says, it’ll be OK. We’ll make it work.’

  Finally, my phone pinged with the timer and I looked at the test. One line.

  ‘Shit,’ said Simon.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said. ‘How many of these have we done over the years? You never remember that’s only the line that says the test has worked. It’s saying I’m not pregnant.’ I felt an unexpected wave of sadness wash over me, but I wasn’t sure if it was for my lost youth now my womb was barren and dry, or the Instagrammable baby.

  ‘WOOOOHOOOOOO!’ yelled Simon punching the air. ‘THANK THE FUCKING LORD. OH JOY OF JOYS, we have a dodged a fucking BULLET, sweetheart! But hang on.’ He paused suddenly. ‘What if it’s wrong? Is there another one in the box? Quick, do it too, make sure!’

  ‘I don’t know if I have enough wee left,’ I protested.

  ‘Oh come on, Ellen, you always need a wee. There hasn’t been one single moment since I met you when you didn’t need a wee – you can squeeze something out.’

  ‘OK. I’ll try.’ I sat down again and concentrated very hard. Maybe the test was wrong. There was still hope. ‘There. Done.’

  The test was not wrong. I wasn’t pregnant. When Simon finally stopped dancing round the bathroom and singing ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’, he saw my face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you pleased? You didn’t really want to be pregnant, did you? You hated being pregnant, and you were very firm after Peter was born that you didn’t want any more children because you wouldn’t cope. Christ, every time you had a false alarm after that because you forgot to take your Pill or whatever you were more horrified than I was!’

 

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