A flood of words is waiting to come out but I can’t say a thing. Lexi must be allowed to see Elisa. I cannot interfere. It is the right thing to do but oh, how it feels so wrong.
I compromise with the best fib I know: ‘Fine. I’m just tired.’
5
The universe gives you what you need
On Monday morning I wake up at six to the sound of my phone alarm. I haven’t been very good at getting up during the past four months because of how badly I sleep in the second half of the night, but today it feels worse than ever.
I should have slept because orgasms at least are the ultimate in sleeping aids, but despite feeling the comfort of Dan’s strong body melding with mine in bed until we were one hot, sweaty mess, and I’m moaning his name and he’s moaning mine, I still couldn’t drift off afterwards the way he did.
In my humble opinion, orgasms do not hold a candle to major pharmaceuticals when it comes to sleep – for women. Unless someone’s doing a survey somewhere and an orgasmic sleeping tablet is being invented. Forget female Viagra – that’s where the medical money needs to go.
After lovemaking, Dan curled around me, almost instantly asleep, naked except for the boxers he pulled on, his strong body spooned against me. At about four, when I had gone round in circles thinking about Elisa and how she could hurt Lexi, I finally uncurled myself from his warm skin and went into the bathroom where I stared,hollow-eyed, into the mirror.
Lexi did not choose her birth mother.
Dan did, Mildred pointed out, unhelpfully.
Dan and she split up when Lexi was a baby, I reminded myself. He’s a good man who wants what was best for all of us, I add.
I wanted to get up because it was easier but at least if I am lying in bed, I am resting, so I head back to bed where I hope I sleep even a little.
I could not think about damn Elisa if I was working.
I would stare at recipe books in the kitchen, sit with my trusty ink pen and paper and write down foods in my wakened version of lucid dreaming.
It’s how I work when I can’t work: I let the foods come into my mind and the right combinations slip in. I can almost taste thesea-fresh scent ofnewly-caught cod and my mind skims from Asia with the delicacy of lemongrass and ginger, bok choi wilting underneath while hot sun intensifies all my senses. And then, I flip to a winter’s day when I was a child, home from school, weary, and my mother stirring chowder on the stove, fresh bread baking, and the hint of dill and tang of bacon lardons fill my head.
I try to make food easier for people, to take the fear out of cooking so the love of it ignites something within them. It’s how I learned to cook: watching my mother, who is the most nurturing cook ever, who effortlessly worked as well as stirring up cakes and making soups on the old stovetop, warming our bellies and our hearts all at the same time.
Good food should be eaten at a family table, whatever sort of family you are, with the cat/dog/hamster peering over the edge of the table, especially if you and your beloved animals are what constitutes your family. In my recipe books, there are just as many versions of my meals for people who live alone, as more and more of us do. Life is complicated enough without making a cookbook a judgement with its ‘serves four’ tagline on each recipe. I dream up the recipes and cook.
Lexi had been quiet and subdued after dinner last night and I intuited, though I didn’t want to ask, that there had been no answering message on WhatsApp from Elisa. Lexi is used to friends like her best pal, Caitlin Keogh, replying instantly. Elisa is a different breed.
Instead of asking if she’d had a reply, I helped Lexi wash her long hair. Then I laboriously brushed the tangles out of it, gently brushing in the love because saying anything at that moment would have been entirely wrong. Sometimes touch is the only love that works.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said when I’d finished, and I hugged her.
I love my darling daughter so much and although she did not emerge from my body, that makes her no less my child. I want to fight for her. But I cannot hurt her in the process and if I warn her off Elisa, as I so dearly wish to do, I will do just that.
Today, house organising has to take a back seat because I simply have to go into work. Freya Abalone, the social media, wonder chef, TV personality extraordinaire has got to come out of hiding and wear something other than mangy yoga pants.
Or else we’ll never be able to pay the mortgage.
Real life does not sell well on social media, for some startling reason. At least, it can – but that’s ‘warts and all’ and my business is not sold on warts.
It’s sold on the firebrand personality of me, who is both Viking Chef and calm woman offorty-two. No sniggering down the back. In other words: I carefully curate my online presence so that I appear to be calm and happy simultaneously.
I would be fascinated to find really calm women offorty-?two because in my experience, women of my vintage are too busy trying to keep all the plates in the air – work, home, children, relationships, family, grocery shopping, laundry, attempting to do some exercise in case our bones crumple – to have really grasped that inner calm thing.
Nina, my social media guru, public relations genius and the slightly intense boss of her own agency at the age of thirty, explained it all to me in the early days when the production company said I needed to pay someone to handle my publicity year round, as they weren’t going to be doing it.
‘You are building a brand,’ she said, already scaring me because it was nine in the morning and she’d clearly had a blow dry and was sipping water out of a giant bottle which she’d alreadyhalf-finished. Both things I have never managed. If I drink a litre of water a day, it’s in tea and coffee. Sometimes I even consume water in the form of ice cubes if Scarlett and Maura come over at the weekend, and Maura brings her beloved Baileys and makes me drink some drizzled over ice, which she says makes her feel like the last word in sophistication.
Nina drinks water and is a green juice fanatic, which is possibly why she still lookstwenty-five instead of thirty. I eat too much of my own food, which has lots of green things in it but also lots of carbs, which have recently become Enemy Number One inhealth-junkie terms.
‘Brands are built on a combination of honesty, relatability and reliability,’ Nina went on. ‘Nobody wants to know you had a crappy weekend, that the water heater broke and you got your period. They get that in their own lives. They want you, with a happy quote for the day, a fabulous recipe they can make without hitting the shops, a feeling that you are one of them. Plus lovely pictures.’
