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Katie
“I swear to God,” my friend Mandy said in a hushed tone. “It’s as dry as a desert down there.”
We all looked at her with a grimace, each one of us feeling her pain. Mandy was well into the menopause and was giving our ‘book club’ the benefit of her experience. I for one was riveted, especially as every single month a fresh round of symptoms hit me. Last month had been trouble sleeping, this month it was the mood swings – just ask my kids. The parched vagina, I’d had on and off for a while.
“So does it hurt when you have sex?” Trisha asked, while shifting her one-year-old from one boob to another, giving us a glimpse of her big brown nipple. “Even after a year, it still feels like Dave is pushing a pineapple up my Mary.”
There were a few hissed breathes from the rest of us who were sipping coffee and pretending that we’d read the latest, supercilious, trite shit which Belinda, our self-appointed leader, had picked for us to review. We only met every two months, because that was how long it took to get through the boring crap she made us read.
Mandy sighed. “Not so much but it’s so damn frustrating. Poor Jim is knackered trying to produce some lubrication. I have to say ‘keep going babe, almost there’, but he’s more likely to start a camp fire with all that rubbing.”
“Have you tried lube?” Samantha asked, before shoving a huge piece of cake into her mouth.
“Yeah,” Trisha added. “Dave and I swear by it, but that’s for when we’ve lost the front door key and have to go around the back.”
Samantha almost choked on her cake as the rest of us burst into laughter.
“You’re disgusting,” I said, still giggling.
“Nothing wrong with some rear-end action. You need to try it.” Trisha popped Marnie off her tit and covered herself up.
As we all shrugged and took a sip of our coffee, Belinda reappeared from visiting the bathroom.
“So, what do we all think about the anally retentive character?”
And we once more fell about laughing.
* * *
Making my way home from book club, I wondered whether the house would be empty when I got home. The home I lived in with my three children – Isaac, nineteen, who thought himself a bit of ladies’ man – I blame my mother who always told him he was the most gorgeous boy ever. Annie, seventeen, a real drama queen if ever there was one, and Charlie, my ten-year-old baby. I loved them dearly, but they drove me bloody nuts on a daily basis. If they weren’t arguing amongst themselves, they were ganging up on me to try and persuade me to get a dog, or making the house look as though squatters had moved in and had a rave in the lounge.
It was hard being a single mum, more so as the kids got older. Coping with them when they were small was much easier. I could take away toys and put them on the naughty step, now though, it was bloody hard getting six feet tall Isaac to sit on the third step up. I blamed their father for the shit they gave me, because while Carl and I were on good terms and had divorced through a mutual decision, the kids still liked to play each of us off against the other. ‘If you won’t let me, then dad will’, was the most common sentence in our house. Seeing as my forty-seven-year-old ex-husband had remarried and was now with the gorgeous, twenty-six-year-old Sophie, who has provided him with a two-year-old cherub called Jessie, I felt inadequate enough without having their father shoved in my face. This often meant I was butting heads with them, because there’s one thing I wasn’t and that was a pushover.
I also missed adult company, more specifically male, adult company. I was forty-five but I wasn’t dead from the knicker elastic down, and as much as Carl and I grew apart in most ways, we’d still been fairly compatible in the bedroom, right up until a few months before he left. It wasn’t that I didn’t go out or avoided trying to meet someone, it just hadn’t happened. I obviously didn’t float anyone’s boat in the looks department. Men were so picky these days. Even though I wasn’t fat, I was probably curvier than I’d have liked. I had a little roundness to my tummy and even though they looked cracking in a bra – never underestimate the value of good foundation garments, according to my mother – my boobs, while not quite spaniel’s ears, would definitely not pass the pencil test. My mum insisted I was pretty, apparently I looked ‘just like that Sandy girl in the film Grease’, but I didn’t see it myself. Maybe when I was younger, but my hair, which was once a lovely golden blonde, was now what I’d call digestive biscuit and my eyes were too pale a blue to be memorable. Long story short, I wasn’t getting any.
Inwardly bemoaning my life, I pushed the button for the pedestrian crossing, and heard my phone buzz in my pocket. When I looked at the screen, I smiled.
“Hey, Annie. You okay?”
As the rapid beeping started, I jostled with a woman with a pushchair and started to cross.
“Mum, what time will you be home?” she asked, the tell-tale whine in her voice that she wanted something.
“About twenty minutes, why?”
The woman with the pushchair eased it in front of me, evidently wanting to race me to the other side. I rolled my eyes and skirted around her and jogged to the pavement, reaching it before she did, forcing myself not to do a victory lap.
“Can you take me to Sally’s?”
“And what would that magic little word be?”
“Oh God,” she sighed. “Please.”
“Depends on whether the house is a mess when I get back.” I smiled waiting for her to combust.
And right on cue. “That is so unfair! The boys are the ones who make the mess but I’m the one who gets it in the neck because you won’t give me a lift. You need to tell them to clear up their own crap, but no, they get away with-.”
“Annie!” I snapped. “Take a bloody breath before you keel over from lack of oxygen.”
