wearing aprons (not even joking) and the closest thing I have to colleagues is a row of Beanie Babies lined up on the windowsill, their colours having faded from decades in the sun.
When I say shit hit the fan, what I really mean is my ex, Leroy, cheated on me with a girl from the gym where we met. In fact, Leroy wasn’t just my ex, he was my ex-fiancé. Even saying his name makes me cringe. Leroy. What was I thinking going for a guy called Leroy? Did I really think I could marry him? Imagine standing at the altar saying, ‘I take thee, Leroy, to be my lawfully wedded husband’. Bleurgh. His name was obviously a red flag. Everything about him was a red flag actually, from the tattoo of Dr Dre on his shoulder to the way he made these horrendous grunting noises when he did bench presses like he was experiencing some kind of demonic possession. And then there was his ridiculous job as a furniture upcycler, which essentially involved buying old chests of drawers for a tenner from car boot sales, painting them blue and then selling them on for a five quid profit to someone who probably needed to go to Specsavers. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit harsh. Sometimes Leroy made a ten-pound profit. Sometimes even fifteen. Basically, he wasn’t exactly going places. And yet somehow (I blame pheromones) that didn’t matter to me. I decided that his furniture upcycling was trendy and cool and creative. I told my friends that he ‘wasn’t really an office person’ which, looking back on it, was just a nice way of saying he was pretty much unemployable. I’d stress how Leroy ‘liked to work with his hands’ as though he were an artisanal god. Ha. Artisanal he was not. A god he was definitely not. But he did like to work with his hands. He loved that. He certainly loved working his hands on Lydia – the annoyingly chipper personal trainer he started seeing while we were still together.
I know I sound bitter but I’m not. I mean, not that much. Okay, a bit – but can you blame me? I thought Leroy was the one. I was willing to overlook a Dr Dre tattoo for crying out loud! It didn’t matter because we were together. We were in love. We were going places. Leroy moved into my flat and somehow –through many frenzied sexual encounters and a lack of respect for reproductive biology – I ended up pregnant. P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T. When I saw those two red lines, I knew this was a problem that had to be solved. When you’ve spent your entire adult life avoiding pregnancy, that’s just how you see it, right? At least you do when you’re me and the only experience you’ve ever had of looking after something living is the time you bought a Venus flytrap and managed to kill it within two weeks. I ran through my options:
Morning-after pill (probably too late)
Abortion (eek)
Buy another test in the hope that this one was faulty (fingers crossed)
I ran to the shop and bought another test, but the damn thing wasn’t faulty. I was pretty sure it was too late for the morning-after pill so that left me with one option: an abortion. Abortion. Even the word made me shudder, but I braced myself to talk to Leroy about it. We’d get through it together.
But then that annoying furniture upcycler went and upcycled my mind, didn’t he? He turned me from an IKEA desk – good for work, reliable, decent and functional – to a rainbow-coloured child’s table, that with a few clicks and manoeuvres could turn into a cot. In Leroy’s eyes, I could become multi-purpose, a businesswoman and a mum. He made me feel like anything was possible. As long as we were together – a team – we could make it work. The timing wasn’t ideal, but we’d find a way.
To begin with, it was all going swimmingly. Leroy was so excited about our baby coming that he started buying the most adorable things – miniature Converse trainers, a tiny tracksuit, a rattle. He even came to antenatal classes with me without grumbling, and I started to feel like this pregnancy might be a gift. The catalyst needed to give my life and mine and Leroy’s relationship a bit more substance. Until then, I’d just been a businesswoman and a party girl, and I thought that with the arrival of a baby, my life might start to mean something more. And then Leroy proposed and even though it wasn’t the most epic proposal ever (a cheapish ring presented midway through eating a calzone at Pizza Express), I still felt like everything was starting to work out. That all the pieces of my life were coming together like a completed jigsaw. But then suddenly, pretty much overnight, Leroy’s whole attitude changed, and he became completely hands off. Literally. He stopped wanting to come anywhere near me in the bedroom. He said he felt weird about ‘disturbing the baby’. I mean, he was well-endowed but not disturbing-the-baby-by-piercing-my-womb big. I could tell it was about more than that.
Leroy quit coming to the antenatal classes. He stopped buying things for our baby. He stopped hanging out at my flat like he’d been doing the whole time we’d been together and went back to his tiny studio, claiming he ‘had a ton of work’, but there’s only so much time you can spend upcycling furniture. When that excuse got old and I asked him to come home, he said he ‘was feeling under the weather’. I didn’t know what was going on, but I desperately missed him, so one evening, I dragged my pregnant arse over to his place, with a carrier bag filled with Lemsip, Jaffa Cakes (his favourites) and even a box of gourmet cupcakes, only to find Leroy wasn’t under the weather at all. He was under Lydia. Leroy had forgotten that he’d left a spare key at my place and when he didn’t answer the front door, I assumed he might be too ill in bed. I burst into his flat and headed to his bedroom, only to find him having such wild passionate sex that he clearly hadn’t even registered my knock at the door. It took so long for him to notice my presence in the room that I began to feel like I was witnessing some kind of live sex show, and gawping in horror throughout the whole thing. Finally, Leroy spotted me and sprung apart from Lydia – but our relationship was over. I yanked the cheap ugly engagement ring he’d given me off my finger and flung it in his face. That was when it first dawned on me: I was going to be a single mum.
‘Natalieeeee!’ My mum’s voice bellows up the stairs now, interrupting my thoughts, which is probably a good thing since they weren’t exactly going to the best places.
‘Yes?’ I call back. The fact that my mum and I are still communicating like this – down a staircase in a similar way to how she used to call me down for dinner – is a little cringeworthy. Okay, it’s really cringe-worthy, but my mum’s been a life-saver recently. She let me move in with her when I realised I couldn’t cope with looking after my baby alone while trying to keep my business going. And living rent-free at home has allowed me to save up for a deposit so that my daughter and I can have our own little home at some point.
‘Come down here!’ she shrieks.
‘Okay!’ I call back, placing my glitter pen on the desk, before heading downstairs.
My mum’s got my daughter Hera downstairs and it’s been a few hours since I saw her, which is a long time for me. Even if Leroy turned out to be a complete waste of space, I have to give him credit for helping me make the World’s Most Perfect Baby. My little Hera is adorable, and I’m not just saying that because I’m her mum. She really is a gorgeous baby. She has the biggest brownest eyes, the longest lashes, a cute button nose and the prettiest little rosebud lips. She’s so uniquely beautiful that I wanted to give her a unique name. I chose Hera because it’s the name of the queen of the Greek gods – a powerful, strong, leading woman, just like I want my baby to grow up to be.
I head into the kitchen and immediately spot Hera sitting in her highchair, playing with her favourite toy – a teddy that somewhere along the line was dubbed ‘Mr Bear’.
‘Hello angel!’ I coo, giving her a kiss on the head.
Hera immediately drops Mr Bear and reaches out for a hug. My heart melts. It never gets old. I pick her up and hold her close to my chest, rubbing her back and bouncing her up and down while she plays with my hair. It’s only then that I notice that my mum is leaning against the kitchen counter fully made up and wearing a party frock she bought last week from TK Maxx. It’s pink, embroidered with gold fuchsias, and she was incredibly happy to get it for 70 per cent off. She’s munching on a cracker with brie, carefully cupping one of her hands under it so the crumbs don’t fall on her dress.
‘How come you’re wearing that?’ I ask, gesturing at her dress and noticing her face of full make-up. She’s gone all out with blue eyeshadow, lashings