Blowing It by Judy Astley

to cancel his golf to stay at home with Sophia) and had told her to grow up, get herself sorted. It had only, he’d said, been a stupid, one-off shag – it wasn’t going to happen again and there was no need for all this palaver. Apparently it was a well-known man thing, so he claimed (so that was all right then – perfectly normal). Nature, in her skewed wisdom, gave men an irresistible desire to go out and spread the seed around immediately after a birth, while the females of the species could see the living proof of the males’ fertility . It was something to do with the survival of the species giving them a primitive urge to impregnate as many women as possible. All this made Clover wonder if she was supposed to be grateful it was only one waitress he’d had, not the entire team, all lined up in their black skirts and little white aprons. If it
was
only one. He was away over night so often, she couldn’t possibly know what he did. She didn’t want to let herself board that particular train of thought. It was too hard to stop.
    The counsellor she had seen hadn’t been much use and had also assumed Clover was suffering crazed delusions brought on by post-natal depression and he had only really taken notice when she’d talked about her early childhood. Nodding and occasionally grunting, the blank-faced therapist had almost chewed the end off his pencil as Clover conjured up her earliest memories: the time she and Ilex were taken round the capitals of Europe in the Charisma tour bus with a selection of beardy old musicians, their sandalled, mantra-chanting women, and the gloriously untamed children of the other band members. Sean had said the therapist was probably stashing all the info away as a case-study for a future self-help bestseller and wasn’t at all interested in Clover’s part in her own childhood but it had left Clover wondering if she’d had her fragile baby-roots shaken by random childcare and the nightly stage-side view of her parents entertaining crowds of thousands instead of tucking her into her cot with nursery rhymes and a Fisher-Price mobile. It had surely left her childishly needy. When she’d worked at Home Comforts, assembling sample boards of paint colours and furnishing fabrics for customers, she’d too often tried to insist that a classic Victorian sitting room really needed candy pink. Now, here she was outside the gates of St Hilary’s, blurting out to her best school-gate friend Mary-Jane that her parents were thinking of selling up and planning a year-long world-trip, and wondering who to blame for her failure to turn into a properly formed grown-up. Hastily, she tried a bit of back-pedalling, looking to make herself feel better.
    ‘Of course I’m sure they didn’t mean any of it. It was probably just my crazy parents’ idea of a windup. It would be typical of them to come out with it for effect. They’ve probably forgotten all about it by now.’
    She smiled and shrugged and opened the door of her VW Touareg in an attempt to put off an approaching traffic warden. Did they have to hover so close to the school at dropping-off time? It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be more than a minute or two and it was only a single yellow line, nothing serious. She sighed and chewed at a nail – and why not? After Sunday they were all thoroughly ruined. Late last night she’d had to take off all the shattered varnish and file away the chewed edges. She’d have popped into Hand Job on the high street for repairs but Sean had now made her feel wary about spending casual cash, in case the redundancy thing really was true. She wasn’t sure whether she hoped it was, and had to face a downgrade in outgoings (and she could handle that) or that it wasn’t, and she had to go through all the angst of being convinced he was stashing money offshore as a lead-up to a cheap divorce or spending money on a mistress.
    Alongside Clover, watching the girls going into school, Mary-Jane’s face was