The Single Mums' Secrets - Janet Hoggarth Page 0,25

to a man in a grey T-shirt and jeans, waiting in the ice cream van queue. He was exactly as Louise had described him and a bit like Kandi’s dad. To add insult to injury, I leaned over into the gutter and violently vomited up my tuna sandwich, surprising myself as well as the children.

Gemma started crying and Ted ran off. Clearly he’d had enough. Clammy and shivering I pulled myself together as tummy cramp gripped my core. My long overdue period chose right now to knock me down. ‘Bloody perimenopause,’ I mumbled like a tramp doused in meths, wiping my lips on a shredded tissue scavenged from my jeans pocket. I was never ill. Maybe the time for HRT was now.

8

Carl

Carl’s previous session with Barbara had ended with him blurting out about how he’d let Janey down, how she’d really hated him and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Therapy had prised open Pandora’s box. This week Barbara faced him from her high-backed chair opposite, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes focused on him as he twisted his thumbs round each other in an endless game of tag.

‘Just take it slow,’ she said gently.

It was raining outside, smudging the corners of the room with gloomy shadows. The light patter on the attic roof took him back to that fateful night. It had been raining then too. Repressed memories roared through Carl’s head. He’d not been able to think about that night and following day in its entirety since it had happened. Fragments would catch him unawares and he’d historically push them away with drink or sex. But now he was sober, there weren’t sufficient distractions to keep it all at bay. He needed to face the incident once and for all…

Janey had been the absolute love of his life and so far removed from the affected fashion world he inhabited. She had been a midwife, an unequivocal girl next door beauty whom he’d met on a night out with Jo when they were tearing up the town in the late nineties. They’d partied hard but once they were married, Janey made it clear she wanted to start a family. Sadly, she’d suffered a missed miscarriage of their much-wanted first child, the foetus not having developed beyond six weeks at the three-month scan.

The fact she had naturally got pregnant at all had been a miracle. Carl had lazy sperm, a result of years of drug and alcohol abuse, something that could have been vastly improved if he’d quit alcohol at the same time as packing in the drugs. He’d attended AA to appease Janey, but he wasn’t being truthful – he was drinking on the sly. Initially, Janey was so grief-stricken she was oblivious to Carl’s descent into full-blown everyday drinking after his period of fake sobriety during the pregnancy.

Carl had shared this part of his journey in AA, his shameful relief that there’d been no baby to try and remain sober for was well documented. They’d resumed trying again, but this time Carl didn’t even attempt to hide his drinking, and Janey didn’t fall pregnant. It became a bone of contention between them as she woke up to the extent of his alcoholism.

‘At first she was supportive, tried to get me to go to meetings, and I went to a few, but never stopped drinking.’

Barbara remained silent, holding the space for this untold part of the story to come out.

‘But her patience had almost run dry. The day it happened, I’d come home completely legless after a photo shoot had ended up in the pub. I think it was just after the third month she’d not fallen pregnant. I walked in the front door as she was going out and she rounded on me from the kitchen, just screaming at me incoherently before slapping me across the face several times quite violently. It was obviously all a bit of a blur because I was pissed. She’d really lost it, which was not like her.’

Carl paused, before dredging up the next part. ‘Then she started shouting, “You don’t even care about our dead baby. You never even wanted one. All you care about is fucking drink! I hate you!” Or something to that effect – I definitely remember that she hated me. I staggered back against the kitchen door where she’d shoved me, so drunk I could barely stand. She ran out of the house. I don’t remember what I did next; probably drank some more. I had