I stare at them. That one, who thinks everyone wants to listen to his TV show out loud. That one, falling asleep standing up. I wonder, whether they have bare legs or jumpers or boots or visible toenails, if anyone is feeling close to how I feel this morning.
Slowly, the tiny stations make way for the edge of the city. The flasks are replaced with branded coffee cups and the platforms are crammed full, the people younger, cooler, edgier. Like my colleagues at New Social, one of the city’s biggest digital marketing agencies. I glance at my trainers, doubtful now about the brand.
Everyone moves more urgently here. My heart starts racing watching it all and I have the edge of a headache. I used to be comfortable at the heart of this picture; pushing past, boots stomping at pace, latte aloft, tut tut tutting if you strayed into my path. Now I feel distant from it all. Maternity leave days have required me to get to one place at 10.30 a.m. and make small talk while singing nursery rhymes. We spoke slowly, the other mums and I, trying to drag out our coffees because otherwise what would we do for the rest of the day? We had tried to kill – stake out and murder – time so that it could be the evening, when husbands would be home and wine would be poured and we would feel, for that tiny window, like the old us.
‘That was my shoulder,’ hisses the woman next to me at a man who had passed by in the aisle. She could have been me, I think. Not so long ago. ‘City wankers.’
She looks at me in solidarity but I feel nervous of her wrath and also like a fraud. This doesn’t feel like my world any longer. Doesn’t she know that I am normally still in my pyjamas around now, singing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ or hanging up row after row of tiny socks while a child sleeps? I’m not a real commuter, I think. If only you knew.
A surge of anxiety pulses as I think about how in an hour or so, I will be expected to do my job as Digital Marketing Manager. To be current in a sea of twenty-somethings. To run meetings. To dash out of the office to eat pancakes for brunch with a client.
I will be expected to be the straight-to-the-point ‘this creative isn’t working for me, we need another option for first thing tomorrow’ version of me that I am not sure hasn’t been written over with toddler songs and baby babble. With photographing my turmeric latte for Cheshire Mama’s Instagram and calling that ‘work’.
I feel a sensation in my stomach akin to a bad hangover.
Oh, Poppy. My best mate for the last year. I’ve never spent as much time with anyone as I do with her, with those long walks in her pram, us dancing round the room to our songs.
Just then my phone beeps and I leap on it because, almost definitely, it’s a message telling me that Poppy had escaped out of Ronnie’s back garden or is in an ambulance with a life-threatening condition, probably brought on by the trauma of being left behind by her mum.
But it’s just Emma.
She checked in last night too, even as she dashed from putting her son to bed to her weekly Slimming World meeting. I was what she had done with her spare thirty seconds and I felt touched. And guilty, because sometimes I think I don’t make enough effort with Emma. But I want to speed her up, and tell her to speak up. She gets lost, even in our small crowd.
Gd luck today S, her message says. You’re going to smash it!!!
I smile, picturing Emma bursting in to baby music class – where I’m normally headed on Monday mornings too – muttering apologies for her tardiness. Emma is ten minutes late for whatever she does.
I smile at the thought of them all, my mum friends.
Emma is thirty-five, only a few months older than me, and sometimes I forget that she has a husband. He doesn’t come up often but when he does he sounds uninvolved and removed from her and her baby’s life.
Our virtually teenage (fine, twenty-nine-year-old) friend Asha messaged this morning at 5 a.m., up early to call her sister in Melbourne. Asha is tiny, less than five foot. She likes to question things and research them and come back to you when she has firmed up her arguments. She would never fight a cause unless she was an encyclopaedia on the subject. Even after wine.
And finally there was Cora, communicating as always via a list of her favourite emojis, sent while I was at Ronnie’s. Cora, unlike Emma, likes to do everything fast, but especially talking, which she does tripping over her own thoughts, flitting to a different point, pulling a compact out of her bag to check her eyelashes but still speaking, then asking you quickly if her hair looks okay while also sending a text. Cora is a whirlwind; the kind of WAG I thought I might run a mile from when I first saw her stomp in in giant heels and faux fur to our antenatal class.
The four of us met last year, when our babies protruded from our middles. When we sat in a room feeling increasingly panicked about things we hadn’t bought, learned or read, and to plan for a birth that could never be planned for.
Emma and Cora sat together on the parents’ evening-style chairs, hands on bumps, already friends. While Ed and I came together, they massaged each other’s backs with tennis balls instead. ‘My other half’s at work,’ Cora said. Then she tipped her head in Emma’s direction. ‘Hers just isn’t into this whole thing.’ Then she’d rolled her eyes, while Emma’s cheeks reddened.
‘You know each other already?’ I asked, in week one.
Everybody round Sowerton – where I had lived for less than a year – seemed to know each other.
My heart sank. I had been hopeful for a fellow ex-city dweller to find some things in common with.
But Cora nodded.
‘Em was in South Wales when she was a kid but after that, we both grew up round here, hon,’ Cora told me, leaning into Emma. ‘Same school, the lot. We’ve been mates for years.’
Even at first impressions they were a wonky juxtaposition. I looked at Emma, the pretty blonde with chubby cheeks who blushed when I spoke to her and couldn’t meet eye contact. And then at Cora, who’d told me that her wedding cost £60,000 and she has a nanny ‘just to help out’ about ten minutes after meeting me.
I suspect it worked for Cora like those types of uneven friendships always do. She dominated and talked; Emma listened. Emma’s stories would never compete with her tales of Hunter, her WAG past. Like having a therapist, for free. And for Emma perhaps Cora made her life easier, found the baby groups they should go to, made the friends on her behalf, formed her life then sent her out an invite for it.
‘You’ve not been in Sowerton long, I take it?’ asked Cora.
I nodded. ‘I’m from Manchester really. Chorlton. I work in town.’
It seemed important that they knew. That they didn’t think I was just … you know, Sowerton.
But Cora was nonplussed, checking her lipstick in a mirror, nodding vaguely.
‘Is it just us three?’ I asked our teacher, Cath, and she looked at her notes.
‘One more starting next week but that’s it,’ she confirmed. ‘We don’t get big classes round here. Not like in your cities.’
She nodded at me.
And I sat back and hoped that mystery mum number four brought some balance. Or wasn’t already mates with everyone else, at least.
Then in week two, as I swigged Gaviscon from a bottle and Emma got out an emergency KitKat, Asha arrived, little and serious and dressed for the gym with a notebook. Her husband Aidan held her hand.