The Cows Read online

  ‘OK ladies, are you all here?’ says a pretty blonde in a white cotton uniform. ‘Come this way.’ They all pick up their bags, and follow her into a changing room.

  ‘OK, I have you all booked for private massages followed by pedicures at the same time, is that right?’

  ‘Yup, that’s right,’ confirms Tanya.

  ‘Actually, can I swap my pedicure for a foot massage, please?’ asks Cam. ‘A private one?’

  ‘Oh, Cam, come on,’ says Mel. ‘The whole point is that we spend time together. Sit with us and have a pedicure.’

  ‘No, I hate that. Looking at all of your feet, it makes me feel sick. It reminds me of when you used to wake me up by putting your toes in my mouth. I’ll pay for everyone if you let me have my treatments on my own. We can go for a drink afterwards and you can carry on ridiculing me then?’

  ‘Will you pay for that too?’ asks Angela, boldly.

  ‘Yes, I’ll pay for that too. Just spare me your feet, please.’

  ‘OK, but tell your therapist not to add extra time just because your feet are so massive,’ says Tanya, jokingly.

  ‘Oh you’re so funny!’ says Cam, pulling off a sock and throwing it at her.

  They all undress. Cam, without much thought, takes off her leather jacket and pulls her black t-shirt over her head.

  ‘Jesus, Camilla. You could have warned us we were about to get our eyes poked out,’ says Mel, taking her underwear off under a towel. ‘Do you ever wear a bra?’

  ‘I didn’t want to have to put one on after a massage. I like to be free.’

  ‘Bra free, childfree, boyfriend free, have you ever committed to anything other than your laptop?’

  ‘Yes, actually. I committed to the home that I own, and the business that I run, and the writing that I do. Not like you three, tied down by husbands and babies. I am free as a bird to do my things, and I am happy, so please can we just spend one afternoon together where you stop acting like some days you don’t envy my life?’

  There are a few moments of awkward silence while they continue to take their clothes off.

  ‘I can’t be as free as you, you’re right,’ says Mel, stepping out of her knickers. ‘Mainly because of this.’

  She drops her towel, revealing a body battered by pregnancy and childbirth. Veins like biros popping out of her legs, breasts like empty tote bags, stretch marks like a dartboard across her belly. Her sisters aren’t sure if they should be laughing or not.

  ‘I also pee when I sneeze,’ Mel adds, causing them all to crack up laughing as she grabs the towel and wedges it between her legs. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘And when I laugh.’

  ‘Come to my yoga class, for Christ’s sake,’ says Tanya. ‘Your pelvic floor is a mess!’

  ‘OK, which one of you is Camilla?’ says a different girl with brown hair and the same white cotton uniform. She is not sure what she just walked in on, but she’s doing her best not to look at the woman who she thinks might be peeing into a towel.

  ‘I am,’ says Cam, tying the robe and dropping her phone into the pocket.

  ‘Cam, no, come on, you can’t take your phone for a massage. Can’t you stay off the Internet for an hour?’ says Angela, who isn’t even on Facebook.

  ‘Yes, I can. And when that hour is up and it’s time for my foot massage, I will blog about the massage. Because that is how I roll, OK?’ Cam sticks her tongue out at them and follows the therapist.

  ‘My name is Sandra, I own this place. If you mention you were here we’ll give you fifty per cent off,’ the therapist says. ‘I love your blog.’

  ‘Sure, thanks!’ says Cam. Yet another perk of the job.

  After a blissful hour-long full body massage, Cam’s brain is ready to get back to work. ‘Can I sit up for the foot massage, so I can be on my phone?’ she asks.

  ‘Sure. I won’t disturb you. I know how you don’t like to chat.’

  Cam buckles at the intimacy. Here she is in a tiny room with a stranger, who knows the intricacies of her life because she’s read the words that Cam herself put out there to the world. It’s the second time this week that has made her feel weird.

  ‘OK, look up and smile. Tweet time,’ Cam says, taking a photo and posting it.

  Best foot massage ever at @dreamspa. Ask for Sandra, she has magic hands #dreamspa #magichands #askforSandra

  ‘Thanks,’ Sandra says. ‘It’s a tough business. Competitive, you know? I set this place up after I had my little girl. Her dad didn’t stick around and I was left with nothing. It started as just manicures and now it’s a spa. Turned it around in the end. Anyway, sorry, you get on. Let me know if it’s too much pressure.’

  ‘I will, thanks. That feels nice.’

  Cam settles back and checks her email. There is one from Tara.

  Hey Cam

  So yeah, my name is out there. I guess there is no hiding now. Also, I passed out in Tesco and ended up in hospital. And yup, officially back living with my parents at the age of forty-two. So feeling really great about myself right now.

  How are you? I loved your piece about women stepping up. I guess it’s not always that easy though. I keep having moments where I think I can pull things together and get my life back on track, and then I realise that the universe is out to get me, and I don’t have the power to do shit. They even seem to have erased me from work, which is the only place I ever felt totally on it. Is this just my life now? Help.

  Tx

  Cam leans forward and looks at Sandra. ‘It must have been hard,’ she says, ‘to find the energy to make this place work, when you had a kid and were on your own?’

  Sandra looks up as she rolls her knuckles around the inside of Cam’s left ankle.

  ‘Yeah, it was. But when you have a kid you have to get it together. I’m not saying it makes life harder than if you don’t, but it’s not just about you. At the end of the day anyone can turn their life around if they put their mind to it. I believe that.’

  Cam closes her eyes for a second, as thoughts swirl around her head. Her eyes ping open as inspiration strikes. She opens www.HowItIs.com on her phone, and gets to work as Sandra applies the perfect amount of pressure to her feet.

  You can always get your life back, no matter what!

  Everyone is in their own rut at some point, and when you’re in it, it can feel like life as you knew it, or hoped it would be, just isn’t going to happen. But that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, or that you have to accept a raw deal. Everyone has the power to turn their life around, it’s really just a matter of good decisions.

  When sadness is dominating your life, when you are so consumed with negativity that you can’t see the wood from the trees; in those times it is the job of someone close to you to remind you that everything will be OK one day. But if you don’t have that person, then I’ll be the one to tell you that everything is going to be alright, if you decide you want it to be.

  Take prison, for example. The whole point of prison is rehabilitation. Criminals are reprimanded for what they have done, locked up as punishment and taught a lesson for their crimes. All with the intention that they learn from their mistakes and go back into the world at the end of their sentences to live relatively normal lives. If the worst people among us are able to rebuild themselves after being incarcerated, then the rest of us absolutely can too.

  Sometimes life presents itself with the kinds of challenges you never think you’ll overcome. Heartbreak, humiliation, losing a job, someone you love or your health, these are all things that happen to so many people. They are darkly ‘normal’, yet they can rip us apart and subsequently life can feel impossible. But the truth is, you can turn anything around with the right mentality. Your attitude to everything, from life to death is what defines how the experience is for you, and those around you. Keep your attitude good, and you can get through anything.

  GO on, turn your life around, you can do it!

  Cam x

  She posts it, then replies to Tara’s last email.


  Tara, see my last blog. It’s all about good decisions – so what are you going to do next?

  7

  Tara

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ Dad says, as Mum feeds his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. ‘How can I enjoy myself when everyone has seen it?’

  ‘We had this organised well before any of this happened, Peter. It would look bad to cancel,’ Mum says with a tight mouth but at full volume, as if that will make her inaudible to me.

  ‘“Look bad to cancel”? How can we look worse? And why do we have to go to the pub, I thought we were having a dinner here at home?’ Dad says, looking in the hallway mirror and straightening his collar. He’s a proud man; I know this is killing him.

  ‘We were, dear. But you smashed three of the dinner plates, two side plates, one serving dish and my china cake tray. How can I have a dinner party with half of my best china missing?’

  Truth is, I wish he would cancel it. A ‘small gathering of our nearest and dearest in our local pub’, as Mum put it, is as tempting to me as a gunshot in the face right now. But I’m doing it, because my mum has been so awesome, and I want to make her happy.

  ‘Is Katya here?’ I ask, coming down the stairs.

  ‘Yes, she’s watching Coronation Street,’ Mum says.

  I go into the living room and Katya is sitting, drinking tea and watching TV. She’s been mine and Mum’s cleaner for six years, and babysits for Annie sometimes when I go out. I told her not to come to mine this week, because the house is so disgusting and I need to clean it before she gets there. She’s around forty, Russian, tall, blonde and a bit trashy in the way she dresses. She’s also hard as nails, never had kids and never talks about love. I trust her entirely.

  ‘Hey, Katya, how are you?’

  She gives me an angry side eye, then focuses back on the TV. She’s wearing a leopard-print top with skinny jeans and ankle boots with pointy toes. She always wears bright pink lipstick, which I think is hilarious when she is essentially spending a night in alone watching television.

  ‘Annie is asleep; she was wiped out. She didn’t eat much dinner, so if she wakes up for any reason you can make her some toast, but I doubt she will. Katya?’

  ‘I can’t look at you,’ she says, sternly. Her accent is very strong.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, even though I know why.

  ‘For years I have cleaned your dildo!’ she says, standing up and getting agitated.

  I step much closer to her. ‘My dildo?’

  ‘I worry about you, that you get none of the sex. So every week I come, I clean your dildo, I make sure it is clean for you and I leave it in your drawer and all so you have sex and respect with yourself. And then you go on a train and you do those things for everyone to see? Why you do that?’

  ‘Wait, you clean my dildo?’ I ask, slowly.

  ‘Every week, I clean it with the polish.’

  ‘With furniture polish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Sophie got me the dildo for my birthday present three years ago. I have never used it. No matter how little sex I get, I’ve never been able to get turned on by a piece of rubber. And thank God; I’d probably have died of toxic poisoning by now with half a gallon of Mr Sheen being wedged up my vagina.

  ‘Katya, you don’t need to clean my dildo, OK? And you don’t need to worry about me and the sex I get.’

  ‘The sex you don’t get, more like.’

  ‘OK, the sex I don’t get. You don’t need to worry about it.’

  ‘I won’t clean it for you any more,’ she says, huffily, as she sits back down.

  ‘That’s OK. Will you look at me?’

  She turns her head slowly to the left and looks up. We make eye contact.

  ‘There,’ I say. ‘Great. OK, we won’t be late. In all honesty, I hope I’m home in under an hour. See you later.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she says, gazing back at the TV. ‘I will not clean your dildo one more time.’

  ‘That’s fine with me,’ I mumble as I leave.

  ‘OK, shall we go?’ says Mum as I walk into the hall, my grown-up mind telling me to face the world head on, the child in me wanting to lock myself in the cupboard under the stairs and never come out. Social paranoia is a new emotion for me. I’d literally rather bathe in cockroaches than sit in a pub with my parents and their friends.

  ‘Yup,’ I say, putting on a brave face and a denim jacket. ‘Let’s get this over and done with.’

  I knew this was a terrible idea. Sitting around a large round table in the back room of our local pub are me, Mum, Dad, Mum’s best friend Gloria (Mum’s ‘sexy friend’), her husband Simon, and two of Dad’s mates that he drinks with at the bar, Ron and Malcolm. Also there is Mrs Bradley and David. There is a buffet table covered in food against a wall. No one has touched it.

  ‘Well, happy birthday, mate!’ says Ron. ‘What is it, the big nine-oh?’

  ‘Oh ha ha,’ says Dad, sipping from his pint of stout. He doesn’t want to be here, it’s screamingly obvious.

  ‘Well, I have news,’ says Gloria. ‘Tina is pregnant.’

  ‘Oh that’s wonderful,’ says my mother. Everyone raises a glass to Tina, Gloria’s daughter. Then we all go quiet again. Ron keeps looking over at me. Whenever I look back, he winks. Ron is seventy-six. I want to throw up.

  ‘Yes, they’d been trying for ages. So we are all thrilled.’

  ‘Not that I like to think of them “trying”,’ says Simon, referring to sex, which makes everyone look at me, then look away and blush.

  ‘Sorry, I …’ he says. Like I’m German and someone mentioned the war. Everyone goes quiet again.

  ‘OK, come on, we might as well deal with this head on,’ says my mother, suddenly, putting her drink down firmly on the table. ‘As you all know, Tara was videotaped doing something very personal on the train last week.’

  ‘Mum, no, what are you doing?’

  ‘Quiet please, Tara. It’s your father’s birthday and we can’t all sit here in silence pretending this isn’t happening.’

  Oh, Jesus.

  ‘We’ve had a very hard week. The newspapers have written about us and we are all very embarrassed. But as a family we thought it was important to not cancel tonight, as we want to move on from all of this. So may I suggest we all raise a glass to my wonderful husband, Peter, on his seventy-second birthday?’

  Everyone does as she says, and I wonder if anyone would notice if I ran out of the room to be sick.

  ‘Thank you,’ says my mother, as she sits back down. My dad looks like he’s sitting on a thousand drawing pins. Everyone goes quiet again.

  ‘I touched myself in public once.’

  ‘Gloria!’ spits my mother. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Oh, no one saw me, but I thought it was wonderful. Very exciting. Of course I didn’t get filmed; we didn’t have camera phones in those days.’

  Oh my God, no, this isn’t happening.

  ‘She’s a wild one, alright,’ says Simon smiling at Gloria, who looks very proud of herself. My dad removes himself from the table and starts cramming small ham sandwiches into his mouth over at the buffet table.

  ‘I’ve had the occasional squeeze outdoors myself,’ says Ron, making Gloria laugh and my mother’s jaw smack her thighs. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that, good on ya, girl,’ continues Ron, looking at me and winking, like I just did well in a maths exam.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘We don’t need to talk about this.’

  ‘We’ve even done it in public, haven’t we, Simon?’

  Oh for fuck’s sake.

  ‘Sorry everyone, I’m not sure this conversation is appropriate,’ says Mrs Bradley in her haughty headmistress voice, gesturing towards David, who is clearly about to have a breakdown at the mention of sex. This is the second time I’ve been involved in David being exposed to sexual content. He’s going to have a full-scale episode every time he sees me from now on.

  ‘What’s the matter, David?’ says Ro
n. ‘Still not popped your cherry?’ Him and Malcolm burst out laughing. Dad turns sharply and silences them with his eyes from the corner of the room. He is comfortable with being around men and has spent hours of his life in this pub talking about sport and work, but he’s never been able to cope with crass, laddish behaviour.

  ‘Yes, please, let’s try to keep the conversation away from S-E-X,’ says Mrs Bradley, looking nervously at David, waiting to see if he gets worse or calms down. I notice that even though David is looking down, his eyes are edging towards me.

  ‘Right, well, now that’s out the way, shall we eat?’ I say, really needing this to move on. I get up and head over to my dad at the buffet. Everyone else stays seated and continues with the awkward silence. I might have to give up trying; this evening is obviously doomed. But then my mother starts to speak again.

  ‘OK, well if you must know, Peter and I did it on a beach in Portugal once, so I guess everyone has had their fair share of public fun, haven’t they?’ she says, as if she didn’t want to be left out.

  ‘Oh for the love of God,’ says my dad, dropping a plate full of stale buffet foods and crouching down to pick it all up.

  ‘Peter, please, will you be careful with the bloody crockery!’ shouts Mum, and I can’t help but laugh. This is all completely ridiculous.

  I kneel down and help him pick up bits of buttery ham off the disgusting pub carpet. ‘Happy birthday, Dad,’ I whisper. He manages to look at me for a second, but it doesn’t last long.

  ‘We were on a private beach and under a towel,’ he says, abruptly.

  ‘Dad, seriously, we don’t need to share any more, OK?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry, love,’ he says, standing and reloading his plate. I hope that is the end of the Over Seventies Confession Club meeting I seem to be stranded at.

  After a short while longer we’ve all managed to eat a little, have a couple of drinks, and keep the conversation off sex, but the tensions are still high. Ron has been trying to edge closer to me for twenty minutes; the more he drinks, the more his eyes glint like a coyote eyeing up a cat. God knows what nuggets of sexually inappropriate wisdom he is planning to spray me with. So as he begins to make his move over to the empty chair next to me, I make a sharp exit to the toilets, where I spend a long time sitting with my head in my hands, not caring what anyone thinks I am doing. When I come out, David is standing right in front of me, blocking my way. His black curly hair is hanging gently over his face, his skinny, tall frame suddenly surprisingly intimidating. I take a sharp intake of breath and slap my hand to my chest.