My Secret Lover

party,’ says Michelle.
    I sit up properly.
    ‘I’m going to be a grandmother,’ she
says, unable to hold back her piece of momentous news a second longer.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Do you think I’d win a competition
for glamorous grans?’
    She makes a kind of vampy face, but
it doesn’t work with the thick layer of white cream she’s got under her eyes.
    ‘What competition’s that?’
    ‘I don’t have a pacific competition
in mind,’ says Michelle, impatiently.
    There are several words she always
gets wrong, but this is not the time to correct her.
    ‘Anyway, forget that bit,’ she says,
regretting she’s mentioned competitions in the first place. She knows what I’m
like. ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Michaela’s pregnant?’ I stutter.
    ‘Four months.’
    ‘But she’s so young
    Michelle just looks at me. Michelle
was pregnant at fifteen.
    ‘I didn’t mean... I just meant, it
makes me feel so old.’
    ‘Shall we have the other pizza?’
Michelle says comfortingly.
    ‘No,’ I say.
    ‘It was free...’
    ‘But it’ll take half an hour to cook
and then we won’t want it.’
    ‘I put it in the oven when I took the
other one out,’ says Michelle.
    ‘Shame to waste it then,’ I say.
    Michelle gives me first choice of the
slices. It’s her way of being sympathetic because she thinks I’m depressed by
Michaela’s news which I’m not, actually.
    I know it makes me sound even more
desperately broody than people already imagine I am, but the truth is, I’m not
sure whether I would want to be a mother anyway. I love children, but I love
not having to see them at the end of the day. I love being able to go out to a
movie if I want to, without making any kind of arrangement. Not that I ever do,
because I usually go to movies with Michelle and she’s got three girls, so we
have to fit round their schedules. But I like having the option. Frankly, what
with my sister’s children, and Michelle’s, and now Michaela’s baby, I haven’t
got a lot of love left over for any children of my own, or time, or money.
    Of our own, I should say, because
Andy would be involved. (Not New Andy, obviously.)
    ‘What does Andy think?’ my mother
asked the other day.
    ‘Not interested,’ I told her.
     
    ‘Is she happy?’ I remember to ask
Michelle. This is Michaela we’re talking about, my first and favourite
goddaughter.
    ‘She’s put herself on the housing
list and she’s going to ask you to be godmother.’
    ‘Oh, that’s nice.’
    ‘Are you called grandgodmother when
you’re godmother to your godchild’s child?’ Michelle wonders.
    ‘No such word,’ I say firmly.
    I am definitely the expert where
words are concerned.
    Total silence required for Eastenders. If you’ve seen magazines in your supermarket with cover stories like STEVE AND
MEL LOVERS AGAIN and wondered who is so keen on soap opera that they seriously
buy magazines which detail the background stories as if the characters really
exist, then look no further than Michelle.
    ‘It’s so true to life,’ Michelle
says.
    If Michelle’s life were a soap opera,
Michelle would be played by Michelle Collins, which would make it easy for the
director, especially if her character were called Michelle too.
    Ironically, Michelle’s life could
easily be a soap opera, but if it were, I don’t know who would play me.
    Michelle got pregnant at fifteen by
her one true love who was almost immediately killed in a motorbike accident.
She then married his brother and had another child, but he never got over the
fact that she loved his dead brother more, so he left her for a barmaid, whose
husband murdered him, leaving Michelle a widow twice over by the age of
twenty-two, and her mother-in-law denouncing her to anyone who’d listen. Around
that time, her parents’ time-share in the Canaries was engulfed in a freak mud
slide burying them alive, but, as Michelle put it, every cloud has a silver
lining, and even though they hadn’t spoken since the first pregnancy, they’d
forgotten to change their will and so she got everything including the house in
Hatch End. Two evenings a week I looked after the kids so that she could do a
hairdressing diploma for which she was awarded a distinction, even though some
of her early cuts were a bit experimental. She had an affair with the teacher,
but left him when it turned out he was sleeping with three of the other
students, two of them male. After that, there was the AIDS scare, and the court
case for assault. I