Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [64]
She handed the phone to Isabel and between sobs and sniffles a story began to emerge.
Now Isabel is a girl of simple needs and one of them is her Saturday night ritual. If she is good and eats her vegetables during the week (well, peas, potatoes, corn and occasionally carrots if we’re very lucky) she is allowed to have, every Saturday night, the same meal of two-minute noodles and ice cream, followed by an hour of her favourite grown-up TV program, Australia’s Funniest Home Videos (yes, I know, but at the time she was not yet four and some of the ‘man hit in groin’ or ‘bride falling down’ videos are quite funny). I’d told all this to Pamela, but of course she’d ignored my advice and had instead served up a plate of meat and vegetables, including - horror of horrors! - broccoli (or ‘green trees’ in Issy’s vernacular). In a fit of temper Isabel had thrown the broccoli across the kitchen, somehow managing to land a piece with startling accuracy in Nana’s restorative evening glass of white wine. Now my daughter had to go to bed without watching her favourite TV show. Things couldn’t have been worse.
‘Mummy…huh, huh…I think Nana is bad and mean…huh…and I hate her,’ sobbed Isabel, in one of her more florid outbursts. I understood this sentiment completely but this was no time to pick a fight with my mother-in-law, so I started trying to smooth things over.
‘Now darling, hate is a very bad word and we should never, ever say it. If you tell Nana you’re sorry and go to bed now I promise you can have ice cream and two-minute noodles for dinner tomorrow night.’ The sniffling stopped as Issy started making her calculations.
‘And Funniest Home Videos?’
‘Well, no, that is only on TV on Saturday night, darling.’ The ‘huh-huhing’ started again in earnest.
‘But, I have a surprise for you in my bag, a new Wiggles video. You can watch that instead.’
‘Which one?’
‘Err, Racing the Rainbow, I think.’
‘Can I watch it two times?’
‘Okay, but only if you go to bed right now and promise to be a good girl for Nana tomorrow.’
‘Okay, I promise…yay The Wiggles…night Mummy.’
‘Nighty night.’
Pamela took the phone back and said, ‘You’re spoiling that child you know. My boys always ate their vegetables and certainly never had tantrums like that.’
This, in Pamela-speak, roughly translated to: ‘You are a slack and lazy mother. Your child is no doubt going to end up a heroin addict and prostitute by the age of fifteen and it will be all your fault.’ Who cares, I’d averted a crisis and that’s all I was really worried about at this stage.
Unfortunately, when I got downstairs I began to realise how long that particular diplomatic exercise had taken. The entrées had all been served and the plates had already been taken away. I was starving, too. What’s more, all the good seats next to the vaguely amusing people had been taken and the only vacant seat I could see in the whole room was next to Brad, the over-enthusiastic facilitator. That was the first time I swore that evening.
Just as I was contemplating this fate, Alex called me over: ‘Hey Ellie, what happened to you? I saved you a seat.’
Alex had indeed saved me a seat, but unfortunately no entrée.
‘Sorry about not keeping your entrée - they’d cleared everything away before I noticed,’ he explained.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘I just had a few domestic issues to settle with my daughter and mother-in-law, which took longer than expected.’
On the other side of Alex was Rosanna, the senior sales representative. She shot me a hostile look. It was obvious she was trying to get her hooks into Alex. Rosanna had been one of our most successful sales reps for Lo-prez, no doubt by virtue of her long black hair and vavavoom figure - think poor man’s Catherine Zeta Jones. I suspect all the male doctors felt that if they were going to have to be bored by the sales pitch they might as well enjoy the scenery on offer. I’d actually wondered why she’d requested a transfer to the Erecta team but the answer was now clear. It was not so much the product