The Not So Perfect Mum: The feel-good novel you have to read this year!
A hilarious, straight-talking read for fans of Fiona Neill and Gill Hornby’s ‘The Hive’.Previously published as ‘The Class Ceiling’.Maia is a cleaner for ladies who lunch. With mops and buckets in tow, she spends her days dashing from house to house cleaning up after them, as they rush from one exhausting Pilates class to the next.But an unusual inheritance catapults her and her children into the very exclusive world of Stirling Hall School – a place where no child can survive without organic apricots and no woman goes a week without a manicure.As Maia and her children, Bronte and Harley, try to settle into their new life, Maia is inadvertently drawn to the one man who can help her family fit in. But is his interest in her purely professional? And will it win her any favours at the school gate?A hilarious, straight-talking read for anyone who's ever despaired at the politics of the school run.
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KERRY FISHER
The Not So Perfect Mum
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers in 2014
This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2017
Copyright © Kerry Fisher 2014
Kerry Fisher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007570232
Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007570249
Version: 2018-05-10
To Steve, Cameron and Michaela
Contents
Posh women with dirty houses sometimes phone me. Posh men never do.
Until today, when this solicitor bod burst into my morning with the sort of booming confidence it would be impossible to argue against. My ears closed down, rejecting the steamroller voice, pushing away his words.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of ghastly news.’
I’d just got home from what was always my worst job of the week – cleaning the changing rooms at Surrey’s grottiest leisure centre. The phone rang shortly after I’d gone upstairs for a bath to scrub every trace of old plasters and plughole cack off my skin. As I clumped down to the kitchen wrapped in a towel that barely covered my backside, I was praying that the call was from Colin, with good news about work. Instead I stood there, holding the phone away from my ear so I didn’t drip water into the receiver while Mr William Lah-di-dah bellowed away at a slight distance, a sort of old Etonian-cum-Clanger. Then I heard it.
‘I’m afraid Professor Rose Stainton passed away last Friday.’
I pressed the phone into my forehead as I tried to take in the fact that my favourite – and best paying – customer had died. My oddball ally, with her outrageous old lady comments and bursts of unexpected kindness, had gone. I hadn’t even said goodbye. Froths of shampoo seeped out from under my towel turban and mingled with the sting in my eyes.
‘Mrs Etxeleku? Are you still there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’ I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. I’m not a Mrs. I’d given up waiting for Colin to pop the question. And my surname is pronounced Ech-eleku, not Et-zeleku. If only my father had hung around long enough for me to be born, I could have had a nice English name – Windsor, Jones, even Sidebottom – on my birth certificate, rather than the blank that made my mother clamp her mouth shut like a Venus flytrap every time I tried to discuss it. Instead I’ve spent thirty-six years lumbered with a Basque surname no one can pronounce.
‘How did she die?’ I heard a wobble in my voice. I leant against the wall, the chilly December draught blowing under the back door, licking around my wet knees.
‘A heart attack.’
‘Was she on her own?’
‘Yes, she managed to call an ambulance but she was dead by the time they reached her.’
He sounded as though he was discussing an order for a Chinese takeaway. I was obviously just a number on his neatly typed list of people to phone – a nobody, someone he needed to tell they no longer had a job. He paused. I imagined him sitting behind a heavy wooden desk, glancing down the page to see who came after ‘cleaner’. The idea that someone who spent her life wiping globs of toothpaste off sinks could be friends with someone who spent hers debating Kafka wouldn’t have crossed his mind. I started clattering about, throwing dirty cereal bowls into the sink and hurling trainers and football boots into a heap by the back door. I had no claim on Rose Stainton. I was just the woman with the mop, the skivvy who washed out the kitchen bin.
