Free After Ever After by Rowan Coleman

hide shopping from him too, don’t you? And then bring it out a couple of weeks later and say you’ve had it ages,’ I say mischievously.
    Camille is unrepentant. ‘Yeah, of course I do! Don’t you?’ She looks from me to Dora.
    ‘No fucker to hide it from,’ Dora shrugs, happily lighting up another cigarette with the embers of the last one. ‘And anyway, it’s my money, I earn it, I’ll spend it on what I like as long as I don’t have to go to a bloke in Dalston to get it and it isn’t gonna kill me.’
    Camille and I smile uneasily. It has always been Dora’s policy to joke about her problems and sometimes, like now, I feel it’s designed more to make other people squirm than to make herself feel better.
    ‘What about you, Kits? Now you’re a lady of leisure, do you have to account for every penny to Prince Charming?’
    I laugh it off, squirming from the truth.
    ‘No, don’t be mad. We share things. I mean, I’m not earning at the moment but I will be soon, when Ella’s a bit bigger maybe … Fergus and I have agreed,’ I lie. In fact we have disagreed about it heartily for the last six months. I want to work, not because I want to escape my baby but because I need to; it’s part of me. I’ve always had to look after myself before; a virtual orphan as a child, I dragged myself up.
    And that’s the problem. Fergus is obsessed by his mission to make sure that for the first time in my life I don’t have to worry about anything at all. When we first got together it sounded like a dream come true. In fact, the more protective he became the more vulnerable I let myself be. But now I find that I miss getting out there and making a contribution to my world that I can see in hard cash.
    Fergus is certain that I’m trying to put a brave face on it and that really I just want to be looked after. And I do, but I want to look after him too. We haven’t had a stand-up row about it, it’s just that every time I bring it up, he puts his arms around me, kisses me on the top of my head and tells me everything’s fine, and it is. But what I don’t think he sees, what I don’t think he realises, is that I feel as if I’m fading from the world, gradually becoming invisible as what used to be me seeps into other people lives.
    As much as I love being with Ella, there will be a time when I need to detach myself from the background hum of our lives and be visible in the world as myself again, as an individual, and I’m fairly sure it doesn’t mean I’m a bad mother or a selfish person. I just need to be a person, an occasional individual person, and Fergus can’t see that – not yet.
    I find myself nodding like one of those dogs in the back of a car and I force my neck to a standstill. ‘It’s cool. I don’t feel like the little woman or anything,’ I say out loud. ‘You know Fergus: the world’s sweetest bloke.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Camille agrees. ‘And the world’s fittest bloke. I tell you, I’d let Alex support me any day of the week.’ Her eyes sparkle as she says it.
    ‘You already do!’ Dora says and we all laugh. Camille glows, and not for the first time in my life I wonder how she stays as much in the first flush of love as if she and Alex had met only yesterday.
    ‘Dors!’
    All three of us turn our heads sharply as two other women enter the room. I squirm uncomfortably in my chair. It’s one thing to feel big and frumpy with your two best mates, it’s another thing entirely when unknown thin people arrive on the scene. They don’t know that I too used to be thin and that I’ve recently had a baby. They’ll think that I’ve always been fat! I suck in my stomach, although it makes no impression, hidden as it is under the voluminous shirt, and I can feel the solid folds that were left behind after Ella’s eviction.
    ‘Oh, all right!’ Dora raises her cigarette in greeting and turns back to me, lowering her voice. ‘That’s Alice and Karina. Really her name’s Karen but she’s moved