Meeting the Foca's girlfriend

Me: Do you know your boyfriend has given us two different truths?
Girlfriend: What do you mean?
Me: He told you I really wanted to meet you and he told me you really wanted to meet me. Neither is true is it?
Silence.

I had wanted to meet her reader, when I first became aware of her existence - a year after the Foca left and our son could speak. I'd ask the Foca if I could meet her and he'd say "yeah yeah, I'll sort it."

About a year after that the Foca and I meet to discuss access. As he prepares to leave he says: "My girlfriend's moving in with me. She really wants to meet you."
"Oh is that so?" I say. "Now she's got her feet under the table you are happy that we meet. Well I don't want to anymore." And I didn't. I really didn't. I'd been asking for a year. I suddenly lost interest.

Oh but the Foca pushed and pushed. Even got his mother to call me. Finally, to get them all off my back I agreed to meet her, in a coffee shop, in Camden.

I knew only what my son had told me, that she was blonde. The Foca's got a string of beautiful ex's, so I imagined this one must look like Kate Moss or Claudia Schiffer. I wore a light patterned summer dress from Oasis, my green platform wedges and minimal make-up. Keep it simple, I told myself.

When I got to Cafe Nero, I saw quite a few blondes. One wore glasses, one was reading a book, one twirling her coffee with a spoon. Which one was she? I sat at a table at the back and I waited.
A non-descript looking blonde walked up to me. "Are you Sue?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You walked straight past me," she said.
"Well I didn't know what you looked like. You have the advantage of having seen photos of me."

She'd secured two armchairs in the middle of the cafe. We started talking.

She was wearing a white floaty hippy type skirt and matching top. She looked normal, neither beautiful nor unattractive. She seemed alright, which was a relief given she hangs out with my son every other weekend.

She failed to unravel a few mysteries for me though. I was still none the wiser as to when she'd got together with the Foca. He'd said he'd met her at work (when still with me) but wouldn't say when they got it together. the Foca's mother, my ex Mother Out Law, said the pair of them had spent the weekend with her in July. The girlfriend said they'd got it together the following October. I didn't know who to believe so I chose to believe my ex Mother Out Law. I have a relationship with her.

The girlfriend also said she didn't send the stream of vitriolic texts that came to me from my ex's phone when he was bringing my son home from a bank holiday weekend a few months earlier.
"So he was stopping the car every four to five minutes to write and send one?" "No," she answered.
"So he was texting while he was driving?" "No."
"Well what then? He wrote them while he drove, he stopped to write them, or you wrote them for him, texts don't just write themselves?" "No, I don't know, I don't know." She was getting flustered so I dropped it.

Then fate intervened, in the form of a thief. My bag which was by my side, had gone.

It's always a surreal moment when something is stolen. There's that momentary disbelief where you think perhaps it wasn't by your side but under the chair, behind the chair, under the table. You search and search.
"It wasn't me!" she exclaimed as my eye caught hers.
"I wasn't suggesting it was!" I answered.

Fluster fluster, "I'll lend you money," she said which I accepted. I had to, I needed a bus fare to the housing association to get the spare set of keys.

I've spoken to her once, since. I told the ex I didn't want her and the new baby to come to our son's 5th birthday. Showcase his new family on my son's day. I called her to explain why so the Foca couldn't distort it. She was cool. "I wouldn't like it either," she said.

Since then I don't like it when the Foca drives up to the block with his family. Or I hadn't, until Friday. If I don't see his "unit" I don't have to acknowledge it, I don't have to acknowledge anything, how he's moved on, living in a nice house with a garden with a wife and kid and another kid on the way while I live in a benefits bucket fighting a council which turns a blind eye to the needs of my child and myself. While I live in a kind of limbo, trying to move forward, then being pushed back.

In the future I'll walk up to their car if my son is in it. I won't stand peering over a balcony up in the sky desperately wanting to see his beautiful face. Nor will she have to crane her head out of her window to take a look at me. She'll be able to have a bloody good look, if that's what she wants.