Читать книгу How Hard Can It Be? - Allison Pearson - Страница 13

7.44 am: ‘Mum, have you seen Twelfth Night?’ Emily looks pale and her hair needs a wash.

‘I think you had it in the living room last night, love, when you were doing your homework. Or it could be in that pile on the chair under Lenny’s toys. Are you going to take a shower?’

‘Haven’t got time,’ she shrugs, ‘got choir practice then we’re getting our revision timetable.’

‘What, already? You’ve barely started the course. That’s a bit soon?’

‘Yeah, I know, but Mr Young said two kids in the year above got Bs last year and they don’t want that happening again.’

‘Well, you should wash your hair before you go in. Make you feel fresher, sweetheart. It looks a bit …’

‘I know.’

‘Em, darling, I’m just trying to …’

‘I know, I know, Mum. But it’s like I’ve got so much on.’ As she turns to go out of the door I notice that her school skirt has got tucked in her knickers at the back, revealing a ladder of nasty cuts up her thigh.

‘Emily, what’s wrong with your leg?’

‘S’nothing.’

‘You’ve hurt yourself, darling. It looks horrid. Come here. What happened?’

‘S’nothing.’ She tugs furiously at the back of her skirt.

‘What do you mean nothing? I can see it’s bleeding from here.’

‘I fell off my bike, Mum. OK?’

‘I thought you said your bike was being mended.’

‘Yeah, I rode Daddy’s.’

‘You rode Bradley Wiggins to school?’

‘Not that one. The old, cheaper one. It was in the garage.’

‘You fell off?’

‘Mmmmmm.’

‘What happened?’

‘There was gravel on the road. I skidded.’

‘Oh, no. And you hurt your poor leg. And you’ve grazed the other one. Lift your skirt up again so I can see properly. Why didn’t you tell me, love? We need to get some Savlon on that. It looks nasty.’

‘Please stop, Mum, OK?’

‘Just let me take a look. Hold still a minute. Pull the skirt up, I can’t see properly.’

‘GO A-WAY. JUST STOP. PUHLEEEASE!’ Emily lashes out wildly, knocking my glasses off and sending them flying to the floor. I bend down to pick them up. The left lens has popped out of its frame.

‘I can’t stand it,’ Emily wails. ‘You always say the wrong thing, Mum. Always.’

‘What? I didn’t say anything, my love. I just want to look at your leg, darling. Em. Emily, please don’t walk out of the room. Emily, please come back here. Emily, you can’t go to school without eating anything. Emily, I’m talking to you. EMILY?’

As my daughter exits the house trailing sulphurous clouds of reproach and leaving me to wonder what crime I have committed this time, Piotr enters. He is standing just inside the back door with his bag of tools. I blush to think of him hearing our screaming match and seeing Emily knock my glasses off. I can’t believe she actually hit me. She didn’t mean to hit me. It was an accident.

‘Sorry. Is bad time, Kate?’

‘No, no, it’s fine. Really. Come in. Sorry, Piotr. It’s just Emily had an accident, she fell off her bike, but she thinks I’m making a fuss about nothing.’

Without being asked, he takes the glasses out of my hand, retrieves the missing lens which is on the floor next to Lenny’s basket, and begins to work it back into its frame. ‘Emily she is teenage. Mum she’s always say wrong things, isn’t it?’

Despite wanting rather badly to cry, I find myself laughing. ‘That’s so true. A mother’s place is in the wrong, Piotr. Wrong is my permanent address at the moment. Would you like some tea? I’ve got some proper tea today, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

In his new spiritual incarnation, Richard has acquired a wide range of tranquillity teas. Rhubarb and Rosemary, Dandelion, Lemon, Nettle and Manuka Honey, and something in a urine-coloured box called Camomindfulness. On the recommendation of Joely at the counselling centre, in February he presented me with Panax Ginseng, said to be good for hot flushes and night sweats. A thoughtful present although, if you were being picky, perhaps not totally ideal for the red-hot lover’s message of Valentine’s Day. (After receiving a set of Jamie Oliver saucepans for Christmas I thought we’d reached a low point in the history of Rich’s gifts to me, but clearly there is plenty of floor below that to fall through.) It takes a lot to perturb Piotr, whose temperament feels as generous and easy as his countenance, but even he recoiled when I said we had run out of builders’ tea and offered him Dandelion instead.

‘In my contree, dantyline means wet bed like children’s,’ he smiled, revealing a mouth of characterful, uneven teeth of the kind that have pretty much died out among the British middle classes.

Piotr’s English is bad, yet strangely appealing. I feel no need to correct it, as I do with Ben and Em, because (a) that would be horribly patronising and (b) I love the mistakes he makes because they are so expressive (which I guess is horribly patronising). That’s what happens with the kids, isn’t it? You correct their errors and their speech gets better and better until, one day, they don’t say those funny, sweet things any more. I can’t press Rewind and hear Ben say, ‘I did go’d fast did I Mummy’ or a five-year-old Emily ask if she can come with me to the ‘Egg Pie Snake Building’ (Empire State sounds so dull by comparison) or have ‘piz-ghetti’ for dinner. Or tell me, ‘I’m not a baby I’m a togg-er-ler.’ Sometimes I think I wished away their childhood so life would be easier; now I have the rest of my life to wish it back.

I put water in a saucepan and olive oil and butter in a casserole on the Aga. Kettle not working again while Piotr has the electricity switched off. Methodically, I start preparing the onions, carrots and celery for bolognese, our family’s all-purpose comfort food. It’s the Marcella Hazan recipe and I know it so well that her quaintly formal words float into my head as I chop. The addition of milk ‘lends a desirable sweetness’. Perfectly true, it’s the magic ingredient you could never guess. In the larder – a tiny, pitch-black cupboard leading off the utility room – I grope for tinned tomatoes in the dark and my hand finds a Hammer Horror cobweb. It’s the size and shape of a tennis racquet. Uch. Fetch some kitchen wipes and start to clean down the slatted wooden shelves.

I always dreamt of having an Aga. Visions of home-baked bread, delicious stews murmuring to themselves on the range and maybe even an orphaned baby lamb being gently brought back to life in the warming drawer. Unclear where I was going to find a lamb, except in the meat aisle of Waitrose, and therefore well past the point of reviving, but the daydream persisted. Now, I realise my Aga fantasy was of the pristine magazine kind that comes equipped with its own Mary Berry. Ours is a malevolent old beast encrusted with the splashed fat of half a century and has only two temperatures: lukewarm and crematorium. You know, I really don’t think it likes me. Shortly after we moved in, I put a cauliflower cheese in the top oven; ten minutes later I prised open the heavy door to take a peek and found a petrified forest with these perfect little charred florets like mini oak trees.

Richard, who was cross, hungry and partial to cauliflower cheese, said it looked like one of those art installations that would have a pretentious title like The Physical Impossibility of Dinner in the Mind of Someone Starving. It’s since become one of his favourite Calamity Kate anecdotes, and I can’t help noticing he finds it much funnier when he’s telling other people than he did at the time.

Not that I’m in any position to complain. Am still trying to convince Rich that this house was a fantastic buy. We agreed that in order to move to Commuterland, so I could get into London and back every day, we would have to downsize and find a place with lower outgoings. (No way could we afford to buy in the capital, not after a period up North. I checked on Rightmove and our old house, the Hackney Heap, is worth £1.2 million now.) We’d just had an offer accepted on a four-bedroom new-build, convenient for the train station, when I took the agent’s advice that I should ‘just pop in’ and see a ‘charming period gem of considerable potential, in need of sensitive updating’.

Fate and the weather conspired against me. It was one of those glittering, glad-to-be-alive days when a bitingly clear cobalt sky makes you feel your soul has left your body and is soaring heavenward. If only it had been raining. Maybe I would have seen that a patchwork of ivy and moss covering three exterior walls, a rickety tiled roof and two chimneys, each the size of a four-by-four, did not, as I preferred to believe, suggest an enchanted castle just waiting to be released from a spell of cruel neglect.

‘Exactly how much will it cost to hack through the foliage to free Sleeping Beauty, and what will the brickwork be like underneath once we get her out?’ These were not among the questions I asked as I stood on the terrace at the back, marvelling at the honeyed stone in which the house was constructed three centuries ago. The view down the garden was like an Impressionist painting – a vivid splash of green lawn fringed with mascara smudges of pine and beech. I could practically hear the strains of Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’ as I drank in this quintessentially English scene; the imagined music was so potent it drowned out the whooshing of the nearby M11, which would become a roar once the trees had shed their leaves and we had signed the contract. Caveat emptor.

We did go back to check out the new-build property, Rich and I. How bland and cramped it seemed with its specially made, teeny, doll’s house furniture (a cynical developer’s trick to make the rooms look bigger, or so a designer friend told me). The agent said the developer was prepared to meet us halfway and would pay the stamp duty, such a huge saving that Rich gave a low, appreciative whistle. But I had lost my heart to another and found only fault where there were bargains and benefits to be had. I wanted the period gem with the gracious proportions and the fine old staircase, its mahogany handrail just visible through layers of chipped paint.

The rival agent said that because it was a renovation project which ‘very few people have the imagination to take on’ (i.e. no one but you is nuts enough to even attempt it), the owner was ‘prepared to consider knocking a significant amount off the asking price’ (they were desperate to sell, it had been on the market more than a year and there was a grave shortage of suckers prepared to share a bath with a daddy-long-legs and her nineteen children). I was able to clinch the deal with Richard by pointing out that the house was in the catchment area of a superb secondary school. Result! True, some persuasion-sex may have been involved, but I had my dream property, and that was orgasm enough.

Except Richard pretty much hated the house from Day One. He calls it ‘Gormenghastly’, and not affectionately either. Anything that goes wrong – oh, let me count the ways! – demonstrates that I made a poor decision and causes him to crow in a rather unpleasant manner. On the first evening we spent here, he actually produced a DVD of a Tom Hanks movie called The Money Pit, which is about a couple who try to restore a hopelessly dilapidated house. It was funny until I plugged in an electric heater to warm up the freezing sitting room and all the lights fused and the TV went phffft.

I wish I could say that I’ve proved my doubting husband wrong. Despite Piotr’s heroic efforts, and almost constant house calls from Polish guys bearing ladders, hammers and saws, every day seems to bring more bad tidings of damp and decay. The financially devastating news of a sagging bathroom floor came in tandem with the emotionally devastating news of a sagging pelvic floor from the person once called my Obs who is now just my Gynae.

‘Kate, pan it’s burn.’

‘Sorry?’ Piotr makes me jump. He’s right beside me in the larder.

‘Cooker it’s fire,’ he says. ‘Careful please.’

I run into the kitchen. The casserole is belching thick smoke. Damn, I forgot. Don’t know what I was thinking.

‘Roy, really, why didn’t you remind me I was heating the oil for the Spag Bol? ROY! We can’t keep forgetting things like this. Last week, it was the bath that overflowed.’

I would douse the pan in the sink, but there is no sink any more because Piotr has taken it out to the skip. Besides, isn’t there something about not pouring water on boiling oil, or is it the other way around? Grab the casserole and run into the garden where a light drizzle tamps down the sizzle and spit. Before going back indoors to start again, and heat up more oil and butter, I spend a minute drinking in the view. The leaves are particularly lovely this year, shades of fierce apricot and shy primrose from Nature’s Autumn Collection that continue to astonish. (‘Roy, please remind me to plant those tulip and daffodil bulbs.’) Yes, I’m prepared to concede that it might have been better to do the sensible thing and downsize. Not only can we not afford the renovations, until I find a job, I have also used up any remaining capital I had in my marriage. In some ways, a relationship is like a savings account: during the good times, you both pay in, and in the lean times there’s enough to see you through. Right now, I’m heavily overdrawn.

I should have listened to Richard. (Perhaps you should tell him that, Kate; climbing down never came easy, did it? Stupid pride again.) I can’t really explain why I made us buy the house except that something in me railed against the thought of life contracting, getting smaller instead of bigger. Before you know it, you’re in a wheelchair-access bungalow in sheltered accommodation wearing incontinence pants. I’m already doing a little wee every time I sneeze. Sorry, but I did not want to ‘go gentle into that good night’. I wanted to take on one more challenge, if only to prove that I’m still alive and capable of thinking big.

In the kitchen, Piotr reunites me with my mended glasses, but not before breathing on them and wiping them with a proper, old-fashioned handkerchief, which he produces with a conjuror’s flourish from the pocket of his jeans. I haven’t seen a laundered handkerchief like that since my grandfather died. As he leans in to place the specs on my face, I get a pungent wash of cigarettes and sawn wood. I’m so happy when he’s here because it means we’re making progress. I’ll definitely have a kitchen in time for Christmas. And because he lends – ‘what was it again, Roy?’ – that’s it: a desirable sweetness.

Kate to Emily

Hi sweetheart. Hope you’re OK. Just been making you Spag Bol for dinner. So sorry about your accident and your poor leg. Let’s cuddle up tonight and watch some Parks and Rec?

Love you, Mum

Emily to Kate

I’m good!!! Can Lizzy & some friends come over? Don’t worry bout me Love u xx

1.11 pm: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman over thirty-five in search of a mate must never reveal her age in a dating profile. At least, that’s what Debra tells me over lunch.

I’ve just confessed to my oldest friend that I’m lying about my age to try and get a job. Deb reports that she does the same if she wants to get a man.

‘Seriously, you never give your true age?’

‘Never, ever ever,’ says Deb. Stabbing miserably at the last rocket leaf on her plate, she picks it up and pops it in her mouth before licking the dressing from her finger. We both ordered salad and sparkling water, no bread, because our thirty-year college reunion, which for so long felt a safe distance away, is approaching fast. But now Deb starts doing urgent, smiley semaphore at the waiter, indicating she wants wine.

‘What if you look amazing for your age?’ I ask.

She gives a bitter laugh – a harsh, cawing sound I can’t remember hearing before. ‘That’s even worse. If you look good for your age you’ll probably be vain enough to give it away. So you arrange to meet up, he takes you for dinner, you have a few glasses of wine, candles, it’s getting romantic and he says, “God, you’re gorgeous”, and you’re feeling relaxed and probably a bit drunk and you really like him and you think “this one’s sensitive, not shallow like some of the others”, so you get carried away and you say, “Pretty good for fifty, huh?”’

‘Well, it’s true you do look fabulous,’ I say. (She is terribly changed since the last time we met, on my birthday. She looks so red and puffy. It’s a drinker’s face, I realise for the first time. Oh, Deb.)

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Debra says, wagging a cautionary finger. ‘So the guy does a charming, funny double-take and he gives a wolf whistle and he agrees that you are, indeed, incredibly well-preserved for fifty. No one could possibly guess. I mean, Totally Amazing. Then you see it. The panic rising behind his eyes. And he’s thinking, “Omigod, how did I not notice that? The lines around her mouth, the scrawny neck. She definitely looks fifty. And I’m only forty-six, so she’s an older woman. Plus, she lied on her profile”. Oh, waiter, waiter, sorry, can I get a glass of wine here? Sauvignon Blanc. Join me, Kate, please?’

‘I can’t, I’ve got Women Returners later.’

‘Then you definitely need alcohol. Two glasses of white, please. Large? Yes, thanks.’

‘And then what happens?’

‘And then he throws you back in the sea and goes fishing for a younger one.’

‘Well, at least you know he’s not the man for you if he’s going to reject you just because of your age.’

‘Oh, Kate, Kate, my sweet deluded girl, they’re all like that.’ Another mirthless cackle. Deb reaches across the table and taps me affectionately on the nose, which hurts a bit. It’s the part of the bone where Ben bit me when he was taking his first steps. I knelt down to catch him in case he fell and he staggered towards me like a tiny drunk, tried to kiss my mouth and got my nose instead. A tiny, tooth-shaped scar marks the spot.

‘What you don’t understand, darling, in your married bliss with Ricardo, is that when guys get to our age they hold all the cards.’

(It’s the perfect opening to tell her how bad things are between me and Richard, but I don’t, not yet. I can hardly bear to tell myself.)

Deb knocks back her wine with a complaint about the small measures, then reaches out her hand and pours most of my untouched one into her own glass. ‘A man of forty-eight isn’t interested in a woman the same age. Why would he be when he can maybe pick up someone in the twenty-nine to thirty-six category? A fifty-year-old man can still tick, “May want children one day”. What can I tick? “May need a hysterectomy if I keep bleeding like a stuck pig”? Anyway, cheers, my dear!’ She clinks both glasses together, hands me my almost empty one and takes several gulps from her own.

I’ve known Debra since our third week at college when we got chatting in the bar and found out that we shared the same boyfriend. We should have been sworn enemies, but we decided we liked each other much better than the boy, who was doubly dumped and would forever after be known as Two-Time Ted.

I was bridesmaid when Deb married Jim. I was godmother to their first child and chief mourner at the divorce after Jim went off with a twenty-seven-year-old broker from Hong Kong when Felix was six and Ruby was three. Deb feels guilty because Felix suffers with anxiety and blames himself for the break-up of the marriage. He has a lot of trouble fitting in at school and Deb keeps moving him (three times in the last five years), probably because it’s easier to believe the school’s the problem than your child. Deb often refers to Felix’s ADHD diagnosis as if it explains everything. I think (though would never say) that, with Jim not around, she found it hard to control the boy’s behaviour and she spent a fortune on PlayStations and every gizmo you can imagine to keep him happy while she worked. I was horrified, last Christmas, at the size of the TV Deb gave Felix, so much bigger than their family one. She spends almost nothing on herself. Felix, now seventeen, looks exactly like Jim, which can’t help. Deb loves her son although, increasingly, I suspect she doesn’t like him very much.

‘Go on, tell me about “Women Returners”, then?’ I can practically hear the ironic quotation marks Deb puts around my support group.

‘I know you think I don’t need it.’

‘You don’t need it, Kate. You just need to get yourself out there and stop sublimating all that ambition of yours into renovating some crazy old house.’

‘I thought I was bringing life back to a period gem of considerable potential in need of sensitive updating.’

‘Is that you or the house, darling?’

‘Both. Can’t you tell?’

She laughs properly, like herself this time, a warm, generous sound which is incongruous in this fashionable palace of steel and glass. I love Deb’s laugh; it reminds me of so many times we’ve shared.

‘Suit yourself,’ she says. ‘Can’t think of anything worse than sitting in a room with a lot of women moaning that they’re past it and nobody will employ them. Do you want coffee? How many calories in a flat white, do you reckon?’

(Hang on, I read that the other day. Paging Roy. ¹‘Roy, can you please get me the number of calories in a flat white? Full fat and semi-skimmed. Roy, hello? You’re not allowed a lunch break by the way. Being my memory valet is a full-time job.’)

Last time I spoke to Richard about finding a position at a good firm in London, he said, ‘It’ll kill you doing that journey twice a day. You’re not as young as you were. Why don’t you find something local like Debra did?’

Is that really what he wants for me? Deb quit her job at one of the top London law firms a couple of years after Jim shacked up with the Asian Babe (who is friendly, tactful, sweet with the kids and super-bright – basically your total nightmare). Felix had become obsessive about not having peas too close to the sweetcorn or ketchup on his plate, and he bit any nanny who forgot this diktat. Finding a form of childcare that was happy to be bitten on a regular basis proved impossible. ‘I did not give up, Kate, I bloody well surrendered to the inevitable,’ Debra booms when she’s had too many, which is quite often lately. In midlife, all the women I know, apart from the ‘My Body is a Temple’ high priestesses, are intimates of Count Chardonnay and his cheeky sidekick Pinot Grigio. Every day, around 6.35 pm, when habit sends me to get wine out of the fridge, I think ‘Empty calories!’ and sometimes I am good and listen to that health warning, but other times it’s easier, and kinder somehow, to grant myself admission to the buzzy warmth and instant sense of well-being. ‘God, I hate it when they call it giving up work,’ Deb always says when she’s onto her third glass.

Me too. So, the legendary, beautiful redhead (think face of Julianne Moore, curves of Jennifer Lopez) with the Cambridge First, on track to become a partner in a London firm earning gazillions, is now festering in a solicitor’s office above Hot Stuff Indian restaurant in the high street of a provincial town, resolving leylandii disputes for homicidal octogenarians and growing big and blowsy from drowning her sorrows. All of Deb’s recent emails begin, ‘Shoot me!’.

I need something better than that. Don’t I?

Debra is growing louder and more belligerent, so I change the subject and tell her about Emily’s belfie. Our disasters are small gifts we can give to our friends who suffer because they believe our lives are easier than their own.

‘Oh, they’re all doing it,’ Deb snorts. ‘Sexting. Some kid in Ruby’s year got himself arrested. Sent a pic of his willy to a girl aged fourteen. Huge hoo-ha at the school – said he was guilty of child abuse or something ridiculous. He’s been suspended, poor thing. The girl didn’t even complain. Teacher saw her laughing and sharing the dick pic with her friends; now it’s this huge deal because she’s underage.’

‘I think I’m pretty broad-minded,’ I say, ‘but can you imagine?’

‘Very easily, darling. If you give kids phones that do all that naughty stuff why wouldn’t they? It’s just too tempting. I mean, I have.’

‘You’ve done what? Deb. No. You haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t.’

‘Only knockers.’ She smiles and cups her breasts in her hands, thrusting them upwards in her straining blouse till they look like two quivering panna cotta. ‘Getting your tits out, that’s pretty entry-level stuff for online dating, Kate darling. Consider yourself lucky you’re off the market and don’t have to display your wares to new suitors.’

‘I feel sorry for them,’ I say, suddenly realizing how helpless and angry I feel about the belfie. ‘Emily and Ruby, they’re supposed to be the freest most liberated generation of girls who ever lived. Then, just as equality’s in sight, they decide to spend every minute slapping on make-up and posing for selfies and belfies like they’re courtesans in some fin de siècle brothel. What the hell happened?’

‘Dunno, beats me.’ Deb tries to suppress a loud burp and fails. ‘Shall we get the bill?’ She turns and flags down a scurrying waiter. ‘I do know Ruby goes out wearing next to nothing then, if some poor guy wolf whistles at her, suddenly it’s, “Oh, no, it’s sexual harassment.” I tried to tell her that the male brain is programmed to respond to certain parts of the female anatomy. Most boys like Felix and Ben can act in a civilised fashion, if they’re properly brought up by women like you and me, but enough boys won’t be civilised and then you’re in big trouble because, surprise fucking surprise, rapist Rob hasn’t read your student guide to inappropriate touching.’

We fall silent for a moment. ‘The kids say I’m from the past,’ I say.

‘We are from the past, thank God,’ Deb booms. ‘I’m bloody glad we grew up before social media, darling. At least when we went home from school we were by ourselves, or with family who treated us like part of the furniture. There was no one poking us every ten seconds to admire their perfect bloody life. Imagine having every little bitch who was hateful to you at school joining you in your bedroom via your phone. I felt crap enough about myself already. I didn’t need an audience, thanks very much.’

‘Probably every generation of parents must feel like this,’ I say cautiously. It’s been so much on my mind, but I haven’t tried to put it into words before. ‘It’s just that this … this … this gulf between us and the kids, their world and the one we grew up in, it’s … I don’t know, Deb, it’s all happened so quickly. Everything’s changed and I don’t think we’ve even begun to understand what’s going on. Or what it’s going to do to them. How is Ben supposed to learn empathy for other people when he spends half his life carrying out drive-by shootings in some virtual-reality world? Did I tell you I found out Emily actually downloaded something to help her bypass the parental controls on their devices?’

Typically, Deb is delighted, not appalled. ‘Genius! She sounds a highly resourceful woman, just like her mummy.’

It’s time to go. She has drained my wine glass and we’ve argued over the bill. (Can’t remember who paid last time. I ask Roy, but he’s still busy looking up the number of calories in a flat white.)

As the guy by the door hands us our coats, I ask Deb to be honest with me. ‘Do you think I can pass for forty-two?’

She grins. ‘God, yes, no problem. I’m thirty-six, darling. If I ever bring a boyfriend to meet you we need to get our stories straight, OK? Or he’ll think “how come these two were in the same year at university and there’s a six-year age difference?” Now, you be honest with me, Kate. Do you think I can get away with thirty-six?’

(No. I don’t. Whatever thirty-six looks like, Deb is no longer it, and neither am I.)

‘Course you can. Never better. Love what you’ve done to your hair.’

Debra is halfway down the street when she turns and yells at me: ‘College reunion! Don’t forget, I’m going to be two stone lighter.’

‘And fifteen years younger!’ I shout back, but the traffic drowns out my reply and she is gone.

5.21 pm: Just had a lovely long walk with Lenny to shake off the Women Returners meeting. He was desperate to go out when I got back from lunch; now he’s fast asleep and lying on his back in his basket by the Aga, all four paws wide apart, fluffy white tummy unprotected. Something almost unbearably touching about an animal’s utter trustingness. No sign of Richard. Ben’s got football, but I’m sure Em said she was having friends over.

Upstairs, I find three girls sitting on Emily’s bed in complete silence, heads bent over their mobiles like they’re trying to decode the meaning of the I Ching. One is Lizzy Knowles, daughter of Cynthia and hateful sharer of the belfie; the other – pale, pretty, auburn – is Izzy, I think.

‘Hello, girls. Why don’t you, you know, have a nice chat? Face to face with eye contact,’ I say, peering round the door at this eerie dumb-show. My tone is only very lightly mocking. Emily looks up and shoots me her special ‘You’ll have to forgive my mother, she’s mentally impaired’ glare.

‘We are chatting. We’re texting,’ she hisses.

I feel like Charles Darwin observing finches on the Galapagos Islands. Where is all this communication without speaking going to end? My great-great-grandchildren will be born with prehensile texting thumbs, no vocal cords and zero capacity to read human facial expressions. I am struggling to see any of this as evolution for our species, if evolution means progress, but at least Em isn’t by herself. Whatever friction the belfie caused in the peer group must have been fixed. At least, that’s what I hope. I tell the girls there’s Spag Bol downstairs if they want it. Only Lizzy responds. ‘Thanks, Kate, we’ll be down later,’ she says in the coolly condescending manner of Lady Mary Crawley addressing Mrs Patmore, the Downton Abbey cook. I give Lizzy my best and most ingratiating smile; my daughter’s fragile happiness is in that girl’s hands.

5.42 pm: By the time Ben gets in, I’ve put carrot sticks and hummus on the kitchen table for him to eat. Piotr has removed all the old worktops; it’s like living in a shed, but it should be over soon. Ben grunts, ignores the healthy snack, gets some crisps from the cupboard (who bought those?) and disappears into the living room. A few minutes later, I hear the voice of another boy in there. Where did he come from?

5.53 pm: ‘Benjamin, dinner time.’

‘Ben? Now, please. Spaghetti’s ready.’

‘Five more minutes. We’re nearly at half-time.’

‘Who is?’

‘We are.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Eddie.’

‘When did he come round? I didn’t hear anyone come in.’

I walk into the living room, adopting the voice of maternal sternness. ‘You know the rule, Ben. If you want your friends to—’

Ben is alone, hunched on the sofa, clutching a handset, thumbs a blur. On the TV, someone in red takes a corner. Players rise in mayhem, the ball goes in, the crowd explodes and Ben keels over sideways as if shot, laughing into a cushion. Other cackles answer him, from nowhere; I recognise the voice of Eddie, saying, ‘That’s sick,’ but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.

‘Is that real?’ I ask, genuinely not knowing whether it’s a football match onscreen, with actual swearing fans telling the referee to fuck off, or whether it’s millions of digital dots. Not quite sure how real I am myself, most days. Maybe I should get someone to design a digital me, who gets on with cooking dinner, ordering shower tiles and all the boring jobs no one notices I’m doing, while the real Kate can concentrate on the life I really want, with time on my nicely manicured hands, firming up the abdominals and the plunging pelvic floor, and much less need to swear.

‘Kind of.’

‘Where’s Eddie?’

‘At home, Mum, don’t be stupid.’

‘Please don’t call me stupid, Benjamin. Your real dinner is on the table and it’s getting cold.’

‘OK. Five more minutes.’

‘It was five minutes ten minutes ago.’

‘Extra time. Maybe penalties. I can’t pause it. We’ll lose the whole game.’

I give up. Emily is upstairs with friends and they’re not speaking. Ben is downstairs speaking with friends, but they’re not here. They’re miles away, in another part of town. The kids are right: I am from the past. But they are from some Mad Max, post-apocalyptic future where mankind has dispensed with the civilities and physical interaction of all previous centuries. It scares me, it really does, but trying to wean them off their screen addiction seems futile. Like switching off the wind or the rain. If there’s a heaven, and my kids ever get there, their first question to St Peter will be, ‘What’s the password?’

Hunger finally draws Ben to the table, where he tucks in with gratifying enthusiasm. I love to watch my boy eat his favourite meal; it must be some atavistic thing. Between mouthfuls of spaghetti, which he shovels in rather than twirling on a fork – the Battle for Table Manners has been lost – he explains that upstairs Emily and her friends are scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, sharing any videos or photos that they like. Talking is strictly optional in that process, apparently. It means showing each other something someone else has said, written, or photographed, not forming their own original thoughts or stories. I can’t help thinking of Julie and me creating a whole universe in our bedroom with just Lego and a single Sindy doll.

‘You do meet some people IRL,’ Ben says. ‘Is there any more Parmesan?’

‘I’ll get it. What’s IRL?’

‘Mu-um, you know IRL.’

‘I don’t, sorry.’

‘In Real Life.’

‘I see. In real life?’

‘Yeah, but mainly it’s not IRL ’cos basically you’re like online the whole time.’

‘How about school? Is school IRL?’

‘You’re not supposed to have phones in class,’ Ben admits cautiously, ‘but people do. Basically, that’s what social life is like now for my generation.’ (I’ve never heard him come out with anything so philosophical or grown-up before. I didn’t know he even knew the word ‘generation’. Result! Must stop thinking of him as seven.)

As he’s leaving the table, Ben says did I know that the boys at school gave Emily the Rear of the Year Award because of the pic of her bum going viral, and she had to go to the nurse because she threw up in assembly?

No, I did not know.

9.37pm: Bedroom is dark, but my daughter’s face is illuminated by her phone. She is scrolling through photos. There are so many of them, an immense number, screen after screen. Up closer, I see they are nearly all selfies; in none of them is she smiling. She’s making that weird duckface, the one all the girls pull now. Halfway between a pout and a pucker, it makes her lips look huge, outsized in her face. And she sucks in her cheeks – a come-hither, glamour-model pose. Emily is constantly watching these online make-up tutorials; she’s got really skilled at it, much better than I am actually. But it does look like she’s painting an older, more sophisticated woman onto that sweet, heart-shaped face.