Читать книгу How Hard Can It Be? - Allison Pearson - Страница 11

Thursday, 5.57 am: My joints are raw and aching. It’s like a flu that never goes away. Must be Perry and his charming symptoms again. (Just like when I woke at three with a puddle of sweat between my breasts even though the bedroom was icy cold.) I’d much rather turn over and spend another hour in bed, but there’s nothing for it. After my ordeal at the hands of the evil, pinstriped headhunter, Project Get Back to Work starts here.

Conor at the gym agreed to stretch the rules and gave me his special Bride’s Deal, for women who want to look their best on the big day. I explained that I had pretty much the same goals as any newly engaged female: I needed to persuade a man, or men, to commit and give me enough money to raise my kids and do up a dilapidated old house. There would be a honeymoon period in which I would have to lull them into thinking I would always be enthusiastic, wildly attractive and up for it.

‘Basically, I need to lose nine pounds – a stone would be even better – and look like a forty-two-year-old who is young for her age,’ I explained.

‘No worries,’ said Conor. He’s a New Zealander.

So, this is where I prepare for re-entry into a real job. By real, I mean a decently paid position, unlike my so-called ‘portfolio career’ of the past few years. Women’s magazines always make the portfolio career sound idyllic: the heroine, in a long, pale, cashmere cardigan worn over a pristine white T-shirt, wafts between rewarding freelance projects whilst being home to bake scrumptious treats for adorable kids in a kitchen that is always painted a soothing shade of dove grey.

In practice, as I soon found out, it means doing part-time work for businesses who are keen to keep you off their books to avoid paying VAT – even to avoid paying you at all. So much time wasted chasing fees. For someone who works in financial services I have a weird phobia of asking people for money – for myself anyhow. I ended up with a handful of overdemanding, underpaid projects, which I had to fit in around my primary role as chauffeur/shopper/laundress/caregiver/cook/party planner/nurse/dog-walker/homework invigilator/Internet killjoy. My office, aka the kitchen table, was covered in a sprawl of paperwork, not wholesome baked goods. My annual earnings did not run to cashmere, and the white T-shirts grew sullen in the family wash.

All successful projects begin with a stern assessment of the bottom line followed by the setting of achievable goals. With everyone still safely asleep, I lock the bathroom door, pull my nightie over my head in a single movement (‘a gesture of matchless eroticism’, a lover once called it) and examine what I see in the mirror. This is what forty-nine and a half looks like. My breasts have definitely got lower and heavier. If you were being critical (and I certainly am), they look slightly more like udders than the perky pups of yore. Actually, I got away quite lightly. Some of my friends lost theirs entirely after childbirth; their boobs inflated, but once the milk dried up they shrivelled like party balloons. Judith in my NCT group got implants after twin boys sucked her dry and her husband couldn’t bear what he charmingly called her ‘witch’s tits’. He went off with his PA anyway and Judith was left with two sacks of silicon so heavy she developed back problems. My boobs kept both their size and shape but, over the years, there’s been a palpable loss of density; it’s the difference between a perfect avocado and one that’s gone to mush in its leathery case. I guess that’s what youth means: ripeness is all.

I shiver involuntarily. It’s freezing in here, even colder in the house than it is outside because Piotr hasn’t got around to upgrading the plumbing yet. To tell you the truth, I’m scared of what he’s going to find when he takes up the floorboards. The ancient radiator beneath the window emits a grudging amount of heat; its gurgling and plopping suggest serious digestive difficulties.

I drape a towel around my shoulders and focus again on the body in the mirror. Legs still looking pretty good: only a touch of crêpey ruching around the knees as though someone has taken a needle and pulled a line of thread through them. Waist has thickened, which makes me more straight-up-and-down than that curvy young woman who never struggled to attract attention and who never, not for one moment, thought about the sly magic her body made to draw men to it.

I always had slight, rather boyish hips. They wear a jacket of flesh now; I pinch it between thumb and forefinger till it hurts. That needs to go for a start. The skin below my neck and across my collarbone looks cross-hatched as though a painter has scored it with a knife. Sun damage. Nothing to be done about that – at least I don’t think there is. (‘Roy, remind me to ask Candy, she’s had every procedure known to man.’) Nor can I fix the C-section scar. It has mottled and faded with time, but the surgeon’s hasty incision – she was in a hurry to get Emily out – created a small, overhanging belly shelf which no amount of Pilates can shift. Believe me, I’ve tried. I used to be so scornful of those celebrities who combine an elective C-section with a tummy tuck. Why wouldn’t you wear your birth scars with pride? Now I’m not so sure, nor so self-righteous. The stomach itself is pretty flat, though the flesh is puckered like seersucker here and there.

And the bottom line? I turn around and try to get a glimpse, over my shoulder, in the mirror. Well, it’s still roughly in the right place and no cellulite, but … butt butt butt. Put it this way, I won’t be taking a photo of it and sharing it with my Facebook friends.

All of this is no surprise, no cause for shame; this is what time does to a body. So small, so mercifully infinitesimal are the changes that we barely notice, until, one day, we see ourselves in a photograph on holiday, or glimpse a reflection in a speckled mirror behind a bar and, for a split second, we think, ‘Now, who is that?’

Certain things about ageing still have the power to shock, though. My friend Debra swears she found her first grey pubic hair the other day. Grey pubes, seriously? Uch. Mine are still dark, though definitely sparser – must we really add balding pussy to the list of menopausal mortifications? – and the hairs on my legs grow back much slower these days. Saves on waxing anyway. All the follicle activity has moved to my chin and neck where seven or eight dastardly little bristles poke through. They are as relentless as weeds. Only tweezers and eternal vigilance on my part prevent them forming a Rasputin tribute beard.

The face. I’ve saved the face till last. The light in here is kind. Soft, sifted, southerly light from a garden that is still dreaming. Too kind for my purposes. I yank the cord on the nasty fluorescent strip above the mirror. One virtue of eyesight deteriorating with age is you can’t see yourself very well; at least that twisted old bitch, Mother Nature, got that bit right. Generally I console myself that, as everyone keeps telling me, I look young for my age. Comforting to hear when you’re thirty-nine. Not so much now I’m nearly that number which shall not be mentioned.

Viewed in the unsparing, acid-yellow glare, my reflection reports that I have an incipient case of Muffin Chin. The jawline is a little lumpy, like cake mix before the flour’s thoroughly blended, though at least it’s not the dreaded wattles. For some masochistic reason, I Googled ‘wattle’ the other day: ‘a fleshy caruncle hanging from various parts of the head or neck in several groups of birds and mammals’. My dread is that the caruncles are coming to get me. With two thumbs, I scoop up the skin under my chin and pull it back. For a second, my younger self stares back at me: startled, wistful, pretty.

The eye area isn’t bad at all – thank you, Sisley Global Anti-Age cream (and I never smoked, which helps) – but there are two sad-clown grooves either side of my mouth and a frown, a small but determined exclamation mark – ! – punctuating the gap between my brows. It makes me look cross. I trace the vertical wrinkles with my fingernail. You can get Botox or Restylane injected into those, can’t you? I never dared. Not that I have any ethical objection, none at all, it’s just superstition. If you look fine why get work done and run the risk of looking freakish?

I would prefer to see a familiar, lightly creased face in the mirror than look like that actress I spotted in a café the other day. She was on TV a lot in the Seventies, starred in all the Dickens and Austen adaptations – the kind of artless, natural beauty poets compose sonnets to. I don’t know what she’s had done, but it’s as though someone tried to restore the bloom of her apple-cheeked youth and ended up making her look like she has a mouth full of Brazil nuts. Her cheeks were bulging, but unevenly, and one corner of that rosebud pout was turned down like it was trying to cry but the rest of the face wouldn’t let it. I was trying hard not to stare, but my eyes kept darting back to check out the disaster. Rubbernecking that sad rubber face. Better to stick with the face that you know than risk one that you don’t.

I put out the cruel light and scramble into my gym stuff. Can hear Lenny whining downstairs; he knows I’m up. Need to let him out for a wee. Before going downstairs, I give the woman in the mirror one final, frank, appraising look. Not too bad, Kate, give yourself some credit, girl. There’s definitely work to be done, but we’re hanging in there. We who were once hot may yet be hot again (well, let’s aim for lukewarm and see how it goes). For now, I’ll just have to rely on concealer and foundation and hope the personal trainer can help me pass for my new age.

6.14 am: Starting as I mean to go on, with two spoons of cider vinegar in hot water (lowers blood sugar and suppresses appetite, probably because it makes you retch). This is also a fasting day, when I am allowed a maximum of five hundred calories. So here I am preparing a sumptuous breakfast of one solitary oatcake and wondering whether to go crazy and have a teaspoon of hummus. The calorie content of the oatcake is written on the side of the box in letters so small they are only legible to tiny elves equipped with an electron microscope. How am I supposed to follow sodding Fast Diet when I can’t even read kcals? Go to fetch my reading glasses from The Place Where Reading Glasses Are Always Kept so Kate Doesn’t Forget Where Her Reading Glasses Are. Not there. (*‘Roy, are you up yet? Roy?? Where did I put my glasses? I need my glasses. Can you find me my glasses, please?’)

No answer. Damn. Nibble small piece of oatcake and wonder if I can get away with drinking any of Emily’s green slime, the making of which has created a pile of washing-up that is filling my sink. Open the fridge and pick up various tempting items, then put them right back again. Pause by the bread bin where yesterday Richard put a crusty, Italian artisanal loaf he picked up at the Deli. Crusty Loaf, Crusty Loaf, how you call to me!

Self-control, Kate. And lead us not into temptation and deliver us from gluten. I am meant to be exchanging the wasteland of midlife elasticated leggings and quiet despair for the waist-land of pencil skirts and professional possibility.

From: Candy Stratton

To: Kate Reddy

Subject: Headhunter Humiliation

You go for one interview and Midget Prick says because you’re 49 you need to get euthanised and YOU BELIEVE HIM? SERIOUSLY!? What happened to that fabulous woman I used to work for? You need to get to work on your résumé and start lying big time. Anything you know that you can do, tell them you’ve done it in the past 18 months, OK? I’ll give you a great reference.

And get a hairdresser to do you some highlights. Not Clairol over the side of the bathtub. Promise me.

XXO C

6.21 am: About to leave for the gym when, somewhere, there is the unfamiliar sound of a phone ringing. It takes me a couple of minutes to realise it’s the landline. Takes twice that to track down the actual phone, which is chirruping forlornly to itself behind some sections of plasterboard that Piotr has stacked against the kitchen wall. Who could be ringing this early? Only cold callers and what Richard insists on calling ‘The Aged Ps’ use the house phone these days, now that everyone has a mobile. Yes, even Ben. It was impossible to hold out any longer once he turned twelve. He claimed it was ‘child abuse’ to deny a kid a phone and he was going to ‘call the government’. Plus, he added, there was no way he was going to show me how to transfer my files onto a new laptop if he didn’t have a mobile. Hard to argue with that.

The phone is covered in a thick layer of chalky builder’s dust. Sure enough, the caller is an Aged P talking very politely to an indifferent answerphone. Donald. I hear his Yorkshire accent, once so rich and thick you could have cut it like parkin, now papery and fluting in his eighty-ninth year. When Richard’s dad leaves a message, he speaks slowly and carefully, pausing at the end of each sentence to allow his silent interlocutor time to respond. Donald’s messages take forever. ‘Come on, Dad, spit it out!’ Richard always shouts across the kitchen. But I love my father-in-law, his air of musing wistfulness like Sir Alec Guinness; he addresses the machine with such courtesy it’s a reminder of a lost world where human spoke unto human.

I listen to Donald with half an ear while rummaging in the fruit bowl for a breakfast kiwi. Better than a banana, surely. Can’t be more than forty calories. Why does this always happen? Like hand grenades when I brought them home from the supermarket two days ago, the kiwis have turned to mush; it feels faintly obscene, like I’m palpating a baboon’s testicle.

‘Terribly sorry to disturb you so early, Richard, Kate. It’s Donald here,’ says my father-in-law unnecessarily. ‘I’m calling about Barbara. I’m afraid she’s had a falling out with our new lady carer. Nothing to worry about.’

No, please God, no. After two months of negotiation with Wrothly Social Services, which would have exhausted the combined diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan and Amal Clooney, I managed to secure a small care-package for Donald and Barbara. That meant someone would help with the cleaning, bathe Barbara and change the dressing on her scalded leg. It’s a pitiful amount of time they’ve been allocated, so short that the carer sometimes doesn’t even bother to take her coat off, but at least there’s someone checking in on them every day. Richard’s parents insist they don’t want to downsize from the family home, a stone farmhouse on the side of a hill, because it means leaving the garden they have tended and loved for forty years; they know some of the trees and shrubs as well as they know their own grandchildren. Barbara always said they would move ‘when the time was right’, but I fear they missed that particular window, probably about seven years ago, and they are now stuck in a rambling place they refuse to heat (‘Can’t go throwing your money around’) with a vertiginous staircase – the one Ben fell down the Easter he was three.

‘We do hate to be a burden …’ the voice continues as I’m lacing up my trainers. Check the clock. Going to be late for first training session with Conor. Sorry. I know if I was a good, self-sacrificing person I would pick up the phone, but I simply cannot face another Groundhog Day conversation with Donald.

‘… but you see Barbara seems to have caused offence yesterday when she said that Erna didn’t have good enough English to understand what was what. Barbara made Erna a cup of tea and Erna said “Thank you”, and Barbara said “You’re welcome”, but Erna thought she said, “You will come”, and that Barbara was giving her orders, but she wasn’t, you see. Erna was rather rough with Barbara, I’m afraid. She left in quite a huff and she hasn’t been in for a few days. I’m happy sorting Barbara’s bandage myself, as I do remember my First Aid, thank goodness, but she won’t let me into the bathroom with her and you know that’s how she burnt her leg in the first place. She runs the hot tap and then she forgets to put in cold.’

A man who, almost seventy years ago, navigated a Lancaster bomber through the treacherous skies over occupied Europe – he was three years older than Emily is now, a thought that always makes me want to cry – sounds resigned to his fate: calm, composed, stoical and utterly utterly helpless.

‘If it’s not too much trouble …’

Oh, all right, all right. Just coming.

‘Hello, Donald. Yes, it’s Kate. No, not at all. You’re not a bother. Sorry, no, we haven’t got your messages. We don’t always check the … Yes, it’s better to call the mobile if you can. I did write our numbers on the calendar for you. Oh, dear. Barbara caught the carer smoking in front of the Bishop of Llandaff?’ (Hang on, what’s a senior Welsh clergyman doing in my mother-in-law’s herbaceous border?) ‘Oh, the Bishop of Llandaff is a type of … Yes, I see, and Barbara doesn’t believe you should smoke by the dahlias. No, quite. Yes, yes. I can see that. And she’d prefer a carer from the area if possible. OK, I’ll give social services another call.’

They’re bound to have a non-smoking, English-speaking, dahlia-friendly home help at short notice, aren’t they?

Eventually manage to hang up after promising Donald that we will pay a visit once the kids are settled back in school, once Emily’s exams are out of the way, once I have a new job and a functioning kitchen and once Richard can take time out from his twice-weekly therapy sessions and cycle races. I make that the Twelfth of Never.

Text Conor to say sorry, I’ve had a family problem, and I will definitely see him at the gym on Friday. If I’m ever allowed to have some time for myself. Is that really too much to ask?

7.17 am: ‘Dear God, listen to this, Kate.’ Rich is sitting at the kitchen table. He looks up from the paper, squinting in the sharp light streaming in through the windows. Beautiful big Georgian windows, a gracious pair, but one sash mechanism is broken so you can’t open it, and the sills are riddled with rot.

‘Can you believe it?’ Rich sighs. ‘It says, “Hackers access one hundred thousand Snapchat photos and prepare to leak them including under-age nude pics”. Darling, do the kids have this Snapchat thing?’

‘Um, drner.’

‘Luckily we know Emily isn’t going to be posting pictures of her genitals for public consumption, but lots of parents haven’t got a clue what their kids are up to on social media.’

‘Ingggmr.’

‘I mean it’s totally inappropriate.’

‘Mmmm.’

Since his midlife crisis took hold my husband has started subscribing to progressive left-wing periodicals and using words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘issues around’ a lot. Instead of saying poverty he says ‘issues around deprivation’. I don’t know why no one says ‘problems’ any more, except maybe problems have to be solved, and they can’t be, and issues sound important but don’t demand solutions.

‘I’ve got therapy first thing,’ Rich says, ‘then I’m straight into lectures. Joely at the drop-in centre wants me to help get this meditation facility off the ground. We’re thinking of crowdfunding it.’

Your average menopausal male can generally be relied upon to purchase a leather jacket and the services of six-foot Russian blondes. Mine buys a book called Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Accessing the Calmer, Kinder You. After being let go by his ethical architecture firm, he decides to take the opportunity to retrain as a counsellor and starts fretting about the health and safety deficiencies in Bolivian tin mines when we can’t even staunch the pong from the soil pipe in the downstairs loo of our Tudorbethan hovel. (How I wish I’d never heard the term soil pipe, which is basically Victorian for ‘shithole’.) Honestly, it’s hideous. I’d rather he got a Harley-Davidson and a girlfriend called Danka Vanka.

Richard is so het up about the global epidemic of inappropriateness that he has no idea what is going on in his own home.

‘We put those parental controls on the kids’ phones and iPads, didn’t we?’ he asks me.

(Please observe the tactical use of the marital ‘we’. Richard doesn’t mean did ‘we’ put parental controls on the kids’ electronic devices. He wouldn’t know a parental control if it punched him on the nose. What he means by ‘we’ is me, the wife, who gets shared credit so long as things are going well. As soon as things go wrong, you can bet the question will be, ‘Did you organise those parental controls?’)

‘Course we have parental controls, darling. Fancy a bacon butty?’

Richard looks down at his Lycra-sheathed six-pack before capitulating. ‘Go on then, won’t say no if you’re making one.’

Over twenty years, the bacon sandwich has never failed as distraction, bribe or tranquilliser dart for my partner. Given a choice between a blow job and a bacon butty, let’s just say Rich would definitely hesitate. If he ever goes vegetarian, or even vegan – as looks increasingly likely judging by the tragic woven bracelet on his left wrist – our marriage is doomed. Anyway, I am telling the truth for a change. The kids do have parental controls on their technology. What I’m not telling Richard is that after Emily’s bottom went viral I called Joshua Reynolds, the village computer prodigy who is now in his late-twenties doing postgraduate work in physics at Imperial. (His mother Elaine told our Women Returners group that the infant Josh could re-route the US Navy from his buggy or something.) One of those disappointed, mousy women who only lights up in her offspring’s reflected glory, Elaine was thrilled when I called to ask for Josh’s number, explaining that I needed help with some Internet problems. I figured Josh was young enough and, let’s face it, sufficiently on the spectrum, not to think it was at all weird that I wanted to spy on my own daughter, or that I needed his help tracking down and destroying evidence of her naked backside wherever it might have got to.

In fact, on the phone, Josh was gratifyingly unsurprised, which instantly made me feel better. He said he would see what he could come up with regarding social media but, in the meantime, he told me how to get into the history on Emily’s laptop. I scrolled down the recent purchases and found that Madam had used my credit card to download ‘How to Use a Proxy to Bypass Parental Control Filters’. I mean, what are you supposed to do? It’s like I’m a Stone Age person living with Bill Gates.

7.23 am: Emily is upset. I made the mistake of pointing out that to produce one pint of her green juice she creates six miles of washing-up, presently still festering, unwashed in the sink. There is a heap of vegetable waste – apple cores, feathery celery stalks, bleeding beetroot carcasses – that would feed a drove of pigs for a week.

‘It’s such a mess, darling. Could you at least put the juicer in the dishwasher?’

‘I know,’ she snaps, ‘I know. I’ll do it, OK?’

‘And you can’t live just on that green juice, sweetheart. You need some solid food inside you. Please at least have some eggs. I’ll make them for you.’

‘What part of juice diet don’t you understand, Mum? It’s a seven-day cleanse.’

‘But you can’t get through a school morning on a glass of slime, love.’

‘You’re on a bloody diet permanently, but when I do it it’s not healthy. I don’t need any more of this crap …’

There are tears in her eyes as she veers away from my outstretched hand and checks her phone.

After the belfie catastrophe, I did confiscate her mobile for twenty-four hours, exactly as Candy suggested, but it was as if Em had been bereaved. Removal of Internet access seemed to distress her even more than her backside going viral. She sobbed inconsolably and begged me to give it back. I know I should have stuck to my guns, I know, but I couldn’t bear to cause her yet more distress. Take away a teenager’s phone and you remove the threat of dangers which are invisible to the maternal eye, plus the constant pressure on a girl to peacock herself for the peer group, then get crushed when she doesn’t get enough Likes. Unfortunately, you also take away their life, or the only part of their life they care about. I couldn’t do that to her, not when she’s still so churned up.

Storming out of the kitchen, Emily slams the door into the hall with such ferocity that the old brass lock shudders loose and hangs there, dangling from two nails. I go over and try to press it back in, but the wood is so badly splintered that the nails have nothing to hold them in place. (‘Roy, please add a locksmith to my to-do list.’)

This is the way our relationship has been for the past eighteen months. The little girl who was desperate to please, who was so angelic she looked like she’d tumbled out of a Pears Soap poster, the poppet who invited me for tea in her Wendy house: that little girl is no more. Instead, there is this exasperated and exasperating young woman who is aggravated by my every suggestion – sometimes, it seems, by my very existence. She tells me I am ‘Soooo annoyyyingg’. I need to ‘Back off’. ‘Just chill, will you?’ ‘Stop worrying, Mum, I’m not a baby any more.’

Stop worrying? Sorry, darling, I’m your mother; that’s kind of the job description.

As my own hormones recede, my daughter’s are surging in. She is buffeted about by them and we all have to surf that tide with her. This belfie business has made it ten times worse. Emily has barely spoken to me for the past three days; any time I try to raise the subject she runs upstairs, like she did just now, and locks herself in the bathroom. When I knock on the door, she claims her period’s started and she feels sick, or her tummy hurts, but close observation of Tampax supplies tells me she’s only just finished her period. I haven’t even told Em that I’ve hired Josh Reynolds to carry out what he calls a ‘seek and destroy mission’. I just wish I knew what the repercussions have been for her at school, but I can’t find out unless we’re talking, can I? Obviously, I am to blame for the entire sixth form, the school choir and three million people on Facebook having seen the photo she took of her bare bottom, complete with its very own hashtag: #FlagBum. I understand that she is taking out her distress and anger on me. As my Parenting Teens in the Digital Age book says, my daughter knows that I love her unconditionally, so I am a safe place to put those feelings. Intellectually, I get that. Doesn’t make her behaviour towards me any less hurtful though. Emily can wound me like no one else.

7.30 am: When she comes back down for breakfast, Em is wearing full Cleopatra make-up, her eyes given raven wings by flicks of kohl. She either looks amazing or like jailbait, depending on your point of view. Pick your battles, Kate, pick your battles.

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Lizzy and some of the other girls are going to see Taylor Swift for her birthday.’

‘Any relation to Jonathan?’ asks Richard, not bothering to look up from his iPad.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Jonathan Swift. Famous satirist during the eighteenth century. Wrote Gulliver’s Travels,’ says Rich.

‘Mum, puhlease can I get a Taylor Swift ticket? She’s so cool, she’s like the best singer ever. Izzy and Bea are going. Everyone’s going. Mu-um, please.’

‘It’s not your birthday,’ objects Ben, not bothering to look up from his phone.

‘Shuddup, will you? Little brat. Mu-umm, tell Ben to stop it, will you?’

‘Emily, don’t kick your brother.’

‘Jonathan Swift suggested that children should be boiled and eaten,’ muses Rich to himself.

Sometimes, just occasionally, my husband makes me laugh out loud, and reminds me why I fell in love with him.

‘I think Swift was definitely onto something there,’ I say, placing scrambled eggs on the table. Richard is washing his bacon butty down with a glass of some weird energy drink which looks like that purple Dioralyte we gave the kids when they were dehydrated from vomiting.

‘Emily, you’ve got to eat something, darling.’

‘You just don’t get it,’ she says, pushing the plate of egg away from her with such venom that it tips over the edge of the table and smashes onto the floor, scattering fluffy yellow florets over the terracotta tiles.

‘Everyone’s like going to the O2 to see Taylor Swift. S’not fair. Why are we poor?’

‘We are not poor, Emily,’ says Richard in that slow, soft, vicar voice he has adopted since starting his course. (Oh, please, not the South Sudan lecture.)

‘There are children in the Horn of Africa, Emily …’

‘OK!’ I jump in before Rich can build up a head of sanctimony. ‘Mummy’s going to get a full-time job very soon, so you can definitely go and see Taylor Swift, darling.’

‘Kate!!!’ protests Richard, ‘what did we say about not negotiating with terrorists?’

‘What do I get?’ wails Ben, looking up from his phone.

Lenny, seizing this optimal moment of family friction, snarfs up the scrambled egg and licks the floor clean.

Rich is right to be cross. Extortionate concert tickets are not part of our agreed budget cuts, but I sense that Emily’s distress – panic even, did I detect panic in her eyes? – is about more than Taylor Swift. The girls she mentioned are all part of the Snapchat group that Lizzy Knowles shared the belfie with. The last thing Emily needs is to miss their outing. If Rich can blow one hundred and fifty quid a week talking about himself, and Ben’s new braces will require us to take out a second mortgage, then surely we can find the money to help Em be happy?

7.54 am: When the kids have gone upstairs to do their teeth and get their stuff together, Richard briefly raises his eyes from his cycling website and notices me – me as a person, that is, not as diary secretary and rinser of Lycra – and says, ‘I thought you were at the gym today.’

‘I was, but your dad rang really early. Couldn’t get him off the phone. He was on for twenty minutes. He’s really worried about your mum. She’s obviously pissed off the new carer. Told her that her English wasn’t good enough after she caught her smoking by the Bishop of Llandaff.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a flower. Passive smoking harms dahlias apparently. You know what your parents are like about the garden. And the carer sounds hideous. Donald mentioned a bruise on Barbara’s wrist, although that could be a fall. The whole thing’s a mess, but now they haven’t got anyone going in again.’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ Richard allows himself a very non-Dalai Lama reaction and I’m glad. Like most couples, our relationship has been held together by a common outlook on life, and by laughing at or despising those who don’t share it. I neither much like nor recognise Mr Wholefoodier Than Thou who is currently occupying the body where my lovely, funny husband used to live.

‘Mum’s impossible,’ he says. ‘How many carers is that they’ve gone through? Three? Four?’

‘Barbara’s really not well, Rich. You need to get up there and sort things out.’

‘Cheryl can do it. She’s nearer.’

‘Cheryl has a full-time job and three sons doing twenty-seven after-school activities. She can’t just drop everything.’

‘She’s their daughter-in-law.’

‘And you’re their son. So is Peter.’ (Don’t you hate the way families assume it’s always the women who should take care of the elderly parents, even if a son lives nearer? That may just be connected to the fact that we always do.)

At least Rich has the grace to look sheepish. ‘I know, I know,’ he sighs. ‘I thought Mum seemed fine in Cornwall. That was only two months ago.’

‘Your father’s good at covering things up.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘You’ve seen how forgetful she is.’

‘That’s perfectly normal at her age, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not normal to ask your fourteen-year-old grandson if he needs a wee wee. She genuinely thinks Ben is in kindergarten. She needs proper help. We can’t just leave your dad to cope, Rich. He’s amazing but he’s almost ninety for God’s sake.’

‘Could you? I mean, would you mind going, Kate? I would go, you know I would, but I can’t take a break from therapy right now. This is such a crucial time in my personal development. I know you’re job hunting and it’s a big ask, darling, but you’re so good at these things.’

‘Are you kidding?’

That’s what I am about to say, anyway, but something in Rich’s expression makes me pause. For a moment, he looks like Ben did that time in the middle of the night when he was kneeling on the bathroom floor next to the toilet bowl and admitted he was scared of vomiting.

Rich has always been horrified by anything to do with illness or doctors. Like most men he believes he’s immortal and I guess there’s nothing like witnessing your parent’s decline into dementia to dent that treasured myth. Despite his phobia, if I’m ill Rich always forces himself to be a good nurse. When I got salmonella from a cheap chicken, not long after we first met, he refused to leave me alone in my grotty shared flat though a combination of paper-thin partition walls and thunderous visits to the loo should have dealt a lethal blow to our budding romance. I remember thinking, between bouts of retching, how tenderly devoted this new boyfriend was. Not at all like the emotionally shut-off public schoolboy I had imagined him to be. If Rich’s passion could survive hourly explosions from all orifices, he must be a keeper. I had had better lovers, men my body was helplessly in thrall to, but wanting someone who was also kind to me? Now, that was a first.

When did we stop being kind to each other, Rich and I? All the pressure and upheaval of the past few months has made us scratchy and inconsiderate. I need to do better.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘I’ll see if I can go up to Wrothly and check in on Barbara and Donald before they invite me to interview for new Governor of the Bank of England.’

Richard smiles (haven’t seen one of those for a while) and swoops in for a kiss. ‘Brilliant. You’ll get a job offer, darling,’ he says. ‘Once that headhunter guy sends out your CV you’ll be beating them off with a stick.’

I haven’t told him how badly things went with Kerslaw. Don’t want to worry him.

Josh Reynolds to Kate

Hi Kate, Josh here. I’ve notified Facebook that the pic of Emily breaches their Community Standards and it should be taken down by now. As she’s sixteen she no longer qualifies as a child & won’t get highest priority. Although she’s not recognisable in the pic – you can only see her back and her bum which won’t identify her – I’ve zapped everything I could find and I’ve set up notifications which will alert me next time a pic of Emily’s bum is shared. I’ll kill it, natch. There are ways in which I can make Lizzy Knowles’s online life very unpleasant but you didn’t hear me say that, OK? If you want me to do what can’t be mentioned, let me know. You know if this is revenge porn you can get police involved. Do you want to do that? Thanks for asking me. It was fun!

Kate to Josh Reynolds

Thanks so much, Josh. Brilliant job. Really appreciate it. No, not revenge porn. Just teenage girl stuff. Not serious. Don’t want police involved!! Let me know how much I owe you.

9.47 am, Starbucks: With breakfast cleared, the site of the Green Juice Massacre swabbed down, the dishwasher mumbling to itself and Candy’s stern advice in mind, I have taken myself into town to work on my CV in a café. I can pretend to be ‘telecommuting’, instead of sitting at the kitchen table waiting to be ambushed by family members.

My mission today is to produce an attractive new CV, omitting my date of birth and any other incriminating details. Instead of admitting to ‘time out’, as prospective employers will see it, I must repackage what I have learned and achieved since I left Edwin Morgan Forster, as a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, loyal friend, school governor, PTA member, penniless yet imaginative house restorer, eBay addict, and inspired (and only slightly crooked) investor of parish church’s 1,900 quid (just call me Bernie Madoff!). It’s a cinch. Apply Harvard Business School model to position of Household Servant and General Dogsbody. Here goes:

 Over the past six years, I have built up an impressive track record in Conflict Resolution. (Translation: Wrestled Xbox out of Ben’s hands after three hours solid on Grand Theft Auto IV. Got him to agree to consume at least one green vegetable a day plus Brainy Teen fish oil capsule in return for more time on GTA IV.)

 Financial management and capital projects: I have considerable expertise in this area after helming several challenging schemes. (You can say that again. The Money Pit, aka ‘period gem’ is eating giant bites out of our meagre savings account and I am driving increasingly hard bargains with suppliers to get the job finished.)

 International negotiating skills honed on domicile issues in the UK. (Bloody au pair Natalia and her cocaine-dealer boyfriend.)

 Time Management and Prioritisation: I have balanced the complex needs of different individuals and developed routines while learning to prioritise multiple tasks and meet strict deadlines. (Of course I have. Am I not a mother? Do I not manage the lives of two adolescents and one male in midlife meltdown whilst keeping an eye on elderly relatives, walking the dog, trying to keep up with friends, carving out time to exercise, doing the garden and watching Homeland and Downton Abbey? Feel free to add to this list, it’s endless.)

 Grown a highly productive business start-up. (Planted beautiful Cutting Flower Garden guided by Sarah Raven book on same. Also, purchased huge smelly composting bin and learned to identify weeds. To my surprise, I have become a gardener.)

 Due diligence work on complex UK legislation. (Fought tooth and nail to get non-existent care package from local authority for Donald and Barbara, who get frailer by the day.)

 Pioneering research in Human Resources with special emphasis on staff development and motivation. (Spent days tracking down and hiring highly rated private tutor, fighting off several Tiger Mothers, to get Ben into the only local secondary school without a record of drive-by shootings and dreadful exam results. Told Emily she could have two tickets for the Reading Festival if she got nine good GCSEs. Result!)

 Built strong knowledge base in transport. (Personal chauffeur to two teenagers with active social, musical and sporting lives. Regularly take Ben and his drum kit to orchestra, jazz group, etc. Drove Emily to events around the country until she decided swimming was giving her Popeye shoulders. If you want my advice, never let your kids take up swimming; you always have to set off at dawn, usually in fog, and then you have to sit on an orange plastic seat in some repellently warm building that stinks of chlorine and wee – you can actually feel the bacteria multiplying in the soupy air. Plus, you have to maintain a keen interest during forty lengths of butterfly stroke. Seriously, choose any other sport.)

‘Oh, hello, Kate? Fancy seeing you here.’

I glance up from my laptop to find a blonde around my age smiling expectantly at me.

**‘Uh-oh. Roy, are you there? We have a woman in her forties, possible school mum, but wildly overdressed for a latte in Starbucks (Missoni coat, Chanel shades). Clearly loaded, judging by the number of bags she’s carrying. How do I know her?’

‘Oh, hello.’ I smile back and hope Roy shows up fast with her name. ‘Hello! Um, I’m just updating my CV.’

‘So I see. Very impressive. Job hunting, are we?’(‘ROY?? Get a move on, will you! Please tell me who she is.’)

‘Er. Yes, well, with the kids getting a bit older I thought I’d stick a toe in the water. See what’s out there, you know how it is.’

She smiles again, revealing lipstick on her top teeth, which have been expensively whitened. Too white – more Dulux gloss than Farrow and Ball.

Oh, here comes Roy, back from the stacks and a little breathless. Thank God. *Roy says that I put my glasses in the drawer next to the Aga.

‘WHAT? I don’t need to know where my glasses are, Roy. That was earlier. What I would now like you to focus on is retrieving this woman’s name.’

‘By the way,’ the woman says, ‘I’m so glad Emily can come to Taylor Swift.’

**‘It’s Lizzy Knowles’s mum,’ says Roy. ‘You know, mum of that little cow that sent Emily’s bum everywhere. Cynthia Knowles.’

Good job, Roy!

I’ve only met Cynthia a couple of times. After a school concert when both our daughters sang in the choir. And then at one of those charity coffee mornings where a well-bred mummy provides chocolate chip cookies no one eats, because we’re all fasting or eating protein only, and you pay her back by buying some jewellery you don’t want, and can’t really afford, but it’s rude not to because the mummy, who is married to Someone in The City, is trying to find something she can Do For Herself. So, you hand over your money to this hugely wealthy woman, which she then gives to charity, when she could perfectly well have written a large cheque. Oh, and nine days later the ‘silver’ earrings you bought at the coffee morning turn green and pus starts coming out of your left earlobe.

‘We’ll take them to the O2, of course,’ Cynthia is saying. ‘Christopher will drive them down in the Land Rover. Lizzy wants Korean BBQ afterwards. She said Emily’s a definite. Did she mention the ticket price?’

You know what? Meeting Cynthia, mother of the girl who has hurt my daughter so hideously, I don’t feel like being polite. My inner maternal dragon would prefer to breathe fire at her and scorch those perfect caramel highlights to cinders. Does she even know about the belfie that Lizzy accidentally-on-purpose shared with the whole school and all the paedophiles of England? Or are we playing Let’s Pretend I Have Perfect Children, which is a favourite game of women like Cynthia because to admit otherwise would be to admit their whole life has been a tragic waste of time?

‘Yes, that’s absolutely fine,’ I lie. How much can it be? More than £50? £60? No wonder poor Em was so frantic to get our agreement at breakfast. She’d already accepted Lizzy’s invitation.

‘And I hear you’re on the waiting list for our brainy book group, Kate?’ Cynthia continues. ‘Serena said that you’d expressed an interest. We like to think we’re a cut above your average book group. Usually choose one of the classics. Very occasionally a novel by a living author. Booker Prize shortlist. No chick lit. Such a waste of time, all that shopping and silly women.’

‘Yes, isn’t it.’ Who does Cynthia Knowles with her carrier bags: two L.K. Bennett, one John Lewis and one Hotel Chocolat think she is – Anna sodding Karenina?

‘Such luck bumping into you. Just tell Emily to give Lizzy a cheque for ninety pounds for the ticket.’

Ninety pounds! Make strenuous effort not to let jaw drop or emit squeak of dismay.

‘I think Lizzy just wants Topshop vouchers for her birthday,’ she goes on. ‘No presents per se. Good luck with the job hunting!’

Cynthia stalks off to the far corner of the café to join a group of the yummiest mummies imaginable, taking her skinny latte and most of my morale with her. Why do women like her get to me? Probably because they get to play domestic goddesses on hubby’s Platinum Amex. Not a life I ever wanted – although, recently, I must admit the idea of being a kept woman has developed a certain appeal.

Bit late for that, Kate. Most of the guys who could keep you in the style to which Cynthia is accustomed are (a) on Wife Number Two or (b) picking up debt-ridden students on Sugar Daddy websites so they can rub their slack, saggy bodies on prime young flesh. Uch. For Wifey Number One, hanging onto her position is a full-time job: gym, Botox, yoga, nutritionist, even vaginoplasty to get her pre-baby pussy back so hubby’s floppy dick isn’t wanging about in a wind tunnel that three babies’ heads have passed through. No thank you.

And yet, glancing across the café at Cynthia and her gaggle of mums, I feel a corkscrew of envy in my gut. Always slightly dreaded the whole school-gate thing; in truth, I was dismissive of those women whose life revolves around coffees and playdates. But now that Ben is too old to be picked up any more, I miss the ready companionship that that ritual provided and all the pleasant, eager, worried women I could discuss my kids with. They were a bulwark against the loneliness of parenting, if only I’d known it. Anyway, need to get this magnificent CV finished. Just a few final points.

 Oversaw the establishment of a major hydro site. (Weekly laundry, handwashing Rich’s pongy cycling gear so it doesn’t ‘go bobbly’.)

 Provided sustainable nutritional support for staff in line with industry standards. (Always kept snacks for kids to eat in car on way home from school, thus avoiding total meltdown. At least one cooked meal a day for four people, making approximately ten thousand hot dinners in the past seven years, without any thanks or acknowledgement of what it takes to cater said dinners.)

 Turned around declining private company through regular programme of cuts and aggressive streamlining to offset threat of double-dip recession. (Went on Fast Diet and started going to gym again. Hopefully on track to fit into my old office clothes.)

 Strove for a consistent improvement in the bottom line. (Slightly smaller bum as a result of excruciating squats.)

If any of the above strikes you as vaguely fraudulent or unethical, well, I’m sorry, but what are the words you’d use to describe the fact that women take care of the young and the old, year in year out, and none of that work counts as skills or experience, or even work? Because women are doing it for free it is literally worthless. As Kerslaw said, we have nothing of interest to offer, except everything we do and everything we are. I am not by nature a political person, but I swear I would march to protest the vast untold work done by all the women of this world.

3.15 pm: Fighting the urge to go upstairs and sleep. Can hardly put ‘afternoon napping’ down as part of my skillset on application form, although it’s the one thing I excel at these days. Probably Perry’s fault. With my CV immensely improved (although I’m not sure I’d dare show it to my Women Returners group) I brace myself for a call to Wrothly Social Services. Sadly, it’s too early for alcohol.

‘Your call may be assessed for training purposes.’

Here we go. You know when you’ve pressed five for one department and then you’ve pressed one from the Following Range of Options, although you think you may have misheard, and that maybe you needed three? And then you’ve pressed seven for Any Other Queries, and your hopes are getting up that you might be about to interact with an actual human being, when a recorded voice says, ‘Sorry. We are experiencing a high volume of calls. Your call is important to us, please hold the line’? And the phone rings and rings and rings and you picture a cobwebby office with a skeleton sitting in a chair at a desk and the phone on the desk it rings and rings and rings? Well, that’s what it feels like to be calling Wrothly Social Services.

By now, surely everyone has figured out that these multiple options are not designed to be helpful; they are supposed to act as a deterrent whilst giving the illusion of progress and choice. Even ‘your call may be used for training purposes’ is basically a threat, telling you to behave yourself or else. A mere twenty minutes elapse until I get through to someone in the right department, who then asks if he can put me on hold while he speaks to a colleague, who may or may not have access to Barbara’s case notes. I am almost tearfully grateful for this basic courtesy.

‘Hello? Can I help you?’

The voice does not sound at all helpful. In fact, she sounds as though she may recently have graduated from a bespoke Unhelpfulness training course – the one they send American border security staff on.

I know, let’s baffle her with politeness and friendliness.

‘Good afternoon, thank you so much. It’s great to talk to an actual person.’

No response.

‘So, I’m ringing on behalf of my mother-in-law, she has a burns injury …’

‘Barbara Shattock?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Great. Thank you so much. I spoke to my father-in-law earlier and he says that, unfortunately, there was a misunderstanding between Barbara and Erna, the carer you so kindly sent to help them.’

‘I’m afraid that your mother-in-law has been reported in connection with a possible hate crime,’ says the voice.

‘What? No. That can’t be right.’

‘Mrs Shattock racially abused one of our carers.’

‘Sorry? No. You’ve got that wrong. You don’t understand. Barbara, she’s eighty-five. She’s very confused. She’s not herself.’

‘Mrs Shattock accused her carer of not being able to speak English. At Wrothly, we take hate crime very seriously.’

‘Hang on. What hate crime? Erna is Lithuanian, isn’t she? She’s not a different race to Barbara. Do you even know what racism is?’

‘I’m not trained to answer that question,’ the voice says flatly.

‘But you’re making a very serious allegation.’

There is an icy silence into which I burble and plead: ‘I’m really sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding, but it’s simply not in Barbara’s nature to upset someone like that.’

That is a blatant lie. As long as I’ve known her, more than twenty years now, Barbara has been the princess of passive aggression, the empress of undermining. The world is full, as far as Barbara is concerned, of people who are Simply Not Up To It. The list of Simply Not Up To Its is long and ever-expanding. It includes news anchors with sloppy diction, women who ‘let themselves go’, tradesmen with dirty boots who don’t show sufficient respect to Axminster carpets, pregnant weathergirls, politicians who are ‘basically Communists’, and the fool responsible for a misprint in the Daily Telegraph crossword. A mistake in her favourite crossword and Barbara will act out the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, calling for the head of the idiot who introduced an error into Twenty-Two Across.

As the lesser of her two daughters-in-law, it was established early on that I was Simply Not Up To It. I was hardly the girl Richard’s mother hoped her son would marry and she did very little to conceal her disappointment. Every time we visited, Barbara would ask without fail, ‘Where did you get that dress/blouse/coat, Kate?’ and not in a way which indicated she wished to go out and purchase one for herself.

One Christmas, I was in the pantry looking for tinned chestnuts when I heard Barbara say to Cheryl, the preferred daughter-in-law, ‘Kate’s problem is she has no background.’

It stung, not just the snobbery, but because Barbara was right. Compared to the comfortable, well-established Shattocks, my own family had a hasty, provisional feel. We were the Beverly Hillbillies, the supermarket’s basic range, and I know Barbara sensed it from the moment Rich first took me home. Luckily, he was so in love he didn’t notice her dig at my unmanicured hands. (I’d been decorating a junk-shop chest of drawers and the residue of grey-green paint looked like dirt beneath my fingernails.) I could put up with having my family patronised, my cooking dismissed and my choice of clothes derided, but the one thing I could never forgive Barbara for is that she has always made me feel like a bad mother. And I’m not.

Yet, here I am defending Barbara to the woman from social services because Barbara is no longer in any fit state to tell this woman that she is Simply Not Up To It. Which she clearly isn’t.

‘Has it occurred to you that it might be quite upsetting if you’re an elderly lady and the person washing you is a bit rough and she can’t understand what you’re saying? Are we allowed to say that? Oh, I see, we’re not allowed to say that. Pardon me.’

Uch. When did we become this nation of hateful automatons, unable to deviate from the official script to respond to genuine need and upset? All friendliness gone now, I channel my steeliest professional self and suggest that the voice gets another carer around to help Barbara and Donald asap.

‘Otherwise, Mrs Shattock might seriously hurt herself at which point Wrothly Social Services will be obliged to comment. On the evening news.’

‘I am not trained to answer that,’ I hear the voice say, followed by the dialling tone.

Well, that went well.

To: Candy Stratton

From: Kate Reddy

Subject: Headhunter Humiliation

Hi hon, thanks for the pep talk. I did a new CV as you suggested. Might enter it for Pulitzer Prize as piece of groundbreaking, experimental fiction. It’s not really lying if you know you can do all the things you haven’t done, is it?

I’ve been going to these Women Returners meetings. Don’t laugh. They’re really sweet and it’s making me realise how much luckier I am than those who quit when they had their first baby. Desperately trying to lose weight and get myself into shape, but I’m just so damn tired and wrung out the whole time. Hard not to raid the biscuit tin when you’re knackered! Not sleeping cos of night sweats. I have hog’s bristles sprouting out of my chinny chin chin. I’m so blind I can’t read the calories on any foodstuffs, which I’m not supposed to be eating anyway as I need to get into my Thin Clothes because I gave my Fat Clothes to the charity shop the last time I lost weight and swore I would never be fat again. Plus, I need to take a nap every afternoon. I have the energy of a heavily sedated sloth.

Missed my gym session today with Conan the Barbarian because I was talking to Richard’s dad about Richard’s mum, who clearly has Alzheimer’s, but no one can face having that conversation so we are all pretending it’s fine until she burns the house down. Oh, and the council is accusing Barbara of a HATE CRIME because she didn’t like the surly, non-English-speaking ‘carer’ they sent to bathe her. Excuse me, she’s eighty fucking five! If you can’t be a difficult old bitch then, when can you be?

I never know when my period’s coming these days and I’m scared the deluge will happen when I’m out. Just like I was scared when I was 13 and my period started in the middle of a chemistry test. So I prefer to stay in and watch property-porn shows and fantasise about life in a neglected French chateau being renovated for me by Gérard Depardieu (circa Green Card, not since he got bigger than an actual chateau) with his large, capable yet tender hands, TOTALLY FREE OF CHARGE.

Be honest. Does this sound like the kind of mature, together person anyone in their right mind would want to employ?

Your (VERY) old friend,

Kxx