Читать книгу Motherwhelmed - Anniki Sommerville - Страница 7

A FEW HOURS HAD passed and I was trying to write the final presentation for a project I’d just finished.

The client wanted to launch a wipe that cleaned a baby’s bottom and also made them fall asleep. The name of the product was ‘Goodnight Bum’ and there was some mocked-up packaging and a potential scent idea (Lavender and Tea Tree oil). It was ambitious but had legs, or at least that was my argument. You see parents will always seek out anything that promises sleep, and nowadays we all believe there’s a product that can fix anything. I’d interviewed twelve groups of mums in focus groups. They all reacted the same way. At first, they’d found the idea appalling (they were worried about the cleaning/sleeping benefit – was there some secret/toxic ingredient?) but I needed to come up with a positive slant for this presentation. Clients don’t like to be told that their idea is shit. It’s just like when a child holds up their drawing for approval. You try and be diplomatic and find something you do like – You’ve drawn a cat with eight legs. How lovely! It’s a spider cat. Don’t cry, love. It’s brilliant!

‘The ‘Goodnight Bum’ proposition is both challenging and disruptive,’ I typed into PowerPoint.

I sipped my coffee. I didn’t have my headphones on, but there was complete silence in the office. I often wondered why we didn’t all work from home. It would save a lot of money and wasted travel time. At least the quiet afforded me some thinking space.

‘The challenge for ‘Goodnight Bum’ is to find a sweet spot between calming and cleansing.’

My phone buzzed with an incoming text. ‘Bella has sustained a small head injury whilst hanging off the climbing frame but we applied a cold compress and she seems to be in good health,’ it said.

I felt a surge of panic. Nursery had been sending texts for some time now. I still felt it was more appropriate to speak to the parent, but then I also acknowledged that speaking was becoming far less common because it was so time-consuming. I resisted the urge to Google ‘minor head injuries in small children,’ and tried to focus. Bella was that kind of child. She was boisterous and outgoing. She loved to try new things. Hopefully she’d never experience the slog and sheer averageness of my own life. She was in good health. All was well.

Back to the presentation and the phrase ‘sweet spot’ was a good one. I used it a fair amount. It made me think of ‘G-spot’ and was just as mythical – it was where the truth lay, where an idea suddenly sprang into life and resonated, where it made people orgasm. In life, I’d failed to find this blissful truth for myself. For now, I could hear the boy next to me playing MC Hammer through his headphones. It brought back memories of a night in South London in my youth when I’d snogged a boy called Freddie. Freddie had been a very good dancer but a terrible kisser. I’d gone out with him for four months before finally realizing the truth. I wondered whether this music had come back into fashion, or was it part and parcel of this irony thing, where anything shit was cool? What was Freddie doing these days? Had someone taught him to snog properly?

Was he working on a ‘disruptive proposition to send a baby to sleep whilst you cleansed its bottom?’

‘Bella is still in good health,’ a new text buzzed.

‘Thanks for the update,’ I replied.

‘Log onto our portal for updates on our menus this week,’ the next text said.

Was this a real person?

And would they text me when they took her to A&E? Or when she was in intensive care? I needed to call them to check she really was okay but that would mean staying an extra half an hour, and missing bedtime. Bedtime was the key objective – if I could get home by bedtime then my life wasn’t completely messed up.

I tried to get back to work again.

‘The idea is overwhelmingly negative,’ I typed as this was closer to the truth, but this sounded, well, rather awful. ‘The idea works on some levels,’ I concluded.

I looked up and the MC Hammer fanboy was wearing a baseball cap with the word ‘TWAT’ emblazoned across the front. He looked up for a second and then back at his screen. Many of these young folks thought I was an elderly person hired by the company to help with our diversity initiative. He had no idea that back in the day I’d been a hot shot. No, that wasn’t true. I’d never been a hot shot. I wasn’t strategic enough and I worked hard but not so hard that I ended up in hospital with nervous exhaustion.

A proper sissy pants, me. Besides not all of us can be Phoebe-Sheryl Sandberg-BIG-BOSS-PANTS. Not all of us want to be her right?

I checked my emails, and there was yet another one from Mum complaining that Dad was being anti-social. I didn’t know why she was surprised by my father’s tendencies to lock himself away – they’d been together for forty-five years now.

Your dad refuses to try line dancing with me. He says he’s too busy but it’s pretty obvious that he’s just hiding away. I never thought my life would be so lonely.

Mum was prone to being dramatic. I could empathise as I could clearly see that there was very little to recommend getting old (unless you were rich and old). They lived in a different part of London, I rarely saw them. It took me two and a bit hours to travel from Acton to Beckenham where I’d grown up. It was quicker to take the Eurostar to Paris. Dad was usually tinkering in his shed with his model railway. He’d retired five years ago and had a history of depression. Maybe it wasn’t depression but was just low mood. He’d set the railway up so it ran around the garden. Mum was a social animal and needed to be around people. Dad was happiest when he could spend uninterrupted periods alone. Mum was constantly experimenting with a range of different evening classes, from watercolour through to Mandarin. They were relatively healthy but each time I spoke to either of them there seemed to be the arrival of another ailment. It was hard to see how there could be much of a silver lining.

Both my parents had always instilled how important it was to work, to have a dependable income, to have financial stability. Sometimes I wished they hadn’t.

And I went for a walk this morning and another big, frightening dog attacked Puddles. He’s shaking with fear whilst I type this. I am at my wit’s end.

Love Mum

Mum was often at her ‘wit’s end’ and Puddles was my parent’s Yorkshire terrier. Puddles was an unhappy dog that shook when he went for a stroll (or more accurately a ‘shake’), shook when he took a dump, and shook when you offered him a treat. He was constantly being attacked by mean dogs and lacked confidence (something we had in common perhaps?). I made a mental note to ring Dad. We usually talked about the weather at great length and then I’d ask him how he was really and he’d say he had a cold (which meant his depression was mild) or the flu (which meant it was pretty bad) or a stomach bug (which translated to needing more antidepressants). We never used the word depression and yet this time I was worried about his reclusiveness. At the same time, I envied the fact that he could avoid people for long periods of time with nothing but Classic FM blaring out of the old ghetto blaster that had resided in my teenage bedroom. He didn’t have to get crammed onto a train or listen to sad men swearing in meetings and he could amuse himself fixing little carriages together with glue and drinking tea (he even had a kettle in there so Mum had enabled him to be more of a recluse). He’d spent his working life in academia and this was how academics were. They pootled and liked quiet. This behaviour was not out of the ordinary.

Lunchtime arrived, and like every other work day I walked listlessly round the local boutiques trying to dispatch the sad feeling that lived inside me. It was cold and windy, so I bought a bobble hat. A scented candle. A new pair of gloves. None of these items were satisfying, and I went back to the canteen upstairs, bought my protein and salad lunch, and hunched over my phone, trying to see what was going on in the world of Instagram. It seemed that everyone else was doing far more interesting things than I was. There were a lot of motivational quotes about how today was the day where my life would finally take off. Others were preaching the benefits of feeling good about our bodies (which felt rather obvious, I thought, but these posts always proved popular). I spent ten minutes trying to think of something witty to fling into the mix, and then gave up. I called Pete instead. He worked at a catering company that provided posh lunches for corporate clients. He hated it but was good and rarely moaned. He accepted that part of life was doing a job you disliked. We were both very different in that regard.

‘What’s up?’ he said picking up after the first ring.

‘Not much. I just had lunch. Are you having a good day?’ I asked. ‘The nursery texted and said Bella fell off the climbing frame again.’

‘Is she okay?’

‘I think so. No she’s definitely okay or they would have sent another one. How’s work?’

‘Bit of a pain. There’s a massive order in for a conference tomorrow. I’ve been on my feet all morning but I’m going to buy some tinned tomatoes on my way home and make a nice prawn pasta for dinner.’

‘Did you take the prawns out of the freezer?’

‘I think so.’

‘If you didn’t take them out then we can’t have prawn pasta can we?’

‘If they haven’t thawed I’ll do that sausage pasta thing Bella likes.’

‘I don’t think the sausages are still okay,’ I said.

‘I’ll check when I get in,’ he replied.

There were a lot of conversations about freezing and defrosting these days. I wondered if all couples were the same.

Yet I knew I was lucky to have Pete. He made delicious food. He still took pride in his appearance and hadn’t lost his teeth and hair. He did more on the domestic front than many other men – in fact some weekend mornings, it was a race to see who could get the washing in the machine first. There was sometimes a tinge of passive-aggressiveness to it. We had sex every two months but there were also long periods where we didn’t do it all and watched TV. Yes I needed to practice more gratitude. The problem was it was hard work, this long-term relationship stuff. The practicalities of life took over and you were left with two people exchanging functional information on how to get from A to B. A bit like when you ask someone directions and then don’t listen and walk the way you originally intended anyway.

An image of Pete popped into my mind. The night we’d first met in a bar in Ladbroke Grove. It had been back in the days before mobiles, before screens, when people looked at each other a lot more (I’d heard from younger colleagues at work that this rarely happened much anymore). I’d had quite a lot of beer to drink (back when beer was trendy for girls to drink), and a friend had introduced me. He was tall, had a mop of dark hair, and an Irish accent.

‘He’s bad news,’ my friend had said. ‘He just goes from one girl to the next.’

I was a woman that loved a challenge and I treated getting Pete like a project.

We’d spent that first night kissing in the corner. We kissed a lot. I tried not to think about it now because it felt like two different people. It had been. Two people without a kid, without the stress of paying a mortgage and bills each month, without all the domestic hum drum that took over, without acres of TV to get through each day.

Just two people that really liked one other.

In the beginning our relationship had been exciting. Like all couples, who fancy each other, we’d taken every opportunity to have sex. We’d had sex in a park, in a toilet, in my old bedroom when I took him to meet my parents (my parents weren’t there for the sex part). Pete had never been a massive talker and had grown up in a family where his mum talked enough for the entire family – the rest of the family nodded or shook their heads. Nevertheless we had that initial phase of getting to know each other, sharing key childhood experiences, music we loved – all that stuff.

Then, like many couples who have been together a long time, we stopped asking those questions. Pete often said things like ‘You told me that story already,’ or ‘I know how this one ends.’ And it was true, there wasn’t much original content. And he hated my work chat. Initially I’d come back full of venom and stories about my day, I’d download them the split-second I came through the door. I had that need to get it all off my chest. Pete was oftentimes looking to provide a basic solution to these problems, so he’d say things like, tell him to bugger off, or just don’t do that project if it isn’t in your job description. This was fine, but what he didn’t understand was that I didn’t want a solution. I JUST WANTED HIM TO LISTEN. And sympathise. Like a friend would.

‘You can’t have conversations with your partner like you do with your mates,’ Kath said.

But this left me wondering what you could do with your partner if conversations and sex were often off the agenda.

What did that leave?

And so I stopped telling him these work stories. I stopped telling him the old stories (he’d heard them all). I stopped telling him. It made me sad but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about it. It didn’t feel like something that dinner in a nice restaurant would fix.

On top of this we’d been through three miscarriages after Bella. Miscarriages can bring you closer together but they’d seemed to push us further apart instead. We wanted to stay together.

But life was tiring and we didn’t have energy to put into it anymore.

After lunch, I went back to the silent, air-conditioned tomb. The air con had been turned up so high that several of my colleagues were wearing thick blankets wrapped around their shoulders. It made the whole place feel a bit desperate – like we were in some sort of disaster zone, just trying to hold our shit together until somebody rescued us. I shoved my headphones on, and spent twenty minutes trying to construct a Spotify playlist that would encourage me to run more often.

Phoebe came back into my field of vision. She mouthed the words, WHERE’S THAT BRIEF? at me and I made a sort of shrugged shoulder, not sure where, gesture and she was off again. It was obvious that there was a need for more briefs today. We were very busy but not busy enough.

I whacked some KRS-One on. An old P. Diddy track. The minute those beats started I felt more energetic. Hip-hop made me feel like I could conquer the world. Hip-hop artists never struggled with their careers or worried that they’d spent too much on a bobble hat and would need to return it. I love hip-hop (classics from the 90s). This stemmed back to my childhood growing up in Beckenham – basically you either liked hip-hop or dance music and I tended to be more of a hip-hop gal. It seemed as if those lyrics were written for a white, middle-class girl dealing with boys who thought I was too tall and boyish for them and friendship dynamics which changed every two minutes. Now if you clocked me in my Boden skirt, grey roots just starting to show through, you’d think I was listening to Coldplay or some such dross but I retained my tiny sliver of youthful abandon through listening to LL Cool J, DMX, Dr Dre and Wu-Tang Clan.

There was something about hip-hop that was remarkably confidence boosting.

Like many females, I didn’t over-index on confidence and was drawn to people who did. LL Cool J never woke in the morning with imposter syndrome. He didn’t have to read positive affirmations to know what he stood for or what he wanted to accomplish that day. It’s was awe-inspiring. One day I would launch a magazine and it would give advice from rappers to middle aged women. It would be called Dope Housewives, and would blow Good Housekeeping out of the water. Who wanted to look at Judith Chalmers in a floral jumpsuit or read articles about body brushing when you could read ‘Snoop Dog’s 10 Tips for a Hot Damn Sex Life?’. It was accepted that your tastes became more conservative, the older you became but why did this have to be so?

Eventually, I came back to the slides I needed to finish off. Some of the presentation seemed to be rather repetitive, but I could always hide those slides, or delete them once I’d finished.

I couldn’t help myself and checked Instagram first, scrolling through another fifty images of women who were apparently ‘killing it’, ‘nailing it’, ‘embracing the day,’ and the like. I wrote another slide. Then went back on social media. I kept this not-very-virtuous-circle going for the rest of the afternoon.

‘The synergy between cleaning and sleeping doesn’t feel optimum for a bum product offering.’

‘Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.’

‘A core barrier is the fear of toxicity next to baby’s private parts.’

‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’

‘The optimized proposition needs to reassure on naturalness as some respondents feared rashes and reactions due to strong offensive odour of product.’

I was increasingly feeling like I was just arranging words in different configurations, and they made very little sense. I took a few screengrabs from various baby websites and stuck smiling faces all over the deck. That jollied it up somewhat and made it feel a bit more accessible. At around three p.m. it was time for a team meeting. Darren was my team leader – I’d hired him just before going on maternity leave and he was now my line manager. It wasn’t uncommon of course. Having a baby was not a good idea and your career rarely survived – unless when you came back you worked ten times as hard and denied the baby’s existence. It was a thorny issue and one that showed no signs of going away.

‘So, are we all SMASHING it today?’ Darren said as the four of us settled around the table.

There was something about him that gave me a visceral response – a queasy feeling. He was a strange hybrid of ‘macho surfer’ and ‘steely banker’. It was a horrid combination.

‘We are smashing it today,’ I said under my breath but this was far from the truth.

I’d only had one brief in two weeks, and had been finishing up this debrief for three days now (when usually I should have moved onto a new project already). On the table there was a young female intern who seemed about fourteen, then a lovely girl called Sam who had joined Mango-Lab after her gap year in Belize rescuing turtles, and the guy with the TWAT cap who I’d seen around the office, but who had only just been put on Darren’s team. Then me – the Grandma of hip-hop.

‘Let’s each take a turn and say the one thing we’re proud of achieving today.’ Darren said.

Darren had whitened his teeth, and smiled a lot to make sure to get his money’s worth. In my last appraisal, he’d told me to study the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. He’d learnt all his ‘tricks and strategies’ from it, he said. I needed to be more like him if I wanted to win in business. The thing was, I wasn’t sure Mango-Lab wanted a forty-two-year-old surfer chick who slapped people on the back without warning … but he was right that I needed to be more enthusiastic – my enthusiasm levels were not great. He also told me that my business-winning target had tripled. He delivered this news with a grin, and then slapped the table to signal our one-on-one had finished.

‘Great dude! Do you want to high five?’

I just glared at him. I clearly didn’t want to do that at all. It had taken me forty minutes to fill in one line on the review form which was all in Excel – I found it impossible to use at the best of times. I had the sense that Darren was trying to catch me out and make my life as difficult as possible. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. Even by Mango-Lab’s standards he was a viper. If I’d been Phoebe, I would have taken his advice on the chin and manned up. Instead I went into the toilet and cried, and then went to Pret and bought myself a cheese and ham croissant. I rang Mum and vowed to escape this terrible job as soon as possible. I understood we needed to bring business in but they needed to be practical about just how much a part-time mum could bring in on her own with little support.

‘You’ll never achieve this huge figure Rebecca,’ Darren had said in one of our more recent catch-ups. ‘You won’t even come close but let’s set the bar REAL high? Let’s see where that tide takes you.’

He’d grinned, flashing those ghastly gnashers. He delivered bad news whilst smiling like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining. This might have come from his self-help book but it didn’t work for me. Many were terrified of him.

‘I worked until three a.m. on a debrief last night.’

‘I typed the whole thing whilst cycling on my bicycle.’

‘My Fitbit says I got one hour of sleep but I just had a twenty-minute cat nap so my metabolism is back on form.’

‘I missed my daughter’s birthday because I was winning this new project from Ribena and so she didn’t mind.’

‘I’ve worked out that if I nap for ten minutes at three p.m. I can keep working till ten and feel fine.’

These were typical Darren statements. People who are workaholics smell bad. This was something I’d noticed about him from day one. His body was slowly decomposing as he became a man/robot hybrid. When he sweated it smelt like someone had died. The human elements were rapidly being broken down. He often appeared from nowhere and was suddenly right behind you like he was floating around. His legs replaced by wheels because legs were useless and didn’t transport you from one laptop to the next in quick enough time. Meanwhile in that same appraisal meeting, Phoebe had sat in the corner and taken notes the whole time he was speaking – ‘This loser will probably last no more than six months,’ or something close. Maybe she drew penises in the margins too. And I tried to do these things – to be more enthusiastic, more dynamic, but it felt as if I was sinking.

They knew this of course and I felt like this was part of the plan.

We were back in the meeting. Darren was using the corner of a piece of paper to pick something out of his teeth.

‘I’m proud that I took good notes during the banking groups and learnt some super interesting insights about people and their favourite financial services apps,’ the intern said cheerily.

She was very pretty but would soon be very tired. I often witnessed their pink, healthy cheeks become hangdog and pale as the long hours drained the life force from them.

‘Great work,’ Darren said tapping his pen noisily on the table. ‘Banking is one of my favourite categories. Well done Sasha.’

‘It’s not Sasha,’ she replied.

‘Whatever … next dude!’

‘I’m proud that I’ve identified a new paradigm shift in the pet food market,’ said the TWAT.

I drew a little penis in the margin.

‘I’m constantly surprised by the pet food category,’ Darren said. ‘Such rich behavioural data when you compare dry versus wet. There’s definitely a breakfast innovation session in there somewhere if you’d be interested in writing it.’

TWAT nodded and then glanced at my pad. I worried that perhaps he’d noticed my penis drawing, so I quickly drew some branches coming out of the bell-end so it looked more like a blossoming tree.

‘And what are YOU proud of this week, Rebecca?’ Darren asked.

I could always sense sarcasm in his voice. I had violent fantasies which ended with me punching him in the face. I knew these feelings were irrational, but Darren had come to represent my failure and lack of popularity. I stared back at him, and thought about how I’d need to bandage up my hands properly to get a good punch in. How I’d never punched anyone before but this first punch would be very powerful. How his teeth would shatter one by one, like in a cartoon, and then fall to the floor. How I would perhaps pick these teeth up and keep them as mementos. How I would leave the office with them in my pocket and then make a bestselling rap album where I dissed Darren in every song. Then I stopped and felt a wave of panic. It wasn’t Darren’s fault that I was becoming less relevant. Or that I only had two clients commissioning business. Or that I didn’t share his boundless enthusiasm for dog kibble.

‘I feel like I’ve finally had a breakthrough on this baby wipe presentation.’ I said, which was not true but no one was going to read it apart from the client. Darren flashed me his winning business smile.

‘Well there’s a surprise. You’re being AWESOME. Well done dude.’

‘Rebecca, I’d love to run some ideas past you about the pet food market,’ TWAT said.

‘That’s a great idea,’ Darren said. ‘Rebecca, remember we said you needed to collaborate more with the semiotics and cultural insights team moving forward? It would be great if you two could hit those waves REAL hard if you know what I mean?’

Darren had managed to make this sound rather pervy. That was another thing he specialized in – innuendo. I scribbled over the penis tree on my pad and nodded. I didn’t like this TWAT but would play the game. If it helped me appear more dynamic and with it then so be it.

I went back to my desk. The meeting had felt a bit staged. Had the TWAT and Darren agreed ahead of time that we would collaborate? Who was this boy? A spy? A flash drive in a baseball cap? I continued writing slides and checking Instagram as before, but I suddenly felt like my head was detaching from itself, and travelling up to the ceiling. Had the nursery texted but I’d accidentally lost the text? Was Bella really okay? Were the prawns defrosted or not? What about the sausages? And the non-existent brief? I’d lied about that and Phoebe would soon uncover the lie. Once it reached the ceiling my head stayed resting on the plastic tiles, and softly bounced around looking down on everyone; the young people in their blankets; the green smoothies in massive plastic bottles; the headphones; the grey carpet; the photocopier which was always broken and required a complicated access code; the herbal teabag stuck to the floor. I’d done a pill or ten in my youth and the whole sensation would have been pleasant if I’d been in a nightclub back in the noughties, but here under the florescent lighting, with the tinny echo from headphones and relentless air con being blown down our necks, this was not pleasant at all. I had to hold onto the desk to stop myself from falling out of my chair. Was this a stroke?

I got up and half walked, half staggered to the kitchen. No one looked up from their laptop. It wasn’t unusual. We were all alone with our emails and anxiety. Once inside the kitchen, I stared at the cupboard and repeated the instructions stuck to the door. Dispose of ALL teabags in the bin provided. The fridge will be cleaned every Friday and all EDIBLES will be disposed of PROMPTLY. My head was still not attached to my body. It was somewhere outside seeking a blanket. I wondered whether I was dying. I tried to normalize my breathing. I rested my head against the cupboard. I am okay. I am okay. I am okay. I repeated. Then I turned around and the TWAT was right next to me.

‘Are you feeling alright?’ he said not unkindly. ‘I read one of your blog articles and you’d written about the unique connection between cats and their owners and I wanted to try and tap into some of that for this proposal I’m writing.’

‘Yes,’ I said weakly, could he not see I was dying right now? ‘I will check my diary and be in touch.’

I turned back to face the cupboard.

‘I hate the instructions, everywhere don’t you?’ he said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea or are you just chilling in here?’

My head has come off and is floating somewhere next to the bookcase thanks.

‘Chilling,’ I said.

Now please leave me be. I really didn’t want him to notice my hands shaking as I took the coffee out of the cupboard and deposited a spoonful into my cup.

Back at my desk I wrote an email to Phoebe and copied in Darren, explaining that I needed to go home as I felt like I was coming down with something bad. Before leaving I sat in the toilet and tried to compose myself for the journey home. It was frightening to feel so out of control. Was this a panic attack? A breakdown? Or was I about to drop dead?

‘We used to have Molton Brown soap and now they’re getting it from Tesco,’ I heard a girl outside the cubicle saying, ‘Do you think there will be redundancies soon?’

I recognized the voice as one of the admin team.

‘Phoebe’s just won that big frozen food account,’ another voice said – it sounded like the receptionist –‘It’s massive. Phoebe is pretty amazing really.’

‘Phoebe is incredible.’

‘I heard she only took one week for her maternity leave.’

‘I heard she had no pain relief during labour.’

‘She did a climb up Kilimanjaro a month later.’

‘I heard her husband is very good-looking.’

‘Their kitchen is huge – I saw a picture on Facebook.’

‘She has lots of dinner parties and I heard that Piers Morgan came to one.’

‘Well maybe we’ll get Aesop in the toilets again.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

On the train, I stared out the window. I felt like you do at the end of a hangover. The feeling you get at roughly 3 p.m. My head was back on my body but my head was aching. I felt flat. I looked down at my phone and saw an email labelled URGENT.

Re: FISH FINGER INNOVATION OPPORTUNITY

Hey Rebecca,

I have some great news on a new fish finger proposition that the client wants to research next month. It’s an exciting challenge. It fits perfectly with the goals and objectives we drew up with Darren at your last appraisal.

Hope you’re feeling better already.

Phoebe.

P.S. What happened about that brief? Was it a false alarm?

Better already? I’d only just left the office! There was nothing about the email that made me feel better. I had ZERO interest in fish fingers. Who did? Well Phoebe was different. She could fake an interest in anything. This was why she was successful. She had the stamina of an ox. She never woke up with the sheets imprinted into her face. She never laughed and weed herself because her pelvic floor was shot to buggery. Okay, she wore terrible clothes and had no style but I was clutching at straws. All you saw when you looked at her was confidence and strategic prowess. She was dynamic. This was the word she constantly waved under my nose – the word she bandied about as if it was some sort of magic formula, but what did it actually mean? How could I be more dynamic if my head was flying off all over the place and everyone was talking like a surfer dude? I was sorely tempted to send her an email telling her to FUCK OFF. Wasn’t this a benefit of getting older? Saying exactly what you thought and not mincing your words? This was what I loved about Mum. The older she got, the less she cared about anyone and the more sweary she became. I wished I could channel some of her now so I could overpower Phoebe.

I typed a reply.

AWESOME! I LOVE FISH FINGERS. Sorry, the brief was a false alarm but will definitely chase again next week. They said they needed to spend more time working out the objectives.

Rebecca x

She was also the kind of person who got off a transatlantic flight, and went straight to a meeting, then got straight back on the plane (perhaps turning her knickers inside out in the airplane toilet), slicked on a bit of lip gloss, readying herself to cook a delicious three course meal for her dinner guests when she got home. So it was true that she’d only had a week off for her maternity leave, and I’d also heard another rumour she’d come back with the umbilical cord still dangling out the bottom of her tights (she’d been dynamic right from the get go then). She lost her baby weight the next week by only eating nuts and drinking water. Her baby boy started talking when he was five months old. His first words were ‘Yaki Soba’ (his favourite dish from Wagamama). She did a successful pitch to an online retailer on her first day back in the office. She never drew penises on her notebooks (as far as I knew), and she was constantly giving me advice on how to be more productive.

‘Rebecca – you need to get up an hour earlier and work on your emails.’

‘Why don’t you use the commute time to ATTACK some of your top objectives? You can actually use your phone to record your TO DO LIST and you need never forget anything important again.’

‘Have you tried that new productivity app called RELENTLESS? It means you can fill in every single moment of the day with tasks?’

Both Phoebe and Darren were cut from the same cloth. Phoebe was the CEO and Darren the Managing Director but Phoebe liked to monitor me at close range. There had been a time, when I’d been doing better, and she’d been more hands off. So, the fact that she was so in my face was not good news. I sometimes thought they would have had amazing children together, who never had to sleep (waste of time), never got ill (illness was for wimps) and worked 24/7. The only difference was that Darren tried to pretend he was a nice person and Phoebe didn’t bother with that at all.

I didn’t like to fill in every available moment with work. It was bad enough that no one had dead time, that no one stared or observed anything because they were constantly on their phones. I still cried now and then when I left Bella at nursery and was then too teary to check emails on the way in. Unlike Phoebe, I had still looked pregnant eighteen months after the birth. My pelvic floor was a giant plastic bag flapping about, and I peed without warning. Each time I wrote a business proposal, I usually lost the project. I kept thinking how pointless this stuff was. Who cared about the positioning strategy for some ear buds? Or an innovation path for an Asian suppository brand? I felt like I had no insights to offer unless they involved my daughter and her sleeping habits. I watched colleagues’ eyes glaze over as I talked about her. I wasn’t dynamic it was true. Clients liked me because I was kind. I made them feel good by laughing at their jokes and asking about their family.

Some people are top strategists and others are … nice.

As I made my way out of the station, walking to the bus stop for the second stage of my journey, I still wasn’t feeling right. There was an uneasy sensation working its way through my body. The email from Phoebe had only made it worse. The month before I’d just finished a project for a frozen yoghurt product. I had found it all so demoralizing. There were people dying in wars and famines, and I was contemplating whether this product should be called ‘Milky Joy,’ or ‘Full of Milkyness.’ Then whether it should have a cartoon dog or a koala as its mouthpiece. I knew this was where I was going wrong. I had to talk myself into it. I had to try and emulate Phoebe.

Then I remembered Dad and quickly left him a message. ‘Dad, can you please pick up? Mum is worried about you. She says you’re spending all your time in the shed and haven’t come out in a while now. Ring me back or send me a text just so I know all is okay.’

Back home I couldn’t wait to see Bella but she was grumpy and tired, kept flailing about and kicking off about the fact that her pasta had tomato sauce ON TOP rather than ON THE SIDE and I’d mixed the broccoli in too. On the positive side, her head just had a small bruise on the side so the fall obviously hadn’t been serious. Nevertheless I lost my temper and ended up shouting at her. Eventually things calmed down, I put her to bed, and spent some time stroking her hair. These were my favourite moments in the day.

‘Mummy, is it nursery day tomorrow?’

‘Yes it is darling.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

She sat up and flung her arms around me, planting tiny kisses on the side of my head.

‘I know. But listen, just two more days and we’ll be together again. We can do lots of fun things.’

I put her back into bed, and pulled the duvet up which she immediately kicked off again. I often came in in the night and found her lying on top of the covers, her tiny feet freezing cold.

‘I don’t like the grown-ups at nursery, they’re horrible.’

‘But you never want to leave when I pick you up.’

‘They said I was a baby because I cried this morning.’

‘Well that’s not true. You’re clearly a big girl.’

‘They’re monsters. They’re horrible. Mummy isn’t a monster.’

‘Sometimes Mummy is a monster right?’

She closed her eyes, sucking on the ear of her bunny toy and fell asleep. I remembered the nights standing over her cot, willing her to sleep, crying with the tiredness of sleep deprivation. It was true that things got easier. It was perhaps a blessing that I’d never had another baby. I was too old to cope. She murmured in her sleep, and something tugged inside. I leant in and smelt her hair. This was one of those happy moments. These moments usually involved Bella. Moments when I felt like life had a bit more meaning and purpose. When I wasn’t lost in a panic of information and things to do.

The prawns had been defrosted.

Pete and I watched TV like most evenings.

‘Why is she running back into the factory when she knows the psychopath is in there?’ I was holding a pillow in front of my face.

‘She’s not. She’s going back to warn him – she wants to save him most likely.’

‘Yeah but she’s the one having an affair with the gangster. Why does she even care about the other guy?’

Pete didn’t answer. He refused eye contact. He hated it if I talked during a dramatic moment.

That had been all the words for the day. No more content. In bed, he gave my arm a quick squeeze, rolled over onto his side, and started snoring.

That night I dreamt I was floating in the sea and I came upon a giant fish wrapped in plastic. He kept floating past me, mouthing the words DYNAMIC then lying very still, like he was in a coma. Was this the fish finger proposition? Was this my career? Was this Dad? Was this Bella? My relationship with Pete stagnating?