by Kathy Lette
‘Where the hell’s your father?’ I plead, plaintively.
‘Eating breakfast.’
There’s nothing else for it. Manoeuvre top bunk-bed mattress onto own back so Jamie can retrieve snagged shirt. Catch sight of myself in mirror. Bent double from the weight of the mattress, look like two-legged turtle. Make mental note to go to chiropractor and to remind husband to put together Jamie’s new Ikea single bed bought bloody weeks ago.
7.38: Hurtle into kitchen. Kids enter after me like a rush of wind. A squall of limbs and cacophony of complaints about what they will and won’t eat. An Impi of Zulus doing close order drill would be less noisy than . . . Oh God! No!
7.39: Cereal fight. Bowl hurled at the fan heater. Cereal and milk globules splatter Jackson-Pollock-like, everywhere. Where is a Turner Prize judge when I need one?
‘Where the hell’s your father?’
‘Shower.’
7.42: Trundle out vacuum cleaner. Start to hoover up rice bubbles. Just in time, see escaped guinea-pig. Bend down to coax it to safety. Hair sucked up in hoover nozzle. Now have impromptu perm on one side of head. Will have to teach in profile.
7.46: Dehair shower plug. Will let the water beat down on me for five minutes and tattoo out a soothing rhythm to stave off nervous breakdown. Turn on taps. Shriek. Water arctic. Thank you, Rory. Fucking hell! Bloody bugger it! Shit! Shit! Shit! Slip on puddle because husband has showered with plastic curtain outside bathtub.
7.50: Taking cold sponge bath with a flannel when daughter barges in. Needs cake for school fête. Oh fab. All the other mothers will have been up all night baking and all I have in the cupboard is a novelty, anatomically correct Gingerbread Man left over from the school librarian’s hen night. Oh, and could I rustle up a few wood-nymph costumes for today’s school play while I’m at it?
7.57: Finally have one leg threaded into tights when son pokes head around bedroom door. He’s just remembered he has rugby today. ‘Rugby! You tell me that now?!!’ I scream, rummaging through drawers, cupboards, laundry baskets, washing machines in frantic search for sports kit.
‘Where the hell’s your father?’
‘Shaving.’
In a moment of blinding insight, I peek into Jamie’s gym bag. There’s something down there, something reeking and harbouring wildlife. Prod. It’s brittle with mud but at least it isn’t moving. What is it? A science experiment? When it doesn’t bite me, realize that it is indeed Jamie’s sports kit. No time to wash it. Spray it with perfume and stuff it back in again.
8.05: Fifteen minutes left for me to manoeuvre my way though peak hour traffic, drop off two kids at two different schools, find a spot in the school car park and get to my meeting with the headmaster about the promotion. Nearly out the door, bags and books in hand, teeth brushed, lunches packed, when there’s a last-minute request for excursion money. Then I’m rummaging again, in bags, drawers, coat pockets. End up stealing neighbour’s milk money.
‘Where the hell’s your father?’ comes my maternal mantra as I grope for keys to lock the front door.
‘I’m right here, kitten.’
‘Rory! Where the hell have you been all bloody morning?’
‘I knew I’d just get under your feet. You’re so brilliant at multi-tasking!’
Monday evening
‘Well?’ Jazz demands. She’s on the phone the nanosecond I get home from school. ‘Did Rory help you get to your meeting on time?’
‘Maybe women are just better at multi-tasking?’ I venture as I dust skirting boards. Dust? Who am I kidding? My skirting boards have topsoil. ‘I know from teaching that boys definitely don’t have the same finely tuned motor skills . . .’
‘Let me get this straight, Cassie. Even though your husband can unhook a lace bustier with one hand in the dark, you think he’s too clumsy to screw on a milk bottle top? Don’t tell me you were late for your meeting?’
‘’Fraid so. And believe me, my hideous Headmaster accepts no excuse. He won’t even take a doctor’s sick-note because he says that if you’re well enough to go to the doctor, then you’re well enough to go to school,’ I say, phone cradled to my ear as I hunt through the fridge for food that hasn’t turned to penicillin. ‘Anyway, talking about the Husband Hall of Shame, did you confront that low-life hubby of yours about his sexual multi-tasking?’
‘Not yet. I’m still in shock. I don’t know whether to vent my spleen or rupture his. I did get a call from the UN though, asking me to measure him for his bulletproof vest. They wanted me to measure him standing and then “sitting when erect”.’
‘Gosh! Have you got a tape measure big enough?’ I ask facetiously as I attack the downstairs bathroom basin.
‘And when I was measuring him . . . well, I didn’t measure quite correctly.’
‘Revenge of the Human Rights surgeon’s wife. You’re evil, Mrs Studlands,’ I cackle, chipping away at Rory’s beard stubble which enamels the porcelain.
‘I’m making light of it, Cass, but I have been feeling so awful. I can’t sleep. I have headaches, depression . . . and I’m so hot I’m creating my own micro-climate here!’
‘Really? Should weather girls start including you in their reports? East Anglia, cold and windy. Jasmine Jardine, humid and sticky with warm front approaching.’
‘Don’t joke. I’ve made an appointment with the doctor even though I’m sure it’s just stress. I wish I were more like you, Cass. You have the patience of a saint.’
‘No. Two kids, a husband, a job and seven hundred animals to feed. That’s what I’ve got.’
‘Well, just remind that hulking great hubby of yours to help you more, okay?’
Tuesday morning
Rory’s helping method is to set the clock an hour earlier.
‘The early worm gets eaten by the bird,’ my hubby mutters groggily, resetting the snooze alarm and rolling over.
Still, by 7.55 I am out of the door. Breathe a sigh of deep relief. Will make it to the meeting!
‘Bye, tiger,’ Rory waves as he slides into his Jeep.
‘Rory! I thought you were doing the school run today? I have that interview with Scroope.’
‘But I have a seminar. It’s recently been discovered that research causes cancer in rats. Anyway the kids’ schools are on your route, Cass. Oh, and could you drop off Mrs Pinkerton’s Doberman in St John’s Wood? I mean, it’s right on your way.’
Oh no. Not the Hound of the Baskervilles. ‘But—’
‘That’s what I love about you modern women. You really can Do It All,’ he beams, blowing a kiss.
At eight o’clock, Rory roars off, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ blasting from both speakers.
Rory always seems to get a parking spot right outside our house whereas I can only ever find a space so far away I actually contemplate catching a taxi to my car each morning. Set off on a cross-country trek to find my Honda, me, the kids and the Doberman – with a compass and a list of edible berries.
Whoever wrote that bull about it being better to travel hopefully than to arrive has never done a school run.
The children start to fight about who gets to sit in the front. Solve battle by ordering them both into the back and strapping the Doberman into the passenger seat. It’s a mystery of parenthood that your son can give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to stray, worm-riddled dogs, share a piece of rechewed gum from a kid with bronchitis and pick his nose and eat it on a regular basis, yet won’t sit next to his sister because of ‘Girl Germs’.
The kids are at each other’s throats by the end of the street. This chiefly entails trying to push each other, or sometimes me, out of the car windows. I don’t think the Highway Code has a clause about not pushing the driver out of a moving vehicle because no one with a rational mind would ever imagine this as a possibility. Traffic lights were invented, not as you might imagine to ease the flow of cars in each direction, but to enable the distraught mother on the school run to flail around insanely at anything within striking distance – which in this c
ase ends up being the Hound of the Baskervilles. Scream in pain as arm gnawed off by offended Doberman.
Miss one green light because busy stemming flow of blood. Miss second green light because picking chewing gum out of Jenny’s hair and making Leaning Tower of Pisa from toothpicks for Jamie’s art assignment. Miss third green light writing late notes on yesterday’s parking ticket with eye-liner. Now so late I don’t even stop outside my kids’ schools. I just slow down long enough to hurl my eleven and thirteen year olds out onto the pavement like mailbags. Same with Cujo the killer dog.
Turn car for Primrose Hill. Put foot flat to the floor on the accelerator and land smack bang in a gridlock of 4 × 4s. Why do London mothers on the school run opt for four-wheel-drives which would only come into their own in, say, the Kalahari or Kathmandu?
Their only motto seems to be Death Before Giving Way. Sandwiched between the high bumpers of motorized monsters, my little Honda only comes up to the hubcaps of what Hannah self-deprecatingly calls ‘Jews in Jeeps’ and what Jazz refers to as ‘derangerovers’. Panic rises in chest. I’ve five minutes to get to school and present myself, all calm and capable, before my headmaster. Reverse up one-way street – and become the first person in motoring history to be given a ticket for speeding backwards.
Might have got away with this radical manoeuvre if I hadn’t drawn attention to myself by crashing into a miniature Smart car. But the policeman reckons he’s been following me ever since I veered into the bus lane whilst talking on my mobile.
‘Sorry, Officer,’ I gabble. ‘I think I’m high on library paste from making a Leaning Tower of Pisa in rush hour. And anyway, I’m a mother – a working mother – and we really should have our own lane. A pink lane. Right next to the bus lane. I mean, we need help, goddamn it! Anyway smart cars are not all that smart if they can be crushed like a cigarette packet from one incy wincey little bump. They’re just a good way of keeping the population down, don’t you think? So actually I’ve done society a service by demonstrating this design fault – which should cancel out all the road rules I broke during this slavering-animal-instigated, whining off-spring inspired, deranged Working Mother (now there’s a tautology) incident,’ I plead, showing him my bleeding dog bite. ‘Don’t you think?’
The cop cocks an amused eyebrow, says he feels sure the insurers are bound to frame my statement of claim, then books me, before escorting me and my mangled arm to the Royal Free Hospital.
As the nurse stitches my wound, I ring Rory. Tell him what happened. Suggest in a thin-lipped way that he do the school run from now on, concluding with the fact that children in the back seat cause accidents.
‘Accidents in the back seat cause children. That was how Jamie was conceived, remember?’ he hints lasciviously.
‘Rory! I’m in a hospital! I need looking after. And all you want to do is take my temperature WITH YOUR PENIS?’ I notice that Casualty has gone terribly quiet all of a sudden and lower my voice. ‘You have to look after the kids tonight, okay? I rang the Head from the car to say I’d be late . . .’
‘Of course you were late, Cassie! How can any teacher be on time when there’s that sign outside which says School Ahead. Go slow?’
‘Rory, this is no laughing matter. Scroope informed me over the phone that he’s devised something called a Threshold Assessment Form for job applicants. I have to fill it in before my meeting with him, rescheduled for tomorrow morning. It’s fifty-seven pages long.’
‘Hey, have I ever let you down foxy?’
‘You’re right. I couldn’t ask for a better husband,’ then, under my breath, ‘as much as I’d bloody well like to.’
‘Well?’ Jazz asks when we bump into each other in the chemist in Camden during my lunch hour. She’s at the counter. ‘I’ll have some soluble vitamin C tablets, a jar of Echinacea tablets and,’ she raises her voice by ten decibels, ‘tampons.’ She clocks my arm wound. ‘Let me guess. You missed your meeting?’
‘Not a bit,’ I reply sarcastically. ‘It’s rescheduled for the morning. Rory’s going to mind the kids so that I can swot. Scroope is making the contenders fill in some ridiculous questionnaire.’
‘Don’t forget the TAMPONS. The biggest box you’ve got!’ Jazz calls out to the assistant. ‘But you’re the best qualified, Cass. You’ve been in charge of Year Six for five years. You get the best SATS results. The Head’s always receiving letters from happy parents saying you’re fab for getting their kids into their first choice of schools. Ofsted Inspectors give you top marks all the time for innovation and creative flair. The staff love you, as do the rug-rats. So what’s he waiting for?’
‘He prefers the Chalk and Talk method of teaching, where the teacher stands at the board writing stuff and the kids learn by rote. He’s devised this questionnaire as a way of catching me out. Then he’ll have an excuse not to promote me.’
‘Really? You think you’ll have trouble with the questions?’
‘No,’ I said patiently. ‘It’s the answers I’ll have trouble with.’
‘My TAMPONS? . . .’ Jazz nags the attendant. ‘Thanks. Actually I need SUPER TAMPONS, if you don’t mind.’
‘What did the doctor say?’ I ask.
Jazz’s face takes on a stricken expression. She lowers her voice to a scandalized whisper. ‘Apart from discovering that what you thought might be the menopause is really a three-month pregnancy, what is the worst thing that can happen to a woman our age?’
‘I dunno. What?’
‘Discovering that you’re having an early menopause, of course! I’m peri-menopausal, apparently. Can you believe it? Moi?’
‘Lucky you. My periods are so bad I have to wear pads down to my knees. I’m positively upholstered. So . . . what’s with all the tampons?’
‘Good God, Cass! I don’t want anyone to know. Cone of silence, promise? No wonder Studz has gone off me.’ Tears rim her green eyes. ‘What man in the world would want a woman who has,’ she can barely utter the words ‘passed her use-by date?’
‘Um, Prince Charles? He gave up a supermodel for an older woman.’
‘That’s true.’ Jazz rallies a little, blowing her nose. ‘Actually, I’ve really liked Prince Charles ever since he wanted to be a Tampon. Although it is a metaphor for his whole life, don’t you think? Always in the right place at the wrong time.’
We laugh and hug before parting, with promises to speak the next day. ‘Where is Studz?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. No doubt off fornicating with a couple of crack-whores somewhere.’
‘Are you going to confront him?’
‘Not yet. He’s off to Haiti. Here, look.’ She fossicks through her Kim Novak bag and extracts a handwritten note. The letterhead declares it to be from a prison in Port-au-Prince. She reads it aloud. ‘My grateful thanks for coming to meet my Prime Boss on Death Row. I need not tell you that you and your family will always be welcome to my perfumed land fondled by the sun and the Creole beauties whose charms are unknown to the world . . . Which, I presume, is why Studz hasn’t asked his family to go with him,’ she post-scripts bitterly.
‘Maybe he thought it was too dangerous – that you’d be kidnapped before you could say “I wonder who that man is, with the handcuffs and the tranquillizer daaaaa . . .”’
‘No. That cheat of a husband of mine is just too busy saving the world to save his marriage.’
My Rory may not be famous for healing the world’s wounds, but he suddenly looked so good by contrast. You may be only one person in the world, but you can also be the world to one person. ‘I do love Rory, you know, Jazz,’ I say on an impulse. ‘Tonight he’ll redeem himself. I know he will.’
‘Yeah, sure. . . And Melanie Griffith is aging naturally.’
Days in the houses of working parents pretty much conclude as they began – in a state of chaos and confusion.
4.30: Somehow manage to shoe-horn car between two massive Range Rovers only one hour’s walk from my house and trudge home without getting mugged. Oh happy day
!
5.30: Rory still not home. No Jeep outside but lots of rubbish. Rory hasn’t tied the drawstring on the garbage bag tightly enough, much to the joy of the urban foxes which have recently invaded London. Littering the garden are all my guilty working-mother secrets – the frozen food packets and fast-food containers which I don’t particularly want my stay-at-home organic mum neighbours to see.
5.40: Inside, find kids gazing mystified into fridge waiting for something edible to materialize. If ever I get time I’m going to hunt down Martha Stewart and ram that bread maker right up her jacksey! Domestic Goddesses from Mrs Beeton onwards have made the lives of ordinary women a misery. My favourite recipe would be to roast one slowly on a spit. Domestic Goddess en croute. Settle on chicken nuggets in the shape of comical cartoon characters which will no doubt introduce an array of inoperable tumours into my offspring’s delicate systems.
6.00: Whilst cooking dinner, yell at kids to do homework. Express regret when can’t answer their questions. From Jamie, ‘I took the Religious Studies exam at school, Mum, but shouldn’t my grade be determined by God?’
6.30: Pick up phone sticky with Nutella. Ring Rory’s mobile. ‘Rory? I’ve got to start filling in my Threshold Assessment form.’
‘Just write “etc” a lot. That’s what you write when you want bosses to think you know more than you do,’ he says, promising to be home soon. A Golden Retriever has died in surgery during foreign object removal, and he’s apparently on his way to break the news to the owners.
Try to revise my notes during dinner but kids keep up a stream of ridiculous questions.
‘Mum, wasn’t Hitler’s first name Heil? Tell Jenny, she won’t believe me.’
‘Mum, when that ad on TV says that dog food is new and improved tasting, well, who tests it? How do they know?’
Look at my offspring in bewilderment. Hadn’t I ingested gallons of fish oils during pregnancy to optimise brain development? Hell, I’d eaten so much fish oil I’d probably soon grow gills and start spawning. And for what?