How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What is it, Ben?’

  ‘You can do my history homework. I don’t care what I get.’

  9.43 pm: I was fully intending to tell Richard about the lipo. Honestly, I was, but then we got sidetracked by the Twelfth Night argument. And, after that meeting with Grant, I can’t face any more unpleasantness. The guy made my flesh crawl, but I may have lost EM Royal several million by refusing to make myself one of our exciting incentives. As I walked out of the hotel, I thought, I’m too old to put up with this bullshit. Perfectly true. But I’m also too old to get another job and, in order to hang onto the one I’ve got, some bullshit tolerance, however repugnant, may be essential.

  Actually, when you think about it, the cost of lunchtime lipo is an absolute bargain compared to the number of personal training sessions it would take to remove those stubborn areas now deposited in a Hoover bag off Hyde Park. Also, no need to purchase new dress for college reunion. If you look at it like that, it’s a massive saving. Plus, I am now earning my own money, which is keeping the entire household afloat, and hardly ever spend anything on myself, so should not have to justify it to my husband.

  Besides, am confident I could make Rich see lipo is not an example of escalating midlife crisis, as he may suspect, but prudent and essential maintenance of a declining asset. Me. (Speaking of declining assets, I paid by cheque to avoid running into trouble with the mystifying credit problem. ‘Roy, did you get anywhere with working out why my credit rating is so bad?’)

  Unfortunately, after dinner, when the kids have both disappeared upstairs, Rich launches into a rant about the vast, featureless desert that is our current account. He says ‘your building work’ on ‘your house’ is to blame, although this is the man who decided to renounce capitalism and train as a £3-an-hour empathiser. So armoured is he by the righteousness of his new calling that he can’t seem to see the effect it’s had on me and the kids. The fact he won’t even start earning money for another two years. Two years! By then, I’m the one who will need psychiatric help.

  As I load the dishwasher in my best clattery, passive-aggressive manner, Rich continues to make helpful suggestions about ways we can cut back.

  ‘The energy bills are huge, for one thing. Kate, I know you enjoy your baths, but do we have to have the hot water coming on at six am? How about just turning it on when we know we’ll need it?’

  I rearrange the knives, trying not to look at my husband, just in case he has – as that last idea suggests – been replaced by the landlady of a Bexhill boarding-house in 1971. Soon he’ll be putting up little placards announcing which members of the household can wash when. I am becoming, I realise, little more than a lodger in his eyes, and a slightly unreliable one at that. But there is more.

  ‘The car. I know what you’re going to say, Kate’ (no you don’t), ‘but on both the micro and macro levels it really is more of a luxury than a necessity these days, and not a very defensible luxury at that.’ The landlady has morphed into a spokesman for Greenpeace. Dear God, please don’t let him say the word ‘planet’.

  ‘I know you think I’m pontificating, darling,’ (you’re right there, matey), ‘but we do have responsibilities beyond those of our immediate family. Of course we need to get around, but I’ve done a breakdown.’ (And I’m about to have one.) ‘And if you look carefully at when we actually need the car these days, as opposed to when we lapse into using it just because it’s there …’

  Lapse? Did I lapse up to my mother when she was in hospital for weeks after her heart attack? Who had to lapse Ben to that jazz course in Norfolk? How on earth would Lenny get lapsed every day in the country park without a car? Richard continues to drone.

  ‘… so what I’m saying is, if, if, if you felt at all able to switch to cycling, and combined that with public transport.’ He is staring above my head now, as if a higher ideal were stuck to the ceiling. ‘You know, it’s been a real confidence booster for me, and I really feel it could do the same for you. Not to mention the health benefits. And, you know, just think of the example we’d be setting the children.’

  ‘What example? Both of us getting knocked off by white vans on the same day, leaving the house full of orphans?’

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic, darling. Elementary road sense and a helmet will keep you perfectly safe. No, I just, I just think it would be great if Ben and Emily started to realise that they have duties not just towards us, but towards the planet—’

  ‘Done.’ I slam the door of the dishwasher shut, like a drawbridge, and leave the kitchen.

  Was he always this unsufferable? I feel like I married Jeff Bridges and ended up with a mix of Al Gore and some tree-hugging bore. It’s me, I think, who has had to return to her former office in a humiliating capacity, being patronised and pimped out by male foetuses, while Mr Planet tells me how I can economise.

  ‘You’ve lost weight, Mum,’ says Emily, inspecting me as I enter the sitting room. She puts her arm around my waist.

  Oouuch. The anaesthetic is definitely wearing off.

  ‘Oh, do you think so, darling?’ I yelp. There is no elixir sweeter than approval from that harshest of critics, one’s own teenage daughter.

  ‘Yeah, that diet’s worked so fast,’ she says. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

  It is.

  1.01 am: Can’t sleep. Through the bathroom window, a new moon is lolling in its deckchair in a sky which is dark and bright at the same time. As the anaesthetic retreats, my middle hurts more and more, but it isn’t pain which is keeping me awake. I know exactly what it is. Or who.

  Standing in front of the mirror, I take my nightie off and brace myself to inspect the damage. I can hear Richard and his Hog Symphony through the wall, like the sound of distant gunfire. One good thing about my husband not looking at me any more is that at least he’s not going to notice I’ve had lipo.

  In the cold light of night, my naked body doesn’t look too bad, not for something almost half a century old. Poor body. The stomach is blotchy with bruising from the lipo, but the good news is I have my waist back. Or I might have. The swelling after the local anaesthetic makes it hard to tell. So does the girdle of wadding that covers the incisions. Yeuch. Am basically a human colander. I step into the compression corset, then reach for the dress, which is hanging on the shower door, and hold it in front of me. Give me another couple of days, and it will fit perfectly. That wretched zip will purr into position.

  What the hell, I decide to try it now.

  The minute the dress is on, I know who I did it for. The clinic, the secrecy, the machine sucking out my stubborn areas. Not for old friends I haven’t seen for thirty years, that’s for sure. It’s another old friend I want to look good for.

  A name I never thought I’d see again. Never wanted to see again. That’s what I told myself anyway, but as soon as I saw it in my Inbox I knew that was a lie. Who could believe that a name could summon so much emotion? I have missed Jack every single day since I last saw him; he is always there in my peripheral vision, teasing me, putting me on my mettle, making me want to be the best version of myself, just for him. When Grant Hatch was coming on to me this afternoon, I felt this overwhelming longing for Jack to be there, to suddenly be there right next to me, my champion and protector.

  You promised you wouldn’t open the email, Kate, you promised.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, with Lenny lying like a rug across my bare feet, I open the laptop. I move the cursor down the Inbox, but I find it quickly, I know exactly where it is. I’ve looked at it so often, but never dared open it. On the other hand, I haven’t pressed Delete. I’m impatient to open it now, like a child finally given permission to unwrap a present.

  From: Jack Abelhammer

  To: Kate Reddy

  Subject: Hello again

  Katharine, I seem to recall we had an agreement that we wouldn’t contact each other, but I bumped into Candy Stratton’s ex and he’d heard you were back in the City working in marketing at EM Royal?
I’m curious. I never had you pegged as a ‘backroom boy’. It sounds a little cramped for the Kate Reddy I knew.

  I was planning on being in London in the next few weeks and I wondered if I could pick your brains about something. We could maybe get a coffee depending on how you’re fixed?

  Jack

  So much for tingling anticipation. So much for lunchtime lipo and an emerald dress. So much for a ‘marvellous night for a moondance’. So much for my long-lost love. He would like to pick my brains. He would like to maybe get a coffee. Maybe. Maybe? When you’ve felt that much about a man and he disappears from your life, you start to think: Was it just me? Was it just some foolish illusion on my part and he never loved me? Clearly, he never felt the same. You were broken into a million pieces and the other person walked clean away.

  God, I’m such an idiot. Jack Abelhammer’s an old business contact, not your lover. You’re almost fifty years old, woman. I start to cry. The disappointment is unbearable. I’m crying so hard that I almost miss the PS. It’s right down the bottom, which explains why I didn’t see it at first.

  PS It only took me five hours to compose this short email. Not bad, huh? And not a single word in it that I want to say to you. Not one. Jx

  14

  THE COLLEGE REUNION

  7.12 pm: How do you feel approaching a college reunion? I mean, you can have your hair highlighted to hide the grey and you can carefully apply concealer on the area under your eyes, where it settles in the fine lines like chalk. You can rummage in your jewellery box and find a ‘statement necklace’ to wear. (And the statement is: ‘I don’t like this neck and would like the old neck back, please.’)

  If you are particularly desperate to get into a certain dress, you may go on a crash diet or panic and spend a stupid amount of money having your ‘stubborn areas’ hoovered out over lunchtime. You can be waxed and plucked and purchase fishnet hold-ups on a whim, but when the day dawns you will look in the mirror, the one with the harsh fluorescent light you have been avoiding for some time, and realise this one, inescapable fact: the woman you are taking along tonight to her college reunion is more than a quarter of a century older than the one who graduated.

  How did that happen? Time changes everything except something within which is always surprised by change. I forget who said that, but they were dead right, weren’t they? When I was a teenager and I used to hear friends of my mother say, ‘I still feel twenty-one inside’, I was puzzled and a bit embarrassed for them. Beholding those ancient shipwrecks in our lounge, I thought: how could they still feel what I felt? Surely, your mind and your emotions kept pace with your age. To grow older was to be grown-up, and grown-ups were mature. But that doesn’t seem to hold true. Do we shed our younger selves like chrysalises or do they live on inside us, filed away, waiting and waiting for their time to come again?

  It’s spitting with rain and there’s a Siberian wind threshing through the trees when I park in the temporary car park just across the road from college. With one hand protecting my blow-dry, I pick my way through the boggy grass, worrying about my fishnet hold-ups, one of which is already trying to make a run for it. Vaguely remember some warning in a magazine about not putting hold-ups on straight after a bubble bath. Why couldn’t I have put on sensible, age-appropriate opaque tights?

  Funny thing is, I’m not sure which Kate is going to the drinks reception in the Senior Common Room. Is it the student Kate of 1985, involved in an agonised love triangle and luxuriating in Whitney’s ‘Greatest Love of All’ on the Sony Walkman, whilst secretly drunk on her sexual power over competing suitors? Or is it the Kate of today, mother of teenagers, libido missing, presumed dead, who will turn fifty in three months?

  Who’s counting.

  7.27 pm: I arranged to meet Debra by the Porter’s Lodge so we could go in together. We shared a set of rooms in our third year (a boyfriend in our first, Two-Time Ted) and I figure that, if I am so horribly changed as to be unrecognizable, then at least people will see the flame-haired Debra Richards and know that it’s probably Kate Reddy beside her. I’m not afraid of ageing, but I know now that I’m scared of people’s reaction to my ageing.

  ‘My God, Kate, look at those children,’ shrieks Deb, pointing at three strapping boat-club guys coming up the stairs from the bar. How old are they – nineteen? Can you imagine, we actually had sex with kids like that?’

  ‘Yes, but we were nineteen too, remember.’

  I can hardly hear her, the wind is blowing so hard. It carries us on its fierce breath across the court to the vast, panelled dining-hall doors, so familiar I could draw them in my sleep.

  ‘But they’re babies.’ Deb is laughing and still pointing at the boys.

  Yes, they are, and how incredibly grown-up we thought ourselves to be when we were their age. The boys glance at us, two middle-aged women in their finery, then turn away. Now, we are filed under Somebody’s Mother.

  7.41 pm: Drinks before dinner, and the mob of us has split into islands. Everyone stands in groups of five or six. The noisy islands consist of people who have kept in regular touch. For them this is just another get-together, albeit with posher frocks, blacker tie, and better booze. The quiet and more awkward islands are composed of crumbly men and embarrassed women staring at each other and making the very smallest of talk while they try to work out who the others are now, who they once were, and why the two versions seem not to overlap.

  My island has only four inhabitants. Deb, me, Fiona Jaggard, and a man who nobody knows. He is small, neat, almost child-sized, but very correctly dressed, with oval glasses and an unwavering smile, turning to listen politely to each of us as we talk. Genuinely think he may be automaton created in experimental-science lab up the road and wheeled out for his first ever social occasion.

  Fiona, on the other hand, is exuberance made flesh. She always was. I remember her laughing so hard once, in the midst of a formal dinner, that port came out of her nose. People looked down the table and thought she’d been in a fight. ‘That girl is one of the boys,’ a boyfriend once said to me, and I couldn’t tell if he was impressed or frightened. Fiona had grown up with four brothers – two older, two younger – and had spent her holidays playing cricket and building tree houses with planks. When we were all living together in a college house, the boiler packed up. The rest of us went unwashed and smelly for four days, but Fi was up at seven, cheerfully showering in cold water and singing Gilbert and Sullivan in a lusty alto.

  Now she is standing here, undiminished by the years, smile undimmed, and wearing a dress of dark-red velvet. Maybe she hopes to sneeze port all over again.

  ‘Where are you living, Fi?’

  ‘Piddletrenthide.’

  ‘No, where are you actually living?’

  ‘Piddletrenthide. It’s a real place. Bugger of a house, but if you get a chance to live somewhere called Piddle, you’ve got to take it, right?’ she says, laughing at Robot Man. Is it my imagination, or did he actually bow in her direction, to acknowledge the joke? Did the graduate students who built him flick the Humour Reception switch just before they let him out for the evening?

  ‘This bloody dress,’ Fi says, shimmying in discomfort. ‘Too small. Must be donkeys since I had to put on something smart. Found it second-hand in Dorchester.’ She runs her finger round the high neckline. ‘Too tight. I feel like a Labrador.’

  ‘D’you remember that blue thing you wore to the ball?’ Deb asks. ‘The one where you—’

  ‘Oh my GOD,’ Fi says, jogging the elbow of a man coming round with a bottle of wine for top-ups. He spills some onto a thin and breakable-looking blonde in the next group, who flinches as if it were boiling water. ‘I literally came out of it on the dance floor. Poor Gareth Thingummy got hit on the side of the head. Closest he ever got to me, to be honest. Not likely these days. One boob gone, three months ago. Hence the neckline.’

  Deb and I both reach out to her as if she, or we, were falling, and put our hands on her arms.

  ‘Fi, I�
��m so sorry, I didn’t—’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine, caught it early and all that malarkey. I was lucky. GP was onto it like a shot. Felt a lump the size of a hazelnut in the shower, six weeks later they were putting in an implant. Bit of an improvement on the old tit, to be perfectly honest. Johnny was a brick. “Soon have you back in the saddle”, he said.’

  ‘Ah, men,’ says Deb, then catches herself, and apologises to Robot Man, who inclines his head by exactly thirty degrees to indicate acceptance.

  ‘No, he was bang on,’ says Fi. ‘No use feeling sorry for yourself. And anyway, someone’s got to run the show. Won’t run itself.’

  ‘Show?’

  ‘Riding for the Disabled. Big thing. Used to be just Piddlers, then someone got me onto county, and now, God help me, I’m Mrs Disabled Riding for the whole bloody nation. Kids from all over. Some of them never seen a horse in their lives, poor souls. Barely even been in a green field, let alone a paddock.’ She finishes her drink, throwing her head back like a man knocking back pints against the clock. ‘Odd thing is, they’re the ones who end up loving it most. Ducks to water.’

  ‘So your Theology degree did come in handy.’

  ‘Absolutely. Whacking great halo,’ she says, reaching out and physically abducting a bottle from the waiter, who stands there bereft and open-mouthed. All our glasses are refilled to the brim, except for little Robot Man’s. Being half a foot taller than him, Fi tries pouring from a great height and gets sparkling wine all over his slender wrist and, I am pleased to see, his expensive-looking watch with a metal strap. ‘Whoops!’ she says. I wait for him to fuse and explode in a shower of sparks.

  ‘Amazing they asked me to run anything, frankly. Was a time I couldn’t even run a bath.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I say, surprising myself. Roy must be staying late for the occasion, putting in overtime to deliver memories that I’d forgotten I filed away. ‘You went to Nepal to help rebuild that school, remember, and we all had to do that mini-marathon around town to raise the funds. Hundreds of us turned up on a Sunday morning. You organised the whole thing.’