Irregular or heavy periods? And how. I still have the Velikovsky hand towel to prove it.
Emotional fragility, increased weepiness? Surely it’s perfectly normal to burst into tears at least twice a day?
Loss of stamina in the afternoon, particularly from two to five? Yup.
Increased irritability and/or excessively aggressive? WHO ARE YOU CALLING IRRITABLE, MISTER? Didn’t that PlayStation supplier say I sounded aggressive? Tick bloody tick.
Difficulty concentrating? No. Yes. Yes. No.
Low libido and you’re not sure why? No sexual feeling of any kind, until I got Jack’s email.
The best bit about this questionnaire is it has made me realise that I am not going insane. There they are, all the horrors I have been experiencing for months written down in black and white. Actual medical symptoms, not some free-floating terror that this is just the way things are now. Calamity Girl, always anticipating the worst-case scenario, is not who I really am; it’s bloody biology that’s all, or chemistry.
I apologise to the nurse for starting to cry when she takes some blood and she smiles that Streepish smile, serene yet steely, and says, ‘Don’t worry. A lot of women come crawling in here in a far worse state than you.’
In terms of interior design, in my experience, private consulting rooms aim in one of two directions: the book-lined study of a pre-war country house or the bridge of a post-human spaceship floating just off Xarquon 9. Dr Libido’s haunt goes squarely for the first. The basic principle appears to be: the more you pay your doctor, the more lavishly you will be lulled into believing that the person you have come to see is not a doctor at all. I mean, look at this place. Long windows at which to stand and contemplate a world that brims with expensive illnesses. The smug gleam of walnut furniture. Wallpaper which even William Morris would have thought a bit much. Everything except a royal coat of arms. No actual medical equipment in sight, not even a stethoscope, let alone – horrors! – anything so vulgar as a syringe. There is an examination couch, but it is tucked away, discreetly, behind a folding marquetry screen, which was obviously designed not to conceal the desexed depressives of modern middle age but to allow French courtesans of 1880 to play peekaboo with their discarded garments, one by one. Pride of place goes to the desk, as broad as a billiard table, topped with a greensward of old leather rather than fuzzy baize.
And, seated behind the desk, Dr Libido himself. His real name is Farquhar, although Sally assured me that everybody, out of his hearing, refers to him as Dr Fuckyeah. It’s too old and stately a name for the handsome, tanned, self-satisfied individual opposite me. You can see him as gynaecology’s answer to Tony Blair, the shining hope of a political movement – the Mummy Get Your Mojo Back party. My guess is that all his patients would vote for him.
Fuckyeah loses no time in telling me that he sees several women a day who complain of anxiety, depression, mood swings, anger and panic attacks. Often their GPs have mis-diagnosed them with a mental health problem. About seventy per cent are on antidepressants. Their problems, says Dr Libido, can easily be solved by synthetic hormones, which will stabilise everything and lift the cloud under which they are living. He also thinks I have an underactive thyroid. (Just like Sally. Another bond to bind us.) Ah, yes, that might account for my being able to fall asleep standing up in a cupboard, like an ironing board. The blood test would confirm it.
‘What about all the research linking HRT to increased risk of cancer?’ I say, feeling that I should at least try to act responsibly while basically being ready to inject heroin on the spot if it will stop me feeling so bloody dreadful.
‘Inaccurate information, I’m afraid, based on flawed studies.’ His grin displays a daunting number of veneers, suddenly making me think of Liberace and his piano. ‘A lot of women’s lives are made utterly miserable when, if they are started on the right kind of HRT, all of those symptoms can be avoided.’
The truth is if Dr Libido had, at that moment, handed me a prescription for Class A drugs and the police had been waiting outside the door, truncheons and cuffs at the ready, I’d still have snatched it out of his hands. I am desperate. Sorry, I can’t do this by myself any more. It’s like trying to restart a laptop left out in the rain. I have to stop yelling at the kids, I need to have energy for my work, for Emily’s party, for the office party. I have to make it through Christmas without murdering Richard, Cheryl, the incontinent Dickie, or all three. It would also be nice to have just a tiny drop of me left over for me.
I tell Dr Libido about Candy’s testosterone patches, which I gave up for fear I might jump on poor Piotr. He says they are illegal in the UK, but if I want more bang for my buck he will give me some testosterone in a little tube. Just one dab on my inner thigh will be enough. He also prescribes nightly progesterone, which – oh joy! – will help me sleep.
Honestly, it is hard to leave that office without kissing him. Quite sure I’m not the only female patient to have had that impulse. When I pick up the prescription at the pharmacy round the corner, the holy trinity of female sexuality – progesterone, oestrogen and testosterone – I can’t wait. I come outside and tear open the box of oestrogen in the same eager way that my childhood self would have unwrapped a Sherbet Fountain for that first sweet powdery hit, or my teenage self once took a new Top Ten single straight out of the bag, scarcely believing that I had this precious, prayed-for treasure in my hands. The years rattle by, and what I crave will always change, but the sheer force of that craving – the need to have, to hear, to taste, to get better – stays the same.
Rubbing some of the precious, youth-restoring gel on my arm, I say a little prayer, right there on Wigmore Street with the traffic thrumming past. ‘Please give me the strength to deal with whatever life throws at me. That’s all I ask. Oh, and a taxi right now would be nice. Taxi! Amen.’
So, the Christmas party. Tidings of comfort and joy! In a moment of weakness – when do I ever have a moment of strength? – I told Emily that she could have a Christmas/pre-birthday celebration. What on earth was I thinking?
It began, as everything seemed to, with the belfie. Em had been stroppier than ever since her bum went viral. Some of our fights were so furious that for days after I was still resounding like a struck gong. I shudder at what Emily makes me capable of. She sulks. Invariably, I am the one who has to broker the peace, break the silence, unless Em wants money or a lift – usually both.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the wise, mysterious words of my late friend, Jill Cooper-Clark. ‘When you have children, Kate, the important thing is to remember that you are the grown-up.’
When Jill said that to me, over a decade ago now, I literally had no idea what she was talking about. I mean, of course, when I became a mother, I would be the grown-up and the kids would be the kids. Now, with teenagers of my own, I know exactly what Jill meant. No matter what Emily hurls at me, no matter how horrible the ingratitude or how grotesque the sense of entitlement, I cannot lash out at her childishly. For I am the grown-up. Aren’t I? (A confession: there are days, or mad minutes at least, when I feel myself slipping backwards, down towards the furies of my own youth, as if to meet my daughter on her own ground. Don’t go there, Kate. Climb back up to now.)
Meanwhile, rather than blowing over, things had got worse. I found out that Emily’s misery had spread to school. Her form tutor emailed and asked me to call, which I did in a whisper from the office. (I even got Alice to stand guard nearby, in case Troy or Jay-B caught me in the act of being a mum; for a moment, again, it was me who felt like the naughty schoolgirl, having a quick smoke while someone watched out for teachers.)
Mr Baker said that Emily had seemed withdrawn and a bit isolated lately. Was I aware of any particular problems?
‘What, you mean apart from being a sixteen-year-old girl in the hideously pressurised age of social media who has to jump through the stupid yet life-determining hoops of exams and thinks she can never be good enough?’ It came out so angrily; I hadn’t r
ealised until that moment how worried I was. I said what I meant without meaning to say it.
‘Well, um,’ said Mr Baker. Presumably rocking back in his chair, holding the phone as far away as possible, and passionately wishing that he had stuck to email. There was a pause, then he gathered himself bravely and carried on. Give that man a medal. He told me that Emily wasn’t unusual. Not at all. He reckoned that at least a third of the kids in her year were depressed or self-harming. (As if I was going to be reassured by that. Safety in numbers? What about danger in numbers?)
‘Emily’s not depressed,’ I objected. Her hormones were flooding in, just as mine were receding, and we were both caught up in that perilous rip tide. But depression? No.
One of Emily’s good friends in the tutor group, Izzy, who was suffering from anorexia, had recently been admitted to a psychiatric unit. Was I aware of that? Mr Baker continued.
No, I was not.
‘Would you please be sure to keep an eye out and let me know?’
I would be sure.
After he rang off, I let out an involuntary wail, like a rabbit snared in a trap. Alice went ‘Sshhh,’ making calm-down patting signs with her hands. The shriek made Troy and another bloke at the far end of the office stop their conversation, swivel round and stare. Instinctively, I pretended to have banged my leg on the desk and hopped about in a pantomime of pain. ‘Ow, ow, shit, ow.’ Far better to look like a clumsy clown than a woman ambushed by maternal anguish. ‘Withdrawn and a bit isolated.’ My child? Emily?
Almost immediately, I felt ashamed of my reaction. This was no time for worrying what a couple of male colleagues thought of me. Fuck it. Of course I wailed after experiencing a whiff of mortal fear for my child. Because I am mortal, a mere mortal, and that’s not weak. If you prick me do I not bleed? We all bleed when we’re wounded, a piece of common humanity that gets overlooked in the corporate world. I glared at the two bleeding pricks, daring them to say anything. I knew in that moment I was capable of violence.
Emily was still in lessons at school. If I hurried I could be there in time to pick her up at the gate where I would hold her and tell her it’ll be OK, your mother is here to protect you. With as much calm as I could muster, I told Alice what she needed to keep tabs on in my absence, after explaining that a teacher said my daughter was struggling and I had to go to her.
‘Poor sweetheart, she’s only eleven,’ said Alice, and I didn’t know what she meant. Remembered, just in time, that I was lying about Emily’s age as well as my own. Grabbed my jacket and my phone. If I sprinted to Liverpool Street I might make the next train.
At the entrance to the station, outside the shoe-mending bar, a woman was sitting on the floor begging, one twig arm outstretched. She looked ancient, whether from hunger or the remorseless battering of life it was hard to say, but she couldn’t be old because there was a baby at her breast, squirming in a tightly wrapped shawl. I skittered past, then stopped, turned around and took out my wallet. Didn’t have time to scramble for the coins in the zip compartment so I pressed a twenty-pound note into the woman’s bony hand before leaping down the steps towards the platform. Boarded the train just as the guard’s whistle blew and fell, breathless, into a seat in an empty carriage. No one else heading home at this time of day. As the grey circuitry of London gradually gave way to browns and greens, I thought about Emily and about the baby in the beggar’s arms – the two becoming a single thought. That baby couldn’t know his or her mother was pleading for money on the streets of some foreign city, commuters swerving past her crumpled form, her dirty clothes. To the baby, the poor, wretched woman was a place of safety and comfort; it wanted no other mother, and it never would. It killed me, that thought. It just killed me.
Back home, I put Lenny in the car and drove straight to the school. Parked opposite and waited till the kids came out. Spotted Emily and her gang. Was I imagining it or was she tagging onto the back of Lizzy Knowles’s group as a drowning person clings to a life raft, or did she just happen to be a few feet behind them?
Emily was bewildered when I called her name and, for a moment, I wasn’t even sure that she would cross the street and come over. She seemed to be weighing up whether or not to ignore me and walk on by, but Lenny recognised her and barked his delight through the rear window. She might avoid me, but she would never disappoint Lenny.Without thinking, once Em was in the car, I drove straight to the country park. My daughter thinks walks are for losers, the old or the criminally insane, but that afternoon she allowed me to link arms with her and we followed the path Sally and I always take up the side of the hill. I made Em wear my dog-walking fleece while I shivered a little in my office clothes.
‘Why did you pick me up from school, Mum? I’m not seven,’ she said. We were sitting right at the summit on mine and Sally’s bench.
‘I wanted to see you, darling. Mr Baker called and he was just a little worried that you weren’t, you know, your usual self.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said flatly.
‘We never had a proper talk about that belfie business, love.’
‘Mu-um, how many times? It’s no biggie, OK. You literally don’t understand. Basically, that stuff happens the whole time.’
‘Still, it can’t be nice having people see your …’
‘Didn’t get that many Likes anyway.’
‘What didn’t?’
‘#FlagBum. Didn’t get that many Likes.’
I didn’t know what to say. It took a few seconds to process. Emily’s main concern about the belfie was not the fact that her naked bottom was seen by thousands of people, but that it wasn’t a big enough hit. Or didn’t get enough hits or Likes or whatever they are. Not for the first time, I felt like I’d woken up in a parallel universe where all the values I was brought up to believe in, such as modesty and decency, are inverted, no, perverted, that’s it, perverted.
‘It’s cold, sweetie, are you warm enough?’ I said this so I had an excuse to pull her close to me. She leant in, resting her head on my shoulder, and I willed all the warmth and strength I had in my body to pass to hers.
‘Do you think you might like to see a counsellor, sweetheart?’
Silence. ‘What do you think, eh?’ I pushed.
‘Maybe, yes.’
‘Good. OK, so we can fix that. Sometimes, it’s good to talk to someone.’
‘Not a counsellor like Daddy,’ she said quickly. ‘He only cares about his bikes.’
‘That’s not true, Em, you know Daddy loves you very much. He’s just …’ He’s just what? I struggled to find a word for what Richard is at this moment, apart from absent. ‘Right, so I will find a really good person you can talk things through with.’ Someone who understands this stuff better than I do because I am completely at a loss for the first time since you were born, I thought but did not say.
On the walk back to the car park, with Lenny leading the way, Emily said, ‘Lizzy’s going to have a New Year’s party, Mum, she’s like really popular.’
Lizzy again. How long before Emily would be able to see her ‘best friend’ for what she is?
So, full disclosure: that was why I went along with the party. I thought it would be a chance for Emily to not be withdrawn and isolated, to get some friends round, or, if she didn’t have any friends, to get some. To shore up her position in the year group. To be more than just that sad loser tricked by Lizzy Knowles into showing her naked arse. To enter the charmed circle of the Popular, the Holy Grail of every teenager. I wanted what, in fact, I have wanted every single hour since that magic day when my first baby entered the world. I wanted her to be happy. How desperately we want them to be happy.
Richard wasn’t so sure. ‘I still can’t believe you said Emily could have a party, Kate,’ said Richard, examining his new bike lock (what, another one?). ‘I don’t want a house full of drunken teenagers doing drugs and trying to have sex with each other. A party, in fact, is what I want less than anything in the world.’
This was strange. R
ich always used to be the easygoing parent while I was the reluctant disciplinarian. When did we change sides?
‘They’re not going to be drunk,’ I beamed encouragingly. ‘We’ll be serving alcohol-free mulled wine, and no one is going to do drugs or have sex. Emily has nice friends. They’re not like those kids you read about who crash a party they’ve seen on Facebook and trash people’s houses. Seriously, you need to have a little faith in the younger generation, Rich.’
I wanted to tell him the real reason for the party, I really did. But the lies, or the not being honest, had got too complicated by then. Truth is, I didn’t really tell him anything much any more. Richard had gone off into the forest on his own journey of self-discovery, as people do at our age, but he forgot to drop a trail of crumbs for me to follow him. I had no clue where he was and I’d stopped trying to find out, mainly because he didn’t seem to notice or care that I wasn’t looking any more. Too much of the time, I felt like a single parent.
Another admission. I thought that a party might be good, not just for Emily. Anything that would offer some distraction from the hourly torment of wondering why there was still no reply from Jack.
Anyway, what with Em being so disorganised, and so many calls on everyone’s time, there was no guarantee that the party would even go ahead.
The party went ahead.
Saturday, 7.17 pm: The Night of Doom begins with a ring on the doorbell. I open the door and two burly boys in black T-shirts and low-slung jeans barge in, bearing armfuls of boxes and cable.
‘Where d’you wan’ the speakers?’ grunts one.
‘You Emily’s mum?’ grunts the other.
Not waiting for a reply they barrel through to the kitchen, with me fussing around in their wake.
There is a dish of cooked mini-sausages sitting on the kitchen table. The burly boys pick up the dish and plonk it next to the sink, each taking the opportunity to claw a handful of sausages and munch as they work. I hear my mother’s voice in my head, loud and brisk, exclaiming, ‘D’you know, they didn’t even say please! Whatever happened to manners?’ More of me than I would care to admit to agrees with her, even if it makes me feel like a late Edwardian, but I wouldn’t dream of telling them off out loud. Instead, my disapproval comes out as a single harsh tut. More than a tut: a cluck. If I’m turning into a mother hen by half past seven, ruffling her feathers with disapproval, what the hell will I be like by midnight? The burly boys glance up at the sound of the cluck, then at each other, and give a leering grin. Delightful.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 27