How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson

  Mrs Ebert said Emily had been seeing the school counsellor, the one I’d arranged after her form tutor called me. Details were strictly confidential, of course, but her teachers thought she was doing much better and she did seem to have detached herself from Lady Macbeth and found a new friendship group.

  ‘Emily’s such a lovely girl,’ Mrs Ebert said, and I could only nod vigorously while shaking her hand. I was too upset to reply.

  Kate to Emily

  Sweetheart, we need to speak. Where ARE you? Xx

  Emily to Kate

  Am at Jess’s house doing our History. I’m fine. Pls don’t worry bout me! Xx

  Kate to Emily

  Love you xx

  Emily to Kate

  u too xx

  8.23 pm: House is quiet. Ben at Sam’s, Emily still at Jess’s. I called her and she said they were having a great time, please could she stay a while longer. I’ll talk to her about what Mrs Ebert said later. I can’t stand the thought of her carrying all that hateful stuff alone. Am mincing Lenny’s claggy, hypoallergenic food with a fork when he starts growling. It means that Richard’s coming. This is new, this growling at Richard – protective of me, I suppose. I’ve been psyching myself up to tell Rich about Emily and the belfie, and now is the time. I should never have tried to hide it even though Em made me promise not to tell him. Like Mrs Ebert said, the belfie was always going to come back to bite us one way or another.

  So, am feeling both guilty and nervous when Rich comes in and puts his helmet on the counter. But I notice he looks even worse than I feel, positively queasy in fact. He seems terrified, like we’ve been burgled or something. And I see the scared way he looks at me and I think: oh my God, my mum has died. Or his mum has died. Or something’s happened to Ben.

  ‘What’s wrong? Is everything OK?’

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ he says.

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ I say.

  ‘No, Kate, I really have to tell you something. I feel, well I’ve been feeling for some time that I’m very stuck and I need to direct my energy where it wants to be.’

  ‘Your energy is mainly directed towards your bike, Rich. I agree it might be better if it was directed at your children for instance. Look, I need to tell you, Emily’s had problems at school. I’ve just been up to see the head of sixth form. Em took a picture of her bottom to compare tan lines with other girls after the summer holidays and one hideous girl, Lizzy Knowles, you know the one, well, she posted Emily’s belfie, that’s a photo of your bum, on social media and it went viral.’

  Richard winces, the same pained look he gives when he catches me watching Downton. ‘Why would Emily do something so idiotic?’

  ‘Er, because she’s an adolescent living in a Big Brother culture that encourages them to display themselves on social media. And they get addicted to the adulation and the Likes and they swipe right, or left, and they become objects to each other, not soulmates, and no one has any concept of privacy and the whole thing is fantastically fucked up quite frankly. Sorry, I was going to tell you before,’ I say.

  ‘Sorry, I was going to tell you before,’ Rich says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What? I’ve been trying to find a good moment to mention the pregnancy.’

  ‘EMILY’S PREGNANT?’

  ‘Joely.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Joely’s pregnant.’

  ‘That girl who came round here at Christmas? Tofurky Joely?’

  ‘Yes. She thought she might be losing the babies.’

  ‘Babies. Plural? Twins? Yours?’

  He won’t look at me. My God, he’s serious.

  ‘Is this part of your spiritual development, Richard? Tofurking Joely while I’m working my arse off to keep the show on the road?’

  ‘Kate, look I hope and believe we can sit down and discuss this in a constructive and civilised manner.’

  ‘Really? Civilised? You think so, do you? What happened to, “Sorry, we can’t have baby number three because we can’t afford it, Kate. Because we’ve moved into a new phase of our lives, Kate. Because we don’t want to go back to broken nights, Kate.” The baby you decided I couldn’t have?’

  ‘I know how this looks,’ he says, ‘and I am incredibly sorry, really I am. It got complicated and you and I, we’d stopped talking and I should have, I didn’t …’

  ‘Use contraception? Or does Joely prefer to calculate her fertility by the cycles of the sodding moon?’

  Richard doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he studies his cycling shoes and asks politely if he should pack a bag, as though he were going away for a long weekend, not leaving a relationship more than a quarter of a century old. I look around the kitchen, this room I have been doing up, along with the rest of the house, to make a wonderful home, a family fortress against the worst that life could throw at us.

  And that’s when it comes pouring out of me. All the rage and resentment which has been accruing interest in the Bank of Righteous Indignation. Richard’s selfishness in putting his desire to do something meaningful and retrain as a counsellor before our financial security. ‘How many men could have the luxury of doing that? No wonder all the other people on your bloody counselling course are women. Women with rich husbands who can indulge them as they take two years’ unpaid leave to get a qualification while paying for extortionate therapy as well.’

  A low blow, I admit it, but I was high on my sense of injustice, deeply upset about Emily, torn in half by sending Jack away so I could stick with the family Richard was now ditching for a pregnant pixie.

  ‘How old is Joely anyway – twelve?’

  ‘Actually, she’s twenty-six.’

  ‘God, she’s half your age. What a cliché.’ On I scorched. How many women would go along with the choice Richard had made? How many wives would get a stressful, full-time job when they were in the middle of the bloody menopause and feeling like death so their husband could ‘enjoy living in the here and now’ and perch his bony arse on a meditation mat? And how about Richard’s increasingly long absences? Missing Ben’s concert because he had to do mindfulness with Joely. Leaving me to worry about his parents, my mother, our children. Spending all our money – my money – on gear for that bloody bike of his.

  ‘What exactly have you contributed, Richard?’

  ‘That’s not fair, Kate,’ he says, literally reeling backwards from the verbal assault and falling into the chair by the Aga. ‘I sold my other bike to pay for my therapy.’

  ‘You sold your bike? When did you sell it?’

  ‘I sold it over the summer to Andy from the club. He gave me four grand for it.’

  Richard sold his other bike?

  ‘Roy, there’s something very wrong here. What am I supposed to remember about Richard’s bike? Something happened with Richard’s bike. Please find it, Roy. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s really important.’

  Lenny starts barking furiously and even bares his fangs at Richard. I get down on the floor and put my arms around his neck.

  ‘We should never have got that bloody dog,’ says Richard.

  If anything sealed our marriage’s demise, it was that remark. I don’t bother to reply. Instead, I kneel there stroking my beloved friend, allowing him to administer urgent licks to my face.

  You know, the strangest thing is how remarkably little I felt. About Joely. About the twins. (Twins? I told Alice men who leave always go off and have twins. I didn’t ever think that would be me.) I was shocked, yes, and distraught about the marriage we once had, Rich and I, but even in that first blast of hurt and outrage I knew I wasn’t destroyed. The truth is I’d been living alone for a long time. Isn’t that why I failed to put two and two together about what was going on with Joely? God knows Richard mentioned her enough, maybe he was even willing me to notice and challenge him, but I’d already tuned him out. I felt so desperately alone I started calling to Jack, willing him to be back in touch with me. And now I’d sent him away
again, for good.

  ‘Yes, Roy, what is it?’ A memory surfacing. Something important, vitally important. Something I’ve been struggling to piece together, to put into words. Something about Richard’s bike. My faithful old librarian is bringing it to me, I can hear the flipflap of his carpet slippers as he approaches, footfalls in the memory; he’s almost here now. ‘Come on, Roy, you can do it. Something about the bike.’

  ‘Oh, God, I’ve been so blind.’

  ‘You weren’t to know about Joely,’ Richard says. And then I start crying, really crying, and it isn’t for us. ‘I don’t give a damn about Joely. Can’t you see? It’s Emily. Emily said she fell off your bike.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘She said she did. But she couldn’t have because there wasn’t a bike for her to fall off, was there? You sold it. Emily lied to me. Her legs. The cuts on her legs.’ Closing my eyes, I see them now; they are regular, almost like thatching – one cut after the next in an even show of force and penetration. Stupid, stupid. Of course she didn’t fall off a fucking bike. What’s wrong with me?

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘She didn’t have cuts because she fell off a bike, did she? Mr Baker said a third of the girls in Emily’s year are depressed or self-harming. He told me, but I wasn’t listening. I never thought Em would cut herself, not in a million years.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Richard comes towards me, extending his arm, clearly distraught about Emily, but he is afraid to touch me, as if I’m on fire.

  Tears are streaming down my face. I’m not weeping for myself and my menopausal woes, not for keeping it together at work pretending to be forty-two when I felt like I was ninety-six, not for my mum who fell off her high heels, not for Barbara who can remember the Latin words for shrubs but not the names of her own sons, not for Julie worried sick about Steven’s gambling debt and too ashamed to tell me, not for telling Jack I can’t violate the sanctity of my marriage and be with him when, all along, it turns out Richard has been seeing someone else. No, I’m weeping for my daughter who was so horribly sad and desperate that she could do that to herself. And I looked, but I was blind, heard her crying, but I was deaf.

  And now a bell is ringing distantly. Don’t ask for whom the belfie tolls, it tolls for thee.

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘Someone at the door,’ says Richard.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The doorbell.’

  On autopilot, I walk across the kitchen and turn the handle. A boy Ben’s age is standing on the doorstep holding a small suitcase and a large box of Mozart marzipan chocolates. ‘Good evening,’ the boy says, ‘I am Cedric from Hamburg. Very happy to meet you.’

  24

  CUT TO THE QUICK

  11.20 am: You know if some big bad misogynist bastard set out to design something that would make girls feel totally crap about themselves, which would prey on every insecurity and diminish their sense of agency in the world, then he couldn’t come up with anything better than social media, could he?

  I mean, it’s almost diabolically fit for purpose. Inviting a young female to photograph and scrutinise herself over and over before offering an image up to the world for comment. Oh, and you can Photoshop the picture so your waist looks teenier and your boobs look bigger, and your lips look poutier, and then you’ll never dare be seen IRL because your online self is so perfect that the normal one is doomed to disappoint. That’ll really help with all those teenage feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness.

  Just one of the confused, angry, helpless thoughts I have had in the hours I’ve sat right here, on the orange plastic benches at the SHo Clinic – that’s the Self-Harm Outpatients Unit of our local hospital. I’d never noticed the green, single-storey building before, tucked right behind the maternity unit. In a somewhat macabre way, the clinic turned out to be quite the social scene. The first time Emily and I came here, we were told to take a seat in the waiting room where we found three other girls from her year at school, also accompanied by their shellshocked parents. The girls half-smiled at each other, but then looked away; no one was sure about the etiquette in this strange new club they belonged to. Richard was supposed to be with us, but he had to accompany Joely to a scan that same afternoon. I was worried that Em would see this as another betrayal, but she just sighed and said, ‘Honestly, Mum, Dad’s such a plonker.’

  One of the surprises I got after we broke the news that Richard and I were splitting up was that, while both children love their father deeply, they didn’t have an especially high opinion of him. On hearing that Dad had a girlfriend, who was pregnant, Ben said, ‘Eww. Gross.’ Emily was more outwardly emotional but, from the start, I was determined to make something positive out of this seismic event in our family life. If I overdid the Julie Andrews ‘raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens’ routine, well, staying cheerful for the sake of the children helped keep me going as well. Once Richard had moved out, Ben grew three inches overnight and announced he was going to set me up a Tinder account ‘to find you a boyfriend, Mum. So long as me and Em get to vet any weirdos, OK?’

  I didn’t mention Jack. What was there to say? I had sent him away and he had only texted me once since – a coolly noncommittal message about Provence being lovely at this time of year. After the way I’d treated him, I didn’t feel I had the right to crawl back and plead for a second chance. Besides, the last thing the kids needed was another stranger entering their lives while their dad was shacked up down the road with Pippi Longstocking.

  I just about managed to keep work going through this period, although it was a struggle. I didn’t want to let Emily out of my sight. I was tormented by the fact she had been cutting herself without me noticing. When he called me that time at the office, Mr Baker told me a huge number of kids in her year were self-harming, but for some reason I was obscenely, irrationally confident that my own daughter would never do such a thing. Not Emily. How could I be so oblivious? What darkness had crept into my child’s tender soul that she would cut into her own flesh with something sharp, repeatedly, on purpose? The marks on Emily’s thighs were like angry cross-hatching, as if she had scraped against dozens of brambles, over and over. I couldn’t see them without a sick lurch in my stomach.

  When Emily was a few weeks old I cut her baby fingernails with rounded scissors and accidentally nicked her skin. Her cry, that first astonished accusation of treachery, came back to me a thousandfold when I saw the slashes on her legs. All those mistakes you make as a mother accumulate – is there a totaliser, do you suppose? – so you are doubly pained when they are injured as they get older. Maybe because you can do less about fixing things for them.

  The counsellor here at the clinic said that Emily was no longer cutting herself: Lizzy’s betrayal at New Year had shocked her into leaving the poisonous group to which she had clung so desperately. It was a really good sign, he said, that Emily was now comfortable enough to walk around the house with bare legs. It was when they were still hiding it that you had to be worried.

  I blamed myself, of course I did. Had I not nurtured my daughter’s self-confidence well enough? Did all our stupid bickering about clothes and juice diets and messy bedrooms make her feel she couldn’t confide in me? Was I too anxious that she did as well as her A* peers in exams, and did I fail to protect her from that anxiety? In short, did I expect her to be the crazy, high-achieving workaholic I’d been for most of my life? Guilty as charged.

  When Emily got home from Jess’s house, the same night Richard told me about Joely and Cedric the German exchange student showed up at our door, she looked at my face and, instantly, she knew that I knew. Arm in arm, we went upstairs, sat on my bed and cried. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ we both said at the same time.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t know, my love.’

  ‘Sorry I didn’t tell you, Mum.’

  It was agony for her to show me, and agony for me to look, but Emily’s anguish was the greater. I might have guessed that the poison began
with Lizzy Knowles. After some stupid kid left a boyband, it was Lizzy’s idea that her group should join the #Cut4 cult to prove the depth of their devotion and grief. Emily told me it trended on Twitter; there were actual diagrams of how to do the cutting, and girls around the world shared images of harming themselves. Uch. The counsellor said Emily was particularly vulnerable because the belfie going viral made her ashamed and anxious that her friends didn’t like her. For someone of my generation, all this was hard to get your head around, let alone the fact that it had become commonplace. Look at them all, sitting around me in this waiting room – lovely young women who seek to control emotional pain by inflicting it on their blameless bodies.

  ‘Hello, Kate.’

  I look up. Cynthia Knowles. (‘Thank you, Roy, I do recognise her. In a pink Chanel suit it could hardly be anyone else.’)

  ‘Funny place to meet,’ Cynthia says. ‘I mean, what strange times we live in.’ Nervous laughter. ‘Lizzy, she’s had a bit of a blip. And Emily too, I suppose … Such bad timing.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Their AS’s are coming up in a few weeks. Hopefully, we can put all this behind us by then. It’s just the marks in the AS will affect the A level grades, you know. I’ve looked into getting extra time for Lizzy in the exams, but self-harm doesn’t count as a disability yet, I checked. We don’t want this business –’ with a heavily ringed hand Cynthia gestures around the room full of deeply unhappy girls ‘– to get in the way of their goals.’

  There is that moment, you may know it, when all the pent-up anger inside you finds its perfect object. Cynthia is that object. ‘My only goal for Emily,’ I say, ‘is for her to feel happy and loved and for her to realise that nothing else matters very much in the great scheme of things. I don’t need to look to my child’s exam results for my own self-worth because I have a job. Oh, here she comes now.’

  Emily gives me a shy little wave as she emerges from a door opposite.