I Don't Know How She Does It
Page 8
“Well, I did have one in ’96 and you broke the slide. I mean, they wrote and said it had broken in transit and could I come in again. But, obviously, I’d already been in and time is very tight, so if I could please just have my pills?”
“And there has been no time in the last four years when you could drop in for another test?” A basset hound in human form, Dr. Dobson has that wet-eyed solicitude common to dogs and caring professionals.
“Well, no. I mean you have to ring for an appointment and hang on for ages because they never seem to answer the phone, and...”
His finger moves to a date halfway down my notes. “And on one occasion you failed to cancel. March twenty-third of last year.”
“Taiwan.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was in Taiwan. Hard to cancel when it’s the middle of the night in another hemisphere and you haven’t got an hour to hang on the phone hoping the receptionist in Drayton Lane will pick up out of idle curiosity.”
The doctor tugs anxiously on his tie—it is beige and apparently woven from Shreddies. “I see, I see,” he says, clearly not seeing at all. “Well, I don’t think it would be sensible for me to prescribe you another year’s worth of Microgynon until you’ve had your smear, Mrs. Shattock. The Government, as you may have heard, is taking a very proactive role in cervical health.”
“The Government thinks it would be better for me to have another baby?”
He shakes his head sadly. “I wouldn’t put it that way. The Government is merely keen to encourage women to avoid a life-threatening illness with a simple test.”
“Well, if I have another baby I really will be dead.” God, I can’t believe I just said that. What do you mean by that, Kate?
“There’s no need to get upset, Mrs. Shattock.”
“I am not upset,” I insist, rather too shrilly. “I’m just a very busy woman who doesn’t need any more children right at the moment if you don’t mind. So if you could please let me have my pills.”
The doctor takes a slow, careful note with an ancient Biro that has a clump of ink snot on its nose. It gives every word it writes a presmudged outline. He asks me if I have any other symptoms.
“But I’m not ill.”
“Are you sleeping properly? How is your sleep?”
For the first time since Loopy Fay arrived at six this morning, my features relax enough to form a smile. “Well, I have an eleven-month-old son with teeth coming through. Sleep doesn’t really go with the territory, does it?”
Dr. Dobson returns my smile, but with wary creases at the edges—creases that act like inverted commas around the smile. I realize that the look on his face can properly be described as long-suffering. Who is long in suffering if not a doctor? The amount of pain he must see. Anyway, he tells me to come in any time I feel I need to. Any time at all. Says he will ring down to the nurse right away and see if she can fit me in for a smear now. “You can surely spare ten minutes?”
I surely can’t, but I do.
9:06 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Arrive late and dying to go to the loo. Will have to wait. Need to submit nine fund reports, having talked to twelve different managers by Wednesday. Also must present in-depth briefing on Japanese Toki Rubber Company fiasco by Wednesday. Then Rod Task pitches up at my desk and tells me I have to go and salvage my career by giving blow job to Jack Abelhammer in New York on—why, Wednesday. Not sure the term blow job was actually used, but he definitely said “on your knees, honey.”
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
Terrific start to the day. Smear test. Like having sex with the Tin Man. Can’t they make that damn probe out of rubber, or would they just get sad women like me queuing up to have it done twice a week?
Got in here sixteen minutes late and Guy is at my desk telling everyone he’s Almost Certain that Kate will be in At Some Point. Felt like Mummy Bear and wanted to growl, Who’s been sitting in my chair? Said nothing. Wouldn’t give the little creep the satisfaction.
Plus I have to go to NYC to “placate” client. Have never met Jack Abelhammer, but I H8 him already.
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Dear Desdemona, U shd watch Guy “Iago” Chase. Don’t drop that handkerchief, honey. He wants yr job so badly his gums ache.
PS: Have fckd brainless Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion (Sat night, Nobu), but never tried Tin Man. Able Hammer sounds prmsng tho.
* * *
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Glad to hear you’re still alive after Xmas. Not sure I am. (How can I tell?) Sorry about Felix’s knee and Ruby’s ear infection. Can someone pls coin new word for holiday with children that doesn’t imply (a) holiday, (b) rest, (c) pleasure?
helliday? K xxxxx
* * *
2:35 P.M. Just as I am going into European Group meeting, Paula calls. Says she thinks she may have caught the sick bug Emily had over Christmas. Is it all right if she leaves early today?
Think: No, that is Absolutely Out of the Question, this is your first day back at work after two whole weeks off.
Say: Yes, of course, you poor thing, you sound terrible.
I ring Richard at the office. He is in a meeting about designing some Peace Pagoda for British Nuclear Fuels. Leave urgent message asking if he can get home and hold the fort soonest.
8:12 P.M. Squeak home in time for Emily’s bed. Bump into Richard in the hall. Says no, he hasn’t sorted out the new parking permit yet. Yes, they both had their hair washed. Run upstairs. Am desperate to make it up to her after this morning’s harsh words over I Spy. All milky warmth, my daughter curls my hair round her finger. “Who is your favorite Tweenie, Mama?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“Milo is the biggest.”
“Ah. What did you do at school today, love?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, I’m sure you did. What did you do, Em?”
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with W.”
“Window?”
“No.”
“Wallpaper?”
“No.”
“Well, what could it be, I wonder. Wecorder?”
“Yes! You are clever, Mummy.”
“I try, darling. Really I do.”
MUST REMEMBER
Thank-you letters, dismember Christmas tree and hide in rubbish bags from bin men who won’t take trees away (Not part of our job, love), Check for Bouncy Babies class (94 quid a term—cheaper to enroll in astronaut training), Emily new ballet leotard (blue not pink), find osteopath to check out “heavy head,” ring Mum, return call from sister or she will be confirmed in view am posh cow who has lost touch with her roots—highlights! Passport expiry please God no. Ask cool friend what is gangsta rap. No cool friends. Make cool friend. Downstairs ballcock Richard?, Baby-sitter Sat/Weds, pay newspaper bill/read back issues of newspapers, call nanny temp agency if Paula still ill, See amazing new kung fu film—Sitting Tiger? Sleepy Dragon? Trim Ben’s nails, name tags, dentist appointment, ring Juno Academy of Fitness and book personal trainer who will contract stomach instead of trying to expand soul, Ben birthday Teletubbies cake where? Pelvic floor squeeeze. Return Snow White video to library! Emily school applications get organized. Be nicer, more patient person with Emily so doesn’t grow up to be needy psychopath. Quote for new stair carpet. Call Jill Cooper-Clark. Social life: invite people Sunday lunch—Simon and Kirsty? Alison and Jon? Think about half-term plans. What, already? Yes, already. Swimming party on Sunday for “Jedda”—girl or boy find out? Empty bladder more frequently. Prepare to meet Jack Abelhammer.
8
Teething Troubles
TUESDAY, 4:48 A.M. There is a scream from Ben’s room. A Hammer Horror scream. Third time tonight—or is it fourth? Teething again. And we’re already over the legal Calpol limit. Will probably be exposed in News of the World as Monster Mum Who Doped Tot for Kip. They’re
right to call it a broken night—cracked and unmendable. You crawl back to bed and you lie there trying to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the pieces missing. Perhaps he’ll go back by himself. Please let him go back. It’s always around now, when the dark is silvery with the first inkling of light, that you start cutting desperate deals with God. “Oh, God, if you’ll just let him go back to sleep, I’ll...”
I’ll what? I’ll be a better mother, I’ll never complain again, I’ll savor every grain of sleep I get from now until my dying day.
No, he won’t go back. Benjamin’s experimental are-you-there? yelps have given way to full-throated Pavarotti aria (“Nessun Dorma” means None Shall Sleep, doesn’t it?). The book tells you to leave baby to cry, but Ben hasn’t read the book. He doesn’t understand that after forty minutes or so of continuous crying, baby will settle down. The book says that Ben may have attachment issues; I think he’s just figured out that the Mummy who isn’t here in the day is available for nocturnal cuddles.
Brain is willing to get out of bed, but body lags behind like a morose teenager. Next to me, Richard lies on his back, hands folded across his chest, exhaling king-size sighs. Sleeping like a baby. (Where the hell did that expression come from?)
Climbing the stairs, legs feel encased in calipers. Through the landing window I can make out the terrace of houses at the bottom of our garden with their spooky sightless eyes. An early riser turns on a kitchen light and the room ignites with a saffron flare like a match. The windows offer a pretty good view of the wealth of the people inside: our area lies to the northeast of the City, so plenty of astute financial types like me have moved in here and ruined themselves doing up damp and peeling Victorian wrecks. Our houses are the ones with no covering at the window, their owners preferring to rely on expensively restored shutters while our poorer neighbors still comfort themselves with proper curtains or hide their business behind nets like veils. In the seventies, couples like us tore out all the old Victorian fittings—fireplaces, cornices, baths with a beast’s gnarled claw at each corner—in the name of modernity and now we, in the name of a newer kind of modernity, have paid a fortune to have them put back again. (Is it coincidence that we spend far more than our parents ever did on the restyling and improvement of our homes—homes in which we spend less and less time because we are out earning the money to pay for French chrome mixer taps and stripped oak floors? It’s as though home had become some kind of stage set for a play in which we one day hope to star.)
Upstairs, I find Ben rattling the bars of his cot. He grins and extrudes a thread of spittle that bungee-jumps off the end of his chin right down to the crotch of his sleep suit and shimmers there, twirling in the dark.
“Hello, you. What time do you call this, eh?”
I hoist him out and, overcome by the joy of our reunion, he tries a brand-new incisor on my neck. Ow!
I never wanted a boy. After Emily, I suspected my body could only make her kind, and anyway I was more than happy to have another girl—beautiful, self-contained, intricate as a watch. “Boys are like so over,” Candy announced to a lunch for female colleagues this time last year. My bump was so big the wine-bar manager had to fetch a chair, because I couldn’t slip inside the booth with everyone else. We all laughed. Nervous, insubordinate laughter, but tinged with triumph—the laugh of the Celts when they knew the Romans’ time was nearly up. But then, three days later, they handed him to me in the delivery room. Him! Something so small, faced with the vast and implausible task of becoming a man, and I loved him. Loved him like a shot. And he couldn’t get enough of me. Still can’t. A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.
He’s so heavy suddenly, my baby: that lithe body is filling out with boyness. Thighs as dense and plump as a boxer’s glove. I carry him to the blue chair, hold his hand and begin to croon our favorite song.
“Lavender’s blue dilly dilly, lavender’s green,
When I am King dilly dilly, you shall be Queen.”
Mothers have been singing this for centuries and still no one has the faintest clue what it means. The singing of lullabies is a bit like motherhood itself: something to be done instinctively in the dark, although its purpose feels magically clear.
I sense every part of Ben relax, his weight shifting inside the Babygro like sand until he is evenly distributed across my chest. You have to judge the moment just right; you have to guess when doze has deepened into dream. I stand up and move stealthily towards the cot, not letting him drop down until the very last second. There. Hallelujah! Then, just when I’m thinking I’ve got away with it, his eyes snap open. Bottom lip trembles for a few seconds like Rick glimpsing his lost Ilsa in Casablanca, then the whole mouth forms a tremulous O and the lungs fill for a reprise of the scream.
(Babies never extend any credit. They have a tyrant’s disdain for fairness. They grant no time off for cuddles received, no parole for long hours spent nursing in the dark. You can answer that cry a hundred times, and on the hundred and first they’ll still have you court-martialed for desertion.)
“All right, all right, Mummy’s here. It’s OK, I’m still here.”
We go back to the blue chair. I hold Ben’s hand and begin the sleep ritual over again.
5:16 A.M. Ben finally flat out.
5:36 A.M. Emily asks me to read a book called Little Miss Busy. No.
7:45 A.M. Paula back today and feeling much better, thank God. Ask her to remember Teletubbies cake for Ben’s birthday on Friday—oh, and candles. And go easy on the biscuits in case the other mums are crazy Sugar Ayatollahs. (Last year, Angela Brunt issued a fatwa on raisins.) Paula asks me for a large amount of cash, sufficient to cater Buckingham Palace garden party, but don’t dare query.
8:27 A.M. So out of it by the time I get to Broadgate that I pick up two double espressos at Starbucks and down them like vodka shots. I read somewhere that people suffering from sleep deprivation are in what’s called a hypnagogic state—a sort of purgatory between sleeping and waking, where surreal images drift across the brain. Like being permanently stuck in a David Lynch movie. This could account for the fact that Rod Task is ceasing to come across as a merely annoying Aussie bully and is starting to resemble unblinking Dennis Hopper with madman’s laugh. I sit at my desk wearing the old pair of glasses I keep in the drawer to give an impression of intense cerebral activity; then I select the most mindless task available, one where making mistakes will matter least. So long as I don’t buy or sell anything I should be OK. I have twenty-nine e-mails. Can hardly believe the first one.
To: Kate Reddy, EMF
From: Jack Abelhammer, Salinger Foundation
Katharine,
I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have worked out the problem we ran into over the holidays. Clearly it was a bad time for you too.
It’s great news about Toki Rubber and the patenting of the unbreakable prophylactic. Amazing recovery of stock. I admire your coolness under pressure. Maybe we can celebrate when you get here on Thursday? Terrific new lobster joint down the street.
Best, Jack
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
What say we hit Corny & Barrw for bottle or 2 so we can get arrestd for disordly cnduct & miss fckg stratgy mtng?
U look wreckd. C xxxxx
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
I don’t have to be drunk to be disorderly. Need to go to bed for a week.
love and kisses K8 xxxxxx
* * *
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
URGENT! Tell me you just got that msg.
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Wot msg?
* * *
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
About being drunk and disorderly. Quick. HURRY!
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
Srry, hon. U mst have sent to some other lucky gal.
* * *
To: Candy Stratton
From: Kate Reddy
To client in New York actually. Am dead woman. No flowers please.
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Candy Stratton
Holy shit. Snd anothr Right This Minute.
Dear Sir, my evil depraved twin, also calling herself Kate Reddy, has just sent U a crazy and offensive e-mail, please ignore.
Anyway, don’t worry. Abelhammer’s American, right? Remember we have No Sense of Humor.
* * *
3:23 P.M. Team leaders start to file in for strategy meeting in Rod Task’s office. My eyelids are closing like a doll’s. Only thing keeping me awake is the thought that Jack Abelhammer will sue for sexual harassment. Yanks are obsessed with “inappropriate behavior.” Still no e-mail back from him. Hopes that he will put mine down to charming British eccentricity are fading as fast as the daylight. Lost in a nightmare reverie, I fail to notice the approach of Celia Harmsworth. Extending one bony finger, the head of Human Resources prods the place where Ben sank his teeth in this morning. Feels at least three lifetimes ago.
“Something on your neck, Katharine?”
“Oh, that. The baby bit me.”
A couple of guys seated at the table start to snigger into their Perrier. Celia gives the wintry smirk you see on the face of the wicked Queen when she’s handing the apple to Snow White. Make my excuses and shoot to ladies’ room pursued by Candy. Lighting is terrible in here, but the mirror reveals what appears to be a love bite left by a teenage vampire halfway down my neck. Try foundation. No use. Try face powder. Damn. Bite looks angry and foaming, like an aerial view of Mount Etna.