I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  To: Debra Richardson

  From: Kate Reddy

  Good to know nits have become oppressed minority group with their own EU funding rather than pest you have to comb out of groaning child’s hair every night. (Tried tea-tree oil—stank, but no use—now onto chemical stuff brewed by Saddam Hussein. But will it kill the kids before it kills the nits?)

  Sorry, can’t do lunch: forgot it was half term.

  Think the Hammer man just sent me major valentine bouquet.

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Candy Stratton

  Bad news, hon. Slow Richard rang while U wre out and stoopid secrtry said, “Oh, your flowers are SO much nicer than those tulips she got.”

  pretend U hav florist stalker. Prefrbly GAY florist stalker.

  PS: Thnx for crazy zebra shoes. Did you shoot them yourself?

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Debra Richardson

  Kate, we are too tired for adultery, AREN’T WE? xxxxx

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Debra Richardson

  Don’t do anything disgusting and amoral.

  Without telling me EVERYTHING. D xxxx

  * * *

  1:27 P.M. Half an hour for lunchless lightning browse in gleaming electronics emporium near Liverpool Street. The atmosphere in the shop is delirious, malarial. Everyone in here has too much money and not enough time to spend it. I spot a guy from our tech team reverently cupping a digital camera as if it were a chunk of the true cross.

  It only takes a minute to find exactly what I’m looking for: the latest dinkiest personal organizer. A truly gorgeous thing—implausibly light, but with a pleasing scientific heft, and witty too, like a fifties drinks coaster. The Pocket Memory comes with an impressive raft of promises:

  It will simplify your life!

  Banish stress!

  Pay your bills!

  Remember your friends’ birthdays!

  Have sex with your husband while you

  finish that Carol Shields novel you started

  some weeks into your first pregnancy!

  I say I’ll take it. I don’t even ask how much. One way or another I’ve earned it.

  2:08 P.M. Rod Task approaches my desk like a marine storming a beach. “Katie, I need your help,” he hollers. Then, ominously, he parts his lips and clenches his teeth to form what he thinks is a smile. (Rod is only really scary when he’s trying to be nice.)

  Playfully cuffing a daffodil in the vase on my desk, he tells me he wants me to do a final for a three-hundred-million-dollar ethical pension fund account. Finals are a sort of beauty contest in which rival investment managers vie to convince a prospective client that they are the most responsible gambler in town. Oh, and Rod forgot to mention the final when he heard about it, so I have only twelve days to prepare, although this is now my fault, because if it wasn’t my fault it means Rod made a mistake. And Rod is a man, so that can’t be right.

  I can hear myself starting to protest a long way off—a watery wail of injustice—but Rod bulldozes on. “They want us to field a team that reflects EMF’s commitment to diversity,” he says, “so I reckon that’s gotta be you, Katie, and the Chinky from Research.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Moma, right?”

  “Momo is not Chinese. She’s Sri Lankan.”

  “Whatever.” He shrugs. “She looks pretty fucking diverse to me.”

  “Rod, I simply can’t. Momo has absolutely no experience. You just can’t—”

  My boss has the daffodil by the neck now, and the dejected bloom is weeping yellow ash onto the gray carpet.

  “Hey, we don’t do can’t, sweetie. When did we start doing can’t? Can’t is for pussies.”

  * * *

  WAS I SHOCKED by the way Rod talked to me? Actually, you’d probably be shocked by how unshocked I was. Chauvinism is the air I breathe—a bracing blend of Gucci Envy and salty gym residue. Like one of those cuboid amber air fresheners Winston hangs in the minicab, the smell stuns you as soon as you enter the City; it lays waste to your septum before curling into your brain. Soon it becomes the only smell in the world. Other odors—milk, apples, soap—seem sickly and feeble by comparison. When I first came to the City I smelled the smell and recognized it immediately as power.

  Truth is, I don’t mind: let them comment on my legs if those legs help keep my children in shoes. Being a woman doesn’t get you what you want within Edwin Morgan Forster, but it enables the firm to get what it wants outside—accounts, a reputation for “diversity”—and they owe you for that. It’s the oldest trade of all and it’s good enough for me. Sometimes I mind for other women, though. For the older ones like Clare Mainwaring in Operations, whose gray hair puts them among the firm’s Disappeared, and for the kids like Momo who think that having an MBA means that guys won’t look up your skirt.

  Round here, there are only three kinds of women. As Chris Bunce once explained to me over a drink in Corney and Barrow, back in the days when he was still hoping to get into my knickers, “You’re either a babe, a mumsy, or a grandma.” Back then, I qualified as a babe.

  And the equal-opportunities legislation? Doesn’t make it better, just drives the misogyny underground, into the dripping caves of the Internet. Women make jokes about men on the Net all the time—wry, helpless, furious jokes—but the stuff some of the guys send? Well, a gynecologist would need to go and lie down. Let them pass as many laws as they like. Can you legislate for the cock to stop crowing?

  The way I look at it, women in the City are like first-generation immigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work as hard as you can and do your damnedest to ignore the taunts of ignorant natives who hate you just because you look different and you smell different and because one day you might take their job. And you hope. You know it’s probably not going to get that much better in your own lifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact that they had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet—all that makes it easier for the women who come after you. Years ago, when I was still at school, I read this book about a cathedral by William Golding. It took several generations to build a medieval cathedral, and the men who drew up the plans knew that not their sons but their grandsons, or even great-grandsons, would be around for the crowning of the spire they had dreamed of. It’s the same for women in the City, I think: we are the foundation stones. The females who come after us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk on our bones.

  Last year, during the photo shoot for EMF’s corporate brochure, they had to “borrow” workers from the sandwich place in the basement to fill in the blank spaces where the women and ethnic minorities should be. I sat in some ludicrous fake meeting opposite a Colombian waitress. Eager and uncomprehending, she wore Celia Harmsworth’s red Jaeger jacket and was instructed to study a fund report. The photographer had to turn it the right way up.

  Later, going downstairs to pick up a bagel, I tried to catch the waitress’s eye across the counter, to share a look of girly complicity—Men! What can you do?—but the woman didn’t even glance up from her tub of cream cheese.

  * * *

  4:53 P.M. Got to start work on the pitch for the ethical fund, but distracted by thoughts of Jack, and then there’s Emily’s birthday. Three and a half months to go and my daughter is already counting the seconds. (The desire to get to a birthday when you’re five is as urgent as the desire to miss one when you’re thirty-five.) Feeling like proper organized mother for once, I put in a call to Roger Rainbow, a clown of high repute among the Muffia. Roger’s answerphone informs me he is absolutely chocker every weekend but still has some slots left for Halloween. Bloody hell, it would be easier to book the Three Tenors. Trust me to become a parent in the era when birthdays finally became a competitive sport.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me. Kate Reddy?”

  “Yes?” I look up, and standing by my desk is the beautiful young
woman who pressed me so hard at the trainees’ induction before Christmas. Now, as then, she is blushing but there is nothing frail or floundering in her shyness; her reticence seems to have been cast from some fine but resilient metal.

  “Sorry,” she says again, “but I understand we’re going to be working together on an—um, final. Mr. Task said he felt I had an important contribution to make.”

  I bet he did. “Oh, yes, Momo. It is Momo, isn’t it? I didn’t imagine we’d be working together so soon. It’s certainly going to be a real challenge.” Come on, Kate, give the poor girl a break. It’s not her fault she’s been dumped on you. “I’ve heard so many good things about you, Momo.”

  “And vice versa,” she says gratefully, taking a seat. “We all—well, all the women—she gestures across the sea of suits—we don’t know how you do it. Oh, is this yours?”

  Disappearing under my desk for a second, she comes back up holding a daffodil.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s broken.”

  MUST REMEMBER

  Thank-you letters, ring Mum, ring sister. HIGHLIGHTS! Complete IMRO forms. See amazing new film—Sitting Tiger? Sleepy Dragon? Trim Ben’s nails, ring Juno Academy of Fitness and book new personal trainer, Pelvic floor squeeeze. Momo list “to do” Emily school applications GET ORGANIZED. Father-in-law’s 65th birthday—tickets for Lion King? Call Jill Cooper-Clark. Social life: invite people Sunday lunch—Simon and Kirsty? QUOTE FOR STAIR CARPET! Note for Juanita. Packing for half term: Roo! Extra towels, nappies, portacot, wipes, Aromatic Anti-Stress pillow, Wellies.

  14

  Half Term

  “KATE, I AM NOT HAVING an argument with you about Wellies.”

  “Well I’m having an argument with you about Wellies. Emily is soaking wet. Just look at the state of her trousers. I have to remember everything. Every single thing. And I swear to God there’s no room in my brain for any more information, Richard. I remembered to ask you to check the Wellies were in the car.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot. It’s not a big deal.”

  “No, you’re not sorry. If you were sorry you’d have remembered.”

  How much do you think the human brain can bear in the way of remembering? I read somewhere that our long-term memory is basically this giant storehouse where all the people and places and jokes and songs we’ve ever known are laid down like wine, but if you don’t visit a memory often enough the route to it is lost, briared over. Like the approach to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Is that why all fairy tales are about trying to find the way back?

  Anyway, my memory’s not what it used to be, but I have to try and remember. Someone has to. What’s that awful word? Multitasking. Women are meant to be great at that. But Rich, if you ask Rich to hold more than three things in his head at once you can see smoke start to come out of his ears; the circuits have blown in there. I’ve heard women on the radio arguing that guys play up how useless they are in order to avoid doing stuff. Unfortunately, extensive scientific trials in the Shattock home have revealed that the inability to remember the dry cleaning and the dishwasher tablets plus the film for the camera is, in fact, a congenital defect, like color blindness or a dicky heart. It’s not laziness, it’s biology.

  On the endless drive to Wales on Saturday, I was watching Richard, observing the way he can screen out the kids when he needs to, when there is a destination he has in mind. Life is a road for a man; for women it’s a map—we’re always thinking about side roads and slip roads and doubling back, while they simply plow on in the fast lane. Their only diversion is an occasional brilliant idea for a shortcut, most of which turn out to be longer and more treacherous than the original route.

  Is that why men can live in the moment so much better than we can? Posterity is full of men who seized the day while the women were planning for a fortnight on Tuesday.

  So many of the rows Rich and I have nowadays are about remembering or forgetting. Like the one we had when we got to the beach in Pembrokeshire that first afternoon of the half-term holiday, and it turned out that Rich hadn’t packed the children’s Wellingtons. I don’t know what made me go so berserk. Yes, the kids’ feet were soaking, but they were having a lovely time.

  Swaddled in three layers of clothing, Ben and Emily play contentedly by the milk-chocolate channel that emerges from the hillside at the back of Whitesands Bay and foams over stones down to the sea. She has been building a Sleeping Beauty castle with water gardens and a fountain made out of a razor shell, while he picks up a pebble, carries it to the water’s edge, drops it in and then goes back to fetch another. They are as happy and intent as I’ve seen them. But the weather has got worse. Of course the weather has got worse. We are on holiday in Wales, why didn’t I remember? Wet Wales. The sun broke through earlier, just long enough to see the freckles begin to swarm over Emily’s face, but now the sky is pewter with rain. We decide to cut our losses and take the kids back to the cottage I have rented a few miles inland. Getting them away from the water and into the car takes roughly fifty minutes: requests give way to threats, and when they don’t work we fall back on bribes.

  I promise Emily that Mummy will finally get around to reading Little Miss Busy to her, so after I’ve stripped off their wet clothes, given them their tea, bathed them in the tiny freezing bathroom with the wall heater that smells of burnt air, and persuaded Ben to lie in his portacot, my daughter and I settle down next to the open fire—two resentfully smoldering logs.

  “‘Little Miss Busy loved nothing more than to be hard at work, keeping herself busy. Every day she would get up at three o’clock in the morning. Then, Little Miss Busy would read a chapter from her favorite book. It was called Work Is Good for You.’”

  “Can’t we read something more fun, Em?”

  “No. I want that one.”

  “Oh, all right. Where were we? ‘Miss Busy wasn’t happy unless she was busy working.’”

  “Mummy, you came to Ben’s birthday party.”

  “Yes, I did.” I can see her thinking. Five-year-olds’ thoughts are naked; they haven’t learned to cloak them yet. This one ripples across Emily’s brow like a breeze over a dune.

  “Did the teacher say you could leave early?” she asks at last.

  “No, sweetheart, Mummy doesn’t have a teacher. She has—well, she has a boss, this man who’s in charge. And she has to ask him if she can leave.”

  “Could you ask that man if you could come home early other days?”

  “No. Well, yes, I could, but I can’t do it too often.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mummy has to be in the office or...otherwise people might get cross with her. Let’s finish the story, Em. ‘Little Miss Busy—’”

  “Could you come home early and take me to ballet on Thursdays? Please can you, Mama?”

  “Paula takes you to ballet, darling, and she says you’re really really good at it. And Mummy promises to try and come to your show at the end of term this time.”

  “But it’s not fair. Ella’s mum takes her to ballet.”

  “Emily, I really haven’t got time to argue with you now. Let’s finish the story, shall we?

  “‘And Miss Busy didn’t rest all day long, not for a minute, not even for a second.’”

  WHEN THEY WERE BOTH asleep upstairs, Rich accused me of not being relaxed and I got incredibly upset. I’d done three solid hours of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! in the car on the way down, hadn’t I?

  “‘Wh-e-e-e-e-e-ere is love? Does it fall from skies above?’”

  Does it, hell. Mark Lester was so desperately beautiful as Oliver, and I read the other day that now he’s an osteopath in Cheltenham or somewhere. I mean, that can’t be right, can it? Like the breaking of a magic spell.

  And after Oliver! we sang twenty choruses of “The Wheels on the Bus,” which I did most cheerfully, even though that song drives me absolutely nuts. Then, when Ben threw up in the car outside Swansea, I got him into the service station, washed him in the basin, dried him somehow with the one
dry paper towel and changed him before buying all the basics we’d need when we got to the cottage—tea bags, milk, sliced bread for toast. I was doing a pretty good impersonation of a mummy on holiday, wasn’t I?

  But Rich was right. Thoughts of the upcoming final that Rod had sprung on me were keeping me awake at night. I’d left Momo to do the research into the ethical pharmaceutical sector while I was away, but she simply didn’t have the experience to hack her way through the material in time. Twice a day, I called her from a phone box in a high-hedged lane or by some rasping pebbled shore—my mobile signal came and went like the tide. And of course I told Momo where to find stuff, but it was like asking a skateboarder to dock a space station. Specifically instructed Guy to help her out too, but while I was away he would be otherwise engaged, having his bony Machiavellian arse measured for my chair. No way was Guy going to do anything that would put me in a good light.

  Plus, as the cottage’s phone connection was practically steam-powered, I couldn’t pick up my e-mails. Being out of contact with Abelhammer for four days made me realize how much I relied upon him as a safety valve. Without his soothing attentions I was ready to explode.

  THURSDAY, A CAR PARK, ST. DAVIDS CATHEDRAL. 3:47 P.M. Am unloading Ben’s buggy from the boot of the car when the downpour starts: joke rain, crazy rain, Gene Kelly Singing-in-the-sodding-Rain rain. Try to wrestle the baby into the buggy straps, his body stiffening as my impatience grows. I feel like an asylum orderly putting a straitjacket on a madman. Richard has fetched the buggy rain cover and hands it over; it’s a fiendish combination of cling film and climbing frame.

  Boldly loop big hoop over Ben’s head and try to fasten the clips, but I cannot get them round buggy handles so attach to the fabric instead. Seems OK, but I’m left with two elastic loops. What the hell are they for? Drape remainder of cover over the baby’s feet, but the rain snatches it and whips it up into my face. Damn. Start again.