“Have you got a large serial port in the back, madam?”
“Of me or the computer? How the hell should I know?”
“What you need, madam, is a Connect Kit.”
“No, what I need is to make my personal organizer organize.”
“You may order our Connect Kit now, madam. Should you wish to proceed—”
“Excuse me, is this part of your promise to simplify my life? Couldn’t I just go to a shop and get the kit?”
“There aren’t that many available, madam. People order them. It will take from five to ten days to arrive.”
“I don’t have five to ten days. I am leaving for the States in twenty-four hours.”
“I’m afraid we can’t—”
“Can’t is for pussies.”
“I beg your pardon, madam?”
“It’s an old Australian proverb meaning Tell your manager that I have several million shares in his company which are currently under review and that our market research reports are not showing them in a favorable light. Am I making myself clear?”
There is an audible swallow. “I’ll have to have a word with the supervisor.”
TUESDAY, 8:11 A.M. So it’s come to this. Richard and I actually lay in bed last night discussing whether we were too tired to have sex. Couldn’t quite remember what conclusion we reached until I got up this morning and noticed that inner thighs were lightly glued together with glacé icing.
Not a good idea before a major presentation. Sportsmen always say they never have sex in the run-up to a big race or match, don’t they? You never hear women athletes complain about it, but it must be the same for them, if not worse. There can be little to rival the female orgasm for knocking you out cold. Hours after the earth moves, a deep tentacular weariness is still trying to drag you under: coming, I mean really coming, makes you want to go and lie down till Christmas. I reckon it must be Mother Nature’s way of giving the sperm the best possible shot at the egg. (When you think about it, almost everything in female biology is Mother Nature’s way of making us want a baby or, when we have one, of making us want to protect it.) Up until last year, I suffered from mild PMT; not nothing, but nowhere near the crampy hell some women go through. Then, as soon as I hit thirty-five, it was war. Every month now, the hormones are out in the streets jumping up and down, waving placards and shouting “Save Our Eggs!” My body appears to know that time is short and the passing of each egg is mourned like the loss of a precious stone, a pearl beyond price.
But how can I have another baby when I don’t see the ones I’ve got? Have hardly been home these past few days. I look up at the office clock, and if it’s after 8:00 I know I’ve missed the kids’ bedtimes and—well, I figure I may as well push on for the night. Momo orders in a pizza or we have something healthy from the canteen in a Styrofoam box—always inedible—and we end up with our usual midnight feast: a bag of tortilla chips and a couple of Crunchies from the machine washed down with Diet Coke.
Picked up the phone when I finally got in last night at 11:55, expecting it to be Momo with some more figures. And who did I get? Barbara, my mother-in-law. Couldn’t believe she was ringing that late.
“Tell me not to stick my oar in where it’s not wanted, Katharine, but I spoke to Richard earlier and he sounded very tired. I hope everything’s all right.”
She thinks he’s tired?
10:07 A.M. In a meeting with Rod, Momo and Guy. We are rehearsing the final for the third time, with Rod and Guy taking the parts of the clients, when Rod’s secretary, Lorraine, bursts in.
“Sorry to interrupt, Kate, but there’s someone for you on Line Three. He says you said it was urgent.”
“But who is it?”
Lorraine appears reluctant to say. She stands awkwardly in the doorway until finally, in a stage whisper, she volunteers, “It’s a Percy Pineapple.”
Guy rolls his eyes so languidly he’s practically looking backwards into his own skull. Momo gazes at her shoes.
“Who the fuck’s Percy Pineapple?” asks Rod amiably.
I decide to brazen it out. “Oh, yes, that’ll be Percy Pineapple, the entertainment stock, part of Fruitscape.com, which is coming to the market. Chairman is coming in to see me to discuss the float. Just his little joke.”
Dear God. Still no entertainer for Emily’s party. Have worked my way through the trusted favorites: Roger Rainbow, Zee-Zee the Clown and Katie Cupcake, who does the most marvelous things with Smarties and an air pump. All have prior engagements in Monaco or Las Vegas or are dancing attendance on some anal-retentive Mother Superior who had the paper plates and napkins picked out for Jocasta’s seventh birthday by the time her waters broke.
I am rapidly sliding down the food chain and have entered the small-ad territory of bearded loons whose mug shots have an uncanny overlap with those printed in the News of the World “Name and Shame” pedophile campaign. There was a flash of hope on Monday when Percy Pineapple of Gravesend said that for a hundred and twenty quid, no questions asked, love, he could drive up in his van and put on a lovely show for the little girl. But Percy’s leaflet came in the post this morning. It shows a chubby homunculus twisting Durex-pink balloons into worryingly priapic dachshunds.
Of course, what Emily really wants is a swimming party, but that is totally out of the question. At the pool you hire for such occasions, the water is tepid, bacteria-rich and, unlike most water, not transparent. Also, would have to take time off for bikini wax: cannot do public nudity with other parents.
11:19 P.M. Arrive home to discover the Pocket Memory Connect Kit on the hall table. Richard is shipwrecked on the sofa watching the Arsenal game. He has left me some pasta in the oven; it has the texture and smell of baked toes.
“Would it be totally out of the question for anyone except me to take stuff left at the bottom of the stairs upstairs?”
Rich doesn’t look up from the TV. “Ah, the great She returns. Is it that time of the month already?”
“Are you accusing me of having PMT?”
Rich yelps. “God, Kate, I look back to your premenstrual tension with nostalgia. These days, we have postmenstrual tension, intermenstrual tension. We have 24/7 tension. Can you switch off when you eventually come to bed or will you be issuing instructions in your sleep?”
I open the dishwasher and notice that the supposedly clean dishes have a tide mark of gray sediment. Damn machine must be on the blink. “It may have escaped your notice, Rich, but I have a major presentation—”
“For it to have escaped my notice, I would have to have been embalmed in Ulan Bator.”
“I do this for us, you know.”
“What us, Kate? The kids haven’t seen you since we got back from Wales. Maybe you should become a TV presenter. At least they’d catch you once a day on-screen.”
Standing in the doorway, watching my husband’s baffled misery from a long, long way off, I think how I know this situation so well and I know the ways out of it—either leave for the airport in the morning with a frost on the ground and hope it has melted by the time I get back, or take my clothes off right now and remind both of us that love is something you can make. Am so exhausted my body feels like a carcass; no, it feels like a living body carrying a dead one on its back. But I can’t bear to leave him like this, and some kinds of sex take less time and energy than others.
“Please be on my side, Rich,” I say to him, as I get to my feet a few minutes later. “It’s me by myself in the office, against them: I can’t be on my own at home as well.”
1:01 A.M. Have almost finished transferring all the information I need into the Pocket Memory when there is a cry from upstairs.
4:17 A.M. Emily up three times already. Wrestling with her duvet, damp hair drying in crusty tendrils on her pale cheek. Can’t tell me what’s wrong. How can she do this to me tonight of all nights? I have to leave for the airport in three hours.
Immediate stab of guilt for even thinking such a thought. Then, just when I’ve decided this is a
preemptive punishment for leaving her—like a cat, Emily senses a departure before the suitcase is brought down—she finally moans, “Mummy, my wee-wee hurts.”
Pour her a large cup of cranberry juice and spend the next twenty minutes on the phone trying to get through to an emergency doctor. He suggests I give her Calpol and take a urine sample into the surgery first thing. Downstairs, I try to find the nearest thing to a specimen bottle—something watertight but big enough for her to pee into. Only thing I can find is Barbie flask. It will have to do. Back upstairs, kneeling next to the toilet, I have no luck coaxing a wincing Em to perform into the flask.
“Mummy?”
“Yes, love.”
“Can I have a swimming party?”
“Of course, sweetheart.” Flask is instantly filled to the brim.
NOON. JFK AIRPORT, NEW YORK. A hulking Customs inspector bearing a strong resemblance to Sipowicz in NYPD Blue rifles through my hand luggage. Totally unconcerned, I look on as he takes out my mobile, spare tights and Percy the Puppy book. Dips his meaty hand in a side pocket and brings out the Barbie flask. Omigod. Was supposed to leave that on the kitchen table. If flask is here, where is Pocket Memory?
Customs inspector unscrews Barbie container and sniffs. “Ma’am, how would you describe this liquid?”
“It’s my daughter’s urine.”
“Ma’am, I think you’d better come with me.”
MUST REMEMBER
Absolutely Bloody Everything.
16
The Final
WEDNESDAY, FAIRWEATHER INN, SHANKSVILLE, NEW JERSEY. Awake since 4:00 a.m., trapped in the revolving door of jet lag. Room service doesn’t start till 6:00 so I get a rank metallic coffee from machine in the hallway and add a slug of miniature from the minibar. Whisky gives a sustained top note to the hell brew. Catch sight of old woman in the bathroom mirror. Look away.
This morning, I dress for battle in full Armani armor—it is incredibly comforting pulling on a crisp white blouse and a digestive-biscuit-brown jacket and skirt with seams so sharp you could perform surgery with them. Shoes are fudge-colored LK Bennett pencil heels with white stitching and a groin-piercing toe. The look I’m aiming for is Katharine Hepburn Kicks Ass.
Two hours before the final and Momo joins me in the room. She is wearing a blue silk suit, and her dark hair is scraped back and pinned up. She may be nervous within, but she looks so mysteriously serene that a religion ought to be founded in her name.
Today, I have to be confident for both of us, exuding the gale-force bonhomie of a game-show host who knows his contract is up for renewal. We’ve been through the presentation fifty times already, but there’s no harm reprising all the don’ts.
“If they offer you a drink, don’t take it, OK? Don’t call them by their first names whatever you do. This is an ethical fund; these people like to think of themselves as the kind of people who like to be Gregged and Hannahed, but if you try it they’ll suddenly realize how much they prefer to be deferred to. They’re thinking about trusting us with an awful lot of money, so it’s sir and ma’am all round. And remember, we are the suitors.”
Momo looks surprised. “It’s a flirtation?”
“Yes, only we don’t flirt. It’s like courtly love.”
“The one who was married to Kurt Cobain?”
“Courtly love, Momo. Courtly. Did you ever read any Chaucer at school?” She shakes her head. God, what are they teaching them these days?
“No? Well, we protest our undying devotion. Desperate to please the beloved, we’d walk a million miles for one of their files: that kind of thing. And the key is to keep reminding them that although we have hundreds of white guys behind us who practically invented banking, we also have an unparalleled commitment to diversity. Ethical funds want decent returns. They want diversity, but they don’t want Third World. So we can give them the best of British with a rainbow gloss, which is where you and I come in.”
“Isn’t that sort of unethical, Kate?”
Weeks of exposure to my radioactive cynicism and she can still ask that question? What am I going to do with this child? “If we told the truth, Momo, we’d lose, which would have the virtue of being extremely ethical. But if we bluff our way through and we win, then two women—one of them not white—will have landed a three-hundred-million-dollar account for Edwin Morgan Forster, which means diversity really does pay, and that means that one day, instead of being window dressing, we may get a crack at running the store. Which will be altogether ethical and also mean we can buy ourselves a lot of excellent shoes. Next question.”
“So, lying in a final isn’t wrong?”
“Only if you do it badly.”
Momo gives a laugh that is too big for her slight frame; it propels her back onto the bed, and one shoe slips off and thumps onto the floor. (Must remember to do something about her shoes: navy flatties, they do nothing for her feet, which are as tiny and articulated as a ballerina’s.) Lying there on the swirly orange counterpane, she looks up at me and sighs. “I don’t understand you, Kate. Sometimes I think you think it’s all the most terrific bullshit, and then it seems as though you really really want to win.”
“Oh, I really really do. Just watch me. When I was little I used to hide a Monopoly hotel down my sock. If I landed on Park Lane, I’d smuggle the hotel out. My dad caught me one Christmas and hit me with the nutcracker for being a cheating little cow.”
I can see Momo struggling to place this Dickensian episode in the polite well-ordered childhood that is the birthright of every middle-class girl. She hasn’t worked out that I’m traveling on a false passport—why would she? These days even I’d struggle to spot myself as the imposter in a City lineup.
When she responds, it’s as though the sun were in her eyes. “That’s awful,” she says. “Your father. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be. Be sorry for the losers. Now let’s run through that part where you hand me the list of clients again.”
The phone rings, and for a second neither of us recognizes its plaintive foreign bleat. It’s Rod with a few last-minute suggestions. When I’ve hung up, I turn to Momo.
“All right, guess what he said.”
She furrows her brow and pretends to be thinking before answering in her best crystal Cheltenham Lady, “Go out and kick the fucking tires?”
Suddenly I feel a lot less worried about her. “OK, you got the job. Rod’s not bad, you know, once you learn how to handle him. If you make him think everything you want to do is his idea, he’ll be happy as a clam.”
Momo frowns. “When you talk about the men at work, Kate, it’s as though we were their mothers.”
“We are their mothers. I have people hanging on to my skirt in the office and then I have them hanging on to my skirt when I go home. You’d better get used to it. Right, let’s try the beginning one more time.”
The phone rings again. It’s Paula, just calling to say she located my personal organizer in the salad drawer. Ben has started hiding things in the fridge. All the information I have needed over the past twelve hours has been with the celery. Meanwhile, Emily is on antibiotics for her urinary infection. Her temperature is still up, but she’d like to talk to me, if that’s OK.
Emily comes on the line, at once pipingly eager and breathily shy. Whenever I hear my daughter’s voice on the phone, I feel as though I’m hearing it for the first time; it seems implausible that something I grew inside myself so recently should be able to converse with me, let alone bounce off a satellite.
“Mummy, are you at America?”
“Yes, Em.”
“Like Woody and Jessie in Toy Story 2?”
“Yes, that’s right. And how are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“Fine. Ben got a bump. There was loads and loads of blood.”
At this, I feel my own blood just stop, as if someone took a flash photo of my whole being. “Em, can I speak to Paula again? Please ask Paula to come to the phone now, there’s a good girl.”
&nb
sp; I try to keep my voice calm and raise the matter of Ben’s bump casually when what I feel like doing is appearing in a ball of fire in my own kitchen with maternal fangs glittering and a headful of hissing snakes.
“Oh, that,” Paula says dismissively. “He just hit his head on the table.”
The metal table with the retina-perforating corners I banished to the cellar in case Ben fell on it? That’s the one. Hey, but these things happen, Paula is telling me and, her tone says, Anyway, you weren’t here so who are you to criticize? Besides, she doesn’t think Ben needs stitches.
Stitches? My God. I clear my throat and try to find that sweet liberal register where an order sounds like a suggestion. Perhaps Paula could take Ben to the surgery? Just in case. A deep sigh and then suddenly she is telling Ben to put something down. At this distance, my children’s carer sounds sardonic, detached. Most distressing of all, she sounds like someone who is not me. I can just about hear Ben—he must be over by the window—making those yelps which sound like pain but are just his way of recording the fierce pleasure of discovery. Paula is saying there was something else. Alexandra Law called about a Parent Teachers meeting at school. Will I be attending?
“What?”
“Can you go to the PTA meeting?”
“I really can’t think about that now.”
“So I’ll tell her no?”
“No. Tell her I’ll call her . . . after.”
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Q: Why is it difficult to find men who are sensitive, caring and good-looking?
A: They all have boyfriends already.
How U?
* * *
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Completely mental. Literally. Life of the body a distant memory. Am now just brain on a stick. About to pitch for $$$$$$ account with terrified trainee who thinks Geoffrey Chaucer is rap artist. Plus Emily sick and Ben nearly decapitated while Pol Pot busy listening to Kiss FM.
I Don't Know How She Does It Page 15