I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  Back downstairs in the kitchen, I make a pot of mint tea and try to get some sense out of Momo. Ten minutes later, I understand why she is having trouble explaining the problem. She simply doesn’t have a vocabulary crude enough to describe what she has seen.

  After work tonight Momo went to 171, a bar opposite Liverpool Street, with a bunch of people from the US desk. Later, she dropped by the office to collect some files for our forthcoming final. Chris Bunce was there with a group of guys all gathered round his screen, laughing and making raucous comments. They included her friend Julian, who joined EMF the same day Momo did last year. The men didn’t hear her come in and they didn’t notice until too late that she had come over to look at what they were looking at.

  “Pictures of a woman—you know, Kate, wearing nothing. I mean worse than nothing.”

  “But they download that stuff all the time, Momo.”

  “You don’t understand, Kate, they were pictures of me.”

  2:10 A.M. I have helped Momo upstairs, found her some night clothes and tucked her up in the guest bed. Floundering in my Gap XXXL T-shirt with the dachshund motif, she looks about eight years old. Calmer now, she manages to tell me the whole story. Apparently, she screamed at the top of her voice when she saw the pictures on the screen, demanding to know who had done this.

  Bunce, naturally, toughed it out. Turned to Momo and said, “Well, now the real thing is here, perhaps she’d like to show us what she can do, guys?”

  They all laughed at that, but when she started crying they left the office pretty quickly. Only Julian hung around and tried to calm her down. Eventually, she yelled at him until he told her Bunce had taken head shots of Momo from the EMF website—the ones the firm was using in its brochure to illustrate its commitment to diversity—and digitally spliced them onto other women’s bodies that are freely available on the Net. “Bodies with no clothes on,” Momo repeats, and her primness makes it doubly painful.

  Momo says she stopped looking when she saw her own head giving head. There were captions to go with the pictures, but she found it hard to make them out because she dropped her glasses and they cracked on the trading floor.

  “There was something about Asian Babes, I think.”

  “There would be.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asks, and the we feels both presumptuous and entirely right.

  Nothing is what we’re going to do. “We’ll think of something.”

  I put the main light out and leave the bedside lamp on. Next to it in a vase is a desiccated sprig of lily of the valley, left over from Donald and Barbara’s visit.

  “I don’t understand, Kate,” Momo says. “Why would Bunce do that? Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “Oh, because you’re beautiful and you’re female and because he can. It’s not very complicated.”

  For a second, she ignites with anger. “Are you saying what Chris Bunce did to me was nothing personal?”

  “No. Yes.” I suddenly feel exorbitantly tired, as though my veins were filled with lead. The terror of there being something wrong with Ben and now this. Why do I always have to explain things to Momo, important things, when I’m at my most stupid? I lay my hand on her cool brown one and will the words to come. “I’m saying that there was all history and now there’s us. There’s never been anything like us before, Momo. Century after century of women knowing their place—and suddenly it’s twenty years of women who don’t know their place, and it’s scary for men. It’s happened so fast. Chris Bunce looks at you and he sees someone who’s supposed to be an equal. We know what he wants to do to you, but he’s not allowed to touch anymore, so he fakes pictures of you that he can do what he likes with.”

  Under the duvet, she shakes, the shudder of a still-fresh shame, and tightens her grip on my fingers.

  “Momo, do you know how long they reckon it took for early man to stand upright?”

  “How long?”

  “Between two and five million years. If you give Chris Bunce five million years he may realize that it’s possible to work alongside women without needing to take their clothes off.”

  I can see the opal precipitate of tears in her eyes. “You’re telling me we can’t do anything, Kate, aren’t you? About Bunce. I just have to put up with it because that’s what they’re like and there’s no use trying to change anything.”

  That’s exactly what I’m saying. “No, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

  AS MOMO SIGHS and winces her way to sleep, I go downstairs to switch off the lights and lock up. I miss Richard all the time, but this is the time I miss him most. Locking up is his job and the bolt feels less safe when I draw it across, the creaking in the window frames more ghostly. As I close the shutters, I keep thinking of what will happen over the next few days. In the morning, Momo Gumeratne will make a formal complaint about the behavior of Christopher Bunce to her line manager, Rod Task. Task will refer the complaint to Human Resources. Momo will then be suspended on full pay pending an internal inquiry. At the first meeting of the inquiry, which I will be invited to attend, it will be publicly noted that Momo Gumeratne is of previously impeccable character. It will be silently noted that Chris Bunce is our leading performer who last year moved 400 million pounds of business. Quite soon, the offense against Momo will be referred to as “a bad business” or simply “that Bunce business.”

  After three months at home—enough time for her to start feeling anxious and depressed—Momo will be called into the office. A financial settlement will be offered. The Cheltenham Lady in her will stand up straight and say she cannot be bought off; all she wants is to see justice done. The inquiry panel will be shocked. They too want justice to be done; it’s just that the nature of the evidence is—how shall we say?—problematic. Casually, imperceptibly, it will be implied that Momo’s career in the City could be over. She is a young woman of exceptional promise, but these things have a way of being misinterpreted. No smoke without fire, all tremendously unfortunate. If news of the pornographic computer images, say, were to get out to the media....

  Two days later, Momo Gumeratne will settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. When she walks down the steps of Edwin Morgan Forster for the last time, a woman reporter from the TV news will poke a microphone in her face and ask her to give details of what happened. Is it true that they called her an Asian Babe and ran porno pictures of her? Lowering her lovely head, Momo will decline to comment. Next day, four newspapers will run a story on page 3. One headline reads asian babe in city porn pics storm. Momo’s denial will appear in the second-to-last paragraph. Soon after, she will take a job abroad and pray to be forgotten. Bunce will hold on to his job and the black mark against his character will be erased by a steady tide of profits. And nothing will change. That much is certain.

  As I’m reaching for the light switch, I notice a new picture stuck to the fridge under the Tinky Winky magnet. It’s a drawing of a woman with yellow hair; she is wearing a stripy brown suit and her heels are as high as stilts. The glare from the light means it’s hard to make out the writing in pencil underneath. I go up close. The artist is Emily, and with the help of a teacher she has written, My Mummy goes out to work, but she thinks about me all day long.

  Did I really say that to her? Must have. Em remembers absolutely everything. I heave open the freezer and force my face into its arctic air. The impulse to get in and keep walking is immense. I’m going in now; I may be some time.

  Back upstairs, I look in on Momo. Her lids are closed, but the eyes beneath them flutter like moths. Dreaming, poor baby. I’m turning the lamp off when the eyes open and she whispers, “What are you thinking, Kate?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking about what I said to you the day we first met.”

  “You said that I had to stop saying sorry.”

  “Too damn right you do. And what else?”

  She stares up at me with that trusting spaniel look I saw at the final all those eons ago. “You said that compassion, although e
xpensive, is not necessarily a waste of money.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did.”

  “God, how appalling. I’m such a cow. What else did I say?”

  “You said that money can’t tell what sex you are.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly?” she echoes uncertainly.

  “Where does it hurt them most, Momo? Where can we hurt them most?”

  ALL THAT NIGHT, I couldn’t sleep. I kept creeping into Ben’s room, checking his breathing as I used to check Emily’s when I first brought her home and I worried she would never wake. Ben slept on and on, but there was nothing to be afraid of. He was sleeping like a baby.

  Richard rang about two. He was in Brussels pitching for a Euro grant for a northern arts center and had only just got my message. He asked me if I was OK and I said no. He said we needed to talk and I said yes.

  At 5:30, I rang Candy, who I knew was being woken early by the baby kicking her in the ribs. Told her about the pictures of Momo on the system. I had no idea what we could do about it, but I thought she might, with her background in Internet companies. Between 5:50 and 6:30, she wrote a program that would seek and destroy all files containing references to Momo Gumeratne.

  “It’ll be hard tracking down any stuff that’s gone out of the building,” she said, “but I can nix anything still held in the EMF system.” We agreed that she should keep one copy of the pictures for evidence.

  At 6:00, Momo came into the kitchen and held something up. “I found this in my bed. Does it belong to anybody?”

  I went across and hugged her. “That’s Roo. He’s a member of the family.”

  Giving her a cup of tea to take back to bed, I walked up with her and went into Ben’s room. Still fast asleep. I tucked Roo next to his cheek. In a very short time one little boy was going to be happier than Christmas.

  Going into my own bedroom, I opened the wardrobe and ran my hand along the rail until I got to my finest Armani armor: a crow-black suit. From the rack beneath I chose a pair of patent heels with snakeskin toes—heels it was impossible to walk in, but walking wasn’t really the point today. As I got dressed, I went through all the resources I could draw on, the forces I could muster. I wanted Richard to come home and I knew now that I would do whatever it took to make that happen, but first Mummy had to finish her work.

  MUST REMEMBER

  Destroy Bunce.

  36

  The Sting

  IT WAS GENERALLY AGREED that the business plan for Power’s Biodegradable Nappy was an exceptional document. Over thirty handsome pages of A4, it featured details of the target market for the miracle new nappy and the projected growth rate. There was an impressive rundown on the competition, a review of the environmental advantages and a detailed implementation plan. The figures were excellent without being unduly optimistic. The CVs of the management team were first rate, particularly that of the inventor himself, Joseph R. Power, who, it was noted, had enjoyed connections with the Apollo space program and subsequent lucrative spinoffs. The patent for the biodegradable nappy was still pending, but the patent application—which described the product in crystalline detail—left you in no doubt of its success. Under the circumstances, it seemed a pity that only one person would get to see the document. The target market for Power’s Biodegradable Nappy was not a billion leaky babies but a Mr. Christopher Bunce.

  Bunce was now the head of EMF’s Venture Capital Unit. This was good news in two ways. First, it made it easier to get him to take a huge punt on my dad’s crappy nappy; gambling on exciting new products before anyone else got to them was part of the job. Second, Veronica Pick, the number two on Venture Capital who had been expecting to get the top job herself and was furious at having to make way for a novice in the area, could be relied upon not to steer her new boss clear of any minefields—might indeed be persuaded to guide him towards one with a friendly smile.

  FRIDAY NOON. THE SUCKLING CLUB.

  “OK, so let’s go through this one more time.”

  Candy is not even attempting to hide her scorn. “Your dad, a guy who can’t remember the name of his own kids and has never, to anyone’s knowledge, seen their tushes, has invented a diaper that’s gonna change the face of world diaperdom, except that we know the diaper doesn’t work because you have tried the prototype on your son, Benjamin, and when Benjamin took a—”

  “Candy, please.”

  “All right, when Ben needed to go to the bathroom, the diaper fell apart. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna sell the diaper project to the new chief of our own Venture Capital unit who, being an arrogant cocksucker and knowing even less than your dad about little kids, will invest thousands of dollars in the Great Diaper Adventure and will then lose all that money because...remind me of the because, Kate.”

  “Because my father’s company is heavily in debt and the money EMF invests will be claimed by his creditors and the nappy company will immediately go into liquidation and Bunce will lose his shirt, his socks and his poxy boxers and be exposed for the appalling chancre he is. Do you have any problem with the plan, Candy?”

  “No, it sounds great.” She sniffs the air as though testing a new perfume. “I just need to hear from you how we are gonna keep our jobs when I’m about to become a single mom and, until Slow Richard returns to the Reddy ranch, you are a de facto single mom.”

  “Candy, there’s a principle at stake here.”

  She looks momentarily alarmed. “Oh, I get it. It’s our old friend Oates.”

  “Who?”

  “The snowman. The one you told Rod about? Pardon me, gentlemen, I’m goin’ out now and I may be some fucking time. That’s not a plot, Katie, that’s a noble act of meaningless self-sacrifice. Very British, but you know in the States we have this really weird thing where we like the good guys to be alive at the end of the movie.”

  “Not all self-sacrifice is meaningless, Candy.”

  My friend detonates her big laugh, and everyone in the club turns to stare nervously at the pregnant woman. “Whoa,” she says. “You’re beautiful when you’re ethical.”

  “Look, there will be nothing to link you to the nappy deal, I promise.”

  “So all roads will lead to Reddy? You know that after this no one’s gonna employ you ever again, Kate. Nobody. You’re not gonna get hired to change the fucking fax paper.”

  With this dire warning, Candy reaches across, takes my hand and guides it onto the swell of her bump. Through the drum-taut skin, I feel the unmistakable jab of a heel. This is the first time she has acknowledged the baby as something permanent, not disposable, and I know better than to say anything mushy.

  “Is it kicking a lot?”

  “Uh-huh. When I’m taking a bath, you can see her going crazy in there. It’s like some goddam dolphin show.”

  “It’s not necessarily a girl, Cand.”

  “Hey, I’m a girl, she’s a girl. OK?” Candy clocks my smile and quickly adds, “’Course, I can still get her adopted.”

  “Of course.”

  I seem to recall it was Candy’s idea that seven women meeting in secret in the City would look less conspicuous in a lap-dancing club than in, say, a restaurant where people were wearing clothes. Sitting here, I wish I had a Polaroid camera to capture the expressions on the faces of my friends as they enter the venue. In the case of Momo, good breeding immediately conquers shock and she sweetly inquires of the blonde at the desk, “Oh, how long have you been open?”

  We are not the only women in the Suckling Club, a gentlemen’s entertainment emporium located within easy reach of the world’s premier financial district, but we are the only ones with unexposed breasts. Everyone who has turned up this lunchtime has important work to do. I already know that Chris Bunce is greedy and ambitious enough to plow money into a project without running it by anyone on his team. Why would he want to share the credit if he can take it all himself?

  But I also know that we will have to do a highly professional
job on the biodegradable nappy to get him to buy it. Dad’s drawing of a winged pig has to be upgraded. There needs to be a brochure, knowledge of the market and production, plus input from a top commercial lawyer. When I called Debra, I was scared she would say no—our string of canceled lunches over the past year had stretched our friendship to twanging point—but she didn’t need to be asked twice. Without ever having met Chris Bunce, Deb knew instantly what manner of man he was and what we had to do to him.

  So, our merry band consists of Candy, me, Debra and Momo and Judith and Caroline from my old Mother and Baby Group. We’re still waiting for Alice. (It was vital for Alice, who’s a TV producer, to help us out, but I didn’t hear back from her so I assumed she wanted no part in it. Luckily, she phoned me this morning. Said she’d been away filming, and she’d be delighted to join us, although she’d be late.)

  A patent agent before becoming a full-time mum, Judith has written the patent application for the nappy and made it so convincing I want to order a truckload for Ben immediately. In her cool marshaling of language and science, I see a side to Judith I have never known. Caroline, the graphic designer, has come up with a brochure which stresses the nappy’s eco-friendliness and has featured an irresistible picture of her own baby, Otto, sitting on a potty made of lettuce leaves.

  Debra is handling the legal side of things. She tells me that EMF will have no comeback against my father. “Look, this isn’t fraud. It’s naughty, but it’s not illegal. And it’s a clear case of caveat emptor—if the buyer doesn’t take care over what he’s buying, then that’s his lookout.”

  Deb will be acting as my dad’s lawyer during the meeting he will need to have with Chris Bunce, which we have arranged to be held in a suite at the Savoy.

  “You have no idea how brilliant I am at this,” Deb exclaims, as she takes me through the documentation. “What are we going to call ourselves, the Seven Deadly Sisters?”