by Anna Maxted
Even now, she spoke to her godson like he was an idiot – ‘Ooh, Tomas, that’s a nice top you’re wearing, what colour is it?’ Quite rightly, Tomas wouldn’t dignify her questions with a response. I suppose she’d got slightly better with him, but she reminded me of an arachnophobe who’d successfully completed a course at the zoo and was now holding a tarantula in her hand. You felt that at any minute she might throw her arms in the air, let out a bloodcurdling scream, shudder from head to foot, and run from the room.
Whereas, the cat . . . Jesus. She’d have put it down for Oxford if she could. I’d be standing in her kitchen and the cat would be sprawled on the surface. Literally, it would crap in its litter tray, filling the room with the aroma of shit, then leap onto the side where food was prepared. It was disgusting. Then it would collapse, like Cleopatra on a day bed, with its poo-flecked arse touching the counter top, and Lizbet would cry, ‘Cassie, doesn’t Sphinx look like she’s on Question Time?’
What? No! What the hell was she talking about?
I’d say as much, and she’d say, ‘Oh, you know, the way she’s got her paws tucked in, and she’s leaning to one side, she looks so serious and intelligent . . . she also reminds me of the Chinese Mandarin in that old story. ‘The Little Shepherdess’ – you know, those big sleeves, his hands clasped together but you can’t see them?’
Really. I mean, what?
Every time I thought of her, smug and unknowing with a baby inside, I felt a rip of rage. I was the one who was supposed to breeze through life with it all going right, and I’ll tell you why – because I worked to ensure that it all went right. And I just couldn’t believe how wrong it had gone for me. I hate that phrase ‘nothing’s certain in life except death and taxes’, because, actually, I feel that some things should be certain. For instance, if your perfect mother dies before you meet her, you are owed. In that situation, you are owed whatever you fucking want. It made me snarl when I thought of all the work I’d put into trying to conceive. You work hard, you expect the payoff.
How had she managed it? She was the bumbling one. She was the older child, the girl who had to hack her way through jungle, clearing the path for me. That was how I thought of it – her, dishevelled, dirty, exhausted, sweat running in rivulets down her face, in the wrong trousers that creased over the crotch, and me, walking neatly and swiftly after, pristine and glamorous in my Marc Jacobs mules. That was how it had always been. Lizbet made the mistakes. Even though she was such a good girl, our parents never gave her credit. They had no idea of their luck.
Even now, if Lizbet spoke at the table and I even looked as if I had a thought in my head, Mummy would say, ‘Elizabeth! Let your sister speak!’ Although Lizbet had never interrupted me, I was always the one who interrupted her. But Mummy never saw that. She confused size with strength. Lizbet is a great big girl, and the reason is, she’s uncontrolled – with food, spending, everything. She feels she was deprived as a child, so as an adult, whatever she wants she must have. Her cupboards are crammed with Cappuccino Mix. No one needs Cappuccino Mix. It’s not dignified. She watched Supersize Me and went straight to McDonald’s. She did the Atkins Diet ‘but with potatoes’.
And if a new chocolate bar is launched, Lizbet has to eat it that same day. She’ll ring me from the shop. She and Tim refer to chocolate as ‘brown’. She tells me how much she’s eaten, like I’m a priest, and can rub out her guilt. That’s Lizbet: she wants someone to erase the consequences of her mistakes. I find it a bit retro, going on about chocolate. It’s the twenty-first century – I think women can eat a bit of chocolate with impunity. But Lizbet hates being weak. ‘YOU ARE A BIG FATTY’ is spelled in fluorescent magnetic letters on her fridge, and I once caught her taking an instant photo of herself naked from waist to knee. ‘I’m going to stick it on the larder door,’ she explained.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘You’re going to stick a snap of your vagina on the kitchen wall. That’ll be a nice warm welcome for guests.’
I’m the maternal one. It irritates me that people are always surprised by that – as if it’s impossible to be more than one thing. I have a tough exterior, and interior, but a good mother needs that, and, by the way, I love children. They make me laugh. They’re crazy, and honest, and pure undistilled emotion, and I appreciate that – in others. I understand children. For God’s sake, Lizbet is like a child! I look after her. She’s always screwing up. Even though she has the air of being sensible, she isn’t. She’s a liability. She pays a great deal of attention to little things that don’t matter – ‘Hang on, no, not that cup, I can’t drink out of a cup that shape, get the one that Tomas painted, the purple, yellow and black one – no! – sorry, I’ve changed my mind, the bone-china one with cats on the side, yes! Great, just pour in the coffee from the other cup’ – and the big things that do matter – say, buying the house that she can afford rather than the house she wants – are ignored.
Children aren’t called ‘dependants’ for fun, Lizbet. You need a hundred grand a year to raise a kid in London. They’d been in that house three years and it was a wreck. Lizbet was a laughing stock in the Jewish community for marrying out to a man who was bad at DIY. The paintwork was flaking, the wall plaster was chipped, and still two sheets of blackout material hung from their bedroom curtain rail instead of curtains. And there was a large grease stain on the wall above the bed. When Lizbet saw me looking, she shrugged and said, ‘It’s from the previous owner’s head, I think. I don’t lean back, or else I prop the pillow up really high.’
Lizbet is so happy-go-lucky, and I don’t like happy-go-lucky people. ‘Happy-go-lucky’ is a polite phrase for ‘too lazy to try’. Just happy and lucky without trying. Her optimism borders on stupidity. Every week, she doesn’t win the lottery, and is surprised. And she thinks that pension planning is for other people. As for what she does worry about . . . ‘Cassie, can Buddhists wear fur coats?’ ‘Cassie, is it possible for a body to fart after dying?’ ‘Cassie, you know when you say, “It’s too much aggro”? “Aggro” is short for “aggravation”, so shouldn’t it be, “It’s too much aggra”?’
She’s so . . . distracted. She’s just wafted into pregnancy. She has no idea. My boss, Sophie, and I were gazing at baby Justin – asleep with an imperious look and fists clenched after a full hour of blue-faced screeching – and I thought, where’s your knuckle duster reading ‘R U TUFF ENUF’?
Fair enough if Lizbet was neutral about babies. But she regards them as an affront to her human rights. Aunt Edith once asked Lizbet when she was going to have a baby, and Lizbet said, ‘It’s private.’ Aunt Edith is elderly. She is also the person who spent every Friday of the seventies and eighties cooking the two of us veal escalopes, beef goulash, black cherry sundaes with fan wafers, choux swans (she fashioned the neck shapes out of pastry), and meringue gateaux, topped with pink icing, raspberries and crushed pistachio nuts. So, you make allowances. Lizbet doesn’t have the wit to see that the question isn’t offensive if it’s borne out of love. I mean, Aunt Edith has a subscription to Ladz Mag.
But I forget. ‘Mother’ has always been a dirty word to Lizbet. She finds mothers threatening, her own included. I hold Mummy in abject disregard, but that’s her own fault. She couldn’t really be bothered to do her job, and I don’t mean as editor of Mother & Home. When we were little we only ever played with the kids in our road, because Mummy was never at the school gates to network with other mothers and get us invited to proper places.
I misbehaved for sixteen years to get her attention and it only half worked. But I adored Aunt Edith; I saw how motherhood could be done. Aunt Edith focused, and nothing I did could shake her love. Aged four, I bit her and told her to ‘fuck it.’ (She wouldn’t let me hack the ‘magic curling hair’ off my Quick Curl Barbie with a carving knife.) Aunt Edith said, ‘That’s unacceptable behaviour, young lady. It also makes me sad because I love you, Cassie. Say sorry, let’s have a hug, and we’ll be friends.’
I always remembered that, and reminded
her of it, years later. She’d smiled and said, ‘You weren’t naughty in the slightest, Cassie. You were a normal toddler – boisterous, challenging, powerful. That’s the nature of the beast!’
Why wasn’t our mother like that?
Lizbet doesn’t see that being a mother is an important occupation, the most important occupation. No one’s suggesting that’s all she’s good for – but if they were it’s a compliment, even if, in these skewed times, it doesn’t seem to be. A good mother has to be nails. You have to be tireless, not like these City wimps who can only function on five unbroken hours of sleep a night. You have to be alert, patient, fun, resourceful, diplomatic, selfless, thoughtful, creative, clever, loving for, oh, the rest of your life. But never mind all that. What would make Lizbet truly content is if she got a three-hundred-word feature on DIY sex disasters printed on page ninety-three of the ‘Filth Issue’ of Ladz Mag.
Because she was never glamorous growing up, she needs to feel glamorous now – and while writing for Ladz Mag scrapes the barrel in glamour terms, she sees it as glamour of a sort, in that it’s slightly seedy, risqué, it suggests she’s a bit of a bad girl. (Nothing could be further from the truth.) Being a mother wouldn’t satisfy her because, in her mind, there’s no glamour in it. Duh!
She’s not qualified to be a mother. I remember how she was with me. Always making me sit on radiators. I’d do it to humour her. I looked out for Lizbet because she couldn’t even stand up for herself. She attended Hebrew classes for a year before I intervened. She hated Hebrew classes, yet she meekly trudged off to synagogue week after week, even though Mummy and Daddy were joke opponents and would have packed her off in a red bikini if she’d said, ‘No one has Hebrew classes any more. Mrs Schuller says we should be spending our Sunday mornings at sauna baths. She says they’re springing up all over the place’.
Mummy and Daddy didn’t have a clue, they flapped around with their hopeless child-rearing theories: learn the trombone, see a monkey, get some fresh air. They needed direction and discipline – which I provided. I showed them a firm hand and set boundaries, and they were far happier. But Lizbet never had the confidence to lead. That was fine when she only had her own life to ruin, but as a parent, it’s disastrous. You need to be fearless. If you’re afraid of the world, you kill your kids’ self-esteem. They see you scared, and it’s like Dorothy seeing the Wizard of Oz scared. Lizbet’s idea of being tough is penning the supermarket a polite note about a brown avocado.
Her child is doomed.
Chapter 12
I couldn’t look at Lizbet. I didn’t want to be in the same room as her. I didn’t want to be on the same planet. Everyone ooo-ing and cooing, talking about booties, even George’s parents. And I saw Mrs Hershlag’s eyes pass wistfully over me. Me, the barren career bitch. Lizbet didn’t even notice I was upset – she was totally consumed with herself and the baby. I and everyone else around her were white noise. You see that in pregnant women. Unless they’re looking at nursery furniture, their gaze doesn’t actually lock on.
She’d told me on the phone, before she told our parents, and for a minute, I was robbed of the ability to form words. Do you even know how significant that is for a barrister? No one knew how I had been feeling, for so long. I was a good performer. I preferred to keep all mess inside. You have to be one selfish sod to let another person see you, as a grown adult, snot-nosed from crying.
But some days I had to force myself to stand upright instead of cringing, heaving my heavy self around like a human question mark, because I was sure the sky was about to fall on my head. Disaster was imminent, always. At any moment, I expected the ceiling to collapse on top of me – great rocks of concrete crashing down like a biblical hail – and smash my skull to bits of eggshell.
The feeling might have coincided with news of the death of Sarah Paula, but I couldn’t tell any more. The badness was all mixed up in one nauseating swirl. Gloom had arrived, sudden and heavy as a rain cloud, and stayed. It had been over a year now, and I was used to it being there, an oppressive, dragging presence. It was like having an inoperable hump: nothing I could do about it, except maintain the pretence of pursuing my life as normal. But that was the problem. I was pursuing life – chasing after the meaning of existence – and it was eluding me.
I took it as a personal affront. Forrest Gump was wrong. ‘Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get.’ What a flawed analogy. You do know what you’re gonna get with a box of chocolates. You read the illustrated leaflet, usually to be found resting on the top layer, and it describes each filling and flavour exactly. It turned out that life was not like this at all. Every last bite was a disgusting shock.
And there was more. The truth had been creeping after me for a while and it had finally caught up. I didn’t know what to do – it was a rotten situation. At first I’d thought it was a phase, but it wasn’t. I was out of love with George.
It had always been hard for people – except George – to see what I saw in George. His mother had given him the confidence of ten men, and he expected all women to find him irresistible, even though, in a Cosmo quiz, he’d have scored nil points. For one, he was rude. We met at a Brazilian restaurant in West London. It was Lizbet’s birthday, and a friend of hers had brought him along. He sat between us and ignored me for an hour, while he explained why he was a viable candidate for Mensa and Lizbet wasn’t.
‘How much do you weigh? Right. And you’re not that tall. You’re a viscerotonic endomorph. I’ll explain. When babies are born, they’re composed of gut, muscle and brain in equal amounts, yes? However, things change. Some people grow up to have more muscle than gut – Schwarzenegger, for instance’ – all George’s references were thirty years out of date – ‘and in others, the brain develops so effectively, you get a person with more brain than gut. Me, for instance. Feel my abs. Go on. Can you pinch anything? Go on, try! Go on! See? Can’t get a grip, can you? And wouldn’t you say that my head was on the large side? To house the brain, see? Whereas, your head is medium-sized. You’re more . . . gut.’
He made me laugh. He was so sure of himself. A lot of men wouldn’t dare approach me, which I found pathetic. And if they did, they wouldn’t know what to say. George always had something to say, even if it was rubbish. In fact, you could have fed George into a sausage machine and chances were he’d still be talking until his head disappeared down the chute and emerged the other end, a frankfurter.
When he finally got round to acknowledging my presence, he said, ‘I can’t believe you’re sisters. You look nothing like each other. Who chose this place? The wine’s good, but . . . all this meat. Every five seconds I look up and there’s a man wielding a beef joint and a large knife two centimetres from my head. It’s like Friday Night at my mother’s house.’
George always referred to his parents’ home as ‘my mother’s house’, as if his father had moved out and was now living in a tent on wasteland. George certainly didn’t appreciate his father, or how much his father loved him. He once told me that his father ‘threatened me a lot, as a child’. I was surprised and disappointed, as I couldn’t think of a gentler soul than Mr Hershlag. What, exactly, had he done?
George did an impression of his father at the breakfast table, when he, George, was fifteen. ‘“If you get a degree, I buy you a car! Only if you get a degree! No degree, no car! And don’t become a junkie! All these kids I see on the street, they’re all junkies! You become a junkie, see that knife?”’ – at this point Mr Hershlag would jab a finger at the bread knife – ‘“Take it! Take it and kill me! Kill me!”’ – banging on his chest with the flat of both hands – ‘“Right here!”’
Of course George got his degree – he wasn’t going to miss out on a free car. He reminded me of myself in that he had no guilt about squeezing every last penny out of his parents. They could have been homeless in the street before he suffered the slightest twinge. In the first term of his Media, Culture and Society degree, he claimed that Birmingh
am was freezing, so Mrs Hershlag sent him money for a winter coat. He immediately spent it on . . . a winter coat. (Me: ‘Weren’t you tempted to spend it on beer?’ Him: ‘No! I was cold!’)
He was irrepressible. His old roommate at college had once described him as ‘like a shit in a toilet that wouldn’t flush down’. While this was a little harsh, the essence of the simile was correct. George always bounced back, despite your best efforts.
Initially, I was cool and frosty towards him, but he was so convinced of his own charms, I don’t think he noticed. On our first date, ordained by George twenty minutes after we met, without my consent – ‘Shoulder of what? Lamb? Ugh! Cholesterol city! No thanks!’ Turning to me: ‘I’ll take you somewhere proper to eat’ – we went to a sleek Japanese, sat on hard chairs, and ate a little raw tuna and rice. (George set the chopsticks to one side, and reached for a fork, before we were served.) I found him intriguing. He was funny, in a terse sort of way. He said what he thought, not what you wanted to hear.
It all went wrong for George when the world didn’t acknowledge his brilliance with the same rapture as his parents had. He had done well to get into the BBC (he’d claimed to be half-Russian on his CV – ‘basically, as ethnic as possible’). Oxbridge graduates were clamouring for the job he had, even though broadcast assistants were paid meanly and worked like mules, but George had always seen the BA job as a short-term position, until the commissioning editor knocked on his door and begged him to become a drama producer. But there were no vacancies. George’s only hope was that a colleague would die.