Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

by Helen Simpson

  After all, it’s important to put up a decent apologia for your life; well, it is to other people, mostly; to come up with a convincing defence, to argue your corner. It’s nothing but healthy, the way the sanguine mind does leap around looking for the advantages of any new shift in situation. And if you can’t, or won’t, you will be shunned. You will appear to be a whiner, or a malcontent. Frances knows this, and so does Sally.

  Even so they pause and turn and give each other a brief, gruff, foolish hug, with the child safely sandwiched between them.

  Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

  Dorrie stood at the edge of the early morning garden and inhaled a column of chilly air. After the mulch of soft sheets and stumbling down through the domestic rubble and crumbs and sleeping bodies, it made her gasp with delight, outside, the rough half-light of March and its menthol coldness.

  The only other creature apart from herself was next door’s cat which sauntered the length of the fence’s top edge stately as a fin de siècle roué returning from a night of pleasure. That was what she was after, the old feline assurance that she had a place here. Of course you couldn’t expect to remain inviolate; but surely there had to be some part of yourself you could call your own without causing trouble. It couldn’t all be spoken for. She watched the cat hunch its shoulders and soundlessly pour itself from the fence onto the path.

  Nowadays those few who continued to see Dorrie at all registered her as a gloomy, timid woman who had grown rather fat and over-protective of her three infants. They sighed with impatient pity to observe how easily small anxieties took possession of her, how her sense of proportion appeared to have receded along with her horizons. She was never still, she was always available, a conciliatory twittering fusspot. Since the arrival of the children, one, two and then three, in the space of four years, she had broken herself into little pieces like a biscuit and was now scattered all over the place. The urge – indeed, the necessity – to give everything, to throw herself on the bonfire, had been shocking; but now it was starting to wear off.

  Back in the warmth of her side of the bed she lay listening to Max’s breathing, and the clink and wheezing protest of a milk float, then the first front doors slamming as the trainee accountants and solicitors set off for the station. There was a light pattering across the carpet and a small round figure stood by the bed. She could see the gleam of his eyes and teeth smiling conspiratorially in the blanching dark.

  ‘Come on then,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t wake Daddy.’

  He climbed into bed and curled into her, his head on her shoulder, his face a few inches from hers, gazed into her eyes and heaved a happy sigh. They lay looking at each other, breathing in each other’s sleepy scent; his eyes were guileless, unguarded and intent, and he gave a little occasional beatific smile.

  ‘Where’s your pyjama top?’ she whispered.

  ‘Took it off,’ he whispered back. ‘Too itchy.’

  ‘It’s not itchy,’ she tutted. ‘I’ll put some special oil in your bath tonight.’

  His chest was like a huge warm baroque pearl. She satined the side of her face against it for a moment.

  ‘When are you going to stop wearing nappies at night?’ she scolded in a whisper.

  ‘When I’m four,’ he chuckled, and shifted his pumpkin padding squarely onto her lap.

  Max stirred and muttered something.

  ‘Ssssh,’ said Robin, placing a forefinger against his mother’s lips and widening his eyes for emphasis.

  They watched Max’s dark bearded face break into a yawn, a seadog or a seagod about to rally his crew. He was waking up. Robin wriggled under the bedclothes to hide. Last night it had been her under the bedclothes and Max’s hands on her head while she brought him off with her mouth. Then she had curled into him, her head on his shoulder, until he fell into a dense sleep, and she basked like a lioness in the sun. Next, gently unwinding herself from his knotty embrace she had glided along to the next room and plucked this heavy boy from his bed, standing him, sleep-dazed, in front of the lavatory, pointing the shrimp of his penis for him, whispering encouragement as the water hissed, before closing in on him with the midnight nappy.

  Max’s eyes flickered awake and he smiled at Dorrie.

  ‘Mmmm,’ he said. ‘Come here.’ He reached over and grabbed her, buried his face in her neck, and then as he reached downwards his hands encountered his son.

  ‘No! No!’ screeched Robin, laughing hectically. ‘Get away, Daddy!’

  This brought his siblings, Martin and Maxine, running from their bedroom and they hurled themselves into the heap of bodies. Max struggled out of it growling, and was gone.

  The three children shoved and biffed their way into shares of her supine body. Robin clung to his central stake, arms round her neck, head between her breasts, kicking out at attempts to supplant him. Martin hooked his legs round her waist and lay under her left arm gnawing his nails and complaining it wasn’t fair. Maxine burrowed at her right side, all elbows and knees, until she settled in the crook of her other arm, her head beside Dome’s on the pillow.

  ‘Mummy. A good heart is never proud. Is that true?’ said Maxine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was on my Little Mermaid tape. I can make my eyes squelch, listen.’

  ‘Oof, careful, Robin,’ said Dorrie, as Robin brought his head up under her chin and crashed her teeth together.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Max from the doorway.

  ‘Don’t forget we’re going out tonight,’ said Dorrie from the pillows.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Max. He looked at the heap of bodies on the bed. ‘Your mother and I were married eight years ago today,’ he said into the air, piously.

  ‘Where was I?’ said Maxine.

  ‘Not going out,’ hissed Robin, gripping Dorrie more tightly. ‘Stay inner house, Mummy.’

  ‘And I’m not going to stand for any nonsense like that,’ growled Max. He glared at his youngest son. ‘Get off your mother, she can’t move. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s all right, Max,’ said Dorrie. ‘Don’t make yourself late.’

  ‘Go away, Daddy,’ shouted Robin.

  ‘Yeah,’ joined in Martin and Maxine. ‘Go away, Daddy.’

  Max glared at them impotently, then turned on his heel like a pantomime villain. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

  ‘Yesss!’ said Robin, punching the air with his dimpled fist. The bed heaved with cheers and chuckles.

  ‘You shouldn’t talk to Daddy like that,’ said Dorrie.

  ‘Horble Daddy,’ said Robin dismissively.

  ‘He’s not horble,’ huffed Dorrie. ‘Horrible. Time to get up.’

  They all squealed and clutched her harder, staking her down with sharp elbows and knees wherever they could.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ complained Dorrie. ‘Come on, it really is time to get up.’ And at last she extracted herself like a slow giantess from the cluster of children, gently detaching their fingers from her limbs and nightdress.

  When she turned back from drawing the curtains, Martin was painting his shins with a stick of deodorant while Maxine sat on the floor, galloping her round bare heels in the cups of a discarded bra, pulling on the straps like a jockey, with shouts of ‘Ya! Ya! Giddy up boy!’ Robin ran round and round his mother’s legs, wrapping and rewrapping her nightdress. Then he rolled on the carpet with both hands round her ankle, a lively leg-iron, singing alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

  ‘Don’t do that, Martin,’ said Dorrie as she climbed into yesterday’s jeans and sweatshirt. But he was already on to something else, crossing the floor with a bow-legged rocking gait, a pillow across his shoulders, groaning under its imaginary weight and bulk.

  ‘I’m Robin Hood carrying a deer,’ he grinned back over his shoulder. Maxine roared with laughter, hearty as a Tudor despot.

  ‘Come on, darlings,’ Dorrie expostulated feebly. ‘Help me get you dressed.’

  They ran around her and across the landing, ignoring her, scre
eching, singing, bellowing insults and roaring into the stairwell. She pulled vests and socks and jumpers from various drawers, stepping around them like a slave during a palace orgy. Their separate energies whizzed through the air, colliding constantly, as random as the weather. She grabbed Martin as he shot past and started to strip off his nightclothes.

  ‘No!’ he yelled and tore himself free, running off trouserless. He was as quick as she was slow. It was like wading through mud after dragonflies.

  ‘I hate you!’ he was screaming at Maxine now for some reason. ‘I wish you were dead!’

  ‘Now now,’ said Dorrie. ‘That’s not very nice, is it.’

  Then there were pinches and thumps and full-chested bellows of rage. By the time she had herded them down for the cornflakes stage, they had lived through as many variants of passion as occur in the average Shakespeare play. She looked at their momentarily woebegone faces streaked with tears of fury over whichever was the most recent hair-pulling or jealousy or bruising, she had lost track, and said with deliberate cheer, ‘Goodness, if we could save all the tears from getting ready in the mornings, if we could collect them in a bucket, I could use them to do the washing up.’

  All three faces broke into wreathed smiles and appreciative laughter at this sally, and then the row started up again. They did not take turns to talk, but cut across each other’s words with reckless thoughtlessness. She was trying to think through the hairbrushing, shoe-hunting, tooth-cleaning, packed lunch for Martin, empty toilet roll cylinder for Maxine’s Miss Atkinson, with an eye on the clock, but it was a non-starter.

  ‘SHUSH,’ she shouted. ‘I can’t hear myself THINK.’

  ‘Are you thinking?’ asked Maxine curiously.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Hurry UP.’

  It was not in fact possible to think under these conditions; no train of thought could ever quite leave the platform, let alone arrive at any sort of destination. This was what the mothers at the school gates meant when they said they were brain-dead, when they told the joke about the secret of childcare being a frontal lobotomy or a bottle in front of me. This was why she had started waking in the small hours, she realised, even though heaven knew she was tired enough without that, even though she was still being woken once or twice a night by one or the other of them; not Max because he had to be fresh for work and anyway they wouldn’t want him. They wanted her. But when they were all safe, breathing regularly, asleep, quiet, she was able at last to wait for herself to grow still, to grow still and alive so that the sediment settled and things grew clearer. So that she could think.

  ‘Mrs Piper said Jonathan had nits and she sent him home,’ said Martin, lifting his face up. She was brushing his hair, and pushed his brow back down against her breastbone. Then, more muffled, came, ‘Don’t make me look like Elvis de Presto.’

  ‘What I want to know, Mum,’ he said as she pushed him back and knelt at Maxine’s feet to struggle with her shoe buckles. ‘What I need to know, nobody will tell me,’ he continued crossly, ‘is, is God there, can he hold the whole world in his hand – or is he like the Borrowers? I mean, what is he? Is he a man? Is he a cow?’

  She was working grimly against the clock now. Her hands shook. She was shot to hell. Maxine was complaining of a blister on her little toe. Dorrie ran off upstairs like a heifer for the plaster roll and cut a strip and carefully fit it round the pea-sized top joint of the toe. Maxine moaned and screamed, tears squirted from her eyes, her face became a mask of grief as she felt the plaster arrangement inside her sock even more uncomfortable once strapped into her shoe. It all had to be removed again and a square quarter inch of plaster carefully applied like a miniature postage stamp to the reddened area.

  ‘We’re late,’ hissed Dorrie, but even in the middle of this felt a great sick thud of relief that it was not two years ago when she had been racing against the clock to get to work pretending to them there that all this had not just happened. When at last she had caved in, when she had given in her notice, it felt like giving up the world, the flesh and the devil. It had been terrible at first, the loss of breadth, the loss of adult company. There were the minutes at various school gates with the other mothers, but you couldn’t really call that proper talk, not with all the babies and toddlers on at them. After all she had not managed to keep both worlds up in the air. She knew she had failed.

  She picked Robin up and jammed him into the buggy.

  ‘Teeth!’ said Martin, baring his own at her. ‘You’ve forgotten about teeth!’

  ‘Never mind,’ she said through hers, gritted, manoeuvring the buggy across the front doorstep. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Martin, pulling his school jumper up to his eyes and goggling at himself in front of the hall mirror. ‘Burglars don’t show their noses, Mum. Look. Mum.’

  These days Martin flew off towards the playground as soon as they reached the school gate, for which she was profoundly grateful. For his first five years he had been full of complaints, fault-finding and irritability. He still flew into towering rages and hit her and screamed until he was pink or blue in the face, often several times a day. As he was her first child this had come as a shock. She even asked the doctor about it, and the doctor had smiled and said his sounded a fiery little nature but he would no doubt learn to control himself in time. ‘Also, all behaviour is learned behaviour,’ said the doctor reprovingly. ‘Never shout back or you’ll just encourage him.’ Plenty of the other mothers had children who behaved similarly, she noticed after a while. You just had to take it, and wait for time to pass. It could take years. It did. He was loud, waspish, frequently agitated and a constant prey to boredom. When she saw him nibbling his nails, tired and white as a cross elf, she would draw him onto her lap and make a basket of her arms around him. She saw his lack of ease in the world, and grieved for him, and knew it was her fault because she was his mother.

  Maxine was less irritable but more manipulative. Her memory was terrifyingly precise and long – yesterday, for example, she had raged at Dorrie for stealing a fruit pastille, having remembered the colour of the top one from several hours before. She relished experiments and emotional mayhem. Her new trick this week was to fix you with her pale pretty eye, and say, quite coolly, ‘I hate you.’ This poleaxed Dorrie. And yet this little girl was also utterly unglazed against experience, as fresh and easily hurt as one of those new daffodil shoots.

  Only when Robin was born had she realised what it was to have what is commonly known as an easy child. No rhyme nor reason to it. Same treatment, completely different. They were as they were as soon as they were born, utterly different from each other. That was something at least. It couldn’t all be her fault.

  Now it was halfway through Martin’s first school year and he had settled in well. It was wonderful. She glanced in passing at other less fortunate mothers talking low and urgent with their infants, entwined and unlinking, like lovers, bargaining with furtive tears, sobs, clinging arms, angry rejections, pettishness and red eyes.

  It was the same when she dropped Maxine off at nursery school half an hour later. On the way out she and Robin passed a little girl of three or so saying to her mother, ‘But Mummy I miss you;’ and the mother, smartly dressed, a briefcase by her, rather tightly reasoning with her, murmuring, glancing at her watch. Dorrie felt herself break into a light sympathetic sweat.

  The little scene brought back Robin’s trial morning there last week. He had refused to walk through the nursery school’s entrance and was shouting and struggling as she carried him in. She had set him down by a low table of jigsaw puzzles and told him sternly that she would sit over there in that corner for five minutes, that his sister was just over there in the Wendy house, and that he must let her go quietly. From the toy kitchen he had brought her a plastic cupcake with a fat ingratiating smile.

  ‘Here y’are,’ he’d said.

  ‘Save it for when I come to pick you up,’ Dorrie had said, handing it back to him, pity and coldness battling through her like warri
ng blood corpuscles. At last he had given her a resigned kiss on the cheek and gone off to the painting table without another look. (Two hours alone, for the first time in months. Wait till he’s at school, said the mothers; you won’t know yourself.) She dashed a tear away, sneering at her own babyishness.

  Now, today, there was this precious time with Robin. He liked to be around her, within a few yards of her, to keep her in his sight, but he did not pull the stuffing out of her as the other two did. He did not demand her thoughts and full attention like Maxine; nor that she should identify and change colour like litmus paper with his every modulation of emotion as it occurred, which was what Martin seemed to need. Sometimes those two were so extravagantly exacting, they levied such a fantastic rate of slavish fealty that they left her gasping for air.

  No, Robin talked to his allies and foes, sotto voce, in the subterranean fields which ran alongside the privet-hedged landscape in which they moved together. He sent out smiles or little waves while Dorrie was working, and took breaks for a hug or to pause and drink squash, him on her lap like a stalwart beanbag.

  She sorted the dirty whites from the coloured wash up on the landing, and he put them into the washing basket for her. Up and down the stairs she went with round baskets of washing, the smell of feet and bottoms, five sets, fresh and smelly, all different. Robin stuffed the garments into the washing machine one by one, shutting the door smartly and saying ‘There!’ and smiling with satisfaction. She did some handwashing at the sink, and he pushed a chair over across the floor to stand on, and squeezed the garments, then took handfuls of the soap bubbles that wouldn’t drain away and trotted to and from the bucket on the mat with them.

  ‘What a helpful boy you are!’ she said. He beamed.

  ‘Now I’m going to iron some things including Daddy’s shirt for tonight,’ she said. ‘So you must sit over there because the iron is dangerous.’

  ‘Hot,’ he agreed, with a sharp camp intake of breath.