Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

by Helen Simpson

  He sat down on the floor with some toys in a corner of the kitchen and as she ironed she looked over now and then at his soft thoughtfully frowning face as he tried to put a brick into a toy car, the curve of his big soft cheek like a mushroom somehow, and his lovely close-to-the-head small ears. He gave an unconscious sigh of concentration; his frequent sighs came right from deep in the diaphragm. Squab or chub or dab had been the words which best expressed him until recently, but now he was growing taller and fining down, his limbs had lost their chubbiness and his body had become his own.

  No longer could she kiss his eyelids whenever she wished, nor pretend to bite his fingers, nor even stroke his hair with impunity. He was a child now, not a baby, and must be accorded his own dignity. The baby was gone, almost.

  Abruptly she put the iron on its heel and swooped down on him, scooped him up and buried her nose in his neck with throaty growling noises. He huffed and shouted and laughed as they swayed struggling by the vegetable rack. She tickled him and they sank down to the lino laughing and shouting, then he rubbed his barely-there velvet nose against hers like an Eskimo, his eyes close and dark and merry, inches from hers, gazing in without shame or constraint.

  It was going to be a long series of leave-takings from now on, she thought; goodbye and goodbye and goodbye; that had been the case with the others, and now this boy was three and a half. Unless she had another. But then Max would leave. Or so he said. This treacherous brainless greed for more of the same, it would finish her off if she wasn’t careful. If she wasn’t already.

  She took Max’s shirt upstairs on a hanger and put the rest of the ironing away. What would she wear tonight? She looked at her side of the wardrobe. Everything that wasn’t made of T-shirt or sweatshirt fabric was too tight for her now. Unenthusiastically she took down an old red shirt-dress, looser than the rest, and held it up against her reflection in the full-length mirror. She used to know what she looked like, she used to be interested. Now she barely recognised herself. She peeled off her sweatshirt and jeans and pulled the dress on. She looked enormous. The dress was straining at the seams. She looked away fast, round the bedroom, the unmade bed like a dog basket, the mess everywhere, the shelves of books on the wall loaded with forbidden fruit, impossible to broach, sealed off by the laws of necessity from her maternal eyes. During the past five years, reading a book had become for her an activity engaged in at somebody else’s expense.

  The doorbell rang and she answered it dressed as she was. Robin hid behind her.

  ‘Gemma’s got to be a crocodile tomorrow,’ said Sally, who lived two roads away. ‘We’re desperate for green tights, I’ve tried Mothercare and Boots and then I thought of Maxine. I don’t suppose?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dorrie, ‘Only red or blue.’

  ‘Worth a try,’ said Sally, hopeless. ‘You look dressed up.’

  ‘I look fat,’ said Dorrie. ‘Wedding anniversary,’ she added tersely.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sally. ‘How many years?’

  ‘Eight,’ said Dorrie. ‘Bronze. Sally, can you remember that feeling before all the family stuff kicked in, I know it’s marvellous but. You know, that spark, that feeling of fun and – and lightness, somehow.’

  Immediately Sally replied, ‘It’s still there in me but I don’t know for how much longer.’

  ‘You could try Verity,’ said Dorrie. ‘I seem to remember she put Hannah in green tights last winter to go with that holly berry outfit.’

  ‘So she did!’ said Sally. ‘I’ll give her a ring.’

  ‘Kill,’ whispered Robin, edging past the women into the tiny front garden; ‘Die, megazord,’ and he crushed a snail shell beneath his shoe. Half hidden beneath the windowsill he crouched in a hero’s cave. Across the dangerous river of the front path he had to save his mother, who was chatting to a wicked witch. He started round the grape hyacinths as though they were on fire and squeezed his way along behind the lilac bush, past cobwebs and worms, until he burst out fiercely into the space behind the hedge. She was being forced to walk the plank. He leaped into the ocean and cantered sternly across the waves.

  They were late coming out of nursery school, and Dorrie stood with the other mothers and nannies in the queue. Some were chatting, some were sagging and gazing into the middle distance.

  In front of her, two women were discussing a third just out of earshot.

  ‘Look at her nails,’ said the one directly in front of Dorrie. ‘You can always tell. Painted fingernails mean a rubbish mother.’

  ‘I sometimes put nail polish on if I’m going out in the evening,’ said the other.

  ‘If,’ scoffed the first. ‘Once in a blue moon. And then you make a mess of it, I bet. You lose your touch. Anyway, you’ve got better things to do with your time, you give your time to your children, not to primping yourself up.’

  Robin pushed his head between Dorrie’s knees and clutched her thighs, a mini Atlas supporting the world.

  Dorrie saw it was Patricia from Hawthornden Avenue.

  ‘I was thinking of doing my nails today,’ said Dorrie.

  ‘What on earth for?’ laughed Patricia. She was broad in the beam, clever but narrow-minded.

  ‘Wedding anniversary,’ said Dorrie. ‘Out for a meal.’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Patricia triumphantly, as though she had proved some point.

  ‘I had a blazing row with my husband last night,’ said Patricia’s friend. ‘And I was just saying to myself, Right that’s it, I was dusting myself down ready for the off, when I thought, No, hang on a minute, I can’t go. I’ve got three little children, I’ve got to stay.’

  Patricia’s eyebrows were out of sight, she reeled from side to side laughing. They all laughed, looking sideways at each other, uneasy.

  ‘Have you noticed what happens now that everyone’s splitting up,’ snorted Patricia’s friend. ‘I’ve got friends, their divorce comes through and do you know they say it’s amazing! They lose weight and take up smoking and have all the weekends to themselves to do whatever they want in because the men take the children off out then.’

  ‘Divorce,’ said Dorrie ruminatively. ‘Yes. You get to thirty-seven, married, three kids, and you look in the mirror, at least I did this morning, and you realise – it’s a shock – you realise nothing else is supposed to happen until you die. Or you spoil the pattern.’

  The nursery school doors opened at last. Dorrie held her arms out and Maxine ran into them. Maxine had woken screaming at five that morning, clutching her ear, but then the pain had stopped and she had gone back to sleep again. Dorrie had not. That was when she had gone downstairs and into the garden.

  ‘The doctor’s going to fit us in after her morning surgery, so I must run,’ said Dorrie, scooping Maxine up to kiss her, strapping Robin into the buggy.

  ‘Mum,’ called Maxine, as they galloped slowly along the pavement, ‘Mum, Gemma says I must only play with her or she won’t be my friend. But I told her Suzanne was my best friend. Gemma’s only second best.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorrie. ‘Mind that old lady coming towards us.’

  ‘Suzanne and me really wanted Gemma to play Sour Lemons but Shoshaya wanted her to play rabbits,’ panted Maxine. ‘Then Shoshaya cried and she told Miss Atkinson. And Miss Atkinson told us to let her play. But Gemma wanted to play Sour Lemons with me and Suzanne and she did.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorrie. She must get some milk, and extra cheese for lunch. She ought to pick up Max’s jacket from the cleaners. Had she got the ticket? Had she got enough cash? Then there was Max’s mother’s birthday present to be bought and packed up and posted off to Salcombe, and a card. She had to be thinking of other people all the time or the whole thing fell apart. It was like being bitten all over by soldier ants without being able to work up enough interest to deal with them. Sometimes she found herself holding her breath for no reason at all.

  ‘Why do you always say yes?’ said Maxine.

  ‘What?’ said Dorrie. They stood at the kerb waiting to
cross. She looked up at the top deck of the bus passing on the other side and saw a young man sitting alone up there. He happened to meet her eye for a moment as she stood with the children, and the way he looked at her, through her, as though she were a greengrocer’s display or a parked car, made her feel less than useless. She was a rock or stone or tree. She was nothing.

  ‘Why do you always say yes?’ said Maxine.

  ‘What?’ said Dorrie.

  ‘Why do you always say YES!’ screamed Maxine in a rage.

  ‘Cross now,’ said Dorrie, grabbing her arm and hauling her howling across the road as she pushed the buggy.

  They turned the corner into the road where the surgery was and saw a small boy running towards them trip and go flying, smack down onto the pavement.

  ‘Oof,’ said Maxine and Robin simultaneously.

  The child held up his grazed hands in grief and started to split the air with his screams. His mother came lumbering up with an angry face.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you! You see? God was looking down and he saw you were getting out of control. You wouldn’t do what I said, would you. And God said, right, and He made you fall down like that and that’s what happens when you’re like that. So now maybe you’ll listen the next time!’

  Dorrie looked away, blinking. That was another thing, it had turned her completely soft. The boy’s mother yanked him up by the arm, and dragged him past, moralising greedily over his sobs.

  ‘She should have hugged him, Mummy, shouldn’t she,’ said Maxine astutely.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorrie, stopping to blow her nose.

  The tattered covers of the waiting room magazines smiled over at them in a congregation of female brightness and intimacy. The women I see in the course of a day, thought Dorrie, and it’s women only (except Max at the end of the day), we can’t really exchange more than a sentence or two of any interest because of our children. At this age they need us all the time; and anyway we often have little in common except femaleness and being in the same boat. Why should we? She scanned the leadlines while Robin and Maxine chose a book from the scruffy pile – ‘How to dump him: twenty ways that work’, ‘Your hair: what does it say about you?’ ‘Countdown to your best orgasm.’ Those were the magazines for the under-thirties, the free-standing feisty girls who had not yet crossed the ego line. And of course some girls never did cross the ego line. Like men, they stayed the stars of their own lives. Then there was this lot, this lot here with words like juggle and struggle across their covers, these were for her and her like – ‘Modern motherhood: how do you measure up?’; ‘Is your husband getting enough: time management and you’; ‘Doormat etiquette: are you too nice?’

  Am I too nice? thought Dorrie. They even took that away. Nice here meant weak and feeble, she knew what it meant. Nice was now an insult, whereas self had been the dirty word when she was growing up. For girls, anyway. She had been trained to think of her mother and not be a nuisance. She couldn’t remember ever saying (let alone being asked) what she wanted. To the point of thinking she didn’t really mind what she wanted as long as other people were happy. It wasn’t long ago.

  The doctor inspected Maxine’s eardrum with her pointed torch, and offered a choice.

  ‘You can leave it and hope it goes away. That’s what they’d do on the Continent.’

  ‘But then it might flare up in the night and burst the eardrum. That happened to Martin. Blood on the pillow. Two sets of grommets since then.’

  ‘Well, tant pis, they’d say. They’re tough on the Continent. Or it’s the usual Amoxcyllin.’

  ‘I don’t like to keep giving them that. But perhaps I could have some in case it gets very painful later. And not give it otherwise.’

  ‘That’s what I’d do,’ said the doctor, scribbling out a prescription.

  ‘How are you finding it, being back at work?’ asked Dorrie timidly but with great interest. The doctor had just returned after her second baby and second five-month maternity leave.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ smiled the doctor, rubbing her eyes briefly, tired blue eyes kind in her worn face. ‘In fact of course it’s easier. I mean, it’s hard in terms of organisation, hours, being at full stretch. But it’s still easier than being at home. With tiny children you really have to be so . . . selfless.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorrie, encouraged. ‘It gets to be a habit. In the end you really do lose yourself. Lost. But then they start to be not tiny.’

  ‘Lost!’ said Maxine. ‘Who’s lost? What you talking about, Mum? Who’s lost?’

  The doctor glanced involuntarily at her watch.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dorrie, bustling the children over to the door.

  ‘Not at all,’ said the doctor. She did look tired. ‘Look after yourself.’

  Look after yourself, thought Dorrie as she walked the children home, holding her daughter’s hand as she skipped and pulled at her. She glanced down at her hand holding Maxine’s, plastic shopping bags of vegetables over her wrist, and her nails looked uneven, not very clean. According to the nursery school queue, that meant she was a good mother. She did nothing for herself. She was a vanity-free zone. Broken nails against that tight red dress wouldn’t be very alluring, but all that was quite beyond her now. By schooling herself to harmlessness, constant usefulness to others, she had become a big fat zero.

  By the time they got home Dorrie was carrying Robin straddled African-style across her front, and he was alternately sagging down protesting, then straightening his back and climbing her like a tree. He had rebelled against the buggy, so she had folded it and trailed it behind her, but when he walked one of his shoes hurt him; she knew the big toenail needed cutting but whenever his feet were approached he set up a herd-of-elephants roar. She made a mental note to creep up with the scissors while he slept. I can’t see how the family would work if I let myself start wanting things again, thought Dorrie; give me an inch and I’d run a mile, that’s what I’m afraid of.

  Indoors, she peeled vegetables while they squabbled and played around her legs. She wiped the surfaces while answering long strings of zany questions which led up a spiral staircase into the wild blue nowhere.

  ‘I know when you’re having a thought, Mummy,’ said Maxine astutely. ‘Because when I start to say something then you close your eyes.’

  ‘Can I have my Superman suit?’ said Robin.

  ‘In a minute,’ said Dorrie, who was tying up a plastic sack of rubbish.

  ‘Not in a minute,’ said Robin. ‘Now.’

  The thing about small children was that they needed things all day long. They wanted games set up and tears wiped away and a thousand small attentions. This was all fine until you started to do something else round them, or something that wasn’t just a basic menial chore, she thought, dragging the hoover out after burrowing in the stacking boxes for the Superman suit. You had to be infinitely elastic and adaptable; all very laudable but this had the concomitant effect of slowly but surely strangling your powers of concentration.

  Then Superman needed help in blowing his nose, and next he wanted his cowboys and Indians reached down from the top of the cupboard. She forgot what she was thinking about.

  Now she was chopping onions finely as thread so that Martin would not be able to distinguish their texture in the meatballs and so spit them out. (Onions were good for their immune systems, for their blood.) She added these to the minced lamb and mixed in eggs and breadcrumbs then shaped the mixture into forty tiny globes, these to bubble away in a tomato sauce, one of her half-dozen flesh-concealing ruses against Maxine’s incipient vegetarianism. (She knew it was technically possible to provide enough protein for young children from beans as long as these were eaten in various careful conjunctions with other beans – all to do with amino acids – but she was not wanting to plan and prepare even more separate meals – Max had his dinner later in the evening – not just yet anyway – or she’d be simmering and peeling till midnight.)

  The whole pattern of family life hung fo
r a vivid moment above the chopping board as a seamless cycle of nourishment and devoural. And after all, children were not teeth extracted from you. Perhaps it was necessary to be devoured.

  Dorrie felt sick and faint as she often did at this point in the day, so she ate a pile of tepid left-over mashed potato and some biscuits while she finished clearing up and peace-keeping. The minutes crawled by. She wanted to lie down on the lino and pass out.

  Maxine’s nursery school crony, Suzanne, came to play after lunch. Dorrie helped them make a shop and set up tins of food and jars of dried fruit, but they lost interest after five minutes and wanted to do colouring in with felt tips. Then they had a fight over the yellow. Then they played with the Polly Pockets, and screamed, and hit each other. Now, now, said Dorrie, patient but intensely bored, as she pulled them apart and calmed them down and cheered them up.

  At last it was time to drop Suzanne off and collect Martin. Inside the school gates they joined the other mothers, many of whom Dorrie now knew by name or by their child’s name, and waited at the edge of the playground for the release of their offspring.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything about Wednesday until Monday,’ said Thomas’ mother to a woman named Marion. A note had been sent back in each child’s reading folder the previous day, announcing that the last day before half term would finish at twelve. The women who had part-time jobs now started grumbling about this, and making convoluted webs of arrangements. ‘If you drop Neil off at two then my neighbour will be there, you remember, he got on with her last time all right, that business with the spacehopper; then Verity can drop Kirsty by after Tumble-tots and I’ll be back with Michael and Susan just after three-thirty. Hell! It’s ballet. Half an hour later. Are you sure that’s all right with you?’

  ‘They’re late,’ said Thomas’ mother, glancing at her watch.

  ‘So your youngest will be starting nursery after Easter,’ said Marion to Dorrie. ‘You won’t know yourself.’

  ‘No,’ said Dorrie. She reached down to ruffle Robin’s feathery hair; he was playing around her legs.