Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

by Helen Simpson

  ‘I would love to hold a baby again,’ I said, thinking back to that good dense beanbag weight.

  ‘For half an hour,’ she said shortly, struggling inside a hiss of silk. ‘I’m not that keen on babies per se.’ Her head surfaced above the glinting tussore and she scowled. She really did look impressive when she scowled, her features baroque and curly round the long straight nose.

  ‘All those vile health visitors in hospital moralising about breast-feeding,’ she shuddered.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to mention antibodies, just for fun, but I thought she might punch me in the face.

  When I had my daughter, I expressed my milk at home and at work; the freezer hoarded those precious cubes for the nanny to defrost; I carried the agonising breast pump round in my handbag as reverently as if it were a holy relic. The milk I managed to collect in the Ladies at work I stored at the back of the office fridge in a clearly-marked bottle until I could take it home. I stopped all that rather abruptly when my secretary one day came and whispered to me that there was a rumour that the boys in Sales were adding vodka. To the milk. Which is the sort of thing that seems mere infantile fun before you have a baby, but cruelty itself afterwards. I could see I might have seemed too earnest to them about the baby-feeding business. They simply couldn’t begin to imagine. That was almost seven years ago, though.

  ‘Have you got a good nanny?’ I asked as I pulled on a stretchy velvet skirt like pliable moss.

  ‘I loathe her with a passion,’ she said, her voice muffled as she drew the dress back up. ‘So do the children. But she’s excellent, she runs the entire domestic show, I couldn’t do without her. Anyway it’s good for them to realise that life isn’t just about what they want all the time. It’s not a picnic.’

  Whenever I ache for another baby, I think about the whole nanny business and think again. One child was fine. I mean, it was too much for my husband. In the year after she was born, he said he was wilting, he no longer felt free. (Do you know, that’s exactly how I felt.) Then in the second year he said, ‘I don’t feel I can grow unless I leave,’ and, dashing a manly tear from his eye, he left. I’ve kept the same nanny, for whom it is an ideal job. Nannies tend to jump ship at new babies, but I didn’t rock the boat and now she’s like my wife.

  I looked at the glamorous velvet against my thighs, its pile as close as sheep-nibbled grass, soaking up light and sound.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be covered with this all over,’ I said dreamily, ‘Like a cat.’

  ‘What,’ she said, frowning. ‘A catsuit?’

  ‘What’s a catsuit?’

  For an instant I saw a cat unzip its fur and step out naked into the sun. I caught my eye in the mirror above the basin. Some days I look at my face – I might be a bit tired – and find myself thinking, That could do with a press with a damp cloth. Time marches on. Recently a graininess like slub silk has appeared in the valley between my breasts, where a few months ago all was perfectly smooth and unmarked. It’s more obvious after sleep, and rather fascinating to see age approaching in leaps and bounds. The man for whom I had not been able to spare the time was suddenly upon me, an excellent weight, for those few ideal moments when my knees had been drawn up into the made-to-measure hollows of his armpits.

  ‘It’s hot in here,’ I said, and heaved another sigh.

  In that cramped washroom space, trying not to catch each other’s elbows or noses as we pulled garments over our heads, tugged others along our thighs, eyes averted, up in the air, musing apparently on other things, I caught glimpses of Isobel’s baby-packed belly and of her extra-long limbs, more bone and health than is usually a woman’s share, and wondered for a moment how she and her husband had sex together. Did she go up and catch him by the lapel like a judo wrestler? Did he rugby tackle her from behind and bring her down like that? Or did she collapse elegantly onto a chaise longue, a giraffe, a folding ruler, gradually succumbing? Perhaps there was no surrender; possibly she was proactive in her rapprochement with her husband, chucking him under the chin, bearhugging him, exchanging sportive punches. Hard to imagine how a very tall strong woman comports herself here. Shrinking and passivity would look ridiculous, like a mountain trying to be a mouse. You’d have to live up to your stature, be splendid, remote, brave, ungirlish. To be big and tall and spiritless would be worse than being little and short and spiritless; as somehow more of a waste, like an uninhabited tenement building. I reflected on the spite tall women endure, as though they’re not entitled to that extra length of bone, as though there’s something risible about it; and, frequently, their woundedness in the face of this, the huddled quality which makes them the diametrical opposite of so many short men who go round causing trouble, demanding more space and attention than they were born with. Than their mothers could give them.

  Anyway, there was nothing passive or spiritless about Isobel. She was full of power. Back in the shop where we went to stand in front of the long mirror, a sweet-faced young salesgirl had attached herself to her splendour, eyeing her with the shrewdness of a lover, pulling out this, then this, then that for her to try. Despite herself, Isobel was impressed.

  ‘That on you,’ I said excitedly of the strange item the girl had persuaded Isobel to try, pelisse-like but sleeved, pink and fawn and minutely pleated as the gills on the underside of a field mushroom. ‘That’s so clever, like Mme de Sevigné meets Simone de Beauvoir.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said, staring hard at herself in the mirror.

  ‘I think it’s right for you,’ murmured the salesgirl.

  She was some fifteen years younger than either of us, a few inches of golden stomach open to the air, her navel pierced with a diamond-tipped silver ring. Isobel and I are both in our mid-thirties, the age of heroes in Russian novels, halfway through the threescore years and ten.

  ‘Try this,’ said the girl to Isobel, holding against her a dress in a green the violent colour of a cricket pitch before a thunderstorm.

  ‘Yes,’ said Isobel slowly, nodding.

  The girl dropped an acid-yellow mantilla over her left shoulder and we let out our collective breath with a hiss. She smiled in triumph.

  After that, Isobel was in the buying vein. Straight on to the yes pile went a jacket the good honest colour of carrots and their paler core; a grey linen suit with the mauveness of dry earth; a blue-and-white dress like a willow-patterned teacup.

  I cannot imagine what colour has to do with emotion, but the two are certainly inextricable. When I call my daughter to mind, I see her pale hot eyes, a furious light blue, fair-fringed, and the coral-freckled pink pallor of her father’s thin skin. My best friend (to use my daughter’s terminology) appears, and her celadon eyes are full of understanding without hardness, translucent, like sage backlit or the clear green of chives, their colour and light remarkable as if reflected off a silver plate.

  When I think of women I know, I always see their eyes; with men, I see their mouths, their hands, the shape of their heads. I’ve tried to imagine why this is, and can only conclude that it’s because women and men still do not fully meet each other’s gaze.

  Isobel’s mobile phone sang out in muffled urgency from her bag. It was buried beneath a heap of bias-cut frangipani-petalled skirts and pinstriped peignoirs, pink plush toreador pants and a richly ribboned peajacket.

  It rang and rang.

  She looked at the heap of clothes as though it cradled a howling baby. She scowled, and the frown line between her brows was like a fault-line running clean through her.

  ‘Leave it,’ I said. ‘I can’t even hear it.’

  ‘It might be important,’ she said.

  I shrugged.

  It stopped after a while.

  Both of us ought to have been somewhere else. Both of us had too much to do. Her time is so precious that it is charged out to other people at a pound a minute. Five pounds a minute. Ten!

  I never have enough time. I work an eleven-hour day, excluding commuting. That means my nanny has to work a th
irteen-hour day. I have to be out before seven in the morning, and if I’m lucky I’m back to kiss my daughter goodnight.

  Isobel’s words floated back to me from that high-flying FT interview. ‘It’s unreal to say you can balance work and children. At the end of the day you have to make up your mind whether you’re going to bake cakes with them or go to work.’

  Cakes again! Why do hard-working women always bring cakes into it when they’re discussing childcare? Nobody bakes cakes these days, they’re difficult to cook and bad for us. Surely we should be more concerned about the impossibility of persuading the childminder to prepare, and then to persuade the children to eat, plain fresh food. That’s invisible work all right; that’s a labour of love. But no, it’s always cakes that are mentioned. It’s obviously something to do with having our cake and eating it.

  ‘Do you feel guilty?’ I asked Isobel.

  ‘What about?’ she said.

  ‘Work,’ I mumbled. ‘The children.’

  ‘Why should I?’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to be financially dependent on your partner, then you have to work. That’s obvious.’

  How strange, I thought; that sounds just like the sort of thing you say before you have children. And after all the what my ex-husband would term ‘personal growth’ I’ve been through in recent years, nothing is obvious to me any more.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘guilt is not a useful emotion.’

  I almost fell on the floor. I had never before considered emotion in terms of its usefulness. I was amazed.

  ‘Try this,’ said Isobel, surprising me again.

  And so I tried on a long peculiar dress, yellow as a pear with mulberry-stained panels from armpit to hem, and a sash which tied over the stomach making a present of the wearer like the bow on a box of chocolates. It was a wild figment. It was unhinged. And yet I stood between big Isobel and the little salesgirl and we all smiled at the mirror, even Isobel, that expert shopping smile. The dress was made for me.

  The salesgirl held up her fingertips in some cabalistic continental sign indicating perfection. I don’t look at my reflection much these days, but now I was doing so and felt rather shy, like laughing, as though seeing a once-close friend after a long time. Isobel said. ‘That’s you. It’s got that look you have. Don’t mind me saying so.’

  She was a little embarrassed. After all, we didn’t know each other from Adam. These were intimate exchanges. And yet we probably saw the point of each other, the visual point, more than our husbands, or ex-husbands, did.

  Do you know that old euphemism ‘a bit of the other’? To me it suggests a different world just on the edge of our own, a middle-earth free of the usual cares and weights. Well, this dress was a bit of the other, it was what you might wear to a middle-earth party. I felt aerated and energised, the very opposite of the creeping dismay which descends when you buy and immediately know you should not have bought, so that the new garment dogs you grimly, haunts you miserably, to flap at you from the touchline of your dreams.

  As for Isobel, she had accumulated a heap of finery and was now standing frowning by the till while they totted up how much it would cost. She looked like a baffled monarch, unable to believe that she was preparing to hand over vast sums to these illusionists.

  ‘I think these things are right for you,’ said the salesgirl consolingly. She smiled and nodded her head and wandered back to her patch.

  We were now in the hands of two assiduous bustling boys. One was removing the price tags and the other was folding and wrapping.

  ‘This gilet, it does not have a ticket,’ said the first boy. “Ow much is it?’

  The second boy raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘One hundred fifty? Two hundred, I think.’

  He shrugged, and held it in the air, hallooing up to his colleague in the chemise gallery.

  ‘’Ow much is this, Gianni?’

  ‘Three hundred.’

  ‘Three hundred,’ he repeated, turning back, unblinking.

  ‘Three unnerun fifty,’ called someone from another corner of the shop.

  Figures ricocheted around in the air, as at an auction.

  ‘No, three hundred,’ came the final estimate from the woman at the till, chimed out as though announcing a bargain.

  Isobel moved her head from side to side as if she had been swimming and was trying to shake the water from her ears.

  After such an exchange in Wurstigkeit, everything is so unreal that payment becomes something oddly casual and insouciant. You are anaesthetised against the usual anxiety at handing over money. It is pure thaumaturgy. I remembered my own first visit here, years ago, when I had asked the price of something, and politely scoffed at the answer and walked out. Then I’d walked around the narrow streets thinking about the silly little garment in question, and it was just like coming down with flu. Actual feverishness joined forces with a sense of suddenly lowered resistance and I had gone back in and handed over my money.

  ‘You’ve got to hand it to them,’ I quipped.

  Isobel gave a wan smile.

  ‘Let’s see,’ she said, ‘I’d have to wear that dress eight hundred times before it came down to thirty pence a wearing. So that’s twenty-seven times a year until I’m sixty-five.’

  ‘You would spend the same on a picture,’ commented the woman at the till. ‘Is the same thing.’

  ‘Is not the same thing,’ hissed Isobel to me.

  ‘Have them both,’ I said, as she havered between two shirts, the one pale pink and the other bright Saxe blue.

  ‘You’ve got to make choices, Laura,’ she said sternly. ‘You can’t have everything.’

  ‘Why not?’ I enquired. ‘Here at least.’

  I wandered off while she paid. When I returned she sat sprawled on a chair, flushed and exhausted and leaden-eyed.

  Our salesgirl approached with a little tray holding a crystal noggin of eau-de-vie and a few frail sugar biscuits. These Isobel wolfed down.

  Then she said crossly, ‘What are they for.’

  We turned and watched as a pair of cowry-trimmed chaparejos was wrapped in silver tissue paper.

  ‘They are smart but casual,’ pronounced the beautiful boy who was wrapping them.

  ‘Yeah yeah,’ said Isobel rudely.

  Back in her work clothes, the spell was wearing off. She glanced at her watch and clicked her tongue impatiently.

  ‘You can wear them anywhere,’ he insisted, looking up from under raven’s wing brows.

  ‘Like where?’ snapped Isobel.

  He shrugged superbly.

  ‘You can do the gardening in them,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes of course,’ said Isobel. ‘The gardening!’

  And at last she capitulated. She was positively wreathed in smiles. I barely recognised her. Amusement played on her face and made it appear like floating quicksilver. She was transmogrified; she had literally lightened up.

  ‘I can offer you a five per cent discount,’ said the boy, superbly magnanimous.

  ‘Well,’ she gurgled, ‘That might just tip me over the edge.’

  I glanced at my watch. Good grief, was that the time? It was.

  Things started to move fast. Her five per cent was restored in a hurry, the crackling carrier bags were handed across like hot cakes, and we were out in the real world again, turfed out onto the pavement with the numberless door closed firmly behind us.

  ‘Where are you going next?’ she asked.

  ‘Eastcheap.’

  ‘We can share a cab,’ she said. ‘Do you know, I’ve got eight hundred pages to read before four o’clock.’

  We were walking fast towards the main road, almost skipping. Her strong face was alive with pleasure and sweetness, silvery and flickering with smiles like water in the sun.

  ‘And I’ve got to go and interview the Head of Sales.’ I laughed. ‘Guilty as hell. Out on his ear!’

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said, slowing down for a moment. ‘Now I’ve paid, I want the password.’


  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  We stopped, she stooped down, and I stood on tiptoe to whisper it into her ear.

  She laughed aloud.

  Hurrah for the Hols

  These were the dogdays all right, these last flyblown days of August. Her maternal goodwill was worn threadbare. This was the nadir of Dorrie’s year, all this holiday flesh needing to be tended and shameless bad temper on display.

  She was sitting at a table in the unshaded barbecue area by the pool over a cup of terrible coffee. And yet it was supposed to be the annual high-water mark, their summer fortnight, particularly this year when they had rejected camping or self-catering in favour of splashing out on a room in this value-for-money family hotel.

  ‘You really are a stupid little boy. You’re really pushing your luck,’ said the man at the next table to one of the three children sitting with him. ‘I want to see that burger finished now. Can’t you for once in your whole life . . .’

  His voice was quiet and venomous. What was he doing here alone with his children? It must be the same as Max was doing with their three now, playing crazy golf to give her some time to herself. This man’s wife was probably just round the corner over just such another cup of coffee. Was she too feeling panic at not making good use of that dear-bought commodity, solitude?

  ‘If you don’t do what I say right now there’ll be no ice cream. No swimming. No puppet show. I mean it.’

  The small boy beside him started to cry into his burger, wailing and complaining that his teeth hurt.

  ‘And don’t think you’re going to get round me like that,’ snarled the man. ‘I’m not your mother, remember!’

  All over the place, if you listened, you could hear the steady exasperated undertone of the unglamorously leisure-clad parents teasing their tempestuous egomaniacal little people into, for example, eating that sandwich up ‘or I tell you what, and you’re being very silly, but you won’t be going to the Treasure Island club tonight and I mean it.’ It stuck in her throat, the bread of the weeping child. The parents said nothing to each other, except the names of sandwich fillings. She and Max were the same, they couldn’t talk over, under or round the children and so it turned them sour and obdurate in each other’s company. They held each other at night in bed but again could say or do nothing for fear of their children beside them, sleeping like larks, like clean-limbed breathing fruit.