Getting a Life Read online

  “Cannon fodder,” observes Frances.

  “It’s all right if you’re the sort who can manage on four hours,” says Sally. “Churchill. Thatcher. Bugger.”

  Ben, having tipped his chair to the point of no return, carries on down towards the floor in slow motion. Frances dives in and with quiet skill prevents infant skull from hitting lino-clad concrete.

  “Reflexes,” says Sally gratefully. “Shot to pieces.”

  She clasps the shaken child to her coat with absent fervor. He is drawing breath for a blare of delayed shock when the arrival of the toast deflects him.

  “The camel’s back,” says Sally obscurely.

  “Not funny,” comments Frances, who understands that she is referring to sleep, or its absence.

  Ben takes the buttery knife from the side of his plate and waves it in the air, then drops it onto his mother’s coat sleeve. From there it falls to her lap and then, noisily, to the floor. She dabs at the butter stains with a tissue and bangs her forehead as she reaches beneath the table for the knife. Ben laughs and sand-papers his chin with a square of toast.

  This woman Sally has a drinker’s face, but her lusterless gray skin and saurian eye come not from alcohol but from prolonged lack of sleep.

  As a former research student it has often occurred to her that a medical or sociology postgraduate might profitably study the phenomenon in society of a large number of professional women in their thirties suffering from exhaustion. Her third child, this bouncing boy, has woken at least four times a night since he was born. Most mornings he won’t go back to sleep after five, so she has him in with her jumping and playing and singing. She hasn’t shared a bedroom with her husband for eighteen months now. She’d carried on full-time through the first and second. They slept. Luck of the draw. Yes of course she has talked to her Health Visitor about this, she has taken the boy to a sleep clinic, she has rung Cry-sis and listened to unseen mothers in the same foundering boat. The Health Visitor booked her into a sleep counseling course which involved her taking an afternoon every week off work, driving an hour’s round trip on the North Circular, only to listen to some well-meaning woman tell her what damage this sleep pattern was causing to the family unit, to her health, to her marriage, to the boy’s less demanding siblings. Well, she knew all that anyway, didn’t she. After the third session she said, What’s the point. Not every problem has a solution, she decided, and here it is obviously a brutally simple question of survival, of whether she cracks before he starts sleeping through. It’s years now.

  These thoughts flash through her mind, vivid and open, but must remain unspoken as Ben’s presence precludes anything much in the way of communication beyond blinking in Morse. The few words she has exchanged with this woman Frances, known only by sight after all from the nursery school queue, are the merest tips of icebergs. Such thoughts are dangerous to articulate anyway, bringing up into the air what has been submerged. Nearly all faces close in censorship at the merest hint of such talk. Put up and shut up is the rule, except with fellow mothers. Even then it can be taken as letting the side down. She yawns uncontrollably so that her eyes water, leaving her with the face of a bloodhound.

  From her handbag this tired woman Sally takes a pad and felt tips and places them in front of her son Ben, who is rolling his eyes and braying like a donkey.

  “Shush, Ben,” she says. “You’re not a donkey.”

  He looks at her with beautiful affectless eyes. He sucks in air and starts up a series of guttural snorts.

  “You’re not a piggy, Ben, stop it,” says Sally.

  “Piggy,” says Ben, laughing with lunatic fervor.

  “They were brilliant at work, they bent over backwards,” says Sally, rapidly, anyway. “It was me that resigned, I thought it wasn’t fair on them. I was going into work for a rest. Ben!”

  “That’s hard,” says Frances, watching as Sally straightens the boy in his chair and tries to engage him in coloring a picture of a rabbit in police uniform.

  “Do you work then?” asks Sally, filling in one long furry ear with pink.

  “Yes. No,” says Frances. “I shouldn’t be here! You know, round the edges at the moment. I mean, I must. I have. Always. Unthinkable! But, erm. You know. Freelance at the moment.”

  Ben pushes the paper away from him and grasps at a handful of felt tips. He throws them against the window and cheers at the clatter they make on impact.

  “No, Ben!” growls Sally through clenched teeth. “Naughty.”

  The two women grovel under the table picking up pens. Ben throws a few more after them.

  What Frances would have said had there been a quiet patch of more than five seconds was that she had worked full-time all through the babyhood of her first child, Emma, and also until her second, Rose, was three, as well as running the domestic circus, functioning as the beating heart of the family while deferring to the demands of her partner’s job in that it was always her rather than him who took a day off sick when one of the girls sprained a wrist or starred in a concert, and her too of course who was responsible for finding, organizing and paying for child care and for the necessary expenditure of countless megavolts of the vicarious emotional and practical energy involved in having someone else look after your babies while you are outside the house all day, all the deeply unrestful habits of vigilance masquerading as “every confidence” in the nanny who would, perfectly reasonably, really rather be an aerobics instructor working on Legs Tums ’n’ Bums.

  Then there was one nanny-based strappado too many; and she cracked. After all those years. She had come home unexpectedly in the afternoon to find the woman fast asleep on the sofa, clubbed out as she later put it, while Emma and Rose played on the stairs with needles and matches or some such. Could be worse, her sensible woman-in-the-workplace voice said; she’s young, she likes a good time and why shouldn’t she; nothing happened, did it? To hell with that, her mother-in-the-house voice said; I could be the one on the sofa rather than out there busting a gut and barely breaking even.

  The nanny before had been a secret smacker, the knowledge of which made Frances moan aloud in the small hours (and, if she but knew it, would do so until she died).

  She needed work, she loved work, she was educated for it. Didn’t she, Sally, feel the same way? She’d never asked her partner for money; no, they were equals, pulling together. Well, work was fabulous while you were there; it was what you had to do before and after work that was the killer. It was good for the girls to see their mother out working in the real world, he said when she talked of feeling torn apart; a role model. There’s no need to feel guilty, he would begin, with Godlike compassion. It’s not guilt, you fool. It’s the unwelcome awareness that being daily ripped in half is not good, not even ultimately. I agree with all the reasons. “I’m sorry, they’ve got to realize that you are a person in your own right and have work to do.” I couldn’t agree more. “Women have always worked, except for that brief sinister time in the fifties.” Yes. But had they always had to work a ten-hour day at a full hour’s commuting distance from their babies while not showing by a murmur or a flicker what this was doing to them?

  So here she was after all these years “gone freelance,” that coy phrase, cramming a full-time job into their school hours and also the evenings once they’d gone to bed. She had a large envelope of sweets pinned to the wall by the telephone so that she could receive work calls to the noise of lollipop sucking rather than shrilling and howls. And now, of course, she had no sick pay, paid holiday, pension or maternity leave should she be so foolish as to find herself pregnant again. Just as the welfare state she’d been raised to lean on was packing up.

  Unfortunately not one word of this makes it into the light of day, as Ben is creating.

  “It was more fun at work,” Frances bursts out, watching Sally wipe the child’s buttery jawline with another of the inexhaustible supply of tissues from her bag. “You get some respect at work.”

  “My last childminder,”
says Sally. She flinches.

  “Snap,” says Frances.

  The two women sip their powerless cappuccinos.

  “In a couple of years’ time, when this one starts school,” says Sally, “I could probably get back, get by with an au pair in term-time. Someone to collect them from school, get their tea. But then there’s the holidays.”

  “Very long, the holidays,” agrees Frances.

  “Not fair on the poor girl,” says Sally. “Not when she doesn’t speak English. Now if it was just Leo he’d be fine,” she continues, off on another tack, thinking aloud about her two eldest children. “But Gemma is different.”

  The child Ben slides off his chair and runs over to the glass-fronted display of sandwich fillings, the metal trays of damp cheese, dead ham and tired old tuna mixed with sweet corn kernels. He starts to hit the glass with the flat of his hand. There is a collective intake of breath and everyone turns to stare. As she lurches over to apologize and expostulate, Sally’s mind continues to follow her train of thought, silently addressing Frances even if all that Frances can see of her is a bumbling clucking blur.

  Children are all different, Sally thinks on, and they are different from birth. Her own son Leo has a robust nature, a level temperament and the valuable ability to amuse himself, which is what makes him so easy to care for. He has smilingly greeted more than half a dozen nannies and childminders in his time, and waved them good-bye with equal cheeriness. Gemma, however, was born more anxious, less spirited. She cries easily and when her mother used to leave the house for work would abandon herself to despair. She is crushingly jealous of this youngest child Ben. She wants to sit on Sally’s lap all the time when she is there, and nags and whines like a neglected wife, and clings so hard that all around are uncomfortably filled with irritation. She has formed fervid attachments to the aforementioned nannies, and has wept bitterly at their various departures. Well, Gemma may thrive better now that her mother is at home, or she may not; the same could be said of her mother. Time will tell, but by then of course it will be then and not now, and Sally will be unemployable whichever way it has turned out.

  “Oof,” grunts Sally, returning with her son, who leaps within her arms like a young dolphin. She sits him firmly on his chair again.

  “My neighbor’s nanny wrote their car off last week,” says Frances. “Nobody hurt, luckily.”

  They both shudder.

  “We’re so lucky,” they agree, solemn, glum, gazing at zany Ben as he stabs holes into the police rabbit with a sharp red pen. Sally yawns uncontrollably, then Frances starts up where she leaves off.

  After all, they’re getting nowhere fast.

  An elderly woman pauses as she edges past their table on the way to the till. She cocks her head on one side and smiles brightly at Ben, whose mouth drops open. He stares at her, transfixed, with the expression of a seraph who has understood the mystery of the sixth pair of wings. His mother Sally knows that he is in fact temporarily dumbstruck by the woman’s tremendous wart, which sits at the corner of her mouth with several black hairs sprouting from it.

  “What a handsome little fellow,” says the woman fondly. “Make the most of it, dear,” she continues, smiling at Sally. “It goes so fast.” Sally tenses as she smiles brightly back, willing her son not to produce one of his devastating monosyllables. Surely he does not know the word for wart yet.

  “Such a short time,” repeats the woman, damp-eyed.

  Well, not really, thinks Frances. Sometimes it takes an hour to go a hundred yards. Now that she knows what she knows she puts it at three and a half years per child, the time spent exhausted, absorbed, used up; and, what’s more, if not, then something’s wrong. That’s a whole decade if you have three! This is accurate, wouldn’t you agree, she wants to ask Sally; this is surely true for all but those women with Olympic physical stamina, cast-iron immune systems, steel-clad nerves and sensitivities. Extraordinary women; heroines, in fact. But what about the strugglers? The ordinary mother strugglers? Why do they educate us, Sally, only to make it so hard for us to work afterwards? Why don’t they insist on hysterectomies for girls who want further education and have done with it? Of course none of this will get said. There is simply no airspace.

  Ben’s eyes have sharpened and focused on his admirer’s huge side-of-the-mouth wart.

  “Witch,” he says, loud and distinct.

  “Ben,” says Sally. She looks ready to cry, and so does the older woman, who smiles with a hurt face and says, “Don’t worry, dear, he didn’t mean anything,” and moves off.

  “WITCH,” shouts Ben, following her with his eyes.

  At this point, Sally and Frances give up. With a scraping of chairs and a flailing of coats, they wordlessly heave themselves and Ben and his paraphernalia up to the counter, and pay, and go. They won’t try that again in a hurry. They smile briefly at each other as they say good-bye, wry and guarded. They have exchanged little more than two hundred words inside this hour, and how much friendship can you base on that?

  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 defense, 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.

  GETTING 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 overprotective 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 pajama top?” she whispered.

  “Took it off,” he whispered back. “Too itchy.”

  “It’s not itchy,” she tutted. “I’ll put some special oil in y
our 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 sea dog or a sea god 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 Dorrie’s on the pillow.