Hey Yeah Right Get a Life Read online

  She waved the tweezers again and knelt above her daughter on the carpet.

  I wouldn’t let you loose on my CV, thought Jade, recoiling. Not in a million years. It’d come back with jam all over it.

  The little girl was quite a solid child and tried to control her crying, allowing herself to be comforted in between the probings inside her face. But she was growing hotter, and when, at the woman’s request, Jade unwillingly held her, she was like a small combustion engine, full of distress.

  ‘See, if I hold her down, you have a try,’ said the woman, handing her the tweezers.

  Jade was appalled and fascinated. She peered up the child’s nose and could see a grey-green disc at the top of one fleshy nostril. Tentatively she waved the silver tongs. Sensibly the child began to howl. The mother clamped her head and shoulders down with tired violence.

  ‘I don’t think I’d better do this,’ said Jade. She was frightened that metal inside the warm young face combined with sudden fierce movement could be a disastrous combination.

  The woman tried again and the walls rang with her daughter’s screams.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Ring your husband?’ suggested Jade.

  ‘He’s in Leeds,’ said the woman. ‘Or is it Manchester. Oh dear.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Jade. You’d think it was the fifties, men roaming the world while the women stayed indoors. The personal was the political, hadn’t she heard?

  ‘I’ve got to make a phone call to say I’ll be late,’ said the woman, distracted yet listless. She seemed unable to think beyond the next few minutes or to formulate a plan of action, as though in a state of terminal exhaustion. Jade felt obscurely resentful. If she ever found herself in this sort of situation, a man, babies, etcetera; when the time came; IF. Well, he would be responsible for half the childcare and half the housework. At least. She believed in justice, unlike this useless great lump.

  ‘Why don’t you ring Casualty?’ she suggested. ‘See what the queues are like?’

  ‘I did that before,’ said the woman dully. ‘They said, try to get it out yourself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jade, standing up. ‘I’m on my way to an interview. I’ll be late if I stay.’ People should deal with their own problems, she wanted to say; you shouldn’t get yourself into situations you can’t handle then slop all over everybody else.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Thank you anyway.’

  ‘You could ring the doctor,’ said Jade on the way to the front door. ‘Ask for an emergency appointment.’

  ‘I’ll do that next,’ said the woman, brightening a little; then added suddenly, ‘This year has been the hardest of my life. The two of them.’

  ‘My mother’s got four,’ said Jade censoriously. ‘And a job. Goodbye.’

  She turned with relief back into the shining spring morning and started to sprint, fast and light, as quick off the blocks as Atalanta.

  Café Society

  Two shattered women and a bright-eyed child have just sat down at the window table in the café. Both women hope to talk, for their minds to meet; at the same time they are aware that the odds against this happening are about fifty to one. Still they have decided to back that dark horse Intimacy, somewhere out there muffledly galloping. They order coffee, and toast for the boy, who seizes a teaspoon and starts to bash away at the cracked ice marbling of the formica table.

  ‘No, Ben,’ says his mother, prising the spoon from his fingers and diverting his attention to the basket of sugar sachets. She flings discreet glances at the surrounding tables, gauging the degrees of irritability of those nearest. There are several other places they could have chosen, but this sandwich bar is where they came.

  They might have gone to McDonald’s, so cheap and tolerant, packed with flat light and fat smells and unofficial crêche clamour. There they could have slumped like the old punchbags they are while Ben screeched and flew around with the other children. McDonald’s is essentially a wordless experience, though, and they both want to see if they can for a wonder exchange some words. Then there is Pete’s Café on the main road, a lovely steamy unbuttoned room where men sit in their work clothes in a friendly fug of bonhomie and banter, smoking, stirring silver streams of sugar into mugs of bright brown tea. But it would not be fair to take this child in there and spoil that Edenic all-day-breakfast fun. It would take the insensitivity of an ox. Unthinkable.

  Here is all right. They get all sorts here. Here is used to women walking in with that look on their faces – ‘What hit me?’ Even now there is a confused-looking specimen up there ordering a decaffitated coffee, takeaway, at the counter.

  ‘Every now and then I think I might give it up, see if that helps,’ says Frances. ‘Caffeine. But then I reckon it’s just a drop in the ocean.’

  Ben rocks backwards in his chair a few times, seeing how far he can go. He is making a resonant zooming noise behind his teeth, but not very loudly yet. Sally keeps her baggy eye on him and says, ‘Sometimes I think I’m just pathetic but then other times I think, I’m not a tank.’

  ‘Cannonfodder,’ 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 fervour. 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 sandpapers his chin with a square of toast.

  This woman Sally has a drinker’s face, but her lustreless grey 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 post-graduate 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 counselling 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 wha
t 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 fervour.

  ‘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 colouring 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, organising and paying for childcare 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 girl who would, perfectly reasonably, really rather be an aerobics instructor working on Legs Tums ’n Bums.

  Then there was one childcare-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.

  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 God-like 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 realise 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 sweetcorn 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 apologise 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 childminders in his time, and waved them goodbye with equal cheeriness. Gemma, however, was born more anxious, less spirited. She cries easily and when her mother used to leave 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 childminders, and has wept bitterly at their various departures. Well, Gemma may thrive better now 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 neighbour’s au pair wrote their car off last week,’ says Frances. ‘Nobody hurt, luckily.’

  They both shudder.

  ‘We’re so lucky,’ they agree, po-faced, 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 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 goodbye, wry and guarded. They have exchanged little more than two hundred words inside this hour, and how much friendship can you base on that?