Getting a Life Read online

  “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 realize—it’s a shock—you realize 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 appointments, 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 Laura. “Then Shoshaya cried and she told Miss Atkins. And Miss Atkins 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 curb 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 doctor’s office 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, moralizing 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, the noise, and 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 freestanding 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 amoxicillin.”

  “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 organization, 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 her 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 ve
getables 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. “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 as 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 bread crumbs, 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 for a vivid moment above the chopping board as a seamless cycle of nourishment and devourment. 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 leftover mashed potato and some biscuits while she finished clearing up and peacekeeping. 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 coloring 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’s 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 neighbor will be there, you remember, he got on with her last time all right, that business with the spacehopper; then Valerie 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’s 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.

  “Will you get a job then?” asked Marion.

  “Um, I thought just for those weeks before summer I’d get the house straight, it’s only two hours in the morning. And a half,” said Dorrie in a defensive rush. “Collect my thoughts. If there are any.”

  “Anyway, you do your husband’s paperwork in the evenings, don’t you,” said Thomas’s mother. “The accounts and that. VAT.”

  “You get so you can’t see the wood for the trees, don’t you,” said Dorrie. “You get so good at fitting things round everything else. Everybody else.”

  “I used to be in accounts,” said Marion. “B.C. But I couldn’t go back now. I’ve lost touch. I couldn’t get into my suits anymore, I tried the other day. I couldn’t do it! I’d hardly cover the cost of the child care. I’ve lost my nerve.”

  “My husband says he’ll back me up one hundred percent when the youngest starts school,” said Thomas’s mother pensively. “Whatever job I want to do. But no way would he be able to support change which would end by making his working life more difficult, he said.”

  “That’s not really on, then, is it,” said Marion. “Unless you get some nursery school work to fit round school hours. Or turn into a freelance something.”

  “Some people seem to manage it,” said Thomas’s mother. “Susan Gloverall.”

  “I didn’t know she was back at work.”

  “Sort of. She’s hot-desking somewhere off the A3, leaves the kids with a childminder over Tooting way. Shocking journey, but the devil drives.”

  “Keith still not found anything, then? That’s almost a year now.”

  “I know. Dreadful really. I don’t think it makes things any, you know, easier between them. And of course she can’t leave the kids with him while he’s looking. Though she said he’s watching a lot of TV.”

  “What about Nicola Beaumont, then,” said Dorrie.

  “Oh her,” said Marion. “Wall-to-wall nannies. No thank you.”

  “I could never make enough to pay a nanny,” said Thomas’s mother. “I never earned that much to start with. And then you have to pay their tax on top, out of your own taxed income. You’d have to earn eighteen thousand at least before you broke even if you weren’t on the fiddle. I’ve worked it out.”

  “Nearer twenty-two these days,” said Marion. “In London. Surely.”

  “Nicola’s nice, though,” said Dorrie. “Her daughter Jade, the teenage one, she’s baby-sitting for us tonight.”

  “Well, she never seems to have much time for me,” said Marion.

  “I think she just doesn’t have much time full stop,” said Dorrie.

  “Nor do any of us, dear,” said Thomas’s mother. “Not proper time.”

  “Not time to yourself,” said Marion.

  “I bet she gets more of that than I do. She commutes, doesn’t she? There you are then!”

  They were all laughing again when th
e bell went.

  “Harry swallowed his tooth today,” said Martin. “Mrs. Tyrone said it didn’t matter, it would melt inside him.” He wiggled his own front tooth, an enamel tag, tipping it forward with his fingernail. Soon there would be the growing looseness, the gradual twisting of it into a spiral, hanging on by a thread, and the final silent snap.

  “He won’t get any money from the tooth fairy, will he, Mum,” said Martin. “Will he, Mum. Will he, Mum. Mum. Mum!”

  “Yes,” said Dorrie. “What? I expect so, dear.” She was peeling carrots and cutting them into sticks.

  “And Kosenia scratched her bandage off today, and she’s got eczema, and she scratched off, you know, that stuff on top, like the cheese on shepherd’s pie, she just lifted it off,” Martin went on.

  “Crust,” said Dorrie.

  “Yes, crust,” said Martin. “I’m not eating those carrots. No way.”

  “Carrots are very good for you,” said Dorrie. “And tomorrow I’m going to pack some carrot sticks in your lunch box and I want you to eat them.”

  “Hey yeah right,” gabbled Martin. “Hey yeah right get a life!”

  And he marched off to where the other two were watching a story about a mouse who ate magic berries and grew as big as a lion. Television was nothing but good and hopeful and stimulating compared with the rest of life so far as she could see. Certainly it had been the high point of her own childhood. Her mother thought she spoiled her children, but then most of her friends said their mothers thought the same about them. She was trying to be more tender with them—she and her contemporaries—to offer them choices rather than just tell them what to do; to be more patient and to hug them when they cried, rather than briskly talk of being brave; never to hit them. They felt, they all felt, they were trying harder than their parents had ever done to love well. And one of the side effects of this was that their children were incredibly quick to castigate any shortfall in the quality of attention paid to them.

  Now they were fighting again. Martin was screaming and chattering of injustice like an angry ape. Maxine shrilled back at him with her earsplitting screech. Robin sat on the ground, hands to his ears, sobbing deep-chested sobs of dismay.