Clearing her throat, the woman attempts to find the cool unemotional register that experience has taught her the men will respect. “Why do I work so hard if not to buy my children things that give them pleasure?”
The judge peers stonily over his half-moon glasses. “Mrs. Shattock, we are not concerned here with the realms of philosophical speculation.”
“Well, maybe you should be,” the woman says, rubbing fiercely behind her right ear. “There’s more to being a good mother than an in-depth knowledge of vegetable preferences.”
“Silence! Silence in court!” says the judge. “Call Richard Shattock.”
Oh, no, please don’t let them call Richard. Rich wouldn’t testify against me, would he?
PART TWO
7 Happy New Year
MONDAY, 5:57 A.M. “Aaaannnd open the world. Aaaand close the world. Open the world aaand close the world.”
I am standing in the middle of the living room, legs wide apart and arms above my head. In each of my hands I hold a ball, one of those squidgy ones that feels like a giant octopus head. With the balls, I am required to draw a circle in the air. “Aaaand open the world aaaand close the world.”
The person telling me to do this is a loopily cheerful fiftysomething woman with a crystal on a chain round her neck; she probably runs a protection league for animals that everybody else would be perfectly happy to see run over: rats, bats, stoats. Fay is a personal trainer hired to help me with my intensive new year relaxation and exercise program. I got her over the phone from the Juno Academy of Health and Fitness. Not cheap, but I figure it will save me a lot if I can get back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. Plus, it must work out as less expensive than joining gyms I never have time to visit.
“The only exercise you ever get, Kate, is lifting your wallet with all those health club membership cards in it,” says Richard.
Unfair. Unfair and true. According to conservative estimates, my annual swim at the most recent health club, sneaked between lunch at Conundrum and a new business pitch in Blackfriars, worked out at &Bembo.xa3;47.50 a length.
Anyway, there I was expecting Cindy Crawford in pink Lycra and what do I find when I open the door but Isadora Duncan in green loden. A windblown faery creature, my personal trainer was sporting the kind of double-decker cape previously only worn by Douglas Hurd when Foreign Secretary. “The name’s Fay,” she said dreamily and, from one of those carpet bags that Mary Poppins keeps her hatstand in, she produced what she called “my Chi balls.”
Rotating the Chi balls in slow patient circles is not exactly what I had in mind. I ask if we could possibly move on and do some work on my stomach. “You see, I had a cesarean and there’s this overhang of skin which just won’t go away.”
Fay shivers at the interruption, fastidious as a greyhound at a sheepdog trial. “My approach is to the whole person, Katya. I may call you Katya, mayn’t I? You see, once we have freed up the mind, we can move on to the body, gradually introducing the various parts to each other until we establish a harmonious conversation.”
“Actually,” I tell Fay, with as much harmony as I can muster, “I’m incredibly busy, so if we could just say, Hello, stomach muscles, remember me? that would be terrific.”
“You don’t have to tell me you’re busy, Katya. I can see by the weight of your head. You really have a very heavy head. A poor stressed head. And the neck ligaments. Loose! Loose! Looose! Barely supporting your poor head. And this in turn is bringing truly intolerable pressure onto the lower lumbar region.”
And there I was thinking you paid these people to make you feel better. After thirty minutes of Fay, I feel as though my next appointment should be with an embalmer. Now she suggests I lie flat on my back, extend my arms over my head and pretend I’m lying on a rack. Mind flicks to thoughts of traitors having secrets dragged out of them in the Tower of London at twenty-five quid an hour by ye olde personal torturer. According to Fay, this exercise will realign my spine, the spine that is one of the saddest and most misshapen Fay has ever seen.
“That’s it, that’s it, Katya, excellent.” She beams. “Now, bring your arms slowly forward over your head and repeat after me, If we compete, we are not complete. If we compete, we are not complete.”
7:01 A.M. Departure of Fay. Truly intolerable pressure lifts immediately. Treat myself to bowl of Honey Nut Loops; I cannot do exercise and self-denial in the same morning. Sitting at the kitchen table am suddenly aware of unaccustomed sound, a dry scratchy wireless hiss, and look round the room for its source. It takes a couple of minutes to track it down: silence. The sound of nothing is shouting in my ears. Have five minutes to myself, drinking it in, before Emily and Ben come whooping through the door.
After the holidays, I always sense a special edge to the children’s neediness. Far from being satisfied by the time we’ve had together they seem famished, as ravenous for my attention as newborns. It’s as though the more they have of me, the more they’re reminded how much they want. (Maybe that’s true of every human appetite: sleep begets sleep; eating makes you hungry; fucking stokes desire.) Clearly, my kids have not grasped the principle of Quality Time. Since we got back from Richard’s parents, every time I go out the door it’s like the Railway Children seeing their father off to jail. Ben’s face is a popped red balloon of anguish, and Emily has started doing that hideous coughing thing in the night — she hacks and hacks until she makes herself sick. When I mentioned it to Paula for reassurance, she said, “Attention-seeking,” with a quiet note of triumph. (Implying that attention is lacking, obviously.)
Then there are Emily’s nonstop requests for me to play with her, always at the most inconvenient times, as if she were testing me and at the same time willing me to fail. Like this morning, when I am desperate to get to a doctor’s appointment, she comes up and hangs on my skirt.
“Mummy, I spy with my little eye something beginning with B.”
“Not now, Em.”
“Oh, pleeese. Something beginning with B.”
“Breakfast?”
“No.”
“Bunny rabbit?”
“No.”
“Book?”
“No.”
“I don’t know, Emily, I give up.”
“Bideo!”
“Video doesn’t begin with B.”
“It do.”
“It does.”
“It does begin with B.”
“No, it doesn’t. It begins with V. V for van. V for volcano. V for violent. If you choose the right letter, Emily, it saves an awful lot of time.”
“Katie, give her a break, she’s only five years old,” says Richard, who has ambled downstairs, hair still damp from the shower, and is now carefully cutting out a Cruella De Vil mask from the back of a Frosties packet.
Glare across the table at him. Trust Rich not to back me up. He is so bad at presenting a united front.
“Well, if I don’t correct her, who’s going to? Not those all-spellings-are-equally-valid mullahs at school.”
“Kate, it’s I Spy, for God’s sake, not Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”