“You’ve got to grind grind grind at that grindstone
Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve,
And all too soon they’ve up and grown
And then they’ve flown
And it’s too late for you to give…
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
Emily and I join in, our voices twining round each other in a silvery helix. Suddenly, I have the most disturbing feeling that the film is talking to me, which is when Emily announces, “When I have babies, Mummy, I’m going to look after them myself till they’re an adult. No nannies.”
Has she made me watch Mary Poppins so she can say that? Is it her way of telling me? I search her face, but there is no sign of calculation; she doesn’t appear to be watching for a reaction.
“Maaa-aaaa.” The baby monitor crackles into life. Ben must be waking up. Before I go upstairs, I sit Em on my knee.
“I thought you and I could go on a special outing together. Would you like that?”
She wrinkles her nose the way Momo does when she’s excited. “Where?”
“The Egg Pie Snake Building.”
“Where?”
“The Egg Pie Snake Building. Do you remember that’s what you called the Empire State Building?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did, love.”
“Mum-my,” says Emily, dragging out my title with maximum scorn,“that’s a baby way of talking. I’m not a baby anymore.”
“No, darling, you’re not.”
IT GOES SO QUICKLY, doesn’t it? One day they’re saying all those funny little things you promise yourself you’ll write down and never do, and then they’re talking like some streetwise kid or, even worse, they’re talking just like you. I will my children to grow up quicker and I mourn every minute I have missed of their infancy.
After I have fed them and bathed them and dried their hair and read Owl Babies and gone to fetch her a glass of water, I finally go downstairs and sit by myself in the dark and think of all the irretrievable time.
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
This afternoon was spent in Illicit Mummy Time. The most profitable few hours of the financial year to date. How much per hour do you think I can bill clients for kicking leaves and watching Mary Poppins?
Sneaking time with the kids feels like what an affair must feel like: the same lies to get away for the tryst, the same burst of fulfillment and, of course, the guilt.
Think I have forgotten how to waste time and I need the kids to remind me how to do it.
Don’t hate me if I stop work, will you? I know we said how we all need to keep going to prove it can be done. It’s just that I used to think maybe my job was killing me and now I’m scared I died and didn’t notice.
Our daughters’ daughters will adore us and they’ll sing in grateful chorus, Well done, well done, well done, sister suffragette!
all my love K xxxxxxxxxxxxx
38 The Waterfall
7:54 A.M. As I wait for the knock at the door, I realize how much I have been looking forward to telling Winston about the plan. Finally, here is something I can impress Pegasus with: proof that I am not just some blinkered lackey of the capitalist system. But after I’ve blurted out all the stuff about Dad’s nappy and Alice’s interview with Bunce, Winston doesn’t say anything except a curt, “You gotta remember you got two babies to feed.”
Five minutes later, when we’re stuck in our usual jam, he asks me if I know the story of Scipio. I shake my head.
“OK, so this Roman general Scipio he had a dream. And in it he found a village which was built right next to this big waterfall. The sound from the waterfall was so bad you had to shout to make yourself heard. ‘How do you live with that sound all day?’ Scipio asked the head of the village over the roaring of this water. ‘What sound?’ the puzzled guy said.”
Pegasus shudders forward a couple of inches, and when Winston hits the brake there is a sound like a cow dying.
“And the moral of the story, please sir?”
In the mirror, I see his grin, sly and full of relish. “Well, it’s like I think we all of us have this background noise and we’re so used to it we can’t hear it. But if you move far enough away you can hear again and you think, Jesus, that waterfall was making one helluva racket. How’d I live with that noise?”
“Are you saying I have a waterfall, Winston?”
He lets out that deep grainy laugh that I love. “Kate, girl, you got Niagara fucking Falls.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Winston?”
As he shakes his head, the cab is filled with that gold dust once more. “Am I your main client?”
“You the only one.”
“I see. And how many drivers does Pegasus Cars have? Let me guess. You the only one?”
“Yah. Gonna finish cabbing soon, though. Got my exams to do.”
“Mechanical engineering?”
“Philosophy.”
“So you’re by way of being my chauffeur, my very own winged horse?”
He honks the horn in joyous acknowledgment that this is so.
“Did you know that chauffeurs are tax deductible and child care isn’t, Winston?”
Another honk on the horn startles a group of suits on the pavement; they scatter like pigeons. “It’s a crazy fucking world out there, man.”
“No, it’s a crazy fucking man’s world out there. Have you got change?”
As I’m walking away from the cab, I’m just thinking how much I’m going to miss him when I hear a voice shout after me. “Hey, you need a getaway car, lady?”
10:08 A.M. A call from Reception. They say there’s a man called Abelhammer waiting for me downstairs, and my heart actually tries to punch a hole through my chest wall. When I get downstairs, he is standing there with a large grin and two pairs of ice skates.
I’m shaking my head as I move across the floor towards him. “No. I can’t skate.”
“Yeah, but I can. Enough for both of us.”
“Absolutely not.”
Later, when we are making our fourth circuit of the rink, Jack says, “All you have to do is lean on me, Kate. Is that so hard?”
“Yes. It’s hard.”
“Jesus, woman. If you just lean on me here — remember your John Donne, think of us as a pair of compasses. I’m holding still and you’re sweeping around me, OK? You’re not gonna fall. I’ve got you. Just let go.”
So I just let go. We skated for an hour and I’m not sure what we wrote on the ice. You’d have to be a bird — one of my pigeons — or sitting high up in my boss’s office to see what we wrote that day. Love or Goodbye or both.
He wanted to buy me a hot chocolate, but I said I had to go.
The smile never faltered. “Must be an important date?”
“Very. A man I used to know.”
SURPRISING HOW QUICKLY you can forget how to hold someone, even your husband. Maybe especially your husband. It takes a certain absence from touching to make you fully appreciate the geometry of the hug: the precise angle of your head in relation to his. Should it be roosted in under the neck, as pigeons do, or nose pressed to his chest? And your hands: cupped in the small of his back or palms laid flat along the flanges of his thighs? When Richard and I met that lunchtime outside Starbucks, we both meant to deliver a peck on the cheek, but it felt too silly, the kind of kiss you could only give to an aunt, so we splayed awkwardly into the hug. I felt as gauche, as painfully observed, as when my dad first took me shuffling round the floor at a dinner dance. Richard’s body shocked me by being a body: his hair and its smell, the bulk of shoulder under his jumper. The hug wasn’t that dry click of bones you get holding someone when the passion has drained away. It was more like a shadow dance: I still wanted him and I think he wanted me, but we hadn’t touched in a very long time.