How Hard Can It Be?

3

THE BOTTOM LINE

Thursday, 5.57 am: My joints are raw and aching. It’s like a flu that never goes away. Must be Perry and his charming symptoms again. (Just like when I woke at three with a puddle of sweat between my breasts even though the bedroom was icy cold.) I’d much rather turn over and spend another hour in bed, but there’s nothing for it. After my ordeal at the hands of the evil, pinstriped headhunter, Project Get Back to Work starts here.

Conor at the gym agreed to stretch the rules and gave me his special Bride’s Deal, for women who want to look their best on the big day. I explained that I had pretty much the same goals as any newly engaged female: I needed to persuade a man, or men, to commit and give me enough money to raise my kids and do up a dilapidated old house. There would be a honeymoon period in which I would have to lull them into thinking I would always be enthusiastic, wildly attractive and up for it.

‘Basically, I need to lose nine pounds – a stone would be even better – and look like a forty-two-year-old who is young for her age,’ I explained.

‘No worries,’ said Conor. He’s a New Zealander.

So, this is where I prepare for re-entry into a real job. By real, I mean a decently paid position, unlike my so-called ‘portfolio career’ of the past few years. Women’s magazines always make the portfolio career sound idyllic: the heroine, in a long, pale, cashmere cardigan worn over a pristine white T-shirt, wafts between rewarding freelance projects whilst being home to bake scrumptious treats for adorable kids in a kitchen that is always painted a soothing shade of dove grey.

In practice, as I soon found out, it means doing part-time work for businesses who are keen to keep you off their books to avoid paying VAT – even to avoid paying you at all. So much time wasted chasing fees. For someone who works in financial services I have a weird phobia of asking people for money – for myself anyhow. I ended up with a handful of overdemanding, underpaid projects, which I had to fit in around my primary role as chauffeur/shopper/laundress/caregiver/cook/party planner/nurse/dog-walker/homework invigilator/Internet killjoy. My office, aka the kitchen table, was covered in a sprawl of paperwork, not wholesome baked goods. My annual earnings did not run to cashmere, and the white T-shirts grew sullen in the family wash.

All successful projects begin with a stern assessment of the bottom line followed by the setting of achievable goals. With everyone still safely asleep, I lock the bathroom door, pull my nightie over my head in a single movement (‘a gesture of matchless eroticism’, a lover once called it) and examine what I see in the mirror. This is what forty-nine and a half looks like. My breasts have definitely got lower and heavier. If you were being critical (and I certainly am), they look slightly more like udders than the perky pups of yore. Actually, I got away quite lightly. Some of my friends lost theirs entirely after childbirth; their boobs inflated, but once the milk dried up they shrivelled like party balloons. Judith in my NCT group got implants after twin boys sucked her dry and her husband couldn’t bear what he charmingly called her ‘witch’s tits’. He went off with his PA anyway and Judith was left with two sacks of silicon so heavy she developed back problems. My boobs kept both their size and shape but, over the years, there’s been a palpable loss of density; it’s the difference between a perfect avocado and one that’s gone to mush in its leathery case. I guess that’s what youth means: ripeness is all.

I shiver involuntarily. It’s freezing in here, even colder in the house than it is outside because Piotr hasn’t got around to upgrading the plumbing yet. To tell you the truth, I’m scared of what he’s going to find when he takes up the floorboards. The ancient radiator beneath the window emits a grudging amount of heat; its gurgling and plopping suggest serious digestive difficulties.

I drape a towel around my shoulders and focus again on the body in the mirror. Legs still looking pretty good: only a touch of crêpey ruching around the knees as though someone has taken a needle and pulled a line of thread through them. Waist has thickened, which makes me more straight-up-and-down than that curvy young woman who never struggled to attract attention and who never, not for one moment, thought about the sly magic her body made to draw men to it.

I always had slight, rather boyish hips. They wear a jacket of flesh now; I pinch it between thumb and forefinger till it hurts. That needs to go for a start. The skin below my neck and across my collarbone looks cross-hatched as though a painter has scored it with a knife. Sun damage. Nothing to be done about that – at least I don’t think there is. (‘Roy, remind me to ask Candy, she’s had every procedure known to man.’) Nor can I fix the C-section scar. It has mottled and faded with time, but the surgeon’s hasty incision – she was in a hurry to get Emily out – created a small, overhanging belly shelf which no amount of Pilates can shift. Believe me, I’ve tried. I used to be so scornful of those celebrities who combine an elective C-section with a tummy tuck. Why wouldn’t you wear your birth scars with pride? Now I’m not so sure, nor so self-righteous. The stomach itself is pretty flat, though the flesh is puckered like seersucker here and there.

And the bottom line? I turn around and try to get a glimpse, over my shoulder, in the mirror. Well, it’s still roughly in the right place and no cellulite, but … butt butt butt. Put it this way, I won’t be taking a photo of it and sharing it with my Facebook friends.

All of this is no surprise, no cause for shame; this is what time does to a body. So small, so mercifully infinitesimal are the changes that we barely notice, until, one day, we see ourselves in a photograph on holiday, or glimpse a reflection in a speckled mirror behind a bar and, for a split second, we think, ‘Now, who is that?’

Certain things about ageing still have the power to shock, though. My friend Debra swears she found her first grey pubic hair the other day. Grey pubes, seriously? Uch. Mine are still dark, though definitely sparser – must we really add balding pussy to the list of menopausal mortifications? – and the hairs on my legs grow back much slower these days. Saves on waxing anyway. All the follicle activity has moved to my chin and neck where seven or eight dastardly little bristles poke through. They are as relentless as weeds. Only tweezers and eternal vigilance on my part prevent them forming a Rasputin tribute beard.

The face. I’ve saved the face till last. The light in here is kind. Soft, sifted, southerly light from a garden that is still dreaming. Too kind for my purposes. I yank the cord on the nasty fluorescent strip above the mirror. One virtue of eyesight deteriorating with age is you can’t see yourself very well; at least that twisted old bitch, Mother Nature, got that bit right. Generally I console myself that, as everyone keeps telling me, I look young for my age. Comforting to hear when you’re thirty-nine. Not so much now I’m nearly that number which shall not be mentioned.

Viewed in the unsparing, acid-yellow glare, my reflection reports that I have an incipient case of Muffin Chin. The jawline is a little lumpy, like cake mix before the flour’s thoroughly blended, though at least it’s not the dreaded wattles. For some masochistic reason, I Googled ‘wattle’ the other day: ‘a fleshy caruncle hanging from various parts of the head or neck in several groups of birds and mammals’. My dread is that the caruncles are coming to get me. With two thumbs, I scoop up the skin under my chin and pull it back. For a second, my younger self stares back at me: startled, wistful, pretty.

The eye area isn’t bad at all – thank you, Sisley Global Anti-Age cream (and I never smoked, which helps) – but there are two sad-clown grooves either side of my mouth and a frown, a small but determined exclamation mark – ! – punctuating the gap between my brows. It makes me look cross. I trace the vertical wrinkles with my fingernail. You can get Botox or Restylane injected into those, can’t you? I never dared. Not that I have any ethical objection, none at all, it’s just superstition. If you look fine why get work done and run the risk of looking freakish?

I would prefer to see a familiar, lightly creased face in the mirror than look like that actress I spotted in a café the other day. She was on TV a lot in the Seventies, starred in all the Dickens and Austen adaptations – the kind of artless, natural beauty poets compose sonnets to. I don’t know what she’s had done, but it’s as though someone tried to restore the bloom of her apple-cheeked youth and ended up making her look like she has a mouth full of Brazil nuts. Her cheeks were bulging, but unevenly, and one corner of that rosebud pout was turned down like it was trying to cry but the rest of the face wouldn’t let it. I was trying hard not to stare, but my eyes kept darting back to check out the disaster. Rubbernecking that sad rubber face. Better to stick with the face that you know than risk one that you don’t.

I put out the cruel light and scramble into my gym stuff. Can hear Lenny whining downstairs; he knows I’m up. Need to let him out for a wee. Before going downstairs, I give the woman in the mirror one final, frank, appraising look. Not too bad, Kate, give yourself some credit, girl. There’s definitely work to be done, but we’re hanging in there. We who were once hot may yet be hot again (well, let’s aim for lukewarm and see how it goes). For now, I’ll just have to rely on concealer and foundation and hope the personal trainer can help me pass for my new age.

6.14 am: Starting as I mean to go on, with two spoons of cider vinegar in hot water (lowers blood sugar and suppresses appetite, probably because it makes you retch). This is also a fasting day, when I am allowed a maximum of five hundred calories. So here I am preparing a sumptuous breakfast of one solitary oatcake and wondering whether to go crazy and have a teaspoon of hummus. The calorie content of the oatcake is written on the side of the box in letters so small they are only legible to tiny elves equipped with an electron microscope. How am I supposed to follow sodding Fast Diet when I can’t even read kcals? Go to fetch my reading glasses from The Place Where Reading Glasses Are Always Kept so Kate Doesn’t Forget Where Her Reading Glasses Are. Not there. (*‘Roy, are you up yet? Roy?? Where did I put my glasses? I need my glasses. Can you find me my glasses, please?’)

No answer. Damn. Nibble small piece of oatcake and wonder if I can get away with drinking any of Emily’s green slime, the making of which has created a pile of washing-up that is filling my sink. Open the fridge and pick up various tempting items, then put them right back again. Pause by the bread bin where yesterday Richard put a crusty, Italian artisanal loaf he picked up at the Deli. Crusty Loaf, Crusty Loaf, how you call to me!

Self-control, Kate. And lead us not into temptation and deliver us from gluten. I am meant to be exchanging the wasteland of midlife elasticated leggings and quiet despair for the waist-land of pencil skirts and professional possibility.

From: Candy Stratton

To: Kate Reddy

Subject: Headhunter Humiliation

You go for one interview and Midget Prick says because you’re 49 you need to get euthanised and YOU BELIEVE HIM? SERIOUSLY!? What happened to that fabulous woman I used to work for? You need to get to work on your résumé and start lying big time. Anything you know that you can do, tell them you’ve done it in the past 18 months, OK? I’ll give you a great reference.

And get a hairdresser to do you some highlights. Not Clairol over the side of the bathtub. Promise me.

XXO C

6.21 am: About to leave for the gym when, somewhere, there is the unfamiliar sound of a phone ringing. It takes me a couple of minutes to realise it’s the landline. Takes twice that to track down the actual phone, which is chirruping forlornly to itself behind some sections of plasterboard that Piotr has stacked against the kitchen wall. Who could be ringing this early? Only cold callers and what Richard insists on calling ‘The Aged Ps’ use the house phone these days, now that everyone has a mobile. Yes, even Ben. It was impossible to hold out any longer once he turned twelve. He claimed it was ‘child abuse’ to deny a kid a phone and he was going to ‘call the government’. Plus, he added, there was no way he was going to show me how to transfer my files onto a new laptop if he didn’t have a mobile. Hard to argue with that.

The phone is covered in a thick layer of chalky builder’s dust. Sure enough, the caller is an Aged P talking very politely to an indifferent answerphone. Donald. I hear his Yorkshire accent, once so rich and thick you could have cut it like parkin, now papery and fluting in his eighty-ninth year. When Richard’s dad leaves a message, he speaks slowly and carefully, pausing at the end of each sentence to allow his silent interlocutor time to respond. Donald’s messages take forever. ‘Come on, Dad, spit it out!’ Richard always shouts across the kitchen. But I love my father-in-law, his air of musing wistfulness like Sir Alec Guinness; he addresses the machine with such courtesy it’s a reminder of a lost world where human spoke unto human.

I listen to Donald with half an ear while rummaging in the fruit bowl for a breakfast kiwi. Better than a banana, surely. Can’t be more than forty calories. Why does this always happen? Like hand grenades when I brought them home from the supermarket two days ago, the kiwis have turned to mush; it feels faintly obscene, like I’m palpating a baboon’s testicle.

‘Terribly sorry to disturb you so early, Richard, Kate. It’s Donald here,’ says my father-in-law unnecessarily. ‘I’m calling about Barbara. I’m afraid she’s had a falling out with our new lady carer. Nothing to worry about.’

No, please God, no. After two months of negotiation with Wrothly Social Services, which would have exhausted the combined diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan and Amal Clooney, I managed to secure a small care-package for Donald and Barbara. That meant someone would help with the cleaning, bathe Barbara and change the dressing on her scalded leg. It’s a pitiful amount of time they’ve been allocated, so short that the carer sometimes doesn’t even bother to take her coat off, but at least there’s someone checking in on them every day. Richard’s parents insist they don’t want to downsize from the family home, a stone farmhouse on the side of a hill, because it means leaving the garden they have tended and loved for forty years; they know some of the trees and shrubs as well as they know their own grandchildren. Barbara always said they would move ‘when the time was right’, but I fear they missed that particular window, probably about seven years ago, and they are now stuck in a rambling place they refuse to heat (‘Can’t go throwing your money around’) with a vertiginous staircase – the one Ben fell down the Easter he was three.

‘We do hate to be a burden …’ the voice continues as I’m lacing up my trainers. Check the clock. Going to be late for first training session with Conor. Sorry. I know if I was a good, self-sacrificing person I would pick up the phone, but I simply cannot face another Groundhog Day conversation with Donald.

‘… but you see Barbara seems to have caused offence yesterday when she said that Erna didn’t have good enough English to understand what was what. Barbara made Erna a cup of tea and Erna said “Thank you”, and Barbara said “You’re welcome”, but Erna thought she said, “You will come”, and that Barbara was giving her orders, but she wasn’t, you see. Erna was rather rough with Barbara, I’m afraid. She left in quite a huff and she hasn’t been in for a few days. I’m happy sorting Barbara’s bandage myself, as I do remember my First Aid, thank goodness, but she won’t let me into the bathroom with her and you know that’s how she burnt her leg in the first place. She runs the hot tap and then she forgets to put in cold.’

A man who, almost seventy years ago, navigated a Lancaster bomber through the treacherous skies over occupied Europe – he was three years older than Emily is now, a thought that always makes me want to cry – sounds resigned to his fate: calm, composed, stoical and utterly utterly helpless.

‘If it’s not too much trouble …’

Oh, all right, all right. Just coming.

‘Hello, Donald. Yes, it’s Kate. No, not at all. You’re not a bother. Sorry, no, we haven’t got your messages. We don’t always check the … Yes, it’s better to call the mobile if you can. I did write our numbers on the calendar for you. Oh, dear. Barbara caught the carer smoking in front of the Bishop of Llandaff?’ (Hang on, what’s a senior Welsh clergyman doing in my mother-in-law’s herbaceous border?) ‘Oh, the Bishop of Llandaff is a type of … Yes, I see, and Barbara doesn’t believe you should smoke by the dahlias. No, quite. Yes, yes. I can see that. And she’d prefer a carer from the area if possible. OK, I’ll give social services another call.’

They’re bound to have a non-smoking, English-speaking, dahlia-friendly home help at short notice, aren’t they?

Eventually manage to hang up after promising Donald that we will pay a visit once the kids are settled back in school, once Emily’s exams are out of the way, once I have a new job and a functioning kitchen and once Richard can take time out from his twice-weekly therapy sessions and cycle races. I make that the Twelfth of Never.

Text Conor to say sorry, I’ve had a family problem, and I will definitely see him at the gym on Friday. If I’m ever allowed to have some time for myself. Is that really too much to ask?

7.17 am: ‘Dear God, listen to this, Kate.’ Rich is sitting at the kitchen table. He looks up from the paper, squinting in the sharp light streaming in through the windows. Beautiful big Georgian windows, a gracious pair, but one sash mechanism is broken so you can’t open it, and the sills are riddled with rot.

‘Can you believe it?’ Rich sighs. ‘It says, “Hackers access one hundred thousand Snapchat photos and prepare to leak them including under-age nude pics”. Darling, do the kids have this Snapchat thing?’

‘Um, drner.’

‘Luckily we know Emily isn’t going to be posting pictures of her genitals for public consumption, but lots of parents haven’t got a clue what their kids are up to on social media.’

‘Ingggmr.’

‘I mean it’s totally inappropriate.’

‘Mmmm.’

Since his midlife crisis took hold my husband has started subscribing to progressive left-wing periodicals and using words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘issues around’ a lot. Instead of saying poverty he says ‘issues around deprivation’. I don’t know why no one says ‘problems’ any more, except maybe problems have to be solved, and they can’t be, and issues sound important but don’t demand solutions.

‘I’ve got therapy first thing,’ Rich says, ‘then I’m straight into lectures. Joely at the drop-in centre wants me to help get this meditation facility off the ground. We’re thinking of crowdfunding it.’

Your average menopausal male can generally be relied upon to purchase a leather jacket and the services of six-foot Russian blondes. Mine buys a book called Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Accessing the Calmer, Kinder You. After being let go by his ethical architecture firm, he decides to take the opportunity to retrain as a counsellor and starts fretting about the health and safety deficiencies in Bolivian tin mines when we can’t even staunch the pong from the soil pipe in the downstairs loo of our Tudorbethan hovel. (How I wish I’d never heard the term soil pipe, which is basically Victorian for ‘shithole’.) Honestly, it’s hideous. I’d rather he got a Harley-Davidson and a girlfriend called Danka Vanka.

Richard is so het up about the global epidemic of inappropriateness that he has no idea what is going on in his own home.

‘We put those parental controls on the kids’ phones and iPads, didn’t we?’ he asks me.

(Please observe the tactical use of the marital ‘we’. Richard doesn’t mean did ‘we’ put parental controls on the kids’ electronic devices. He wouldn’t know a parental control if it punched him on the nose. What he means by ‘we’ is me, the wife, who gets shared credit so long as things are going well. As soon as things go wrong, you can bet the question will be, ‘Did you organise those parental controls?’)

‘Course we have parental controls, darling. Fancy a bacon butty?’

Richard looks down at his Lycra-sheathed six-pack before capitulating. ‘Go on then, won’t say no if you’re making one.’

Over twenty years, the bacon sandwich has never failed as distraction, bribe or tranquilliser dart for my partner. Given a choice between a blow job and a bacon butty, let’s just say Rich would definitely hesitate. If he ever goes vegetarian, or even vegan – as looks increasingly likely judging by the tragic woven bracelet on his left wrist – our marriage is doomed. Anyway, I am telling the truth for a change. The kids do have parental controls on their technology. What I’m not telling Richard is that after Emily’s bottom went viral I called Joshua Reynolds, the village computer prodigy who is now in his late-twenties doing postgraduate work in physics at Imperial. (His mother Elaine told our Women Returners group that the infant Josh could re-route the US Navy from his buggy or something.) One of those disappointed, mousy women who only lights up in her offspring’s reflected glory, Elaine was thrilled when I called to ask for Josh’s number, explaining that I needed help with some Internet problems. I figured Josh was young enough and, let’s face it, sufficiently on the spectrum, not to think it was at all weird that I wanted to spy on my own daughter, or that I needed his help tracking down and destroying evidence of her naked backside wherever it might have got to.