Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Allison Pearson 2017

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Hand lettering by Ruth Rowland. Cover illustration by Henn Kim

Allison Pearson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008150556

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008150549

Version: 2018-03-22

Praise for How Hard Can It Be?

‘Revolutionary … Both funny and unflinching’

ELIZABETH DAY, Daily Telegraph

‘Once again, countless women will recognise themselves … Pearson has a gift’

The Times

‘Zesty, razor-sharp and hilarious … Get ready for Kate!’

TINA BROWN, magazine editor and bestselling author

‘Sharply observed and very funny’

Woman & Home

‘Made me laugh, wince, shudder and shed a tear!’

SOPHIE KINSELLA

‘As sharp and witty as ever … hugely enjoyable’

Daily Mail

‘Funny, heart-breaking, wise and delightful’

SOPHIE HANNAH

‘How Hard Can It Be? is that rare thing: a sequel that matches and even surpasses the original’

Daily Telegraph

‘Brilliantly well observed’

INDIA KNIGHT

‘Pearson deftly balances despair-inducing observations with escapist pizzazz’

Mail on Sunday

‘Pearson makes a sharp point about the lack of value and status that society places on the onerous job of a stay at home mother … in these pages, there is a raw honesty’

Financial Times

‘Sparkling, funny and poignant, this is a triumphant return for Pearson and hopefully not the last we will hear of Kate’

Daily Express

‘A cutting edge of its own’

Metro

‘Wildly entertaining’

Reader’s Digest

‘[Pearson] nails the comedy and the pathos of daily domestic life like no one else’

Country Life

‘Poignant and smart takes on the pressures affecting working mothers … laugh out loud funny’

Women’s Agenda

‘[Peason writes] with acid and a daunting determination to tell it like it is’

New Zealand Herald

Dedication

For Awen and Evie,

my mother and my daughter

Epigraph

Conceal me what I am, and by my aid

For such disguise as haply shall become

The form of my intent.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Nobody tells you about the balding pudenda.

Whoopi Goldberg

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: Countdown to Invisibility: T minus six months and two days

1. Bats in the Belfie

2. The Has-been

3. The Bottom Line

4. Ghosts

5. Five More Minutes

6. Of Mice and Menopause

7. Back to the Future

8. Old and New

9. Genuine Fake

10. Rebirth of a Saleswoman

11. Twelfth Night (or What You Won’t)

12. Catch-32

13. Those Stubborn Areas

14. The College Reunion

15. Calamity Girl

16. Help!

17. The Rock Widow

18. The Office Party

19. Coitus Interruptus

20. Merry Christmas

21. The Mere Idea of You

22. Madonna and Mum

23. Never Can Say Goodbye

24. For Whom the Belfie Tolls

25. Cut to the Quick

26. Redemption

27. Guilty Secret

28. 11th March

29. After All

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Allison Pearson

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
COUNTDOWN TO INVISIBILITY: T MINUS SIX MONTHS AND TWO DAYS

Funny thing is I never worried about getting older. Youth had not been so kind to me that I minded the loss of it. I thought women who lied about their age were shallow and deluded, but I was not without vanity. I could see the dermatologists were right when they said that a cheap aqueous cream was just as good as those youth elixirs in their fancy packaging, but I bought the expensive moisturiser anyway. Call it insurance. I was a competent woman of substance and I simply wanted to look good for my age, that’s all – what that age was didn’t really matter. At least that’s what I told myself. And then I got older.

Look, I’ve studied the financial markets half my life. That’s my job. I know the deal: my sexual currency was going down and facing total collapse unless I did something to shore it up. The once-proud and not unattractive Kate Reddy Inc was fighting a hostile takeover of her mojo. To make matters worse, this fact was rubbed in my face every day by the emerging market in the messiest room in the house. My teenage daughter’s womanly stock was rising while mine was declining. This was exactly as Mother Nature intended, and I took pride in my gorgeous girl, I really did. But sometimes that loss could be painful – excruciatingly so. Like the morning I locked eyes on the Circle Line with some guy with luxuriant, tousled Roger Federer hair (is there any better kind?) and I swear there was a flicker of something between us, a sizzle of static, a frisson of flirtation right before he offered me his seat. Not his number, his seat.

‘Totes humil’, as Emily would say. The fact he didn’t even consider me worthy of interest stung like a slapped cheek. Unfortunately, the impassioned young woman who lives on inside me, who actually thought Roger was flirting with her, still doesn’t get it. She sees her former self in the mirror of her mind’s eye as she looks out at the world and assumes that’s what the world sees when it looks back. She is quite insanely and irrationally hopeful that she might be attractive to Roger (likely age: thirty-one) because she doesn’t realise that she/we now have a thickening waist, thinning vaginal walls (who knew?) and are starting to think about spring bulbs and comfortable footwear with considerably more enthusiasm than, say, the latest scratchy thongs from Agent Provocateur. Roger’s erotic radar could probably detect the presence of those practical, flesh-coloured pants of mine.

Look, I was doing OK. Really, I was. I got through the oil-spill-on-the-road that is turning forty. Lost a little control, but I drove into the skid just like the driving instructors tell you to and afterwards things were fine again; no, they were better than fine. The holy trinity of midlife – good husband, nice home, great kids – was mine.

Then, in no particular order, my husband lost his job and tuned into his inner Dalai Lama. He would not be earning anything for two years, as he retrained as a counsellor (oh, joy!). The kids entered the twister of adolescence at exactly the same time as their grandparents were taking what might charitably be called a second pass at their own childhood. My mother-in-law bought a chainsaw with a stolen credit card (not as funny as it sounds). After recovering from a heart attack, my own mum lost her footing and broke her hip. I worried I was losing my mind; but it was probably just hiding in the same place as the car keys and the reading glasses and the earring. And those concert tickets.

In March it’s my fiftieth. No, I will not be celebrating with a party and yes, I probably am scared to admit I am scared, or apprehensive (I’m not quite sure what I am, but I definitely don’t like it.) To be perfectly honest, I’d rather not think about my age at all, but significant birthdays – the kind they helpfully put in huge, embossed numbers on the front of cards to signpost The Road to Death – have a way of forcing the issue. They say that fifty is the new forty, but to the world of work, my kind of work anyway, fifty may as well be sixty or seventy or eighty. As a matter of urgency, I need to get younger, not older. It’s a question of survival: to get a job, to hold onto my position in the world, to remain marketable and within my sell-by date. To keep the ship afloat, the show on the road. To meet the needs of those who seem to need me more than ever, I must reverse time, or at least get the bitch to stand still.

With this goal in mind, the build-up to my half-century will be quiet and totally uneventful. I will not show any outward sign of the panic I feel. I will glide towards it serenely, no more sudden swerves or bumps in the road.

Well, that was the plan. Then Emily woke me up.

1
BATS IN THE BELFIE
SEPTEMBER

Monday, 1.37 am: Such a weird dream. Emily is crying, she’s really upset. Something about a belfry. A boy wants to come round to our house because of her belfry. She keeps saying she’s sorry, it was a mistake, she didn’t mean to do it. Strange. Most of my nightmares lately feature me on my unmentionable birthday having become totally invisible and talking to people who can’t hear me or see me.

‘But we haven’t got a belfry,’ I say, and the moment I speak the words aloud I know that I’m awake.

Emily is by my side of the bed, bent over as if in prayer or protecting a wound. ‘Please don’t tell Daddy,’ she pleads. ‘You can’t tell him, Mummy.’

‘What? Tell him what?’

I fumble blindly on the bedside table and my baffled hand finds reading glasses, distance glasses, a pot of moisturiser and three foil sheets of pills before I locate my phone. Its small window of milky, metallic light reveals that my daughter is dressed in the Victoria’s Secret candy-pink shorty shorts and camisole I foolishly agreed to buy her after one of our horrible rows.

‘What is it, Em? Don’t tell Daddy what?’

No need to look over to check that Richard’s still asleep. I can hear that he’s asleep. With every year of our marriage, my husband’s snoring has got louder. What began as piglet snufflings twenty years ago is now a nightly Hog Symphony, complete with wind section. Sometimes, at the snore’s crescendo, it gets so loud that Rich wakes himself up with a start, rolls over and starts the symphony’s first movement again. Otherwise, he is harder to wake than a saint on a tomb.

Richard had the same talent for Selective Nocturnal Deafness when Emily was a baby, so it was me who got up two or three times in the night to respond to her cries, locate her blankie, change her nappy, soothe and settle her, only for that penitential playlet to begin all over again. Maternal sonar doesn’t come with an off-switch, worse luck.

‘Mum,’ Emily pleads, clutching my wrist.

I feel drugged. I am drugged. I took an antihistamine before bed because I’ve been waking up most nights between two and three, bathed in sweat, and it helps me sleep through. The pill did its work all too well, and now a thought, any thought at all, struggles to break the surface of dense, clotted sleep. No part of me wants to move. I feel like my limbs are being pressed down on the bed by weights.

‘Muuuu-uuuumm, please.’

God, I am too old for this.

‘Sorry, give me a minute, love. Just coming.’

I get out of bed onto stiff, protesting feet and put one hand around my daughter’s slender frame. With the other, I check her forehead. No temperature, but her face is damp with tears. So many tears that they have dripped onto her camisole. I feel its humid wetness – a mix of warm skin and sadness – through my cotton nightie and I flinch. In the darkness, I plant a kiss on Em’s forehead and get her nose instead. Emily is taller than me now. Each time I see her it takes a few seconds to adjust to this incredible fact. I want her to be taller than me, because in the world of woman, tall is good, leggy is good, but I also want her to be four years old and really small so I can pick her up and make a safe world for her in my arms.

‘Is it your period, darling?’

She shakes her head and I smell my conditioner on her hair, the expensive one I specifically told her not to use.

‘No, I did something really ba-aa-aa-aad. He says he’s coming here.’ Emily starts crying again.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’s OK,’ I say, manoeuvring us both awkwardly towards the door, guided by the chink of light from the landing. ‘Whatever it is, we can fix it, I promise. It’ll be fine.’

And, you know, I really thought it would be fine, because what could be so bad in the life of a teenage girl that her mother couldn’t make it better?

2.11 am: ‘You sent. A picture. Of your naked bottom. To a boy. Or boys. You’ve never met?’

Emily nods miserably. She sits in her place at the kitchen table, clutching her phone in one hand and a Simpsons D’oh mug of hot milk in the other, while I inhale green tea and wish it were Scotch. Or cyanide. Think, Kate, THINK.

The problem is I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand. Emily may as well be talking in a foreign language. I mean, I’m on Facebook, I’m in a family group on WhatsApp that the kids set up for us and I’ve tweeted all of eight times (once, embarrassingly, about Pasha on Strictly Come Dancing after a couple of glasses of wine), but the rest of social media has passed me by. Until now, my ignorance has been funny – a family joke, something the kids could tease me about. ‘Are you from the past?’ That was the punchline Emily and Ben would chorus in a sing-song Irish lilt; they had learned it from a favourite sitcom. ‘Are you from the past, Mum?’

They simply could not believe it when, for years, I remained stubbornly loyal to my first mobile: a small, greyish-green object that shuddered in my pocket like a baby gerbil. It could barely send a text message – not that I ever imagined I would be sending those on an hourly basis – and you had to hold down a number to get a letter to appear. Three letters allocated to each number. It took twenty minutes to type ‘Hello’. The screen was the size of a thumbnail and you only needed to charge it once a week. Mum’s Flintstone Phone, that’s what the kids called it. I was happy to collude with their mockery; it made me feel momentarily light-hearted, like the relaxed, laid-back parent I knew I never really could be. I suppose I was proud that these beings I had given life to, recently so small and helpless, had become so enviably proficient, such experts in this new tongue that was Mandarin to me. I probably thought it was a harmless way for Emily and Ben to feel superior to their control-freak(ish) mother, who was still boss when it came to all the important things like safety and decency, right?

Wrong. Boy, did I get that wrong. In the half hour we have been sitting at the kitchen table, Emily, through hiccups of shock, has managed to tell me that she sent a picture of her bare backside to her friend Lizzy Knowles on Snapchat because Lizzy told Em that the girls in their group were all going to compare tan-lines after the summer holidays.

‘What’s a Snapchat?’

‘Mum, it’s like a photo that disappears after like ten seconds.’

‘Great, it’s gone. So what’s the problem?’

‘Lizzy took a screenshot of the Snapchat and she said she meant to put it in our Facebook Group Chat, but she put it on her wall by mistake so now it’s there like forever.’ She pronounces the word ‘forever’ so it rhymes with her favourite, ‘Whatevah’ – lately further abbreviated to the intolerable ‘Whatevs’.

‘Fu’evah,’ Emily says again. At the thought of this unwanted immortality, her mouth collapses into an anguished ‘O’ – a popped balloon of grief.

It takes a few moments for me to translate what she has said into English. I may be wrong (and I’m hoping I am), but I think it means that my beloved daughter has taken a photo of her own bare bum. Through the magic of social media and the wickedness of another girl, this image has now been disseminated – if that’s the word I want, which I’m very much afraid it is – to everyone in the school, the street, the universe. Everyone, in fact, but her own father, who is upstairs snoring for England.

‘People think it’s like really funny,’ Emily says, ‘because my back is still a bit burnt from Greece so it’s like really red and my bum’s like really white so I look like a flag. Lizzy says she tried to delete it, but loads of people have shared it already.’

‘Slow down, slow down, sweetheart. When did this happen?’

‘It was like seven thirty but I didn’t notice for ages. You told me to put my phone away when we were having dinner, remember? My name was at the top of the screenshot so everyone knows it’s me. Lizzy says she’s tried to take it down but it’s gone viral. And Lizzy’s like, “Em, I thought it was funny. I’m so sorry.” And I don’t want to seem like I’m upset about it because everyone thinks it’s really hilarious. But now all these people have got my like Facebook and I’m getting these creepy messages.’ All of that comes out in one big sobbing blurt.

I get up and go to the counter to fetch some kitchen roll for Em to blow her nose because I have stopped buying tissues as part of recent family budget cuts. The chill wind of austerity blowing across the country, and specifically through our household, means that fancy pastel boxes of paper softened with aloe vera are off the shopping list. I silently curse Richard’s decision to use being made redundant by his architecture firm as ‘an opportunity to retrain in something more meaningful’ – or ‘something more unpaid and self-indulgent’ if you were being harsh, which, sorry, but I am at this precise moment because I don’t have any Kleenex to soak up our daughter’s tears. Only when I make a mess of ripping the kitchen paper along its serrated edge do I notice that my hand is shaking, quite badly actually. I place the trembling right hand in my left hand and interlink the fingers in a way I haven’t done for years. ‘Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Look inside and see all the people.’ Em used to make me do that little rhyme over and over because she loved to see the fingers waggling in the church.

‘’Gain, Mummy. Do it ’gain.’

What was she then? Three? Four? It seems so near yet, at the same time, impossibly far. My baby. I’m still trying to get my bearings in this strange new country my child has taken me to, but the feelings won’t stay still. Disbelief, disgust, a tincture of fear.

‘Sharing a picture of your bottom on a phone? Oh, Emily, how could you be so bloody stupid?’ (That’s the fear flaring into anger right there.)

She trumpets her nose on the kitchen roll, screws up the paper and hands it back to me.

‘It’s a belfie, Mum.’

‘What’s a belfie for heaven’s sake?’

‘It’s a selfie of your bum,’ Emily says. She talks as though this were a normal part of life, like a loaf of bread or a bar of soap.

‘You know, a BELFIE.’ She says it louder this time, like an Englishman abroad raising his voice so the dumb foreigner will understand.

Ah, a belfie, not a belfry. In my dream, I thought she said belfry. A selfie I know about. Once, when my phone flipped to selfie mode and I found myself looking at my own face, I recoiled. It was unnatural. I sympathised with that tribe which refused to be photographed for fear the camera would steal their souls. I know girls like Em constantly take selfies. But a belfie?

‘Rihanna does it. Kim Kardashian. Everyone does it,’ Emily says flatly, a familiar note of sullenness creeping into her voice.

This is my daughter’s stock response lately. Getting into a nightclub with fake ID? ‘Don’t be shocked, Mum, everyone does it.’ Sleeping over at the house of a ‘best friend’ I’ve never met, whose parents seem weirdly unconcerned about their child’s nocturnal movements? Perfectly normal behaviour, apparently. Whatever it is I am so preposterously objecting to, I need to chill out, basically, because Everyone Does It. Am I so out of touch that distributing pictures of one’s naked arse has become socially acceptable?

‘Emily, stop texting, will you? Give me that phone. You’re in enough trouble as it is.’ I snatch the wretched thing out of her hands and she lunges across the table to grab it back, but not before I see a message from someone called Tyler: ‘Ur ass is well fit make me big lol!!! ’

Christ, the Village Idiot is talking dirty to my baby. And ‘Ur’ instead of ‘Your’? The boy is not just lewd but illiterate. My Inner Grammarian clutches her pearls and shudders. Come off it, Kate. What kind of warped avoidance strategy is this? Some drooling lout is sending your sixteen-year-old daughter pornographic texts and you’re worried about his spelling?

‘Look, darling, I think I’d better call Lizzy’s mum to talk about wha—’

‘Nooooooo.’ Emily’s howl is so piercing that Lenny springs from his basket and starts barking to see off whoever has hurt her.

‘You can’t,’ she wails. ‘Lizzy’s my best friend. You can’t get her in trouble.’

I look at her swollen face, the bottom lip raw and bloody from chewing. Does she really think Lizzy is her best friend? Manipulative little witch more like. I haven’t trusted Lizzy Knowles since the time she announced to Emily that she was allowed to take two friends to see Justin Bieber at the O2 for her birthday. Emily was so excited; then Lizzy broke the news that she was first reserve. I bought Em a ticket for the concert myself, at catastrophic expense, to protect her from that slow haemorrhage of exclusion, that internal bleed of self-confidence which only girls can do to girls. Boys are such amateurs when it comes to spite.

All of this I think, but do not say. For my daughter cannot be expected to deal with public humiliation and private treachery in the same night.

‘Lenny, back in your basket, there’s a good boy. It’s not getting up time yet. Lie down. There, good boy. Good boy.’

I settle and reassure the dog – this feels more manageable than settling and reassuring the girl – and Emily comes across and lies next to him, burying her head in his neck. With a complete lack of self-consciousness, she sticks her bottom in the air. The pink Victoria’s Secret shorts offer no more cover than a thong and I get the double full-moon effect of both bum cheeks – that same pert little posterior which, God help us, is now preserved for posterity in a billion pixels. Emily’s body may be that of a young woman, but she has the total trustingness of the child she was not long ago. Still is in so many ways. Here we are, Em and me, safe in our kitchen, warmed by a cranky old Aga, cuddled up to our beloved dog, yet outside these walls forces have been unleashed that are beyond our control. How am I supposed to protect her from things I can’t see or hear? Tell me that. Lenny is just delighted that the two girls in his life are up at this late hour; he turns his head and starts to lick Em’s ear with his long, startlingly pink tongue.

The puppy, purchase of which was strictly forbidden by Richard, is my proxy third child, also strictly forbidden by Richard. (The two, I admit, are not unrelated.) I brought this jumble of soft limbs and big brown eyes home just after we moved into this ancient, crumbling-down house. A little light incontinence could hardly hurt the place, I reasoned. The carpets we inherited from the previous owners were filthy and sent up smoke signals of dust as you walked across a room. They would have to be replaced, though only after the kitchen and the bathroom and all the other things that needed replacing first. I knew Rich would be pissed off for the reasons above, but I didn’t care. The house move had been unsettling for all of us and Ben had been begging for a puppy for so long – he’d sent me birthday cards every single year featuring a sequence of adorable, beseeching hounds. And now that he was old enough not to want his mother to hug him, I figured out that Ben would cuddle the puppy and I would cuddle the puppy, and, somehow, somewhere in the middle, I would get to touch my son.

The strategy was a bit fluffy and not fully formed, rather like the new arrival, but it worked beautifully. Whatever the opposite of a punchbag is, that’s Lenny’s role in our family. He soaks up all the children’s cares. To a teenager, whose daily lot is to discover how unlovable and misshapen they are, the dog’s gift is complete and uncomplicated adoration. And I love Lenny too, really love him with such a tender devotion I am embarrassed to admit it. He probably fills some gap in my life I don’t even want to think about.

‘Lizzy said it was an accident,’ says Em, stretching out a hand for me to pull her up. ‘The belfie was only supposed to be for the girls in our group, but she like posted it where all of her other friends could see it by mistake. She took it down as soon as she realised, but it was too late ’cos loads of people had already saved it and reposted it.’

‘What about that boy you said was coming round? Um, Tyler?’ I close and open my eyes quickly to wipe the boy’s lewd text.

‘He saw it on Facebook. Lizzy tagged my bum #FlagBum and now everyone on Facebook can see it and knows it’s like mine, so now everyone thinks I’m like just one of those girls who takes her clothes off for nothing.’

‘No they don’t, love.’ I pull Em into my arms. She lays her head on my shoulder and we stand in the middle of the kitchen, half hugging, half slow-dancing. ‘People will talk about it for a day or two then it’ll blow over, you’ll see.’

I want to believe that, I really do. But it’s like an infectious disease, isn’t it? Immunologists would have a field day researching the viral spread of compromising photographs on social media. I’d venture that the Spanish flu and Ebola combined couldn’t touch the speed of photographic mortification spreading through cyberspace.

Through the virus that is Internet porn, and in the blink of an eye, my little girl’s bare backside had found its way from our commuter village forty-seven miles outside London all the way to Elephant and Castle where Tyler, who is what police call ‘a known associate’ of Lizzy’s cousin’s mate’s brother, was able to see it. All because, according to Em, dear Lizzy had her settings fixed to allow ‘friends of friends’ to see whatever she posted. Great, why not just send it directly to the paedophile wing of Wormwood Scrubs?

4.19 am: Emily is asleep at last. Outside, it’s black and cold, the first chill of early autumn. I’m still getting used to night in a village – so different from night in a town, where it’s never truly dark. Not like this furry black pelt thrown over everything. Quite close by, somewhere down the bottom of the garden, there is the shriek of something killing or being killed. When we first moved here, I mistook these noises for a human in pain and I wanted to call the police. Now I just assume it’s the fox again.

I promised Em I would stay by her bed in case Tyler or any other belfie hounds try to drop in. That’s why I’m sitting here in her little chair with the teddy bear upholstery, my own mottled, forty-something backside struggling to squidge between its narrow, scratched wooden arms. I think of all the times I’ve kept vigil on this chair. Praying she would go to sleep (pretty much every single night, 1998–2000). Praying she would wake up (suspected concussion after falling off bouncy castle, 2004). And now here I am thinking of her bottom, the one that I trapped expertly in Pampers and which is now bouncing around the worldwide web all by itself, no doubt inflaming the loins of hordes of deviant Tylers. Uch.

I feel ashamed that my daughter has no sense of modesty because whose fault is that? Her mother’s, obviously. Mine – Emily’s Grandma Jean – instilled in me an almost Victorian dread of nakedness that came from her own strict Baptist upbringing. Ours was the only family on the beach that got changed into swimwear inside a kind of towelling burqa, with a drawstring neck my mum had fashioned from curtain flex. To this day, I hardly glance at my own backside, let alone offer it up to public view. How in the name of God did our family go, in just two generations, from prudery to porn?

I desperately need to talk to someone, but who? I can’t tell Richard because the thought of his princess being defiled would kill him. I flick through my mental Rolodex of friends, pausing at certain names, trying to weigh up who would judge harshly, who would sympathise effusively then spread the gossip anyway – in a spirit of deep concern, naturally. (‘Poor Kate, you won’t believe what her daughter did.’) It’s not like laughing with other mums about something embarrassing Emily did when she was little, like that Nativity play when she broke Arabella’s halo because she was so cross about getting the part of the innkeeper’s wife. (A dowdy, non-speaking role with no tinsel; I saw her point.) I can’t expose Em to the sanctimony of the Muffia, that organised gang of mothers superior. So, who on earth can I trust with this thing so distressing and surreal that I actually feel sick? I go to my Inbox, find a name that spells ‘unshockability’ and begin to type.

From: Kate Reddy

To: Candy Stratton

Subject: Help!

Hi hon, you still up? Can’t remember the time difference. It’s been quite a night here. Emily was lured by a ‘friend’ into posting a photo of her naked derrière on Snapchat which has now been circulated to the entire Internet. This is called a ‘belfie’, which I’m old enough to think might be short for Harry Belafonte. Worried that heavy-breathing stalkers are about to form a queue outside our house. Seriously, I feel Jurassic when she talks to me. I don’t understand any of the tech stuff, but I do know it’s really bad. I want to murder the little idiot and I want to protect her so badly.

I thought this parenting lark was supposed to get easier. What do I do? Ban her from social media? Get her to a nunnery?

Yours in a sobbing heap,

Kx

A Technicolor image pings into my head of Candy at Edwin Morgan Forster, the international investment company where we both worked, must be eight or nine years ago. She was wearing a red dress so tight you could watch the sashimi she ate for lunch progressing down her oesophagus. ‘Whad you lookin’ at, kid?’ she would jeer at any male colleague foolish enough to comment on her Jessica Rabbit silhouette. Candace Marlene Stratton: proud, foul-mouthed export of New Jersey, Internet whizz, and my bosom buddy in an office where sexism was the air that we breathed. I read about a discrimination case in the paper the other day, some junior accountant complaining that her boss hadn’t been respectful enough in his use of language. I thought: Seriously? You don’t know you’re born, sweetie. At EMF, if a woman so much as raised her voice, the traders would yell across the floor, ‘On the rag are you, darling?’ Nothing was off limits, not even menstruation. They loved to tease female staff about their time of the month. Complaining would only have confirmed the sniggerers’ view that we couldn’t hack it, so we never bothered. Candy, who subsisted on coke back then – the kind you gulped from a can and the kind you snorted up your nose – sat about fifteen feet away from me for three years, yet we hardly spoke. Two women talking in the office was ‘gossiping’; two men doing exactly the same was ‘a briefing’. We knew the rules. But Candy and I emailed the whole time, in and out of each other’s minds, venting and joking: members of the Resistance in a country of men.

I never thought I would look back on that time with affection, let alone longing, only suddenly I think how exciting it was. It tested me in a way that nagging kids to do their homework, cooking nine meals a week and getting a man in to do the gutters – the wearisome warp and weft of life – never does. Can you be a success as a mother? People only notice when you’re not doing it right.

Back then, I had targets I could hit and I knew that I was good, really good at my work. Camaraderie under pressure; you don’t realise what a deep pleasure that is until it’s gone. And Candy, she always had my back. Not long after she gave birth to Seymour, she headed home to the States to be near her mom, who longed to babysit her first grandchild. It allowed Candy to start an upmarket sex-toy business. Orgazma: for the woman who’s too busy going to come (or maybe the other way around). I’ve only seen Candy once in the years since we both left EMF, although, forged in the heat of adversity, ours are the ties that bind. I really wish she was here now. I’m not sure I can do this by myself.

From: Candy Stratton

To: Kate Reddy

Subject: Help!

Hey Sobbing Heap, this is the Westchester County 24-Hour Counselling Service. Calm down, OK. What Emily did is perfectly normal teen behaviour. Think of it as the 21 st century equivalent of love letters tied with a red ribbon in a scented drawer … only now it’s her drawers.

Count yourself lucky it’s just a picture of her ass. A girl in Seymour’s class shared a picture of her lady garden because the captain of the football team asked to see it. These kids have NO sense of privacy. They think because they’re on the phone or computer in their own home it’s safe.

Emily doesn’t realise she’s walking butt-naked down the information superhighway looking like she’s got her thumb out and she’s trying to hitch a ride. Your job is to point that out to her. With force if necessary. I suggest hiring some friendly nerd to see how much he can track down online and destroy. You can ask Facebook to take obscene stuff down I’m pretty sure. And restrict her privileges – no Internet access for a few weeks until she’s learned her lesson.

You should get some sleep, hon, must be crazy late there?

Am here for you always,

XXO C

5.35 am: It’s now so late that it’s early. I decide to unload the dishwasher rather than go back to bed for a futile hour staring at the ceiling. This perimenopause thing is playing havoc with my sleep. You won’t believe it, but when the doctor mentioned that word to me a few months ago the first thing that popped into my head was a Sixties band with moptop hair: Perry and the Menopauses. Dooby-dooby-doo. Perry was smiling, unthreatening, and almost certainly wearing a hand-knitted Christmas jumper. I know, I know, but I’d never heard of it before and I was relieved to finally have a name for a condition that was giving me broken nights then plunging me down a mineshaft of tiredness straight after lunch. (I’d vaguely wondered if I had some fatal illness and had already moved on to touching scenes by the graveside where both kids cried and said if only they’d appreciated me while I was still alive.) If you have a name for what’s making you scared you can try to befriend it, can’t you? So Perry and I, we would be friends.

‘I can’t afford to take an afternoon nap,’ I explained to the doctor. ‘I’d just like to feel like my old self again.’

‘That’s not uncommon,’ she said, typing busily into my notes on the screen. ‘Classic textbook symptoms for your age.’

I was relieved to have classic symptoms; there was safety in numbers. Out there were thousands, no, millions of women who also walked around feeling like they were strapped to a dying animal. All we wanted was our old self back, and if we waited patiently for her she would come. Meanwhile, we could make lists to combat another of Perry’s delightful symptoms. Forgetfulness.

What did Candy say in her email? Find some nerdy guy who can track down Emily’s belfie and wipe it? ‘Perfectly normal teen behaviour.’ Maybe it’s not so bad after all. I take a seat in the chair next to the Aga, the one I bought on eBay for £95 (absolute bargain, it only needs new springs, new feet and new upholstery) and start to make a list of all the things I mustn’t forget. The last thing I remember is a dog with no sense of his own size jumping onto my lap, his tail beating against my arm, silky head resting on my shoulder.

7.01 am: The moment I wake I check my phone. Two missed calls from Julie. My sister likes to keep me up to date on our mother’s latest adventure, just to make it clear that, living three streets away in our Northern home town, it’s she who has to be on call for Mum, who has so far refused to adopt any behaviour which might be called ‘age appropriate’. Every Wednesday morning, Mum prepares all the vegetables for Luncheon Club, where some of the diners who she calls ‘the old people’ are fifteen years her junior. This fills me with a mixture of pride (look at her spirit!) and exasperation (stop being so bloody independent, will you?). When is my mother going to accept that she too is old?

Since I decided to ‘swan off’ as my sister calls it – aka taking the difficult decision to move the family back down South so I could be near London, the place most likely to give me a well-paid job – Julie has become one of the great English martyrs, giving off a noxious whiff of bonfire and sanctimony. Never misses a chance to point out I’m not pulling my weight. Even though, when I speak to Mum, as I do most days, she tells me that she hasn’t seen my younger sister for ages. I think it’s terrible Julie doesn’t drop in to check on Mum, seeing how near she is, but I can’t say so because, in the casting for the play of our family, I am the Bad Daughter Who Buggered Off and Julie is the Unappreciated Good Daughter Who Stayed Put. I do my best to change the script; I bought Mum a computer for her birthday and told her it was from both of us, Julie and me. But making me feel guilty is one of the few bits of power my twice-divorced, vodka-chugging sister gets to wield in her hard and helpless life. I get that. Rationally, I do, and I try to be understanding, but since when could the power of reason unpick the knots of sibling rivalry? I should call Julie back, and I will, but I need to get Emily sorted out. Emily first, then Mum, then prepare for my interview with the headhunter this afternoon. Anyway, I don’t need Julie’s help to make me feel guilty about getting my priorities wrong. Guilt is where I live.

7.11 am: At breakfast, I tell Richard that Emily is sleeping in because she had a bad night. This has the virtue of being a lie that is perfectly true. It was certainly bad, right up there with the worst nights ever. Completely drained, I move through my morning tasks like a rusty, scrapyard android. Even bending over to pick up Lenny’s water bowl is such an effort I actually make encouraging sounds to get myself to straighten up. (‘Come on, ooff, you can do it!’) Am making porridge when Ben descends from his lair looking like a wildebeest tethered to three kinds of electronic device. When he turned fourteen, my lovely boy’s shoulders slumped overnight and he lost the power of speech, communicating his needs in occasional grunts and snide put-downs. This morning, however, he seems weirdly animated – talkative even.

‘Mum, guess what? I saw this picture of Emily on Facebook. Crack-ing photo.’

‘Ben.’

‘Seriously, the bottom line is she got thousands of Likes for this picture of her …’

‘BENJAMIN!’

‘Well, well, young man,’ says Richard, looking up briefly from his frogspawn yogurt, or whatever it is he’s eating these days, ‘it’s good to hear you saying something positive about your sister for a change. Isn’t it, Kate?’

I shoot Ben my best Medusa death-ray stare and mouth, ‘Tell Dad and you’re dead.’

Richard doesn’t notice this frantic semaphore between mother and son because he is absorbed in an article on a cycling website. I can read the headline over his shoulder. ‘15 Gadgets You Never Knew You Needed.’

The number of gadgets cyclists don’t know that they need is very extensive, as our small utility room can testify. Getting to the washing machine these days is like competing in the hurdles because Rich’s bike gear occupies every inch of floor. There are several kinds of helmet: a helmet that plays music, a helmet with a miner’s lamp clipped to the front, even a helmet with its own indicator. From my drying rack hang two heavy, metal locks that look more like implements used during the torture of a Tudor nobleman than something to fasten a bike to a railing. When I went in there yesterday to empty the dryer, I found Rich’s latest purchase. A worryingly phallic object, still in its box, it claimed to be ‘an automatic lube dispenser’. Is that for the bike or for my husband’s chafed backside, which has lost its cushion of fat since he became a mountain goat? It sure as hell isn’t for our sex life.

‘I’ll be late tonight. Andy and I are riding to Outer Mongolia,’ (at least that’s what I think he said). ‘OK with you?’

It’s a statement not a question. Richard doesn’t look up from his laptop, not even when I put a bowl of porridge in front of him. ‘Darling, you know I’m not eating gluten,’ he mutters.

‘I thought oats were OK? Slow release, low GI aren’t they?’ He doesn’t respond.

Same goes for Ben who I can see is scrolling through Facebook, smirking and communing with that invisible world where he spends so much of his time. Probably charting the global adventures of his sister’s bottom. With a pang, I think of Emily asleep upstairs. I told her everything would seem better in the morning and now it is the morning I need to think how to make it better. First, I have to get her father out of the house.

Over by the back door, Richard starts to put on his cycling gear, a process fraught with zips and studs and flaps. Picture, if you will, a knight getting ready for the Battle of Agincourt with a £2,300 carbon fibre bike taking the part of the horse. When my husband took up cycling three years ago, I was totally in favour. Exercise, fresh air, anything so I could be left in peace on eBay picking up ‘more junk we don’t need to clutter up this ruin’, as Richard calls it. Or ‘incredible bargains that will find a place in our magical old house’, which I prefer.

That was before it became clear that Rich wasn’t just cycling for fun. Seriously, fun did not come into it. Before my unsuspecting eyes, he morphed into one of those MAMILs you read about in the Lifestyle section of the papers, a Middle-Aged Man in Lycra who did a minimum of ten hours in the saddle every week. On his new regime, Rich rapidly lost two stone. I found it hard to be delighted about this because my own extra pounds were clinging to me with greater tenacity every year. Unlike Richard’s saddlebags, mine were no longer removable (if only you could unhook the panniers of spare flesh!). Until my late thirties, I swear all it took was four days of eating only cottage cheese and Ryvita and I could feel my ribs again. That trick doesn’t work any more.

Rich had never been fat, but he was always cuddly in a rumpled, Jeff Bridges kind of way, and there was something about the soft ampleness of his body that matched his good nature. He looked like what he was: an amiable and generous man. This angular stranger he studies in the mirror with intense interest has a taut, toned body and a heavily lined face – we have both reached that age where being too thin makes you look gaunt instead of youthful. The new Richard attracts lots of admiring comments from our friends and I know I should find him attractive, but any lustful thoughts are punctured instantly by the cycling gear. What Rich most resembles when he wears his neck-to-knee stretchwear is a giant turquoise condom. Horribly visible, his penis and testicles dangle like low-hanging fruit.

The old Rich would have appreciated how ridiculous he looks and enjoyed sharing the joke. This new one doesn’t smile much, or maybe I don’t give him much to smile about. He is permanently in a grump about the house or ‘Your Money Pit’ as he calls it, never missing an opportunity to get in a dig at the lovely builder who is skilfully helping me coax the sad old place back to life.

As he fastens his helmet, he says: ‘Kate, can you get Piotr to take a look at the bathroom tap? I think the washer he used was another of his post-war Polish cast-offs.’

See what I mean? Another sideswipe at poor Piotr. I would say something sarcastic back, like how I’m amazed that Richard even noticed something about our house when his mind is on much higher things, but suddenly feel really bad that I haven’t told him about Emily and the belfie. Instead of snapping, I go over and give him a guilty goodbye hug, whereupon my dressing gown gets snagged on a Velcro pocket flap. There are an awkward few seconds when we are stuck together. It’s the closest we’ve been for a while. Perhaps I should tell him about last night? The temptation to blurt it all out, to share the burden, is almost overwhelming, but I promised Emily that I wouldn’t tell Daddy, so I don’t.

7.54 am: With Richard and Ben safely out of the house, I go upstairs to check on Em, bearing a mug of brick-red tea with one sugar. Since she started her juicing regime, she won’t allow any sugar to pass her lips, but surely sweet tea counts as medicine in an emergency? I can only push her door so far before it jams on a pile of clothes and shoes. I squeeze through the gap and find myself in what looks like a room vacated in a hurry after an air raid. Debris is spread over a wide area and on the bedside table teeters an art installation made of Diet Coke cans.

The state of a teenager’s bedroom is such a time-honoured source of mother–daughter conflict that I guess I should have been prepared for it, but our fights over this disputed territory are never less than bruising. The latest, after school on Friday, when I insisted that her room be tidied right now, ended in furious stalemate:

Emily: ‘But it’s my room.’

Me: ‘But it’s my house.’

Neither of us was prepared to back down.

‘She’s so stubborn,’ I complained later to Richard.

‘Who does that remind you of?’ he said.

Emily is sprawled diagonally across the bed, duvet twisted about her like a chrysalis. She has always been a very active sleeper, moving around her mattress like the hands of a clock. When she’s asleep, as she is now, she looks exactly like the toddler I remember in her cot – that determined jut to her chin, the flaxen hair which forms damp curls on the pillow when she’s hot. She was born with these enormous eyes whose colour didn’t settle for a long while, as if they were still making up their mind. When I lifted her out of the cot each morning, I used to chant, ‘What colour are your eyes today? Browny bluey greeny grey?’

They ended up hazel like mine and I was secretly disappointed she didn’t get Richard’s perfect shade of Paul Newman blue, though she carries the gene for those so they may yet come out in her own kids. Unbelievably, my mind has already started straying to grandchildren. (I knew you could be broody for a baby, but broody for your baby’s baby? Is that a thing?)

I can tell Emily is dreaming. There’s a movie running behind those busy, fluttering eyelids; hope it’s not a horror film. Lying on the pillow next to her head are Baa-Sheep, her first toy, and the damn phone, its screen lit up with overnight activity. ‘37 unread messages,’ it says. I shudder to think what they contain. Candy told me I should confiscate Emily’s mobile, but when I reach out to take it her legs twitch in protest like a laboratory frog’s. Sleeping Beauty ain’t going to give up her online life without a struggle.

‘Emily, sweetheart, you need to wake up. Time to get ready for school.’

As she groans and turns over, burrowing deeper into her chrysalis, the phone dings once, then again and again. It’s like a lift door opening every few seconds.

‘Em, love, please wake up. I’ve brought you some tea.’

Ding. Ding. Ding. Hateful sound. Emily’s innocent mistake started this and who knows where it will end. I snatch the phone and put it in my pocket before she can see. Ding. Ding.

On the way downstairs, I pause on the landing. Ding. Looking through the ancient mullioned window onto a still-misty garden a line of poetry comes, absurdly, alarmingly, into my head. ‘Send not to know for whom the belfie tolls. It tolls for thee.’

8.19 am: In the kitchen, or what passes for one while Piotr is building an actual kitchen, I quickly post the breakfast stuff into the dishwasher and open a tin for Lenny before checking my emails. The first one I see is from a name that has never previously bothered my Inbox. Oh, hell.

From: Jean Reddy

To: Kate Reddy

Subject: Surprise!

Dear Kath,

It’s Mum here. My first email ever! Thank you so much for clubbing together with Julie to buy me a laptop computer. You girls do spoil me. I’ve started a computing class at the library.

The Internet seems very interesting so far. Lots of funny cat pictures. Am really looking forward to keeping up with all the grandchildren. Emily told me she is on a thing called Facebook. Please can you give me her address?

Love Mum xxxx

So yesterday, I Googled ‘Perimenopause’. If you’re thinking of doing it, one word of advice. Don’t.

Symptoms of Perimenopause:

 Hot flushes, night sweats and/or clammy feeling

 Palpitations

 Dry and itchy skin

 Irritability!!!

 Headaches, possibly worsening migraines

 Mood swings, sudden tears

 Loss of confidence, feelings of low self-worth

 Trouble sleeping through the night

 Irregular periods; shorter, heavier periods, flooding

 Loss of libido

 Vaginal dryness

 Crashing fatigue

 Feelings of dread, apprehension, doom

 Difficulty concentrating, disorientation, mental confusion

 Disturbing memory lapses

 Incontinence, especially upon sneezing or laughing

 Aching, sore joints, muscles and tendons

 Gastrointestinal distress, indigestion, flatulence, nausea

 Weight gain

 Hair loss or thinning (head, pubic, or whole body); increase in facial hair

 Depression

What does that leave? Oh, right. Death. I think they forgot death.

2
THE HAS-BEEN

I made Emily go to school the day after the night her bottom went viral. Maybe you think I was wrong. Maybe I agree with you. She didn’t want to, she pleaded, she came up with every reason under the sun why it would be better if she stayed home with Lenny and caught up on some ‘homework’ (binge-watching Girls, I’m not that stupid). She even offered to tidy her room – a clear sign of desperation – but it felt like one of those times when you have to stick to your guns and insist that the child does what feels hardest. Get back in the saddle, isn’t that the phrase our parents’ generation used before making your child do something they don’t want to became socially unacceptable.

I told myself it would be better for Em to run the gauntlet of crude jokes and smirking whispers in the corridors than throw a sickie and hide her dread under the duvet at home. Just as when the seven-year-old Emily came off her bike in the park, the gravel cruelly embedded in her scraped and bloody knee, and I knelt before her and sucked the tiny stones out of the wound before insisting that she got back on again in case the instinctive aversion to trying what has just hurt you were to bloom into an unconquerable fear.

‘NO, Daddy, NO!’ she screamed, appealing over my head to Richard who, by then, had already bagged the softer, more empathetic parent role, leaving me to be the enforcer of manners, bedtimes and green vegetables – tedious stuff lovely, tickly daddies don’t care to get involved with. I hated Rich for obliging me to become the kind of person I had never wanted to be and would, in other circumstances, have paid good money to avoid. But the moulds of our parental roles, cast when our kids are really quite small, set and harden without our noticing until one day you wake up and you are no longer just wearing the mask of a bossy, multi-tasking nag. The mask has eaten into your face.

Come to think of it, you can probably date everything that went wrong with modern civilisation to the moment parent became a verb. Parenting is now a full-time job, in addition to your other job, the one that pays the mortgage and the bills. There are days when I think I would love to have been a mother in the era when parents were still adults who selfishly got on with their own lives and drank cocktails in the evening while children did their best to please and fit in. By the time it was my turn, it was the other way around. Did this vast army of men and women dedicated to the hour-by-hour comfort and stimulation of their offspring cause unprecedented joy in the younger generation? Well, read the papers and make up your own mind. But this was our story, Emily’s and mine, Richard’s and Ben’s, and I can only tell you what it felt like to live it from the inside. History will pass its own verdict on whether modern parenting was a science or a fearful neurosis that filled the gap once occupied by religion.

Yes, I made Emily go to school that day, and I nearly made myself late for my interview because I drove her there, instead of making her ride her bike. I remember the way she walked through the gate, head and shoulders down as if braced against a gale, although there was no wind, none at all. She turned for a second and gave a brave little wave and I waved back and gave her a thumbs-up, although my heart felt like a crushed can inside my chest. I almost wound down the window and called after her to come back, but I thought that, as the adult, I needed to give my child confidence, not show that I, too, was anxious and freaked out.

Did it start then? Was that the root of the terrible thing that happened later? If I’d played things differently, if I’d let Em stay home, if I’d cancelled the interview and we’d both snuggled under the duvet, watched four episodes of Girls back to back and let the caustic, jubilant wit of Lena Dunham purge a sixteen-year-old’s fearful shame? So many ifs I could have heeded.

Sorry, I didn’t. I had to find a job urgently. I reckoned there was enough money in the joint account to last us three months, four at most. The lump of money we put by after selling the London house for a profit and moving up North had shrunk alarmingly, first when Richard lost his job, then after the move back South when we rented for a while until we found the right place. One Sunday lunchtime, Richard casually revealed that not only would he be earning next to nothing for two years but also that, as part of his counsellor training, he was now in therapy himself twice a week, for which we would have to pay. The fees were monstrous, maiming: I felt like ringing the therapist and offering her a potted history of my husband in return for a fifty per cent discount. Who knew every quirk and wrinkle of his personality better than I did? The fact Rich was spending our food-shopping money on sessions where he got to complain about me only fuelled my sense of injustice. To make up the difference, I needed a serious, main-breadwinner position, and I needed it fast or we would be homeless and dining on KFC. So, I made my daughter get back in the saddle, just as I took myself back to work when she was four months old and had a streaming cold, the phlegm bubbling in her tiny lungs. Because that’s the deal, that’s what we have to do. Even when every atom of our being is shrieking, ‘Wrong, Wrong, Wrong’? Even then.

10.12 am: On the train to London, I’m supposed to be going through my CV and reading the financial pages in preparation for my meeting with the headhunter, but all I can think about is Emily, and Tyler’s foul, disgusting message to her. What does it feel like to be the object of such salivating lust before you’ve even lost your virginity? (At least I assume Em is still a virgin. I’d know if she wasn’t, wouldn’t I?) How many of those kinds of messages is she getting? Should I notify the school? How would the conversation with the Head of Sixth Form go: ‘Um, my daughter accidentally shared a picture of her bottom with your entire pupil body’? And what further problems might that cause Em? Isn’t it better to play it down, try to carry on as normal? I may want to kill Lizzy Knowles. I may, in fact, want her entrails hung above the school gate to discourage any future abuse of social media that mortifies a sweet, naive girl. But Emily said she didn’t want her friend to get in trouble. Best let them sort it out themselves.

I could call Richard now and tell him about the belfie, but it will distress him and the thought of having to comfort him and deal with his anxiety, as I have done for the whole of our life together, is too exhausting. No, easier to fix it myself, like I always do (whether it is a new house, a new school or a new carpet). Then, once everything is OK for Em, I will tell him.

That’s how I ended up being a liar in the office and a liar at home. If MI5 were ever looking for a perimenopausal double-agent who could do everything except remember the password (‘No, hang on, give me time, it’ll come to me in a minute’), I was a shoo-in. But, believe me, it wasn’t easy.

You may have noticed that I joke a lot about forgetfulness, but it’s not funny, it’s humiliating. For a while, I told myself it was just a phase, like that milky brain-fug I first got when I was breastfeeding Emily. I was so zombified one day, when I’d arranged to meet my college friend Debra in Selfridges (she was on maternity leave with Felix, I think), that I actually put wet loo paper in my handbag and threw the car keys down the toilet. I mean, if you put that in a book no one would believe it, would they?

This feels different, though, this new kind of forgetfulness; less like a mist that will burn itself off than some vital piece of circuitry that has gone down for good. Eighteen months into the perimenopause and I regret to say that the great library of my mind is reduced to one overdue Danielle Steel novel.

Each month, each week, each day it gets slightly harder to retrieve the things that I know. Correction. The things that I know that I knew. At forty-nine years of age, the tip of the tongue becomes a very crowded place.

Looking back, I can see all the times my memory got me out of trouble. How many exams would I have failed had I not been blessed with an almost photographic ability to scan several chapters in a textbook, carry the facts gingerly into the exam room – like an ostrich egg balanced on a saucer – regurgitate them right there on the paper and, Bingo! That fabulous, state-of-the-art digital retrieval system, which I took entirely for granted for four decades, is now a dusty provincial library staffed by Roy. Or that’s how I think of him anyway.

Others ask God to hear their prayers. I plead with Roy to rifle through my memory bank and track down a missing object/word/thingummy. Poor Roy is not in his first youth. Well, neither of us is. He has his work cut out finding where I left my phone or my purse let alone locating an obscure quotation or the name of that film I thought about the other day with the young Demi Moore and Ally Somebody.

Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld, when he was US Secretary of Defense, being mocked for talking about ‘Known Unknowns’ in Iraq? My, how we laughed at the old boy’s evasiveness. Well, finally, I have some idea what Rumsfeld meant. Perimenopause is a daily struggle with Unknown Knowns.

See that tall brunette coming towards me down the dairy aisle in the supermarket with an expectant smile on her face? Uh-oh. Who is this woman and why does she know me?

‘Roy, please can you go and get that woman’s name for me? I know we have it filed in there somewhere. Possibly under Scary School Mums or Females I Suspect Richard Fancies?’

Off Roy shuffles in his carpet slippers while Unknown But Very Friendly Tall Brunette – Gemma? Jemima? Julia? – chats away about other women we have in common. She lets slip that her daughter got all A*s in her GCSEs. Unfortunately, that hardly narrows it down, perfect grades being the must-have accessory for every middle-class child and their aspirational parents.

Sometimes, when the forgetfulness is scary bad – I mean, bad like that fish in that, that, that film¹ (‘Roy, hello?’) – it’s like I’m trying to get back a thought that just swam into my head then departed a millisecond later, with a flick of its minnow’s tail. Trying to retrieve the thought, I feel like a prisoner who has glimpsed the keys to her cell on a high ledge, but can’t quite reach them with her fingertips. I try to get to the keys, I stretch as hard as I can, I brush aside the cobwebs, I beg Roy to remind me what it was I came into the study/kitchen/garage for. But the mind’s a blank.

Is that why I started lying about my age? Trust me, it wasn’t vanity, it was self-preservation. An old friend from my City days told me this headhunter she knew was anxious to fill his female quota, as laid down by the Society of Investment Trusts. He was the sort of well-connected chap who can put a word in the right tufty, barnacled old ear and get you a non-executive directorship; a position on the board of a company that’s highly remunerated but requires only a few days of time a year. I figured if I had a couple of those under my belt, to supplement my financial-advice work, I could earn just enough to keep us afloat while Richard was training, while still taking care of the kids and keeping an eye on Mum and Rich’s parents as well. On paper, everything looked great. Hell, I could do two non-execs in my sleep. Full of hope, I went to meet Gerald Kerslaw.

11.45 am: Kerslaw’s office is in one of those monumental, white, wedding-cake houses in Holland Park. The front steps, of which there must be at least fifteen, feel like scaling the White Cliffs of Dover. Apart from the occasional party and meeting with clients, I haven’t worn a decent pair of shoes in a while – amazing how quickly you lose the ability to walk in heels. On the short journey from the Tube, I feel like a newborn gnu; tottering on splayed legs, I even stop to steady myself with one hand on a newspaper vendor’s stand.

‘Alright, Miss? Careful how you go,’ the guy cackles, and I am embarrassed at how absurdly grateful I am that he thinks I’m still young enough to be called Miss. (Funny how rank old sexists become charming, gallant gentlemen when you’re in need of a boost, isn’t it?)

It’s hard to comprehend how swiftly all the confidence you built up over a career ebbs away. Years of knowledge brushed aside in minutes.

‘So, Mrs Reddy, you’ve been out of the City for how long – seven years?’

Kerslaw has one of those stentorian barks that is designed to carry to the soldier mucking about at the back of the parade. He is bawling at me across a desk the size of Switzerland.

‘Kate, please call me Kate. Six and a half years actually. But I’ve taken on a lot of new responsibilities since then. Kept up my skillset, provided regular financial advice to several local people, read the financial pages every day and …’

‘I see.’ Kerslaw is holding my CV at a distance as if it is giving off a faint but unpleasant odour. Ex-Army, clip-on Lego helmet of silver hair; a small man whose shiny face bears the stretched look of someone who had always wanted to be three inches taller. The pinstripes on his jacket are far too wide, like the chalk lines on a tennis court. It’s the kind of suit only worn by a family-values politician after their cocaine-fuelled night with two hookers has been revealed in a Sunday tabloid.

‘Treasurer of the PCC?’ he says, raising one eyebrow.

‘Yes, that’s the parochial church council in the village. The books were a mess, but it was quite hard to persuade the vicar to trust me to manage their one thousand nine hundred pounds. I mean, I’d been used to running a four hundred million-pound fund so it was quite funny really and …’

‘I see. Now, moving on to your time as Chairman of the Governors at Beckles (is it?) Community College. Of what relevance might that be, Mrs Reddy?’

‘Kate, please. Well, the school was failing, about to go into special measures actually, and it took a huge amount of work to turn it around. I had to change the management structure, which was a diplomatic nightmare. You can’t believe school politics, seriously, they’re much worse than a bank, and there was all the legislation to adhere to and the inspection reports. So much red tape. An untrained person hasn’t got a hope in hell of understanding it. I instigated a merger with another school so we’d have the money to invest in frontline staff and bring down classroom sizes. It made Mergers and Acquisitions look like Teletubbies, quite frankly.’

‘I see,’ says Kerslaw, not an atom of a smile on his face. (Never watched Teletubbies with his kids, obviously.) ‘And you were not working full-time in that period because your mother was unwell, I believe?’

‘Yes, Mum – my mother – had a heart attack, but she’s much better now, made a full recovery thank goodness. I’d just like to say, Mr Kerslaw, that Beckles Community College is one of the fastest improving schools in the country, and it’s got a terrific new head who …’

‘Quite. So what I need to ask you is: if one of your children were to be ill when a board meeting was scheduled, what would you do? It’s vital that, as a non-exec director, you would have time to prepare for the meetings and, of course, attendance is compulsory.’

I don’t know how long I sit there staring at him. Seconds? Minutes? I can’t promise that my jaw isn’t resting on the green leather desktop. Do I really have to dignify that question with an answer? Even when such questions are supposed to be illegal now? It seems that I do. So, I tell the headhunter prat with his trying-too-hard red silk jacket lining that, yes, when I was a successful fund manager, my children were occasionally unwell, and I had always arranged backup care like the conscientious professional I was and that any board could have the utmost confidence in my reliability as well as my discretion.

The speech might have gone down better had a phone not chosen that exact moment to start playing the theme from The Pink Panther. I look at Kerslaw and he looks at me. Funny kind of ringtone for a stuffy old headhunter, I think. It takes a few moments to realise that the jaunty prowl of a tune is, in fact, coming from the handbag under my chair. Oh, hell. Ben must have changed my ringtone again. He thinks it’s funny.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I say, one hand plunged into the bag, frantically searching for the mobile, while the rest of me tries to remain as upright as possible. Why does a handbag turn into a bran tub when you need to find something fast? Purse. Tissues. Powder compact. Something sticky. Uch. Glasses. Come on! It has to be here somewhere. Got it. Switching the errant phone to Silent, I glance down to see one missed call and a text from my mother. Mum never texts. It’s as worrying as getting a handwritten letter from a teenager. ‘URGENT! Need your help. Mum x’

I hope that my face remains both smiley and calm, and that Kerslaw sees only a highly suitable non-exec director opposite him, but my imagination starts to pound. Oh, God. The possibilities swarm:

1 Mum has had another heart attack and crawled across the floor to get her mobile, which has ninety seconds’ battery life left.

2 Mum is wandering around Tesco, utterly bewildered, hair uncombed, wearing only her nightie.

3 What Mum really means is: ‘Don’t worry, they’re really very nice in intensive care.’

‘You see, Mrs Reddy,’ says Kerslaw, steepling his fingers like an archdeacon in a Trollope novel, ‘our problem is that, while you undoubtedly had a very impressive track record in the City, with excellent references which attest to that, there is simply nothing you have done in the seven years since you left Edwin Morgan Forster which would be of any interest to my clients. And then, I’m afraid to say, there is the question of your age. Late forties and fast approaching the cohort parameter beyond which …’

My mouth is dry. I’m not sure, when I open it, whether any words will come out. ‘Fifty’s the new thirty-five,’ I croak. Don’t break down, Kate, whatever you do. Let’s just get out of here, please don’t make a scene. Men hate scenes, this one especially, he’s not worth it.

I get up quickly, making it look like the decision to terminate the interview is mine. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Kerslaw. I really appreciate it. If anything comes up, I’m not too proud to go in at a considerably more junior level.’

The door seems a long way away. And the pile on Kerslaw’s carpet is so lush it feels like my heels are sinking into a summer lawn.

12.41 pm: Back on the pavement, I call my mother and could almost cry with relief when I hear her voice. She’s alive.

‘Mum, where are you?’

‘Oh, hello, Kath, I’m in Rugworld.’

‘What?’

‘Rugworld. Better choice than you get in Allied Carpets.’

‘Mum, you said it was urgent.’

‘It is, love. What d’you think I should go for? For my lounge. The sage or the oatmeal? Or they’ve got wheatgrass. Mind you it’s very dear. Seventeen pounds ninety-nine a square metre!’

One of the most crucial interviews of my entire life has just been derailed because my mother can’t decide what colour carpet she wants.

‘The oatmeal would go with everything, Mum.’ I hardly know what I’m saying. The roaring traffic’s boom, my feet screaming to be let out of their stilettos, the sickening thump of rejection. I’m too old. Outside the cohort parameter. Old.

‘Are you all right, love?’

No, I’m not. Very much not all right, pretty bloody desperate actually. All my hopes were pinned on this interview, but I can’t tell her that. She wouldn’t understand; I’d only make her worry. The years when my mother could cope with my problems are past. At some indiscernible moment, on a day like any other, the fulcrum tips and it becomes the child’s turn to reassure the parent. (One day, I will be consoled by Emily, hard though that is to imagine now.) My father’s death five years ago was the tipping point. Even though my parents were long divorced, I think Mum secretly thought Dad would come crawling back when he was old enough or, more realistically, skint and immobile enough, to stop acquiring girlfriends younger than his own daughters. This time, though, it would be her who would have the upper hand. After he was found dead in the bed of Jade, a glamour model who lived in a flat above his favourite betting shop, it was only ten months before Mum had a coronary of her own. A broken heart isn’t just a metaphor, it turns out. So, you see, my mother can no longer be confided in, or leant upon, or burdened; I am careful what I say.

‘I just had an interview, Mum.’

‘Did you? Bet it went well, love. They couldn’t ask for anyone more conscientious, I’ll say that for you.’

‘Yes, it was really good. It all came back to me. What I need to do.’

‘You know best, love. I’ll go for the oatmeal, shall I? Mind you, oatmeal can be a bit bland. I think I fancy the sage.’

After my mother has gone off quite happily to not buy a carpet, I take first a deep breath and then a decision. I told Kerslaw I wasn’t proud, but it turns out I was wrong: I am proud, he has rekindled it. Ambition was there like a pilot light inside me, awaiting ignition. If I’m too old, then I’ll bloody well have to get younger, won’t I? If that’s what it takes to get a job I could do in my sleep, then I’ll do it. Henceforth, Kate Reddy will not be forty-nine and a half, a pitiful has-been and an unemployable irrelevance. She will not be ‘fast approaching that cohort parameter’ which doesn’t apply to over-promoted dicks like Kerslaw or men in general, only to women funnily enough. She will be … She will be forty-two!

Yes, that sounds right. Forty-two. The answer to life, the universe and everything. If Joan Collins can knock twenty years off her age to secure a part in Dynasty, I can sure as hell knock seven off mine to get a job in financial services and keep my own dynasty going. From now on, against all my better instincts, and trying not to imagine what my mother would say, I shall become a liar.

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.

In fact, on the phone, Josh was gratifyingly unsurprised, which instantly made me feel better. He said he would see what he could come up with regarding social media but, in the meantime, he told me how to get into the history on Emily’s laptop. I scrolled down the recent purchases and found that Madam had used my credit card to download ‘How to Use a Proxy to Bypass Parental Control Filters’. I mean, what are you supposed to do? It’s like I’m a Stone Age person living with Bill Gates.

7.23 am: Emily is upset. I made the mistake of pointing out that to produce one pint of her green juice she creates six miles of washing-up, presently still festering, unwashed in the sink. There is a heap of vegetable waste – apple cores, feathery celery stalks, bleeding beetroot carcasses – that would feed a drove of pigs for a week.

‘It’s such a mess, darling. Could you at least put the juicer in the dishwasher?’

‘I know,’ she snaps, ‘I know. I’ll do it, OK?’

‘And you can’t live just on that green juice, sweetheart. You need some solid food inside you. Please at least have some eggs. I’ll make them for you.’

‘What part of juice diet don’t you understand, Mum? It’s a seven-day cleanse.’

‘But you can’t get through a school morning on a glass of slime, love.’

‘You’re on a bloody diet permanently, but when I do it it’s not healthy. I don’t need any more of this crap …’

There are tears in her eyes as she veers away from my outstretched hand and checks her phone.

After the belfie catastrophe, I did confiscate her mobile for twenty-four hours, exactly as Candy suggested, but it was as if Em had been bereaved. Removal of Internet access seemed to distress her even more than her backside going viral. She sobbed inconsolably and begged me to give it back. I know I should have stuck to my guns, I know, but I couldn’t bear to cause her yet more distress. Take away a teenager’s phone and you remove the threat of dangers which are invisible to the maternal eye, plus the constant pressure on a girl to peacock herself for the peer group, then get crushed when she doesn’t get enough Likes. Unfortunately, you also take away their life, or the only part of their life they care about. I couldn’t do that to her, not when she’s still so churned up.

Storming out of the kitchen, Emily slams the door into the hall with such ferocity that the old brass lock shudders loose and hangs there, dangling from two nails. I go over and try to press it back in, but the wood is so badly splintered that the nails have nothing to hold them in place. (‘Roy, please add a locksmith to my to-do list.’)

This is the way our relationship has been for the past eighteen months. The little girl who was desperate to please, who was so angelic she looked like she’d tumbled out of a Pears Soap poster, the poppet who invited me for tea in her Wendy house: that little girl is no more. Instead, there is this exasperated and exasperating young woman who is aggravated by my every suggestion – sometimes, it seems, by my very existence. She tells me I am ‘Soooo annoyyyingg’. I need to ‘Back off’. ‘Just chill, will you?’ ‘Stop worrying, Mum, I’m not a baby any more.’

Stop worrying? Sorry, darling, I’m your mother; that’s kind of the job description.

As my own hormones recede, my daughter’s are surging in. She is buffeted about by them and we all have to surf that tide with her. This belfie business has made it ten times worse. Emily has barely spoken to me for the past three days; any time I try to raise the subject she runs upstairs, like she did just now, and locks herself in the bathroom. When I knock on the door, she claims her period’s started and she feels sick, or her tummy hurts, but close observation of Tampax supplies tells me she’s only just finished her period. I haven’t even told Em that I’ve hired Josh Reynolds to carry out what he calls a ‘seek and destroy mission’. I just wish I knew what the repercussions have been for her at school, but I can’t find out unless we’re talking, can I? Obviously, I am to blame for the entire sixth form, the school choir and three million people on Facebook having seen the photo she took of her bare bottom, complete with its very own hashtag: #FlagBum. I understand that she is taking out her distress and anger on me. As my Parenting Teens in the Digital Age book says, my daughter knows that I love her unconditionally, so I am a safe place to put those feelings. Intellectually, I get that. Doesn’t make her behaviour towards me any less hurtful though. Emily can wound me like no one else.

7.30 am: When she comes back down for breakfast, Em is wearing full Cleopatra make-up, her eyes given raven wings by flicks of kohl. She either looks amazing or like jailbait, depending on your point of view. Pick your battles, Kate, pick your battles.

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Lizzy and some of the other girls are going to see Taylor Swift for her birthday.’

‘Any relation to Jonathan?’ asks Richard, not bothering to look up from his iPad.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Jonathan Swift. Famous satirist during the eighteenth century. Wrote Gulliver’s Travels,’ says Rich.

‘Mum, puhlease can I get a Taylor Swift ticket? She’s so cool, she’s like the best singer ever. Izzy and Bea are going. Everyone’s going. Mu-um, please.’

‘It’s not your birthday,’ objects Ben, not bothering to look up from his phone.

‘Shuddup, will you? Little brat. Mu-umm, tell Ben to stop it, will you?’

‘Emily, don’t kick your brother.’

‘Jonathan Swift suggested that children should be boiled and eaten,’ muses Rich to himself.

Sometimes, just occasionally, my husband makes me laugh out loud, and reminds me why I fell in love with him.

‘I think Swift was definitely onto something there,’ I say, placing scrambled eggs on the table. Richard is washing his bacon butty down with a glass of some weird energy drink which looks like that purple Dioralyte we gave the kids when they were dehydrated from vomiting.

‘Emily, you’ve got to eat something, darling.’

‘You just don’t get it,’ she says, pushing the plate of egg away from her with such venom that it tips over the edge of the table and smashes onto the floor, scattering fluffy yellow florets over the terracotta tiles.

‘Everyone’s like going to the O2 to see Taylor Swift. S’not fair. Why are we poor?’

‘We are not poor, Emily,’ says Richard in that slow, soft, vicar voice he has adopted since starting his course. (Oh, please, not the South Sudan lecture.)

‘There are children in the Horn of Africa, Emily …’

‘OK!’ I jump in before Rich can build up a head of sanctimony. ‘Mummy’s going to get a full-time job very soon, so you can definitely go and see Taylor Swift, darling.’

‘Kate!!!’ protests Richard, ‘what did we say about not negotiating with terrorists?’

‘What do I get?’ wails Ben, looking up from his phone.

Lenny, seizing this optimal moment of family friction, snarfs up the scrambled egg and licks the floor clean.

Rich is right to be cross. Extortionate concert tickets are not part of our agreed budget cuts, but I sense that Emily’s distress – panic even, did I detect panic in her eyes? – is about more than Taylor Swift. The girls she mentioned are all part of the Snapchat group that Lizzy Knowles shared the belfie with. The last thing Emily needs is to miss their outing. If Rich can blow one hundred and fifty quid a week talking about himself, and Ben’s new braces will require us to take out a second mortgage, then surely we can find the money to help Em be happy?

7.54 am: When the kids have gone upstairs to do their teeth and get their stuff together, Richard briefly raises his eyes from his cycling website and notices me – me as a person, that is, not as diary secretary and rinser of Lycra – and says, ‘I thought you were at the gym today.’

‘I was, but your dad rang really early. Couldn’t get him off the phone. He was on for twenty minutes. He’s really worried about your mum. She’s obviously pissed off the new carer. Told her that her English wasn’t good enough after she caught her smoking by the Bishop of Llandaff.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a flower. Passive smoking harms dahlias apparently. You know what your parents are like about the garden. And the carer sounds hideous. Donald mentioned a bruise on Barbara’s wrist, although that could be a fall. The whole thing’s a mess, but now they haven’t got anyone going in again.’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ Richard allows himself a very non-Dalai Lama reaction and I’m glad. Like most couples, our relationship has been held together by a common outlook on life, and by laughing at or despising those who don’t share it. I neither much like nor recognise Mr Wholefoodier Than Thou who is currently occupying the body where my lovely, funny husband used to live.

‘Mum’s impossible,’ he says. ‘How many carers is that they’ve gone through? Three? Four?’

‘Barbara’s really not well, Rich. You need to get up there and sort things out.’

‘Cheryl can do it. She’s nearer.’

‘Cheryl has a full-time job and three sons doing twenty-seven after-school activities. She can’t just drop everything.’

‘She’s their daughter-in-law.’

‘And you’re their son. So is Peter.’ (Don’t you hate the way families assume it’s always the women who should take care of the elderly parents, even if a son lives nearer? That may just be connected to the fact that we always do.)

At least Rich has the grace to look sheepish. ‘I know, I know,’ he sighs. ‘I thought Mum seemed fine in Cornwall. That was only two months ago.’

‘Your father’s good at covering things up.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘You’ve seen how forgetful she is.’

‘That’s perfectly normal at her age, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not normal to ask your fourteen-year-old grandson if he needs a wee wee. She genuinely thinks Ben is in kindergarten. She needs proper help. We can’t just leave your dad to cope, Rich. He’s amazing but he’s almost ninety for God’s sake.’

‘Could you? I mean, would you mind going, Kate? I would go, you know I would, but I can’t take a break from therapy right now. This is such a crucial time in my personal development. I know you’re job hunting and it’s a big ask, darling, but you’re so good at these things.’

‘Are you kidding?’

That’s what I am about to say, anyway, but something in Rich’s expression makes me pause. For a moment, he looks like Ben did that time in the middle of the night when he was kneeling on the bathroom floor next to the toilet bowl and admitted he was scared of vomiting.

Rich has always been horrified by anything to do with illness or doctors. Like most men he believes he’s immortal and I guess there’s nothing like witnessing your parent’s decline into dementia to dent that treasured myth. Despite his phobia, if I’m ill Rich always forces himself to be a good nurse. When I got salmonella from a cheap chicken, not long after we first met, he refused to leave me alone in my grotty shared flat though a combination of paper-thin partition walls and thunderous visits to the loo should have dealt a lethal blow to our budding romance. I remember thinking, between bouts of retching, how tenderly devoted this new boyfriend was. Not at all like the emotionally shut-off public schoolboy I had imagined him to be. If Rich’s passion could survive hourly explosions from all orifices, he must be a keeper. I had had better lovers, men my body was helplessly in thrall to, but wanting someone who was also kind to me? Now, that was a first.

When did we stop being kind to each other, Rich and I? All the pressure and upheaval of the past few months has made us scratchy and inconsiderate. I need to do better.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘I’ll see if I can go up to Wrothly and check in on Barbara and Donald before they invite me to interview for new Governor of the Bank of England.’

Richard smiles (haven’t seen one of those for a while) and swoops in for a kiss. ‘Brilliant. You’ll get a job offer, darling,’ he says. ‘Once that headhunter guy sends out your CV you’ll be beating them off with a stick.’

I haven’t told him how badly things went with Kerslaw. Don’t want to worry him.

Josh Reynolds to Kate

Hi Kate, Josh here. I’ve notified Facebook that the pic of Emily breaches their Community Standards and it should be taken down by now. As she’s sixteen she no longer qualifies as a child & won’t get highest priority. Although she’s not recognisable in the pic – you can only see her back and her bum which won’t identify her – I’ve zapped everything I could find and I’ve set up notifications which will alert me next time a pic of Emily’s bum is shared. I’ll kill it, natch. There are ways in which I can make Lizzy Knowles’s online life very unpleasant but you didn’t hear me say that, OK? If you want me to do what can’t be mentioned, let me know. You know if this is revenge porn you can get police involved. Do you want to do that? Thanks for asking me. It was fun!

Kate to Josh Reynolds

Thanks so much, Josh. Brilliant job. Really appreciate it. No, not revenge porn. Just teenage girl stuff. Not serious. Don’t want police involved!! Let me know how much I owe you.

9.47 am, Starbucks: With breakfast cleared, the site of the Green Juice Massacre swabbed down, the dishwasher mumbling to itself and Candy’s stern advice in mind, I have taken myself into town to work on my CV in a café. I can pretend to be ‘telecommuting’, instead of sitting at the kitchen table waiting to be ambushed by family members.

My mission today is to produce an attractive new CV, omitting my date of birth and any other incriminating details. Instead of admitting to ‘time out’, as prospective employers will see it, I must repackage what I have learned and achieved since I left Edwin Morgan Forster, as a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, loyal friend, school governor, PTA member, penniless yet imaginative house restorer, eBay addict, and inspired (and only slightly crooked) investor of parish church’s 1,900 quid (just call me Bernie Madoff!). It’s a cinch. Apply Harvard Business School model to position of Household Servant and General Dogsbody. Here goes:

 Over the past six years, I have built up an impressive track record in Conflict Resolution. (Translation: Wrestled Xbox out of Ben’s hands after three hours solid on Grand Theft Auto IV. Got him to agree to consume at least one green vegetable a day plus Brainy Teen fish oil capsule in return for more time on GTA IV.)

 Financial management and capital projects: I have considerable expertise in this area after helming several challenging schemes. (You can say that again. The Money Pit, aka ‘period gem’ is eating giant bites out of our meagre savings account and I am driving increasingly hard bargains with suppliers to get the job finished.)

 International negotiating skills honed on domicile issues in the UK. (Bloody au pair Natalia and her cocaine-dealer boyfriend.)

 Time Management and Prioritisation: I have balanced the complex needs of different individuals and developed routines while learning to prioritise multiple tasks and meet strict deadlines. (Of course I have. Am I not a mother? Do I not manage the lives of two adolescents and one male in midlife meltdown whilst keeping an eye on elderly relatives, walking the dog, trying to keep up with friends, carving out time to exercise, doing the garden and watching Homeland and Downton Abbey? Feel free to add to this list, it’s endless.)

 Grown a highly productive business start-up. (Planted beautiful Cutting Flower Garden guided by Sarah Raven book on same. Also, purchased huge smelly composting bin and learned to identify weeds. To my surprise, I have become a gardener.)

 Due diligence work on complex UK legislation. (Fought tooth and nail to get non-existent care package from local authority for Donald and Barbara, who get frailer by the day.)

 Pioneering research in Human Resources with special emphasis on staff development and motivation. (Spent days tracking down and hiring highly rated private tutor, fighting off several Tiger Mothers, to get Ben into the only local secondary school without a record of drive-by shootings and dreadful exam results. Told Emily she could have two tickets for the Reading Festival if she got nine good GCSEs. Result!)

 Built strong knowledge base in transport. (Personal chauffeur to two teenagers with active social, musical and sporting lives. Regularly take Ben and his drum kit to orchestra, jazz group, etc. Drove Emily to events around the country until she decided swimming was giving her Popeye shoulders. If you want my advice, never let your kids take up swimming; you always have to set off at dawn, usually in fog, and then you have to sit on an orange plastic seat in some repellently warm building that stinks of chlorine and wee – you can actually feel the bacteria multiplying in the soupy air. Plus, you have to maintain a keen interest during forty lengths of butterfly stroke. Seriously, choose any other sport.)

‘Oh, hello, Kate? Fancy seeing you here.’

I glance up from my laptop to find a blonde around my age smiling expectantly at me.

**‘Uh-oh. Roy, are you there? We have a woman in her forties, possible school mum, but wildly overdressed for a latte in Starbucks (Missoni coat, Chanel shades). Clearly loaded, judging by the number of bags she’s carrying. How do I know her?’

‘Oh, hello.’ I smile back and hope Roy shows up fast with her name. ‘Hello! Um, I’m just updating my CV.’

‘So I see. Very impressive. Job hunting, are we?’(‘ROY?? Get a move on, will you! Please tell me who she is.’)

‘Er. Yes, well, with the kids getting a bit older I thought I’d stick a toe in the water. See what’s out there, you know how it is.’

She smiles again, revealing lipstick on her top teeth, which have been expensively whitened. Too white – more Dulux gloss than Farrow and Ball.

Oh, here comes Roy, back from the stacks and a little breathless. Thank God. *Roy says that I put my glasses in the drawer next to the Aga.

‘WHAT? I don’t need to know where my glasses are, Roy. That was earlier. What I would now like you to focus on is retrieving this woman’s name.’

‘By the way,’ the woman says, ‘I’m so glad Emily can come to Taylor Swift.’

**‘It’s Lizzy Knowles’s mum,’ says Roy. ‘You know, mum of that little cow that sent Emily’s bum everywhere. Cynthia Knowles.’

Good job, Roy!

I’ve only met Cynthia a couple of times. After a school concert when both our daughters sang in the choir. And then at one of those charity coffee mornings where a well-bred mummy provides chocolate chip cookies no one eats, because we’re all fasting or eating protein only, and you pay her back by buying some jewellery you don’t want, and can’t really afford, but it’s rude not to because the mummy, who is married to Someone in The City, is trying to find something she can Do For Herself. So, you hand over your money to this hugely wealthy woman, which she then gives to charity, when she could perfectly well have written a large cheque. Oh, and nine days later the ‘silver’ earrings you bought at the coffee morning turn green and pus starts coming out of your left earlobe.

‘We’ll take them to the O2, of course,’ Cynthia is saying. ‘Christopher will drive them down in the Land Rover. Lizzy wants Korean BBQ afterwards. She said Emily’s a definite. Did she mention the ticket price?’

You know what? Meeting Cynthia, mother of the girl who has hurt my daughter so hideously, I don’t feel like being polite. My inner maternal dragon would prefer to breathe fire at her and scorch those perfect caramel highlights to cinders. Does she even know about the belfie that Lizzy accidentally-on-purpose shared with the whole school and all the paedophiles of England? Or are we playing Let’s Pretend I Have Perfect Children, which is a favourite game of women like Cynthia because to admit otherwise would be to admit their whole life has been a tragic waste of time?

‘Yes, that’s absolutely fine,’ I lie. How much can it be? More than £50? £60? No wonder poor Em was so frantic to get our agreement at breakfast. She’d already accepted Lizzy’s invitation.

‘And I hear you’re on the waiting list for our brainy book group, Kate?’ Cynthia continues. ‘Serena said that you’d expressed an interest. We like to think we’re a cut above your average book group. Usually choose one of the classics. Very occasionally a novel by a living author. Booker Prize shortlist. No chick lit. Such a waste of time, all that shopping and silly women.’

‘Yes, isn’t it.’ Who does Cynthia Knowles with her carrier bags: two L.K. Bennett, one John Lewis and one Hotel Chocolat think she is – Anna sodding Karenina?

‘Such luck bumping into you. Just tell Emily to give Lizzy a cheque for ninety pounds for the ticket.’

Ninety pounds! Make strenuous effort not to let jaw drop or emit squeak of dismay.

‘I think Lizzy just wants Topshop vouchers for her birthday,’ she goes on. ‘No presents per se. Good luck with the job hunting!’

Cynthia stalks off to the far corner of the café to join a group of the yummiest mummies imaginable, taking her skinny latte and most of my morale with her. Why do women like her get to me? Probably because they get to play domestic goddesses on hubby’s Platinum Amex. Not a life I ever wanted – although, recently, I must admit the idea of being a kept woman has developed a certain appeal.

Bit late for that, Kate. Most of the guys who could keep you in the style to which Cynthia is accustomed are (a) on Wife Number Two or (b) picking up debt-ridden students on Sugar Daddy websites so they can rub their slack, saggy bodies on prime young flesh. Uch. For Wifey Number One, hanging onto her position is a full-time job: gym, Botox, yoga, nutritionist, even vaginoplasty to get her pre-baby pussy back so hubby’s floppy dick isn’t wanging about in a wind tunnel that three babies’ heads have passed through. No thank you.

And yet, glancing across the café at Cynthia and her gaggle of mums, I feel a corkscrew of envy in my gut. Always slightly dreaded the whole school-gate thing; in truth, I was dismissive of those women whose life revolves around coffees and playdates. But now that Ben is too old to be picked up any more, I miss the ready companionship that that ritual provided and all the pleasant, eager, worried women I could discuss my kids with. They were a bulwark against the loneliness of parenting, if only I’d known it. Anyway, need to get this magnificent CV finished. Just a few final points.

 Oversaw the establishment of a major hydro site. (Weekly laundry, handwashing Rich’s pongy cycling gear so it doesn’t ‘go bobbly’.)

 Provided sustainable nutritional support for staff in line with industry standards. (Always kept snacks for kids to eat in car on way home from school, thus avoiding total meltdown. At least one cooked meal a day for four people, making approximately ten thousand hot dinners in the past seven years, without any thanks or acknowledgement of what it takes to cater said dinners.)

 Turned around declining private company through regular programme of cuts and aggressive streamlining to offset threat of double-dip recession. (Went on Fast Diet and started going to gym again. Hopefully on track to fit into my old office clothes.)

 Strove for a consistent improvement in the bottom line. (Slightly smaller bum as a result of excruciating squats.)

If any of the above strikes you as vaguely fraudulent or unethical, well, I’m sorry, but what are the words you’d use to describe the fact that women take care of the young and the old, year in year out, and none of that work counts as skills or experience, or even work? Because women are doing it for free it is literally worthless. As Kerslaw said, we have nothing of interest to offer, except everything we do and everything we are. I am not by nature a political person, but I swear I would march to protest the vast untold work done by all the women of this world.

3.15 pm: Fighting the urge to go upstairs and sleep. Can hardly put ‘afternoon napping’ down as part of my skillset on application form, although it’s the one thing I excel at these days. Probably Perry’s fault. With my CV immensely improved (although I’m not sure I’d dare show it to my Women Returners group) I brace myself for a call to Wrothly Social Services. Sadly, it’s too early for alcohol.

‘Your call may be assessed for training purposes.’

Here we go. You know when you’ve pressed five for one department and then you’ve pressed one from the Following Range of Options, although you think you may have misheard, and that maybe you needed three? And then you’ve pressed seven for Any Other Queries, and your hopes are getting up that you might be about to interact with an actual human being, when a recorded voice says, ‘Sorry. We are experiencing a high volume of calls. Your call is important to us, please hold the line’? And the phone rings and rings and rings and you picture a cobwebby office with a skeleton sitting in a chair at a desk and the phone on the desk it rings and rings and rings? Well, that’s what it feels like to be calling Wrothly Social Services.

By now, surely everyone has figured out that these multiple options are not designed to be helpful; they are supposed to act as a deterrent whilst giving the illusion of progress and choice. Even ‘your call may be used for training purposes’ is basically a threat, telling you to behave yourself or else. A mere twenty minutes elapse until I get through to someone in the right department, who then asks if he can put me on hold while he speaks to a colleague, who may or may not have access to Barbara’s case notes. I am almost tearfully grateful for this basic courtesy.

‘Hello? Can I help you?’

The voice does not sound at all helpful. In fact, she sounds as though she may recently have graduated from a bespoke Unhelpfulness training course – the one they send American border security staff on.

I know, let’s baffle her with politeness and friendliness.

‘Good afternoon, thank you so much. It’s great to talk to an actual person.’

No response.

‘So, I’m ringing on behalf of my mother-in-law, she has a burns injury …’

‘Barbara Shattock?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Great. Thank you so much. I spoke to my father-in-law earlier and he says that, unfortunately, there was a misunderstanding between Barbara and Erna, the carer you so kindly sent to help them.’

‘I’m afraid that your mother-in-law has been reported in connection with a possible hate crime,’ says the voice.

‘What? No. That can’t be right.’

‘Mrs Shattock racially abused one of our carers.’

‘Sorry? No. You’ve got that wrong. You don’t understand. Barbara, she’s eighty-five. She’s very confused. She’s not herself.’

‘Mrs Shattock accused her carer of not being able to speak English. At Wrothly, we take hate crime very seriously.’

‘Hang on. What hate crime? Erna is Lithuanian, isn’t she? She’s not a different race to Barbara. Do you even know what racism is?’

‘I’m not trained to answer that question,’ the voice says flatly.

‘But you’re making a very serious allegation.’

There is an icy silence into which I burble and plead: ‘I’m really sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding, but it’s simply not in Barbara’s nature to upset someone like that.’

That is a blatant lie. As long as I’ve known her, more than twenty years now, Barbara has been the princess of passive aggression, the empress of undermining. The world is full, as far as Barbara is concerned, of people who are Simply Not Up To It. The list of Simply Not Up To Its is long and ever-expanding. It includes news anchors with sloppy diction, women who ‘let themselves go’, tradesmen with dirty boots who don’t show sufficient respect to Axminster carpets, pregnant weathergirls, politicians who are ‘basically Communists’, and the fool responsible for a misprint in the Daily Telegraph crossword. A mistake in her favourite crossword and Barbara will act out the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, calling for the head of the idiot who introduced an error into Twenty-Two Across.

As the lesser of her two daughters-in-law, it was established early on that I was Simply Not Up To It. I was hardly the girl Richard’s mother hoped her son would marry and she did very little to conceal her disappointment. Every time we visited, Barbara would ask without fail, ‘Where did you get that dress/blouse/coat, Kate?’ and not in a way which indicated she wished to go out and purchase one for herself.

One Christmas, I was in the pantry looking for tinned chestnuts when I heard Barbara say to Cheryl, the preferred daughter-in-law, ‘Kate’s problem is she has no background.’

It stung, not just the snobbery, but because Barbara was right. Compared to the comfortable, well-established Shattocks, my own family had a hasty, provisional feel. We were the Beverly Hillbillies, the supermarket’s basic range, and I know Barbara sensed it from the moment Rich first took me home. Luckily, he was so in love he didn’t notice her dig at my unmanicured hands. (I’d been decorating a junk-shop chest of drawers and the residue of grey-green paint looked like dirt beneath my fingernails.) I could put up with having my family patronised, my cooking dismissed and my choice of clothes derided, but the one thing I could never forgive Barbara for is that she has always made me feel like a bad mother. And I’m not.

Yet, here I am defending Barbara to the woman from social services because Barbara is no longer in any fit state to tell this woman that she is Simply Not Up To It. Which she clearly isn’t.

‘Has it occurred to you that it might be quite upsetting if you’re an elderly lady and the person washing you is a bit rough and she can’t understand what you’re saying? Are we allowed to say that? Oh, I see, we’re not allowed to say that. Pardon me.’

Uch. When did we become this nation of hateful automatons, unable to deviate from the official script to respond to genuine need and upset? All friendliness gone now, I channel my steeliest professional self and suggest that the voice gets another carer around to help Barbara and Donald asap.

‘Otherwise, Mrs Shattock might seriously hurt herself at which point Wrothly Social Services will be obliged to comment. On the evening news.’

‘I am not trained to answer that,’ I hear the voice say, followed by the dialling tone.

Well, that went well.

To: Candy Stratton

From: Kate Reddy

Subject: Headhunter Humiliation

Hi hon, thanks for the pep talk. I did a new CV as you suggested. Might enter it for Pulitzer Prize as piece of groundbreaking, experimental fiction. It’s not really lying if you know you can do all the things you haven’t done, is it?

I’ve been going to these Women Returners meetings. Don’t laugh. They’re really sweet and it’s making me realise how much luckier I am than those who quit when they had their first baby. Desperately trying to lose weight and get myself into shape, but I’m just so damn tired and wrung out the whole time. Hard not to raid the biscuit tin when you’re knackered! Not sleeping cos of night sweats. I have hog’s bristles sprouting out of my chinny chin chin. I’m so blind I can’t read the calories on any foodstuffs, which I’m not supposed to be eating anyway as I need to get into my Thin Clothes because I gave my Fat Clothes to the charity shop the last time I lost weight and swore I would never be fat again. Plus, I need to take a nap every afternoon. I have the energy of a heavily sedated sloth.

Missed my gym session today with Conan the Barbarian because I was talking to Richard’s dad about Richard’s mum, who clearly has Alzheimer’s, but no one can face having that conversation so we are all pretending it’s fine until she burns the house down. Oh, and the council is accusing Barbara of a HATE CRIME because she didn’t like the surly, non-English-speaking ‘carer’ they sent to bathe her. Excuse me, she’s eighty fucking five! If you can’t be a difficult old bitch then, when can you be?

I never know when my period’s coming these days and I’m scared the deluge will happen when I’m out. Just like I was scared when I was 13 and my period started in the middle of a chemistry test. So I prefer to stay in and watch property-porn shows and fantasise about life in a neglected French chateau being renovated for me by Gérard Depardieu (circa Green Card, not since he got bigger than an actual chateau) with his large, capable yet tender hands, TOTALLY FREE OF CHARGE.

Be honest. Does this sound like the kind of mature, together person anyone in their right mind would want to employ?

Your (VERY) old friend,

Kxx

4
GHOSTS

Women Returners. They sound like the ghosts in some horror movie, don’t they? You can practically see the trailer with that grave, apocalyptic, male Hollywood voice booming, ‘Women Returners! They’re back! Rising from the dead and rejoining the workplace! If only they can escape the Mummy’s Curse and rely on someone else to take the lasagne out of the freezer and give Grandma her statins!’

I don’t know about ghosts, but some of the women in our Returners group definitely have a haunted look about them. Haunted by the careers they gave up – in some cases so many years ago that they might as well be a different person altogether. Haunted by all those Might Have Beens. Sally, sitting on my right today, used to work for a big Spanish bank in Fenchurch Street. A small, sunken person in an outsize cable-knit cardigan, Sally only has to say Santander or Banco de España in a perfect Spanish accent and you glimpse the spirited, flirtatious person that she must have been twenty years ago, when she was running her own department with a squad of Juans and Julios doing her bidding. Sally’s nostalgia for those days is so acute that sometimes I can’t bear to watch the dormouse-bright eyes in that lined face. During the group’s first few meetings, Sally was shy, almost painfully reticent, swathed in an unseasonally warm fleece when the rest of us were still in linen trousers and summer dresses.

Kaylie, the group leader – a large, expansive Californian with a wardrobe built exclusively around turquoise and orange (to be fair, it probably worked better in San Diego than it does in East Anglia) – did her best to draw Sally out. By Week Four, Sally volunteered that once her two sons and a daughter had flown the nest (Antonia graduated two years ago; Spanish and History at Royal Holloway), she did think it would be ‘good to get back out there’. Sally said she got a part-time job, which she still has, working as a cashier at Lloyds Bank in the scuzziest street in the pretty, prosperous market town where we meet.

‘You know the one, it’s all charity shops and doner kebabs,’ Sally said. We nodded politely, but we didn’t know it.

Over time, the branch manager began to notice that Sally was unusually competent. (She played down her years in London on her application because she was worried it might look boastful or intimidating and they wouldn’t employ her.) The manager gave her more responsibility: totting up at the end of the day, handling foreign currency. They get a lot of Turkish lira conversions because of the kebab shops.

‘I suppose it is a bit beneath me,’ she told the group, sounding not in the least bit convinced that anything was beneath her, except possibly the ground, ‘but I like my colleagues. We have a laugh. It gets me out of the house. And now that Mike is retired …’

‘You’d like to be at home more?’ Kaylie beamed her best facilitator smile.

‘Oh, no,’ said Sally quickly, ‘now that Mike is retired I want to be at home less. Drives me potty having him in my kitchen.’

‘I know how you feel,’ said Andrea. ‘I sometimes think I’ll go mad if I don’t get out of the house.’ Andrea Griffin joined the graduate training scheme of one of the UK’s big four accountancy firms straight from university. By the time she was thirty-seven, she’d made partner. Not long after, her husband John had his accident; a lorry smashed into his car on a fogbound M11. Luckily the helicopter was available – it’s the same one Prince William pilots now – and they flew him straight to the head injuries unit at St George’s. Took John a year to learn to talk again.

‘The first words that came back to him were the filthiest swear words you can imagine,’ Andrea said. Her freckly chest flushed a little at the thought of her husband, a decent sort who used to say ‘Blimey’ and ‘Well I never!’ at moments of great surprise, reduced to a scowling wreck who told his mother-in-law to go fuck herself. The insurance company finally paid up in January, after a ten-year legal battle, and now that they can afford 24/7 care for John, Andrea can relinquish some of her responsibilities. ‘Started to think it might be nice to use my brain again,’ she said when Kaylie asked us to share what we hoped to get out of the Returners workshop. ‘If I’ve still got a brain,’ Andrea laughed. ‘The jury’s still out on that one. It’s all a bit daunting, to be honest.’

The room we meet in is in the modern annexe of the old town library. What it lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in strenuous attempts to remove actual books from what one poster depressingly calls ‘The Reading Experience’. Why is everything in here on a screen? I remember how Emily and Ben adored their bedtime stories, then gulped down Harry Potter, even making us queue up at midnight outside the local bookshop to buy the latest instalment. Now they are practically soldered to their keyboards. Emily might still pick up a novel from time to time and breeze through seventy pages before something more compelling intervenes – usually a make-up tutorial on YouTube by Zooella or Cruella or someone. She’s obsessed with make-up. Ben is wary of anything too long to be read on the screen of a phone.

The decor in here is that folksy Scandinavian look which seems to have taken over all British public spaces. There is a noisy pale-wood floor and uncomfortable, sloping bony chairs with leaf-print cushions and matching pale-wood arms. The coffee from the machine by the entrance is disgusting, so people pick one up from Caffè Nero next door. Sally brings a flask and so does Elaine Reynolds (mum of belfie-tracker Josh). We’ve been meeting here every Wednesday afternoon for five weeks now. There were fifteen of us to begin with, but two women swiftly decided it wasn’t for them and then, a fortnight ago, a third dropped out because her daughter was hospitalised with anorexia after failing to meet her weekly outpatients’ target of 0.5 kg weight gain.

‘Of course, it doesn’t rule out Sophia going to Oxford,’ Sadie said, as though there might actually be someone among us who urgently needed reassurance on that score. Sophia was already garlanded with 10 A*s at GCSE, as we’d been told several times, and her mother clearly saw the girl’s stint in an eating disorders unit as a minor bump on the road to academic glory, rather than a possible hint that it was precisely that route which had brought about her recent crash.

‘They can still sit their exams in there,’ Sadie continued. ‘There’s no problem with that. I’m making sure Soph gets her AS coursework in on time. Compare Atonement with The Go-Between. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, is it? I’m reading both novels, of course, so I can help the poor darling as much as I can.’

Everything about Sadie, from her figure to her dark bobbed hair, from her matching taupe bag and loafers to her South African accent, was clipped, with no unnecessary waste. The person she most reminded me of was Wallis Simpson – immaculate without being in any way appealing. Or human. I found myself wondering what it must be like to have such a controlled and controlling creature as a mother. Looking across the circle, I could see that Sally was having exactly the same thought. She rolled her lips back and forth as if she were setting lipstick on an invisible tissue, and her eyes glistened with what might easily be mistaken for concern, but was actually closer to disdain.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure about joining the Returners. I mean, I’ve never cared for the lazy assumption that women have shared preoccupations and views, like we’re some kind of endangered minority group. There are good, decent and feeling women, sure, millions of them, but there are also Sadies who would leave your child for dead by the side of the road if it meant getting an advantage for her kids. Why do we insist on pretending otherwise? Just because she has ovaries and a vagina (probably steam cleaned), doesn’t make Sadie my ‘sister’, thanks very much.

Like so many of the all-female events that I’ve attended, there is something mildly apologetic about Women Returners. With no men in the room, we are free to be ourselves, but maybe we are so out of practice that we tend to overshoot and end up giggling like nine-year-olds or, inevitably, talking about the kids we actually have. Women get so easily bogged down in anecdote; instinctive novelists, we make sense of our lives through stories and characters. It’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t make us any good at single-mindedness, at shutting out the day-to-day stuff and going for what we want. Imagine a group of men ending up talking about their wife’s mother’s heart bypass. Never happen, would it?

Today will be different, however, because a man, a well-known employment consultant called Matthew Exley, is here to talk to us about how best to market our skills. ‘Call me Matt’ is clearly enjoying being the only ram in a flock of ewes. He begins with some research. Studies show, Matt says, that if ten criteria are listed for an advertised job and a man has seven of them, the man would be willing to ‘have a go’. By contrast, if a woman has eight, she will say, ‘No, I can’t possibly apply for the job because I don’t meet two of the criteria.’

‘Now, ladies, what do we think this is telling us?’ Matt beams encouragingly at his flock. ‘Yes, Karen?’

‘I’m Sharon,’ says Sharon. ‘It’s telling us that women tend to undersell themselves. We underrate our capabilities.’

‘Spot on, Sharon, thank you,’ says Matt. ‘And what else can we deduce? Yes, the blonde lady over there?’

‘That men generally assume they’ll be good at things they’re rubbish at because their experience of the workplace proves that mediocre men are consistently given positions beyond their capabilities, while highly able women have to be twice as good as a man to have any chance of being given a senior position for which they are infinitely better qualified?’

Every so often at Women Returners, I’m sorry to report that a cynical, world-weary and, quite frankly, abrasive voice ruptures the happy bubble of feelgood reinvention and shared sisterhood.

‘Ah.’ Matt looks to Kaylie for support in dealing with this party pooper.

‘C’mon, Katie,’ smiles Kaylie valiantly with her too-white teeth. (You guessed it was me, didn’t you?) ‘I think you’re kinda taking all the negatives onboard. We’ve talked before about how women are tough on themselves. I know how perfectionist you are, Katie. What Matt is trying to say is that we need to give ourselves permission to think that, even if we’re not the perfect candidate for a job, then being a seven or eight instead of a ten may be good enough.’

‘That’s right,’ says Matt with obvious relief. ‘Your CV doesn’t need to be a perfect fit to have a shot at a job.’

‘Sorry, but I think what Kate was trying to say …’ It’s Sally speaking now. The group turns with interest to its shyest and most tongue-tied member. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what Kate was saying is that the reason men have a lot of confidence applying for jobs is because the odds were, and to some extent still are, heavily stacked in their favour. They think they have more chance of succeeding because they actually do. You can’t really blame older women for having low self-confidence when that reflects the opinion the world has of us.’

‘I hear you, Sally,’ says Matt.

(In my experience, ‘I hear you’ is a phrase used only by those who are completely deaf to any sound but their own voice.)

‘But things are much better than they were even five years ago,’ he goes on. ‘Employers are much more aware of the qualities that women returners can bring to the office. You will all have noticed that work–life balance has moved up the political agenda and many firms are beginning to see that a more, shall we say, enlightened approach to taking on older females, who have taken time out from their careers, may not damage their business. Quite the contrary, in fact!’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Sally uncertainly. ‘My friend’s daughter took nine months off work from an investment fund with her second baby and no one batted an eyelid. That would have been unheard of when I was at the bank. Even four months’ maternity leave … Well, your job might still be there when you got back, but someone else would have the title. You might be allowed to assist him. My bank sent me to the Middle East when my boys were very small, to see if I would give up, probably.’

‘When I told my boss I was pregnant with my second,’ Sharon chips in, ‘he went fucking mental. He said, “But, Sharon, sweetheart, you’ve already had a baby.”’

Everyone laughs. The secret, subversive laughter of the servants below-stairs at Downton Abbey discussing their masters’ funny little ways.

‘Listen, guys,’ says Kaylie, ‘I think Katie is being way too pessimistic. Like Matt says, firms are more open than ever to the idea that activities outside of the office can give you transferable skills. Seriously, the Mum CV is now a big thing in recruitment.’

I look around the circle at the women’s eager faces. They nod and smile at Matt, grateful for his assurances that the employment they left during the years of raising children will welcome them back, that the ‘skills’ of nurturing and running a small country called Home are transferable. Maybe that’s true if you’ve been out of the loop three years, five max. Privately, I think the ones who are in the worst position are those who kept no work going at all, who gave up every last bit of personal independence. When the chicks fly the nest, at eighteen, they take with them their mother’s reason for being. And the women turn to look at the men they’ve lived with for the past twenty-four years and they realise the only thing they have in common any more is the kids, who have just left home. The child-rearing years are so busy, so all-consuming it’s easy to ignore the fact your marriage is broken because it’s buried under the Lego and the muddy dungarees and the PE bags. Once the kids are gone there’s no place for your relationship to hide. It’s brutal.

At least my freelance stuff gave me a slender handrail to hold onto in a rapidly changing jobs market. Plus, I’m one of the younger ones here, and even I will have to lie about how old I am to stand a chance of getting back into my industry.

I think of how I felt sitting in Gerald Kerslaw’s office with my own ‘Mum CV’. Watching his eyes flick down my activities outside the office for the past six and a half years. Work for the school, work for the community, for the church, backbone of society, carer for young and old. I felt small. I felt diminished, irrelevant, unregarded. Worst of all, I felt foolish. Maybe ‘Call me Matt’ is right and attitudes are changing, but, in my line of business, a forty-nine-year-old who’s been out of the game for seven years might as well walk through the Square Mile ringing a bell and shouting, ‘Chlamydia!’

Matt asks for one final question and I raise my hand. Bravely, he picks me. ‘As ageism is clearly a major problem in the workplace, whether we like it or not, would you ever recommend that those of us who are in our forties, fifties and sixties should lie on our CV?’

His brow puckers, not with genuine thoughtfulness but in that mature frown which men adopt to indicate that they are busy pondering. If he had been wearing glasses he would have pushed them to the end of his nose and looked over them in my direction.

‘Lie?’ Nervous neigh of laughter. ‘No. Although I wouldn’t necessarily foreground your age. There’s no requirement to write down a date of birth any more. Put it this way, I certainly wouldn’t make your age an issue if it doesn’t need to be. Or the particular years when you were at school and university; people can count, you know. Anyway,’ (a consoling smile), ‘I wish you all the very best of luck.’

I’m putting my card in the machine to pay for the car park, when I feel a hand on my arm. ‘I just wanted to say well done in there.’ It’s Sally the mouse.

‘Oh, thank you. You’re very sweet, but I was awful. Much too cynical. Kaylie’s trying to give us all a boost and there’s me sounding off about institutionalised sexism like Gloria Steinem with rabies. Just what everyone needs.’

‘You were telling the truth,’ Sally says, cocking her head to one side in that intelligent, birdlike way I’ve noticed.

‘Maybe, but who wants the truth? Highly overrated, in my experience. It’s just … Oh, look, I went to a headhunter in London the other day to see if he could come up with anything for me. It was … Well, he made me feel like some hideous old peasant woman turning up to flog goat turds in Fortnum & Mason. It was terrible. Funny thing is, I didn’t even want to come to our group in the first place. You know that saying about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member? I thought it was all a bit pathetic. I mean, Women Returners?’

‘Revenant,’ says Sally.

‘Sorry?’

‘The French for ghost is un revenant, which literally means ‘a returner’. One who comes back. As in, from beyond,’ she says.

I told her that was spooky. She laughed. She said ghosts generally are spooky. I said, ‘No, I meant it’s such a coincidence because I was only thinking earlier that returners made us sound like we were back from the dead; I didn’t know it was French for ghost.’ She said her French was rusty – shameful really when she had half a degree in it. I said, ‘Don’t worry, you sound like Christine Lagarde to me.’ I said sometimes I felt like the ghost of my former self. There was no way back to that person I used to be. That it was all over for me. ‘Not for you, Kate,’ she said. And we kept talking and talking, and we would have liked to have gone for tea at some point, but it turned out we both had dogs we had to get back for and then it turned out that we walked our dogs in the same country park and so we went and collected the dogs and walked them on our favourite walk together and sat on our favourite bench at the top of the hill. And that was how Sally Carter became my very dear friend.

5
FIVE MORE MINUTES

7.44 am: ‘Mum, have you seen Twelfth Night?’ Emily looks pale and her hair needs a wash.

‘I think you had it in the living room last night, love, when you were doing your homework. Or it could be in that pile on the chair under Lenny’s toys. Are you going to take a shower?’

‘Haven’t got time,’ she shrugs, ‘got choir practice then we’re getting our revision timetable.’

‘What, already? You’ve barely started the course. That’s a bit soon?’

‘Yeah, I know, but Mr Young said two kids in the year above got Bs last year and they don’t want that happening again.’

‘Well, you should wash your hair before you go in. Make you feel fresher, sweetheart. It looks a bit …’

‘I know.’

‘Em, darling, I’m just trying to …’

‘I know, I know, Mum. But it’s like I’ve got so much on.’ As she turns to go out of the door I notice that her school skirt has got tucked in her knickers at the back, revealing a ladder of nasty cuts up her thigh.

‘Emily, what’s wrong with your leg?’

‘S’nothing.’

‘You’ve hurt yourself, darling. It looks horrid. Come here. What happened?’

‘S’nothing.’ She tugs furiously at the back of her skirt.

‘What do you mean nothing? I can see it’s bleeding from here.’

‘I fell off my bike, Mum. OK?’

‘I thought you said your bike was being mended.’

‘Yeah, I rode Daddy’s.’

‘You rode Bradley Wiggins to school?’

‘Not that one. The old, cheaper one. It was in the garage.’

‘You fell off?’

‘Mmmmmm.’

‘What happened?’

‘There was gravel on the road. I skidded.’

‘Oh, no. And you hurt your poor leg. And you’ve grazed the other one. Lift your skirt up again so I can see properly. Why didn’t you tell me, love? We need to get some Savlon on that. It looks nasty.’

‘Please stop, Mum, OK?’

‘Just let me take a look. Hold still a minute. Pull the skirt up, I can’t see properly.’

‘GO A-WAY. JUST STOP. PUHLEEEASE!’ Emily lashes out wildly, knocking my glasses off and sending them flying to the floor. I bend down to pick them up. The left lens has popped out of its frame.

‘I can’t stand it,’ Emily wails. ‘You always say the wrong thing, Mum. Always.’

‘What? I didn’t say anything, my love. I just want to look at your leg, darling. Em. Emily, please don’t walk out of the room. Emily, please come back here. Emily, you can’t go to school without eating anything. Emily, I’m talking to you. EMILY?’

As my daughter exits the house trailing sulphurous clouds of reproach and leaving me to wonder what crime I have committed this time, Piotr enters. He is standing just inside the back door with his bag of tools. I blush to think of him hearing our screaming match and seeing Emily knock my glasses off. I can’t believe she actually hit me. She didn’t mean to hit me. It was an accident.

‘Sorry. Is bad time, Kate?’

‘No, no, it’s fine. Really. Come in. Sorry, Piotr. It’s just Emily had an accident, she fell off her bike, but she thinks I’m making a fuss about nothing.’

Without being asked, he takes the glasses out of my hand, retrieves the missing lens which is on the floor next to Lenny’s basket, and begins to work it back into its frame. ‘Emily she is teenage. Mum she’s always say wrong things, isn’t it?’

Despite wanting rather badly to cry, I find myself laughing. ‘That’s so true. A mother’s place is in the wrong, Piotr. Wrong is my permanent address at the moment. Would you like some tea? I’ve got some proper tea today, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

In his new spiritual incarnation, Richard has acquired a wide range of tranquillity teas. Rhubarb and Rosemary, Dandelion, Lemon, Nettle and Manuka Honey, and something in a urine-coloured box called Camomindfulness. On the recommendation of Joely at the counselling centre, in February he presented me with Panax Ginseng, said to be good for hot flushes and night sweats. A thoughtful present although, if you were being picky, perhaps not totally ideal for the red-hot lover’s message of Valentine’s Day. (After receiving a set of Jamie Oliver saucepans for Christmas I thought we’d reached a low point in the history of Rich’s gifts to me, but clearly there is plenty of floor below that to fall through.) It takes a lot to perturb Piotr, whose temperament feels as generous and easy as his countenance, but even he recoiled when I said we had run out of builders’ tea and offered him Dandelion instead.

‘In my contree, dantyline means wet bed like children’s,’ he smiled, revealing a mouth of characterful, uneven teeth of the kind that have pretty much died out among the British middle classes.

Piotr’s English is bad, yet strangely appealing. I feel no need to correct it, as I do with Ben and Em, because (a) that would be horribly patronising and (b) I love the mistakes he makes because they are so expressive (which I guess is horribly patronising). That’s what happens with the kids, isn’t it? You correct their errors and their speech gets better and better until, one day, they don’t say those funny, sweet things any more. I can’t press Rewind and hear Ben say, ‘I did go’d fast did I Mummy’ or a five-year-old Emily ask if she can come with me to the ‘Egg Pie Snake Building’ (Empire State sounds so dull by comparison) or have ‘piz-ghetti’ for dinner. Or tell me, ‘I’m not a baby I’m a togg-er-ler.’ Sometimes I think I wished away their childhood so life would be easier; now I have the rest of my life to wish it back.

I put water in a saucepan and olive oil and butter in a casserole on the Aga. Kettle not working again while Piotr has the electricity switched off. Methodically, I start preparing the onions, carrots and celery for bolognese, our family’s all-purpose comfort food. It’s the Marcella Hazan recipe and I know it so well that her quaintly formal words float into my head as I chop. The addition of milk ‘lends a desirable sweetness’. Perfectly true, it’s the magic ingredient you could never guess. In the larder – a tiny, pitch-black cupboard leading off the utility room – I grope for tinned tomatoes in the dark and my hand finds a Hammer Horror cobweb. It’s the size and shape of a tennis racquet. Uch. Fetch some kitchen wipes and start to clean down the slatted wooden shelves.

I always dreamt of having an Aga. Visions of home-baked bread, delicious stews murmuring to themselves on the range and maybe even an orphaned baby lamb being gently brought back to life in the warming drawer. Unclear where I was going to find a lamb, except in the meat aisle of Waitrose, and therefore well past the point of reviving, but the daydream persisted. Now, I realise my Aga fantasy was of the pristine magazine kind that comes equipped with its own Mary Berry. Ours is a malevolent old beast encrusted with the splashed fat of half a century and has only two temperatures: lukewarm and crematorium. You know, I really don’t think it likes me. Shortly after we moved in, I put a cauliflower cheese in the top oven; ten minutes later I prised open the heavy door to take a peek and found a petrified forest with these perfect little charred florets like mini oak trees.

Richard, who was cross, hungry and partial to cauliflower cheese, said it looked like one of those art installations that would have a pretentious title like The Physical Impossibility of Dinner in the Mind of Someone Starving. It’s since become one of his favourite Calamity Kate anecdotes, and I can’t help noticing he finds it much funnier when he’s telling other people than he did at the time.

Not that I’m in any position to complain. Am still trying to convince Rich that this house was a fantastic buy. We agreed that in order to move to Commuterland, so I could get into London and back every day, we would have to downsize and find a place with lower outgoings. (No way could we afford to buy in the capital, not after a period up North. I checked on Rightmove and our old house, the Hackney Heap, is worth £1.2 million now.) We’d just had an offer accepted on a four-bedroom new-build, convenient for the train station, when I took the agent’s advice that I should ‘just pop in’ and see a ‘charming period gem of considerable potential, in need of sensitive updating’.

Fate and the weather conspired against me. It was one of those glittering, glad-to-be-alive days when a bitingly clear cobalt sky makes you feel your soul has left your body and is soaring heavenward. If only it had been raining. Maybe I would have seen that a patchwork of ivy and moss covering three exterior walls, a rickety tiled roof and two chimneys, each the size of a four-by-four, did not, as I preferred to believe, suggest an enchanted castle just waiting to be released from a spell of cruel neglect.

‘Exactly how much will it cost to hack through the foliage to free Sleeping Beauty, and what will the brickwork be like underneath once we get her out?’ These were not among the questions I asked as I stood on the terrace at the back, marvelling at the honeyed stone in which the house was constructed three centuries ago. The view down the garden was like an Impressionist painting – a vivid splash of green lawn fringed with mascara smudges of pine and beech. I could practically hear the strains of Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’ as I drank in this quintessentially English scene; the imagined music was so potent it drowned out the whooshing of the nearby M11, which would become a roar once the trees had shed their leaves and we had signed the contract. Caveat emptor.

We did go back to check out the new-build property, Rich and I. How bland and cramped it seemed with its specially made, teeny, doll’s house furniture (a cynical developer’s trick to make the rooms look bigger, or so a designer friend told me). The agent said the developer was prepared to meet us halfway and would pay the stamp duty, such a huge saving that Rich gave a low, appreciative whistle. But I had lost my heart to another and found only fault where there were bargains and benefits to be had. I wanted the period gem with the gracious proportions and the fine old staircase, its mahogany handrail just visible through layers of chipped paint.

The rival agent said that because it was a renovation project which ‘very few people have the imagination to take on’ (i.e. no one but you is nuts enough to even attempt it), the owner was ‘prepared to consider knocking a significant amount off the asking price’ (they were desperate to sell, it had been on the market more than a year and there was a grave shortage of suckers prepared to share a bath with a daddy-long-legs and her nineteen children). I was able to clinch the deal with Richard by pointing out that the house was in the catchment area of a superb secondary school. Result! True, some persuasion-sex may have been involved, but I had my dream property, and that was orgasm enough.

Except Richard pretty much hated the house from Day One. He calls it ‘Gormenghastly’, and not affectionately either. Anything that goes wrong – oh, let me count the ways! – demonstrates that I made a poor decision and causes him to crow in a rather unpleasant manner. On the first evening we spent here, he actually produced a DVD of a Tom Hanks movie called The Money Pit, which is about a couple who try to restore a hopelessly dilapidated house. It was funny until I plugged in an electric heater to warm up the freezing sitting room and all the lights fused and the TV went phffft.

I wish I could say that I’ve proved my doubting husband wrong. Despite Piotr’s heroic efforts, and almost constant house calls from Polish guys bearing ladders, hammers and saws, every day seems to bring more bad tidings of damp and decay. The financially devastating news of a sagging bathroom floor came in tandem with the emotionally devastating news of a sagging pelvic floor from the person once called my Obs who is now just my Gynae.

‘Kate, pan it’s burn.’

‘Sorry?’ Piotr makes me jump. He’s right beside me in the larder.

‘Cooker it’s fire,’ he says. ‘Careful please.’

I run into the kitchen. The casserole is belching thick smoke. Damn, I forgot. Don’t know what I was thinking.

‘Roy, really, why didn’t you remind me I was heating the oil for the Spag Bol? ROY! We can’t keep forgetting things like this. Last week, it was the bath that overflowed.’

I would douse the pan in the sink, but there is no sink any more because Piotr has taken it out to the skip. Besides, isn’t there something about not pouring water on boiling oil, or is it the other way around? Grab the casserole and run into the garden where a light drizzle tamps down the sizzle and spit. Before going back indoors to start again, and heat up more oil and butter, I spend a minute drinking in the view. The leaves are particularly lovely this year, shades of fierce apricot and shy primrose from Nature’s Autumn Collection that continue to astonish. (‘Roy, please remind me to plant those tulip and daffodil bulbs.’) Yes, I’m prepared to concede that it might have been better to do the sensible thing and downsize. Not only can we not afford the renovations, until I find a job, I have also used up any remaining capital I had in my marriage. In some ways, a relationship is like a savings account: during the good times, you both pay in, and in the lean times there’s enough to see you through. Right now, I’m heavily overdrawn.

I should have listened to Richard. (Perhaps you should tell him that, Kate; climbing down never came easy, did it? Stupid pride again.) I can’t really explain why I made us buy the house except that something in me railed against the thought of life contracting, getting smaller instead of bigger. Before you know it, you’re in a wheelchair-access bungalow in sheltered accommodation wearing incontinence pants. I’m already doing a little wee every time I sneeze. Sorry, but I did not want to ‘go gentle into that good night’. I wanted to take on one more challenge, if only to prove that I’m still alive and capable of thinking big.

In the kitchen, Piotr reunites me with my mended glasses, but not before breathing on them and wiping them with a proper, old-fashioned handkerchief, which he produces with a conjuror’s flourish from the pocket of his jeans. I haven’t seen a laundered handkerchief like that since my grandfather died. As he leans in to place the specs on my face, I get a pungent wash of cigarettes and sawn wood. I’m so happy when he’s here because it means we’re making progress. I’ll definitely have a kitchen in time for Christmas. And because he lends – ‘what was it again, Roy?’ – that’s it: a desirable sweetness.

Kate to Emily

Hi sweetheart. Hope you’re OK. Just been making you Spag Bol for dinner. So sorry about your accident and your poor leg. Let’s cuddle up tonight and watch some Parks and Rec?

Love you, Mum

Emily to Kate

I’m good!!! Can Lizzy & some friends come over? Don’t worry bout me Love u xx

1.11 pm: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman over thirty-five in search of a mate must never reveal her age in a dating profile. At least, that’s what Debra tells me over lunch.

I’ve just confessed to my oldest friend that I’m lying about my age to try and get a job. Deb reports that she does the same if she wants to get a man.

‘Seriously, you never give your true age?’

‘Never, ever ever,’ says Deb. Stabbing miserably at the last rocket leaf on her plate, she picks it up and pops it in her mouth before licking the dressing from her finger. We both ordered salad and sparkling water, no bread, because our thirty-year college reunion, which for so long felt a safe distance away, is approaching fast. But now Deb starts doing urgent, smiley semaphore at the waiter, indicating she wants wine.

‘What if you look amazing for your age?’ I ask.

She gives a bitter laugh – a harsh, cawing sound I can’t remember hearing before. ‘That’s even worse. If you look good for your age you’ll probably be vain enough to give it away. So you arrange to meet up, he takes you for dinner, you have a few glasses of wine, candles, it’s getting romantic and he says, “God, you’re gorgeous”, and you’re feeling relaxed and probably a bit drunk and you really like him and you think “this one’s sensitive, not shallow like some of the others”, so you get carried away and you say, “Pretty good for fifty, huh?”’

‘Well, it’s true you do look fabulous,’ I say. (She is terribly changed since the last time we met, on my birthday. She looks so red and puffy. It’s a drinker’s face, I realise for the first time. Oh, Deb.)

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Debra says, wagging a cautionary finger. ‘So the guy does a charming, funny double-take and he gives a wolf whistle and he agrees that you are, indeed, incredibly well-preserved for fifty. No one could possibly guess. I mean, Totally Amazing. Then you see it. The panic rising behind his eyes. And he’s thinking, “Omigod, how did I not notice that? The lines around her mouth, the scrawny neck. She definitely looks fifty. And I’m only forty-six, so she’s an older woman. Plus, she lied on her profile”. Oh, waiter, waiter, sorry, can I get a glass of wine here? Sauvignon Blanc. Join me, Kate, please?’

‘I can’t, I’ve got Women Returners later.’

‘Then you definitely need alcohol. Two glasses of white, please. Large? Yes, thanks.’

‘And then what happens?’

‘And then he throws you back in the sea and goes fishing for a younger one.’

‘Well, at least you know he’s not the man for you if he’s going to reject you just because of your age.’

‘Oh, Kate, Kate, my sweet deluded girl, they’re all like that.’ Another mirthless cackle. Deb reaches across the table and taps me affectionately on the nose, which hurts a bit. It’s the part of the bone where Ben bit me when he was taking his first steps. I knelt down to catch him in case he fell and he staggered towards me like a tiny drunk, tried to kiss my mouth and got my nose instead. A tiny, tooth-shaped scar marks the spot.

‘What you don’t understand, darling, in your married bliss with Ricardo, is that when guys get to our age they hold all the cards.’

(It’s the perfect opening to tell her how bad things are between me and Richard, but I don’t, not yet. I can hardly bear to tell myself.)

Deb knocks back her wine with a complaint about the small measures, then reaches out her hand and pours most of my untouched one into her own glass. ‘A man of forty-eight isn’t interested in a woman the same age. Why would he be when he can maybe pick up someone in the twenty-nine to thirty-six category? A fifty-year-old man can still tick, “May want children one day”. What can I tick? “May need a hysterectomy if I keep bleeding like a stuck pig”? Anyway, cheers, my dear!’ She clinks both glasses together, hands me my almost empty one and takes several gulps from her own.

I’ve known Debra since our third week at college when we got chatting in the bar and found out that we shared the same boyfriend. We should have been sworn enemies, but we decided we liked each other much better than the boy, who was doubly dumped and would forever after be known as Two-Time Ted.

I was bridesmaid when Deb married Jim. I was godmother to their first child and chief mourner at the divorce after Jim went off with a twenty-seven-year-old broker from Hong Kong when Felix was six and Ruby was three. Deb feels guilty because Felix suffers with anxiety and blames himself for the break-up of the marriage. He has a lot of trouble fitting in at school and Deb keeps moving him (three times in the last five years), probably because it’s easier to believe the school’s the problem than your child. Deb often refers to Felix’s ADHD diagnosis as if it explains everything. I think (though would never say) that, with Jim not around, she found it hard to control the boy’s behaviour and she spent a fortune on PlayStations and every gizmo you can imagine to keep him happy while she worked. I was horrified, last Christmas, at the size of the TV Deb gave Felix, so much bigger than their family one. She spends almost nothing on herself. Felix, now seventeen, looks exactly like Jim, which can’t help. Deb loves her son although, increasingly, I suspect she doesn’t like him very much.

‘Go on, tell me about “Women Returners”, then?’ I can practically hear the ironic quotation marks Deb puts around my support group.

‘I know you think I don’t need it.’

‘You don’t need it, Kate. You just need to get yourself out there and stop sublimating all that ambition of yours into renovating some crazy old house.’

‘I thought I was bringing life back to a period gem of considerable potential in need of sensitive updating.’

‘Is that you or the house, darling?’

‘Both. Can’t you tell?’

She laughs properly, like herself this time, a warm, generous sound which is incongruous in this fashionable palace of steel and glass. I love Deb’s laugh; it reminds me of so many times we’ve shared.

‘Suit yourself,’ she says. ‘Can’t think of anything worse than sitting in a room with a lot of women moaning that they’re past it and nobody will employ them. Do you want coffee? How many calories in a flat white, do you reckon?’

(Hang on, I read that the other day. Paging Roy. ¹‘Roy, can you please get me the number of calories in a flat white? Full fat and semi-skimmed. Roy, hello? You’re not allowed a lunch break by the way. Being my memory valet is a full-time job.’)

Last time I spoke to Richard about finding a position at a good firm in London, he said, ‘It’ll kill you doing that journey twice a day. You’re not as young as you were. Why don’t you find something local like Debra did?’

Is that really what he wants for me? Deb quit her job at one of the top London law firms a couple of years after Jim shacked up with the Asian Babe (who is friendly, tactful, sweet with the kids and super-bright – basically your total nightmare). Felix had become obsessive about not having peas too close to the sweetcorn or ketchup on his plate, and he bit any nanny who forgot this diktat. Finding a form of childcare that was happy to be bitten on a regular basis proved impossible. ‘I did not give up, Kate, I bloody well surrendered to the inevitable,’ Debra booms when she’s had too many, which is quite often lately. In midlife, all the women I know, apart from the ‘My Body is a Temple’ high priestesses, are intimates of Count Chardonnay and his cheeky sidekick Pinot Grigio. Every day, around 6.35 pm, when habit sends me to get wine out of the fridge, I think ‘Empty calories!’ and sometimes I am good and listen to that health warning, but other times it’s easier, and kinder somehow, to grant myself admission to the buzzy warmth and instant sense of well-being. ‘God, I hate it when they call it giving up work,’ Deb always says when she’s onto her third glass.

Me too. So, the legendary, beautiful redhead (think face of Julianne Moore, curves of Jennifer Lopez) with the Cambridge First, on track to become a partner in a London firm earning gazillions, is now festering in a solicitor’s office above Hot Stuff Indian restaurant in the high street of a provincial town, resolving leylandii disputes for homicidal octogenarians and growing big and blowsy from drowning her sorrows. All of Deb’s recent emails begin, ‘Shoot me!’.

I need something better than that. Don’t I?

Debra is growing louder and more belligerent, so I change the subject and tell her about Emily’s belfie. Our disasters are small gifts we can give to our friends who suffer because they believe our lives are easier than their own.

‘Oh, they’re all doing it,’ Deb snorts. ‘Sexting. Some kid in Ruby’s year got himself arrested. Sent a pic of his willy to a girl aged fourteen. Huge hoo-ha at the school – said he was guilty of child abuse or something ridiculous. He’s been suspended, poor thing. The girl didn’t even complain. Teacher saw her laughing and sharing the dick pic with her friends; now it’s this huge deal because she’s underage.’

‘I think I’m pretty broad-minded,’ I say, ‘but can you imagine?’

‘Very easily, darling. If you give kids phones that do all that naughty stuff why wouldn’t they? It’s just too tempting. I mean, I have.’

‘You’ve done what? Deb. No. You haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t.’

‘Only knockers.’ She smiles and cups her breasts in her hands, thrusting them upwards in her straining blouse till they look like two quivering panna cotta. ‘Getting your tits out, that’s pretty entry-level stuff for online dating, Kate darling. Consider yourself lucky you’re off the market and don’t have to display your wares to new suitors.’

‘I feel sorry for them,’ I say, suddenly realizing how helpless and angry I feel about the belfie. ‘Emily and Ruby, they’re supposed to be the freest most liberated generation of girls who ever lived. Then, just as equality’s in sight, they decide to spend every minute slapping on make-up and posing for selfies and belfies like they’re courtesans in some fin de siècle brothel. What the hell happened?’

‘Dunno, beats me.’ Deb tries to suppress a loud burp and fails. ‘Shall we get the bill?’ She turns and flags down a scurrying waiter. ‘I do know Ruby goes out wearing next to nothing then, if some poor guy wolf whistles at her, suddenly it’s, “Oh, no, it’s sexual harassment.” I tried to tell her that the male brain is programmed to respond to certain parts of the female anatomy. Most boys like Felix and Ben can act in a civilised fashion, if they’re properly brought up by women like you and me, but enough boys won’t be civilised and then you’re in big trouble because, surprise fucking surprise, rapist Rob hasn’t read your student guide to inappropriate touching.’

We fall silent for a moment. ‘The kids say I’m from the past,’ I say.

‘We are from the past, thank God,’ Deb booms. ‘I’m bloody glad we grew up before social media, darling. At least when we went home from school we were by ourselves, or with family who treated us like part of the furniture. There was no one poking us every ten seconds to admire their perfect bloody life. Imagine having every little bitch who was hateful to you at school joining you in your bedroom via your phone. I felt crap enough about myself already. I didn’t need an audience, thanks very much.’

‘Probably every generation of parents must feel like this,’ I say cautiously. It’s been so much on my mind, but I haven’t tried to put it into words before. ‘It’s just that this … this … this gulf between us and the kids, their world and the one we grew up in, it’s … I don’t know, Deb, it’s all happened so quickly. Everything’s changed and I don’t think we’ve even begun to understand what’s going on. Or what it’s going to do to them. How is Ben supposed to learn empathy for other people when he spends half his life carrying out drive-by shootings in some virtual-reality world? Did I tell you I found out Emily actually downloaded something to help her bypass the parental controls on their devices?’

Typically, Deb is delighted, not appalled. ‘Genius! She sounds a highly resourceful woman, just like her mummy.’

It’s time to go. She has drained my wine glass and we’ve argued over the bill. (Can’t remember who paid last time. I ask Roy, but he’s still busy looking up the number of calories in a flat white.)

As the guy by the door hands us our coats, I ask Deb to be honest with me. ‘Do you think I can pass for forty-two?’

She grins. ‘God, yes, no problem. I’m thirty-six, darling. If I ever bring a boyfriend to meet you we need to get our stories straight, OK? Or he’ll think “how come these two were in the same year at university and there’s a six-year age difference?” Now, you be honest with me, Kate. Do you think I can get away with thirty-six?’

(No. I don’t. Whatever thirty-six looks like, Deb is no longer it, and neither am I.)

‘Course you can. Never better. Love what you’ve done to your hair.’

Debra is halfway down the street when she turns and yells at me: ‘College reunion! Don’t forget, I’m going to be two stone lighter.’

‘And fifteen years younger!’ I shout back, but the traffic drowns out my reply and she is gone.

5.21 pm: Just had a lovely long walk with Lenny to shake off the Women Returners meeting. He was desperate to go out when I got back from lunch; now he’s fast asleep and lying on his back in his basket by the Aga, all four paws wide apart, fluffy white tummy unprotected. Something almost unbearably touching about an animal’s utter trustingness. No sign of Richard. Ben’s got football, but I’m sure Em said she was having friends over.

Upstairs, I find three girls sitting on Emily’s bed in complete silence, heads bent over their mobiles like they’re trying to decode the meaning of the I Ching. One is Lizzy Knowles, daughter of Cynthia and hateful sharer of the belfie; the other – pale, pretty, auburn – is Izzy, I think.

‘Hello, girls. Why don’t you, you know, have a nice chat? Face to face with eye contact,’ I say, peering round the door at this eerie dumb-show. My tone is only very lightly mocking. Emily looks up and shoots me her special ‘You’ll have to forgive my mother, she’s mentally impaired’ glare.

‘We are chatting. We’re texting,’ she hisses.

I feel like Charles Darwin observing finches on the Galapagos Islands. Where is all this communication without speaking going to end? My great-great-grandchildren will be born with prehensile texting thumbs, no vocal cords and zero capacity to read human facial expressions. I am struggling to see any of this as evolution for our species, if evolution means progress, but at least Em isn’t by herself. Whatever friction the belfie caused in the peer group must have been fixed. At least, that’s what I hope. I tell the girls there’s Spag Bol downstairs if they want it. Only Lizzy responds. ‘Thanks, Kate, we’ll be down later,’ she says in the coolly condescending manner of Lady Mary Crawley addressing Mrs Patmore, the Downton Abbey cook. I give Lizzy my best and most ingratiating smile; my daughter’s fragile happiness is in that girl’s hands.

5.42 pm: By the time Ben gets in, I’ve put carrot sticks and hummus on the kitchen table for him to eat. Piotr has removed all the old worktops; it’s like living in a shed, but it should be over soon. Ben grunts, ignores the healthy snack, gets some crisps from the cupboard (who bought those?) and disappears into the living room. A few minutes later, I hear the voice of another boy in there. Where did he come from?

5.53 pm: ‘Benjamin, dinner time.’

‘Ben? Now, please. Spaghetti’s ready.’

‘Five more minutes. We’re nearly at half-time.’

‘Who is?’

‘We are.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Eddie.’

‘When did he come round? I didn’t hear anyone come in.’

I walk into the living room, adopting the voice of maternal sternness. ‘You know the rule, Ben. If you want your friends to—’

Ben is alone, hunched on the sofa, clutching a handset, thumbs a blur. On the TV, someone in red takes a corner. Players rise in mayhem, the ball goes in, the crowd explodes and Ben keels over sideways as if shot, laughing into a cushion. Other cackles answer him, from nowhere; I recognise the voice of Eddie, saying, ‘That’s sick,’ but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.

‘Is that real?’ I ask, genuinely not knowing whether it’s a football match onscreen, with actual swearing fans telling the referee to fuck off, or whether it’s millions of digital dots. Not quite sure how real I am myself, most days. Maybe I should get someone to design a digital me, who gets on with cooking dinner, ordering shower tiles and all the boring jobs no one notices I’m doing, while the real Kate can concentrate on the life I really want, with time on my nicely manicured hands, firming up the abdominals and the plunging pelvic floor, and much less need to swear.

‘Kind of.’

‘Where’s Eddie?’

‘At home, Mum, don’t be stupid.’

‘Please don’t call me stupid, Benjamin. Your real dinner is on the table and it’s getting cold.’

‘OK. Five more minutes.’

‘It was five minutes ten minutes ago.’

‘Extra time. Maybe penalties. I can’t pause it. We’ll lose the whole game.’

I give up. Emily is upstairs with friends and they’re not speaking. Ben is downstairs speaking with friends, but they’re not here. They’re miles away, in another part of town. The kids are right: I am from the past. But they are from some Mad Max, post-apocalyptic future where mankind has dispensed with the civilities and physical interaction of all previous centuries. It scares me, it really does, but trying to wean them off their screen addiction seems futile. Like switching off the wind or the rain. If there’s a heaven, and my kids ever get there, their first question to St Peter will be, ‘What’s the password?’

Hunger finally draws Ben to the table, where he tucks in with gratifying enthusiasm. I love to watch my boy eat his favourite meal; it must be some atavistic thing. Between mouthfuls of spaghetti, which he shovels in rather than twirling on a fork – the Battle for Table Manners has been lost – he explains that upstairs Emily and her friends are scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, sharing any videos or photos that they like. Talking is strictly optional in that process, apparently. It means showing each other something someone else has said, written, or photographed, not forming their own original thoughts or stories. I can’t help thinking of Julie and me creating a whole universe in our bedroom with just Lego and a single Sindy doll.

‘You do meet some people IRL,’ Ben says. ‘Is there any more Parmesan?’

‘I’ll get it. What’s IRL?’

‘Mu-um, you know IRL.’

‘I don’t, sorry.’

‘In Real Life.’

‘I see. In real life?’

‘Yeah, but mainly it’s not IRL ’cos basically you’re like online the whole time.’

‘How about school? Is school IRL?’

‘You’re not supposed to have phones in class,’ Ben admits cautiously, ‘but people do. Basically, that’s what social life is like now for my generation.’ (I’ve never heard him come out with anything so philosophical or grown-up before. I didn’t know he even knew the word ‘generation’. Result! Must stop thinking of him as seven.)

As he’s leaving the table, Ben says did I know that the boys at school gave Emily the Rear of the Year Award because of the pic of her bum going viral, and she had to go to the nurse because she threw up in assembly?

No, I did not know.

9.37pm: Bedroom is dark, but my daughter’s face is illuminated by her phone. She is scrolling through photos. There are so many of them, an immense number, screen after screen. Up closer, I see they are nearly all selfies; in none of them is she smiling. She’s making that weird duckface, the one all the girls pull now. Halfway between a pout and a pucker, it makes her lips look huge, outsized in her face. And she sucks in her cheeks – a come-hither, glamour-model pose. Emily is constantly watching these online make-up tutorials; she’s got really skilled at it, much better than I am actually. But it does look like she’s painting an older, more sophisticated woman onto that sweet, heart-shaped face.

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