Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

All I knew was that I wasn’t going back there: to the scams, the evasions, the holding your breath in the dark hall.

JET LAG HAS ITS OWN microclimate: gray, sticky, Singaporean. I move through the stinging February rain with almost tropical lethargy, step out into Long Acre, straight into the path of a courier. Through the visor, I can see eyes full of hatred.

“Yew stew-pid cow,” he spits out. “Cancha fuckin’ look where ya goin’?”

Fourteen minutes to spare before Rod and I have a meeting with consultants in Covent Garden, just off the piazza. Enough time to run into LK Bennett 50 % Shoe Sale.

I think I’ve forgotten how to shop for pleasure. No lingering foreplay for me, no harmless flirtation with chenille and silk before getting off with aloof linen or gorgeous cuddly alpaca. These days I shop like a locust: famished, ruinous, hoovering up anything I need and things I definitely won’t need but deserve anyway, because I never have time to go shopping. Grab a pair of fudge pencil heels — good for treading on Guy’s toes — and calf-length caramel-soft boots. As an afterthought, I pick up some black slingbacks patterned with so many punch holes it looks like braille for foot fetishists. Funny how two pairs of shoes feels extravagant but three’s a bargain.

Across the shop, I glimpse a glossy brunette, a triumph of Botox over gravity, swaddled in dove-gray cashmere. She is considering each shoe like a judge at a flower show. Can tell she has time as well as money on her hands. I see a whole day of browsing stretching ahead of her — a prairie of possibility, dotted with skinny lattes and a delicious light lunch. I notice her eyes land on a pair of zebra mules on the size 6 rack. She must be stopped. Execute Charlie’s Angels pirouette and get to them just in time.

“Excuse me, I was picking those up.” Her voice is peevish — as aggrieved as someone that languid will allow herself to be.

“Sorry, I was here first,” I say, jamming toe into zebra.

“No need to be aggressive.” She smiles and trails away, leaving a slipstream of Jo Malone Tuberose. Is she not fragrant? Certainly. Does one not want to strangle her eerily wrinkle-free neck? You bet.

At the till, the assistant pauses when she gets to the zebra mules and turns them over. “These aren’t your size, madam.”

“I know. I’m taking them anyway.”

The credit-card machine chunters busily and then gags. “Sorry, madam, your card has been rejected. I’ll have to make a call.”

“I don’t have time for you to make a call.”

The assistant smirks. “Shall we try another card?”

10:36 A.M. Six minutes, thirty-five seconds late for meeting. Enter room full of suits, trying to hide gleaming carrier bag behind knees. Rod Task looks up from his notes with a shark’s grin. “Ah, when the going gets tough the ladies go shopping. Good of you to join us, Katie.”

12:19 P.M.Four days to go till Emily’s half term but am way too busy to have booked a relaxing break. Paula is off to Morocco for the week. When I tentatively inquired this morning if there was any chance of her ever taking a holiday to coincide with ours, she shot me her Joan-of-Arc put-those-matches-down look. So I offered to pay for her flight. Weak, Kate, very weak.

Pretend to be checking fund valuations while making call to travel agent.

How about Florida?

Hyena cackle at the other end of phone. “Fully booked since October, sorry.”

“Disneyland Paris?”

Non . Eurostar apparently groaning with loathsome forward planners. It would be wise to book for Easter now, the agent says; he still has a few spaces left for Easter.

“Have you thought about Centerparcs, Mrs. Shattock?”

Yes, I have thought about Centerparcs: like going to hell in a Tupperware container.

I try Cornwall, Cotswolds and the Canaries. All full. Eventually get through to some firm called Cymru Cottages. Valda says, miraculously, she has a cancellation outside St. Davids. “On the cozy side, mind, but you can’t go wrong with an open fire, can you?”

Am just getting ready to leave for lunch when the postroom lad arrives at my desk looking rather sheepish: he is carrying two bunches of valentine flowers. One — gardenias, lilies, white roses as big as a hand — looks like Grace Kelly’s wedding bouquet; the other consists of garage-forecourt tulips padded out with funeral-director fern. Open the cards. The tulips are from my husband.

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Don’t be freaked out about nits. Nits are now very middle class. Felix’s school just had Nits Day to “remove the stigma of nits”!

How was your Hammer man in New York?

The only good thing about our situation is that we are Far Too Knackered to Commit Adultery.

Lunch thursday, right? Deb xxxx

To: Debra Richardson

From: Kate Reddy

Good to know nits have become oppressed minority group with their own EU funding rather than pest you have to comb out of groaning child’s hair every night. (Tried tea-tree oil — stank, but no use — now onto chemical stuff brewed by Saddam Hussein. But will it kill the kids before it kills the nits?)

Sorry, can’t do lunch: forgot it was half term.

Think the Hammer man just sent me major valentine bouquet.

To: Kate Reddy

From: Candy Stratton

Bad news, hon. Slow Richard rang while U wre out and stoopid secrtry said, “Oh, your flowers are SO much nicer than those tulips she got.”

pretend U hav florist stalker. Prefrbly GAY florist stalker.

PS: Thnx for crazy zebra shoes. Did you shoot them yourself?

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Kate, we are too tired for adultery, AREN’T WE? xxxxx

To: Kate Reddy

From: Debra Richardson

Don’t do anything disgusting and amoral.Without telling me EVERYTHING. D xxxx

1:27 P.M.Half an hour for lunchless lightning browse in gleaming electronics emporium near Liverpool Street. The atmosphere in the shop is delirious, malarial. Everyone in here has too much money and not enough time to spend it. I spot a guy from our tech team reverently cupping a digital camera as if it were a chunk of the true cross.

It only takes a minute to find exactly what I’m looking for: the latest dinkiest personal organizer. A truly gorgeous thing — implausibly light, but with a pleasing scientific heft, and witty too, like a fifties drinks coaster. The Pocket Memory comes with an impressive raft of promises:

It will simplify your life!

Banish stress!

Pay your bills!

Remember your friends’ birthdays!

Have sex with your husband while you

finish that Carol Shields novel you started

some weeks into your first pregnancy!

I say I’ll take it. I don’t even ask how much. One way or another I’ve earned it.

2:08 P.M.Rod Task approaches my desk like a marine storming a beach. “Katie, I need your help,” he hollers. Then, ominously, he parts his lips and clenches his teeth to form what he thinks is a smile. (Rod is only really scary when he’s trying to be nice.)

Playfully cuffing a daffodil in the vase on my desk, he tells me he wants me to do a final for a three-hundred-million-dollar ethical pension fund account. Finals are a sort of beauty contest in which rival investment managers vie to convince a prospective client that they are the most responsible gambler in town. Oh, and Rod forgot to mention the final when he heard about it, so I have only twelve days to prepare, although this is now my fault, because if it wasn’t my fault it means Rod made a mistake. And Rod is a man, so that can’t be right.

I can hear myself starting to protest a long way off — a watery wail of injustice — but Rod bulldozes on. “They want us to field a team that reflects EMF’s commitment to diversity,” he says, “so I reckon that’s gotta be you, Katie, and the Chinky from Research.”