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

Sitting on the curb, weeping with frustration and self-pity, when a fire engine streaks up the street with an inconsolable wail. The engine stops and the guys let me clamber aboard. I’m so grateful for the lift, I forget to tell them where I’m going, but we move swiftly through familiar roads till we reach my own. As we get close to our house, I can see a knot of people standing outside.

Smoke purls out of a bedroom window. Emily’s window.

“Stand back, miss, we’ll handle it,” a man says.

I am slapping my hands against the door. I am calling the children’s names, but I can’t hear for the siren. Can’t hear myself scream. Turn the siren off. Please could somebody please turn that fucking siren off—

“Kate! Kate, wake up. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

“What?”

“It’s all right, darling. You’ve had a bad dream.”

I sit up. My nightie is a shroud of sweat. Inside my rib cage, there is a bird scrabbling to get out.

“I left the children, Rich. There was a fire.”

“It’s OK. Really, it’s OK.”

“No, I left them by themselves. I went in to work. I left them. ”

“No. No, you didn’t leave them. Listen, that’s Ben crying. Listen, Kate.”

It’s true. From upstairs comes the siren call: the inconsolable wail of a teething baby, a one-man fire brigade.

DAY OF REST, otherwise known as day of ceaseless manual labor. Chuck out extinct ready-meals from fridge. (“Reddy meals,” as my sister-in-law Cheryl likes to call them.) Swab down curious algaelike residue from glass shelves. Discard knuckle of Parmesan which smells of old people’s home. Get rid of disgusting antibiotic-enriched Happy Chicken Shapes that Paula feeds the children and make sure to hide right at the bottom of bin bag. For my vulnerable young, only free-range. How many times must I tell her?

Fill and empty washing machine three times. Cleaning lady, Juanita, has chronic back problem (three and a half years) and quite rightly cannot be expected to carry heavy laundry around the house. Adult washing is outside nanny’s duties, although Paula does occasionally break strict demarcation to put in one of my hand-wash-only sweaters. (I always consider complaining about this, but file instead under Pending Paula Grievances: Volume 3.)

Today, I have invited Kirsty and Simon round for a “relaxing” lunch. Important to see friends, remember there is more to life than work, weaving of social fabric that strengthens sense of community, etc. Also important for children to see Mummy at ease in domestic context, build up glowing childhood memories, instead of woman in black running out of door yelling instructions.

Everything is totally under control. The recipe book is open like a Bible under the clean plastic lectern, ingredients are in pleasing formation. Very dinky bottle of olive oil with Siennese silk ribbon. Am wearing charming Laura Ashley apron with retro floral print which gives an ironic nod to the role of fifties homemaker while signaling jokey distance from appalling domestic servitude of women like my mum. Possibly. Also have planned casual weekend hostess outfit to change into seconds before guests arrive: Earl jeans, pink cashmere Donna Karan. Try to follow instructions for Salsify, Leek and Blue Cheese Filo Tart, only Ben keeps rock-climbing up my legs, using uncut nails as crampons. Every time I put him down, he gives a car-alarm wail.

There are those who make their own filo pastry, but they are like people who go in for bondage in the bedroom: you admire the effort and technique without necessarily wanting to do it yourself. I unwrap the pastry from its packet and brush one sheet with melted butter. Place another sheet on top. Very restful. Enter Emily with bulbous lower lip: “Where’s Paula?”

“It’s Sunday. Paula doesn’t come in today, sweetheart. Mummy and Emily are going to make some lovely cookies together.”

“Don’t want to. I want Paula.” (The first time she said that I swear I could feel the skewer going into my heart, and there is still nothing to rival it, the pain of your firstborn’s infidelity.)

“Well, I’d really like you to help me with the biscuits, darling. It’ll be great fun.”

Through her great gray eyes, Emily weighs up the sight of her mother playing at being her mother. “Daddy said I could watch Rugrats. ”

“All right, you can watch Rugrats if you put your blue dress on by the time Kirsty and Simon get here.”

11:47 A.M.Everything under control. Return to recipe. Stir lemon juice and blue cheese into cold bechamel sauce. What bechamel sauce?

Turn page. For bechamel sauce recipe see page 74. What? Now they tell me. Mobile rings: it’s Rod Task. “Bad time, Katie?”

“No, absolutely fine. Ow! Ben, don’t do that. Sorry, Rod. Go on.”

“I’m faxing through details of tomorrow’s meeting, Katie. We need you to be up to speed on performance, asset allocation, attribution, and strategy outlook. Your kind of stuff. Guy Chase was singing your praises Friday night, said how great you managed, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Oh, you know how blokes get talking over a curry.”

No, I do not know. Would love to go out with Rod and the team for the Friday-night Indian, if only to keep that creep Guy from stalking my job, but had to get home to read Harry Potter.

Sudden ominous smell from oven. “Don’t worry, Rod. Everything’s under control. See you tomorrow.”

“Take it easy, sweetie!”

Open oven door to reveal disaster. Filo pastry case has become a petrified forest. Don’t panic. Think, Kate, think. Run out of door yelling instructions. Can Richard please dress Ben and tidy the kitchen?

12:31 P.M.Back from the supermarket. Ben is dressed but kitchen looks like a scene from Disney Goes to Dresden.

“Richard, I thought I asked you to tidy up?”

He looks up from the paper, amazed. “I have been tidying up. I’ve already put the CDs in alphabetical order.”

Kick Brio train track under sofa, hurl rest of toys into utility room and jam the door shut with a drying rack. Substitute M&S spinach quiche for salsify-and-Gruyère catastrophe. Now to make the dressing. Dinky bottle of olive oil has immovable crimson wax stopper. Try to pull out stopper with bottle opener but merely shred flakes of red rind into baby leaf salad. Use teeth. No use. Bugger. Bugger. Attack stopper with sharp knife. Miss bottle and slash back of hand instead. Looks like drunken suicide attempt. Search first-aid drawer. Can only find one plaster: Mister Bump. Run upstairs to change into relaxed hostess attire. Wriggle into new jeans, but no sign of Donna Karan pink cashmere sweater. Why is nothing ever in the right place in this house?

12:58 P.M.Find pink cashmere. Paula has hidden it at the back of the airing cupboard, and no wonder. Plainly it has barely survived kids’ wash. Now so shrunken would only fit Mrs. Thomasina Tittlemouse or Ally McBeal. Go downstairs to discover Ben posting remaining blue cheese into the video. Emily screaming because Rugrats has jammed. No sign of Richard. Doorbell rings.

Kirsty and Simon Bing are architect friends of Richard. The same age as us, they have no children but only one exquisite gray-blue cat that drifts like smoke through the Japanese porcelain in their Clerkenwell loft. When we go to visit the Bings, I spend a lot of time shouting as Ben crawls up the open-plan staircase without any banister and peers gleefully into the abyss. There is an unspoken strain between the childless and those of us bowed down with infants. Before Emily was born, we rented a villa outside Siena with Kirsty and Simon, and our cooling relationship is occasionally warmed by memories of that week in the sun. These days, Rich and I, if we socialize at all, tend to hang out with people with kids. Because they understand. The sudden need to produce pizza and tissues, often simultaneously; the unpredictable smells and naps. The moods that arrive like tanks.