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

7:43 A.M.Call Pegasus. Winston answers the phone. Why? Doesn’t Pegasus have any other drivers? I’m starting to wonder what kind of racket he’s running.

Winston says he’ll be fifteen minutes; I tell him I need him in four.

“See what I can do,” he says coolly.

I have a sudden and impossible longing to climb onto the lap of a large comforting person and be held there for — oh, twenty-five years should probably do the trick.

“Mummy?”

“What is it, Em?”

“Heaven’s a nice place, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Heaven’s a very nice place.”

“Is there a McDonald’s?”

“Where?”

“In Heaven?”

“God, no. I need to pack Ben’s wings.”

“For Heaven?”

“What? No. Water wings. You’re going swimming. You remember Nat and Jacob, don’t you?”

“Why doesn’t Heaven have McDonald’s, Mum?”

“Because. I’ve no idea. Because dead people don’t need to eat anything.”

“Why don’t dead people eat anything?”

“Ben, no. No, Benjamin. Sit down. Mummy will fetch you that juice in a — not on my dress!”

“Mummy, can I have my next birthday party in Heaven?”

“Emily, will you please be quiet. ”

7:44 A.M.Winston has pulled up outside the house in a new chariot — new to him, practically fossilized to the rest of us. The Nissan Primera is hidden behind a cloud of its own dirt, but at least when you open the door it doesn’t rain rust on your clothes. I load the children into the back, clasp Ben on my knee, and with the free hand call a nanny agency on the mobile. A Sloaney girl, her voice designed to carry across stag-rich moors, says she would really like to help, but it’s a particularly bad time for temps.

“It’s the school holidays, you know.”

Yes, I know.

Everyone’s been snapped up ages ago, only she does have this new girl on the books. Croatian. Eighteen. English not her best thing, but really keen. Likes children.

Well, that’s a start. Rack brain trying to remember which side Croatia was on in Balkan massacres. Think they sided with the Nazis in the war and are the good guys now; maybe it’s the other way round. I say OK, I’ll interview her tonight. What’s her name?

“Ratka.”

Of course it is. Must remember to call rat man. Why didn’t he show up? Emily pats my leg urgently. She has been deep in conversation with our driver.

“Mummy, Winston says the nice thing about being in Heaven is if you’re hungry you can lean over and bite off a bit of cloud. Like candy floss. The angels make it.” She looks far happier with this explanation than any I have managed to come up with.

Alice lives in a gentrified house on the edge of Queen’s Park: she bought in the area before a four-bedroom terraced cost more than Colorado. Once inside, my daughter wanders off happily to play with Nat and Jake, but Ben takes one look at the unfamiliar Brio set and clings to my right leg like a sailor lashing himself to the mast in a Force 10. I need to get out of here fast, but I have to spend a few minutes humbling myself before Jo the nanny. Can see her eyeing the hysterical toddler and wondering what she’s got herself into. I end up having to shake him off me and run out of the room with his screams at my back.

Sitting in the back of Pegasus, I try to read the FT to bring myself up to speed for the meeting, but I can’t concentrate. Shake head fiercely to dislodge memory of Ben’s tears. I can see Winston studying me in the rearview mirror. We are at the Old Street roundabout before he finally speaks.

“How much they paying you, lady?”

“None of your business.”

“Fifty? A hundred?”

“Depends on my bonus. But this year there isn’t going to be any bonus. After June’s performance be lucky to keep my job, frankly.”

Winston bangs the sheepskin steering wheel with both hands. “You gotta be kidding. They got you every second of every minute of every day. You their slave, girl.”

“I can’t do very much about it, Winston. I’m what’s technically known as the main breadwinner.”

“Whoa.” He stamps on the brake to avoid a nun on a zebra crossing. “How your man feel about that? Kind of thing tend to make the guys feel a little small in the Johnson department.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that the size of my salary is shrinking my husband’s penis?”

“Well, it would account for why no one out there can’t make no babies no more, wouldn’t it? Fertility rate was doing just fine till women went out to work.”

“I think you’ll find that’s down to estrogen in the water.”

“I think you’ll find that’s down to estrogen in the office.”

Even from the back seat, I can tell he is grinning broadly, because his cheeks are stretched so taut they have rumpled up the skin under his ears.

“For God’s sake, Winston, this is the end of the twentieth century.”

He shakes his head and a sprinkling of gold dust fills the cab. Like a fairy godmother, Emily said, when she saw it. “Don’t matter what century it is,” he growls. “The clock in men’s head always set to the same time. Pussy time.”

“I thought we’d all grown up and got over that caveman nonsense.”

“That’s where people like you got it all wrong, lady. The women they outgrew it and the guys they just went along so they could keep getting the women to have sex with them. The guy, he just ask himself, What tune she want me to play now? and he play it. Here, try one of these.”

Winston chucks a tin at me. I recognize the round bronze container from childhood: travel sweets. Julie and I preferred the frosted pears, the ones that tasted the way bells would taste if you licked bells, but we always got given these — barley sugars. Mum swore that barley sugars kept motion sickness at bay. So for me the taste of barley sugar is now the taste of being sick — the paper bag with its grim cargo, the lurch onto the roadside, the wiping your hands on the dead brown grass.

We have entered the City proper now, sweeping through the glass canyons where the heat hangs in a lilac haze. I open the sweets tin. Inside are six neatly rolled joints. Clearing my throat, I adopt the tone of a Radio 4 announcer. “Company policy is quite clear that the consumption of any illegal drugs on the premises of Edwin Morgan Forster is specifically forbidden. And…we’re nearly there so I’d better hurry up. Have you got a light, Winston?”

11:31 A.M.Research for my meeting hampered because the typeface of the Wall Street Journal refuses to keep still. All squirmy black lines, the Market Returns Page looks like the Ugly Bugs’ Ball.

Completely pathetic. Feel like a maiden aunt after a schooner of vicarage sherry. Motherhood — or abstinence brought on by motherhood — has wrecked my capacity to enjoy drugs of any kind except the occasional desperate slug of Calpol. I manage to walk into the meeting room OK, but once I’m inside the walls keep receding into infinite reflections of themselves like an Escher print. Every time I stand up to change a slide, I have to grab the edge of the table and tip my head slightly to one side to steady the horizon. Feel like a human spirit level.

When I open my mouth to address the twelve fund managers around the table, the voice that comes out sounds confident enough. But then I discover I have only a vague idea who’s talking and none at all about what she’s going to say next. It’s like being a ventriloquist of myself. Nonetheless, a profound feeling of relaxation enables me to disregard the opinions of my colleagues and make the investment choices that will become policy for the entire company starting tomorrow.