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

“So you didn’t see him at all yesterday?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I try to get home in time to put him in bed, but not last night, no.”

“And not the night before.”

“No, I had to go to Frankfurt. You see, Ben fell down the stairs this morning and he seemed to be fine, but then Paula got really worried and he became limp, so—”

“Yes, I see.” I don’t think he sees. I must try to talk calmly and slowly so he sees.

“Can you undress baby for me?”

I slip him out of his Thomas the Tank sleep suit, undo the poppers at the crotch of his vest and pull it over his head. The skin is so fair it’s almost translucent and through the rack of ribs you can see the tiny bellows of his lungs.

“And the baby’s weight. What does he weigh now, Mrs. Shattock?”

“I’m not entirely sure. He must be about twenty-eight or thirty pounds, I think.”

“When did you last have him weighed?”

“Well, he had his eighteen-month check, but you know he’s my second and you’re not as worried about things like weight with the second so long as they’re—”

“And at the eighteen-month check, his weight was?”

“As I said, I’m not sure, but Paula said he was absolutely fine.”

“And Benjamin’s date of birth — you are familiar with that, I presume?”

The insult is so biting that the tears jump to my eyes as if I had walked out into snow. I do really well in tests. I know the answers, but I don’t know these answers and I should know. I know I should know.

Ben was born on the twenty-fifth of January. He is very strong and very happy and he never cries. Only if he is tired or if his teeth hurt. And his favorite book is Owl Babies and his favorite song is “The Wheels on the Bus” and he is my dearest sweetest only son and if anything happens to him I will kill you and then I will burn down your hospital and then I will kill myself. “The twenty-fifth of January.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Shattock. Now, little man, let’s take a look at that chest.”

12:17 A.M.I don’t know how I would have managed without Winston. He stayed all the time with us at the hospital, fetching sweet tea for me from the machine, holding Ben when I had to go to the loo and only showing any sign of upset when I offered to pay him for his time. As he helps me and the sleeping baby out of the cab, I can just make out a figure on the steps of our house. I think that if it’s a mugger I won’t be responsible for my actions, but a few steps nearer and I realize that it’s Momo. Can’t bear to see anyone from work. Not now.

“Whatever it is, surely it could have waited till morning?” I say, stabbing the key in the lock.

“I’m sorry, Kate.”

“Sorry doesn’t really cover it, I’m afraid. I’ve just got back with Ben from the hospital. He’s been under observation. It’s been a long night. If the Hang Seng fell 10 percent, I don’t give a shit, frankly, and you can tell Rod that in those precise words….Oh, God, what is it?”

In the blade of light that the opening door casts into the street, I suddenly see that Momo has been crying. It’s a shock to find that perfect face puffed up with misery.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and can say nothing else because speaking has triggered a fresh bout of crying. I get her inside and sit her in the kitchen while I take Ben up to his cot. A viral rash, the doctor called it. Unconnected to his fall; we just have to be sure to keep baby’s fluids up for the next twenty-four hours and keep an eye on his temperature. Turning the corner to the flight of stairs that leads up to the kids’ rooms, I see the patch of worn carpet where Ben tripped. I hate that carpet, I hate the fact I didn’t get a quote for a new one, I hate the fact that finding the time to call someone out to measure my stairs seemed like an impossible luxury when it was a necessity all along. Triage — the order of urgency — I got it wrong. Things that could harm the children come first; everything else can wait. Looking in on Emily, I find her curled around Paula, who has fallen asleep on the bed. I go in and switch off the Cinderella light and cover them both with the duvet.

Back downstairs in the kitchen, I make a pot of mint tea and try to get some sense out of Momo. Ten minutes later, I understand why she is having trouble explaining the problem. She simply doesn’t have a vocabulary crude enough to describe what she has seen.

After work tonight Momo went to 171, a bar opposite Liverpool Street, with a bunch of people from the US desk. Later, she dropped by the office to collect some files for our forthcoming final. Chris Bunce was there with a group of guys all gathered round his screen, laughing and making raucous comments. They included her friend Julian, who joined EMF the same day Momo did last year. The men didn’t hear her come in and they didn’t notice until too late that she had come over to look at what they were looking at.

“Pictures of a woman — you know, Kate, wearing nothing. I mean worse than nothing.”

“But they download that stuff all the time, Momo.”

“You don’t understand, Kate, they were pictures of me. ”

2:10 A.M.I have helped Momo upstairs, found her some night clothes and tucked her up in the guest bed. Floundering in my Gap XXXL T-shirt with the dachshund motif, she looks about eight years old. Calmer now, she manages to tell me the whole story. Apparently, she screamed at the top of her voice when she saw the pictures on the screen, demanding to know who had done this.

Bunce, naturally, toughed it out. Turned to Momo and said, “Well, now the real thing is here, perhaps she’d like to show us what she can do, guys?”

They all laughed at that, but when she started crying they left the office pretty quickly. Only Julian hung around and tried to calm her down. Eventually, she yelled at him until he told her Bunce had taken head shots of Momo from the EMF website — the ones the firm was using in its brochure to illustrate its commitment to diversity — and digitally spliced them onto other women’s bodies that are freely available on the Net. “Bodies with no clothes on,” Momo repeats, and her primness makes it doubly painful.

Momo says she stopped looking when she saw her own head giving head. There were captions to go with the pictures, but she found it hard to make them out because she dropped her glasses and they cracked on the trading floor.

“There was something about Asian Babes, I think.”

“There would be.”

“What are we going to do?” she asks, and the we feels both presumptuous and entirely right.

Nothing is what we’re going to do. “We’ll think of something.”

I put the main light out and leave the bedside lamp on. Next to it in a vase is a desiccated sprig of lily of the valley, left over from Donald and Barbara’s visit.

“I don’t understand, Kate,” Momo says. “Why would Bunce do that? Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Oh, because you’re beautiful and you’re female and because he can. It’s not very complicated.”

For a second, she ignites with anger. “Are you saying what Chris Bunce did to me was nothing personal?”

“No. Yes.” I suddenly feel exorbitantly tired, as though my veins were filled with lead. The terror of there being something wrong with Ben and now this. Why do I always have to explain things to Momo, important things, when I’m at my most stupid? I lay my hand on her cool brown one and will the words to come. “I’m saying that there was all history and now there’s us. There’s never been anything like us before, Momo. Century after century of women knowing their place — and suddenly it’s twenty years of women who don’t know their place, and it’s scary for men. It’s happened so fast. Chris Bunce looks at you and he sees someone who’s supposed to be an equal. We know what he wants to do to you, but he’s not allowed to touch anymore, so he fakes pictures of you that he can do what he likes with.”