I Don't Know How She Does It

balls.”

Rotating the Chi balls in slow patient circles is not exactly what I had in mind. I ask if we could possibly move on and do some work on my stomach. “You see, I had a cesarean and there’s this overhang of skin which just won’t go away.”

Fay shivers at the interruption, fastidious as a greyhound at a sheepdog trial. “My approach is to the whole person, Katya. I may call you Katya, mayn’t I? You see, once we have freed up the mind, we can move on to the body, gradually introducing the various parts to each other until we establish a harmonious conversation.”

“Actually,” I tell Fay, with as much harmony as I can muster, “I’m incredibly busy, so if we could just say, Hello, stomach muscles, remember me? that would be terrific.”

“You don’t have to tell me you’re busy, Katya. I can see by the weight of your head. You really have a very heavy head. A poor stressed head. And the neck ligaments. Loose! Loose! Looose! Barely supporting your poor head. And this in turn is bringing truly intolerable pressure onto the lower lumbar region.”

And there I was thinking you paid these people to make you feel better. After thirty minutes of Fay, I feel as though my next appointment should be with an embalmer. Now she suggests I lie flat on my back, extend my arms over my head and pretend I’m lying on a rack. Mind flicks to thoughts of traitors having secrets dragged out of them in the Tower of London at twenty-five quid an hour by ye olde personal torturer. According to Fay, this exercise will realign my spine, the spine that is one of the saddest and most misshapen Fay has ever seen.

“That’s it, that’s it, Katya, excellent.” She beams. “Now, bring your arms slowly forward over your head and repeat after me, If we compete, we are not complete. If we compete, we are not complete.”

7:01 A.M. Departure of Fay. Truly intolerable pressure lifts immediately. Treat myself to bowl of Honey Nut Loops; I cannot do exercise and self-denial in the same morning. Sitting at the kitchen table am suddenly aware of unaccustomed sound, a dry scratchy wireless hiss, and look round the room for its source. It takes a couple of minutes to track it down: silence. The sound of nothing is shouting in my ears. Have five minutes to myself, drinking it in, before Emily and Ben come whooping through the door.

After the holidays, I always sense a special edge to the children’s neediness. Far from being satisfied by the time we’ve had together they seem famished, as ravenous for my attention as newborns. It’s as though the more they have of me, the more they’re reminded how much they want. (Maybe that’s true of every human appetite: sleep begets sleep; eating makes you hungry; fucking stokes desire.) Clearly, my kids have not grasped the principle of Quality Time. Since we got back from Richard’s parents, every time I go out the door it’s like the Railway Children seeing their father off to jail. Ben’s face is a popped red balloon of anguish, and Emily has started doing that hideous coughing thing in the night — she hacks and hacks until she makes herself sick. When I mentioned it to Paula for reassurance, she said, “Attention-seeking,” with a quiet note of triumph. (Implying that attention is lacking, obviously.)

Then there are Emily’s nonstop requests for me to play with her, always at the most inconvenient times, as if she were testing me and at the same time willing me to fail. Like this morning, when I am desperate to get to a doctor’s appointment, she comes up and hangs on my skirt.

“Mummy, I spy with my little eye something beginning with B.”

“Not now, Em.”

“Oh, pleeese. Something beginning with B.”

“Breakfast?”

“No.”

“Bunny rabbit?”

“No.”

“Book?”

“No.”

“I don’t know, Emily, I give up.”

“Bideo!”

“Video doesn’t begin with B.”

“It do.”

“It does.”

“It does begin with B.”

“No, it doesn’t. It begins with V. V for van. V for volcano. V for violent. If you choose the right letter, Emily, it saves an awful lot of time.”

“Katie, give her a break, she’s only five years old,” says Richard, who has ambled downstairs, hair still damp from the shower, and is now carefully cutting out a Cruella De Vil mask from the back of a Frosties packet.

Glare across the table at him. Trust Rich not to back me up. He is so bad at presenting a united front.

“Well, if I don’t correct her, who’s going to? Not those all-spellings-are-equally-valid mullahs at school.”

“Kate, it’s I Spy, for God’s sake, not Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

Rich, I notice, no longer looks at me as though I am merely mad. A certain sideways flicker to the eyes and corrugating of the brow suggests he is now weighing up how long he should leave it before calling the ambulance.

“Everything’s a competition for you, isn’t it, Kate?”

“Everything is a competition, Rich, in case you hadn’t noticed. Someone wanting to smash your conker, someone wanting a prettier special-edition Barbie, someone wanting to take your biggest client away just to prove you couldn’t handle it.” As I unload the dishwasher, I think of Fay and her daft mantra. What was it? “If we compete, we are not complete.” She should try that one in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster. “If we do not compete, we are out on the street. In the sheet.”

“Mummy, can I watch a bideo? Pleeese can I watch a bideo?” Emily has climbed up onto the granite worktop and is attaching a Barbie slide to my hair.

“How many times have I told you, we don’t watch bideo — Jesus, video—at breakfast time.”

“Kate, seriously. What you need is to slow down.”

“No, Richard, what I need is a helicopter. I’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s for which I am going to be ten minutes late, making me even later for my conference call with Australia. The Pegasus minicab number’s on the board, can you ring? And tell them not to send that weirdo in the Nissan Sunny.”

RICHARD IS A NICER person than me, anyone can see that. But in suffering, in bitter experience, I am his superior and I carry that knowledge like a knife. Why am I so much tougher on Emily? Because I guess I’m scared that Rich would bring up our children to live in an England that doesn’t exist. A place where people say “After you” instead of “Me first,” a better and a kinder place, for sure, but not one that I have ever lived or worked in.

Rich had a happy childhood, and a happy childhood is terrific preparation — indeed, the only known apprenticeship — for being a happy adult. But happy childhoods are no bloody good for drive and success; misery and rejection and standing in the rain at bus stops are the fuel for those. Consider, for instance, Rich’s tragic lack of guile, his repeated undercharging of clients he feels sorry for, his insane optimism up to and including the recent purchase of erotic underwear for a wife who, since the birth of her first child, has come to the nuptial bed in a Gap XXXL T-shirt with a dachshund motif.

Children do that to you, don’t they? He is Daddy and I am Mummy and finding the time to be Kate and Richard — to be You and Me — well, it slipped down the agenda. Sex now comes under Any Other Business, along with parking permits and a new boiler. Emily — she can barely have been three then — once found us kissing in the kitchen and turned on her parents like Queen Victoria discovering a footman with his finger in the port.

“Don’t do that. It gives me a tummy ache,” she hissed.

So we didn’t.

8:17 A.M. Despite my specific request, Pegasus Cars has once again sent round the Nissan Sunny. The back seat is so damp you could start a mushroom farm in there. Tensing both thigh muscles and buttocks and hiking up my Nicole Farhi gray wool skirt, I do my best to squat an inch or two above the mildew.

When I ask the driver if he could possibly find a quicker route to the surgery, he responds by turning up the volume on the tape deck so high my cheekbones start to shiver in gale-force music. (Is this gangsta rap?)