3:19 P.M. A State of Emergency. Roo is missing. Paula calls and says she knows for definite that he was in the buggy when she took Ben to Little Stars music group this morning, and she’s pretty sure Roo came back with them. But then, when she went to put Ben down for his afternoon nap, they couldn’t find him. Ben was devastated. Screamed and screamed for his toy while Paula searched the house. High and low, but there was no kangaroo to be seen. I can hear Ben hiccuping with grief in the background.
What was she doing taking Roo out of the house in the first place? I can’t believe Paula could be so stupid when she knows how awful it would be if he got lost. I voice this thought out loud and, instead of snapping back, she just sounds culpable and sad.
“Do you think we can find another one, Kate?”
“I’ve no idea what the market in used kangaroos is like, Paula.”
3:29 P.M. Call Woolworth’s, where Roo came from originally. Assistant says sorry, but she believes they are out of kangaroos. Would I like to speak to the manager? Yes.
Manager says that kangaroos been discontinued. “There’s been a big trend away from the softer animals towards plastic novelty creatures, Mrs. Reddy. Would you perhaps be interested in a Mr. Potato Head?”
No. I already work with a dozen of those.
3:51 P.M. Try Harrods. Surely, they must have a Roo. They have everything, don’t they? A woman in the toy department says she may have something; she’ll just go and check in the next room if I can hang on. When she gets back, she describes something, but it sounds all wrong.
“No, I can’t have one with a baby. It’s an emergency….Australian, yes….I need one about eight inches long for tonight.”
“Kate, I didn’t know you cared.” I look up to see Rod Task leering down at me. Oh, God. “Sorry, Rod, I’m just looking for a kangaroo.”
“Great. I never thought you’d ask.”
There is a nasty snicker from Guy two desks away. When Rod is out of earshot, I tell him to get onto the Internet and start researching toy marsupials right away.
9:43 P.M. It takes two hours and forty-three minutes to persuade my son to go to sleep. All the substitute comforters I offer — lamb, polar bear, purple dinosaur, each of the Teletubbies in rotation — are hurled in a fury out of the cot.
“Roo,” he wails. “Roo!”
To get him to settle, I have to let him hold my electric toothbrush and then we sit in the blue chair with him sprawled over me, clutching my shirt like a baby monkey. At the bottom of each boy breath there is a sticky catch, like a tiny gate being opened in his lungs. Please God, let me find another Roo.
EVERYTHING WAS GOING WELL during Barbara and Donald’s visit — suspiciously well, I see that now. To the best of her ability, Barbara had complimented me on the kitchen. “I’m sure it will be lovely when it’s finished,” she said. But I smiled graciously throughout, even during tea with the children when Barbara turned to Donald and said, “Isn’t it funny? Emily looks like Richard when she smiles and Kate when she frowns!”
For dinner that night, we were having Italian. I had washed and dried a pile of arugula, the red peppers had been charred and then peeled with the same lavish care I used to bring to a scab on the knee in infants school. At the top of the oven, there was a leg of lamb, and at the bottom the potatoes, suffused with rosemary from my very own garden, were hunkering down nicely. I had even squeezed in a bath after the kids’ bedtime and put on a clean blouse and velvet skirt over which I wore the wipable Liberty print apron the in-laws gave me for Christmas.
Yes, I thought, surveying the scene at dinner, this is one of those rare times when life approaches the condition of color magazine. The domestic goddess entertaining her admiring parents-in-law in her lovely stylish home. Barbara had just asked me for the peppers recipe and then I saw it. Moving across the oak floor, the plump suede rear of a rat.
Etiquette books are unnaturally silent on the subject of rats at dinner parties. Do you
a. Laugh gaily and pretend the rat is a treasured pet?
b. Exclaim, Ah, there’s the main course! Nigel Slater says rodent’s the coming thing. Very good done the Vietnamese way, apparently?
c. Invite your guests to adjourn upstairs, ply them with as much drink as possible and put on a Burt Bacharach CD to drown out the sound from the kitchen where your husband is pursuing the rodent with your daughter’s Mary Poppins umbrella?
Richard and I went for c.
Downstairs, the rat holed up in the baby’s playpen, perhaps hoping to pass for a soft toy. Before long, though, it was doing frisky circuits of the kitchen. Barbara said that, come to think of it, she remembered feeling something running across her feet: she would need to take some aspirin immediately and go and lie down. Nobody was in the mood for my amaretto peaches in raspberry coulis. I suddenly had a very bad feeling about the clumps of raisins that had been appearing on the kitchen floor.
“Don’t get hysterical,” said Richard, after he had got the rat out of the patio door and into the garden. “Remember they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”
This seemed unlikely. The rat triggered what I can only call rat dread — that back flip of the stomach every time you open a cupboard, not knowing whether you will come face-to-face with a face. That night, whiskers and paws scurried through my dreams.
MONDAY, 9:38 A.M. I have been fired by my own cleaner. In the annals of domestic humiliation, how high does that rate? When I came down this morning, I found Barbara and Juanita in an accusing huddle. My motherin-law was tutting audibly as my cleaner mimed a rat scurrying along the worktop and pointed to parts of the kitchen made impassable by newspapers and toys. “It’s no wonder,” said Barbara. Although my motherin-law is not a Spanish speaker, she was able to communicate with Juanita in the international female language of Disapproval.
“The rat man is on his way,” I announced loudly, to alert them to my presence and stop the exchange of further examples of my sluttishness.
At the sound of the pest’s name, Juanita unleashed a machine-gun burst of woe.
“If you leave food out, it will attract vermin,” volunteered Barbara.
“I do not leave food out,” I said, but she was already in the hallway where Donald was assembling the luggage. He gave me a rueful little wave.
When they had gone, Juanita told me she was very sorry, but she couldn’t take it anymore. This all communicated via operatic arm gestures and sobs. Here at long last was my chance to point out that one of the reasons the house was in such a mess was because my cleaner had been unable to clean it for the past two years, owing to a succession of ailments which I had reacted to with enormous sympathy because — oh, probably because I am from a background where you don’t expect to have anyone else tidying up after you and some sneaking shame is attached to the fact that you’re a woman who can’t keep her own house clean. (“Kate may be a whiz with figures,” Cheryl my sister-in-law once said, “but you should see the state of her skirting boards!”)
So did I give Juanita a piece of my mind there and then? Not exactly. I gave her all the cash I had in my purse, promised to send more in the post and said I would recommend her to some friends in Highgate who were looking for a cleaner.
Chase RAT MAN again! Hire new cleaner! Replacement Roo MUST. Proxy voting policy to be agreed with clients. Complete quarterly performance questionnaire. Meeting minutes do myself (Secretary Lorraine still off sick in heat wave). Prospect for gaining client in final just done with Momo blown by bloody awful June performance.
