“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
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.
Bonds or equities? No problem. UK or Japan? Hell, only a fool would hesitate over that one.
Halfway through the meeting, Andrew McManus — Scots, rugger bugger, shoulders like a Chesterfield sofa — gives a self-important little cough and announces that he hopes all present will forgive him, but he has to slip away early because Catriona, his daughter, has this swimming gala and he promised her that Daddy would be there. Everyone around the table reacts as though this is the most normal thing in the world. The younger guys who think they may one day get around to having kids, but only when the Porsche Boxter comes complete with a nappy- changing shelf, don’t flinch. The other fathers bask in conspiratorial new-dad smugness. I see Momo, who is single and knows no better, mouth, “
Observing that I am the only colleague not to join in the cooing approbation, Andrew shrugs helplessly and says, “You know how it is, Kate.” Slips into his jacket and out of the room.
Indeed, I do know how it is. Man annnounces he has to leave the office to be with his child for short recreational burst and is hailed as selfless doting paternal role model. Woman announces she has to leave the office to be with child who is on sickbed and is damned as disorganized, irresponsible, and Showing Insufficient Commitment. For father to parade himself as a Father is a sign of strength; for mother to out herself as a Mother is a sign of appalling vulnerability. Don’t you just love equal opportunities?
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy
Just chaired meeting where fellow manager announced he had to leave to attend daughter’s swimming gala. Practically knighted on the spot for services to parenthood. If I tried that, Rod would have me executed and my dripping bloody head stuck on the ramparts of Bank of England as a warning to other women slackers.
It’s sooooo unfair. Am coming to conclusion that career-girl bollocks is one-generation-only trick. We are living proof that it can’t work, aren’t we?
Forget higher education. Think we should send our girls to catering college where they can learn to make decorative floral centerpieces and a delicious supper for two. Then they can marry a man who will pay for them to stay at home and have pedicures.
URGENT: Pls remind me what was drawback to that way of life again???
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
