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With My Body
Nikki Gemmell

Contents

Title Page

Prologue

I

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Lesson 8

Lesson 9

Lesson 10

Lesson 11

Lesson 12

Lesson 13

Lesson 14

Lesson 15

Lesson 16

Lesson 17

Lesson 18

II

Lesson 19

Lesson 20

Lesson 21

Lesson 22

Lesson 23

Lesson 24

Lesson 25

Lesson 26

Lesson 27

Lesson 28

Lesson 29

Lesson 30

Lesson 31

Lesson 32

Lesson 33

Lesson 34

III

Lesson 35

Lesson 36

Lesson 37

Lesson 38

Lesson 39

Lesson 40

Lesson 41

Lesson 42

Lesson 43

Lesson 44

IV

Lesson 45

Lesson 46

Lesson 47

Lesson 48

Lesson 49

Lesson 50

Lesson 51

Lesson 52

Lesson 53

Lesson 54

Lesson 55

Lesson 56

Lesson 57

Lesson 58

Lesson 59

Lesson 60

Lesson 61

Lesson 62

Lesson 63

Lesson 64

Lesson 65

Lesson 66

Lesson 67

Lesson 68

Lesson 69

V

Lesson 70

Lesson 71

Lesson 72

Lesson 73

Lesson 74

Lesson 75

Lesson 76

Lesson 77

Lesson 78

Lesson 79

Lesson 80

Lesson 81

Lesson 82

Lesson 83

Lesson 84

Lesson 85

Lesson 86

Lesson 87

Lesson 88

Lesson 89

Lesson 90

Lesson 91

VI

Lesson 92

Lesson 93

Lesson 94

Lesson 95

Lesson 96

Lesson 97

Lesson 98

Lesson 99

Lesson 100

Lesson 101

Lesson 102

Lesson 103

Lesson 104

Lesson 105

Lesson 106

Lesson 107

Lesson 108

Lesson 109

Lesson 110

Lesson 111

Lesson 112

Lesson 113

Lesson 114

Lesson 115

Lesson 116

Lesson 117

Lesson 118

Lesson 119

VII

Lesson 120

Lesson 121

Lesson 122

Lesson 123

Lesson 124

Lesson 125

Lesson 126

Lesson 127

Lesson 128

Lesson 129

Lesson 130

Lesson 131

Lesson 132

Lesson 133

Lesson 134

Lesson 135

Lesson 136

Lesson 137

Lesson 138

Lesson 139

Lesson 140

Lesson 141

Lesson 142

Lesson 143

Lesson 144

Lesson 145

Lesson 146

Lesson 147

Lesson 148

Lesson 149

Lesson 150

Lesson 151

VIII

Lesson 152

Lesson 153

Lesson 154

Lesson 155

Lesson 156

Lesson 157

Lesson 158

Lesson 159

Lesson 160

Lesson 161

Lesson 162

Lesson 163

Lesson 164

Lesson 165

Lesson 166

Lesson 167

Lesson 168

IX

Lesson 169

Lesson 170

Lesson 171

Lesson 172

Lesson 173

Lesson 174

Lesson 175

Lesson 176

Lesson 177

Lesson 178

Lesson 179

Lesson 180

Lesson 181

Lesson 182

Lesson 183

Lesson 184

Lesson 185

Lesson 186

Lesson 187

Lesson 188

Lesson 189

Lesson 190

Lesson 191

Lesson 192

Lesson 193

Lesson 194

Lesson 195

Lesson 196

Lesson 197

Lesson 198

Lesson 199

Lesson 200

Lesson 201

X

Lesson 202

Lesson 203

Lesson 204

Lesson 205

Lesson 206

Lesson 207

Lesson 208

Lesson 209

Lesson 210

Lesson 211

Lesson 212

Lesson 213

Lesson 214

Lesson 215

Lesson 216

Lesson 217

Lesson 218

Lesson 219

Lesson 220

Lesson 221

Lesson 222

Lesson 223

Lesson 224

Lesson 225 – The Last

Other Books by Nikki Gemmell

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

You begin.

It feels right. At his desk. On his chair. His typewriter is the only thing left of him in the room. The ink ribbon is fresh – the metal letters cut firm and deep – as if he has placed it for this moment, just for you. You start slow, clunking, getting used to the heft of the old way. Working laboriously on the beautiful, antique machine for if you make a mistake you can’t go back and you need these pages methodical, neat. You type with his old Victorian volume by your side, that he gave you once – A Woman’s Thoughts About Women – that logged within its folds all that happened in this place, that breathed life, once. You relive the dialogue of his handwriting and yours jotted in the margins and the back, don’t quite know what you’re going to do with all the work; at this stage you’re just collating, filching everything that’s needed from this notebook whose pages are bruised with age and grubbiness and life, luminous life: sweat and ink and rain spots; sap and dirt and ash; the grease from a bicycle and a silvery snail’s trail and a cicada wing, its fragile, leadlit tracery. You reap his words and yours and then the Victorian housewife’s, her lessons about life, her guiding voice. She will lead you through this. Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it, she soothes. Yes.

Writing to understand.

And as you work you feel a presence, a hand in the small of your back, willing you on. Every person who’s ever loved and lost, every person who’s ever entered that exclusive club – heartbreak. Your little volume always beside you, the book you came here to bury, to have the earth of this valley receive as one day it will receive your own flesh, you are sure – lovingly, gratefully, because it is so, right, you are part of it.

But first this book must serve another purpose.

You feel strong, lit.

Whole.

Writing to work it all out.

You have never told anyone this. No one knows what you really think. It has always been extremely important to never let them know; to never show them the ugliness, brutality, magnificence, selfishness, glory; never give them a way in. It has always been important to maintain your equilibrium, your smile, your carapace at all times. You could not bear for anyone to see who you really are.

But now, finally, it is time. With knowing has come release. It has taken years to get to this point.

I

‘Even in sleep I know no respite’

Heloise d’Argenteuil

Lesson 1

Let everything be plain, open and above-board.

Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it.

You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. Couldn’t be bothered anymore. You are too tired, too cold. The cold has curled up in your bones like mould and you feel, in deepest winter, in this place that has cemented around you, that it will never be gouged out. You live in Gloucestershire. In a converted farmhouse with a ceiling made of coffin lids resting on thatchers’ ladders. It is never quite warm enough. There are snowdrops in February and bluebells in May and the wet black leaves of autumn then the naked branches of winter clawing at the sky, all around you, months and months of them with their wheeling birds lifting in alarm when you walk through the fields not paddocks; in this land of heaths and commons and moors, all the language that is not your language for you were not born in this place.

Your memories scream of the sun, of bush taut with sound and bleached earth. Of the woman you once were. She is barely recognisable now.

You do not know how to climb out, to gain traction with some kind of visibility, as a woman. To find a way to live audaciously. Again.

Lesson 2

The house-mother! Where could you find a nobler title, a more sacred charge?

Your husband, Hugh, will be home late. Ten or so. This is not unusual. He works hard, as a GP, and you cherish that, the work ethic firm in him; he will not let his family down. There’s always something he has to do at the end of the day, paperwork, whatever.

It is good Hugh is home late, what you want. You seize those precious few hours between putting the children to bed and his homecoming for yourself. The soldering time. When you uncurl, recalibrate. Draw a bath and dream of being unclenched, of standing with your face to the sky in the hurting light, opening out your chest and filling up your bones with warmth. Becoming tall again, vivid-hearted, the woman you once were.

You have a good girl’s face. Young, still. But Hugh detected something underneath, early on he sniffed it out like a bloodhound. Something … unhinged … under the smile. Something coiled, waiting for release.

He’ll never find it. You have been locked away for so long and your husband does not have the combination and never will, now, has no idea what kind of combination is needed; he thinks all is basically fine with his marriage. You’ve both reached a point of stopping in the relationship. Too busy, too swamped by everything else.

You are the good doctor’s wife. All wellies and Range Rovers, school runs and Sunday church and there is a part of you that your husband will never reach and that elusiveness used to addle him with desire; what went on, once, in your life.

‘Tell me your thoughts,’ he used to say. ‘What are you thinking?’ But you couldn’t let on, ever, didn’t want this good man scared off: he must never know the rawness of the underbelly of your past. This one was marriage material: respectability, kids, the rose-bowered cottage; nothing must jeopardise it.

The magnificence, ugliness, beauty, power, transcendence – when you were unlocked. That Hugh will never know, for you did not marry him for that; he cannot lay you bare like you were laid bare once.

Some men know how, but most don’t.

Lesson 3

She is forever pursued by a host of vague adjectives,

‘proper’, ‘correct’, ‘genteel’, which hunt her to death like a pack of rabid hounds

Your children are just back from school. Outside is icy-white but it is frost, not snow, a brittle blanket of stillness that clamps down the world. The frost has not melted in the mewly light of the previous few days. The kids champ at the bit inside, they want to be out in the light, before it is gone; almost. You let them loose. They spill through the kitchen door, run. Storming into the crisp quiet, roaring it up; bullying the frost, its deathly stillness.

You smile as you stare through the window at your boys – so much life in them. Such shining, demanding, insistent personalities, all so different. You make another cup of tea, the last of the day or you won’t sleep; green tea because so many dear friends are getting ill now – three at the moment, with breast cancer. And with your mother’s history you have to be careful of that.

You’re so tired, you have four boys if you count the one you’re married to and the exhaustion is now like an alien that’s nestled inside your body, sucking away all your energy. It’s an exhaustion that stretches over years, since your first child, Rexi, was born; the exhaustion of never being in control anymore, of never completely calling the shots. Once, long ago, as a single career woman, you did. You dwelled within a white balloon of loveliness, in the city, loved your beautifully pressed, colour-ordered clothes and regular weekend sleep-ins, your overseas trips and crammed social life.

But now this. A tight little world of Mummyland, symbolised by a mountain of unsorted clothes on the floor at the end of the bed. You can get the clothes into the washing machine. You can get them out. You can arrange them over the radiators to dry. You can collect the dried clothes and put them in a heap ready for sorting. But you cannot, cannot, get the clothes back into their cupboards and drawers. Until that pile at the end of the bed becomes a volcano of frustration and accusation and despair; ever growing, ever depleting you. Until sometimes, alone, you are weeping and you barely know why, your hands clawed frozen at your cheeks. ‘I can’t do it.’ Sometimes you even say it to your children, horribly it slips out – ‘It’s too hard, I can’t do this’ – bewildering them.

You weren’t this woman, once; despised this type of woman, once.

You are lonely yet desperate for alone; it’s so hard to get away from your beloved Tigger-boys, to steal moments of blissful alone from everyone dependent upon you. You feel infected with sourness, have lost the sunshine in your soul. You do not like who you have become; someone reduced.

Yet you are so fortunate, have so much. You know this, despairingly. Cannot complain but are locked in your demanding little world of giving, giving, giving to everyone else, all the time; trapped.

Lesson 4

Lost women

You have not slept with your husband since the birth of your third son two years ago. This doesn’t bother you. It is a relief. If it bothers Hugh he no longer expresses it. You’ve both stopped talking about your lack of a sex life, the joshing has gone, the teasing; he never talks about it now. He used to snuffle about, playful, trying to unlock his little librarian with her knee-length tweed skirts and demure shirts, unleash whatever it was that was underneath. Now, you suspect, he’s as exhausted as you.

Almost every night it’s musical beds, a different combination of child next to you with Hugh squeezed into various dipping mattresses. Recently you’ve been waking every night, around 3 a.m., hugely, violently. Roaming the house, banging the walls with clenched fists; harangued by sleeplessness, needing to reclaim yourself. Heart thudding, knowing you will not be able to sleep for several hours and then tomorrow will be no better and perhaps worse. Oh for a full, deep, rich sleep, with nothing to wake you the next day, no demands, squabbles, wants. Oh for that sated sleep of deeply satisfying sex. Tenderness, a shiver of a touch.

You love Hugh, of course, feel for him deeply, but would be happy to be celibate from now on. You look at some of the school dads around you and just know they’d be ‘dirt’ – cheeky, playful, a bit of rough – and it’s always the divorced ones; there’s something unfettered, loose, lighter about them. But you’d never do anything about it. Don’t need sex anymore. You wonder at the shine of those women who are man-free by choice: some widows and divorcees you’ve seen over the years, nuns, septuagenarians; those precious few who no longer seek out men and are strong with their decision and lit with it. You recognise that glow.

Unencumbered.

Men, for you, have fulfilled their purpose; you have children, are sated. Once, long ago, you were made tall and strong by the shock of someone who cherished women and was not afraid of them, who revered their bodies. Men like that are extremely rare and when a woman finds one she recognises profoundly the difference in the lovemaking and is forever changed; that man becomes a paragon by which all others are measured and you are lucky, so lucky, to have found it, once. You have girlfriends who never have.

Lesson 5

That season of early autumn, which ought to be the most peaceful, abundant, safe and sacred time in a woman’s whole existence

A memory slicing through your life.

That you slip out every night like a billet-doux hidden in a pillowcase, that you’ve carried through all your adult years. A memory of exquisite shock: that your body was cherished once. Not used but thrummed into life. His touch – you are addled by the remembering even now, after all these years. His touch – sparking you awake, God in it. And his voice. Is that what we remember most potently, out of all the senses, long after someone has gone? You can still recall the exact way he spoke your name when he was deep inside you, moving almost imperceptibly, the nourishment of it. You have pocketed that voice in your memory long after the sharpness of his features has faded.

In no way did he want to reduce you; that above all you remember. His singular aim: to empower you, lift you, unlock you. Teach you to know your body, what it is capable of. How many men give women that gift?

Another country. Another life.

A world away from this one, now, sipping your green tea as you stare out the window at 4.30 p.m., your life ticking by, your knuckles white around the mug. It’ll be teatime soon, followed by the pleading to get the homework done, the dragging from screens, the nagging to have showers, do teeth; all the plea-bargaining, negotiating, cajoling in your life, the relentless exhaustion of it.

Lesson 6

Married women have cast their lot for good or ill, having realised in greater or lesser degree the natural destiny of our sex

Hugh and you are bound by an unspoken acknowledgement that you’ll never split – you’re in this together, for life. When you married him you were aching for love, something transporting; he was a friend who had you laughing deep into the night and so it would work, yes. You’ve always cherished his evenness. Were never uncomfortable with him, even in silence – the test of a true connection. You are so fortunate to have him, you know this, you must never forget it.

You do not like the way he kisses. Do not know how to tell him this, could never hurt him. It will not change. It’s gone on too long. It cannot be taught. How can you say to someone you love that they lack tenderness? It’s impossible to learn, to acquire. You could endure it pre-children, he offered so much else – filling up the glittery loneliness of yet another Saturday night by yourself, another New Year’s Eve; his sturdy, charming presence quelling all those awkward questions on Christmas Days and all the weddings and baby showers you were suddenly going to. Your saviour, you know it.

Yet it feels like the only thing that unites you now is the children. You dream of another, a girl – the bliss of her – but just couldn’t be bothered; with Hugh, you’re both beyond all that. You never talk about it. About anything.

He is an Englishman who boarded from the age of seven and from then onward was taught not to trust his feelings; to shut down. He craved his mother, was overwhelmed by grief and loneliness yet all the time was told that his family wanted this, it was for the best. So he learnt from very young not to trust his deepest instincts, to bury far inside what he really thought. He has carried these lessons through life; expects it of others. He never changes towards you – is warm, playful – but doesn’t want all the emotion, the mess of it.

He calls you Vesuvius to his Pompeii. When all your raging, swamping frustrations blurt out. When a voice in you snaps in the thick of the exhaustion, a voice you’ve never heard before, a woman you don’t recognise, at your husband and your children; a voice of anger and ugliness. You fear your beloved boys will hold its tone somewhere in their memories for the rest of their lives and you’re ashamed of that but still, occasionally, it roars out. Yet you love them to distraction, it’s a swamping that’s greedy, wild, voluptuous; every night in prayer you thank God for the gift of them.

Motherhood, the complexity of it. The richness, the depletion, the incandescence. The despair, the loneliness.

Lesson 7

She has ceased to think principally of herself and her own pleasures

Once, for a long period, you never had an orgasm. You had surrounded yourself with a boundary of no; your body recoiling, in shock, at what men would do. Or wouldn’t. Their ignorance, clumsiness, lack of finesse. Your body in shock at what was the smarting truth: that some of these men didn’t, actually, like women very much. Wanted to chip away at them, deplete them, make them vulnerable and weak; were afraid of them. And your entire body retracted at the knowing, like a sea anemone flinched.

But then the lover from long ago, who gave you your first orgasm. Taught you to surrender. And now, at your age, if you can’t have transcendent sex you’re not going to have it at all. It’s as simple as that. You’re too old for anything else.

Hugh, God love him, is good at sleep. He doesn’t snore or smell, he wings you close on the rare occasions you find yourself in the same bed as him and you love the protectiveness of it. You may have lost your taste for sex but you will never lose your desire for shared sleep.

With Hugh.

To the outside world you are blissfully married, one of those rare couples that works.

Lesson 8

Marriage: to resign one’s self totally and contentedly into the hands of another; to have no longer any need of asserting one’s rights or one’s personality

You were born in mountain country, north of Sydney, a place assaulted by light. High hill country with ground leached pale by the sun and tap water the colour of tea and you always looked down when walking through tall grass, because of snakes, and at dusk the hills glowed pink with the force of the sun, trapping the heat under your skin, in the very marrow of your spine; that could not be gouged out. Whispering you back. Home. To a tall sun, a light-filled life.

When you were eighteen you climbed down from your high mountain place. Went to university and became a lawyer, in Sydney, the Big Smoke. Winged your way to London in your mid twenties: restless, fuelled by curiosity, eager to gulp life. After several years of hard work there was the expat’s dilemma of wanting to return to Australia but unable to decide when; of meeting Hugh – the man who did not excite you but sheltered you; of one thing leading to another and now you are in this rain-soaked island for life, staring at a mountain of washing by your bed and dreaming of the roaring light. After the second bouncy boy the decision was mutual: a move to the west country, the Cotswolds, for space and fresh air, a better life. Your dream of a partnership in the law firm fell away under the demands of motherhood; after the first maternity leave you never went back, lost your professional confidence and now your children cram every corner of your life. You are driven by perfection and ambition as a mother, just as you were driven as a lawyer. Everything you do you dive into completely, attacking with a ferocious will to succeed and hating it when you fall short. Which you do now, often, to your distress.

Hugh has said it’s good you’re Australian in this place; your accent can’t be placed, you can slip effortlessly from lower class to upper, can’t be pinned down. You know it’s good Hugh is not Australian for he can’t nail the broad flatness of tone that any Aussie East Coaster would recognise as originally from the sticks. The bush has never been completely erased from your voice; wilfully some remnant clings to it. Your vowels have been softened by Sydney, yes, but they still carry, faintly, the red-neck boondocks in their cadence. England hasn’t left a trace.

You will always be an outsider here. You revel in not-belonging, enjoy the high vantage point. Marvel, still, at the strict sense of place, of class they cannot breach – the fishing and shooting, the villas in France, the stone walls that collect the cold and the damp, the wellies even in July, the jumpers in August, the hanging sky like the water-bowed ceiling of an old house. How can it hold so much rain, cry so much? Days and days and days of it and at times you just want to raise your arms and push up the clouds, run. Hugh will never move to Australia, he has a blinkered idea of it as the end of the earth and deeply uninteresting, really – that the only culture you’ll find there is in a yoghurt pot.

You can see your whole future stretching ahead of you now until your body is slipped into this damp black earth, the years and years of sameness ahead. Once, long ago, you never wanted to be able to do that, curiosity was your fuel, the unknown. You carry your despair in you like an infection that cannot be shaken.

But now. A dangerous will inside you to crash catastrophe into your life, somehow, God knows how – or with whom. It’s been brewing for years; it’s something about reaching your forties and seeing all that stretches ahead. You’ve never been fully unlocked with Hugh and bear responsibility for that, entirely.

For always wearing a mask. For not being entirely honest. For never showing him your real self.

Lesson 9

Unhappiness of soul – a state of being often as unaccountable as it is irrational

‘How are you?’ the lovely, cheeky Bengali man in your newsagency asked before school pick up today.

You replied, distracted, ‘I have no idea.’

The ultimate flaky mum, you know he thought.

But it was the truth. You have no idea. Have lost the woman you once were. Cannot simplify your life. Had so much energy for so much, once; now your days are taken up with so many bitsy, consuming, domestic things. You catch yourself talking aloud as you walk away down the High Street. Is it madness or preoccupation or mere motherhood. In a window reflection you gasp at yourself scowling, jaw set. There’s the niggle that now you’re married you are somehow less. Just the little wife. Hugh doesn’t mean to convey that but he does. There’s a subtle and discernible loss of confidence, so insidious, as you lean on another for so much and you never did that, once. As you have somehow allowed over the years your petrol tank to be filled and restaurant dinners to be decided for you, sweets secreted to your kids, Nintendo Wiis gleefully bought behind your back, theatre tickets purchased for plays you don’t like.

You cannot explain how circumstances have closed over you, how you became a woman who lost her voice.

But you know there’s only one person who can haul you out.

It is five o’clock.

The potatoes have to be peeled and the toilet unblocked; it’s probably a plastic toy, it’s becoming a habit with Pip, your youngest.

You have to change this life, somehow, or something in you will implode like a depth charge way beneath the surface.

Lesson 10

There are very few families whose internal mismanagement and domestic unhappiness are not mainly the fault of the mistress

Nine p.m. Just the dishwasher to unpack now and then you’ll draw your bath and unclench, at last, in the warmest room in the house, the main bathroom.

The phone. Susan. A mum from the boys’ school and you don’t know how it came to this: a Susan so entwined in your life. Rexi is friends with her eldest, Basti. You met when the boys were in the same nursery and then they moved to primary school together, have known each other for years. It is assumed. But you became friends before you realised how unsettling she is. A mother with an overdeveloped sense of her own rightness, with everything, and there’s something so undermining about that.

Every conversation, to Susan, is a form of competition; there must always be the moment of triumph. When she’s first seen every morning, at the school gate, she forces you to say how lovely her little girl looks, to compliment.

‘Look at Honor, she dressed herself today, doesn’t she look gorgeous?’

‘Where’s Honor, is she hiding on my shoulders?’

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

Yes of course, and you are a woman who does not have a daughter but it would never cross Susan’s mind that the keenness for a girl once sliced through you like a ragged bit of tin; you can’t deny there was a moment of disappointment at each subsequent son who appeared from your womb – just a moment, wiped as soon as you held them to your breast. And now, every day at the school gate, there is the ritual noticing of what you do not have, every day this conversation you have somehow allowed in your life.

Susan is obsessed by her children. Like no other woman you know. Always talking about how good her Basti is – at maths, swimming, art, he’s just swum four laps, helped plant her herb garden, is never sick, always good – not one of those naughty ones.

You always cringe at this – your boys are boys, you adore them but they are not always the best; often your heart is in your mouth when your family is with other people, about what may be said, knocked over, who may be shouted at. Susan is critical of your Rexi whenever he’s had a play date. Always, on the doorstep when you pick him up, you have to submit to her little ritual of complaint. The only time you can ever remember her complimenting your eldest was when she said, in wonder, ‘He’s good looking … now.’ Now. Your beautiful, sunny, ravishing boy, from day one.

‘Rex didn’t eat his food … wouldn’t play with Honor … was very loud …’

You have allowed it, for so long – Susan’s reward for taking one son off your hands, for giving you a blessed break; it means one less child for a few hours and you both know how needed that is in your life, a tiny sliver of extra space.

Lesson 11

A state of sublime content and superabundant gaiety – because she always had something or other to do.

If not for herself, then her neighbour.

It is nine-fifteen and Susan is still on the phone and inwardly, at her voice, there is a tightening in your stomach, a knot – what has her Basti excelled at today, what triumph has to be endured? And your head is full of the ‘Shout Book’ you have just discovered under your middle child’s bed. Jack has recorded, meticulously, every time he is yelled at. By you. In writing neater than it’s ever been at school.

Saturday: 14th January. 2 times.

Sunday: 15th January. AMAZING. Nothing.

Monday: 16th January. 3 times.

Devastation. Today it was all to do with him wearing a good shirt to his grandmother’s tomorrow, for her birthday tea.

‘I hate that button shirt so much it makes me walk backwards,’ he had shouted.

You laughed at the time and later jotted it down; for what, God knows. You had to laugh, they give you so much and don’t even know it. These bouncy, shiny little scamps fill every corner of your life, plump it out; you love them so consumingly but you’re not sure they believe it, Jack most of all, your middle child you worry will one day slip through the cracks.

‘Please, God, stop Mummy shouting,’ was his prayer tonight.

‘Don’t!’ came his muffled protest from under the duvet when you tried to tickle him into giggles, to kiss away all your guilt, but he recoiled as if your touch would scald him which only made you want to caress him, cuddle him, envelop him all the more.

Susan is prattling on, she wants you to do the coffee before the class assembly on Monday and didn’t catch you today. She is president of the P.T.A., you are a class rep, this is the new world you have thrown yourself into with the zeal you once reserved for law. You’re deeply embedded in this intense little microcosm, yet feel sick every day now as you approach the gates for pick up. Wear a mask of joy – you have perfected it but if only they knew of your relief when for some reason, too rarely, you don’t have to be there. It’s your twice daily torture and you feel ill, sometimes, as you near the school gates. You wait in the car so you’re not standing there early, having to talk. Filling up afternoons with play dates for the boys so they’re not missing out and filling up your own evenings with drinks and dinners with your mummy friends for the same reason and you need the solace and release of using your brain, somehow. You’ve been with some of these women for over five years now. And their flaws are getting worse as they age – as are yours; it feels like you are all hardening into your weaknesses and you’ve got years of this school run ahead of you. The competitiveness, petty power games, boasting, one-upmanship; sometimes you feel like you’re ten again, back in the school yard. It’s stealing who you really are, who you became, once.

Lesson 12

Beware the outside friend who only rubs against one’s angles

Your shout book.

What Mothers Do (or, The Tyranny of the School Gate)

Ignore requests for play dates, just don’t return emails, or constantly say their child can’t do it. Or get their P.A. to decline on their behalf.

Invite every child in the class to their son’s party but yours.

Talk and talk about their own child and never ask a single question about your own.

At every mention of a problem your child has – e.g. crooked front teeth/can’t do the maths/is having difficulties with friends – comes back with, ‘Johnnie’s teeth are beautifully straight, thank God, Johnnie’s always been good at maths, he gets on with everyone,’ etc. Whether you believe it or not.

Drop their child off to your son’s birthday party without a present, pick up their child with no mention of a present, happily take a party bag, say an extravagant thank you but never give a birthday present in return or mention the situation again, as if challenging you. Of course you say nothing.

Never reciprocate with lifts to or from school, as if it just hasn’t crossed their mind to do so.

Like a butterfly buzz from school gate flower to flower, alighting on the freshest and most beautiful – the newest mum, the next best friend – before flitting off to someone else. Dropping you, just like that, into a cold, cold place. Phone calls are suddenly unanswered, coffee requests met with, ‘So busy, another time’. Felling you with silence. Because someone else is filling up their lives now, whereas once you were the loveliest and most intriguing mum in the school; fresh from London, foreign, marked by difference. Long ago. The technique is stunning: how to bring a strong woman down, torment them with bewilderment, force them to ask the question, again and again, ‘What’s wrong with me?’

Sometimes you just want to scream at these women, at the height of all the pettiness (usually towards the end of term when everyone’s frazzled). Can’t we all just value each other? Please? It’s hard, for every one of us, you’re sure of that.

And then, specifically, there’s Queen Susan:

Using the royal ‘we’ when talking about the school because as P.T.A. president she has a sense of entitlement and ownership over the institution – and access to the headmaster – that no other parent has.

Likes to slip in to conversations, often, her privileged position. For example, parking is difficult around the school and everyone wings it, including you, with illegal, jittery, hovery pulling up at pick up and drop off. Except Susan. ‘I’m president, I just can’t,’ she likes to remind everyone, often, with a rueful smile. ‘I’m president, my boy has to do his homework … I’m president, I can’t be late for pick up.’ If the job came with a badge she’d wear it.

Always includes a link to her own website at the bottom of her weekly school newsletter, as if to rub it in that she has a life beyond all this, she has managed to be one of those ones who does it all, effortlessly (she runs a website selling bespoke wooden kitchenware along with her school duties).

If you were content, none of this would infect you; it would just roll away like water off a duck’s back. But one woman, this woman, has become a focus for all your frustration and you know it’s unfair and paranoid and ridiculous, she’s a good person, you’re just jealous of her position and the way she’s worked out her life and it’s eating you up, can’t escape it. But you’d be happy to never see her again. Would never have befriended a Susan in your former existence, are not uplifted by her in any way; your heart doesn’t skip with happiness to see her and you need heart-lifters around you now, more than ever – it feels like you’re becoming more thin-skinned and vulnerable as you age. How can that be? That the great, raw wounds inflicted by others in the distant past are sharpening now, in middle age. You can’t gouge them out and you have no idea why; have lost your voice, your strength.

Lesson 13

Friendship – a bond, not of nature but of choice, it should be maintained, calm, free, and clear, having neither rights nor jealousies, at once the firmest and most independent of all human ties

Your hand is straying into your pants, thinking of other things entirely, school dads, their spark. How one in particular, Ari, would spring you alive, back to the woman you once were. Ari, yes, he’d have the knowledge, the instinct; but you’d never do it. God no, the mess of it. Susan is still in your ear, telling you that Basti is just about to pass his first flute exam, can pick up any piece of music and just play it, he amazes her. (Rexi, God love him, is on page six of his guitar book and unlikely to progress.) And the coffee morning, ‘Can you run it, babes?’ Of course, yes. Susan will bake some muffins for you: ‘I know you’re not good at that bit.’

She is constantly baking, her house a show place, her children spotless – yours are the ones who sometimes wear grubby t-shirts you’ve flipped inside out, have cereal for dinner and Coca-Cola as a treat. In Susan’s kitchen is a huge notice board in an ornate frame crammed with certificates of achievement and baby photos and colourful kids’ drawings. The occasional certificates your own children get are lost in piles, somewhere, along with school reports and photos and Santa lists and they will all be sorted, sometime. Long ago, you were in control of your career, your friends, your life; you never feel in control within motherhood. The guilt at so much.

The time you folded up the push chair and placed it in the boot, only to hear a squeak – baby Pip still in it.

The time Jack rolled off the bed as you were changing his nappy and ended up with a dint in his skull.

The birthday cakes from Tesco, year after year.

The computer games that keep them all riveted, baby included.

The occasional McDonald’s, three quarters of an hour’s drive away on a Sunday night.

Basti, of course, has never had it in his life. He tells you this when he comes to your house. He has inherited his mother’s heightened sense of censorious rightness, about everything in his life, and you fear for what’s ahead of him, how the wider world will chip away at that. Meanwhile Susan bustles about in her flurry of energy, a tiny, dark sparrow of efficiency with an enormous, puffed chest, making you feel deficient in response, that you’re always running and never quite catching up. Have had no role model in life for this. The best mothers are those who had bad mothers, you think, because they know what not to do – but what if you never had a mother? If she died before she was lodged in memory.

Susan’s voice veers you back.

‘Wasn’t that homework hard today? Basti got it, eventually.’

‘Rexi took a while. I had to snap off the TV just to get him to the table …’

‘We don’t miss ours. The kids never ask for it.’

A pause. ‘Lucky you.’

Television, of course, is babysitting for you, your guilty secret. And you didn’t notice exactly what Rexi was doing in his maths book.

‘Just checking you’re still on for Basti this Thursday?’

You’re always scrupulously generous with play dates; it’s why the routine works.

‘Of course … can’t wait.’

‘Did you get the notice about nits? I know you never check their schoolbags, just reminding you. Basti’s never had them. I don’t know who it is …’

You shut your eyes, your knuckles little snow-capped mountains around the phone. Because of bath time, several hours earlier – all the boys, even Pip – and dragging out the lice with all their tiny, frantic legs. And Jack has a pathological aversion to nits, almost vomits with the horror of them, yells like you’re scalping him. Then the pleas, the threats, to finish the homework due tomorrow, to stop the Wii, get to bed. Rexi storming off in frustration, his arms over his head. You feel, sometimes, he’s a great open wound that you’re pouring your love and puzzlement into. What’s going on in there? Does it ever even out? He’s only nine. His teacher says it’s something to do with boys about this age, from seven onwards, their teeth coming through; there’s a huge psychological change in them, hormones swirling. Does he mellow with age, does he strengthen? Is he too much like you, too emotional? You are fascinated and fearful at the depth of his feelings.

You are not responsible for your child’s happiness, Rexi’s teacher in her fifties told you gently the other day.

‘All you’re responsible for is what is said and done to them, as a parent. That’s all. Nothing else.’ You must remember that.