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Richard is so het up about the global epidemic of inappropriateness that he has no idea what is going on in his own home.
‘We put those parental controls on the kids’ phones and iPads, didn’t we?’ he asks me.
(Please observe the tactical use of the marital ‘we’. Richard doesn’t mean did ‘we’ put parental controls on the kids’ electronic devices. He wouldn’t know a parental control if it punched him on the nose. What he means by ‘we’ is me, the wife, who gets shared credit so long as things are going well. As soon as things go wrong, you can bet the question will be, ‘Did you organise those parental controls?’)
‘Course we have parental controls, darling. Fancy a bacon butty?’
Richard looks down at his Lycra-sheathed six-pack before capitulating. ‘Go on then, won’t say no if you’re making one.’
Over twenty years, the bacon sandwich has never failed as distraction, bribe or tranquilliser dart for my partner. Given a choice between a blow job and a bacon butty, let’s just say Rich would definitely hesitate. If he ever goes vegetarian, or even vegan – as looks increasingly likely judging by the tragic woven bracelet on his left wrist – our marriage is doomed. Anyway, I am telling the truth for a change. The kids do have parental controls on their technology. What I’m not telling Richard is that after Emily’s bottom went viral I called Joshua Reynolds, the village computer prodigy who is now in his late-twenties doing postgraduate work in physics at Imperial. (His mother Elaine told our Women Returners group that the infant Josh could re-route the US Navy from his buggy or something.) One of those disappointed, mousy women who only lights up in her offspring’s reflected glory, Elaine was thrilled when I called to ask for Josh’s number, explaining that I needed help with some Internet problems. I figured Josh was young enough and, let’s face it, sufficiently on the spectrum, not to think it was at all weird that I wanted to spy on my own daughter, or that I needed his help tracking down and destroying evidence of her naked backside wherever it might have got to.
In fact, on the phone, Josh was gratifyingly unsurprised, which instantly made me feel better. He said he would see what he could come up with regarding social media but, in the meantime, he told me how to get into the history on Emily’s laptop. I scrolled down the recent purchases and found that Madam had used my credit card to download ‘How to Use a Proxy to Bypass Parental Control Filters’. I mean, what are you supposed to do? It’s like I’m a Stone Age person living with Bill Gates.
7.23 am: Emily is upset. I made the mistake of pointing out that to produce one pint of her green juice she creates six miles of washing-up, presently still festering, unwashed in the sink. There is a heap of vegetable waste – apple cores, feathery celery stalks, bleeding beetroot carcasses – that would feed a drove of pigs for a week.
‘It’s such a mess, darling. Could you at least put the juicer in the dishwasher?’
‘I know,’ she snaps, ‘I know. I’ll do it, OK?’
‘And you can’t live just on that green juice, sweetheart. You need some solid food inside you. Please at least have some eggs. I’ll make them for you.’
‘What part of juice diet don’t you understand, Mum? It’s a seven-day cleanse.’
‘But you can’t get through a school morning on a glass of slime, love.’
‘You’re on a bloody diet permanently, but when I do it it’s not healthy. I don’t need any more of this crap …’
There are tears in her eyes as she veers away from my outstretched hand and checks her phone.
After the belfie catastrophe, I did confiscate her mobile for twenty-four hours, exactly as Candy suggested, but it was as if Em had been bereaved. Removal of Internet access seemed to distress her even more than her backside going viral. She sobbed inconsolably and begged me to give it back. I know I should have stuck to my guns, I know, but I couldn’t bear to cause her yet more distress. Take away a teenager’s phone and you remove the threat of dangers which are invisible to the maternal eye, plus the constant pressure on a girl to peacock herself for the peer group, then get crushed when she doesn’t get enough Likes. Unfortunately, you also take away their life, or the only part of their life they care about. I couldn’t do that to her, not when she’s still so churned up.
Storming out of the kitchen, Emily slams the door into the hall with such ferocity that the old brass lock shudders loose and hangs there, dangling from two nails. I go over and try to press it back in, but the wood is so badly splintered that the nails have nothing to hold them in place. (‘Roy, please add a locksmith to my to-do list.’)
This is the way our relationship has been for the past eighteen months. The little girl who was desperate to please, who was so angelic she looked like she’d tumbled out of a Pears Soap poster, the poppet who invited me for tea in her Wendy house: that little girl is no more. Instead, there is this exasperated and exasperating young woman who is aggravated by my every suggestion – sometimes, it seems, by my very existence. She tells me I am ‘Soooo annoyyyingg’. I need to ‘Back off’. ‘Just chill, will you?’ ‘Stop worrying, Mum, I’m not a baby any more.’
Stop worrying? Sorry, darling, I’m your mother; that’s kind of the job description.
As my own hormones recede, my daughter’s are surging in. She is buffeted about by them and we all have to surf that tide with her. This belfie business has made it ten times worse. Emily has barely spoken to me for the past three days; any time I try to raise the subject she runs upstairs, like she did just now, and locks herself in the bathroom. When I knock on the door, she claims her period’s started and she feels sick, or her tummy hurts, but close observation of Tampax supplies tells me she’s only just finished her period. I haven’t even told Em that I’ve hired Josh Reynolds to carry out what he calls a ‘seek and destroy mission’. I just wish I knew what the repercussions have been for her at school, but I can’t find out unless we’re talking, can I? Obviously, I am to blame for the entire sixth form, the school choir and three million people on Facebook having seen the photo she took of her bare bottom, complete with its very own hashtag: #FlagBum. I understand that she is taking out her distress and anger on me. As my Parenting Teens in the Digital Age book says, my daughter knows that I love her unconditionally, so I am a safe place to put those feelings. Intellectually, I get that. Doesn’t make her behaviour towards me any less hurtful though. Emily can wound me like no one else.
7.30 am: When she comes back down for breakfast, Em is wearing full Cleopatra make-up, her eyes given raven wings by flicks of kohl. She either looks amazing or like jailbait, depending on your point of view. Pick your battles, Kate, pick your battles.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘Lizzy and some of the other girls are going to see Taylor Swift for her birthday.’
‘Any relation to Jonathan?’ asks Richard, not bothering to look up from his iPad.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Jonathan Swift. Famous satirist during the eighteenth century. Wrote Gulliver’s Travels,’ says Rich.
‘Mum, puhlease can I get a Taylor Swift ticket? She’s so cool, she’s like the best singer ever. Izzy and Bea are going. Everyone’s going. Mu-um, please.’
‘It’s not your birthday,’ objects Ben, not bothering to look up from his phone.
‘Shuddup, will you? Little brat. Mu-umm, tell Ben to stop it, will you?’
‘Emily, don’t kick your brother.’
‘Jonathan Swift suggested that children should be boiled and eaten,’ muses Rich to himself.
Sometimes, just occasionally, my husband makes me laugh out loud, and reminds me why I fell in love with him.
‘I think Swift was definitely onto something there,’ I say, placing scrambled eggs on the table. Richard is washing his bacon butty down with a glass of some weird energy drink which looks like that purple Dioralyte we gave the kids when they were dehydrated from vomiting.
‘Emily, you’ve got to eat something, darling.’
‘You just don’t get it,’ she says, pushing the plate of egg away from her with such venom that it tips over the edge of the table and smashes onto the floor, scattering fluffy yellow florets over the terracotta tiles.
‘Everyone’s like going to the O2 to see Taylor Swift. S’not fair. Why are we poor?’
‘We are not poor, Emily,’ says Richard in that slow, soft, vicar voice he has adopted since starting his course. (Oh, please, not the South Sudan lecture.)
‘There are children in the Horn of Africa, Emily …’
‘OK!’ I jump in before Rich can build up a head of sanctimony. ‘Mummy’s going to get a full-time job very soon, so you can definitely go and see Taylor Swift, darling.’
‘Kate!!!’ protests Richard, ‘what did we say about not negotiating with terrorists?’
‘What do I get?’ wails Ben, looking up from his phone.
Lenny, seizing this optimal moment of family friction, snarfs up the scrambled egg and licks the floor clean.
Rich is right to be cross. Extortionate concert tickets are not part of our agreed budget cuts, but I sense that Emily’s distress – panic even, did I detect panic in her eyes? – is about more than Taylor Swift. The girls she mentioned are all part of the Snapchat group that Lizzy Knowles shared the belfie with. The last thing Emily needs is to miss their outing. If Rich can blow one hundred and fifty quid a week talking about himself, and Ben’s new braces will require us to take out a second mortgage, then surely we can find the money to help Em be happy?
7.54 am: When the kids have gone upstairs to do their teeth and get their stuff together, Richard briefly raises his eyes from his cycling website and notices me – me as a person, that is, not as diary secretary and rinser of Lycra – and says, ‘I thought you were at the gym today.’
‘I was, but your dad rang really early. Couldn’t get him off the phone. He was on for twenty minutes. He’s really worried about your mum. She’s obviously pissed off the new carer. Told her that her English wasn’t good enough after she caught her smoking by the Bishop of Llandaff.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a flower. Passive smoking harms dahlias apparently. You know what your parents are like about the garden. And the carer sounds hideous. Donald mentioned a bruise on Barbara’s wrist, although that could be a fall. The whole thing’s a mess, but now they haven’t got anyone going in again.’
‘For fuck’s sake.’ Richard allows himself a very non-Dalai Lama reaction and I’m glad. Like most couples, our relationship has been held together by a common outlook on life, and by laughing at or despising those who don’t share it. I neither much like nor recognise Mr Wholefoodier Than Thou who is currently occupying the body where my lovely, funny husband used to live.
‘Mum’s impossible,’ he says. ‘How many carers is that they’ve gone through? Three? Four?’
‘Barbara’s really not well, Rich. You need to get up there and sort things out.’
‘Cheryl can do it. She’s nearer.’
‘Cheryl has a full-time job and three sons doing twenty-seven after-school activities. She can’t just drop everything.’
‘She’s their daughter-in-law.’
‘And you’re their son. So is Peter.’ (Don’t you hate the way families assume it’s always the women who should take care of the elderly parents, even if a son lives nearer? That may just be connected to the fact that we always do.)
At least Rich has the grace to look sheepish. ‘I know, I know,’ he sighs. ‘I thought Mum seemed fine in Cornwall. That was only two months ago.’
‘Your father’s good at covering things up.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘You’ve seen how forgetful she is.’
‘That’s perfectly normal at her age, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not normal to ask your fourteen-year-old grandson if he needs a wee wee. She genuinely thinks Ben is in kindergarten. She needs proper help. We can’t just leave your dad to cope, Rich. He’s amazing but he’s almost ninety for God’s sake.’
‘Could you? I mean, would you mind going, Kate? I would go, you know I would, but I can’t take a break from therapy right now. This is such a crucial time in my personal development. I know you’re job hunting and it’s a big ask, darling, but you’re so good at these things.’
‘Are you kidding?’
That’s what I am about to say, anyway, but something in Rich’s expression makes me pause. For a moment, he looks like Ben did that time in the middle of the night when he was kneeling on the bathroom floor next to the toilet bowl and admitted he was scared of vomiting.
Rich has always been horrified by anything to do with illness or doctors. Like most men he believes he’s immortal and I guess there’s nothing like witnessing your parent’s decline into dementia to dent that treasured myth. Despite his phobia, if I’m ill Rich always forces himself to be a good nurse. When I got salmonella from a cheap chicken, not long after we first met, he refused to leave me alone in my grotty shared flat though a combination of paper-thin partition walls and thunderous visits to the loo should have dealt a lethal blow to our budding romance. I remember thinking, between bouts of retching, how tenderly devoted this new boyfriend was. Not at all like the emotionally shut-off public schoolboy I had imagined him to be. If Rich’s passion could survive hourly explosions from all orifices, he must be a keeper. I had had better lovers, men my body was helplessly in thrall to, but wanting someone who was also kind to me? Now, that was a first.
When did we stop being kind to each other, Rich and I? All the pressure and upheaval of the past few months has made us scratchy and inconsiderate. I need to do better.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘I’ll see if I can go up to Wrothly and check in on Barbara and Donald before they invite me to interview for new Governor of the Bank of England.’
Richard smiles (haven’t seen one of those for a while) and swoops in for a kiss. ‘Brilliant. You’ll get a job offer, darling,’ he says. ‘Once that headhunter guy sends out your CV you’ll be beating them off with a stick.’
I haven’t told him how badly things went with Kerslaw. Don’t want to worry him.
Josh Reynolds to Kate
Hi Kate, Josh here. I’ve notified Facebook that the pic of Emily breaches their Community Standards and it should be taken down by now. As she’s sixteen she no longer qualifies as a child & won’t get highest priority. Although she’s not recognisable in the pic – you can only see her back and her bum which won’t identify her – I’ve zapped everything I could find and I’ve set up notifications which will alert me next time a pic of Emily’s bum is shared. I’ll kill it, natch. There are ways in which I can make Lizzy Knowles’s online life very unpleasant
but you didn’t hear me say that, OK? If you want me to do what can’t be mentioned, let me know. You know if this is revenge porn you can get police involved. Do you want to do that? Thanks for asking me. It was fun!
Kate to Josh Reynolds
Thanks so much, Josh. Brilliant job. Really appreciate it. No, not revenge porn. Just teenage girl stuff. Not serious. Don’t want police involved!! Let me know how much I owe you.
9.47 am, Starbucks:With breakfast cleared, the site of the Green Juice Massacre swabbed down, the dishwasher mumbling to itself and Candy’s stern advice in mind, I have taken myself into town to work on my CV in a café. I can pretend to be ‘telecommuting’, instead of sitting at the kitchen table waiting to be ambushed by family members.
My mission today is to produce an attractive new CV, omitting my date of birth and any other incriminating details. Instead of admitting to ‘time out’, as prospective employers will see it, I must repackage what I have learned and achieved since I left Edwin Morgan Forster, as a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, loyal friend, school governor, PTA member, penniless yet imaginative house restorer, eBay addict, and inspired (and only slightly crooked) investor of parish church’s 1,900 quid (just call me Bernie Madoff!). It’s a cinch. Apply Harvard Business School model to position of Household Servant and General Dogsbody. Here goes:
Over the past six years, I have built up an impressive track record in Conflict Resolution. (Translation: Wrestled Xbox out of Ben’s hands after three hours solid on Grand Theft Auto IV. Got him to agree to consume at least one green vegetable a day plus Brainy Teen fish oil capsule in return for more time on GTA IV.)
Financial management and capital projects: I have considerable expertise in this area after helming several challenging schemes. (You can say that again. The Money Pit, aka ‘period gem’ is eating giant bites out of our meagre savings account and I am driving increasingly hard bargains with suppliers to get the job finished.)
International negotiating skills honed on domicile issues in the UK. (Bloody au pair Natalia and her cocaine-dealer boyfriend.)
Time Management and Prioritisation: I have balanced the complex needs of different individuals and developed routines while learning to prioritise multiple tasks and meet strict deadlines. (Of course I have. Am I not a mother? Do I not manage the lives of two adolescents and one male in midlife meltdown whilst keeping an eye on elderly relatives, walking the dog, trying to keep up with friends, carving out time to exercise, doing the garden and watching Homeland and Downton Abbey? Feel free to add to this list, it’s endless.)
Grown a highly productive business start-up. (Planted beautiful Cutting Flower Garden guided by Sarah Raven book on same. Also, purchased huge smelly composting bin and learned to identify weeds. To my surprise, I have become a gardener.)
Due diligence work on complex UK legislation. (Fought tooth and nail to get non-existent care package from local authority for Donald and Barbara, who get frailer by the day.)
Pioneering research in Human Resources with special emphasis on staff development and motivation. (Spent days tracking down and hiring highly rated private tutor, fighting off several Tiger Mothers, to get Ben into the only local secondary school without a record of drive-by shootings and dreadful exam results. Told Emily she could have two tickets for the Reading Festival if she got nine good GCSEs. Result!)
Built strong knowledge base in transport. (Personal chauffeur to two teenagers with active social, musical and sporting lives. Regularly take Ben and his drum kit to orchestra, jazz group, etc. Drove Emily to events around the country until she decided swimming was giving her Popeye shoulders. If you want my advice, never let your kids take up swimming; you always have to set off at dawn, usually in fog, and then you have to sit on an orange plastic seat in some repellently warm building that stinks of chlorine and wee – you can actually feel the bacteria multiplying in the soupy air. Plus, you have to maintain a keen interest during forty lengths of butterfly stroke. Seriously, choose any other sport.)
‘Oh, hello, Kate? Fancy seeing you here.’
I glance up from my laptop to find a blonde around my age smiling expectantly at me.
**‘Uh-oh. Roy, are you there? We have a woman in her forties, possible school mum, but wildly overdressed for a latte in Starbucks (Missoni coat, Chanel shades). Clearly loaded, judging by the number of bags she’s carrying. How do I know her?’
‘Oh, hello.’ I smile back and hope Roy shows up fast with her name. ‘Hello! Um, I’m just updating my CV.’
‘So I see. Very impressive. Job hunting, are we?’(‘ROY?? Get a move on, will you! Please tell me who she is.’)
‘Er. Yes, well, with the kids getting a bit older I thought I’d stick a toe in the water. See what’s out there, you know how it is.’
She smiles again, revealing lipstick on her top teeth, which have been expensively whitened. Too white – more Dulux gloss than Farrow and Ball.
Oh, here comes Roy, back from the stacks and a little breathless. Thank God. *Roy says that I put my glasses in the drawer next to the Aga.
‘WHAT?I don’t need to know where my glasses are, Roy. That was earlier. What I would now like you to focus on is retrieving this woman’s name.’
‘By the way,’ the woman says, ‘I’m so glad Emily can come to Taylor Swift.’
**‘It’s Lizzy Knowles’s mum,’ says Roy. ‘You know, mum of that little cow that sent Emily’s bum everywhere. Cynthia Knowles.’
Good job, Roy!
I’ve only met Cynthia a couple of times. After a school concert when both our daughters sang in the choir. And then at one of those charity coffee mornings where a well-bred mummy provides chocolate chip cookies no one eats, because we’re all fasting or eating protein only, and you pay her back by buying some jewellery you don’t want, and can’t really afford, but it’s rude not to because the mummy, who is married to Someone in The City, is trying to find something she can Do For Herself. So, you hand over your money to this hugely wealthy woman, which she then gives to charity, when she could perfectly well have written a large cheque. Oh, and nine days later the ‘silver’ earrings you bought at the coffee morning turn green and pus starts coming out of your left earlobe.
‘We’ll take them to the O2, of course,’ Cynthia is saying. ‘Christopher will drive them down in the Land Rover. Lizzy wants Korean BBQ afterwards. She said Emily’s a definite. Did she mention the ticket price?’
You know what? Meeting Cynthia, mother of the girl who has hurt my daughter so hideously, I don’t feel like being polite. My inner maternal dragon would prefer to breathe fire at her and scorch those perfect caramel highlights to cinders. Does she even know about the belfie that Lizzy accidentally-on-purpose shared with the whole school and all the paedophiles of England? Or are we playing Let’s Pretend I Have Perfect Children, which is a favourite game of women like Cynthia because to admit otherwise would be to admit their whole life has been a tragic waste of time?
‘Yes, that’s absolutely fine,’ I lie. How much can it be? More than £50? £60? No wonder poor Em was so frantic to get our agreement at breakfast. She’d already accepted Lizzy’s invitation.
