Allison Pearson Extracts from the follow-up to I Don’t Know How She Does It
Allison Pearson’s debut novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It,
defined a generation of women attempting to have it all. Ten years on, Kate Reddy returns in Pearson’s new novel How Hard
Can it Be? – fast approaching 50, juggling teenagers, ageing parents and the menopause…
Today is my seventh session at the gym this week. Even God got to rest on the seventh day, but God was only trying to create the world, not restore a middle-aged female body to a state of battle readiness. I’d like to see how long that would take Him. What can I tell you? Everything hurts. I have pain in parts where I didn’t know I had parts. But this is a good thing. Finding the old me, the leaner, keener, meaner me, within this sad and sagging sack is the object of the exercise, and, boy, am I exercising. When Conor, my trainer, said we would be doing Tabitha, I thought, “Oh, that sounds nice. Maybe some catlike stretches (tabby cat, I suppose)?” Turned out it was Tabata, some new Japanese fitness torture where you do a series of exercises eight times for 20 seconds with 10 seconds’ rest in between. The worst is the lunges, where you have to bend one knee and stretch the other leg out behind you in a kind of masochist’s curtsy. Conor’s instruction to “lay on the floor” sounds relaxing, but I now realise that that is code for stomach work, even more hellish than the lunges, if such a thing were possible.
“Pill your billy bitten to your spain, Kite.” (It’s a New Zealand accent, you need to hear it.) I’m trying, I’m trying. My belly button has not connected with my spine for many years. In fact, the pregnant Lycra bulge I see when I survey the length of my stomach from the supine position strongly suggests that the two named body parts may no longer be in the same postal district. Conor is great, though. A Kiwi of few words, he is excellent at ignoring my panted excuses and yelps of anguish. Every morning, he says a combination of three things: “Awesome”, “You are in the zone” and “Set your own goals and I’ll help you get there.” My goal is to be able to climb successfully out of the driver’s seat of my car when every single muscle is screaming, “You must be kidding me!” On the plus side, it can’t be long before I qualify for a blue disability parking badge.
All of the above is in preparation for my interview on Thursday. Claire Ashley, head of Human Resources at EM Royal, as Edwin Morgan Forster is now called, said they were “very interested” in considering me for the position and thanks so much for my email. (How many times have I read and reread Claire’s three-line email, examining it for any nuances I may have missed?) Alternately, I tell myself not to get too excited (it’s not a great job) then I get excited (it’s a job!). A rather lowly marketing position trying to bring in new business, that’s pretty much what Miranda said in her email, and at my old investment management firm of all places, but an opening, nonetheless. Somewhere, a heavy, glass door sighs in its airlock and a woman approaching 50 sprints to get her fingers in the gap before it closes.
7.48am
Back from the gym. Absolute agony and, thanks to lunges, now walking with thighs splayed apart like John Wayne in a gunfight. Even squatting down to sit on the loo is excruciating; will soon have to pee standing up. Take a shower, as hot as I can bear, to soothe angry muscles. Decide that I haven’t left enough time to go to the hairdresser to get my colour done and fit in a leg wax before the interview. So will have to shave legs myself, for the first time in yonks, risking the wrath of beauty therapist Michelle, who believes that self-shaving is the work of the devil and promotes rampant hair growth. I locate my long-lost Ladyshave under the sink and scream. Has a pirate been in my bathroom? The head is clogged with a clump of dense black hairs. A whole beard’s worth. Trust me, there are few sights more disturbing than unknown hairs in your shaver.
Richard appears at bathroom door in a new towelling bath robe and asks what I’m making such a fuss about. I say that my shaver has been abused by werewolves. Rich laughs lightly before explaining that the culprit is none other than himself.
“You used my shaver. How about using your shaver?”
“Not for my face, darling,” Rich says, pointing downwards.
Dear God. My husband’s legs look like chicken drumsticks – deathly, almost bluish, pale skin with dark dots where the hairs used to be.
“You shaved your legs?”
For a second, I wonder if this heralds the start of Rich transitioning to a woman. Honestly, at this moment nothing would surprise me. “Marginal gains,” says my husband. Apparently, some study has shown that the aerodynamic improvement offered by hairless legs could save five seconds in a 40k bike race ridden at 37kph or something. Plus, if he falls off, it’s easier to treat the wound. For some reason, Rich thinks this explanation will be reassuring. His enthusiasm for cycling seems to be moving beyond the worryingly obsessive into something unhinged. It’s only when my smooth-legged spouse has left the bathroom that I realise something else. I’ve been naked during our whole conversation and this has had no noticeable effect on him or the front of his new bathrobe. None whatsoever. What, not even a flicker of interest from my old friend who used to dance with hope if even a hint of areola peeped out of my own dressing gown?
From: Candy Stratton To: Kate Reddy Subject: Sex
Hi hon, just checking you got the testosterone patches? Trust me, they’re the best. All that perimenopausal crap will go away. Put some lead in your pencil as you get back to the office. It works for the guys, right? Bonus is you don’t have to join all those 50-year-olds queuing at the doctors to get hormone pussaries to keep them juices flowing!
XXO C
PS I meant pessaries, but I kinda like pussaries. Whaddya think – shall I apply for a patent?
Yes, I did get the testosterone patches from Candy. She sent them by Fedex as soon as she heard I’d got an interview. A typically generous and crazy gesture. The unopened yellow box with the More Mojo label and a picture of an ecstatic Cindy Crawford type standing on a perfect white American beach sporting a perfect white sweater and a full keyboard of Steinway teeth is in the drawer next to the furious old Aga. Every time I yank open the drawer (broken) to pull out a wooden spoon, I see “Cindy” beaming at me. “Get your mojo back!” begins the small print. “Small transparent patches worn on the skin could help with a range of problems, including depression, anxiety, persistent tiredness, reduced sex drive, poor sense of well-being and loss of confidence.”
Is that all? How about raising teenage boys from the dead in time for school, training a dog not to chew your newly upholstered sofa, tiptoeing round a stressed-out daughter, paying a builder to discover yet more intractable problems in your decrepit old house, oh, and grabbing the attention of a husband who is more hairless than a Thai ladyboy and no longer gets erect at the sight of his wife’s naked breasts. Can you help with that, Mojo Cindy? I actually flinched when I first opened Candy’s parcel and saw all of my symptoms written down like that. Am I really such a cliché? The middle-aged mammal who once had a tiger in her tank and now has a slightly hesitant vole. The thought of all those hormones going out like the tide, leaving my body arid and dried out. Uch. “Barren” was the word my grandmother used when a woman couldn’t get pregnant. Such a cruel word, “barren” – biblical in its harshness. Like a land that can’t be tilled. Like a seed that can’t be sown. You don’t think about being fertile when you are fertile, do you? Not once in the past 35 years did I wake up and think, “Yay, I’m fertile!” Periods were a monthly chore to be got through, a headache in every way – often a skull-splitting migraine in my case, just like my mum had – and the cue for frequent outbursts. I was a premenstrual monster, flying into a rage if someone so much as dropped a spoon on a tiled floor.
Sudden loud noises I found particularly intolerable. What bliss to be free of all that dumb biology. And yet and yet … Poor sense of wellbeing? Check. Weight gain? Sadly. Depression? No. No, I’m just tired, that’s all. Reduced sex drive? What sex drive? Signals from down below are now so intermittent it’s like one of those black-box flight recorders lost on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Teams of men with advanced radar systems could be sent out to locate my libido and never be seen again. Come to think of it, when did Richard and I last have sex?
Oh, please no. It couldn’t be, could it? Yup. It was New Year’s Eve. Another cliché. Starting the year as we meant to go on, except we didn’t – go on, that is. Rich never stopped wanting to but, eventually, he stopped trying because whenever he moved on to my side of the bed I hardly gave him a warm welcome. Didn’t feel so much as a bat-squeak of desire. What ever happened to that magic, electrical connection between lips and loins? “As long as there’s nothing wrong in That Department, a marriage will survive,” Barbara, my mother-in-law, boomed at me one day in ladies’ underwear in M&S. I remember laughing like a fiend, so preposterous was the idea that Rich and I would ever have problems in That Department. I would never have believed that my young, hungry body would close the department and shut up shop altogether.
So back in June, six months since I’d last had sex, I went to the doctor like all the dried-up lady hags Candy mentioned in today’s email. I’d never seen that particular doctor before. She was wearing one of those stripy, boxy Breton tops that suit no one, except possibly a Breton fisherman. She stared at the screen for some time before saying, “You’re 49? Periods?”
“Yes. I mean intermittently. None for a couple of months then one or two. Then none again.”
“Perfectly normal at your age. When did your mother have her menopause?”
“Not quite sure.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Yes. Yes, very much so.” “Better ask her. So any discomfort during intercourse?”
“Er, well, we haven’t tried for a while.” Embarrassed laughter.
“But I don’t think so, no.”
“Tch tch tch.” The doctor clucked her tongue and I believe she may have wagged her finger at me like a teacher whose pupil has failed to complete their coursework. She turned to the computer and started typing. “You do know what they say, Mrs Reddy? Use it or lose it.”