On my first week in the job, I overheard her telling someone on the phone: ‘She’s Irish… but, you know, nottooIrish?’
Today though, she moves on to complaining about her cleaner.
‘She always looks so lethargic,’ she says. ‘Am I meant to believe she is doing her best on the pantry in that state?’
‘But she has two other jobs,’ I remind her.
‘Well, yes, but I’m not paying her seven pounds an hour to come in and carry on every afternoon like she’s just emerged from a coma.’
It’s just the two of us down here, although every so often, someone who is supposedly our superior, someone of Scandinavian origin wearing a Pink shirt and Topman tie, materializes to offer some sort of motivational bump. But not often, and certainly not often enough.
Francesca still talks about the time when someone from the main drag poked his head around the door, looking for a vending machine. He came straight from Central Casting:those foppish blond curtains that men from only a select postcode or two can get away with, and the sort of ruddy red cheeks/Barbados tan combo that is exclusive to a certain British class. Francesca and I nearly lost our reason, clucking around and trying to help him find this mythical vending machine.
We needn’t have bothered, in hindsight. These people have the personality of week-old mayonnaise.
Francesca inputs fewer codes than me because her left hand is almost always stroking her pregnancy bump. She can tell you to the closest minute how long she has until her next maternity leave. In these stretches of parental focus, far away from our brown-walled office, Francesca reaches pure contentment. Motherhood is her main reason for living. Anything that happens before or after it is simply background noise to be put up with in the interim.
There are dozens of mums like this in my neighbourhood. ‘Stoke Newington, the goat’s milk mile,’ Francesca says knowingly, she who bought an Islington townhouse for about six quid many years ago.
I hate and covetously envy the women who live in Stoke Newington. Even if they have a mewling two-week-old clamped to their breast, they will always be cooler, trendier and more at ease in themselves than me. Motherhood and money have gifted them a halo. A legitimacy. They convene in packs, taking over cafes like Drury or the Spence on the weekend, one sprawling, organic cotton, Boden-striped tribe. The ease with which these women walk through life, their ease in themselves, the effortlessness of babywearing, the way their children are delightful, flaxen-haired little appendages of themselves, no bother at all– I so wish itdidn’t, but it seems to press down on me. Even their topknots seem artfully gathered in a way I could never manage, not even with YouTube tutorials. They live in big houses where the kitchen, and only the kitchen, takes up the entire basement floor. There’s the casual way they breastfeed as though they were put on this earth solely to do it. They wear engagement rings that make me instantly wonder about the men who gifted them, and whattheirlives are like.
The babies are the picture of serenity, too. It’s all cooing and Pampers gurgling now, but will these mothers and babies have the grave misfortune of ending up like me and my mum, thirty-five years hence? I’m sure my mum looked down on me in much the same way when I was an infant, all doting and calm and maternal. I mean, I’dsay. It’s not happened for a while.
My mother is still pinballing around in my childhood home in Dublin, losing her reading glasses and meddling in my life as though she’s on a six-figure salary to do so, even with me at a geographical remove and thirty-six years old. She doesn’t seem to know or care that my job is essentially data entry, and that I am effectively working from the broom cupboard of what is otherwise a very fancy building. ‘Financial services!’ she tells everyone, right down to the neighbour’s goldfish. She cares an awful lot about what other people think: of me, of her, of where we came from, what we’ve had to come through, and what we have to offer right now.
My commute home from work is only slightly clouded by the idea that I will need to call my mother. Sure enough, she picks up on the second ring and immediately deploys her patented passive-aggressive special. Silent contemplation, pretending that the thought has just arrived to her, and has not been at the front of her mind, waiting patientlyin her gob, since we last talked. Do Irish mums go to night school on the sly to perfect this?
‘I see that Lar Donovan has gone out to Dubai. On huge money now, he is. His mum told me earlier,’ she starts off with. I can taste blood on the inside of my cheek.
‘How long have you been married again?’ she asks, as though she doesn’t know to the exact day.
‘Four years, I guess?’
‘That’s a long time, isn’t it? To be married, and for…’
I can hear the phantom bit of the sentence, clear as Sellotape: ‘… for nothing to be happening’.
‘You still see that Carrie girl?’
I exhale, trying to rid myself of the irritation. ‘Sometimes.’
‘What about Brigitte?’ I make a non-committal noise,hnyeah.
‘Mother,’ I say, which is what I call her when I’m in a damp mood like this one. ‘I do have friends here. I do.’
‘Well, if you’re not going to be bothered doing the baby thing, you’d want to keep your friends about you,’ Mum suggests. ‘It can’t just be you and Johnny and the four walls, all day every day, can it? I mean, would you bewell?’
The way you did, Mother?I say in my mind, but not down the phone. I wish I could say that was my parting shot, but instead I mumble a moody goodbye, forever the teenager around her.
Are Carrie and Brigitte and I real friends, or are we just there together on the same London life raft? I’ve asked myself this more than once of late, and I’m wondering it again now as I walk to meet them for a late-night drink in Hackney.
Carrie was the very first friend I made when I moved to London ten years ago. The loneliness in my Kensal Green flat was at me like an insect bite back then. London is not acity especially known for offering people a neat and ready-made social circle. It took me a while to find not even a tribe, but a single willing tribe member.
Carrie and I bonded over two-pound pints at brilliantly scuzzy indie discos in Soho. We smiled at each other as we danced under the lights amid the dry ice. We were both trying to get off with a very tall boy called Rupert, until she very gallantly moved aside, fixed her eye on his less exciting mate and let me at it. Rupert turned out to be a bust, but our friendship somehow stuck around. In the weeks that followed, we would meet in nightclubs and look into each other’s reflections in the bathroom mirror and, under the strip lighting, we would put the world to rights, promising unending sisterhood in slurred voices.
‘When we’re older, we should buy a house together and just… pay for a really hot young nurse to take care of us,’ she told me one night, winking at me. ‘Like, y’know. Takecareofussshh.’
‘Feck that. Let’s move on to a cruise ship permanently for back-to-back holidays and spend our retirement doing karaoke and getting facials together,’ I countered.
