Chapter 2
Leaving for work every morning usually elicits one of two emotions.
On a good day, the routine is a comfort.
There’s the knowing that I don’t have to exert a single shred of excess brainpower, because today will be the same as yesterday, and the day before and the day before that.
On the bad days, a tiny voice suggests that maybe I shouldn’t be sleepwalking so willingly through this one precious life.
The voice reminds me that I used to watch the Oscars every year and hope to be there in the auditorium someday, celebrated and adored for my God-anointed acting talents.
That I would run to the bathroom as a child and practise my own winning speech in the mirror, holding the toilet brush.
‘What do you put your success down to?’ a reporter would ask me on the red carpet.
‘Well, I won’t be putting it down to anyone else,’ I’ll reply. ‘Those who got me to where I am know who they are.’ Much appreciative murmuring. ‘And those who stood in my way, they know who they are too.’
London is cooler in ways that Dublin never could be, I think to myself as I survey everyone on the Overground.
People in London know how to manage an effortless sort of style.
Last time I was in Dublin, I watched as a guy walked down the street in a Breton top and chinos while someone shouted ‘Ooh la la, wanker’ across the street at him.
I have seen grown men in actual lederhosen in Hackney, and no one so much as squeaks.
I watch as everyone around me stands, holding a pole or reading the newspaper, each of them calmly resigned, sleepwalking towards their own executions and not really knowing it yet.
Many of them then bolt out of the carriage with needless purpose and into the moving centipede of people in Liverpool Street station.
Like them, I have fallen victim to an intricate coffee order habit.
From the coffee with nine details, it’s on to a desk in a brown-walled basement, where I input financial codes into a computer until it feels like my fingers are bleeding.
I still don’t know what the actual point of any of this is; I was told on my first day during orientation, but the information has refused to glom on to my brain – what the codes mean or what they do in the overall scheme of things, although I manage to talk up a good game about my Role in Financial Services whenever I need to.
I could be dealing with nuclear codes. I could be inputting the team’s lunch orders.
I did once ask Francesca, who is on the desk across from me, what it is we actually do.
She laughed so hard that I worried that the clump of cells in her womb that would eventually become the person that is baby Barnaby would fly out of her nostrils.
We are technically In the City! – 64-point font, bold, italics, underlined – but we are as far from the sexy stockbroking action as it’s possible to get. We might as well be pulling the heads from free-range chickens down here.
On the very first day in the job, I sat down to my first batch of codes, glad of the opportunity to not think too much about anything for the day. Forty-five minutes later, my brain was beginning to cramp. By lunchtime, part of my soul had departed my body, never to be seen or heard from again.
A dog farted on the Overground this morning, a genuine napalm assault on the lungs for all present, which at least means I have something to talk about with Francesca.
One thing you need to know about Francesca: you could be talking about Armageddon, orgies or the price of tampons, and she will always, always bring the conversation back round to Her Two. And so it goes with the dog fart.
‘I tell you, he’d have nothing on My Two. They can fart for days on end! Usually while jumping on your head! Absolute carnage round ours!’
On my first week in the job, I overheard her telling someone on the phone: ‘She’s Irish … but, you know, not too Irish?’
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 it didn’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 what their lives 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’d say. 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 patiently in 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 be well?’
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.