Chapter 1 #2
‘That’s no way to talk about my friends.
’ Nick kisses the top of her head, springs around the room with far more energy than Olivia thinks is fair for a 44-year-old, and does not stumble over one of her yoga blocks.
She sighs at the sight of his shoulders, broad now not from picking her up and fucking her against the wall, but from bench pressing at the gym.
RIP, hot shower sex. ‘Could we pay Lily to come an extra night?’
‘Why don’t we just invite her to move in with us as well? And bring in Mum too, while we’re at it. Then we can really meet the full madhouse brief.’
‘I just think you’d feel better about yourself if you were able to invest in your health more,’ says Nick. His skin looks particularly glowing today. Is he taking a multivitamin or something?
Olivia suddenly feels like one of those washed-out, decrepit ‘before’ photos that people post on their social media.
She knows her husband is genuinely trying to be supportive, but she wants to leap on him and claw out his peppery dark hair in rage.
How come he gets to improve with age, transforming into some sort of McDreamy style heart-throb, while she feels like a Grey’s Anatomy surgery gone terribly wrong?
Is this why she and Nick have drifted so far apart? Because her husband is able to prioritize his wellbeing and his needs without the world falling apart, while she seems to be stuck in a perpetual loop of self-sacrifice and still everything always feels like it’s about to go to shit?
Every day, Olivia pretends she has dreams, dreams that her mother and Instagram and society at large would approve of.
Dreams such as: living a life true to herself; standing in her own power; dancing like nobody is watching.
Et cetera, et cetera. Olivia has become very good at pitter-pattering these dreams into conversations with Nina and the other young women she has been mentoring at The Morning under their Women Rising scheme.
Initially she was sceptical about it: a corporate initiative set up to pinkwash the fact that the majority of senior staff are men.
Not to mention it involved an extra eight to ten hours a month, for no additional pay.
Olivia would like to dream big, but the constant threat of cut budgets and redundancies keeps her in a perpetual low-level nightmare.
But it turns out she loves the scheme, loves being able to breathe confidence and certainty into the young women who actually have a shot at breaking free from the stifling patriarchal bullshit she’s become numb to – even entertains sometimes so as not to rock the boat, in a kind of never-ending bad dream she hasn’t quite worked out how to wake up from.
But perhaps today? Perhaps today.
She stares at her tired reflection in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door.
She’s learned to mask her exhaustion with various helpful props: a teeth-whitened smile; a biannual injection of botox that she can neither afford nor admit to; and a make-up palette that consists entirely of inoffensive nudes that will make her look fresh and pretty but not too threatening.
She sets to work now, grateful for the almost meditative ease with which she has perfected her morning routine.
Make-up done, Olivia attempts to make sense of the jumble of clothes that she has shoved haphazardly in her side of the wardrobe, stuffed there in stark contrast to her husband’s beautifully folded workwear and military cosplay uniform.
That a man so fastidious about folding and functional fitness could also be so incapable of remembering holiday dates is one of life’s great mysteries to her.
Today, Olivia carefully selects an outfit that she believes to be stylish yet businesslike.
The look of a woman who knows her own mind, as dictated to her by the Instagram stories of the latest popular midlife fashion influencer everyone is following.
A pair of Boden trousers, a white shirt and a selection of faux-gold jewellery from Zara that will show she’s serious but fun.
She teams the outfit with a simple pair of ballet flats that are back in fashion according to said influencer, who saw them on the runway at all the shows last season, a knock-off version of which Olivia found on .
If anyone asks – and frankly, Olivia flatters herself by imagining that they will – she will say that they are vintage, i.e.
from 2002, when they were last popular and Olivia’s mum bought her a pair of ￡100 Pretty Ballerinas because ‘it’s the kind of shoe that I can imagine on a young lady Prince William would go out with’.
She checks her phone: 8.12 a.m. She needs to get a move on.
Suddenly a scream pierces the house, the kind that Olivia recognizes as sibling warfare, but that a neighbour might reasonably misidentify as homicide.
She bounds down the stairs at a speed she wishes she could emulate on the imaginary 5K she runs regularly in her fantasies, but has yet to attempt in real life.
‘Kids!’ She comes to a halt in the kitchen, where her younger sister is holding a bagel in the air like a prize, a triumphant look on her face, as Jack and Saskia attempt to snatch it from her hands.
There is a Marmite moustache above her lip, and Olivia would not be surprised if her sister had put it there on purpose, as some way of distracting the kids while bargaining with them to get out of bed and ready for school.
‘Don’t mind me while I avert a small diplomatic crisis in the style of Emmanuel Mac-a-ron.
’ Lily pronounces it like the French pastry, rather than the French president.
She is dressed in a bright pink kimono from one of her many jaunts around the world to find herself.
Jaunts financed, conveniently, by their mother.
Lily throws the bagel to Olivia but she fumbles the catch and fails to prevent Jack immediately snatching it from her grasp.
‘Mum, that’s MY KETO BAGEL!’ Saskia appears close to tears, in a way that Olivia finds both entirely disproportionate and incredibly relatable.
‘Isn’t there toast, cornflakes, any number of other things in the vastness of the cupboards me and Dad are forever stocking with food?’ Olivia places her arm around one of her daughter’s bony shoulders.
‘You know I don’t like toast or cornflakes, Mum, and that they’re basically nutritionally bankrupt items of food that taste of cardboard.
’ Saskia shrugs her mother’s hand away, repulsed and annoyed in equal measure.
‘And Jack knows that those bagels are specially formulated so they are vegan and keto-friendly and have more protein than carbohydrate in them, which I need if I’m ever going to progress into the next level of the football squad, because unlike Jack, I actually have a life and do sport with my friends, as opposed to just sitting around at home staring at a poster of Erling Haaland. ’
Jack wrinkles his freckled nose in dismay. ‘I have friends, you just don’t know them because you’re too busy thinking about yourself. And I don’t just sit and stare at posters of Erling Haaland!’
‘You mean Ian Harland,’ says Lily, sitting down at the kitchen table to eat her toast, licking the Marmite from above her lip.
‘Erling Haaland,’ correct Jack and Saskia together, in a rare show of unity.
‘Whatever his name is,’ sighs Lily, quietly triumphant. ‘We’re all talking about the blond bloke who looks like a thumb with a face, right?’
‘I’ve always thought he has more of a vibe of Legolas from Lord of the Rings,’ says Olivia, grabbing the bagel back out of her ten-year-old’s hand, passing it to Saskia, then reaching in a cupboard for a hidden packet of non-keto bagels that she bought on her lunch break yesterday to head off this exact emergency.
She is OLIVIA GREENWOOD: CALM, COOL, COLLECTED.
If she had a moment, she might reflect on how many roles she is able to flip between, and all before 8. 15 a.m.
Instead, she robotically heads over to the ancient Nutribullet to make her morning elixir: a dollop of yogurt, some frozen spinach, a banana, a handful of blueberries, a thimble of chia seeds, a whole heap of midlife crisis.
‘Now if you could eat your breakfast without resorting to violence,’ she says, placing the lid on the machine, ‘that would be much appreciated. I’ve got a big day ahead of me, work-wise. ’
‘Oh wow, you really have turned into Mum,’ sniggers Lily, shoving a piece of toast in her mouth.
‘That is NOT funny,’ Olivia snaps.
‘I know, mate, I was being deadly serious.’
Olivia presses the button on the Nutribullet, hears the deafening clatter of the machine’s motor, and allows her shoulders to relax as she enjoys one of the few screech-free moments of the morning.
‘Football kit!’ Olivia shouts into the ether, as soon as the machine has stopped its incredible racket.
‘Smoothie machine? Toaster? Television? School bag?’ Lily runs a hand through a wild and wonderful thicket of golden curls, the type that Olivia had longed for since childhood, signifying as they did a sort of carefree joie de vivre that had always seemed slightly out of reach.
‘Are we just naming random things for fun or is “football kit” code for something?’
‘Sorry, it suddenly popped into my head that it’s football kits today, for both kids. Why is it that these things only come to me when something’s making a sound similar to a pneumatic drill?’
‘You’d probably be able to answer that question, sis, if you’d ever taken my advice and got some therapy.’
‘Not all of us have time for therapy, Lil. I’m too busy trying to remember the football kits.’