LITMIR.BIZ

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the past twenty-four years and they realise the only thing they have in common any more is the kids, who have just left home. The child-rearing years are so busy, so all-consuming it’s easy to ignore the fact your marriage is broken because it’s buried under the Lego and the muddy dungarees and the PE bags. Once the kids are gone there’s no place for your relationship to hide. It’s brutal.

      At least my freelance stuff gave me a slender handrail to hold onto in a rapidly changing jobs market. Plus, I’m one of the younger ones here, and even I will have to lie about how old I am to stand a chance of getting back into my industry.

      I think of how I felt sitting in Gerald Kerslaw’s office with my own ‘Mum CV’. Watching his eyes flick down my activities outside the office for the past six and a half years. Work for the school, work for the community, for the church, backbone of society, carer for young and old. I felt small. I felt diminished, irrelevant, unregarded. Worst of all, I felt foolish. Maybe ‘Call me Matt’ is right and attitudes are changing, but, in my line of business, a forty-nine-year-old who’s been out of the game for seven years might as well walk through the Square Mile ringing a bell and shouting, ‘Chlamydia!’

      Matt asks for one final question and I raise my hand. Bravely, he picks me. ‘As ageism is clearly a major problem in the workplace, whether we like it or not, would you ever recommend that those of us who are in our forties, fifties and sixties should lie on our CV?’

      His brow puckers, not with genuine thoughtfulness but in that mature frown which men adopt to indicate that they are busy pondering. If he had been wearing glasses he would have pushed them to the end of his nose and looked over them in my direction.

      ‘Lie?’ Nervous neigh of laughter. ‘No. Although I wouldn’t necessarily foreground your age. There’s no requirement to write down a date of birth any more. Put it this way, I certainly wouldn’t make your age an issue if it doesn’t need to be. Or the particular years when you were at school and university; people can count, you know. Anyway,’ (a consoling smile), ‘I wish you all the very best of luck.’

      I’m putting my card in the machine to pay for the car park, when I feel a hand on my arm. ‘I just wanted to say well done in there.’ It’s Sally the mouse.

      ‘Oh, thank you. You’re very sweet, but I was awful. Much too cynical. Kaylie’s trying to give us all a boost and there’s me sounding off about institutionalised sexism like Gloria Steinem with rabies. Just what everyone needs.’

      ‘You were telling the truth,’ Sally says, cocking her head to one side in that intelligent, birdlike way I’ve noticed.

      ‘Maybe, but who wants the truth? Highly overrated, in my experience. It’s just … Oh, look, I went to a headhunter in London the other day to see if he could come up with anything for me. It was … Well, he made me feel like some hideous old peasant woman turning up to flog goat turds in Fortnum & Mason. It was terrible. Funny thing is, I didn’t even want to come to our group in the first place. You know that saying about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member? I thought it was all a bit pathetic. I mean, Women Returners?’

      ‘Revenant,’ says Sally.

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘The French for ghost is un revenant, which literally means ‘a returner’. One who comes back. As in, from beyond,’ she says.

      I told her that was spooky. She laughed. She said ghosts generally are spooky. I said, ‘No, I meant it’s such a coincidence because I was only thinking earlier that returners made us sound like we were back from the dead; I didn’t know it was French for ghost.’ She said her French was rusty – shameful really when she had half a degree in it. I said, ‘Don’t worry, you sound like Christine Lagarde to me.’ I said sometimes I felt like the ghost of my former self. There was no way back to that person I used to be. That it was all over for me. ‘Not for you, Kate,’ she said. And we kept talking and talking, and we would have liked to have gone for tea at some point, but it turned out we both had dogs we had to get back for and then it turned out that we walked our dogs in the same country park and so we went and collected the dogs and walked them on our favourite walk together and sat on our favourite bench at the top of the hill. And that was how Sally Carter became my very dear friend.

       5

       FIVE MORE MINUTES

      7.44 am: ‘Mum, have you seen Twelfth Night?’ Emily looks pale and her hair needs a wash.

      ‘I think you had it in the living room last night, love, when you were doing your homework. Or it could be in that pile on the chair under Lenny’s toys. Are you going to take a shower?’

      ‘Haven’t got time,’ she shrugs, ‘got choir practice then we’re getting our revision timetable.’

      ‘What, already? You’ve barely started the course. That’s a bit soon?’

      ‘Yeah, I know, but Mr Young said two kids in the year above got Bs last year and they don’t want that happening again.’

      ‘Well, you should wash your hair before you go in. Make you feel fresher, sweetheart. It looks a bit …’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘Em, darling, I’m just trying to …’

      ‘I know, I know, Mum. But it’s like I’ve got so much on.’ As she turns to go out of the door I notice that her school skirt has got tucked in her knickers at the back, revealing a ladder of nasty cuts up her thigh.

      ‘Emily, what’s wrong with your leg?’

      ‘S’nothing.’

      ‘You’ve hurt yourself, darling. It looks horrid. Come here. What happened?’

      ‘S’nothing.’ She tugs furiously at the back of her skirt.

      ‘What do you mean nothing? I can see it’s bleeding from here.’

      ‘I fell off my bike, Mum. OK?’

      ‘I thought you said your bike was being mended.’

      ‘Yeah, I rode Daddy’s.’

      ‘You rode Bradley Wiggins to school?’

      ‘Not that one. The old, cheaper one. It was in the garage.’

      ‘You fell off?’

      ‘Mmmmmm.’

      ‘What happened?’

      ‘There was gravel on the road. I skidded.’

      ‘Oh, no. And you hurt your poor leg. And you’ve grazed the other one. Lift your skirt up again so I can see properly. Why didn’t you tell me, love? We need to get some Savlon on that. It looks nasty.’

      ‘Please stop, Mum, OK?’

      ‘Just let me take a look. Hold still a minute. Pull the skirt up, I can’t see properly.’

      ‘GO A-WAY. JUST STOP. PUHLEEEASE!’ Emily lashes out wildly, knocking my glasses off and sending them flying to the floor. I bend down to pick them up. The left lens has popped out of its frame.

      ‘I can’t stand it,’ Emily wails. ‘You always say the wrong thing, Mum. Always.’

      ‘What? I didn’t say anything, my love. I just want to look at your leg, darling. Em. Emily, please don’t walk out of the room. Emily, please come back here. Emily, you can’t go to school without eating anything. Emily, I’m talking to you. EMILY?’

      As my daughter exits the house trailing sulphurous clouds of reproach and leaving me to wonder what crime I have committed this time, Piotr enters. He is standing

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