I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson

Author:Allison Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400040124
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

7:47 P.M. THE CLOISTERS HOTEL, YORK. I ring my mother back. She sounds breathless. With a little gentle prompting from me she admits that, yes, she has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, which, translated from Motherspeak, means she has lost all feeling in her limbs and her vital organs are shutting down. Oh, God.

I don’t even bother to replace the handset before keying in the number of my sister, Julie, who lives just round the corner from Mum. Steven, Julie’s eldest, answers the phone. He reports that his mum’s watching The Street, but he’ll get her.

Julie’s tone still takes me by surprise: the adoring lisp of my little sister has been supplanted in recent years by something tense and grudging; whenever we speak these days, she seems to be spoiling for a fight about a grievance that’s too painful to have a name.

I got away and Julie didn’t. Julie fell pregnant and got married when she was twenty-one and had three kids by the time she was twenty-eight and I didn’t. Julie’s husband is an electrician and mine is an architect. Julie lives a mile away from our mother and tries to look in every other day and I don’t. Julie, who is good with her hands, brings in a bit of extra cash by making tiny curtains and bits of furniture for a local dolls’ house company and I, who am good with my head, don’t. (In fact, I probably invest my clients’ money indirectly in the Far Eastern sweatshops that are driving Julie’s employer out of business.) Julie has been abroad once—Rimini, unlucky with the weather—whereas it is not unknown for me to go twice in a single week. And none of this is anybody’s fault, but we exist now, my sister and I, in an atmosphere of guilt and blame.

I ask Julie if she thinks Mum should go and see a doctor, and her sigh blows across the Pennines, flattening trees in its path. “Mum won’t listen to me,” she says. “If you’re that bothered, why don’t you get up here and tell her yourself?”

I’m explaining what my schedule has been like when Julie jumps in: “Anyway, it’s not physical. She’s had some bother with men coming round to the flat. Said they were after money Dad owed them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

From my sister’s living room floats the mournful theme tune of Coronation Street. Julie and I both loved that soap when we were kids; there was a period when we fought furiously over the affections of Ray Langton, a mechanic with dark wavy hair, until he got squashed under one of his own cars. I haven’t seen it in twenty years.

“I’ve left a couple of messages on that machine, Kath,” says my sister, “but you’re never there, are you?”

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