By lunchtime, however, some of the old confidence is returning to my fingers. My job is to add sound to a TV ad for a new digital cooking program that promises to teach budding cooks skills such as filleting, chopping, and skinning. The visual, which I play on a plasma screen above my sound desk, shows a chef expertly juggling ten different sharp knives, each one landing in a different food ingredient around his kitchen, till he is left with one.
Biting my lip in concentration, I access the massive digital library of sound effects on the updated software, and pick five or six for each ingredient, then meld them together into one
noise for a tomato being split with a mild squelch by a filleting knife or the dull thump of a bread knife in cheese.
To my surprise, it isn’t too difficult. I don’t know why, but my ears just know instinctively which sounds to mix together, in the way that some people just know which herbs and spices work and never need recipe books.
“You’re either born with sensitive ears, or you’re not,” Guy told me when I first came to Rocket, aged twenty-three, to work as a studio assistant. “I bet you loved music when you were a baby.” The comment left me openmouthed. Just that weekend, on a visit back to see Dad, I had found a photo of me in old-fashioned earphones as a toddler, smiling, with one of Mum’s captions underneath. “Callie can’t stop dancing!!”
I keep meaning to go for lunch, but before I know it, the clock says 4
P.M.
There is a basket of muffins for clients in reception, I remember. I pop out and Megan looks up.
“Can I take a couple of these?” I say, not sure.
“Course!” she laughs.
So I take one to eat, and put the other in my bag for Rae. I look back at the screen and plunge back into my work. The strange thing is, I am not really hungry.
* * *
It is 5:31
P.M.
Aha! I am lucky tonight. There is no signal failure on the Victoria Line after all. I run down the crowded escalator at Oxford Circus, wind my way through the slow-moving passengers onto the packed northbound platform, and manage to squeeze onto a train that’s just about to shut its doors. Even as I jump on, I know there isn’t enough room, and can only blame myself when I have to travel three stops with my head bent into the curved side, worrying about Rae. It doesn’t help that
the group of French students around me are all talking at each other at the same time. To my newly resensitized ears, it sounds like three TV channels on in the same room.
At King’s Cross, the carriage finally half-clears and I grab a grubby tartan seat. My face looks flushed in the reflection of the window in the dark tunnel. I rub it. My skin feels raw, as if it’s been slightly burned by all the artificial wall lights and computer rays emanating from around the studio. It’s as though the dead cells have been zapped away and the blood has pumped near to the surface of my cheeks.
As the train roars off through each station, I realize I am perching on the edge of the seat, not sitting back. Energy has made me rigid, given my stance purpose. I have finished one job today, and now I have another ahead of me. To pick up Rae.
Two purposes, I think. Mother and sound designer. Each clearly defined. Corners and edges.
And then exhaustion hits. As the train rumbles on through dark tunnels, the adrenaline that has powered me all day unexpectedly drains away. I look round. Women like me are dotted up and down the carriage, some perched on the edge of their own seats, some slumped. Some have mascara smudged under their eyes, others creased skirts and suits.
I am joining a tribe, I think. Women who work all day in London, then go home to look after a child. Women who choose to do that in a big city, despite the fact that they probably live far from their extended families in places like Lincolnshire, and in London streets—if they are anything like mine—where they don’t know their neighbors.
They make it work. So this could work. With some adjustment, maybe, I can really make this work.
Then I remember Suzy’s call. What if Rae refuses to go back to after-school club? Who could I ask to look after her?
As I jump out at Highbury & Islington and race across the platform to the overland train to Alexandra Park, a memory comes back to me of the day I heard a bang at my door and I opened it to find a panting woman, sweat pouring down her face. She was dressed in a huge black dress, with a child asleep in a stroller wearing just a nappy.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Can you help? I think I’m going into labor early. I saw the child seat in your car outside.”
Wet slick down her legs told me she was right. Her water had broken.
“Oh my God, of course,” I said, ushering her in. “How far on are you?”
“Thirty-three weeks,” she gasped.
“Don’t worry,” I said, running for the phone. “I’ll get an ambulance.”
The next minute was a flurry of dialing 999 and grabbing a chair from the sitting room.
The woman nodded thanks and kneeled down, carefully putting her head and hands on the chair before moaning with another contraction.
“Oh hell, I think they’re coming.”
They?
“Twins.”
Jesus. “Can you hurry up?” I shout down the phone. “It’s twins!”
I run into the kitchen, grab a wet cloth, and run over and wipe the woman’s forehead. She smells a little greasy and sicky. I rub her back, too, remembering how much it helped when Tom did it to me.
“Thanks,” she says, gulping for air. “I’m sorry—my husband’s away and we’ve just moved in.”
“Don’t worry,” I say for the second time, struggling to find more words to comfort her. “I’ve helped my dad deliver lots of sheep.”
My words hang in the air for a second, as we both realize she is on all fours with her bum pointing toward me. We both burst out laughing.
“Suzy,” she says, before taking a sharp gasp of air.
“Callie,” I say.
* * *
I check my watch for the hundredth time: 5:47
P.M.
A worry starts to gnaw at me. What if being a working mother in the city makes me even more dependent on her, rather than less?
The problem is, after my day at Rocket Studio, I don’t think I can give up work ever again. At just after 5
P.M.,
Guy came to see my finished sound track for the promo. If I wasn’t tense enough already, he then called in Megan and three male sound designers, including an edgy-looking twenty-five-year-old called Jerome, in retro black-rimmed glasses and Nudie jeans, whom Guy had described to me earlier as an exciting find—“The new you,” he said, without irony.
“OK, go for it,” Guy says, looking up at the plasma screen.
Nerves flutter in my stomach. I press “play” and sit upright, gauging Guy’s reaction out of the corner of my eye. The knives slice through the air with a sharp, metallic whizzing noise and land in each piece of food with a subtly different effect. Only designers know how much work goes into making each sound so imperceptible that it doesn’t intrude on the message of the advert.
There is a silence.
Then he claps.
“Great work, Cal,” he laughs, turning round. “What did I tell you? That’s how to do it, guys!”
My mouth bursts open into an unexpected, happy smile whose muscles I can’t control.
“Thanks. Look, Guy, but is it all right if I slip off? I have to get Rae?”
“Course.” Guy smiles, resting his hand on my shoulder for a second, and gets up to leave. “Good work, Cal. Remember, Loll Parker’s in at ten tomorrow. He’s looking forward to meeting you.”
* * *
It is 5:54
P.M.
One stop from Alexandra Park. So much for escaping signal failures tonight. I have been blindsided by the good old passenger alarm.
Our train driver informs us cheerfully that one has been activated in the train in front of us and we will be held here while an elderly lady who feels unwell is helped off the train. Eleven minutes to reach Rae. I am so far forward on my seat now, I am in danger of falling off altogether if the train takes a particularly fast bend. A woman in the opposite seat catches my eye and makes a face. Surprised, I nod back.
My phone shows no signal. What will they do if I am not there at six?
Luckily, the elderly lady is taken off quickly, and I stand up and hold on to a pole for the rest of the journey, bursting through the opening doors as soon as there is a gap, and ascending the steep stairs to the pavement in great, unladylike gallops.
I check my watch again: 5:59
P.M.
I am not going to make it. It is starting to rain, too. I set off running along the steep
main road up to the school, trying not to slip in my sandals. A woman in heels and a tight suit jogs ahead of me, looking equally harried. She is shouting into a mobile at her ear: “It’s on my desk, Ian, just look!”
It is 6:04
P.M.
I can hardly breathe. My lungs ache. I turn left up the last hill and there is the school in front of me. I race past it and through the iron gates of the redbrick Victorian building next door, which was once a swimming pool.
The woman in front of me, who clearly exercises more than I do, has already arrived and buzzed the intercom of the big wooden door, so I manage to squeeze through just before it swings shut.
A warm, yeasty smell greets me. The grand former hall might be empty now, but the frenetic disturbance of twenty-eight recently departed children is still evident in the air. The mother in front of me has already grabbed a grumpy-looking child and is on her way out, still shouting into her mobile: “Well, try the printer, Ian, maybe I left it there.” I rush up to the after-school leader, Ms. Buck, who is clearing tables, and try to look as apologetic as possible.
“I’m so sorry . . . first day . . . passenger alarm on the train . . . won’t happen again,” I splutter.
“Don’t worry,” she says, looking a little like it does matter. “Rae’s over there with Mrs. Ribwell in the painting area.”
Through a brick arch, I see Rae in an area decorated with children’s drawings. A teacher is kneeling down in front of her, talking to her intently.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I call.
Rae looks at me without smiling. In fact, she looks cross. My heart sinks.
Mrs. Ribwell turns round. I am so concerned about the look on Rae’s face it takes me a second to realize that I recognize her.
“Oh, hi. What are you doing here?”
“Oh—I work here.” She smiles.
“Do you? How funny,” I say. “Oh. Well, that’s great. Rae will be pleased. I hope she’s behaved herself?”
“Oh, yes. We’ve had a nice afternoon, haven’t we, Rae?”
Rae looks at the floor.
“Want to go,” she whines, and begins to walk away from me, toward the door.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Bye,” the woman calls. But Rae has already slipped out of the wooden door, so I wave in her place.
“So, how was it?” I say when I find her outside and we head out through the iron gates and along the side of Alexandra Palace.
“Hannah left early,” she says quietly. “She had a playdate at Grace’s house.”
My heart drops.
“Well, that will happen sometimes,” I say, trying to keep the sadness I feel for Rae out of my voice. “You’ll just have to play with someone else. That’s the fun bit of after-school club: you’ll meet lots of other children not in your class.”
I wouldn’t have been convinced when I was five years old, but it is the best I can do.
“When can I go to someone’s house?” she says quietly.
“Soon, darling, it’ll happen soon,” I say, putting an arm round her, hating the sound of my own lie. “Listen, what’s that lady’s name, you were talking to—it went right out of my head, I was so surprised to see her.”
“Mrs. Ribwell,” Rae says. “But she says when no one else is there I can call her Debs.”
* * *
I take her hand, and we make our way down the hill on the main road that leads to Churchill Road.
Cars flash by us. The traffic is heavy, I think. Of course, six o’clock is the busiest time on this road. Sometimes, when Rae and I have tried to cross the road from the park, we have had to wait here for three or four minutes.
Rain starts to fall heavily now, turning the road wet and slick. Traffic crashes by my ear, spitting and screeching.
And then, with no warning, Rae lets go of my hand.
“What are you doing?”
She starts to run. An image of the racehorses a family used to keep in one of Dad’s fields comes to mind. At the end of the day, I would watch them from my bedroom window as they were released from their bridles and let loose, jumping and kicking their heels high, daring anyone to try to catch them again till tomorrow.
“Rae?” I call. “What are you doing?”
She is not just doing her careful half trot. She is actually trying to run, her little sandals flying up in the air.
“Rae!” I raise my voice, speed up and grab the back of her coat. “I mean it.”
Cars skid past, ignoring the 30 mph sign, people as desperate as me to get home.
She staggers a little as she turns.
“That’s so naughty,” I say. “So dangerous. You know you could fall. And then what would happen?”
“It’s not fair!” she shouts, pulling her shoulder away from me. “I can’t NEVER do anything.”
Her face is angry and confused, her big eyes flashing. I put my hand on her shoulder and kneel in front of her.
“You’re right, darling, it’s not fair. But I don’t want you back
in hospital, and I don’t think you want that, either, do you? So you always, always hold my hand on the road, right?”
She shrugs. I open my bag and pull out the muffin I took from Rocket.
“I brought this for you from work.”
Rae’s eyes open wide and she grabs it, taking a bite.
“Sorry, Mummy,” she says, taking my hand again.
“I’m sorry, too, for being late,” I say. And we wait at the side of the road for the traffic to break.
* * *
At Suzy’s house, we stop. I can hear a child shouting behind the front door.
“Oh, it’s you,” she says when she opens the door. She gives us both hugs and ushers us into the hall. Rae runs off to find the boys in the kitchen.
“How is she?” she whispers.