In Search of Mary (12 page)

What treasures have I gathered? My mind greedily amasses a wealth that I can roll in and let cascade through my fingers. I’ve gathered up times of joy and adventure with Will to save – to store life-long. The water, the bubbles of light in the water, sunbeams, strawberries, the music. Me and the boy, already I can see us as if from afar. I’ve collected a luminous string of people who have welcomed and helped us. And I’ve trodden in her footsteps, walked and sailed and scrambled right behind her, and read her words aloud.

As Wollstonecraft’s journey gets darker, mine keeps on gathering light.

She was so brave. I knew she was brave before, but I hadn’t seen those spiky rocks jutting up out of the sea, and hadn’t launched myself among far-off strangers with my baby. I feel disloyal at what a relief it is, getting out from between her
darkening words for the last few days of our Norway trip. Sometimes I think I’m just too happy to hang around with Wollstonecraft. She’d think I was a bit of a lightweight, no doubt. In the couple of days we have left, Will and I meander slowly and easily to Oslo.

As we leave Wollstonecraft’s trail behind us, there’s more time to think about Norway, and how it’s my new favourite place. This is a country that includes and celebrates children by design. I’ve seen a strange contraption that turned out to be a pram on skis, allowing babies to join in the snowy winter action. I’ve seen street signs showing that a child playing football has priority over a car. And in a strange twist Norwegian children, the wealthiest in Europe, have a closeness to nature and wilderness that’s more often the preserve of impoverished children. It’s not uncommon to see a seven-year-old child fishing or managing a small boat with an outboard motor on her own.

Wilderness is precious, and Norwegians value it. Space is common. Garden fences are rare. They have a cherished law:
allemannsret
– the right of everyone to roam freely in Norway’s open spaces, as long as nothing is disturbed. Not to mention the equality, the Peace Prize and all that. Wollstonecraft praised Norway back then; nowadays I reckon she’d queue up for citizenship. Will and I have felt safe and welcome, everywhere. Of course, we’ve spent the whole time in rural Norway, in the summer. It can’t all be wild cloudberries and fairy-looking children. There must be a dark side. What about that famous alcoholism, the winters, those violent crime thrillers?

Will and I stop over in Oslo. The city is obviously more edgy than where we’ve been, but there’s still no sign of a shocking underbelly. It’s increasingly clear that the Norwegians have it all worked out, that civilization thing. Wollstonecraft would not be disappointed by this city. Oslo seems to lack that desperate urban drift, the expanses of poverty that hover around cities like a smell that people learn to ignore. The rudest thing we’ve seen so far is still that shopping trolley in the sea back in Risør. And even that had been tidied away by the next day.

Behind the station is an immigrant market. I buy a samosa from a stall. The man is from Pakistan. He tells me in perfect English that he also speaks Norwegian. I go into a corner shop for water, and fall into conversation with the owner about Snus. Snus are extremely popular Scandinavian tobacco pouches. They look like a wrong teabag. You put them inside your cheek and they make your teeth go bright brown. “Here – take one,” says the shop owner, proffering his own Snus stash. “It’s healthier than smoking a cigarette.” I try one. It’s more villainous than burnt rubber. I attempt to thank him, and he laughs. Will and I trundle on through Oslo, looking round shops full of things we can’t afford.

We end up at a Diversity Festival on a university campus. There’s music by the Afro-Norwegian band Queendom, stalls promoting cultural tolerance and blonde kids running around dressed in turbans. Will and I tuck into some falafel. How adorable, I muse – but is it really necessary? It’s so right-on, so advanced here in Norway: surely they must be post-diversity by now? I sigh irritably. Don’t you simply live with diversity, and the point is that finally you stop even seeing it as such?

Will totters around in front of some drummers while I examine my private dissent from the celebrations. I can’t yet tell if I’m just choking on the wholesomeness of it all, or if there’s a proper argument for not celebrating diversity. This, after all, is why I live in London – I see different sorts of people every day, and that’s just normal and how it should be. I don’t feel the need to burst into song about it. “Festival of Diversity,” I sneer, in my urban wisdom. “What’s the point?”

The answer comes much sooner than I expect.

Three weeks later is the massacre. A Christian fundamentalist blows up eight people and then shoots a further sixty-nine people, mostly children. It’s his way of showing that he doesn’t want any more Muslims in his country. I’m back at home, frozen, unable to leave the house. I can’t stop myself watching the story as it breaks. How could it happen here, of all places? Norwegians, my newly beloved friends, are all over the news in the shape of innocent children fleeing a lone gunman. He is armed with a rifle and a handgun, to which he has given names from Norse mythology. And he is carrying “dum-dum” bullets, designed for their expanding rounds. These cause greater internal tissue damage and leave a large exit wound.

Two hours earlier he had set off a car bomb in Oslo that killed eight people working in a government building. He intended to kill as many journalists as possible, but settled for government workers. He couldn’t get the right parking spot either, and was upset about the angle at which he parked, because it diminished the impact. Another hitch was the delivery of his “manifesto” to other extremists. He’s been getting this ready for a decade or so, but now that he tries to send it out,
the repeating “error” messages of the Outlook mailing system cause a delay in his plans.

But once he heads north to the island of Utøya, his luck changes. Utøya is a holiday island owned by the ruling Labour Party’s youth wing. They host summer camps here for bright young things who want to make the world better. The Norwegian police are miles away, concentrating on the Oslo attack, and their boats are out of order, and the helicopter team is on holiday. He can really take his time here.

The man is dressed as a police officer. News of the Oslo attack has reached the island and everyone’s relieved to see a policeman. He calls the children to come and gather round, and they obey. He puts down his bag, and pulls out his guns, and he starts killing them. He strides along the beach as they scream and run away. Some beg for their lives, and are shot at close range. Some are paralysed with fear and just stand there, motionless. He kills them too. He pursues them methodically, firing round after round, and going back to make sure he hasn’t missed. Those who have fallen and are injured are shot in the head. He shouts, “You will die today, Marxists!” He has brought drinking water, so as not to get a dry throat.

Children run into caves, toilets, behind rocks, bushes and trees. Some are given away when their mobile phones ring, and they are shot dead. In the canteen, some plead with him and are shot at point-blank range. He combs the woodland and beaches of the tiny island, ending young lives as he goes. Many try to escape into the water, struggling to swim to safety. One victim drowns, another dies fleeing off a cliff. The man goes about his work, undisturbed for around ninety minutes.
He aims at them, one by one, sometimes using the handgun and then the rifle too. He steadily reloads as they flail in the blue Norwegian water.

The collapsing feeling I get inside rips away at the light tissue of my golden trip. Closing my eyes, I can’t stop seeing the children in the water and the corpses on the beach. I think about my Norwegian friends – their children and my children – and I cry. I see Wollstonecraft, dreaming of her daughter’s tiny footsteps on the sand. Dreaming of a time, soon, when civilization would be complete. Perfectibility, she believed. We’ve got a long way to go.

Chapter Eight

Baby, You Can Drive My Career

How to write about motherhood? Step into the ever-expanding blogosphere and before you even get to “mommy wars” you’ll find that mothering is nothing less than a human rights conflict, and as a mother you’re on the front line. It starts with some pungent nappy talk: nappies leaking, nappies smelling and changing nappies every moment of the night and day. Screaming is the next key ingredient. Your baby screams like no baby has screamed before. Don’t forget how knackered you look, how no one fancies you and even if they did you’ve lost your sex drive: you can actually see your own eye bags, and your breasts feel offended.

There should be sick on your T-shirt of course, and snot and milk on your remaining clothes. These clothes are stretchy and drab, and probably smelly. The buggy that you push around is like a ball and chain, a visual reminder of your enslaved status. Your hair should be a mess. Mums with good hair or make-up are bitches, trying to make the school run even worse than it already is.

A comedy moment is helpful, especially if it includes a useless dad. Useless Dad always forgets something vital, like milk or nappies, and then just goes back to work. So selfish. Another source of hilarity is how your once-sacred handbag
now includes a dummy and some Calpol. Unbelievable. How about accidentally pulling out a baby-related item, under circumstances that will cause maximum awkwardness? Perhaps in front of people who have proper jobs and have never seen such a thing as a baby’s toy before.

You might pause and think back to your own mum, and wonder how she did it. Or all the other mums throughout history and around the world. How do they manage? It’s simple. They’re not as tired or as busy as you. It all boils down to the injustice that no one told you it would be like this. So it’s your duty to lift the lid on it. You may mutter, and we’re going off-road now, that you don’t even like your own baby. In fact you hate him and think he’ll end up a psychopath. Sisters around the world will salute you for saying the unsayable. You may even get a film deal.

There’s another unsayable: you’re basically too clever for this. Sitting in a room full of mums singing ‘Wind the Bobbin up’? Pushing a swing for an hour? That’s OK for some people, but frankly, you used to have a PA/be creative/do proper things for actual money. There may be a class element here that you don’t feel you have to explore too deeply, as there’s no point wondering how poor people make it work. They probably get their mums to help or something.

Do not admit that there is smugness in the relief that you feel when you hear about someone’s fertility struggles. Or that you can’t understand women who don’t want babies: what can it
really
be, what’s wrong with them? You feel superior to them in your motherhood, despite everything that you’ve said about it.

Do not say that your children are people in their own right, that they can’t help that you’re their mum, and that their journey into the world is as valid as yours. Don’t describe the smallness of their feet. It’s not worth lingering on any new connections that kids forge between you and the rest of the world. Or the fact that, despite everything, your children like you, however your clothes look and smell. In fact they like you a lot more than your colleagues or even your friends ever have. But this may not last.

I once sat down to write in this vein, inhaling the indignation alongside the furious detractors and lid-lifters. I hadn’t even advanced to the pay gap: my principal motivation was seeing that working mothers still do all the laundry. I have four kids and work part-time. Is it even possible, I wailed, at a lump of chisel-proof Weetabix, to be a mother and also write a book? How to battle the constant interruptions and the splintering of time, concentration and even your very own self?

I squinted back, with the distillation of radgy hindsight, into my teenage years. All those breezy assumptions about equality and worlds being oysters – how did they harden into resentment? Running headfirst into motherhood, that’s how. I was a slow and reluctant adapter to the landscape of parenting, unwilling to acknowledge that the alien force known as babies can mark a profound change in women’s lives. After having four of them, I’m still catching up with that identity split.

It first emerged long ago, on a night out with some work friends. We’re in some place near Covent Garden, and the table’s now covered in wine bottles. I’m the only one with babies. To rhyme with scabies and rabies. And I’m tired enough
to feel delirious and have watery eyes, even though I’m only doing the odd freelance newsroom shift here and there. They are all caught up in the glamour of foreign news trips:

“Of course the Nigerian elections were
so
different this time round…”

“In Kabul we got so drunk the presenter fell in the swimming pool…”

“You wouldn’t believe how many lines dropped in my outside broadcast…”

I sit through the evening with nothing to contribute. My week was spent going to and from Ten o’Clock Club, making playdough snails and pointing at trains. I get home that night in a state of anxiety, and tell Justin I don’t like my friends any more.

He looks at me. “There’s only one thing that you needed to say, and it would’ve stopped them in their tracks.”

“What?”

“All you had to say was: I had an amazing morning, just playing with the kids.”

“Hm. That’s obnoxious,” I say, grudgingly thinking he may be onto something. If this is true, it means that despite our current differences my friends and I have more in common than we thought. We share the same ailment: the feeling of being on the wrong part of the family-work continuum. The itch of constant reminders that there’s always something else you should be achieving. But hasn’t there been ’70s feminism and “Having It All”? Who makes us feel this way? By which of course I mean: “Who can we blame for this?”

Whoever’s nearest, usually. Resentment makes you say things that, as you say them, you notice make you sound like a right cow. But it’s too late: it’s already out there. “
Your
problem is that you’re
too selfish
to pick the towel up off the floor, and now you’re doing it just to
annoy
me,” you shout, while your partner looks around for a towel that he wasn’t even sure existed.