Wag the Dog

Jemima towers over her family, she is their great rock and the earthquake. She seems like a piece from a different puzzle, walking around her family’s flat in East London, a black statue among the much paler, and smaller, rest of her family. You have the sense she should hunch down before passing through a doorway. But Jemima does not hunch down. Not since being an awkward middle-schooler, when she did hunch. But she stopped that when she broke a tray on Phat Phil’s head. No one else - not even her two teenage sons - are as tall or big-built as she is, by far the most recognisable figure on the entire council estate, and her smaller, loving boys enjoy teasing her about this. Big momma. Big momma Jemo-mma. Her husband is also smaller, Phil, sharing the name with the preteen brat who bullied her until that fateful day in the cafeteria line, when he did it one too many times. Phil the husband is gentle and adores Jemima, though he does fear her a little, for self preservation, of course.

Jemima is a nurse, and having fried what she calls her “last resilient nerve” sometime between October 2020 and March 2021, she quit her hospital job suddenly, after over two decades, and works now for a company that sends trained nurses to paying customers for blood work and treatment. Her specialty was palliative care, and her experience on the oncology ward has served her well. A lot of her old friends switched jobs around the same time she did, from the British tax-funded NHS to private services with inane names. She opted for Kare, because she knew a couple of the other nurses working there well enough and can change shifts with them when needed. She likes to have a bit of freedom, of spontaneity, after years of being a slave to a routine devised by a system she had no control over. Marta, who’s a single mom to a small child, is a good one to switch with, as they have the same expertise, and they both live east, and it’s Marta’s shift she has this Thursday, which will be followed by two free days, her next shift being Sunday afternoon, which is usually an easy one. “Bye love, I’m off. See you 8-ish!” she says as she exits the house. Phil, who’s currently unemployed, can be heard shifting in the living room chaise. He responds “Dinner when you arrive, love. On me!” which means some form of red-sauced pasta that both of her sons and Phil devour with gusto. 

In a few minutes, Jemima is at the wheel of her small blue Prius, which almost looks like a toy next to her, or at most a go-kart. Her nurse troller is in the backseat, and the lunch bag is strapped in on the seat next to her, as well as a hot decaffeinated coffee that she lugs around in a thermos half the day until pouring all of it out, bar two sips, around lunchtime. Sometimes, if she’s in the mood, after throwing out the half-day old decaf, she opts for a milky coffee from one of the coffee places near her old hospital - if she’s in the area - where they still give her the NHS discount. As she’s driving towards the busy main road, a man with what appears to be a three-legged dog crosses the street without looking, no pedestrian crossing in sight. Jemima presses hard on the brakes and only remembers her horn when the man and his dog are already on the sidewalk. The thermos now having rolled under the front seat, she honks, once and hard. “Idiot!”

From the other direction, Alana, pony-tailed and pink, is cycling back from the morning’s school drop off, with the child seat now populated by a tote bag, tied and bursting with groceries. Alana is listening to a podcast in one ear about how to improve one’s time management, a large whirlwind of anxiety twisting her insides. She’d been late for drop-off, again, and Amara, her daughter, had looked lost through her dark bangs as Alana tipped her into the school building with “Go-go”. As Amara was being ushered in, she’d meant to protest - Amara was aware, and imagined her mother was not, that the rule is to go through the main office when late so that someone picks up the pupil. She was not aware, however, that her mother had chosen this, having taken the opportunity presented by the door left ajar, which meant that her late arrival would not be noted in the school’s “lates paper”, as it had been on Tuesday. She’d said, in hushed tones, “look for the Florence Nightingale class signs”, pointing to the red Florence Nightingale sign which her daughter, being in her fourth day of Year 1, can hardly read. 

She’d been lucky, she thought just then, as Sarwar, one of the school admins, was passing by and took Amara with him. She had remembered Sarwar from the previous school year, “he knows Amara well” she’d said to herself. But as she’s cycling back home, after her quick grocery shop, she worries about Sarwar, about what it means to have left her small child in school in the hands of a man she barely knows, who wouldn’t normally be in charge of taking kids somewhere, his role being more janitor-esque than anything else. She is reconsidering her memory of the drop-off, thinks of his warm smile again and is concerned that she may have missed some malice hidden behind his grin. 

She is absorbed in these thoughts as she notices a man with an old dog, barely walking, crossing the street. She notices a blue car stopping across the street to let him pass, but as he does so, dog in tow, Alana then presses on the pedal to regain the speed she’d lost. Her electric bike has spunk, so when there is a honk, she had already gained enough speed that the ensuing brake unbalances her and her groceries are now flying into the street. Her chickpeas are immediately crushed by a van that was a bit too close for comfort behind her, and the pop terrifies her. There is nowhere to stop the bike easily so she makes her way slowly, both feet on the ground, towards the sidewalk, so she can recover what remains of her shopping. Her favorite tote bag is now adorned with very visible tyre marks. 

A man comes crying out of the van, confusing Alana, as the blue car speeds off towards the stop sign that will hold her in place for another 45 seconds. The bald passenger looks disheveled, as if he’s about to throw up. “This is all my fault!” he yells. Alana looks at him, perplexed, as her podcast drones on like an eery poem in her left ear: “it’s those banal things, like putting time in your diary, that have a huge impact.” The driver also steps out of the van, he is an old white man, so blond his hair looks like it’s made of sunshine, weary-looking, he attempts to calm his passenger. “Mate, it’s just a helmet, there’s no kid.” The bald passenger becomes a worrying shade of red, and his eyes bulge to the point where Alana wonders if he is having a heart episode. And then she sees it, her daughter’s little watermelon-coloured bike helmet, which she’d stuffed in the tote bag and which had rolled, with some tomatoes and the now-defunct chickpeas, into the middle of the road. She looks at it, then at the bald man, who has kneeled in the street and is retching. “He’s drunk” the driver explains. “He’s a good ‘un, but he’s drunk.” When she doesn’t react, he continues, by way of explanation “His wife left him. And he was supposed to be driving. That’s why-” he gestures, bowing slightly, as if introducing his co-pilot on a stage. The passenger’s original, slightly less beetroot color, seems to have returned. But Alana can’t say anything, so she bends down to pick up the run-over tote bag, the helmet and a tomato, holds them close to her chest. As she does so, she finds, with some surprise, that she is no longer anxious, the turmoil has paused. “Thank you for joining us today” Alana’s earphone goes on, and she touches it so that it stops, thinking she has to go back a few minutes as she hasn’t caught that last bit.