Accounts!!!

FAMILY

Book M.’s swimming lesson.

XMAS gifts still to buy: Mum, C., K.

Menu for XMAS Day

Appointment for K. with Dr. Lewis

Talk to C. re D.

FRIENDS

Call Yvonne for birthday.

E-mail Susan.

MISCELLANEOUS

Query gas bill—why so high?

“Cat. It’s me. Please don’t hang—”

The phone clicked and beeped ponderously in her ear.

Oh, for God’s sake, thought Lyn, as she replaced the phone. Each time Cat hung up on her, it felt like a stinging slap across her face. It was so childish! So unproductive!

She doodled an asterisk next to Talk to C. re D.

Fine then, she would move on to another priority. She looked at her list, sighed, checked her watch, and considered her half-full coffee cup. It was still hot. She couldn’t even pretend she felt like another one.

Get a grip, she told herself. It wasn’t like her to procrastinate like this. Come on, remember the third habit: First things first.

When Lyn was in her final year at university, she had a profound, almost religious experience: She read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Every page brought a new epiphany. Yes! she kept thinking, as she highlighted another paragraph in fluorescent yellow and felt herself expanding with potential. It was such a relief to discover that she wasn’t at the mercy of her unfortunate Kettle genes or her overly dramatic Kettle childhood. Unlike animals, she learned, human beings could choose how they responded to stimuli. She could change her programming, with a simple paradigm shift. She didn’t have to be a Kettle girl! She could be whoever she wanted to be!

Her sisters, of course, refused to be converted. “What crap,” sneered Cat. “I hate those sort of books. I can’t believe you’re falling for it.”

“It’s weird,” said Gemma. “Every time I tried to read about the first habit, I just fell into the deepest sleep.”

So Lyn became a highly effective person on her own—and it worked. It worked like a charm.

“Oh, you’re so lucky!” people said of her success. Well, she wasn’t lucky. She was effective. Ever since then, she had begun each day with a strong cup of coffee and a brand-new “to do” list. She had a hardbound notebook especially for the task. At the front was her “principle-centered personal mission statement” and her long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals for each of the key areas of her life: work, family, and friends.

She loved that notebook. It gave her such a soothing sense of satisfaction as she drew a neat, sharp line through each new priority—check, check, check!

Just recently however, she’d noticed the tiniest, quickly suppressed blip of panic whenever she began a new list. She found herself thinking unproductive thoughts like, What if it was simply physically impossible to do everything? Sometimes it felt like all the people in her life were scavengers, pecking viciously away at her flesh, wanting more, more, more.

A friend from university had called recently, complaining that Lyn never kept in touch, and Lyn had wanted to scream at her, I have no time, don’t you see, I have no time! Instead, she had done a spreadsheet and listed all her friends, categorized by importance (close friend, good friend, casual friend) with columns for dinners, lunches, coffees, “just called to see how you are” phone calls and e-mails.

If her sisters ever discovered the existence of her “friend management system” they would be merciless.

She looked out her office window at the dazzling expanse of turquoise water and thought about herself through the eyes of the She journalist. When she’d walked into Lyn’s elegant home office with its harbor views, her lip had curled with envy. In some ways, Lyn agreed with her. She did have it all—adoring husband, gorgeous child, stimulating career—and she damn well deserved it. She worked hard, she was good at what she did—she was effective!

But some days, like when Gemma telephoned from the bathtub, water sloshing in the background, Lyn wondered what it would be like to be a little less effective, with nothing more to worry about than when to sleep with a new boyfriend.

And some days, like today, it felt like there was a band of pressure squeezing tightly around her skull. Talk to C. re D. Oh God.

No paradigm shift could eliminate a good strong dose of Catholic guilt.

The year Lyn turned twenty-two someone switched her life over to fast-forward and forgot to change it back again. That’s how it felt. When people said to her, “Can you believe how fast the year has gone? Christmas again!” she replied too fervently, “I know! I can’t believe it!”

Sometimes she’d be doing something perfectly ordinary, sitting at the dinner table passing Kara the pepper and without warning, she’d feel a strange, dizzy sense of disorientation. She’d look at Michael and think, Surely it was only a few months ago that we got married! She’d look at Maddie and think, But you were a tiny baby, only a few days ago! It was as if she were being picked up and put down again in each new stage of her life like a chess piece.

She could pinpoint the moment her life switched over to fast-forward. It was the day she got the phone call in Spain. The phone call about Gemma.

“It’s bad news,” said Cat, her voice echoing hollowly down the line and Lyn said “What?” even though she heard her perfectly well, just to put it off, just to annoy Cat, because she didn’t really believe it was anything bad.

“Bad news!” Cat repeated impatiently. “It’s something really, really bad.”