Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Wednesday, 12 September 2007

  Autumn

  Honeysuckle, spindly pink and cream amid the white trumpets of bindweed, russet hawthorn beads and brambles. ‘Summer,’ the hedge says, ‘ah, summer that was. Gone now. Almost never here. But we shall take comfort in the autumn that is come among us.’ Over the hedge, cotton reels and cubes of straw mark the season’s shift. Fields worked; already green shoots of rape and wheat haze the ever-restless earth. One or two late and golden fields of oats rustle with embarrassment, still to be standing there, while the wind pushes away the skinny warmth of the day.

  Friday, 14 September 2007

  Lady of the Flies 2

  Ding dong, the flies are dead. Not all of them but most. Since I have effectively been living in the Australian outback of the nineteenth century, I am quite happy with a couple of dozen hangers-on who do not yet know the party is over. It was bad. I would make a cup of tea and as I poured in the milk, a fly would bob to the surface. Often it would still be swimming. Sometimes it would have an inflatable toy. I bought geranium oil and burners along with geranium incense sticks. The geranium oil got a bit much. It did not kill the flies; instead they retreated to the corners of the room to talk about me or sank to floor level. They swirled around my feet. I think they were doing that commando-like crawl you are supposed to do in the event of fire, pulling themselves along by their elbows to avoid the stink. I braved the nettles to get down to the sandpit and ladled sand into a glass mixing bowl and brought it back to the house. I slid in four incense sticks and lit them. My six-year-old came in. He looked delighted. He said: ‘Mummy, you’ve baked a cake.’ I said: ‘No, it just looks like a cake. I’m killing flies.’ He sighed and walked away. At the doorway, he said to the four-year-old: ‘Don’t bother asking. It’s not a cake.’

  Tuesday, 18 September 2007

  Dirty dancing

  I had put the children to bed after the usual two-hour performance involving baths, books and bollockings. I had lain next to the six-year-old and said: ‘You make me so proud and I love you so much. Do you know that?’ And he said: ‘No. How much do you love me?’ And I said: ‘I love you brighter than the stars.’ He said: ‘Do you love me more than Daddy?’ I said: ‘Yes. That’s just the way it is.’ He said: ‘More than Granny?’ and I said yes and thought: ‘Don’t tell her though.’ ‘More than television?’ No contest. ‘More than your make-up?’ More than that even. Once I had lost him to sleep, I came downstairs to the kitchen. I pushed the table against the hearth and cleared the chairs to one side. I thought: ‘I can sweep the floor. Clear it of crumbs, mop off the dirt and wait for it to dry, or I can dance.’ I pressed eject to open up the CD drawer on my laptop, fed it and thought: ‘It has been an age since I went to a club. Will anyone buy me a drink?’ Acoustic guitars and fiddles gushed out into the warm air to catch in the gobbets of crystal hanging from the chandelier. Folk rock spun me one way then the other. I like to dance, always have. I closed my eyes a while. My Gay Best Boyfriend cool-shimmies on the dance floor, hands behind his back, dandy hips asway. He and I do this thing. On the dance floor. We step around and round, twirling to face each other and then away. Anyone watching who did not know I am his hag, he is my Gay Best Friend, would think we have hot sex and oftentime. But we do not, will not, cannot think of such a thing. Instead, we dance, caressing with a smile, loving each other in the beat. I danced with him last night. I could not tell him so. I wonder, later, in his London bed, if he dreamt he danced with me.

  Wednesday, 19 September 2007

  Dinosaur roar

  Last week, a retired child psychotherapist and a consultant psychotherapist were holidaying in the cottage next to us. I made a mental note to myself: ‘Do not shout at the children. If you do want to shout at the children, remember to shut the windows.’ I was doing really well until the phone rang just as I was putting everyone to bed. Usually, I let it ring but I thought it might be my husband so I dashed downstairs and answered it. It was the Tory ‘bastard’, who said he would not be able to take me stalking because of foot and mouth restrictions. As we were talking, I saw my pyjama-clad four-year-old and the six-year-old tear out of the front door and into the garden carrying cleaning products. When I put the phone down, I swept up the rompered baby and went out. I was careful not to shout. I called loudly: ‘Boys.’ I called slightly more loudly: ‘Boys!’ They emerged; the four-year-old, beaming. He always beams when he has done something that will drive me to distraction. I said: ‘Right. I want the washing-up liquid and the washing powder tablets back. Now.’ The six-year-old looked pained. ‘How did you know?’ he wailed. ‘I know everything,’ I said. ‘I know everything you think. I know everything you do. For ever.’ I thought: ‘I really hope the psychotherapists can’t hear this.’

  We opened up the wooden gate and stepped down into their garden paradise. The four-year-old went one way, the six-year-old the other. Realizing his tactical mistake, the four-year-old veered over to his brother. He beamed at me again as he ran past to join his ally in all misdeeds. We peered over the stone wall at the bottom of the garden. The foaming bottle, the box and its contents were nowhere near where we were standing; they were laying among the trodden-down nettles, over where the four-year-old had been heading. I said, through tight lips: ‘I want them picked up. Please.’

  Babe on hip, I cut across the grass to the point the four-year-old had been aiming for originally – a patch of garden close to the greenhouse. Here, a narrow entrance squeezes you between glass and golden privet leaves to a garden room, a private place, curiously attractive to my children, enclosed by thick hedges on two sides, a greenhouse and a stone wall. Or what was a stone wall.

  It is a superhero den, with a tree which the boys use to scramble into their other den in the nettle patch. The boys, with help from two small friends, had used sticks to scrape out the lime mortar and carefully pull and tumble out the stones. Aghast, I watched the four-year-old scrambling back through the hole with the washing-up liquid. Stones arched above his egg fragile head, resting on nothing but neighbours and innate goodwill. I said: ‘You are kidding me. What were you thinking?’ They wanted ‘a shortcut’. While they worked with their sticks, they were pretending they were in the mouth of a big dinosaur taking out its teeth so it couldn’t eat the little dinosaurs.

  Later in the adult twilight, children in bed, disgraced, the consultant psychotherapist assessed the latest outrage. She said: ‘You realize this is all about boundaries, don’t you? You didn’t say no to their other den when they wanted you to, so now they have pushed it further. They have literally pushed through the boundary. They want you to say no.’ I said: ‘I say no to my kids all the time.’ So much for keeping a low profile, I thought. I told her about the dinosaurs. She said: ‘Hmmm. So they think there is a monster in their life somewhere.’ I changed the subject. To their thieving. Bad choice. They have slipped into a habit of stealing biscuits, chocolate, sweet stuff. I had thought because they did not get enough sugar in their little lives. The retired child psychotherapist hazarded: ‘Perhaps they feel they are not being nurtured enough.’ I groaned inside. I said: ‘What about the cleaning products though?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s an interesting one. They are stealing what they think is important to you, they are stealing a piece of you.’ I said: ‘There is no way they associate me with cleaning products.’ I boy-banned them from my Eden.

  Tuesday, 25 September 2007

  Baby toast

  I said to the baby girl – and I know you should not ask such questions of children – ‘Who do you love the most?’ She stared back at me, her face all truth and beauty; hazel-blue eyes and her mouth which looks like mine at the corners. I whispered again as I bunched her to me, settling in to the rocking chair: ‘Who do you love the most? The best? Who in this world?’ She lay back into me, raised up her plastic cup of milk as if to make a toast. ‘Granny,’ she confided.

  Tuesday, 2 October 2007

  My old china

  My mot
her is much better than she was when I first moved here when she was so very fragile – unless you catch her on a morning when pain binds her limbs to bed. She ages with grace and bravery, my father matching his step to hers. They take pills, make jokes, hold hands on the sofa, talk about me all the time, I think; my father, a gentle man caring for her with resolute tenderness. They love the fact they are about to get a home from home, but as yet the arches are not ready and they cannot manage stairs so they are staying in the Accountant’s holiday cottage down the road. I say they cannot manage stairs. This is their first visit since we moved back in. I showed them round the downstairs and said: ‘I won’t show you upstairs because you won’t be able to manage the stairs.’ I completed the last bit of this sentence to their backs as they disappeared up the staircase they cannot manage and down the landing. I trailed up after them. I said: ‘You can’t manage stairs. Remember? That’s why we’re having the arches built. So you can have a downstairs bedroom and a bathroom.’ ‘Yes, that’s right, we can’t manage stairs,’ my mother said, pushing me gently to one side as she went to inspect the en suite.

  Everything measured up to their high standards so I do not have to move again immediately, thank God. My mother said: ‘It is everything I ever hoped you would have.’ This is not entirely true. At one time, she would have liked me to marry Prince Charles and she would have preferred me to be a doctor. She sat back in my cream leather sofa in the kitchen. She said: ‘Would it be a good idea if I gave you a china cabinet?’ ‘No,’ I said. She got tougher. ‘But there is a china cabinet sitting in our front bedroom’s bow window and it doesn’t belong in there. There isn’t room for it.’ I said: ‘Have you just looked round my nice empty house to find where I can put all your old tat?’ Her game was up. ‘I do not want a china cabinet. I do not want that little head of a Scotsman in a glass with a fly in his eye.’ She changed tack again. ‘But if you don’t want it, I shall have to give it all away.’ She had been in the house less than thirty minutes before she put the knife to my throat: take the tat or lose your childhood memories. I cannot remember all that is in the china cabinet. As a child, I thought them marvels and would extract them, one by one, to carefully, and with clean hands, admire them: the silver model of the shrine of Lourdes which plays a hymn to the Virgin Mary if you wind a key, a little clockwork Russian doll with red bobbles on her hat who does a goosestep and at least one flamenco dancer, complete with castanets. My mother is a firm believer in decluttering providing she is the one doing the decluttering. I wonder, too, whether she wants me to carry the past into my future. She can rest easy on that one. I shall take the china cabinet and I think when the arches are complete, I shall find a place for it in their bedroom.

  Wednesday, 3 October 2007

  Mothers and daughters

  I saw them walk away from me, my mother and my daughter. My mother in her slippers with her stick, head bent to listen, best she could, to my girl’s burble. My baby girl beside her, pushing a buggy with a pink and brand-new dolly along the road outside the cottages. I thought: ‘Engrave this on my heart: my mother walking, talking with the little mother next to her.’ ‘Shall we go in?’ I heard her granny ask her. ‘No. Walk again.’ And walk they did. I thought: ‘When you are all grown and a mother to more than just a doll, when my mother is no more, will something in you recall this golden autumn morning promenade?’

  Wednesday, 10 October 2007

  Samaritan city

  The Dairy Farmer just broke his hip in a fracas with a cow and a large amount of slurry. I always suspected cows were dangerous. I buy walnut whips and pineapple chunks and set off for a visit to the sick.

  I pull off the A1 on to a country road. I check I do not have the handbrake on. I check I have enough petrol. I think: ‘The car is going to break down’ and realize I have a flat tyre. Thinking about it, it must have been flat for a good ten minutes, maybe longer. I climb out of the car to stare at the smoking tyre. It smells bad and it is pouring with rain. I am in the middle of nowhere and have given up on mobile phones as there is never a signal or the battery is flat. I have been happier.

  I think: ‘Right, well, it could be worse. The boys are at school, the baby is with Girl Friday and it can’t be that hard to change a tyre.’ I open the boot and find a jack, screwdriver, dirty nappy, pushchair, large amount of children’s clothing, two teddy bears, banana skin, spacegun and underneath it all, a tyre which I cannot lift. I go back to the front of the car with the jack. My husband has always maintained that if you use a jack in the wrong place on a car, your car will break. I slide it next to the wheel. A car goes by in the rain. I leap up and wave at it frantically and a nice man stops. He lends me his mobile phone so that I can call my husband (who is of course in London) and he can call the RAC. I think: ‘I can’t call the RAC direct because it may take too long and I don’t want to keep the man waiting for his phone.’ I have to ask the driver what road I am on. It turns out he is another local farmer and has heard all about the broken hip. He drives off. As he pulls away, I think: ‘I really should have asked you to change the tyre for me.’ It is too late.

  I go back to the car and cautiously try turning the screw in the jack while working out whether the car could kill me if it falls off it. I decide I am reasonably safe as I am not underneath it on a trolley but kneeling next to it in a muddy puddle. I go back to the boot and pull out a few other pieces of metal that are lying around the spare tyre. I realize that rather than lifting the rear end of the car off the ground in a bid to extract the spare tyre from the boot, it may be easier to unwind the bolt holding it in place. I feel inadequate. A car drives by and I try to attract its attention but the driver does not see me. I contemplate putting on some lipstick and undoing some buttons. I am glad I have not done this when a little red runabout draws up and a white-haired old lady peers out. I say: ‘Hello.’ I do not want to frighten her. I crouch down. I say: ‘Do you by any chance have a mobile pohone I could borrow?’ I wonder if she knows what a mobile phone is. She says no, she is driving to see her daughter and had not wanted to drive by me. I know she is wishing she had a toffee she could offer me. I say how kind of her to stop and thank you. She drives on.

  I go back to the car and look at the wheel. The tyre is still flat and I am getting wetter. I look at the signpost at the junction. I am about four miles from my friends. I wonder if they would hear me if I shout very loudly. Another car draws up. I think: ‘For the back of beyond, you get a fair amount of passing traffic,’ although the hands on my watch stopped going round some time ago. I say to the elderly man driving the car: ‘Could I borrow your phone?’ He hands it to me. His elderly wife looks at me with deep suspicion. I ring my husband. He tells me the RAC will not come as I am not named on the cover for the car and the AA cannot find me. While I am trying to explain where I am to him, despite the fact I have no idea, the elderly man goes over to look at the wheel and says he can fix it. I tell my husband I will ring him back. The elderly man, a caravaner, digs around his own boot. He pulls out a walking stick cum Zimmer frame and then a wheel brace. I wonder if he is carrying it in case the Zimmer ever gets a flat. We spend some time trying to find a place for the jack to go. He is incredibly game but is now wheezing very badly. His breath is so laboured I am seriously worried he is going to have a heart attack while he changes the wheel. I suspect his wife is sitting in the car rightly having a hissy fit. He has to give up when the jack refuses to go up any further. I shake him by the hand and thank his wife for lending him to me. I do not think she likes me.

  I go back and have another go. I pull the jack out and slide it further along the car and turn the screw, but the wheel remains resolutely on the ground. I am not sure I care by now as I have no idea what to do once the wheel is in the air. Another car draws up. This final chap (who spends half his year in Australia and used to do something with trucks) cracks on with the job in hand. It takes him about five minutes. My tyre has a lengthy gash in it. He pours scorn on my spare wheel and implies I wil
l die horribly if I go any speed at all. He says I must go straight to a garage and get a new tyre. I have the impression it could abandon the other three wheels and roll away from the car at any moment. He drives away. I open up the walnut whips.

  Wednesday, 17 October 2007

  What am I bid?