I was a mad woman, consumed by pain and grief and anger. I wrestled out of his arms.
‘Get off me! Leave me alone!’
‘Just stop it! Talk to me …’
‘I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to talk to anyone, you don’t understand, you can’t understand …’
‘I can’t understand if you won’t let me, if you won’t talk to me about it. Please. What is it? What is wrong with you?’
What was wrong with me? Where would I start?
I couldn’t tell him that I was filled with pain and rage and fear and longing and loss. Longing and loss for something that had never been mine in the first place. I couldn’t tell him I was scared that maybe it wasn’t just the baby that I had lost, that maybe it was also our last chance at happiness. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t know what to do now, I didn’t know what the next rung of the ladder was, didn’t know how to make him happy, how to make me happy.
So I just shrugged.
James took a deep breath, stepped back away from me and stared at the floor.
‘Look. We shouldn’t have come here. It was a bad choice. You’re not happy.’
He looked up.
‘I don’t think you’re happy anywhere any more. I don’t think you’re happy with me. I … I just don’t know how much longer we can keep trying at this …’
And even though he was talking about me and my happiness I knew that, really, he was talking about himself.
I had lost the baby and, despite all of my efforts, I was losing James.
I reached forward to take his hand but he moved further away and turned back towards the Hobbit House.
‘It’s fine. I’m just tired.’
And, in that instant, I knew he was right.
He was tired. Tired of me.
We left the Hobbit House that afternoon and went home.
Late April 2024
Even though the last time I had been there had been steeped in misery, I knew that the Hobbit House would be the perfect place to wait to have my baby. It was pretty much self-sufficient, away from any potential places that rats or seagulls might gather, and was small enough for me to manage on my own.
So, given all the recent drama with the birds, it would be nice to be able to say that I gathered everything I needed, came straight to the Hobbit House, settled in and have been living quietly and easily for the last four months, gestating my child in peaceful harmony with the new world.
But that’s not what happened.
For a start I had completely forgotten where the Hobbit House was.
I hadn’t been paying much attention when James drove me there. I knew it was between King’s Lynn and the Norfolk coast, but I didn’t know quite where. It turns out that that’s a pretty big area and driving around hoping that I would see a sign for it didn’t actually work very well.
I couldn’t find it.
But I did find a rose-covered cottage like something from a Jane Austen novel. It had running water, an open fire, an AGA, a rocking chair in the front room and, mercifully, no rotting bodies upstairs or down.
It was perfect.
I drove to the nearest shopping outlet, checked for rats, and then went to town. I got everything. Food, fresh bedding, pillows, duvets, blankets, towels, cleaning products, clothing, toiletries, dog treats and about twenty new balls for Lucky, books, magazines, CDs, batteries and battery-operated CD and DVD players. As it had been Christmas time when 6DM hit, the shops were full of decorations and battery-powered fairy lights so I took armfuls to decorate and light the cottage with. The Defender was so rammed with stuff that I had to drive with Lucky sitting on my lap, which, now that my belly was definitely starting to protrude, neither of us particularly enjoyed.
I spent the afternoon and next day unloading and pottering about the cottage, and then I sat on a chair in the front garden in the weak April sunshine and felt a small wave of contentment wash over me. I felt like this was somewhere I could settle for a while.
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The following morning the toilet stopped flushing, and by the afternoon there was no water coming from the taps.
I must have just been using what was left in the tanks.
Fucking idiot.
I wasn’t ready to give up on my cottage dream just yet and so I drove to King’s Lynn and went to the central library.
It took me roughly ten minutes of research to learn that the cottage would never again have running water and that if I wanted to live there I would have to drink bottled water and either dig a medieval Glastonbury-style, hole-in-the-ground, faeces-dumping-trench or turn a nearby field into a field of shit and do my business there each day.
Neither sounded particularly appealing or practical and both made me feel like I would be turning into a countrified version of Susan Palmers.
I sat in a library armchair to sulk and, as always happens when I am stationary for more than a few seconds, Lucky appeared and dropped one of his new balls in my lap for me to throw for him.
I threw it, half-heartedly, and it bounced away with surprising speed on the wooden floor. Lucky went skidding after it, barrelled into a stand full of leaflets by the reception desk, and colourful pamphlets flew in all directions.
‘Lucky!’ I scolded, getting out of my chair to clear them up. He gave me a doggy grin.
I actually bent down to clear them before I realised that no one else was ever going to come here, so what the hell was I doing?
And then I saw it.
Escape the stress of modern life.
Enjoy our environmentally-friendly, no impact, organic ecosphere.
It was a leaflet left by the Hobbit House hippies.
The beautiful Hobbit House hippies.
Turns out the house was only a couple of miles away.
Before I left the library I took every novel by Marian Keyes and Jilly Cooper that they had.
So, back to the rose-covered cottage I went, back into the Defender went all my precious new things, back on my lap went Lucky, and off to the Hobbit House we drove.
The Hobbit House was still there, sitting squat in the middle of the clearing, in the middle of the woodland with the river bubbling along beside it.
I stopped the car for a moment and sat staring. This was not a place of happy memories. It was a place of endings, the end of my last pregnancy, the beginning of the end for me and James. I am not particularly superstitious, but I did wonder if this was actually a good idea.
Lucky, it turns out, is not superstitious at all or given to moments of contemplation because while I was having mine, he decided to bark continuously and scratch at the door to be let out.
I decided that the fact he was keen was as good a sign as any.
I got out of the Defender, walked decisively forward, and pulled on the front door to the Hobbit House. It wasn’t locked and, when the stomach-churning smell of rotten flesh greeted me, my immediate thought was that someone had actually chosen this dark hole as their final resting place. Lucky, who had been ready to rush in and explore, backed up swiftly and sat down with an ‘I ain’t going in there’ look on his face. I was inclined to agree with him but our immediate options were limited so I had to make sure that this definitely wasn’t one of them.
It was a badger.
It was dead in the corner, rotting and covered in maggots.
I wrapped a scarf around my face, grabbed a handy big stick from the woods to scoop the carcass up with, and set about removing it.
Badgers are surprisingly huge and heavy.
In the end I had to put gloves on and manhandle it into a bin bag and then drag it outside.
After the badger was gone, I used my new cleaning products to scrub away the remnants (you should be thankful I am not expanding on that description), and then disinfected and scrubbed the entire floor.
Throughout, Lucky stared at me with such blatant disgust that I got fed up with him and purposefully threw his latest ball into the stream. He
went and got it and then came back and shook his wet fur all over me and my clean floor.
He was getting a bit cheeky, that dog.
Despite all my cleaning, the room still stank of dead badger and, not for the first time, I cursed my amazing sense of smell.
It was Harry Boyle’s smell that made me first notice him again.
I’d all but forgotten that Harry Boyle existed in the month that I had been off work after the miscarriage; but eventually I had to go back to work. I couldn’t keep sitting at home on the sofa crying, especially now that James and I had an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t be in the same room as each other for more than five minutes at a time unless entirely unavoidable.
Neither of us had mentioned the fight in the woods since we got back from the Hobbit House. I was in complete emotional turmoil and desperate for James to comfort or love me, but he was cool and distant, and his controlled facade froze my heart. I should have reached out to him, apologised, begged him to love me again, but my voice was paralysed by the fear of rejection. At night we lay beside each other in bed, careful not to touch accidentally, and both of us made excuses to be out of the house as much as possible. Going back to work was one of those excuses.
The office lift was going up and the blanket fog of my depression was descending when Harry Boyle got in on the fourth floor.
‘You look like shit.’
I stared up at his scowling face and burst into tears.
He tutted, muttered something like ‘fucking women’, and then pulled me into him and wrapped his arms around me while I cried mascara streaks into his incredibly white, well-ironed shirt.
And then it happened.
I smelt him for the first time.
Not his deodorant or hair product or expensive aftershave.
Him.
It wasn’t anything he had artificially put on, it was his sweat, his scent, his musk, the smell that made him, him.
It was fresh and new and it wasn’t James or anything that reminded me of James or of the sad little life I was currently living.
Harry smelt of money and privilege and excitement and unexplored possibilities.
Harry smelt of escape.
Early May 2024
It took about ten days for the rotten badger stench to fully disappear from the Hobbit House and during that time Lucky and I slept in the Defender. By the time the stench had gone, my tummy was a medium, round, hard football that made it extremely uncomfortable to sleep anywhere other than a proper bed, so I was very happy to finally ‘move in’.
I used the time to clean, organise, and furnish our new home. The wood burner still worked but the clay oven outside had a huge crack in it and didn’t heat up properly no matter how much wood I put in. I got new bedding and towels and cushions, and everything for the kitchen, and rugs for the floor, and paintings for the walls.
The reed-bed sanitation system still functioned, and the toilet had a very healthy flush (God knows what I will do if it ever breaks). Water gushed from the well-fed taps but there was no hot water, and the solar shower didn’t work, so I relied on the kettle for hot water. I also discovered that there was only about an hour of electricity a day, nowhere near the five that the guest book promised, so I broke into the storage hut that the solar panels were linked into to see if I could find out why.
The lying hippy bastards were hooked up to the national grid.
There was an electricity meter in the hut and cables running underground. The solar panels obviously only provided about an hour a day, and the rest was from Eastern Electric. So much for a good electricity supply. But an hour a day was better than no hours, and at least it meant I wasn’t entirely dependent on candles at night.
The walls of the storage hut were lined with racks containing all manner of gardening equipment and tools, and there were three huge bags full of firewood. It wasn’t the ‘sustainable, foraged wood’ that had been advertised. It was from the local garden centre.
The Hobbit House was now rather lovely. It was filled with bright cushions and rugs and strung with Christmas fairy lights, and I’d manhandled the rocking chair from the cottage into the Defender and brought it here to place in front of the wood burner.
So, when it poured with rain on the first night we slept inside our new home, I sat in the rocking chair in front of my wood burner with Lucky snoring at my feet and began to learn to knit clothes and blankets for my baby.
I had jumped my first hurdle. I had provided a home for my growing family.
And in that moment, on that rainy night, by the fire, I allowed myself the smallest glimmer of hope. I started to believe that I could really do this. I had managed to come this far. I could give birth to my baby and raise him or her in the deserted landscape amongst the remnants of the world that once was.
I could work hard and survive in this world. I was determined that I could, and would, make a life here for me and my baby.
As if to show solidarity, the baby gave my tummy a resounding kick. I smiled. I could do this.
In another life, one that seemed so far away now, I had been determined with Harry Boyle.
Determined that I wasn’t going to throw my decade-long love with James away just because Harry smelt nice.
I was a better person than that.
At least I thought I was a better person than that.
I started to smell Harry everywhere: when he was in the office, after he had been in the office, when he was walking up the corridor, if he had just come out of the lift. I could tell if he had been speaking to someone or used a certain cup or glass. I used to follow his smell from room to room. I craved it. I had no idea what ‘his’ smell was, and it nearly drove me insane. I went to Selfridges and demanded to sniff every man’s aftershave. I smelt hair products, face products, deodorant. Nothing had that same scent.
I was addicted to it and I couldn’t get it anywhere except from him.
Without even realising it I began to worry less about making James happy and more about my clothing, hair and make-up on the days I knew Harry was going to be in the office.
I began to overlook his rudeness, the scowling, and the swearing, and instead saw the intelligence, how he treated everyone in the team the same regardless of rank, the way he inspired confidence and made people work harder. I liked the tall solidity of him, the way you couldn’t help but notice when he entered a room, the way he used his hands to gesture as he talked.
I started going to all of the meetings that I knew he was going to attend, and then I noticed he was watching me in those meetings.
And still, nothing happened. I continued to convince myself that nothing would happen.
But, of course, it did.
The day I first kissed Harry was a beautiful spring day.
A day that was fresh and new and filled with possibilities. I had woken up sprawled in a shaft of bright spring sunshine and my heart had been filled with hope. I decided to ask James to go for dinner, decided to be brave, break our impasse and offer him my heart once more. It was spring, things grew again in spring, maybe that could include us.
But, walking into the kitchen, I found that James had escaped the flat early to go to the gym before work. He’d left a note saying he was staying out for dinner. The sun disappeared behind a cloud and I cried in the shower.
I wanted to escape too, but where would I go?
By the time I had finished with my third meeting of the day the sun was once more high and bright in the sky. People were shedding winter cardigans, leaving them draped over the backs of chairs and taking their sandwiches to the park to allow the noon sun to gently roast their white wintery skin.
Harry leant over my chair.
‘It’s too sunny to be inside. Let’s run away.’
We got on the River Bus down the Thames. Filled with commuters and excitable tourists standing up top in the sunshine, pointing out famous sights and the odd fancy hotel that they mistook for a famous sight. It was noisy and busy.
We d
idn’t speak.
I leant over the guardrail and stared down into the foaming river, rushing on its way, so sure of the journey ahead. The sun was warm on my neck and the light-dappled water was hypnotising. I felt calm and drugged. I had no choice but to be carried along. Anything that happened now was out of my control.
The boat hit a current and rocked side to side. Harry, standing behind, grabbed the guardrail either side of me. I could smell him, feel his weight, reassuring and solid.
I turned in his arms and squinted up at him. He scowled down as he brushed my windswept hair from my face.
‘I’m a bit of a mess,’ I said.
He gave a short bark of laughter.
‘Yes, you really fucking are,’ he said.
Then he kissed me.
Late May 2024
Despite my previous bold, brave statement of hard work, determination and survival, I didn’t actually do anything for most of May.
The weather was very warm so I would wake up, roll out of my bed, put the kettle on, grab some cereal and the least disgusting non-dairy alternative to milk that I could find, make tea, grab a book, and then move out to one of the sunloungers in the garden and lie there until my stomach told me it was lunchtime. Only then would I struggle off my sunlounger, curse my lack of bread, dairy products and processed meat, and heat something from a can for lunch. Then it was back to the sunlounger to alternately nap and read until I felt it was time for dinner.
I was too lazy to try to cook anything more elaborate than the contents of a can. I had resigned myself to a life without fresh fruit and veg or bread or dairy and, in my lethargic state, anything more involved than opening a can of beans and heating them in a pan seemed too much like hard work.
I did wash, but the camping shower I had got from Go Outdoors (in what seemed like a different lifetime) was literally a clear plastic bag hung on a peg. The bag held five litres of water, which sounds a lot, but definitely isn’t when you are trying to get the soap off the lower part of your body, which you can no longer easily see. It was also rubbish for washing my hair, which was constantly knotted and sweaty and smelly, so one day I just grabbed my kitchen scissors and cut it off. Not just my pony tail, the whole lot. Cut and trimmed up the back of my neck. It felt short and spiky and amazing and, from what I could see in the tiny bathroom mirror that the Hobbit House had, looked pretty cool too.
Last One at the Party Page 25