I couldn’t stand anything tight around my tummy and I had forgotten (or superstitiously refused) to get any maternity clothes, so most of my clothes – barring a kaftan, dressing gown and couple of huge jumpers – were too small for my growing belly. Mostly I didn’t even bother with clothes any more, just wandered around in a pair of huge granny knickers that I threw away and replaced with new ones when they started to smell bad.
There were only two things that I paid attention to and did rigorously without fail.
One was clean my teeth. I brushed and flossed and tooth-picked and mouth-washed and cleaned those enamel jewels until they sparkled. I had never paid much attention to my teeth before. I saw my dentist every six months, had a couple of fillings every other year, and just bumbled through life taking them for granted. But, ever since 6DM, I have taken the best, the most expert, the most excellent care of my teeth. I remember seeing a segment on the news about NHS dentist waiting times and how some people had resorted to pulling their own teeth out rather than wait six months to see a dentist. They interviewed one of these self-torture victims and she had the thousand-yard-stare and sorrow-filled brow of someone who has experienced a pain that no human should go through. She had been beaten by the contents of her own mouth, her will to live had been taken out along with her teeth. That is the image I see every time I flirt with the notion of missing my cleaning session, and it is that image that always makes me haul my rapidly expanding, pregnant arse off the sunlounger/sofa/bed/rocking chair and into the bathroom for a damn good scrubbing.
The other thing I do without fail is apply sunscreen. Not some crappy cheap stuff either. I have the five-star UV rating, super strong, could practically visit the surface of the sun, takes seventeen minutes to fully rub in, best sunscreen that money can buy. There are illnesses that I can’t do anything about: brain haemorrhage, heart attack, appendicitis, most of the cancers, sepsis. But skin cancer I can and will guard against. I haven’t got this far to just allow myself to be fried like a little bit of bacon by the sun’s almighty glare.
Such was my lethargy during the first part of May that I didn’t even really play with Lucky that much. He, like me, seemed content to sit, sleep, and eat most of the time. Sometimes he’d disappear into the woods for a few hours and I’d hear him barking and scurrying around as he chased squirrels. I didn’t worry if he disappeared, he always came back. I brought him a variety of dry and canned dog food, and he wolfed them all down. I made him take dog vitamins, which he hated, but he took them and then stared woefully at me for ten minutes after. He sat on my feet when I was in the rocking chair, lolled by my side when I was on the sunlounger, and slept on my bed at night. He continued to be my funny, furry, loving life partner. I just hoped he didn’t get jealous and eat the baby when it arrived.
And that was it, that is what happened for most of May. Nothing much really.
I still wasn’t sure I was capable of making my life any better than this all by myself.
If you’d asked me ten minutes before Harry kissed me if I was capable of having an affair then I would have said no.
At that point I had no idea what I was or would be capable of.
Kissing Harry on the River Bus with the sun shining down and the Thames roaring in my ears was all-encompassing, all sensation and exhilaration, there was no room for thought or reason. But, as soon as we stopped and I pulled back and looked into dark brown eyes so different to the blue I was used to seeing, reality came crashing back in.
I was hit by such a wave of guilt I nearly fell over. I think Harry thought I was overwhelmed by the kiss and performing an old-fashioned swoon. He caught me, but I wriggled away.
This wasn’t one of the mid-meeting daydreams I’d had about kissing Harry.
This was real.
I was an adulteress.
Five hours later I sat at the kitchen table in my flat. Our flat. The flat I shared with my husband.
I was halfway through a bottle of gin, in the midst of a giant panic attack, and stricken with shame.
I had to tell James. I had to tell him everything. I had been bad, I had done an awful thing, but I wouldn’t do it again. I would make more of an effort, I would be happy, we could be happy.
I just needed James to tell me he still loved me, that he was still with me, that he would still take care of me, that he would make everything better.
It was another two hours before James got home.
I sat in darkness in the kitchen, and he stopped in the hallway when he saw me. The hallway light left his face in shadow, but I could tell by the way his shoulders slumped that he was still tired of this, tired of us.
Tired of me.
I couldn’t do it.
I didn’t know if it was the gin, my panic, or his dejection, but the words wouldn’t form. I couldn’t tell him.
Instead, I walked to the fridge and took out the can of whipped cream that he had periodically replaced, but which I had never used.
I took the lid off, shook it, and then squirted half the can straight into my mouth.
The fridge light lit my face, which pleaded with him to understand, pleaded with him to remember.
He didn’t move from the hallway, so I never knew what his expression was, but when he spoke his voice was filled with sadness.
‘I think that stuff’s out of date.’
Then he went into the bedroom to get changed.
I was too late.
As I said, I’d been pretty lazy while at the Hobbit House. I was still waiting for someone else to come and take over, someone else to do all the hard work.
I hadn’t really cleaned, I hadn’t tidied. I had picked up after myself just enough to keep the Hobbit House pleasant and liveable and not let it slip into the fetid state of Xav’s house.
Without the convenience of weekly recycling and refuse trucks I had had to find somewhere else to dump my rubbish, so I had been putting it into the electricity storeroom with the vague plan of getting rid of it somehow once every six months (preferably without having to visit a dump).
So, it was something of a surprise when I opened the storeroom door one evening to throw my bag of rubbish in, to find that I couldn’t.
In a month I had managed to fill the storeroom with forty-two black bin bags full of rubbish. Forty-two. Admittedly, around twenty of those were from when I had first cleared the Hobbit House out and got rid of anything old or mouldy or not country-cottage enough for my liking. But still, that’s nearly a bag of rubbish a day.
And the smell … for a moment I thought my morning sickness had returned, but then I realised it was just my involuntary reaction to being presented with the smell of death all over again.
I had forgotten that I had put the badger in there.
Without the use of the recycling bin that was normally in my kitchen I had also thrown my leftover food, scraps and unwashed empty tins, Lucky’s leftover food, scraps and unwashed empty tins, and the occasional stray dog turd into the bin liners.
It stank.
I loaded the Defender with the rubbish, drove into King’s Lynn, and avoided having to visit the local dump by finding a random house on a random road with a door that opened and dumping my rubbish inside, shutting the door firmly after me when I was finished.
I had to do something. I had to find a way to live that didn’t create so many leftovers.
I went back to the Hobbit House and, for the first time since I had arrived there, walked around the side and looked at the polytunnel and fruit and vegetable patch to see if there was any sort of composting area. If my mum could fit one in her little suburban garden, surely the hippies could fit one in here.
You’d have thought I would have walked around to look at the vegetable patch before, seeing as I was having desperate pregnancy cravings for anything green. But I hadn’t. Maybe baby brain is a real thing.
There was no compost area that I could see, and the vegetable patch was a complete mess. Weeds and plants and unidentifiable green thin
gs all over the place. Things climbing up stakes, things growing over the sides of the borders, things pushing through netting. The polytunnel was worse; I could hardly see inside because it was so overgrown and the plastic sheeting was dripping with moisture in the afternoon heat. A less lazy part of me remembered the summers spent in the garden with my mum, and how disappointed she would be with me for letting things get so bad, so I bent over and half-heartedly pulled one of the larger weeds out.
It came up easily.
And on the end of the weed was a carrot.
A tiny, underdeveloped, twisted carrot. But a carrot, nonetheless.
I was so shocked I sat down on the ground with a bump.
And then I ate it.
I didn’t even brush the dirt off properly, I ate half carrot, half mud.
And then I pulled up the weed next to it, found a carrot on the end, and ate that too.
And the next, and the next, and the next.
I went back into the Hobbit House and rummaged in the weekend bag that I had managed to keep with me for the last six months.
They were still in there, my mum’s gardening gloves.
I took them out and was assailed by the pungent earthy, green smell that washed over me from them. Tears pricked at my eyes but, rather than cry, I smiled as I pulled them on.
Mum would have loved it here.
I spent the rest of the day rampaging through the fruit and veg patch and polytunnel like a mad woman.
The polytunnel was so verdent I could hardly get through the door and, once inside, couldn’t tell one plant from the next. Plants had grown into each other, over each other and through each other, all struggling upwards towards the light. I slashed and struggled through grabbing whatever I could.
Outside I found carrots, potatoes, some tiny cabbages, plums and gooseberries. In the polytunnel were green beans growing up sticks, what I thought were tiny cucumbers, but now know are courgettes, lettuce, rhubarb, some actual cucumbers, a row of half-grown leeks, onions, a couple of big pots of tomatoes, and to my utter joy, three rows of raspberries and a patch of strawberries. Most of them still had some growing to do but, be still my rumbling tummy, some were ready to eat straight away.
I gathered everything that was ripe, and far more of the non-ripe things than I should have, and spent the rest of the day in a fresh, vitamin-fuelled daze. I ate most things raw and threw the rest into a pot and made it into a strange vegetable soup. Lucky came back from one of his woodland rampages to find me drooling tomato juice from my mouth and slopping a ladle of soup into a clean bowl for him.
He did not share my enthusiasm. He wouldn’t even go near it.
And I am not ashamed to say I took it right back out of his bowl and ate it myself.
By the end of the day my tummy was so extended with fruit and vegetable gas that the baby was doing somersaults trying to find a comfortable place to float, and I was walking around burping and farting.
Lucky refused to sleep on the bed that night and instead slept by the front door as if poised to escape, should one of my cabbage-fuelled farts burn the place down.
I really tested the reed-bed toilet the next day.
My vegetable patch/polytunnel discovery galvanised me into action. It would have made my mum incredibly proud that I was finally getting to put her gardening training to use on something bigger than a pot plant.
However, while my pruning skills might have been just about okay, I soon learnt I had little to no knowledge of fruit and veg growing and had no idea how to take care of the polytunnel or anything in it. I needed guidance and I needed tools. I drove to the nearest garden centre.
Or, at least, I started driving to the nearest garden centre but was sidetracked by a pick-your-own raspberry farm that, when I went to pick my own, also had strawberries and cherries. I collected seven punnets full. Then on my way back I saw a place advertising runner beans. Worth a shot, I thought. Two hours and three bags of runner beans later the sun was setting and I was heading home, garden centre visit-less.
My brush with near-starvation in Scotland was still fresh in my mind and I had already started to half-heartedly stockpile canned goods for when winter arrived. I realised that my veg patch and visit to the pick-your-own farm had given me the opportunity to stockpile fresh food also. But once back at the Hobbit House I saw I had a problem: the world’s smallest fridge and therefore the world’s smallest freezer section. I needed another way to preserve the bundles of fresh stuff I now found myself with.
So, back to King’s Lynn Library I went for books on preserving and pickling, plus armfuls on gardening, growing your own fruit and vegetables, and how to recognise what to eat and what is poisonous (very, very well used by me). Then it was off to Wilko’s for every pickling jar they had, plus sterilising tablets, vinegar for pickling, and sugar for jam.
The library was a goldmine of information about the local area and stocked an abundance of leaflets recommending pick-your-own places and even a lavender farm. For the next two days I did a tour of the surrounding area and got more raspberries and strawberries, plums, rhubarb, broccoli, cucumbers, runner beans, potatoes, and some random lettuces and leaves. I was too early in the season for most of them but, as long as they were ripe enough to eat, I didn’t care if they were small, into my bags they went.
It took three days to can and jam everything I had collected. I canned most of the raspberries, strawberries and plums and made jam with the leftovers. I pickled the cucumbers, but have absolutely no idea what they will taste like – I guess if I start starving to death I won’t care. I lined the shelves of the storeroom with my jars, and then put the onions and potatoes in hessian sacks in the darkest part of the storeroom and hoped for the best.
I hope the potatoes don’t rot. If the chap in The Martian can last on them for two years, then so can I.
Two years is a long time to eat nothing but potatoes.
Ten years is a long time to be with just one person.
After that amount of time you know everything about them; their smell, taste, jokes, moods, fears, dreams, hopes.
Nothing about me was new for James. Nothing was exciting.
I was new and I was exciting for Harry Boyle.
Harry knew almost nothing about me.
Harry knew I was the EMEA new business lead, that I lived in London, and that I was married.
That was it.
Harry might have made a joke about me being a bit of a mess, but he didn’t know that was true, not really.
Harry knew nothing of my past, nothing of my panic attacks, depression, miscarriage. Harry didn’t know Xav or Ginny or my mum and dad.
Harry didn’t know I preferred baths to showers, that I liked to sleep on the right of the bed, that my feet always seemed to be cold.
James knew me. James knew everything about me, and I hadn’t made James happy.
But I could make Harry happy.
When I was with Harry it was like the last ten years were erased. It was like I was erased. I could be who I wanted to be. I could start over.
And this time I was going to do it right.
I invented someone new. A new me.
I was funny and erudite and knowledgeable and smart. A raconteur with a raft of wonderful and detailed experiences stolen from the memories of pretty much everyone I knew. Very few of those stories were real, but all of them provided the colourful experiences of a life that Harry believed I had been lucky enough to live.
I presented Harry with an amalgamation of people and personalities. I was literally the perfect woman. I had no weaknesses, no faults, only charming quirks and eccentricities.
I glittered with life and vitality. For the first time, I looked rich and successful and was part of a rich, successful couple.
Harry took me to the best restaurants, bars and places in town. I went to the Ritz, the Dorchester, Soho House, the Mondrian. I marvelled and delighted at them and I was marvellous and delightful in them.
I didn’t include
anything in my new persona that might have given the game away, that might have alluded to my real life. I didn’t talk about my failing marriage, the all-consuming level of guilt I felt, the almost constant level of panic I now found myself living with.
I didn’t tell Harry how exhausted I was: exhausted by the subterfuge, exhausted by the huge amount of work it took to keep looking good and being good for him, exhausted by lying to my husband, family, and friends.
Exhausted by the effort of trying to be someone different, someone perfect, someone who didn’t exist.
Again.
Mid June 2024
I finally got to the local garden centre to get my gardening supplies about a week after I had meant to go.
It was the first time I had been in a shop for at least a month and it was suddenly jarring to find myself back in the real world. The old world. I realised that in this world it would for ever be Christmas, for ever be decorated with tinsel and lights to celebrate a holiday that no longer existed. Would I still celebrate Christmas? I wasn’t sure.
I heard the noise when I was packing seeds and tools into the Defender.
My new world is far from quiet. Sure, there is no traffic or machinery or human chatter, but there is a constant background hum, chirp, whistle and rustle from a hundred thousand mini beasts that are going about their daily business in close proximity to me. But that is all just background noise. Anything new always comes as a shock, whether it is the clatter of a pan falling on the floor or the squeal of some small animal that Lucky has pounced on in the woods.
This sound wasn’t frightening, it was familiar.
It was a cluck.
And then a squawk.
My heart jumped, and I spun around.
A high fence separated me from my quarry.
Last One at the Party Page 26