Fuck.
The gas and air bottle is too heavy to carry.
(Door opens and closes. Quiet. Only heavy breathing.)
I’m so sorry. I hope you’re with your babies now.
(Sobs. Sounds of running and fast breathing. Four-minute gap)
Why is the pharmacy always in the bloody basement?
(Door bangs.)
Shit. It’s been raided.
(Fast breathing and sounds of frantic rummaging. Rattling of pill bottles thrown to the floor.)
Yes! Oh, thank God. Thank you! Thank you! Got them.
(More rattling of pill bottles, then sound of a zip being pulled. Door opening and shutting. Feet running. Panting. Door creaks open.)
(Sudden silence.)
(Whispering.)
Shit. Rats.
(Quiet movement and rapid, short breathing.)
They’re right by the exit. About, maybe, thirty of them.
Shit. Shit. Where did they come from?
Oh fuck.
(Whispering.)
They’re coming towards me.
(Something creaks and bangs.)
I don’t know if they’ve seen me. I’m on a trolley bed above them.
(Shallow breathing. Faint squealing and scampering.)
(Sigh of relief.)
They’ve gone.
(Creaking and movement.)
(Then … scampering. Squealing.)
Get off me!
Ow! Get off! GET OFF!
Ow!
I’ll stamp on you I will, I’ll kill all of you!
(Heavy breathing, loud rustling, squealing, cries of pain, running.)
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Someone help!
(Loud squealing and rustling.)
(Something falls heavily and clatters across the floor.)
Get off me!
(Groaning. Squealing. Rustling.)
(Running feet.)
(Creak of a door opening and banging shut.)
They bit me, they BIT me!
I’m out but they bit me! Christ, they would have eaten me!
They attacked me! How did they know? How did they know what I was?
(Running.)
I’m out, I got it and I’m out.
(Very loud rustling. Deep breathing, sobbing. Voice is no longer muffled.)
I want to go home.
Recording ends.
August 2024
When I got back Lucky was still alive. Barely. His side was oozing thick pus and smelt like the dead corpses from five months ago.
I dissolved antibiotics and pain relief tablets in water and spooned it into his mouth, massaging his throat to make it go down like I had seen vets do on TV.
I cleaned his welts again and sprayed antiseptic on them.
Then I sewed the deep gashes shut.
He woke halfway through for a few minutes and tried to bite me, but was too weak. So, instead, he howled pitifully until I howled along with him. Then he passed out again.
I only had to stop sewing twice to vomit, which I think was pretty good going.
I used a running stitch.
I had no idea what I was doing.
After I had finished I showered outside and the water ran deep burgundy red.
I carefully moved Lucky from the kitchen table onto my mattress and lay down next to him.
I was more tired than I have ever been in my life.
As I closed my eyes to sleep I realised that, if Lucky was dead when I woke up, I probably wouldn’t leave the mattress again.
September 2024
I wrote my last diary entry two weeks ago.
Lucky is still alive.
I don’t know how long I slept after sewing Lucky back together. It was dark when I got up and seemed a very long time before the sun rose again.
Literally and metaphorically.
After that sleep I found the alarm clock (yes, I have one, I want to be able to time my contractions … if they ever bloody well start) and I set it to ring every four hours.
For the next five days I dutifully gave Lucky antibiotics and water every four hours, and cleaned and creamed his wounds three times a day.
At first, I thought it wasn’t making any difference and he would die anyway. He slept the whole time, his breathing was shallow and ragged, and the gashes in his side still stank and wept copious amounts of pus.
But, on day four, he opened his eyes and his side didn’t smell quite so bad.
By day six he could lift his head enough to sideways drink from his bowl so that I no longer needed to spoon water into his mouth. On day eight he started to eat again, and on day ten I carried him out to sit in the shade by the river. He mustered enough energy to bark at Simon, and I knew he was going to live.
It is now day fifteen, and we have got into a routine of me carrying him out to the river and then bringing him food and water all day. He is still worryingly skinny and weak, so I am letting him eat whatever he wants. So far that mainly seems to be corned beef and tins of beef stew. If I open a can and he doesn’t want it, I eat the rest for my dinner. I’m not proud.
Three times a day I carry him to the edge of the woods and leave him for a bit to do his ‘business’. Then I carry him back to the river and clean up whatever ‘business’ he has left.
He is not daft, and I am beginning to suspect that he is starting to fake his level of weakness. This afternoon when I left him by the woods I could have sworn I saw him streaking back to his blanket when I was coming to get him. He hadn’t done his ordinary afternoon crap nearby so I think he had done that elsewhere. When I picked him up he gave me his most innocent doggy grin and licked my face.
He’s definitely milking it.
And I couldn’t care less.
He can milk it from here until eternity if he likes. I am just so happy he is better. I can’t stop smiling and hugging and kissing him. He has stopped smelling of rot and is beginning to smell of grass and sunshine again, and I am astounded by how comforting that smell now is to me – and appalled by how much I took it for granted before. The first time he managed to lift his head up and give me a doggy grin after he started to get better, I thought my heart would burst with happiness.
I would carry him to the ends of the earth, fetch his food and water until I die, and clean up his crap until my arms fall off.
He is my family.
The last time I saw my family, my other family, was November 2nd 2023.
My mum and dad had their traditional fireworks party in the back garden. 6DM was racing across America and, even though there hadn’t been an official announcement yet, people were naturally social distancing. But everyone loves fireworks and, as the party was outside, it was pretty busy in my parents’ back garden.
Everyone at the party would be dead in a little over a month.
Ginny and Alex had popped in to show Radley off to my mum and dad and Ginny generously allowed my mum a cuddle, but I could tell she was already nervous of letting anyone other than herself or Alex hold her. They left the party straight after. In my wildest dreams I would never have thought that the next time I would see Ginny would be the final time I would ever see her and that she would tell me to buy a gun.
Xav hadn’t come to the party. My mum and dad had invited him, but he had said he was busy.
I hadn’t seen Xav in about a month and had been hoping he would be at my mum and dad’s. I wanted to make up with him, to beg him to forgive me. I had lost James, was in the process of losing Harry, and had realised I was dangerously close to losing Xav if I didn’t stop being such an idiot.
He was, and always would be, my best friend.
I should have called him, but I was worried I would be too late. That he, like James, would have given up on me.
I was too scared to call and find out.
I hadn’t seen Harry in a fortnight as he was busy fighting the economic impact that 6DM was already having on his company; so I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him, a chance to end things.
>
That’s a lie.
I could have seen him. I was avoiding him so that I wouldn’t have the chance to talk to him or end things.
The only positive was that, during the fortnight where I hadn’t seen Harry, James and I had reached a weird equilibrium. We’d both been at home more, so had tentatively started to talk, have dinner together, sit next to each other on the sofa to watch TV. The day before he had laughed at a crap joke I had made. Not a forced laugh, a real bubble of merriment escaping out of him.
It was nearing the end of the party. My mum and dad had put music on and a few scattered people were dancing.
‘Let’s Stay Together’ by Al Green came on and people coupled off.
It was one of my mum and dad’s favourite songs and I was watching them laughing in each other’s arms in the middle of the lawn. My dad couldn’t dance for shit so my mum basically had to pull him around, stopping him from tripping over their feet.
But they didn’t care. They were laughing with each other, blowing puffs of frosty breath into the air, pretending they were smoking. After all this time they were still in love, still each other’s favourite person, still naturally, and without any effort at all, making each other happy.
I didn’t have to look to know who it was when I felt someone reach for my hand.
The hand that held mine had been doing so for over ten years.
James was watching my parents too. He turned and smiled at me.
I looked at our hands, our fingers intertwined like so much of our lives were.
I pulled him gently towards the other dancers.
He paused and then tugged his hand softly and carefully out of mine.
‘I’m just going to get a drink.’
He kissed me on the forehead and went into the kitchen.
And then I knew. I knew he loved me, I knew he would never leave me, and I knew I would never leave him.
But, together, neither of us would ever truly be happy.
So, I walked to the middle of the grass in my parents’ back garden, and I danced.
I danced on my own to one of the greatest love songs of all time.
No one stared, no one pointed at me, no one cared.
But I cared.
I was dancing and I was happy.
On my own.
At the end of the song I looked up and saw my mum and dad staring at me. They held their hands out for me to join them, but I shook my head.
I grinned at them.
I like to think they knew then that I was going to be okay.
I lay in bed the next morning for a long time after James had gotten up.
I couldn’t think how to say what I needed him to hear.
I knew it started with something about how me being unhappy wasn’t his fault, about how it wasn’t anyone else’s fault but mine. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t taken the time to fully form ‘me’ before I became part of ‘us’, that I needed to learn to love myself as much as I loved him, I needed to start dancing on my own more. I wanted to tell him something wise about loving yourself before you can love anyone else, like Ginny had told me. It all made sense in my brain, but would probably have fallen from my mouth in a jumble of words and lost meaning.
In the end, when I eventually got out of bed, I didn’t tell him anything.
Because when I went into the kitchen to sit down and talk to James, he told me the PM had collapsed the Channel Tunnel.
Then he took my hand and held it tight.
I didn’t pull away.
September 21st 2024
By my calculations, I am now somewhere between six and twenty-four days over the date when I should have given birth.
What shall I moan about first?
The rain.
It started raining at dusk four days ago and, after fifty-four days without rain, I was ecstatic. No more watering the vegetable patch! More fish! Green grass! I went outside and danced around, literally naked, in the rain.
I fell asleep to the magical sound of it thundering on the roof of the Hobbit House.
And I woke up to the sound of it still thundering on the roof of the Hobbit House.
By that afternoon the vegetable patch was thoroughly soaked, Simon had taken up permanent residence in my doorway to hide from it, and the thundering on the roof was becoming a form of Chinese water torture.
Three days in and the vegetable patch is flooded and water has leaked into the polytunnel and started to flood that as well, Simon has now moved into the kitchen area, the roof of the Hobbit House has a leak in one corner, and I can hear ominous dripping in three other places.
The river is lapping at the top of the bank so I have had to move the chickens into the Defender in case their chicken run is flooded. The Defender is actually abandoned halfway up the drive because that is where it finally ran out of diesel after my trip to the hospital and, barring diesel gushing miraculously forth from the ground, that is where it will stay for eternity.
Lucky is still thin, but otherwise displays all the excitement and new-found energy of a six-year-old after a bout of illness. He keeps running out into the rain to play and then bounding back into the Hobbit House and shaking muddy, dog-stinky water all over the furniture I have just cleaned. I still love and appreciate him very much, but am thinking of putting him in the Defender too.
My nesting has gone to shit because there is mud all over the floor of my home and dog-water splatters on the walls, ceiling, and furnishings.
The baby feels as if it is trying to push its way out of the top of my vagina, I am so huge that there is no place I can comfortably sit, and I HAVE BACKACHE. In fact not backache, back-agony. It doesn’t matter though because I am so anxious about ‘not being in labour when I should be in labour but being happy that I am not in labour because I am scared to be in labour and not sure I can survive labour’ that I am constantly pacing around the tiny Hobbit House because, of course, I can’t go outside BECAUSE IT IS RAINING!
And my other question is – if it’s raining, how can it still be so fucking hot?
I need to calm down.
Fuck it. I’m having a beer.
September 22nd 2024
I don’t know if it was the beer, but last night I slept, properly slept, for the first time since after Lucky was attacked.
I slept and I had an incredibly vivid dream.
I dreamt I heard an aeroplane outside.
Not unusual. When I first was alone, I used to imagine I heard them all the time. I was constantly scanning the sky or jumping out of bed to look out of the window. Of course, there was never anything there.
In my dream I was so convinced there was a plane that I got out of bed, put wellies and a coat on, and went out in the rain to look.
The dream felt so real. I could feel myself hauling my huge tummy out of bed, struggling into my boots, pulling on my too-tight raincoat.
And when I went outside I saw it. I saw the lights of the plane getting higher and higher into the sky, flashing and blinking red.
I stood and watched until I couldn’t see them any more.
When I woke up this morning my pillow was wet and my boots and raincoat were by the front door. Wet.
But, I don’t have time to think about the potential significance of that now.
It is still raining and the river breached the bank last night. Water is now edging towards the doorstep to my home.
I am trying to move things off the mezzanine so that there is space for me, Lucky, and, I suppose, Simon to move up there if we have to.
It’s not ideal, but I can’t leave.
I don’t know where we would go and, without the Defender, we have no way of leaving anyway. We’ll just have to stay here and wait for the rain to stop.
I am weirdly calm.
The river is rising, we are about to be flooded, and my tummy has been tightening all day.
I’m pretty sure I am in labour.
September 23rd 2024
I wrote my last entry late la
st night and the sun is now just coming up so I am setting my alarm clock to say it is 5 a.m. I need to know the time so I can monitor how things are going, and 5 a.m. seems as good a time as any to start.
I am definitely in labour. My back pain has ramped up a notch, and the tightening in my tummy is now starting to become painful. And regular. It feels like the cramps you get from a bad stomach bug.
Oh, and my waters have broken. All over the floor of the Hobbit House. Someone should warn you how much of that stuff there is because it is everywhere. Everywhere. I’ll be honest, seeing as it looks like the ground floor of my house is about to be flooded I haven’t really bothered clearing it up that much. I am starting to feel a bit knackered so am prioritising what needs to be done.
I have been out in the rain already and given the girls about three days’ worth of food just in case this goes on for a long time. The water is a long way from the Defender so they should be fine until I can get to them again.
I have organised the mezzanine and laid out all my labour equipment. Weirdly, considering my baby shopping and visit to the hospital, there isn’t as much as I thought there was. Blankets, nappies and clothes for the baby, towels, bottles of water, energy bars, some paracetamol (turns out it is fine to take), three hot water bottles, a couple of buckets in case I can’t get down to the toilet, books, my CD player. I’ve got the scalpel and the nasal aspirator. Not sure what exactly I am going to use either of them for, but better to be safe than sorry.
I haven’t managed to get the mattress up here, so I am going to have to give birth on the floor. I have made a sort of nest out of blankets and towels that is pretty comfy and I imagine that, when the time comes, the lack of a comfy mattress will be the least of my problems. Lucky is eyeing my nest up enviously.
I’d brought a huge tub back from the garden centre and had been planning to fill it with hot water and sit in it like a mini bath to help with the early pain, but I can’t fit it inside the Hobbit House and I am not sitting in it in the rain, so that’s out.
I’m already exhausted, but am panicking too much to sleep, or even sit, so I have been pacing the floor because all the books say that is good for helping things move along. Obviously, it’s not a huge space that I am pacing in, so I have managed to go back and forth 622 times so far. I am going to see if I can get to 1,000, and then I am going to try to sleep again.
Last One at the Party Page 30