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Evening

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Friday

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Acknowledgements

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MORNING

1

Today started like any other, but then . . . veered off course. It all derailed pretty quickly, to be honest. Little things snowballing, building up to an avalanche. Like that poem about the horseshoe nail: ‘For want of a nail . . .’ I can’t remember it now – God, brain fog again – but it starts small and before you know it a whole kingdom is lost and you’re screwed. All for the want of a tiny nail. On Thursday, 16th June, I should have been in my office looking online for nice places in Padstow, but for various reasons I called my boss a prick and had some sort of episode, and here we are.

A headache came on last night, creeping up the side of my face like a dark force, prodding me awake. Ordinary painkillers do nothing, and I’ve long given up asking the doctor for something stronger. Last time, as I hunched, whimpering, on a vinyl chair that reeked of disinfectant, he suggested I try meditating, and turned away to tap something on his computer. I panicked it would be one of those coded notes medics use, calling me malingering or making sure I didn’t get any more sleeping tablets, so I backed out, saying I’d download the Calm app. I did download it, but the sound of rain made me fret that the leak in the loft dormer had opened up again, so it didn’t really work.

Unable to get back to sleep, I got up early and pottered round finishing jobs from the night before, folding washing, reloading the machine, blinking as the colours danced in front of my eyes. Scraping dried tomato off the base of the casserole dish, fetching lamb out the freezer for later, mentally adding naan bread to my shopping list, giving Grizelda her breakfast, which she lapped at fastidiously. The fridge door was a seething mass of Post-it note reminders, scrawled by me, ignored by my family: Cancel milk, Call roofer, Hima’s birthday, Jonathan’s birthday, Dry-cleaning Tuesday, Cat flea treatment, Ethan inhaler, Order garden waste bags, Book smear, Fix landing light, Pay Lottie, BDD WRAP?? 

Those booming capitals reminded me, as they were supposed to. I started checking emails and got sucked into one about the work party later, a viewing of a show we’d made. I had nothing to do with it, didn’t want to go, didn’t want to be involved, but Vince, my boss, had insisted we all turn up. Now Imogen, Vince’s PA, was sending me guest lists and asking me to check in case anyone on it was someone he hated: Clover, You’re a Life-Saver!!!! Not even 6 a.m., and I found myself scrolling down a list of names to see if they’d included a commissioner Vince had offended or a former employee with a grudge.

Names, names, mostly unfamiliar, one I recognized here and there, and then a particular selection of letters seemed to balloon and scatter in front of my eyes until the pain took over and I couldn’t look any more. I slapped the laptop shut, pressing my hands to my face to push away the ache, banish it. Who cared who was going to the party, I certainly wasn’t, so it didn’t matter either way, just forget it, put it out of my mind, none of my business. After pinching the bridge of my nose for a second, trying and failing to do some mindful breathing, I decided to get on with the day, to see if ignoring it would make it go away.

My head was still pounding as I unloaded the dishwasher. Robbie always loads it wrong, fork prongs down, probably to make sure it remains my job. I mean, I pretend I can’t understand council tax for the same reason, but the balance of things we both pretend we can’t do seems unfairly uneven. When everything was sorted and put away, I rooted about in the ceramic chicken that lives on the windowsill in the kitchen. It’s supposed to hold eggs, but who decants eggs? Instead, it’s a repository for random tablets – indigestion, constipation, congestion – you name the ‘tion’ and we’ve got a tablet for it in the chicken. I like to be ready for any development – steeling myself for disaster, Robbie says.

There they were: two leftover Vicodin pills, the last of a packet he brought back from a work trip to the US where he wrenched his shoulder getting his bag down from an overhead locker. Robbie said they made him high for a week, and he had to stop taking them because he was starting to enjoy it too much. He dropped the last two into the chicken, saying ‘These are not to be taken, under any circumstances,’ and I said ‘Why are you putting them in there then?’ and he said ‘As insurance against those circumstances.’ Like, if they were there, no one would need them. But I did need them, and they were bound to be out of date, so I was doing everyone a favour by getting rid of them. It was basically tidying up, hoovering pharmaceuticals, being useful. But there was also a hint of rebellion there, consuming forbidden fruit – fruit forbidden by my husband, whose loading of the dishwasher should be criminalized. I took them with a swig of tea, and immediately felt better. Well, I felt much the same physically, but had the sated feeling I get after decluttering. Pills, with added jam.

Except . . . what if I was allergic to Vicodin? It’s American; they put different substances in stuff over there, like chlorine and pesticides. I pulled up my sleeves to check for hives, the beginnings of anaphylactic shock, then noticed ancient antihistamines nestling at the bottom of the hen – bingo. I took three to finish the blister packet, and chucked it in the bin, figuring that at the very least, this medicinal mix should achieve some degree of numbness. Those letters, that name, still dancing in front of my eyes, stabbing at my skull . . . I needed the drugs to delete them.

That done, I started laying out breakfast things; the cereal library the twins require every morning to get them up and running, a cafetière for Robbie’s coffee, which he mainlines as soon as he gets out of bed. I love coffee, but it makes me twitchy as hell so I gave it up in favour of tamer tea-caffeine. Seems lately I react to everything one way or another. Bloated after carbs, queasy after meat, gassy after vegetables. Can’t even drink a sip of water without peeing every five minutes. Sometimes I drink wine in the evenings just to dehydrate myself, so I won’t be up every hour in the night, heading to the bathroom, quaking in the dark at the sighs and grinds of our creaky old house. But wine gives me a headache. In my twenties, I could sink a bottle and come up smiling the next morning; nowadays I can feel my brow tighten just looking at the glass. An anticipation of undoing. The older you get, the more things stop being fun and just become a chore. Music festivals, flights abroad, wrap parties – someone always has to prepare for eventualities, deal with the mess.

The headache had receded by the time Robbie came down just after seven, in his MAMIL gear, ready to cycle to work. No point in telling him about the drugs, he probably forgot they even existed, it would only cause a fuss. For the same reason, I didn’t mention the forks, or the plates thrown in every which way so that they came out flecked with bolognese. My husband began making his coffee with the concentration and precision of a lab technician studying embryos, while I put another tea bag in a cup and picked up my book. I’ve been reading The Blind Assassin for about eleven years and have never got past page 48. Sure enough, as the words blurred before my still-prickling eyes, the washing machine beeped. I got to my feet.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it,’ said Robbie. He pressed the plunger down slowly, focused on the rolling granules. We both knew he had no intention of emptying the washing machine. I prefer to do it myself, since he once took the wet clothes out and left them in a pile gathering crumbs on the kitchen table, while he went off to fetch the New European from the front doormat. He didn’t come back.