Housekeeper's Diary

Hello. What’s new? Here at Chaos Central, Meep has contracted the plague (a cold) and appointed himself Supreme Guardian of a bit of plastic the size of my thumbnail. While I am self-medicating with narrowboat videos - these slow, hypnotic canals being my current drug of choice, all over again, and Ben has escaped to the wilderness with his spanielly mates.

It is Sunday. I have committed the crime of sleeping through morning. Then I drank enough coffee to fuel a small village, which naturally made me immediately comatose (because my body is hilarious), so I slept again. And then, plot twist, I felt absolutely zero guilt about any of this because I am a proper grown-up who can sleep whenever she bloody well pleases.

Except that’s a lie.

I talked about this with Ben this morning. I said “I might stay in bed all day long.”

He said, “Yes, do.”

“I’m not sure I can,” I said. “I’ll feel naughty in my head.”

And “Me too,” he admitted. “But we need to teach ourselves we’re safe. That if we need sleep and there’s nothing urgent, we’re allowed to sleep.”

And then he went to the shop and brought me soup to sip in bed. And told me to sleep afterwards and I said I would and then as soon as he left the house again, I felt naughty in my head and got up and cleaned what amounts to cleaning here, and then I got dressed and ate a tangerine and drank a gallon of water and I was up and not asleep at all and so I put Youtube on the TV, in search of my favourite narrow-boater and then of course I opened my laptop because if I am upright I should be working because how else will I afford tangerines? And soon I was not sleeping at at all, pushing my exhaustion into the dark cupboard at the back of my skull, and overseeing a war between the cats over said piece of plastic and watching a woman living a dream life tootling up and down the canals, reading books she finds in telephone box libraries and frying halloumi in orange Le Creuset pans.

And now Ben is home with muddy feet and it is five o’clock in the afternoon and it is still light and that means Spring is on the way and I don’t know what to do with that, because I don’t feel ready, as if I have only just settled into Winter and want to stay awhile? But time is rude and life moves on and so must we. The house sale has reached the this is really happening stage. Between us, Ben and I have sold exactly one house in our entire lives (my cottage, a decade ago; him never, despite living in many). So our anxiety is doing spectacular acrobatics: Will the buyer flee? Will the searches uncover something apocalyptic? We simply don't know, don't know, don't know. Heckity pie, I wish we knew.

I barely remember selling my darling cottage. It was less than a year after Mum died and I was walking through fog. People tramping through, saying nothing, judging silently, all of it borderline hellish, so I accepted the first offer just to make it stop. Because trauma makes fools of all of us, doesn’t it? That house was haunted by ghosts: Mum. The hope Finn’s dad and I felt when we first bought it, before Finn was even dreamed into being. The Richard years, those unspeakable horrors I still can’t speak of, the thing that happened after he was gone that I have never found words for. All of it terrible and beautiful and gone, so the house had to go too, so I could breathe again.

How much I say here in these diaries without saying anything at all. Because I still can’t. Still can’t put it into words.

Late afternoon. I have done ten minutes with my pink weights and I am a woman ready for ANYTHING. Ben is giggling at his phone and the lady boater is filming herons and making pizza and visiting a floating market and I am ready to party. Because my days are utterly upside down and these hours, five to seven o’clock, are when I become fully alive. Most awake. Most capable of world domination. Also the hours when I annoy Ben most spectacularly: dancing as I shimmy past him, talking at the speed of light, making myself laugh at my own jokes like the absolute menace I am.

But a person who finds herself hilarious is probably a person who should sit down and behave, so instead of staging my nightly one-woman comedy extravaganza, I’m finally surrendering to Sunday. Browsing Borrowbox and borrowing this and this and this for the late hours, when Ben is asleep and I am not, for lately I cannot read in daylight and almost need midnight to be able to make sense of story and words. Like some sort of literary vampire. Perhaps then a castor oil facial, which renders my skin plump and glowing but gives permission for brewing spots to make themselves loud and angry. A price I am willing to pay because there is something lovely about waking to skin younger overnight. A plate of salt beef and pickles? A glass of Malbec and an episode of Goggle box we missed on Friday night because we were yet again haunting the streets of Hebden Bridge, peeking into the windows of closed shops (cheese - oh my! - and organic food and gorgeous flowers) and establishing the whereabouts of the post office and the Library because we may yet choose a life of cottage and boat on the canal.

Now. Ben is out fetching supplies. The house is quiet for a while. Only the drip of the bath tap to provide a rhythm for the dance party in my head. An online newspaper to close down on my phone because anymore of all that is the horror of the world right now will undo me. A child to chase because I haven’t heard from him for a day. Cats to separate in case they eat each others ears, and candles to light so I take a long wash in the darkness of the bathroom.

And so it goes on, and so it goes on, and so it goes on. And Ben will laugh because I will make him laugh and the child will just turn out to have been working very hard indeed and the cats will curl up next to each other in the manner of a married couple relieved the war is over, and all shall be well, because all is always well in the end, and if it isn’t well then, it isn’t, as my Mum used to remind me, the end at all.