Friday. It used to be the high spot of my week and now I greet it with the dread of a debt collector. I come back to the house with my heart in my heels. There is three days worth of junk mail lying on the doormat, shoes laid out like dance steps on the tiles of the hall, hoodies and jumpers hanging with one arm hooked around the stair-rail and the smell of burnt toast hanging bitterly in the air.
In the kitchen carbon films the counter tops as though we’ve been dusted for fingerprints, and indeed there has been a crime. The crime is filth. Dishes seem to be gathering for some sort of grime convention. It’s making me feel like I’m 19 again, but not in a good way. It reminds me wearily of kitchens gone by - you probably remember the sort of place I mean - melamine counters peeling at the edges, spotted grainy, stainless steel sinks with other people's pots containing the memories of other people's meals, all piled on top of each other like the leaning tower of pizza, food scattered like confetti all over the stove, clogging up the drain, and crumbs crunching underfoot.
There's a lid that once closed an ice cream container and when I pick it up melted ice cream curdles and slides off the plastic all over my feet and on to the floor.
It suddenly strikes me that I’m in flat share hell with my own kids, but instead of it being some faceless landlord that owns the furniture and pays for the home maintenance, it’s me (with magnanimous help from the ex).
So it’s my lovely black lacquer dining table that I bought fondly imagining it surrounded by friends (that I don’t seem to have) set with all my beautiful candle sticks and Designer Guild plates (the former have been burnt down during last weeks house party and are covered in wax, and the latter are wearing their name tags for the convention in the sink) and instead find it covered in CDs a computer, two screens, laundry, papers and three glasses.
There is unfolded laundry all over the kitchen table, pots crusty and cold on the oven, dirty laundry in two bags vomiting clothes all over the upstairs hall, the bathroom should be condemned and there is a trail of cocoa puffs all over the floor just so the mice can find them before the ants do.
This is why people used to send their kids down the mines. Just to get them out of the bloody house.
But at least you’re not alone, friends say. And yes, it’s true, I’m not alone, except in any way that’s enjoyable.
I am tripping over people, I find them sleeping on my floor, lying in my bathtub, wearing my bras, pointedly not eating my food, borrowing my concealer (I’m fifty for goodness sake – who do you think needs more concealer – me or a sixteen year old with peaches instead of skin?)
On the way back from the daily walk round Wormwood Scrubs, Nel and I ran into her neighbour.
'Oh hi,' she greeted me enthusiastically. 'I am so glad I saw you, I just wanted to tell you that I’m off on holiday with two books written by people who live around here.'
'Oh yeah', I try to sound enthusiastic, but it would be a stretch under normal circumstances, in today’s climate I don’t really want to even admit that there exist other writers.
'That Sadie woman who is on Richard and Judy and was shortlisted for the Orange, she lives down there' (she points) 'and the whatsername something about Moths, lives down there – she was handing out copies of the book when she was picking up her kid from school. She said to me, is this naff?'
(Yep, it’s naff)
'…and I said, no, I bake cakes and hand them out, you write books and hand them out.'
(okay it’s not that naff, because a cake takes like thirty minutes and a book takes that many months, so it’s just faintly desperate – I like her already.)
'…so next year I’ll take your book on holiday.'
Hahaha, I laugh weakly. As though I want to know that there are two other really fantastic writers who live within two streets of me. Does that help. Have their husbands also left them? Are they also living with the mistletoe of with adult kids who still think they are five?
I already know the poet who used to live up the road until he left his wife, and that Margaret Drabble has a house a few streets across, and I know that Will Self used to live round the corner in my friend Rosie's house. I know. I know. I’m a citizen of literary, shagging, dinner party London. But I don’t have a work permit.
I’m in the kitchen doing their bloody washing up.
