Reality has dropped on me like a python from an overhead tree and is currently draped heavily around my shoulders, coiling itself around my neck.
Manhattan seems like a distant dream. Even the memory of my long anticipated and finally redeemed weekend at the Connaught has faded away like the colour on a much washed shirt - the highlight of which was a suite with a bed big enough to actually sleep in. Considering my theory that hotels only exist for two things - sex and room service - it's strange that what this one finally delivered was a full night's slumber, each of us marooned on our own side of no-man's land in the great cool divide of smoothed sheets, turned down at the corner like bookmarked pages; his and hers placemarks. However, we know each other well enough by now that there's no discussion about who sleeps where. It's one of the few things I'm sure of in this unfamiliar dance that is getting to know someone. He on the right, me on the left, curled in opposite directions like single apostrophes in separate clauses that in the morning revolve to slip back into the same sentence.
Then the bathtub drains away the last bubbles. The steam evaporates from the inside of the shower and runs tearily down the condensation on the bathroom mirror. The empty bottle of Laurent Perrier is upturned in a lukewarm puddle of melted ice, slumped like an unwell Jeffrey Bernard to the side of the bucket. Stems torn from plump strawberries decorate the delicate white china with green stars and cherry stones fill a bowl: He loves me, he loves me not. Our champagne glasses sit abandoned on the bedside table; mine, undrunk from the night before, as flat as my spirits as we rewind the weekend back into our individual bags. His thumbs dance across his electronic screen until a space floats up to accommodate me on the other side of August which suddenly seems like a long, slow, age away. Then we leave, just the sound of my heels, slapping against the soles of my flip flops on the solemn Sunday street, him walking slightly ahead, his arm tucked tidily into his pocket. My ex would, and still does, say: 'Shanglini' which means, link with me, in Arabic. But no invitation is issued and I'm back on unfamiliar territory. The irony that you can spend the weekend with someone but be afraid to take their arm is not lost on me.
Lovely romantic idyll over - this, then, would be the anti-climax.
At home, thankfully, the couple staying with my daughter have also left. We had watched them in the kitchen, one entwined around the other, he kissing her neck, talking about each other in the third person, in baby voices.
'Two fricking years they've been living together, and they still carry on like this.' She hissed in my ear as we excused ourselves, de trop in our own home.
'I've even had to give up my bed for them and sleep on the sofa.'
I wanted to throw a bucket of water over them and remind them they were guest and might like to comport themselves less like they were about to have sex on my kitchen table, which I feel should be my privilege. Though, I wisely don't voice either of these desires.
'At least you don't have to sleep underneath them.' She said, wincing.
I shuddered, wondering if it would be better to hear your friends overhead or your mother and her lover?
'And even when we're out together, they're petting each other. They were smooching all the time in the restaurant last night, kissing each other's noses.'
They had slept (we hoped) until eleven the previous morning and then the man appeared in the kitchen, plonking himself down at breakfast beside me and Worcester man, treading where even my children fear to intrude. So coming home alone, I am very glad not to find them still in the house, joined at the hip when my own feels suddenly empty.
When I arrive, however, elder daughter's bedding, is still straddling the sofa and scattered across the floor though she herself has gone to stay with her own boyfriend. Younger daughter is holed up in the fetid pit she calls a bedroom but comes downstairs to complain that there is no food. There is a taut cling-filmed bowl of paella, untouched, from the night before and three chicken breasts in a tray that only need to be heated, but these don't, apparently, count as food since they require some preparation, and a fork, to eat. There are families of cereal bowls in the sink, and water sloshes from the other, broken, fridge every time the door is opened to reveal a week old chocolate cake and crumb-strewn, but otherwise empty interior. Cigarette ends are spilling out of a flower pot in the garden where the umberella has blown over in the wind and fallen on the steps.
Elder son is hunched cross-legged on the sitting room floor wearing earphones, using his computer which he has brought downstairs and plugged into the internet so he can 'work' which seems to be a euphemism for MSN Instant Messenger. There is not one single clean drinking glass to be found anywhere. Younger daughter is drinking diet coke from a silver teacup. All other vessels seem to huddled underneath elder son's bed. He is, by the way, twenty two. Not fifteen. And he works in a bar. But washing glasses at home seems to be outside his job description.
My sister has rung in my absence. The second I hear her voice I know the news is bad. Her husband has lung cancer. She cries down the phone and I cry with her as Younger Daughter comes into my bedroom and perches on the edge of the bed, unmade from Friday night, with Worcester man's coffee cup still on the tray on the floor and the imprint of his body on the pillow beside it. Hastily, I wipe away my tears while scanning the room for other incriminating evidence of sex that neither of us want her to stumble across. She idly paints her nails while sifting through my make up. She discovers my new Benefit concealer. I quietly kiss it goodbye and wish that Myla had a cosmetics range which would protect it from thieving kids who might, on seeing the box, avoid it, thinking it was something tawdry that they shouldn't investigate.
I shake my head at her questioningly and shower water over my cheeks and she mimes that she needs some money to go to the shop. But seeing I'm upset she waits until I put down the phone.
'What's up?'
I relay the bad news, still not believing the awfulness of it, even as I hear the words come out of my mouth.
Her face crumples briefly before the safety curtain falls. 'Well, I suppose I'm not surprised. He does smoke.'
I remember the sodden flower pot full of fag ends in the garden that are mostly hers, but with the inability of youth to imagine their own mortality, this doesn't frighten her. She doesn't know, yet, what it feels like to watch someone you love suffer. I reach into my purse and give her twenty pounds from which, later, I get three pounds change.
'Oh I owe you two pounds twenty,' she says as she hands it to me. 'I had to buy a deodorant.' I see a twenty package of Marlborough Lite lying beside her pillow, which I'm guessing is not going to protect her from body odour but is probably what I paid for.
A French film at the Gate on Monday afternoon after a tiring day at work catching up on several hundred emails - most of which are junk - does nothing to cheer me up. Nor does the fact that my phone doesn't ring for the remainder of that day, or this, except for Mark the builder who calls to see about taking out my weeping fridge which he mops up gently with a rag before carrying it though the door.
'What are you going to do now?' he asks, seeing me hollow eyed and glum.
'Nothing,. You?'
'I'm going to Chelsea to see about a job in Cadogan Square.'
I nod.
'Fancy coming for the ride?'
I'm already opening the door of his little red Mercedes and climbing in.
We negotiate the traffic, he parks and leaves me listening to Marvin Gaye singing Lets Get it On while he meets with his client, and then he slips back in beside me, tucking his pencil into his dreads.
I massage the python who contracts his muscles at the nape of my neck and crushes my holiday relaxed shoulders into a deep V of anxiety. 'Where do you want to go now, gorgeous?' He asks, grinning his gap toothed smile.'
'Anywhere. Just drive and keep on going.' I say.
And so he does.
