Done

So it's out there.  Just.  I finally got Maggie off the path of the house in Chelsea and sent her forward to the present. Six months of Wednesdays and my first draft of Asylum is finished. My daughter read it, my ex husband read it, my ex lover read it, and I'm waiting for my office wife, and the all-mighty, all-knowing Publishing Director at Pedantic to read it.  It's nerve-wracking.  I'd rather take my knickers off and walk down the street that take that first step into showing work that someone may or may not like.  My ex was shocked at his own portrayal saying I got him bang to rights, which actually wasn't the intention.  My daughter thought I didn't need the baby or the other sister, which may be Freudian, and my ex lover wondered if he were the taxi driver (he isn't).  But these people either love me or hate me, or a mixture of both and their opinions are all slightly touched by their relationship to me which in some cases is deeply troubled.  At work, it's a professional reading it.  A professional who may not want to hurt your feelings, but may still think it's weak or even bad.  That's a tougher audience to please.  But what's a book if nobody reads it?  I couldn't give a stuff about publishing it, because if working in publishing teaches you anything it's that getting a book to a publisher doesn't mean anyone reads it, often not even most of the people working for the company.  It's not a mark of your worth, but it is the point of doing it - letting it be seen.

So while I'm waiting for comments, I've gone back to Jennifer, whose tale is tame compared to Maggie, and she - like  me - is a bit lost.  In a limbo of not knowing what her story is, where she's going, what's happening to her.  I've taken one of her daughters already and it's up for grabs where her mother is.  I started it with a clear idea but didn't like the first draft - it was too melodramatic, so I'm toning it and her down.  One day it will suddenly take shape and show itself to me, like Maggie's did.  But at the moment, I'm living with the two different women in my head, already missing one, and slightly irritated by the other.

A new term.

There was a commotion on the doorstep as I left for work this morning.  Mr and Mrs Posh-Posh moved in last year and I expected to see their children given that it was their posh dog who was barking but instead it was a woman who I assume is Mrs Posh-Posh's sister, her Scottish husband (Posh Scot obviously) who looked at me as though I were the one standing on 'his' path, rather than the other way around, and three sprogs in too large blazers with fake badges on the pockets.  You know what I mean, the badges for schools that have twee names and were begun in 1993 to cater for the over-entitled classes who are afraid to send their over-priviledged kid to the local state.  The Unicorn, or   - in the case of my own kid - The Harrodian.  Not that I was afraid, no rather it was the other way round.  I don't think the local kids were ready for my martinet of a daughter and feared she might incite a coup.  At The Horrodian (sic) she fit right in.   First thing I did, as with all the other kids, was teach her how to fake my signature.  The next six years passed with only minor events, and one or two visits to the headmaster (smoking, truant, no hard drugs).

But it made me choke, seeing the kids in their square shouldered blazers and summer print dresses, and long shorts.  It's going to be a scorcher of a day, but there was condensation on the windscreen this morning, and I needed to pull the quilt over me in the night.  At seven thirty there was that open fridge door chill, albeit with the promise of sun to come - a slight autumn haze in the sky, and there were these little things obviously going off for their first day of school and nursery.  A new term.  The start of the new year, I always and still think.

Almost thirty years ago, that was me, holding a baby in my arms, with two more bedraggled and beribboned with new clothes and hats on elastic to grow into.  They were my children, off to Bassett House, and Glendower, and Pembridge Hall, carrying lunch boxes and sports bags and apples with stickers on them.  And now I'm the mad old bat next door.  I heard one parent jaw to the other that 'Baudelaire was going to Bassett House' where my children all went.  (Okay not Baudelaire, but Bo which is just as ruddy pretentious)' so I guess he'll be in his blue blazer with the intertwining initials and the cap doing the walk I did myself thousands of times.'  When I moved into our house, we were the aspiring middle classes, gentry-fying the neighbourhood, grabbing it from the Gladyses and the Ernies who skipped happily off to a distant suburb where they could buy a small mansion for the price we paid for their terrace.  But now, it's the upper-classes who can afford it.  The ones with family portraits in oil and furniture 'inherited' along with the money from their upper class parents, who "might as well' go off to India for a month when Mr Posh-posh gets made redunsant, and who  see 'Mummy and Daddy' every weekend in the 'cuntry' after spending millions to do up the house to their standards - mostly plate glass floor to ceiling windows that they hide behind with shutters and curtains and steel grids, which they're rarely there to enjoy.  But you can bet that Daddy doesn't wash their car, cut their grass, or live in a semi-detached in Abingdon, as mine did.  We're the new Gladyses and Ernies.  The Posh-Poshes will eventually push us and our pink staircases out and turn the whole street into Mouse Ear Grey and glass.

I like my life, but oh I miss the old one.  I miss being a young mother with a waist.  I miss my little children even though my big children are great.  I miss being the new girl.

More in the pink

One of my friends saw the covered table with the paper flowers on it and asked if I was having 'children' round.  I guess she thought it looked childish.  Good.  I still want a Barbie Dream House, I guess.  In continuation of the Barbification of the house, I lifted the hideous red carpet and had a man with teeth like pegs in to paint it with a pink stripe up the middle (same colour as the loo floor - seemed a shame to waste the Designers Guild floor paint.  I should have known that a man who doesn't take care of his teeth might be equally slapdash with his idea of 'neat' because this guy does not know how to colour within the lines, nor how to measure distance as the stripe is ever so slightly off to the left.  When I took the tape off it was full of smears and leaks, but by that time he had already disappeared for a week and fitted the carpet to a metal strip that didn't keep it fixed.  Enough.  I decided I could fathom the mysteries of Frog Tape myself and touch it up as and when I feel like it.  Barbie isn't planning on a visit any time soon, and we don't care that much.  I quite like it.  It's fun.  My friends house is a shrine to minimalism and stuff lying around because they're so minimalist that there's no where to put it.  I prefer mine.  I like clutter, I like pink, and I like paper.  The problem is that you do one thing and set off another ten that need doing.  I have more plans than time to do them.  I feel like a kid with a pot of poster paints and a big blank canvas that I can do whatever I like with - cover it with wrapping paper, draw on the walls, nail shoes to the wall and use them for keys.  Oh yes.  You can't see those in the picture.  They're from Nigeria, and I got them from the friend who thinks my house looks like Playschool.

I can only imagine what she's going to think.

Soft pleasures

 It doesn't look much, I admit, but I've just picked the first decent crop of tomatoes - the tiny ones are snowberries and are really sweet and delicious.  The larger yellow ones turn peach on the vine and taste like nothing you can find in the supermarket.  The red ones are brandy wine, also wonderful and the green zebras, sharp and zesty.  There was a time I'd have been more excited by buying a pair of shoes that picking a few tomatoes, but those days are gone with my thin thighs and the ability to balance.  There are times when I'm sitting out in the garden under the tree, and Bf looks over at the neighbours fig tree and says he'll need to cut it back, and just that makes me love my life.  Is that sad?  If it is, pass me a hankie and let me weep into it with contentment.  Of course I'm superstitious saying this, fearing that stopping to enjoy the view will bring a thunderclap down on my head and knock me off my perch right back down the mountain, but what's the point of climbing if you can't enjoy being up there?    I didn't get a picture of the Persian rice cake, or the Bisella, or the cheese cake cup cakes made from apples from the tree and blackberries from the cottaging capital of West London, aka Wormwood Scrubs, where I noticed an awful lot of single men sitting around on benches who, I'm sure, were there for pricks of a different kind.  Shame.  It used to be such a nice place to walk around in, and now it just feels sordid and unsavory, though I wish them luck amongst the brambles and the Rotwielers.  It can't be comfortable.

One little frog

Today I cried for only the second time since the pills kicked in.  Speaking as someone who used to blub at the Cancer adverts, pictures of my kids when they were small, and even the thought of Truly Madly Deeply, five months is something of an all time record.  And yet there I was, at work, sobbing.  Le Petit Frog is hopping off to another pond, and leaving me, like my ginger cat, bereft.  Lest you wonder why the cat cares, well his beloved frogs are of the small, spotted, hoppy variety, 17 of which he's brought home in the last months, legs and feet awebbed and waving, and in so doing, depleted the entire frog population of the neighbourhood.  We lost three, but all the others have been repatriated to other homes in the vicinity of a pond, by means of the tupperware box that has now been named the frog box.  Bf carries them tenderly to a nearby park by the council estate of White City, where he sets them free, often being watched by a gaggle of drunken Polish workers - migrants of a different sort, who must feel the English are very bizarre.

My Frog, though, is my dearest colleague who is also leaving us after almost 5 years, for pastures new, and life in our pond will be very much depleted, as he really does bring a smile to my face every day, and brightens up the office.  I've said before that work is the new family, and it's always gutting when one of your dearly beloved family leaves the nest (okay, mixing my metaphors here).  Not one for gushing, I am bereft to be losing my office son.

However, the second reason I cried recently was when I heard that my real family may well be increasing, albeit second-hand.  Apparently, my husband is trying for a baby.

With another woman.

call it a speeding car

Day four in the slaughter house.

I killed five times this morning. 

The old are easy. They don't move get around much, or move very fast -or at all sometimes.  Instead they snooze contentedly away, not stirring even when disturbed, their worst already done. You can despatch them easily and whack them while they're asleep.  They don't even know what's coming. The babies are the hardest as they're lively and all over the place, but they're the ones you want to kill first.  Get them young.   I have no mercy. As I kill I feel victorious, not even appalled any longer by the carnage I wreak. I kill with my bare hands and wipe the blood off my fingers without feeling so much as a qualm, then I leave their bodies where they fall and walk over them. The killing is the easy part. It's what to do about the silent ones, the ones who hide in the dark, the left behind...

I didn't see the threat at first. Live and let live, I thought when it was just a scarf here, or a jumper there. But then it was the Turkish carpet. The Betty Jackson mohair coat. The cashmere sweater. The cashmere sweater (s). The camel hair scarf. The red LK Bennett dress. So many sweaters and dresses that I've started to wear them holes and all, like it's a fashion detail.  But still they came -on and on and on and on through my vast collection of clothes I don't wear and which don't even fit me and yet I hold on to them, now just a haven for destroyers laying waste to everything they touch. Moths. The quiet invasion.

But I too can be quiet, carrying out covert operations on walls where I simply crush them with my thumb. I gently shake the row of coats hanging outside my bedroom and if anything flies out I snatch it in my hand, but most of them don't fly, they just cling on, dopey with a belly full of silk, and I pinch them into oblivion. Others require more force, a rolled up Chelsea flag, and a mop. The mop sweeps them off the ceiling and crushes them at the same time, while the tip of the Chelsea flag, gets right into the cracks where they hide and obliterates them like Tottenham fans. I learned the hard way that clapping the between your palms only sends them up and off in the draft of air the force creates where they flitter off into the camoflage of soft furnishings.

I killed ten yesterday. Twelve the day before and twenty one the day before that. But still they come. My house is a moth factory. Now the internet tells me I have to wash all my clothes at high temperatures or dry clean them, or even put them in the freezer – though I've barely room for a box of Cornettos in there, let alone fifty black dresses. I also need to take all my clothes outside into the sunshine (what's that?) and brush them, then wash all the walls and vacuum the entire house, including drawers and closets - clean like it's 1957 - then throw away the bag because they'll eat the dust and fly back out again. Finally I'm told to put all my clothes in moth-proof bags (make a mistake and what you are effectively doing is making a moth house and giving them a nice big enclosed feast to enjoy until you release them later). Dear God, can't you just smite them, or drown them in the Red Sea or something? Furthermore I'm going to have to redecorate since the walls are like a bedroom in a Greek hotel – covered in splodges and smears, black, red and sometimes, perfectly moth-shaped where their dusty shadow is impregnated in the paint.  Frankly it's getting hard to tell the real ones from the corpses. Still, this morning's killing spree is over. Until tonight when I'm back in assassin mode, ready to strike again.