I'm doing my taxes in self-employed solidarity with all the other leave-it-to-the-last-minute financ-o-phobics out there in freelanceville. The sitting room floor is covered with blank taxi receipts for journeys I don't remember taking and blank deposit stubs for payments I can't remember earning, let alone putting in my bank account. I make less than almost everyone else I know, and yet still I'm clueless about where some of these cheques have come from.
On the debit side, I'm slightly less confused - painfully so. There it is - spread in front of me on the threadbare Turkish carpet: my life in till receipts. The credit note at Jensen (guilt does not come cheap) for the returned gift my husband bought me for my wedding anniversary, presented on the day he decided to leave (if this was fiction, nobody would believe it), sits forlornly on its own. There are piles of bills for meals I ate in ignorance, some I choked on, and others I never wanted to eat, the last toyed with on a series of dismal blind dates before being split in half, right down to the last penny of the 10 percent service. There are the credit card slips for evenings of Italian moaning at Julie's Wine Bar; airline tickets bought in happier times when I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead and what some of these trips concealed, more airline tickets when all was revealed and heels were being kicked (mine, this time), guarantees for electrical appliances which broke down along with everything else last year, receipts for shoes I haven't worn, and clothes that no longer fit, and bills for haircolours that I've bleached out, and dyed back again. There are also a lot of point of sale transactions at various branches of Oddbins and Threshers Wine, clumps of expenses for a book I'm probably never going to publish, and wads of paper scraps scribbled with enigmatic phrases, once considered words of genius, but now just words. It's strange. I can recall sitting in a hotel room in Guernsey writing some of these sentences down, but can't for the life of me think why I ever thought they were profound.
The worst receipts rear up like scorpions hidden in your shoe: the post office chit for a parcel sent to France, meant for other eyes. I torture myself wondering what the package contained though I already know from the joint Amazon account which CDs and Novels were shared with the new love interest. Take it from me. When your partner starts reading poetry, you should know you're in trouble. When the old volumes of Cavafy come down from the high shelves, your redundancy cheque is already in the post.
I don't want to look at the telephone bills with the 033 area code, and I don't want to second guess every minute of my long past life, but nevertheless I do. I remember where I was when each of the calls were made, and what I was doing when this hidden life was still folded away like one of those kid's fortune telling puzzles, just waiting for the answer to be picked and the future to be revealed. Who the hell wants to know their future. The past is more than enough to deal with.
Especially when so little of it is tax deductable and you still have to pay for it all.
