Time Off

His lowliness descended upon me today. Offered to take both girls off my hands, down to the park and then up into town for a meal. After biting back my instinctual veto, and almost choking on the blood welling up from my impaled tongue, I nodded assent, which he in his razor sharp keenness, took as dumbfoundedness on my part. After shoeing up and shooing out the girls, with swollen, muffled yelps, I shut the door on them and braced my back against it, before any of our strung quartet could have a change of heart. I tracked the report of their receding progress, until I could register no further clamour.

I relinquished my station at the door and walked into the lounge. Paused and listened very intently for the silence. But all I encountered was ear-popping voided space. I shook my head trying to clear the muzziness, but it just pounded back on the inside of my cranium like an aggrieved neighbour. I glimpsed the sunlight dappling in through the nets and tried to bask in it. Shut my eyes and imagined I was a sundial. But the only horology was the thumping of blood being pushed though my temples, as I drew the staunch lids tightly over their charges. Close my eyes and make a wish. Or a potential migraine.

The very conjuration of this period of free time beyond all expectation, had obviously expended my desire quotient. The stopper was most firmly back in the bottle. The jobsworth net curtains diffused any and all sensation of heat and light away from my face. I could always ruffle them with a prolonged scrub in the washing machine. I reopened my eyes and felt wooly. My neck was cricked with the alien angle of projection up towards the sun. Its sinew was unfamiliar with the extrinsic function of an easel; rather its tendency tilted a grooved stanchion for eyes scanning surface peril at floor level. The careful quotidian plotting of trine for mother and two daughters, had been eclipsed. Disoriented, I had to flop backwards into an (the lone) armchair for support, banging the back of my knee on the arm as I did so. My proprioception sensors were underwhelmed. Misfiring into the evanescence of unreciprocated sonar. Gagging on the white noise of insensibility. They, me, we were on our own. Thrown back upon one another. Naked and exposed. In a vacuum, spawned by the sudden displacement of all other matter in my solar system. I just didn’t know where to put myself.

Moonwalked into the kitchen, to make myself a coffee to ground me. Dedicated half the morning to watching the kettle boil. I chanced my gaze upwards again, as I circled my locked neck in petition for a pardon. A dark tangle of dust-laden cobweb clouded my vision. Gently swaying in the kettle’s steam convection, flaunting itself on my dance ceiling, now that it had finally caught my eye and cut in. I swivelled round looking for something with a long handle, when I checked myself. I was not going to squander my precious remission on housework. Be it precipitated directly in the wake of children currently on day release. Or indirectly by the neglect their duty of care propagates everywhere else around the house. After all, today was to be a lady’s excuse-me, not a mother’s ruin.

The kettle ceased its adhãn and I was about to pour the scourging liquid into my ceramic mug of oblation, when I noticed the spider herself had also heeded the call. I didn’t doubt that she had only come to check on the integrity of her web. In a momentary reversion to my former self, I silently applauded that she had been able to distinguish the steam’s gentle tug on the silken fibres, from that of light-winged prey. For, I used to marvel at all things arachnid. Not being one of those women sent into a fit of the screaming abdabs by the slightest suggestion of furry, eight-legged, creepy-crawling. (After all, the four pairs of smooth limbs of Amy and regressing Suzanne slithering around, readily renders me prostrate). No, I maintain a sense of proportion. I’ve never regarded them as stealth bombers waiting to spring SAS-like from silk parachutes and storm any female embassy. Pound for pound, and though the spider has a fine battery of tricks and talents, I always believed I could make my reach advantage count. Besides, I used to delight in that whole silky death thing. Meditated too, on the zen-like patience of the spider just sitting there, unattended in its antechamber, waiting. Maybe tugging a strand like a punkahwallah, just enough to entice some addict of motion. And how I used to revel in the delicious thought, of the sometime grisly upshot of spiderly mating. A true and worthy illustration of vagina dentata.

No, I was proud that sister spider here, has elected my kitchen to be her killing field. It was far from an intimation of dirt and decay. More one of nourishment and life. A cockroach, now that would presage breakdown and ruin. But spidey sweeps my kitchen clear of insects, just as I’d enlist a cat if ever a rodent invaded the parlour. We’re allies here in a war of modest sterility. Sticking our callused digits in dykes, to hold back each sullying surge. A sorority of sanitary homemaking. Spidey saw there was no food for her and scuttled back beneath her parapet; the breastwork of a rent in my brickwork, a job needing a man, in this want of men. So now sister sister too was deserting me. Clearly she had only padded down to see if my vibrations afforded her any prospect of mealtime. Just as my daughters might. Cupboard love, when I’m Old Mother Hubbard. And my doors only swing open one way. The kettle had cooled its hackles during my abstracted contemplation. I didn’t fancy undertaking the whole rigmarole again. Of the steam drawing her back out. Time to leave her alone. In peace. Like I hanker after.

What to do with this free time ? Something uniquely for me. I was without a single aspiration. Just how to fill a hole darn it ! So I retired to bed. The privilege of a lie down with no prospect of interruption. Except from the prowling dreams that lapped at my unguarded imagination. I woke up glazed behind gauze. My mind had posited a restorative repose, but it had been shellacked. Whether by prickings of dreams, or its own internal audit as to how much deeper the salvage operation, after eight plus years of deprivation, needed to go. A root and branch overhaul. Root and branch. It immediately fired in its invoice and withdrew any further credit terms.

I could not open my eyes they were so beaten. In the abeyance, I could smell the aroma of my own mucus. This made me queasy and I countervailed by scratching my arm. Hard. I could feel the chalky dryness of the skin. Not only the epidermis, but the dessication of the corium beneath. Root and branch. It was as if I had been buried alive, stewing in the necrosis fermenting through me. Still I could not ramraid open my eyes. Is this all there is ? An endless hibernation ? After the kids grow up and skedaddle out of my life ? Having pithed me, deseeded me and scraped out all my marrow. Until there’s nothing left. Except consigning myself to my hand-crafted coffin...

My eyes bolt open, my trunk swings from the bed in one taut flow. I hear the report of the girls even before the door chimes. Saved from further morbidity by the bell. And henceforth slump once again into damnation. I try to envision the make up effect I’d be after, if I still pandered to cosmetics. The look of a confident, independent woman, who has just serenely engaged in a most delectable morning. Rather than the look of Euripides’ Hecabe, yoked amid the shattered wreckage of Troy. I’ll just have to use my facial muscles to feign the effect. Appears they too have stagnated without recent employment, since, on opening the front door my children burst into sobs. As he is smiling beatifically, I can only assume that it’s more likely to be the scary clown face they’re confronted with, than anything he’s wreaked upon them.

Shockworker Daddy had evidently put in a good shift. The girls were exhausted and put up no resistance to retiring early to bed. I resumed my journal, to put the counter-case. I was at a bit of a low ebb this morning. Caught at a vulnerable moment. First time without the children. Bit of a loose end. Time to sally forth, rather than be an Aunt Sally. This had better be good !

Er, um ...