COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Gill Sims 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover illustration © Tom Gauld/Heart Agency

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Source ISBN: 9780008301255

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008340476

Version: 2019-04-03

DEDICATION

For Rona … the avalanche

CONTENTS

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  JANUARY

7 APRIL

8 MAY

9 JUNE

10 JULY

11 AUGUST

12 SEPTEMBER

13 OCTOBER

14 NOVEMBER

15  DECEMBER

16  Acknowledgements

17  By the Same Author

18  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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JANUARY

Wednesday, 3 January

The first day back at work after Christmas and New Year is always a bit of a slog. The sudden realisation that foodstuffs exist other than Toblerone and Quality Street and cheese, and that it’s now frowned upon to start on the white wine at 2 pm, is always a shock to the system, let alone remembering that you’re a functioning adult with a responsible job and clothes with non-elasticated waists. When your first day back is followed by your first relationship counselling session after what could be described as a ‘difficult’ Christmas, it’s even less fun.

Christina, our counsellor, came highly recommended. Well, Debbie in HR at work said that Christina had saved her sister’s marriage after it turned out her sister’s husband had been having it off with their twins’ first teacher since they started primary school, and said twins were in Year 10 when this all came out, and he also had a thing for being spanked while covered in PVA glue and glitter (hence his attraction to a primary school teacher and their easy access to such things), so I thought that if Christina could wave her magic wand and sort out that little peccadillo, then surely Simon and I would be an easy fix – a walk in the park, practically!

After all, no peculiar kinks had come to light. He hadn’t betrayed me with a woman I’d bought several ‘World’s Best Teacher’ mugs and bottles of wine for, someone I’d sat across from while she outlined the importance of reading every night with my precious moppets, all the while having a life-size model of my husband’s penis on her bedside table, made from the scraps of clay left over from making Mother’s Day presents with her class and decorated with his favourite glitter, had he? I mean, when you put it into context like that, the fact that he had had a one-night stand with some sexy señorita that he met while on a business trip to Madrid really wasn’t that bad, was it? Or at least, it could have been so much worse.

That is what I keep telling myself. ‘Chin up! It could have been worse!’ He could have had a predilection for dressing up as Ann Widdecombe. He could have had a thing about bonking someone dressed as Ann Widdecombe (I’m really not sure which would be more disturbing). He could have followed in the footsteps of Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Daddy who left Lucy’s Perfect Mummy high and dry when he ran off with Lucy’s Mummy’s sidekick and wannabe, Fiona Montague, leaving Lucy’s Mummy to face Fiona (whom I never liked, very smug and always just a bit too try-hard – though clearly Lucy’s Perfect Daddy liked how hard Fiona tried, even though he’s got very fat since moving in with her and is obviously overindulging in Fiona’s bloody endless cupcakes that she was forever posting on Instagram) at the school gate every morning. Of course, the kids are now too old for the school gate as they’re at Big School, so I suppose I wouldn’t have had to do that anyway. And Simon doesn’t like cupcakes.

But on the other hand, it was really quite bad enough. When Simon told me a couple of months ago, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Literally winded. I still don’t know what possessed him to tell me. Guilt, he said.

I’d heard people talk about a ‘maelstrom of emotions’ before, but I didn’t honestly know what that meant until then, as I veered wildly between rage and despair and a really quite strong desire to kill him, and periods of calm during which I convinced myself we were mature adults with two children and we’d been together for twenty-five years, give or take, we loved each other and we could get through this – only to have the whole cycle start again. I felt so sick I couldn’t eat for three days, which has never ever happened to me before; periods of high emotion normally lead to relentless comfort eating for me. I did lose ten pounds, so one must look on the bright side when one can.

After a couple of weeks of Simon looking hangdog and saying he was sorry, and me finding the rage wasn’t really abating at all, and all our attempts to discuss it like mature adults generally ending in me shouting something about ripping his bollocks off if he told me one more fucking time that it didn’t mean anything, because if it didn’t mean anything, then why the fuck had he done it in the first place, and yes, yes, I realised it was ‘just sex’ but didn’t he think that was quite e-bloody-nough, it was clear we weren’t really getting anywhere and perhaps we needed some sort of professional help.

I heard Debbie in HR holding forth on the wonders of Christina (she was describing the clay-modelled knob ornament at the same time) and discreetly asked for Christina’s number – ‘for a friend’, obviously, as one does not tell Debbie anything one does not want the entire office to know. In some ways this trait of hers is useful if you want word of something circulated quickly – you can guarantee that if you tell Debbie something and stress it’s in ‘the strictest confidence’, every single person in the building will know about it by close of business.

Simon was reluctant to go at first, making British noises about ‘airing dirty laundry in public’ and ‘it all being a bit New Age wank’, but he agreed to give it a shot if it would help me stop shouting so much. So off we went.

After the initial session, Simon was surprisingly into the counselling. I think he liked the fact that the first thing Christina said was that she wasn’t there to apportion blame or opine on who was wrong or right, but only to mediate and give a safe space for us both to talk without judgement. Simon also very much enjoyed the fact that Christina would not allow raised voices in her office, and so I wasn’t allowed to shout at him, which gave him an hour’s peace a week.

I thought all that was pretty rubbish, actually. I’d 100 per cent been hoping she’d totally judge, apportion blame, tell Simon how shit he was and take my side, before pronouncing some suitable punishment upon Simon, so he could atone for his sins and thus we could all move on with our lives, once Simon had done some marital form of Community Service – like, oh, I don’t know: doing all the ironing for the entirety of the rest of our lives, and changing all the loo rolls for ever more, and being put in the stocks and flogged. Or something like that.

Instead of agreeing Simon was a total shit and must do penance before we were able to move forward, Christina said things like, ‘Mmmm. And how did that make you feel?’

Today’s session followed the same pattern as usual – Simon was surprisingly good at talking about how things made him feel, especially how his Spanish señorita had made him feel (‘Alive. Wanted. Like I mattered to someone!’). I was slightly less good at it …

‘Mmmmm. How do you feel about Simon feeling like that, Ellen?’

‘Fine! I feel fine about it! Absolutely fine!’ I hissed through gritted teeth, because Christina would not allow shouting or insults and so I couldn’t scream, ‘You mattered to me, you insensitive bastard. You wanted to feel wanted, well, how do you think I felt? But I managed not to fall into bed with anyone else, didn’t I? I stuck to my marriage vows, even though I could have had sex with plenty of other people if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t because I’m NOT A TWAT, but now you expect me to feel sorry for you? And also, for something that “didn’t mean anything”, it seemed to make you feel quite fucking special. And also – BAAAAASSSSSSTAAAAAARD!’

Then Christina said, ‘I feel like I’m getting a lot of anger from you, Ellen.’

‘Nope,’ I beamed. ‘No anger here!’

‘I think you’ve brought a lot of anger today, Ellen. Would you like to talk about it?’ Christina mused, while Simon nodded wisely, and I seethed to myself that of course I had brought a lot of sodding anger to the session. If I wasn’t angry and broken and wretched, would we even bloody well be here, and surely the whole point of all this is that Christina is supposed to make me feel less angry, not more so? £70 an hour to be told I’m angry? After our first session I briefly flirted with the idea of retraining as a counsellor, only a good one, one that instead of saying, ‘How did that make you feel?’ and claiming it wasn’t her job to apportion blame, would say, ‘Well, that’s a bit shit, isn’t it?’ and ‘Your husband is clearly an arsehole!’ I’d be excellent at that. Simon told me that that wasn’t the point of counselling, actually, and if people wanted opinions like that they could go to Mumsnet for free.

Something finally snapped inside me. Maybe it was the thought of all the shoes I could have bought if I didn’t have to pay Christina £70 to tell me I seemed a bit cross.

‘Are you surprised I’m angry?’ I snarled. ‘It’s always about Simon. What Simon wants. What Simon feels. What Simon needs. Who cares about what I want? Who cares about what I feel? Who cares about what I need? Nobody. All we do is talk about how Simon feels.’

‘Well, I do keep asking you how you feel, and you always say “Fine”,’ Christina pointed out mildly.

‘Well, of course I’m not fine!’ I wailed. ‘My husband has had it off with someone else and my marriage is in tatters. Why would you think I was fine?’

‘But I don’t,’ said Christina. ‘That’s why I keep asking you how you feel. You’re the one who tells me you’re “fine” and denies any anger or grief. Go on.’

‘Simon says he felt unwanted and neglected. Well, does he not think maybe I felt the same? That I still feel the same, only a million times more now? He got someone to make him feel “wanted”, he got a bit of excitement, he got the thrills and the validation and some Spanish sex, and what did I get? Nothing. He’s had all his fun and I’m supposed to just get over it and move on like nothing has happened. And I’m still stuck with a man who doesn’t even notice me, let alone make me feel wanted.’

‘I do notice you,’ said Simon indignantly.

‘No, you don’t,’ I said in despair. ‘You don’t even see me anymore. I’m just there, like a piece of old furniture. You don’t notice how I look, you don’t notice what I do, you certainly don’t notice how I feel.’

‘I do notice how you look,’ insisted Simon.

‘You don’t. No matter how dressed up I am, you never notice, you never say anything, you never compliment me. When I ask you how I look, you don’t even look up from your iPad, you just grunt, “You look fine” – and that’s it.’

‘Well, you do. You always look fine. What do you want me to say?’

‘Simon, “You look fine” means “Yes, you’re respectable, your skirt isn’t tucked into your knickers, you haven’t got spinach in your teeth and you’re fit to leave the house.” You don’t notice if I have my hair done or I’m wearing a new dress or I’ve gone to a bit of extra effort. You make me beg even for that grudging “You look fine!”’

‘I didn’t realise it was a big deal. I’m sorry. I’ll not say you look fine again.’

‘Pay me a compliment now. Go on. Say one nice thing about me.’

‘This is very good,’ breathed Christina.

‘Ummm.’ Simon thought hard. ‘I know. You make the best lasagne I’ve ever tasted.’

I stared at him in disbelief.

‘Lasagne? Really? LASAGNE? That’s the most noticeable, memorable, NICEST thing about me you could think of? Fucking LASAGNE?’

‘Well, you put me on the spot, and the other things I could think of I couldn’t say here.’

‘So lasagne. That’s what I’m reduced to. Twenty-five years together, and you’re only here for my lasagne?’ I howled.

‘Ellen, I’m going to have to ask you not to raise your voice,’ said Christina in her irritatingly calm way.

‘Oh sorry. Sorry. I wouldn’t want to make a scene or anything. But seriously, Christina, you tell me I’m angry, and are you surprised I’m angry when that is the sort of thing he says?’

‘Ellen, you know I’m not here to take sides. This isn’t about me – it’s about you and Simon. Simon, how do you feel about Ellen saying you don’t notice her anymore?’

‘I think that’s pretty hypocritical because she doesn’t notice me either,’ said Simon crossly. ‘She doesn’t know who I am, she doesn’t know what I want in life, she doesn’t know what interests or excites me –’

‘Tapas, apparently, rather than lasagne,’ I muttered.

‘Ellen, I’m going to have to ask you not to interrupt Simon again. Just let him speak,’ said Christina. Christina’s sessions are rather like being counselled by the bloody Supernanny. I really wouldn’t be at all surprised if she put me on the naughty step one day.

Simon carried on: ‘You want to keep the family together. You don’t want the children shuttled back and forth between different homes at the weekend, introduced to step-parents, used as pawns in their parents’ games, like you were. And I think most of the reason you’re still here is because of the kids, in an attempt to spare them that, rather than an active desire to be with me. You say I don’t see you. Well, you don’t see me either. I could be anyone. An anonymous father and husband figure in your life who you need to keep things together.’

‘That’s better than the housekeeper, cook and nanny you see me as,’ I objected.

‘Ellen, this is the last time I’m going to ask you to stop interrupting,’ said Christina. ‘If you do it again, I’ll be forced to give you a yellow card.’

I glared at her. She glared back. It was blatantly obvious the ‘yellow card’ was no more than an adult version of the naughty step. She never threatened Simon with yellow cards. She clearly liked him better than me, and it wasn’t fair. I half expected her to get down on my level, look me sternly in the eye and tell me I had to the count of three to start behaving myself.

‘I don’t even know if you love me anymore, Ellen,’ announced Simon with a dramatic sigh. ‘And that makes me question whether I still love you. I just don’t know.’

I opened my mouth to respond to this – fuck your yellow card, Christina – but she suddenly announced, ‘Oh dear, this has been very useful, but I’m afraid our time is up!’

So it’s OK for you to interrupt then, Christina!

I put my coat on in a daze, and we left Christina’s office. In the street, the cold air hit me in the face like a slap from a wet kipper and brought me back to my senses.

‘You don’t love me anymore?’ I snarled. ‘What has all this been for, if you don’t love me anymore? Why have you put me through this?’

‘Don’t make a scene, Ellen, not in the street!’ said Simon briskly. ‘Come on,’ he added, steering me into the bar next to Christina’s office, ‘let’s go for a drink.’

‘Is that really all you’re worried about? A scene in the street? Anyway, we need to get back for the kids,’ I objected.

‘They can hang on for another half-hour. We need to talk.’

‘We’ve just been talking. You’ve made everything very clear. What’s there left to talk about?’

‘OK, I need to talk to you.’

It was a very nice bar. It had cosy booths and ambient lighting, and under any other circumstances I’d have been thinking how totally Instagrammable it was. Simon got me a glass of wine and sat down beside me.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ he said. ‘You’re tearing yourself into pieces. I can’t do this anymore.’

‘You can’t do this? So even though the person who is supposed to always be there for me, who is supposed to never hurt me, even though this person has basically ripped my heart out and left me in pieces, I need to get over it, because you’ve had enough of me hurting? You’ve cheated on me, compared me to lasagne and then told me you don’t love me, and what? Am I supposed to be happy about that? Yippee! My husband and the father of my children doesn’t love me anymore! Hurrah, my life is fucking complete, at last!’

‘Please keep your voice down,’ he hissed. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t love you.’

‘You did.’

‘No, I said I wasn’t sure. And that I wasn’t sure if you loved me. Of course I love you, I’m just not sure if I still love you like that. I mean, I don’t even know if you want to be married to me anymore,’ he said sadly.

‘Of course I do,’ I protested. ‘I wouldn’t be going through all this if I didn’t, would I? Don’t you want our marriage anymore?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I know I’m unhappy, and I have been for a long time, long before all this. I know I can’t say sorry any more than I have, but it doesn’t make any difference. I know I can’t keep trying to change the past, I can only change the future, but as things are, you won’t let me, because you can’t move on from the past. So, I think we need some time apart.’

‘What, like you going away for the weekend or something? Another jolly?’

‘No, some proper time apart. Geoff at work is moving to New York for three months and doesn’t want to leave his flat empty all that time. I’ve said I’ll move in and look after it. Gives us both some space, some time to think, some time for us to consider what we really want. I’m going to move in there tonight. I had one final hope that this evening with Christina might have helped you start healing, but it didn’t, so something has to change.’

‘You’re leaving me?’ I whispered. ‘After all that, after everything you put me through, you’re leaving me? And you’re doing it using all those old clichés of “I love you but I’m not in love with you” and “I just need some space”? Could you not even have come up with an original line? Christ, all that’s missing is “My wife doesn’t understand me.”’

‘Well, I do need some space, OK, and some time. And you don’t understand what it’s like for me. I can’t stay with you if I’m always going to be the bad guy, living with your constant anger. It’s destroying us both.’

‘And there we go. Well done, you’ve hit the hat-trick of how to leave your wife. So you’re just walking away, moving into Geoff’s nice little bachelor pad and living the life of Riley, leaving me to pick up all the pieces – again? Because you’re not happy that I’m a tiny bit pissed off about how you’ve behaved and you, what? Want to find yourself?’

‘Ellen, please, it’s not like that.’

I drained my wine. ‘It’s exactly like that.’

‘I just want to find out who I am again, that’s all. Apart from a father and a husband!’

‘I’ll tell you what you want. You’ve had a taste of freedom and fun, and you want a bit more of it, because suddenly the wife and kids feel a bit millstoney round your neck. Especially as the ball and chain won’t shut up like a good girl and turn a blind eye and let you have your cake and eat it. So you’re going for the easy option and giving up. You get the single life, and I get to keep being a drudge and bring up your children. Well, fine. It’s fine. If that’s what you want, go ahead, no one’s going to stop you. If you thought I was going to sit here and beg you to stay, you were wrong. Have a nice life, Simon. Actually, I don’t mean that. I hope your knob falls off. Goodbye.’

‘I’m not leaving you, I just need –’

‘Do kindly go fuck yourself. Or whoever else it is that you “need”.’

‘Ellen, please –’

I walked out of the bar with my head held high, and made it as far as the little play park round the corner before I collapsed on a bench, sobbing. Thank God it was evening and there were no tots bouncing merrily on the seesaw to be alarmed by the mad woman wailing all on her own. All the hours I’ve spent sitting on benches like these, watching Peter and Jane play (and fight), freezing my arse off, wishing it was time to go home, and never once did I think I’d end up sitting on one crying because Simon had left me. I thought we’d grow old together. I’d never considered a future that didn’t involve him.

I dried my eyes on an extremely dubious tissue I found in my coat pocket (at least back when the children were small there would have been several half-eaten jelly babies stuck to it that I could have consoled myself with), and resolved that that was it. I wasn’t relying on anyone else for anything, ever again. Well, apart from getting the number of a bloody good divorce lawyer from Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy.

It was a shame, I thought pathetically to myself, that I could never go back to that very nice bar and take photos for Instagram, as it would now be forever known as The Bar Where Simon Left Me. If he was going to leave me, he could at least have done it in a dive, and not spoiled somewhere nice for me. Selfish bastard.

APRIL

Friday, 6 April

I woke up in a panic, dry-mouthed and heart racing, convinced I’d slept through the alarm and that the removal men were here already. They weren’t, of course, because it was only 3.43 am, but as it was the sixth time I’d woken up like that, the chances of me actually sleeping through the alarm increased every time, and thus so did the panic. It didn’t help that in the brief snatches of sleep I’d managed in between waking up I’d dreamt that the removal men turned up but nothing was packed and so we couldn’t move, and then in another much, much worse dream, that they turned up, that everything I owned was neatly boxed up, that I was smoothly and seamlessly directing operations as they loaded their lorry, only to make the hideous discovery, while I was standing in the front garden watching two burly sorts lug out the sofa, that I was stark bollock naked, and everyone had been too polite to say anything, but there was every chance the removal men were traumatised for life by the sight of a forty-five-year-old woman standing in the street, tits jiggling, reminding them to be careful with the sideboard as it was a family heirloom.

Actually, I don’t even know why the sideboard was in my dream. I don’t have it anymore. It was Simon’s granny’s, so he’s got it. Admittedly, he didn’t really want it and had harboured an unreasonable hatred for it ever since I’d attempted to ‘shabby chic’ it up and painted it a lovely eau de nil, but I was determined to be fair, and so I insisted he took the sideboard. It was definitely fairness that made me let him have the sideboard and not a malicious amusement at thinking how pissed off he’d be every time he looked at it, nor a sadistic pleasure in thinking how it would ruin the minimalist effect he could finally achieve in his new flat but, because it was his grandmother’s, he’d be stuck with it.

After Simon’s announcement that he was moving out to ‘give us some space’, I didn’t hang around. I’ve seen too many friends and colleagues put in the same position, with their partner buggering off, assuring them it was ‘only temporary’ to give them ‘time to think’. They went off to ‘think’, and then a month down the line the joint accounts were emptied, there was a lawyer’s letter on the doormat and an estate agent at the door announcing they were there to do a valuation, because the ‘temporary thinking time’ was just a ruse to allow them to move out with minimal hassle while sorting out their financial affairs to their own benefit.

I wasn’t going to be caught on the hop like that. The next day, when I checked our bank accounts and found that Simon had withdrawn a considerable sum – apparently to cover the rent on Geoff’s flat, as it had turned out that Geoff wasn’t letting him house sit rent free, as Simon had implied – and after listening to Simon’s excuses that the joint account was ‘living expenses’ and me pointing out that it was his choice to move out into an expensive flat and why the fuck should I be part-funding that, I called the estate agents and the lawyers, removed my share from the remains of the joint accounts and got the ball rolling. Unfortunately, our house turned out to have gone up in value since we bought it, and neither of us could afford to buy the other out, so it had to be sold, all while Simon bleated on that I was being too hasty and he hadn’t meant this to be permanent.

Competitively priced family homes in catchment areas for decent schools tend to sell fast, though – rather faster than I’d expected, leaving me without much time to find somewhere for me and the children to go. And so, I find myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, contemplating a future where I’ll not be growing old with Simon in a little stone cottage with roses round the door. However, on the plus side, I will be growing old in a little stone cottage with roses round the door. That is what I need to focus on – the positives, not the negatives. The fact is that Simon had always baulked at my visions of quaint and rustic cottages, and muttered darkly about energy efficiency, and lack of double glazing, and low ceilings (surely the low ceilings would make it easier to heat, as I used to point out). He’d tut and point out all the flaws in the survey reports of the Dream Houses I showed him, sighing over wet rot and dry rot and rising damp and crumbling pointing, crying, ‘Money pit! Money pit!’ as I cried, ‘Character and soul! IT HAS CHARACTER AND SOUL! What’s a little mildew compared with THAT?’

As an architect, Simon was always able to trump me (a mere ‘computer person’, as he used to refer to my job) on all things house by hurling technical words around and citing the terrible costs of a new roof (according to him, every house I fell in love with would need a new roof, despite the clearly functional and vintagely slated roof having done perfectly well for over a hundred years), and so, one by one, my dreams were crushed under the weight of tedious practicalities.

But now, Simonless, with no unfaithful naysayer crushing my visions of stone-flagged kitchens and mullioned windows anymore, I’ve found the cottage of my dreams, and we’re moving in today. Well, it’s possibly not quite the Cottage of My Dreams. My finances didn’t entirely stretch to that, despite a small stroke of luck in my batshit-mental ex-sister-in-law Louisa deciding her latest blow struck against the patriarchy would be to become a lesbian and move to a women’s commune with her new lover Isabel, thus finally vacating the house I’d been emotionally blackmailed into buying for her several years earlier. My lingering resentment at being forced to bankroll Louisa’s feckless lifestyle with the profits of the one financially successful thing I’ve ever achieved, my lovely app called Why Mummy Drinks, obviously in no way contributed to the breakdown of things with Simon at all. But she’s gone, her (my) house is sold, and the resulting cash injection added to my share of the Marital Home meant I was able to afford to buy a Vaguely Dreamish Cottage, with not too crippling a mortgage. Hurrah! It will be magical. If you overlook the damp. Which is probably nothing that can’t be painted over. And the fact that I didn’t have much time to wait around for the perfect house to come on the market so, to afford a house with a garden for Judgy Dog and three bedrooms for the children and me, I’ve had to move miles out of town.

But anyway. I shall have a vegetable garden, and look adorable in wellies and an unfeasible amount of Cath Kidston prints (well, probably not real Cath Kidston, as it’s very bloody expensive and I’m a Single Mother now, but I can probably find some affordable knock-offs on eBay). I’m going to keep chickens – Speckled Sussexes, I’ve decided, because I liked the name and when I googled them they were described as very chatty chickens. Who even needs a man when you have chatty chickens? I just have to hope that Judgy Dog does not attempt to eat my chatty chickens. I’ve had stern words with him to this effect, but he just gave me one of his ‘I’m paying no attention to your foolish witterings, woman, and I shall do as I please’ looks. Luckily, Judgy being my dog, having got him somewhat against Simon’s will, despite Simon coming to love him almost as much as I do, there was no question of who got Judgy in the divorce. I’d probably have let him have Peter and Jane if he’d really wanted, but I’d have fought tooth and nail for sole custody of Judgy …

Peter and Jane are not entirely enamoured of my Splendid Plan to move to the country. Although in actual fact we’re not moving that far into the country, we’re still (just) within the catchment area for their school, so they’ll not be further traumatised by changing schools, as well as being from a Broken Home (do people even still say that? I just remember, in Coronation Street, Tracy Barlow shouting about coming from a Broken Home at Ken and Deirdre when they had one of their frequent divorces – not that it really mattered with Ken and Deirdre, of course, as they’d be back together again by the Omnibus).

Despite this, the children were still horrified at living ‘out in the sticks’ and the lack of late buses to transport them home from parties and bouts of underage drinking. Well, at fifteen, I suspect Jane at least has been dabbling somewhat with the Bacardi Breezers, or whatever over-sugared shit the Youth of Today drink. Peter is only thirteen, so hopefully I’ve a year or so’s grace before he too starts on the path of depravity. I live in hope, however, that they might both yet declare themselves to be teetotallers, as I’ve been a Terrible Warning rather than a Good Example when it comes to the Evils of Drink. I attempted to placate them with rash promises of providing plenty of lifts home, and brightly reminded them that every second weekend they’d be staying over at their dad’s flat in town, and so it would be a) his problem and b) nice and easy to get home from parties and the dubious pubs that serve underage teenagers. Simon was there when I announced this, and I must say he did not look entirely thrilled at the prospect.

He has meanwhile found his Dream Flat, the minimalist White Box he’s hankered after for years. He’d practically drool while watching Grand Designs whenever anyone built one of those spare, modern cubes as a house, as he looked round our cluttered sitting room and sighed in despair. There were some rows about his flat too, because, as I pointed out, he could not buy an open-plan loft, because he needed somewhere for his CHILDREN to sleep when they came to stay – something that did not seem to have occurred to him. He finally grudgingly compromised on somewhere that had one decent-sized bedroom, one small room he announced he’d use as a study and put a futon in for Jane (I didn’t know you even still got futons – I thought they had vanished after the Nineties, along with my youth and the perkiness of my tits), and what he optimistically called a ‘boxroom’ for Peter, which Peter and I called a ‘cupboard’. Apart from having to shut his only son and heir in a cupboard every second weekend, from the photos it looks like an annoyingly nice flat, although the sideboard will look bloody awful there, so ha!

Anyway, I might as well get up and have a cup of tea in peace, before starting the lengthy and painful process of trying to prise two teenagers from their pits. There’s a part of me that wonders if it would be easier to just leave them in their beds and let the removal men load them onto the lorry and install them still slumbering in their new rooms at the other end. And also, how long would it actually take them to notice they were in a different house? In fairness, Peter would notice almost straight away when he walked towards the fridge on autopilot, ready to inhale the entire contents in the name of a ‘snack’, and found it in a different location, thus delaying his ‘snack’ by an essential and life-threatening thirty seconds.

It’s a strange feeling to think that this is the last time I’ll wake up in this house. There have been a lot of ‘last times’ over the previous few days. Some of them have been quite sad, like the last time I’d say goodnight to the children in the rooms they’ve slept in since they were tiny. Peter and Jane were less moved by my tearful attempts to tuck them in last night, saying that I was being weird and telling me to go away. Other last times were less sad. The last time I had to adjust the rug to hide the mark on the floor where Judgy puked and his stomach acid stripped the varnish from the floorboards. The last time I’ll ever bang my hip on the stupidly placed cupboard in the kitchen. The last time I’ll have to wipe the countertops and ignore the large chunk out of the surface where Jane threw a knife at Peter in a fit of rage, probably because of some heinous transgression such as looking at her.

But this isn’t the time to dwell on last times. It’s a time for FIRST times, for new beginnings and fresh starts! I hope Judgy Dog isn’t too outraged by the upheaval and settles into his new home all right.

Saturday, 7 April

Well. We’re here. And I’m slowly getting to grips with the chaos and trying to tackle the mountains of boxes!

Yesterday was … interesting. As predicted, Peter and Jane were almost impossible to shift from their beds. Once they were up, they wandered around aimlessly, getting under everyone’s feet, as Peter attempted to unpack bowls and cereal so he could have another breakfast and Jane screamed that I’d ruined her life by having the Wi-Fi disconnected in the old house, and what did I MEAN, it might not be connected in the new house until Monday, and how did I not know about the strength of the 4G signal at the new house, and WHY WOULD I EVEN DO THAT TO HER, and Peter drank all the milk so I couldn’t even give the removal men a cup of tea, so I had to send him to the shop to get more, while he looked at me pityingly and explained that we were meant to be moving and getting rid of stuff, Mum, not buying more, and I howled that if he didn’t get on his bike and get to the shop and return with a pint of milk in the next three minutes, I was taking all his carefully boxed-up possessions, including all his games consoles, and giving them to a charity shop, and if he answered me back one more fucking time I might give him away too, in the unlikely event of anyone actually wanting him. The removal men meanwhile observed all this, expressionless, until Peter muttered something about ‘Don’t mind her, it’s probably her age, and the Change of Life’ as he huffed out the door in search of milk and the removal men all sniggered. Bastards.

Finally – finally – everything was loaded onto the lorry, despite my helpful suggestions about the order in which they might want to put it on, and that maybe if they put the sofa on the other side they could pile more boxes around it. The Chief Removal Man finally said, ‘Look, love, we do know what we’re doing. We do it every day,’ and I quietly seethed about being called ‘love’ because it’s one of my pet hates, especially from an unfamiliar man who is talking down to me (although I suppose he might have had a point about knowing how to pack his lorry better than me), but I didn’t dare say anything in case they decided that they wouldn’t move all my worldly possessions after all on account of me being a snowflake feminist bitch and then I’d be left sitting in the middle of the road with a big pile of boxes and two angry teenagers.

We set off, me chirping, ‘Isn’t this FUN, darlings! A splendid new adventure! We’re going to be SO HAPPY in the new house, I just KNOW it!’ while the children slumped in the back seat and complained it was SO UNFAIR that I hadn’t let one of them sit in the front because Judgy had already called shotgun (it’s his favourite seat – he likes to look out of the window for cats), and I pointed out that I might have let one of them sit there if World War Fucking Three didn’t break out over whose turn it is to sit there every single bastarding time we get in the car, and would they please just CHEER UP ALREADY, because this was a LOVELY FRESH START and we were going to be VERY FUCKING HAPPY.

As we turned out of the street for the last time ever (well, in reality it probably wasn’t the last time ever, because my friend Katie still lives across the road, and so I’ll probably be back to visit her, but it was still a Symbolic Last Time Ever), the new people who had bought the house turned into it. I accelerated slightly, lest they spotted me in the distance and tried to come after me to enquire about the Smell in Peter’s room. I’d cleaned the house, I really had, and in truth it was probably the cleanest it had ever been since we’d moved in, but nothing I did, not shampooing the carpets, not liberal quantities of Febreeze, not all the TKMaxx scented candles in the world could entirely shift that musty, fusty, Teenage Boy Pong from Peter’s room.

When people were viewing the house I had to open his windows as wide as they would go, empty half a can of air freshener into the room and hope the stench would be masked for long enough to dupe any potential buyers, but within half an hour the smell would start seeping back – an unpleasant combination of sweaty socks, BO, a hint of stale jizz and something undefinable that can only be described as Boy, all pulled together with a generous helping of Lynx. It just seems to be something teenage boys emit, however clean they are, however often you boil-wash their towels and bedding, however many hours they spend in the shower, however many cans of deodorant they empty under each pit (‘Darling, seriously, you just need a quick squirt under each arm, you don’t need to spray clouds and clouds of the damn stuff till we’re all choking on a chemical cloud that whiffs of broken teenage dreams and sexual frustration’) and however often you surreptitiously check under the bed to see if the source of the stench is a crusty wank sock stashed under there. So far I’ve been spared this horror, I presume because I discreetly provide a never-ending supply of Mansize tissues – I was so shocked when I finally realised what Mansize tissues were for (I’d thought it was just because Kleenex assumed men were snottier than ladies).

I remember (many, MANY years ago) when I was in halls of residence at university, and you could immediately tell when you’d turned the corner from the (pleasantly scented with hints of Impulse and Ex’clamation and Wella Mousse) girls’ corridor and had entered the boys’ corridor, due to the Smell. After we left halls, the university renovated the building (it was planned, we hadn’t trashed the place. Much), and I mean they gutted the whole thing and stripped it down to the bare bones. I went in to drop something off to someone after the renovation, when the whole building was spanking fresh and full of new paint and plaster, and the entire concept of boys’ and girls’ corridors had been done away with and it was all mixed sex, but you could STILL smell the Smell on what had once been the old boys’ corridors. So I think the new owners might be stuck with it. Hopefully they’ll also have a teenage boy who can just slot into the stinky room and they’ll assume it’s only his own Smell, and not a lingering whiff of the previous occupant …

Anyway, new owners successfully avoided, off we trundled to our New Start, ‘I Will Survive’ (OBVS, what else? Though Jane has repeatedly asked me NOT to say ‘obvs’, or ‘totes amazeballs’, or ‘down with the kids’, even in an ironic way) blasting out of the car stereo. The sun was shining, the birds were singing – it was all Most Auspicious.

Unfortunately, about a mile down the road, the sun stopped shining, the birds stopped singing, the sky suddenly turned black and it began to piss down royally. This, needless to say, was Less Auspicious.

The removal men were distinctly unjovial at having to unload in the tipping rain, as if it was somehow my fault and I was some kind of misguided witch who had conjured up the storm on my way here, because mysteriously I actually wanted every single thing I owned in the world to get soaking wet, and they muttered darkly as they lugged everything in. Worse, in all my excitement about my quaint and adorable cottage, I’d neglected to actually measure or work out if any of my furniture would fit in, and there were some ugly scenes manoeuvring my super-king-size bed up the most un-super-king-size cottage stairs, and trying to get my sofa through the door into the sitting room. At one point the Chief Removal Man announced, ‘You’ll have to saw it in half, love!’ and I frostily reminded him how only that very morning he’d informed me that he was a removal EXPERT, and thus I had faith in his expertise and would not be sawing my sofa in half, because he could jolly well work out how to get it in, thank you very much (after all, he’s a man, he should have had YEARS of practice at trying to get it in). The sofa was eventually manhandled in, although the dark muttering had turned into open and loud swearing by that point.

Unfortunately, now that the previous owners’ artfully placed furniture had been removed and the sun was no longer streaming merrily through the windows like it had been when I’d viewed the property, it began to dawn on me that all the ‘quirks’ of the house I’d convinced myself were ‘rustic’ might possibly also be construed as being a ‘bit shit’, even ‘problematic’. The house was also a lot darker and somewhat damper than I remembered, and there were some suspicious marks on the ceiling I hadn’t noticed before, which suggested the roof wasn’t in perhaps as quite as good order as I’d blithely assumed when I’d dismissed the survey report’s queries about it as mere naysaying.

Simon had offered to come with me to view houses, which I’d tartly informed him was quite unnecessary as I was perfectly capable of finding a house without him – after all, there was a reason he was now my ex-husband. He’d mildly replied that he was only trying to help, and had thought that in his professional capacity he might have been able to offer some useful advice, nothing more. I, meanwhile, declined his offer once again on the basis that I wasn’t going to all the trouble, effort and expense of divorcing him only to have him continue to piss on my chips when it came to finding my Dream House. Or even my Vaguely Dreamish House. Looking around the Not Quite Even Vaguely Dreamish House now, I reflected that I’d possibly been a little hasty in rejecting his offer of help.

But never mind, I thought. It’ll be FINE! We just have to be positive, as I pointed out to Jane as she wailed in horror at the realisation that she no longer had fitted wardrobes to not put her New Look hauls in, but instead had an alcove with a rail across it in front of which I was planning on hanging an adorable floral curtain.

‘HOW am I supposed to cope with that to keep my clothes in?’ she shrieked. ‘It’s fucking Soviet, Mother. It’s probably one of the things that define you as living in poverty. This is inhumane. I could report you!’

‘To who?’ I said. ‘I don’t think fitted wardrobes and constant access to Snapchat are actually included the UN’s Rights of a Child. I think it’s more things like clean water and not being sent down the mines. And anyway, you’ve never in your entire life put anything away in your wardrobe. You just chuck it all on the floor, so I fail to see how this will actually make any difference to you whatsoever.’

‘Do we even have clean water?’ moaned Jane. ‘Are you going to announce next that we have to fetch it from a well? Maybe a river? Or are we lucky enough to have some sort of pump in the yard that we can fill buckets from so we can crouch in a tin bath once a week in front of the fire and try and scrub the rural dirt from our calloused palms? By the light of an oil lamp?’ she added dolefully.

‘Don’t be SILLY, Jane,’ I said as brightly as possible. ‘We’ve a lovely bathroom, with a proper vintage claw-footed bath. And hot running water and electricity. You’re overreacting, as usual.’

‘Don’t tell me I’m overreacting!’ shouted Jane, ‘I’m not overreacting. You’re the one who drove Dad away because you were always nagging him and who’s ruined our family and made us move to a hovel without indoor plumbing, but you say I’m the one who’s overreacting! Maybe YOU’RE overreacting by dragging us out here for no reason rather than just being nicer to Dad instead of BEING HORRIBLE ALL THE TIME!’

I was protesting that we DID have indoor plumbing and wishing I could tell the children there was so much more to Simon and me separating than me just not being that happy, when I was distracted by Peter wandering upstairs and collapsing dramatically on the landing because he was STARVING.

‘You’re not starving,’ I said automatically. ‘You’re just slightly hungry.’

‘I can’t find any food,’ said Peter gloomily. ‘Like, there’s literally NO FOOD, Mum.’

‘Have you looked?’ I asked. ‘Because there are boxes and boxes of food in the kitchen.’

‘Which room is the kitchen?’ said Peter hopelessly. ‘I can’t tell. There’s boxes everywhere, so how am I supposed to know where the kitchen is?’

‘Do you think it might be the one with the sink?’ I suggested. ‘And the fridge? Were they not any sort of a hint to you?’

Peter looked at me blankly. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that.’

Peter wandered off back downstairs, in search of sustenance, and Jane burst furiously from the bathroom.

‘Is there a shower in the other bathroom?’ she demanded.

‘What other bathroom?’ I said.

‘There must be another bathroom,’ she insisted.

‘No, darling, there’s only one bathroom, I’m afraid. That’s sort of the thing about downsizing. You have a slightly smaller house. The clue is somewhat in the name, you know.’

‘But there must be another bathroom. An en suite or something. That can’t be the only one.’

‘It is,’ I informed her, as her face fell.

‘But there’s no shower,’ she wailed. ‘How am I supposed to wash my hair?’

‘Well, in the bath, sweetheart. Like people did for hundreds of years before the Americans invented showers.’

In truth, I’m not 100 per cent sure whether Americans invented showers or not, but it sounded plausible as they invented most mod cons. Luckily Jane was too distraught to challenge this statement, which made a nice change, as she usually likes to query every single thing that I say.

‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘It’s not possible. I’m not THREE, to have plastic cups of water sluiced over my head, Mother! This is awful. Are you SURE you don’t have an en suite you’re hiding from me?’

‘Why would I hide an en suite from you?’ I said in surprise (though in truth, as I looked around the dimensions of the cottage, which could at best be described as ‘bijou and compact’, there was a small part of me also hoping for some extra rooms to materialise from somewhere, like the splendid room full of food the Railway Children found the morning after moving into their own slightly less than dreamy cottage).

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why you do anything anymore, Mother. You’ve abandoned Dad, you’ve made us come and live in this dump, and all you offer us in return is wittering on about how we’re going to get chatty chickens. So I wouldn’t put it past you to hide an en suite from me,’ she said bitterly.

‘That’s so unfair,’ I said. ‘I haven’t abandoned anyone.’ I bit back my words as I was about to snap, ‘Your father was the one who moved out, if you recall, not me. He was the one needing his “space to think”, not me. I’m the one who’s always here for you.’ But I managed to stop myself in time, as my mother’s voice rang in my ears, saying those exact things to me, reminding me how she was the victim and encouraging me to take her side. I would not have my daughter see me as a victim, and I would not, even if it killed me, say anything to make her feel she had to choose between Simon and me. The only reason I’d managed to stop myself telling the children about Miss Madrid was to avoid making them pick sides. Tears pricked in my eyes at the sheer injustice of it, though, that the more I tried to be fair and not make them take sides, the more Jane raged and hated me and blamed me for everything. Luckily she’d stormed off to find something else to complain about before she saw the treacherous tears. I wiped my eyes and sniffed ‘Strong Independent Woman’ to myself, as Peter bellowed up the stairs, ‘MUM! There’s TWO rooms with sinks down here, so how do I know which one is the kitchen?’

I trudged downstairs to explain to Peter in words of ideally less than one syllable that the BIG room with the fridge, cupboards and table was the KITCHEN, and the very small room beside the back door with nothing more than a sink in it was the SCULLERY. There then ensued a lengthy discussion about what exactly a scullery was, culminating in Peter saying, ‘Well, if it’s just a utility room from the olden days, why don’t you just CALL it a utility room?’ and me insisting, ‘Because this is a lovely, quirky, quaint old cottage, darling, with oodles of character and they have sculleries, not utility rooms. It’s all about the soul, you see,’ while Peter shovelled Doritos into his mouth and look at me in confusion.

‘OK, Mum,’ he said kindly. ‘We can call it a scullery if it makes you happy.’

I was so nonplussed at winning the scullery battle so easily, and fretting that it was because Peter felt sorry for me (in the old house, everyone but me had persisted in calling the larder ‘the big cupboard’ despite my frequent exhortations to call it ‘the larder’ because we were more middle class than a ‘big cupboard’), that I forgot to take the Doritos off him before he inhaled the entire bag.

He was still cramming fistfuls of Doritos into his mouth when Jane marched downstairs and announced that she supposed she’d just have to make do with having a bath, and where were the towels? I suggested that perhaps she could help with the unpacking for a little longer before buggering off to bathe herself, but was frostily informed that this wasn’t an option and her life had been ruined quite enough. I replied that maybe, just maybe, if she’d shown the TINIEST bit of interest in her new home, the lack of bathrooms and showers would not have come as such a shock to her, but this was met with an eye roll and a snort. I counted myself lucky to have avoided a ‘FFS, Mother!’

I’m still trying to pinpoint when the ‘Mothers’ began. When she started talking, Jane would call me Mama, which was too bloody adorable for words, then when she was about three and a half, a horrible older child at nursery made fun of her for saying Mama, and she switched to Mummy. Then it became Mum, but it happened gradually, so I don’t really remember when exactly she gave up on Mummy, although it didn’t really matter, because Mum was OK, and anyway, only screamingly posh people with ponies called Tarquin (both the people and the ponies) still call their mothers Mummy past the age of about twelve. But I was quite unprepared for the day when I stopped even being Mum and simply became Mother – a word only uttered when dripping with sarcasm, disgust, condescension or all three. To my shame, I think I vaguely recall a time in my teens when I also only referred to my dearest Mama as Mother in similarly scathing tones, so I can only hope it’s just a ‘phase’ and that she’ll grow out of it. Though I’m wondering how many more fucking ‘phases’ I have to endure before my children become civilised and functioning members of society.

It seems like people have been telling me ‘It’s just a phase’ for the last fifteen bloody years. Not sleeping through the night is ‘just a phase’. Potty training and the associated accidents are ‘just a phase’. The tantrums of the terrible twos – ‘just a phase’. The picky eating, the back chat, the obsessions. The toddler refusals to nap, the teenage inability to leave their beds before 1 pm without a rocket being put up their arse, the endless singing of Frozen songs, the dabbing, the weeks where apparently making them wear pants was akin to child torture. All ‘just phases’. When do the ‘phases’ end, though? WHEN? I’m surprised, when every man and his dog was sticking their nose in and giving me unsolicited advice about what to do about my marriage (‘Leave the bastard,’ ‘Make it work for the children,’ ‘You have to try and forgive him,’ ‘Screw him for every penny he has,’ ‘You have to understand that it’s different for men,’ ‘Cut his bollocks off’), that no one told me that shagging random women in Madrid was obviously ‘just a phase’, and I just had to wait for Simon to grow out of it.

‘MOTHER,’ shouted Jane, bringing me back to earth with a bump. ‘You still haven’t found me a towel.’

‘Jane,’ I said as calmly as possible. ‘If you want a bath that badly, you’ll have to find your own towel. I’ve other things to do.’

Peter mumbled something unintelligible through a mouthful of Doritos, spraying orange crumbs all over Jane.

‘OH MY GOD! HE’S DISGUSTING! MOTHER, DO SOMETHING ABOUT HIM!’ screamed Jane. ‘Can’t he, like, live in the shed or something?’

Peter swallowed, and in the brief window before eating something else shouted, ‘YOU live in the shed! Live with the CHICKENS! Ha ha ha!’

Jane screamed more and Peter continued to snigger through his mouthful of salty preservatives and flavourings, and I left the room in despair. I decided to unpack my books. That would be a nice, calming activity. And also, once the books were on the bookcase, they’d hide the large and extremely dubious stain on the floral wallpaper that had looked so charmingly faded and vintage a few months ago, and now just looked like something from the ‘before’ shots on Changing Rooms. Maybe, I mused, as I stacked the books, I could strip off all the paper and do something cunning with bits of baton to give the impression of wood panelling, à la Handy Andy …? Then I found Riders and decided to cheer myself up with a few pages, for surely there’s no situation so dire, especially not when it comes to cheating men and revolting teenagers, that has not been faced up to by one of Jilly Cooper’s characters with a large vodka and tonic and an excellent pun. Jake was just shagging Tory in the stable for the first time, and I was wondering if I too looked a lot less fat without my clothes on – I suspected not, though the horrible realisation was dawning on me that if I were ever going to have sex again, I would HAVE to take my clothes off in front of a strange man, although to be honest, the thought of just never having sex again was preferable to doing that – when a drenched and furious Jane shot into the room, making noises like a scalded cat. The problem, it quickly turned out was quite the opposite – she was very far indeed from being scalded, because having run herself a nice deep bath, she’d plunged in to find that it was freezing cold, because there was no hot water.

‘Oh, I expect they’ve maybe just turned it off, in case the pipes freeze or something,’ I said vaguely.

‘It’s APRIL, Mother,’ said Jane. ‘The pipes won’t freeze in April! And anyway, they only moved out yesterday, you said. Why would they turn off the hot water for the twenty-four hours before we moved in?’

I’d no idea, but I wasn’t giving Jane the satisfaction of saying so. I poked vaguely at the boiler, hindered rather than helped by Peter, who insisted that if I’d just let him look at it, he could probably fix it. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be helpful or just taking after his father, who always claimed he could fix things and refused to call a professional in until after he’d broken it even more.

‘What’s for dinner?’ demanded Jane, as I hopefully pressed all the switches and turned the boiler on and off several times.

‘Oh God, I don’t know, I’m trying to fix the boiler,’ I snapped.

‘I only asked. Don’t we even get fed now?’

‘Jane, you’re fifteen, you can make yourself something to eat. I’m trying to fix the fucking boiler right now.’

‘Can I go to Dad’s? I hate it here, I want you to drive me to Dad’s.’

‘I’m not driving you to your father’s because I’m trying to fix the boiler and if you want to go there so badly, call him to come and get you.’

‘He didn’t pick up. So you need to take me.’

‘I don’t need to do anything, except fix the boiler.’

‘You NEVER do ANYTHING for me. I bet if Peter wanted to go to Dad’s you’d take him.’

‘I’m not taking anyone anywhere. This is our first night in our new home and it would be nice if we spent it together. Now please give me peace while I try to fix the fucking boiler. PLEASE!’

‘Mum, when will the Wi-Fi be connected? Can you call them and find out?’ said Peter.

‘I’M TRYING TO FIX THE BOILER!’

‘When can you call them, then?’

I kicked the scullery door closed and leant my head against the piece of shit broken boiler. I was only one person, trying to do the job of two. At least if Simon had been here, he could have been the one swearing at the boiler while I dealt with the children’s incessant demands for food, lifts and internet access. But Simon wasn’t here, I reminded myself, as those tears threatened again, and I wasn’t going to be beaten by a bloody boiler. I could do this. I gave the boiler a tentative whack with a wrench. It had not responded to me hitting it with a pair of pliers, but I was working on the basis that boilers came under plumbing and wrenches were plumbing tools and therefore it might work better. I was quite proud of my logic, but the boiler remained stubbornly lifeless. Finally, I had one last idea before I spent the GDP of Luxembourg on an emergency plumber. I stumbled out to the oil tank (too country for gas) and, by the light of my phone torch, found a valve on the tank that looked suspiciously like it was pointing to ‘closed’.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ I muttered, as I barked my shin on a stupidly placed piece of wall, and turned it to open. Either the boiler would burst into life, or I’d burn the house down. I went back inside, stubbing my toe on an abandoned plant pot and surveyed the boiler once more. It still sat there lifeless. I went through the process of pressing all the buttons again, and miraculously, on pressing the reset button, it finally roared into life. I’D DONE IT! I’D FIXED THE FUCKING BOILER!

‘MUUUUM!’ yelled Peter.

‘MOTHER!’ howled Jane.

I flung open the scullery door in triumph.

‘I’VE FIXED THE BOILER!’ I announced, expecting at least a fanfare of trumpets and a twelve-gun salute. ‘I was right, Jane. They had turned it off. Outside!’

Jane snorted. ‘I bet Dad would have known that hours ago.’

‘I didn’t need a man, I fixed it myself.’

‘Whatever. Can I go to Millie’s?’

‘NO! We’re going to have a lovely night together. I’ll light the fire and we’ll have a picnic dinner in front of it.’

‘Isn’t this fun?’ I said brightly later on, sitting with Judgy Dog before the rather smoky fire.

Jane snorted from beside the window, where she’d discovered an intermittent 4G signal.

‘It’s quite fun, Mum,’ said Peter carefully. ‘But it would be more fun with Wi-Fi, if you could phone them in the morning and see when we’ll get the broadband connected?’

The fire went out.

Judgy made a snorting noise rather akin to Jane’s, and something scratched suspiciously behind the skirting boards.

‘It’s fun,’ I said firmly. After all, as the saying goes, sometimes you just have to fake it till you make it.

Saturday, 14 April

My first weekend here without the children. In fairness, Simon had offered to take them last weekend so they were out of the way while I moved, but foolishly I’d laboured under the impression that they were old enough and big enough to make themselves useful – I’m nothing if not an eternal optimist …

Last week passed in a blur of desperate attempts to find work clothes from the general jumble of boxes, days at work mainly spent lining everything up on my desk in beautiful straight lines and appreciating the general tidiness and order of the office, before returning home to demand what the children had been doing all day (lounging around, eating and making a mess – such are the joys of teenagers in the school holidays), stomping round shouting about the mess the children had made, hurling the trail of plates and glasses left around the house in the dishwasher, and bellowing about who had drunk all the milk again, before spending the evenings in a whirl of unpacking boxes, wishing I could go to bed because I was knackered, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of boxes needing to be unpacked and wondering why the fuck I’ve so much stuff.

When Simon and I first moved in together, every single thing we owned in the entire world BETWEEN US fitted in his rusting Ford Fiesta, with room left over. Over twenty years later, and it took two vast removal lorries to distribute our possessions, not to mention the skip full of crap, the innumerable bags to the charity shops and several runs to the local dump. I’d packed everything up in a tremendous hurry, flinging things into boxes and promising myself I’d sort it all out at the other end (this rushed packing also led to some raised eyebrows from the removal men as they looked askance at my boxes labelled with things like ‘kitchen crap’, ‘general crap’ and – this was one of the last boxes I packed – ‘more fucking shit’), but this was proving harder than I thought, as I pulled out Jane’s first baby-gro – so tiny, and rather faded and yellowing now, but even so, I couldn’t possibly get rid of it.

I had rather a lump in my throat, when I found a box of photos of me in hospital holding a newborn Jane in the same baby-gro, Simon beaming proudly beside me. These must have been some of the last actual photos we ever took, before we got a digital camera. Beneath the box of photos were red books filled with their vaccination records. Did I need them? What if at some point they needed to prove they had been vaccinated? Would that ever happen? I set them to one side in the ‘maybe keep’ pile, and then I found Peter’s first shoes. So tiny! I remembered the day we bought them. There should be a photo of that too – I dug through the box, and there it was, a Polaroid taken by Clarks of a small, furious and scowling Peter, clutching his blanky, who had been unimpressed with this momentous day. Did he still have his blanky, I wondered? We’d gone to the park after he got his shoes and he’d been so pleased with himself as he tottered across the playground on his own for the first time, me hovering anxiously by his side, ready to catch him if he fell. The shoes were definitely for the ‘keep’ pile. And what was this? A box full of tiny human teeth? Well, of course I was keeping that, even if at some point the children’s teeth had got jumbled up and I no longer knew whose were whose.

Jane wandered in at that point. She looked at my little box of teeth that I was gazing at fondly and said, ‘You do know, Mother, that one day you’re going to be dead and we’re going to have to clear your house out and it’s going to be like totally gross if we have to come across things like boxes of human teeth.’

‘But they’re your teeth,’ I protested. ‘It’s not like I’m a serial killer and I’ve kept the teeth of my victims as a souvenir. They are keepsakes from your childhood.’

Jane gave another one of her snorts. ‘It’s still gross,’ she insisted. ‘In fact, it would be less weird if you had killed people for their teeth. Why do you have them?’

Once upon a time, that special moment had been quite magical, when Simon and I first tiptoed into Jane’s room, as she lay there, all flushed and rosy-cheeked in her White Company pyjamas, sleeping innocently, dreaming of the Tooth Fairy and the spoils she’d wake up to. We slid a little pearly tooth out from under her pillow and popped a (shiny shiny) pound coin in its place. We stood hand in hand and gazed down at her, still slightly in awe of this perfect little person we’d made together. We put that tiny little tooth into the special box I’d bought for it, and marvelled at how grown up our baby girl was getting. I wondered if Simon and I would ever do anything together again like that for the children?

Of course, the standards slipped in later years – any old pound coin would do – and quite often I’d forget, and when an angry child burst into my bedroom complaining the Tooth Fairy hadn’t been I’d have to hastily rustle up a pound coin and pretend to ‘look’ under their pillow before triumphantly ‘finding’ it, and accusing them of just not looking properly. Luckily they fell for this every time, and I still constantly complain about them never looking for anything properly. Now though, looking into the box filled with yellowing little teeth, several of them still bearing traces of dried blood where, the sooner to get his hands on the booty, Peter had forcibly yanked them out, it did seem a rather macabre thing to keep. But on the other hand, a) I wasn’t actually going to admit that to Jane, and b) I’d really gone to rather a lot of effort to collect those teeth and so I wasn’t quite ready to part with them just yet. Anyway, they might come in useful for something.

‘Useful for what?’ said Jane in horror. ‘Seriously, Mother, what exactly do you think a box full of human teeth might be useful for? Are you going to become a witch or something? Eye of newt and tooth of child? Is that why you’re getting chickens – you claimed it was because they were chatty, but actually you’re planning on sacrificing them and reading the portents in their entrails while daubed in their blood? I’m not having any part of that. I’m going to go and live with Dad if you do that. That’s just going too far, Mother.’

‘What?’ I said in confusion. ‘How did you get from your baby teeth to me becoming some sort of chicken-murdering devil worshipper? I’m not going to sacrifice the chatty chickens. The chickens aren’t even here yet and you’re accusing me of secretly wanting to kill them!’

Simon chose that moment to arrive and collect his darling children.

‘Dad, if Mum becomes a Satanist and kills the chickens, I’m coming to live with you, OK,’ Jane informed him by way of a greeting.

‘Errr, hello darling,’ said Simon. ‘Why is your mother becoming a Satanist?’

‘I’m NOT,’ I said crossly.

‘She collects human body parts,’ said Jane darkly.

‘I BLOODY WELL DON’T!’ I shouted.

This wasn’t the scene I’d envisioned for Simon seeing me in my new home for the first time. I’d lost track of time, and instead of being elegantly yet casually clad in a cashmere sweater and sexy boots, perhaps with some sort of flirty little mini skirt to remind him that actually my legs really weren’t bad still, while reclining on a sofa in my Gracious Drawing Room, I was in my scabbiest jeans, covered in mud from walking Judgy earlier, with no make-up, dirty hair and clutching a box of teeth, with the house looking like a bomb had gone off and boxes everywhere. Simon meanwhile appeared to have finally cast aside his scabby fleeces in favour of tasteful knitwear and seemed to be attempting to cultivate some sort of designer stubble. Or maybe he just hadn’t bothered to shave. Either way, it suited him. Bastard. I glared at him.

‘Right …,’ he said, wisely deciding the best thing to do would be to ignore this whole conversation and pretend it had never happened. ‘Jane, are you ready? And where’s your brother?’

Jane looked surprised. ‘Ready? What, now? Like, NO, I need to pack. How should I know where Peter is? I’m not his mother!’

I sighed. ‘I suppose you’d better come in then, Simon. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Could I get some coffee?’

‘Fine.’

At least the kitchen was unpacked and relatively tidy. I reached for the jar of Nescafé, as Simon said, ‘Don’t you have any proper coffee? You know I don’t like instant coffee.’

I gritted my teeth. ‘No, Simon. I don’t have any proper coffee, because I don’t have a coffee maker, because I don’t drink coffee, and so I only have a jar of instant as a courtesy for guests, and I only offered you a cup of tea in the first place because I’m trying VERY HARD to keep things between us on an amicable footing, at least on the surface, so we don’t mentally scar and traumatise our children and condemn them to a lifetime of therapy because we weren’t adult enough to be civil to each other, but I must say, you’re doing an extraordinarily good job of making it difficult for me to FUCKING WELL DO THIS!’

‘You don’t drink coffee?’ said Simon. ‘Since when don’t you drink coffee?’

‘I haven’t drunk coffee in the house since I was pregnant with Jane,’ I said. ‘I occasionally, VERY occasionally have a latte when I’m out, but other than that, I barely touch the stuff, because it made me puke like something out The Exorcist when I was pregnant. How have you never noticed me not drinking coffee over the last FIFTEEN YEARS?’

‘But what about the coffee maker I gave you for your birthday a few years ago?’

‘Would that be the coffee maker when I said, “Well, this is a lovely present for you, because I DON’T DRINK COFFEE?”’

‘I thought you were joking. Is that why you let me keep it?’

‘Yes, Simon. Because there’s no point in me having a shiny fuck-off coffee machine cluttering up my kitchen when I DON’T DRINK COFFEE! Are you starting to perhaps grasp why we’re getting divorced?’

‘Because of coffee?’

‘No, the coffee is a METAPHOR!’

‘Are you sure you mean metaphor?’

‘No, no I’m not. Anyway, the fucking COFFEE is symbolic of the vast chasm and divide between us.’

‘Oh,’ said Simon. ‘Should I just have a cup of tea then?’

‘Oh FFS! I don’t CARE what you have. I’m going to see if your children are ready.’

Upstairs, I knocked tentatively on Peter’s door, then left a few seconds and knocked again. I’m too afraid to enter unbidden in case I witness something that means I can no longer look at my baby boy in QUITE the same way again. While I was standing there, I mentally added more Mansize tissues to the shopping list. Eventually I shouted, ‘Peter? Peter, Dad is here! Are you ready?’

Peter finally opened his door and looked at me blankly. ‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Dad is here.’

‘Dad? Here? Why?’

‘To pick you up. You’re going to his house this weekend.’

‘THIS weekend?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, like TODAY?’

‘YES.’

‘But I can’t go yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m at a really good part in my game and I haven’t got a proper computer at Dad’s.’

‘I don’t care, you’re going to his house. Now.’

‘Can I take my computer?’

‘NO! Just pack some pants or something.’

‘Pants? Why?’

‘SO YOU CAN CHANGE THEM. OMG. JUST PACK SOME CLOTHES.’

‘OK.’

I banged on Jane’s door.

‘Are you ready?’ I demanded.

‘I’m doing my make-up,’ Jane shouted. ‘My eyebrows aren’t done.’

Eventually, after an HOUR of toing and froing and shouting and bellowing (during which Simon sat placidly at MY kitchen table, eating MY chocolate HobNobs and playing no part whatsoever in getting HIS children ready to spend the weekend with HIM), I finally waved them all off.

Two days. Two whole days. All to myself. What to do? I could go for a run (ha ha, NO!). Read an Improving Book? Or, first things first, I could finally finish the unpacking and get the house straight.

It was very quiet. I unpacked another box, and found the DVD of Jane’s nursery graduation. So then I had to find a laptop with a DVD drive so I could watch it. And then I cried all over again like I had on the day she left nursery and I thought my baby was all grown up now she was ready to start school. She was so little. In those dark days when they were babies and toddlers, I never thought they’d grow up. I thought they’d be little forever, and God knows, some of those long, long days certainly felt like forever. But all of a sudden, they went and grew up when I wasn’t looking.

I checked my watch. 2.41 pm. Gosh. Was that all? Doesn’t time … drag when you’re not running round like a blue-arsed fly. I’ve spent years longing for this moment – to not be constantly chasing my tail, to have some time to myself, to have some SPACE to myself, to have a room of one’s own, or at least an hour with the house to myself with nobody fighting or complaining they were hungry or demanding I magically increase the broadband speed or provide my credit card to buy something on the internet that they’d definitely pay me back for but hardly ever do. And now I had it – I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

A nap, I decided. A lovely nap. When was the last time I had time for a nap? Probably … pre-children. I know, I know, we’re all told that you’re supposed to nap when the baby naps, but then when are you supposed to have a shower, make the dinner, put the laundry on, pay the bills, stare hopelessly into a mirror wondering who this hollow-eyed stranger is staring back at you that bears a vague resemblance to your mother? Exactly. When the baby naps. So, FINALLY, after fifteen years of feeling permanently sleep-deprived, I could start catching up. A nap!

I arranged Judgy Dog and myself on the sofa with a snuggly blanky (Jesus, will I ever be able to say ‘blanket’ again, or are certain words condemned to be forever ingrained in my mind in baby talk – the same way I seem unable to shake off the urge to shout ‘LOOK! COW! HORSEY! WHAT DO COWS SAY? DO COWS SAY “MOOOOOO”? WHAT DO HORSEYS SAY? HORSEYS SAY “NEEEEEIIIIGHHHH!”’ every time I pass a field with animals in?) and we cosied down for a lovely nap.

The more I tried to sleep, the more wide awake I became. I stared at the ceiling, wondering what would happen if I died right now. Who would find me? Would Judgy have started eating me by the time the children came home on Sunday night? Would they then be so appalled and disgusted by his cannibalistic ways that they got rid of him and then he died alone in a shelter, even though it’s not actually cannibalism for a dog to eat a human? The thought of Judgy’s lonely death, all by himself in a cold concrete pen, was almost too much for me to bear.

I gave up hope of sleep and scrolled through Instagram instead. Maybe the children were having a horrible time at Simon’s and their feed would reflect this and I could feel smug. Except Jane had blocked me and Peter had not posted anything in months apart from photos of gaming scores. WHY HAD MY OWN DAUGHTER BLOCKED ME ON INSTAGRAM? I looked at Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy’s page instead. She was on a girly spa weekend. Why was I not on a girly spa weekend, drinking champagne in a hot tub? Even though champagne makes me belch and I haven’t been in a hot tub since I read an article that said they’re basically just heaving cauldrons of bacteria soup. But even so!

What about Fiona Montague? Oh, look, she was training for a triathlon and posting lots of photos of her looking great in skin-tight Lycra with ‘inspirational’ captions. Fuck off, Fiona, you husband-stealing slut. But despite her wanton ways, even Fiona was out and about having fun, and oooh, she’d just posted a new photo – her toes in the bath with a glass of wine because apparently she was about to head out on a ‘date night’. Bitch.

Who else to stalk? What about Debbie from HR? Debbie had been out for ‘brunch with good friends’ and finished her caption with #lovelaughlive. I might have to have Debbie killed. Christina, my erstwhile relationship counsellor, only posted wanky quotes about being true to yourself. That made me feel a little bit better, and I had a bijou judge of Christina.

I searched for Simon’s name again, although he’d always been staunchly anti-Instagram, and lo and behold, there he was! @SimonRussell30 (imaginative, Simon – I assume the ‘30’ refers to a random number, and you weren’t hoping people would think you were actually thirty). Why did he have an account now, after being so scathing about it for all these years? Not many photos yet, obviously, but there was one last night of two beers clinking, just titled ‘#Friyay!’ FFS. Firstly, who even still says ‘Friyay’? Even I know that is totally lame. Secondly, why does he get to go out for beers on Friday night when I spent my Friday night cooking dinner for his children, doing all his children’s laundry so they had clean clothes to take to his house for the weekend and then just as I was about to finally have a glass of wine, having to go and pick Jane up from the cinema because apparently the ‘bus hadn’t come’ – the same bus I assume that passed me heading out of town as I was heading in, as Jane seems to think if she misses the bus that is clearly the bus’s fault and it must have just not come and so I need to solve the problem. All while Simon was quaffing his ‘Friyay’ beer. And thirdly, who did the other beer belong to? Who? It could have been a work colleague, of course, but it was a wanky little bottle of foreign lager, not a Manly Pint, so equally could have been a girl’s. I realised I’d gnawed off what remained of my nails while scrolling through Simon’s photos. #SweetNewPad was another, with an arty shot of what must be his new sitting room (I couldn’t see the sideboard. Where was it? After all the fuss he made about me painting it, had he just got rid of it? RUDE). It looked very nice, and considerably more elegant than my own scruffy sitting room. But ‘#Sweet New Pad’? What was wrong with him? And he did realise you don’t have to hashtag every caption, didn’t he? Twat.

I went to my own page to see what Simon might think if he looked at it. It was less than inspiring. The last photo I’d posted was a pile of boxes, simply captioned ‘Moving Day!’ I must try harder. I wanted Simon to seethe with jealousy at my sheer fabulousness every time he looked at it. Assuming he looked at it. Why wouldn’t he look at it? Apart from because he was too busy having mindblowing #Friyay sex with a wanky, beer-drinking twenty-three-year-old with gravity-defying tits and no stretch marks in his #SweetNewPad, of course. Oh God! That was obviously what he was doing, while I lay slumped on a sagging sofa, trying not to cry because me and my cannibalistic dog were both going to die alone and unloved.

In the end, in case Simon did find a minute out of his filthy shag timetable to look at my page and gloat he’d escaped the nagging witch of an ex-wife and remind himself of how much he was #lovinglife with his lithe sex bomb (who could probably contort herself into improbable positions without shrieking, ‘Wait, stop, I’ve done something to my hip’), I went and had a bath and posted a Fiona Montague-style shot with a glass of wine and about a million filters so it looked quite sexy, and put ‘The weekend starts here!’ It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could manage.

Duly bathed (it turns out a bath isn’t quite so decadent when there isn’t much else you’re supposed to be doing), I was bored out of my mind and quite alarmed at the prospect of the many empty hours stretching ahead of me. I’d been so sure I had Inner Resources at my disposal and would be happy with my own company, but it seems it has been so long since I’ve had the chance to experience my own company that my Inner Resources appear to have buggered off, along with the perkiness of my tits and my natural hair colour.

‘Bollocks!’ I thought, as I failed to log in to Netflix, Jane having ignored my pleading texts for the password – Peter claims not to know it as he only watches YouTube. I wished I’d had the wit to have arranged to go out or meet friends or do SOMETHING tonight, but I’d been so sure of those Inner Resources I’d not bothered. I vaguely wondered about being an Independent Modern Woman and going to the cinema by myself, but I wasn’t sure I could eat a whole tub of popcorn on my own, and obviously the popcorn is the only reason to go to the pictures. And also, I’d have to put my bra back on. I gave up and returned to reading Riders. Since I was clearly never going to have sex again, I might as well read about other people doing it.

But then – oh hallelujah – the doorbell rang. Who could it be? I positively skipped to the door, filled with excitement. I was pretty sure it was probably some passing hunky farmer, who had popped by to tell me off for some Terrible Countryside Transgression I’d unwittingly made, and although initially he’d be very cross with me and I’d think him arrogant and overbearing, I’d still notice his Cambridge blue eyes and rugged physique as he sprang onto his tractor, and he in turn would in fact have fallen hopelessly in love with me at first sight, and would only fall deeper over the coming weeks as he berated me further for my charmingly hopeless country faux pas, until he could contain himself no longer and declared his undying love for me, just as I was feeling gloomy over a misunderstanding that had led me to think he was marrying the icily beautiful Lady of the Manor, but it was OK, it was me all along. It didn’t even really matter that I was in my jammies with toast crumbs in my cleavage, because everyone knows in these scenarios that the more grubby, dishevelled and deranged you look, the MORE likely the hero is to fall in love with you …

It was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Judgy, who could at least have earned his keep by seeing them off, refused to move from the sofa.

I shuffled back, gloomy once more, to consider whether I could be arsed starting a seven-season American sitcom. The doorbell rang again. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were at least persistent in their desire to save my soul from eternal damnation, I reflected, but I still wasn’t really interested in hearing more about it. I flung open the door, ready to explain that it was all very well, but actually I was an atheist, and would THEY like to hear about MY beliefs about how there’s no God, THERE’S ONLY SCIENCE?

On the doorstep stood a very welcome sight in the form of my lovely friends Colin and Sam, and Hannah and Charlie. Not quite a rugged farmer to fall in love with me, but probably much, much better, because, really, who could arsed with all the emotional upheaval of falling in love again?

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

‘Well, that is a nice way to greet your oldest and bestest friend,’ said Hannah.

‘We thought you might like some company,’ said Sam, ‘what with it being your first night on your own in the new house. It’s always a tough one, that first night without the kids.’

‘But how did you know?’ I said.

‘Oh, Jane told Sophie she was at Simon’s tonight,’ said Sam. ‘So we thought what better way to spend our Saturday night than by getting pissed with you and shouting “Bastard” about Simon in a supportive way.’

‘That does sound quite good fun,’ I admitted.

‘I’ll definitely shout “Bastard” the loudest,’ said Hannah.

‘And also,’ put in Colin, ‘we haven’t even seen your new house yet, so I’m obviously dying to conform to the gay stereotype by coming round and criticising your décor. But also what Sam said.’

I do love Colin. Sam spent several years as a single father, following the departure of his dastardly former partner Robin, and after years of lurking around supermarkets (he read an article about it being a good place to meet men, but felt his trolley full of fish fingers and Petits Filous was off-putting to the singletons on the prowl in the produce aisle), a flirtation with Tinder (I don’t think Hannah and I helped there, we just kept shouting ‘No! SWIPE!’ every time he showed us a potential date/shag), a period of announcing he was Never Going to Find Love and thus was giving up looking and Focusing on His Inner Self (he pulled a muscle his first week at yoga and was thrown out of the class for shouting ‘Fucking hell, I think I’ve broken my arse!’, after which he accepted that his inner self preferred tequila slammers to Downward Dogs), he met Colin at the gym – ‘I’m almost afraid to tell people that’s how we met,’ he admitted. ‘It’s such a cliché.’

‘And Hannah told me I was to come and make myself useful, which I suspect will involve being sent for a takeaway and then driving everyone home. Which I think will actually be quite useful of me,’ said Charlie.

Oh lovely, lovely Charlie. Hannah’s divine second husband is so much nicer than her horrible first husband Dan, who was nothing more than a rancid streak of weasel piss. To my utter horror, I found myself for the first time ever thinking that maybe I should have made better choices in my life and married Charlie and not Simon, because once upon a time, at university, about a million years ago, when we were all young and foolish and irresponsible, Charlie had been in love with me, but with the callousness of youth I’d rejected good old dependable Charlie Carrhill for the dashingly gorgeous, romantic and slightly dangerous Simon Russell. Simon was so gorgeous back then. I think the very fact he noticed my existence was enough to turn my head and make me fall in love with him, breaking poor Charlie’s heart in the process.

And now look at us. All that hope and promise and love Simon and I once had, reduced to trying to make him jealous through my Instagram feed. What if I hadn’t let Simon seduce me with his wicked smile and come-to-bed eyes and had made a more sensible and considered choice, like Charlie? I gave myself a shake. No one deserved lovely Charlie more than Hannah (my bestest and oldest friend indeed, I reminded myself), and to even begin thinking like that … Well, that would make me a terrible person, and if I was determined one thing was going to come out of this sodding divorce, it was that I was going to be a Better Person. Do Good Works and things like that, and become universally beloved so I don’t die alone and unwanted, and small children would call out, ‘God bless you, Ma’am’ when I walked down the street. I probably wasn’t doing very well so far after my Instagramming earlier, though. Maybe I could make up for it by retweeting something worthy later. And actually, divine though Charlie was with Hannah, he hadn’t actually been any better than Simon when he was with his first wife, so he wasn’t really Mr Perfect either.

‘Ellen, are you going to stand there gawping and staring into space or are you going to open that nice champagne I brought? Go and get some glasses while I decide why all your paintings are in the wrong place,’ chided Colin.

‘It doesn’t matter what you think about my painting placement,’ I informed him. ‘They’re positioned like they are for a reason, to hide a multitude of sins. Likewise, why the sofa is where it is. So it’s all staying put, because otherwise it all looks a bit shit.’

Colin sighed. ‘You’re spoiling all my fun,’ he said. ‘How am I supposed to be a Proper Gay with you thwarting me at every turn when I try to express myself?’

‘Colin, darling, you’re a corporate lawyer, you express yourself by making obscene amounts of money for evil corporations, not by prancing around rearranging Ellen’s furniture. If you want to unleash your Proper Gay, just stick some Madonna on and leave the sofa where it is,’ said Sam.

Colin looked sulky. ‘You know I don’t like Madonna,’ he complained. ‘I’m not a total cliché, you know. Anyway, Ellen, cheers! New house, new life, new you, new start! How are you feeling?’

‘A bit lost …’ I confessed.

‘Oh Ellen,’ said Hannah. ‘Of course you are, that’s totally natural. But this is an amazing opportunity for a fresh start. Imagine if Dan had never left me, and I was still stuck with him.’

‘But Simon wasn’t Dan, was he?’ I said sadly. ‘I mean, he could be a bit of a lazy arsehole at times, but he wasn’t a bad person. There were a lot of good bits too. I really do love him. Loved him. I did love him, I mean.’

‘This is the hardest part,’ said Hannah. ‘The bit where you think you’re going to be on the shelf for evermore, and die alone and unloved in a damp basement flat surrounded by seventeen cats. Remember when I was at that stage?’

‘Vaguely. Instead I shall die alone and unloved in a damp hovel of cottage with weirdly placed paintings to hide the mildew, surrounded by terriers who will fight over my dead body. I don’t even think the roses round the door are roses, I think they’re just brambles.’

‘Well, maybe it’s time to think about getting back in the game then?’ suggested Colin.

‘Back in the saddle, so to speak,’ added Sam with a lascivious wink.

‘Saddle? Game?’ I said in confusion. ‘What on earth are you talking about? You think I should take up tennis? And riding? Or cycling? Do a triathlon like Fiona Montague?’

‘Well, riding of a sort,’ snorted Sam with another leery wink. ‘Crikey, is Fiona doing a triathlon? I’d have thought she’d be too worried about her make-up running!’

‘Sam,’ snapped Colin. ‘Your double entendres are not helping, nor is your winking, which frankly is just disturbing. Please never do that at me. And we’re not here to talk about Fiona Montague.’

Sam muttered something mutinous.

‘No, Ellen,’ Colin went on. ‘We’re talking about you getting back in the dating game. Finding yourself a man. Getting a bit of cock. You’re a beautiful woman in her prime, who deserves to have a bit of fun, and we thought you maybe just need a nudge.’

I looked at them both in horror. ‘No. Just … no. I can’t. It’s not possible. And please don’t describe me as a woman in her prime, because that just reminds me of Miss Jean Brodie, who was a mad, sex-obsessed fascist who came to no good in the end. I’m not a nympho Nazi, thank you very much!’

‘But Ellen, don’t you miss sex?’ asked Colin gently.

‘No,’ I said bluntly. ‘I don’t. I miss Simon. I miss the man I thought he was. I miss having someone to come home to and tell about my day, even if he doesn’t listen, and someone to make me a cup of tea in bed on Sunday morning, and having someone I’ve spent my whole life with so that sometimes when I see something funny and I know they’d be the only other person in the world who would find that funny too I can just tell them or text them a photo and know they’ll get my joke without having to explain it. I miss having someone who remembers our children’s firsts – their first steps, their first words, their first days at school. I miss having someone who knows me in the way you can only know someone after twenty-five years together. And he wasn’t annoying all the time. There was a lot of good stuff too, when he took off his ratty fleeces and wore the nice jumpers I bought him. We had a lot of laughs together, and now I’ve no one to think about going on Nile cruises with when we’re old, or to share my indignation when the first SAGA catalogue drops through the door, and I miss the thought of all the things we should have done together when we finally had time and money and were free from the children. But I don’t miss fucking SEX, if you’ll pardon the pun!’

And then I burst into tears. Hideous, wracking tears, the tears I’d been holding in for months, ever since the furious, scalding, angry tears the night that he told me he needed some ‘space’, and I decided after those tears that I could either get on with my life or I could give in to the tears, but I couldn’t do both because if I gave in to the tears I’d drown in them. But it seems they were still there and had sneakily found a way to escape, which after all is what water always does. I sobbed and I sobbed, while Sam did the awkward man thing of patting my back gingerly and mumbling ‘There, there’, until Colin dispatched him in search of tissues and ‘a PROPER drink, darling, something stronger than bloody champagne, but for Christ’s sake not gin, she’s in enough of a state as it is!’ and I attempted to howl something about there being twelve packs of Mansize tissues in the cupboard under the stairs, and Colin took over and pulled me into a huge bear hug and just held me while I cried and cried, until the storm started to pass and I became uncomfortably aware that I’d drenched the front of his shirt in tears and, much worse, snot.

As the howling subsided into that awkward sniffling hiccupping that comes at the end of a really bad crying jag, and I attempted to gain some sort of control over myself, Colin handed me a large wad of tissues, and an eye-wateringly strong vodka and tonic.

‘Better?’ he enquired.

‘Uh huh,’ I gulped.

‘I think you needed that, didn’t you?’ he said gently.

I had needed it. I felt oddly cleansed, and calmer than I’d been for months.

‘Ellen,’ said Hannah. ‘Do you really still love Simon? Do you regret divorcing him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s all so confusing. We’d been together so long, and I was so hurt and angry by what he did, but I thought we’d get through it in the end, we’d find a way, but then he started all that shit about “needing space” and not knowing if he loved me, so that was that, really … But it’s strange, life without him, because there were good bits too, you know. I know you thought he was an arse, but I do, did, I don’t know, love him, and despite everything, deep down I always thought he loved me too. I just always thought we’d grow old together. I’ve thought that since the very first night we got together. And now we won’t. And that takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that I’ll be on my own now for the rest of my life, with no one to accompany me on that Nile cruise.’

‘In fairness, you’d been trying to persuade Simon to go on a Nile cruise for years and he always refused on the basis that you’d only be disappointed when no one was murdered on board so you could don a shady hat and solve the mystery, gin and tonic in hand. Same as he wouldn’t go on the Orient Express with you either, because the murder-free reality would just shatter all your Agatha Christie fantasies,’ pointed out Colin.

‘And anyway, things like that are exactly what we were talking about,’ said Sam. ‘You seem to think that that’s it, that you’re now condemned to some lonely nun-like existence for evermore, but it’s the twenty-first century, people split up, move on, find new partners all the fucking time, babe. Look at me. Look at Colin. Look at Hannah and Charlie. We’ve all had failed marriages or long-term relationships, and we’ve all found someone else. Why do you think you won’t?’

‘I didn’t say I thought I won’t,’ I pointed out. ‘I said I can’t. There’s a difference.’

‘But why not?’ said Colin, looking baffled. ‘Unless you are still in love with Simon and feel you’ve made a terrible mistake, in which case it’s probably not too late to tell him, don’t be like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, both too proud to admit how they feel. If you want Simon, do something about it. You’re not actually divorced yet – you could just put all this behind you and move on and we’ll say no more about it.’

‘I’m not pining for Simon,’ I said, remembering the very annoying coffee conversation we’d had that morning and his utter uselessness in attempting to galvanise his children into action even when it was officially his time to be responsible for them, and also reminding myself he was probably even now having red-hot contortionist sex to put on Instagram while his children were shut in their cupboards. ‘I just miss the companionship and the shorthand of an established relationship. Anyway, I can’t tell you why I can’t find someone else. You will just have to take my word for it,’ and I took a large slug of my drink.

Two more enormous vodka and tonics later, while Charlie was out getting a curry, I thought maybe, after all, I could tell the rest of them why I was now destined for a life of celibacy and loneliness.

‘I can’t have sex with another man,’ I announced.

‘Why not?’ said Colin.

‘Of course you can!’ said Hannah. ‘It’s hardly like you were some virgin bride when you married Simon, you’d been round the block a few times by the time you hooked up with our Mr Russell! I mean, you’ve even shagged Charlie!’

‘What, your Charlie?’ said Colin in surprise. ‘When did she shag him?’

‘She is here, you know!’ I said frostily. ‘Thank you, Hannah. I thought we’d agreed never to speak of the unfortunate fact that I’d shagged him, not once you two were an item. And it was years and years ago, Colin, before Simon, before any such thing as a hint of Hannah and him.’

Colin, who had obviously been hoping for something a little juicier, looked disappointed. ‘So if you’ve not been averse to a bit of the old casual sex in the past,’ he said, ‘why can’t you go back to your wicked and wanton ways?’

‘Because I can’t be naked!’ I burst out. ‘I cannot take my clothes off in front of a man! Not now!’

‘I know it’s daunting, babe,’ said Sam. ‘Men feel like that too, you know. The fear someone might laugh at the size of our dick (not that that has ever happened to me. I’ve never had any complaints in that department, thank you).’ Colin snorted. ‘Or they might think, I dunno, our balls are weird.’ Colin snorted again.

‘Would you please stop that, darling?’ said Sam. ‘You are the one not helping now. But you know what I mean, Ellen. It’s scary taking your clothes off in front of a new person. But just remember, they’ll probably be feeling exactly the same.’

‘NO!’ I shouted. ‘NO, THEY WON’T! Because it’s DIFFERENT for men!’

‘Of course it’s not,’ said Colin kindly. ‘We might be better at seeming OK about it, but really we do get nervous too.’

‘NO! Seriously, men can never understand what I’m talking about. Your bodies have not been ravaged by child bearing. My stomach looks like an uncooked focaccia –’

‘At least you manage to stay middle class with your metaphors,’ interrupted Colin approvingly.

‘Well, it DOES. All saggy and dimpled and with stretch marks all over it. It’s not a case of just going to the gym, either. No crunches in the world are going to sort the ravages of pregnancy. And my tits. My tits were once perky and firm, but not anymore. Now, I hardly dare take my bra off in winter, lest the floor is too cold, so far south are they migrating.’

‘But it can’t be that bad,’ said Sam. ‘You look all right with your clothes on.’

‘That is rather the whole point of why I can’t take them OFF,’ I shouted. ‘Just because I can cover the ravages in Zara’s finest doesn’t change the horror that lurks beneath.’

‘I’m sure you’re just being self-conscious,’ said Colin kindly. ‘It really can’t be that bad. You’re overthinking this.’

In answer, I pulled up my top and showed them my stretch-marked stomach. They recoiled, and then remembered themselves.

‘It’s fine, really,’ said Sam.

‘It does look a bit like an uncooked focaccia, doesn’t it?’ said Colin, with interest. ‘The stretch marks are like the little holes in the top of the focaccia. Maybe you should just put on some fake tan? After all, a nice baked loaf always looks more appealing than a lump of dough.’

‘COLIN!’ said Sam.

‘I’m trying to help,’ said Colin.

‘But I felt just the same with Charlie,’ said Hannah. ‘And it was fine.’

‘But you already knew Charlie. You’d known him for years. He wasn’t someone new.’

‘Yes, but he’d never seen me naked.’

‘No, but he was Charlie. Lovely, lovely Charlie. You knew he was wonderful and adored you and was a very good person. If I were to have sex again, it would be with a stranger. I mean, not an actual stranger, but in relative terms, when you’ve spent twenty-five years shagging the same person, really, anyone else counts as a stranger. What if I do sex wrong? What if it’s all different now and I didn’t get the memo? I can’t even remember what any other penises look like apart from Simon’s.’

‘Not even Charlie’s?’ said Hannah curiously.

‘Especially not Charlie’s. I have put that right out of my mind. I don’t want to think about what Charlie’s penis looks like.’

‘Why is Ellen thinking about my penis?’ enquired Charlie, coming back at exactly the wrong moment.

‘I’m not thinking about your penis!’ I insisted. ‘Or any penises. No penises. I mean, as far as I recall, I don’t remember being shocked or surprised by Simon’s, so I assume that most penises look like his, but even so, to look at someone else’s? To touch another man’s willy, let alone, well, you know! It would be too … strange. Too intimate. It would feel wrong.’

‘Or it might feel very right?’ suggested Colin. ‘You won’t know until you try.’

‘Anyway,’ I said darkly. ‘My stomach and my willy worries aren’t even the worst of it.’

‘Please don’t show us your tits,’ begged Colin.

‘I’m not going to show you my tits,’ I assured him. ‘The tits are not what I’m talking about anyway. The horror I’m referring to can never be seen by any man. Except perhaps a gynaecologist.’

Sam and Colin looked at me fearfully. Charlie retreated to the kitchen muttering something about heating up the naan bread.

I nodded. ‘Yep. I mean my fanny is the issue. Two human heads have squeezed through it. It has been sewn up twice. Basically, I’ve a fanny that looks like a patchwork quilt and I fear it’s not as … embracing … as it once was, so I can’t ever be naked or Do Sex with another man again. It was OK with Simon, he saw it all happening gradually, the stretch marks and the sagging, and even the baggy tapestry fanny didn’t all happen at once, and also it was mostly his fault. Have you noticed that he has quite a big head that he probably passed on to his children? So that was different. But I could no more inflict my Flaps of Doom on a new man than, well, than I could show them to you. It Just Is Not Going to Happen!’

‘Well, anyway, we’re not advocating you pick up randoms on Tinder and booty-call them,’ said Colin sternly. ‘If you meet someone that you find you connect with enough to want to go to bed with him, then he’ll probably be a nice enough person to not care that you have a few flaws and imperfections. He’ll probably be too busy worrying about his own imperfections anyway. But you can get to know someone first, and then think about bed. There’s no obligation to shag anyone you don’t want to.’

‘But what about dick pics?’ I whimpered.

‘Well, they’re quite useful. Look at it like this, if they send you a dick pic, you can instantly discount them, and not waste any more time on them. Unless, of course, you like what you see …’

‘OK, OK,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll think about it. I’m trying very hard to be a strong independent woman and not need a man, though, but it’s bloody lonely being a single mother and coping with everything on your own.’

‘You are a strong independent woman,’ said Hannah firmly. ‘You’ve always been a strong independent woman, and really, you’ve been coping on your own for years as Simon was always working or away so much.’

‘I know, I know, but I’m starting to realise he did do stuff. It’s the little things, you know – like having someone open a bottle of wine for me after a bad day. Someone to warm my feet on in bed. Judgy won’t let me, in fact he growls at me when I try. I don’t need a knight in shining armour to rescue me, but occasionally I’d so like someone to bring me a glass of wine after a long day.’

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘in the meantime, remember you’ve always got us. You’re not on your own.’

Monday, 16 April

And at last the children have returned to school after the Easter holidays or the Spring Break or whatever the fuck they call it these days. I thought things would be easier when they were in secondary school. I thought as they got older they’d get more self-sufficient, they’d be able to get themselves up and out the door in the mornings, they’d not need me to find all their stuff (though why I thought that age would bring them the magical ability to locate lost items, I don’t know, given that it had never bestowed that gift upon their father), they’d be able to make their own lunches and breakfasts and possibly even their own dinners sometimes too. Oh, what a poor, sweet fool I was! Trying to get teenagers out the door is possibly even more stressful – more reminiscent of banging your head endlessly against a brick wall – than trying to get bloody toddlers out the door.

The happy fun joy started with trying to get them TO bed last night. I’d duly packed them off at a decent hour, reminding them that they needed their sleep, that they had to concentrate at school today and also that they were still growing, for which I was rewarded with the same whinges about how everyone else gets to stay up as late as they like that I’d been hearing for the last ten years, and which fell upon deaf and unsympathetic ears. Then there had been the arguments from Jane that it was not fair that she had to go to bed at 10 pm, just like Peter, when she was a whole two years older and so should be allowed to stay up much later, to which my only counter-argument was that she bloody well had to go to bed because I was going to bed, followed by me having to sit in the kitchen and guard the fridge until I was sure Peter was safely in bed to stop him downing three pints of milk before retiring for the night and then complaining when there was nothing to put on his vat of Weetabix in the morning. Then there had always been Simon’s role – after I’d shouted in vain at them to go to bed, he’d finally wade in to the argument and bellow that they were to go to bed NOW and they’d be so surprised by him shouting at them, that they’d go. Now that it’s just me shouting, I think they simply tune out.

THEN, when their lights were still on at 11 pm, despite increasingly furious bellows from me, I had to go downstairs and switch the router off, which resulted in further furious bellows from them because Peter had been number one on Fortnite and about to win the battle and Jane had been having a like, really, like, important chat with Millie and Sophie on Snapchat and now her life was ruined. Neither of them seemed the slightest bit concerned that these things had been happening when they were supposed to be sleeping – it was still all my fault according to Jane because Simon apparently let her stay up as late as she wanted over the weekend.

So, after all that, it was no bastarding surprise when the little fuckers showed no signs of wanting to arise from their fetid pits this morning. I banged on the doors, I shouted and I shrieked, all while trying to get myself ready for work. I eventually threatened to go in and dump a bucket of water on them. But all to no avail. Someone needs to invent a special bed for teenagers, so that when their alarm goes off, if they’re still in bed after five minutes they get a mild electric shock. If they STILL don’t get up, the shock increases in intensity, and so on and so on until they finally deign to arise. Some might say this is harsh, and probably contravenes the Geneva Convention, etc, etc, but those people clearly have never had to get a bloody teenager out of bed in the morning …

Jane finally emerged from her room half an hour before we had to leave, and locked herself in the bathroom. This immediately set alarm bells ringing, because Jane is incapable of spending less than an hour in the bathroom at the best of times.

I banged on the door and shouted, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I need to wash my hair,’ she screamed back.

‘But you washed it last night before bed,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, I need to wash it AGAIN, don’t I, Mother,’ she snarled.

‘But we need to go in half an hour at the most if you want a lift to the bus stop,’ I wailed. ‘And if I don’t give you a lift to the bus stop you’ll miss the bus and be late for school and then you’ll get another detention and I’ll probably be summonsed to see your head of year and made to feel like a shit mother because you were late again, when actually it’s not my fault, but Mrs Simmons won’t see it like that, she’ll judge me for being an incompetent single mother and probably have you taken into care because when she starts giving me her judgy look I’ll revert to being a sulky teenager too and huffing and rolling my eyes, and last time I had to go and see her she actually asked me if I was chewing and Jane, please, just be ready in time.’

There was no answer, probably because Jane had her head under the rubber shower attachment I’d purchased as the solution to her hair-washing woes. Jane had looked at it in disgust. ‘WTF is that, Mother?’ she’d enquired in scathing tones. I’d explained that it attached to the taps, to wash your hair with, and that everyone had them in their bathrooms when I was her age. She gave me the same look of blank incomprehension as when I tried to explain to her about telephone boxes. In fairness, I’d forgotten how rubbish those shower attachments were, and despite brightly telling Jane that it was just the same as a real shower, it really wasn’t, not least on account of its ability to choose the most inconvenient time to detach one side from the tap and spray water all over you.

Meanwhile, Peter finally emerged from his room and shuffled downstairs. I abandoned trying to prise Jane out of the bathroom and ran downstairs, as he slouched over the kitchen counter shovelling Weetabix into his mouth.

‘Peter, how many Weetabix have you got in there?’

Peter considered my question as he crammed another shovelful into his mouth.

‘Six?’ he finally offered.

‘And is there any milk left for your sister’s breakfast?’

‘Oh yes,’ Peter assured me virtuously. ‘I put two bananas in as well, so I wouldn’t need as much milk.’

I was unconvinced by his logic, especially when I looked in the fridge and found the milk carton had been put back in empty.

‘PETER! You’ve finished all the milk again!’

‘No, Mum, I haven’t,’ he insisted, ‘Look.’ He took the carton and tilted it, so a tiny dribble ran into one corner. ‘There’s still some left.’

‘No. No, there isn’t. That was a full two-litre carton last night.’

‘Was it?’

‘Well, maybe Jane can just make do with orange juice and toast then.’

‘Oh yeah. I meant to say, Mum, we’re out of OJ.’

‘HOW? That was another full carton last night.’

Peter shrugged. ‘I dunno. I only had a couple of glasses. And now there’s none left.’

I sighed in despair. I’d been fretting for years about how I was going to feed Peter as a teenager, and now the reality was upon me, I was genuinely fearful I might have to remortgage the house. When we were working out how much maintenance Simon should pay for the children, apparently you can’t have ‘feeding giant teenage child with a possible tapeworm and hollow legs who can eat like a plague of locusts’ taken into account to have the amount increased – according to the law, which has never seen how much a teenage boy can eat, he’ll cost no more to feed than Jane. With only one income, the days of blithely flinging anything I fancied in my trolley at Waitrose are long gone, and budget German supermarkets are now my best friends.

Peter turned his bowl upside down and drained the last drops.

‘Mum, I think I’ve left my PE kit at Dad’s,’ he said.

‘What? Why?’

‘You said we’d be at Dad’s for the weekends, so I put it in the box of stuff to go to his, because I thought that would be best. I didn’t know we’d be coming home on Sunday nights. Sorry, Mum. It’s confusing, trying to live in two places.’

I wanted to be angry at him for having no PE kit, but I remembered all too well the confusion of the early days after your parents’ divorce, when something essential always seemed to be at the other parent’s house.

‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about all this. I really am.’

Peter gave me a very brief hug. ‘It’s OK, Mum. It’s just a bit hard sometimes, you know?’

‘I know. You can talk to me about it, if you want?’

‘Yeah, no, maybe you can just give me a note off PE?’

Under the circumstances, that seemed the least I could do, although I gave him strict instructions not to tell Jane, as all hell would break loose if she found out I’d given Peter a note just because he didn’t have any PE kit.

I went and banged on the bathroom door again to no avail. ‘JANE! JANE, HURRY UP! OTHER PEOPLE NEED THE BATHROOM AND YOU NEED TO HAVE BREAKFAST!’

Peter was still in the kitchen playing on his phone and a thought occurred to me.

‘Peter, do you follow your sister on Instagram?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can I borrow your phone to check something?’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to look at something quickly, please?’

‘OK.’

I clicked on Instagram and went to Jane’s page. The first six photos were of Jane with a boy, looking very cosy. He was tagged as @harryx9876. I clicked on his page. More photos of him and Jane looking equally cosy. No wonder she’d blocked me!

‘Who’s Harryx?’ I asked Peter.

He peered at his phone. ‘You mean Harry, Mum. That’s just his Insta handle. He’s a boy at school.’

‘In Jane’s class?’

‘Year above. I think he’s like her boyfriend or something?’

Well, that at least explained the incessant hair-washing. What should I do? Should I say something? But then she’d know I’d basically been stalking her. I resolved to say nothing for the time being anyway, and just cajole Peter into letting me stalk her from time to time. Finally, after more hammering on Jane’s door to try to make her come and have breakfast and being loftily informed that straightening her hair was far more important than food (I had hoped that what I save on Jane’s vanity not giving her time to eat might make up for Peter’s tapeworm, except her energy consumption cancels that out too – apparently you don’t have the hours of hot water and hairdryers and hair straighteners running taken into consideration when the final maintenance amount is calculated either) and Peter was semi-ready and looking for a pre-school snack, Jane eventually came strolling downstairs, all glammed up for Harryx, just as I was howling that I was going now, NOW and anyone who wasn’t ready would just have to take their chances themselves.

‘GET IN THE CAR, IN THE CAR!’ I bellowed. ‘JANE! What are you wearing? Where’s the rest of your skirt? OMG, the school’s new uniform policy. You will be sent home!’

‘Chill, Mother,’ said Jane. ‘EVERYBODY wears their skirts like this, don’t be so old-fashioned.’

‘Go and change. No, don’t go and change, we haven’t got time, we’ll just have to hope no one notices.’

‘Make up your mind, Mother,’ huffed Jane. ‘You know that memory lapses and a lack of concentration are symptoms of the menopause, don’t you?’

‘JUST GET IN THE FUCKING CAAAAARRRRR!’

‘Mood swings too,’ she added helpfully. ‘And bloating …’

‘I’m not fucking menopausal, I just need you to get in the car!’ I begged, as Jane sauntered out the door, before screaming in outrage because Peter had beaten her there and was smugly ensconced in the front seat. I wondered if I went to the GP and just whimpered ‘Teenagers’ they’d prescribe me valium? And also gin?

I finally got them to the bus stop, and was just kicking them out of the car when Peter stopped halfway out (‘Darling, please, there’s traffic, what are you doing?’) to say, ‘Oh yeah, Mum, by the way, I need some money on my thumb for lunch.’

‘What?’

‘Y’know! My thumb money. You need to put some on it. So I can get lunch?’

‘Your thumb. Do you perchance mean your ParentPay account?’

‘Yeah. My thumb!’

‘Oh, I need mine topped up too, Mum,’ said Jane, suddenly sweetness and light and dropping the sarky ‘Mother’ now cold hard cash was involved.

‘Right! You didn’t think to remind me of this before?’ I said, thinking, ‘Wave them off with a smile, don’t let them leave on a sour note, be nice, so their last memory of you isn’t as a shrieking harridan,’ and also thinking, ‘Why couldn’t they ask Simon about things like this, just once? Why do I always have to do everything?’

‘We’re reminding you now!’ they said in surprise.

‘I’ll have to do it when I get to work. I’m late. Now please just GO!’ I hissed, before brightly adding, ‘Bye darlings, love you. Have a wonderful day!’

Arrgh! Fucking ParentPay. Or his ‘thumb money’, as Peter confusingly insists on referring to it. In theory, a useful and efficient website that allows you to top up your children’s dinner money accounts (which they then use to pay for their lunches using their thumb print, hence the ‘thumb money’. I do have concerns about this and fear the government might steal their data and keep files on them, although in my children’s case the files would mainly record the fact that they spend inordinate amounts of money on chips and traybakes while at school, because you can also check what they’ve bought with their thumbs. I quickly found it was too depressing to look, and I still marvel they’ve not got scurvy – they must have very sound constitutions, which I expect they got from me), pay for school trips and other extras, all online using your card, instead of scrabbling around to find change/chequebooks/cash to pay for these things. In reality, it’s a constant drain of money. No sooner have you topped up their accounts than they’re unaccountably empty again. It’s very depressing!

Sunday, 22 April

The chatty chickens are here! I’d pondered keeping them in the shed but decided against it (sometimes I wonder how Simon copes without a shed now he’s living in a flat, but I suppose he doesn’t have me to avoid and only has the children one weekend a fortnight. I bet he wishes he had a shed, though. How has it not occurred to me till now that I should really make the most of my shed-bragging rights against poor shedless Simon? I could really rub salt in the wound by laughing that actually, I use it so little that sometimes I even forget that I have a shed! That would go some way to making up for all the times he asked me if I’d had a ‘nice day off’ when I worked part-time when the children were little, when in reality I’d spent the entirety of my ‘day off’ trying to tackle the shit heap of our house, wrangle his feral fuck trophies and cling on to my sanity while trying to have a wee for the last two hours since inevitably someone needed me for something crucial every time I tried to head to the loo, and so now I thought my bladder was going to burst and I probably had a UTI … Hmm, on second thoughts, taunting him with my shed doesn’t even come close. Maybe I’ll burn it down in front of him while laughing maniacally and telling him I don’t need it. No, better to mock him with a functioning but unused shed …).

The chicken house arrived yesterday, a rather lovely little wood affair with a built-in run, and roosts and nesting boxes and all sorts including special fox-proof wire apparently. I was a little alarmed at the ‘easy clean’ features, as I hadn’t really taken cleaning out chickens into account (I sort of assumed they’d just poop outside and it would be good for the grass or something, but it seems not). Anyway, never mind, I decided that maybe the children could clean out the chickens for me – such a wholesome outdoor activity. After all, the whole point of the chickens (apart from their Instagrammability) was because I’d read somewhere that looking after animals was very therapeutic for children after suffering a trauma such as their parents’ divorce. Having paid out so much to bloody Christina to no avail as well, I also reckoned chickens would be much cheaper than getting the children counselling, and I’d get some free eggs out of it too. In a fit of chicken enthusiasm I spent most of yesterday painting the chicken house an adorable duck egg blue so that it would be a worthy home for my Speckled Sussexes to chat to me in. I’d attempted to persuade Peter and Jane that this might be a lovely bonding activity for us to do together, but Jane curtly told me she was ‘busy’ and after ten minutes of Peter enthusiastically sloshing my beautiful duck egg blue paint all over the lawn, the garden bench, the apple tree and himself – everywhere in fact but on the chicken house, I suggested that maybe I’d just finish it myself.

When I went in to get a cup of tea there were giant duck egg blue footprints all through the house, which was particularly baffling as Peter had taken his shoes off at the back door. How had he got paint INSIDE his shoes? I told myself it didn’t matter, it would wash off, and anyway, I was very partial to a bit of duck egg blue (perhaps I shall also keep ducks, as part of my wholesome Country Image? I can see my Instagram feed now, all hens and ducks and trugs of beautiful vegetables, and me skipping about in a pair of fetching dungarees looking like Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. I just need to find a way to stop myself looking like a Soviet era mechanic when I put on dungarees).

When the chickens arrived, the children did shuffle outside to admire them. They were very beautiful chickens, and even Jane seemed enamoured of them. I’d told the children they could each name a chicken, and I would name the third. I’d harboured hopes of names of Shakespearean grandeur, or perhaps some classics from Greek mythology (when I suggested they could look to the Greek myths for inspiration, Jane sniggered and said, ‘What about Jason? Was that the sort of thing you had in mind, Mother?’ to which I pointed out that the chickens were girls and so Jason wasn’t appropriate – and also definitely not what I’d had in mind).

‘So, darlings,’ I said cheerily. ‘Have you decided what you’re going to call your chickens?’

‘Oh yes, Mum,’ they said, exchanging knowing looks. I should have anticipated that no good would come of the children colluding on anything.

‘I’m calling mine Oxo,’ announced Jane.

‘And mine’s Bisto,’ giggled Peter.

‘What? No! You can’t call them after stock cubes and gravy. How will that make them feel? They’ll constantly be worried we’re going to eat them.’

‘Mum, they’re chickens,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t think they really know about things like that.’

‘They’re chatty chickens,’ I insisted. ‘You don’t know what they know about. You’ll upset them.’

‘Well, you said we could call them whatever we wanted, and that’s what we’ve chosen,’ said Jane firmly. ‘What are you going to call yours, Mum?’

‘Oh fuck it,’ I said wearily. ‘I suppose if I can’t beat you, I’ll have to join you. I don’t want my chicken feeling different, so she’d better be Paxo.’

At least, I reflected, Jane had called me ‘Mum’ for once and not a sarcasm-laden ‘Mother’. Perhaps the chickens were already weaving their therapeutic magic and soon we’d all be sitting together playing board games and doing jigsaws in the evening and having a good old sing-song round the piano, and being a wholesome, normal and functional family.

From Judgy Dog’s reaction when I tentatively introduced him to the chickens, he wholeheartedly approved of the names and couldn’t wait to see the chickens live up to them. Fuck. My. Life.

Wednesday, 25 April

I was feeling like a perfect, clever domestic goddess, totally and utterly nailing juggling teenage parenting, single motherhood and a demanding career (it’s very good being important enough to be given your own office, because it makes timewasting on non-work-related things – like topping up ParentPay accounts – much easier. I’d feel bad about this, if I didn’t know for a fact that my old boss, Ed, whose job and office I was promoted into last year, as he’s gone to be Busy and Important at the head office in California, had always had a two-hour nap under his desk every afternoon, having insisted that he must not be disturbed, as that was when he made Important Calls. Therefore I feel that since I’m actually rather good at my job and efficient enough to get everything done with time left over, snatching the odd half-hour for life admin is perfectly OK. We’ll gloss over the time I spend browsing the Daily Mail website, though).

In a fit of said efficiency, I’d ordered a Sainsbury’s shop online as there’s less temptation to spend money on unnecessary items that catch my eye and look useful or delicious – the budget German supermarkets are all very well until you hit the middle aisles and their tempting arrays of randomness – and arranged to have it delivered after the children got in from school, leaving strict instructions that they were to have put it away by the time I got home. I felt slightly guilty about making my poor latch-key children also put the shopping away after a tough day at school, but then I reminded myself that a) the fridge stuff would all be warm by the time I finally got home and there was no one else to do it, and b) agonising over making your children put away the Arborio risotto rice and Parmesan was surely a first world problem if ever there was one.

I got in the door to be greeted by Judgy’s usual performance of ‘Hello, I love you, you are the centre of my world, come and sit down so I can sit on your knee and tell you how much I love you!’ for two minutes, before he remembered that I had in fact dared to leave him, and so he hated me and I must be punished, even though I knew he’d had a perfectly lovely day with the fabulous dog sitter, who picks him up in the morning and returns him in the evening and who had sent me a photo at lunchtime of Judgy lolling on her sofa, having thrown all the cushions on the floor (he does this at home as well). He does this every day, though, so I’m no longer distressed by it, as he forgives me as soon as there’s a sniff of food.

The house, which had been tidy when I left this morning, looked like a bomb had hit it. A trail of shoes, school bags and coats littered the hall. In the sitting room, plates and glasses festooned every surface, while Jane sprawled on the sofa, staring intently at her phone.

‘Hello, darling,’ I said loudly.

Jane slowly dragged her eyes up from her phone and grunted something.

‘Did the shopping come?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘And did you put it away?’

‘No, that’s not my job. That’s your job.’

‘I can’t do everything, Jane. I just … can’t. Please help me out here. Meet me halfway?’

‘If you didn’t want to do everything yourself, you should have stayed with Dad then, shouldn’t you?’ snapped Jane. ‘Then you’d have had someone to help!’

I gave up and went through to the kitchen. The shopping was all over the floor. Jane followed me through.

‘And you had it delivered in bags!’ she said accusingly. ‘I mean, don’t worry about us, Mother! It’s not like we want a planet to live on in the future or anything.’

‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘I must’ve ticked the wrong box. I’ll reuse them or take them to be recycled, it’ll be fine.’

Jane snorted again.

Peter meanwhile was standing there disconsolately, surrounded by the shopping.

‘When’s dinner?’ he said. ‘I’m SO hungry, Mum, and there’s no food.’

‘Dinner will be about half an hour,’ I said. ‘Peter, there’s literally food all around you, because neither of you have bothered your arse to put the shopping away.’

‘I did put it away,’ protested Peter. ‘I put the fridge stuff away, and then I didn’t know where anything else went.’

I opened the fridge. He had indeed ‘put the fridge stuff away’, if you could call cramming everything in randomly ‘putting it away’. There was a block of Cheddar at the front with teeth marks in it.

‘Who did this?’ I demanded.

Peter shrugged. ‘I told you I was hungry,’ he said.

‘Right,’ I said furiously. ‘There will be no dinner until all this shopping is put away. ALL of it. Work out where it goes, it’s not rocket science. I, meanwhile, am going to have a glass of wine and FIVE MINUTES’ PEACE, while you BOTH put it away – do not even think about bleating about gender stereotypes or the FUCKING PATRIARCHY at me, Jane, and Peter, PUT IT AWAY AND DO NOT EAT IT. You can go fifteen minutes without eating something.’

I poured myself a large glass of wine and stomped out to talk to my chatty chickens, followed by Judgy Dog, who wasn’t going to let a little thing like being in a sulk with me mean I could be let out of his sight, especially not to betray him with the chickens. I also suspected him of harbouring hopes of getting into the chicken house and being a winner, winner with a chicken dinner. I’ve already had stern words with him about how I’d struggle to love him so much if he ate the Speckled Sussexes, even though so far they’ve not laid a single egg. I expect they’re still settling in.

The chickens looked at me balefully in response to my cheery greeting. So far they’ve proved distinctly unchatty. I can’t help but wonder if they’ve taken against me because of their names? They also refuse to look Instagrammable every time I try to take a picture of them. Instead, as soon as I get my phone out, they hunch into themselves and huddle pathetically and do an excellent impression of an RSPCA advert, despite their extremely pampered life. Luckily Jane does seem to like them, and even deigns to feed them, so there’s that. I’m starting to wonder if buying expensive chickens was a mistake, and I should have got some rescue battery hens, who might at least have been grateful for their new home and not looked at me quite so nastily. Maybe I should get some rescue hens too? I fear the Speckled Sussexes might bully them, though.

‘What do you think? Would you like some friends?’ I asked the chickens. They glared at me. Oxo gave a disgusted squawk. I assumed that was a no.

I gave up trying to converse with them and drank my wine, while reflecting that at least Peter tries to help, even if his attempts are more of a hindrance, while I fretted that perhaps his efforts are due to some misplaced idea that he has to be the man of the house, which will go down badly with Jane and her views on the patriarchy if he tries to tell her what to do. Jane has recently become very vocal on the subject of the Oppression of the Patriarchy, although as far as I can see, rather than trying to overthrow it and bring about an equal and fair society, she mostly uses it as an excuse not to lift a finger, and to tell me why I’m wrong about everything, because obviously I’ve no idea whatsoever what it’s like to live in a patriarchal society like she does.

My wine finished, I gave up trying to work out the tangled thought processes of my teenage children, shut the chickens in their house for the night (Judgy would never forgive me if I allowed a dastardly fox to enjoy his

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