A typing … not typing

… PS don’t die. Rem to floss. Bye (monkey covering little eyes) PPS I’m in bed now. Beer gone. Wrecked. Love you xxx

Hegs began to snore and Jane was nibbling Bourbons like Minnie Mouse.

Floss. The sum of our love.

*

Hospital Sundays were strange. I felt strange and although time was moving, it was stuck on strange same. It was just another Hospital day, without the good doctors who were off in their holiday homes or running marathons or whatever else it is that doctors do when they’re not doctoring.

Outside of here, Sundays smelled free, if being free has a smell, like rusty wood incense, leather or cold air. Sundays smelled like Alex. Male. I didn’t check emails on Sundays. (At least not in front of him and definitely not until after sex and a shower.) It was coming to the end of the Premier League season. That was the hot topic. And their hot Sunday topics sometimes got in on me.

Everything so cyclical.

After the season ended the transfer markets would open and then the boys would divert onto some European thing. Except Nathan. He excelled at the role of middle child with a terrifying love of dinosaurs, Thomas the Tank Engine, socks with sandals and rational-thinking-that-bordered-on-catastrophic-thinking. But among the other three, there was talk about the World Cup qualifiers around the corner, the corruption of the Russians, and sadness in the FIFA world, which was hurting them. Not a lot of food in the house. Which was hurting them too. They were now living on pizza, which wasn’t hurting. There’d be much talk about men wearing earrings and hairstyles and left kickers, and the most pressing question of all, whether or not the English team would be allowed to bring the wives to next year’s World Cup, if they qualified, considering the media frenzy following around Victoria Beckham many years ago in Baden-Baden, the chariot with the horses and the sixty pairs of sunglasses like glitzy Tommy fucken Shelby’s.

I missed having my daughter to talk to, though the thought of it also frightened the life out of me. I would be too strict, just in case she turned into that woman following her husband’s success on a chariot in Baden-fucken-Baden. Nothing would be appropriate, not her hair or her smell or her clothes or her swagger. I’d be too tough on her. In the way mothers are with daughters, because they know, mothers. They know how different it is. Boys were fine. Besides, they had coped well without me for years. Ten.

I was ten years working madly and thinking about manoeuvres and strategy, so that at the end I’d have photos to hang all over our concrete lives (aka The House) and everyone would be comfortable and none of them would want for things, the way I had wanted, that crippling awfulness of not having The Things; clothes and runners and schoolbags and music lessons and gym gear and labelled denims and fancy stuff and days out and Irish summer college and keyboards and hamsters and roller blades and computers and the best games and if they had all of that, then no one would notice them in the wrong way, and therefore if I did a little groundwork, you know, when they were small, when they’d hardly notice my absence at all, then we’d all be safe from judgement. I wouldn’t have to rely on a man leaving money on the counter in a small dim kitchen for our survival. When the mood took him. Or not leaving it. When the mood took him.