Badric's Island by Amanda Nicol

Author:Amanda Nicol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agent Press
Published: 2017-02-09T17:26:04+00:00

I press send and off it goes, the little envelope on my screen disappearing into the ether. Damn, damn, damn! What the hell did I do that for? Come back little text message! I didn’t mean to say that!

16

My millennium memories

I listen to the news on the radio to try and inject a bit of reality into the evening. The words wash over me as I lie on the sofa in the semi-darkness. A car zooms past, bass booming. An alarm eventually stops. A siren screams on Albert Bridge Road, and a helicopter chops its descent into the heliport, not far from Swan Wharf. The sound of the voices is by contrast calming, reassuring. I don’t really hear what they’re saying, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It suggests that there is some sanity to be found, that there is someone, somewhere, who knows what the hell is going on; that there are people who do not live in London, who live in Gloucestershire and York, North Wales or the Isle of Skye; people who read books and revive country crafts; people who don’t watch telly and have never heard of Trinny and Susannah; people who go to the theatre and in the summer listen to the Proms every night on Radio 3; people with good relationships, happy marriages, children who don’t look like dollies or junior members of the National Front.

David listens to Radio 3. I know this because I was there. That fortnight we spent together the first year, with baby Badric, the last of the litter. Fiona was elsewhere, with family, so David slept on Swan with me. My New Life for the New Millennium. A few years late maybe, but so what? I was living it. It all seemed so symbolic, as I lit the stove with the piles of old newspapers, bills and insurance policies that David was prone to horde, but was throwing out to make some cupboard space for me. Papers that distracted me from the task, Millennium papers going on and on about it; The Millennium kitchen; the Millennium garden; my Millennium moment; my first major mistake of the Millennium; how to be a New Millennium Man; a Millennium Mum; sexual mores for a sizzling New Millennium; Millennium menu makeover; 2,000 thousand free tickets to the Millennium Dome for the first 2,000 people to ring this number.

One afternoon turned into two nights, then into a week, followed by a few days of wandering around in a daze, then back, this time with a suitcase. The house-sitting stint was done. I couldn’t face going back to the flat in Streatham. Alan, one of the guys in the theatre group, who I’d had a bit of a fling with on the Brecht tour was always hanging around. Not hanging around me in particular, just there, one of the gang. The gang that told me that Wives was a total sell-out, like they’d have turned it down. Anyway, there was no contest with David’s little cabin, the scent of the honeysuckle growing by the gangplank wafting in on the breeze.

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