My House Is Falling Down by Mary Loudon

Author:Mary Loudon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Time has begun to lose its meaning. At 7 p.m. on a school night, Angus drives us through London’s expensive, antiseptic heart. I’d be happiest on the boat going nowhere but he wants to treat us to a restaurant. I tell him it’s May, it’s warm enough to eat on deck, on Verity – but he replies, ‘I’ve thought of that, nutcase, and booked a table outside, on the terrace.’

I never get this time again.

Mark is always saying that. He says it to the twins when they are fighting. He says it in traffic jams. He says it when he has explained three times by email to his mobile phone provider why he doesn’t want to pay for five hundred minutes of free calls a month because, being deaf, he has no need of them.

I will never get this weekend again. Or more accurately, I will never get to spend it with my children: I have given it away, to someone else, and they will never have it. It will not be part of their childhood store of their mother.

Angus does not know how homesick London makes me. I look out of the car window. Street after street of halogen-lit boutiques adorned with things that shine. I search for evidence of normality until somewhere amongst the couture and jewellery shops I spot a small sign for a hospice – the clearest of reminders that real life exists beyond this assembly of decadent emporia, and is precarious. Quite suddenly, in my slinky dress, one hand resting on Angus’s thigh, I miss the twins with such intensity that my throat constricts. I think about taking them to the GP when they were very small, each with a fever and rash, both of them pink and tetchy. The advice dispensed was sensible, predictable: Calpol and rest, wait and see, come back if it persists. It persisted. Their rashes worsened. They vomited and shivered and were difficult to hydrate. Nauseous with fear, I rolled glass tumblers over the spots on their backs and outlined with felt-tip the blotches on their thighs so that I could chart the progress of their rashes. I resisted A&E but a bag was packed and ready. Mark was halfway up a Scottish mountain at the time, painting cloud formations in a rented croft with no Wi-Fi: texts and emails outlining my insomniac near-derangement went unanswered. When he reappeared a week later, the twins were full of post-viral ennui – sporadically active, then listless and irritable. ‘See,’ he said, ‘you didn’t need me anyway. They’re fine. You’re such a good mummy.’

Now, as Angus negotiates a road diversion – ‘Christ, we’d be better off walking!’ – I see Miranda on her side, thumb in her mouth, damp-haired after a bath. I want to walk into her bedroom this minute: I want to stroke her forehead and lift her plump arm to my mouth and kiss it, savour the softness of her skin. Melanie sleeps on her back, arms slung across the duvet.

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