Category: fear and loathing

This is getting so tedious and exhausting. Three now in, what, ten weeks? It’s like recurrent bouts of malaria only instead of getting weaker they’re getting stronger.

The shrink says double the shrinkage. I say sure, whatever. I’m ceasing to care very much. When this whole palaver began its current phase, more than four years ago, I remember saying to the doctor I didn’t mind what they told me to do, I would hang upside down naked from the branches of the tree outside the window or walk barefoot across broken glass – anything to take the pain away.

Nearly five years later and doctors and pills and trick cyclists and shrinks and different pills and more pills and different doctors and guess what – hurts more than ever. Not all the time, like it used to, but in such massive, apocalyptic convulsions that the effort of getting through them is almost beyond me.

Am I a coward? am I selfish? maybe. Even probably. Do I love my children? of course, passionately. Do I love my friends? yes, greatly. I am so lucky – two beautiful children, many wonderful friends, a roof over my head and so on and so on. Don’t think I don’t know. But it doesn’t make the pain go away.

We have a bowl among our crockery that has an almost invisible crack. The only reason you know to look for it is that is sounds wrong when you put it down on the table. Looks quite normal on cursory inspection. But one day it’s going to shatter because somewhere along the line it was subjected to a force which nearly broke it, but not quite. We still use it, of course. It’s a bowl, after all. But the exigencies of daily life are such that one day it will fall apart irrevocably. It’s only a matter of time.

“That whore and her half-caste bastard are never going to cross my threshold.”

My step-mother had been married to my father for six years at the time that she made this pronouncement so she’d obviously had time to refine her opinion of her step-daughter. This was her reaction to news of my pregnancy.

To have a mother who considers you loathsome might be unfortunate; to have a step-mother who feels the same way while not carelessness, since I had chosen neither, certainly does nothing to bolster a positive self-image.

The fact that both I and my half-caste bastard together with the second, slightly more acceptably parented, bastard are currently across her threshold and under her roof indicates that her initial position has modified somewhat over the intervening decade or so. Children, after all, come into the world innocent and not at their own behest. However her underlying opinion of their mother has changed very little.

Another familiar part of this territory – the aversion to physical contact, the overt hostility and snide remarks – is the concomitant delight in the company of the male. The now live-in-ex has always been drawn across the threshold with effusive delight and demonstrations of affection. It is hardly surprising then that in the current situation I, the wicked, heartless and irrational woman, have injured the long-suffering and saintly man whilst also ruining the lives of my children.

Thus it was that as midnight ticked into Christmas morning I was upstairs wrapping presents for the children serenaded by the gales of laughter and sounds of carousing and merriment from below as my father, step-mother and ex drank life, or at least the port, to the lees.

Merry Christmas.

I’ve slept through quite a bit of weather – the famous hurricane of whenever-it-was that ripped up large swathes of southern England, for instance. Today I slept through the tornado which ripped the side off a house 200 yards away.

Well, I didn’t entirely sleep through it. I was aware of a very bright flash which made me think someone had taken a picture of me whilst in bed followed instantly by a huge clap of thunder. A storm, I thought, immediately overhead. There was a pause, then torrential rain and what sounded like hail, the rushing of wind and, some time later, the annoyance of several helicopters which appeared to be attempting to land on the roof.

I was woken up, about two hours later, by the phone ringing repeatedly as people who’d seen the news checked to find out if all was ok.

I generally find, when suicidal, that the best tactic is to go to bed and sleep. That way you get the benefits of death, at least temporarily, without any of the repercussions for other people. Also the titanic struggle required to resist the blandishments of extinction is exhausting. Sleep is good.

So there I was, half asleep. And my thought, when I realised that the storm was immediately overhead, was that I wished I had been struck by the lightning. Then at least it would have been an accident. This is the current plan, to make it look like an accident. Perhaps, when in India, I could be run over in the street. If the tornado had ripped the top off my house, and me with it, it would have solved so many problems.

I so want to die. I so wish I didn’t.