This is Where We Stayed

The Cream

Jane woke up with her mouth wide open and her hand in a bad position. For a few seconds, she had no idea where she was. She could smell the duvet cover and she knew it wasn't the smell of her own one. Her eyes slid over the bed to the unfamiliar wall paper which was something to do with birds and trees. Nearby, a wooden blind she didn't recognise hung over a window that framed a strange view of a tiny, nondescript gard-

Oh.

She was at Paula's house. She was at Paula's house for the second time in her life. But this was the first time in her life that she'd stayed over.

And then, with a rush of body science that hurt her chest, Jane remembered what she'd done the night before. She pulled herself over to the side of the bed and draped her head over the edge of it to look underneath.

There they were. All the things. From the bathroom. Unopened. Unused. Un-hers. They'd been under the bed all night. Jane looked at them with pride and fear. There was a bottle with cream in it, three bars of posh soap in over the top wrappers, a pink sponge that hadn't been touched and some perfume still in its box. They were all perfectly perfect. But also, they were weird because they were so unlike the kinds of things that were kept in the bathroom at her own house. Oh my God, they were so fucking pretty that she hated them a bit. The words, tasteless and tacky sounded in her head in Mum's voice. 

Jane breathed in with her nose. Under the bed, she could smell a too strong, too sweet, Paula-ish scent. She wanted to rip all the things open and touch them and have them on her. She knew how they would feel; waxy and fruity; thick and gloopy. She wanted to get under the bed and bury her face into them; to chew on them in a never-ending gobstopper way. But she knew that she wouldn't go that far. It was almost enough to just have them there. It was almost enough.

Jane heard Dad and Paula downstairs. Paula was laughing at a joke she didn't get. Dad was laughing at a joke he didn't find funny. Jane thought about Dad and Paula sleeping in the same bed and got a pang in her spine. She thought about yesterday. About how she had made a fuss and caused a scene. About how she had run away to Diane's house when Dad had told her they were going to Paula's for the night. About how she had told Diane to call Mum and how Diane had said, Jane, Mum's on holiday, darling. About how Dad had come to Diane's to get her and how he'd promised she didn't have to go to Paula's house but how they'd ended up there anyway and about how she couldn't remember how this had happened.

Jane thought about all of that for a bit.

Her nightie was all twisted up around her legs and her bum was out and it was getting cold. She thought that she wanted some toast or some cereal. She thought that she wanted to get dressed or go for a walk. She heard sounds from below. A radio. A cup on a table. A clearing of a throat.

Jane sat up in the bed and looked at the door. At first, she was looking at the door. But after a while, she was staring at the door. She wasn't thinking about anything, really. She knew what she was going to do. She'd already decided. So the staring at the door wasn't Jane coming up with a plan and organising the logistics. It was just Jane waiting.

Paula's bedroom was really big. There were flowers on the curtains and cuddly toys on the bed and a silky thing hanging on the door. There was also a photograph of Paula and Dad on the bedside table. In the photograph, they were laughing. Jane wondered who had taken the photograph but she couldn't think of anyone.

Jane stood still for absolutely ages.

Jane was holding the unopened bottle of cream from the bathroom.

Jane started to feel sick-ish.

Outside, there was a scream which made a noise come out of Jane's mouth without her wanting one to. The scream wasn't a real scream. It was more of a yelp. The yelp was made by a grown up. The grown up was telling a child off for running into the road without looking. This whole thing lasted for about ten seconds, which is actually quite a long time, especially when you've been standing still for absolutely ages.

Jane's hands had become a bit hot. The bottle of cream from the bathroom was starting to feel heavy and Jane had begun to lose her grip on it a little bit because of sweat and the passing of time. She walked over to Paula's dressing table which was big and white and very mirrored. 

Jane looked at her own face in the mirror. Then, she put the bottle of cream down and pulled her nightie really tight against herself with both of her hands. She looked at the shape of her body in the mirror. As she did this, she didn't decide anything. She just looked. With one hand still clutching her nightie against her, she opened one of Paula's dresser drawers which was filled with knickers and bras and other things with straps and clasps that Jane didn't understand. She put her hand inside and had a feel. Everything was smooth and thin and wispy and light. Jane could feel that The Moment was about to happen. It was one of those times when people say, it's now or never.

Jane didn't know this but she was holding her breath. She reached for the bottle of cream with a shaky hand and snapped it open. She turned the bottle on its head and held it over the drawer of underwear and started squeezing. She squeezed for a long time. She did all of this without breathing any breaths or thinking any thoughts. Those things would come later.

After lunch, it was time for Jane to go back to Mum's house. Being in the car with Dad was Jane's favourite thing about Dad. She liked watching him doing the driving and she liked the music he listened to. Recently, the seat belt in the passenger seat had started to smell like a mixture of Paula and cigarettes. As Dad was driving too fast down all the country roads, Jane looked out the window, as usual, and pretended to be a different person, as usual. She was making up a story about how she lived in a flat in London and got a bus to school (but not a school bus, a public bus) and she was getting to a really good bit in the story about the kind of bedroom she'd have in the flat when she was interrupted by Dad, who said,

I think we need to have a little chat, don't you?

The Man Who Didn’t Go To His Father’s Funeral.

Dad, I’m not ready to get in touch. Please don’t be in contact. Leave it to me. There’s nothing wrong. Everything’s fine.

I googled: should I go to my estranged father’s funeral.

We were estranged. That was my choice.

For my entire adult life, I’ve tried to understand what happened to me.

There’s the cold palmed, sweaty, midnight horror. There’s the memory of my dad pushing my mum out of a moving car. The memory of us being locked out of the house on Christmas day, in the snow, in our pyjamas. The memory of him shutting himself in the front room, smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking three bottles of wine and screaming at anyone who went near him.

Over and over. Over and over. And when you’re a child, your parents are the weather. 

If you want to know about affection, there were these times:

He once told me we were going to Homebase and he let me sit in the front of the car.

He once had to go to Birmingham and he took me with him and he bought me a comic on the way.

He once said to me, when I was about 17, ‘you’re a very handsome chap aren’t you?’

So. There they are.

If you want to know about Family Dynamics, there is this:

My sister protected me from him. If he hit me, she threw her dinner at him. If he bullied me, she tried to stab him with a knife. She tried to kill him on a number of occasions. They would fight physically. He would hit her around her head with all of his force. My mum would have been on the floor somewhere, having already been beaten by him.

There were no adults in our house. There was me, I was the youngest, there were two other children, there was a father who behaved like a cracked up three-year-old, and there was a mother who was absolutely incapable of protecting us.

And, when you’re a child, your parents are the weather.

If you want to know what this is about, it’s about this:

He died last Christmas eve. In the morning. He was 68. The funeral was today.

I could have gone.

I couldn’t imagine going, though, because I had decided so long ago that I wasn’t going to. But I also couldn’t imagine not going.

If you want know about the questions I’ve asked myself, I’ve asked myself these:

What is the statement I’m making? What are my reasons? What have I decided? My sister said that she didn’t care what my reasons were, that she wanted me there, and that if I wasn’t going to be there, then that was it and there was nothing more to talk about. My other sister said she didn’t understand my reasons, but that she didn’t need to understand them, and that we should all stop dissecting what the other one thinks. 

If you want to know about some of the things I think about and some of the things I feel, there are these things:

People say that decisions are difficult but I don’t buy that. I think that decisions are fucking easy. What’s hard is getting to the point where you know you can live with the consequences. I felt massive relief when he died. I felt like it was my birthday for about a week. There was a lightness in me that I hadn’t felt for fucking years. But I feel incredibly sad for him. I don’t think death is sad, I think loss is sad and I think that sadness is sad. 

If you want to know what the story is, it is this:

It was in September last year that I told him not to call me again. But the estrangement is actually a lot older than that. Through my late teens, we’d hang out. He’d re-married and I’d go to his house and there was a very brittle attempt at him being a dad. And then it all kind of went wrong. He turned up at the pub one day. I was with my friends. He got really, really drunk and he asked me what I thought of him and I said I didn’t want to talk about it. And he said, ‘oh, come on, I know your childhood was difficult’ and I think I said something. And the next thing I knew, he’d punched me square in the face.

I was 18.

And that was kind of it for me. The estrangement happened after that.

His mother bullied him and was violent with him and his father was very distant. He went to university and became a chemist. He ended up working on the stock market. And then, he basically turned into a total fucking bastard somewhere along the line.

The last time I saw him was at his mother’s funeral, last year. He looked like the deadest person there. Before her funeral, I was telling myself it wouldn’t be as bad as I was expecting it to be, it was just an afternoon with an old man I hadn’t seen for a long time. But, fucking hell, it was so much worse than I could’ve imagined. It was awful. I was sitting there thinking, you’re going to kill yourself.

And now he has.

He drank himself to death. 

I cut off all contact with my dad. I was estranged from my him. And now he’s dead. And today is his funeral. And I’m not there. And this is what I’m doing. To mark him. 

Before I told him not to get in touch with me, I was having rolling panic attacks for about three months. A lot of my anxiety was to do with the belief that if I stopped trying to be perfect, stopped trying to work hard all the time – to do everything perfectly –  if I just relaxed, I would turn into him. When I was estranged from him, it was impossible for me to have a problem with him. So, I realised that actually, the problems I had were the parts of him that were embedded in me as memory, or as habit.

All those realisations are very difficult. 

If you want to know what I consider to be the truth, I think it is this:

People who feel hurt, cause hurt. If someone is hurting you, you can’t be the one who stops them hurting. That’s how abuse happens. If you can’t move away from someone who’s hurting you, that’s abuse. And the ‘can’t’ can be for whatever reason; it could even be because you don’t want to. If someone chooses to be in an abusive relationship, it doesn’t make the relationship any less abusive, it just makes it more fucked up. 

If you want to know a bit more about me, there is this:

I went through phases of my life when I was in proper trouble. I went to live in Japan. I did a lot of drugs and a lot of clubbing. Every day, really. I didn’t eat. I was being abused by my partner. He used to hit me and throw my dinner at me, which obviously made me feel like I was back at home. And I remember thinking, ‘this has to stay an abusive relationship. I can’t allow this to become a relationship that’s just two people fighting each other.’ Because if I’d done that, I felt as though I would have lost myself.

It wasn’t epiphanic, but when I was about 24, I started to try and sort myself out. It’s taken 15 years so far and I’m still going. More recently, during the time when I was having a lot of panic attacks, I studied my condition really hard. I did a lot of reading. And I got to the point where I understood exactly what was happening to me. And before all this studying, I imagined that at the moment when I understood everything, it would be like a magic spell and everything would unravel. Of course, it didn’t. And that’s a false belief that I lived under for a long time: that I could just understand my way out of some very big problems.

I’m a Buddhist now. Not religiously, but just because it works. It’s a way of inhabiting the present that doesn’t drive me mental. I discovered that my anxiety was an attempt to stop time. My undeveloped self – the fearful, snotty four-year-old who gets to control things when it all goes to shit – was terrified of time passing and what that meant. So, he attempted to stop time magically, with the muscles of my body. I try to notice the passage of time now, I try to notice that each moment has a different quality from the next.

A lot of my periods of being anxious were characterised by extreme dislocation from reality, and I think that was a place I went to a lot when I was a kid.  A state of freeze. Of shock. Of feeling, quite literally like nothing was real, like I wasn’t there. 

I cut off all contact with my dad. I was estranged from him. He was abusive. And now he’s dead. And today is his funeral. And I’m not there. And this is what I’m doing. To mark him. 

If you want to know some of the things I remember, I remember this:

I used to spend a lot of my time in the garden, away from him. I’d be constantly looking at and studying all the tinniest things; we had a pond with all these tiny animals in it and I remember all the flowers and all the plants in minute detail. And my dad would come into the garden and mow the shit out of it all. So, there’s a quite painful symbolism in that, looking back. There’s a lot I can’t remember but then there’s a lot I remember in photographic detail.

Some of the most painful memories I have are of him being really cruel to animals. There were loads of tiny froglets in the garden, thousands of them that had just hatched out in the pond, and he just mowed them up with the lawn. I can remember being absolutely distraught, begging him to stop. And he wouldn’t. He told me to fuck off. 

If you want to know about anger, there is this:

My sister feels vast, seething cauldrons of anger towards my mother. It’s taken me quite a long time to feel anger of any description; it would immediately channel into fear or despondency or depression or anxiety. My sister channelled her pain into fury. But I think doing that kind of thing only gets you so far. If the only way you can cope is though fear, then you end up with a serious anxiety issue. If the only way you can cope is through anger, then you burn everyone. 

If you want to know what this is all for, it is for this:

Some parents are so fucking shit that you shouldn’t go to their funeral. 

I wasn’t even sure if I should tell anyone that he’d died. Because it would have been like ‘I feel like I need to tell you that my dad’s died because my dad’s died, but, you know, it’s fine because I didn’t like him.’ 

I cut off all contact with my dad. I was estranged from him. He was abusive and violent and a bully and an alcoholic. And when you're a child, your parents are the weather. And now he’s dead. And today is his funeral. And I’m not there. And this is what I’m doing.

To mark him.

If You Go

If you go to Kendal, you might meet Anne and Bernard. They're a couple. Anne has the eyes of an owl that are full of tough love and she knows exactly what kind of knee-length skirt she likes to wear. Bernard wears his black polyester trousers high, high up on his waist. In the morning, at breakfast, Bernard will ask you questions about this and that. Afterwards, there might be an early morning silence that lasts for seven or eight seconds. And then Bernard might say, right, I'd better go and help Anne with the toast then. The thing about Anne and Bernard is that once, a man stayed in their house who kept screaming at night and they didn't know what to do about it.


If you go to Carlisle, you might meet Christine. She's got a huge TV in her lounge and she watches Don't Tell the Bride while she does the ironing. When you first meet Christine, you might think she's too tired and angry to talk to you, but that's not true; she's just thinking about her kids, that's all. And as soon as you say, thanks, Christine, she'll make an expression on her face that's embarrassed and teenagery and quite beautiful. The thing about Christine is that the people around her steal her share of the deep breaths and it's not fair.


If you go to Stornoway, you might meet David. David doesn't know where to stand or where to look or who he is. You might mistake his depression for laziness. And you might get cross with him for things like his mumbling voice or his lack of motivation. But then, he might do a really small, human thing. For example, he might want to shake your hand and say sorry with his eyes, and then you'll picture him eating a sandwich on his own and you'll feel the kind of pity for him that you feel towards your parents sometimes. The thing about David is that he's got to remember that what he doesn't do is as much his responsibility as what he does do. 


If you go to Stranraer, you might meet Ellen and Fred. Ellen has a lovely smell and likes a chat and Fred is the kind of person whose kindness makes your neck ache. They live with their son and his laptop. Fred is recovering from a bad accident at work and Ellen can't wait to go to Lanzarote. Their house is surrounded by grey concrete and grey sky, and the grey sea is just down the road. The thing about Ellen and Fred is that they've definitely thought about compensation, but, truth be told, they just don't really want to go down that road for the time being and that's that.


If you go to Greenock, you might meet Georgina. If you ask Georgina one small, polite question, all sorts of things will come out of her mouth in response, and you won't be allowed to move. You might be forgiven for thinking that Georgina's tears are fake, even though you know they're not. It's hard to explain. When Georgina's about, you might become a human shield for the other people in the room. The thing about Georgina, is that she probably needed someone to be a human shield for her once but, for one reason or another, it just didn't work.


If you go to Ullapool, you might meet Fran. You might sit down and make her a cup of tea and ask her about herself. And she'll tell you the peripheral things. And then, she might suddenly think of a piece of music, and one of those silences might happen where everything feels delicate and breakable and breath-held. And you might touch her arm and give it a soft squeeze because you know that she's weeping. And she'll be weeping in a way that only a heartbroken mother can weep. The thing about Fran is that she'll always turn up, no matter how painful it might be.


If you go to Findhorn, you might meet Gerry. You'll meet his wife, too, and Gerry will patronise her and lie to her face in front of you. Gerry thinks he's super chilled and super in touch with nature but he is super neither of these things. Gerry is full of information and facts that are, inadvertently, all about him and how good he is at his job. He thinks that his job is the most important job in Findhorn and that he is the boss of all the jobs around including your job. The thing about Gerry is that he doesn't know what his job is or how to do it.


If you go to Inverness, you might meet Hal. He lives in a house full of notices that he's stenciled himself and stuck to the walls, and there's a tiny water feature in his lounge that makes a batteries-about-to-run-out noise. Hal practices classical guitar and talks to the news and goes to church with a cap on. You might imagine Hal standing in front of the mirror in his room, striking the poses of various super heroes and screaming at his mother and feeling incredibly powerful. You might think that he does all of this before he's even had breakfast. The thing about Hal is that he's been on the verge of breaking through it all and smashing the place up since he was nine years old.


If you go to Hawick, you might meet Iris. You might be told all sorts of things about Iris by other people while Iris is sitting right next to you. And then, you might turn to look at Iris and give her a smile and a wink and she might burst into song. And after that, Iris might be very quiet again. And you might look at her again and think who did you used to be, Iris? And, quite soon after you've realised it's none of your business, Iris might tell you a story about her favourite person. The thing about Iris is that she's learned how to sit with her coat on in a really hot room and not make a fuss.


If you go to Ayr, you might meet James. It's difficult to know how old James is because of his flawless complexion. James looks haunted by pain and racked with guilt. Sometimes, James tells you that he's a bad man and that he deserves to be dead. You can imagine him playing a saxophone on a train in America, but not for money. Or, you can imagine him standing by a window, looking out at the woman he loves finally leaving him for good. The thing about James is that he could crush a man to death with fierce, fierce love and not say sorry about it for years.


If you go to Peterlee, you might meet Kelly. At first, she might look at you a bit funny and, actually, it'll be fair enough, because you might be rearranging things in her bar without asking. Kelly drinks a bit too much and doesn't eat properly. She doesn't ask questions very often but if you talk to her about something you've done, you'll notice that she listens with her eyes, and not a lot of people do that. The thing about Kelly is that when you say goodbye to her after having known her for about an hour, she'll give you one of the most honest and unassuming hugs of your life.

Any Day Now

When Julie is nine years old, it gets to be the winter. And it's the kind of winter where the darkness is all the time, and not just outside. The darkness is everywhere, all around everything, and in the spirit and the bones and the blood of things. All the sounds are dark, all the silences are dark. And it's dark inside Julie, too. And she imagines this darkness inside her and she can picture it and she can feel how big and important it is and she knows that it didn't even start off small. 

And Julie realises that this dark winter is the time she'll die. And so this is what she thinks about every day. And it doesn't go away. And Julie lies in her bed at night, in her dark room during this dark winter and, quite often, she brings her hands up to her face and her hands look frighteningly big. And Julie tells herself that this is happening because her brain is preparing for death by disconnecting from her body. And her body knows it and her brain knows it and Julie knows it. She just absolutely knows it. And she decides not to take deep breaths because she'll jinx it. So she breathes small, shallow breaths that make her lips feel fuzzy.

And Julie doesn't tell anybody apart from God.

And, during this winter, where everything all around is too dark, and where car journeys feel like a flu-dream, and the characters in tv cartoons look like they're silent-screaming from a million miles away, Julie finds that she can walk just outside of herself. And while she's doing this, she looks closely at her mother and her brother and her sister, and her teachers and her friends and her non-friends. She looks really closely, even though her body feels far away from all of their bodies. And she doesn't tell anyone that she's going to die but she wants and also doesn't want them to know.

And sometimes, during very quiet indeed times, Julie sees a picture in her own head. And in the picture, there are two things happening at once. And one half of the picture is of herself in the hospital just before the moment of her death, and the other half is of her mother at home thinking about Julie in the hospital just before the moment of her death. And these two halves of the picture flit between each other quite slowly, back and forth and back and forth and Julie feels the feelings of the picture until it's so palpable that she can't bear it anymore. So she snaps herself out of it by doing a jerky movement. But then the picture seeps into her mind again and again and again until somebody interrupts her or until the phone rings.

And Julie doesn't tell anybody, apart from God.

And, during this winter, where everything all around is too dark and her body is a cold, delicate temple of symptoms, and where all the things that happen and all the things that are said are definitely an omen, Julie sometimes walks into a room where her mother is crying. And Julie can see the bulging, grief-filled veins on her mother's head, full of stubborn, tenacious blood. And Julie stays very still and quiet and she watches and listens. And she wonders if the blood in those veins on her mother's head is travelling to her heart or away from it. And she thinks about her mother's heart, her actual, real life heart; about what it might feel like to touch that heart, about what the heart might do if Julie shouted at it, about whether or not the heart is going to be ok. And then she hears her own heart, beating in her ears, like a drum wrapped in a dirty blanket. And Julie thinks that she can hear her heart whispering to her, any day now, any day now, any day now.

And Julie remembers to not breathe deeply. Because of jinxing it.

And sometimes, at school, after a whole morning of shallow breathing and prodding at her body to check for clues and thinking about dying in hospital, Julie has to go and sit by the sink with a helper. And when this happens, Julie doesn't want to talk to the helper. So she talks to God instead. Not out loud though. And she's careful not to ask God for too much because she's been told to be careful what you wish for which means omens.

And, during this winter, where everything all around is too dark, and her thumbs are cracked and bleeding from nerves, and where visits to the doctor end in sentences like, but, Julie you really don't look like you're dying, Julie dies. Right on her own doorstep. With a cup of milk in her hand. And it's such a surprise. Even though she knew it was going to happen. She just stops breathing. Just like that. Just as she's about to knock on her own front door to be let back in after going over the road to borrow some milk from a neighbour. And after she completely stops breathing, Julie thinks, oh, it's now.

And she doesn't even think about God.

Or anything.

And then some seconds pass.

And then she collapses.

And then it hurts.

And then it's real.

And then it's terrifying.

And then the door opens.

And then, Julie has one of those moments when she feels a new feeling for the first time, even though she's died. But the feeling isn't just one thing, it's an awful amount of things. And a deep, wild sound like a bellow comes out of Julie's mouth from inside her body and the sound is terrific and frightening and has other sounds attached to it. And Julie's arms shake from the vibrations of it all and she's lifted up from the ground and carried in soft arms to a soft chair and laid down gently on her trembling back. And a cool hand is pressed to her face which is a very hot face for someone who's just died, and a pair of strong, friendly thumbs wipe away Julie's sticky tears. And then eight, careful fingers team up with the thumbs to make a pair of grown-up hands, and the hands travel down the back of Julie's little neck to her pointy shoulder blades. And the grown-up hands gently push Julie onto her side. And the sweet smelling arms that the hands belong to wrap themselves around Julie's shivering bones and start to push and pull and push and pull, slowly and without too much fuss. And a sound that says, shhhh comes out of the mouth of this human rocking chair and the slow, tired, heartbroken voice of her mother whispers into Julie's bright red ear, what are we going to do with you, hmmm?

Peacocks

Think back

Go on

How old are you?

About eight?

Yeah, about eight

And you're ok, you are

All in all

It's probably the summer

That's why it's still light at 7pm

You've just got out of the car

And there are two peacocks in the car park

The ones with all the coloured feathers

Man ones

You're holding three bags of doughnuts

For the doghnut eating competition

(Where you have to eat a whole doughnut without licking your lips) 

At the youth club for kids in care where your mum works

You're not really supposed to be here

But your mum's boss has turned a blind eye

Because of what your mum's been through recently

Oh, look

There's Samantha

You don't know her yet

She comes to talk to you as soon as she sees you

She tells you she's 14

(Wow, you think)

And that she's been coming here for two years

And that she has Down's Syndrome

And that she's been in 12 foster homes

And that the reason she's been in so many

Is that people can't cope with her

They couldn't cope with me, says Samantha

I have aggression

What kind? You ask

Just the normal kind, she says

Samantha looks at you quite a lot

And you look back at her just as much

She asks you why you're here

And you don't know what to say

Samantha says, are you in care?

And after about five seconds

You shake your head

Samantha holds your hand

And takes you inside

And makes you a Ribena

And she says, you're really kind to me

As she passes it to you

And you win the doughnut eating competition

Even though you cheat



Now

Fast forward about 15 years

You're eating a school dinner

In a school hall

You've just performed a show for some of the kids

Oh, look

There's Amy

You don't know her yet

But she comes to talk to you as soon as she sees you

She tells you that she's 12

And that she's been at this school since September

And that there's a girl on her bus who wants to beat her up

And that she's been in about seven different foster homes

And that she's never met her dad

And that she really liked the show

You ask her what her favourite part of the show was

She says she liked the whole thing

She tells you that the reason she's been in so many foster homes

Is that people can't cope with her

They couldn't cope with me, she says

Because of aggression and anger

She tells you all about it

The words that she uses to describe herself

Are words that she's heard adults using about her

Antisocial

Hyperactive

Attention seeking

Difficulty bonding

Acting out

She tells you that she misses her mum

But that her mum had to give her up

For loads of reasons

And that she only sees her every now and again

She tells you that she's been told she'd be a good social worker

You ask her if that's what she wants to be

And she laughs in your face

And says, no way

And she pulls her tights right up to her waist

And asks you if you can come and do a show every week

She doesn't really look at you when she's speaking to you

But that's ok

You get it

One Day at a Time

I just flipped. I can't really remember what I said, but I know it wasn't pretty.

Kate is in her late fifties. She's a cleaner and has been for the past twenty-odd years. She looks worn out, stressed and a pretty wired. Like she hasn't been sleeping or eating very much.

She talks about her job for a little while; how she's been signed off work with stress since she blew up at her line manager; how she's struggling on the £86.70 per week she receives in statutory sick pay but how the thought of going back to work makes her feel like she's going to vomit.

She talks about the problems she's had with her hips; how the new, harsher schedules at work are making it really difficult for her to do her job because of her joint pain.

And then she starts talking about her son.

He's 30. Engaged. Into football and snooker. A good lad. And dying.

He'd had this cough. He'd had it for ages. A couple of years. I kept telling him to go to the doctor. Eventually he did and he was given antibiotics but it didn't go away so he went back to get more. But his cough just got worse. He'd be coughing day and night. He'd have these terrible coughing fits that would last a good three or four minutes. Really violent. So he went back to the doctor again and insisted on a referral to a specialist. And then he got a diagnosis of this fibrosis thing, or ... I can't remember the name exactly... and he didn't tell me about it for ages.

It turns out that Kate's son is a very poorly man.

It turns out that, without a lung transplant, Kate's son won't live much longer.

It turns out that, even if he has a successful transplant, Kate's son probably won't live for more than seven years.

Kate reminisces about her son's engagement party a few months ago.

He came up to me while I was dancing and asked for a Mum hug. And he held on a bit too long, you know? And, I know it sounds silly but I knew that something was wrong straight away. You just know when it's your own kids. And he wouldn't let go of me and he wasn't even that drunk. And he just said, 'Mum, Mum, I'm really scared'. And I just held onto him. My boy.

Kate battles her way through the tears taking little gulps of air. She says that this is the first time she's really talked to anyone about all this.

She talks about her son's partner; how supportive she and her family have been. She talks about getting the coach up to the hospital in Newcastle with her son to see specialists and how lovely the doctors are there.

She talks about trying to be a strong mum for him at the appointments at the hospital. But she says she feels like she's letting him down; that she had to leave the consulting room early last time because she couldn't bear the look of concentration on her son's face when he was trying to take in what the consultant was saying to him. 

She talks about how she hasn't seen her partner since he walked out of the house last night after Kate head-butted the bathroom wall and made a hole in it after an almighty row. She says she doesn't blame him. That they love each other. That she's finding it difficult to control her anger. That she needs to be better at taking things one day at a time. 

So, who knows what will happen with this disciplinary at work. To be honest, I don't really think that's what I came here to talk about.

Kate exhales slowly. She does this a few times. She says it helps her to stop shaking.

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