In A World Gone Mad: Monday 18 May 2020

Monday 18 May 2020

It’s 04:00

I’m am fuming. I’m red hot, white cold, blue ice fucking angry.

 I asked Max to try not to wake me up when he came to bed. But I didn’t stop there. I begged him to let me get some sleep. I hammered the point home in easy to understand words. I added ten exclamation marks to my last statement—and it was a pointed one to leave no lack of clarity. There’s a reason why my need for sleep was more important than his last night and why after having Arthur all day, he was taking the night shift as well.

‘Please try not to wake me through the night, love.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Thank you. Max, I’m not sure how to say this, but I’m getting up at seven. I’ll sort your dad’s breakfast but won’t be able to give him his meds, but don’t worry, they can wait until lunchtime. I don’t suppose, if you’re going to be coming up after, say, four in the morning, I don’t suppose you could stay up till seven. I don’t suppose, could you, I don’t suppose? Please. It will be for the best anyway.’

I don’t suppose he did.

‘Well, not really. I’ll be coming to bed at some point.’

‘Oh, okay.’

‘I’ll try to be quiet.’

‘Thank you.’

I blew him a kiss because we aren’t doing contact.

‘Well, hopefully the next time I see you will be when you get up tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!’

Ten, just like I said, and I hate exclamation marks. Which part of, try to be quiet, didn’t he understand?

03:50

The bedroom door bursts open; the light goes on and Max comes in. Teagan leaves her bed to greet him and we have the dog jumping and Max telling her to get down in his day voice. Echo, who is on the bed next to me, wakes up, yawns, and stretches. In default Echo tradition he decides it must be time for breakfast and starts yelling. This is no Meow, it’s a military reveille.

Max puts his lamp on. We have two lights blazing. He goes back to the door. Teagan who has gone to bed on his command, thinks she might be in line for a walk after all, gets up and we have her excitement again. Arthur’s door opens.

‘Hellooo. Hellooo. What’s all the noise? What’s going on?’

 Max pens the door and Teagan runs out. He tells Arthur to go back to bed and gets irritated with the dog. He turns the main light out. He takes his watch off and clatters it onto his bedside table. He opens his bedside drawer to get something—a pistol would be good, and at this point I don’t care if it’s for me, him, any member of the household or the animals—and he slams it shut. He strips naked and sits on the bed. He gets up from the bed. Goes to the door and puts his dressing gown on.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To turn the heating on, it’s freezing in here.’

He goes downstairs.

Teagan goes downstairs

He comes back up.

He calls the dog.

The dog comes back up.

‘Hellooo. Hellooo. What’s all the noise? What’s going on?’

He settles Arthur.

He gets into bed.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Bad.’

‘I said, how are you feeling?’

‘I answered you. I said bad.’

‘Well you’ve had six hours sleep, so you haven’t done bad.’

‘I had five.’

‘Five then. Oh, Sarah, where are you going?’

I make as much noise as possible putting on pyjamas and a stubbornly silent dressing gown. It’s worth mentioning, that although I swear like a Barrow slag in my diary, in real life I have seven grandchildren and I only let rip when my temper’s gone.

‘The dog’s asking to go out. And I’m wide awake now. I’m not going to get any fucking sleep so I might as well get up.’

‘Oh, my fault again. Everything’s my fault. Come back to bed and get some sleep.’

I stop short of slamming the door, but only because of Arthur.

‘Hellooo. Hellooo. What’s all the noise? What’s going on?’

I’ve left them to it.

Max has been brilliant the last two days. He resents the time I’m spending on Skype with Paul. He said that I should leave him until the paid work is finished. I’m not sure if this is jealousy, or basic common sense. However, anybody that writes will understand this, regardless of whether you are doing or own work or somebody else’s you can only do so much on one book. Eventually, you hit a wall and have to put it down. It’s great that I’ve got three for other people on the go because when I hit the Stop button on one, I switch to the next. When I’m writing my own stuff, I always have at least two books on the go. There’s always a main one and when I can’t write any more on that. I can get another few thousand words in on another one.

Paul said something lovely yesterday. It was loaded with accusation, but it was still lovely.  He’s all loved up. I’m all loved up and life got in the way of our friendship again. We talk on the phone but either his partner is in the background chirping in or Max is. I’m a bad friend. I’m a bad mother. I’m a piece of shit human being who lets current things get in the way of important things—like people. It’s more me that doesn’t make enough time than him.

‘Sarah, you know what’s great about editing with you again? I get to see you and spend time with my best mate.’

Until I get the paid books out, I give Paul a strict hour a day—which so far has been nearer two.

While I’ve been editing, Max doesn’t know I’m editing one of my own and writing my diary as well, he’s looked after Arthur, walked the dog, done the cooking, housework, and the shopping, ours and extras for Andy, and he’s sorted his mother. He even had washing on the line yesterday. The socks were hung with the tops pegged, which to me is upside down. There were underpants between day clothes and tops were mixed with jeans and towels. I thanked him, hid my shudder—and left well alone.

He’s been great and I’ve kicked off at him when he’s under immense pressure and I’m having a ball locked up in the office and out of the way all day under the guise of working. But it’s four o’fucking clock in the bastard morning—nearer to five now—couldn’t he have had one more wank or watched one more ancient football match? He’s been up doing whatever he does all night.  Couldn’t he have done it for another three hours?

I’ve had to leave the room; Echo the Emperor jumped onto the outside of my office window and was screaming loud enough to raise the street.  I had to let him in and was waiting for the, ‘Hellooo. Hellooo. What’s all the noise? What’s going on?’ But the house is quiet and everybody’s asleep. Bliss.

I’m concerned, I’ve just cuddled Echo and he has the unmistakable smell of Whiskas about him. The animals were being spoiled brats. We were feeding them dry food—but because I’m soft, I used to give them a wet food topping as a treat. It was just a taster to make their food more interesting with the majority of their food being dry. Echo is on bog standard Asda, two quid a box biscuits. Where Teagan’s concerned, when I say dry food—this is no ordinary dry animal feed. This isn’t even, Marks & Spencer dry animal feed. This is forty-five to sixty quid a sack, top of the range dog food.

Max works at a hotel that used to be exclusively for blind guests. RNIB sold it to one of the big hotel groups. They are trying to mainstream it and phase out the blind visitors because they are a pain in the arse. However, some of the visitors have been coming for years. Max has a huge role in the hotel. He is employed as their lifeguard but hasn’t sat by the pool sleeping for over two years. He does all of their maintenance and all of their Health and Safety and has close interaction with the guests. He is fourth in command at the hotel after the general, restaurant and kitchen managers, he has taken a managerial position—but it’s in an unofficial capacity and he has never had an employment review or a pay rise.

He is responsible for the dogs. The hotel has up to a dozen guide dogs in at any time.  Max feeds them, cleans their shit and hoses the runs where their owners take them to exercise. He orders in the dog food, and because they are a high-ranking hotel, they advertise that the dogs are given the best food available. If a dog has a specific dietary requirement, Max will order in a sack of whatever brand that animal is on. By law, they can only keep the food for three months and then it must be destroyed. One of Max’s many perks—along with not being able to get his arse out of bed in the morning because he’s been up half the bloody night and wanders in when he feels like it—is that his boss lets him bring the dog food home. A dog might only have three feeds out of a fifteen-kilo sack if it was a weekend stay.  We’ve never had to buy dog food for Teagan and at the beginning of lockdown, Max filled his car boot with sacks of food, three of them unopened because they had to clear the stores before they closed the hotel.  

When we got the dog and cat, I was giving them canned food on their dry. 

They conspired.

It was as though they had a conversation about it because they both stopped eating their dry food at the same time. Every day I was giving them less dry food and more canned. It was only ever meant to be a treat for them.  I spent two hours picking all the fish-based triangles out of a sack of food because Teagan wouldn’t eat them.  A month ago, I stopped it dead. The animals are both on dry food only, because they were being spoiled children.

My cat has just come in at five in the morning stinking of canned cat food—where is he getting it? If he’s getting better food elsewhere, he will leave us for them, and we’ll never see him again. He’s sitting on my desk as I type. I just looked at him-fatal. I was commanded to do—Bow to the Emperor—and we had to touch foreheads. He’s determined to sit on my keyboard because my role is to stroke him to sleep.

I am ill.

It started the evening before last with a sore throat. We were having our weekly music night and I didn’t feel great. Yesterday, I woke with my throat on fire and a tight chest. However, I’m every-so-slightly sniffy so we’re assuming it’s not Covid19. I haven’t had to blow my nose so it’s not a wet cold as such, but I’m a bit congested.

We’ve all had Covid19 and we’re supposed to have some level of immunity to it. However, with Arthur being 87 and Ivor in stage four cancer, I’m taking no chances and am isolating, as much as possible from the rest of the household. I get to shift between office and bedroom for the next seven days. I’m so happy. 

Especially as I think it’s an average, expected at this time of year, common cold. There’s sod all wrong with me. I had a slight temperature yesterday afternoon, a headache and I felt like crap, but I’m sure it’s only a standard winter virus. This morning I’m too tired to know how I feel, apart from angry.

Max thinks he’s Superman. Because we’ve had Covid19, it gives him the power of invincibility. There is evidence to suggest that, as we’ve fought it off and gained antibodies, that we have some kind of immunity until the gene mutates. But we don’t know for sure. I don’t want to go shopping. I don’t want to visit elderly, unknown relatives. I don’t want to see my children for fear of infecting them. But Max strolls in and out of shops with his invisible, I’m Invincible, knickers on top of his jeans and thinks he’s got a special free pass.  He knows he can pick it up from product boxes and pass it on to others and takes every precaution not to, so at least his super power doesn’t extend to out and out, stupidity, otherwise he’d have to wear his, I’m a Dickhead, knickers on top of his jeans as well and I don’t think they’re invisible. He’s told me a hundred times, ‘We’ve all had it. We can’t get it again.’ But the truth is—nobody knows.

I’ve just had to get up and risk opening doors and waking Arthur again. I let the cat out because he was doing my head in with his needy neediness. Would it be cruel to have his vocal chords removed? He has more to say than I do.

I said I’ll get Arthur’s breakfast—which will probably be in the next hour or so—and that will turn into a three ringed circus trying to keep him out of my way so that I can put it on the table in front of him after thorough hand washing.

If he’s in one of his, ‘You’re my concubine,’ states and wants to snog me, that could be interesting.

‘Max. Max. Get up. Your dad’s molesting me again. Come and get him.’