Quiet

The house is deathly quiet. Nothing stirs.

Yesterday the kids went on holiday with their dad to the house in Wales
they go to every year. It's a big family holiday with all sorts of
in-laws and whatnot. I used to go. The very thought of that is
unbelievable nowadays. How I spent a week in almost total silence and
discomfort there for a couple of years running before I bailed out of
that family.

I bet the house is still the same. Standing on the cliff edge in
Pembrokeshire with its massive bay window looking out over the sea. It
must have seen some changes in the family over the years, 10 years of
changes, births and divorces and new partners coming in. No deaths. Not
yet.

This is my one week of the year without the kids. A sacred week. I feel
obliged to do something but this year I have no money and nowhere to
go. That isn't strictly true. I could hop aboard a CSA flight to Prague
and stay with Liana but I can't afford it. I have been vaguely planning
to do something with my dear friend Myrt but she doesn't have any money
either and the very thought of planning is a strain.

Yesterday the boyfriend and I ventured into wildest Derbyshire to meet
Myrt's new man. He lives in an astonishing house with many levels. He
has taste and style. He is a smiley sort of a chap and very generously
provides a swanky lunch for us on his terrace. There is a great deal of
couscous. We eat and gawp at the view, a steam train passes across the
vista several times.

After lunch we go for a Nice Walk at Chatsworth. Boyfriend (who comes
from a city) is charmed by the site of deer flicking their little tails
in the distance. We see a kingfisher and a heron.

It is quite exhausting meeting boyfriends of the people you love. There
is so much expectation and need to be liked all round. I find myself
prattling like a nitwit. I hope he doesn't think I am one.

Back home in Murky we open the door on the dark and silent house. It is
weird. No teenagers are gallumphing. Nobody is asking for chocolate. I
find it eerie. It is a worse silence than the silence I have here when
they are all at school. It has a different quality. No strains of
oafish laughter are coming from any of the rooms. No music. The usual
twenty seven lights all over the house are not on.

Later we go down into town to a music event in the yard of Murky's one
arty cafe. We have been led to believe it is Jazz but when we get there
the terrible truth is revealed. It's a diddly diddly Irish folk band
consisting of three earnest young men and a young woman with the stage
presence of an ironing board in a wig. As soon as we get there I
realise it's a mistake. My brother, his wife and a friend of theirs are
sitting in a row quite close to the stage. They are not talking. I have
an instant desire to run away very fast, screaming.

Instead we buy beer and sit with them and keep hoping the next tune
will be the last. It goes on endlessly. Diddly diddly. The ironing
board girl twitches now and again. A vigorous young man leaps about
playing a skeletal space age electric violin. My brother, who has been
drinking since 6 pm has that familiar drunken smile on his face. There
is hardly anyone in the world I love as much as I love him.

Gratefully we escape. We return to the quiet house. Nobody tries to
crash a fag or comes into the kitchen to make midnight toast or peer
into the fridge. I have to lie down on the carpet. The social strains
of the day have been too much for me. I don't know what to do with
myself. I feel agitated beyond measure. Boyfriend suggests exactly the
right thing - a walk. So we walk the streets of Murky in the dark,
something we have taken to doing since he has been living here.

It is always entertaining taking him for walks as his sense of
direction is so bad it is legendary. Driving with him is almost as good
as he is always spotting places he didn't think ought to be there. It
must be interesting living a life that is so full of small
surprises.

We walk past one of the houses I lived in as a kid. I point out the
sash window my mother and I once climbed through before we bought the
house. This sense of history is overpowering. I point out the garden
where my tortoise made his slow daily escape attempts. In the end my
father painted our address on his shell and he was returned regularly
by local children after a reward.

I don't know what happened to that tortoise. They don't die, do
they?

Back at home, stresses relieved by the walk I begin to enjoy the peace
of the house, the idea of being able to walk about naked without fear
of some lumbering teenage chum of my sons' blundering out onto the
landing. The fact that food will not disappear mysteriously seems
suddenly an attractive notion. Nobody will wake us, stumbling to the
toilet or with early morning requests for cash or a lift
somewhere.

A whole week of being not a mother. I think of this and listen to the
quiet.