Quite
apart from dealing with broken hearts, I am in a tailspin. My lovely in-laws are
coming to stay on Thursday. Suddenly I am seeing the house in a whole new –
deeply unflattering – light. Ye gods, what
the feck am I going to do? Their house
is pristine. Everything is in its place; everything matches. Yeah, sure, that’s just a taste thing – and I
like the mismatched Bohemian mess of this place. But, for pity’s sake, their house
gleams. And for sure, I couldn’t ever
aspire to gleaming. But…clean? Clean would be good, right? I’d even settle for not filthy at a pinch.
Seriously,
I don’t know where to start. Adrian is away at another beer festival, James is surfing
at the beach. I am walking round the house with wild staring eyes wondering how
it ever got quite this bad. There isn’t
just dust, there are dust armies. Dust sculptures. Dust installations. I
suppose I could apply to the Arts Council for a grant? There are festoons of
cobwebs punctuated by dead things. More to the point there are fleas.
Yes,
the house has fleas. The dogs have
fleas. I have fecking fleas. Everything
scratches. The dogs scratch. James and I scratch. The dust probably scratches too. Weirdly
Adrian doesn’t scratch but then he just sneezes instead.
‘Bloody
hay fever,’ he says. Bless him.
Yes,
I’ve doused the dogs with Frontline. It doesn’t work.
The
last time they came to stay (the inlaws, not the fleas) was over ten years
ago. The house we lived in then was
relatively normal (just stuck on a hill in the middle of Deliverance country – honestly,
families round there were seriously…familiar). I had a cleaner; I had a
gardener. The sheets were new, things were polished. I was still functioning in a vaguely acceptable
way and cooked vaguely edible food. I was house proud. I subscribed to interiors
magazines, for pity’s sake.
This is the first time they will see the house. It’s high summer, the sun is shining fit to burst and yet the mould is still playing at a series of variations on the Turin shroud on the bathroom walls. I have given up on the Loo of Doom, Cellar of
Despond etc – and just shut the door firmly and put up a sign saying ‘Danger – Beyond
Here Lie the Kind of Life Forms that Dr House Says Lead to Definite Death’.
The
spare bedroom is now in what was my erstwhile office, hence packed floor to
ceiling with books with titles like ‘Demonology’,
‘Psychic Self-Defence’, ‘The Sin Eater’s Last Confessions’, The Demon Lover’
and ‘How to Turn your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad’. It is also the repository for
all furniture which will not fit anywhere else so – apart from my mother’s old
bed (antique, with suitably antique squeaking springs), it also contains a
large sofa, a small weird wardrobe, a kitchen table and six chairs, a
homeopathic medicine cabinet, a few occasional tables and an unconnected wood
burning stove. Frankly, it’s a
mess.
But
hey. What can I do? Unless a small army
fancies popping over and blitzing the place – or someone sends over a crack troupe of
industrial cleaners, there’s no way I can get it fixed. So I may as well not
bother. It is what it is. There are
worse things in life than dust and fleas, right? In
the scheme of things, who gives a shit?
I
have friends, good friends, the best, who are going through real shit right
now. Nothing I can do about it and yeah, that sucks out loud.
So,
yes, I could clean like a skivvy on speed.
Then again, I could sit at my PC and try a bit harder to get myself out of the total
utter mess I’ve got myself into. But hey…who knows eh?
Who
knows how long any of us have got? That
interstellar highway could be coming through any second now. The Grim Reaper, bless him, could be readying his pointy finger just millimetres away from your or my shoulder. Soooo... I take me a bag
of cherries and me dawg and I go…
…down
to the river…
