Pile Up

4th November 2011 Friday

It rains all morning. Before breakfast I hoover the floors, make up the spare bed for my big sister coming to stay from Luton, and bake my father’s birthday cake. It’s his favourite - my own recipe for a Sticky Ginger Cake with three kinds of ginger in it - ground, fresh and crystallized. I replace the grated apple in it with carrot though - I think the apple makes it too gooey. My husband sits at the table and glues his broken lizards.

In the car driving to our first couples counselling appointment my husband says our tax situation is worse than he thought. He’s negociating with the accountant but it sounds mind bogglingly complicated.That old tight anxiety about money twists my gut.

The two counsellors are lovely - we talk more than they do. At the end of the session they ask what do we want to focus on. They leave the room to talk about us so we can talk about us too. I say I want to explore our loss of intimacy. My husband agrees. The councellors agree. But I feel inexplicably angry and depressed.

We visit my father in hospital. I want to talk about his situation but he wants to talk about how much noise the chairs make when they scrape on the floor. My husband takes a swig of my father’s Dandelion and Burdock juice. It doesn’t matter at all but it annoys me beyond measure. We leave him playing scrabble with one of the other patients. And I put in a call to the doctor.

In Sainsbury’s we bump into my husband’s colleague who took over a lot of his clients when he left the company. The colleague says how much my husband is missed. And what interesting people his clients are. And he’s making a lot of money. I feel my husband’s pain like a black waterfall coursing through him. He buys six bottles of wine.

At 9.30 I pick up my big sister from the station. She helps me park the car in a tight space as the back windscreen is misted up. But then I can’t close the passenger window. It’s jammed open. The lovely RAC man comes and can’t mend it - needs a new motor - but he jams it shut. He says there has been a terrible pile up on the M5 - people killed. I know my sister and her husband are driving back from Bristol. My big sister calls her on the mobile - they are stuck in the tail back. Safe.

The RAC man say he’s heading over there now. I’m thinking about those people whose lives will never be the same again. Selfishly I’m glad it wasn’t our turn tonight. Broken cars can be mended.