I waited until 7.32 p.m. to message Dustin because it seemed like a casual, spontaneous kind of time for a Monday, like I might have got home from work, had something to eat, and then found myself at a bit of a loose end. He wasn’t to know that I was sitting on the floor in Jess’s room with the blackout blinds closed, trying to convince her that she was tired.
‘Hey,’ I typed, (breezy), ‘I’m feeling a bit stiff after yesterday. Perhaps I’m not as bendy as I thought!’
One grey tick turned to two.
‘Mummy,’ whined Jess from her bed, ‘I’m really honestly not tired. Can I get up and play Sylvanians, just for a little bit?’
I told her no, it was definitely bedtime.
‘But I’m bored,’ she said. ‘I need something to play with.’
I fumbled around on the floor by the light of my phone and found two members of the raccoon family.
‘Play with these,’ I said, throwing them towards the bed.
‘Ow!’ said Jess. ‘They hit me on the arm!’
I shushed her and went back to staring at my phone.
Two grey ticks turned to blue. I took a deep breath in and held it. ‘Dustin is typing …’ my phone told me. Then he wasn’t. Then he was again. Then a reply.
‘I was a bit stiff after watching you do that downward dog,’ he wrote. He followed it up with a little monkey face with his hands over his mouth.
Outrageous. But also very exciting.
‘Sorry,’ he wrote, ‘but every time I close my eyes I keep seeing your bum. It’s amazing!’
‘Really?’ I wrote back, ‘I’d always thought I was more a “waist up” kind of girl.’
‘Honestly! It’s the best bum I’ve ever seen!’
We chatted for about an hour, until I realised that Jess had given up complaining and had fallen asleep and that my highly desirable bum had gone numb on the floor. We talked about work and books and travel and all the places we’d like to visit. It was exciting.
Later I floated the ‘me coming on holiday idea’ to Flo and she seemed really keen. I’d thought she might want it just to be her and Jess and Ian, and would feel that I was intruding, but she said she thought it would be really good.
‘You and Dad are funny together,’ she said, ‘like Ant and Dec.’
(Question: which one does she see me as? Hopefully not the one with the drink problem.)
Message from Dustin at 2 p.m.: ‘How has your day been?’
I told him I have been entrusted with downloading the paper’s weekly crossword from an online crossword site and about the late-morning scandal concerning a particular street in Barnmouth that has been missed off the recycling collection route for two weeks running.
‘Wow, it sounds cutting edge,’ he said, clearly impressed. ‘I’m so swamped by work at the moment, I could really do with a break.’ Oh, I see. The old ‘swamped by work’ line. I knew immediately where it was going, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
‘What are you busiest with at the moment?’ I asked instead.
‘Oh, you know,’ he replied quickly, clearly wanting to get it over with, ‘the usual farm stuff. It’s a bit relentless, to be honest. I hardly ever seem to get time off.’
God, Dustin, spit it out. I did my best to make things more awkward deliberately. He brought this upon himself, after all.
‘Well, that’s great,’ I said, ‘being busy is such a positive sign!’ I almost laughed to myself, imagining him squirming.
‘Yeah, true,’ he wrote, ‘only I’m not sure it’s going to leave me a lot of time for dating, if I’m honest. You’re really lovely, but I think perhaps I need to focus on work right now.’
Bastard.
‘No worries at all!’ I typed.
Seriously? WTF? What was the point of last night?
‘Thanks for being so understanding!’ he said.
I didn’t reply, imagining that to be the end of what was possibly the shortest relationship in history, but then I saw that he was typing again.
‘So, what does the rest of the week have in store for you?’ he wrote. ‘Any fun plans?’ I told him not really. Again with the typing. ‘Do you reckon you’ll be getting into yoga now? You were a natural!’
I didn’t quite understand what was happening. Had I just imagined the dumping? I thought the whole point of telling someone that you didn’t have time to date them was that you didn’t want to talk to them any more. Why was he still messaging me like nothing had happened?
I told him maybe I’d consider yoga if I could find the time. We went backwards and forwards for a while, with him asking questions and me giving one-word answers before I decided I needed to step in. I’d dragged out the initial dumping, I should let him off the hook with this bit.
‘It’s OK, you know,’ I wrote, ‘you’re allowed not to talk to me any more, it’s really fine.’
He seemed surprised. ‘Oh,’ he wrote, ‘but I like chatting to you!’
‘Um …’ I replied, ‘but isn’t it a bit pointless if you don’t have the time to meet in person? Not that I’m not interested in you as a human being and all that, but I don’t need a pen pal.’
‘I guess maybe it’s a bit weird,’ he conceded.
Yes, it’s a bit weird, Dustin.
I thought a lot about Goat Man last night.
Honestly, I don’t mind that it was possibly the quickest ever dumping in the whole of history. I don’t mind that he turned out to be a bit hopeless, because I feel somehow reignited. For a start, it’s nice to know that perhaps my bum isn’t the disaster zone I imagined it to be. Maybe I could actually meet someone new at some point and feel desirable and sexy.
Also, though, I feel really positive about my reaction to it. I didn’t feel especially upset or angry, because I hadn’t run away in my mind with fantasies about us travelling the world with our herd of goats, so I felt very relaxed and positive about it.
I like that, as I get older, I feel more in control with relationship stuff because I was pretty intense when I was younger. When I was in secondary school I would get these all-consuming crushes on boys that would last for months and, while I had them, I couldn’t think about anything else – I’d spend hours at home, gazing out of my bedroom window, imagining that I could catch a glimpse of my crush staring back up at me, too shy to come to the door but obviously completely in love with me.
I remember when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, there was a boy in school I liked called Mason. I knew that he lived in a flat, which was glamorous enough as I didn’t know anyone who lived in a flat, and he used to cycle to school every day from the other side of town. I imagined a romantic but tragic backstory for him – why didn’t he go to the school closer to him? Why was he so impoverished that he had to ride a bike? I found out his address, I can’t remember how, and I sent him a letter.
I say letter …
I copied out all of the words to that classic 60s hit ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ by Gordon Lightfoot – I must have felt the song described the passion and desperation of my feelings for him – and sent it to him anonymously. The lyrics included stuff about fortresses, chains and ghosts.
Mason must have been terrified.
I imagined that he would read it and just know that it was me, and we’d embrace in the maths cupboard and swear our undying love.
Like I say, intense.
Flo has plans with some friends tomorrow for a birthday trip to the cinema and then to Starbucks to see how long they can make Frappuccinos last, so today she decided that she wanted to go into Exeter and spend her birthday money on clothes.
We started off in Topshop.
In case you’ve never been into Topshop as a chubby thirty-eight-year-old with a Bambi-like fifteen-year-old girl before, let me set the scene.
For a start, everything in Topshop is tiny. I don’t just mean as in they don’t do larger sizes – which they don’t – but just genuinely small. You pick something off a rail thinking, ‘Oh that’s quite a nice blouse’ and then you realise it has a belt and is actually a dress. T-shirts are just scraps of fabric, more J-cloth than T-shirt. Most lack key components like sleeves or shoulders or mid-sections.
If you make it as far as the underwear section, then be prepared to fall into a pit of despair.
‘Mummy, why do you look so sad?’ asked Jess as I fingered a lace bralette.
‘I’m not sad!’ I said cheerily, crying a bit inside. Even when I actually was fifteen there was no way my boobs could have been in anyway supported by the underwear in Topshop. I have always longed to be a lacy bralette type of woman.
I imagined myself briefly in another life, long-limbed, lying on a large double bed, propped up on my pointy elbows, flicking through Vogue. A tall, dark, Parisian man brings me a tiny cup of coffee and I sit up, folding myself casually into a cross-legged position. I am wearing his shirt over my lacy bralette, done up with just one button.
‘Mummy!’ squawks Jess, shattering the fantasy, ‘are these pants my size?’ She is holding up a scrap of silk that I feel I’d be hard pressed to get around one thigh.
Just when I thought I might have to have a little lie down under the cropped hoodies (Why? The point of a hoodie surely is to keep you warm), Flo came over with an armful of clothes. ‘I’m ready to try these on,’ she said.
Oh joy!
The changing rooms are the very worst bit of Topshop. Changing rooms generally aren’t exactly fun. If I were listening to one of those relaxation tapes that asks you to picture your ‘happy place’, it definitely wouldn’t be a changing room.
Topshop as a mum is pretty bad, though. You’re forced to sit on one of those plastic stools in a corner, where you can’t help but slouch and look sad. Every few minutes a size six teenager will emerge from one of the changing rooms and look at herself in the full-length mirror disapprovingly.
‘My thighs look way too big in this,’ she’ll call out to a friend in another changing room, and all of the mums will look at her with tears in their eyes. You can’t help but look creepy because you find yourself gazing longingly at these waif-like teenagers, so beautiful and yet so full of self-loathing. It’s not the girls, though, that you are yearning for, it’s your youth.
You imagine yourself at fifteen, obsessed with your weight and the single spot on your forehead that’s barely visible, and you long to travel back in time to give yourself a good shake. ‘You’re beautiful!’ you want to yell to your teenage self. ‘Please just notice it now before it’s too late!’
Flo looked stunning in everything she tried on. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to hate herself with the quite the passion of some girls her age, so she was pretty happy with her purchases.
Yo Sushi for lunch – Flo’s favourite – where I spent about fifty pounds on seventeen teeny-tiny plates of food.
Fantasies about having the hallway of dreams – 3. Aspirational interiors catalogues found on pile of unopened post – 0. (Unless Screwfix counts, which it does not.)
Decided to tackle ‘the area’ this evening.
‘The area’ is that place in the house where things just sort of get left while you are having a little think about what to do with them. I’m pretty sure everyone has an ‘area’ – it’s just that rich people can afford a house big enough to disguise it as a utility room.
My area is the top of the sideboard in the hallway, which is extra bad as it’s the first thing anyone sees when they come into the house and it really isn’t the first impression I am striving for. Ideally, I see the sideboard as home to a tastefully arranged bunch of seasonal flowers, an artisanal, locally made bowl for keys, and a casually arranged pile of post, preferably including a couple of high-end catalogues from interiors companies. The addition of the post would show that yes, I am stylish, but I am also approachable and down to earth because I’ve not got around to opening my post yet.
(At this point in the fantasy I toss my head back and laugh about how I’m so busy I’ve not even had chance to browse the latest rug trends. In the fantasy, my hair is also much thicker than in real life.)
I would allow a reed diffuser at a push.
My area currently has none of these things, so I poured myself a smallish gin and tonic – for stamina – and set to work.
Items found in the area and rehomed:
Arse!
Messaged WIB in desperation, thinking a sweet potato would be exactly the sort of thing Louise would have knocking about, but apparently she’d just used her last one to make a rustic farmhouse risotto.