hOw Me aND MY Mum wrOte Letters

We drove home in silence. When we got back to the house, I stormed straight up to my bedroom and sat down inside my wardrobe. I’m well aware that this makes me sound like a bunch of bananas but it’s actually totally OK because I don’t tend to view it as a wardrobe. I view it as more of a Think Tank. With clothes in.

I sat in there for quite a while and even though my body wasn’t moving at all, my inner being was moving about massively. It was going on a journey.

At the start of that journey, my inner being was doing this:

And the words it was screaming at me were these:

DETECTIVE

SERGEANT GILES

SPECIAL FRIEND I’m a woman too

really nice man FREE AGENT

we must stop meeting like this

Stevie Wonder Oh,

I sense fun days ahead

YOU’RE BEING

ABSOLUTELY

ABSURD

But it takes a lot of intensive energy to keep up this level of brain activity and after some time sitting there in the dark, freaking out at a thousand miles per minute, my inner being must have got quite knackered because, gradually, I started to calm down. And pretty soon, I felt less like a skull in a hoody and slightly more like an emotional hardcore punk.

And this time, instead of screaming at me, my inner being was just mumbling and muttering to itself. And the words that it was mumbling and muttering were these:

you’re being absolutely absurd you’re being absolutely absurd

you’re being absolutely absurd

And within a short while, I started to feel less like an emotional hardcore punk and more like the biggest nerd in the entire nerdiverse. Because it began to occur to me that possibly –just possibly – my mum was right and I was absurd. I clambered out of my wardrobe and sat on my bed for a bit and then I got up and took my dictionary off my bookshelf and looked up the word absurd.10 It said this:

absur’d adjective silly; ridiculous; incongruous

And even though I didn’t have a flipping clue what incongruous meant, I understood the words silly and ridiculous perfectly well and I’m still troubled by those words even now and it doesn’t make me feel very clever when I think that possibly –just possibly – this is how I’ve been behaving. So then I looked up the word incongruous and it said this:

incŏ’ngruous adjective absurd; out of place; disagreeing

I put down the dictionary and scratched my head. However much I wanted to deny it then, and would still like to deny it now, I have to admit that the Hippo Eater Happy Pub is really not the place to throw a wobbler. Some people might even argue that my behaviour in the Hippo Eater at Saturday lunchtime was actually downright disagreeable and the mark of someone with a totally bad brattitude.

I scratched my head again and put the dictionary back on the shelf. Then I did what I always do when I need an immediate honest answer to an important direct question. I picked up my phone and texted Goose.

And barely a minute later, my phone bleeped back at me with Goose’s reply.

Which made me feel ever so slightly better but only by a microscopic mini-fraction. To be honest, with each passing second, I was getting more and more and more regretful about having told my mum that she was sad and tragic.

I switched off my mobile and stared into space. I was beginning to feel quite sad and tragic myself. Blake, my counsellor, once told me that when I’m feeling like this, it’s probably best not to think too much. He reckons I should try to switch my head off and allow myself to float quietly through the dreary feeling. Then, when I’m feeling more positive and in control of things, I can do all the thinking and reflecting I need in order to avoid the same situation happening again.

So I switched my head off and tried to think of nothing.

Downstairs, the sound of the telephone cut through the silence. I curled up on my bed and put my pillow over my head and continued trying to think of nothing. It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Instead of thinking of:

I was now thinking about how it was really warm and cosy under my pillow and how it smelt faintly of hair dye. And I was also thinking about how I could still hear the stupid blinking telephone. Which led me to thinking about how my mum obviously wasn’t in any sort of mood to pick it up.

After a few more noisy and thought-packed seconds, the answer-machine finally kicked into operation and the house plunged back into silence. I took the pillow away from my face and sat up again. On the opposite wall of my bedroom, a picture I had of René Descartes which I’d printed off the internet stared back at me. Underneath I had scribbled the words:

And when I read those words again, it suddenly dawned on me that, in spite of all Blake’s good advice, I needed to listen to what the father of modern philosophy was telling me and actually start thinking straight away. Because, somehow, I had to make things better between me and my mum.

And seeing as how I’m much better at writing than I am at thinking, I got up from my bed, picked up a notepad and pen from my desk and decided to write down exactly what was in my head and why I was feeling so completely cheddarly-cheesed off.

Before I even knew what was going on, I had written my mum a letter. It went like this:

I read it through a couple of times. It said what needed to be said. I put the letter in the pocket of my jeans, opened my bedroom door and listened. The house was still really quiet. Weirdly quiet. I couldn’t hear any of the usual Saturday sounds. Sounds like the TV or my mum singing along to the radio or the thump thump thump of her jumping around to her fitness CD. I snuck along the landing to my mum’s room and knocked nervously on the door. There was no answer so I pushed the door open to check that she wasn’t hiding from me and then I went to Ruthie’s room and pushed that door open too. Inside, Winnie was sitting up and washing his little white face. It’s extremely rare for Winnie to be awake before teatime so I took this as a sign that he wanted to give me some moral support, scooped him up and carried him along with me. At the bottom of the stairs, I paused again and listened. There was really no sound at all. Nothing.

Puzzled, I wondered for a second if my mum was doing something in the garden but then I saw the rain hammering against the hallway window and decided that this was probably unlikely.

Shifting Winnie to my other arm, I crossed over to the telephone table which stands in a corner of our hallway and pressed the button on the answer machine. After three short beeps, Gareth’s voice broke the silence.

‘Hey Lottie, Gareth it is. I was just wondering if you wanted to come and see a film with me tonight. Love, Lies and Secrets is on at the Ponty-Carlo. It’s supposed to be one of those romcom things. Not my type of film if I’m honest but I thought you might like it. Ring me back, yeah.’

Even though I wasn’t in the mood for smiling, I smiled anyway. I couldn’t stop myself. Normally, Gareth only ever likes to watch films about Rocky Balboa or rugby. Hanging around with me must be seriously giving him the Frillies.

Minutes later, I saw the note. It was in the kitchen, pinned up on the door of the fridge with a magnet. There was nothing weird about that. My mum and I often use the fridge door as a message board. What was unusual, though, was the length of the note. Usually our messages say things like Your shepherd’s pie is in the microwave or I’m at Goose’s. But this new note was abnormally long. Still clutching Winnie, I took it off the fridge and read it. It said this:

And even though I had Winnie’s warm little body cuddled up tightly right next to mine, I was suddenly overcome by this massive landslide of loneliness. I was the loneliest person in the entire loneliverse. Sort of like this:

For a moment, I just stood there, floating without a radio in space, and stroked Winnie’s warm little head. Then, carefully, I put him down on the floor. Taking my own letter out of my pocket, I unfolded it and read it through again. And then I scrunched it up into a tiny ball and buried it in the rubbish bin where my mum would never see it. Because I’d suddenly got this feeling that it didn’t say what was needed, after all. Taking a pen from the kitchen drawer, I turned over my mum’s note and wrote a single word on the back of it.

And then I stuck it back on the fridge and hoped from the very bottom of my heart that my mum would never again feel the need to write me a letter and run away to have a cup of tea with the next-door neighbour. I hadn’t even heard her leave. But I suppose this is one of the dangers of sitting inside a wardrobe or burying your head under a pillow.