*
That evening, Elaine dragged me along to her monthly WOMBAT meeting. They’re a Christian women’s group who go on outings, raise money for various different charities, eat cake and pray. Tonight’s meeting featured their new ‘Kindness Circle’.
Yes, it’s just as dull as it sounds.
WOMBAT stands for the Women of Monks Bay and Temperley and Elaine says it’s ‘full of characters’. There’s Big-Headed Edna, Morbid Marge, Poll Potts, who dresses like a sister-wife, Pincushion-Face Grace, Erica the Overfriendly Troll, Bea Moore the Colossal Bore, Wheelchair Pat, Wheelchair Mary, Rita Who Sits By the Heater, Elephant Vadge Madge, Jean Coker the Strokey Smoker, whose palsy makes her look like she’s constantly trying to eat her own neck, Black Nancy and White Nancy. Black Nancy calls me ‘Bab’ and is covered in dog hairs. She’s knitting a cardigan for the baby, whether I want her to or not. I’ve only exchanged brief ‘Hellos’ with White Nancy but as far as I can tell she’s a twat.
This is what I do now. This is what I have become. I meet up once a month with a group of women I don’t want to know. We gossip, we pray and we eat cake. My life will return to normal when the baby’s out in the open, of that I am sure, but while he’s gestating, I’m stagnating. I’m a freak on a leash.
It feels odd. Not wrong exactly, just nothing seems to fit. Everything’s too small. Too mundane. I’m a square peg and every damn hole is round. Yeah sure Baby Bear might be contented but Momma’s getting grizzly.
Erica the WOMBAT secretary had the idea to incorporate Kindness Circle into the meetings and tonight’s is the first one. Spurred on by ISIS and our world leaders basically all being megalomaniacal shits, she thought people needed to ‘make time to be kind’. Everyone breaks off into groups like they’re in the damn Brownies and partakes of kind activities – organising collections for the food bank, creating cross-stitch patterns for underprivileged traffic wardens or sitting around talking about how lovely everything is.
I heard the word ‘lovely’ precisely 126 times this evening. I want to hurt the word ‘lovely’. I want to beat lovely to within an inch of its life, tie lovely in a sack and fucking drown it.
Erica, I should mention, is also responsible for the ‘lovely’ rhymes in the church hall kitchenette:
Wash, wash, wash your plates
Gently down the drain
Rinse rinse, rinse them clean
Then dry them up again
And on the fridge door there’s
Welcome welcome, one and all,
To our communal milk and tea,
But if you use the last of them,
A refill’s nice to see!
And don’t get me started on If you’re happy and you know it wash your hands…
They’re so goddamn twee they make me want to gnaw concrete. Erica was all abuzz this evening having announced that the ‘church hall fund has agreed to splash out on hanging baskets for the smokers’ area’. You know, so people can admire the pansies while their tumours metastasize.
So I’m sitting there at Clit-Lickers Monthly and we have to go around the circle and say happy things. I’m with Erica, Tight Bun Doreen, Debbie Does Donkeys, One Armed Joyce and Rita Who Sits By the Heater. Erica’s rattling through a long list of contentments, which surprises me as she has a face that would make a blind child cry. Then it’s my turn.
‘Uh, I have nothing,’ I said.
‘Come on,’ said Debbie Does Donkeys. ‘There must be something.’
‘It’s a bit hard to think of anything right now. There’s a lot of bad happening in the world.’
‘Yes but we choose love,’ said Rita. ‘We might have to look a bit harder to find it but it is always there. Happy thoughts, you must have some.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I say. ‘I don’t have any. I’m not a happy-go-lucky person.’
Tight Bun Doreen pipes up. ‘Well perhaps if you were you’d find it easier to come up with something?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, heartburn biting. Inside my head she is flat on her back beneath a hydraulic drill press. My finger’s on the button.
Doreen’s lips pursed. ‘Maybe you need to change your world view?’
‘Maybe I do,’ I said.
‘So? Do you have a happy thought now?’ she asked.
‘What, because you tell me I have to have one? Yes, all right then, I do.’
Doreen frowned and waited. ‘Well? What is it?’
I continued to stare at her, smiling. ‘Can’t say else it won’t come true.’
Later, Debbie Does Donkeys read the lesson – a passage from Luke about Jesus anointing a sinful woman – the lesson being that one who has sinned deserves a second chance because ‘she has faith in the Lord’.
You can tell an evening has been a washout when the best part is being given a Bible. I was given my own Good News Bible.
I don’t think they like me at WOMBAT. I heard a few whisperings about Elaine’s ‘beast of a son’ and there were some sly looks, mostly from Edna and Doreen. Irritating people is the nearest I can get to fun these days so I’m going to go to next month’s meeting. In fact, I’m going to read my Bible too.
Let’s see what God has to say about the kind of sinful woman I am.
Wednesday, 25th July – 11 weeks, 3 days
1. Sandra Huggins.
2. People who use the hashtag #familyiseverything.
3. People who brag about stealing stuff from Buckingham Palace – what do you want, a medal? Though you’re probably in the right place if you did.
4. Helen at Pudding Club who wants to ban fireworks, the works of Charles Dickens and clown gifs on Twitter. Apparently they’re all ‘triggering’.
5. Peter Andre.
I’m bed-bound and teetering on the lip of insanity. I’ve watched back to back eps of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares even though I’ve seen them all before. I get up only to drink, piss, or puke and even then I’m dizzy. I’m lying here, falling down endless internet rabbit holes. I could read one of the preg books Elaine got from the library – What to Expect When You’re Gestating or Mummy to Be: A Day to Day Guide to the Most Magical Time in your Life but I don’t like library books in my bed. You never know what’s been done to them. Or in them.
So I stick to online stuff, mostly Buzzfeed, Bustle and
