Anyway, I don’t need Julie’s help to make me feel guilty about getting my priorities wrong. Guilt is where I live.
7.11 am: At breakfast, I tell Richard that Emily is sleeping in because she had a bad night. This has the virtue of being a lie that is perfectly true. It was certainly bad, right up there with the worst nights ever. Completely drained, I move through my morning tasks like a rusty, scrapyard android. Even bending over to pick up Lenny’s water bowl is such an effort I actually make encouraging sounds to get myself to straighten up. (‘Come on, ooff, you can do it!’) Am making porridge when Ben descends from his lair looking like a wildebeest tethered to three kinds of electronic device. When he turned fourteen, my lovely boy’s shoulders slumped overnight and he lost the power of speech, communicating his needs in occasional grunts and snide put-downs. This morning, however, he seems weirdly animated – talkative even.
‘Mum, guess what? I saw this picture of Emily on Facebook. Crack-ing photo.’
‘Ben.’
‘Seriously, the bottom line is she got thousands of Likes for this picture of her …’
‘BENJAMIN!’
‘Well, well, young man,’ says Richard, looking up briefly from his frogspawn yogurt, or whatever it is he’s eating these days, ‘it’s good to hear you saying something positive about your sister for a change. Isn’t it, Kate?’
I shoot Ben my best Medusa death-ray stare and mouth, ‘Tell Dad and you’re dead.’
Richard doesn’t notice this frantic semaphore between mother and son because he is absorbed in an article on a cycling website. I can read the headline over his shoulder. ‘15 Gadgets You Never Knew You Needed.’
The number of gadgets cyclists don’t know that they need is very extensive, as our small utility room can testify. Getting to the washing machine these days is like competing in the hurdles because Rich’s bike gear occupies every inch of floor. There are several kinds of helmet: a helmet that plays music, a helmet with a miner’s lamp clipped to the front, even a helmet with its own indicator. From my drying rack hang two heavy, metal locks that look more like implements used during the torture of a Tudor nobleman than something to fasten a bike to a railing. When I went in there yesterday to empty the dryer, I found Rich’s latest purchase. A worryingly phallic object, still in its box, it claimed to be ‘an automatic lube dispenser’. Is that for the bike or for my husband’s chafed backside, which has lost its cushion of fat since he became a mountain goat? It sure as hell isn’t for our sex life.
‘I’ll be late tonight. Andy and I are riding to Outer Mongolia,’ (at least that’s what I think he said). ‘OK with you?’
It’s a statement not a question. Richard doesn’t look up from his laptop, not even when I put a bowl of porridge in front of him. ‘Darling, you know I’m not eating gluten,’ he mutters.
‘I thought oats were OK? Slow release, low GI aren’t they?’ He doesn’t respond.
Same goes for Ben who I can see is scrolling through Facebook, smirking and communing with that invisible world where he spends so much of his time. Probably charting the global adventures of his sister’s bottom. With a pang, I think of Emily asleep upstairs. I told her everything would seem better in the morning and now it is the morning I need to think how to make it better. First, I have to get her father out of the house.
Over by the back door, Richard starts to put on his cycling gear, a process fraught with zips and studs and flaps. Picture, if you will, a knight getting ready for the Battle of Agincourt with a £2,300 carbon fibre bike taking the part of the horse. When my husband took up cycling three years ago, I was totally in favour. Exercise, fresh air, anything so I could be left in peace on eBay picking up ‘more junk we don’t need to clutter up this ruin’, as Richard calls it. Or ‘incredible bargains that will find a place in our magical old house’, which I prefer.
That was before it became clear that Rich wasn’t just cycling for fun. Seriously, fun did not come into it. Before my unsuspecting eyes, he morphed into one of those MAMILs you read about in the Lifestyle section of the papers, a Middle-Aged Man in Lycra who did a minimum of ten hours in the saddle every week. On his new regime, Rich rapidly lost two stone. I found it hard to be delighted about this because my own extra pounds were clinging to me with greater tenacity every year. Unlike Richard’s saddlebags, mine were no longer removable (if only you could unhook the panniers of spare flesh!). Until my late thirties, I swear all it took was four days of eating only cottage cheese and Ryvita and I could feel my ribs again. That trick doesn’t work any more.
Rich had never been fat, but he was always cuddly in a rumpled, Jeff Bridges kind of way, and there was something about the soft ampleness of his body that matched his good nature. He looked like what he was: an amiable and generous man. This angular stranger he studies in the mirror with intense interest has a taut, toned body and a heavily lined face – we have both reached that age where being too thin makes you look gaunt instead of youthful. The new Richard attracts lots of admiring comments from our friends and I know I should find him attractive, but any lustful thoughts are punctured instantly by the cycling gear. What Rich most resembles when he wears his neck-to-knee stretchwear is a giant turquoise condom. Horribly visible, his penis and testicles dangle like low-hanging fruit.
The old Rich would have appreciated how ridiculous he looks and enjoyed sharing the joke. This new one doesn’t smile much, or maybe I don’t give him much to smile about. He is permanently in a grump about the house or ‘Your Money Pit’ as he calls it, never missing an opportunity to get in a dig at the lovely builder who is skilfully helping me coax the sad old place back to life.
As he fastens his helmet, he says: ‘Kate, can you get Piotr to take a look at the bathroom tap? I think the washer he used was another of his post-war Polish cast-offs.’
See what I mean? Another sideswipe at poor Piotr. I would say something sarcastic back, like how I’m amazed that Richard even noticed something about our house when his mind is on much higher things, but suddenly feel really bad that I haven’t told him about Emily and the belfie. Instead of snapping, I go over and give him a guilty goodbye hug, whereupon my dressing gown gets snagged on a Velcro pocket flap. There are an awkward few seconds when we are stuck together. It’s the closest we’ve been for a while. Perhaps I should tell him about last night? The temptation to blurt it all out, to share the burden, is almost overwhelming, but I promised Emily that I wouldn’t tell Daddy, so I don’t.
7.54 am: With Richard and Ben safely out of the house, I go upstairs to check on Em, bearing a mug of brick-red tea with one sugar. Since she started her juicing regime, she won’t allow any sugar to pass her lips, but surely sweet tea counts as medicine in an emergency? I can only push her door so far before it jams on a pile of clothes and shoes. I squeeze through the gap and find myself in what looks like a room vacated in a hurry after an air raid. Debris is spread over a wide area and on the bedside table teeters an art installation made of Diet Coke cans.
The state of a teenager’s bedroom is such a time-honoured source of mother–daughter conflict that I guess I should have been prepared for it, but our fights over this disputed territory are never less than bruising. The latest, after school on Friday, when I insisted that her room be tidied right now, ended in furious stalemate:
Emily: ‘But it’s my room.’
Me: ‘But it’s my house.’
Neither of us was prepared to back down.
‘She’s so stubborn,’ I complained later to Richard.
‘Who
