Nine lives

The horrors of the weekend are receding, washed away with the monsoon June torrents, to be picked over by political scavengers until the next time. It’s as if some kind of fever pitch was reached: the heat, the half-term madness – no doubt a full moon bringing the werewolves out of their high rise caverns, inciting us all to crazy behaviour. Indeed, my own cyclical mood swings, apparently no longer held in check by contraceptive pills were also going haywire.

I was in a filthy mood camping with the kids at a Mersea Island squat – a friend – a man of the woods – sold us a tumbledown wilderness commune and we got a leaking roof, a dog – a Staffie- bitten thrice by an adder, two additional sugar-fatted teens: one incommunicado, the other by turns sulky and trivial, looked spuriously on our arrival, while their hulking father (their mothers were absent) silently asserted dominance in front of a massive TV. I made the best of it until I could no longer make it any longer – the weather was hit and miss – squally showers cut short a game of Nerf wars, and noone had enough food for the extra bodies we had no idea we’d be feeding.

We pitched a tent that noone but me would sleep in, irritable at Tom’s beer clogged snoring; and the kids, loonified by marshmallows (a fire was lit with petrol), Ribena and other toxic pacifiers, passed out on floors while I, highly strung on red wine, and keeping everybody else’s spirits and washing up, grew cranky in a stuffy bedroom, bouncing on an overfilled air mattress in full knowledge I would wake up backsore.

In the tent, the rain patted and the traffic from the adjacent road roared, and I woke up early, the sun yet to creep out. It did though, in time for Ava to pat chickens and collect eggs, and breakfast was somehow gathered and cooked while the kids polished off a violent game of Monopoly. Despite the morning’s realisation of the promised idyll, it was too late for my mood. Sleepy and irritable, feeling insecure by the long, rounded limbs of said fifteen-year-old playing table tennis on a storage unit, I spat venom at Tom, who’d been friendly – unable to stop tears from leaking beneath my sunglasses, sharing my spoilt discomfort with the others for whom this place was evidently some kind of paradise.

We travelled home early: a neck cranked car doze could not make up for a night under soggy canvas, and it was hard to muster enthusiasm for a rare night out – the last minute invite for a friend’s husband’s fortieth. Still, even as I fretted over what to wear (the pill it seems, whilst tempering my mood has added five pounds that mean most of my clothes are now wretchedly tight), I felt going out was not wise – I was due to start a new job on Monday, and my hangovers take several days recover from – and yet, we went: me angrily berating Tom for not having suitable shoes for the occasion – a smart caberet style West End bar – having advised him against his choice of t-shirt that was looking too clingy, despite the fact I myself was in my fat dress.

We bickered on the tube – me stalking off at one point, eyes pricking; Tom closing his in pain – partly from the pressure of the sinusitus that’s had him on anti b’s and talking like Zippy for weeks; partly because I was being a dick. In that moment, I was embarrassed of him and of myself – we were the farcical bickering couple of dubious comedies airing their dirty linen in public.

We turned it around in time for the party – a sophisticated affair where the average height of the stockbroking crowd was 6ft 4, taller than Tom, who at just 6ft, suddenly seemed schoolboyish. I was glad I’d worn the heels I could barely walk in, so as to be able to look people in the eye – a sure sign of class anxiety that I often, perhaps foolishly, feel among a West London crowd.

We left sensibly, but then, footsore and ravenously tequila-fueled, I’d wanted to take a cab and swing past a late night restaurant, while Tom wanted to tube it home in time to let our teenage babysitter go home. Our earlier feud was resurrected – me becoming hysterical at Tom’s belligerent practicality. In the heat of the moment I threw my engagement ring – worth the deposit on a small flat – at him, and he grew bullish and taunting, and though I scrabbled to find it, and gave him my phone for good measure before I flipped and threw it at him, he stalked off without a backwards glance and I was left, limping – no money, no cards, to prevail on the pity and credit of a private equities partner named Tarquin to Uber me safely home.

I paid him back, but not before I’d been surged – down the road from my workplaces old and new, pedestrians were flying out of the way of a van that was mowing them down, before running into a restaurant in which I have dined to slit the throat of a pretty blonde tourist. Terror has become so commonplace that neither me, nor the other partygoers smoking surreptitiously outside the club, batted much of an eyelid. It always happened somewhere else, you see, for all it’s creeping ever closer to home.

Arriving back to a locked door, and Tom sleeping off one more shot that he should have imbibed, I took aim at him for leaving me stranded in the middle of London’s chaos, and all I’d wanted was to get something to eat. I flung my ire at a wedding photo which shattered and later, swung for Tom’s stupid, supine form, refusing to get involved in my wrath that funnelled down so many let downs and disappointments and anxieties in a tussle that left neither of us hurt but both of us hurting.

In the morning, puffy and sheepish, I heard the kids creeping round upstairs and realised to my dismay, I’d probably hurt them as well. I refused to get up, wallowing in the juices of my despair until Tom brought me a cup of tea and told me neither of them had heard anything. The joy of deep sleep, the fact that Field Day partygoers were making equally noisy descents to Mile End tube had got me off scot free – more so than the men who’d been gunned down for slaughtering innocent westerners (if any of us can be said to be such a thing, complicit as we all are in the barbarism of capitalism and the global fallout thereof) enjoying their Saturday nights in a salubrious part of one of the world’s most unequal cities.

Two days later, and I’m baking Portuguese egg tarts with my mother- the silver lining to this horrific turn of events is that I get two extra days off to download from half term, unable to start my new job because the whole area’s in lockdown – and in a bid to stop arguing with Tom about things that are largely not his fault. My children are still young enough to be placated by sugar despite the fact that I’m clearly not in great mental shape and the world isn’t either. For now, they’ll forgive me. How many more times I can get away with it, I don’t know.

It’s all too easy to take things out on people that are only slightly to blame. But we’re all capable of creating our own worst nightmare. This time, my kids slept through it. The next day, when it happened again, Jonah heard me losing my mind and my temper and lashing out on the only person who really cares. No matter that I spent most of this last week organising outings and trying to make the most of my son’s last summer of childhood: Thorpe Park, the Royal Institute, Buckingham Palace – despite poor night’s sleep, and a chest infection that hung around since my last week at work. Now, it feels as though his innocence is gone for good as he’s descended into teenage mono- silence and averted eyes.

It will take him longer to understand that there are shades of grey to right and wrong. We are all of us capable of darkness. Nothing is ever one thing or one person’s fault. We all need to take a look at ourselves and see how far we are culpable for what other people do. It’s all too easy to blame the person who snaps and see the world and its woes in black and white that simply isn’t real.