Chapter Two
In the end Layla was back home before her father.
She had been designated driver for the evening and tended to prefer a quiet chat with her mates down the pub compared to, say, staying up until the early hours clubbing.
Not that there were many clubs or options for all-night raving in rural Hertfordshire even if she had been so inclined.
Either way, she didn’t drink much, and if she was driving, she wouldn’t have anything more than a lemonade.
Joe, on the other hand, had been into London to watch England being thumped by New Zealand in one of the rugby autumn internationals.
This had been followed by a compulsory visit to the neighbouring public houses where he’d evidently consumed north of ten pints by the time he blundered up the stairs and into bed.
He was asleep within seconds of his head hitting the pillow, although he did manage to stay conscious for long enough to ask ‘Good shhhhopp?’ and run an optimistic hand underneath my pyjama top, which I removed when he started snoring.
I lay staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, as is standard practice.
I’ve never been a great sleeper but over recent years it’s been getting worse.
I guess it’s one of the joys of perimenopause.
I don’t have any hot flushes yet but pretty much every ailment or complaint after the age of forty seems to be attributable to ‘women’s problems’ in some way – as are most of the ones before forty, come to think of it.
You’d think that the medical establishment might have found a more equitable way to deal with half the population by now, rather than having every single medical and surgical speciality geared towards men by default, and everything affecting women being lumped together as one problem group, attributed to our hormones and reproductive status – as if we had no other purpose or function.
But t’was ever thus. No point in dwelling on the patriarchy at two in the morning (as I said to myself whilst dwelling on the patriarchy at two in the morning).
No, there were far more significant issues to worry about.
Climate change, for example; whether the cats were due another worming tablet; civil unrest; the funny smell coming from the dishwasher; whether my lovely friend Farah had recovered from being punched in the boob by her eleven-year-old step-son whose actual mother was a firm believer in gentle parenting; the threat of imminent war in multiple regions across the globe; whether Layla should take a pair of wellies with her to university.
And, most glaring of all – the number one question – what was I going to do when she left?
I’m a terrible one for thinking I’ve kicked these internal conversations into touch during daylight hours only to have them resurface at night, which probably explains the chronic insomnia.
Daytime is fine. Once I’ve woken up, and lain there for a few minutes cataloguing any new aches and pains, I can crack on with the day relatively untroubled by the existential issues that keep me awake at night (although concerns about Farah’s sore boob and what she’s going to do about her step-son have been living rent-free in my head for some time).
I get up and pull on some suitably shapeless clothes, often indistinguishable from my nightwear (sometimes, it is my actual nightwear).
I may or may not brush my hair before pulling it into a scrunchie.
I may or may not apply some moisturiser (although it’s vanishingly rare that I’d put on any make-up).
I feed the cats, make breakfast for myself and Layla (and sometimes Joe depending on whether he’s already headed off to work), nothing fancy, just tea and toast. I wave my daughter off to school – or at least I used to.
Recently I’ve been waving her off to her job at the local supermarket – and I head out to the shed to start work myself.
When I say shed, most people assume I have one of those bijoux home offices tucked into a beautiful area of an immaculately landscaped garden, Scandi spruce pine, polished glass, sleek interior.
They think it’s just a humblebrag, like describing the wing of your stately home as an annexe.
But no, this really is our shed, complete with lawnmower, stacks of teetering paint tins and padded camping chair that I pull up to an ancient fold-out table where I prop my laptop.
Most days I get a solid three to four hours of editing done outside.
I might finish off indoors with a read-through while I’m sorting out dinner, and depending on the job, and the whereabouts of my family, I might choose to carry on into the evening.
The majority of my workload at the moment is fulfilling a semi-permanent contract with a large pharmaceutical and medical device supplier, ProChem – it’s not hugely exciting, checking through the grammar and phrasing of adverts for incontinence pads and mobility equipment, but I now know a lot more about bulk-forming laxatives, fast-acting antacids, and slow-release cardiac medication than your average non-doctor.
And it pays a regular, if not huge, salary.
The rest of my working week is taken up with freelance editing – mostly dull technical journals, cross-referencing scientific papers and ensuring the citations are correct – but sometimes I’ll allow myself the treat of taking on an individual project, a self-published memoir for example, or a fiction submission from an aspiring author hoping to snare an agent.
These are the jobs I love – helping someone shape and polish their words into an accessible, presentable state.
It’s just unfortunate that the income from these projects is so derisory.
It probably costs me more in electricity to power the laptop than I can charge these clients.
Basically, the life-affirming projects are rare and poorly remunerated, and the bulk of my work is technical and a bit dull, but overall, I’m still happy as an editor.
I’m a methodical person and I’ve always loved getting lost in a story, even if it’s one about the benefits of beta blockers.
Working from home means that I can be flexible about time, working the early hours of the morning or the late hours of evening depending on my social calendar.
Which is why it’s something of a surprise that my social calendar isn’t fuller, or even slightly full.
The truth is that this job can be very isolating.
The features that make it so appealing are also its downside, and I can often go for days, even weeks at a time, without seeing anyone other than my husband and daughter.
This wasn’t always the case. When Layla was young, I had plenty of mummy friends living locally.
Women whose houses I frequented for play dates and PTA meetings.
Friends to bump into in the playpark and eyeroll with whilst studiously ignoring toddler meltdowns about why the slide is yellow, or why raisins are wrinkly, or why cars, or why grass (or why motherhood for that matter).
Friends to share a morning cuppa with as we helped assemble marble runs or intervened in fights over the cursed Moon Sand (a work of the devil), or explained that, no, Hot Wheels track could not be attached to the dog and no, Aquabeads should not be inserted into nostrils.
I was involved in groups, I ran stalls at the fete, I attended coffee mornings for new school mums to help them come to terms with the trauma of having their four-year-old wrenched from their arms by stern Mrs Pattinson.
I even had some friends whom I might invite round for dinner with their husbands, evenings where we’d all be so sleep-deprived and giddy with the freedom of having a babysitter booked that we’d slip into a coma after two glasses of wine.
Either that or end up playing The Floor is Lava and breaking several items of furniture.
Those were heady days indeed, packed to bursting with the mundanities of dealing with small people, exhausted and overwhelmed, but always surrounded by noise and chatter and activity.
Fast forward to now and those women either have full time jobs, or they’re busy with larger families and children younger than mine.
Some have a child the same age as Layla, but we’ve realised we don’t have anything in common now that the kids have grown up.
I have had a few friends like this where the only thing keeping us together was a shared dread of supervising the school disco or a shared love of the Mother’s Day assembly.
Where most of our time was spent gossiping about the year four teaching assistant’s facial tattoos or the passive aggressive comparative ranking of our children’s academic potential.
Those friendships were very much of their time and without the social glue of the school run there’s little incentive to maintain them.