Notes for the Next Time

by Eirin Thompson

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Addled mother-of-three finds her identity buried under layers of clutter in her unkempt home. Dealing with the unrelenting demands of children, the ever-growing pile of laundry, dishes and post, she finds herself having to admit she''s no longer able to cope.

Enter her very own ''listening angel'' - a supposed good Samaritan from the local charity set up to give support to ''Mums'' under pressure.

So why can''t she get a word in edgeways? And why is her husband''s mood suddenly so elevated - when a certain angel is hovering nearby?

Thus unfolds a dark and hilarious journey into the wilds of suburbia, where unforgettable characters dwell and the unexpected is never far away.

Told through diary-style musings, Notes for the Next Time explores the murky depths beneath the smooth surface of life in a hilarious, surprising and genuinely moving read.

And what looks to be the final nail in the coffin of our mum-on-the-edge''s ebbing sanity may actually provide the much-needed catalyst for change.

Release date: August 30, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 272

Sample

Sometimes optimism just isn’t enough.

* * *

Jill across the road has started power-walking. At least, I think she has. She was belting along in a baseball cap and hoodie
this morning as I was coming back from school. She waved because she is a nice person. I have had to revise my initial impression
of her, formed when she was standing outside the supermarket with a couple of older women. They were talking to each other
while she waited with her mouth slightly open, looking vacant. I felt superior because I was doing my shopping unaccompanied
and with my mouth shut. Subsequently it has come to my attention that Jill is tall with a stunning figure, a permanent natural tan, the smartest house
in the avenue and an easy relationship with her children, who are all the same ages as mine. Plus she is seven years younger
than me.


*

I need new glasses. The hard little teardrops that rest on my nose have started to leave red welts. This was pointed out to
me by the children’s dentist. In a pretence of aghast surprise, I removed the glasses and looked at them. Why? It was then
inescapably obvious to us both that they were extremely scratched and greasy.


When I put on this weight, seemingly even my nose expanded.

*

I couldn’t wear a baseball cap, partly because of the glasses and partly because of my profile, which – as I recently discovered
via my first experience of a changing room with a three-sided mirror – is really quite ugly. It turns out I have a nose like
a beak, an upper jaw several sizes bigger than the lower and a receding chin. None of this is apparent, head-on. If I wore
a baseball cap, I’d look like Jonathan King, which is not a good look for a woman.


*

Could much adolescent unhappiness have been avoided had I known what I really looked like? Did I behave as though I were pretty
when I was not, and did people hate me for it? I didn’t know. I didn’t know.


*

‘Greet the unseen with a cheer!’ This is one of my Uplifting Quotes, but I can’t remember who said it (although probably not
the Earl of Gloucester). The more I don’t know, the more I want to, as I must find out whether it was a person who faced great
suffering or really none at all.


*

Top of the Urgent list this morning was cleaning the toilets and bathroom, and now they gleam, but everywhere else is mess
and gloom. My incompetence as a housekeeper seems to have increased, if anything, since the children were babies. How can
this be, now that I have all the morning when they are at school? How can it take me half a day to clean a bathroom and two
toilets? There are women surgeons, no doubt, who have whipped through such tasks before attending to a morning theatre list
of tumours and bullet wounds.


*

I would like to see the look on his face if the surgeon doing his precious vasectomy turns out to be a woman.

*

I haven’t really been comfortable using the word ‘toilet’ for a toilet since I discovered the classier ‘lavatory’ alternative. So, now I wish I had been brought up in a family who used
‘lavatory’ as standard, because it’s far too late for me to switch, detesting, as I do, affectation (in myself; sometimes
I can quite like it in others).


As if that were the regret worth singling out about my family.

‘Detesting, as I do, affectation’? Like, that’s not affected.

The blinking has come back.

* * *

When you have pushed out a large turd on to the delivery table, before the watching eyes of two midwives, an anaesthetist
and him, you think, Embarrassment is dead to me, now. Wrong. This morning at the roundabout a girl who looked like Joey Ramone
was trying to cross the road with her baby in a buggy. She was dressed for a spring morning – which was optimistic, though
it is spring – and it was starting to rain. He just drove on like she wasn’t there. I squirmed beside him, but she grinned. Why?


He always sees racing-green BMWs nosing out at junctions, and then it’s all gentlemanly standing aside, Come ahead, my good
friend, come ahead. But he never sees women trying to cross the road with toddlers by the hand, and he never sees old people
with nylon shopping bags and perforated shoes quivering on the kerb. At such moments, I cannot see the point of him.


And he is the one who presumes to lecture me about two generations of war heroes and poppies and minutes’ silence for the fallen! Just so long as the survivors aren’t
getting in his way sixty years later, trying to cross the road back to their nursing homes.


*

He is going out with Woods tonight. I like it when he’s out. I can do things my way and be tucked up in bed by nine. Bliss.
(Nobody says ‘Bliss’ any more. Is this simply because the expression is passé, or have we lost all capacity for contentment?)


I don’t like the part when he comes in with the bitter juice steaming out of his pores. He’ll be sick, which he does very
tidily, but he’ll still smell contagious when he shambles into bed, and I’ll disinfect the toilet and basin in the morning.


*

I think the blinking is connected to tiredness. I think it’s just something I do when I’m tired.

* * *

Stephanie next door has got a vibrator. It took me a while to work out what it was. I was in bed, pillowed up against the
party wall with my book, when I heard the high little strimmer sound. At first, I couldn’t identify it, never actually having
held or heard a vibrator in real life, but I’m not completely naïve: a couple of minutes’ whirring in the bedroom, then a
little pause, then they turn on the radio? It wasn’t a hand-held blender.


This is yet another example of my double standards. The couple next door indulges in use of a vibrator, and I think: Racy.
If it were us, I would be thinking: Desperate. Probably because Stephanie is blonde with long legs and Pete is a body builder,
while we are just Us.


*

His big night out failed to materialise. Woods went off with a female member of the bar staff, and he was left alone and came
home early – still radiating alcohol fumes but at least no actual disinfectant necessary.


*

There are certain spoken words over which it is only polite to stumble slightly. ‘Reciprocity’ is one. Anyone who can hurtle
unimpeded through a sentence in which they decide at some point to use the word ‘reciprocity’ is lacking a sense of the human
connection (givers of Royal Society Christmas Lectures excepted). It is perfectly acceptable and understood that people are
fluent on ‘reciprocal’, but use of ‘reciprocity’ needs a certain hesitance and a slight smile, to acknowledge that the speaker
is now grasping for the less familiar derivation with its unexpected footwork. Failure to acknowledge this looks a bit like
showing off, and nobody likes a show-off.


Actually, everybody loves a show-off. Look at Elvis. Look at Jesus! Ah, but: Jesus wasn’t merely a show-off, but also ‘a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief’. Aren’t we all?


Except for people who don’t hesitate over ‘reciprocity’, obviously.

*

Jesus also invented the capsule wardrobe, by the way. ‘One robe on and one in the wash’, I think he said. In his part of the
world, this meant one robe, full stop. Because you could wash it before you went to bed, hang it on the line, and it would
be dry in the morning. I know this because I have done it (shorts and a T-shirt, in my case). I didn’t have a spiritual awakening in the Holy Land, because I was too young.
Here is how young I was. Once when we went hunting for casual work near the Egyptian border, we found a private beach enclosed
by a ten-foot fence. There was a full-height turnstile where we peeked through and saw tables with parasols, but the place
was deserted. I was so thin and so stupid (i.e., very, very young), I squeezed through the padlocked turnstile. I couldn’t find anybody to ask for a job. What if there had been guard
dogs (like the ones in the warning pictures!)? Or men with guns? What if I had got stuck in the turnstile and died of thirst?
But I didn’t see such possible outcomes until I was years and years and continents away.


Remember the smell of Jerusalem, of the Arab quarter. Warm, damp, overripe fruit and bread, ancient stone and undertones of
urine. Little children played a game round an old sofa on the Via Dolorosa.


*

Is it normal, under any circumstances, to live in dread of your undealt-with post? I have one cardboard box, two long-life
carrier bags and a kitchen drawer full of envelopes, and they keep me in perpetual torment. It’s not even all mine to neglect. When the previous elderly householder died in a care home, his son telephoned to request in a humble yet charming
way that I send on any of his deceased father’s mail that might mistakenly persist in coming to our address. This is just
the kind of help I love to be asked for because it is so easy to be generous. It’s like when strangers approach you for directions
and then think you’re saintly because you lead them to their destination instead of merely advising them. This postal favour was so modest and untaxing that I proudly anticipated supplementing it with a chatty note about
the house’s new life, ringing with the sound of happy, playing children, or perhaps a charity donation in lieu of flowers
as per the bereaved family’s notice in the newspaper. So why, eighteen months later, do I have a heap of correspondence so
huge and so heavy that I cannot forward it by ordinary mail (it wouldn’t fit through a letterbox) yet cannot send by parcel
post because it is unbearable to cost a working man his evening retrieving a mysterious package from the sorting office, knowing
as I do that it is mainly full of last year’s seed catalogues?


*

When is the last time a stranger asked me for directions? When I lived in cities, people often did. Perhaps then I looked
more approachable. But, really, I know it is also because we do not get visitors, in these parts.


*

In these parts? Who am I, Joe Grundy?

*

Right. I am going to chip away. I am going to deal with five items of postal backlog each day, plus I am going to process
today’s mail today, every day. I am going to stop feeling defeated and guilty and become a woman of action.


*

With my immense postal backlog and associated feelings of failure, it is surely perverse that I am disappointed on days like
today when nothing comes in the post.


* * *

This morning, I have filed an old oil bill and an electricity bill-type acknowledgement; I have binned an order form for new
school jumpers, which should have been returned three months ago; and I have written hospital clinic appoiments and dates for the parent teacher meetings into the Family Organiser. Five items of postal backlog, gone! Hooray!


*

A particularly pedantic English-speaker might point to the double-negative in ‘Je ne regrette rien’ and assert that Edith Piaf was sorry about her whole bloody life.


* * *

Trevor is running for election. (Trevor is Jill’s husband. His family owns the kind of old-fashioned shoe shop that specialises
in leather brogues and zip-up slippers. We buy the black school shoes there.) He is standing for the Salt-of-the-Earth-God-Helps-Those-Who-Help-Themselves
Party, which might mean an end to his football weekends away with the lads as I’m not sure the party fathers encourage that
kind of thing. Jill and the children are having a studio portrait done with him on Monday for the campaign leaflets.


Had another look at the baseball-cap situation, with the help of the shaving mirror alongside the dressing table. Still Jonathan
King. Not as bad without the glasses, but the beak-type peak seems to emphasise the beak-type nose, so still no.


*

There are two kinds of people who are very good at knowing what other people want and giving it to them. People like me (needy)
and people like Woods (charmer). People like me are really tuned into what others want to hear. We watch and we listen, we
identify it in a minute and we hand it straight over. People like Woods identify it just as quickly, but they get a glint
in their eye, and they say, ‘I know you, I know all about you, I know what you want, and, because I like you, I’m going to
give it to you. But only because I like you.’ That’s the difference. And I don’t know what it means.


*

I saw the girl who looks like Joey Ramone again this morning, in the post office. She is a brave girl, looking like Joey Ramone
in a town like this where the dress code is: don’t wear anything people can describe.


Often the word ‘indescribable’ is used when what is actually meant is ‘describable’ (eminently describable, even, using colour-words
and size-words and words like ‘noisy’, ‘daring’ and ‘spiky’). Try describing invisible. I am indescribable.


*

A totally wasted weekend. Hell is other people? Mais non, Monsieur Sartre. Hell is other people’s children. Les enfants terribles des autres. Let’s not go into it, but I like mine a lot better, right now.


*

OK. Greeting the unseen with a cheer, now, and there’s rather a lot of unseen at present, as the legs of my glasses appear
to have become baggy, if that is possible. Every time I lean forward, they fall off. They have already fallen into my dinner,
and they depart every time I look down to brush the kitchen floor, which I cannot see sufficiently well to brush without them.
This is where having no money becomes seriously irritating.


*

If God is Love, then why not just say Love?

*

And if Love is Blind, what does that make God?

*

I think there may be an actual, factual reason for my debilitating sense of inadequacy around other adults. Since I stopped
working (for money) and had the children, I have suspended my human development. I have completely skipped group dynamics and interpersonal skills alongside all rites of passage involving colleagues’ miscarriages, suicidal teenagers and Alzheimer’s-ridden parents. I haven’t
learned through other people’s experiences because there are no other people. I am frozen at the age of twenty-six, while
the paperwork says I am so, so much older.


*

Every time my glasses fall off, I mutter, ‘Fuck,’ while every time I inadvertently hurt myself, I mutter, ‘Shit.’ I think I must use ‘fuck’ for sudden, unexpected but not completely unforeseeable misfortunes, because I would also say
it if, f. . .