Housekeeper's Diary

In Which Deliveroo Decides I Must Be Dead

Great strides this week! And by great strides I mean the sort of domestic miracle that would look like nothing at all to anyone else, but which to me feels like a brass band has come marching through the bedroom playing Rule, Britannia! while I stand there in bare feet holding a raspberry lolly ice aloft like a torch.

There’s food in the fridge.

Actual lovely food. Food I chose, food I carried home and put away with my own two hands.

So much of it that Deliveroo has gone into mourning. The vouchers have started, £7 off and then £10 off and then free delivery till Sunday, each one more frantic than the last, the digital equivalent of a jilted lover leaving casseroles on the doorstep. They’re convinced we’ve either perished beneath the rubble or, worse, taken up clean living without filing the paperwork.

I’m expecting the police any minute now. A welfare check, conducted on behalf of a very worried algorithm.

“Madam. Deliveroo reports you’ve not ordered anything beige in four days. Blink twice if you’re being held against your will by a tin of beans and a block of Cathedral City.”

Safe? No. Nobody in this house is safe. But in possession of vegetables and olive oil, of porcini mushrooms and a raspberry lolly ice the colour of a cheap sunset? Yes, officer. Wildly, gloriously yes!

We’ve also turned a writing bureau into a pantry.

Oh my! The sloping lid comes down and there it all is. Dried goods standing to attention, condiments stood at ease, and a particular rice cracker I have developed a moreish issue with, all of it lined up in soldierly rows and waiting on orders from a woman who’s only just remembered she’s allowed to feed herself. A bureau-pantry! Honestly I feel as though I’ve personally invented civilisation. As though somewhere Mrs Beeton is looking down and nodding.

There’s ice in the freezer too.

Worth recording, this, because ice is the sort of thing women have in films. Women in films have ice. (Shaved and cubed and occasionally containing petals or lemon slices). And nice lingerie, and the settled air of someone who got round to processing her childhood while my knicker drawer is a travesty and my memory so awful I’m not even sure I had a childhood and instead arrived fully formed with way too much boobage at the age of 32. Born I think on the same day as Finley? Could that be true? It feels true.

But the ice. The ice I have got. And good job too, because yesterday the heat came for the lot of us.

Warm in that baffling June way. Hot and clammy, the sky the colour of old dishwater and the air gone thick enough to wade through. A day that promised it would be gentle and then sat on your chest like a damp dog.

It got into the plaster and the bare boards, the heat. Got into the spaniels, who lay flung out along the cool of the hall tiles like things dropped from a height, and into the cats poured boneless along the warm sill with one ear twitching at flies. We threw every window open and not a breath came in to thank us for it. The house just held the warmth the way an old Brown Betty holds it, sullen and slow and proud.

Then a stuffy, sleepless night. The kind you spend on top of the covers, listening to the house tick and settle in the dark, the window propped onto a square of black garden that gave back no relief at all. And the bats.

Bats, endlessly, round a crescent moon.

And for an hour or so the whole world went strange and lovely, the way it does maybe twice a year if you’re paying attention. Not pretty or decorative. The other thing. The sky going that deep, drowned blue that isn’t quite black and isn’t quite anything you could put a name to, the trees holding as still as held breath, the bats scrawling their mad invisible thread across the face of the moon. The ordinary world tilting a few degrees on its hinge to show you the something-else it usually keeps tucked out of sight…

Earlier I’d spent the afternoon with Finley. Catching up on all the WWE I miss when I’m not with him. Lamb koftas and lemonade, a feast! My curly-haired boy talking me through who’d betrayed whom in the ring and which of them had it coming, and me loving him so hard from the other end of the sofa that watching him in profile did something painful to my chest. The boy. Still in there. Not gone off anywhere at all, just folded up inside him like a note left in the pocket of a coat from a winter he’d forgotten.

Then home.

To Gloria.

And Ben.

Another Friday night, and Ben’s out in the garden taking a mallet to the rubble. As you do. As one simply does, on a Friday, in June, when the only other option is sitting still inside your own head.

The light goes slow this time of year, reluctant to leave, the sky bruising violet and then to a blue so deep you can barely tell the man from the stone he’s swinging at. Midges lifting off the warm ground and covering him in bites. The mallet falling and falling in the half-dark, a dull soft thud you feel in the sternum more than hear.

The front garden’s already halfway back to lovely, which seems flatly impossible given the warzone it was a fortnight since. But it turns out rubble is no match for a man with a blunt instrument and something to prove.

We’re overwhelmed. And quietly getting on with it anyway. That’s the week, if it’s anything. Overwhelmed, but not inert. Frightened, but still moving anyway. Cross with each other over toast and soldered back together again by the time the owls start up by way of twisty conversation, for what is a relationship if it is not one endless conversation, picked up and put down, over and over again?

Decision fatigue has moved in. We’re sick to the back teeth of our own thoughts, worn thin by the great clattering machinery of what-if, by all those nights spent lying awake costing out other lives. Because we are, the pair of us, big-ideas people.

Our imaginations bolt like badly trained cock-a-poos the second a door’s left open. Because there are no real constraints now the kids are grown up. So a conversation about painting the floorboards becomes a cabin in a Swedish wood. A cottage gone soft and golden with Provençal heat. A bothy with the wind coming sideways off a Scottish loch, a canal boat, a tiny house, a hut at the end of a track no postman would ever find. Lives with fewer bills and fewer expectations. More trees, more weather. Silence enough to properly lose yourself in.

And yet.

Underneath the whole racket, this stubborn small voice. Here. For now. Here’s where the mending must carry on, for we are better for the year here, and will be better still for another one.

For might it not be a kind of madness, to set fire to the escape route while the front garden’s still only halfway back to lovely and the bureau’s only just learned to be a pantry? To turn round to a fragile, guttering executive function and ask it to please now also project-manage relocation to a fjord.

There’s a case for staying for a while, and we are still making it.

Not forever. Not a sentence handed down from a judge. Staying long enough to light the lamps and fill the shelves. Long enough to find out what a house does once it stops being a building site and starts being temporarily, yours.

A case too for a fjord in the future.

But tonight, pasta. Porcini mushroom and truffle and butter and far too much black pepper. Later, a BBC drama about a clutch of old friends quietly coming apart on a Greek holiday. A bath run so scalding it’ll have to cool all on its own, because the bathroom’s got no cold tap and neither of us fancies being boiled lobster-pink before the second episode.

And when it does, I’ll scrub myself raw with salt by candlelight in the now tepid water. One candle, because the overhead light in there is impossible and the dark is kinder to a half-started room. The flame leaning and righting itself in the draught from the loft window. And if the bathroom’s got peeling wallpaper then I shall simply call it atmosphere. If the bath’s absurd then we shall call it ritual. If the house is still wounded, still all bare wiring and unfinished edges, then I’ll light my two tiny glass lamps and set them on the table and let them flicker away like proof of life.

The heat won’t lift. The dark comes down warm as a held hand. Somewhere out in it the bats are still going and the owls have started up, and the house sits in its own small pool of lamplight like a thing being kept alive by hand.

Because it matters.

The smallest house-things matter the most.

A lamp. A lolly ice. A pantry shelf. A swept corner. A garden with less rubble in it tonight than there was this morning. Food in the fridge and ice in the freezer. A boy in profile. Bats round the moon. Ben out there in the warm dark, furious with the rubble and faithful to it all the same. Me, romanticising a bathroom that would make a landlord whistle through his teeth.

It’s been a long week. Cross words and cabin fever, and that strange welding-together that comes when you both finally cop on that you’re soldiers in the same daft war. We want stodge and we want wine. We want the kids well and the owls hooting and the bats circling and the deep animal relief of having got through another seven days without the whole lot coming down around us.

So. Another one done.

Owls and bats, and the heat that won’t break. Two new little lamps going on the table.

The bureau’s a pantry. The freezer’s got ice. Deliveroo’s beside itself with worry. The garden’s clawing its way back to beautiful.

And us?

Still here.

Overwhelmed, aye. But getting on with it. Which is, some weeks, the bravest little prayer a house will ever hear.

Here’s the thing I don’t say out loud very often.

I was once a woman who always had ice.

Not here, though. Never here. That woman lived in another town and another county. Another life altogether. She had ice the way you have your own name, without thinking about it, without once stopping to be grateful.

It wouldn’t have crossed her mind to be a woman without it. Ice was just a thing that happened in the door of the freezer, the way water happens out of taps and post comes through the letterbox. She’d have laughed at you, that one, if you’d told her ice would one day be a small private triumph in a house still full of bare wiring. She’d have thought you were describing somebody else’s life entirely. Some sad little documentary caught between the proper programmes.

I used to be her. I’m fairly sure I used to be her?

But that whole stretch of life has gone the way of an old video now. You know the kind. A film you loved so hard you wore the tape thin, watched it till you could mouth the lines a half-second ahead of the actors, till the box itself went soft at the corners from all the handling.

And then one evening you put it on, and the picture warbles.

The tracking just won’t hold. There’s a band of silver hiss rolling up through the middle of every face you loved. You whack the side of the telly the way your dad taught you and it helps for a second and then it doesn’t. And when you finally pull the cassette out to see what’s wrong, the tape’s come spilling out in a brown glossy tangle, yards of it, the ribbon that held the whole story now chewed and looped round the spindle. You sit on the floor with a biro trying to wind it back in. And you can feel, even as you’re doing it, that some of it’s gone. Creased past playing. Whatever was on that stretch isn’t coming back clean.

That’s the before. That’s the woman with the ice.

She’s on there somewhere still. I can almost see her. Topping up the trays without a thought. Moving through a kitchen in a town I don’t live in any more like she owned the place, a gin and tonic slung together at six like it was nothing at all. Which she did. Which she did.

I just can’t get the playback to hold on her.

And yet.

Here’s the thing about this house. There has never been ice in it. Not once. Not in all the time we’ve been wounded and making do, the house simply went without, the way some houses go without music or without heat. Although once we treated ourselves to a whole bag of fat square cubes and they melted in a pool on the floor and we were for a while bewildered by way of neglect.

Until tonight.

Tonight there’s ice in the freezer because I put it there. Not summoned. Not arrived by magic in the door of an appliance. Put there, here, in this house.

So this isn’t the old tape playing again. That one’s gone, warbled and creased past saving. This is a new reel entirely. Blank till now. The first good frame coming in faint and grainy the way they always do, before they find their hold.

She always had ice, that other woman, in that other life. It would have struck her as bizarre past words that a house could go without.

This one went without.

Until one day she realised she didn’t have to.

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