Chapter 16

I decide, as my brain yawns and stretches ready for a good eight hours in the soporific glow from the woodburner, to attempt a non-confessional, sharing yet reserved, amusing, friendly but not one hundred percent straightforward, womanly, empathic exchange. Should be dead easy in my condition.

     “Clara, I am tired,” I confess. “I’m exhausted actually.” Then I lie. “I really don’t know what’s the matter…”

    “Don’t worry,” she reassures. “You’re not alone. Ever since the solstice everyone’s been saying how dark it is – and I don’t just mean outside. Do you want peppermint, camomile or just ordinary?”

     “Ordinary will be fine, thanks. Weak with milk.” I manage to sit up and shrug my off- white fake fur coat from my shoulders to reveal a low-cut, tie-dyed top and a moonstone on a silver chain. Visiting Clara is always an opportunity to dress up. I like to wear the oddest things in my closet – you know, the sorts of items you buy at the sales when you’ve downed one too many cappuccinos and ‘high’ just isn’t the word. The only thing she ever took exception to was my Mini-mouse t-shirt. Don’t think she’s a fan of Mini or Mickey or any of the Disney gang. Possibly repugnant as symbols of rampant western commercialism.

    She laughs, sitting back on her heels in the orange and gold swirly patterned children’s leggings she got from Lidl for £1.99.

     “Well I’m not the one to ask, am I? And don’t ask any of my friends unless you want to make them laugh too! Why d’you ask? Are you having man trouble?”

     “No! Well, at least, it’s been a difficult winter for us so far. I think we need a change, you know? From running the business and everything, and I went on this course to try and open up our options a bit but I don’t think Kev’s quite ready to move on into another sphere. Tree surgery’s all he knows and he’s worried about leaving a thriving if stressful business behind for, well, for the unknown!”

     If only he had been that, I think to myself, it might have helped him keep his dick in his pants.

     I suppose the kinds of things she’s looking for could include Freedom, a Chance to Find Myself, More Time with My Children, More space for Self expression etc, etc but the picture that actually comes to mind is of myself performing a DIY castration of my errant partner on the bread board with a blunt kitchen knife.

     She laughs again. Jon is not the difficult subject Kev is for me.

“Well,” she says thoughtfully, her head tipped to one side. “He comes up to visit with his new woman, I feed him, he’s useless at looking after Poppy, then he goes away again. Don’t really know whether I miss him or resent the fact that he continues to pester me. Do you want a scone?”

     They’re fresh out of her tiny oven and we butter them still warm while Poppy, now old enough to be getting to grips with the concept of verbal communication, tries to articulate her observations about the frogs in a story book. It’s only early afternoon but getting very dark now, snow falling fast on the roof light. We take turns reading to Poppy in the glow from the woodburner. Once the story’s finished, and having struggled to ask intelligible questions, Poppy yawns and crawls away on hands and knees to roll up, thumb in mouth, on a knitted shawl.

     “So what was it that broke you two up?” I ask Clara, draining my tea mug and beginning to feel both slightly more human and very much less strung out. “Was it that he didn’t want more children, or that he went off with someone else?”

     She puts the kettle back on the gas ring. “A bit of both, I suppose,” she says. “When it all happened, I began to see the pattern. He doesn’t seem to be able to stay with anyone and bring up a family. The pattern repeats itself over and over. Knowing that, even if we’d eventually reconciled, I would never have been able to trust him. I think he just has a problem he needs to work through.”

     Jon is a Druid too. I have it in my mind that, Druid’s possessing an alternative spiritual approach to the world, they may also have an alternative approach to love, relationships and, yes, fidelity. Jon sounds like a good candidate for polygamous marriage. How far then do Kev’s father’s views fit in with what, in our modern world, still rates as unconventional?

      I can ask (I think). “But is that really a problem Jon has, or does it just go with the territory? I mean, when freedom isn’t something you feel is offered by life in mainstream society and you decide to opt out and live under canvas?”

    Clara puts down her mug with the male nude on it to become quite animated.

    “The Free Love thing, you mean? People get so mixed up with this! It’s like any other religion or whatever - Druidism teaches Universal Love. It has nothing to do with sex but there are some people who are drawn to it because, well I don’t know, maybe they think it somehow justifies or lets them off the hook with some really bad behaviour. We can’t stop it happening but most of us have the same moral values as anybody else. How else can we believe in universal love? Not love is it, to set yourself up as some kind of self-appointed ‘love – doctor’ and seduce middle-aged women who feel they’ve never enjoyed the right kind of orgasm…”

      I am intrigued. “Have you come across that?”

    “Oh yes, at camp. I had him sussed quite quickly! One night we were sharing a meal, a few of us, and this woman started talking about how bad her sex life had always been and I could see him prick his ears up (bet that wasn’t all!). I made a bet with myself that he’d sleep with her that night and I wasn’t wrong. Funniest thing was though Lizzie, he once made a pass at me when I was down there with my friend Vanessa. When I told him ‘no’ he asked in a snide, not very complimentary sort of way if Vanessa and I were ‘together’. I knew what he was insinuating. “We share a vibrator if that’s what you mean,” I told him. Another scone?”

    “Then there’s this other guy,” she continues, using a butter knife to stab the air in support of her point. “The number of young girls he’s worked his way through is beginning to embarrass us all! The older men are now starting to feel quite protective towards the younger women on camp. It’s the emotional damage it does you see. Last year he got two girls pregnant at once. The one he persuaded to have an abortion, the other said ‘no’ and had her baby but refused to let him have anything to do with it. He then started whining and bleating and trying to make out she was a bad person for forbidding him to see his child! No, it’s not what any of us want to see happening. It just happens, like in the rest of society.”

   “What, you mean the good things get hi-jacked by bad people?”

  “Well, strictly speaking I shouldn’t call them that. Not very universally loving, is it? They’re just people with problems who are trying to sort themselves out.”

     Maybe Clara’s repeating the mantra now. I can’t work out why Universal Love means people ‘trying to sort themselves out’ at other people’s expense should be tolerated. What about the seduced girls, and the unwanted babies and the single mothers like herself? Hell, the single mothers potentially like me? Where was the love?

   “And you?” I ask, taking another mug of tea from her in the spooky orange glow from the stove. “What do you want from a man, I mean, if you’re really honest - Druid or otherwise?”

     She crosses her legs thoughtfully and leans back on her hands. It’s a tough one.

     “How about a young man?” I prompt. “Bound to have a bit more energy in bed, aren’t they?”

     She shakes her head. “Maybe. But I think I want someone who’s at the same place on the journey as I am. Young men, well, I would guess you might have to explain to them what a clitoris was but then, neither do you want the kind of overblown male ego that thinks they know everything. You know, the ‘love doctor’ types. I don’t need anyone to show me how to have fun in bed!”

          “An equal, then,” I say. “Just an equal. Someone to share the chores and the woes and the fun and the work and the sex. The sex just being a part of it.”

     “Oh yes. I’d have to fancy them, there’d have to be that spark. But everything has to be kept in perspective, doesn’t it? You know what I’d like most of all?”

    She scoops up her sleeping, shawl-wrapped child like she was a puppy or a kitten and there she is, the most alternative of all my friends, sitting cross-legged on the stained floor of her wig-wam with an angel-haired, Druid love-child in her lap.

     “What I’d like most of all,” she says quietly, “is a man who’d bring me flowers.”

   

3.30 pm. Back Home - My encounter with Clara has left me debating with myself – what actually constitutes a ‘strong’ woman? Is it really about being able to let go enough to put up with the odd, possibly inevitable, infidelity during a lifetime’s association? Or about being able to ‘give’ enough to keep a man around even if he’s repeatedly unfaithful so that other (maybe more important) aspects of our lives remain intact and our children grow up within a family that possesses a male role model? Clara seems to use her belief in Universal Love to accept everything that happens to her and to carry on at least caring for her lost Jon in a relatively tolerant, all-forgiving way. Me? Because I care for her, I want to track him down, flush his bearded head in a toilet bowl and march him back up north to fulfil his paternal destiny with the woman who loves him. If she would accept his renewed loyalty and sense of responsibility with open arms, she could leave me to do the hard bit – twist his scrotum on the quiet and swear that if he ever hurt her again he’d have me to answer to.

     Clara lives with her daughter in her tent and it can’t be easy. She pursues her life according to her own beliefs and no one gets to tell her how she should live. But still, mysteriously perhaps, I have the urge to tell her she deserves better than this.

     Time for question 6 on this year’s Gender Ethics A level paper – Which is the stronger woman, me or Clara, and why? And for anyone who finishes early, why oh why oh why do the Jons of this world seem to be able to find countless other sapless females to move on to? Girls, what the fuck is wrong with us?

     I am still trying to answer this deeply disturbing, horribly relevant question as I flick on the lights in the kitchen and find myself pushed roughly against the door frame by Youngest. Some hassle at school involving juvenile threats and menaces and a plastic water bottle which had been peed into, has left him needing the lavatory urgently. I need a wee too but will cross my legs and find something to do while I wait.

     The off-white envelope bearing her handwriting must have dropped through the door when I was out this afternoon. I have a strong impulse to rush over to her place and remind her that I exist (because she seems happier operating in the not-quite-real world of text messages and letters) and to tell her, firmly but quietly and face to face, that whatever emotional maelstrom she’s gotten herself into with Kev, it’s not my fault nor my problem and picking on me is quite out of order. But she’s trying to goad – a visit is probably just what she wants. A visit, a screaming match and my departure for another Continent. So instead I put pizzas in the oven and spread Youngest’s homework on the table. Kev’s working locally, about seven miles distant, and there are logs requiring delivery in his vicinity. As soon as Eldest’s back from school to child-mind, I work off some stress and aggravation filling the pickup with oak blocks under the glare of the security lights.

Stress and aggravation is only partially offset.

     Thinking about it, I would have to fill several eight-toners with really massive logs and fall down suffering extreme lumbar trauma combined with mind-numbing exhaustion for the aggravation to dissipate entirely, and even then it would be back, rolling round the pit of my stomach, as soon as I regained conciousness.

     When I arrive in the village, Kev and Gary have set up floodlights and the felled stem of a massive Beech lies on the deck, grey as an elephant’s leg, waiting to be sliced. Kev’s firing up the top-handled saw. I wave him over while Gary looks on, puzzled, from the ominous gloom of an overgrown shrubbery.

     Two minutes later we’re sitting on the leather-upholstered seats of the lorry surrounded by woodchips, crisp packets, biscuit crumbs, old teabags, grubby pens, rolled up fleeces with burn holes and oil stains, dirty cups and greasy hand tools. Not a womb perhaps, but an equivalent masculine survival capsule.

     Kev’s smirking. He’s been smirking since he opened the envelope. I haven’t read it myself (will say ‘no thanks’ this time) but the first line, read upside down, says – ‘It’s difficult to know how to end our great love…’ Ok, it is a little bit amusing, a useless attempt to prettify a shag-fest - but I can’t let him know I think that.

     “Kev, what in God’s name is there to smirk about?” I demand.

    “It’s bollocks!” he grins, “that’s what! Total and absolute bollocks!”

    Oh, I suppose this should be good to know but, as ever, I am caught in this awful double-bind; I can’t really let myself be amused by all this, can I? I mean, what does it say about a man that he can embroil his significant other in a situation where malice/blame/defensive manipulation are the name of the game but there are bound to be a few laughs along the way?

   “It is! Yes, it is, in every way!” he asserts, waving the letter in the air as though I should be able to verify the truth of his statement just by watching the pages flap. “She’s just trying to hurt,” he goes on a little more earnestly, trying to appeal to my emotional intelligence, “you know she is…”

   I tut. Loudly. “Well either that,” I say, pushing away the flapping pages, “or she’s completely nuts! And, I can tell you, that’s not an idea I’m particularly happy with!”

     I find myself kicking out involuntarily at whatever’s lying in the foot well. There’s a dull clang and somebody’s thermos rolls over. Kev sighs and drops the smirk. “What did you come all the way out for, Lizzie?” he asks. Stupidly, I think. “We were more or less packing up – I’d’ve been home in an hour…”

     “I’ve got the logs to deliver.” I tell him. “And anyway! You can’t expect to have your bit on the side drop malicious letters through my letterbox and for me just put them on the kitchen table and wait politely till you get home for you to deal with them! Make it stop Kev! It’s my home she’s invading, and for what purpose? You said it yourself, she just wants to hurt me, as if she hasn’t done enough already. Am I making too much fuss about it? Am I? Well maybe I should give you a taste of your own medicine and see how calm and reasonable you feel!”

    

His face drops. “What do you mean?”

    “I mean I should find a bloke to have it off with behind your back and then let him rub your nose in it!”

    He plants his grubby hands over his face and moans into them. “Don’t do that, Lizzie! You wouldn’t do that, would you?” when I don’t reply he drops his hands and tries to look me in the eye but I turn and stare out into the dark. “Look,” he says. “I know it sounds selfish but you can’t do what I’ve done. I just couldn’t deal with it…”

Of course he couldn’t. I know he couldn’t. And suddenly it strikes me. Maybe none of this is about sexual freedom, the restrictions of monogamy, the right of every human being to live their life to the full etc, etc. Maybe it’s really, purely and simply, about the need for men to feel some kind of superiority? The rules seem to be that it’s only natural (normal even) for a man to stray – it’s in his biological make-up, it’s an instinct, heck, he probably has to do it in order to stay healthy – but we women can’t expect the same indulgence, being, as we are, well, slightly ‘lesser’. Our needs are less, our appetites less, we are (when all’s right with the world) less powerful, we are certainly of less importance and, even when we do, through our behaviour, strive for equality by exercising our freedoms, our importance is diminished rather than enhanced and we are easier to take guiltless advantage of.

Our biological natures somehow fit us for adapting ourselves to men’s many, fundamentally important ‘needs’, doing the majority of life’s chores and yes, suffering the inevitable infidelity of the men we love. Maybe, deep down, they like it when we suffer? Maybe it gets them hot? At the very least, it makes them feel like hairy chest-beaters.

Leaving the testosterone-and-stale-biscuit pungent cab of the lorry and shutting the door perhaps a little too firmly behind me, I drive the pick-up into Town, developing my theme as I negotiate single-track hairpins in the dark. Have you ever noticed how many unhappy-looking women you pass in the street? Are we all suffering a huge confidence crisis brought on by compensatory over-expansion of the male ego following female emancipation?

They must really, really resent us now that we’re not slaves to pregnancy, to what masculine biology can perpetrate upon feminine biology. At some deep, dark level, maybe they miss being able to think of us as their animals, their breeding stock. Shut-up-get-shagged-don’t-bother-me-with-the-offspring. Perhaps most of them don’t like to think they have this in them but perhaps most of us suspect they have, either because we have first hand experience of being discounted as a person by a man we thought loved us or because we see what’s going on around us and despair of ever being able to properly relate to any creature with testicles.

     Beverley Majors on Old Mill Road is on her own now. Apart from the kids, obviously. She and I open up a tarpaulin inside the carport and unload the logs onto it. She admires my eye shadow, I admire her choice of colours for the kitchen and just to piss Kev off I give her a hefty discount.

     Driving home, back end of the pick-up skipping out every five seconds now that she’s unladen, I make an important resolution. It is my intention to smile at every woman I come across from now on – especially the ones who avert their eyes because they think they’ll get indifference / obvious lack of interest from someone covered in woodchips, sporting embroidered cowboy boots, a mini mouse t-shirt and oddly coloured hair.

 

That night – the razor-sharp needles of what used to be called my pussy and is now called my AC (Abrasive Catastrophe) are softening just a little as they slowly lengthen. In the meantime, quite unable not to have sex even though he’s effectively left me and I’ve effectively thrown him out several times, Kev and I use our imaginations to overcome the obstacles (physical and emotional) and achieve an orgasm apiece. Mental note: must remember to wash that large, goat’s hair make-up brush before putting it anywhere near my eyes.

     For a while afterwards I am happy enough to bask in the warm post-coital glow and get my breath back beside him. He’s happy enough to research heated outerwear in Motorcycle News. Then:

  “So what exactly was missing – I mean in the sex department?”

   Another question that just has to be asked, but not until you think you’re strong enough to handle the reply.

   “I mean, so that you went looking elsewhere?”

   Motorcycle News gets folded and he sits looking thoughtful. “Nothing.” He says, eventually.

   The length of time it has taken him to answer concerns me. “Nothing?” I query, after some silent moments have elapsed. “How can that be?”

 I am biting my lip and thinking deeply. “Did you think I was looking a bit old?” I try, “because you know Kev, we all get old and you’ve lost your hair and your waistline’s not what you used to be…”

   “No, it wasn’t that,” he says irritably, “she was the same age for God’s sake!”

   I try again. “The romance then. We’ve been together for ten years, through all kinds of hassle. Maybe when there are so many obstacles to overcome you build up a memory bank consisting almost entirely of trials and their difficult resolutions. Perhaps we should have indulged ourselves more often so that we had other sorts of memories to draw on?”

     “Oh God,” he sighs. “I just don’t know – maybe it was as simple as pheromones or something! And then there was her story, you know, married to a man she didn’t love all those years, wanting kids and not getting them. The one-night stand and getting pregnant and losing the baby. Whole thing just tugged at my heart strings I guess…”

     A big heart and a sensitivity to pheromones. Oh my God. I’d begun this conversation with a genuine impulse to delve into core territory, release the 100% pure truth and inhale. I’d begun in the hope that, despite any associated pain, the truth would burn away the bad and then set me free. It’s so disappointing that he’s going to cling to some version of infidelity-friendly biology and boast of self-serving powers of sympathy via which he can identify an emotionally vulnerable victim before she’s even fluttered an eyelash.

     Jack-In-The-Box style, the image of the ‘Love Doctor’, created for me by Clara, springs into my mind. The picture is of a long-haired, podgy-faced individual in a scruffy t-shirt who obviously thinks he looks sexy when dishevelled. This probably means he’s very lazy and the only sense of achievement available to him in life is obtained from persuading sad, middle-aged divorcees that he can give them the time of their lives between his, rather grubby, sheets. Of course that’s just one big pile of manure, but having played the game while slightly inebriated and ended up lying there between said grubby sheets waiting to be unleashed, one is just going to have to suffer the intense nausea (not to mention embarrassment) which has to go hand in hand with accepting digital stimulation from a man you hardly know and certainly don’t care about. Especially if he’s jiggling your clit like he’s trying to fix some dodgy wiring while staring into your eyes to remind you that you don’t even like him (which he inevitably will be). Admit it – you’re going to fake it, aren’t you? Rather than own up to having been monumentally, desperately stupid. Rather than stop the encounter with a firm slap on the wrist and a “thanks but I reckon I can do this on my own – oh, and by the way your pits whiff.” You’re going to grit your teeth, and lie (or stand, or kneel) clinging to the hope that at least he’s having a good time so you may as well just go with that, moan a bit and writhe, and soon it’ll all be over. If he enjoyed your ‘performance’ enough he may come back for more, which, even if you intend to turn him down, is a wee bit flattering, and, who knows, he may even bring flowers.

     Suddenly the face on the imaginary Love Doctor is Kev’s and I can’t hang on to a derisive, bed-shuddering snort.

     “So you thought you’d show her what it should be like, you mean?” I say quietly.

     He tuts like I’ve no right to make fun of him but I am angry at his lack of honesty or his lack of self-awareness or whatever it bloody-well is, and I cannot suppress an impulse to press my point. “Kev, I really do believe she was spinning you a line. Surely you can see there’s something, well, not quite right about a forty-something woman deliberately trying to make herself a single mum just to prove something to her ex-husband? The story’s either rubbish or she’s bonkers and the fact that you think any of this is worth repeating suggests you’re on a hopeless mission to self-justify. I’m sorry – at least, no… no I’m not! These are not reasons to risk wrecking the relationship you’re already in.”

    He looks flushed, but I can see him, bravely I think, working on regaining his composure in the wake of another serious blow to the structural integrity of his defensive façade. He wipes his face with his hand. “Oh shit,” he says irritably. “You’re right! You’re always right! But what else can I tell you? Maybe there is no explanation? Maybe I’m just a really crap person!”

    “Well, yes. Maybe you’re just a push-over,” I tell him. “And how do you think a woman feels about a man she can do that to?”

    “Oh come on Kev! Do you think she respects him? Or do you think she thinks of him as a bit of a dumb animal? At the beck and call of his lustful impulses, putty in her hands as long as she massages his ego through sex? What do you think?”

    “Oh God! I don’t know!  Obviously I don’t know what the difference is between lust and love! I mean, doesn’t a loving relationship often start with lust? Didn’t ours start that way? What’s the difference in the end how it starts? The fact is, once it’s started, just having sex means you become…attached.”

I let this sink in for a moment. Of course it’s not an idea I’m comfortable with, for obvious reasons. “Was our relationship like that?” I ask as a lump forms itself just beneath my epiglottis. “Did it start the same way as this one?”

    “Oh thank God! Because I don’t remember coercing you into bed with tales of my inability to conceive due to never having enjoyed a fulfilling love life! What do orgasms mean anyway, you can get one sitting on a washing machine! Certainly not proof of love are they? Or any indication of a relationship’s long-term worth? Some of my most memorable sexual experiences have been orgasm free – that encounter at Liam Wyles birthday party when I was seventeen stands out particularly! He used his tongue to… – but anyway, the point is, I would be very sad indeed to think our relationship was primarily about lust…”

     He interrupts. “Nine times a night, wasn’t it? At peak?”

    “Ok! Yes! Yes it was. But it was never just sex, was it? At least, if it was you’d better tell me now! I had turned thirty when we got together, think I was old enough to differentiate between love and lust. It’s something we women learn as we grow up you know – to steer well clear of the guys who’re just after your body… “

     “It wasn’t anything like that! I’d liked you for ages. You felt like someone I’d been waiting for a long time to meet.”

    There’s a silence and I so want to sleep. Problem is, our conversation has resulted in an awful lot of dammed-up anger trying to force its way out like excited champagne. “Good!” I exclaim, wanting to bring this particular exchange to a satisfactory close but not knowing how to do it. “Because, you know, one of the things I hate most about this God awful mess is the fact that my love story with you has been trashed! I don’t want to think of us that way Kev. I don’t want to have to think of us as a very big mistake…”

     He rolls over to hold me when I start to cry and I nearly choke on the amount of deodorant he’s having to wear to keep in check the outbreaks of toxic sweat exchanges such as this tend to induce.

     “It wasn’t lust, Lizzie,” he says quietly, into my ear.

     “You’re just saying that because you think it’s what I want to hear.”

     “No! Will you just listen to me? It wasn’t lust!”

    I somehow manage to stop crying long enough to phrase the important question from deep within his toxic armpit. “But Kev, how do we know that?”

    His answer is unexpected and bang-on accurate. “I know because the first time you and I made love, I didn’t come. I was so nervous about pleasing you and so anxious about what you’d think about us afterwards that I just, well, it felt impolite.”

    It’s true. I remember it very clearly. I didn’t come either (but then that’s not unusual). He had stood holding me passionately in my kitchen, newly vacated by soon-to-be-ex-husband, and he’d asked, almost to himself “Are we gonna make love?”

     My reply had been, “No! No, of course not! Not yet! Maybe not ever. I really don’t think so, no. I’m not ready. No. No. Okay, yes, I think we are.”

    But my bed had so recently been ‘our’ bed, the marital bed, and the ex’s least tasteful suits still hung in the wardrobe. Neither of us knew what the hell we were doing. We were scared we were playing a game we shouldn’t have been.

     Maybe that feeling had persisted in some form for a whole ten years?

     “Lizzie?” He interrupts my exhausted reminiscence.

     “It’s probably not what you want to hear, but I think I’ve changed. I’m not who I used to be.”

    Fuck. Another puzzle. So who is he now and what does it mean? Let’s see – when I fell in love with him he was warm, affectionate, romantic but down-to-earth, hard-working and capable, honest, trustworthy, dependable, strong, a self-made man, a home-lover, a gentle lover, caring, unsophisticated, young in his outlook, limited in his experience, unspoilt and happy with the simple things. There’d been nothing he’d liked better than to sit by the bonfire with a mug of tea. At times, in the early days, he’d reminded me of my grandfather. I was able to picture us as a very old couple and, when I did, he was still someone I wanted to curl up (carefully because of the arthritis) under the duvet with. He’s right then. I don’t really want to hear that he’s changed. I’d have to get to know him all over again. And I might not like him.

     “Who are you now then, Kevin Gates?” I ask wearily.

     “It’s difficult to say,” he murmurs unhelpfully. “You know, I think maybe I grew up a bit. It happened, I wish it hadn’t, but it did and the whole experience’s changed me. I don’t want to start again with anybody else. I would like us to get through this, I just don’t know if it’s possible. It’s like being lost somewhere without any signposts. How’re we going to get things back now that we’re very different people to one another?”

     It’s not possible to pick a hole in this. I could tell him he left his growing up a bit late, or that he could’ve tried doing it without hurting other people, or that it has to be possible for him to grow with me or we are, well and truly, sunk. But growing’s good whichever way you look at it, and it’s gone 1am. If we talk anymore, the chemical balance of my brain, a bit up and down lately, will become incompatible with even light sleep.

     I try taking four Sleepeze tablets but my heartbeat refuses to slow so I have to attempt to nod off with a metabolic rate something akin to that of an Olympic sprinter just finishing a medal-winning race. This gives rise to dreams so vivid, tortured and grisly I wouldn’t dare unpack them to Eldest – they’d be bound to end up part of a school art project, animated, and set to a death-metal soundtrack.

  From bizarre 'lady-clothes' to unwraxed body-armour, can Lizzie exercise her alternative images effectively enough to open the door to a different life? Can Kev and the big yellow ball exercise away the pain in his arse? Will Lizzie really manage the pick-up in such an emotionally-charged state? Let's see whether the tinned tomatoes drop into the footwell in Chapter 17...