We All Live Here

When she wakes, mostly between 5 and 6am, she slugs down a anti-depressant Citalopram with a glass of water, dresses before she has time to think, and walks Truant for an hour, striding up to the Heath where the early morning dogwalkers cross muddy paths with the lone coffee drinkers and grim-faced runners in earphones. She walks while listening to audiobooks, or chatty, anodyne podcasts; anything to ensure that she is not alone with her thoughts. She returns and wakes the girls, bribing and cajoling them out of bed and onto the school run, trying not to take personally the harrumphing and cries of anguish about missing socks and phones. Since Bill moved in with them he has made breakfast, insisting that the girls eat porridge with berries and a variety of seeds instead of Lila’s pop tarts and three day old bagels with jam. Bill is rigorous about diet and talks endlessly of fish oils and the scouring properties of lentils, ignoring the rolling of the girls’ eyes, and their longing looks towards the box of Coco Pops. In the evenings he rustles up nutritional meals involving unfamiliar vegetables, and tries not to show his hurt when the girls grumble that actually they would rather have a ham and cheese toastie.

When Lila returns from dropping the girls, she sits in what is laughingly called her study, a room near the top of the house still lined with the battered cardboard boxes of books they never quite unpacked and attacks the most urgent admin of the day. This – and its accompanying financial calculations - exhausts her, so that she often has a little nap on the sofa-bed, or occasionally lies on the rug listening to a soothing meditation podcast, trying to ignore the barking of the dog downstairs. She tries to eat regularly so that her blood sugar does not drop, and her mood with it, and then by the time she wakes up, shakes off her grogginess with a mug of tea and picks up whatever it is that they don’t have from the shop, it is usually time to pick up Violet, at which point she becomes Mum again, with no time for invasive thoughts; engaged instead in an endless domestic warfare against mess, laundry, homework, the respective travails of her girls’ days, until bedtime. Then she takes two anti-histamine pills (the doctor will no longer give her preferred sleeping pills; apparently they are now considered a ‘dirty drug’), or sometimes, if in a pronounced insomniac phase, smokes half a joint out of the window, and finally, when she feels mildly confident that sleep is approaching tentatively, like a skittish horse, she switches on a sleepcast – where soft voiced actors read boring stories in monotones – and prays not to wake again within a couple of hours.

She does not want to think about her ex-husband and his effortlessly gorgeous new partner. She does not want to think about his and Marja’s spotless home up the road, with its sparse selection of stylish objects and Noguchi coffee tables. She does not want to think about her absent mother, who somehow made all of this mess so much more manageable.

Some days, Lila feels like she is battling everything; the furious, slippery contents of her brain, her wavering, unreliable hormones, her weight, her ex-husband, her house’s attempts to fall down piece by piece around her ears, the world in general. She has a vague memory of a time when she simply existed, writing, eating or sleeping or seeing friends and laughing. She can’t quite remember what it feels like to be that woman. As the girls get up from the supper table that evening, leaving Bill gazing reproachfully at the unfinished bowls of venison and pearl barley stew (“it’s a very good meal – high in protein and low in fat”), Lila realises with an internal thud that a whole new battleground has just opened up: Dan’s new baby. This child will be the half-sibling of her daughters, will be a constant presence in all their lives, will have an equal right to whatever their father has – money, time, love. This child, more than anything else, makes it all real – Dan is never coming back, no matter how unlikely she had known that was. This child is going to be a new thing for Lila to deal with – possibly daily - for the next eighteen years. And the thought makes her want to ram her knuckles into her eye sockets.