I wake from a series of half remembered dreams.
My car needs attention, is not mechanically sound. I do not know why it is not in the garage but there seems to be delay in ordering parts. I discover the tyres are unexpectedly bald which adds to the diffiuclties and now makes it unroadworthy too. I need to move it to a less prominent position, get help to guide me, reversing up hill so it can sit on road but tightly to the bank, not draw attention to itself, far enough away from the end of the road so another car will park in front of it but not too far away from me for there is something i am caring for inside it. Once parked, I climb out over the passenger seat.
I am caring for a giant aspergic tortoise and have to find a temporary home for it. It is an avid reader, keeping lists of many things. For a short while i have placed it in the car boot while i find it a home. My car is now parked under a large spreading chestnut tree, on a slope. I am living in a house with steps down from the back door in a leafy town somewhere, the kitchen feels like that of the one i lived in when first married. I go out to check on the tortoise, to take it some dandelion and lettuce but find it has opened the boot from the inside, crawled out, opened the bonnet and is busy annotating engine number parts.
Not Nicola, Carla or Poppy but a female child of mine is a young child, she loves to collect balls that are the currect fad, the size of a soft football yet not used as a ball, they are instead a fashion accessory and wear a perfectly fitting sleeve with writing or logos. The trend is to collect the balls and my daughter has a grandparent who keeps buying the latest new one for her. I dispair with the spoiling but say nothing. Her headmaster calls round. I try to make apologies for them, think he must think me a bad parent for her to have so many. He becomes my doctor, She asks how am i and i say up and down and then talk about the parenting course i am going to and criticise aspects of it but patronisingly say how i realise it is aimed for delivery to a wide range of abilities, expectations and knowledge bases.
The doctor is not really interested, has called for a social visit, asks instead what we are doing for
Halloween, asks whether we are following local traditions or our own. I am ashamed, have missed that it is even halloween and look to my children saying we will be carving pumpkins and having a simple pumpkin soup supper, hoping they wont show me up for the liar i am being knowing that we have no pumpkin and i am unsure i can even buy one here.
My adult daughter asks me to babysit for she is going to an all day event starting at two o clock, she is miffed that i am working and cannot offer to babysit until after i finish. I am confused that she has taken time off work for this but not arranged childcare. It is an unresolved moment. I wake to the sound of a pigeon cooing outside my window. Light streams through two triangular corner windows and a thin pale curtain. It is a little after seven. I can see a chestnut tree outside my window, blue sky and another sunny day.
My room looks reminiscent of a beach hut, grey wood laminate flooring, palest of grey walls, worn, white painted pine table, chest and shelves, stripped bare in places. A neatly woven long rag rug adorns the floor with stripes of blues, greens, creams and grey. My bed is a pine 'cot' bed such that i cannot slide out of bed but must get half up, whilst on the bed, so as to be able to position myself for getting out. I worked out how to do this only after several attempts to struggle out. Getting in is easy so i tried to replicate my body movements in reverse. It works.
