Read Online On Top of Everything by Sarah-Kate Lynch - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sarah-Kate Lynch
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and I had better gird my loins in preparation — especially as my loins were unlikely to get much other activity in the immediate future.
I had spent half my life being Mrs Harry Dowling and now I was to be what? Who?
I didn’t even have a job.
Sparky was beside himself with sympathy, which franklyjust made me want to go outside and shoot my face off. His too.
I didn’t know what to do with myself as I sat in the kitchen, the debris of our broken marriage splattered and shattered around me. I couldn’t even think who to turn to, other than Harry, who was too busy leaving me, or Monty, who was still on the other side of the world.
Monty!
What were we going to tell him? How? I leapt to my feet and ran downstairs to the front door to see if Harry was still lurking outside somewhere, picking sludge from his hair, but when I pulled the door open, a ruddy-faced man with lowslung work-pants and a huge beer belly was standing on the doorstep grinning at me.
‘Afternoon, missus. Stanley Morris, plumber,’ he said, holding out the hand that wasn’t carrying his tool kit and looking over my shoulder down the hall. ‘I’m here about your leaky tap. Kitchen down the back, is it?’
My leaky tap. I had rung the plumber about a month before to come and fix it but had given up hope that anyone would ever show. Yet here he was. Now. Just after my heart had been ripped out of my chest and jumped on by the man I trusted most in the whole wide world.
Yet, the tap was indeed leaky. Life went on.
I remember my mother saying something to the same effect after the grandparent trifecta. She was smoking a joint and gazing out the window as the rubbish truck collected the next door neighbour’s rubbish.
‘It’s so hard to believe that everything is just carrying on as usual,’ she said dreamily, her rings and bracelets jangling as she ran her fingers through her long, wiry grey hair. ‘We all think we are so important, but we’re not, are we? We can live, or die,and it makes no difference to the garbage man. There’s still the same amount of garbage in the world, with or without us.’
‘But
we
compost and recycle,’ I pointed out. It was a sore point: the compost bin was alive with a kingdom of tiny flying insects and it was my job to fill it. ‘So it would really make no difference to the garbage man if we lived or died because he doesn’t collect our garbage anyway.’
My mother looked at me, disappointedly I suspect, then went back to gazing out the window.
She
was
talking rubbish about the garbage man, but I remember silently agreeing that it didn’t seem right that one still had to do one’s homework and walk the dog and dry the dishes and change the loo roll when such a great gaping hole had been left in one’s universe by the death of a much treasured loved one.
Now, all these years later, here was my husband leaving me for another man one minute and Stanley Morris wanting to fix my leaky tap the next. And despite everything that had just happened, I really did want the tap fixed because every time I turned it on a jet of water shot out and got me square in the eye, no matter where my eye happened to be at the time, and no matter what the marital status of the body in which the eye belonged.
‘Upstairs,’ I said weakly to Stanley Morris, then followed his somewhat jiggly backside up to the kitchen. He could have hitched his pants up higher, frankly, but he kept up a friendly patter as we climbed.
‘Lovely old place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Used to be a doctor’s surgery, am I right? I used to come here when I was a lad, I think. We lived just around the corner in St John’s Wood. You know them council flats in Lisson Grove? Yeah, grew up there, I did. She still lives there, my old mum. Eighty-sevenand not showing any signs of going anywhere else in a hurry either, God bless her. There was a doctor closer to us than this, of course, right across the road, but my old mum didn’t care for him.
I had spent half my life being Mrs Harry Dowling and now I was to be what? Who?
I didn’t even have a job.
Sparky was beside himself with sympathy, which franklyjust made me want to go outside and shoot my face off. His too.
I didn’t know what to do with myself as I sat in the kitchen, the debris of our broken marriage splattered and shattered around me. I couldn’t even think who to turn to, other than Harry, who was too busy leaving me, or Monty, who was still on the other side of the world.
Monty!
What were we going to tell him? How? I leapt to my feet and ran downstairs to the front door to see if Harry was still lurking outside somewhere, picking sludge from his hair, but when I pulled the door open, a ruddy-faced man with lowslung work-pants and a huge beer belly was standing on the doorstep grinning at me.
‘Afternoon, missus. Stanley Morris, plumber,’ he said, holding out the hand that wasn’t carrying his tool kit and looking over my shoulder down the hall. ‘I’m here about your leaky tap. Kitchen down the back, is it?’
My leaky tap. I had rung the plumber about a month before to come and fix it but had given up hope that anyone would ever show. Yet here he was. Now. Just after my heart had been ripped out of my chest and jumped on by the man I trusted most in the whole wide world.
Yet, the tap was indeed leaky. Life went on.
I remember my mother saying something to the same effect after the grandparent trifecta. She was smoking a joint and gazing out the window as the rubbish truck collected the next door neighbour’s rubbish.
‘It’s so hard to believe that everything is just carrying on as usual,’ she said dreamily, her rings and bracelets jangling as she ran her fingers through her long, wiry grey hair. ‘We all think we are so important, but we’re not, are we? We can live, or die,and it makes no difference to the garbage man. There’s still the same amount of garbage in the world, with or without us.’
‘But
we
compost and recycle,’ I pointed out. It was a sore point: the compost bin was alive with a kingdom of tiny flying insects and it was my job to fill it. ‘So it would really make no difference to the garbage man if we lived or died because he doesn’t collect our garbage anyway.’
My mother looked at me, disappointedly I suspect, then went back to gazing out the window.
She
was
talking rubbish about the garbage man, but I remember silently agreeing that it didn’t seem right that one still had to do one’s homework and walk the dog and dry the dishes and change the loo roll when such a great gaping hole had been left in one’s universe by the death of a much treasured loved one.
Now, all these years later, here was my husband leaving me for another man one minute and Stanley Morris wanting to fix my leaky tap the next. And despite everything that had just happened, I really did want the tap fixed because every time I turned it on a jet of water shot out and got me square in the eye, no matter where my eye happened to be at the time, and no matter what the marital status of the body in which the eye belonged.
‘Upstairs,’ I said weakly to Stanley Morris, then followed his somewhat jiggly backside up to the kitchen. He could have hitched his pants up higher, frankly, but he kept up a friendly patter as we climbed.
‘Lovely old place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Used to be a doctor’s surgery, am I right? I used to come here when I was a lad, I think. We lived just around the corner in St John’s Wood. You know them council flats in Lisson Grove? Yeah, grew up there, I did. She still lives there, my old mum. Eighty-sevenand not showing any signs of going anywhere else in a hurry either, God bless her. There was a doctor closer to us than this, of course, right across the road, but my old mum didn’t care for him.
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