C comes to stay. She draws pictures for my walls and we drag a term’s worth of clothes down to the laundry room in bin bags. She makes garlic and pea soup which we eat on the floor from a tray we make from our new shoe boxes, watching Hugh Laurie. Your bin overfloweth, she says, empty it. Change your bedding. Come to London. She sits at the fountain in the middle of the market as I talk to A in Nero, my heart in my snow-stained boots.
They flee from me, who sometime did me seek, I say - C is still in bed, kicking and whimpering, dreaming of Dodo flying into fire – and A is sitting opposite me white as a sheet, J next to him adding to his hoard of words. (He writes the long ones he does not know onto the back of his hand. Possibly he is compiling the ultimate list of long words.) S has her eyes half-closed, H her pink slippers up on the coffee table. I have written down what I want to say, because if I don’t who knows what will come out of my mouth, but as it is I can’t say anything anway. I wish for my long hair back, you can’t hide behind a bob.
C climbs into the taxi without me, leaving behind a clean laundry smell and a floundering resolve to kick-start myself back into something resembling action. A has left for home, and I would do the same only I think maybe I would not come back.
