A piece of string

I’m trying to finish my novel. By which I more specifically mean I’m trying to find the point where I say, ‘It’s finished.’

It’s taken me a long time, hasn’t it? Six years, nearly seven, since my first was published and not much done between then and now. I need to finish writing something sometime soon. Something that gets published. Something that people read. Otherwise I’m not really a writer anymore, more someone who has written.

I’ve done a lot of things to try to make sure this manuscript gets finished. I stayed in Abu Dhabi for two weeks at Christmas time while the mister and the lads went back to Australia. I got a lot done then, but I didn’t get it finished. I get up at 4.30 a couple of mornings each week to squeeze some time in before I go to work. I get a lot done that way too, but it doesn’t get it finished.

I keep thinking, ‘Two weeks. If I give it two good weeks I will get it finished.’ And I do that and then I realise that there are two more weeks to get it to the next stage and the next and then the next. I know the onion analogy gets a lot of airplay when people are talking about writing. But it’s not peeling an onion, it’s making one, like adding the layers one by one.

This time I think there really are only two more weeks. The framework is strong now and I can’t move any of it. I look through this draft now and I see the places where I need to put in more of this sub-plot, make that storyline stronger, strengthen this paragraph with a bit of detail.

It’s closer than it’s ever been. Two more weeks and it will be there.

But I remember back when the mister and I still thought that we would finish the boat we had started building. ‘Tell everyone six months,’ our boatbuilding teacher told us. ‘It’s close and far away at the same time.’

I wonder what tricks that piece of advice is playing with my subconscious because all my two weeks turn into another six months. And I need to finish. If I keep doing this two weeks thing my thoughts will start getting stale. I’ll never start anything new. And this will never get published.

So I’m drawing a line. I’m going to do a proofread, then I’m sending it off to my agent. It’s time for the next stage to begin.

I went walking

So my beloved and I were out walking and while we were walking we were chatting about this and that and mostly our chat was my list, ordered alphabetically, of Things That Could Go Wrong as I venture into unknown waters this week. And I was particularly keen to seek his opinion on one of those items as it is something about which he knows more than I, so I detailed my fear, ending with, ‘…but I’m being silly, aren’t I, that won’t happen will it?’

To which he replied, ‘It could, and in fact…’

At which point I stopped walking and said, ‘Yeah, nah, here’s the part where you snort and say, goodness no, what, how did you even manage to think that. No way, I know this is Abu Dhabi, but nah, you’ll be right.’

And he said, ‘Well, I just want to prepare you for the worst that could happen.’

There is a silence.

And then I’m like, ‘WTF BELOVED SINCE WHEN DID I NEED YOUR HELP PREPARING FOR THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN MY GOD IF WE ARE TALKING WORST CASE SCENARIOS YOUR IMAGINATION CAN GET FROM THE FRONT DOOR TO THE CAR WHEREAS MINE…HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN ME LET’S START THIS CONVERSATION AGAIN, SHALL WE, AND GO BACK TO OUR CLEARLY DEFINED MARITAL ROLES.’
And he’s like, ‘Yes, let’s go home and I’ll pour you a glass of wine.’

(disclosure, this is just lifted from my facebook updates, but I’m desperate to get my blog going again, and it’s silly to give facebook everything)

The mornings

I like to get up early in the morning and potter about the house before everyone else comes and starts the day. It’s lovely. I make myself a coffee, get out my writing – a diary, a printout of a work in progress, a letter to a friend – and I start to think.

I treasure the time to the point that if the mister gets up early too I am nothing short of rude. What are you doing here? It’s his house too, but his presence seems such an invasion. I tell him it isn’t personal but he says, It feels like it. There must be a way to make it work that doesn’t involve two houses, one of which is only used for a couple of hours in the morning.

The Tour de France in Belgium

From Bruges we are going to Ieper (Ypres). I do a quick google from our room in Bruges just to see if there’s any last minute things I need to know about. This is when I discover that the Tour de France will be starting its fifth leg from Bruges. The Tour de France? But this is Belgium. What?

I know people who would think this a fantastic coincidence. I know some people who might even plan for this. I’m not one of them, but what’s to be done? I’ve paid for the hotel room now. Tour de France it is.

We have no idea what to do in Ieper, but we follow the crowd and stand for some time on the barrier from the cyclists’ village up to the square. Felix starts to take selfies. The Skoda mascot walks by and stops. ‘I’m gonna get heaps of likes for this,’ Felix says. Then he adds, ‘I’m hungry.’

We find a Panos and order a scant meal of the closest thing to sausage rolls and a donut. I have been trying to explain the imperative of keeping costs down. We are nearly one week into our trip and I am starting to panic about spiralling costs, especially as they pertain to the food. So far we have not stayed in any self-catering accommodation and the lads won’t get it through their heads that I won’t just be paying for meal after meal after meal. Anticipating that Felix won’t like the food anyway I don’t order myself anything.

I notice that people are walking down a side street and we follow the signs to the outside course. The crowd is thinner here, but there is still no space against the fence. We keep walking until finally we find a space. Behind us is a frites shop and a fibreglass cone of frites with enormous goggling eyes. Felix takes a selfie.

We wait. We have no real idea of how long we will be waiting or what we are waiting for but it seems the right thing to do. Around us people wait. The sense of camaraderie builds as it always does in waiting crowds. And as the rain shifts from a drizzle to light rain, people join their umbrellas to form a makeshift canopy. Then it gets a little heavier still, and when I hear the announcement for the merchandise I go to the nearby truck and ask how much for the rain poncho. Ten euros. Okay I think I’ll leave that.

Back at the barrier, the rain falls more heavily and the breeze grows a little stronger, a little colder.

‘I’m freezing,’ Felix says. We have invested enough time and energy that it seems pointless to leave now, and besides we can’t check into our bed and breakfast until four.‘Here you are.’ I give him ten euros and he goes to buy a poncho returning with an enormous yellow sheet of plastic that it is nothing more than a series of plastic bags sewn together. Ten euros.

We wait.

Cars begin to drive past us, some with television crews inside, others with racks of bikes on top. One cyclist who has skipped the barricade rides past to cheers. He is stopped by a pair of police officers. And still we stand. We wait. Behind us the crowd grows thicker. The lads are standing at the barrier, but I am behind them. And then a man taps me on the shoulder, points down at his child.

‘Bien sur,’ I say and we make way for him, ensuring I can see nothing really and probably the child can see not much more but almost as soon as the last child is jammed into place, the crowd begins to cheer. I have been waiting for the sound of the bikes, but I can’t hear them through the crowd. The colours flash. I see a blue helmet, bright splashes of lycra. There is an intensity about them and they travel, a self-contained bubble through the waiting crowd. There is no indication that they notice us or care that we are there.

And then they have passed us. The bikes have gone. The crowd loosens. The rain begins to fall, it feels as if it is heavier now, but perhaps it is just because the canopy of umbrellas has broken up as people walk away.

‘Ca, c’est tous?’ I say.

The man next to me shrugs, and says, ’Oui.’ He smiles and I smile back at him.

‘What did you say?’ Felix asks.

‘I just said, Is that it?’

Felix shrugs. ‘I guess so.’

‘I didn’t really see anything,’ I say.

‘Don’t worry. You can look at my photos. Can we get some chips?’

Still with the over-thinking

Back when I was in the midst of All the Things, my bff sent me a card with a quote from Fay Weldon. “Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.” I loved that card fiercely. Not just because of the love it came loaded with, but also because of the sense of relief which overwhelmed me when I read it – that marvellous thing that happens when you read the very right words at the very right time and you realise it’s all right, I’m not the only one has felt this way.

So much got squeezed into the final years of my thirties and the first few years of my forties, that every now and then my mind stops whatever else it is doing and just thinks, ‘it’s not like that any more.’ And it still takes me by surprise. I’m not that person anymore.

The circularity of things is almost missing from that quote, but not quite. It does promise that nothing happens and that times of nothing will happen again. But it doesn’t say, “and then nothing comes back again.”

Nothing much is happening these days. Time has knocked the edges off my grief. I’ve made peace with infertility. My grandfather passed away, and I miss him, but he was 97 and he was a man of deep faith who absolutely believed his time had come. The lads are adolescenting and that is not without its challenges, but as far as I can tell all I can really do for them is be steady as a rock while all else around them shifts and changes and at this stage I reckon I can do that. I am still probably the most ill-suited to expat life that a person could be, but I can find my way from Abu Dhabi A to Abu Dhabi B and even if I do get lost it doesn’t make me burst into tears and ring the mister no matter where he is in the world and say, ‘I just want to go home.’ My novel has finally found a shape and form and a bunch of words that will work. It’s a long way from being finished, even further from being published but it’s way better than the first one and I’ve got a clarity of purpose which I have never felt before and that is most satisfying.

It’s seductive though, this nothing. I want to sink ever deeper into it. I don’t want to disrupt it, I don’t want everything to happen. I suppose it’s fairly easy to join the dots from nothing happens to the clarity of purpose I have found in my writing work. I know some people find tumultuous times to be productive. For some people depression and anxiety are artistic fuel. But I’m not one of them. Everything made me a better person, that’s true. I’m more compassionate, more rounded, more all sorts of things. But I don’t want to repeat those times.

It’s nice to be seduced that’s for sure. But the line between flirtation and danger is thin. I feel myself increasingly unwilling to push myself or to take risks. I worry that I used my quota of courage. That if the opportunity came to stand in a board election or to try stand up, I would let that opportunity pass me by. I wouldn’t look for opportunities. And then I tell myself off. I say, Self you have really excelled yourself in over-thinking today. Nothing is good.

Where my piano led me

I’ve got a piano. My grandfather bought it for us when I was young and a piano was a monetary stretch too far for my parents, teachers in their late twenties who had not come from landed gentry.

Long story, but in the last year, the piano has finally followed us to Abu Dhabi. We’ve put it in the little alcove the stairs make. It was a pragmatic choice because I didn’t want to risk having it dragged up and down the stairs. The loungeroom was out because I know enough not to put a piano against an outside wall and the only other wall with enough space is the one we share with our neighbour and what with the baby on their side and the dog with the mighty bark and the lads who never stop running on our side a piano seemed a step too far.

As it turns out, it’s an excellent place for a piano. Just a few steps in front of the door, it fits nicely in its nook and having a piano at the physical heart of the house. It’s excellent.

I play it every now and then. I’m stuck on pieces I learnt as an adolescent. Playing those pieces conjures up times and places that have gone, but live so deep inside I can’t ever lose them. This has been especially the case over the last six months which have been sad ones for me.

Best of all about having the piano here has been watching my eldest lad. He plays the sax, and he’s getting ready for his first lot of exams, but he also picked up my first piano books and started to teach himself. My heart, she sang. Of course my heart she also wept as she was forced to relive pieces she’d already played a thousand, million times. Greensleeves, anyone? Music Box Dancer? Oats and Beans?

Still, I never scream ‘Stop, please stop’ unless it’s that one, you know the one that everybody plays and it’s got a high part and a low part? What’s that called? My mother used to yell at me, ‘Stop, please stop’. I suppose at some point I must have stopped. I wonder, when was the last time I played that piece?

Anyhoo and moving on, he didn’t stop and thank goodness for that, because then he started doing something I never did. Transposing it. Adding in new chords. Changing the timing. And now every time he walks past the piano (which is often) he adds another note or two. He’s written three or four little pieces now all of them really lovely (I know, I would say that).

My heart, she sings.

He’s got an excellent sense of humour that boy. He’s thirteen so my goodness me he’s a pain in the arse, but he makes me laugh.

Things are going well for him, but he is thirteen and he’s a little bit lost and I’m trying to find some anchors he might be able to use in the choppy seas that are a human’s adolescence. Books. Music. It’s all I really know.

This is me last night: Genius idea! I will introduce him to the magic that is Tim Minchin. And then he (my eldest lad) can see that he could put together all his ridiculous jokes and all his slapstick and all the little bits and pieces he is writing on the piano and make something fully sick, totes amazeballs and OMG.

I told you he’s thirteen, didn’t I?

We went to youtube. Look! I said. And there’s Tim Minchin with an orchestra. An orchestra! What could go wrong?

In our house, you aren’t supposed to sit at the computer with headphones on. Cyber safety and all that, but because of reasons, I am having to study the rules of netball in great depth so I asked him to put the headphones on so I could concentrate.

I concentrated. And so did my eldest lad.

I had forgotten about some of the more hardcore Tim Minchin pieces. In truth, I’m not sure I’d ever listened to the Pope song.

(‘Mum, have you ever listened to this?’
We listen together.
‘Okay, so apart from the swearing do you know what he’s trying to say?’
‘Yeah, don’t protect paedophiles’
I guess that about sums it up).

So today, there’s a whole lot of stuff me and the mister don’t need to teach our eldest lad.

And today I was sitting here, in this very chair, faffing around the internet, looking at the expat lady blog which today is asking why people think it’s okay to give you their second baby clothes and whether it’s better to buy your diamonds in Dubai or in New York. And Tim Minchin’s words, the ones I heard before the earphones went on, came back to haunt me. I try to be intellectually honest, he said.

I closed the bulletin board and I sat at the piano and played Fantasia in D Minor which I first learnt in 1983. And as I played, it occurred to me that my relationship with this paper and this pattern of keys is one of the oldest relationships I’ve got.

I played it again and then once more. I do hope that it wasn’t our neighbour’s baby’s sleep time.

Do you like it?

It’s summer where we live, which means it’s time to come back to the place we don’t live where it’s winter.

It’s been nearly five years since we left which is time enough for things to have changed so substantially that no one is living the life they were living when we left even if jobs, relationships and modes of transport remain unchanged.

The lads and I have spent the last two weeks settling in and catching up with people. By settling in, I mean going to Haigh’s and the market and delighting in being cold. By catching up with people I mean sending emails and texts and hoping that they will ring and ask us to come over. It’s a lovely, brilliant, glorious way to spend some time because who doesn’t love to be loved?

From time to time, across the dinner table or in people’s loungerooms we come across people we have never met before or have not seen us for some time but who have known us it seems forever. A friend’s cousin, a cousin’s oldest friend, you know the kind of thing. In the first case – people we have never met before – they say, ‘Abu Dhabi? Do you like it?’ In the case of the second – people we have not seen for some time – they say, ‘Are you still there? But I thought that you hated it.’

If you’re a person like me, the type of person who over-thinks things, this makes you think which sets you down the path of over-thinking. Of the people who say, ‘Are you still there? But I thought you hated it,’ one of the things you think is, ‘They must really think I’m stupid,’ because you remember the last conversation that you had and you probably were fairly certain that you’d be taking control of your life at any minute now and moving on and why wouldn’t you because really, who wants to be that miserable. Of course it is unlikely that they have even thought of you at all since the last time that they saw you and while they might possibly have a quick chat about you in the car on the way home even that conversation will last only as long as it takes for someone to say, ‘Oh, I love this song’ and turn up the volume on the radio.

Of the people who say, ‘Abu Dhabi? Do you like it?’…you know, this one has really stopped me in my tracks this time. I think I have been asked it on every other visit home, but somehow or other something about being asked this question has changed. I would still be hard-pressed to think of a place to which I am less suited. I think I’ve mentioned the heat, the cars for example? So, in that sense, no, I don’t like it.

But it’s where I live. It’s where my children go to school, where they have made their school friends, where I have made friends, where I work, where I have managed to re-establish something of a career.

It’s odd isn’t it, because if we hadn’t moved, no one would be asking me of my life, ‘Do you like it?’

Do you like it? In my own over-thinking way, when I ask myself the question later on, I suppose I am asking myself, ‘Are you happy?’ as much as I am asking, ‘Do you like it?’

I think I need to think on it some more.

The honey smoothie

It turns out he did tip the smoothie down the bathroom sink.

Now here’s where I think I ran into a bit of trouble with my blogging. Not that I was ever a mummy blogger in the strict sense of the way people (mis)use that term, but certainly my experiences as the mother of very young children coloured my blog simply because they coloured my thinking. If my four-year-old or six-year-old had screwed his nose up at a smoothie because his dad used honey yoghurt instead of vanilla I daresay it would have been funny. It would have been a bit of light relief from a life of physical and emotional intensity.

But now he’s ten. Dealing with a smoothie that’s been tipped down the sink is something less than funny and something more of an entanglement, no?

I grew up in the kind of house where you ate what was on your plate and you didn’t complain. As a parent, I don’t really work that way, because yes, I reckon if someone goes to the effort of putting a meal in front of you, you give it a go, but I rarely tell people that they have to finish eating what’s on their plate or drinking what’s in their glass. Two things: I think forcing people to eat is gross; and I abhor rich people wasting food or water. Another thing: he’s not a fussy eater, but he’s got a small grazing range. Another thing: you get into a battle of wills with that lad you are going to lose. One final thing: drinking a smoothie made with honey instead of vanilla is no great hardship even if you’re not really a fan of honey.

When he first left the kitchen, smoothie in hand, I thought about telling the lad that he had to come back to the table instead of walking out of the kitchen with his glass. I thought about not going up to his room to collect the glass. And I definitely thought about not looking in the bathroom sink. I did not follow any of my own internal advice.

He had done a pretty good job of disposing of the evidence, but he’s 10 and I’m 44 and I’ve spent all his life observing him where he hasn’t really learned to think like anyone except himself. See? Me, I would have flushed it down the toilet because I would have known those chunks of mango are gonna be a bugger to dispose of.

I thought about not mentioning it, because you know, once you mention it, you have to follow through. And because I knew the minute I mentioned it he would deny it, and then we’d be dealing with not just the deception, but a more calculated lie.

But then I thought, It was really wrong what he did and he needs to be held to account. So when we were in the car driving home from school and after they had said everything they needed to say about the day’s exams, I casually said, with a hint of a laugh which was supposed to give him space to be honest and to keep his pride, ‘So, did you really drink that smoothie this morning?’

You know what he said, don’t you?

‘Yes.’ With a tone of great offence. And then put his nose back in his book.

I left it for a couple of hours until the dinner had been cooked and consumed and the table had been cleared. Eldest was on the computer looking for Rubik’s cube hacks, I was on my laptop determined to squeeze out the rest of the day’s quota of words. And youngest was at the table, looking in the thesaurus.

This is him: ‘A…’ flick flick flick ‘b’ flick flick flick ‘c’ flick flick flick

This is me: ‘With regard to the smoothie…it’s just I saw there was quite a bit of smoothie in the bathroom sink.’

Him again: ‘f’ flick flick flick ‘g’ flick flick flick

And me: ‘So I think maybe you didn’t drink it and maybe you tipped it down the sink.’

Pause.

Him: ‘h’ flick flick flick ‘i…right’

Me: ‘So?’

Him (still without taking his head out of the thesaurus): ‘All right. I drank half of it and half of it I tipped down the sink…icy, idea, ideal, idealistic…’

Me: ‘You know in some houses you would be punished for that.’

Him: ‘identical, identification’

Me still talking although I am 44 and should know better: ‘What are you looking for anyway?’

Him: ‘Ha! Here it is…fool, ass, dolt, imbecile, simpleton…’

Me: ‘That doesn’t sound very nice.’

Voice of lad sitting at the computer: ‘You said we aren’t allowed to call each other idiot.’

Me: ‘Everyone clean your teeth and go to bed.’

And that is a picture of me, doing what everyone tells you you will do, but you never believe them. Wishing my children were toddlers again.

June is for blogging

I told myself I would get back in to blogging. As fun as facebook is, it steals ideas and time. I’ve never looked back through my journals like I’ve looked through my blog. My writing is neat, but hard to read and my journal voice has never quite lost its wounded tone and its overwrought angst. Without a blog, my mind is overflowing with ideas and no net to catch them. I love my blogging friends, and…I just like to blog.

In June, I told myself, I will start to blog again. With regularity. I circled it in my diary. But June? June is the month before the summer break and it’s end-of-school which means my young lads have exams and we need thank you gifts for teachers. I am back at Arabic lessons, I have one huge work deadline and another, I am on a strict novel diet of 1,000 words per day to get me up to 70,000 words before we hit July. I still have assignments that need to be done before I am assessed as Competent for Certificate III in Fitness. The mister made the smoothies with honey yoghurt instead of vanilla and the lads said, ‘You should have asked Mum’ and I said, ‘Just drink it, you have to drink it,’ which is something I don’t normally say and now I’m almost certain youngest tipped his down the bathroom sink. The cockroaches come back in June, the dog has a guts ache, the floor has a carpet of dust. At night I don’t know whether I am supposed to choose the age-defying or the restorative eye cream.

So here I am with ten minutes (okay, seven) where I planned to have an hour. And there is not an idea to be found.