Life under fall-out conditions

I grew up in an isolated farmhouse in South Wales; a teensy village called Llangattock, in fact, although I gather it's a little larger these days. I was ten years old when I fled to boarding school, returning only under protest for holidays.
Of all my memories for this period, the most powerful is full of unpleasant sensory imagery - to me now. As I recall, when I was a child I found the prospect of snow somewhat thrilling; the texture, the colour changes it could bring about in skin, temperament and landscape. The possibilities.

I loved, and still adore, ice-skating. The first time I went was with my father; I remember standing nervously by the side of the rink, swaddled in layers of hand-me down jumpers, with my mouth half open beneath the knit cap as I watched total strangers glide across the ice. I spent the usual hour or three falling down in between alternating my death grip on the wooden rail or my fathers index finger. I must only have been five years old, six tops. I got a little ambitious after managing a complete lap of the rink without taking a tumble, and asked, "Do you think, if you skated long enough in one place, you could make it like nobody else had ever skated there?"

I still feel that. I loved snow for exactly the same reason; but our love affair had a life expectancy totally dependent on my childhood.

My particular memory of snow, however, is from the winter it snowed so hard we couldn't leave the house for a week. The front door was frozen shut; we were climbing in and out of the windows all week. I used to do that anyway, because I was a decidedly odd child, but this was legitimate clambering across window sills, and it was almost as thrilling as snow that came over the tops of your wellies and weather that froze the big duck pond over to the extent we could skate on it; in trainers or riding boots or wellies, and with one eye cocked towards the house. Because that was considerably less legit than the windows.

I have never been an early riser. That first morning of snow I was woken by the onslaught of my two big brothers, armed with snow scraped from window sills and shoving it determinedly down the front of my blue and yelllow checked pyjamas. This first day, I was the victim, coming awake with a start and a handful of Russian swear words - established for the simple reason neither of my parents understood it. I've since heard most children choose French for this, but my question is, why? Russian is the greatest language ever to swear in, and there are so many options. I nagged and begged and cajoled many many of these choice words and phrases out of the Russian au pair, alternating between tears and sweetness until she agreed. Surprisingly, she wasn't hugely keen on my mother. I was five years old. After that first morning, I learned once and for all the value of forging alliances.

Through my determined machinations, I didn't fall victim to ambush again that week.

Now, consider the state of my dander.

This evening, I have been forcibly brought to the conclusion that all the people I know who are 'even vaguely' feministy* disapprove of my tendency to sit on the floor.
To be more specific, they deplore my predilection of sitting on the floor by the arm chair** my boyfriend might be sitting in, on the rug I've been bitching about since day one, close to a fireplace that may or may not have a fire raging within.
It just doesn't look good, they say. You're the arrogant thespian, one said, charmingly I feel, so you know about the importance of visual leveling in revealing the inner working of the characters. Subconsciously, you clearly think he's more important than you, and I feel you have to come to realise this. And another, addressing Stuart, why the fuck do you get the seat? Why the fuck do you let*** her sit on the floor?
Left to my own devices, I will sit on the floor. Give me a room with a chair, a rug, a book and a fireplace and I'll be content curling up as close to the fire as possible until my skin starts to crackle and burn and I run out of reading material.
Once upon a time, I missed a General Studies exam when I was in college - definitely back in the day - in favour of staying home by the fire and reading, if memory serves, War and Peace. It was certainly more useful to me, even if I did get a U in the overall A-level. My bad.
Give me a room with just a chair, a rug and a book, and I'd suggest, now I've been trammelled into thinking about it, to look for me at knee height, with my legs curled under me and my back leaning against the chair.
Whether the chair is filled or not makes no difference, but since people have been objecting not so much to me sitting on the floor but to me quite clearly sitting at somebodys feet, I have to defend myself on another count. And it requires introspection. God, how dull. I am entirely too given to erecting emotional blockades at the drop**** of a hat to allow myself to do what I want to do without thinking about it first; actually, that's not quite right. I'm too impulsive for that to work out on any level, so let's go with the specifics. I'm quite a touchy-feely girl, something which, like, totally***** stems from my mother being a complete she-wolf who practices emotional terrorism like she's going for gold and not giving me enough affection/ attention as a child. But I don't really let myself indulge these touchy-feely tendancies.

Except, y'know, with people I'm boffing and have been boffing for long periods of time.

Six months or maybe thereabouts in******, and I've been sitting on the floor, by whichever chair he's sitting in - generally, lucky for me and my reluctance to be importune and ask him to do something for me, this is the one closest to the elecky fire - leaning against his legs with my arm round them.
Like a pet one of them said. My. Blood. Boiled.

It's nothing to do with my subconscious desire to subjugate myself to the Man and very much out dated social values. Nothing to do with my letting the side down, as one of them put it, as women like you she went on to say, would cast the whole feminist movement back a century. Oh yes, because of course the fact I like touching someone I care about isn't the real point here, it's quite clearly an expression of my very very well hidden inner belief that I'm just a girl and should defer to the man in my life.
Oh, please. If I'd been a cat, my hackles would have hit the rafters, and hissing would be a very real option. Instead, because I'm too emotionally stunted, I stayed sitting on the floor and took pity on Stuart who was looking utterly pissed off and uncomfortable and told them to get the fuck out. Postponing the rest of the argument for another day. Then felt the need to write it down before bedtime, because writing stuff down is how I get my head round things, it adds high definition to previously unclear footage. I can read what I've written and know exactly what I am all about.

It's all very much to do with the fact it just makes me feel better. Comfortable, comforted, whatever. And any discomforting psychological analysis of that can fuck right off. And I'm sure the rights of the subjugated female can be better protected elsewhere.
I'm very much of the newly encountered position that if I can touch him without curling up in his lap to do it, which strikes me as very unpractical if I were to do it for hours at a time and also a little too PDA (when company is present, of course) for my liking, and if I can do it while maintaining my habitual motion of eschewing furniture for the floor, then I'd call it more a previously totally unconscious act that makes me happy without compromising my previous stance regarding seating arrangements.



* Actually, make that, 'totally fucking bonkers'. We are not amused. Feminist was their word, not mine.
** It's a bachelor pad. Lots of arm chairs. Totally designed for the family that is the clan of the single male.
*** And I'm seeing just a smidgeon of hyposrisy right there. Huh, let me indeed.
**** Add 'tilt' and 'possible slip' to that.
***** American accent duly inserted for those last few words? Good good.
****** He's more romantic and less of a slut than I am, so he reckons its longer than I'm giving it. I'm also less decisive than he is, so I just sort of compromised and went for a half way mark that I'm not about to defend because no jury would acquit me if monogamy was, like, a decisive marker.

Puppies.

"You?"
"Yes."
"You?"
"Yes."
"That's huge! You're, like, a mother. You're, like, married! Omigod! *long pause* Hang on. You?"
__________

"Babe," he said, with his arm slung around me as we walked to the bar. "How about we get a puppy?"
I sort of sputtered rainwater. It was beautiful. "A puppy? The small furry kind that eats shoes and books?"
"A puppy. Yes."
"I think you could have a puppy, and be a wonderful parent. But me? As well? Really, really not so much. I'm mean, I have a bipolar bitch scale and I'd have to murder it if it chewed any of my things." There was a long pause, which I decided to fill before his thought process reached the, My girlfriend really is slightly odd, stage. "Oh come on. No court would convict me."
"How can you not like puppies?"
"Of course I like puppies. But from a distance. In fact, I feel every partybash should come with a puppy, just so the host doesn't feel obliged to keep the person sitting by themself on the couch company. And so they have something to keep them looking occupied, keeping people from thinking they're socially inept. And holding a puppy would make someone more approachable, I guess... But actually, thinking about it, I'm not sure I'd advise cuddling a puppy on the couch for the whole evening if you're just after sex. I mean, a puppy is a very, well, easy child substitute. Semantics." I said, swiping at the rainwater inching its way down my nose. "If you want a puppy, get one. I might even babysit from time to time, but... we cannot get a dog. I mean, I'm not sure there's enough We for that. There's definitely not enough Me, but I'm pretty sure there's enough You."

He smiled at me and tugged at a straggling piece of hair. "Are we here again?"
"No, this isn't me locking you out. But, a pet? Please. I can't see myself as ever a dog owner. You'll have to find some other way to satisfy your paternal urges. Or you can come to grips with the idea of it being just your dog. But I guess that would make you a single parent, which I hear is tough."

He pushed the hair back behind my ear where rain drenched hair belongs.
"Ah," I said. "You've already paid for the thing, haven't you?"
"Sure have, doll."

Pause.

"Oh, right, fine. Call it Manet."

No. Not so much.

"What happened to the blonde?" Lewis asked me. I frowned at him for a moment as he sort of stroked clumsily at my hair, then decided to forgive him; he's moving to Dubai next week, and I anticipate something of a shortage of blonde locked girls.
"I haven't been blonde in weeks, love. But it had to go, it was rousing too much speculation."
"Like?"
"It was unfavourably likened to a mermaid. Oh, and I got called a sloane."
He laughed. The bastard laughed. "Let's look at this, shall we babe? I know your mummy has the pony thing going on, so I know you can ride--"
"--but I don't."
"--You had peroxide blonde hair, and you own a pashmina--"
"--that's not fair! You can't discriminate against me because of that! I defy you to find a girl who doesn't!" Slightly over wrought.
"You took your hair straightners to Yemen with you--"
"--Yemen. Not, ah, Rock."
"--and you went to public school, and are, safe to say, pretty much a Londoner."

I made a conscious effort to smooth out the frown lines. I refuse to turn into my mother.

"This isn't a bad thing though."
"And how, sir, do you work that one out?"
"I thought the blonde look was dead nice. *pauses* It reminded me, you know Phoebe?"
"Um. The one you hooked up with? The high jump champion who superseeded me when I was relieved of my position as Head Girl."
"Yep."
"The one who had ring worm?"
"Um--"
"--and announced her lesbian status at the end of year ball while on stage with the gym mistress?"

Ahh, high school friends. Much appreciated.

Yes. Do let's bring that up as much as possible.

I'm not sure they were ignoring us so much as we were just failing to register with them, while they debated the respective merits of those, uh, you know those things you get in airports that are either flat escalators or moving pavements? Those. And my amazing lack of technical knowledge has spectacularly just ruined all semblance of sentencical flow.

"Hellooo," she called, long, low and drawn out. No response. "Hey!" she tried again, on the bring of losing her temper. "Did you know Imogen's not wearing any knickers?"

I am not, however, going to talk about my breasts.

I have of late - but wherefore I know not - come to a decision about my ongoing indecision to take up a place of permanent abode.
One reason for this would be laziness, pure and simple. The other is that I am a slatternly house keeper, but this is not news. The main reason for this is that I have a lot of clothes. Which only becomes a bad thing because I hate doing laundry. Pure and simple. Except today I ran out of clean knickers and was therefore forced to abandon all my plans and spent the day in penance: in pyjamas, eating ice-cream out of the container like the slatternly house keeper I appear to be.

"So how was your day babe?"
"Um. I watched the whole first season of Buffy and I finished the cheddar. And I ate half a container of ice-cream."
"That good, huh?"
"Absolutely. Did you know there's an actual Techno Pagan in Buffy?"

There was a bit of a tangent there for a while. Much mirth. Where do they come up with these things?

But knickers. That's what this post was about.
"But what do I do? I'm all out of clean clothes. How do you still have clean clothes to wear? Have you been doing laundry without me?"
He lobbed a bit of satsuma at me from his place of safety behind the breakfast bar.
"Hey! If you get these dirty, what, may I ask, will I be wearing then?"

*pause*

"Oh. OK, fine. I'll do some laundry."
"If you're still hunting for a place to live that isn't here--"
"-- I haven't decided." *folds arms, waits*
"-- maybe you should start considering answering one of those more creepy flatmate ads? You know, Female flatmate wanted. No rent required provided she's willing to walk round naked, sort of thing."

I was eyeing the remains of the ice-cream at the time, and it struck me that maybe putting myself in a place where I'd be naked a large proportion of the time might not be to my advantage. Particularly if it was just my sheer bloody mindedness that got me there. There was another pause while I mulled over my options.

"Maybe, maybe I'll just buy some new clothes. How about that?"

At the time I may not have been wholly serious. But I'm begining to worry about my waistline - another day alone in the flat and Stuart might come home to find his girlfriend crouching on top of the worksurfaces with wall tiles sticking out of her mouth. And then the game is up.
Mail ordering some new clothes is seeming more and more like a possibility every moment.

She's from Poland, to be fair...

I sauntered over to the car taking advantage of the ridiculous hour* to cross the road without looking and said "I've just had an epiphany."
She leaned across and opened the door for me. "Are you sure that's a good idea?" she asked. "I hear they're bad for your heart."

* 4am. And not by choice. It's tough trying to be a social recluse with friends.

Is it any wonder?

I was nine years old when I stumbled upon the book Death, Dissection and the Destitute while going through the book shelves in search of Treasure Island. It was certainly a grand coming to terms with what my mother as Dr. and head of department deals with on a daily basis. I sort of waved the book at her at the time, expecting admonishment and an apology- and she told me to read it, because it was 'utterly fascinating.' I flicked through it. Lots of long words. Lots of mental images that haunted me for years.

I thought that this moment in all its rather gory glory (sorry, sorry) couldn't be topped; but actually it turns out I was wrong. My mother is currently applying for a pay rise at her hospital and has left little written notes to herself scrawled on envelopes around the house -
Reason to grant this No. 2: Have identified weakness in departmental and trust protocols for handling the bodies of dead patients.

This time my coming face to face with her job doesn't come complete with pictures, so you'd think it would be monumentally less vivid. You'd be wrong.

I did, of course, have to ask about this. I don't care if it turned up again - they lost a corpse on its way to the hospital morgue. They. Mislaid. A. Corpse.

I hate my imagination right now.

__________________

Two week hiatus. Back soon.