But it has to be done. From now on, half a sleeping tablet a night. They’ll last longer too. I might get the summer out of them before I have to give them up and learn to sleep on my own again.
Plus, maybe if I’m very tired, I will sleep.
And yet that’s not first and foremost in my mind: chocolate is.
Chocolate helps people sleep, like hot milk and valerian, which does admittedly smell like lettuce at the botton of the crisper when the fridge has gone feral. But chocolate ... I yearn for the lush, velvety taste of chocolate cake. Right now.
I slip from the bed, quickly check on the children, and then pull on yoga pants and a sweatshirt.
Moonlight lights up downstairs with squares and rectangles of light in through the windows but it doesn’t scare me.
Instead, I head for the kitchen, grab my pen and laptop and begin to research. I feel strangely like myself again.
By morning, I think I’ve cracked it. There are two chocolate cakes sitting on the counter, and I’ve swept all the offcuts into the compost bin. I sit looking at them with pride. This glorious confection has a name:
Fear of the Dark Chocolate Cake
If you can’t sleep after eating this, then at least you’ll lie there with a sense of wellbeing in your heart. No bad dream can get past it. Like warriors guarding your heart, you can take comfort in that one glorious thing today because sometimes that’s all you can focus on: one glorious thing. Everything else might be dreadful, but you’ve got mouthfuls of your chocolate cake to give your courage.
As I run upstairs to wake everyone, I think of telling Dan about my plan with the sleeping tablets but ... I’ve already told him I’m trying to cut down, so he’ll know I’m lying. And what if I do sweat and go nuts during it all? But I have to tell him the truth. Just when?
It’s weird how I look forward to the Thursday evenings and my victim support group. For a start it’s cheaper: I had been going to shopping centres and idling around, trying on bits and bobs and then having to leave the shop without buying them because we really are broke. But I had to buy a coffee, right? And even a bun. Cream.
You might consider exercise, Mildred points out mildly. She is definitely kinder lately.
And for a second thing, the group is so comforting because there is some magic in this not particularly beautiful little room with other people, talking. Honestly. My family has always been brilliant – we discuss everything. But I know that’s not necessarily normal and that for a lot of people, talking about their deepest inner fears is really unusual. Here, I can talk about my fear of January and what I still call The Fear, although I am considering downgrading it from capital letters to just the fear.
‘Progress, right?’ I say to Ariel on the phone.
‘Progress,’ she agrees.
One day, I think, I might be able to talk about January, the garage and The Fear with my family. I might not feel that I have to protect them from it. It’s not as if we haven’t had a lot of talking about our deepest inner fears this last year, what with Dad.
And now Jack’s leaving is out in the open, we can talk – cautiously – about that. Scarlett is doing marvellously at Mum’s for a whole week now.
‘She’s eating, she’s tidied out Eddie’s room and she dyed Bridget’s hair,’ Mum reports on the phone. ‘Of course, she’s treading water but right now, that’s a result. It’s better than drowning.’
Lexi and Caitlin are involved in a ballet camp for a lot of the summer, so Caitlin’s mother and I are organisingpick-ups anddrop-offs, a complex system because it also involves taking Liam to soccer camp and getting Teddy to a small children’s play camp that includes art.
Anyone seeing Teddy after a session would think it entails redecorating the interior of a bordello because she comes out every day covered, and I mean covered, in paint at the dark purple and red end of the colour spectrum.
She has paint in her hair, on her clothes and another pair of shoes are totally ruined.
‘Don’t they wear old shirts or aprons for the painting bit?’ I ask one day, when we are laundried out of clothes because none of the stain removers appear to be working and Teddy’s wardrobe has been seriously depleted.
‘Teddy is such a natural artist,’ says Carly, the teacher in charge of the camp, an enthusiastic woman in her thirties who wears – no, not making this up – loose dungarees and has hair as curly and red as Little Orphan Annie’s. She could audition for a children’s TV show right now. With her beaming face, dusting of freckles and all roundgood-?natured loveliness, I know she is exactly the right person to run a camp for someone as energetic as Teddy. I just wish they didn’t paint every day with such abandon.
Carly holds up Zoom, her own tortoise, who is one of the camp’s pets. ‘Today, we’re having a nature day,’ she says happily. ‘We’ve got Zoom and Fluff, the guinea pig. And some ants.’
I have a vision of Teddy holding Zoom upside down and shaking him to see if he falls out of his shell. Fluff had better look out for herself. But, guineas can bite. Only thing is, if anything bites Teddy, she tends to bite it back.
And if she comes home with any ants she’s secreted in her lunch box, I am going to euthanise them with my shoe.
Elisa is due back in Ireland at the end of July for the second round of Surella publicity blasts. Summer is fake tan madness, apparently, or so Dan says to me that evening, when the day has gone well for everyone and no ants have made it home.
‘Youhavegot Instagram?’ I say.
‘No, Con’s doing it for me. He says it’s brilliant. There’smake-up, underwear, all sorts of gorgeous women showing you their outfits for the day. He says it’s the new way to hunt for girlfriends.’
