Читать книгу The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife - Daisy Waugh - Страница 9

Will I wind up wearing a chignon and having a mouth like an old cat’s arse? Or will it be worse than that? Will I turn fat and mousey, and never get out of my anorak? Or will I hit the bottle and never get out of bed? Will my friends keep in touch with me? Will I keep in touch with them? Will Fin get a lover in London and never come home? Will I—

I’ve been lying here worrying for hours, thinking maybe we’re making a terrible mistake, thinking maybe we’d be better off staying in London after all—and then I heard it, the old muffled smash, the panicky boot-shuffle, the ruffle-ruffle-slam: a series of sounds so familiar to Shepherds Bush night life I could probably recognise them from my sleep, integrate them seamlessly into any one of my dreams.

It is the musical sound of yet another car windscreen biting the dust. Not ours, though, on this occasion. It can’t be, unfortunately, because we still haven’t fixed ours from the week before last.

Maybe I should call the police?

Shall I call the police? Can I be bothered? It means getting out of bed, and then they probably won’t even pick up the telephone…Or if they do, they’ll get here too late to do anything about it. And I’ll have to give them my name and address and possibly even a cup of tea, and it’ll wake up the entire house and the children will never go back to sleep and the whole thing will be a waste of time. I can’t be bothered.

Maybe I should just knock on the window and give the little sods a jolt by shaking my fist at them? Or maybe I shouldn’t. Not much to be gained from being a have-a-go hero in this dark corner of the woods. A couple of boys kicked through the front door of Number 35 last week, with the owners inside and screaming. I certainly wouldn’t want to encourage that.

What shall I do then? Switch on the telly and pretend I can’t hear them? Except the remote’s broken. No, I think I’ll just lie here until it goes quiet out there and then, er, put down the diary and go to sleep. Next time they come, maybe I’ll call the police.

Except I won’t, of course, because there won’t be a next time. We’ll be gone. We’ll have left it all behind: street crime, parking fines, Ken Livingstone, London…We’ve had enough of it all.

I think we have.

At any rate I hope we have, because most of our belongings are already in storage half way up the M5. Finley, the two children and I—and the new puppy (called Mabel, after the dream)—we’re moving on. To a new and fragrant life in the slow lane. We will be joining that peculiar section of the human race that doesn’t get baity when queuing. Somehow. And there’s clearly not a single reason to be feeling nervous about it.

In any case the children and I—and Finley and his mobile, intermittently—have a good long break in France ahead of us, to mull the thing over.

It’s a rough old life.