Читать книгу When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis - Helen Bailey - Страница 29

Oh my god, I remember the wailing, the body shaking, the face pulling, the noise. I said to a fellow widow friend, ‘I seem to have developed this ridiculous cry’ and she said, ‘Yes, me too.’ ~ Sue Smith

I was going to write about ‘Courage’ today. I knew exactly what I wanted to write, and I’m a super speedy typist so it wouldn’t have taken long, but, annoyingly, work got in the way. So, instead of sitting at my iMac fiddling about on Facebook, sending or replying to emails or writing a post for my blog, I’ve had to buckle down and do some ‘professional’ writing. It wasn’t a great deal of prose, just a letter to go in the front of my next book and some answers to questions that the marketing department want to include in the back, but as I’ve been majorly ‘Bleurgh!’ since my birthday, I’ve either been putting it off or genuinely forgetting to do it. But yesterday, The Grammar Gestapo sent me one of her ‘I don’t want to chase you but . . .’ emails, which means that she doesn’t want to chase me, but she has to. So this morning, I buckled down to the task.

Mornings aren’t good for me. Actually, neither are evenings, afternoons, lunchtimes or bedtimes. There is a reasonable two-minute period when I come back from taking The Hound for a walk and put the kettle on, but I wouldn’t get much done in two minutes, especially as I am an expert at tidying my desk, polishing the monitor screen, shaking crumbs from the keyboard, adjusting the blinds and so on before putting words on the screen, at which point I’m off like a ferret down a trouser leg, my fingers a mere blur over the keys. But starting anything new is always difficult, which is perhaps just one of the reasons why I find the start of a new day so difficult. Or it may be entirely down to the fact that my husband died.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t absolve me from having to do some work.

I sat at my desk and felt my heart banging away in my chest. The old cardiac muscle was racing faster than Usain Bolt when he’s not disqualified for a false start, and I felt anxious, very anxious. Not anxious about writing or what bills the postman will bring, or whether I’m going to get any more vitriolic emails from people claiming that I’m claiming my grief is worse than theirs, just generally anxious. I thought about taking The Hound out and then writing like a maniac for two hours when I got back, but I knew I had to get some words on the screen before doing my daily ‘Sad Mad Woman with Dog’ impression, or The Grammar Gestapo would need to notch up the tone of her emails, and I don’t want to be thought of as a typically unreliable author working to elastic deadlines.

For inspiration, I dug out copies of my books to see what I’d written before and I came across these two questions and my answers, which appeared in the back of my last teenage novel.

Describe your teenage self in five words. Anxious. Anxious. Anxious. Anxious. Anxious.

If you could give your teenage self one piece of advice, what would it be? Relax. It will all turn out OK in the end, I promise you.

And reading it, I wept. I wept for the anxious teenager I was, and I wept for the anxious widow I am now.

But most of all I wept because in a sense it had all turned out OK. The difficult issues I faced in my childhood were decades ago. I’d moved forward, used the angst of my youth constructively and creatively, and though life as an adult wasn’t always hearts and flowers, it was good. But now, now life isn’t OK. Far from it.

As I sobbed, I wondered whether if I’m still around in thirty years (which in itself turned the Sobometer up several notches), what advice I’d give the anxious widow weeping over her keyboard. Will I look back and say to her, ‘Relax, it will all turn out OK in the end, I promise you’?

Right now, it seems impossible that I will ever be able to say that, but I doubt the fourteen-year-old me would have believed it either, and yet beyond my teenage years it was more than OK.

And then I pulled myself together and got writing.