Читать книгу Being Kari - Qarnita Loxton - Страница 12

06:30 AM Dirk: Hi, I am thinking of you, sorry we didn’t get to talk yesterday. Please ring me. Love you x

I usually hate Monday mornings. This one felt like the Mother of all Mondays. I am in Denial and it’s not a fucking river in Egypt.

I woke up at five, a good two and half hours before my usual wake up. I could’ve gone home last night but in the same way I couldn’t face Dirk, I couldn’t face our empty house. Di must’ve seen it in my eyes.

“Stay another night at least, no need to rush off,” she’d said, delivering supper to the bedside table and fresh towels to the bathroom. I ate the cold pasta this morning, picking out the ham bits (go figure: I can drink wine but I still can’t eat ham bits), while reading all of last week’s Cape Times that someone – Alan, probably – had left folded on the other bedside table. I scanned all the horoscopes (Gemini for me, Scorpio for Dirk), looking for some crazy clue I had missed that could have tipped me off about the disaster that was Friday. The only clue – and it was not an obvious one – I found on my phone in a last-ditch google of the “importance of 14 February 2014”. Some number jumbo about it having been “a unique day because its specific circumstances have never happened before and can’t happen again for eighteen thousand years. The Valentine’s Day of 14 February 2014 has the month and day numbers reflected in the year number”.

Great. It has never happened before and it isn’t going to happen again for eighteen thousand years. Lucky. Going to bookmark affinitynumerology.com in case they send out some kind of heads-up alert for when the numbers say your husband is going to cheat and your gran is going to die. And that family who hates you? You’re going to move in with them for six weeks.

Never happened before. And not again for eighteen thousand years. Hallelujah.

Six weeks! How did I even get myself into that? Stupid self, nodding at Dhanyal like that.

The early morning wake up didn’t help me get out of bed. I stayed there the whole day, hiding. It seemed easier to eavesdrop on Di’s life than try to deal with my own. I listened. Heard Di and Alan getting the girls, Kate and Sarah, ready for school. Di always said it was a nagfest in the morning but I’d never really believed her. This morning the scales fell from my eyes. Di made being a mother to Kate and Sarah look easy; hearing the school routine confirmed that it was actually at least as hard as I suspected. What kind of mother would I be? What would it have been like if Dirk and I had had children?

At 12:30 Di came into the room. She stood at the side of the bed with another cup of coffee and a fresh toasted cheese sandwich on a tray. A perfect latte-art heart sat on the foam. She’d learned to make all kinds of things at the zillion courses she did to keep sane.

“Come on, I’ve left you alone long enough, let’s see what you need to do today.” She put the coffee and the sandwich down next to the bedside clock and picked up the pasta bowl. “I’m going to have to leave for Woolies soon and then get the kids at school. Are you okay here?”

I’m sure Di never spent a day in bed in her life. Not even when Alan went AWOL. I felt stupid just lying there in a pile of newspapers, glued to my phone, Medusa hair all over. But I couldn’t get myself to do anything else.

“Kari, come on, let’s make a plan,” Di said. I wasn’t in Egypt, but I think Di could see in my eyes that the guest bed was my Survivor Island and I wasn’t ready to get voted off just yet. She sat down and put her arms around me instead, as if I was one of her girls. “Have you spoken to Dirk? He called here a few times yesterday asking how you are. I told him you were probably going to stay here but that I didn’t know anything more . . . He sounds as shattered as you look,” she added softly into my hair.

I had no answers. I just cried on her shoulder for a long time.