Light the Bloody Candle

It has been hot this week. Not linen-and-rhubarb-lemonade, ankles-trailing-in-a-river, aren’t we all so free and easy warm? More a kind of the-heat-has-moved-into the house hot? It arrived a few days ago and refused to leave, and now its lounging about in every room eating the last of the air and suffocating me slowly, so I have become a jar of something fermenting quietly on a high shelf.

Today, the sky out the window is a flat, insolent blue. The blue of a swimming pool you are not allowed into, cloudless and too perfect. I want to fling the windows open and invite it in, but a) the windows are too high for me to reach when I am by myself and b) the great moral dilemma of the open window is flies. Open one for a breath of anything at all and you have also opened a fly cabaret, a whole fly conference convened solely for their joy, so the cats lose what little remains of their minds, flying up the walls like furry lightning. Running across across me, in full pursuit of one small black comma of a bluebottle, because I am no more than a soft inconvenient hill lying between animal and its destiny, cats springing clean off my hipbone and making no apology for the drama of it all.

So I put my feet in a bowl of cold soapy water.

And oh my. The relief

 

The small startled animal of my body said thank you and the cold climbed up my legs like the iciest of welcome hands. Ooh er. Apologies. The nervous system of a hot and bothered woman handed back to its owner, so I who is she sat there feeling completely ridiculous and completely saved: therapy, cheap and immediate, with not a crystal in sight.

ASIDE: (and I am aware this tips me clean into the voice of somebody’s auntie with no grip on her opinions), I have found a cream: Christian Breton Sleeping Cream (UK ladies, buy it in TK Maxx). There. Unpaid ad break done. We are all very welcome.

I’d hidden it the day I was given it. Squirrelled it away in a little box of treasures I was apparently saving for After The Move, for the gleaming future woman with the new postcode or no postcode at all (imagine that!) and the better posture and presumably an entirely upgraded personality, while the present woman, the one doing all the actual lifting and sweating and weeping at flies, made do with a face like a bag of chips.

Saving it for what, though? A ceremonial first night? A ribbon-cutting for my own cheekbones, scissors, a small gathered crowd, light refreshments? The good stuff sitting there in its tissue paper three feet away, waiting for a worthier day that, between us, was never going to bother turning up?

So I opened it. And honestly I don’t want to be one of those women who finds a face cream and behaves as though she has isolated penicillin single-handed in the spare room. But.

Overnight. Plumper, and a lot less assembled out of worry and bad lighting. I had anointed myself like a Sunday joint and woke up basted and glowing and faintly delicious. But to check I was not simply hallucinating from the heat, I tested it on Ben, which is it seems where romance washes up by your fifties. The poems stop. And in their place, two exhausted people pat expensive cream into one another’s faces at bedtime murmuring is it doing anything, no hold still, like a tender little clinical trial run entirely on hope and proximity.

It was doing something. His whole face went calm almost at once. Proof either that the cream is a small miracle or that we are both so far gone now we can be visibly improved by a dollop of moisturiser and gentle hands.

 

Ugh, though, the heat. Ben, meanwhile, keeps walking out into it. Into the blue and the broil, with the dogs, because the dogs don’t care that the nation is gently poaching, they insist on keeping a schedule anyways, howling like the hounds of Baskerville if they are ignored and so he does the duty that is in fact his saving grace and comes back the colour of a man who has been microwaved. Melting through the door, steaming faintly, hair stuck to his head, having performed the one genuinely heroic act of the household day. And I look up from my bowl of feet-water, and he looks down at me, and we are two people being slow-braised in the broth of their own lives, and we love each other mostly, I am pretty certain, because nobody else would take us in this condition.

Then the candle. Same crime, your honour. Throw the book.

A beautiful thing. A little pink tiger prowling round green ceramic with a zebra striped border. It smells of figs and intention, of somewhere warmer and far more solvent than here. And I had been saving it for the move. Because somewhere along the line, despite lecturing you all otherwise for years, I had built myself a mean little economy in which loveliness gets rationed out in thimbles and the present day must make do with whatever happens to smell of warm cupboard and dog. So I looked at it, and I thought: no. We are not, in this house, rationing loveliness until the the Russian doll roulette that is trying to deal with one conveyancing solicitor after another is finally over.

So I lit it.

 

And it sits there now being gorgeous and absurd right next to an open tub of garlic sauce, which is, hand on heart and without exaggeration, the truest portrait of my whole domestic life ever taken. Figs and garlic. The sacred and the dip. That is the house style, and I have stopped, at long last, apologising for it.

Because really, why wait? Honestly. If you hold out for the immaculate room before you will light the good candle, the good candle will outlive you and attend your funeral unlit and smug. There is always a tub of something. There is always a cable belonging to nobody, and a plate set down where plates shouldn’t be, so light the candle. Light the bloody candle now.

Anyway. I was going to tell you a whole thing here. About my Nana, and the Sunday smell of her kitchen in the Summer the

a cat has just gone across me. Off the sill, over the duvet, off my literal shoulder, gone, in hot pursuit of a fly the approximate size of a full stop. And it has gone. The thread. My nana. The Sunday and the smell and the whole tender point I was so certain I was building towards. Sailed clean out the open window after the bluebottle, and I am not going back for it.

Where was I.

Reading. Right?

 

I have been reading the Wildflower Lock books by Hannah Lynn, which some of you kindly pressed on me, and I love them for one quite shaming reason, which is that they ask absolutely nothing of me. Not a thing. They do not want to improve me. They have no designs whatsoever on my character or my soul.

And oh, the states I get into about reading. I decide it ought to sharpen me, and hand me glittering things to say at dinner parties I have no intention of attending and am, in fairness, likely not invited to because I can’t be trusted not to say something ludicrous. But there is something close to indecent about reading purely for ease. Sliding down into the hot afternoon all glazed and useless and faintly stupefied, carried somewhere perfect and kind by an author who does not, blessedly, want one single thing back.

And that, I think, is the thought that slid out of my head and onto the floor while I lay there with a narrowboat romance rising and falling on my chest and a cat using my shins to knead biscuits.

 

I think I want this, this Substack, to be a little like that too?

This. Here. Whatever this little lit-up room of ours actually is.

Because, and do bear with me, I think I have been treating it like homework, like a weekly examination, like it has to mean something and ache somewhere and be just slightly tragic and earn its keep with depth, with hard-won wisdom posted out on schedule like a milk round, and I am tired, I am so unspeakably tired of being profound, I have been profound for twenty-one years, I have wrung significance out of a teaspoon, and what if, what if now, instead of all of that, this were a playground, what if this were the place we came not to be wise but to be messy and wrong, beautifully, out loud, in floaty kimonos, to try things on, to make small useless gorgeous nonsense and hold it up and go look, look what I found in the hedge, to want things shamelessly, to imagine our way sideways and giggling and half-undressed into a freer and far sillier way of living, instead of me filing the solemn weekly dispatch from the front line of midlife like a war correspondent who has seen too much and needs a lie down and a custard cream, what if we just, what if we simply, what if instead we

stopped.

And played?

I have to breathe now. Hand on the chest. There we go.

But you see it. You see exactly what I mean, I know you do? So here is the whole manifesto, since you ask…

• No more elegies. Bring the dressing-up box.

• We are not here to be improved. We are here to be alive in interesting ways and report back from the silliness.

• Nothing has to mean anything. Some weeks it can just be cold pizza and a candle lit out of pure spite at the heat.

• I will be wrong in public, wearing something ridiculous, and I would like that to be the entire glorious point of the place.

What if I played out loud right here: gave you playbooks, and half-drafted notes and the little novellas I’ve got tucked inside my laptop, and pretty, silly images just because I can, and lists and poems and all the emotions served up in mad recipes for a gloriously messy breakfast?

Come and play. That’s my idea. Come and play. Weep if you want, (I will), but let’s be muchier together?

*

 

Anyway. Boats. We were always going to come back to boats.

Because we are still, God help us, in boat limbo.

The one we thought might be The One is hovering at the edge of everything. The seller keeps saying yes, absolutely, the information is coming, it is being gathered as we speak, gathered by whom, from where, from the bottom of which canal, and then he vanishes for days like mist at dawn. The administrative equivalent of being left on read by a man who is also dangling the keys to your entire imagined future just out of reach.

So we are trying to be sensible. Vile word, sensible. What it means in practice is that one half of me has already hung the little curtains and named the boat and rearranged the cushions on a vessel I do not own, while the other half stands in the doorway hissing, put it down, put down the cushions, stop emotionally moving house, you absolute lunatic.

We may have to let her go, that boat. Which stings, because she was lovely. But there is another one. Boats aren’t unicorns, whatever Rightmove-for-water murmurs to you at one in the morning with its glowing little thumbnails and its outright lies. This new one ticks most of the boxes, especially the dog boxes, and the dogs are by now functionally the entire planning department, the board, the shareholders, and the cleaners. Where will they sleep? Is there room for them to lie down in the single most inconvenient and load-bearing position the vessel can possibly offer? Can we contain the whiff of eau de wet spaniel somewhere?

It has gone disappointing →then hopeful →then disappointing all over again, which is simply house-hunting in a snazzy hat I think? Bricks or boat, the whole circus is built to make you imagine an entire shimmering life and then fine you, heavily, for having had feelings about it.

But oh. The imagining.

Ben and I keep talking about what we want it to be. Not grandly. I would sooner be buried. Just the practical poetry of the thing. Where the books will live. What comes with us, and what we release, gently, weeping a little, into the wild. How you make a narrow floating room feel like the two of you and not like a tense negotiation conducted by propeller?

 

And by some small daily miracle, we want the same thing. A busy little boat. Not minimalist, obviously, let us not insult the dead. A boat fat with books and blankets, herbs going leggy and hopeful on the windowsill, baskets, chipped and beloved nonsense, the dogs stitched into every single plan like furry clauses in a contract nobody read. Somewhere warm and overexcited and faintly out of breath. The kind of place where something is forever steeping, or sliding very slowly off a shelf while you both watch and neither of you moves.

Meanwhile we are living, gloriously and shamelessly, in the past. Going over old trials and tribulations so we can leave them locked inside this house when we finally leave. Eating last night’s pizza for lunch, cold, eaten straight out of the box, standing up, like two raccoons, because it asks nothing of the oven. And it asks nothing of me because it is like my current reading, a thing that gives and gives and expects not one ounce of personal growth in return.

And in the evenings, Rivals, because sometimes the soul wants nothing more elevated than glossy rubbish. Jilly Cooper, big hair and worse behaviour. Appalling decisions made in beautiful rooms by people with too much money and not a single gram of restraint between the lot of them. Deeply, medicinally restorative. We watch with the candle going and the heat still pressed flat and panting against the windows, two people who have thought quite enough for one day.

 

And we sing too, after a fashion. We keep laughing at how musical we are, which sounds completely insufferable and horribly smug until you understand that we mean noises. We mean noises and daft little rhythms, one of us starting something idiotic and the other helplessly joining in, until we are essentially a domestic cabaret act with no bookings and no rehearsal discipline, performing nightly to a stony catty audience of two who would walk out if only they could work the door handle.

But God, it makes us laugh. Properly. Belly laugh. The kind that arrives uninvited when everything is uncertain and far too hot and nothing whatsoever is decided, and it works exactly like a window thrown open. The metaphorical kind. The kind, mercifully, without flies.

Keep up.

There have been family worries, because there are always family worries, that is just life isn’t it? A few careful conversations. A bit of quiet turning-over of how to build this new floating thing so that it lands gently around everyone it touches. I am trying so hard not to gather up every passing anxiety and carry it around like a handbag stuffed with wet stones. Results, I will admit, are mixed. God knows the bag is getting heavier?

So mostly, this week, my head has been off somewhere else entirely. Or nowhere. Or in six places at once, none of them adequately staffed or insured.

Case in point. The other afternoon I drifted into the bathroom in the middle of the day and started brushing my teeth, having apparently decided that mint was some species of reset button for the soul. Then I wandered back out, sat down, put Family Guy on, (because I am ridiculous), and noticed nothing at all amiss until I reached for my water and discovered the toothbrush still in my mouth. Just there. Present. Fully and enthusiastically involved in the afternoon. Chewing on the bristles like a scally gnawing on a toothpick.

I sat extremely still. And then I thought: right. Okay. Is this it, then. Have I finally gone? Is this demented?

Maybe. Or perhaps this is just what a head does when you ask it to hold the heat and the money and the dogs and the galley measurements and the family and the candle and the skin cream and the genuinely unresolved question of whether one’s future self requires a cheese grater, all at the same time, with no breaks and no union representation. It can only juggle so long before it quietly starts setting objects down in the mouth and wandering off to watch cartoons.

Teeth still hanging in there, though. Standards, you will be relieved to hear, maintained.

And the other thing, Autumn the ginger cat finally seems to warming to us after a year in which she has been terrifying and feisty. All of a sudden less suspicious. Less braced for the betrayal she has clearly always been expecting from somewhere. More inclined now to pour herself like warm honey into a square of sun and lie there as if she has always lived among us, which she has, a fact she has only just, grudgingly, with theatrical reluctance, agreed to. So naturally we are about to move her, because the universe has got an excellent sense of humour and cats are resigned to ever revolving attitude.

She will adjust. They all will. We all will.

 

And that is the thing keeping me sane, not dreamily, more in a knackered, sunlit, faintly hysterical sort of way. We will adjust. We are bright, middle-aged things and can get used to anything. We make a corner. We find the shade and we lower our poor feet into the cold water. We light the good candle while the table is still a crumb-scattered war zone. We read the easy book and we are, against all the rules, the better for it. We eat the cold pizza standing up like raccoons. We rub cream into one another’s worn-out faces in the dark and sing absolute drivel at the dogs.

Limbo week. And yet, against every reasonable forecast, not an unhappy one.

Happy, in fact. Oddly, quietly, no-getting-around-it happy. Not because anything is settled, because none of it is. Not because any of it makes the faintest sense, please, do not. But because something underneath the whole glorious sweating muddle is moving. Shifting. Opening like a window, flies and all. A life being sketched out, badly in places, all crossings-out and coffee rings and a tea stain shaped uncannily like the Macclesfield canal, which is very definitely not where I imagined I would be, but life will drag you willy-nilly towards a life that might just be your saving grace, whether you had popped it into the five year plan or otherwise.

Tis an adventure and I am excited. Properly, ridiculously, slightly indecently excited, which is rare enough these days that I am writing it down quickly before it wears off or a cat bolts across the page after it.

So. A week of cold soapy feet and a fig candle. A cheeky pool-blue sky and launchpad cats. Cold leftover pizza and a narrowboat romance. Rivals and that vanishing, maddening boat information. Plumper skin, a microwaved Ben, a gentle ginger cat, one renegade toothbrush, and a small quiet riot over what this whole thing is even for.

A week of muddle, and of small mercies both.

A week that leaned right over me, all overheated and half-undone and grinning like a lunatic, and said: come on then! There is so much life still left in here. Let’s stop being wise about it. Let’s go play.