Billy Boy

I am going mad – seriously. There is so much to do and he won’t do any of it. Forms are unfilled, bank accounts unopened. Instead of tidying up, organising, collecting clothes that won’t ever be worn again, so that I can take them to a charity shop, he just adds new ones to his wardrobe, so it’s overflowing. Stuff falls off hangers and onto the floor, cats creep in and make little nests in the piles of tshirts and shirts. There’s a mug in there – I know for a fact that it hasn’t been downstairs for at least a month – probably longer.

The more I ask, the less he will do. I say, “Please empty the bins.” He says “later”, and when, much, much later he still hasn’t done it, and I ask again, because it’s overflowing, it develops into a full blown argument and he insists that later could mean anything up to midnight. Then, deliberately, he waits until midnight exactly, to do it – to prove the point. I know because the sound of it wakes me up – I think it wakes everyone on the street up, and in the morning I find he’s left the gate swinging wide open because it was too dark at midnight to see to close it properly. Then I get angry all over again

I ask him to hang washing on the line outside, and he does it so badly that ten minutes later it’s all fallen off again onto the grass. So I sigh, then I go out and show him how to do it properly and stand watching while he does it again. It would be so much easier to do it all myself.

I want to take some time to think about what I’ll do next – but there never is any time, because we have to buy suits and ties and cufflinks – things I have no idea about, We trawl up and down Oxford Street, and Carnaby Street and I slump in corners in Urban Outfitters and Uniqlo waiting while he tries things on, and it’s always the men’s department, and they play such shit music, and we can’t split up and meet later because he forgot to charge his phone so he’ll never find me again. Besides, he wants me to tell him if it looks okay – not that he’ll pay any attention to what I say.

He needs lifts all over the place. Every day there seems to be another goodbye party for someone or other – they’re almost all going – and every party means a pile of crumpled shirts– jackets that just didn’t look quite right. Then he comes home in the morning looking like death, eats three pieces of toast and marmite, and falls asleep until late afternoon, so that’s another day wasted. I am sick of it.

This morning though, a small passage jumps out at me from the newspaper. I don't know why, I think I flung it down in frustration and it flapped open at the obituary section, and it’s not the regular kind of obituary, it’s a little rhyme – a nursery rhyme – Billy boy, Billy boy, riding through the glen – and it has a name and dates – 1992 – 1995, and I stop for a minute because it’s almost the same birth date as my son. I think about the people phoning to place the notice every year since then, perhaps watching while other boys the same age passed all their milestones. Then something catches in my throat, and for a while I don’t mind any of it.