Four Days

We are juggling more figures today – my son and I, and it’s very frustrating because I’m almost innumerate, and he seems to have forgotten how to add up, despite getting an A in his maths A level last month. Also he has a strange idiosyncrasy where he doesn’t know the months of the year off by heart. This means we can spend an hour carefully writing down income and expenditure, only to realise that we’ve made some fatal mistake – like he forgot all about November for instance, so then we have to start all over again. It’s going to take a little while longer I should think, before we arrive at anything reliably accurate.

Four days left now, and I’m trying not to think about Tucson because there’ll be time for that later. He does sound better though – much more like himself, and the tiredness has almost gone. He says he’s only going to do crystal meth once or twice a year from now on, if offered, and even then maybe not, but he doesn’t want to be a zealot about it.

It’ll be my birthday while I’m there, if I go, and I’d asked if he wanted to do anything – go back to the seaside - California perhaps, or maybe Las Vegas, but he says he’s broke and do I mind staying in Tucson for sunshine and heroin instead, which luckily he hasn’t also given up. He said, jokingly that that was the American dream, but since it also includes him, it is more or less my American dream; I can’t think of a better way to start things off.

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I’ve told him I’m definitely coming, on account of having found a bargain Alexander McQueen pencil skirt - so nice it would have been very short-sighted not to buy it even though I am supposed to be economising, and it’s the kind of thing you absolutely need a hot sunny day for. I think he realises I’m joking. I still don’t know if I have the courage to get on the plane.

But before all that though, I have to go and visit Marnie, and this time she wants me to come to the cottage. I’ve been twice since Joe died, but the last time was sixteen years ago when it was still pretty as a postcard. I have an idea she’s let it go rather since then, and perhaps that’s why she hasn’t asked me before. Everything of Joe’s is there - she told me she hasn’t thrown anything away – not even John Bonham’s drumstick that by Joe managed to catch once during a Led Zeppelin gig . I think that was the first time they managed to successfully forge backstage passes and they couldn’t stop boasting for months afterwards. The stick and the pass were sellotaped to his bedroom wall for years. She didn’t even know the story behind them until I told her recently.

She wants to talk to me about Tucson – she says it’s very important to see me before I go, and I’m not quite sure what else she’s going to say about that. Also she wants to show me a film script she’s written – about Joe I think . I hope I manage to give her the right answers, whatever they might be.