Friday 5th September 2008

Friday 5th September 2008

And in true Doe form we leap from the pits of the ungodly and unholy to petty near, service resumed normality. Everything in the garden is weedy. Rosy is too ambitious for us but the weeds that I have are strong and healthy and my particular brand of metaphorical weeds have sprouted pretty little purple flowers. I don’t even have the bleedin` garden let alone the weeds!

Marty is the same belligerent and disrespectful little sod that he’s been for the last few years. He still speaks to me as though I’m a piece of horse manure dropped in the road but he’s doing a lot better. He’s been given a new job in a new taxi office and at sixteen years old he’s getting paid six pounds and ninety pence an hour. I am salary based but broken down by the hour my wage equates to seven pounds. My kid is on just ten pence an hour less than me. He worked eight hours the other day and because he doesn’t pay tax or insurance yet he came away with fifty-five pounds twenty. I hope he keeps this job.

When he was eight my child was diagnosed as ‘gifted’ this has always been an affliction for him because he likes to dumb down and portray himself as one step up from remedial. When he was eleven his IQ was higher than mine. One of his talents is having a low level savant-like ability with direction and numbers. He can memorise a map and knows every street, alley and courtyard in a ten-mile radius this makes him invaluable as a taxi operator. Tell him a phone number or postcode and he can recall it from memory two years later… but ask him what a monarchy is and he’ll tell you it’s a big church! He is not autistic in any way. He is not a genius. He can’t look at a map for five seconds and know every line on it. He just has a higher than normal sense of direction and memory for numbers. On a train journey back from London he studied and memorised the entire tube network and knows which station follows which on any line. He did this the way we learn the alphabet, by repetition. If we’re driving in a strange town and he’s paying attention he will know the name of every street we’ve passed and would be able to tell me that we’d passed Cedar Grove three streets back on the left and he can spot a MacDonald’s long before any other mere mortal. He’s not exceptional; he just has a good memory for certain things. Ask him to take out his cup and he’ll reply, “In a minute,” but the thought has passed through one ear and out of the other before the words have even left his mouth. Five minutes later ask him why he hasn’t taken his cup out and he hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about.

Even better than his job is his new friend, the latest lump to present itself underneath a duvet on the sofa is a lad called Carl. He appeared late one night last week and has stayed at ours most nights since. I like him. Marty has brought home an endless steam of trouble on legs for two years. Carl is clean, that’s a first. He is of average intelligence and that’s also a first. He is older than Marty, which would have worried me a year ago but now I think it’s a good thing that he’s socialising with a twenty-two year old. Carl has been a bugger in his time. He’s been though the courts and played at being a petty criminal until one day he realised that it was getting him nowhere. He got a girl pregnant and now has the responsibility of a young son. He seems to be a good ‘away from home’ dad and sees a lot of his boy. He’s turned his life around and now works hard to provide for and pay for his son, admirable in any man, and has a solid head on his shoulders. He has his own flat in the next town but I’m happy to welcome him into my home any time because he’s so good for Marty. I don’t know if the girl Josie is still on the scene, I’m guessing not because he certainly hasn’t seen much of her if she is. He tells me nowt. I’m not saying for one second that things have been resolved. I’m sure Marty still drinks too much when they go out. I don’t think one hard lecture from mother is enough to stop him popping pills, any one of which could kill him and just because he has a decent job this week doesn’t mean that he won’t have messed it up by next but for now at least things are on the up.

Russ and I have sorted things out too. I still have trust issues and whether or not they are founded or just a product of my paranoia is anybody’s guess. I had it firmly in my head that he was two minutes from picking up a floosie and walking out on us. He doesn’t like the restrictions that the animals bring. He didn’t sign up for a life with a demon sixteen year old one thing and another has led to me having less disposable income than I had when we met. What I get from him has never changed from day one. He’s as consistent as a well fed bowel… me, well he’s taken on a lot more than he signed up for.

What brought about the change was a freezer. This week we have bought a freeze between us. We did intend to buy a cheap second hand one but in the end bought a new chest freezer that cost more than we planned on paying. We agreed to go halves on it because although we live together our finances are very separate. I made a remark about paying him out on it if we ever split up. His reply was all that I needed to hear.

“Hey, I’m not going anywhere. There’s a twelve-month guarantee on this and I’m not leaving until we’ve at least had the benefit of that.”

It was so typical of Russ. He’ll stick with me through thick and thin so that he can get his money’s worth out of the freezer. If he left and we still had a few months to run on the guarantee it would grieve him painfully. It may not be the most romantic statement ever but it was all the security I need. I have a cunning plan. In twelve months I’ll pull out some wires from the washing machine so that we have to buy a new one, the year after the dryer. If in years to come people ask me why I have seven washing machines, five fridges and an abundance of miscellaneous appliances I can tell them that’s it’s to keep my man. I’ll still remove his bollocks and feed them to Stoker if I find out that he’s ever played away though.

Daz has settled back down at work. I’m not happy with him. Watching him on camera he has no interest in the job. I’ve noticed that when he serves a customer he gives them the least attention possible and is reluctant to move his backside from his chair behind the counter to assist. This is something I intend to raise with him next time we have an appraisal. But things have drifted into some sot of pattern again. I will never trust him as I used to and I’m going to have to re-apply for new staff again when I lose Sally but it’s all good at work too.

I have a chance to re-charge before my next crisis-horriblis.

We a night out last night and Mac tagged along with us. We went into the pub and managed to squeeze in with a group of disabled people. These men (no women) were mentally disabled. The ratio of patient to carer was three to one and they stayed in the pub until about ten. We left to move onto the Knights at more or less the same time. Mac had been asking to move on for an hour. Wherever Mac is and whoever he’s with it becomes the Mac show. He was out on the pull and wanted to trawl the bars. I’d already explained that we were going out with friends and that he was welcome to join us but we wouldn’t be changing our plans to accommodate what he wanted to do. He could either come out with us all or not as he chose.

On the way down to the Knights he complained that he’d found it very uncomfortable.

“Why?” I asked. “I wasn’t uncomfortable. They weren’t uncomfortable. Why should you be? Surely that’s down to your social incompetence, not theirs.”

“Jane, they made it illegal to laugh at the lunatics in Bedlam years ago. That was wrong and it was highly illegal. The pub should be reported.”

I literally stopped in my tracks. “Mac, they are human beings. They are adults over the age of eighteen. Why the hell shouldn’t they be allowed to have a night out like the rest of us? They had a couple of drinks and had one song each on the karaoke. Personally I thought it was lovely to see.”

“Come on Jane, they were a freak show. Those carers should be up before a judge for neglect. That was bloody embarrassing.”

He went on to make a very valid point that I did actually agree with. He asked what would have happened if twenty pissed up Neanderthals on a stag do had gone into the pub and mocked them. It could easily happen and the staff with them would be ill-equipped to deal with any trouble. I replied that every single decent person in that pub would have stood up to protect them. He told me that I live in la-la land where all the trees grow lemon drops. Most people would have sat on their arses and watched the drama unfold. I disagreed.

I couldn’t believe that he had such an archaic opinion. Anybody being offended or feeling uncomfortable in the company of those people could have found somewhere else to drink. They had the choice to do what they wanted and be where they liked and so should the disabled customers in that pub. Three of them ‘sang’. One man, the best of them tried, We are the Champions, by Queen. You could just about make out the odd word in the chorus. It was obvious that he knew the song. The other two just made noises into the mic. I don’t think they had any speech at all. The Queen fan literally burst into tears and sobbed. I don’t know if this was because he felt overwhelmed or just emotional. I don’t know if it was good crying or bad because we weren’t involved with him, but Mac said that it was abuse to put him through that. It was that man’s choice to have a go nobody pressured him or made him. He was an adult man having a pint with his mates and a sing on the karaoke and bloody good on him. Mac had one pint in the Knight’s sulked and then took it upon himself to storm off without saying goodbye. He was loud and verbally aggressive in his arguments in the street. To my mind every single one of those disabled people behaved with more dignity and presence of mind than he did.

Sal and Fynn are still apart but Fynn has agreed to see Sal on a weekend basis. It wouldn’t do for me but Sal seems happy with this temporary compromise until they decide what they want to do. At least I get to keep my assistant for the time being.

It’s all good.