Saturday 30th August 2008. Sausages

Saturday 30th August 2008.

I’m not well. I’ve been feeling iffy for a few days. I think I’m just over tired and ready for a decent break from work, which it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to get any time soon. I’ve been getting a lot of headaches, too many late nights followed by early mornings. I have a lot of friends, a far cry from five years ago when I had nobody in my life. Being a social magnet is a double-edged sword. I love my mates coming round but sometimes it does get too much. My normal working life comprises fifty-six hours on a standard week. In addition to that my animals take a minimum of thirty-five hours a week to look after, that’s working on two hours every morning and three every night and not allowing for all day on a Sunday. I am trying to be a mum and failing miserably and hoping for a miniscule slot to be a girlfriend too and I’m not very good at that either. Russ likes to go out, given the money to do it he’d be out every single night that he’s free and away at concerts every weekend and festivals when he can. Then we have the fact that he now wants to slide in two foreign holidays a year instead of one and here’s me with no sodding time left to lobby for a fifty-hour day.

Sally is like a lost lamb this week. I really enjoy her company and don’t mind her coming round in the evenings… but evenings turn into nights and she doesn’t know when to go home. I offer her a pillow and duvet to sleep on the setee but she always declines and then I have to get my belligerent car out at daft o’clock in the morning to take her home. More than once it has been daylight and an average night for us ends at three. I have to be up at seven and it’s killing me.

I’m worried about the affect on Russ as well. He came home from work on Wednesday to find Jess, Nigel, Jemma, Sally, Marty and myself all sitting around drinking coffee. He looked knackered and went to bed at ten. I had to keep reminding everybody to be quiet and the ensuing silence only lasted for thirty seconds because we were having a Wii (is that how you spell it?) night and it kept getting rowdy. Things are already on the rocks with Russ and I and I really do need to tell people not to come around when Russ is on Days … and enforce it!

The more I think about it the more insulted I am that I annoy Russ fifty percent of the time. Half of me wants to reduce my score in any way that I can and the other half just wants to tell him to fuck off.

When Sally brought her Wii round the other night my heart sank. I had a headache had worked eleven hours and really didn’t feel like doing anything energetic at all. Everybody got stuck in and helped sort the animals out and with all hands to the deck we had them boxed off and finished by nine. I must admit, once we got going I really enjoyed playing on the Wii and it all got highly competitive.

Sally is six foot two and gorgeous. She works out and has a fitness age of twenty, three years less than her actual age. I have a fitness age of forty-five which made me suicidal and I figured that if I had the energy to I might just hang myself … until it was pointed out that I am actually forty-five and therefore spot on target. The Wii was kind enough to tell me that I’m in ‘pretty good shape’. I still wasn’t mollified until Jess got on and was told that she had a fitness age of forty-seven …. Ten years older than her actual age. Normally Russ would be up for anything like that and would have really enjoyed it but he sloped off to bed early and had very little to say.

I didn’t see him last night because he had Tia. I’m worried about the state of our relationship. He’s coming round tonight with Tia which means that I have to make huge efforts to cook and entertain when I get home from work. I want to do something fun so I thought we might make home-made burgers from scratch. I think Tia will like that and if she’s made them with me she might just eat it.

Marty brought a new friend home last night. He came downstairs after I got in and informed me that he had friends in his bedroom. They were quiet, too quiet. The foursome consisted of this new lad on the scene Mebby, his girlfriend, Marty and his girlfriend who is called Josie and is only fifteen. I disapprove. The girls had to be in at ten and Marty snuck them out of the back door before I had a chance to meet them. I haven’t met this Josie pussycat and until I do I don’t know if Marty having a ‘bird’ is a good thing or not. I was going to insist that they came downstairs but Sally said that as there were four of them in his room they wouldn’t be getting up to much that they shouldn’t be. I just hope she’s right.

Now the cleaning of the cess-pit bedroom makes perfect sense. It’s amazing how the pieces fit into place when you can see the whole puzzle. He hasn’t cleaned his room for any other of his recent girlies so maybe this Josie is going to be a good influence.

I did meet his new friend Mebby. Unfortunately Mebby is more of a side-shuffle than a step up from V.J, who incidentally hasn’t been seen or heard of since the day Marty moved out. It seems the boy has been used and discarded and I’m ashamed to say that I’m just relieved. I want to feel guilty that my son has treated this poor kid and his mother badly but I don’t. I’m just glad that he’s gone and hope that he doesn’t make a resurgence.

At least Mebby made an effort. He talked without a breath for an hour. He talked complete gibberish. I found myself breathing for him and had a pleasing image of him going blue and writhing around on my living room floor as he suffocated. The image was enhanced by a neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and I completed the mental picture by adding my smoking finger into the foreground of the frame.

Sally said that he was quite sweet because he was trying too hard to make a good impression on me. He failed. We give everybody nicknames; V.J is now called Poppy because of his liking for the pretty pills. This is probably harshly unfair because I have no evidence at all that V.J was also doing drugs... only that my son was. I wanted to call Mebby IQ, which contorted into Iqe but Sally said that was too cruel and he has become Amoeba-head. Marty made supper for them at about midnight. They had a Chicago Town pizza each and a fish pie. That wouldn’t have been my first choice for a culinary combi but it seemed to work for them and Mebby at least shut the hell up for five minutes while he ate. Though his first statement to Marty when he’d finished was quite bizarre and kept me occupied for a full five minutes as I tried to work out if he really was lacking in any mental ability at all or if he was a satirical genius. He said to Marty, “Stop being a sausage and eat your sausage.” Marty was eating fish pie at the time. Maybe it was code, an enigma way too complex for the likes of me to work out.

Marty rarely seems to keep one of his girlies for more than three days, I never meet them. I just hope that if this Josie is around for longer than the standard set my previous girlies that her sixteenth birthday is soon … like today maybe. I did ask him when her birthday was which caused Sally who knew exactly what I was getting at to guffaw.

“How am I supposed to know that?” Marty replied baffled, at that point he’d forgotten her name and wrote it on the back of his hand. This was not an immature gesture of love, merely a reminder of what to call her next time they meet.

At least my boy is happy.