Why Mommy Swears

Jane looked mutinous and shouted back yet again about HOW UNFAIR I am, because EVERYBODY ELSE had one, and I was ruining her life, and DADDY had said it was OK, so why was I so mean.

‘SIMON!’ I yelled. ‘Why the actual fuck did you agree to this?’

‘I DIDN’T!’ said Simon indignantly. ‘I said if you had said it was all right, then I didn’t have any objection, and Jane said you had said she could have an account.’

‘I SAID SHE COULD HAVE AN ACCOUNT WHEN SHE IS THIRTEEN!’ I howled. ‘I’m so angry with you, Jane. We have been over and over this, and yet you thought you could get one over on me by lying to your father. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? I don’t know what makes me crosser, the blatant disregard for my rules or the lying to your father. Don’t you agree she has behaved very badly, Simon?’

‘Er,’ muttered Simon, ‘I suppose it’s not ideal …’

‘Simon, FFS! Not ideal? Is that all you have to say?’

‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it? I think you might be overreacting a tiny bit. It was just a misunderstanding.’

I took a very deep breath and calmly said, ‘Jane, could you please go to your room, while I discuss this with your father?’

Jane slouched out, still muttering her favourite mantra about everything being so unfair, and then despite the several additional deep breaths I had taken while she was making her leisurely exit from the room, I could no longer speak calmly, as I shrieked, ‘Simon. It was NOT a misunderstanding; it was a deliberate manipulation of us by Jane. She knows perfectly well I have said she is not to have an account yet. She just thought you were a soft touch and she would get round you while I was out, and I would be none the wiser. And WHY can’t you just bloody back me up with the children? Why the fuck do I always have to be the bad cop, and you get to be the good cop, while I rant and rave and you just refuse to take anything seriously? You ALWAYS DO THIS, and it’s NOT FAIR!’

‘You do realise that you now sound like your eleven-year-old daughter, claiming things aren’t fair?’ said Simon, in his special ‘I’m going to sound annoyingly rational because I think you are hysterical’ voice.

‘But it’s NOT fair!’ I howled. ‘You never punish them, you always leave it up to me, so when they grow up and write their memoirs I will be the Mommie Dearest figure and you will be some sort of fucking saint. Joan Crawford probably wasn’t even that bad a mother. She probably just had a husband who DIDN’T BACK HER UP!’

‘I think she was quite a bad mother …’ remarked Simon.

‘Don’t change the subject,’ I snapped.

‘I do back you up though. I backed you up over Peter’s screen ban last week.’

‘Well, apart from the two of you downloading and watching Guardians of the Galaxy while I was at the supermarket. And letting him play Fortnite! Apart from that, you totally backed me up,’ I said with what was supposed to be a hollow laugh, but sadly came out more as a strangulated snarl.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! I DO back you up, you just overreact ALL THE TIME. My God, are you hormonal or something? Is this the start of The Change?’

‘I am not hormonal,’ I said coldly. ‘I resent your assumption that every time I express any emotion, it must just be because I am an irrational … beachball … just swept away on an uncontrollable tide of hormones.’

‘What an image!’ sniggered Simon, who was fiddling with his phone. ‘And actually, darling, according to the period tracker app on my phone, you are due on, actually.’

‘MY FUCKING CYCLE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOU ARE AN INCONSIDERATE PRICK! AND THAT APP IS FUCKING CREEPY AND A TOTAL INVASION OF MY PRIVACY!’ I snarled.

‘On the contrary, sweetheart, it’s a useful reminder for when I need to don my Kevlar jacket each month,’ sighed Simon.

‘I am late,’ I responded with as much dignity as I could muster. ‘I am going now. We will talk about this tomorrow. In the meantime, do not let Jane have an Instagram account, if that is not too much to ask!’

I swept out of the house on that parting note, pausing only to pop upstairs and throw some tampons in my bag, as I had a horrible feeling he was right about me being due on. I do hate it when he is right.

All in all, therefore, I was not in the best frame of mind when I arrived at the pub to meet Hannah and Sam, and before we even got onto the subject of this year’s teachers and class groups I indignantly relayed my tale of woe. Sam’s daughter Sophie and Hannah’s daughter Emily are the same age as Jane, although Hannah’s children are at a different school, due to the vagaries of the catchment system, and they at least shared my outrage and concerns, as I hiccupped about pedophiles and sexting, unlike Simon who had made unhelpful suggestions about privacy settings and parental controls when I had raised these concerns.

Nonetheless, despite her sympathetic noises about this, and about my tales of the millennials in short pants with their reuseable cups and their meeting rooms that were more like upmarket soft-plays, and did they think that I had said the right thing in answer to that question, I could not help but feel that Hannah was not wholly concentrating on Instagram or my interview, and indeed was squirming in her seat like a newly potty-trained toddler in need of a pee.

‘Are you all right, Hannah?’ I said. ‘You look a bit odd. Have you got a UTI?’

‘What?’ said Hannah.‘Why would I have a UTI? I do have some news, actually, but I’m not supposed to tell you yet!’

‘Well, you have to tell us now,’ said Sam indignantly. ‘You can’t just say, “I have news” and then refuse to say what it is!’

‘Oh, fuck my life, you’ve got a bun in the oven!’ I gasped. ‘That’s why you’re wriggling around and needing a pee – you have pregnancy bladder. Oh my God! But you’re forty-two! You will have to go to the special unit for the geriatric mothers, with all the other old people who have been shagging. Still, I suppose that’s better than all the retirees who are apparently filling the clap clinics because they are all at it like bunnies and not taking precautions now they’re too old to even worry about being a geriatric mother.’

‘Thank you, Ellen, for your supportive comments,’ said Hannah dryly. ‘Firstly, I don’t think they call them “geriatric mothers” any more. It’s advanced maternal age or something, which isn’t much better, but you are classed as one of them at thirty-five, so it’s not like I’d be the only dried-up husk of a medical miracle if I was pregnant, which I’m not, because as you may have noticed, I’m the best part of the way down a bottle of Cab Sauv! Which I’d hardly be doing if I was fucking pregnant, would I now, Miss Marple?’

‘I suppose not,’ I conceded grudgingly. ‘So what is it then?’

‘Shall we guess? Let’s guess!’ suggested Sam excitedly. ‘We could make a drinking game of it and do shots every time we get it wrong?’

‘Or Hannah could just tell us, because I am her best friend and she tells me everything, like she promised she would when we were eleven,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’ll just tell me, and not you, Sam, because I’m her best friend!’

‘Ah,’ said Sam. ‘But I am her best gay friend, which means, according to the laws of cliché, that actually she tells me everything.’

‘Ha!’ I said. ‘Yes, but according to the laws of cliché, after a Gay Best Friend is told a secret, they have to go shoe shopping with you and then drink Cosmopolitans, and you hate shoe shopping and Cosmos give you heartburn. I WIN!’

‘My God!’ said Hannah. ‘Do you actually WANT to hear my news, or do you just want to squabble between yourselves until I put you on the naughty step?’

‘I know. You’ve won the lottery! Like millions and squillions and you are going to share it with your best friend,’ I squawked.

‘Will you both shut the fuck up? I’m not preggers and I’ve not won the lottery, BUT Charlie has proposed. We haven’t officially announced it yet, because we haven’t told our parents, but I couldn’t keep it a secret. Look, look at my ring!’ said Hannah smugly, fishing a rather swanky little leather box out of her bag.

‘Oh my God! Oh my actual fucking God! You’re getting married! To Charlie. It’s like a fairy story,’ I babbled, only slightly tearfully, because my best friend in the whole wide world was getting married again, and this time to a lovely man, instead of a dickhead goblin troll, like her horrible first husband who had unexpectedly walked out on her three years ago.

‘Oh, babe. That’s amazeballs!’ said Sam, also with suspiciously moist eyes. ‘Oh, wait. I’m trying to stop saying “amazeballs”. Sophie told me it was the lamest thing she had ever heard and she was embarrassed for me.’

‘Ooooh, just look at the rock too!’ I squeaked. ‘Shiny shiny shiny. Put it on. Oh, blissful bling, it’s gorgeous! And can I help you plan the wedding? Please say I can? What about a dress? When is it? Oooh, you should totally have one of those vintage shabby chic weddings in a barn, with hay bales and antique bottles full of wildflowers and wellies under your wedding dress!’

‘Ellen, does it ever occur to you that you spend a tiny bit too much time on Pinterest?’ enquired Sam.

‘No. There is no such thing as spending too much time on Pinterest. And anyway, I am the one who got Hannah and Charlie together, so I should totes be the wedding planner extraordinaire. And the guest of honour. Oh, frabjous day! I can finally buy my dream hat. Oh, I’m so glad you are getting married, Hannah, and I can get a hat.’

‘Firstly, Sophie informs me that “totes” is also one of the things only lame, sad old people say, and secondly, some people might say that getting Hannah and Charlie together now was the least you could do, after breaking his poor heart at university and letting poor Hannah pine after him for all those years, so that they ended up marrying unsuitable other people,’ said Sam, rather unkindly, I thought.

It is true that Hannah and Charlie and I do go back a very long way, and it is also true that I might have once led him on a tiny bit and then made out with Simon instead, and possibly, yes, if I was a better person then maybe Hannah and Charlie would’ve got together twenty years ago, but I did do the right thing in the end when I bumped into Charlie a couple of years ago, and so really I think I do deserve all the credit. And the best hat at the wedding.

‘We are talking about hats, Sam, not past indiscretions,’ I said with dignity, before babbling more at Hannah about my Vision for her elegant, rustic, Pinterest-tastic wedding.

‘I don’t want to get married in a barn with wellies under my dress, though,’ protested Hannah. ‘And anyway, we haven’t even set a date yet, so put down your phone and stop bidding on vintage bottles on eBay, Ellen!’

‘I was just looking!’ I said indignantly. ‘There’s no harm in looking. Ooooh, just think, we can go dress shopping. And get shitfaced again on the free champagne in the posh dress shops.Oh, just think … A wedding dress. An elegant, tasteful one, not a confection of taffeta monstrousness like last time. Can I be a bridesmaid? Can I still wear a hat if I’m a bridesmaid? Emily and Sophie and Jane could be bridesmaids too!’

‘Ellen, I’m forty-two, and we are both getting married for the second time. I’m not having dozens of bridesmaids – this is not the Royal Wedding, you know!’

‘It would be nice,’ I muttered sulkily.

‘I’ve DONE the big wedding, Ellen. And had no control of it, because my mother arranged most of it, and what my mother didn’t take over, my bloody ex-monster-in-law did, as she did her best to make the day all about her, right down to the old hag turning up at the church in what looked suspiciously like a wedding dress herself, before trying to claim that it was “tradition” for her to dance the first dance with my new husband. I want this day to be about Charlie and me. And you are my best friend, and so of course I want you to be involved and help me plan it. Just don’t get carried away!’

‘Can I get carried away with my hat at least?’ I demanded.

‘Do what you like with your bloody hat!’ said Hannah.

Monday, 12 September

Today is my birthday. I am now the grandly depressing age of forty-two. And it is a Monday. There should be a law against having birthdays on Mondays. It is absolutely the worst day of the week to have a birthday on.

My forty-second birthday was not nearly as good as my fortieth. I had been rather in dread of my fortieth, convinced that it was nothing more than the marking of the inexorable slide into cronedom and haghood, that it would be the bringer of sagging and wrinkling and walking into a room only to announce that I couldn’t remember what I had gone in there for (actually, that is happening more and more). But in the event, Simon swept me off to Paris for a gloriously romantic weekend (though I do not recommend having sex after you have been eating croissants in bed, the crumbs get everywhere and are very hard to remove).

We walked hand in hand by the Seine, and Simon grumbled yet again about why I felt the need to buy old postcards (‘Because I just do, OK, Simon, it’s not my fault that you have no soul’), we baulked in horror at the queues for the Eiffel Tower, and Simon was forced to bundle me out the Louvre when I took exception to the crowds of tourists clustered around the Mona Lisa, as I was very hot and rather over people and was remarking loudly that I was not at all impressed and wasn’t it rather small and dingy a painting for people to make such a fuss about, and some of the tourists, having travelled halfway across the world to make a dream come true by seeing the Mona Lisa, were muttering and taking exception to my views on Great Art. Due to the many people in Paris, I also found it necessary to frequently pop into bijou cafés and have my equilibrium restored with delightful pichets of vin rouge, which meant that I largely spent the weekend in a splendidly blurry haze.

There was one quite unfortunate moment, though, when Simon left me alone in the very posh hotel, as I wanted a soak in the bath, and he decided to go down to the bar for a drink. The hotel had the most gloriously huge, deep, wide bathtub I had ever seen – not only that, but it was a Jacuzzi bath! Oh the bliss, I thought! How relaxed and reinvigorated I would be after a good old wallow in that!

I tipped the tiny little bottle of ‘complimentary’ bubble bath into the splendidly deep, hot bath I had run, hopped in and set the Jacuzzi settings to ‘high’, but instead of lying back and enjoying a tranquil moment with lovely warm jets of water soothing my aching muscles, I found myself being spun around into a vortex. The bath was so large, and the Jacuzzi so powerful, I was sucked into a whirlpool in the middle of the bath, unable to reach the controls on the side and turn the bastarding thing off. In addition, the VERY FUCKING TINY bottle of bubble bath had been whipped into a giant foam mountain, obscuring my vision, disorientating me as to where in the bath I was or where the control panel was, and very shortly spilling over the edge of the bath.

Simon, thank God, had got downstairs to the bar, realised he had forgotten his phone and come back upstairs for it. He opened the door to our room to be greeted by bubbles pouring from under the bathroom door, and me screaming for help. When he finally finished laughing he did at least turn off the bath and rescue me, but it is very difficult to attempt to maintain any illusion of poise when one has had to be fished from a killer bath, looking like a drowned rat.

This was also the evening that I insisted we went to a jazz bar in Montmartre so we could be cool and Parisian and sophisticated. Simon had warned me I wouldn’t like it, and sure enough, within about ten minutes I was grumbling that it was just noise and there was no proper tune. Simon looked smug and pretended he was enjoying it, while calling me a philistine. He wouldn’t let us leave till we had finished our drinks, and as I had demanded a Campari and soda, thinking it would make me look very European, as well as being pretty and pink, it took me quite a long time to choke it down. It turned out that Campari and soda actually tastes like very nasty cough syrup and Simon said that he wasn’t buying me another drink if I wasted that one, as it had been the princely sum of €15 in the over-priced jazz bar. Sometimes Simon is very cruel.

Anyway, now I am forty-two. Quite irretrievably into the realms of the fortysomethings, which is even worse than when I turned thirty-one and had histrionics because I was now a thirty-something (mainly because I remembered watching Thirty-something in my teens and thinking how terribly old they all were, and now I was a fucking thirtysomethinger myself, and I was afraid of turning into Hope, who always seemed so boring and sanctimonious, even though everyone found her inexplicably fanciable, a bit like Monica in Friends). My forty-second birthday was celebrated by vacuuming, doing the laundry, shouting at the children that they were not even to look at each other, much less speak to each other since they did not seem able to say a single word to their sibling without winding them up, and eating an indifferent takeout when I insisted I wasn’t cooking on my birthday, as Simon had huffed and puffed about going out because he had an early meeting the next day, and ‘It is Monday night, darling, and it’s not like it’s actually a special birthday, is it?’

No, no, he’s quite right, it’s not a special birthday, because it’s only my birthday. Everyone else in this house gets special birthdays every year, because I bloody well make sure they are special, but no one ever thinks to repay the favour for me.

Tuesday, 13 September

Well, I don’t know what the significance of the dick and balls in the interview room was, but whatever it was there for, I passed the test (either that or the other candidates reacted to it even worse than I did – perhaps they added spurting cum and pubic hairs?). Anyway, the whys are not important. What is important is that I got a SECOND INTERVIEW. It’s next Monday, which should give me plenty of time to prepare, and even better, it’s with their head of development who is in currently in California, so it’s a phone interview and I don’t have to worry about what to wear! There was a horrible moment when I thought it might be a video call, and I would have to find a non-scabby corner of my house to sit in and look executivey, but they said just an ordinary conference call with the Very Important Man and Morose Ed would be fine, so I don’t even have to put make-up on and can fish crumbs out of my bra mid-conversation if need be! Happy belated birthday to me! Maybe my family is indifferent to me, but at least the universe or karma or something is on my side.

Wednesday, 14 September

Oh buggering bollocking arseholing twatbums. Tonight was ‘Meet the Teacher Night’. Everyone knows that even if your child has had the same teacher for the last three years, you have to go along to Meet the Teacher Night (although you don’t actually get to Meet the Teacher – you get to sit on a tiny chair and watch a PowerPoint presentation about the curriculum that will in fact bear no resemblance whatsoever to what your child will really learn about over the coming year), because if you don’t you are Judged, both by the Unmet Teacher and by the other parents, who will notice your absence. And of course, despite the fact that most people have more sense than to shell out for a babysitter to enable them both to go to the Meet the Teacher Night, there is always at least one extremely smug and enthusiastic couple there together, who hold up all the proceedings by asking inane questions about how the teacher might deal with completely hypothetical situations. Meanwhile the rest of us attempt not to roll our eyes or face palm because these idiots are causing tedious delays until the moment when we can pop home and sink face first into a large gin.

I thought I was being nice by giving Katie a lift to Meet the Teacher Night, so she didn’t feel daunted walking into the school by herself, but it turned out that this was a foolish thing to do, because although Katie is very lovely, and also a kindred spirit, which is nice to have living across the road, she is also a much better person than me, as well as still being naive and innocent in matters of playground politics.

Thus it was that when we walked into the school foyer together and found Fiona Montague and Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy standing there, brandishing clipboards menacingly as they attempted to sign people up for the PTA, instead of sidling past with a feeble excuse and trying not to make eye contact, Katie stopped and said she would LOVE to hear more about the PTA.

‘Oh, that sounds marvellous!’ said Katie with enthusiasm. ‘I mean, who wouldn’t want to help raise funds for the school? And I expect it is also a really good way to meet other parents, isn’t it?’

Lucy’s Mummy and Fiona brightly assured Katie that yes, indeed, it was an excellent way for someone new to the school to meet other parents, probably much the best way there was.

‘And what about you, Ellen?’ suggested Katie, ‘You’ll join too, won’t you, and keep me on the right track, stop me making any terrible playground-politics faux pas? I don’t really know how all this works, but you must be an old hand by now.’

‘Errr,’ I said desperately. ‘Well, the thing is …’

‘What’s wrong, Ellen? Don’t you want to help raise money for the school?’ asked Katie with wide-eyed innocence.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ I protested indignantly. ‘And I am already on the list of people who have agreed to help at actual events. I’m just not totally sure that I’m really a committee person, that’s all!’

‘Oh, there’s nothing to it!’ said Lucy’s Mummy.

‘It really takes hardly any time at all!’ chirped Fiona.

‘Think of the children!’ begged Katie.

And so somehow, after seven years of cunningly avoiding joining the PTA, I found myself agreeing to go along to the AGM and even to consider a committee role, as long as it wasn’t Treasurer, in case I accidently embezzled the money and had to go to prison while the children featured in a Sad Face article in the Daily Mail.

Simon laughed like a drain when I told him of this when I got home, and reminded me of how, when Jane first started school, I had been so terrified of being forced to join the PTA that I had had a series of distressing dreams in which I was attending PTA coffee mornings or committee meetings, only to find that I was stark naked. Sometimes I fear that Simon is not as supportive a husband as he could be. I also really hope that there was nothing prophetic about all my naked PTA dreams – no strangers need to see a woman of my age naked, no matter what Trinny and Susannah on TV used to claim as they made those poor unlucky women strip off while they jiggled their boobs. Thinking about it, that was such a weird programme. Who thought going on it would be a good idea? ‘I know, I’m not very confident, and I don’t like my clothes, so I’ll go on national television and let a pair of poshos grab my tits, before advising me that a nice scarf will be the end to all my woes!’ It was probably the thin end of the wedge that led to programmes like Embarrassing Bodies, when people who claim they are too ashamed to go to the doctors are quite happy to whip their suppurating dicks out on camera (I once made the mistake of watching a clap special of Embarrassing Bodies. On the plus side, I lost three pounds, as it put me off my dinner for days).

Monday, 19 September

Aaaargh! Today is my second interview, by phone, and oh happy days, Simon is sick. Really sick. Not just with a sniffle, or a cold, or a bit of cough. He is terribly, dreadfully debilitated, and it is touch and go whether he will make it. He sits hunched over his laptop, wrapped in his nastiest and most synthetic fleece, googling and googling his symptoms, finding ever more terminal diagnoses and wondering aloud every five minutes whether he should call the doctor or an ambulance. In between he groans dramatically, or coughs feebly.

‘You have man flu!’ I said unsympathetically.

Simon moaned pathetically. ‘I think it might be Zika virus,’ he whimpered.

‘How can you have Zika virus? You haven’t been anywhere with Zika!’ I pointed out briskly.

‘I was in London last week. There was a woman on the Underground who kept coughing. That could be where I caught it.’

‘No, darling, you did not catch Zika on the Undergound, because it is not an airborne virus. It is spread by the special Zika mosquitoes. And anyway, Zika is only serious if you are a pregnant woman, and last time I looked, my love, you were neither a woman nor pregnant! So I think perhaps you might be malingering a little and making something of a meal out of the fact that you are suffering from a common fucking cold!’

‘I’m sure I have a fever,’ Simon mewed, still tapping away at Dr Google. ‘Can you take my temperature? Ebola is airborne. Maybe I’ve got Ebola. The first symptoms are a fever, a headache, joint and muscle pain, a sore throat and severe muscle weakness. I have all of them! Oh God, I have Ebola. I’m going to die. Don’t you even care? You are so unfeeling. Please take my temperature.’

‘If you did have Ebola, why would I want to come anywhere near you?’ I said. ‘But you don’t. You have a severe case of hypo-fucking-chondria, that’s all.’

‘My poor nose is so sore,’ sniffed Simon. ‘Why don’t we have any of the special Balsam Kleenex?’

‘Because they cost twice as much as ordinary Kleenex.’

‘Why are you so unsympathetic?’ he whimpered.

‘Because you have a cold. A fucking cold! Man the fuck up!’ I snapped brusquely.

‘But I feel so ill. It must be more than a cold. Please take my temperature.’

‘You know the most reliable way to take a temperature is rectally …’ I said evilly.

‘What? No! You’re not putting it up my butt! Just put it under my arm or something.’

‘That gives very inaccurate results …’

‘I just want a bit of love and sympathy from my wife. Is that too much to ask for? Just a little bit of nurturing, but instead you are threatening to violate me with a thermometer. Why are you so cruel?’

‘I am sympathetic. I made you a cup of tea when I got home from picking up the kids and made no comment whatsoever on the bloody mess you made in the kitchen while I was gone, while apparently being too sick to get off the sofa!’

‘I was just trying to keep my strength up,’ whispered Simon feebly.

‘Well, now you have fortified yourself, you need to look after the children and keep them QUIET, because I have this phone interview at 5.30 p.m. Do you think you can do that?’

‘What? Who has a phone interview at that time?’ scoffed Simon.

‘One of them’s in America.’

‘So?’

‘The time difference? I can take the call upstairs, if you can just keep the kids down here and out of my hair so I can actually concentrate and hear myself think. Please, Simon, this is important!’

‘But I feel awful,’ groaned Simon. ‘What am I supposed to do with them? Can’t you just tell them to play quietly or something?’

‘NO! Someone needs to be supervising them, because otherwise, the minute I am on the phone their radar pricks up and they immediately start causing havoc and barging in and screaming and bellowing. Don’t you remember a couple of years ago when I tried to have a work call at home and we ended up in the ER because Peter managed to get a pea stuck up his nose?’

Simon looked blank. ‘Did he?’

I sighed. ‘No, of course you don’t remember. You weren’t here. You were on yet another trip, which was why I was dealing with everything by myself, yet again, which is why it would be nice if just for once you could help me out and keep the kids out of the way.’

‘I’m just saying, I’m not well,’ complained Simon. ‘Yet I’m supposed to look after the kids. You know, my mother would never have expected my father to look after us.’

‘What the fuck does that have to do with it?’ I snapped. ‘You are not your father and I am not your mother and this is the twenty-first fucking century, so just get with the programme and LOOK AFTER YOUR CHILDREN because I am going to get ready for my call!’

‘But what about dinner?’ Simon wailed plaintively after me. ‘Am I expected to do that too?’

‘I’ll make dinner when I’ve finished,’ I shouted over my shoulder. ‘Just keep the kids QUIET!’

The call started well. Max, the very important boss man, turned out to be American as well as being in America, so he did that lovely American thing of being very jolly and positive and polite. Ed still did not say much, and mostly was a slightly disturbing heavy-breathing presence on the line while Max and I chatted. After about twenty minutes there was a screech from downstairs. I tensed. Shortly afterwards there were thunder footsteps on the stairs, and I braced myself, while seething with fury. Then the hammering on the door and the bellowing began.

‘Is everything OK, Ellen?’ asked Max kindly. ‘There seems to be kinda a funny noise coming from your end?’

‘Yes,’ I said desperately. ‘It’s, err, it’s a crossed line, I think.’

‘A crossed line?’ said Max in confusion. ‘Isn’t this your cell phone though? I didn’t think you could get crossed lines on a cell. Heck, I didn’t think you still got crossed lines at all!’

‘It’s, um, it’s a British thing,’ I improvised as the screaming increased, and I thanked my lucky stars that at least the bedroom door had a lock so the little fuckers couldn’t get in. ‘We still get them because our networks … errr … the war … you know?’

Ed made what could have been a snort of derision, or possibly just a snore because he had fallen asleep, having not said anything for the last fifteen minutes, and Max said, ‘The war? Um, OK, I didn’t know that, that’s interesting.’