Hilary Fannin: A day of endless possibilities that ended with a fall

I finished the edits on the book I’ve been working on. Which is to say, the deadline arrived and two men with big nets and steel-capped boots pulled up in a dirty van and drove away with the whimpering manuscript, while I ran after them, a blue pencil in my hand, weeping and coughing and choking on the noxious effluvium from the belching exhaust.

Oh, all right, I’m lying through my softening molars. I just emailed the final changes to the editor.

He then emailed back to say he had had enough, he never wanted to see another ragged colon again, and furthermore he was moving to outer Outer Mongolia to live as a nomad among the snow-white reindeer of the Altai mountains, and he wasn’t bringing his laptop.

Actually, he said something like: “Thanks a million, mine’s a pint”, and – hey presto – my flimsy, papery companion, the opus I’ve spent so much time on, disappeared into the ether, and I was free to get back to some property porn.

“Look,” I called to the cat. “For sale: bijou yurt in Ulan Bator for 30 dromedaries and a case of Stolichnaya.”

“Book’s finished, is it?” asked the cat. “Got a bit of time on your hands? Wanna go eat some baby starlings?”

Thank God it’s Friday

It was a Friday when the book went to the printers. Friday is a good day to begin the rest of your life, to lift your head from whatever has been obsessing you, to look around, to notice the season, the depth of your undyed roots, the empty fridge, the pregnant laundry basket.

There were so many things I wanted to do now that I didn’t have a deadline, plans hatched in the dead of sleepless nights: join a gym, paint the wardrobe, find my driver’s licence, hoover something.

I was speaking to a friend of mine around the time the book was hitting its due date, fantasising about an entirely present life, a life where you never run out of milk, or lose the car keys, or your reason with the spluttering wifi, or all hope of ever getting to bed before 1am.

Just for a day or two, I said to her, I’d like to be the kind of woman to whip up a vegetarian option, hovering over a warm oven in steam-ironed Lycra, while simultaneously grating nutmeg and discreetly exercising my pelvic floor muscles, instead of belting through word counts and eating Pot Noodles with my fingers.

“It’s not either/or,” she replied. “It’s ‘and’. It’s about managing all strands of a life. Not perfectly, just managing.”

I know she’s correct. I know there is no right time, no summit to stand on, gazing down over a neatly stitched valley. There’s just life, and more life, and then more life, until there isn’t.

Lucky lady

And I am one of the lucky ones, haggling over my first-world concerns. I am steeped in luck; an accident of birth, of time and place. I live in peace. I eat and think and read. I have a home. My children are healthy. No wolf bays at my door.

Friday: the book went to the printers; I dropped my son to school, then went to a local gym, did a practice class. It was all fine until the instructor told us to lie down on our mats and “relax”.”

Relax? I lay on the mat with my eyes wide open, thinking about all the things I could be doing instead of lying in a darkened room, counting goosebumps and listening to supermarket music.

Friday: the book went to the printers; one son was in school, the other was collecting his student card. After the gym class, I searched for my phone, ignoring my abdomen asking me what the hell I thought I was playing at. We are not “crunch” material, it hissed.

I turned on the phone: missed calls, a hospital, family members.

My mother had fallen during the night. She had got out of bed at 4am to stretch her muscles. Her personal alarm should have been around her neck; it wasn’t. Eventually, at nine the following morning, she managed to raise the alarm. The fire brigade broke into her flat and lifted her into a waiting ambulance.

“She’s comfortable,” the A&E nurse said over the phone.

Comfortable. I repeated the word to myself as I drove to the hospital. Comfortable: a contented, undisturbed place. Comfortable: being at ease.

Language, as they say, can be tricky.