The Bottom Drawer

The outcome:

I was seriously planning to do some work for a change, but there came a text from the Hippo. It says, "Happy Anniversary. Luv me."

It's the second Whoops! this morning. I promptly covered it up with discharged battery and the cat took the blame for dragging the phone off to his hidey-hole in Goat's underwear drawer.

However, it isn't that simple, you see. The anniversary was three days ago! 31st October! So the kidnapping of the phone by the cat became an elopment. Still, IT IS NO EXCUSE FOR THE HIPPO TO FORGET! MEN!!!!

You may be wondering who on earth would choose to get married on Hollowe'en. And here you've got me. Yes, I would and yes, I did. I thought it was most appropriate at the time. The groom (Hippo) was getting himself into a Nightmare on Elm Street so what better time to do it than Hallowe'en? Of course, he didn't know that until three days later. Sometimes I feel sorry for my hippo. Living with a mad witch ain't no fun for the directly afflicted.

I'm thinking of posting our wedding photo: him tall, straight as an arrow and handsome in his borrowed Armani and me in me pointy hat, glass beads and a broomstick for a bouquet. But Hippo is a very private person and he may find it objectionable. Understandably, he is trying to bury his past (with me) in oblivion, or rather drown in it in a pint of lager. Plus he doesn't approve of blogging. Actually, he doesn't know I'm blogging. He'd most likely bite my head off. And what good would I be without my head, you may ask. As good as with it, I'd say.

I am given to urges when I'm home alone. And why not? No one's looking (other than the postman).

Today I had the following urges:
1. Eat some cheddar cheese with a morsel of honey on top;

2. Drown a spider in a can of paint. (Actually, it's a whole long story about my spiders. I have good affinity with them and they know that in mea casa not one hair shall fall of their rather hairy torsos. But as I embarked on painting, the spiders had been given one-hour notice of temporary eviction. Some of them scampered away into nail holes and behind the skirting boards, but there were a few terrorists left behind. One of them, acting with unprovoked premeditation, threw himself into my paint can. Another one walked head-on into my brush and was smudged on the wall. So there, it wasn't entirely my fault).

3. Paint a butterfly on the wall, of which you know already.

4. Do some washing up (I didn't give in to that urge as yet. I'm being strong!)

5. Make a departure from ventilating my cracks while performing menial tasks and go the library to get an interesting book. Hippo left behind something called The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth. As soon as I arrived at a section about the comraderie between SIS and CIA, I got unwell and threw up. American Intelligence reports may be the sort of FICTION my husband enjoys but I prefer something more factual and sophisticated.

6. On my way from the library I sense a strong urge will occur to purchase a bottle of red. So I'd better be on my way.

I'm living alone. It's an eerie feeling to come to an empty house. It's as if someone died while you were out and here you are intruding on them as they're trying their best to RIP. They give you a cold shoulder - that sensation that the spirit has departed and left the shell of your house to cool down and rot. You're treading on freshly turned soil of their grave. Creepy feeling.

I won't even mention that the staircase in this damn house creaks all by itself and without any prior warning. The windows sigh and the cat breaks into random attacks of panic. I half-expect the dirty dishes from the sink (I now have ONLY dirty dishes, but I guess had I any clean ones they'd behave in the same manner)to start lavitating any minute. The clock thumps mercilessly like a dripping tap.

In the evenings, inadvertently, I turn the TV down and bath without much splashing or diving - subconsciously I am tiptoeing so as not to wake up my child. She is in bed by 7:30. Except of course that she isn't in bed in this house but in another one, eleven thousands miles away.
I sleep on my side of the bed and never venture onto the other side as if there was a tangible imprint of my husband lying there, protecting his space.

I used to live alone once, for year and a half it was. It wasn't painful. I can content myself with my own company. In fact, I love myself so much that if I had to choose one person to go with me to a desert island it would be me, and I enjoy solitude, but it is the house that unsettles me. Any house - this house, my previous houses... they start dying when they have nothing to witness.

I worry about the house that came to me when my Dad absconded upwardly to be with my Mum. It's such a big, overpowering presence, that house, and now it is standing empty and forlorn, and when I go there, my presence cannot break that veil of loneliness that house is wearing. Still, I love it. It guards, locked inside, all my childhood and memories of happiness.

Now, what was I really wanting to say?... um... no bloody idea!

I won't be having a bath. I will grow a beard and develop a drinking habit. Starting now.
Aha... the cat will be going on a hunger strike.

Time to trudge on into my past. It has to be done. I must find out why and how from a girl with loving, caring family and great prospects, I have become such on oddball and escapist dipping in and out of bouts of depression.

In Year2 I briefly attempted to befriend another girl. We used to go together to see that dentist who makes sure your jaws align together properly – what do you call him? Anyway, since we were in the same class and suffered from the same affliction, I concluded she could do as my playmate. She was a pretty little thing, blonde and blue-eyed, with big spectacles over her upturned nose, but she was rather physically fragile. I got her to dig tunnels with me.
It was my firm belief that there was life under the ground, and it was just a matter of digging before I uncovered it. We organised two spades from our respective fathers’ gardening tools collections and went into the field in the middle of which there was a little coppice. We dug in.
It took us several weeks but we kept on digging. It was early autumn. It rained most of the time, but we pressed on until we stood knee high in muddy water (sensibly wearing Wellingtons, of course).
Now that I recall she did ask me several times if it wouldn’t be better to stay at home and play dolls but I dismissed the proposal as undoable and rather silly.
Then we hit something metallic. Initial investigation (banging about it with our spades to find the edges) revealed it was a metal box. Well, it had corners. It could be a metal plate, but I was quite convinced it was a metal box containing WWII top secret plans and maps, as well as a few hand grenades and maybe even a bomb. I suggested we take it out and find out. With untypical for her firmness, she asked to go home, and in my bewilderment, I conceded. The next day she fell ill and stayed in bed for several days, down with flu (did I say it had been a couple of cold and windy, rainy days on location for us?). After that, her dad spoke to mine and they arbitrarily prohibited me from returning to my dugout. I don’t know if my friend had also been prohibited or whether she had abdicated from the project voluntarily, but I saw her play dolls with other girls when she came back to school after her illness, and I left her to it. Of course, prohibition notwithstanding, I did return to my dugout to find it demolished! It was covered with soil and there was a concrete slab on top. It had DAD written all over it.

I spend the next two years romping in the local woods. I was the lone ranger and I was on a first name basis with most wildlife. You may wonder what a little girl did in a vast stretch of woods all by herself, but those were the safe times. Even the witch from Hansel and Gretchel was on a leave of absence. So it was me and my dog, Nero patrolling the forest for no pay. Call it child labour but it was such fun! To this day I have a fascination with trees. We only bought our current house because there is a great big oak in the garden. The house itself is a shambles, but who cares if I can look out of the window and say hi to the squirrels in the oak’s branches teasing my cat.
Here are some pictures: with Nero and with a mushroom.

Then this new girl came to our class, well, to our town really. There were lots of new people moving in. The world was turning on its head. I was in Year5. She became my best friend. She had dark, dark hair, long and wavy, and dark blue eyes, and she was skin-and-bone, very shy and unworldly (today she is a successful businesswoman in Canada while I still climb trees).
I introduced her to the woods and we became quite proficient at mousse tracking, tree-house construction and general orienteering. We had our share of near-death experiences including being discovered by a Russian soldier (there was a Russian military base near the town, hidden in the woods) as we were busy inspecting the content of a bunker which lay beyond barbwire fences with signs KEEP OUT all over them, which we had totally ignored upon finding a small hole near the ground. On another occasion, we had been locked up (by mistake) in our school after hiding in the Science classroom to do some experiments with nitrogen. We had to let ourselves out of the window and down to the ground on a gutter pipe. May I add that the experiment had not been a success but we had never been found out!
And then she discovered boys…. At about 13 that is precisely what teenagers do – they start acknowledging the opposite sex. Regrettably, I didn’t seem to go with my times and once again, was left behind living in my own world of dinosaurs and wild duck nest tempering. My friend found different, likeminded friends and she swapped Wellingtons for stilettos. It had taken me another seven years to – sort of - catch up with her, but by then, it was too late for both of us as we were living thousands of miles apart.

As a young child I was a tomboy (never had any girl-friends until Standard 5), a hooligan and a good for nothing tree climber.

Once I managed to scrape right to the top of a gnarly, old beech only to get stuck there and wait for backup while the rest of my hoodlum-pals scattered away to the safety of their homes for dinner. My Dad carried me down while I was clutching his neck like the Yorkshire Strangler that I could've well been, and nearly smothered him in the process. There were three bloody scars on his shoulder where I had dug my nails.

The next suicidal occasion presented itself when I was six. I went skating on the town's pond. That in itself didn't pose any danger except that it was already March and the pond was beginning to thaw. The ice was paper thin, especially around the edges. Bigger boys (the same old hooldlum mates of mine as always) would take a big jump to the middle of the pond where the ice was firm, but the clumsy inexperienced me, dressed in a thick rabbit fur in which I could hardly lift an arm, stepped menacingly onto the transparent veneer of ice, and despite ominious crackling sounds, proceed forward... until I found myself plunging into the smelly depths of muddy waters. I was pulled out by a passing railway guard who delivered me home dripping with seaweeds and smeared with something clayish. Following on a warm-up of a good old-fashioned hiding, I was soaked in boiling water and despatched to eierdown bed.

For statistical purposes, I have also escaped unscathed from a first floor window jump with a large scarf pretending to be a parachute. My Mum threatened to have a heart attack and she did point out that sooner rather than later I woould send her to an early grave.

Aha, and I ran away once at the tender age of 11 for a whole day and a NIGHT(!)The experience was never repeated due to the cold and horror added value.

Coincidentally, my grandma used to say that devil won't take his own. There must be a grain of truth to it or I'd be long dead by now.

Anyway, here is me looking ah-so-ungirly, also featuring my Mum, big brother, and Dad.

It feels odd to start a diary with an ending but dealing with endings, closures and capitulations has been my motto over the past two years – since I came back to my cradle, to my own beginning.
It seems those I once left behind had only waited for my return with the sole intention of giving me the taste of my own medicine. Bitter taste.

My old friends may remember my Mum lost her short but violent battle with cancer a year ago. It was harder to watch her deteriorate, shrink slowly but surely without hope, wince in pain, fade into the ultimate surrender than to accept her final defeat. Death came as a relief, and she was beautiful again when at last she was at peace. I was happy for her.

A year later, nearly to the day, out of the blue, my Dad decides to up and go.

Now, that wasn’t quite in the cards, apart from the single one he hid away up his sleeve. His German auntie, who is about a hundred years old but commands energy levels of a goat in its prime (as is the case with everyone on that side on my Dad’s family), arrived dutifully and waving her walking stick announced my Dad had died of a broken heart. The fact that my Dad had a heart of an ox was of no consequence. He had missed his wife painfully (“people don’t love like that any more”, were my Grand-Auntie’s words) and would go to hell to be with her. I’m sure though that wasn’t necessary. Being a walking-breathing Saint my Mum had had a reception party waiting for him up in Heaven with St Peter doubling as a doorman.
I dug up a few over half-a-century old pictures of her from the days when my Dad fell in love with her. Just trying to understand why he would leave me and my brother so readily – I think I do understand. This is how – I imagine - my Dad always saw his wife.

Can’t blame him. He was always a free spirit, unpredictable, fighting for causes, with his finger in many pies. I found plenty of ancient photographs, and I chose a few most representative of my Dad’s greatest passions: his passion for football, his passion for aeroplanes and his passion for skiing.

And finally there was his passion for the community, his people and our little town. Our family had lived there for generations, since the XIV century when early German settlers started arriving and cleared vast depths of Polish forest to build a town. Places changed hands, the wheel of history rolled several times over leaving no stones unturned, but the little town survived and its people stood up for themselves. My Dad was that town’s soul – he lived for it. And they all came to thank him at his funeral – the town’s Voluntary Fire Brigade (of whose my great Grandfather was a founding member) arrived in full force and sirens went on wailing for a good five minutes. The town’s very own brass band walked my Dad to his final resting place, playing so soulfully that my heart went into a spasm of grief. The Town Council’s delegation was there to pay their respects and I saw faces from the past so remote that I thought them ghosts. Maybe they were. I remember the past through gauze of time.

Childhood memories are always part reality, part fantastical fantasy. I was glad to see those dusty old characters like fairies floating in the fog over the moors, like reflections in a rusty mirror. It’s been so long. My Dad couldn’t live without them for more than a few nostalgia-filled years, he ran back to them. He was the lord of his world. But I stayed in a different, alien world and only came back to see the old one had not changed but for one thing - my Dad is no longer here.