My Study, all day (again)

'Do Not Desterb'

Hear him outside the closed door. Two hours since I shut myself in here to work. Work is slow. Laborious. This draft, uncompliant. My brain, also slow. Maybe the house move catching up. Dislocating to be in a new town.

Another morning of rain. Check the forecast to make sure it’s the same at home. Find myself craving snow. Bone deep cold. Sometimes, stay too long and too still for too long at the beach just to get cold right through. A strange exile a friend calls living here and they are not wrong. But rain everywhere, all up the country. This is how it is now. Warmer. Wetter. Just like they said ten years ago. Recall the afternoon before the Bataclan attacks, in town with my eldest, collecting parcels, pushing the double buggy, the wind whipping its corners, both boys, sleeping through it in snowsuits and blankets, and telling her that for the first time climate change felt like it’d changed tense, whereas it had always been future, it was present now. That winter, floods. This winter, the same. In town, there are many sandbags still, around doors and windows, barricades to fend off the sea during storms earlier in the month. Wish for snow. Sleet at least.

Propped on the windowsill, a photograph of my grandfather. Sitting leaning froward in his seat and smiling. I believe it to be the last one taken on him. I know this belief is false because he looks younger than I remember him being, but I need this belief and as is the way with beliefs, I keep it.

Warned the children to only interrupt me if there’s blood or an intruder, a lot of blood, I add, simultaneously running through fatal bloodless accidents that could possibly befall them while I’m upstairs at the back of the house, door shut, tunnelled in to work.

Outside my door, at normal volume to begin with, mummy, mummy, no I reply, but mummy, mummy. Is there blood, I ask. A pause, no. An intruder? No. He knows where this is going, I hear him make his way down the stairs. Find the right book on the shelf, Ted Hughes, and although I swore I would not use him for an epigraph this time - so expensive - of course I will, like all the things I swear off. Silence apart from the keyboard and the gull outside the window. Realise I have not heard sirens here since moving here, whereas daily the soundtrack to London. Not sure if I miss them or not. Sometimes, it is very quiet here. I am coming to like it.

It is quiet until I hear him laughing this time outside my door. I shout his name, telling him to be quiet, cannot risk concentration being broken, not having finally, maybe, having got somewhere.

Then he is gone. Back begins to hurt. Slept strangely, trapped a nerve. Find myself cold. Find I’m often cold when I stop working, fail to notice anything happening around me until it’s too late. There could be blood. An intruder. A bath might help. Open my study door and see hanging there, a piece of A4 paper. Written in his tiny handwriting do not desturb on one side, come in on the other. This tiny little fantasist of a boy, thinking I’ll ever invite him into my study. Two days earlier, and he sat on the floor of the bookshop after searching for The Last Days on the shelf, knowing it’s banned at home and me knowing too, ban a book and it’s all you want to read but still, he is 9 and it is not for 9 year olds. He sat, reading the blurb before flicking to the thanks at the back, his face stricken as he read them, I’ll sue you, he said, for not including me in the credits.