Hump Day

Wednesdays. Bloody Wednesdays, eh? ‘Hump day’ according to Trixie, who knows about these sort of things.

I missed what Ms S V Strunckel predicted I might have in store this week but the chaos she foresaw for the last seven days most certainly went off big style.

Manchester. Christ. A city which seems to get further and further away from London every time I travel there. I failed miserably to tempt my husband to join me on my business trip. The idea of languishing in the car while I long-windedly blathered out a sales pitch to a brown corduroy-clad client with a surprisingly weak handshake just did not appeal to him for some reason.

And so the motorways stretched out before me like an endless grey roller coaster ghost track. Despite me leaving Wapping at lunchtime, the autumn night came in swiftly and caught up with me before I’d reached my hotel. I was tired and totally fucked off. Our trusty car, the Slipper, looked like a student bedroom, having got messier with every near-fatal 80 mph CD change and a flimsy carrier-bagful of entirely nutrition-less road snacks.

The hypnotic horror of repeatedly driving round and round Manchester’s inner ring road, trying to find the entrance to the car park of the Malmaison hotel was shattered when Mum called my mobile phone. I yanked the Slipper to the side of the road and sat on double yellow lines with the clicking of the hazard lights deafening me in the dark. This was a first – I usually seem to think that it is a good idea, and, in fact, clever to drive whilst talking on my mobile. I patiently justify this, to anyone who will care to listen, by explaining that the Slipper is an automatic car and therefore does not require two hands at all times to be safely and successfully driven.

Listening to my beloved Mum’s fraught voice, I felt a million miles away from her, from Matt and from my bastard hotel. I was temporarily homeless in the grim North and nothing seemed quite real. Mum told me that Uncle Jesse was very poorly and that things looked bad. The details just pricked at the side of my scalp without really sinking in.

In the Malmaison, I was given a small single corner room, which had been put together at very strange angles, its Feng Shui all on the piss. After eating gratinated comfort food and watching some rubbish television, I fell asleep hugging a pillow-Matt and woke just before 5 am, about when Jesse died, feeling like a breath of air had been knocked out of me. Walking to the car park, I saw a red pencil, capped with the blue lid of a ballpoint pen, nestled in the gutter next to the kerb and wondered, for far too long, why was it like that and how had it got there.