The
East Dulwich Forum
26 July 2014
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Fiwith2dogs 10.58 p.m.
Can anyone else hear the hideous party coming
from behind Terry’s Tool Hire? WTF is it? Someone’s singing fucking reggae on a
PA system at eleven at night. People need to sleep.
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Neighbour12 11.05 p.m.
It’s those annoying people in the Mews behind
the tool hire place. Call the noise police. Shut those idiots down. They’re
always celebrating for no reason. Number seven is usually to blame.
27 July 2014
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Linzicatlady64 12.04 a.m.
It’s still going and I can hear it down by
the Plough. I’ve called the noise police. Cannot believe people are so selfish.
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by Fiwith2dogs 12.11 a.m.
As much as I want those fuckers to get in
trouble, I don’t think you can hear it from the Plough. That’s too far. You’re
obviously caught in the crossfire of another party.
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Frankymews66 11.05 a.m.
Hello everyone. Very sorry if you were
disturbed by the annual Mews summer party. We did tell everyone in the
immediate area, invited all the neighbours and we switched off the PA system at
eleven thirty, all in all not causing outrageous noise pollution. When the
noise police arrived they were totally happy with the sound level coming from
an iPod dock at midnight. Also, if you don’t live in the Mews, how would you
even know what number was hosting the music? If you can’t stand the heat,
Neighbour12 get out from behind your kitchen curtains. Everyone always welcome
to join in!
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Janemakescakes 11.15 a.m.
My baby was up screaming all night because of
the noise, whatevs to you switching the PA off, we could still hear singalongs
to shitting Oasis (torture) and lots of shouting into the small hours. What
makes you people above the law?
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Frankymews66 11.32 a.m.
Very sorry your baby was up all night, but
probably would have been up all night anyway. Babies usually sleep through most
things. Hope you have a better night tonight. Light and love x
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Oldskoolraver 11.46 a.m.
Janemakescakes, you were probably just
jealous you weren’t at the party and stuck at home with a baby!
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Janemakescakes 12.03 p.m.
Fuck you, Oldskoolraver.
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Fiwith2dogs 12.34 p.m.
Joining in with a load of selfish knob-heads
is the last thing I want to do. Next time I hear anything, I’m calling the
police. Be warned.
Re: Loud House Party near Terry’s Tool Hire
Posted by: Oldskoolraver 12.55 p.m.
I bet the Mews are quaking in their party
shoes, Fi with 2 dogs. Ignore the haters, Mews people. Party on!
1
I
Do
Here comes the bride, sixty inches wide… Ali, you bloody heifer, why did you eat so much at
Christmas? I silently fumed. My embonpoint was bursting out of my prom-style
bridesmaid’s dress, causing mild upper thorax asphyxiation and creating a
fleshy shelf upon which I could probably rest a round of drinks. An irksome
label was irritating my back; it hadn’t been there when I’d tried the dress on
in Coast months ago. I was like a dog chasing its tail, unable to reach the
label without shedding the entire outfit. I couldn’t face wrestling my boobs
back into the dress so I left it as it was.
Jacqui, in a better-fitting version of my dress, her hair a stunning
blond Farrah Fawcett bouffant, zipped a jittery Amanda into her striking grey
chiffon ball gown.
‘Five minutes, girls,’ I warned Amanda’s daughters, Isla and Meg.
They nodded, dressed in their identical dusky-pink John Lewis
bridesmaids’ dresses, delicate fresh gypsophila flower crowns adorning both
their heads like angelic halos. Sonny, Amanda’s little boy, was the
ring-bearer, waiting with Chris at the town hall in a mini-me dark grey suit, a
picture-perfect box-fresh family. Amanda’s dad, suited and booted, sat on the
over-stuffed blue velvet armchair by the door, looking like he was recounting
his speech in his head. I felt a sharp pain below my ribs; Dad was never going
to make a speech or walk me down the aisle in the vintage cream lace dress I’d
always imagined myself in, even if I actually got that far. My latest
boyfriend, Ifan, had spouted all sorts of romantic shit when we’d first met a
year ago in Kebab and Stab after Jacqui’s leaving drinks. He’d recited Dylan
Thomas to me in bed and said he couldn’t wait for me to have his babies, but as
soon as he moved in three months later, real life tightened the drawstring on
the blissful honeymoon period.
‘He’s so handsome!’ Jacqui had swooned after I’d sent her a picture.
‘You finally got the rock-star boy you always wanted.’
Ifan worked in an achingly trendy men’s clothes shop in Covent Garden
and had aspirations of becoming a model after posing for a few moody Instagram
photo shoots for the store. He was certainly pretty enough and young enough
(eight years my junior at thirty-three) and an improvement on all the hideous
men I’d encountered in my recent dating past. We had spent the first week
together tucked up in bed incessantly shagging – he was a veritable Clit
Eastwood – until I was struck down with killer cystitis, weeing razor blades
every time I went to the loo. I had to sneak him out under cover of darkness
before my five-year-old daughter, Grace, surfaced. She slept in my bed so Ifan and
I had appropriated the spare room as our shagging palace, a broom cupboard with
a narrow single bed armed with a sagging mattress rammed against one wall like
a coffin awaiting a corpse. I had earmarked it for Grace when we moved in, but
the damp was now so tenacious that her clothes in the wardrobe had started
growing mould on them, and I couldn’t afford anywhere else, even with housing
benefit. I wanted to be near my friends, Amanda and Ursula, but flats in East
Dulwich were so out of my league.
The housing situation hadn’t always been this dire. A few years ago I’d
had it all – the roomy Victorian semi near Amanda with the ubiquitous stripped
wooden floors and a free-standing Habitat kitchen (something of great beauty in
the noughties). Added to that, I’d had a mad chocolate Labrador called Max, a
stepdaughter, and a fiancé who also happened to be my agent. I kept having to
pinch myself when I finally fell pregnant – all my life goals were real and
happening in vivid Technicolor. Until my now ex-fiancé, Jim, had left me
holding a newborn baby and sold our perfect house from under my feet to move in
with Hattie (now his wife). Completely heartbroken and homeless with baby
Grace, I had ended up moving in with Amanda for a few years while Grace
metamorphosed from a baby into a strong-willed toddler. During our time in the
house we affectionately called the Single Mums’ Mansion, we became a patchwork
family, along with Jacqui, another single mum. We spent Christmases together,
hosted crazy parties, snogged unreliable men and helped each other through such
an emotionally corrosive time that we formed an unbreakable bond. These women
were like my family.
On the other hand, it gradually dawned on me that living in Amanda’s
attic with Grace, as if we were a couple of students, wasn’t conducive to
finding a much-wanted long-term partner. Grace and I needed our own space once
she’d reached three, and we had to let Amanda move on with her life after she’d
met Chris. Realising this had been a huge blow, but I knew it made sense.
Leaving the safety net of the Single Mums’ Mansion to forge my new life had
felt like losing a limb. In the first few weeks away from the house, I’d
continually questioned my sanity on the matter. I desperately missed the cosy
warmth of the attic and the nightly catch-ups in the kitchen over a glass of
red. I’d found myself crying at the sink when washing up, and Grace had wailed
for the entire first week: ‘Mummy, I want go home. I miss ’Manda.’ My heart
broke for her – the Single Mums’ Mansion had been the only home she had ever
known and Amanda was her other mummy. But every time anxiety swamped me, I
heard Mini Amanda give me a pep talk inside my head: This is your life, own it, live it,
accept it. What will be will be…
Mum had moved round the corner in Penge for a few months once her house
in Spain had sold. Just having her there acted as a buffer against the
low-level grey fug I couldn’t shake off since leaving Amanda’s. I’d been so
excited about spending more time with Mum after she’d lived abroad for years,
and Grace now had a granny she could see all the time. Dan and Alex, my
brothers, were both married and had hectic family lives, and with Dad dying so
suddenly four years ago it had felt all the more important that Mum lived near
me.
However, after only six months it had been obvious that she was unhappy.
I’d thought it was just because she didn’t like Penge. I didn’t blame her for
that: every time I said ‘Penge’ out loud the word ‘minge’ reverberated in my
head. I had suggested we club together to find a place in East Dulwich, but
she’d been adamant. ‘I’ve missed my chance at London, love. It’s too busy, too
impersonal. You and Grace are here and I love that, you know I do, but I can’t
live your life. I have to live my own.’
Mum headed for the south coast to be near Uncle Graham. I’d balled my
eyes out as I’d driven off, leaving her in the cute little cottage in the
centre of Whitstable, but I could see she was thrilled. ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, we
can always visit. Granny Annie said so,’ Grace wisely told me from the back
seat. ‘Don’t be sad.’ But it wouldn’t be the same. I’d loved having that local
family connection even if it had been only for a short while. It had made me
feel cosseted, just like my time in the Single Mums’ Mansion. Grace and I were
alone once more…
Left to my own devices my life started to go completely off the rails
with no grown-ups to rein me in. I’d lost count of the number of times I would
say on a Sunday night after a particularly wonky weekend: ‘Monday is the start
of a whole new me!’, but it must have been quite a few because Jacqui had
threatened to get it printed on a T-shirt. By Thursday I would be climbing the
walls and, in the weeks that Grace was off to her dad’s, the bar-hopping
treadmill would restart, more often than not dragging along terminally single
Ursula, one of my uni mates, Jacqui, or Amanda. Not even the lure of my latest
discovery, Radio Four, could keep the ants in my pants at bay. But my love of
it did seem to mark my inevitable slide into middle age, especially when
combined with a sudden interest in garden centres (I didn’t have a garden) and
a new appreciation for the benefits of flossing one’s teeth in the knowledge
that preserving your own set was essential with time ticking.
On the flip side of the coin, I was fighting being an actual functioning
adult with every single atom of my being. For example, one morning after a
one-night stand fuelled by Bolivian marching powder, I had found the draining
board swept of dishes, what could only be smeared arse cheek prints on the
steel worktop, and the green washing-up liquid overturned, dripping down the
kitchen cabinets. This wasn’t how I had planned to be approaching forty-two: as
a single mum, living in a Dickensian flat, with a dead mouse in the hoover bag,
indulging in a multitude of meaningless but fun one-night stands.
Meanwhile, Jacqui had met Mark, a psychology lecturer, when she was
visiting her sister in Australia the Christmas after I moved out of the
commune. She engaged in an all-out war with Simon, her ex-husband, about
emigrating with their children, Neve and Joe, a year later (she had dual
citizenship). But she won him round eventually with a deal to bring them over
twice a year for a few weeks at a time. ‘Yeah, I don’t get why he’s so fucking
angry about it – he only sees them twice a month anyway because now he has two
more kids, he hasn’t got time for them. I told him this way he’d spend more
quality time with them than his half-baked attempts at being a dad every other
weekend.’
I had been devastated when she’d dropped the bomb – she had been my
steadfast wing woman out on the Strip (our affectionate nickname for Lordship
Lane), when our misadventures had seen us behaving like teenagers in the
Adventure Bar, hooking up with the most unsuitable men, snogging behind the
fruit machines in Kebab and Stab while awaiting chips for the journey home.
‘In the words of Arnie: “I’ll be back,”’ she reassured me as I grizzled
into my red wine. ‘I’m renting my house out and if it’s empty when it’s time to
come home for the kids’ custody visits, we’ll stay there. If not, I’ll rent
somewhere local. The kids will be with Simon most of the time, and Mark might
come over too, depending on work. He’s never been to the UK. We can all hang out.’
To top it all off, Chris proposed to Amanda just before Jacqui abandoned
us, making me wonder if my time in the Single Mums’ Mansion had only been a
dream. I was so happy for Amanda – she totally deserved happiness second time
round – but it had just served to highlight how far I was from finding that
lasting relationship, until I met Ifan. Since we’d been together, the mould,
the distance from my friends, and Penge itself had steadily grown on me, much
like the spores in Grace’s wardrobe. Bad Ali had finally been firmly stashed
back in her box.
But now, my spidey senses were tingling. For two nights in a row between
Christmas and the wedding, Ifan had failed to come home from a boys’ night out.
His phone was ‘switched off’ the entire time, sparking well-acquainted dread in
me.
‘Where were you?’ I’d beseeched him when he’d nonchalantly resurfaced
the day before we had to leave for the wedding like he’d just popped to the
shops for some milk instead of vanishing into a textless void.
‘Nowhere. At the old flat. I told you I was going there. Things were mad
at the shop because of the sales so I crashed with Niko both nights.'
‘You never told me!’ I’d screeched, hysteria bubbling dangerously below
the surface. ‘I would have remembered.’
‘You were on the phone to Amanda talking about some wedding stuff when I
told you – you nodded.’
‘You’re lying! I would’ve said something.’
‘I’m not lying, babe. How could you say that?’ He winked at me; his
puppy-dog eyes coupled with his lilting Welsh accent making it impossible for
me to get genuinely cross with him. ‘We live together – I’m hardly going to
sabotage all this, am I?’ He waved his hand round the dingy living room like it
was Versailles.
‘I suppose not.’ I really wanted to believe him. He was so good with
Grace, well apart from when she had a tantrum; then he would storm off. But to
be fair, I find her annoying when she’s behaving
like that. When it was good it was lovely to finally feel like a real family,
and maybe one day, when he had a proper job we would have a baby of our own…
‘Next time can you just make sure I’m listening before you think you’ve told me
something?’
‘Yes, anything for you, babe. You know that.’
Comments
Post a Comment