What was I saying. I am putting my face on for the second time this morning. My brow, my cheeks, my chin receding into the featureless landscape of the unguents. I am drawing on the eyebrows, which have largely vanished after years of preening. Hurrying this time. The sun has left the bathroom so I move, following a line of orange colouring marker on the skirting boards that dips and rises to our daughters’ old bedroom, where I bend awkwardly for a small, round mirror. I have found an eyelash on my cheek. I dab it with the end of a middle finger, holding it erect for a moment, then close my eyes, and make a wish, to please keep the aircraft in the air today. And blow as on a birthday candle.

I will have to find a new wish now, I am thinking, looking for the eyebrow pencil. Now I have retired from the airline, I could change the make-up routine. Try plum or lilac. I am looking around the dresser for the pencil I was holding a second ago, my annoyance only half drawn on as I look in the drawer of the nightstand.

Has my husband, sitting in front of the television, seen a pencil, I am asking on all fours, looking under the armchair. An eyebrow pencil, brown, about this long. What are you watching. Maybe I took it to one of the other mirrors, I am saying, letting the question trail off into the television’s applause. My husband, who retired from the welfare office a year ago but continues to dress in his office clothes and to rise at seven on weekdays, has fallen asleep in front of the game show, which means it is later than I thought.

When the face is a mess, as we say to juniors, the rest follows, things begin to slip. But a face put together feels no fear or tiredness or anger. Bright smiles hold the plane in the air, I am always saying.

I am looking around the bathroom, on the floor, on and around the sink. But unlike my husband, I do not lose my head when things disappear. I have come to accept that sometimes you are holding something and then it is gone. You are writing a list, you put the pen down and then the pen is gone. No matter how hard you look it is as if the pen had flown away. My husband says I have a talent for making his things disappear. It has become a source of despondence to my husband when I put things away and forget about them, which he says, is the same as deliberately hiding them. It is as if an entity living in our house were slowly moving things out of our reach. One day, my husband says, I will misplace him and it will be like falling through a hole in the world where at least, he says, he will be reunited with the charging cable and his reading glasses, the Blu-Tack and the good pen. But if my husband would let me finish, a while later when you are no longer thinking about pens but looking for the television remote, which has somehow fallen out of existence, it turns out you are actually holding the pen. There, in your other hand, as in a magic trick. And so there is no reason to get angry, I assure my husband, for though the remote is lost, is not the pen regained, and if something must first be lacking, is not everything found that once was lost.

I am looking around the sink in case the pencil decided to reappear when I had my back turned. And then my phone starts ringing. Our eldest daughter is calling as I search for the reading glasses without which I am always stabbing the wrong part of the phone and declining people’s phone calls. Please wait, please hold on, I am saying, as I hurry down the stairs, looking around the catchall, the pockets of my coat, letting my hand fall to my side in mock despair when the ringing stops.

I am standing for a moment in front of the game show where contestants open boxes. Whatishecalled is speaking through a red telephone to an entity who dispenses cash prizes, and because of Jenny from Manchester’s enormous gums, I have forgotten what I was looking for. Still, I am turning over the sofa cushions so that by looking I may remember what was forgotten, maybe under the sofa or somewhere around the room, my hands on my hips, so that no one will say that I wander into rooms forgetting what it was I was doing.

Everyone is praying for Joan from Middlesex who has selected the box in front of Andrew from Cardiff. The number of the box is the same as her son’s birthday and she is holding to her lips a small stuffed tiger that once belonged to him, its ears and stripes worn with fondling.

I am worming my hand under my husband in case he is sitting on whatever it was I was looking for, until finally I take my glasses off, put them on my head and drop my arms in defeat, letting go of whatever it was that was probably nothing, leaving the room with the same assurance I have learned from years of smiling into the distance, even as the oxygen masks are dangling and the duty-free is rolling along the aisles, and clings to me wherever I go, obliging and never complaining, impeccable in every detail, appearing always busy, unperturbed by strange noises and sudden drops in altitude.

As I climb the stairs, I think is it possible that I did not lose anything. As when I leave the house with the feeling that something is missing or forgotten or undone, but after checking all my pockets or turning back find that everything is where it was. Maybe you cannot remember, because no one can remember what they have not forgotten, I am thinking, putting away the suitcase from the France retirement holiday. My husband insists he will put the suitcase away, but it has just been lying on the floor of our bedroom since we got back a week ago, reminding me of this holiday he thoughtfully organised to celebrate my retirement and which I would like now to forget. The whole time he called me Madame, for he knows I love France and everything French. He said I would never pick up another suitcase as long as he lived, but I wish he was less rough with our luggage and with things in general which, he says, are not made of glass, doing a mincing impression of a French homosexual, but was in fact a retirement present from the airline and now the retractable handle is broken and you have to bend down to wheel it in front of you over the quaint but uneven cobbles of Chapeau, causing him to sweat and gasp in front of the French, who never gasp or sweat. I wish my husband would close his mouth when we are on holiday, and not stick his tongue out at the slightest effort. I wish he would stop breathing in front of women on deckchairs, in front of children in swimwear who cannot help watching the spectacle of my husband eating ice cream cones. Still, it is important to me that he performs these gestures, such as carrying the luggage, showing that he thinks of me, and that I continue to exist when I am not in the room.

Before I put the case in the attic I will use it to store the summer clothes and some things I have found in the closet, like the cushion shaped like a fish which admittedly was very funny at the time but now you do not know what to do with, and some lewd souvenirs from Chapeau which my husband thinks are extremely funny and wanted to give to people and which I put away when we came back and we have not been able to find since. I am moving some old video cassettes that we have been keeping in the girls’ bedroom to the suitcase lying on the bed.

I am sitting on the small single bed opposite the bunk beds in our daughters’ bedroom, young men with hair gel and abdominals looking on dreamily as I leaf through some old copybooks from a cardboard box that once contained an under-desk bike exerciser and now is full of all kinds of rubbish, sports-day medals, communion medals, ribbons, CDs, spare memorial cards from our daughter’s funeral, things you do not even know what they are. The orange marker that goes around the skirting boards comes into the room, loops over the window frame, runs up the bunk bed and swirls and expands under the top bunk where it begins or ends, and now leaps on to the copybook where the youngest of the three has done a crude drawing of her father which, you must admit, looks like the male member smiling at you with bird’s wings and flaming orange hair. Our eldest, it must be, has written, I am doing your hair the colour of the holy spirit in quotes and the date.

Hmm, I am thinking, wandering out on to the landing. I am like a coin that has not yet fallen on one side or the other. But then I start moving towards the bathroom, where I catch myself unfinished in the mirror. I had to put my make-up on twice this morning because I cried all over myself like a papier-mâché head left out in the rain and now I am behind on the day.

I almost never cry, never once went on strike. But this morning I called our eldest daughter, whom I am usually careful not to disturb, about something I cannot now remember. Now, as I apply the contours of the nose, heightening the cheekbones, foreshortening the top half of my massive forehead, lining the airline’s stipulated red smile, I am thinking about how I started shaking with tears this morning and had to hold on to the kitchen counter as if to stop myself from falling. I am remembering the long rope of weeping that reached almost to the floor, until by the fourth or fifth ring of the phone I suddenly fell quiet, like a baby that has cried itself out, and whatever it was fell right out of my head and I hung up before our daughter could answer. I am taking the pencil from the edge of the sink to complete the ponderous expression, thinking what it could have been that I forgot. No trace of the storm that carried my face away, only the quiet optimism which you feel on some level is all that is keeping the plane in the air.

Pulling the shopping trolley behind me on the pavement, I wish I did not have to experience the tedium of the walk to the Lidl supermarket. It is mostly pebble-dash, except for the statue of the Virgin which they have had to put behind chicken wire to stop children throwing stones at her. Once you are in the Lidl supermarket it is not too bad but then there is the return which is arguably worse, where you pass the Virgin again, missing her hands and nose, baring her terrifying wire armature, where the plaster has fallen away. Sometimes I wish the shopping could be done as in a montage. Much of life, I feel, should be as in a montage. The effort and tedium edited out, the wheelless, seatless bicycle tied to the lamp post edited out, the young men on bicycles, and the wet mattress clinging to a lamp post edited out, leaving only the nice parts, and maybe some light piano music. Surely they must be working on something like it. How is it that one minute you are on the pavement going to the Lidl supermarket sighing at the eternity of the pebble-dash and then somehow you have returned, and where does the time between the one and the other go. Does it fall out of existence, I am asking my husband as I survey the road between the curtains of the front-room window, or does it remain, not in an actual room, not in a literal room, but somewhere, I am saying, sucking my teeth at the smear on the shoulder of my blouse, where a series of beige chins accumulate. My hand falls with a despondent slap of my thigh at the stain on the fun and different pineapple blouse where I must have caught my face this morning.

I am wetting my finger on the way to the kitchen, wiping urgently at the stain which you must address as soon as possible, like mutinous junior flight staff or an unfamiliar lump. Quick, the fun and different pineapple blouse is new, its jumble of pineapples is very me. Quick, I am thinking, rubbing harder. Wiping the pineapples with some soap, I notice that my husband has pulled sheets out of the Lidl supermarket magazine and laid them in front of the wall where he has started painting over some orange marker. When my husband retired he started seeing orange marker all around the skirting boards of our house. For a second the shadow of what I was crying about opens its arms to me and I try to hold the memory by rubbing harder with the soap and sticking my tongue out a little. Our daughter died a long time ago and you feel it is okay to paint over these things now, to get new appliances even if they have orange marker on them where our dead daughter tried to colour everything in the so-called colour of the holy spirit. I am doing a sad weeping face and thinking of our dead daughter in case that was what it was this morning, but then the kettle grumbles to a boil. I do not remember putting the kettle on but it has a cup next to it with a teabag inside, which I drown in the water. Then I go back to rubbing the blouse with the soap, looking around at the floor in case the tears are there waiting to be cried again. I am trying to remember the first two notes of this memory which is like a song that will not come back or a bird that has flown back out of a window, leaving me in the hallway, thinking, where am I going, until the hot tea I am holding takes me, as though by the hand, into the front room where it is set before my husband.

Andrew who works at an Argos warehouse is weeping and has to be comforted by Jill from Northampton and Noel from Antrim, and eventually, everyone joins in to comfort him, including Joan, the woman with the stuffed toy, because of how guilty Andrew feels about the contents of the box that was randomly assigned to him. I am standing for a moment, hands on my hips, sucking my teeth and shaking my head, then turn to the door and go upstairs where I had started packing.

But I must have drifted off. Like when I am reading and pages later I have no idea how I got here, in this woman’s body, sitting on the lid of the toilet, under the open window, eating biscuits as the cars on the motorway rock back and forth in the rain like the sea.

The way I have drawn my eyebrows is as if I were thinking very hard about something, but actually I was gazing into space remembering the restaurant in Chapeau when he insisted on shaking the chef’s hand. He had to congratulate the chef on the food. He got angry because I would not try the mussels. Kept saying how talented the chef was, and I had to try and calm him down. People looking, waiters asking him to stay seated, a fight almost breaking out. It comes back in waves of clenching embarrassment. Then, later, watching him apologise to everyone profusely with a French accent to make them understand, tears in his eyes. My husband is always crying and saying sorry. Before leaving, I went to the bathroom, and when I came out he was doing his magic routine, his expression full of wonder, theirs polite and embarrassed, a napkin folded into a dove perched on his arm and then vanishing.

I am wearing one of the dingier bras and still almost-skin-coloured underpants that sink into rolls of fat like bread dough, thin blue veins scrambling like fireworks and petering out over bristling thighs, painted toes staring back like fat pigs from a nursery rhyme. The biscuits I am eating come from behind the plastic bath panel that my husband has still not sealed to the tub. This is where I hide the biscuits from my husband but I have no memory of pulling out the plastic bath panel or only vaguely, or it was a different time.

I was about to remember what I was doing here, but our eldest daughter is calling again and by the time the glasses are on the end of my nose and I am holding the phone, close at first, then farther away, close and far away, back and forth like this, taking aim with a red fingernail and the tip of my tongue sticking out, our daughter has hung up.

Hmm, I am thinking, trying to match the puzzled expression of the eyebrows with a pursing of the mouth, what is the kettle doing on the floor.

Suddenly, I am remembering to lock the door in case my husband comes in, asking why am I sitting naked on the toilet, eating biscuits and so on in the middle of the afternoon.

But the door is already locked.

My husband and I never lock the door though, I am thinking, eating another biscuit, thinking what was I doing in the upstairs bathroom.

Suddenly my irises widen. My heart flutters. But it turns out to be nothing and I sit back down again, shaking my head at myself and this stupid idea I just had.

Back on the toilet seat, I notice the orange marker again, this time in the grouting. Our four-year-old’s most concerted effort with the marker took place behind the television which we moved to cover it up. This meant adjusting the sofa which we forgot had been covering up another spot that she had been trying to fill in with the holy spirit, but which, it turned out, was roughly the shape of the CD rack, and then when CDs were no longer a thing, became a cheese plant.

I am listening to the vascular throb of the television downstairs, wondering what my husband is watching. Soon it will be time for my programme, and then I realise, with sudden brutal clarity, why it was I came up here. I slap myself on the forehead but when I stand up and examine this new realisation, it turns out to be the first realisation, in all its abject stupidity, for the second time.

Soon it will be time for my favourite programme about a depressed English detective. It is getting cold and dark and quiet in the bathroom and I wish I would stop eating the biscuits which are beginning to turn my stomach. I know it was a stupid idea, but still, I cannot help feeling hopeful about this idea I once considered extremely stupid. I am standing at the mirror, taking the hairbrush from the edge of the sink, and brushing my hair. I am brushing my hair in case that was why I came up here but how, I am thinking, can the brushing account for the kettle or the nudity or the lock on the door or the biscuits. Still, I continue to brush my hair in case it takes a while to take effect.

Our eldest daughter is calling but I just remembered why I locked myself in. You become so accustomed to the shouting and crying and recriminations in this house that it becomes a kind of routine in the middle of which you drift off listening to the hush of the motorway or thinking of Chapeau. Some things you do so many times, I always tell my juniors, you can forget you are doing them. I could work through an entire flight, thinking about something else, or perform the safety demonstration, sometimes thinking nothing at all, and have almost no memory of the flight taking place, or the memory of that flight would be the memory of some earlier flight. So now, I cannot remember the precise details of this argument with my husband, but which has all the signs of many previous arguments and is the only way to explain the lock on the door, which he could easily break through but is held back from for fear of damaging the frame. And though I cannot remember all the particulars of this argument, the whole situation is very distressing, which is why I console myself with the biscuits and keep boiling water to throw on my husband should he attempt to tear through the door’s flimsy locking mechanism.

That is why I cannot answer my phone. There is a lot our eldest daughter does not know about her father that her mother keeps behind closed doors. Soon my husband will come out of the front room and call my name from the bottom of the stairs. I will refuse to come out of the bathroom, and may well have to leave my husband for good this time. After a minute or so he will lose patience and go back to the television. Then he will rise from the sofa with something that has occurred to him, stirring things up again, and so on, until, at the end of a long silence, the stairs will ache under my husband’s weight. I will refuse to open the door and will not believe any of my husband’s words which are empty. What has pushed me to the edge this time and so many times is how routine the whole thing has become. The routine has changed and adapted in minor ways just as the in-flight safety demonstration changes and adapts, but always it is the same argument in essence, just as the planes are always largely the same. My voice then will crack with weeping, screaming at him to not come any closer and so on, I have boiling water and so forth. I cannot do it any more, for the last time I cannot do it.

It will not be long now, I am thinking, following the television for the time. My husband will let himself slide to the foot of the door, whispering there, as if our daughters were still here to listen. Who are you whispering for, I sometimes shout angrily. One minute my husband is shouting, the next minute he is whispering. But for whom, I ask, screaming. Then after a long silence it will be his turn to start crying, saying over and over again how sorry he is. My husband never used to cry when the children were around. Not until they were gone did he start crying, wearing you down until you drift off and eventually have no choice but to let him in.

It will not be long now, I am thinking. Because I am in love with France and everything French, my husband always made crêpes for our daughters after our fights, sometimes bringing a plate under the stairs where the two youngest would hide from the screaming. After the girls were gone, it was the only way we knew to bring things to a close and I am always careful to have ingredients, in case of an argument, always the same or more or less the same argument, usually on a Sunday, the only chance work ever afforded. I am not looking forward to the screaming, which is always exhausting, yet even now I cannot help smiling at the thought of the crêpes and the mystery of a dead body showing up next to a lake in Devon or somewhere. Eventually, I will unlock the door and sit back on the floor, eyes turned away from my husband, who, after a pause, will slide over to me, rest his head in my lap and cry as we listen to the lullaby of the motorway. I will stroke his hair until he goes quiet and later give him the rest of the biscuits, usually two-thirds to three-quarters, letting what is said pass into silence.

My husband thinks I will not notice that there are fewer biscuits behind the bath panel. He thinks I will not miss one or two, sometimes three or even four biscuits, which he sneaks out of the bathroom. He thinks I do not know he has found the hiding place, but I have always known. Imagine, I am thinking, how rapidly our marriage would have dissolved without the biscuits and ingredients for the crêpes, and if I let my husband do the shopping, what surreal assortment my husband would come home with if he was allowed to go to the supermarket. It is pointless sulking if there are fewer biscuits than usual. He should have taken less time to make things up to me, and in the first place, he should not be eating biscuits. I am shaking my head at my husband who thinks that by going unnamed, by remaining unspoken, the biscuits will not affect his diabetes. It is because of the diabetes that I must hide the biscuits, which, officially, are reserved for me, and are meant to be a secret, and, therefore, do not, strictly speaking, exist.

Pff, I am thinking, in the soft pink dusk of the bathroom, the water in the kettle could not burn anyone any more. What is going on in the mind of my husband. He does not call my name so I can shout back at him to leave me alone, to not come in here, and so on. I am worrying now about what he will say about all the biscuits I have eaten, even though he is the one who should have come to the door sooner, broken down in tears so we could move on. But instead I must eat my husband’s biscuits which I do not even enjoy.

My phone lights the bathroom like a tea light in a church and goes dark again. A smile is forming on my lips even as I am sucking my teeth, for though it is always the same excuses, the same promises and twisting of words, I am looking forward to leaving the bathroom. But then it turns out to just be our daughter and my heart falls out of the sky.

Is it possible he is acting as if nothing happened, as if I had just been attending to the ordinary concerns of the bathroom, brushing the toilet bowl, changing the dried flowers in the ornamental dish, watching the television as if he had no idea of an argument, what do you mean, love, what did I do, what the hell are you talking about.

I am screaming. Usually, I would also be crying, but it is hard to get the tears going when you do not remember what caused them. The vein in the side of my head is swelling and throbbing, though I am held back by a kind of self-awareness and my heart is not really in it. The room itself swells and throbs with shouting, until there is no air left in my lungs, only a faint fading ring as the bathroom falls quiet again.

My husband knows it is Sunday and that my programme will be on soon yet he will not take responsibility. He does not care that I am in the bathroom screaming and, as far as he knows, also weeping. My husband, with whom I only stayed because of the children, is finally driving me to leave him forever. Now that our children have gone, each in their separate ways, finally, it is time to think about myself. Finally, I will pack a suitcase and I will leave forever, I have decided. It is the only way to put down the biscuits and get out of the bathroom, to get as far away as I can from my husband.

I am making sure to leave everything as it was before I came in, closing the window, pushing the plastic bath panel back into the tub with all of the weight of the years. The weight of the years makes a lot of noise scraping the floor tiles and I have to kick it into place a couple of times. Though in some ways it is true that I have not been crying, I wipe the make-up away from my face with the backs of my hands. I am emptying the kettle into the toilet and washing my face in the sink, rubbing it until it is red and swollen and ugly. Sighing for courage, I take a square of paper, drop it in the toilet and press the bigger of the two flushes.

I am standing, broken, in the doorway of our bedroom, for the last time. After forty years of trying, I am finally leaving my husband once and for all, just as our eldest daughter always said I should have but which I could not for one reason or another. Sometimes I think our daughter failed to leave her husband because of my failure to leave mine. The suitcase is waiting on the bed, where I started packing earlier but was probably stopped by my husband. Probably it is getting a bit cold for the dresses and flip-flops, I am thinking, I do not know what use I will have for a cushion shaped like a fish that beats its tail when there are batteries. Maybe to raise my spirits on dark days, I remember. That is why I have taken the children’s old copybooks. The dresses, the fun and different pineapple blouse, and my passion for France, express who I am deep, deep down, far, far in.

I am slowly descending the stairs with the kettle and the suitcase and all of the years living with my husband. My steps are heavy and I am holding the bannisters as if weak with the years and the weeping. For though I am broken, I have not forgotten what my husband has done which at present I cannot quite remember. I am looking between the hinges of the sitting-room door, where I can see him pretending to sleep. I should have held my breath on tiptoe, I am thinking. Then I would have caught him watching, smiling at the television and moving back into position the way children do when you come back in the room. But I gave him too much warning, and now I will have to leave my husband for good this time.

My phone is ringing but I will be speaking to our daughter later when I need to find a place to stay. It will only be a couple of nights. I do not want to trouble our daughter, whose house is cold and dimly lit, you always feel you are in her way, and by then things will have sorted themselves out with my husband, who is not nearly as bad as our daughter likes to paint him.

But what was I saying. I am taking flour from the cupboard and eggs and milk from the fridge. I cannot remember when I first started taking boiling water upstairs, I am thinking, looking up at the time. Probably it dates back to when I did not know my husband as well as I know him today, like a safety protocol you have to point out for legal reasons but which no one really takes seriously any more. I am sifting the flour for my husband, making a little well at the bottom of the mixing bowl, to save us both some time. Pff, I am thinking, probably our daughter will take it as another reason to blame everything on her father. You cannot tell your daughter anything about her father without her telling you to leave your husband who has worked hard and has earned a break from her constant relitigation of the past. Our eldest daughter has an opinion on everything and uses these so-called thoughts as ways to not think about her own failures, her own husbands and children. I am heating the pan, looking up at the time. Children have their own individual characters, which you cannot set at the feet of their parents. Our daughter will see that eventually some of her children will move to Florida, some will die, while others will always be crying and complaining and relitigating. There is nothing you can do about these things, I want to tell our daughter.

I have made my husband’s crêpes and we are watching my programme about English people winding up dead in enviable homes. There is lots of exposed stone and wisteria in this one and the investigator is particularly ambivalent about his job. His house, you can tell from his clothes and manner, is not as nice as the deceased’s.

Every so often I tap my husband, asking is that not Whatishecalled, who plays the Youknowwhat, I am whispering behind the screen of my hand, in Thesomething, which my husband always confuses with Theotherone.

I am withdrawing my hand from my husband, who pretends to be asleep because of something I must have said in the past which I cannot remember but which in its context was probably justified, and so I move to the other armrest. Maybe I will remind my husband that he snores but we are no longer speaking. At least now you can follow what is going on without a running commentary from my husband, even if what is going on is not as good as you remember.

I am drawing the curtains of the front room. I am taking my plate to the kitchen where I accidentally break wind, which I worry will make me sound cheerful instead of angry for the things my husband has said, which were far worse than anything I said. I am standing for a moment in the doorway, watching my husband in case I catch him smiling or taking a biscuit. He is not moving now but you can tell he was just a moment before, like junior flight staff going quiet when senior flight staff enter a room. Please turn the television off at the wall when you come to bed, I am asking politely.

I was going to unpack the suitcase after the crêpes, but now I will have to leave it in front of the bedroom so I am ready to leave him first thing in the morning. It is too late to leave my husband today and I have not spoken to our daughter about arrangements yet.

I am turning on to my side, away from his half of the bed, as close as I can to my edge without falling off, and letting one out. I have rolled myself in the duvet so he will not have any. I do not want him to touch me. I am closing my eyes, floating on tides of murmured television washing back and forth through the door, wondering in the warm vascular darkness what must I have said for him not to speak to me. I do not want to stay at our daughter’s house, whose dog’s name and gender you are always supposedly getting wrong. Admittedly, it is not unusual for one of us to take it this far, though packing a suitcase is usually enough to end it. Once I took it a step further and, after packing my bag, said goodbye to the children, lying that I had to go back to work, and the two youngest wept and hung on to my ankles and I parked on the other side of the block for a few hours, eating chocolate from an expired advent calendar. I did the shopping and, after a probationary silence, he made crêpes and the two youngest came out of their hiding places. The four-year-old wet with tears and my husband making the dove disappear.

And when I open my eyes, the sun is wincing in the curtains. My husband is up. His pillow cold to the touch, his half of the mattress empty, and the television already on. I am hoping he will not try to talk to me. He forgets that mornings are like jet lag for me, and then he complains that he told me something and that I forgot, even though I told him. I told him I am not there in the mornings.

I am dead weight. I lower myself down the stairs, one step at a time, shuffle to and fro in the kitchen until the water has boiled and lean against the counter, zoning out at a nest of orange marker I am noticing on the refrigerator, unspooling itself around the skirting boards and on to the dial of the washing machine. Since retiring I have started noticing things, primarily in the mornings, like the three freckles on the back of my husband’s ear which I swear were not there before. We had to move the fridge around to hide our four-year-old’s attempt to fill in this blank that resides in things. I am going to pour hot water from the kettle into a mug but I am already holding a mug, hot and beige and burning my lips.

I am putting my make-up on though I thought I remembered doing it already. I am putting the clothes from the suitcase back into the dresser, reminding myself to find something with which to take them to the attic, leaving the suitcase next to the bed for my husband to put away. I am not sure what I was doing in the front room but there is always something you can be getting on with while you remember so I am dusting the picture frames on the mantelpiece and around the retirement card which reads Bonne Voyage. I cannot help smiling at this as I dust, and at the kind words of my former colleagues, who I thought did not like me but perhaps just thought I was being French. People at work somehow got it in their heads that I liked France, and would use French phrases with me. I have no idea where they got this or who they could have mistaken me for. Friends and relatives also started working under this assumption, I remember, burning my lips, gazing out the front-room window. And eventually, my husband followed. I was always missing Christmas but I would come home to a lot of French-themed gifts and it seemed impolite to say anything, and eventually, it became a part of who I am, like the fun and different pineapple blouse, which it is true has something French about it. Sometimes I think I have gotten tired of France, tired of all the French-themed decor in our home, but actually it is that I never liked France. It is easy to forget that I have never cared much for the French.

What are you watching, I am asking my husband, who has fallen asleep in front of the antiques programme. Is it the antiques you are watching.

I am thinking we should get a new refrigerator, I am telling my husband, the old one works but probably it is time to get rid of it now.

My husband is wearing black leather shoes, a blue chequered short-sleeved shirt, grey flannel trousers open at the fly that bunch three centimetres down from the belt buckle. His head is cocked back, his mouth open, showing its glistening pinks, off-whites and reds. His tie is open and some of the buttons of his shirt have popped off showing some of his chest. One of your shoelaces is loose, I am saying, sucking my teeth, except that there is a knot where you can see he lost his patience and started pulling like a maniac. I am kneeling by my husband’s shoe, trying to undo the knot but it is no use. I feel like crying at this knot in my husband’s shoelace.

I am turning off the television. I am putting the television remote in my husband’s shirt pocket as a joke about me always disappearing the television remote. I am caressing his thin, white hair and putting a throw over his knees, tucking him in, kissing him on the head.

I am standing, thinking what I will do next. I am opening the window to let the stale air out. Our daughter is calling but I cannot answer, unfortunately, due to the hoover, which is almost completely drowning out the ringing. I am not as careful with the hoover attachment around my husband’s feet as I am around the furniture. Sorry, I am saying to my husband when it hits his foot. And again a second time.

I am catching my face in the glass of the picture frames. I have not done a great job of the eyebrows today, I am thinking, which look startled as if by something coming this way. I cannot always explain the placement of my eyebrows from one day to the next.

I am looking out at the road from the front window. I dreamed, I am telling my husband, I was flying, but the controls were written in French. Anyway, I am saying, flinching at the tea, though it is basically cold, flinching as I suck it in, as if it was burning hot, and scowl at the road from the heat of the tea. A sudden downpour of children’s voices, screaming, school shoes smacking the pavement, a flash of coats and school bags, and the dead silence they leave behind them, like litter.

I am crouching under the window of the sitting room to avoid detection by our eldest daughter. Now and then you can hear the flimsy, metallic letter flap clearing its throat, her voice alternating with her daughter’s and her husband’s, Whatishecalled. No, not Whatishecalled, that is what we called the first one. Thenewone. Eventually, a key starts turning in the lock.

Our daughter is giving me a hug, then our granddaughter, whose name I am supposedly always getting confused with my youngest daughter, and I smile affably at Thenewone who says Bonjour. Our daughter is asking me something but I hold a finger to my lips, gesturing to our granddaughter that my husband is sleeping in the front room. Our daughter is asking how I am and I take the coats. She tried calling a few times but I have to strain to hear what she is saying, cupping my ear, and she is speaking so low that I simply agree, smiling at Whatishecalled, Thenewone, who is quite handsome and likes to say things in French to me. France is my thing. I am winking at him and make a drinking-tea-from-a-cup gesture while orienting us to the kitchen.

I am explaining to Thenewone about the parking disc as the tea brews, and to be careful of his tyres. Watch your tyres do not get stabbed, I am telling him, with a stabbing motion. Our daughter says I called her yesterday morning and she was worried because I was not answering the phone, but I do not have any parking discs, I am sorry to tell our daughter’s husband whom I am careful not to name in case I confuse him with the first husband, Whatwashecalled. I am offering him one of the biscuits my husband did not finish last night. I am showing our granddaughter the card I got from work. Not everyone makes it to the end, I am telling her. One colleague, years back, I am saying, laughing, after years in the company started panicking during the safety demonstration that there was nothing under our feet, and began struggling to breathe, shaking with tears and holding on to a bit of panelling as if she might fall. Haha, I am saying. She was never able to fly after that, I am laughing. Not once did I go on strike, I am telling our granddaughter. My girls always hit their targets. Where is our daughter, I am asking Thenewone, getting our daughter’s name confused with our other daughters and then my sister and my mother until finally, I get the right one. Please, I am telling him, with a hand on his arm, do not leave valuables visible in the car. I am winking and smiling at him, nodding at something he is saying, and start pouring milk, remembering how once when I came home from work our four-year-old managed to kill herself with a Lidl shopping bag. This was especially depressing as people did not really go to Lidl at the time. People forget that it was embarrassing to be seen at Lidl, to have German-labelled gherkins or biscuits, as this meant you were poor and shopped from bins, as we used to say. Their biscuits are very good though. My husband, who you know, I am saying to Thenewone, had to break down the door of the bathroom and when he got in the room was empty, as if the four-year-old had flown away. There and then not there, created and uncreated. Actually she was at the foot of the house outside, I am saying, shaking my head disapprovingly. The bag was tied to a string, I am saying, tied under her armpits in a sort of parachute. Now it is perfectly acceptable to shop in Lidl. Everyone does. I am trying to think of something else to say to our daughter’s husband in the front room where his wife is having some kind of meltdown. Still, I am saying, I find the bags a bit depressing so I usually bring a shopping trolley.

For a second I was worried I had forgotten the purse I usually take for the shopping, its weight missing from my left coat pocket, but actually this is normal as I am standing next to a coffin laid on a pair of trestles in an alley of the cemetery, with our daughter, and Thenewone and their daughter and others. I am beginning to notice a certain pattern with our children. Though we have three daughters, it is always the same daughter I have the least to say to who is always calling or linking arms with me, looking mournfully at me, or rubbing my back. Our daughter in Florida is sorry she could not make it, because of the dogs, which you have to say is fair enough, but sent a wreath. How true to life that the daughter I have the most in common with, the one I have the most to say to and would welcome a phone call from at any time, is the one who jumped out the bathroom window. And the daughter I have the second most in common with, who feels like an old friend you have drifted away from but still welcome a catch up with from time to time, at least is not dead, but still is very far away, has children who sound American, and almost never calls. And that finally, the daughter I have nothing to say to, the one who has nothing but the most trivial, empty things to say because she never travels and just stays on her estate, a couple of estates from here where they have exactly the same things happening, is, contrary to the first two, always calling me, and calling round to our house, and at the most inopportune times, when I am holding more things than I have hands or when I am trying to remember something perching its weightless anxious body on my shoulder and that the slightest movement will scare away. She scares it away.

The man in charge of the ceremony is wearing a black suit and white shirt and asks if anyone would like to say a word. He makes you feel awkward, this man, that you did not dress better for the occasion, or are not sad enough and do not have poignant words to say. At least he is not a priest, I am thinking. You have to say, looking at this man, that the country has come far. There is some awkward looking around at our feet, some holding of breath, clenching of jaws. A cousin of my husband is about to say something but closes his mouth again when the man moves on to the next bit. I want to laugh at my husband’s cousin, who as soon as he opens his mouth someone else is talking over him. The officiant is unfolding a sheet of paper from his trouser pocket and begins to read a poem. You have to wonder what else is in that pocket and what else that hand was holding today. A bus lurches past and I am wondering what number. I am standing the way people do, waiting for their luggage to come around. Our daughter keeps sniffling. I wish she would blow her nose but I do not want her to start relitigating the past.

Finally, the young men who were hanging around in a corner somewhere hurry solemn expressions back on to their faces and mount the coffin on to their shoulders. They too make you feel underdressed. There is a moment where the coffin looks like it might slip but coffins never slip. One of them has a stud in his ear. He is probably thinking about sex, I am thinking. My husband’s cousin tries to rub my back but my daughter gets there first and he has to make it look natural as we look into the carpeted rectangle in the earth. Then, all of a sudden, I feel light with panic, as if I was falling or made of paper. I am digging around my pocket for the keys to the house, which are in the left pocket where I keep them. Then I think that I have lost my phone but it is in the right pocket. Our daughter, who is crying, is looking at me as if to ask what is it, and I am thinking that I have lost it, lost it forever, but then I remember that I am holding it, the umbrella, and wave her away.

Photograph by Eliza Bourner, Golden Hour, 2020