Lost Apostrophe – the Diary of a Writing Group
by Rosalie Warren
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE TWENTY: February 2015 – Becca
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE TWENTY: February 2015 – Becca
Sam’s working. I’ve crept out of the house, though I know he won’t be pleased to discover I’m not there. He thinks I should stay at home – after all, I’m officially off work and he says it’s ‘immoral’ to be getting sick pay if I’m well enough to go out for a walk.
Sam is never ill. Or when he is, it’s the tiniest of colds, nothing you’d notice. He makes a big thing about soldiering on, unlike me. I get the most horrible colds, where my nose streams without stopping for four or five days – pretty much like a period really – and nothing I can take will staunch the flow.
‘Just sniff,’ he tells me. ‘Stop blowing your nose. Blowing makes it worse.’
I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help. My nose fills up and starts to drip uncontrollably. The mucus pours down into my throat and makes me cough and choke. I sneeze and sneeze and… Well, you get the idea. Nothing helps but time. In another four days, it will stop. Meanwhile I’m no use to neither man nor beast, as my gran would say. I get through at least three boxes of tissues in a day, and if I’m away from home there’s the problem of what to do with the soggy discarded ones – I need a big plastic carrier bag just to put them in. I’m much better to stay at home, and my boss understands, he really does – he’s seen me try to cope with a cold at work and he very reasonably doesn’t want me on the premises.
Wish Sam could experience, even just for a day, what it’s like to have one of my type of colds. Or a period, come to that. Or both at once, which has occasionally happened. Nightmare at both ends. Leaky Becca.
Not that what I have at present is a cold. Oh no. I only wish it was. This is something weird and horrible I’ve never had before. It’s like my self-hatred, which is never far away, has gathered itself up into a massive infected boil. The boil being me – vile, disgusting me. Sam agrees with this, of course. He’s always telling me how sloppy and messy and irritating and generally hopeless I am. That tiny deposit on the cooker top – I’d have removed it next time I cleaned the cooker, of course I would. Or he could have cleaned it off himself but no, oh no, that’s my job. I’m a nineteen-fifties wife, but without the daintiness and gracefulness they all have in the pictures of back then. No tiny waist for me. No New Elizabethan look. I look terrible in anything that has any shape. Not that I look any better in baggy clothes, but at least they don’t dig in and remind me how fat I am.
Anyway my self-disgust has built up to the point I can’t take it any more. I actually went to the doctor with a stomach ache but she asked me so many questions I ended up crying and telling her I hated myself. She’s given me anti-depressants. I’m officially depressed and on the waiting list for talking therapy.
Sam doesn’t know yet. What the hell is he going to think? Depression, in his eyes, is a condition of the weak, of people who can’t cope.
I might try not to tell him. I can probably hide my tablets, if I’m careful. I certainly don’t intend to take them. I’m terrified of what they’ll do to me.
So that’s why I’m escaping, just for half an hour, going for a walk. The sun has come out again and the sky is blue. I hate the sky for being blue. Not sure why… perhaps I feel like it’s mocking me. Or that everyone else will be happy, out there in the sun, except useless pathetic me.
Hope I don’t see anyone I know. Some of the older members of the writing group might be out for a stroll. I don’t think I can bear to talk to anyone. If anyone asks me how I am, I’ll break down, I know I will.
Oh God, there’s the French woman – Miri. Looking pale, mysterious and beautiful, as always. So slim, so serious. A proper French academic female. Even her duffle coat looks like designer. Why can’t I be her?
Should I cross over the road and say hello? Or call her name from here? She doesn’t seem to have seen me. Or maybe she has and she’s ignoring me, as people often seem to do these days. I can understand why. I never was a great conversationalist, and recently I’ve started getting brain freeze when I try to talk. That voice inside my head telling me that the thing I’m about to say is totally stupid, if not completely insulting and rude. Just wrong, in other words. Enough to stop you ever opening your mouth, like at the writing group and at work before I went off sick. You can’t say anything but you feel really bad not speaking, as though everyone’s looking at you.
No, I won’t do anything. Too late now, anyway. Wonder where she’s going? Probably to meet her boyfriend.
Those were the days. Before…
Though I sometimes ask myself – before what?
Sam is never ill. Or when he is, it’s the tiniest of colds, nothing you’d notice. He makes a big thing about soldiering on, unlike me. I get the most horrible colds, where my nose streams without stopping for four or five days – pretty much like a period really – and nothing I can take will staunch the flow.
‘Just sniff,’ he tells me. ‘Stop blowing your nose. Blowing makes it worse.’
I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help. My nose fills up and starts to drip uncontrollably. The mucus pours down into my throat and makes me cough and choke. I sneeze and sneeze and… Well, you get the idea. Nothing helps but time. In another four days, it will stop. Meanwhile I’m no use to neither man nor beast, as my gran would say. I get through at least three boxes of tissues in a day, and if I’m away from home there’s the problem of what to do with the soggy discarded ones – I need a big plastic carrier bag just to put them in. I’m much better to stay at home, and my boss understands, he really does – he’s seen me try to cope with a cold at work and he very reasonably doesn’t want me on the premises.
Wish Sam could experience, even just for a day, what it’s like to have one of my type of colds. Or a period, come to that. Or both at once, which has occasionally happened. Nightmare at both ends. Leaky Becca.
Not that what I have at present is a cold. Oh no. I only wish it was. This is something weird and horrible I’ve never had before. It’s like my self-hatred, which is never far away, has gathered itself up into a massive infected boil. The boil being me – vile, disgusting me. Sam agrees with this, of course. He’s always telling me how sloppy and messy and irritating and generally hopeless I am. That tiny deposit on the cooker top – I’d have removed it next time I cleaned the cooker, of course I would. Or he could have cleaned it off himself but no, oh no, that’s my job. I’m a nineteen-fifties wife, but without the daintiness and gracefulness they all have in the pictures of back then. No tiny waist for me. No New Elizabethan look. I look terrible in anything that has any shape. Not that I look any better in baggy clothes, but at least they don’t dig in and remind me how fat I am.
Anyway my self-disgust has built up to the point I can’t take it any more. I actually went to the doctor with a stomach ache but she asked me so many questions I ended up crying and telling her I hated myself. She’s given me anti-depressants. I’m officially depressed and on the waiting list for talking therapy.
Sam doesn’t know yet. What the hell is he going to think? Depression, in his eyes, is a condition of the weak, of people who can’t cope.
I might try not to tell him. I can probably hide my tablets, if I’m careful. I certainly don’t intend to take them. I’m terrified of what they’ll do to me.
So that’s why I’m escaping, just for half an hour, going for a walk. The sun has come out again and the sky is blue. I hate the sky for being blue. Not sure why… perhaps I feel like it’s mocking me. Or that everyone else will be happy, out there in the sun, except useless pathetic me.
Hope I don’t see anyone I know. Some of the older members of the writing group might be out for a stroll. I don’t think I can bear to talk to anyone. If anyone asks me how I am, I’ll break down, I know I will.
Oh God, there’s the French woman – Miri. Looking pale, mysterious and beautiful, as always. So slim, so serious. A proper French academic female. Even her duffle coat looks like designer. Why can’t I be her?
Should I cross over the road and say hello? Or call her name from here? She doesn’t seem to have seen me. Or maybe she has and she’s ignoring me, as people often seem to do these days. I can understand why. I never was a great conversationalist, and recently I’ve started getting brain freeze when I try to talk. That voice inside my head telling me that the thing I’m about to say is totally stupid, if not completely insulting and rude. Just wrong, in other words. Enough to stop you ever opening your mouth, like at the writing group and at work before I went off sick. You can’t say anything but you feel really bad not speaking, as though everyone’s looking at you.
No, I won’t do anything. Too late now, anyway. Wonder where she’s going? Probably to meet her boyfriend.
Those were the days. Before…
Though I sometimes ask myself – before what?
About the Author
Rosalie Warren was once a university lecturer, specialising in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. But her earliest love was books and stories, and since taking early retirement ten years ago she has been following her dream of writing and publishing. For details of her publications for adults and children, including science fiction and romantic suspense, see http://srg521.wix.com/mybooks and https://www.facebook.com/RosalieWarrenAuthor/
Rosalie has been an exile from Scotland for the past fourteen years, but still has many happy memories of the wonderful city of Edinburgh, where her children were born and raised, and of the equally amazing Dundee, where she worked for a further three years. Going back even further, she was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and regularly returns there to visit a seaside place not so very different from the town of Castlehaven in her serial.
Rosalie is also a qualified proofreader and editor and (under the name Sheila Glasbey) her editing services can be found at http://www.affordable-editing.com/
Rosalie has been an exile from Scotland for the past fourteen years, but still has many happy memories of the wonderful city of Edinburgh, where her children were born and raised, and of the equally amazing Dundee, where she worked for a further three years. Going back even further, she was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and regularly returns there to visit a seaside place not so very different from the town of Castlehaven in her serial.
Rosalie is also a qualified proofreader and editor and (under the name Sheila Glasbey) her editing services can be found at http://www.affordable-editing.com/