31 May

Earlier I was standing in the biblical passport queue at Schiphol Airport, weeping in plain sight. It’s not as if I’m not an experienced weeper-in-the-open. I hate it, I really, really do, but whatever strength or dignity or continence I used to have vanished along with my blinking sister, and now I cry at the drop of a hat. It’s usually frustration which does it but it can also just be pure unhappiness. I suppose it’s good that I have to keep an eye on my bag and on the rate at which the queue creeps along - it gives me something other than desperation and despair and rising panic to focus on. After a considerable amount of vacillation and misinformation, my Amsterdam to London flight has been cancelled and I am in the throes of accepting that I will not make an audition later today. If I’d known about the cancellation earlier I might have got on another flight, but now it’s too late and I need to accept it. But my little toddler’s heart is hurling her fists at all and sundry and I cannot rein her in. I’m so ashamed as I try to avoid eye contact from everyone else in the snaking queue, which is no mean feat, let me tell you.

I am trapped here and have to make the best of it and I know it, just as you’d know it if you were here in my place.

Forty years ago this evening - 31 May 2018 - my dad was knocked off his bike in the accident which would lead to his death. The day has never been here nor there to me really, and I’ve asked my mother on which date the accident took place over the years, maybe a handful of times. I messaged her yesterday to ask again, knowing it was near. I suspect it has a lot to do with my personal sense of failure that this 40-year anniversary is proving less fun than all the other intervening decades and years and weeks and minutes. I’m a middle-aged woman who should have metabolised this piece of bad luck by now, but instead I am a middle-aged woman who is freefalling through her own life, sometimes screaming at other people as I pass their floor, sometimes laughing like a maniac. And I am trying to work out where I went wrong, how this event proved so insurmountable for me, after all, I was only too aware that when it came to life without him, I was trapped there and had to make the best of it, and I knew it, just as you would have known if you had been there in my place. 

And maybe this is the best I could do, struggle to here, just about solvent enough and with no outstanding Court Orders against me. Maybe that’s a lot, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like the meagrest of ‘achievements’, if I can use that word. I rather think of it as existing and as having squandered a million opportunities and good fortunes which have lined my route.

I passed most of the afternoon in a queue for the helpdesk at the airport and I am now installed in a hotel near Schiphol Airport. There were no ways out for me, I am being put up by the airline. I should be asleep really as I have a flight at 7am tomorrow, but I’m awake. I’ll be asleep soon, some fitful thing should come. It usually does. I rather like the isolation and utter weirdness of the situation I find myself in on this anniversary, entirely alone and with no idea who I might talk to, and if I did talk to someone, what I might say. I’ve just eaten in the hotel buffet and there were couples and groups and families and me, the sore thumb of proceedings, as ever. There were some other people on their own, but they were chatting away on their phones to whoever there was at the end. I tried to look beautiful and enigmatic and not to cry.

I am utterly accustomed and totally weirded out by the fact that I live in a world my father would not have understood, full of internets and mobile phones and budget airlines. The carpet here, though, oh, the carpet, Dad would recognise that. I remember 1970s hotel The Shining carpets from a hotel stay or two when I was a kid, when we were flying to visit my grandparents. He’d understand that.

Being stuck in a hotel away from home all alone with a pretty unpleasant journey ahead of me tomorrow somehow seems as suitable as any other thing to be doing tonight. Apparently it was a glorious night, 31 May 1978, when Dad went for a bike ride to let off steam and never returned. Part of me wants to replicate that journey, to never go home, and it is a desire I have to resist, which I always have had to resist. I can spin on the wheels of wanting to return to before his accident, I can still spin on those wheels in my fevered breast of a brain, and then it relents somewhat. Maybe it'll be quieter tomorrow, my breast of a brain. 

That I am unintentionally not at home tonight and being baked alive in a budget hotel on the most beautiful of evenings seems as suitable as anything else. At least I have some privacy for the weeping now and for that I am extremely grateful.