Why does the mental load descend with such force? Is it late middle age? The anxiety has smothered her libido, once as bounding as a Labrador pup. It has smothered lightness. No more What the Fuck, Give it a Go, Devil May Care, C’mon Let’s Have a Laugh et cetera, et cetera.
Where were all the full-blown feelings of her youth? Interrailing around Europe at seventeen, having regular epiphanies in Italian churches. Reading Where Angels Fear to Tread as she pulled into San Gimignano station, Tears for Fears through her headphones. The smell of Vidal Sassoon’s Wash & Go, its green bottle perched in plastic soap dishes of campervan showers. God, everything was miraculous then. Music! Literature! Frescoes! She fancied everyone at seventeen, as opposed to no one at forty-six.
It was the absence of weariness. She could sit on a pew in some preposterously gold-leafed church and think seriously about Lucy Honeychurch, and Isabel Archer, and Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda, so fully engaged with them that they might have been interrailing together in some unwieldy, crinoline-wearing troupe. Why couldn’t she live like that for ever? Why did one have to switch energy providers and set a mobile phone alert for bin day, only to find out you cannot set an alert because your phone storage is full, so you decide to pay for more storage (until you die), only to find you don’t know your password. By the time you retrieve your password, you are sixty-five and howling into the abyss.
It’s the children, she thinks. You can’t jack in your marriage because of the children. You can’t stick two fingers up to your job to go and tend orangutans in Borneo. You can’t forget to go food shopping for, like, three weeks. You can’t think fuck this, I fancy doing an MA in Classical Greek. You have to keep the sodding show on the sodding road. Weetabix at 6 a.m. whether you like it or not. Behind every meal is another meal. And can you imagine sitting across the table from some loathsome Internet date (who hasn’t half the charms of Mark Talbot, even on bin day) with your epic brow furrowed to the max, the Über-Furrow, and then looking at your watch and saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t get pissed and come to your place for a shag because I have to put the bins out tonight, otherwise the council won’t come back for a fortnight.’ Politicians so incompetent she can hardly bear to look.
No one replaces the lightbulbs, so they live in an ever-descending gloom.
It’s either the children or it is Death. It might well be Death: that shadow of a notion that you might be more than halfway through and this is all you’ve got, this is all the powder in your keg. New experiences? You’ve had ’em. Except cancer, and that might well be the one remaining new experience left to try. Each holiday a repeat of a previous holiday: Eurocamp sites where the plastic houses were just a smidgen too close together so she could gaze on happier couples from her Verandah of Bitterness. Doing crosswords on her phone (storage allowing).
The great variable of it all after forty-five: when the reaper might call. Will it be fifty? Sixty-two? Will people shake their heads momentarily, saying, ‘So young’ before going back to their online food order? Or will it be ninety-two, blind, deaf and gaga? Once you’re living after half time, it’s a gamble – when death is going to take you and whether it might be your own fault for not ‘eating clean’. Too many fags, not enough kale. Too much telly, not enough yoga. Sitting is the new smoking. Obesity is the new sitting. A scientist once told her the age of your death is set at your birth. If only we could know, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about it. Imagine spending your life chowing down on kale, only to find you’ve got ninety years of it to get through? If someone could just inform you, at maybe thirty, that you’ve got until sixty-eight to do everything, love everyone, set your affairs in order, have your affairs. If only we could be taken less by surprise by death. People in the past who went quietly mad losing child after child, lived cheek by jowl with death, less utterly astonished by it. Perhaps if it surrounded you like that, like a terrible, dank lake, you would take less umbrage at its random cruelties.
Must research ISAs, renew contents insurance, remember Thursday is ‘wear green to nursery day’, and take in a panoply of exotic fruit. Which diet to follow as she hurtles towards matronly? Embark on daily seven-minute fitness? Seven whole minutes though SO BORING! Which new holiday idea might be the least Not Fun, and just as they decide on a place and a date after approximately three years on the Internet, they check in with TripAdvisor, which shits on all their dreams with close-up shots of moulding shower trays.
Bring back the high street travel agent. Get rid of estate agents, but bring back travel agents. Someone out there ought to be a purveyor of joy rather than a peddler of worry.
She thinks of the song ‘Age of Aquarius’, but substitutes Anxiety.
At the GP they tested her iron levels.
‘I’m tired all the time. Like, I wake up tired,’ she told the nurse.
‘Forty-six-year-old women generally are tired because they’re doing everything,’ the nurse said, seemingly unable to summon much interest in her case.
She’s been out of the office most of the day on some dull cold-case interviews that yielded close to nothing. Still, it was an outing. Manon squints into the brightness, wrapping her scarf around her neck. It’s that time in the year when the coat has been dispensed with but, frankly, it’s freezing, hence the scarf. Her mobile starts ringing before she’s even at the end of the path. Bryony.
‘All right?’ says Manon.
‘You on your way in?’ asks Bri.
‘Yup, why? D’you want a coffee?’
‘No, McFuckface wants to see you.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
The new detective superintendent in charge of MCU and hence Manon’s über-boss, above Harriet but below the commissioner (replacing the regrettably deceased and thoroughly discredited Gary Stanton) is, drumroll, Glenda McBain.
Glenda McBainofMyLife.
Glenda McBlameGame.
The promotion had taken place during Manon’s maternity leave and according to pretty much everyone in the major crime unit, it was an over-promotion. What McBain lacked in policing acumen, she made up for in buzz words, trotting out references to social media, digital presence, and ‘blue sky thinking’ until the panic among the ageing interview panel was palpable. So the story doing the rounds in the canteen went, anyway. These senior officers, with their shiny buttons and epaulettes, were men of an age to smooth a physical newspaper across a kitchen table in order to keep abreast of current events. Word was that Glenda McPersonalGain had mentioned Facebook and Twitter, sticky content, and clickbait sufficient times to have them reaching for the Gaviscon. So terrified were they by her Internetty lexicon, that they ended up spluttering, ‘Well, she seems to have it covered,’ in relieved tones, hopeful they might never have to discuss it again.
Manon’s first run-in with Glenda McBain was her return to work interview, it being never too soon to fall out with your new boss.
Manon was returning to cold cases three days per week – a very feasible pattern in a department that was not driven by round the clock ‘live’ investigations, their victims usually having been dead for decades, so another few weeks wasn’t going to hurt. There was no middle-of-the-night responding, no sleepless first seventy-two hours like there was on MCU. Cold cases was the force’s cultural backwater, thick with officer plankton, and Manon was more than happy to be swimming in it. Pottering in, coffee in hand, and logging on for a spot of Internet shopping was precisely what she had in mind when she thought of work–life balance. Admittedly, however, the work lacked a certain grip. Excitement couldn’t be listed as part of her daily experience.
It made no discernible difference which days Manon worked, so she naturally chose Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Long weekends a go-go, much of it spent in bed with Teddy, cuddling, kissing his face and reading Dr Dog on a loop. These mornings would be all the more delicious in contrast to the workday scramble;