Melissa Kite

With families chatting in the seats around me, a young girl knitting across the aisle, I gripped the arm rests. I’m not a good sailor, so as I stared out at a flat calm sea, I went through a version of the same ritual I do when I’m on a plane: I figured that if I never took my eyes off what was beneath me and ahead of me, that would make it safe. I texted the builder boyfriend, a keen yachtsman, to say I did not understand how anyone could go on a cruise. All that sea for miles. What was there to look at? I drove in a dream alongside my own land, looking to the right of me thinking: ‘All this!’ To my utter astonishment, a circle appeared in the water just beneath my window and a head popped out. Somehow, I was seeing a dolphin by accident.

‘We’re in the living room with a roaring fire, there’s not a sound for miles, it’s wonderful,’ said the builder boyfriend, phoning from Ireland. I was lying on the bed of a budget hotel room in Surrey, watching TV and eating a packet of crisps. I leapt up. ‘Are the dogs OK?’ I asked, thrilled to hear his voice. ‘They’re curled up next to me…’ The line cut off. The phone reception at the Irish house is minimalist. There’s no wifi until we have a satellite installed. That morning, when he phoned to say he was there safely, I had to make do with a quick blast of the spaniels barking with delight as they ran around the rambling house. I had waved them off from the hotel a day earlier, the BB at the wheel of the pick-up truck.

The hatchet-faced woman who shouted at me pulled out her lipstick and sat reapplying it during the meeting. The pretty young girl next to her took out a nail file and sat filing her nails, as people shared. She was wearing see-through, skin-tight, skin-coloured leggings and a pair of six-inch wedged boots. I sat opposite them in the church hall and brooded. This used to be a support group but after 20 years of going it no longer feels like I am getting support. Lately, I feel worse when I come out. The woman with the stern face screeched at me at another meeting recently when I tried to speak up for my friend, the bricklayer, who had been texted and told not to come again. When I asked why, she and the other women in the room shouted me down, and I had to leave.

For a few blissful days I became ensconced in a room at the Premier Inn, with no fixed abode. I was not a property owner. I had no responsibilities. I was free. This wondrous state of near-vagrancy was only until the purchase of my house in Ireland went through, but I enjoyed it all the same. I got the better end of the deal, taking the king-sized bed in the budget hotel room while the builder boyfriend slept in his pick-up truck with the dogs, or next to the truck in a pop-up tent. Obviously, I let him come by for a shower in the morning, and some breakfast. He was so happy to be on his way to Ireland that he declared camping in a friend’s field the most minor inconvenience.

When I drive to see my parents in the once-peaceful farming country where I grew up, it is a strange, bittersweet experience. The car journey takes me through places I ought to recognise but I don’t any more, because the green fields of Warwickshire, the villages and the farms, are scarred by the tortuous works of HS2. The distinctive red earth is laid bare for mile upon mile as the bulldozers do their worst. Rows of cottages and entire villages lie deserted, testimony to the billions already spent. As I drive along the main Banbury to Coventry road, I see mountains of earth piled high as flyovers take shape. I stare at this curiously outdated project – old hat both in terms of the controversy and the purpose it was meant to have.

Queueing behind a young woman in the supermarket I became fascinated by the items she had placed on the conveyor belt. Several bottles of expensive booze had gone through first, followed by six tins of chickpeas, two bits of broccoli, then packet after packet of processed meat substitute products.  Cheese-free cheese, ham-free ham, soy this and tofu that, and something to make a curry with that was simply called ‘Chunks’… Bringing up the rear, rather fabulously, were two enormous crates of an energy drink called Monster Energy Ultra. I was bursting to ask this lady: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that the reason you need 24 large cans of liquid energy in your weekly shop is that the food you are putting into yourself is almost totally devoid of energy?

‘They’re going to have to stop cows,’ said my mother, looking doubtfully down at her plate as we tucked into a roast dinner. It was not like her to come over all veganistic, but she had been watching the BBC where she had got hold of the idea that cows might have to be banned because ‘they can’t stop them breaking wind’. Put the entire working population on veganism for a week and see what happens And nor should they, said I, cutting off a juicy slice to push into my mouth, the builder boyfriend and my father also chomping away as we sat around my parents’ dining table. I wish the BBC wouldn’t do this.

‘Ukraine Family – Welcome You,’ said the ungrammatical sign at the entrance to the car park of our favourite West Sussex beach. The rest of the beach was like a bomb had hit. Mounds of shingle had risen up like statues of mythical creatures We had arrived for a sentimental visit that might be our last here if the house sale goes through. But Climping was unrecognisable. Oh, there was the sea, milky blue and churning, beneath a deep blue sky. A few windsurfers bobbing. And there was the vast expanse of sand, dotted with beachcombers, the tide way out. But the rest of it was like a bomb had hit. Vast mounds of shingle had risen up like statues of mythical creatures, boulders were blown back.

‘I can’t go through this again!’ I groaned, as I lay in bed encased in icepacks, one on my eyes and the other round the back of my neck. Covid – which seems to be alive and kicking this summer despite being pronounced over by the World Health Organisation – always strikes at my nervous system and sets off existing problems, including my fragile emotional stability. The builder boyfriend brings me orange juice and breakfast on a tray, walks the dogs, feeds the horses, goes to work and comes back to find me huddled under the duvet, sobbing. He is weather-beaten from his day on a roof, and feeling rough himself. ‘It will pass,’ he says. I looked up the latest variant and it is called BA.2.86, which sounds like a flight to somewhere nice, like Lefkas or Majorca.

We were about to exchange contracts when I got a call from the estate agent to tell me that another list of queries had come in. I took one look at it and decided I had better not read it properly, because I saw the words ‘wind turbines’. In a few decades no conveyancing will be possible and no one willbe able to move house ‘What the hell is this?’ I asked the agent, who was stuttering: ‘Oh dear… calm down…’ ‘Don’t tell a woman to calm down!’ I shouted. And he apologised profusely. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault. The buyer’s solicitor had gone on holiday and left the file in the hands of a gaggle of millennials, who had managed to unpick ten weeks of negotiations by googling everything – again.

‘What a worry the Ulez must be for you both,’ said a friend with a nod to the pick-up truck parked outside our house. It was kind of him to wonder. The builder boyfriend drives an old Mitsubishi L200 to work in London every day and like almost every other working man he cannot afford to buy a new vehicle that is Ulez compliant so you would presume he has to pay the charge. But that’s not quite how it’s turning out. There is no Ulez problem for any Khan supporter who can find an old granny to put in his old car once a week If I might speak for the working man for a second, because not many seem to be doing that, let me explain with an anecdote from the life of the builder boyfriend, who came home the other day in a buoyant mood to tell me this.

‘Come on, let’s get a move on with filling in all the forms and we could have this done and dusted in three weeks!’ the estate agent bellowed at me down the phone. ‘Are you perhaps confusing the sale of my house with your Tesco delivery?’ I said. But in spite of myself, I took on board what the agent was saying, and I believed it was possible that in three weeks’ time I would be moving house. Nine weeks later, I wonder why I did that. Perhaps it was because a terrible disorientation seems to descend when one is going through the moving business. The impending upheaval and ever more complex to-do list grows impossibly, and it starts to make one feel quite queasy, as though one were being tossed about on a rough sea.

As I slapped a rude note on a car parked outside my house, I realised that nature was taking its course. My transformation into a Surreyite was in danger of becoming complete. ‘If you have enjoyed using this private access track, then perhaps you might consider making a donation for its maintenance,’ I had snidely scrawled on a scrap of paper which I tucked under the wipers of the same Nissan crossover that always seems to be plonked there by some dog walker or other who can’t be bothered to drive further along the village green to park in the public car park. Ugh, I thought. I have become something quite horrible Do I care? No. Of course I don’t. Was there plenty of other space? Loads. And yet I found myself writing this note.

Having loaded the last sack of working dog food in Surrey into my car, I slammed the trolley back into the trolley park and shouted an expletive at no one in particular. ‘What have you done to your lovely country store?’ I thought about asking one of the sales assistants inside the newly revamped posh dog food shop that used to be a warehouse for horse feed and pet supplies. But the likelihood was they didn’t care.

As I sat down to dinner in a lovely old country pub my reservation was cancelled by my iPhone, which was having a tantrum. The owner of this restaurant was serving us with a smile, we had been shown to our table, drinks and menus had been brought. But the buzzing lump of metal in my bag was adamant this was not happening. My iPhone had packaged up a montage surprise, complete with a replay of our private conversation I was experiencing one of those moments where reality splits into two: the one you are experiencing and the one your phone claims you are. A lot of people obediently accept the phone’s version no matter what. This is presumably why drivers follow their satnavs into garden walls, or swerve along the motorway looking at pictures of dogs on Facebook.

‘You certainly gave us a run for our money,’ said the village elder, serving us with what appeared to be the official goodbye statement. I was sick of that old navy dressing gown myself. Shortly afterwards I got him a new one from Sainsbury’s The builder boyfriend was flabbergasted. He had been walking across the green with the spaniels when this gentleman, a leading light in the community, came towards him. He braced for impact because the last time they engaged outside the house it had not gone well. The builder b had, on that occasion, been wearing his old navy-blue towelling dressing gown and was putting out the bins. No doubt I shouted at him to go and do it when I heard the beeping of the reversing garbage trucks.