I was training for the Great North Run with OC. Just after we crossed the swing bridge, I saw a lost smartphone propped up on a road sign. I reached out to pick it up.
Suddenly, a man approached me, grabbed the phone from my hand, and claimed it for himself. I snatched it back again, then ran to my house and TPR, screaming for protection from the thief.
I thought that I had shaken off the villain, but then I saw him pushing a lit explosive through our letterbox.
Although my mother was still alive and well, the care home staff convinced me to participate in a dry-run of their ‘death routine’.
A carer showed me into a small room that contained a low, blue plastic platform.
‘This is where we lay the body’ she explained. ‘Now you wait here’.
As the walls of the room began to move, she stepped out of the way. I was now trapped alone in a thin corridor, listening to the squeak of trolley wheels nearby.
Then, when the walls were brought back to their normal position, I saw my mother’s corpse laid out on the blue plastic platform.
I really didn’t have much to do with the refereeing the journal article, but my new Swedish collaborator was keen for my input to be acknowledged.
I was happy to go along with this – especially because when we leant together over his laptop, his soft beard stroked my cheek.
I grabbed my rucksack and followed my Canadian colleague BD out the door. If this was the last time that we were together, I wanted to be with him as long as I could. We walked across the big public park, passing the Taiwanese embassy. Opposite the headquarters of Scotia Bank, I waved him off from the bus stop to the airport.
By now, my back was aching from carrying my rucksack. It was only when I opened it to check its contents that I remembered the smooth round rock that I had picked up on the beach. It had taken so long to find that I didn’t want to dump it, so I left it in there and continued walking.
Since I was now so close to the hospital, it seemed sensible to pop in to ask about the bleeding from the scar on my left breast. A fierce, officious nurse saw to me. She was efficient, even if she offered me no sympathy. At the end of my consultation she admonished me for having dumped the contents of my rucksack on the consulting room table, and for inviting a bunch of unruly final year students to clear up my mess.
I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could, but not without my ivory handled cutlery currently laid out on the table as if for a dinner party. I instructed the students to stop fighting, collect the cutlery, and leave.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ I screamed at my mother in the bed next to mine. ‘Naomi’s baby has vanished!’
I made such a noise that I literally woke my father from the dead. When I noticed his corpse stir at the other side of the room, I begged it to settle again. I had enough on my plate ‘carenting’ my mother and looking after the baby that I had now lost. I refused to add another caring responsibility to this already-heavy burden.
I left the bedroom to hunt for the baby. My greatest fear was that the dog had plucked her from her cot and wolfed her down as a tasty breakfast. It was therefore with great relief that I found the dog in his basket in the kitchen, curled around the infant, with my tall, slim sister S keeping an eye on the pair of them.
Then I noticed the empty syringe on the kitchen table. My heart dropped: S was injecting again. Even worse, I could hear noises coming from the garage where a bunch of S’s tattooed druggie friends were partying (and probably wrecking the place in the process). I couldn’t bear to think of our sister J’s reaction when she heard about this.
By the time that I returned to the bedroom, my mother was up and dressed. She looked very glamorous in a black chiffon dress. I admired its sheer sleeves and tiny red flower decorations. I also noticed that my mother held some car keys in her hand.
Before we could stop her, my mother was at the wheel of the silver Volvo that I thought we had sold years ago. Neither I nor TPR could wrench control of the car from her, not even when we told her that she no longer held a driving licence and was uninsured to drive. Eventually – with the promise of an Americano – we persuaded her to stop in a café car park. There we grabbed the car keys from her.
Our next challenge was to work out how to return my mother to the safety of her care home.
For months I had been trying to find an opportunity to teach the board game Catan to my neighbour KB and online friend KJD. Now, at last, they were both at my flat and eager to learn. Even my sister J wanted to join in, though on the condition that we did not keep score. As things turned out, however, we didn’t even manage to lay out the board, let alone play a game.
The first problem was that although we had plenty of Catan boxes, they were either empty or contained a version of the game that I did not know.
Then I was distracted into dealing with the two needy men in my life. I had to cajole my husband out of the house to ensure that he reached his golf tournament on time. Meanwhile my unnamed, super-fit, long-haired Viking lover sent me into a spin when he suddenly announced that he was off to the Caribbean for a month – without me.
When KJD reminded me that she had to leave for the 11:05 train to London, it was obvious that we were fated never to play this game together.
I was travelling on an American-style school bus and couldn’t remember why, or where I was going. I took a sneaky peak at my fellow travellers – a handful of Minions were sitting quietly staring out of the bus windows.
This reminded me – hadn’t I invented the Minions several years ago, and shouldn’t I now be extremely wealthy rather than travelling on a bus?
Under a thick layer of dust beneath our bed, I found three hair bobbles. What were they doing there, and why hadn’t our cleaner J found them? More to the point, when had she last cleaned under the bed?
Of course, I knew the answer to my questions: J never made a thorough job of hoovering our bedroom.
I wanted to raise this with her. However, it would be difficult to do so while she was laughing and joking (and not cleaning!) with TPR in the study.
I was passed from one Canadian young man to another. It was as if the second had asked the first if he could borrow a bag of sugar.
This was such a disappointment. I had become quite attached to Canadian boyfriend number 1. In fact, I almost believed that this tall, dark super-fit man might be my life partner. I now understood, however, that I should probably have classed him as ‘out of my league’.
Canadian boyfriend number 2 – fairer, shorter, and without the washboard six-pack of his predecessor – would have to do. Despite his shortcomings, however, I was confident that I would learn to love him.
The two men house-shared with three young women, also Canadian. I got on really well with them all. I visited their house frequently, and we often socialised together.
Early in the relationship with Canadian boyfriend number 2, the six of us walked through the park down to the docks. When I sat down for a rest at the side of the road, a couple of people threw their spare change at my feet. In the time that it took to explain that I was a well-educated British woman with a decent salary and not a beggar, my Canadian friends had all disappeared.
I was later reunited with the three young women, but the men were lost forever. I later heard a rumour that they had fallen down a ravine in the mountains and died.
Dreamaticus 