Story of My Life

When I reached the flat, I let myself in and sat on the sofa, hands holding each other to dampen their shake and keep out the sense of having gone astray: twenty-five and no real profession, no prudent strategy, not much of a relationship.

And too many teeth.

But you try to keep cheery, don’t you? And you have time. At twenty-five you’ve bags of it.
Thirty-five, that’s a touch more unnerving – wake up with thirty- five and you’ll find that it nags, expects things you don’t have: kitchen extensions and dinner parties, DIY, the ability to send out Christmas cards signed With love from both of us. With love from all of us.

Instead I’m house-sitting for friends.

And this section of the story is here for you to like and to let your liking spread to me. Frailty and failure, they’re charismatic, they have a kind of nakedness that charms.

So.

Minding the house is company for me.

Well, it isn’t company – the owners are obviously away, hence my minding – and they’ve left their cats. And this is domesticity without effort: Brazilian cleaning lady, leather cushions, large numbers of superfluous and troubling ornaments.

This isn’t like me owning cats, me living alone with cats, me growing six-inch fingernails and giggling through the letter box when the pizza delivery man comes, peering out at him and smelling of cats – that’s not how it is.

There are these other people who are not me and they are the ones who have the cats and I am treating their animals politely but with an emotional distance, no dependency and no indications of despair. There should be no suggestion that these friends are sorry for me, that the husband is more sorry than the wife and that they have argued about my trustworthiness in their absence and their possessions and have doubted the supervisory skills of a Portuguese-speaking obsessive-compulsive who polishes their every surface twice a week: tables, glasses, apples, door knobs, the skin between the end of the air and the beginning of my wine. I will not tell you that they left behind them a plethora of mildly hysterical notes, or that their act of charity has been overshadowed by a sense of filth, oncoming sadness.