I threw on the duvet cover and pulled on four clean pillowcases. Then I sat on the end of the newly made bed and thought about Mrs Clean’s Instagram that I followed earlier and what tips there might be for bedrooms. Mine was okay, but I needed more tasks to do each day, simply making a bed every night wasn’t time-consuming enough. Sure, I’d have a workload to contend with when the introductory course started on Monday, but that still left me with plenty of hours to fill each day with the other menial tasks.
I pulled out my phone from my back pocket and found my way back to Mrs Clean’s page. As I entered her profile, I was presented with yet another new photo. It was an image of a kitchen, taken on an angle so it was lopsided; it was a technique I have seen done a few times already in just a few hours scrolling through different profiles.
I could see why her account was so popular: over one million followers. I looked again at the kitchen, and I saw some sort of resemblance to the size and shape of our kitchen downstairs, which made me feel as though something similar could be created to modernise it. Mrs Clean’s kitchen was a mix of pastel-grey kitchen units and stark-white surfaces, gleaming and shining, with a deep, aluminium double sink.
Without thinking, I hit the heart button and liked the photo along with 32,135 other people. Would Mrs Clean see my like out of everyone else’s?
I began scrolling through some more of her other posts.
I was drawn to an image of a hallway. The walls were bright white, the floor a light hardwood. On the wall were three large black-and-white prints in frames, but because the photo had been taken at an angle, I couldn’t see them properly. I noticed that there were two small grey circles underneath the photo, so I swiped across and another photo was revealed. This one showed the three monochrome prints straight on. One was of a volcano erupting, one was of a wave crashing against a cluster of rocks, the third was a series of waterfalls. I looked at the image of the photos for a long time and imagined myself standing in her hallway as though I was standing in an art gallery.
I continued scrolling. I looked at the date of the first post and found it fascinating how one woman could go from having zero followers to having over one million within a year. I thought about the summerhouse and how I could make it my project, upload some photos to my Instagram site and take some inspiration from Mrs Clean. I could already feel the satisfaction within me growing, overtaking the numb feeling I had been stuck with for years. Just looking at the glorious organised symmetry stirred up something within me. Things I hadn’t felt for a long time. And I wanted to feel more of them.
But just as I was starting to believe I could immerse myself amongst these tiny squares as a way to escape the horrors of the past, my phone rang. Across the screen was a mobile number I knew, and suddenly I was being dragged right back there.
5 Then
We had been together for three months when he asked me to move in with him. I was ecstatic. We had done everything that couples in the movies did. He took me shopping, bought me clothes and jewellery, we sat at the back of the cinema throwing popcorn in each other’s hair and drove to the seaside to ride the Ferris wheel and eat candyfloss.
Once we were living together, all I could think about was those films I had watched over and over with Mum. How those couples existed next to one another, cooking together, brushing and flossing their teeth next to each other in the bathroom, then taking it in turns getting the kids to football practice. Families sitting around a table, having too loud conversations, but no one minding because the love was so fierce.
I was scared to tell Mum I’d be moving out, then D encouraged me to just get it over with. I apologised profusely to her.
Her response was, ‘You’re fine. Go and do what you need to do – don’t let me hold you back. God knows I let your father do enough of that to me.’ She looked up towards the heavens, something she would do every time she spoke of my dad, even though she wasn’t religious. I remember him, of course. I remember it all. But I choose to block it out. The only reminders were the episodes that Mum had. Too often for my liking. She said she could cope. I promised to visit every week.
We didn’t move far. The flat we found was just on the outskirts of town, about a ten-minute drive from Mum’s. There were no bus routes that went back that way, and I still hadn’t learned to drive.
‘You can walk to the shops from here,’ he said. It was only later, my fifth time at the shops, that I realised I would always be making these trips alone.
I never knew exactly what it was he did. He told me he worked in construction and that he had an office in the next town. I tried on occasion to dig a little deeper; I wanted
