ABANDONED

Transcript for Abandoned, Episode 13 of An Author’s Dreams podcast

There’s a guy standing in front of me, talking, behind him an array of wall-mounted computer screens, surrounded by virtual reality booths.

I recognise him. He makes Adobe Illustrator video tutorials on YouTube, only he’s shorter and plumper here in real life. He runs a web design company in Bristol, the city where my son went to uni, and I’m here at company HQ, the screens flickering and blaring out information. He’s gives me a quote for designing a website for my podcast which I accept, and he instructs me to wait outside.

I sit on a grass verge with my husband, Brian, facing the two-story brick building inside which website guy is at work. A huge projection appears on the wall, a live stream of what he’s doing inside his HQ. He’s checking over, selecting and deleting lines of code. I stare up at the wall, following his progress, and realise that I could have done all this coding myself.

Over the road, in between us and the building, is another grass verge, this one in the middle of a roundabout, like the grass verge I used to sit on when I lived in London in the 80s, outside The Warrington Pub in Maida Vale, my white Triumph Spitfire parked alongside.

The verge is covered in beach towels where people have reserved good spots to sit on once the sun hits the street, currently in the early morning shade.

Website guy’s voice booms from the projection on the building, asking me to remind him of the name of my website. I can’t remember. Something to do with authors. He’s going to think me a complete idiot, not being able to remember the name of my own website. But I’ve had long covid for a year, I can’t remember what day of the week it is half the time, never mind the name of my own website. Everything has to be done from lists now, and I don’t have a list to hand bearing the name of my website.

Failing, and forgetting, day in, day out, is exhausting. I just want to lie down on the bench and sleep, if Brian will just budge up. But the people monitoring the CCTV cameras will see me then, and will arrive to move me on, as though I were living on the streets. I need a rest. I need a holiday.

I’m on holiday with my grown-up children. Only my son is back to being 4 years old, small and vulnerable. I’m in a large building with many rooms. My son and my eldest daughter are at one end of the building. My youngest daughter is at the other end, camping with her friends in a large room. I go there to check they’re all OK but on opening the door discover that the tents have all gone and the room is empty. I go to the next room along the corridor. The door is closed so I look through a crack in the door. The room is filled with naked ballerinas, stretching and warming up. I’d better not go in. Eventually I stumble across my youngest daughter, sitting contentedly in the bottom of a large barrel. I lean over the edge and drop a Perspex placard into the barrel on which is written “I love you”.

Now I’m in an empty room nearby. One of my daughter’s friends, also in his twenties, is sitting on the floor, openly weeping, his head in his hands. He tells me that someone ran off with all his camping gear and that back home someone has broken into his house and taken everything. He blames himself, but I gently explain that it’s not his fault.

Now I’m at the other end of the building where I enter a huge, airy canteen with floor to ceiling glass windows, like the canteen at my old, long demolished art college, Psalter Lane, in Sheffield.

My eldest daughter is there on a huge bed, romping around with her friends being daft and playing with dolls. She shows me a rectangular plastic box with compartments for make-up, for use with her dolls. The make-up tray is self-cleansing. A little swab of cotton wool is bobbing around on its own, cleaning each compartment of pigment, dancing in the air as it goes about its business. I’m aware that these self-cleansing make-up trays are horrendously expensive.

“Why don’t you just clean it yourself?” I ask my daughter. She looks at me disparagingly as though I’m completely stupid even for asking her, never mind thinking it.

I look around the canteen for my little son then see him through the floor to ceiling windows outside. The windows have a narrow opening but I manage to squeeze through to reach him. He’s sitting on a beach and being minded by suspicious looking people, a woman and several men. The woman walks away, leaving my son with a burly dark-haired man who says he just wants to go to the pub. Suddenly I notice other children as well as my son, there’s a whole bunch of them. They look like something out of Oliver Twist, filthy and neglected, and they’re complaining that they don’t want to go to the pub. I know the pub he’s talking about and it’s a seedy little inn down the end of a dark alley with sawdust on the floors and leery men swaying drunkenly by the bar, talking bollocks.

“I’ll look after you all” I say, before realising that I can’t. Now I’m in a dark apartment, the burly dark-haired man is there, surrounded with his dodgy-looking mates. I have to leave my son with this gang of thieves, and once I’ve walked away I am filled with guilt at how irresponsible I’m being, leaving my son in such danger.

In desperation after such a terrible holiday, I sell two of my old tents to a neighbour. They pitch them in their garden and I spend that night at my kitchen window, mournfully gazing at them. The fabric entrances flap around in the wind and rain, revealing glimpses of the neglected and empty interiors which should be lit with glowing gas lamps and lined with plump, cosy sleeping bags, but are dark, empty and bare.

I think “At least I didn’t sell the bell tent. We’ll have a great holiday, one day.”