Half way through my fifth book of the holiday, and I’m no longer able to tell you which day of the week it is. The number of hours we are both awake is in the single digits. I’ve even started making my usual assessment of ‘in a zombie apocalypse, how long should/could we stay here?’ Which I suppose is my brain’s way of saying it’s having a good time.
I am taught basic differential calculus on our drive down, and when I fall asleep here on the sofa after a three-hour lunch of cheese, with one bent leg somehow balanced on top of a stiff cushion, I dream that I must calculate how to find a new father, that there is a new father waiting for me in one of the tiny dark doorways I must get my unanswering long limbs to visit. I think of the maths teacher telling me at eleven that Maths Is Everything, that anything may be calculated if we only know the variables with which to begin, and the two novels I’ve been reading today metastasise in my brain to shape my dreams into airless, endless puzzles to which the answer is “the Father”.
I might eat fractionally less cheese tomorrow.
Warm rain most of the day, which means I must just eat cheese and bread while reading under a blanket on the sofa. The horrors.
Three days of radio silence from my mother and I was imagining the worst. Just temperamental technology, it turns out. Isn’t it always.
We’ve taken le péage, mais je n'aime pas le péage avec les personnes, par ce que je suis sans culottes, partly so I can epilate while J drives, partly because it’s so damn hot and I somehow put on my thickest trousers to travel. Don’t stare at me, buddy, I’m just trying to pay your damn toll.
When we get to our destination the sky is lavender and lilac and peach, the same shade as the flowers by the pool, colour-matched perfectly, clouds darkening to distant booms over the hills. I walk from the shallow end to the deep end over and over, pretending to be the men in Under the Skin.