It’s the third day of the week I’ve booked off work… and I’m continuing to use the time in a pretty lazy manner. Sitting in cafés having coffees. Sitting a lot at home, tapping at my laptop – when I can be bothered to even do that.
I’m about to have lunch in our kitchen with Lizzie… and Jake too, who has mock exams at school and has been given the day off to revise at home.
My laptop is open on the kitchen table, with something I’ve been writing (the previous journal entry in fact) clearly visible for all to see.
Lizzie clocks it. ‘What’s that?’ She glances down at the Word doc containing my digital ramblings. ‘Are you writing something?’ she asks suspiciously. Clearly there’s something about the layout of the words in the Word doc (maybe it’s the way the paragraphs are spaced… and the prevalence of speech marks) that sets off an alarm in her head. Piers is doing his stupid journal again!
‘It’s my journal,’ I explain. ‘I’ve carried on writing it. I told you about it a month or so ago.’
Lizzie squints at me. She’s plainly forgotten. Or, more likely, she didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention when I told her – a month or so ago – that I’d started again on the memoir.
Since Stop Telling Me I’m Brave has failed to set the literary world alight – resulting in an immediate million-pound book offer – the whole project has drifted off Lizzie’s mental radar like so much insignificant flotsam. If there’s no money to be made in it, Lizzie just ain’t interested.
In a tone which somehow mixes exasperation with abject boredom, she asks: ‘don’t tell me you’re still writing about me?’
‘Not exactly,’ I reply. ‘I’m writing about all sorts of things. It’s much more general now. A lot of it’s more focused on me, this time!’
I look at Lizzie, imagining she’s thinking something along the lines of ‘who’s going to be interested in reading that? You didn’t have a major illness. And you’re not famous either – so who’s going to give a shit?’
But, in fact, Lizzie’s expression doesn’t suggest she’s thinking that at all. In fact, it suggests that she’s already lost interest in (or forgotten about) the whole subject and has mentally moved on.
‘If you’re cooking supper tonight,’ she says, ‘can we please not have chicken pies again?’
May 2023
P. D. Clifton 
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