Day 6

Another struggle, I wrote for a couple of hours yesterday but then went to bed thinking it was mostly crap and revised it this morning, finally staggering over the word count. I was actually amazed when it came up over 1700. I have to do another week's worth of planning today, decided I'm not going to more than a week at a time, because I'm already coming up with stuff I didn't know was going to happen.

I forgot about ‘Be lucky!’ for the next few days as it remained stuck behind the toaster, along with Marlene’s unopened mail. She had rung a couple of times from California to keep us updated her on her dad’s progress. Seems he had stabilised and was now off the critical list but was being kept in for observation at a no doubt exorbitant daily charge. Marlene sounded OK, if a little strained, not surprising really, her only connection with Santa Barbara was her father and he was confined to bed, so she was having to find her own way around. She had been out to see him on a few occasions previously but those times he had lived in San Francisco, so she was finding it difficult to get her bearings in a new town. She was staying in his house but so was her father’s new wife, not surprisingly, and despite the fact that the house was large, they obviously had to interact at some stage. It would have been testing under any circumstances but when the man they both loved (albeit in different ways) was lying incapacitated by a potentially life-threatening condition, the relationship was seemingly strained to say the least. Marlene wasn’t shy by any means, but she was certainly reserved until she got to know you, I remember that I thought she was a right stuck up little madam for the first few years at school until I got friendly with her, and the cultural differences weren’t helping Marlene and Cindy (aargh, clichéd Californian alert!) to bond quickly. Although Marlene had an open return ticket, I think she was wishing her father back to recovery quickly for more than one reason, she was planning on coming back to Britain almost as soon as he was home, by the sound of things. She sounded tired and she’d probably been crying when I spoke to her last, her voice sounded quieter as if she was trying to stop someone else overhearing, I presumed Cindy, but Marlene had told me that there had been quite a few people over at the house, all Cindy’s friends and relations and she’d been trying to stay out of their way. Before she rang off it seemed like she was keeping me on, trying to work up to saying something but in the end she just told me to take care and put the phone down, her voice almost tailing off to nothing before the connection was gone.
I deliberately hadn’t told Mum what had happened when I rang her on the Thursday before she was due back home. I didn’t like giving her undue reasons to worry because I knew she’d stew on it and wouldn’t sleep properly, which seemed to make her MS worse. When she did arrive at the house, she didn’t make any comment about her absence because Marlene would have still been at work anyway.
“I’m a bit tired love, I’ll go for a bit of a lie-down for a few hours,” she said, after kissing me on the cheek. She did look fairly weary, although she often was when she came home, even though the journey was only around an hour, it seemed to drain her, despite being driven by someone from the home.
“Ok, I’ll be nipping out to the supermarket when Shuggsy gets back so don’t worry of there’s no-one around when you wake up. And don’t do too much!” I said.
“Oh don’t fuss so George,” she said, but she didn’t mean it, she just likes to think there’s nothing wrong and she hates that her body can’t do everything she asks of it anymore.
Once mum was asleep I belled Shuggsy on his mobile and wasn’t surprised to hear he was in the pub. Not our local, the Beehive, but the scuzzy boozer that he goes in with his workmates, the Primrose. I told him to get his arse out of there after the pint he was drinking so he could help me get the shopping back, then I jumped on the bus off to Morrisons. I’d got halfway round when Shuggs joined me, he was pushing a trolley already half laden with stuff he’d pulled off the shelves. I didn’t bother asking, I knew he thought I didn’t get enough food in so he always supplemented it with his own choices. To be fair, he always paid for his share and usually chipped in a few extra quid. He’d obviously just been paid as well, as he ostentatiously flashed a wad of notes in front of me and chucked the family size pack of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes in my trolley, simultaneously replacing the own brand box I’d selected.
“Don’t be a tightwad, Georgie boy!” he exclaimed (again only Shugs and Marlene would dare….) “Shuggsy has been with Lou Gramm and the boys again!” Lou Gramm being the lead singer of Foreigner, therefore denoting that Shuggsy had been paid to do a private plastering job, outside of his normal employ. I apologise if I can hear eggs being sucked out there but you never know who you’re talking to do you, don’t feel patronised.
We meandered round the aisles, Shugsy telling us about the house he’d been working on and the amount of biscuits he’d consumed there. Then he jumped on the back of his trolley base with both feet and rode it down to the checkouts, attempted to bring it to a smooth stop but only succeeded in shunting into a stationary trolley and pushing that into a woman who was unloading her groceries onto the conveyor belt.
“Sorry love,” he said, the big kid.
“You’ve lost your trolley no-claims bonus there Shugs, I said.
We got through the checkout without further mishaps, you probably won’t be surprised to hear we’ve perfected a system for packing whereby I deal with all the fridge and freezer items and Shuggsy packs anything else. You won’t forget what a geek I am will you? Shugs lugged six carrier bags to the bus stop while I managed four. After waiting for ten minutes in a light drizzle, Shugs said ‘bollocks to this’ and hailed a black cab that was cruising past. I didn’t argue, that was one of Shuggsy’s assets, whenever he had money in his bin, he shared it around. He’d offered to pay for half of Marlene’s ticket when he’d heard about it, but I’d declined. Don’t know why, especially as I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay the bill when it came through.
As the taxi chugged through what passed for a rush hour in the town, Shuggsy was obviously thinking. I could tell this because he stopped rooting through the bags for something to eat for a minute.
“Why don’t we do something with your mum this weekend?” he said, finally.
“Like what, take her out on the moors and leave her?” Shuggs was used to my flippant humour thankfully.
“No, like go somewhere. I could hire us a car.”
Shuggsy was the only one of us who had passed their driving test, and he occasionally would hire a car and transport us to the Lakes or the coast. Only trouble was, he drove like he rode a shopping trolley.
“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea, I’ll split it with you.” I offered. Luckily Shugs turned the proposal down.
“Don’t be daft man, I’m good for it. I’ll give them a bell when I get in.”
“Aye alright, you do that and I’ll sort out somewhere for you to chauffeur us to.” Shugs settled back with a pack of chocolate digestives, happy with his plan. It didn’t take much to satisfy the big man.
When we got back to the house, Mum was up and about and inevitably by now had noticed Marlene’s absence. After I’d filled her in on the details and she’d tutted and aahed, she asked me to fire up the computer so she could dictate an e-mail for me to send her. At the end of the message, she asked me to put something she’d never said to Marlene in person before, she said to say she loved her, not ‘all my love’ or some other platitude but ‘I love you’. I got a strange feeling after I’d sent the e-mail, but mum just got on with making a brew. I guess that mum thinks of my two friends as a kind of family now, as I said before she always said that Marlene was like a daughter and I guess Shuggsy was a sort of dopey kid brother for us. And I do love all three of them but all in different ways, mum well, that was obvious, I did tell her on a regular basis. Shuggsy I’d never told, but I do love the clumsy bastard, he’s tried to express his feelings before, kind of, usually on the wrong end of ten pints of Guinness when he sticks a massive paw on my head and tells me how great I am. Marlene and I have a kind of unspoken bond that’s hard to explain to someone looking in. I have told her that I love her and she me, but I never mean it in a romantic way and I never thought she did. Of course, now I was revising my memories but I would probably talk to her when she got back. Or not. I didn’t want to jeopardise the relationship we had, and certainly not when she was feeling vulnerable after leaving her father. So in a way I had all the bases covered at home. There was only one kind of love I didn’t have and I thought I didn’t want or need it. Everyone has a yearning for something, in Shuggsy’s case it was normally food or beer, Marlene wanted to give up her tedious job and become an artist or a writer full time and me? Well, I just wanted to get by with a minimum of fuss, I didn’t feel like I needed anything else in my life, least of all a relationship with anyone outside my circle of three.
But someone, or rather, something did, and that something was currently residing behind the toaster.

Daily Word Count: 1,707
Total Word Count: 10,398
% over target: 3.96%
Words to go: 39,602
Word of the day: ostentatious