My study is the smallest room in the house – in fact smaller than the traditionally smallest room. And yet everyone congregates here while I try to write. Mother has taken to doing her Pilates right under my nose as I’m typing.

“Why are you even doing it?” I demanded yesterday morning. “You’ve always been so scornful of exercise.”

“Because if the medical profession refuses to help me, then I must help myself,” she grunted.

Peony, who was eating her cereal while standing over me and idly observing my progress, tutted: “Hurry up and write something funny, Mum. I’ve been watching you for ages and I haven’t even managed a smile. Come on!”

I’ll get you all out of here somehow, I seethed, and I pushed Ken rather roughly off my lap.

*

A little later that day, my daughter sought me out in the garden:

“Mum, I’ve got my agent’s hat on now. Not literally. It’s a figure of speech.”

“Right?” I sighed.

“Alfons is very excited about something and wishes to speak to you.”

The thought of an excitable Alfons was revolting to me and so I struggled to get out of whatever they had brewing but the man actually turned up on my doorstep at lunchtime, phosphorescent with news.

“Just think, don’t you!” he exclaimed. “Someone has submitted a novel for me to publish. Plankton is a going concern. I want you to take a look at this manuscript and tell me as a fellow writer what you think.”

God but my heart sank.

It was bad enough to have to look at this manuscript but to be pulled into a writing fellowship with Alfons was galling. I asked to be able to retire with it to my study for ten minutes. I thought ten minutes would be enough to get a feel for it. In the event, ten minutes felt like a lifetime.

I emerged to find Peony pushing a Twix into Alfons’ trouser pocket.

“Well?” he beamed.

“What exactly do you want to do with this?” I asked him, throwing the manuscript onto the kitchen table.

“Why publish, isn’t he! Then lots of crazy publicity. Lots of people buying lots of books and buying mine too.”

I cleared my throat.

“But it’s excrement.”

He turned questioningly to Peony.

“Poo,” she said.

“Alfons, this is the most dire bit of nonsense I’ve ever been forced to read. And I include my own manuscripts in that.”

“It is genius.”

“It is poo.”

“Tah.” He dismissed me. “This writer is very, very clever. What fault are you finding?”

“Well for starters there’s absolutely no punctuation whatsoever. It appears to be four hundred pages made up of one sentence.”

“Genuis. Experimental.”

“I can’t find anything in the way of plot and certainly no characters. It is all written in the first person – with a lower case ‘I’ while we’re on the subject. It is puerile indulgence.”

“This is literature, isn’t he.”

“Alfons, simply because you don’t understand it, doesn’t make it high art.”

“Maybe you don’t understand it.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“But you will still edit it for me?”

I exploded.

“How do you suggest I do that? Place a judicious full stop in the middle?”

But of course I’ve taken it on. He’s determined to publish it, on the basis that it’s the only book that anyone’s ever submitted to Plankton. It was Peony in the end who brought me round. Alfons had gone and she was hooting with laughter.

“Can’t you just see the humour in this?” she cackled. “Sometimes getting a laugh out of something is its own reward.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I relented and looked again at the title page. solid.passage by Leon Bogrush. At least he’s put a full stop in the title. That is a title, isn’t it?”

“Hey I’ve just noticed.” she laughed. “If you put a b in the middle of his surname it spells bogbrush”

*

I am writing this in the vast embrace of my new PU leather “executive” office chair. Lush and brown and excessively thick in the seat and back and with great curlicue arms, it as good as screams “Sell! Sell!” down the phone by itself.

I picked it out from the pile in front of the second-hand office furniture shop this morning. It is such a monster that you have to flatten yourself against the wall to get into my study. This room now consists or a desk and a chair. And me. Just me.

Mother and Peony were out. They had taken Ken Tray to the pet superstore to look at the rabbits again.

I called Laurence and told him they were out.

“I’ll be right over,” he said and my heart sang. I just knew for a fact his heart was singing, too.

But the very minute I put the phone down, I got a call from school. It was that grating class warrior, Miss Cutting.

“John has vomited on a pile of quoits,” she told me.

“What do you want me to do about it?” I demanded. “They’re wipe-clean, surely.”

She cleared her throat.

“It is our policy, when a child vomits, to ask the parent – or guardian – to come to school and collect the said child.”

“Ah well there you are,” I said. “I’m neither the parent, nor the guardian.”

“I’ve got you down here as the person to contact. I assumed you were his grandmother and that strapping woman with the dyed hair was his mother.”

“That’s my daughter and that’s her natural hair colour. John is her ward. John’s real mother is incapable.”

“Incapable of what?”

“Of absolutely anything. Now give his little mouth a wipe and he’ll be right as rain. Goodbye.”

“You’re going to have to come and fetch him, I’m afraid,” she sighed. And of course we both knew I would be the first one to break.

“School policy, school policy,” I twittered bitterly all the way there. “I’ll give you school policy, you pompous jobsworth.” But when I saw the little fella’s pale face and grim expression, and more to the point, how it brightened with joy at the sight of me, I wanted to snatch him to me at once and take him home where he belonged.

As we walked up our street I saw Laurence at our front door, about to ring the bell.

“Is that ill man looking for drugs?” asked John, gripping my hand tighter.

*

I left Laurence and John in the kitchen to discuss the science of vomiting and went up to my bedroom where I thumped the bed violently for seven distraught minutes. Then I got up and rearranged my face at my mirror and went down. When I got back, John was busily drawing with Laurence looking on over his shoulder.

“Oh is that a worm coming through a trap door?” I asked.

“No it’s a pyloric sphincter,” he replied.

Laurence laughed heartily and I relaxed at last. What can you do? I am owned by everyone, controlled by their whims. I don’t remember agreeing to it, but there you are.

Laurence looked up at me with a contented smile. Here was a man who understood entirely this sense of perpetual captivity.

“You look chipper,” I said.

“The initial hearing went very well,” he said. “I feel a little less likely to be booted out now. Henge is being looked into and that can only show me in a good light.”

“Oh that’s wonderful news,” I said. “So mother’s angry visit to the hospital and my anonymous letters might have helped.”

“Perhaps they did,” he smiled. “But it’s not over yet. Even if I am totally exonerated, I feel a bit betrayed. The place won’t feel the same. What can I do? Just go back and watch it all go wrong again?”

I opened my mouth but John was the first to speak.

“Why don’t you write things as well? Then you can both live together and be writers. You could write about puking.”

Live together and write together. What was the boy saying? I frowned very hard and meaningfully at Laurence. Don’t get any ideas, it told him. It’s just a child talking. Life isn’t that simple or successful.

And I was almost grateful then, when I suddenly heard Peony grinding my gears as the others arrived back from their baiting session.

*

As I write this, I watch the blossom spiral lazily to the lawn. The year is fattening up again and at speed. I have a new book to launch very soon. But I’m restless and full of doubts once more, not taken in at all by the unfurling of things, the newness. It’s not new at all. It’s all just the same reminder of one’s irrelevance.

I am constantly distracted from my work by the people in my life. But maybe what I thought were distractions are the true life after all and the rest is a sham. Is it finally time to give up?