Read by Sarah Feathers
Carbohydrates are all well and good when you’re tired and hangry but they are not a substitute for a hug or a conversation.
Speaking of: call your mother more often. Or at least text. I have WhatsApp now, you know. I follow you on Instagram. You’re cute but vary the expression a little, why don’t you?
Meringues should always be left in the oven to cool, preferably overnight – like most things – if you really want that chewy centre and clarity of crunch.
Keep good accounts. Air your bathroom. Stay hydrated. Get a dehumidifier. Don’t waste time on books you can’t finish. Insure yourself. Overpay your mortgage whenever you can. If you ever get one.
Rehabilitate your skin. It doesn’t need half the shit you put on it. It’s a racket. Do you know how many years I spent moisturising skin that already knew how to heal itself?
Be a good host. Offer visitors a cup of tea at least three times upon welcoming them into your home. They will try to be polite and turn you down but you must persist. If they still refuse, do not trust them.
Life is rarely fair but I never understood why people thought it should be. Don’t look to blame other people for your own guilt. There’s no dark side but shame leads to anger and in a man that’s frightening and in a woman it’s hysterical. Be vengeful, sure. Be enraged. But stay calm about it. Cold and efficient. Make it work for you instead of eating you up inside.
Cereal is not an adequate dinner and I know you know this. No, not even granola.
Give compliments freely, but not creepily, and always sincerely. There will be days when you can pinpoint the infinite beauty of humankind and want to dissect it on the kitchen table, and on those days you should ride the bus and memorise as many faces as you can. Fill yourself up with people to offset the days when all you can see are upright mammals made of poison and fists and excretions and threats and sex and melancholy. There will be days when you are also the latter type. Take note of the moments you are not, and pin a good picture of yourself on the wall to use instead of a mirror.
Learn to make white sauce from scratch and witness alchemy in the thickening. Stirring is a meditation. Meditation is a pause. A bath. A cigarette. A closing of the eyes. A silence when you want to be screaming.
Practise saying no. No qualifiers. No excuses. No apologies. Hold up your hand with your palm straight out and pull the word out from the bottom of your lungs. You can freeze grown men that way.
To poach perfect eggs you want to use a frying pan and wait until the bubbles just begin to form on the bottom. None of this rolling boil and vinegar and whisking nonsense. Just a hint of a simmer. Then slide them in, like slipping a sleeping child into a cot, and let them be.
Wait until the sun is over the yardarm before partaking in things that make your brain forget it’s a brain. Know that there’s a gene inside you that will try to take control of your ability to refuse oblivion. It lies dormant in me, even though I try to coax it out with the romanticism of a tortured artist, but thankfully I am not your grandfather so I will never be any good at being drunk. They say it skips a generation, though, so have caution. I have poured enough bottles down the drain. I don’t need your empties, too.
There’s nothing in the world a little extra salt can’t fix. Season liberally. Drink the tears that run into your mouth. Swim in the sea whenever you can.
Be good. Even though there is badness all around you; badness you can’t see, like germs, or electricity, or the wind. There’s bad in you, too. And me. Bad in everyone. Which maybe means it’s not so bad. It just is. And all you can do is make good choices. Nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so. You should know who said that or I have failed in my literary teachings. He couldn’t work out the difference either. So. Fuck it. Just do your best. Fuck is a bad word. You’ve probably heard me say it, but really it’s just another way of saying God, which is meaningless in the end, too.
I take it back about the carbs. Sometimes a potato can be a friend. Baked, with plenty of butter. Fried, in plenty of butter. Mashed. All the butter. A potato doesn’t need you to explain yourself. It just leaves a warmth in your belly and the strength for another day.
Create patience when you have none. Count to ten and ten again. Even when people are walking slowly in front of you and stop randomly on the street. Create patience. Even when your own children procrastinate at bedtime – just like you used to – and you want to smother them with a pillow or throw them out the window, even though you wouldn’t. Probably. But you want to, all the same. Create patience out of air. Even when your mother calls to tell you about that person you might know, who she thinks you went to school with – or maybe they weren’t in your year – either way you have no interest at all in the development of their life but there is no escaping the telling of it because this unknown person’s mother still lives in your hometown and met your mother the other day at the supermarket, and she’s sure you do know them, you must know them, and anyway they just had a baby and are moving to Berlin. Know that sometimes I tell you these things just to have something to say and your patience is a gift.
A watched pot will boil eventually, if you sit quietly and just wait.
You will find patience, sometimes, the same way I have, when time moves differently, like a snake in water, never sure if it’s swimming or being moved by the current. When you realise that sometimes patience is all you have. I must have passed some onto you when you made your way out of me – I had enough reasons to wait then, in a place where there was no time at all, only heartbeats and waves and more blood and power than I knew was inside a person and patience replaced any concept of time while they resuscitated you on the bare boards of the living room floor; when I wasn’t allowed to lift you out of the plastic box full of wires that kept you alive after my pelvis refused to let you go.
I hope you never discover that treacle-thick time, but chances are you will – missing a step on the stairs, watching your kid slip and fall and hearing the thud of concrete on precious flesh it is your job to keep seamless, waiting for an ambulance, waiting for news you don’t want to hear. Never enough time to stop it happening but time enough for the vision of it to seep into the little valleys of your brain. To see it all over again in more detail than you thought possible when you wake at 3:AM shivering out the PTSD. There will be too much patience, then. More than you can bear and still maintain the façade of a media-ready human being. And that’s when you bottle it. Your time, and your patience, and your good deeds. Store them up for middle age when everything moves more slowly, except the distancing of your children and the dying of your parents.
Love your food. Nourish the body I gave you. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong in any infinitesimal way. It houses everything that keeps you alive.
Love me. Even when you hate me. Even when biology gives out to individuality and you realise you have no godly reason to care for the womb that tried to suffocate you. Even then – know that you left your cells behind, drifting in my bloodstream, and I can never flush them out. That I will never lose the trickle of pinpricks in my milk ducts when the memory of you lets out a mushroom cloud of oxytocin. Know that I tried. I tried. I really did. I’m trying still. And you will too, if you get your turn. And just like me, you’ll get it wrong.
(c) Jo Gatford, 2020
Jo Gatford is a novelist, playwright, and short fiction author who procrastinates about writing by writing about writing. She is one half of Writers’ HQ (www.writershq.co.uk) and tweets about weird 17th century mermaid tiles at @jmgatford. She feels very strongly about puns and Shakespeare. Read some of her work at www.jogatford.com.
Sarah Feathers regularly narrates audiobooks including novels by Philippa Gregory, Sarah Vaughan, Adele Parks and Amanda Reynolds. She has been reading for Liars’ League periodically for many years and is very excited about our first lockdown event! Sarah is an actor and has appeared in many theatre productions, films and commercials.
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