These Wilder Things: Part III ~ Diapause

'Peace and Plenty' by George Inness, 1865

---

As we close the front door behind us, our eyes widen. We race from room to room like children on a school trip — doors opening, gasps exchanged. After admiring the floor-to-ceiling windows, the crisp white linen, and a sofa big enough to sleep an entire family, the kettle goes on and the slippers come out.

In my bedroom I place my laptop on the writing desk and stack the pile of books I know I won’t read beside the lamp. I set the teddy I bought him on the windowsill overlooking the harbour, and Steve on the bed.

We adopted Steve after our first trip to the seaside. We were trying our luck in the arcade when he turned to me — frustrated, swearing — after failing to win. The machine was filled with guinea pigs, speckled brown, black, and white. He looked at me helplessly and silently stepped aside.

I won on the first go. I turned and handed Steve over like a golden crown.

He smiled.

“Whatever my baby wants, my baby gets,” I said. We looked at each other in that way that has now become seared into my memory — two small galaxies marvelling at one another.

Those people feel like ghosts now. I hope some fragment of them is still there in that arcade, the scene looping forever — the machine humming, the claw dropping, the small improbable win.

Teddy and Steve aren’t the only relics of our love.

After some deliberation, I place Scuba Diving Ducky and T-Rex Ducky in prominent positions on either side of the sink. It seemed wrong not to pack them. I’ve been collecting them since he died — a habit handed down from a fragment of his playful eccentricity.

When we first started dating, I once turned up at his house to find him in the bath — playing with one.

“What you doing?” I said, poking my head around the open bathroom door, my smile huge, curious, and highly fucking amused.

He was laid out in the tub, white foam piled on his head and face like an athletic Father Christmas, tattoos marking his body, calmly playing with the rubber duck that normally stood guard on the wooden bath tray.

“Just hanging out with Ducky,” he said, lifting him to show me, as if this small act alone explained everything.

I know plenty of women who would have found this odd or a turn-off. But it made me fall in love with him even more. He was the most masculine man I’d ever known. And yet here he was — not caught out, not embarrassed. Just playing with Mr Ducky in the bath.

It helped me return to the playful parts of myself I had locked away long before.

So I started buying them for him whenever I saw them.

Sometimes, during arguments, he’d throw them out of the window. It amused me that, of all the things I’d ever given him, it was the collection of rubber ducks he reached for when angry — and couldn’t throw me out of a window instead.

But then, an hour later, he’d be in the garden, hobbling about in the dark in his pants, searching through bushes with a torch, swearing.

He couldn’t bear to leave them out there.

He had other playful eccentricities too. Sometimes he’d suddenly come at me, elbows tucked into his sides, arms bent like a tyrannosaurus, snapping at me. He thought it was hilarious. I generally didn’t.

I hate that about myself now.

I’d give anything to have him pissing me off again.

I hear doors closing softly, voices lowering, the kitchen light clicking off. The storm presses against the bedroom windows. For the first time in months, I realise there is nowhere I need to be. Nothing I need to be doing.

No performance.

No bracing.

No anxiety.

Just space.

To breathe.

The air outside is cold enough to sting and I wrap the scarf Samantha made me tighter around my neck. Somewhere below, the harbour shifts in the dark, bells on the boats singing a lament for the living. The night sky fills every space, the stars indistinguishable from the lights of houses nestled in the surrounding hills.

I light a joint and watch the ember glow like a tiny lighthouse in the wind. Ruth Moody starts playing in my ears on my headphones, reminding me of a truth I know only too well.

And letting go is the hardest part

Holding on, some semblance of control

Well, I have this pain deep in my heart

But I am still whole

I am still whole

For the first time in months, as the marble rises in my throat, I don't push it down.

Inside, the house is dark and still. I wander into the kitchen, opening cupboards for no reason other than to remind myself I am still a person. I find the chocolate biscuits and tuck them under my arm, already negotiating with myself about crumbs and white sheets.

The duvet is cool. The mattress soft. The room smells faintly of clean cotton and sea air. I lie down and listen to the wind pushing against the glass. My breathing slows. My muscles loosen. My body, finally, accepts we have arrived.

We're safe.

And for a while, I just exist.

Then the stillness starts to itch.

I reach for a biscuit. Then another. The sweetness anchors me, briefly. Something to do with my hands. Something to chew. Something to control.

I tell myself I will stop after the next one.

I don’t.

When I look at the last remaining survivor in the box, I close the lid and feel I have achieved some façade of restraint. Scanning the duvet in a panic, I’m relieved to find no evidence of my bedtime snacking crime spree.

I decide to try reading one of the books from the desk and tuck the duvet up to my chin. When I reach for my reading glasses on the bed, I freeze.

No.

No, no, no, no.

There, on the crisp linen — white enough to make a bride blush — is a small dark stain. I throw my head back against the headboard and a string of expletives falls out of my mouth.

Holding back tears, I peer down at it, wondering how the fuck I’m going to get it out.

But as I peer closer, the expletives change.

The dark stain on the linen isn’t chocolate.

It’s a little red ladybird.

Watching me.

And washing its feet.

I assume I’ve finally lost my mind and get down to eye level, certain it must be dead.

But no.

There it is.

Not a care in the world.

On my bed.

In January.

Out of diapause.

In a house that was freezing when we arrived.

I start laughing.

And laughing.

And laughing.

I wonder how much of a maniac I’ll seem if I take the ladybird into the girls’ room — but I don’t wait to find out the answer.

Still chuckling, I place my hand flat on the bed and the ladybird tries to drive round the roundabout the wrong way a few times before climbing aboard. I gently guide it as it wanders slowly from one hand to the other, like we're performing a magic trick.

I burst into their room without knocking.

“Fucking hell!” Samantha yells, sitting bolt upright, her shocked face backlit by the hallway light behind me.

“You scared the shit out of me!” Jessica adds from the darkness.

They both breathe a sigh of relief and someone switches on a lamp.

I’m concealing the ladybird now, who seems to understand the assignment — tickling my left palm as I cup my other hand over the top to stop it from flying away.

“You’ll never fucking guess what I just found in my bedroom,” I say — staring straight at Samantha, because she’s the keeper of every strange thing that’s happened this last year. The watch under the coffee table. The flickering lamp. The questions into the dark. The owl. The knock on the door.

She looks from my face to my hand.

“Fuck off,” she says quietly. “No way.”

She already knows.

I open my palm.

The ladybird lifts off and flies straight to the ceiling.

We all start laughing as it begins circling furiously above us, looping wide arcs in the warm light.

“Have you ever seen one do that before?” I ask.

“No,” they say.

“Me neither,” I reply.

We watch its performance in silence.

Then Samantha panics — as if it’s a wasp.

“Oh my God. Get it out!” she yells, grabbing the front of her nightie and scrunching it in her fist.

Jessica and I start laughing at her.

“It’s only a ladybird,” we say at the same time.

“I know,” she says, almost crying now, “but I don’t want it in here doing that all night.”

I look up.

It’s still looping on the ceiling.

Before I can even attempt to catch it — never having had to catch a ladybird before — it lands. Straight on the front of Samantha’s nightie. Looking up at her.

She screams.

Seemingly unperturbed by the noise, the ladybird just stays there, bold as brass, right under her chin.

I'm still laughing at Samantha — who looks like she’s come face-to-face with a Great White — as I lay my hand flat against her chest. “That’s so him,” I chuckle. The ladybird hops aboard.

“Night then,” I say, carrying the ladybird out of the room on my hand, like a father giving away the bride, pulling the door softly closed behind me.

“Night, love,” I hear in its wake.

I look at the ladybird fondly before it lifts off, disappearing into the darkness of the hallway.