Upstairs, I knocked tentatively on Peter’s door, then left a few seconds and knocked again. I’m too afraid to enter unbidden in case I witness something that means I can no longer look at my baby boy in QUITE the same way again. While I was standing there, I mentally added more Mansize tissues to the shopping list. Eventually I shouted, ‘Peter? Peter, Dad is here! Are you ready?’

Peter finally opened his door and looked at me blankly. ‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Dad is here.’

‘Dad? Here? Why?’

‘To pick you up. You’re going to his house this weekend.’

‘THIS weekend?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, like TODAY?’

‘YES.’

‘But I can’t go yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m at a really good part in my game and I haven’t got a proper computer at Dad’s.’

‘I don’t care, you’re going to his house. Now.’

‘Can I take my computer?’

‘NO! Just pack some pants or something.’

‘Pants? Why?’

‘SO YOU CAN CHANGE THEM. OMG. JUST PACK SOME CLOTHES.’

‘OK.’

I banged on Jane’s door.

‘Are you ready?’ I demanded.

‘I’m doing my make-up,’ Jane shouted. ‘My eyebrows aren’t done.’

Eventually, after an HOUR of toing and froing and shouting and bellowing (during which Simon sat placidly at MY kitchen table, eating MY chocolate HobNobs and playing no part whatsoever in getting HIS children ready to spend the weekend with HIM), I finally waved them all off.

Two days. Two whole days. All to myself. What to do? I could go for a run (ha ha, NO!). Read an Improving Book? Or, first things first, I could finally finish the unpacking and get the house straight.

It was very quiet. I unpacked another box, and found the DVD of Jane’s nursery graduation. So then I had to find a laptop with a DVD drive so I could watch it. And then I cried all over again like I had on the day she left nursery and I thought my baby was all grown up now she was ready to start school. She was so little. In those dark days when they were babies and toddlers, I never thought they’d grow up. I thought they’d be little forever, and God knows, some of those long, long days certainly felt like forever. But all of a sudden, they went and grew up when I wasn’t looking.

I checked my watch. 2.41 pm. Gosh. Was that all? Doesn’t time … drag when you’re not running round like a blue-arsed fly. I’ve spent years longing for this moment – to not be constantly chasing my tail, to have some time to myself, to have some SPACE to myself, to have a room of one’s own, or at least an hour with the house to myself with nobody fighting or complaining they were hungry or demanding I magically increase the broadband speed or provide my credit card to buy something on the internet that they’d definitely pay me back for but hardly ever do. And now I had it – I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

A nap, I decided. A lovely nap. When was the last time I had time for a nap? Probably … pre-children. I know, I know, we’re all told that you’re supposed to nap when the baby naps, but then when are you supposed to have a shower, make the dinner, put the laundry on, pay the bills, stare hopelessly into a mirror wondering who this hollow-eyed stranger is staring back at you that bears a vague resemblance to your mother? Exactly. When the baby naps. So, FINALLY, after fifteen years of feeling permanently sleep-deprived, I could start catching up. A nap!

I arranged Judgy Dog and myself on the sofa with a snuggly blanky (Jesus, will I ever be able to say ‘blanket’ again, or are certain words condemned to be forever ingrained in my mind in baby talk – the same way I seem unable to shake off the urge to shout ‘LOOK! COW! HORSEY! WHAT DO COWS SAY? DO COWS SAY “MOOOOOO”? WHAT DO HORSEYS SAY? HORSEYS SAY “NEEEEEIIIIGHHHH!”’ every time I pass a field with animals in?) and we cosied down for a lovely nap.

The more I tried to sleep, the more wide awake I became. I stared at the ceiling, wondering what would happen if I died right now. Who would find me? Would Judgy have started eating me by the time the children came home on Sunday night? Would they then be so appalled and disgusted by his cannibalistic ways that they got rid of him and then he died alone in a shelter, even though it’s not actually cannibalism for a dog to eat a human? The thought of Judgy’s lonely death, all by himself in a cold concrete pen, was almost too much for me to bear.

I gave up hope of sleep and scrolled through Instagram instead. Maybe the children were having a horrible time at Simon’s and their feed would reflect this and I could feel smug. Except Jane had blocked me and Peter had not posted anything in months apart from photos of gaming scores. WHY HAD MY OWN DAUGHTER BLOCKED ME ON INSTAGRAM? I looked at Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy’s page instead. She was on a girly spa weekend. Why was I not on a girly spa weekend, drinking champagne in a hot tub? Even though champagne makes me belch and I haven’t been in a hot tub since I read an article that said they’re basically just heaving cauldrons of bacteria soup. But even so!

What about Fiona Montague? Oh, look, she was training for a triathlon and posting lots of photos of her looking great in skin-tight Lycra with ‘inspirational’ captions. Fuck off, Fiona, you husband-stealing slut. But despite her wanton ways, even Fiona was out and about having fun, and oooh, she’d just posted a new photo – her toes in the bath with a glass of wine because apparently she was about to head out on a ‘date night’. Bitch.

Who else to stalk? What about Debbie from HR? Debbie had been out for ‘brunch with good friends’ and finished her caption with #lovelaughlive. I might have to have Debbie killed. Christina, my erstwhile relationship counsellor, only posted wanky quotes about being true to yourself. That made me feel a little bit better, and I had a bijou judge of Christina.

I searched for Simon’s name again, although he’d always been staunchly anti-Instagram, and lo and behold, there he was! @SimonRussell30 (imaginative, Simon – I assume the ‘30’ refers to a random number, and you weren’t hoping people would think you were actually thirty). Why did he have an account now, after being so scathing about it for all these years? Not many photos yet, obviously, but there was one last night of two beers clinking, just titled ‘#Friyay!’ FFS. Firstly, who even still says ‘Friyay’? Even I know that is totally lame. Secondly, why does he get to go out for beers on Friday night when I spent my Friday night cooking dinner for his children, doing all his children’s laundry so they had clean clothes to take to his house for the weekend and then just as I was about to finally have a glass of wine, having to go and pick Jane up from the cinema because apparently the ‘bus hadn’t come’ – the same bus I assume that passed me heading out of town as I was heading in, as Jane seems to think if she misses the bus that is clearly the bus’s fault and it must have just not come and so I need to solve the problem. All while Simon was quaffing his ‘Friyay’ beer. And thirdly, who did the other beer belong to? Who? It could have been a work colleague, of course, but it was a wanky little bottle of foreign lager, not a Manly Pint, so equally could have been a girl’s. I realised I’d gnawed off what remained of my nails while scrolling through Simon’s photos. #SweetNewPad was another, with an arty shot of what must be his new sitting room (I couldn’t see the sideboard. Where was it? After all the fuss he made about me painting it, had he just got rid of it? RUDE). It looked very nice, and considerably more elegant than my own scruffy sitting room. But ‘#Sweet New Pad’? What was wrong with him? And he did realise you don’t have to hashtag every caption, didn’t he? Twat.

I went to my own page to see what Simon might think if he looked at it. It was less than inspiring. The last photo I’d posted was a pile of boxes, simply captioned ‘Moving Day!’ I must try harder. I wanted Simon to seethe with jealousy at my sheer fabulousness every time he looked at it. Assuming he looked at it. Why wouldn’t he look at it? Apart from because he was too busy having mindblowing #Friyay sex with a wanky, beer-drinking twenty-three-year-old with gravity-defying tits and no stretch marks in his #SweetNewPad, of course. Oh God! That was obviously what he was doing, while I lay slumped on a sagging sofa, trying not to cry because me and my cannibalistic dog were both going to die alone and unloved.

In the end, in case Simon did find a minute out of his filthy shag timetable to look at my page and gloat he’d escaped the nagging witch of an ex-wife and remind himself of how much he was #lovinglife with his lithe sex bomb (who could probably contort herself into improbable positions without shrieking, ‘Wait, stop, I’ve done something to my hip’), I went and had a bath and posted a Fiona Montague-style shot with a glass of wine and about a million filters so it looked quite sexy, and put ‘The weekend starts here!’ It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could manage.

Duly bathed (it turns out a bath isn’t quite so decadent when there isn’t much else you’re supposed to be doing), I was bored out of my mind and quite alarmed at the prospect of the many empty hours stretching ahead of me. I’d been so sure I had Inner Resources at my disposal and would be happy with my own company, but it seems it has been so long since I’ve had the chance to experience my own company that my Inner Resources appear to have buggered off, along with the perkiness of my tits and my natural hair colour.

‘Bollocks!’ I thought, as I failed to log in to Netflix, Jane having ignored my pleading texts for the password – Peter claims not to know it as he only watches YouTube. I wished I’d had the wit to have arranged to go out or meet friends or do SOMETHING tonight, but I’d been so sure of those Inner Resources I’d not bothered. I vaguely wondered about being an Independent Modern Woman and going to the cinema by myself, but I wasn’t sure I could eat a whole tub of popcorn on my own, and obviously the popcorn is the only reason to go to the pictures. And also, I’d have to put my bra back on. I gave up and returned to reading Riders. Since I was clearly never going to have sex again, I might as well read about other people doing it.

But then – oh hallelujah – the doorbell rang. Who could it be? I positively skipped to the door, filled with excitement. I was pretty sure it was probably some passing hunky farmer, who had popped by to tell me off for some Terrible Countryside Transgression I’d unwittingly made, and although initially he’d be very cross with me and I’d think him arrogant and overbearing, I’d still notice his Cambridge blue eyes and rugged physique as he sprang onto his tractor, and he in turn would in fact have fallen hopelessly in love with me at first sight, and would only fall deeper over the coming weeks as he berated me further for my charmingly hopeless country faux pas, until he could contain himself no longer and declared his undying love for me, just as I was feeling gloomy over a misunderstanding that had led me to think he was marrying the icily beautiful Lady of the Manor, but it was OK, it was me all along. It didn’t even really matter that I was in my jammies with toast crumbs in my cleavage, because everyone knows in these scenarios that the more grubby, dishevelled and deranged you look, the MORE likely the hero is to fall in love with you …

It was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Judgy, who could at least have earned his keep by seeing them off, refused to move from the sofa.

I shuffled back, gloomy once more, to consider whether I could be arsed starting a seven-season American sitcom. The doorbell rang again. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were at least persistent in their desire to save my soul from eternal damnation, I reflected, but I still wasn’t really interested in hearing more about it. I flung open the door, ready to explain that it was all very well, but actually I was an atheist, and would THEY like to hear about MY beliefs about how there’s no God, THERE’S ONLY SCIENCE?

On the doorstep stood a very welcome sight in the form of my lovely friends Colin and Sam, and Hannah and Charlie. Not quite a rugged farmer to fall in love with me, but probably much, much better, because, really, who could arsed with all the emotional upheaval of falling in love again?

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

‘Well, that is a nice way to greet your oldest and bestest friend,’ said Hannah.

‘We thought you might like some company,’ said Sam, ‘what with it being your first night on your own in the new house. It’s always a tough one, that first night without the kids.’

‘But how did you know?’ I said.

‘Oh, Jane told Sophie she was at Simon’s tonight,’ said Sam. ‘So we thought what better way to spend our Saturday night than by getting pissed with you and shouting “Bastard” about Simon in a supportive way.’

‘That does sound quite good fun,’ I admitted.

‘I’ll definitely shout “Bastard” the loudest,’ said Hannah.

‘And also,’ put in Colin, ‘we haven’t even seen your new house yet, so I’m obviously dying to conform to the gay stereotype by coming round and criticising your décor. But also what Sam said.’

I do love Colin. Sam spent several years as a single father, following the departure of his dastardly former partner Robin, and after years of lurking around supermarkets (he read an article about it being a good place to meet men, but felt his trolley full of fish fingers and Petits Filous was off-putting to the singletons on the prowl in the produce aisle), a flirtation with Tinder (I don’t think Hannah and I helped there, we just kept shouting ‘No! SWIPE!’ every time he showed us a potential date/shag), a period of announcing he was Never Going to Find Love and thus was giving up looking and Focusing on His Inner Self (he pulled a muscle his first week at yoga and was thrown out of the class for shouting ‘Fucking hell, I think I’ve broken my arse!’, after which he accepted that his inner self preferred tequila slammers to Downward Dogs), he met Colin at the gym – ‘I’m almost afraid to tell people that’s how we met,’ he admitted. ‘It’s such a cliché.’

‘And Hannah told me I was to come and make myself useful, which I suspect will involve being sent for a takeaway and then driving everyone home. Which I think will actually be quite useful of me,’ said Charlie.

Oh lovely, lovely Charlie. Hannah’s divine second husband is so much nicer than her horrible first husband Dan, who was nothing more than a rancid streak of weasel piss. To my utter horror, I found myself for the first time ever thinking that maybe I should have made better choices in my life and married Charlie and not Simon, because once upon a time, at university, about a million years ago, when we were all young and foolish and irresponsible, Charlie had been in love with me, but with the callousness of youth I’d rejected good old dependable Charlie Carrhill for the dashingly gorgeous, romantic and slightly dangerous Simon Russell. Simon was so gorgeous back then. I think the very fact he noticed my existence was enough to turn my head and make me fall in love with him, breaking poor Charlie’s heart in the process.

And now look at us. All that hope and promise and love Simon and I once had, reduced to trying to make him jealous through my Instagram feed. What if I hadn’t let Simon seduce me with his wicked smile and come-to-bed eyes and had made a more sensible and considered choice, like Charlie? I gave myself a shake. No one deserved lovely Charlie more than Hannah (my bestest and oldest friend indeed, I reminded myself), and to even begin thinking like that … Well, that would make me a terrible person, and if I was determined one thing was going to come out of this sodding divorce, it was that I was going to be a Better Person. Do Good Works and things like that, and become universally beloved so I don’t die alone and unwanted, and small children would call out, ‘God bless you, Ma’am’ when I walked down the street. I probably wasn’t doing very well so far after my Instagramming earlier, though. Maybe I could make up for it by retweeting something worthy later. And actually, divine though Charlie was with Hannah, he hadn’t actually been any better than Simon when he was with his first wife, so he wasn’t really Mr Perfect either.

‘Ellen, are you going to stand there gawping and staring into space or are you going to open that nice champagne I brought? Go and get some glasses while I decide why all your paintings are in the wrong place,’ chided Colin.

‘It doesn’t matter what you think about my painting placement,’ I informed him. ‘They’re positioned like they are for a reason, to hide a multitude of sins. Likewise, why the sofa is where it is. So it’s all staying put, because otherwise it all looks a bit shit.’

Colin sighed. ‘You’re spoiling all my fun,’ he said. ‘How am I supposed to be a Proper Gay with you thwarting me at every turn when I try to express myself?’

‘Colin, darling, you’re a corporate lawyer, you express yourself by making obscene amounts of money for evil corporations, not by prancing around rearranging Ellen’s furniture. If you want to unleash your Proper Gay, just stick some Madonna on and leave the sofa where it is,’ said Sam.

Colin looked sulky. ‘You know I don’t like Madonna,’ he complained. ‘I’m not a total cliché, you know. Anyway, Ellen, cheers! New house, new life, new you, new start! How are you feeling?’

‘A bit lost …’ I confessed.

‘Oh Ellen,’ said Hannah. ‘Of course you are, that’s totally natural. But this is an amazing opportunity for a fresh start. Imagine if Dan had never left me, and I was still stuck with him.’

‘But Simon wasn’t Dan, was he?’ I said sadly. ‘I mean, he could be a bit of a lazy arsehole at times, but he wasn’t a bad person. There were a lot of good bits too. I really do love him. Loved him. I did love him, I mean.’

‘This is the hardest part,’ said Hannah. ‘The bit where you think you’re going to be on the shelf for evermore, and die alone and unloved in a damp basement flat surrounded by seventeen cats. Remember when I was at that stage?’

‘Vaguely. Instead I shall die alone and unloved in a damp hovel of cottage with weirdly placed paintings to hide the mildew, surrounded by terriers who will fight over my dead body. I don’t even think the roses round the door are roses, I think they’re just brambles.’

‘Well, maybe it’s time to think about getting back in the game then?’ suggested Colin.

‘Back in the saddle, so to speak,’ added Sam with a lascivious wink.

‘Saddle? Game?’ I said in confusion. ‘What on earth are you talking about? You think I should take up tennis? And riding? Or cycling? Do a triathlon like Fiona Montague?’

‘Well, riding of a sort,’ snorted Sam with another leery wink. ‘Crikey, is Fiona doing a triathlon? I’d have thought she’d be too worried about her make-up running!’

‘Sam,’ snapped Colin. ‘Your double entendres are not helping, nor is your winking, which frankly is just disturbing. Please never do that at me. And we’re not here to talk about Fiona Montague.’

Sam muttered something mutinous.

‘No, Ellen,’ Colin went on. ‘We’re talking about you getting back in the dating game. Finding yourself a man. Getting a bit of cock. You’re a beautiful woman in her prime, who deserves to have a bit of fun, and we thought you maybe just need a nudge.’

I looked at them both in horror. ‘No. Just … no. I can’t. It’s not possible. And please don’t describe me as a woman in her prime, because that just reminds me of Miss Jean Brodie, who was a mad, sex-obsessed fascist who came to no good in the end. I’m not a nympho Nazi, thank you very much!’

‘But Ellen, don’t you miss sex?’ asked Colin gently.

‘No,’ I said bluntly. ‘I don’t. I miss Simon. I miss the man I thought he was. I miss having someone to come home to and tell about my day, even if he doesn’t listen, and someone to make me a cup of tea in bed on Sunday morning, and having someone I’ve spent my whole life with so that sometimes when I see something funny and I know they’d be the only other person in the world who would find that funny too I can just tell them or text them a photo and know they’ll get my joke without having to explain it. I miss having someone who remembers our children’s firsts – their first steps, their first words, their first days at school. I miss having someone who knows me in the way you can only know someone after twenty-five years together. And he wasn’t annoying all the time. There was a lot of good stuff too, when he took off his ratty fleeces and wore the nice jumpers I bought him. We had a lot of laughs together, and now I’ve no one to think about going on Nile cruises with when we’re old, or to share my indignation when the first SAGA catalogue drops through the door, and I miss the thought of all the things we should have done together when we finally had time and money and were free from the children. But I don’t miss fucking SEX, if you’ll pardon the pun!’

And then I burst into tears. Hideous, wracking tears, the tears I’d been holding in for months, ever since the furious, scalding, angry tears the night that he told me he needed some ‘space’, and I decided after those tears that I could either get on with my life or I could give in to the tears, but I couldn’t do both because if I gave in to the tears I’d drown in them. But it seems they were still there and had sneakily found a way to escape, which after all is what water always does. I sobbed and I sobbed, while Sam did the awkward man thing of patting my back gingerly and mumbling ‘There, there’, until Colin dispatched him in search of tissues and ‘a PROPER drink, darling, something stronger than bloody champagne, but for Christ’s sake not gin, she’s in enough of a state as it is!’ and I attempted to howl something about there being twelve packs of Mansize tissues in the cupboard under the stairs, and Colin took over and pulled me into a huge bear hug and just held me while I cried and cried, until the storm started to pass and I became uncomfortably aware that I’d drenched the front of his shirt in tears and, much worse, snot.

As the howling subsided into that awkward sniffling hiccupping that comes at the end of a really bad crying jag, and I attempted to gain some sort of control over myself, Colin handed me a large wad of tissues, and an eye-wateringly strong vodka and tonic.

‘Better?’ he enquired.

‘Uh huh,’ I gulped.

‘I think you needed that, didn’t you?’ he said gently.

I had needed it. I felt oddly cleansed, and calmer than I’d been for months.

‘Ellen,’ said Hannah. ‘Do you really still love Simon? Do you regret divorcing him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s all so confusing. We’d been together so long, and I was so hurt and angry by what he did, but I thought we’d get through it in the end, we’d find a way, but then he started all that shit about “needing space” and not knowing if he loved me, so that was that, really … But it’s strange, life without him, because there were good bits too, you know. I know you thought he was an arse, but I do, did, I don’t know, love him, and despite everything, deep down I always thought he loved me too. I just always thought we’d grow old together. I’ve thought that since the very first night we got together. And now we won’t. And that takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that I’ll be on my own now for the rest of my life, with no one to accompany me on that Nile cruise.’

‘In fairness, you’d been trying to persuade Simon to go on a Nile cruise for years and he always refused on the basis that you’d only be disappointed when no one was murdered on board so you could don a shady hat and solve the mystery, gin and tonic in hand. Same as he wouldn’t go on the Orient Express with you either, because the murder-free reality would just shatter all your Agatha Christie fantasies,’ pointed out Colin.

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