I know things are bad when I start re-watching the final series of Sex and the City. Those four women are my friends. Bar a couple of exceptions, my only friends. I try to be nice, but it always backfires. I find that people – especially women – are all very lovely when they get what they want; when you demand anything in return, they react with self-righteous indignation.
I suppose I’ve only just started to realise this now I’m bankrupt. Now my hands are tied, you have no idea how many times I am yanked back from my former pattern of behaviour, which was to throw money and favours at people. I see everyone around me in a completely different light. I realise pretty much every person I know treats me in this way. Sweetness and light when I’m giving them what they want (brand new appliances when I lost my home, loans, gifts, meals out, holidays, beauty products, clothes); resentful, chippy and pugilistic when I simply can’t.
Take last week. Two stand-up rows: one in person, one via text. All I had done was to send a text asking to borrow something: not money, not time, just an object. This person, whom I have helped out numerous times in the past, flew off the handle. It was like my awful trip home from Manchester Airport all over again when I’d asked for a lift, and it turned out to be too late, too dark, too inconvenient. I’d sheltered from the rain in a bus stop, called Nic, who came to get me with her charges, Gracie and Mini. Gracie was so excited to see me, she chewed Nic’s seat belt. £300. Would have been cheaper to call a taxi.
The other row was when I let a (sick) horse out of his stable by mistake: not my horse, but certainly my fault. What can I say? I was exhausted after that Milan trip, what with its eight-hour wait at the airport and no food when I finally got to the hotel at midnight. (‘Oooh! Italy!’ people say. ‘Have fun!’) It seems everyone else is allowed to make mistakes, say, ‘Oh, I forgot. Not my fault though!’ but not me. It’s as though people assume I’m made of steel. David did it the other day. We were eating, and as always I made a horrible mess around my plate. ‘It’s good to know you’re not perfect,’ he said. But whoever said I was?
There was another row, only today, just because I politely asked someone to close the boot of their car on their dog. ‘I’m not an idiot!’ the woman snapped, giving me the death stare. How about instead just a, ‘Course! No problem!’ But it seems I’m held in too much contempt for common courtesy.
The only person who has stepped up to the mark has been, surprise surprise, David. Having involved him at the eleventh hour in the rescue of two small Herdwick lambs, who had arrived in Antwerp for a ritual slaughter that was to be broadcast on Facebook, he has been guarding them in their temporary paddock ever since. Every now and then he sends a plaintive email: ‘I can’t stay in Europe indefinitely…’ I know he offered initially just to please me (he got really annoyed when I didn’t call him a hero; ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’ve eaten meat most of your life. It’s payback time’), but he has become inordinately fond of them as the weeks have ticked past. And I of him.
I remember the day my sister died. I arrived home after an eight-hour drive from visiting my accountant in Bristol to a cold, dark house. No one had bothered to cook me a meal, or write me a card or pop round with a takeaway and a bottle of wine. Those people who seem so friendly, so quick with hugs and a ‘Hello my love!’ take niceness only so far. It’s a veneer, to get what they want. But when my horse Lizzie died while I was away working in Canada, David turned up at Heathrow to meet me. It was like that scene at the beginning of Love, Actually. People hugging, in tears. All my life, I had never thought myself worthy of anyone bothering to turn up to meet me off a plane. My husband never did it. But David did.
I realise I’ve turned into Whitney Houston: a skeleton, a shadow of my former self. I’ve just spent my last £4 on a bottle of wine in Lidl. I’m unloved. A laughing stock. Only valuable as a cash cow. When we stumble, dead meat.