The show must go on - My Message in a Bottle monologue

            Mum says it’s like a circus when she comes round here. Bright lights and squealing, kids running wild. That’s what she means. She thinks I don’t have them under control. Not like she did. Ringmaster. Lion tamer.

            He’s on her side. The strong man in his big top. Comes home asking why the chairs are balanced like acrobats in a heap, can’t see the mountain or the den they made. He complains about the glitter in the cracks in the kitchen table, doesn’t look at what we’ve conjured from scraps and glue.

            We set things straight by six though and I dish up. Meat and two veg, the way he likes it. There used to be three, but times are tight and I have to cut our cloth accordingly. He pours that Hendos like wine. I tell him to go easy. It’s not cheap that stuff, even though I shop around. You can’t get relish at the food bank. ‘Strong and Northern’, he says, every time, ‘like me’. Pumping his muscles for the audience. Biceps like the steel he lifts at the gym five nights a week.

            I’ve not been to the gym for years. Between kids and work, I can’t find the time. It’s a tightrope as it is. To be honest, I’m grateful that he doesn’t find me attractive these days, glad that he keeps those arms away from me. He used to say I was soft like rolling Sheffield hills, used to nestle his head in peaks and crevices. I used to welcome him then. I was happy being the glamorous assistant in his show, until he pinned me to that spinning wheel, throwing words and fists like knives. At least he doesn’t touch me anymore. Now he just calls me fat lass. I’m the bearded lady, freak show. The kids laugh at his jokes as he bounces them off his pecs for half an hour before he heads out. Just two now, though there used to be three.

            While he’s at the gym, I juggle the dinner plates. No audience now, it’s just me.  One toddler round my legs and one in my arms, and the weight of this grief that I lift daily, that I carry on my shoulders in the dark. I put a costume on each morning, put a mask on for the kids, spend the day walking on the hire wire, trying not to fall. Strong and Northern. I put the Hendos back in cupboard, put the kids to bed, imagine crawling into my own den, watching the glitter glint in the table cracks.