Help Me

Just had dinner with my ex-de-facto-step kid. She's a lovely girl - much taller and more grown-up than last time I saw her, which must have been something like Christmas last year. We had dinner together. She told me all sorts of stories of school, the drums, her first rock concert, a camping trip she'd been on. She talks too fast and on and on, so it was a little hard to hear her in the restaurant but I kept nodding and going "Oh!" at the appropriate places and we had a nice time. I still can't work out my obligations toward her, exactly, but with 13 year olds it's pretty easy, we don't have to blow this dinner up into a great hoo-ha goodbye thing. It's just dinner. I enjoy her company. I will keep in touch. I'm a grown-up who's got her back.

Two things knocked me. One, I asked her, just casually on the way to taking her back to his house, "Are you doing anything special over the summer?" "Yeah, I'm going overseas with Dad." Oh. He didn't mention. Why would he have mentioned? I haven't had any contact with him at all for like nine months. And he's studiously learned not to mention words like "Europe" in my presence. Because of reactions like this. I feel a bit knocked. He's going to take Grom, who I knew from the time she was 1 1/2, with whom I did the hard yards of weekends and school holidays for ten years, he's going to take her to meet the Other Woman.

And he gave me a copy of his book. I almost asked him to sign it and thought better of it - what would be appropriate to say? It's remarkably slender, compared to the thesis that spawned it. I'm glad to have it - actually because I need to read the bit about quantum physics and information, in order to talk to another boy altogether. I shouldn't even have looked at the acknowledgements, but how can you not? I was there, in a big list of friends, with thanks to all of us for "support and inspiration". My erstwhile friend was there and I'm not sure why - maybe they got closer than I thought before she moved away. No doubt they did. Anyway, but I thought, oh good, the Other Woman is not there at all. That's good, because she wasn't around for any of this, it was all me. "Support", as in $70,000 worth of paying his rent and child support for various periods while he was writing the thing. But then. The last name in the list. "Melinda". Her big name. Her big real name that her stupid cartoon regular name is shortened from. So, she was there. Last.

At least I was there too - a friend of mine wrote a book and in the acknowledgements he thanked the new girlfriend, "who was there at the end of the project." And it was so obvious that the old girlfriend had been there in the first draft and had been excised from the sentence. It was so clear that it had originally said, "For X, who was there at the beginning of the project, and for Y, who was there at the end of the project," but Y was a jealous sort and I'm sure made him cut X out - but the excision was so obvious that the scar was quite evident, still, in the sentence. So at least I was there in the sentence at all. Second. And he spelled my name right and everything.

But I feel knocked.

Despite the fact that I have lost my voice (did it in over the weekend talking about Free Will too loud, but that's another story), and have developed a cough that I'm quite worried about because it feels like a lung infection, an asthma complication, and I really don't have time for that just before a long flight, depite all of this and 4 hours of sleep and being knocked, I stopped off at the Clock and had a glass of house champagne and sat quietly crossing things off my list.

I have a strange desire to talk on the phone about quantum physics. But I remember the joke about the woman who has 8 hours to live ("Easy for you to say, you don't have to get up and go to work in the morning"), and I will instead wait an hour and then ring a bunch of Americans and try to get my accommodation sorted out.

Argh.