update from the cracks: this is how financial control works

even in a wifi black out

We arrived back home in London last weekend after six glorious days in the Pennines a bit out of sorts. After a week of clean air and long lush views, our crumbling black terraced house seemed stand-offish and unwelcoming. A thin layer of smog-dust coated the city the way it does after a few days without a hard rain. Even Solly, who normally breaths a sigh of inner-city tween relief at the eye-curdling sight of the North Circular, complained he missed ‘going for walks.’ This was somewhat irritating because I’d spent half the holiday trying tempt/tease/cajole and, when necessary, shout him out of bed and off his phone, on various nature-oriented excursions, but I was too exhausted for I-told-you-so’s after the long drive south.

It’s hard for any parent to fight the constant tidal pull of the internet — it’s bigger than all of us, literally and figuratively — but for a sole care single parent it’s a hopeless state of affairs. The internet is the altar on which I regularly and ruthlessly am forced to surrender the attention span of my children when I desperately need to work, or just when the fight in me wanes, which on the holidays it often does. If I manage to get them both off it and out of the house for a couple of hours each day, I consider it a victory. David Brooks can write as many smug books as he wants but for those of us forced to live in the harsh neighbourhood of reality, it’s an essential service. Without it, we have no respite or rest. No sense of home.

Four and a half internet-free hours hours on the motorway in a car filled with squabbling boys, half-eaten Gregg’s pasties and the relentless strains of tinny downloaded drill rap would test the spiritual resolve of the Buddha, but somehow I managed the whole journey without even once slamming on the breaks/swearing/crying/threatening to abandon anyone in a lay-by. I did, however, experience my own long-recurring fantasy of pulling over, jumping from the car and running up a rainy hill and sobbing into the neck of a horse as I watched the car burst into flames — a side-effect of watching Michael Clayton too many times.

On entering the house we were greeted by Phoebe, our longtime contra-deal-lodger/au pair. Phoebe is twenty-five, a country girl from Devon, now doing work experience at one of the red tops. Because she lacks family income, Phoebe helps out around the house in exchange for free room and board, a deal that works for everyone involved. After a week on her own I assumed she’d be dreading our return because the shower in the loft is still broken (the quotes to fix it are extortionate) and now that we were back she’d have to go back to sharing a manky family bathroom with my manky children, helping with the endless stream of dishes and childcare in addition to the long hours of general assignment reporting she’s been doing for a pauper’s wave across town in Canary Wharf. But if Phoebe was sad to see us she hid it beautifully. She threw her arms around us one by one and exclaimed how much she’d missed us all.

‘Thomas Cromwell and I were so lonely on our own’ she said, helping me bring in the cases from the car. (Phoebe’s empath tendencies make her prone to emotionally-anthropomorphising the cat). ‘And the house was so quiet, at one point I had to close all the bedroom doors. I didn’t like it at all.’

‘Sounds awful,’ I said, allowing my mind drift to another one of my recurrent fantasies: What would it be like to actually be alone in my own home for more than a few hours at stretch? (Some use PornHub to get off but as a sole care single mother all I have to do is close my eyes and imagine making a perfect two-egg omelette in a silent tidy house at 7 pm on a Tuesday.) Because she is perfect in every conceivable way, Phoebe had tidied the house up for our return, or maybe she just didn’t make a mess in the first place? In any case it was a state of affairs the boys managed to rectify in seconds. As I lugged the cooler bag of half-thawed left-overs back to kitchen, hoping to god the sound of broken glass wasn’t the big bottle of olive oil, Frank came flying down stairs panting in distress. Words tumbled out of him in an incomprehensible stream. Something about FIFA, or was it Fortnite? Or Netflix? Or Prime, or, or, or what? I told him to slow down and use his big words, at which point Solly stormed in doing his twelve-year-old ‘man of the house’ act. Just shut the frick up, he shouted at his brother. Calm down, EVERYONE CALM DOWN NOW! I’ll fix it, we just have to reset it that’s all!

I looked at Phoebe in confusion. ‘Oh!’ she said brightly. ‘I forgot to mention, the Wifi doesn’t seem to be working? It says there’s a connection issue or something?’

I pulled her to the back corner of the kitchen then whispered, ‘Phoebe, exactly long has this been going on?’

‘Um, since yesterday I think? Or maybe this morning?’ The colour drained from her face. As I mentioned she’s highly sensitive. ‘I’m actually not sure? I mean it’s been fine, I have data, plus I didn’t want to bother you on holiday with boring techie stuff so…’

I braced myself against the counter, bowed my head and inhaled very deeply, practicing the ‘tension-and-release’ breathing method from my cognitive hypnotherapy certification course. Sensing danger, Phoebe darted from the room and busied herself banging out the boys’ muddy boots. Within seconds Solly, having investigated the situation more deeply, was in front of me raging about dead wifi connection.

What the hell is going on Mum? How did this happen? The message from Sky says we’ve been disconnected! There’s been some mistake, you need to call them right now and fix it! I have plans! I need to talk to my friends!

I explained to my eldest son there was no point calling the service provider at six p.m. on a weekend evening, it would have to wait til tomorrow at least, more likely Monday. He looked at me with a bereft face that said, Why is this happening? I didn’t need to answer him because he already knew the answer: His father had finally cut us off completely. That was it. The last thread was snipped.

I went into my writing shed after that, half-closed the broken door with the badly rigged bungee cord and laid my face flat on my desk. For two minutes I kept perfectly still and tried to tune into the Marianna Trench of sadness I knew lay somewhere under the silt bottom of the tsunami of pure rage that was crashing over me, wave after roiling wave. Eventually I found it, the dark blue cavernous lull, and was able to cry. I wept just a bit. But a bit is still something. Following this release I felt human enough to go back into the kitchen and make fish fingers and peas which no one ate because of the Greggs stop.

The Wifi in our house is (was) part of a Sky package that also provided our terrestrial TV service and an old fashioned landline, which Phoebe and the boys can use to call me in the event of an emergency. The boys’ devices have no data because data is not a luxury I can afford for my children. The Sky package is (was) the only bill their father has continued to pay since he absented himself from our lives two years ago, despite continuing to receive his pay and benefits. Everything other service, contract and policy, he has, over time, cut off without warning or discussion, a process that began shortly after the initial chaos of the split. First the major utilities went down one by one, then the insurance. Because my name wasn’t on anything and I’d dutifully been forwarding his post to his parents’ address in another city, I had to work out what was happening from a series of bailiffs who arrived at the house to clamp the car and other items, demanding payments in arrears.

I have no idea why the boys’ father kept on paying the Sky package for as long as he did but it didn’t go off and I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Beggars can’t be choosers. I assumed it was because of the sports package, which allowed the boys to watch Everton games. Maybe he had access and to our usage and had noticed noticed they didn’t bother to follow his team anymore? If he’d asked why I could have told him why: It makes them too sad. But I couldn’t ask now because we no longer had wifi. This is how financial control works.