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unfurls from sleep in his green pajamas like a new shoot and Vicki starts bustling around the kitchen and begins, I kid you not, to reorganize my spice cupboard.
    Nothing
is sacred.
    Hours shuffle like cards. Suddenly it’s Monday. Ollie doesn’t look like he’s slept at all. He can’t be arsed to shower and when I get near him, laminating his body as close as I can, he smells of scalp and skin and sweat. He’s been sweating a lot even though it’s cold. It’s as if he’s carried a stash of drugs through Dubai customs in the sole of his sneaker. He needs to shave, but doesn’t. He attempts to pack Vicki off to the local supermarket while he gets Freddie ready for school. But she won’t budge. She’s fussing. No, Ollie mumbles. He wants to do this himself, he’s got to be able to do it himself. Finally, Vicki takes the sledgehammer hint and is successfully banished to buy a pint of milk. Ollie rummages through the kitchen cupboards,looking for Freddie’s lunchbox. It’s on the shelf above the sink, as it always is, but, maddeningly, he looks everywhere but there. He curses, gives up. He puts two Penguin bars in an old plastic bag—two?—alongside one of Jenny’s cold burned fish fingers, which he wraps in cellophane—impressed by the cellophane bit—and a Marmite sandwich made from bread that has outlived me. He does not brush Freddie’s hair, which sticks out like wings. And he does not notice that Freddie is wearing his Superman pajama top beneath his gray school shirt. Freddie has been trying to wear this Superman top to school for at least a year.
    Ollie, one of the hungriest men alive, forgets to feed himself and, more cataclysmically, forgets to feed the mightily disgruntled Ping Pong. He can’t find the school bag, which is on a hook in the utility cupboard, the same hook it’s been hung on for the last two years.
    I’m beginning to realize how much I did. How much I micromanaged our lives. And I’m worrying about how Ollie is going to cope. Because there is the domesticated man. And there’s Ollie. This is a man who once watered a houseplant for a year before realizing it was plastic. This is a man who only last week put washing powder tablets in the tumble dryer. Yes, Ollie is a brilliant music producer. His brain can organize an infinite variation of bars and chords and breaks. But it cannot compute how many pints of milk a family of three drinks in a week. (Five.)
    Ollie and Freddie finally leave for school, hands knotted together. How much I want to slip my hands into that tight little knot. How much I want to run my fingers through Freddie’s hair and feel his hot boy’s neck. How I want to yank up Ollie back to his full height to stop that gorgeous body from collapsing in on itself like a wonky old deck chair. He is normally so reassuringly solid—wide shouldered, barrel chested, male and bulky like a hunk of roughly hewn oak—but day by day he looks whittled down. His twisted-fit Levi’s are slipping down his hips. His face is newly angular, unshaven andangry; his jaw is jutting because his teeth are constantly clenched. He reminds me of how he used to look in his twenties when he’d spent too many sleepless weekends on the coke that made him so elated then so utterly miserable, before “his angel of Harpenden,” as he used to call me back then, rescued him and made him drink Chablis instead. But I can’t rescue him now. It seems I’m merely watching them rather than watching over them, more CCTV than celestial being.
    At the school gates there’s a throng of mothers, milling with muted excitement as if waiting for some sale doors to fling open. Freddie and Ollie walk down the street toward them. The hushed talking immediately stops. They part to make room for his passing, buggies are swiftly jerked out of his way, fevered looks are exchanged. Eyes fill with tears.
    My husband, the
pope
!
    Ollie blanks them, walking determinedly toward the cheerful red door of class 2A to the