Why can't *I* have a wife?

I remember travelling to Spain, at the beginning of 1995, when I lived there. I got as cheap a flight as I could, which meant that it was at a very ungoldy hour in the morning when I had to get up off my brother's floor in north London, get the first tube and make the journey through the dawn dark across town to Gatwick.

I remember driving myself to school, in the summer of 1989, while my mother was away on holiday for two weeks. She had left some food for me, but I was definitely alone in the house - Mum had gone on holiday with her cousins to Italy in the days before mobiles or the interweb.

I remember getting on the train alone, saying goodbye to Kate, leaving her on the platform in Manchester, where I'd gone to stay with her at university for the first time. I was 14.

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There is nothing like leaving alone. Nothing. It can be devastating or exciting, anticipatory or tearful, but it is always exhilarating. That luxurious feeling of alone when you are indeed by yourself, but you have a gorgeous lattice-work of friends and family somewhere in the world, keen to know about you, loving, familiar, your invisible shadow. There are other alones that are not fun or cool or things I want to know about: a fully, vertiginous aloneness where there is no one who will offer me a mattress for the night or lend me a fiver. No siree. I've read about those alones, had them described to me, but I do not need to experience them.

I am about to leave Cape Town alone. Martin and Jacques help me get my stuff to the car. I've been packing for days, I've kind of been packing forever. I'm always in and out of one bag or another. I love packing to leave, even when I don't want to leave, I love the packing. I think it's probably got something to do with owning too much stuff: packing to leave, the kind of packing where you know you can get the stuff in your suitcase/rucksack/handbag because that's how the stuff got here in the first place, makes me relax. Not the packing to go. I hate initial packing to leave home as much as the next person who always carries too much stuff and has to take multiple bras, even for a couple of days away. Packing to go is one of the few things that makes sense of the Christian idea of purgatory, of hell, of the very devil himself. He's imaginary most of the time, but Lucifer is sitting on the end of my bed tossing paperwork and tights at me when I'm packing to go.

As someone who always has too much stuff I feel great when I can get things in a bag, everything I have that needs to go in the bag goes in the bag. This is not true of any other part of my life: draws are overflowing, cupboard doors are forced shut, things spill off.... other things which teeter on the edge of furniture I have half painted/sanded/mended, and land in great drifts by the things which fell there seven weeks before.

I'm as happy as a sandboy packing to leave. Marvelous. And we've had a top fairwell do. Luckily the last few days in Cape Town are so busy, so eventful, so interesting that I find myself suddenly at a play reading and then suddenly leaving the play reading and suddenly preparing the flat and then people are arriving, talking, meeting. My mum and my aunt are here. I've been thinking about these Cape Town people meeting them both, especially as they appear in the play, for a while. Luckily Martin and Jacques have been very good at getting things ready for the party too. I find myself horribly wanting as a hostess, not through lack of wanting to make people feel happy, at their ease. But I fear I am so much not at my ease that I have no sense of proportion and find myself frozen with worry that I'm not cutting the celery into the right shaped pieces, that my gin and tonics are too tonicy (making me stingy) or too ginny (making me something far worse), that there's too much potato and not enough salad cream.... in the cheesecake. Every decision I make is surely wrong.

God, how I wish I had a wife. We should all have a wife. Lots of my mates, even now, in 2013, have lovely, old-fashioned wives, who produce drinks, souffles, children, while my mates get to chat to guests and shelf-wrangle. Why can't I have that? Oh, yeah, it's because I can't have anyone: nobody wants me. Yep, yep, I remember now, there's  no need to go on about it.

Martin and Jacques make it look like a party and the guests make it a party and I treat it like a party, so it's  party. And it's so hard to say goodbye that one guest comes the next morning to wish us bon voyage, birthday gift for the impending day in hand. She was a friend of Kate's. It is unexpectedly difficult to let go of all this, never mind we're off for a few days' holiday, never mind I'll be in wonderful company, never mind we have some shows to look forward to in Jo'burg, I just don't want to say goodbye. As the opportunity that is Cape Town finally closes down on me I want it more than anything else I can think of, more, even, than that darn man.

I hug Martin and Jacques on the street, even though I'll be seeing them later, and I drive out of the Mother City. I'm picking up Mum and My Littlest Auntie on the way, but for now I am alone, beautifully alone, as if this were my natural state, and, with all the farewells done - for now, fleetingly - I can pretend that Kate is beside me and that we are off on one of our adventures.