by Rick Gekoski
‘Close those windows and draw the curtains please!’
‘But,’ she remonstrated, ‘is hot and dark. Not nice to work. And dusty. Bad smell. How you say – ?’
I can’t resist a word game. ‘Stuffy?’ I suggested.
She looked puzzled. ‘No.’
‘Yes! Stuffy! I love stuffy!’
She looked mildly alarmed. Was I propositioning her?
‘I clean some more now,’ she said firmly.
I went on a tour of inspection. The curtains in the kitchen, dining room and downstairs study were pulled back, the windows opened wide. The sunlight infiltrated my interiors alarmingly. I went round hastily, closing and drawing, re-establishing the gloom. You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.
She followed me, puzzled. ‘I am Bronya,’ she said. She did not offer her hand, thank God.
‘I am – ’
‘I know. Mr Dork.’
‘Darke,’ I said.
‘Yes, Mr Dork.’
When I’m not desperate, I’m bored.
I spend a lot of time in bed on the desperate days, and in my comfy armchair on the bored ones.
But I am not inflexible with regard to my emotional states and sites, and can make do in either place in either mood. But then I get bored being in bed, or desperate in the awful comfort of my chair.
Being bored makes me desperate, and being desperate is boring.
I am a double helix of human emotion, and its absence. Over-filled, then empty. Up, then down. Only without the up.
*
The pleasure of my daily rituals is that I have no one to share them with. I wake slowly, make my first cup of coffee and return to bed, read for an hour or so before showering and shaving. Though I have no one for whom to look good, I take care with my appearance, as I never feel whole unless I am dressed well. I am aware that this sounds foppish, or foolish, or perhaps just sad, but I wear a clean white shirt every day, and a casual cashmere jacket. My moleskin trousers are pressed, my shoes shined. My scruffy colleagues – most schoolteachers lose their self-respect quickly, and end up mooching about, whiffy and rumpled – teased me about my fastidiousness. I didn’t mind. I looked better than they did.
I feel imposed upon by the mere ringing of the doorbell, much less by the person that it may herald. And so I have – I thought rather cleverly – made Bronya’s regular Thursday hours (between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.) the time at which my various deliveries appear. She can then receive and unpack whatever shows up. The Waitrose order comes in the morning delivery slot, and Bronya has been instructed never to accept substitutions. They once offered a jar of pickled Jewish cucumbers when I ordered cornichons!
She turns out to be competent in many ways, and I am delighted that her English is too rudimentary for sustained conversation, else she would no doubt impose her life history on me. I pretend to be very hard of hearing, though I slip up too often. She has proved biddable in all respects save her insistence that the curtains be opened while she works downstairs, and having admonished her about this, her innate intractability set in and she threatened to quit.
‘Is not healthy. I rather work someplace else.’
You have to pick your issues with Bulgarians, and had she resigned, who knows, I might have done much worse. A surly Latvian perhaps, or a talkative Pole. After all, I could stay upstairs – as she was quick to point out – while she worked downstairs. And when she came up to do my bedroom, bathroom and study, I could retreat to the drawing room and close the curtains.
This small domestic tiff having been settled, we are consequently getting on adequately: she knows how to programme the dishwasher, do the week’s washing and ironing, and (which took some time) learned where everything goes: wine glasses here, dinner plates there, silver – not to be put in the dishwasher! – in the drawer in the sideboard, sauces on this shelf, seeds on that, pickles and chutneys on the second shelf at the rear of the fridge. I like things in their places. I am by nature what I call orderly and Suzy deemed obsessional.
I’d come into the kitchen to make a second cup of coffee, though Bronya had offered to make one and bring it up to me. I interrupted her search for the Nescafé (!) and said I would do it myself. She’d seen Gaggias in cafés, but was astonished that a private person could own one, and watched me carefully as I made my cup.
‘Smells good!’
She peered into the cup, her face intrusively close enough to attempt a quick slurp of the contents. I pulled it away, rattling the saucer. It would have spilled, but a double espresso only fills half the cup.
Bronya pointed to the contents. ‘What is that?’
‘What is what?’
She pointed again. I was for a moment alarmed that she might be about to dip her finger in.
‘Oh, that. It’s called crema.’
‘Is cream?’
‘No, is oil from coffee bean. Is very delicious.’
Why is it that, faced with a person with limited English, we end up talking in this pidgin variety, rather than setting a good but simple example of right usage?
‘You make like this – ’ She searched for the right word.
‘Purposely.’
She nodded. She was a quick study, and I suspect could have produced a passable cup if I had allowed her to try. I did not. I do better than passable, and I already resented the invasiveness of her desire to please, to know, and to participate. If I wasn’t careful, next thing I knew I would be making coffee for her, and then we would be having companionable lunches together. I needed her presence, but did not want it. Did not like the thought of her using even the downstairs WC, and had instructed the agency that she was to bring her own lunch.
I was making my way out of the kitchen – it was dangerous to linger – as Bronya began unpacking a bag of heirloom tomatoes, in their muted purples and greens, yellows and oranges.
‘What this?’ she asked, holding a large purplish one in her beefy hand, and thrusting it towards me aggressively, as if I had brought something dangerous into the room.
‘A tomato.’
‘Is not. I know tomato. Red.’ She looked at it again. ‘Is wrong. Gone off.’
I do not discuss vegetables with my cleaner.
‘Just put over there. On basket on table. Not in fridge!’
Lucy had a new best friend. This had already happened several times in her young life, for her feelings were both intense and shallow, like most children’s. Attached to a playmate, she was ferociously monogamous, but it rarely lasted. One year, propinquity bound her to a flaxen-haired waif called Jenny, who had joined the playgroup at the same time as Lucy. The two were as inseparable as five-year-olds can be, visited each other’s homes and begged to stay overnight, went to the park together in the afternoon and swimming at the weekends.
‘I love her so much,’ Lucy would enthuse, holding Jenny’s hand. ‘She’s my best!’
The next autumn Jenny was taken out of the group, because her mother could no longer afford it. Lacking its support, both mother and waif were desperate for Lucy to visit as before, or more than before. But Jenny was out of sight and nearly out of mind. Lucy had a new playmate called Gloria.
‘She’s my best!’ said Lucy.
At which point, clear that some response had to be made quickly, or Lucy would be forever lost to her daughter, Jenny’s mum – I never quite mastered her name, it seemed to come and go as frequently as she did, and on each of her reappearances I would have ask Suzy sotto voce what her name was – came up with a master-stroke and bought a puppy, a Shih Tzu called Milly, a bite-sized fluffball of vulgar gorgeousness, with a shaggy little face and an insatiable desire for company. It looked as if it had come straight from Hamley’s Cute as Fuck Dog Department.
Milly was wholly promiscuous, it even approached me skittishly on its sole visit to our house. I took an instant dislike to the creature, as tricky and licky as a schoolgirl on heat. I measured its stature, how far its stomach passed above the ground, and reckoned �
� the calculation was inexact, to be fair – that if I got my foot squarely under it, I could kick it at least three metres through the air.
‘How cute,’ I said, though even the besotted Lucy could sense my reservations.
‘She’s my best!’ she said happily.
The puppy ploy worked a treat, and Suzy was distinctly irritated by how easily manipulated her daughter was. ‘That bitch, she knew exactly what she was doing! Of course Lucy would fall in love with the mutt. Who wouldn’t? It’s like a paedophile offering sweets to kiddies, it ought to be illegal!’
Nothing to get heated up about, I counselled. Surely the dog was bought for Jenny, not Lucy? And why not? The little girl was now at home a lot, her best friend had abandoned her without a wave of farewell, and she needed a treat. It was quite the right thing to do.
‘Mummy,’ said Lucy, ‘I want to go to Jenny’s to see Milly. Please can I go? Please?’
‘But darling,’ said Suzy severely, ‘you don’t like Jenny any more, you said so.’
‘I don’t, she’s boring. But I LOVE Milly!’
It shouldn’t have mattered so much, but Suzy couldn’t reconcile herself to her daughter’s new obsession. Lucy visited Milly, dreamt of Milly, begged to go to Milly’s. One evening, as I read her a bedtime story, I noticed that she had a picture of Milly Blu-Tacked above her little desk.
She saw me looking over her shoulder. ‘Isn’t she dear!’ she said. ‘Do you want to see the pictures of her and me?’
‘Have you shown them to Mummy?’
‘I did,’ said Lucy. ‘But she doesn’t like Milly.’
‘Why is that?’
‘She says she’s too small. And she doesn’t like her name.’
‘Her name? What’s wrong with “Milly”?’
‘Not that name, silly. You know, her rude name.’ She giggled.
Lucy had quickly discovered a joke lurking there, which could cause a potent combination of merriment (hers) and irritation (her mother’s).
‘Don’t you just love her, Mummy?’ she’d say. ‘She’s a real Shih Tzu.’ A well-timed pause between the syllables of the dog’s breed, and you had: ‘She’s a real shit, Sue!’
Suzy found this mildly amusing the first time she heard it, but she was oddly prudish about our daughter’s language, and believed children ought not to swear, apparently forgetting that she’d been a foul-mouthed child herself. The fact that she swore constantly was an adult prerogative, which Lucy might look forward to. ‘That’s enough of that, young lady!’
‘A shit, Sue! Get it? Like a shit! And Sue! That’s funny, isn’t it?’
Later, I overheard her on the phone, apparently talking to the dog. ‘It’s me. It’s Lucy! I’m coming to see you soon. Did you miss me?’
She made some kissy sounds. ‘I do love you,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’ Before Jenny could regain control at her end of the call, Lucy hung up.
‘This has got to stop,’ Suzy said to me.
Only a week later it did. The sort of narcissist who thinks that everything that happens involves them would have felt responsible for the disaster. But neither Suzy nor I felt remotely answerable for Milly’s death, much though we had wished her to go away. Neither of us had warmed to the pooch, but it was quite impossible not to be moved by the tragedy.
Not Milly’s tragedy. There’s plenty of dead dogs out there, but I save my regrets for the demise of (a very few) members of my own species. No, this was Lucy’s drama, her first encounter with the death of anything more dear to her than a goldfish, and she – if I may be allowed an unfatherly thought – wallowed in her misery, indulged herself so utterly and so publicly that there was something luxuriant and performative in her grief. When she retreated to her room to be alone, for one reason or another, she fell silent.
She had no idea of death, of the brutal finality of it, the tearing physiological degeneration, the erosion of functioning, the inexorable return to dust. The unmitigated, unmanning awfulness of it. No, what Lucy – like all small children – reacted to was not death, but absence. She hated parting with something that she was used to, that she needed fiercely in her fickle way, and was shaken when it was taken from her. Her feelings were not grief, if that may be supposed (commonly but mistakenly) to involve feelings for the deceased. No, her feelings were for herself alone. She was outraged. Milly was hers, her best, and now she was not. There was something shockingly arbitrary about it.
‘It’s so unfair!’
She’d exhibited the same reaction when a redundant piece of furniture was taken from the house, to be replaced by something better, more beautiful and more useful: the kitchen sofa with its tatty brown William Morris loose cover full of holes, with springs beginning to worm their way through the seat, to one’s occasional acute discomfort. It had to go, and Suzy found something prettier, less dated and more comfortable to take its place.
On the day it arrived, the delivery men agreed, for a tenner, to take the old one away. They grabbed an arm on each side, and hoisted it up to be transported out the back door, through the garden, and into their lorry at the back of the lane. But they hadn’t reckoned on Lucy, who burst into tears, screaming ‘No! No!’ and clung first to the sofa, and when that became precarious, to the leg of one of the removal men.
Her outrage had two distinct and equally felt components. First, she was used to her sofa, she had grown up with it. It was part of her world, yet another best. But more profoundly and oddly, her feelings were actually for the thing in itself, as Kant put it. The poor sofa would be devastated to be taken away.
She was the last of the animists. At the supermarket she searched through the tinned vegetables to find those with dents in them, and made sure that Suzy purchased them – otherwise no one else would, ‘and they’d be sad’.
‘It’s so unfair!’ she howled.
I detached her from the man’s leg and held her in my arms, screaming, as the funeral procession of the sofa wended its way down the garden path. The gate opened, and it was gone.
Lucy stopped crying and sat on the new sofa, sucking the little rag of cloth that she carried with her at that age. She looked pensive, and settled down into the undoubtedly more comfortable new surroundings. ‘Can I watch Sesame Street?’ she asked.
Milly’s death, little as I regretted it, was both sudden and shocking. Most days, after school, Jenny and her mother, accompanied by their new mutt, went for a walk in the local park, a play on the swings, and a choc-ice at the café. An intelligent and biddable little creature, in no time Milly was let off the leash and able to sniff about at her leisure. She was far too gregarious, and needy, to wander very far, but liked making the acquaintance of the other dogs, large or small, young or old, male or female. And one day she chose the wrong dog.
You couldn’t have seen it coming, I gathered. The wrong ’un was not a Spikedog with a Spikeman, swaggering bundles of danger, from whom you needed to avert your eyes and move to safer ground. Onlookers later described it as medium-sized, with curly dishevelled brown hair. It was over in a moment. Milly approached her assailant in her usually friendly manner and, for whatever reason – perhaps she nipped it, or just pissed it off by being small and friendly – in an instant Milly’s head and shoulders were clutched between the dog’s jaws, being tossed about, both of them making frightful noises. Within a few seconds the Shih Tzu was thrown back onto the grass, broken and bleeding, howling, then silent.
I had no wish to imagine the ensuing drama, though it was hard not to. The problem was how to tell Lucy, in some suitably restrained, edited and untraumatising manner. Milly’d been attacked by another dog in the park. She was in the doggy hospital and was very poorly.
‘But Milly wouldn’t fight with anybody! Milly loves other dogs! Milly loves everybody!’
‘Maybe the other dog started it, I don’t know.’
‘Poor Milly! I want to go and see her!’
‘I’m afraid we can’t. She’s not allowed any visitors.’
; ‘But she’s going to come back soon, isn’t she?’
‘We’ll have to see.’
But there was nothing to be done. Sometime the next morning, Milly, on the vet’s unambiguous advice, was put out of her misery.
Lucy took the news badly. ‘Why didn’t the doctor fix her?’ she asked tearfully.
‘She was too poorly to fix, darling. She lived for a little while, but she was never going to get better, and was in a lot of pain. So they thought it kindest to put her to sleep.’
‘Sleep?’
‘She’s in Heaven now. That’ll be lovely for her, won’t it? With all the other doggie angels?’
There was a very long pause. ‘You mean they killed her?’
‘No, darling, I don’t. I mean they ended her suffering, because there was no way she was going to get better. That is a kind thing to do.’
‘But I need to see her again!’
‘I know, love.’ Suzy picked her up, resisting, for a wriggling desperate cuddle. ‘So do I.’
‘You don’t! You’re lying! You hated Milly!’
Anyone with sufficient emotional or narrative sense might have seen it coming. I am living alone by both choice and necessity, but in spite of my many talents for both self-indulgence and self-deception, I continue to need another voice, if only to project mine against, another visage, if only to register what I have to say.
In my enforced isolation is an accompanying solipsism: it is intermittently enjoyable, being the only person in the world, like God, free to torment the odd dog. But, not to put too fine a point on it, and I resist even writing these words, I was getting lonely.
I do not want the company of Bronya, but I have come, appallingly, to need it. A bit, perhaps a little bit. This is more than surprising to me, I feel abashed by it. Bronya? Like many Eastern Europeans, she is both blunt and insensitive to a degree that, to an English sensibility, is shocking and easily mistaken for crassness. I can be rude to her, dismissive, angry, domineering. Equally, her approaches to me are not so much tactless – which somehow suggests someone who, knowing what tact is, eschews it like a Yorkshireman – but utterly without consideration of how her words might sound to someone who isn’t similarly disabled by having come from Sofia.
