Poor old Nairit.
14 July
Oh dear, there’s a bit of me that misses the family so much I sometimes think I might just drive to Land’s End, jump into my bathing costume, smear myself in goose fat and simply start swimming until I get to New York. Highly unlikely, of course. I can barely do a width in our local pool, but you get the drift. I miss them so much it’s almost unbearable.
‘It’s different, here, Granny,’ said Gene firmly, when we next talked on Skype. I had managed to smother my face with make-up and sit rather far away so I knew he wouldn’t be able to see me properly. He paused. ‘They call poo “shit” here, Granny. That’s a very rude word, isn’t it, Granny?’
‘What about the teacher?’ I asked changing the subject. Perhaps they didn’t call them teachers in American schools. Perhaps they called them ‘tutors’ or ‘instructors’ or ‘mentors’ or ‘educators’.
‘He’s so dumb,’ said Gene, firmly. ‘He don’t know nothing. And we have to sing some silly song, well Dad says it’s silly, about America every morning. It ends up saying “my home sweet home”, but America isn’t home, Dad says, England is home.’
‘Well, I’m sure Dad’s right,’ I said cautiously, ‘but it might be best just to go along with it because people can be very touchy and if you say you don’t like their country they can get very silly. I mean you wouldn’t like it if people said England was stupid, would you?’
‘And they call chips “fries” here. That’s dumb, isn’t it? They’re chips, aren’t they? Not fries.’
‘It must be very puzzling for you,’ I said, my mind aching with sympathy for the little chap. ‘I wish I could be with you and pick you up from school and things sometimes.’
‘It’s very cold here, Granny,’ he added. ‘We have arcon and we can’t turn it down. Do you have arcon, Granny?’
‘I think you mean air-con,’ I said. ‘It’s short for air conditioning. That’s the sort of stupid thing one says to children to try to educate them as one speaks. Who cares if it’s short for air conditioning or not?
‘Well, ours is called arcon,’ said Gene defiantly. Then, ‘How is my jersey going?’ he asked. ‘Can I see it?’
I went and got it. With Marion’s help, I’ve finally managed to finish the back.
‘Now that’s cool!’ he said, sounding far too American for my taste. ‘When will you finish it?’
‘Probably when you’re twelve,’ I said, ‘When you’re far too old to want to wear something with elephants on it.’
‘Well, hurry up,’ he said sensibly. Then he said: ‘I’ve got to go … Dad’s calling … love you, Granny.’
‘Love you too, darling,’ I said, blowing him a kiss.
3.30 a.m.
Tonight I can’t sleep for worry. All I can think of is poor Gene being so cold and low, and for a brief moment I actually wished I hadn’t had Jack, because then he wouldn’t have had Gene and Gene wouldn’t be suffering like this. And then I wouldn’t be suffering. Of course I remember thinking exactly the same thing about Jack when he was at school and came back agonising about some unfair punishment. I just felt it was all my fault. To my horror I then imagined Gene grown up and having children and them feeling low and at that point I got a grip of myself, poured myself a glass of water, and read the horoscope that was in the copy of the Rant that I’d kept by my bed.
I was relieved to find it said, ‘You can worry all you like. But however much you berate yourself, you cannot stop the inexorable rise of Uranus, which means that your wildest dreams are about to come true.’ (I hoped he wasn’t thinking of my actual dreams.) ‘You are about to enter one of the happiest and most peaceful times of your life. For more information about the great week that lies ahead, call the number below and listen to my prediction for you as a Capricorn. Calls will cost just 75p a minute. Mobiles may vary.’
There was a curious drawing of the astrologer himself at the top of the column, an intense, balding man, with piercing eyes, staring into an astrological chart.
Batty as it was, it made me feel a lot better. I took half a temazepam, stared at my pile of books, wondered if I could possibly continue with Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica, that I’d started this month, decided against it, and finally went to sleep.
20 July
Well, I’m glad to see that even I think I’m looking a lot more normal now. Some of the bruises have dropped down to my neck, so I look rather as though someone’s tried to strangle me, but if I wear a scarf or a polo-necked jersey I don’t look too bad at all. I just look a tiny bit swollen. I’ve decided to be completely open about it – and I will tell Jack when I go over. I just didn’t want him to worry beforehand. The reason I tell people is not because I’m such a frank and fearless sort of person, but because I can’t bear the thought of them whispering behind my back that I’ve had a facelift as if I were some foolish vain woman who wanted to put the clock back in secret. I want everyone to know exactly how old I am, that I’ve had a facelift, and if they want to make something of it then they can jolly well step outside.
23 July
Sharmie and Brad and Alice have just been over for a drink and they are absolutely delightful. With typical American generosity they brought a bottle of champagne and chocolates and a huge bunch of roses, and I felt awful having only provided warm white wine, olives and crisps. Particularly having destroyed their wind-chimes as well.
Alice, who is a sweet little girl, immediately got stuck into the box of Gene’s toys I keep in the sitting room, and right away developed an epic scenario between a stuffed kangaroo, an orange frog and a blue rabbit. I saw that a plastic Batman had also made an appearance and longed to get down on my hands and knees to enter her imaginary world, but adulthood called, and I busied myself by briefing her parents about the entire street. I told them about the dispute over the ‘common’ at the top of the road and told them about my project, the Seasons of the Doomed Trees, and Brad was mad keen to appear as an expert witness if there’s some inquiry. They were both very enthusiastic about the idea of joining the Residents’ Association. I told them about Father Emmanuel and his evangelical church. And I told them about the mosque, which adjoins their garden as well as mine.
‘We’re not best pleased with that mosque, Marie,’ said Brad.
‘You know what they did? They actually cut down the chimes at the end of the garden,’ said Sharmie, leaning forward to pick up a crisp.
‘Beats me why anyone would do such a thing,’ said Brad. ‘I mean who the hell would object to chimes?’
‘It’s because of their beliefs, we guess,’ said Sharmie. ‘They don’t approve of musical instruments. And I think it maybe interfered with their prayers.’
‘But we’re letting it go,’ said Brad. ‘We don’t want to start up a holy war. So we’re backing down.’
‘It’s Alice who’s really upset,’ said Sharmie, selecting an olive with her immaculately painted nails. ‘Those beautiful chimes were given her by her grandma back in Florida, who said, ‘Now every time, my little darling, you hear these chimes, you can think of me, and you’ll know I’m thinking of you.’ Wasn’t that just lovely?’
At this point I decided to kill myself with shame, Japanese-style. Her granny’s lovely present! If only I’d known I wouldn’t have minded the noise! I felt myself going redder and redder and was just about to confess when Alice piped up. ‘But grandma’s gonna send me some more, and we’re gonna keep them in my bedroom now so those horrid mosquey people can’t get them!’
‘Good idea!’ I said, in a strangled voice.
To make matters worse, they actually insisted on seeing the four pictures I’d done so far of the Seasons of the Doomed Trees, and absolutely fell about with praise and admiration. Brad even asked tentatively if, when I’d finished, he might be able to buy the lot. ‘To remind us of our great time in London,’ he added.
When they went I actually felt so guilty that if Father Emmanuel had pointed me to the entrance to hell, I would gl
adly have walked straight in.
24 July
Just had another meeting of the Residents’ Association and Sharmie and Brad from next door came as well. Brad turns out to be a genius. He only has to scan the council’s website, and he’s picked up everything about local planning law. He’s drafted our letter brilliantly, citing sub-section 5 from the council’s own planning recommendations, and pointing out that it is against their own policy according to item 19a in their Blueprint for the Borough … or something. I don’t understand a word of it, but Penny says it’s excellent, so I don’t think we’re going to have a problem.
I got a surprising letter this morning from the developer behind the hotel proposal asking if he could meet us, and when I told everyone he’d been in touch there was a general roar of delight, like Romans about to enjoy an excellent show of Christians being thrown to the lions.
‘Yes! Let’s ’ave ’im!’ shouted Sheila the Dealer, through a haze of smoke. ‘I’d like to give ’im a piece of my mind!’
Father Emmanuel sat quietly, absorbed, no doubt, in some spiritual thought.
We’ve got an enormous petition together, what with everyone going out and getting signatures and even Father Emmanuel came up with thirty signatures from his hell-bound congregation. Sheila the Dealer has got about a hundred – I don’t know how she managed it but no doubt a lot of people ‘owe her’. I can imagine her telling her hollow-eyed clients, queuing at her door and begging for further supplies of crack, ‘Not until you’ve signed this petition, mate!’ When you add them all up there are 560 signatures, so I don’t think the council can possibly overlook our objections.
Penny’s going to photocopy the petition and then we’re taking it round to the council on Thursday.
25 July
Woke to find not only that the boiler had broken so there was no hot water, but also the news, in the Rant, that a ‘TEEN HARLOT! Loughborough sex-worker has ten children by eight different fathers, each one a dole scrounger …’ Thanks a lot. I really don’t wish to know this. I think I might have to stop getting the Rant. How often have I said this? It has the extraordinary effect of geeing you up while lowering you, all at the same time.
The plumber came over this afternoon to stare at my boiler. We went through the usual ‘Who installed this? Why are your settings like this? Surely you don’t want it on all day? Why isn’t the pilot light lit? What’s your water pressure like?’ and all kinds of questions that, like the computer questions, make me feel sick with fear, but he managed to get it working again, saying he thought the rads needed bleeding and there might be a leak in one of the valve sockets which would cause the boiler to lose pressure. He might as well have been speaking Japanese. He went round the house looking for leaks, and managed to fix one he discovered in Michelle’s room, under piles of dirty underwear. It had been soaking into the carpet.
‘That’s your problem,’ he said, in a monotone voice.
I wish someone could bleed my rads, I thought. Or fix my leaks. From the moment I wake up, I feel as if I’m losing pressure all day.
27 July
This morning the money came from the sale of the three pictures and the brooch at auction. Amazingly it’s £9,000 altogether, so not only can I pay Mr P.’s fees, but I also have a bit over and with it I shall fly over to the States in style.
I was so enthused by the prospect that I started to look at flight times online. I have to say the idea of visiting the family in New York put a real spring in my step.
When I skyped Jack late this evening he was thrilled.
‘Mum, that’s great!’ he said. He actually called out to Chrissie and Gene who were in another room, ‘Mum’s coming over!’
I was rather surprised to hear him being quite so enthusiastic. Could it be that he was actually missing me? Or, more likely, missing London?
‘When?’ he asked. ‘Do come soon. Come as soon as you can – next month. Or early September. We’ve got a bit of time off then. It would be great to see you.’
Gene came running into the room in his aeroplane pyjamas and scrambled onto Jack’s knee to join in the conversation.
‘Granny, Granny!’ he said. ‘Are you coming over? I can show you my new school! And we’re going camping next week! And it’s so cool here …! We’ll take you up the Empire State and we can go on a boat … Dad, we can go on a boat, can’t we, you promised …? Just a minute …’ And here he vanished from the screen and I was facing an empty chair for ages. All I could hear was him chattering away in a faraway room. After about ten minutes, when I was just about to give up, Jack burst into view. ‘Mum! You’re still here! Sorry, I didn’t realise Gene had left the Skype on.’
Of course all this sudden enthusiasm for New York from Gene changed my mood completely, as I realised he’d got completely hooked on the place, but I kept smiling. However, once we’d made arrangements for when I’d go, I suddenly felt like dancing. I put on an old Dr John record in the kitchen and cavorted about like a maniac.
28 July
I was having another dance in the morning when Penny rang the bell. I answered it gasping and sweating.
‘What on earth have you been doing?’
‘Dancing!’ I said. ‘I’m going to New York! Isn’t it great?’
‘When?’
‘I hope maybe September.’
‘Oh, but you’ll miss my birthday!’ she said, not joining in the spirit of the thing at all.
‘But you hate your birthday,’ I said, puzzled.
‘Oh, I’ve had so many I’ve given up hating them these days.’
We sorted out the petition into piles on the kitchen table and put everything into respectable folders to look nice and professional.
On the way to the town hall the bus was rather crowded and a youngish woman with headphones offered Penny her seat, which Penny refused.
‘It’s not as if I’m decrepit!’ she muttered angrily, as she clung on to the rail in the bus. ‘How dare she offer me a seat!’
But when we got off I laid into her. ‘You’re so badmannered!’ I said. ‘If someone offers you a seat you should jolly well take it even if it does make you feel old. You’ve got to encourage young people to be polite and the more you turn down their offers of help the more you’re discouraging them. I wish she’d offered me a seat! I’d have taken it like a shot!’
‘Well she wouldn’t have offered you a seat, would she?’ said Penny, suddenly rather vicious. ‘Because you look so young now, don’t you!’
We walked on in frosty silence, but our row had blown over by the time we’d handed in the petition.
‘Yes, all right, I will let people get up for me in future,’ Penny muttered as we went back.
‘Sorry I was so snappy,’ I said.
AUGUST
2 August
I was standing in the street wondering what on earth I’d come out to do when one of the men from the mosque, a very nice-looking chap with a bushy beard and wearing a long white dress, came up to me. (How can they wear all that gear in this weather? It’s boiling hot. Beyond me.)
‘Can I help you?’ he said. ‘You look a bit lost.’
Golly, that made me think. I picture myself as the confident local, sauntering down the street on my way to the shops, but clearly he saw me as a barmy old lady, completely confused, only a step away from the Eventide experience.
4 August
Just back from the old school reunion organised by Marion. Crikey, what a bunch! The weird thing is that, despite the fact that we were all fifty years older than when we’d last met, we felt exactly as we did when we were ten or eleven. Wrinkles, grey hairs, middle-aged spread – they were merely incidental.
About eight of us met in Marion’s house … and of course it’s an ideal place to have a school reunion because it’s like a time warp. She stopped paying any attention to stylish interior design or new wallpaper patterns in the early seventies. She still has old spider plants mouldering on the window ledges, and jars of dried flowers no
w weighed down with dust. Each room is dominated by a faded – sometimes even split – round white (or once-white) paper lampshade, and she still has Dali and Che Guevara posters hanging on the walls in clip frames between the Indian wall-hangings. Her floor is covered in the most ghastly grass matting, which was tremendously cool and lovely when it was new but is now worn and frayed and held together with gaffer tape in the worn areas. Even the soap in the bathroom looks as if it’s been there for the past twenty years, dried-up and ingrained with black lines of dirt.
But she’s a sweetie, and even though her cuisine relies almost entirely on beans and lentils, and she’s not a natural cook, she provided huge bowls of steaming soup and bread she’d made herself, and rather wodgy pasta salads, and I’d brought lots of wine, so we had a feast on the broken-down ramshackle stripped-pine kitchen table, another relic from the sixties. It’s not that Marion and Tim, her husband, are skint, it’s just that she’s someone who believes that food is just fuel, and friends and feelings and books are all that matter.
Charming, of course, but it does mean that after lunch with Marion you feel a bit leaden round the old tum.
We all gathered round to stare, astonished, at the photographs of each other’s grown-up children, children far older than the age we were when we last met. And as we all goggled at the old school photographs Marion had laid out on the table before lunch, grey heads bent earnestly, in that split second I was transported back to our classroom. The only thing that was missing was our battered old school desks.
Smothered as we all were in colognes and deodorants, I swear I could still smell the familiar odour of pencil shavings, stale milk and unwashed hair among us. We giggled as we reminded each other of how terrified we used to be of the old Austrian music teacher, we sighed about how sad it was that Mrs Leach had died (‘But did you know? She drank!’) and we gossiped about whether Mr Hitchin was actually gay.
No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! Page 15
