Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

by Helen Simpson

  ‘You said yourself they’re getting easier every day. You said so yourself. It’s not like when they were all at home all day screaming their heads off.’

  ‘It is when they’re on holiday,’ she said. ‘That’s nearly twenty weeks a year, you know. What happens then?’

  ‘You’re off at a tangent again,’ he said, sighing, then demanded, ‘What do you want out of life?’

  ‘It’s not some sort of anaconda you’ve got to wrestle with,’ said Dorrie. She realised that this latest sequestration of her hours would send her beside herself. Loss of inner life, that’s what it was; lack of any purchase in the outside world, and loss of all respect; continuous unavoidable Lilliputian demands; numbness, apathy and biscuits. She was at the end of her rope.

  ‘We can’t just wait for things to fall into our laps though,’ said Max, thinking about his own life.

  ‘We’re doing all right,’ said Dorrie.

  ‘That doesn’t mean to say we couldn’t do better. We need to expand.’

  ‘We’re managing the mortgage,’ said Dorrie. ‘I think we should be grateful.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Max. ‘That’s the spirit that made this island great. Stand and stare, eh. Stand and stare.’

  ‘What would you prefer?’ said Dorrie. ‘Life’s a route march, then you die?’

  ‘But then you’ve got what you wanted, haven’t you – the children.’

  ‘You are horrible,’ said Dorrie. She took a great gulp of wine and drained her glass. ‘It’s about how well you’ve loved and how well you’ve been loved.’ She didn’t sound very convincing, she realised, in fact she sounded like Thought for the Day. She sounded like some big sheep bleating.

  ‘I don’t know what it is, Dorrie,’ he said sadly, ‘But you’re all damped down. You’ve lost your spirit. You’re not there any more.’

  ‘I know. I know. But that’s what I’m trying to say. You think I’ve just turned into a boring saint. But I’m still there. If you could just take them for a few hours now and then and be nice to them, if I just had a bit of quiet time . . .’

  ‘I’m not exactly flourishing either, you know. You’re getting to me.’

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. I seem to be so dreary these days. But . . .’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Such a victim. Makes me want to kick you.’

  ‘Don’t Max. Please don’t. We’ve got to go back to that girl and pay her first.’

  ‘Just being miserable and long-suffering, you think that’ll make me sorry for you.’

  ‘Max . . .’

  ‘But it makes me hate you, if you must know.’

  Back at the house, Max handed Dorrie his wallet and went off upstairs. He was tired as he brushed his teeth, and angry at the way the evening had gone; nor did he like his bad-tempered reflection in the bathroom mirror. Soon he was asleep, frowning in release like a captive hero.

  Dorrie meanwhile was fumbling with five-pound notes, enquiring brightly as to whether Jade had had a quiet evening.

  ‘Oh yes, there wasn’t a sound out of them once you’d gone,’ said Jade, not strictly truthfully, still mesmerised by the beautiful eyes of the sex murderer with the razor on the screen. There had actually been a noise from the boys’ bedroom and when she had put her head around the door sure enough the younger one was lying in a pool of sick. But he was breathing fine so she left him to it, it wasn’t bothering him and no way was she going to volunteer for that sort of thing. She was getting paid to babysit, not to do stuff like that. That would have been right out of order.

  ‘Would you like to stay and finish your video?’ asked Dorrie politely, flinching as she watched the razor slit through filmstar flesh.

  ‘No, that’s all right,’ said Jade reluctantly. She flicked the remote control and the bloody image disappeared. She sighed.

  ‘Well, thank you again,’ said Dorrie. ‘It’s lovely to know I can leave them with someone I can trust.’

  ‘That’s OK’ said Jade. ‘No problem.’ And with a royal yawn she made her exit.

  It took Dorrie half an hour or so to bathe the dazed Robin, to wash the acrid curds holding kernels of sweetcorn and discs of peas from his feathery hair and wrap him in clean pyjamas and lay him down in the big bed beside his noble-looking father, where he fell instantly asleep, slumbering on a cloud of beauty.

  She kissed his warm face and turned back, her body creaking in protest, to the job in hand. Downstairs in the midnight kitchen she scraped the duvet cover and pillow case with the knife kept specifically for this purpose, dumping the half-digested chyme into the sink, running water to clear it away, then scraping again, gazing out of the window into the blackness of the wild garden, yearning at the spatter of rain on the glass and the big free trees out there with their branches in the sky.

  Their needs were what was set. Surely that was the logic of it. It was for her to adapt, accommodate, modify in order to allow the familial organism to flourish. Here she was weeping over her own egotism like a novice nun, for goodness sake, except it was the family instead of God. But still it was necessary, selflessness, for a while, even if it made you spat on by the world. By your husband. By your children. By yourself.

  She wanted to smash the kitchen window. She wanted to hurt herself. Her ghost was out there in the garden, the ghost from her freestanding past. If she kept up this business of reunion, it would catch hold of her hands and saw her wrists to and fro across the jagged glass. It would tear her from the bosom of this family she had breastfed. No. She must stay this side of the glass from now on, thickening and cooling like some old planet until at last she killed the demands of that self-regarding girl out there.

  She twisted and squeezed water from the bedlinen she had just rinsed. If she were to let herself be angry about this obliteration, of her particular mind, of her own relish for things, then it would devour the family. Instead she must let it gnaw at her entrails like some resident tiger. This was not sanctimony speaking but necessity. All this she knew but could not explain. She was wringing the sheet with such force that it creaked.

  ‘Fresh air,’ she said aloud, and tried to open the window in front of her. It was locked, clamped tight with one of the antiburglar fastenings which they had fitted on all the windows last summer. She felt around in the cupboard above the refrigerator for the key, but it wasn’t in its usual place. She hunted through the rows of mugs, the tins of tuna and tomatoes, the bags of rice and flour and pasta, and found it at last inside the glass measuring jug.

  Leaning across the sink she unlocked the window and opened it onto the night. A spray of rain fell across her face and she gasped. There was the cold fresh smell of wet earth. It occurred to her that this might not necessarily be killer pain she was feeling, not terrible goodbyeforever pain as she had assumed; and she felt light-headed with the shock of relief.

  Perhaps this was not the pain of wrist-cutting after all. Instead, the thought came to her, it might be the start of that intense outlandish sensation that comes after protracted sleep; the feeling in a limb that has gone numb, when blood starts to flow again, sluggishly at first, reviving; until after a long dormant while that limb is teeming again, tingling into life.

  Out in the garden, out in the cold black air, she could see the big trees waving their wild bud-bearing branches at her.

  Millennium Blues

  There had been an unbelievable amount of talk about the weather, not to mention the end of the world and so on. The earth continued to turn round the sun, but only just, it seemed. Never before in all its history had the planet’s atmosphere been so heavily matted with information about everything, so clotted with flashes and scoops and entreaties and jeremiads. The air and all its waves were sodden with chitchat.

  Muscae volitantes, or flitting flies; that is the name for the spots which float before the eyes and stop you from reading. Muscae volitantes are what aeroplanes look like when viewed from high above. They are worse when you look up at them. On this 228th day of the year 1999, aircra
ft like stingray are floating overhead, roaring and screaming, their yellow eyes glaring down at the sleeping landscape beneath.

  Seen from the air this ominous August dawn, the Thames is a diamond-dusted silver ribbon. The aircraft follow the river faithfully, nose to tail, as they descend over south-west London, giving panoramic views of the individual boat houses, Putney Bridge, the green spaces of the Hurlingham Club and Fulham Palace gardens, straining and whining as they throttle back over the salubrious complacence of Barnes, then whistling on through the malty cumulus clouds issuing from the chimneys of Mortlake’s brewery. On they roar, hooting and wrangling across the four hundred botanic acres at Kew, from there to shade Richmond’s millennial prosperity with their wings; then on down lower still to the shattered concentration of Hounslow, its double-glazed schools and uproarious bedrooms, where those on the ground can if they so desire look up and check the colour of the pilot’s tie.

  Until at last they touch down at Heathrow. All aircraft coming in to land here must first fly directly across the capital when the prevailing wind is blowing. It is an unusual arrangement which has not been much imitated by other countries, but without being unpleasantly nationalistic about this, the British have always been made of sterner stuff.

  The planes still wear their lights like earrings in this no man’s land between night and day. Cassie Withers stands in her Kew back garden and watches them cross the sky one after another, counting them instead of sheep. She was woken by the first flight in from Seoul. Today at some point her husband Steven Withers will be returning from his fifth foreign trip of the month. The constant overarching trajectories of noise accelerate and fade into one another. Two days ago Steven heard about a problem with the new bidets at one of his company’s hotels in the Philippines. He tried phoning the local quality manager but got a voicemail because of the time difference.

  ‘Can’t it wait ten hours?’ asked Cassie.

  ‘I can be there in ten hours,’ said Steven. ‘That’s the beauty of living here.’

  And he had jumped on the next plane out.

  Now Cassie gazes up beyond the planes as the sky grows lighter. Several stars are almost discernible through the dense maroon-tinted vapour of early morning. She’d watched a documentary on stars last night, about how the earth is long overdue collision with an asteroid or comet, just like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. She had also learned from this programme that a Grand Cross of the planets is due this month, in the four fixed signs of the zodiac – Taurus, Aquarius, Scorpio, Leo – and that flat earthers everywhere are interpreting these signs as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then she had gone to bed and read about Nostradamus – in the last months of this century it is quite hard not to read about Nostradamus, sixteenth-century Provençal plague doctor, and his 942-verse history of the world’s future. She had lingered for a while over a particularly interesting couplet:

  The year 1999, the seventh month,

  From the sky will come a great King of Terror.

  Nuclear war was joint favourite with an asteroid attack, according to the editor’s note. Nostradamus had been right about several things so far, including the death of Henri II in a jousting accident and also the fall of Communism; so there was a strong possibility of something awful happening soon, it seemed.

  It has been an unnaturally still hot summer, and even this early on Saturday there is no freshness in the garden. Cassie yawns and creaks and wonders whether she has M.E. or perhaps a brain tumour or some slow-growing cancer. But so many of her friends are dragging round in a similar state that she decides it must be the unrenewing air of these dogdays. Verity Freeling dropped dead last Tuesday without warning, extinguished by the three-week chest virus which has rampaged through everyone round here. It’s said to come from China, and it simply laughs at antibiotics. Verity’s husband is frantically trying to find a nanny for the three children before he loses his job.

  Or perhaps it’s just sleep. Because of the aircraft she has worn earplugs at night ever since moving to Kew ten years ago. Recently she went deaf as a result of the build-up of impacted wax. For a while she was quite pleased as this removed her from the constant din of aircraft and family life, and there were no side effects save the occasional muffled crump inside her head like a footstep in deep snow. Then reason had prevailed and her GP had syringed her ears. Unfortunately this had had a side effect – tinnitus – which is slowly driving her up the wall.

  Sometimes this new ringing in her ears changes pitch, as now, and turns into a high silvery singing noise with a squeak to it like the edge hysteria gives a voice, or like the sharpening of angels’ knives, stainless, at high speed.

  ‘Mum, what comes after nineteen-ninety-nine?’ asks her five-year-old son Peter as she clears up after breakfast. ‘Is it nineteen-ninety-ten?’

  ‘No,’ says Cassie. ‘Would you sort those knives and forks for me like a good boy. No. It goes nineteen-ninety-nine. TWO THOUSAND.’

  ‘Mum,’ he says, picking up a fork, frowning. ‘Mum, will it be the end of the world then?’

  ‘No of course not,’ says Cassie heartily. ‘It’s just a number. It doesn’t actually mean anything at all. Unless you believe in Jesus.’

  ‘Do you believe in Jesus?’ he asks, as he sometimes does.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says diplomatically. ‘Some people do. Auntie Katie does.’

  ‘I believe in him,’ he says staunchly.

  ‘Well that’s nice,’ she says, then can’t help asking, ‘Why do you believe in him?’

  ‘Because otherwise who made it,’ he demands crossly. ‘Of course.’

  He marches out of the kitchen in a huff.

  She finishes the dishes, then takes a cup of coffee into the front room where Peter is now lining up a row of small plastic dinosaurs behind the sofa while Michael, his elder brother, hunches over holiday homework in front of the television.

  ‘It’s only the news,’ he says, forestalling her protest. ‘It helps me concentrate.’

  She sits by him and lets the news wash over her. Plague is spreading up from Greece through the Balkans, and now Venice has succumbed. There is footage of floods in China, drought in India, war in Africa, famine in Korea, fire in Australia, hysteria in America and desperation in Russia. Reports of a mass throat-cutting in the deserts of New Mexico are just starting to trickle in. Record temperatures worldwide, yet again, have led to speculation that the human race will become a nocturnal species in the next century, on the basis that it’s cooler at night.

  Later that morning Cassie leaves her boys playing Death-wish in the waiting room, and sees her doctor.

  ‘Could it be tinnitus?’ she asks as he peers inside.

  ‘Tinnitus is just a word for any noise you can hear that other people can’t.’

  ‘So it is tinnitus.’

  ‘Idiopathic tinnitus, if you want a loftier label.’

  ‘Idiopathic?’

  ‘It simply means there’s no known cause,’ he says, finishing his examination. ‘No known cure either, I’m afraid. Just try to ignore it and hope it’ll go away.’

  ‘But that’s awful!’

  ‘At least you’re not deaf as well. Deafness combined with tinnitus is very common in old age.’

  ‘Does everybody have some sort of noise?’ asks Cassie. ‘Because I found myself thinking perhaps it was always there and I just didn’t notice.’

  ‘That is often exactly the case,’ smiles the doctor approvingly. ‘Something occurs in the ear, some small malfunction, and there it is: the noise revealed. Unmasked. There is a visual analogy. You come home one day and notice a neighbour’s hideous new purple windowframes. You point them out to your husband. He looks at you in amazement and says, they’ve been like that for three years. Once you become aware of something, you can’t easily lose that awareness.’

  ‘Loss of innocence,’ says Cassie.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he replies. ‘Yes.’

  Cassie knows nine of her ten minutes
are up, and decides not to use the last one trying to describe her recent feelings of intense foreboding. After all, he might feel he has to put her on Prozac.

  They take sandwiches to the park for lunch. Cassie wrestles with each shouting boy in turn, applying sunblock, and then warns them not to roll down the grassy slope because of pesticides. She closes her eyes and feels the sun warm her shoulders, kiss her bare arms, and knows it is hostile, fake gold, full of malignant power.

  Being out in the sun and the open air used to be health-giving. Now the sea is full of viruses, one bathe can leave you in a wheelchair for good; no wonder the fish have turned belly up this summer, bloated, to float and rot. As for sex, she thinks, watching her boys play, by the time it’s their turn it’ll be so dangerous they’ll have to do it in wetsuits.

  ‘You look a bit down,’ says her friend Judith as she joins her on the park bench.

  ‘Is it so obvious?’ smiles Cassie. ‘Talk about gloom and doom. I’ve got this horrible feeling that something appalling is about to happen.’

  ‘When you think about it, something appalling always is happening, somewhere in the world,’ says Judith, watching her daughters run over towards the swings. ‘That’s why I don’t read the papers. I used to feel I ought to; that I ought to know about these terrible things. Then one day I just stopped. And my knowing or not knowing has made no difference at all to the state of the world.’

  ‘How do you know?’ says Cassie. ‘We’re all implicated.’

  Judith merely smiles a smug smile. Pregnant with her third, she has been given 29 December as the date for the baby’s arrival, but she is determined it will wait until the new century. She is going to call it Milly if it’s a girl or Len if it’s a boy.

  ‘Did you hear about Sally Pimlott?’ asks Judith, remembering some gossip. ‘She handed out Lion bars at Ben’s birthday party last week, she didn’t realise they had nuts in, and one of the children had a fatal nut allergy and had to be rushed to hospital.’