by Polly James
I have to ask Greg to take over for the second half of this afternoon’s surgery, as Max and I have been called into school to see Josh’s tutor, Mr Bowen. When we arrive, we discover that Josh is furious that we’ve been contacted, and he doesn’t even calm down during the lengthy period we spend waiting outside the tutor’s office. He spends the entire time ranting, just like a mad constituent.
‘That bloody man’s got it in for me. He just picks on me – all the time. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing, it’s always, “Joshua Bennett. My office – now!” He’s just jealous because I haven’t got a disability,’ announces Josh, with venom.
‘Disability?’ I ask.
‘We call him Mr Thumb,’ says Josh. ‘‘Cause his thumb’s five times the size it should be.’
Josh draws various illustrations of Mr Bowen’s affected appendage to support his claims, and his outrage seems so genuine that Max and I are feeling really hostile by the time we enter the office. I will not have someone picking on my youngest child, just because his digits are undamaged.
I put on my best MP’s office voice and walk to the desk, my hand outstretched. ‘Mr Thumb? I’m Molly Bennett. Pleased to meet you.’
Max and Josh collapse in hysterics, while Mr Bowen looks at me in disbelief. I realise what I’ve done and have to excuse myself. I clutch at my forehead and say, ‘I am so sorry, I’m unwell. I think I may be going to be—’ and then I run for the door, making (very convincing) retching noises.
Max tells me later that things didn’t get any better after my departure. Apparently, when he complained that Mr Bowen was picking on Josh, Mr Bowen replied that Josh was in the sixth-form common room all morning – and all afternoon – of every day, playing poker. Max didn’t believe this, so Mr Bowen made him watch a CCTV recording of Josh in action.
Max then tried to argue that Josh was probably only relaxing during free periods but, again, Mr Bowen’s response wasn’t exactly helpful. He demanded Josh’s homework diary, to enable him to show Max the lesson timetable. The entire cover was decorated with extremely realistic, outsized thumbs.
Max says there’s nothing for it but to kill Josh. Connie’s (unsurprisingly) in favour, and even I agree to think about it. We don’t ask Holly her opinion, in case she objects.
SATURDAY, 19 JUNE
Ouf, I don’t think Connie’s got the H&M job she was interviewed for today, although she says that everything went well until the manager asked her whether there was anything that really annoyed her about people. (The Boss never asked me that!)
The trouble with Connie is that she’s so truthful that she can’t understand the point of those interview questions to which the only correct answers are lies, such as what she should have said on this occasion: ‘I am very tolerant, and really like dealing with the general public.’
Connie doesn’t say anything of the sort. Her argument is that any interviewer worth his or her salt would assume that a candidate who answered with such bullshit must be a compulsive liar, and should therefore be avoided.
She takes the same approach to interviews as she does to life in general: tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. (I have strong suspicions that this characteristic may also be linked to Asperger’s, along with a pathological inability to judge when to explain oral sex to an elderly relative.)
Anyway, Connie’s answer to the H&M manager apparently goes like this: ‘Well, one thing really, really annoys me …’
‘What?’ says the (presumably incredulous) manager.
‘When someone has thin hair, and their ears poke out – right through it.’
Connie says the interview ended shortly thereafter.
SUNDAY, 20 JUNE
I bet you can tell a married woman from a single one, just by the state of her underwear. Mine is tragic. Rather worryingly, this thought occurs to me while I am trying to draft a reply to Johnny’s last email – the one in which he mentioned massage.
I’m hoping that he was so distracted by the oil spill that he forgot that he was writing to me, and thought he was emailing his wife instead – but now I have no idea whether to respond to his suggestion, or whether it’s safer to ignore it altogether.
I draft several clumsy attempts at suitable replies, but my political skills seem to have deserted me entirely so, eventually, I give up and decide to phone Dad instead. It is Father’s Day, after all – even though Connie seems oblivious to the fact that this also applies to Max. She’s still in bed, moaning to her friends on Facebook about retail managers with no sense of humour.
I, however, am in my father’s good books, due to being the only one of his many children who has remembered to send a card, or to phone – or at least I am, until the subject of Facebook comes up again. Along with a mention of Dad’s young Thai women ‘friends’ who are all, without exception, ‘neighbours’, or so he says.
He gets quite cross when I question the likelihood of this, on the basis that: a) he lives in a really small village, and b) it’s in Dorset. Then he says he’s not interested in women since Stepmother Mark III left him, anyway – so I have to phone Dinah as fast as I can.
‘Di,’ I say. ‘Can you set Dad up with one of your friends’ mums?’
‘Why? What’s he up to?’ says Dinah.
(We have a sisterly shorthand which avoids the need for a lot of explanation, which is lucky as she talks so much that I often can’t get a word in edgeways.)
‘He says he’s not interested in women again,’ I say. ‘And that the Thai girls are all his neighbours.’
‘Christ!’ says Dinah. ‘I’ll get onto it straight away. In the meantime, why don’t you write something off-putting on his Facebook wall?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like asking him if his willy’s still bendy, for a start.’
There’s a distinctly triumphant tone to Dinah’s last comment. I wonder if this is how most daughters discuss their fathers? Mind you, I also wonder how many fathers have women friends as young as those. Maybe Max fantasises about starting all over again with someone new, probably half my age, and from another continent.
I don’t think I want to know if he does, but I’m unsettled for the rest of the afternoon now that the thought’s occurred to me. I keep finding myself staring at him, until he notices and says,
‘What’s up? Have I got a bogey hanging from my nose or something?’
He hasn’t, but it’s odd how you don’t really notice the person you’ve been married to for aeons, until you start to consider how attractive they might appear to another person – which is a bit alarming, not just because I bet I look terrible, but also because I suspect Max doesn’t. And, as if that isn’t quite depressing enough, Josh is taking Max out ‘for a Father’s Day drink’ – at a lap dancing club, or so he says.
Honestly, is there no end to the pressure? First, I need new underwear, and now I shall have to learn to pole-dance, too.
MONDAY, 21 JUNE
God, why do I look so different in photographs to how I imagine I look?
The Boss’ website is being updated, to allow him to blog – talk about asking for trouble – so I have to have a new photo taken. The result makes me look like Mr Burns in The Simpsons. When did I become a hunchback?
I blame it on the weird position I have to adopt, in order to preserve an ear-protecting distance from the receiver while talking to Miss Chambers on the phone – and last night’s misguided attempt at pole-dancing didn’t help much either, but what are you supposed to do when your husband and son spend five hours in a lap dancing club on Father’s Day? (Max claims they only went to the pub and that Josh is winding me up, but he looked suspiciously cheerful when he left for work this morning.)
I suppose my photo could be worse, though – Greg looks even more like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho than usual in his. He says he thinks he looks ‘damned attractive’ and ‘will scare off lunatics’, so I can’t persuade him to change it – but I’m not letting mine go anywhere exc
ept into the virtual trash.
I’m going to suggest the web designer uses the most recent photo I sent to Johnny instead. The constituents probably won’t notice that I have my eyes shut or, if they do, they’ll think I’m wincing with empathy for their plights.
Actually, I am feeling rather uncharacteristically empathetic today, seeing as Anti-Social Behaviour is on the agenda. Such an idiotic term, which doesn’t at all reflect the utter misery that is wreaked on so many by so few.
If there’s one thing I blame the Labour Government for, it was their complete inability to call a spade a spade. ASB sounds like a toddler tantrum, which drastically understates the case if our constituents are anything to go by. Whole neighbourhoods are being terrorised, by one or two nightmare families who are out of control.
Whenever the subject comes up at dinner parties – which is pretty rare, anyway – our friends look at me as if I’m making up examples for the sake of entertainment. East Lichford might as well be A Tale of Two Cities, given how little awareness of the underclass those who live in its richer parishes seem to have.
When I mentioned the horse and the burned-out cars Steve Ellington keeps in his front garden, David said, ‘Oh Molly, you are funny.’
He should have seen Edmund Beales’ bloody Doberman the other night; and I bet there were three pit-bulls inside that house as well – Greg and I escaped by the skin of our teeth. I didn’t even recall Mr Beales’ shotgun licence until afterwards, so I suppose things could have been even worse.
Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked now, which is what empathy always does to the brain. You can’t afford too much of it in my job but, getting back to ASB, there seems to be no meaningful deterrent at all. If the nightmare neighbours have children, they’ll be re-housed straight away if they are evicted – in order to protect their children; and then their new neighbours will quickly end up as frantic as the old ones were.
What’s even more depressing is the way that so many of the Council’s Housing Officers seem to view desperate, but otherwise reasonable, residents as ‘moaning minnies’.
I’d find this rather less irritating if almost everyone who worked in the Housing Department didn’t live miles away in rural bliss, as evidenced by their complete inability to get to work at the first hint of snow.
I wonder if they have ASB in Russia? It seems unlikely that Putin would tolerate anything like that, but I forget to ask Johnny about it when he emails me, just before I leave the office. He asks if I’m not talking to him, seeing as I haven’t replied to his offer of a massage yet – so that must have been directed at me, and not his wife!
Now I don’t know what to say, especially as I really fancy a back rub. I’m sure I pulled something, trying to spin around the curtain pole Max left propped up in the hallway. I told him it would cause an accident if he didn’t put it in the shed.
TUESDAY, 22 JUNE
I’m getting really tired of Mr Meeeeurghn now, and not just because his name is so bloody hard to spell.
At lunchtime, he phones and starts screaming that he is being mistreated. ‘You protect me, now!’ he says. ‘I am refugee!’
Then he puts me on to someone else, who identifies herself as a member of staff at Primark. It turns out that Mr Meeeeurghn is trying to claim a refund on a pair of jeans that he insists he’s never worn.
The weary-sounding girl says that the jeans are covered in bleach; and that Mr Meeeeurghn is threatening to kill all the staff if she does not give him his money back immediately. He apparently told her that he would phone his MP who would make her do it.
Meanwhile, the queue of waiting customers is now so long that it reaches down the stairs, and out of the shop, but none of them can be served until Mr Meeeeurghn has been dealt with – by me, presumably. Some people have all the luck.
So, I tell her to put the screeching Mr Meeeeurghn back on the phone to speak to me; tell him that I cannot help him, and then go and check that the new office door is double-locked. Primark have security staff. We don’t – and nor do we have bulletproof glass.
WEDNESDAY, 23 JUNE
Greg is out of the office in the morning, ‘raising awareness’. He texts me at 11:30am to say that he has found a solution to all our problems with difficult constituents. ‘Nuke ‘em’, is his measured response.
He comes back shortly afterwards, but tells me that he is so traumatised by his run-in with Miss Harpenden and her hypothetical rats that we need to treat ourselves by nominating lunchtime as Writing Honest Letters Hour.
This is a luxury in which we occasionally indulge. A typical example would be my reply to Mr Ellis’ repeated threats to kill himself, if we don’t get him what he wants:
Dear Mr Ellis,
Thank you for your letter threatening to throw yourself off the multi-storey car park if we do not stop your next-door neighbour from turning off her light switch so noisily.
I regret that I will not be able to be present tomorrow at 4:00pm as you requested, as I have to be in the House of Commons from Mondays to Thursdays. However, if you could possibly arrange to reschedule the event for 4:30pm on Friday, I shall be more than happy to attend.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Sinclair, MP for Lichford East
Meanwhile, Greg is composing a response to Mrs Underwood, who has written in to ask whether there are plans to increase spending on public benches on the short route between her house and the betting shop:
Dear Mrs Underwood,
Further to your recent letter, I regret that there are currently no plans to increase spending for accessible seating in your area, as any additional funds are earmarked for tax cuts for me.
Yours, etc.,
Andrew Sinclair, MP for the hardworking people of Lichford East
It’s almost heartbreaking to have to shred our literary masterpieces as soon as we’ve finished reading them out but, even so, WHLH has cheered us both up no end. I’ve even managed to forget that Max has jet-setted off to Germany on his business trip, and that he won’t be home tonight – until I get home, and have to deal with Josh and Connie all by myself.
Do kids ever grow out of sibling rivalry? As I let myself in at the front door I hear yelling and incredibly loud banging, only to find Connie calmly listening to her iPod, while Josh is kicking the hell out of the back door. From the outside.
It turns out that he has been stuck in the back garden for the last two and a half hours, and has missed the whole of the England match as a result. It probably serves him right, though, if he really did call Connie ‘a freak who has no friends’ before she decided to lock him out. God knows what the neighbours must have thought. The air was positively blue.
Josh used to be able to escape when this sort of thing occurred, but now he can’t – not since we added barbed wire to the six-foot walls around the garden and padlocked the gate, to which Max has the only key. (I’m sure it was Steve Ellington who burgled us both times, but still can’t prove it.)
So Josh is in a foul mood; while Connie says that she is depressed as, not only does she have the most vile brother on the planet, she didn’t get the H&M job either – even though the manager did write and thank her for a ‘most entertaining interview’.
She and Josh spend all evening in their respective rooms, each furiously complaining about the other to their friends on Facebook. The only thing they are agreed on is that I am guilty of outrageous favouritism, though they disagree on which of them I apparently prefer.
I’m not too keen on either of them tonight, if truth be told; and I’m positively dreading tomorrow evening – Max and I have always spent our wedding anniversaries together until now. He’s left me a note on my pillow, though, so that cheers me up. For a second or two, until I read what it says:
Darling, we’re out of milk. Can’t find details of hotel but will phone you tomorrow and let you know then. All love, Mx
Can’t find details of hotel? What sort of stupid statement is that?
THURSDAY, 24 JUNE
> I’m a bit surprised today when Johnny emails to tell me that he’s back in London, ‘standing in for an embattled colleague caught up in the oil spill fall-out’ – and to ask whether I’d like to meet up while he’s there.
When I hesitate, he says what a shame it is that Max and I can’t be together for our wedding anniversary, and then asks whether I don’t think I am being taken a little for granted. I forget to ask him what he and his wife did for their anniversary in my rather non-committal reply, but I bet it was preferable to the way I spend my evening: completely on my own.
Both kids are still in self-imposed exile upstairs, and I haven’t got any friends to go out with, or none who won’t insist on making me feel like a poor relation, anyway – and even Annoying Ellen isn’t in when I pop round to check she doesn’t need to borrow the corkscrew again. (I think she must have gone away, as I don’t seem to have seen her for a couple of days.)
I do speak to Dinah on the phone, which cheers me up a bit – especially when she tells me that she has found two women who might be suitable for Dad amongst the mothers of her friends.
‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘That’s the best news I’ve had all day. At least we don’t have to worry about a Thai bride now.’
‘Hold your horses, Molly,’ says Dinah. ‘I haven’t finished yet. You really must learn not to interrupt.’
Then she goes on to explain that Dad has ruled both women out, without even taking either of them on a date. Apparently, he told Dinah that they were ‘too old’ for him.
‘Well, I suppose Dad is quite youthful for his age,’ I say. ‘How old were these women, anyway?’
‘The oldest one’s fifteen years younger than him.’
By the time I’m capable of a response to that, Dinah has lost patience and hung up on me – which is what I feel like doing to Max, when he finally phones me some time after midnight, and then forgets to say ‘Happy Anniversary’ anyway.
He sounds as pissed as a fart, and is still claiming that he doesn’t know the phone number, or even the name of the hotel he’s staying in. When I say that I need it, in case of emergencies, he says there’s nothing I can’t handle, given my job – and that he’ll see me tomorrow night. Then he rings off, as if that was that.
