FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2012
Copyright © India Knight, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustration © Trisha Krauss
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-14-197059-2
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
By the same author
FICTION
Comfort and Joy
Don’t You Want Me?
My Life on a Plate
NON-FICTION
The Thrift Book
Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook
Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet
The Shops
For E
‘One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.’
Oscar Wilde
Here are some of the things I have started doing due to age. I am forty-six years old.
a) Making sounds when I sit down or bend. The sound is often ‘Oof’, even though sitting or bending causes me no discomfort whatsoever. There is nothing physically the matter with me; in fact, I’m really bendy. Sometimes I put my hand in the small of my back, for emphasis. I also groan with pleasure, quite loudly – ‘Wooaaarrrgh’ – when entering either the bath or bed.
b) Asking, loudly and indignantly, ‘Who are these people?’ when I read a gossip magazine. Occasionally jabbing crossly at the photographs with my finger. A mere three years ago, I could have named every person in Heat and given you a potted bio – ‘And that’s Dyamondé, who got up the duff to the Loin, who was dating Pipette, you know, with the implants that went wrong. Keep up!’
c) In the rare instances when I do know who the people are, darkly muttering things such as, ‘Heh, that won’t end well,’ Cassandra-like.
d) Going to new restaurants and saying, ‘Ooh, dreadful acoustics,’ as though I were hard of hearing, which I’m not. Leaning forward ostentatiously to emphasize the point. Talking extra loudly. Making exaggerated facial expressions and over-articulating to convey non-existent partial deafness.
e) Being completely uninterested in meeting new people at, say, dinner parties. Being pleasant, obviously, but not even going through the pretence of swapping numbers/emails.
f) Being too old for weddings. Thinking, ‘I’d better go but, oof, it’s a very long day.’ Plus, see e).
g) Thinking, horribly, about many – though not all – weddings, ‘Yeah, good luck with that.’ Like a monster.
h) Forgetting people’s names. Wishing I were camp enough to say, ‘Darling, meet darling.’ Not being as camp as I was.
i) Having two-day hangovers. Sometimes three-day. We’re talking darkened room and death-feeling axe through the head and Temazepam, not Neurofen Plus and ‘plenty of water’.
j) Wondering how it came to pass that the people in charge should be younger than me. Feeling, strongly, that a dreadful mistake has occurred – a rip in the time–space continuum, a grotesque, extra-anomalous anomaly – and that someone needs to notice, and fix it.
k) Realizing that young people talk about the Eighties in the way that I used to talk about the Fifties: i.e. as though speaking quite anthropologically about quaint prehistory. Also, noting that the films being remade are the films of my youth. Ditto the clothes.
l) Developing an interest in the weather. Talking and thinking about it a lot. Responding to the weather as if it were a person – more, a friend: being outraged by the rain’s behaviour, and wondering why it’s doing it. Worrying about slipping in snow, despite snow being my favourite and despite my soles being snow-cautious and grippy.
m) Also developing a strong interest in nature, despite having been the kind of ultra-urban young woman who genuinely didn’t understand what the countryside was for. Being pleased when I see mushrooms. Smiling at trees. Examining leaves. Pondering sheep. Photographing cloud formations and learning their names.
n) Only finding babies interesting up to a point, unless I’m related to them. Sometimes finding the babies a bit irritating, rather than (as in the past) permanently adorable. Saying ‘Oof’ when they leave, and having a nice cup of tea.
o) Oh yes: tea. Pints of the stuff. Pints. Rivers.
p) Developing an unlovely fascination with my own bowel movements. Becoming pleased when I ‘go’ and disgruntled if I am denied my morning poo. Being so breezy about this particular interest (hobby, almost) that I am not shy about discussing it with girlfriends, even though every man I’ve ever slept with is led to believe that I don’t poo or wee, ever, because I am a princess made of special things.
q) Often feeling that there is too much choice. Wishing that there were twenty pairs of shoes to pick from, not 200. Wishing that coffee were just coffee, with three variants, maximum, and only one kind of milk. Preferring small shops to the department stores that I once considered nirvana. Preferring shop assistants not to be versions of my children; craving the matronly.
r) Sometimes overhearing young people talking and, instead of being excited by the fact that language is a growing, ever-evolving, living thing, thinking, ‘Language has just died in your mouth. You have murdered words.’ Being tyrannically intolerant of bad spelling; equating it with imbecility. Becoming a grammar pedant. Saying things like, ‘How can you think if you can’t even write?’
s) Having bits of poetry I learned by heart at school thirty years ago pop into my head unbidden, after a complete absence of three decades. Not unpleasant. Ditto hymns. Also, wandering into churches and having a sit-down, feeling utterly at peace, even though I am not an especially devout person.
t) Minding about manners. This is not new, but now feeling actual rage at people who don’t say please and thank you. Saying it for them, in a horrible, sarcastic, old-biddy tone. Speaking of which: noticing how prefixing anything with ‘old’ makes it a more effective insult.
u) Knowing that I’m more than halfway through, you know … my life … and pushing the thought away with all my might.
v) Becoming incandescent about 1) litter and 2) dog turds. Chasing people who don’t pick either up. Saying, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ in a fluting, rising tone, almost singing, until they notice me.
w) Flirting in a completely mild, ordinary way with waiters and sometimes seeing the confusion in their faces, and realizing they are thinking that I could be their mum.
x) Knowing that one day somebody will ask my youngest child, whom I had at thirty-eight, if I am her granny. Not now. Not yet. But one day.
y) Hoicking my bosoms and sniffing to indicate disapprobation.
z) No, not really. Not that last one. But it can only be a matter of time.
My friend Olive used to narrate her day to herself in her head as a child. ‘Olive is walking down the street, her long brown hair swishing, whee. Today it is plaits and they are a bit tight. Olive looks nice, even though she is named after a gross-tasting thing, like being called Anchovy, which tastes of fish’s bottoms. Soon Olive will be at school. Maybe it will be sausages for lunch. Johnny says they look like willies. Olive sees a red bus and two lots of blossom.’ She told me years later that, as an only child, she found the running commentary kept her company during the many hours she spent alone, travelling to and fro or waiting for her parents to come home. ‘Every cup of tea I made, or every plate of beans on toast, turned into a little bit of presenting, like I was in Blue Peter: “Olive is lighting the gas carefully. Olive thinks half a tin is plenty for tea, because there is strawberry Angel Delight afterwards.” ’
She said thinking about yourself in the third person did wonders for her self-esteem. She rarely thought, ‘Olive Wilkins is walking down the street looking horrible. Galumph, galumph, goes Olive Wilkins. Urgh, the fat spotto. Round by name, round by nature.’ The story she told herself about herself was cheerful, optimistic, with Olive as its star – a mildly tweaked-for-the-better Olive, but a recognizable one. We’d had a couple of bottles of wine when she told me about doing this a fortnight ago, and she laughingly admitted that she had never entirely stopped. ‘Obviously, it stopped being every moment of the day by the time I was about eleven,’ she said. ‘But if I was feeling a bit anxious or insecure it would pop back again: “Olive really hopes David turns up, because she’s been waiting outside the Odeon for ten minutes now and it’s about to start raining. But why would David not turn up? Olive is wearing her nicest dress and her hair actually looks OK, and he said he’d been looking forward to tonight all week. Ah, there David is.” ’ Once, she said, quite recently and during a particularly unsuccessful sexual encounter, she made herself snort with laughter by returning to her childhood habit: ‘Olive hates Harry’s back, because it is hairy. Hairy Harry. Olive wishes she had known about the hair, but she couldn’t see it through the shirt he was wearing at dinner. Oh no, Olive notices sadly. Harry really doesn’t have much of a sense of rhythm. Poor Olive. Poor Harry.’
I’m trying out Olive’s technique while walking down the street. Here Clara comes, looking halfway presentable despite the early hour, because she had a meeting earlier this morning and has made an effort. She notices that the builders have started work at number 33; she sees them from afar, milling about the pavement as a scaffolding lorry is being unloaded. Bother, Clara thinks, I’m going to have to go right past them, and even though the law’s changed and building firms are all discrimination-aware and everything, you do get the ogle and still, sometimes, the odd catcall. Awful, really, that in 2012 women should still be objectified in this way – that they can’t go about their daily business without some brickie shouting out a vague obscenity. And there are about a dozen of them, plus the scaffolders. Oof. Still, deep breath, Clara. Here we go.
How weird. I mean, I know they have to keep their eyes on their important tools and dangerous builder equipment and everything, but really? Silence? Here I am, a woman, not actually ninety-five years old and with my head on the right way round: that’s good enough for most blokes, isn’t it? And these are blokes. But not a peep.
Not that I want a catcall. Not exactly. But – well, come on. Come on. I’m wearing quite a tight dress and a pair of heels; I’ve got on tinted moisturizer, blusher, eyeliner, mascara and lip gloss. I had a blow-dry two days ago. I am only forty-six years old.
Oh, I know. I spent many decades of my life objecting vigorously to objectification. I could bore for England about the theory. Ew, everyday sexism: the horror. Obviously men shouldn’t shout things out at women in the street. It’s not nice. But I’ll tell you what else I don’t find nice either, to be absolutely honest with you: this weird silence. What is wrong with these freaks?
I don’t like it. Clara is displeased.
I’m just going to go past again, as an experiment. I can see they’re busy discussing plumb lines or cement mixers or something; so busy that they’re obviously not able to concentrate on passing women.
I walk more slowly this time. I don’t saunter – not exactly – but I sashay slightly. I swing my bottom. I am heading towards the biggest group – there are six of them – and as I approach I decide not to swerve awkwardly but to go right through them instead, like Moses parting the Red Sea. Ha! Try and ignore that, men with penises. So this is what I do. And they part, wave-like, and as they part I make sure to make eye contact, and to smile – not what I meanly call the full Desperate Nana when my friend Frances does it, but a little smile, with no teeth showing. (Poor Frances. She’s so obsessed with her own invisibility that she’s fulfilling her own prophecy. Also, she never used to smile like that – I don’t know where it’s suddenly appeared from. She does it at any single man who ever talks to her: it’s a sort of leer, with top and bottom teeth showing. I don’t know what it’s supposed to denote: a certain ‘roar’ carnivorousness, maybe. Appetite. It has literally not worked once. You can see the horror in the men’s faces the second it happens; she’s a nice-looking woman, until she does Desperate Nana and then it’s all, ‘Woah, is that the time?’)
Anyway, here comes take two. And then: bingo. Nothing from the other ones but the main one, the foreman – not bad-looking, actually, thirty tops – smiles at me. Get in! Still got it – I mean, of course I’ve still got it, but it’s pleasant to have it confirmed. One isn’t without one’s anxieties. And he’s about to say something. Success.
‘Oops,’ is what he says, moving out of my way. And then he raises his hard hat by a couple of inches, and I stand and stare at him as he lowers it again. ‘Morning, madam,’ he says.
Why is he raising his stupid hat, like he would to his old school headmistress from when he was six? And ‘madam’? I have never pined more for the old ‘Cor,’ or ‘Don’t get many of those to the pound.’ (My most memorable builder line, in the days when they still talked to me, was, ‘Your eyes are like spanners. Every time I see them, my nuts tighten.’ That would do. It’s vulgar, I grant you, but it’s no-nonsense. You know where you stand with a line that vulgar.)
I wonder, wildly and for a brief moment, whether I should actually thrust my arse in his hand, for pinching. ‘Madam this, baby,’ I could say. But I don’t. I give the foreman a tight little nod, and then I get a grip and move on. By the time I arrive home, I am in a very bad mood.
Are my eyes still like spanners? They look all right to me as I peer into the hall mirror. I haven’t even put my bag down and my keys are still in my hand. There are lines at their edges, obviously, but that’s because I’m forty-six and I smile. Smiling is good. I also laugh. I laugh now, mirthlessly and exaggeratedly, to make the bigger lines come: hahaHA. They’re not tiny, the lines, but nor are they huge. I mean, they’re not crevasses. So that’s good. It’s because I have fat in my face, which is also good. I always knew it would come in handy one day.
Less good: my eyelids seem lower down than they were. They’ve slumped slightly. You’d have to be on intimate terms with my eyelids to notice this, but then I am on intimate terms: they live in my face. Slippage has occurred, as if a tiny but unusually heavy person had sat on my brows and sort of pushed down with their minuscule little hands. But! I can reverse the effect, I note, by raising my eyebrows in quizzical fashion. Having raised my eyebrows, I lower them as much as I can. That’s quite a frown line I’ve got going, actually. When did it come? But never mind. I don’t ever frown like that, except maybe at my children, and when I’m helping Maisy with her maths homework.
You know how in films women of a certain age press their palms against their cheeks and pull up, to view the effect a hypothetical facelift might have, and how this denotes ‘Our heroine realizes that she is ageing’? I’m not going to do that. No, I’m not, even though I’d quite like to. Just to see. I realize that I am ageing, what with being conversant with the concept of Time. But it’s fine. I’m in pretty good nick, actually, considering. I’m healthy and strong and I do proper exercise and always take the stairs.
And I don’t think forty-six is old. Not these days. It used to be ancient, of course: I remember the shock of realizing, some years ago, that the ancient old ladies who taught me at school must have been in, maybe, their late thirties. But you couldn’t tell, because they wore horrible A-line skirts and cardigans in sludgy colours, and a visible layer of face powder at all times. They had hankies stuffed up their sleeves and sensible shoes that made their feet look like platypuses, and ‘done’ hair like helmets. I don’t have any of these things. I have a couple of pairs of Louboutins, thanks very much. And some kickass underwear, oh yes. I expect my teachers wore enormous white pants, tucking the top carefully into the bottom of their bras for warmth. These are not my pants. Those teachers were not my people.
I realize with a wave of absolute disgust that I am about to tell myself that I am forty-six years young.
Of course it would be at absolutely this point that Sky should wander down the stairs. Now, I like Sky. I like her a lot. It makes me sad that, what with them both being seventeen, her and Jack’s relationship is presumably doomed. I want to believe in the concept of childhood sweethearts who stay together forever – of course I do – but logic and observation tell me this is unlikely. But anyway, Sky’s great: smart and funny and very pretty. I just wish she’d put some clothes on sometimes. She’s not naked, obviously, but she’s wearing what she usually wears at this time of the morning, namely a T-shirt and pants. The T-shirt covers her bottom, just about, but it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. (There’s a youthful phrase, I think to myself even as I utter it in my head. There’s a thought that doesn’t make me feel grannyish at all for having it: ‘Doesn’t leave much to the imagination.’ Works well if you say it in a Sir John Major voice. I don’t expect Sky has any idea who Sir John Major is.)
‘Morning, but you’re already late for school,’ I say. ‘Where’s Jack?’
‘It’s OK,’ Sky says. ‘We’ve got a free first period. He’s just in the shower. I’m grabbing us some toast.’
I put my bag and keys down and follow her into the kitchen. Golden hair, legs up to here – she is very aesthetically pleasing, old Sky, and this makes me happy. I don’t understand that weird thing whereby women my age (Sir John Major’s voice pops up again, saying, ‘My favourite vegetable is the pea’) – anyway, ‘women my age’ are expected to dislike or resent younger, fresher models. It seems deranged to me, that, as an approach, to say nothing of unsisterly in the extreme. I may have dodgy notions about wolf whistles, but I’m sane enough to wish the best for other women, young or old. So I’m glad for Sky. I’m glad she’s lovely and pert and gorgeous and brainy and ambitious, and not necessarily in that order. Why would I not be glad? If someone’s going to mill about my house in a state of semi-undress, I’m glad it’s Sky and not, you know, some nerdy girl with a tache. Not that there’s anything wrong with nerdy girls with taches: they’re usually clever and interesting. But I could do without one in her pants, moping about all gloomily in – what? – black pants. Emo pants, or skull pants. Death pants, gloom pants, the Doleful Pants of Melancholia. I’d rather Sky’s red and white stripes, which are jaunty.
And anyway – as I tell myself whenever her lack of familiarity with dressing gowns or pyjama bottoms gets on my nerves – it’s good that she feels comfortable enough to wander about in her pants. She has quite a complicated home life – the mother died when Sky was little and the dad has had a succession of girlfriends, not all of whom have been wholeheartedly liked by Sky. She spends a lot of time at ours. Her dad’s some beardy weirdo who writes fantasy fiction, if you please. Big on trolls and elves, is Sky’s dad. And now rich as Croesus, because apparently there’s quite a market for that sort of thing. His trolls and elves have ‘gone global’, according to Sky, particularly since the recent smash-hit TV series.
I don’t suppose she’d walk about in her pants if there were an older man about. Or maybe she would?
‘Sky? Would you get dressed if I had a husband?’
‘Another one?’ Sky says. ‘Oh no, did we run out of Nutella?’
‘Well, not necessarily a husband,’ I concede. She’s right – I’ve got two former ones of those already. ‘But, you know, a boyfriend. Who lived here. A man my sort of age. Would you cover up? And there’s another jar in the drawer.’
‘Cool. Why?’ says Sky. ‘Are you going to move someone in? Who is it? Yeah, I guess so. I wouldn’t feel comfortable walking about like this. Not if I was going to be objectified.’ She wields the word breezily, familiarly, fluently.
‘Who else is moving in? I know about Gaby,’ says Jack, appearing in the doorway. ‘You might have said. That’s just such a weird thing to spring on us.’
‘Nobody,’ I say. ‘Just Gaby. It was a hypothetical question about Sky and her pants.’
‘Oh,’ says Jack. ‘I like her pants. Come on, Sky, we’re going to be late. Got to get dressed.’
As they amble back upstairs, I wonder: would I ever move a man in? I used to do it with such breeziness in my youth – come and live with me, or I’ll come and live with you, look, here I am with my bag and my wheely suitcase, here you are with your borrowed van and your LPs, it’s done – but the fact is, I’m set in my ways. Living alone – well, living alone with biggish, relatively self-reliant children – has quite a lot to recommend it. You can do exactly as you please. You can grab your eight-year-old and lie about watching Disney movies in bed all day without feeling guilty about your spouse’s need for adult conversation. You can have exactly who you like to dinner: no more ‘Yes, I know he’s a wanker, but I’ve known him since university.’ You don’t have to pretend to be interested in golf or rugby. There are additional benefits: you can be quite unphotogenic and gross and there’s no one to see it. I know some couples have no issue with being unphotogenic and gross in front of each other, but I don’t like it. Never have. It’s really unsexy to have someone fart next to you, and there’s nothing anybody can say – ‘friendly’, ‘relaxed’, ‘companionable’ – that will ever change my mind. Go and fart in your own house, I say, Parp-o-tron. Not in bed with me.
Speaking of which – bed, not parps – my sap is rising and I’m not sure what to do about it. I’m incredibly frisky at the moment, even now, as I screw the lid back on to the Nutella and open the dishwasher to unload last night’s plates. What’s that about? Rhetorical question, actually. I know exactly what it’s about. I swore off what my former mother-in-law calls ‘bedroom unpleasantness’ when my last relationship – with a man I met in a hotel bar – eventually went south. The problem was that sex with him was amazing. It was remarkable. I do not say this lightly, or from the position of an ingénue. It was sort of cosmic, that sex – filmic, magnificent, filthy; like nothing else. All we did was fuck and then lie there swooning. This was fantastic, obviously, but also quite debilitating, because the Man From The Connaught and I were permanently knackered, half-broken with exhaustion because of all the fucking. And then we’d get a tiny bit of energy back and – well, you know. When we weren’t fucking, we’d be eating and drinking and talking and laughing until the early hours. It was beautiful, and mad, and at some point I suppose might have become less frenetic – but we shall never know, because, alas, the Man From The Connaught is no more. I mean, he’s alive, as far as I know. He has not perished or met with grievous injury. But our relationship has, because he had to go and live in Australia for work and, well, you know – it’s all very well emailing and talking on the phone, but eventually we agreed that it doesn’t quite cut the mustard.
I didn’t think I’d mind that much – you tend not to, with the more sex-based stuff. But I do mind. I mind increasingly, because it turns out it wasn’t just the sex. It turns out I was in love with him, which was not a thing I pointed out, or was even necessarily fully aware of, at the time. And so now there he is, being a jackaroo and galloping across the outback, herding sheep, I expect, and wrestling them to the ground while wearing chaps. Maybe. Or maybe not: he works in finance. Anyway, he’s there and I’m here and it sucks, especially when I imagine him with a hypothetical new girlfriend called Sheila, all tinnies and sun damage and begging for a ‘rooting’.
I’m still, a year later, trying to be brave about it and pretend I don’t miss him, or the actual sex. But I do. All the time. I cope with this by pretending that he is the last thing on my mind, and sometimes it works. For example, I will try not to mention the Man From The Connaught again.
Anyway, having been shagged half to death, I thought I’d take a little break and try and have the occasional full night’s sleep. Devote myself to the domestic pursuits. Help more with school projects; go back to my language classes; knit. And that was all fine, except at night I’d get this terrible overwhelming feeling of sadness – of brokenness, really. And you can’t be having that. Not at my age: life is short and you must carpe the diem, not lie about on sofas howling into space while the yarn on your lap unravels like a metaphor. And then I thought, ‘Well – it’s perfectly possible to do all of these familial, domestic things and not be a nun.’ So I swore back on: I made myself, to help the grieving process. (Also, not having sex is really fattening. You think, ‘I’m not planning on having sex,’ so you sit there picking absent-mindedly at snacks, the children’s as well as your own, in a way that you wouldn’t if sex was on the agenda. I mean, nobody prepares for a night of passion by scarfing down a tub of taramasalata and two pitta breads, do they? No one thinks, ‘Fwoar, I’m massively in the mood, I’ll just eat this really disgusting and inexplicably overpriced stuffed-crust pizza,’ or ‘I know what would make this underwear look really spectacular: carb-loading.’ Sex is exercise, especially if you’re being flung about: whatever you eat during the period of frenetic sexual activity comes straight off again. No sex equals ‘Hiya, fatso.’ Sex is part of one’s general physical maintenance, really, at my age, like a decent serum or expensive opaques.)
However, sexing, as my daughter Maisy calls it, with people you’re not really massively into is not as emotionally undemanding as you might think: on a bad day, it just serves to remind you of what you lost. I’m pleased that I am emotionally intelligent enough to have fathomed that out, obviously, but now I’ve got this awful Code Red level of the horn, and nowhere to put it: it’s like some awful genie has been unleashed and won’t go back in its bottle. I need to act, before I become the sort of woman who leers at people in the street and turns to her friend saying, ‘Would.’ On top of everything else, the horn feels dreadfully age-inappropriate. I should not be revved up like poor old teenage Meatloaf on a Saturday night.
Plus, you know: logistics. As the Loaf notes, it’s a bummer being a) all revved up with b) no place to go, not even Sydney. I can’t really have people back here if they’re going to be one-offs – I don’t think it would be nice for the children: ‘Freudian nightmare’ pretty much covers it – ‘Welcome! Kids, meet the random. Random, fyi, we all shag on different floors. Try and keep the noise down.’ I could, and have, gone to people’s houses, but I don’t really like that either because it’s so immediately domestically intimate. And while intimacy is fine – evidently: you’re about to shag – I don’t like the domestic bit. I’m not interested. I didn’t have the domestic bit with the Man From, because we never lived together, but I did with my two husbands, obviously, and with countless boyfriends in my youth. I’m not looking to play house the randoms for a good old while. I don’t even want to see their furniture, which is a useless thing to say because there aren’t that many men out there who live with their worldly goods covered in dustsheets, more’s the pity.
It never bothered me before, to know what the inside of somebody’s fridge looked like, but when the men you’re talking about – the shaggees, I mean – are in their late forties or early fifties and inevitably divorced or separated, with pictures of their kids pinned to said fridge, it makes me feel a bit gloomy, or rather gloomier. It kills the horn. Their half-pint bottles of milk-for-one make me feel sad. Their childless man-homes, ditto. Their lonely toothbrushes. Their dying orchid, all crispy and brown. Hair-thickening lotion, once, poignantly, at the house of Richard, who was very handsome and very slightly thinning on top. I think it has something to do with the fact that there was obviously once a time when these men thought, ‘Freedom! No more ball-and-chain! My very own shag-pad!’, envisioning all the hot laydeez passing through and enacting their fantasies – ‘Hey, do you want to ask your mates round? I could really do with a bukkake party, it’s been two long weeks.’ And then, after a period of time, this: hair thickener and, somewhere tucked away, a picture of the ex-family in happier times. It’s the death of hope. As a vibe, it doesn’t really make you want to wave your knickers in the air, joyfully crying, ‘Over here, tiger.’
Also, whereas years ago I’d have forgotten the specifics of various interiors by the time I’d walked to the Tube, these days they’re irritatingly lodged in my head: ‘I liked the way he’d knocked through in the basement. And putting the utility room to the side like that – it’s a really excellent, ingenious use of space.’ This is, let’s face it, also an age thing, born of decades of overfamiliarity with houses in general and interiors magazines in particular. I don’t think you should necessarily walk to the Tube after a night of passion (though it isn’t passion, alas and alack) with total recall of someone’s white goods/carpeting data.
I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea: it’s not like there have been dozens of these lone-toothbrushed men. There have been a mere few. Three. Maybe four (I say maybe because I do not wish to remember Four, who had a thing about feet, which was perfectly fine up to a point and then just tiresome, as well as quite comical in a not-good way). None of whom I had any intention of seeing in anything approaching a regular way.
But that too is awkward, because we’re all so easily findable nowadays: you can’t escape. You can’t say, ‘Thanks for the fun evening,’ and disappear: there’s email, and texts, and Facebook and Twitter and so on and on and on, so that you can never wholly shake someone off. Plus they send distressing, only very slightly coded tweets about feet, in the case of Four. So then you have to go through this rigmarole of doing it again and upping the date ante, even though at least one of you knows the thing has no legs (only feet, ho) and isn’t going anywhere. It’s wearying. It’s like being twenty and doing pity-shags, or politeness-shags, which really ought to be a thing one outgrows.
You’d think men would die of joy if someone sent them a text saying, ‘That was fun, let’s do it again at some point, maybe.’ No strings. Turns out a lot of people like a little string. At our age. Which is damned peculiar: I spent literally decades thinking all men wanted was stringlessness. I wonder when the interest in string kicks off. At around forty-five, I’m guessing, after at least one failed marriage, maybe two; after the initial excitement of thinking ‘I could shag any woman in the world!’ wears off and Angelina Jolie has bafflingly failed to come knocking, naked under her trench coat and writhing with longing, and more realistic expectations set in. Everyone is so lonely, really. It’s piteous.
And another thing: people find the idea that a person – me, for example – should rather fancy the idea of stringlessness … not shocking, exactly, but mildly distasteful. Well, I say ‘a person’ – what I really mean is ‘a single woman with teenage children’. I have observed that you’re allowed to have those thoughts if you’re freshly separated and your children are small, because then the assumption is that you’re looking to hook up again, to form another nuclear unit, to provide your children with a stepfather and to start playing happy families all over again. This is acceptable. Whack on ten or fifteen years, though, and it becomes suspect, especially if you point out that said children have perfectly good dads and that nothing could be further from your mind than providing them with an unnecessary replacement. I mean, maybe if the dads were dead, but Sam and Robert are alive, I’m pleased to say. They’re not even ill.
But live dads and no stepfather requirements basically mean ‘I like sex’ and incredibly this perfectly reasonable statement – not that it’s a statement: I don’t march about shouting it out – is still considered suspect. You see some people’s thought bubbles and they’re saying, ‘Slaaaaag.’ You kind of get the feeling they would prefer it if you said, ‘Sex? Urgh,’ and ran out of the room holding your mouth, which had filled with volumes of sick. And then ran back in, purged, to quietly get on with your macramé.
Anyway, it’s all very well standing around with ants in your pants, wondering about these annoying mute builders and eyelid droop and laughter lines and pushing back the memory of the glorious Sex of Yore and shoving it in a box and putting a padlock on that box and throwing it in the sea and pretending there is no such thing as Australia, but I need to get on. There will be other occasions on which to test the builders, seeing as they work halfway down the road, and the eyelid situation is just going to have to wait. There’s not much I can do about it, frankly, other than take a knife to them, and everybody knows that that way madness lies, plus horrible feline eyes at a strange slant, as though you’d taken a cat and cruelly pulled back all its face-fur and tied it up with an elastic band, like a psycho and as a break from pulling the wings off flies. Bad look on a cat, worse on a human. And the sex: well, you know. It’s not going to kill me to go without for a bit. I don’t think.