Maeve's Times (19 page)

Her friend suggested that she remove everything from her fridge and hoard it there. Another eavesdropper suggested to me that he’d like to tell her where to hoard it.

I
t is well known, of course, that joggers are mad, but when they jog in the torrents of rain you’d wonder should they be put away. All along the road this morning you could see them when the driving rain cleared a bit, steaming and glowing and giving themselves pneumonia as well as coronary arrest. Sometimes one jogs onto a bus, which is particularly bad news. I hate to see someone breathing unnaturally, like people do at the Olympic Games. I hate to see a grown man in a pair of pyjamas that he calls a tracksuit unable to gasp out his destination, and most of all I hate the aura of virtue that comes off him with the steam.

So it is with some pleasure that I see a new Christmas gift launched today by the Campari Sports Equipment Company for a mere £70. It’s a sort of a home jogger which takes the offensive sight of public jogging off the streets. The ‘Fun-Run’, as it is misleadingly called, looks like a bathroom scales, and you keep running on it like mad and it clocks up how many miles you’ve gone, all the while you never have to leave your bathroom. It comes complete with heart-stopping charts and graphs showing you that you are past your prime if you are over 25 anyway, but with proper racing on old ‘Fun Run’ you might stagger along living some passable kind of life even after that age. It also gives you 14 danger signals to look out for if you jog. I’m glad they’ve got around to admitting that jogging had, in fact, some built-in hazards, though I think nobody admitted it until joggers started to drop dead like flies in parks all over the world.

Anyway, these danger signals include extreme fatigue, it says, and your fingernails turning purple. So Campari suggest that you should do warming-up exercises before you start hurtling off on the machine – things like limbering up your back and shoulder muscles apparently. And they stress you shouldn’t do it if you feel exhausted. Naturally they don’t want to be deafened with the clump of falling bathroom joggers keeling over dead on their ‘Fun-Runs’. I was a bit disappointed when I asked what a ‘Fun-Run’ looked like. I thought it would be like that long rubber moving pavement that the bionic woman trains on when she has to do something a bit demanding, but no, it’s just exactly like a scales except, instead of telling your weight, it tells you how far you’ve run.

The more your silly old knees keep coming up, the more theoretical three-feet steps you have taken. And an alternative Christmas jogging present if you can’t manage a ‘Fun-Run’ would be the Runner’s Diary. It’s a huge thing like those impressive padded diaries with all the hours written in which executives have on their desks for women graduates to fill in for them. Anyway, the Runner’s Diary is seething with information about running being the road to understanding and contentment and health. It has dreadful diets for each day of the year, calorie charts, spaces to put in how much you ran, which are good spaces, and how much you ate, which are bad spaces, and advice about breathing from the stomach rather than the chest and moving your legs from the hips not the knees.

It’s altogether a very unsettling and unpleasant diary, which is obviously going to sell enormously well and delight the jogging recipients before their fingernails turn purple.

I
am a very nervous person about my own health; when I get a headache I wonder if it is meningitis, when I have a twinge in my stomach I wonder has my liver finally packed it in. If I get the smallest cut I watch the tiny drops of blood in horror in case I have haemophilia and will bleed to death there and then.

For years and years I tried to disguise this terror, and put a big brave face on it. I would try desperately to be casual when they were taking blood pressure, searching in the face of whoever was wrapping the terrible bit of canvas around my arm for some sign that I was finished. ‘I suppose that’s nice and normal,’ I would say in what I thought was a healthy, uncaring voice, but inside my heart would be thumping in great booms of terror and my eyes were wild for reassurance.

I used to read magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms until the words became a red blur of misery in front of me. Everyone else looked so uncaring about their bodies as they sat there genuinely absorbed in some out-of-date colour supplement, while I’d be afraid to glance at the horoscopes in case Gemini was missing, or it would say that I should make the most of the short bit of time I had left.

If ever I got a spot I thought it was a harbinger of a skin disease that would peel back all the covering on me and expose veins and muscles. A piece of grit in my eye and I was wondering about Moshe Dayan and whether he left the patch on or took it off at night.

But all the time I hid this hypochondria from the world, because I thought grown-ups were meant to be brave and uncaring about themselves and their illnesses. The impassive faces around me in terrifying places like an outpatient ward, this must be the norm.

But now I’ve changed. Now I admit I’m terrified, and it’s much, much better. You have to persuade people that you’re not joking, because some of these hard-boiled medics actually think it’s unlikely that you could be weeping with nerves inwardly. They think it’s a fairly pleasant thing to come up against the medical profession and that we should be pleased rather than fearful.

I began to Come Out as a Bad Patient with the dentist. A gentle softspoken Englishman who had never as he said himself met my type of person before. I explained to him that I was probably more nervous of dentists than anything in the world except flying, and could he show me his hands to ensure that he had no hidden weapons on them. He did this and I relaxed a fraction.

We had a depressing discussion about my teeth and I managed to jump out from under his arms and nearly knocked both of us on the floor.

‘Why did you do that?’ he said sadly, putting on his glasses again.

‘I thought you were going to pounce,’ I said. ‘I’m very nervous.’

He said he’d have to look at them.

‘Could you look at them without instruments?’ I asked.

He couldn’t. He needed a mirror and a pickaxe. He promised me that he couldn’t take out teeth suddenly with a mirror and a pickaxe so I’d be safe.

Since then life with this dentist has been easy. He explains everything, he shows me his hands and lets me examine the pockets in his white coat. He doesn’t say ‘Aha’ any more because it terrifies me. He explains why it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a card with me at all times saying ‘I am a nervous person. In case of an accident, if I am unconscious, please remove all my teeth so that I won’t ever have to worry about fillings and injections again.’ He says that is not the act of a nervous person, it’s the act of an insane person and I mustn’t do it.

Now that he knows I’m nervous and self-dramatising, the whole relationship is on an honest basis. It’s the same with the doctor. I told him that I was possibly the most nervous person he would ever meet in his whole career.

‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘a nice big cheerful person like you, nervous. Ridiculous.’

I argued this with him logically. Indeed I was very nice and very big and cheerful but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be nervous as well. The things weren’t mutually exclusive. Why should he accept that a small, horrible, depressed person was nervous and I wasn’t? It floored him.

‘You don’t look nervous,’ he came back with a bit weakly.

So I was very glad that I had told him. Now I remind him each time I see him that I’m nervous in case he’s forgotten.

‘I know,’ he said the last time, shaking his head. ‘I know you think you’re nervous, I’ve written it in your file. I’m not to use long words. I’m not to say “Aha” and I’m not to assume that you’re brave.’

Life would be a lot more comforting for everyone, doctors and patients alike, if people admitted that they were very frightened when they are. You don’t get a sudden strength from pretending to be brave, you just get treated like a brave person, while if you admit humbly to being appallingly feeble about things the chances are you’ll get someone to be kind and gentle to you when they would have been brisk otherwise.

There’s strength in unity, and if all of us cowards come out openly and honestly they’ll have to take us seriously. They can’t laugh us all out of the waiting rooms and the hospital beds, can they?

T
he man in the phone box in South Anne Street was like a lighting devil. First he had lost his five pence, then he had lost his second five pence, and the box was full of litter and bad smells, and the walls were daubed with things, and, God, could things get any worse he asked rhetorically into the air and at myself. They could. At that precise moment a blast of electioneering nearly lifted us bodily out of the street, and the man’s face turned such a frightening colour I thought he was choking. I tried to remember what you did when people choked and since it didn’t come back to me immediately I was about to contact a competent-looking person but he recovered. It was Stress, he told me, Stress and Fury brought on by living in this country.

The pubs in Anne Street weren’t open, mercifully, or I might be there still with him on the self-deluding pretext that I was actually interviewing him and getting an insight into how Stress-Filled Dubliners lived. As it was we just leaned up against the wall of the deserted post office and calmed each other down.

It was the electioneering that had finished him off. Send Your Best to Europe. Was he the only person who found that funny? If we were sending the Best to Europe, what were we keeping for ourselves? The second best? The worst? Answer him that. I said I didn’t think that was the way they meant it. They meant more that if you were sending people to Europe you should imagine that you were sending great people. It was a measure of how important you thought Europe was. What he thought Europe was could not be printed. In fact it should hardly be said, I told him disapprovingly. Well, he couldn’t help that. That’s what he thought about it. Send our best. He’d like to send the lot, actually, and not only to Europe, further. What did I as a normal, ordinary woman think about Ireland these days? Wasn’t I ashamed of my life to be living in such a madhouse? I said that I was sort of only half here, and half there and all round the place. He said he knew how I felt. I explained that I meant that I lived in England. His eyes went piggy with envy.

‘You live in England?’ he said like you might say to someone, ‘You mean you eat as much as you like and you don’t get fat?’

I explained that I did mainly.

‘That would be lovely,’ he said, calming down like the way a child forgets a tantrum when the thought of something pleasant is put into his mind.

‘But it’s lovely here,’ I said with the fierce possessive love I feel for Dublin which I would never have admitted until a few years ago.

‘In England,’ he said, as one who spoke in a dream, ‘you can post a letter. You can go out to a post office and buy a stamp, a postal order, send a telegram. You can ring up and get information, and directory enquiries. You can get petrol. They empty rubbish bins. And they’re having no European elections to dement themselves further.’

Oh, but they are, I told him. They’re definitely having European elections. In fact, I am meant to be there now writing about them.’

Nothing could have displeased him more. People who wrote about the European elections were almost worse than anyone else in the whole sorry business. It was bad enough having to join up with a lot of foreigners in a meaningless sort of group to make the farmers richer than they already were and butter dearer than it already was. It was bad enough having to change our money system from what it used to be and to what everyone knew it was to desperate, complicated things which varied every day, and nobody could change for you in any bank in the world because nobody knew what it was any more. It was bad enough to live in a country which slowly collapses, and that was becoming a living joke, but people who wrote about these things only encouraged the decline.

I got fed up with him. I had been sorry for him about the phone box. I had lost two shillings in it myself and there was a rotten smell in it, but I felt he was taking things too far to deny any enthusiasm for Europe. ‘What would cheer you up?’ I said to him in a schoolmistress sort of way.

Before he could tell me, a girl with a nice, friendly face approached us with election literature for the Labour Party. The man studied it, his colour beginning to mount again. ‘I hate people with double-barrel names,’ he said about Jane Dillon-Byrne.

‘At least they’re good names,’ I said. ‘It’s not Fossington-Fossington or Chomondly-Chomondly.’

‘The trouble about people like you is that you see good in everything,’ he said, and he tore the leaflet into a thousand pieces and increased the litter in the city.

H
ello, don’t I know you from somewhere?’

It’s always happening to Audrey Hepburn, but this guy was no Cary Grant either, so I decided that it happens to us ordinary people too.

‘I don’t know, do you?’

‘Well I think I do, you look sort of familiar, like someone I would know, if you know what I mean.’

I looked windswept and wet, but then perhaps he was used to wet climates.

‘I’m not desperately sure, I know a lot of people,’ I said. Why did I say that? It sounds like boasting, it sounds idiotic. I rush on to say something that will take the harm out of it. ‘I mean I’m from Dublin,’ I gushed, ‘and everyone in Dublin knows a lot of people.’

‘I’ve never been to Dublin,’ he said.

‘You should, you should,’ I said. Bord Fáilte would have been proud of me and taken me to their Baggot Street bosom instead of shying away from me every time I meet them individually or collectively.