No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! (19 page)

I can tell you, I'd never make a burglar. It's only because Shepherd's Bush is full of such shrieks and yells at night that no one came rushing out to discover what was going on.

Somehow I managed to pick up all the incriminating pieces of the smashed chair, throw them over my wall, scramble up myself, make it back inside, and found myself, slightly drunk and sweating with horror, wondering what on earth to do with the chimes. Eventually, convinced that I'd be found out if I kept them in the house or put them in my bin, I sellotaped the chimes together to prevent them making any noise, wrapped them in newspaper, crept out
of the house and over the road, and put them in the wheelie bin of Father Emmanuel's garage-cum-church.

I went to bed shaking with guilt, imagining a knock on the door and the police standing there with handcuffs. I could visualise the headline in the
Rant
, with a dreadful blurred CCTV picture of me in my nightdress, furtively dropping the wind-chimes into a bin. I could just imagine the story: ‘SHAME OF PENSIONER CHIME-STEALER!
65-year-old Marie Sharp, described by her neighbours as a pillar of the community, leads a Jekyll-and-Hyde life. By day, a peace-loving retired art teacher, by night she turns, hell-bent on devastating her local area by stealing garden features. ‘She has just had a facelift,' revealed a neighbour who did not wish to be named. ‘Perhaps this drove her to this crazy behaviour.' Police are also questioning her about a garden gnome missing from a local hospice …'

Now I'm up and it's two in the morning (the Worrying Hour) and I SO wish I hadn't done it. I'm sure they'll know it was me. But of course it's too late. I can't go over the road, collect the chimes from the wheelie bin, unsellotape them, hop over the wall again and put them back. Besides, my trusty chair is now well and truly out of action.

Isn't it awful when you do wrong like that and there's no putting it right? The guilt! At this moment, feeling as I do, I'd be quite happy to die in my sleep.

While I was writing, I heard the distant sound of soul music. Surely not! No one could be playing music at this time of the morning! This was beyond a joke. I tried to block it out, but couldn't. I took a pill, but that didn't work, and at 3 a.m. I crept downstairs to go out into the garden to see who was making such a frightful racket at this hour.

The sound got louder and louder as I neared the kitchen – and then I realised that I'd left the CD player on and it was just playing and replaying Aretha Franklin. I burst out laughing, turned it off and stumbled back to bed.

Nothing from the neighbours about the chimes, but as I was going out of my front door, Sharmie came out of hers and it was too late to duck down. I gave her a sickly smile, going bright red as I did so. She returned my smile with a twinkling, knowing look. I've been rumbled, I thought. She was only smiling because she'd tipped off the police and knew they were due any minute. Her lawyer husband was at this very minute constructing a watertight case against me. I could see the pitying way she looked at me as she contemplated my last days of freedom. For a moment perhaps she was regretting what she had done … But no.

‘Some party you had last night, huh?' she boomed, in a ‘gee whizz' sort of voice.

‘Oh, I'm so sorry,' I burbled. ‘It was the lodger. I've ticked her off. I do hope it didn't disturb you!'

‘Hell no, we all sleep like logs,' she said. ‘You're looking great after your op! I must get the name of your medic. By the way, what's all this about the trees at the top of the road? They're not going to build a hotel, are they?'

And thankfully I was able to turn the conversation round to a diatribe about how frightful the council was and dragoon her and Brad onto the Residents' Association Committee. Saved by the bell. Or, in this case, bells.

New vacuum cleaner arrived today, in one of those vast cardboard boxes big enough to fit a body in. At last. I tore it open – it was like wrestling with one of those endangered rhinos – and was infuriated to find one of the parts was missing. The engine bit was there, where all the fluff and dust is collected, the brushy bit at the end which picks up the dirt, and different attachments and the flexible hose, but where there should have been two straight tubes of plastic to slot into each other to give the length, there was only one.

After going mad looking up the number of the manufacturer on the internet, and waiting for hours to get on to the right person, I finally got through to someone called Nairit who asked how he could help.

‘I'll tell you how!' I shouted furiously, after having crawled on the floor to get the new cleaner's model number,
and rifled through the torn packaging to find my order number which had been concealed in a plastic envelope on the box, and spelled my name a hundred times and given him my postcode. ‘I've waited weeks for your wretched machine to arrive, and now it's come without one of its parts!'

He asked me patiently which bit was missing and I explained. ‘It's utterly hopeless! In the old days, you'd go into a shop and a nice man would give you what you wanted and explain it all to you …' I exploded. I was into full
Rant
mode now. ‘And now it's all online there's no personal service, I don't even know what you look like, you might as well be speaking from Mars … You pay your money, you expect excellent service from a firm like yours, you wait in for days to take delivery of the thing you ordered and when it arrives it's missing a crucial bit! I'm furious!'

There was a pause.

‘Have you looked at the instructions, madam?' asked Nairit calmly.

‘That's another thing!' I shouted. ‘There are no instructions! There are just meaningless pictures with crosses and ticks on them which are completely baffling to any normal person!'

‘You have one of the plastic tubes?' said Nairit.

‘I have. But what's the use of one without two? If I were nine inches high, the size of a goblin, yours would be the ideal vacuum cleaner for me, but curiously I am a normalsized
human being and I don't wish to have to crouch down to clean my house …'

‘I think you'll find,' said Nairit, politely, ‘that there is a little button on the outside of the plastic tube you already have. If you press it, you will find that an inner tube is released which extends the tube to the correct length.'

Well, of course, I was dumbfounded. I spluttered, and faffed around, tried to get out of it by grumbling that the instructions weren't clear, and ended up feeling like
such
a loony.

Poor old Nairit.

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.

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.

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.

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?'