No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! (20 page)

At this point I decided to kill myself with shame, Japanese-style. Her granny's lovely present! If only I'd known I wouldn't have
minded
the noise! I felt myself going redder and redder and was just about to confess when Alice piped up. ‘But grandma's gonna send me some more, and we're gonna keep them in my bedroom now so those horrid mosquey people can't get them!'

‘Good idea!' I said, in a strangled voice.

To make matters worse, they actually insisted on seeing the four pictures I'd done so far of the Seasons of the Doomed Trees, and absolutely fell about with praise and admiration. Brad even asked tentatively if, when I'd finished, he might
be able to buy the lot. ‘To remind us of our great time in London,' he added.

When they went I actually felt so guilty that if Father Emmanuel had pointed me to the entrance to hell, I would gladly have walked straight in.

Just had another meeting of the Residents' Association and Sharmie and Brad from next door came as well. Brad turns out to be a genius. He only has to scan the council's website, and he's picked up everything about local planning law. He's drafted our letter brilliantly, citing sub-section 5 from the council's own planning recommendations, and pointing out that it is against their own policy according to item 19a in their Blueprint for the Borough … or something. I don't understand a word of it, but Penny says it's excellent, so I don't think we're going to have a problem.

I got a surprising letter this morning from the developer behind the hotel proposal asking if he could meet us, and when I told everyone he'd been in touch there was a general roar of delight, like Romans about to enjoy an excellent show of Christians being thrown to the lions.

‘Yes! Let's 'ave 'im!' shouted Sheila the Dealer, through a haze of smoke. ‘I'd like to give 'im a piece of my mind!'

Father Emmanuel sat quietly, absorbed, no doubt, in some spiritual thought.

We've got an enormous petition together, what with everyone going out and getting signatures and even Father Emmanuel came up with thirty signatures from his hell-bound congregation. Sheila the Dealer has got about a hundred – I don't know how she managed it but no doubt a lot of people ‘owe her'. I can imagine her telling her hollow-eyed clients, queuing at her door and begging for further supplies of crack, ‘Not until you've signed this petition, mate!' When you add them all up there are 560 signatures, so I don't think the council can possibly overlook our objections.

Penny's going to photocopy the petition and then we're taking it round to the council on Thursday.

Woke to find not only that the boiler had broken so there was no hot water, but also the news, in the
Rant
, that a ‘TEEN HARLOT!
Loughborough sex-worker has ten children by eight different fathers, each one a dole scrounger …'
Thanks a lot. I really don't wish to know this. I think I might have to stop getting the
Rant
. How often have I said this? It has the extraordinary effect of geeing you up while lowering you, all at the same time.

The plumber came over this afternoon to stare at my boiler. We went through the usual ‘Who installed this? Why are your settings like this? Surely you don't want it on all day? Why isn't the pilot light lit? What's your water pressure
like?' and all kinds of questions that, like the computer questions, make me feel sick with fear, but he managed to get it working again, saying he thought the rads needed bleeding and there might be a leak in one of the valve sockets which would cause the boiler to lose pressure. He might as well have been speaking Japanese. He went round the house looking for leaks, and managed to fix one he discovered in Michelle's room, under piles of dirty underwear. It had been soaking into the carpet.

‘That's your problem,' he said, in a monotone voice.

I wish someone could bleed
my
rads, I thought. Or fix
my
leaks. From the moment I wake up, I feel as if I'm losing pressure all day.

This morning the money came from the sale of the three pictures and the brooch at auction. Amazingly it's £9,000 altogether, so not only can I pay Mr P.'s fees, but I also have a bit over and with it I shall fly over to the States in style.

I was so enthused by the prospect that I started to look at flight times online. I have to say the idea of visiting the family in New York put a real spring in my step.

When I skyped Jack late this evening he was thrilled.

‘Mum, that's great!' he said. He actually called out to Chrissie and Gene who were in another room, ‘Mum's coming over!'

I was rather surprised to hear him being
quite
so enthusiastic. Could it be that he was actually missing me? Or, more likely, missing London?

‘When?' he asked. ‘Do come soon. Come as soon as you can – next month. Or early September. We've got a bit of time off then. It would be great to see you.'

Gene came running into the room in his aeroplane pyjamas and scrambled onto Jack's knee to join in the conversation.

‘Granny, Granny!' he said. ‘Are you coming over? I can show you my new school! And we're going camping next week! And it's so cool here …! We'll take you up the Empire State and we can go on a boat … Dad, we can go on a boat, can't we, you promised …? Just a minute …' And here he vanished from the screen and I was facing an empty chair for ages. All I could hear was him chattering away in a faraway room. After about ten minutes, when I was just about to give up, Jack burst into view. ‘Mum! You're still here! Sorry, I didn't realise Gene had left the Skype on.'

Of course all this sudden enthusiasm for New York from Gene changed my mood completely, as I realised he'd got completely hooked on the place, but I kept smiling. However, once we'd made arrangements for when I'd go, I suddenly felt like dancing. I put on an old Dr John record in the kitchen and cavorted about like a maniac.

I was having another dance in the morning when Penny rang the bell. I answered it gasping and sweating.

‘What on earth have you been doing?'

‘Dancing!' I said. ‘I'm going to New York! Isn't it great?'

‘When?'

‘I hope maybe September.'

‘Oh, but you'll miss my birthday!' she said, not joining in the spirit of the thing at all.

‘But you hate your birthday,' I said, puzzled.

‘Oh, I've had so many I've given up hating them these days.'

We sorted out the petition into piles on the kitchen table and put everything into respectable folders to look nice and professional.

On the way to the town hall the bus was rather crowded and a youngish woman with headphones offered Penny her seat, which Penny refused.

‘It's not as if I'm decrepit!' she muttered angrily, as she clung on to the rail in the bus. ‘How dare she offer me a seat!'

But when we got off I laid into her. ‘You're so badmannered!' I said. ‘If someone offers you a seat you should jolly well take it even if it does make you feel old. You've got to encourage young people to be polite and the more you turn down their offers of help the more you're discouraging
them. I wish she'd offered
me
a seat!
I'd
have taken it like a shot!'

‘Well she wouldn't have offered you a seat, would she?' said Penny, suddenly rather vicious. ‘Because you look so
young
now, don't you!'

We walked on in frosty silence, but our row had blown over by the time we'd handed in the petition.

‘Yes, all right, I
will
let people get up for me in future,' Penny muttered as we went back.

‘Sorry I was so snappy,' I said.

I was standing in the street wondering what on earth I'd come out to do when one of the men from the mosque, a very nice-looking chap with a bushy beard and wearing a long white dress, came up to me. (How can they wear all that gear in this weather? It's boiling hot. Beyond me.)

‘Can I help you?' he said. ‘You look a bit lost.'

Golly, that made me think. I picture myself as the confident local, sauntering down the street on my way to the shops, but clearly he saw me as a barmy old lady, completely confused, only a step away from the Eventide experience.

Just back from the old school reunion organised by Marion. Crikey, what a bunch! The weird thing is that, despite the fact that we were all fifty years older than when we'd last
met, we felt exactly as we did when we were ten or eleven. Wrinkles, grey hairs, middle-aged spread – they were merely incidental.

About eight of us met in Marion's house … and of course it's an ideal place to have a school reunion because it's like a time warp. She stopped paying any attention to stylish interior design or new wallpaper patterns in the early seventies. She still has old spider plants mouldering on the window ledges, and jars of dried flowers now weighed down with dust. Each room is dominated by a faded – sometimes even split – round white (or once-white) paper lampshade, and she still has Dali and Che Guevara posters hanging on the walls in clip frames between the Indian wall-hangings. Her floor is covered in the most ghastly grass matting, which was tremendously cool and lovely when it was new but is now worn and frayed and held together with gaffer tape in the worn areas. Even the soap in the bathroom looks as if it's been there for the past twenty years, dried-up and ingrained with black lines of dirt.

But she's a sweetie, and even though her cuisine relies almost entirely on beans and lentils, and she's not a natural cook, she provided huge bowls of steaming soup and bread she'd made herself, and rather wodgy pasta salads, and I'd brought lots of wine, so we had a feast on the broken-down ramshackle stripped-pine kitchen table, another relic from the sixties. It's not that Marion and Tim, her husband, are skint, it's just that she's someone who believes that food is just fuel, and friends and feelings and books are all that matter.

Charming, of course, but it does mean that after lunch with Marion you feel a bit leaden round the old tum.

We all gathered round to stare, astonished, at the photographs of each other's grown-up children, children far older than the age we were when we last met. And as we all goggled at the old school photographs Marion had laid out on the table before lunch, grey heads bent earnestly, in that split second I was transported back to our classroom. The only thing that was missing was our battered old school desks.

Smothered as we all were in colognes and deodorants, I swear I could still smell the familiar odour of pencil shavings, stale milk and unwashed hair among us. We giggled as we reminded each other of how terrified we used to be of the old Austrian music teacher, we sighed about how sad it was that Mrs Leach had died (‘But did you know? She
drank!
') and we gossiped about whether Mr Hitchin was actually gay.

There's a peculiar ease about being with people we've known in childhood, even if we haven't seen them since. Because although we've been changed and shaped by life's subsequent experiences, we remain essentially the same. Gilly, who was the netball captain, was dressed now in a designer suit rather than navy gym shorts, but she still bounded energetically into the house with the ease and poise of a natural athlete. And Emily, the class brainbox, might have settled down to make jam in her retirement, but she's still the only one of us who can remember everyone's names,
the names of their parents or nannies, and even the dates of their birthdays.

A successful reunion is like a family get-together. They say that fate chooses our relatives, but we choose our friends. And fate, because we are powerless over who we end up in class with, also chooses our school friends. We were thrown together – the good, the bad and the ugly – and whether we liked it or not we had to get on with each other.

No one I know really liked their old school. Nor did the girls from ours, which was, according to most other people's accounts of their own schools, remarkably civilised. The food was inedible, there were only two loos for 140 young girls, but it was run on liberal Froebel lines, there were no punishments except being sent to the headmistress, and we called the teachers by their Christian names.

Yet, amiable as it was, we all bonded together in a loathing of school as a system and, as a result, we tolerated even the worst of each other's characteristics – something we rarely do as adults.

Crowning moment was down to Marion. She couldn't resist doing her old jug-of-water-passing trick on me, with the result that I was completely soaked. Luckily, knowing the state of Marion's chairs and having sat, frequently, in patches of honey and jam and found my elbows sliding on pools of drying yoghurt on her table, I hadn't put on my smartest clothes, so nothing was spoilt.

There were endless cries of ‘But you look
just
the same!' and then the odd cry, to me, of ‘But
you
, Marie, really
do
look just the same!' so I had to fess up about the facelift, whereupon they all got out their pens and notebooks begging for Mr P.'s details. Most pleasing.

We broke up at about four o'clock, and everyone was terribly affectionate, all clutching each other and hugging and saying ‘I love you' as if we were never going to see each other again.

Which is, of course, probably true.

We had a very quick emergency evening Residents' Association meeting because the hotel developer man was so anxious to meet us. I don't think he yet knows that there's a 560-signature-strong petition waiting at the council.

He arrived – Ross Shatterton by name – with a whole retinue of designers, architects and personal assistants, and was extremely ingratiating and charming to everyone present. We all took an immediate dislike to him. Penny pursed her lips. James and Ned raised their eyebrows at one another. Father Emmanuel stared at him as if he were destined for the burning fiery furnace and Sheila the Dealer wore an expression that would have made the most penurious drug addict pay up. Tim looked cagey, Sharmie and Brad's expressions were totally blank, and only Marion gave her beaming smile. Ross (‘Call me Ross, guys!') looked about twenty-five, with a shaven head and ring in one ear, and it was clear that he thought he was going to coast through
the meeting charming the socks off a bunch of cantankerous complainers and then sail out, job done.