No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! (8 page)

I told her she'd promised to take him to the doctor.

‘Bet she doesn't.' she said. ‘Did you hear the joke about the perks of having Alzheimer's? I can only remember one of them.'

I laughed.

‘That wasn't the joke,' she said crossly. ‘No – one of the things that's good about having Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs. That's funny don't you think?'

I thought it was, rather.

I've just been out in the garden with Pouncer. It was surprisingly warm, and I was thrilled to see that at the end of the garden there is the odd primrose, and a whole bunch of early daffodils. God knows when I planted them. Probably that funny collection that Penny gave me last year that she'd got free with some gardening order. What with a few crocuses, the whole thing down the end looked like a spring glade.

And I suddenly thought of an idea. I'd do a painting of part of my garden every month, for a year. The David Hockney of Shepherd's Bush.

Pouncer was looking contemplative, too, but he was probably thinking about birds. Then I heard someone yelling. Looking round rather irritatedly, I saw my Polish neighbour, Mrs Vladek, who'd come out into her garden and was shouting over the wall. She's a widow who must be at least ninety, and she always has to walk very carefully in her garden as there's not much room on her path because she still collects and hoards driftwood there, an old wartime habit.

‘I want you to know, I am selling house.'

‘What!' I said. For some reason I thought she'd be living there forever. ‘But why?' For a brief moment I imagined that she'd somehow eavesdropped on my ghastly dream and had decided she couldn't carry on living next to such a foul and devious neighbour.

‘I go to live with my sister in Poland,' she said. ‘And I have offer on house. From very nice people. He is American. Lawyer, very big.' I immediately imagined a grossly fat legal eagle, having to be winched up to his room through the window, along with the grand piano. ‘They have plan for house. I leave next month. I will be sad.'

Thinking about this,
I
felt rather sad as well. And
particularly
sad that I'd never made proper friends with this old lady. She'd clearly had a bad war, since she still spent her days scavenging for bits of wood for emergency heating. Once, during the biggest storm in recent history, a storm that felled a quarter of London's trees, I looked out of my bedroom window at three in the morning and saw her wrestling with a piece of tarpaulin on her roof, a tiny, game, wizened creature struggling to keep her balance in the gale, clutching on to the chimney pot while desperately trying to fix the billowing fabric in place.

With great difficulty I had managed to get the window open, waved liked a maniac, yelled at the top of my voice, and finally caught her attention.

‘Get inside!' I shouted. ‘It's dangerous!'

But she couldn't hear a word I said and, blow me, when I next looked out, she was still there with a hammer, banging nails into the tarpaulin as the wind howled around her, leaves and branches and birds tumbling past her. I shut the window, crept back into bed, pulled the duvet over my head and prayed.

I sometimes wonder if our generation isn't rather weedy.
True, we survived the sixties, which was a dreadful stress as it was a time of such social change. But these old birds who lived through the war! What they must have suffered! Presumably all the men were away fighting, so no doubt everything at home was left to the women – sweeping away the rubble from the streets after bombing raids, boiling up weeds for soup and, without a crumb of coal for heating, just pulling on another jersey made out of the front-room carpet and getting on with it.

We're a pampered generation.

But to be honest, after the news she'd just given me, I felt rather like my neighbour herself, struggling on the roof in the middle of the night. I felt I was trying to hammer down some kind of psychic tarpaulin on my feelings. It's the strain of the family going away, I know. I suppose change is much easier to bear when you're young. But now, I only have to find my local butcher has gone away for a holiday and his daughter is serving behind the counter for two weeks instead, and I start to feel as if my whole world is falling apart. It's absolutely pathetic. I try not to show it, of course.

Have had the most horrifying morning of my life. I'd had a bath, done my hair, put on my make-up, and gone out to make some preliminary sketches at the end of the garden. I came back in – it had turned freezing again – and had sat down and written hundreds of words of my diary when I
hit a key on the keyboard, quite innocently, and suddenly the whole screen went blank. It wouldn't start, or anything. It was just a silent square of black nothingness. I thought I'd lost everything I'd ever put on this wretched computer. Not only had I lost my entire diary, but I'd even lost my New Year Resolution list that said I'd got to write a diary!

Rang James and he said it was most peculiar and he'd come and take a look. But just as I was about to take to my bed in despair, he rang again.

‘Just one thing,' he said, ‘I suppose you haven't turned the screen off, have you?'

‘I didn't know you
could
turn the screen off,' I said.

‘Try this,' he said. And when I did what he said, the whole thing sprang back to life. I'm
sure
I hadn't touched the button he was talking about, but he said I must have. Crikey. I was about to start on a great rant about computers, but I suppose in the pre-computer age there were other hazards – and far worse. Carlyle must have felt pretty choked when his maid used the entire manuscript of the first volume of his great
oeuvre, The French Revolution
, for kindling. He couldn't just press a button and retrieve it. Or get in a computer whizz who would, after hours of humming and despairing at the state of his files, eventually magic the manuscript back to life. He just had to start again from scratch.

That's not a book I'll ever get around to, actually. But I've got a huge pile by my bed. Just discovered a brilliant author called Patrick Hamilton who lived in the forties and wrote like a dream. Penny's always trying to get me to read modern
books, but there's so much great old stuff I haven't read. And anyway, there's so much I want to read again before I get on to the new stuff: Chekhov. Turgenev. Wouldn't mind rereading all the old Jane Austens actually.

It's so funny, being retired. Sometimes life stretches out before you like an empty desert and you wonder how you're ever going to fill your days, and then at other times you feel you've got so many things to do you can hardly cope. Just as I was imagining my life was pretty much over – no family, no neighbours and Michelle will soon be off to get married at last – the phone rang and it was Penny in a frightful state. ‘Have you seen the local paper?' she asked, referring to a free-sheet that's bunged through our doors every so often.

‘No,' I said.

‘Well, they're planning to build a huge hotel on the little park at the end of our road!'

‘The one we were admiring just the other day?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘And you know, it's not really a park. It's actually a common. I've looked it up. It was called Rosedale Park in Victorian times, but in the seventeenth century it was part of Wormly Common. They're going to build a hotel! It would mean masses more cars. Think of the parking problems! It would be hideous. There's a picture of it on the council website. It looks like an arms factory! And it would
mean cutting down that huge plane tree – and the false acacia.'

‘But that's the only bit of green space in the area,' I said. ‘They can't do that!'

Admittedly, although I'd said it was Poussin-like the other day, that was after a very good supper at the Japanese restaurant, and a whole carafe of sake. Although it could be charming, through half-closed eyes on a foggy day, in reality it was a small triangle of green scrub used by local drug-dealers as an open-air social club and fighting-dogs' lavatory.

‘Well that's their scheme,' she said. ‘We've got to object.'

We made a plan to galvanise the residents for a meeting, and for Penny and me to meet there later this afternoon.

Just come back from viewing the piece of green or the ‘common', as we have now decided to call it. It makes it sound as if it belongs to the entire community. I have to say it was terrifying. There were gangs of yobs with slavering dogs, most of them wearing nothing but vests and shorts and covered with tattoos (the yobs, that is). It is absolutely freezing still, despite the time of year, and they don't seem to need anything to keep them warm. Probably it's their rage that heats them up. Anyway, they all looked furious when, picking our way through the dog turds, we came on the scene. Penny had brought a camera, which didn't help
matters, and while she was photographing the false acacia and the plane tree, one of the more aggressive-looking blokes came up to her.

‘Wot you tekkin picture of? Wot you fink ya doin'?' he said, threateningly. Luckily Penny was at her most bubbly, and she stuck out her hand to introduce herself and said, ‘Penny Anderson. So pleased to meet you! Did you know the council's thinking of building a hotel here? Don't you think it's ghastly? And they're going to cut down these two beautiful trees!'

Before we knew where we were, there were about five of these guys around us all nodding and muttering. ‘Fuckin' disgustin'.' ‘Somefink oughta be dunnabaht it.'

‘I hope you'll come along to our Residents' Meeting soon,' she said. ‘It's at my friend's house – Marie Sharp.'

My mind reeled as I had a vision of these hardened criminals bursting into what I like to think of as my beautiful home and eyeing my gorgeous pictures and all the things I've collected over the years. I could just imagine them storming in, tearing my Pitchforths from the walls, and filling burlap sacks with cherished antiques, not to mention the special duck Gene made for me at playschool and the tape-recording of Jack speaking, when he was two, but when I confided my fears to Penny later, over a cup of tea at home, she said I was being stupid.

She looked around my immaculate sitting room with her lip curling. ‘They don't want old Victorian mirrors, or embroidered cushions, or sculptured heads or old gas fittings sticking
out the walls,' she said. ‘Nor do they want drawings by minor English artists like Vivien Pitchfork, or whatever his name is,' she said, referring to the two delightful little landscapes I'm planning to sell to fund the facelift. ‘They want tellies and iPads and things, and you don't have any of those.'

‘I've got a Patrick Caulfield,' I said, defensively. I hated the idea that there was absolutely nothing worth stealing in my house. ‘We were at art school together and he gave it to one of my fellow students and she didn't like it so she gave it to me.' Even though I must have been staring at it every day as I came down the stairs, I'd only just remembered who it was by, and of course he's now worth a fortune. With the brooch, the Pitchforths and the Caulfield I could afford a facelift, a breast reduction, a tummy tuck and a pair of brand-new feet – I wish!

‘Who's he?' said Penny.

‘He sells for quite a lot these days. And it's signed,' I said. ‘And I
have
got a telly,' I added. ‘And a video recorder!'

‘Call that a telly?' she said, pointing to my small, wonky, scratched grey box, stuck in the corner. ‘You couldn't give it away! And no one has videos any more!'

I'm really worried about these beetles. There seem to be rather a lot, suddenly. And however many times I catch them, by putting a glass over them, sliding a postcard underneath and placing them in the garden, they keep coming back.
I've stopped putting saucers of milk out for them, but still they come. Wish I'd kept that picture of them from the paper so I could see if they really are an endangered species or not.

When James rang to discuss doing some sketches of me, he was very sceptical.

‘Darling, you can't have beetles in your kitchen!' he said. ‘It's disgusting, even if they are endangered. They might eat your food and lay eggs in your pasta, and then one day when you're pouring out the rice or something you'll find it's not white grains, but loads of little larvae …'

I thought a bit. ‘I wonder if the council could do something,' I said, thoughtfully.

‘No, don't be silly! The council has a waiting list a mile long and they only put down the cheap repellents. Get it done properly,' said James.

So I looked on the computer to find my nearest pest control and told them about my beetles.

‘But I think they're an endangered species,' I said. ‘They're black, by the way, not brown.'

There was a silence at the other end.

‘It is of course possible that they
are
an endangered species, madam,' said a man in a cautious voice, ‘but unlikely if they're in your kitchen and only appear at night. It sounds to me as if they might be oriental—' here I gasped and interrupted, ‘Oriental beetles! How rare can you get?'

‘No, madam, not oriental
beetles
. Oriental
cockroaches
. The black ones. I'll send a man round tomorrow.'

Oh Lord! I felt as if my world were falling apart. My house had suddenly turned into a David Attenborough documentary. I imagined cockroaches everywhere, in my sitting room, crawling round the loo seat, in my bed … down my bra … I called on my Polish neighbour and asked if she had them, and she reluctantly said that yes, she had thought they were earwigs at first, but now she had discovered they were cockroaches.

‘But are yours big and black and shiny?' I asked.