No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (21 page)

I sat down on their extremely uncomfortable sofa—well, it’s uncomfortable for me because it’s very low on the ground; once you’re in it, you need a hoist to get you out of it accompanied by a Red Indian chorus of “Ugh!”s, as I think I’ve said before—and very quietly got all the things that I’d brought out of my bag. A few feet away, Gene was fast asleep in his little Moses basket, lined with the black-and-white material that Chrissie had found at a car boot sale. Then I tiptoed over to have a look at him. He was completely peaceful, one little hand lying above him and the other by his side. I went back to the sofa and opened my book.

No sooner had I done so, than Gene made a kind of grunt. After the grunt he made another grunt, and within seconds, he’d woken himself up and started to cry. I tried everything. I picked him up and took him into the bathroom, where it was pitch dark, and sang to him. I offered him more milk—which I had to make with one hand, far more difficult than I imagined. But the minute I offered it to him, he turned his little mouth away from the teat, roaring with tearful rage.

The only way I could calm him down was to walk him round the flat talking nonstop and pointing things out to him.

“Now, let’s look at these nice banisters,” I said. “They’re painted white, isn’t that nice…and look—on the bit at the end there’s a big wooden ball…
you’ll
be playing with big footballs when you’re a big boy…and now we’re going down the stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six, and stepping on the nice red carpet…oh, here’s a mirror, what can we see in that…I can see Gene in there! And Grannie! Gene is in his nice red sleeping suit, and Grannie’s looking a bit distraught and knackered, isn’t she, it’s because she’s
very
worried that you won’t go back to sleep before Mummy and Daddy get back, and now we’re going
up
the stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six, past the nice white banisters…and now what else can we see…”

I must have continued like this for at least an hour and a half. My mouth became dry with talking, I kept looking at my watch. For God’s sake, when would they return? We looked out of the window and watched all the cars to-ing and fro-ing in the blackness, with the red lights at the back and the white lights at the front, and we fantasized about where they might be going and what they were up to. Occasionally people would pass by.

“Look, Gene,” I would say in my gentle voice. “There’s a man in a hood. He’s probably a mugger. He’s a naughty man, isn’t he? And look, there’s a nice drug dealer the other side of the road. He’s making lots and lots of money selling people heroin. And look, here’s a man who looks very sad. His wife has probably run off with the drug dealer…”

Finally Gene accepted a bottle of milk and I took him into the kitchen where it was very dark, and sang “Rock-a-Bye Baby” to him, swinging him gently in my arms, while stroking his head at the same time. His eyelids started to droop and I repeated the word: “Slee…eeep, slee…eeep…” over and over again, like some crazy hypnotist, and finally he dropped off. Tiptoeing along the corridor, remembering the creaky floorboard, I managed to lower him into his basket and sat down, breathing a huge sigh of relief. After a few minutes I thought it safe enough to put him into the kitchen, while I turned the lights up in the sitting room bright enough to read.

Just as I had got started on my book, the phone rang. It was Chrissie. “Is everything OK there?” she said anxiously.

“Fine!”
I replied jovially. I sounded like some dreadful phony pub landlord from the Home Counties. “Absolutely fine! He woke up for a little bit but he’s back to sleep and there’s nothing to worry about at all.”

“Well, we’re having a really good time, so we thought we’d go and have a quick drink at the pub…is that OK?” she asked.

“Great!” I said. “Everything’s cool! No worries!”

“Do remember, by the way,” she added, “that if you undo the blinds, you must hook up the white strings by the side because if he were to lie on the floor by one and pull it down, he might strangle himself.”

“Oh, don’t worry!” I said breezily. “No strangling round here. Have a lovely time.”

I immediately went round the whole flat checking that all the white strings were tied up beyond reach. I know. It was highly unlikely that Gene would strangle himself when he was asleep, but you couldn’t be too careful.

I started on my book again, and had just found my place, when there was a crackle from the baby monitor and the unnerving sounds of a cockney male voice invaded the room.

“Just got in, two minutes to go. Roger!” it said. “T for Tango, V for Victor and F for ’ow’s yer father. Coming up now!”

I leaped up, terrified. For a split second I thought burglars had scaled the wall outside the kitchen, had snuck in through the window and were communicating with each other on walkie-talkies before making off with Gene. Unless, of course, Gene, after all the conversation he’d heard in the first few months of his life, had suddenly learned to talk. I dashed to the kitchen in panic, but there was no one there. In my haste, I’d trodden on the squeaky floorboard. Gene immediately woke up, howling.

I had to go through the entire routine again. He seemed to get heavier and heavier and as he became more and more wide awake, I got more and more exhausted. Finally, just as he appeared to be flagging a bit, I put him into his Moses basket (On his side? On his back? Who cared anymore?) and started swinging him. As I swung, he quietened down. I swung him high, I swung him low. But every time I stopped swinging he started crying. Eventually I stood in the middle of the room, swinging as hard as I could. I swung him so high that I contemplated just whirling the entire basket around above my head, keeping him in place by centrifugal force, but as I got a glimpse of his head as it sped past me on each swing, I saw, eventually, that he was truly asleep. I risked easing up on the swinging. I got slower and slower. Eventually, I stopped, and very gently placed the basket on the floor. And as I did so I heard the key in the lock. Jack and Chrissie were back.

“How did it go?” they asked as they reeled in, reeking of wine and garlic.

“Fine!”
I said. “Absolutely fine!”

“That’s great, Mum,” said Jack. “We’ve had such a good time! Now we know we can do it, we must do it more often.”

“Anytime,” I said, as I gathered up my unknitted knitting, my unread book and my unfilled address book. “Anytime. It’s a real pleasure.”

And, of course, in a funny way, it was.

November 12th

Michelle knocked on my door very confused. She’d gone into the local Lebanese supermarket to ask for some pine nuts, and they’d insisted on taking her to a shelf on which were displayed a selection of boxes of aspirin, Nurofen and ibuprofen. “I want pine nuts,” she had said. “Pine…pine…pine…”

“Yes, these for pine,” they had replied, gesturing to the aspirins. “Tike why pine!”

November 13th

Hughie and James drove me to the head-wetting ceremony, as Jack and Chrissie call it, at a local pub. I’d tried to persuade Jack and Chrissie to put Gene into the long embroidered white lacy dress that Jack wore when he was christened, but they said he wouldn’t fit into it (and I’m sure they’re right—he’s quite a tubby little person) and he wore, instead, a pair of very smart dungarees. Very sweetly they’d put him in the green hat with the purple sprouting on top that I’d finally finished knitting for him.

As a christening present, James had bought Gene a hand-painted mug with “Gene” written on it. Inside was a special crystal, apparently connected with Gene’s birthday. James insisted that this must be kept by his bed to give him good luck. I just hoped he hadn’t got it from Gavin’s shop in Glastonbury.

It was an oddly warm November day, and the pub was swarming with people I didn’t know. I know Hughie hates pubs, so he was very noble in coming along, but he stood outside most of the time, smoking and talking to Penny, who is zombied out on anti-depressants. I felt rather gooseberrylike, but I only had to say that I was Jack’s mum and Gene’s grannie, and the kindness of everyone was amazing.

It was odd, because surely current thinking is that old people are despised and hated because they’re ancient and boring, but that day I didn’t experience that at all—and have never experienced it, anyway. What I did experience was the complete opposite—not a reverence, exactly, but a special kind of protective instinct emanating from all those grunge-dressed people, a kindness and caring for someone not of their generation. Bliss!

We did come across the odd language problem, however. The words “Andy Pandy” met with complete bafflement as did, oddly, the name Sophie Tucker and, less surprisingly perhaps, Oliver Messel.

I felt rather like my father must have felt when, talking to someone half his age, he referred to someone like, say, Joe Venuti, a jazz violinist apparently well known in his day, but hardly remembered thirty years later. I do
try
not to use the phrase “Of course you’re too young to remember…” too often, but it does come up now and again.

There were a few songs, and then a friend of Jack’s played “Danny Boy” on the musical saw. Everything built into a climax, and finally we all raised our glasses to Gene, held high by a beaming Chrissie. James, on my left, I noticed, had to lift up his spectacles to wipe away a tear, and I felt pretty weepy, too. Then James went outside to check on Hughie, and came back to signal to me that Hughie was feeling a bit tired. As I felt I’d had enough, too, I cadged a lift from them.

In the car, Hughie turned back to me and said: “I had the most extraordinary experience. I met some woman—a parent of one of Jack’s friends—who used to know me when I was twenty. She didn’t recognize me, of course, but you know what she said? She said: ‘I’d recognize that voice anywhere.’ I go to all these lengths to change to become a better person, to mature, to go through hell to twist myself into a new and more noble shape, and all I get, forty years on, is: ‘I’d recognize that voice anywhere.’ Depressing, really.”

He then went into a coughing fit and opened the window. Or rather, asked James to open the window.

“God, I wish we had wind-up windows again,” he said crossly. “What is the
point
of the electric things? Only good thing about them is that they kill, apparently, the odd toddler.”

Now I
know
his synapses are shriveling.

November 14th

Today’s the day of Hughie’s MRI. Don’t like to ring because it looks so intrusive. After all, if anything shows up, they’ll tell me. And anyway, they probably have to wait a while before they get the results. But can’t stop thinking about Hughie, and hoping that everything’s going to be all right. Well, as all right as it can possibly be in the circumstances.

Later

Hello, reads today’s bizarre e-mail,

December 1st

First Christmas card received. This year, Penny and I have decided not to send out any cards at all. Last Christmas I sent cards only to people who sent them to me, keeping a pile of cards on the hall table, along with a pen, a book of stamps and an old address book. The moment one came in, I’d send one back. Rather cold-blooded.

Of course, Penny and I agreed that we would have to send cards to absolutely desperate people who are frightfully ill and never get out of the house. Or people who live abroad but whom we still like. Or, as I suggested, those people we can’t really bear and try to not see but don’t want them to know quite how much we can’t stand them because they’re not totally horrible.

“But if you include that group,” said Penny, “we might as well go back to sending them to everyone.”

Later

Met James for mint tea in dodgy Lebanese hubble-bubble café round the corner. Surrounded by dark men puffing away at strawberry-flavored coals, as far as I could make out. He was extremely upset.

“You know Hughie went for the MRI a fortnight ago, but we
still
haven’t had the results,” he said. “They seem to have lost the notes. I went with him, and it was horrible. Do you think he’s in denial about all this? He keeps making jokes about it. I can’t bear it.”