The To-Do List (28 page)

       
‘That’s incredible,’ I said, partly in response to my wife’s question but more in wonderment at her ability to add this level of detail to an anecdote that basically boiled down to: ‘It was in the recycling bin.’

       
‘How do you think it got in there?’

       
‘Dunno, these things happen, don’t they?’

       
‘Do they?’ Claire raised an eyebrow. ‘Freud would say that there are no accidents and that it was probably your sub-conscious mind’s way of saying you’re getting sick of all this To-Do-List stuff.’

       
‘Well, it’s a good job that Freud isn’t here otherwise I’d have to tell him he was quite wrong and the last thing I’d want to do is offend the father of modern psychoanalysis by telling him he was talking cobblers.’

       
‘If you did he’d say that was exactly what he knew you’d say and that your aggression is indicative of a
guilty state of mind
.’

       
Ignoring the fact that Claire had spoken the last part of her sentence in a very bad Austrian accent I countered, ‘Well if he was here I would tell him that what he said was exactly what I thought he would say in response to what I said.’

       
‘Does that even make any sense?’ asked Claire waggling her eyebrows at me in an accusatory fashion.

       
‘It doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned this conversation is over and I bid you, madam, a good day.’

       
As Claire went downstairs I wondered why I had come over all eighteenth century. Suddenly every last bit of enthusiasm drained from me and I collapsed onto the bed.

       
Did Claire have a point?

       
Was it possible that I had subconsciously thrown away the To-Do List because I didn’t want to carry on?

       
And if my subconscious was indeed trying to sabotage my efforts to defeat the List, what did this mean for the future?

       
I cast my mind back to the last time I had put the newspapers in the recycling box. It had been a Sunday evening, and, tellingly, it had been around the time that the List had gone missing, which ruled out my wife’s involvement in its disappearance. I’d been attempting to plan my future week of To Doing before the Sunday Night Pub Club and not feeling too well disposed towards it. In a bid to kick-start Item 423: ‘Find out what all the fuss is about Pink Floyd’ (which I had been avoiding like the plague) I resolved that I was no longer allowed to listen to any non-Pink Floyd-related music until I had worked my way through all fourteen of the band’s albums. This wouldn’t have been so bad had it been a normal weekend but that Saturday in a bid to tick off Item 519: ‘Buy more new music so that you don’t end up one as one of those sad blokes who only listens to stuff that they liked when they were twenty’, I’d spent well over a hundred quid in Polar Bear records in Kings Heath on CDs by The Hold Steady, Kate Nash, Richard Hawley, Amp Fiddler, Mice Parade, Iron and Wine, Calvin Harris, Ursula Rucker, Sammy Davis Jr, Laura Veirs, Mavis Staples and Beirut. Instead of listening to all this new music I was having to wade through Pink Floyd’s
A Saucerful of Secrets
which, while I could see some people might like, I could never imagine, even with the doors of my mind wide open, ever voluntarily putting this CD on again. The list was ruining my evening and as
Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk
came on I’d had enough. Switching off the hi-fi and tidying up a bit, that must have been the moment when I’d scooped up the List with all the weekend newspapers littering the room and took the whole lot out to be recycled.

       
Maybe Claire’s right, I thought, staring at the ceiling, maybe I was trying to sabotage myself.

       
I picked up the List and balanced it in my hand. Did I really want to carry on? And if I did, where to start? I needed a good place to get stuck in. Some ticks that were tough yet satisfying would put me and my subconscious back on the straight and narrow. For a moment or two nothing stood out and then suddenly it hit me. The items on the list with scribbled red question marks against them indicated tasks started but yet to be finished. This is where I would begin. My next course of action would be to visit the ghosts of tasks incomplete and try to exorcise them once and for all.

Starting with the previously abandoned Items 861 and 1277: ‘Clean all downstairs windows so that you don’t have to have the lights on in the middle of the day’, I battled my way through a good dozen ticks like Item 588: ‘Tell Dad that I love him while I still have the chance’, (which from him prompted the anxious question from him, ‘You’re not dying, are you?’); and Items 555-560: ‘Archive all the video of the kids onto DVD before you end up simultaneously losing a tape and their entire childhood in one go.’

       
Achieving these ticks had the effect of making me feel more positive about the List. This was no longer me cherry-picking the easiest ticks, no, this was me, head bowed, taking on the List like a raging rhinoceros. I was invincible. Or at least I was until I went for a mid-week drink with Danby and Henshaw who decided to take me down a peg or two by pointing out the one item on the List that I had attempted and failed at least twice.

       
‘And it’s not going to get any better with you drinking this stuff, is it?’ Henshaw gestured to the pint in my hand. ‘You must know that beer’s full to the brim with calories, mate.’

       
‘It’s not that bad.’

       
‘It’s the diet equivalent of chocolate for blokes. If your Missus claimed she was on a diet and you caught her out snaffling a four-pack of Crunchies wouldn’t you think that she wasn’t taking her diet very seriously?’

       
‘Claire doesn’t need to diet,’ I replied.

       
‘Deviation!’ crowed Danby. ‘We’re talking about you, not your Missus. So don’t try getting off the subject.’

       
‘Fine. Just tell me what the subject is and I’ll stick to it like glue.’

       
‘You don’t really want us to spell it out to you do you, mate?’

       
‘We could spell it out “Give us a Clue” style,’ suggested Danby, and he stood up, with virtually everyone in the bar watching him, and proceeded to mime.

       
‘One word,’ said Henshaw barely able to breathe, he was laughing so hard.

       
Danby tugged his ear.

       
‘Sounds like  . . .’

       
Danby mimed a man putting on a hat.

       
‘Sounds like . . . helmet,’ offered Henshaw, giggling like a girl.

       
Danby shook his head.

       
‘Sounds like cap,’ wheezed Henshaw.

       
Danby shook his head again.

       
‘Okay.’ Henshaw attempted to recover his composure. ‘Last try . . . sounds like hat.’

       
Danby touched his nose with his finger in affirmation.

       
‘Okay,’ said Henshaw. ‘Let’s gather together what we know. It’s a single word that rhymes with “hat” that describes something obvious about our comrade here that he seems to need some help with. Could it possibly be described as a feminist issue?’

       
‘Too right.’ Danby spluttered into his Grolsch.

       
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I sighed. You’ve had your fun. Now let’s move on.’

       
‘But I thought you were tackling the List head on like a . . . what was it?’

       
‘A “raging rhino”,’ I replied sheepishly, rueing my first and undoubtedly last mention of a horned animal as metaphor in the public arena.

       
‘That’s right,’ said Henshaw. ‘A “raging rhino,” and yet so far you’ve tried to diet, bought a bike, joined FatBusters! and had an all-over-body MOT to scare yourself into getting fitter and how much weight have you lost?’

       
‘None.’

       
‘And how much have you gained?’

       
‘I dunno, I don’t weigh myself every five seconds, do I?’

       
Danby laughed. ‘That sounds to me like the response of a bloke who has put on a pound or two since his last weigh-in.’

       
‘Three, okay?’ I could take no more. ‘I’ve put on three pounds since I started dieting.’ I looked at my pint and with more than a touch of remorse pushed it away.

       
Henshaw pushed my pint back towards me. ‘Like the Garfield poster that my sister used to have on her bedroom door says: “The diet starts tomorrow so why bother messing up today?” ’

       
‘Maybe you’re right. But I’ve had my fill of diets. I’m going to do something completely unrelated to the world of diet and exercise.’

       
‘Like?’

       
‘Like getting on a plane and taking myself off to the other side of the Atlantic,’ I said triumphantly, picking up my pint. ‘I, my friends, am going to New York.’

Chapter 26: ‘Every once in a while do more of the things you do for love.’

‘You’re going where?’ asked Claire the following day when I broke the news to her in the kitchen.

       
‘To New York,’ I replied. ‘It’s a List thing.’

       
‘What kind of
list thing
? I thought your To-Do List was about you doing ordinary things.’

       
‘It is.’

       
‘So why has “Wind up wife by announcing that you’ve got to go to New York”, suddenly appeared on it?’

       
‘It hasn’t, “Go to New York” has never been on the To-Do List.’

       
‘So what possible reason could you have for going?’

       
‘I can’t tell you.’

       
‘Why not?’

       
‘Look, you’ll just have to trust me. There’s nothing dodgy going on. I’m not running away or trying to squeeze in a trip without you and the kids or get up to anything sneaky. But I do have to go and I do have to go quite soon.’

       
I attempted to give her a little hug but she went all stiff, wriggled free and fixed me with her sternest stare.

       
‘Who else is going? Are you taking your Sunday night mates with you?’

       
‘Nope, I’m flying solo on this one.’

       
‘When would you go?’

       
‘Towards the end of the month.’

       
‘And how long for?’

       
‘I’ll be gone a day, two max.’

       
‘Let me get this right. You’re flying all the way to America just for a night or two?’

       
‘I promise I’ll explain everything when I get back.’

       
‘And will I understand then?’

       
‘Yes . . .’ I suddenly felt slightly less sure of my answer, ‘At least I think you will.’

       
‘And this is really that important?’

       
‘Absolutely. And, when this is all done and dusted I’ll take you to New York whenever you like for as long as you like. But this thing . . . well it’s really important.’

       
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘You go and do whatever it is that you’ve got to do. Just so long as you know  . . .’

       
‘What?’

       
‘Me and the kids will miss you like crazy.’

Two weeks later just after eleven in the evening, local time, I found myself landing at Newark airport. On previous trips I’d managed to get through customs, jump in the back of a yellow cab to whichever hotel I was staying at, check myself in and, given that this was the city that supposedly never slept, still had plenty of time to indulge in my little I’ve-just-arrived-in-New-York ritual: CD shopping at the Virgin Megastore near Times Square in the middle of the night.

       
Tonight was different. In a post 9/11 world it took three hours to make it through customs, by which time I’d lost the will to live, let alone the will to leave the safety and comfort of my hotel. So, following the ordering and polishing off of a quick room service minute steak sandwich and fries, I shed my clothes, crawled under the covers, flicked through a couple of pictures of Claire and the kids on my iPod, and fell into a jet-lagged sleep.

       
Five hours later a truck beeping loudly before bellowing in a Dalek voice: ‘Warning! Vehicle Reversing!’ dragged me from the depths of sleep. For a few moments I couldn’t work out where I was. Thanks to the hotel’s heavy curtains the room was pitch black and as my eyes adjusted I began to pick out the outline of various objects: a chair, my suitcase, the mirror on the wall. I wasn’t at home. I was in a hotel. I looked at the clock next to the bed. It was just after seven in the morning. I closed my eyes then reopened them. I had a vague feeling that the hotel wasn’t in London. It all came back to me. I was in New York City.

       
And suddenly I realised that it wasn’t a dream. I really had flown all the way across the Atlantic just to buy my wife a $12 mug.

Six years earlier, around this very time of year Claire had taken me to New York for three days, as a surprise gift for my thirtieth birthday. We had done pretty much everything that you’re supposed to do in New York. We went up to the top of the Empire State Building, visited the Museum of Modern Art, took walks through Central Park and visited Coney Island but most of all we shopped. And of all the shops we visited by far and away our favourite was the delicatessen-cum-homewares store, Dean and Deluca.