Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (20 page)

Seasickness, for example. Is that too difficult? Seasickness pills. The chemist's assistant looks at me as I though I am a madman. She leans towards me, making a hearing trumpet of her face. Not a syllable does she speak. Maybe she guesses, correctly, that if she did form a word I'd be none the wiser. I make a little boat of my hand and send it bobbing on the ocean waves. ‘Seasickness pills.'

‘Ah, pill,' she says at last. Not in an entirely confident spirit. This might be a pharmacy but only a pedant would take that to mean that they sell pharmaceuticals.

‘Yes,' I say, encouraging her. I was a teacher once and know how to leap on the back of dawning intelligence and make it gallop. ‘Pill, yes, good, but specifically pill for seasickness.'

She's in trouble again, looking around for help. Soon shops are going to have to employ translators to mediate between people born after 1980 and people born before it. ‘Scenic pill?' she tries. And for a moment I wonder whether there are such things and whether I should be buying them. A pill for improving your appreciation of scenery, would that be, or a pill for calming you down after you've been too moved by scenery – a sort of Stendhal syndrome prophylactic? Which reminds me that pills can be for or against and that all this might be my fault for not being sufficiently precise in the matter of which I want. What if the poor girl has been wondering why I want to
induce
seasickness?

‘Sorry,' I say. ‘It's
anti
-seasickness pills I'm after.' And to help her I make the little boat with my hands again, this time puffing up my cheeks and blowing a gale, then pressing my fingers to my temples and turning green.

‘Oh, headache,' she says.

‘No, seasick,' I shout, though of course by now it's something for a headache that I need.

Whereupon she gives up on me and goes to fetch the pharmacist. ‘Seizing pills,' I hear her asking him. Which strike me as another good idea. Along with pulverising powders.

Since you will have deduced that I was going to sea you won't be surprised to learn I needed shoes to go to sea in. ‘Does G mean broad-fitting?' I ask the boy in the shoe shop.

He turns a quarter of his face towards me. ‘G?' he repeats. ‘What's G?'

He has a faraway look, dreaming of being in the final of
Pop Idol
.

I show him the shoe and point out the letter G next to the shoe size. ‘What does this mean?' I ask him.

He shrugs, puzzled by how it got there. ‘Dunno,' he says.

‘A letter with the size normally denotes the fitting,' I persist. ‘I want to know if this is a broad fitting.'

He repeats the phrase as though he has never heard it before. ‘Broad fi'in'?'

I point to my feet. ‘Big feet,' I say, giving away more than I want to. ‘Long, but also wide.'

He looks down at my feet and then back up at the shoes, struggling to make the connection. Then he starts to walk away.

‘Is there a manager in this shop?' I call out.

The boy stops and gives me another of his quarter-turns. ‘Yeah,' he says. ‘Me.'

I've been out for two hours and this is the first word I've uttered that anybody has recognised. Manager. I make a mental note to try it more often.

After which I decide to console myself with a steak in a French restaurant in Charlotte Street. ‘A T-bone,' I say.

The waitress stares at me. ‘A T-bone,' I repeat. I could help her out by making a T with my fingers, but why should I? This is a steakhouse.
T-bone is on the menu. And I am still in England, home of English, whatever nationality the restaurant. ‘T-bone,' I say a third time, showing my teeth.

‘Ah, you want D-bone!'

And then there's the problem with camomile tea. She has never heard of it. ‘Camomeeel,' I say. Bingo. Ah, camo
meeel
! But if I can work out that my camomile is her camomeeel, why can't she work out that her camomeeel is my camomile? No quid pro quo, you see. That's why I am become a stranger in my own land, no one's trying. Scalpel, nurse.

Friendly Banking

I am being attacked by my own phone. Correction: I'm being attacked by my bank, but they're doing it through my phone. They ring me up and then ask me to identify myself.

‘I'm who you rang,' I tell them.

‘Yes, but how do we know that?'

‘Because you rang me.'

‘But what if it's not you? What if you're your son? Or your father?'

‘It's a chance you take,' I tell them. ‘How do I know, for example, that
you're
who you say
you
are?'

They want to know my date of birth and my mother's maiden name. At my age I am likely to have forgotten both.
And anyway, since they ring me every day to ask me, there's a better chance that they'll know than that I will.

‘Dostoevsky,' I say. ‘I think my mother's maiden name was Dostoevsky. What's yours?'

The bank won't tell me its mother's maiden name. I have to trust the bank. Given that they've been taking my money for forty years, know my phone number, know my voice, know my credit details, know how pissed off I always am when they ring, you'd think that by now they'd trust me. The trouble is they don't know it is me. It might be my father or my son who's pissed off. I might be impersonating myself. I might even be my own burglar.

Actually, that's not right. It isn't me they say they don't know, they say it's my address. Yes, they write to me and ring me here, but that apparently isn't enough. They need further proof.

‘Why do you need further proof?' I ask them. ‘Further proof against what?'

‘Terrorism.' Government regulations, post Osama bin Laden, say that banks must ascertain for absolutely certain that people live where they say they live, otherwise they could be terrorists laundering money. If Osama bin Laden is himself having trouble managing his funds at present, that's the reason – they aren't sure where he resides. And when they ring him to ask his mother's maiden name, he puts the phone down. Which, I suppose they'd argue, is proof the system's working.

Recently I suggested to the bank that if they wanted to be sure I lived where I said I live they should send someone round to check. Let him even interest me, if he wished, in the bank's latest offers and inducements. New cards, new borrowing arrangements, carpets, whatever. Good idea. John, he was called. Hi, John, welcome to my home. But it appeared that finding me here still wasn't conclusive proof. What if I was my son, sleeping over? What if I had just let myself in through a window? I showed him my photograph. ‘Me,' I said. He wasn't convinced. If it was me, how come I was smiling?

What it turned out he needed was documentation. Paper not flesh. A bank statement, say, dated in the last three months. ‘Hang on,' I said, ‘are you telling me that if I show you a statement from your bank, addressed to me here where you don't believe I live and to which address you therefore have no business sending statements, all will be well? You will believe your own mail, even though you ring me every day because you're not convinced it's me you're sending it to?'

Yes, he said. That should be fine.

Figure that. Figure why I didn't tell him he was a moron and let him out through the window.

Even though it should be fine, he took a photocopy of the statement just in case. But then must have forgotten to show it to the relevant personages, because the new business he got me to agree to cannot be initiated on account of there being no proof I live where I say I live.

Yesterday I rang them before they could ring me. ‘I was born on X,' I told them, ‘my mother's maiden name is Y, and now I want the card you refuse to send me.'

Hilary. ‘Hello, the adviser you are dealing with today is Hilary, how can I help you?'

‘By sending me the card.'

She asked me not to be abusive.

‘Just send me the fucking card, Hilary.'

Can't. Won't. No trace of me at my address.

Then how come John knew where to find me, Hilary?

She is barely comprehensible. Which might be because the call centre is in Manchester and not Calcutta. She seems to be using the word experience. ‘I rely on it,' she tells me. By which I take her to mean that she is well versed in terrorists and money launderers and knows one when she talks to one. ‘If you are relying on your experience,' I reply, ‘it should tell you that I would never have been offered this card you won't send me unless someone had known where to find me to offer it me in the first place. Experience, Hilary – if you've got it, use it.'

She told me I misunderstood her. I laughed at that. Ha! In fact I laughed twice. Ha, ha! ‘I think I understand you only too well, Hilary. You say you are experienced but you won't call on that experience to make a common-sense decision. The card, Hilary. The card!'

But I
had
misunderstood her. She hadn't said she was relying on her experience, she'd said she was relying on Experian –
an, an
– a credit-rating firm, evidently popular with banks. It was the spooks working for Experian who couldn't find me.

Imagine that, my own bank – with whom I've been dealing for forty years or more, which knows the details of my life more intimately than I do myself, my outgoings and my incomings, my birthdays, the entire history of my financial perturbations, my mother's maiden name, everything – my own bank is checking up on me with a credit-rating firm!

Kafka was right. They will come to our lodgings in frock coats and top hats and they will cut our throats. Though since they don't know who lives where there is always a chance they will cut the wrong person's.

O the Opal and the Sapphire of that Wandering Western Sea

I have Cornish longings on me. Maybe something to do with those poor Greek flower-pickers reported rescued last week from the horticultural hell of Hayle. Or BBC2's
A Seaside Parish
, transmitted concurrently with its series about the National Trust. The Seaside Parish in question is Boscastle in north Cornwall, itself a National Trust village, in which, on and off, I spent twelve years of my life. What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore? Not my question, but Thomas Hardy's, Boscastle's presiding ghost, and part of the reason I stayed so long.

Funny the difference words make to a place. Though it has to be said that his were not just any words. Boscastle was where Hardy met his first wife, and it was to Boscastle he returned, long after she was dead, to mourn her, find her, discover whether the bitterness that overtook their marriage was written in it all along, or could be undone in memory. The greatest poems of regret ever written. And impossible to imagine the place without him once you've read them – an old man faltering forward, leaves around him falling, ‘Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward / And the woman calling.'

A local Hardy scholar called Kenneth Phelps wrote an affectionate book about Hardy's Boscastle connection –
The Wormwood Cup
. We sold it in a shop I helped to run, not a big seller, nothing like witches' brooms or badgers etched on Delabole slate, but there was a steady interest. Two or three times a week Kenneth Phelps would come into the shop to see how his book was doing. He kept a small supply in his backpack so that if stocks were low he could replenish them. I was setting out to be an author myself at the time and hoped I would never be reduced to carrying my books on my back. But there is no knowing what will befall an author. I am sorry now that I felt scornful of him. It is a wonderful thing to put your life into a single book, to think about its progress every day, and to be absorbed in its subject matter to the exclusion of all else. Years later I wrote to a distinguished biographer of Hardy, querying something in his book. He wrote back saying he would have loved to help, but frankly could barely remember anything about Hardy now. He had moved on to someone else's life. Kenneth Phelps was not like that. Day after day he retraced Hardy's steps, the scenes of those heartbreaking poems, up the cliff, down, till he was lonely, lost. The idea of forgetting Hardy or moving on to someone else was inconceivable to him.

I seem to remember we fell out over the National Trust. The trouble with people who love poetry is that they are liable to confuse it with the mawkishness of heritage. Myself, I found no contradiction in loving Hardy and hating the National Trust. The latter made life hell for those of us who hadn't come to Boscastle to retire. They ran the place like an army of occupation, and if any of us stood up to them they sued. Just how many membership fees paid over by peaceable, unlitigious, nature-loving ramblers and mug-buyers got spent on fees for QCs I dread to calculate.

We went to law with them ourselves once. Against the wishes of the village, certainly against the wishes of the business community who kept the village alive, they wanted to close the harbour approaches to traffic, so that they could prettify the walk outside their own shop. That was how we read it anyway. In response to which we organised a sit-in, preventing their vehicles from entering the contested area. DON'T TRUST THE TRUST, we shouted. My slogan, I fancy. The novelist in embryo.