Sunday 2 April 9st 3,
cigarettes 10, alcohol units 3, calories 1,878. Yesterday
I received two unsettling and unprecedented messages on my answerphone:
one from my father announcing he was coming down to London to take me
out to lunch today, and not to tell Mum; another from Mum announcing she
was bringing a salmon round for lunch today and not to tell Dad. Recent
signs all point to my becoming the tragic victim of a broken home. But
today, in denial, I am clutching at straws. Maybe it was just an April
Fool. Maybe over-exposure to Noel Edmonds has finally turned them into
practical jokers. Perhaps my mother will arrive with a live salmon
flipping skittishly on a lead and announce that she is leaving Dad for
it. Maybe Dad will appear hanging upside down outside the window dressed
as a morris dancer, crash in and start hitting Mum over the head with a
sheep's bladder; or suddenly fall face downwards out of the airing
cupboard with a plastic knife stuck in his back. Oh
God, I can't have them both arriving here at the same time. It is too
Brian Rix for words. In desperation, I pick up the phone and dial my
brother's number only to get one of his hilarious answerphone messages:
the sound of running water and my brother pretending to be Ground
Control in Houston, then a toilet flushing and his pathetic girlfriend
tittering in the background. The only thing which can possibly get
things back on course is a bloody mary. Later "Mum,
no. Couldn't we all talk this through together over lunch?" I
trilled, as if this were Sleepless in Seattle and lunch was going to end
up with Mum and Dad holding hands and me winking cutely at the camera,
wearing a luminous rucksack. "Just
you wait," she said darkly. "You'll find out what men are
like." "But
Mum, I already..." I began. "I'm
going out, darling," she said. "I'm going out, to get
laid." At
2 o'clock Dad arrived at the door with a neatly folded copy of the
Sunday Telegraph. As he sat down on the sofa, his face suddenly crumpled
and big tears started to splosh out of his eyes. "She's
been like this since she went to Albufeira with Una Alconbury and
Geoffrey Coles's wife, Audrey," he sobbed, trying to rub the tears
off his cheek with his fist. "When she got back she started saying
she wanted to be paid for doing the housework, and she'd wasted her life
being our slave {Our slave? I knew it. This is all my fault. If I was a
better person, Mum would not have stopped loving Dad.} and...
and..." he collapsed in monster sobs. "And
what, Dad?" "She
said I thought the clitoris was something out of Geoffrey Coles's
lepidoptery collection." Monday 11 April 9st 1, cigarettes 0 (spiritual enrichment removes need to smoke: massive
breakthrough), alcohol units 5, calories 2,845. Though
heartbroken by my parents' distress, I have to admit parallel and
shameful feelings of smugness over my new role as carer and, though I
say it myself, wise counsellor this week. It is so long since I have
done anything at all for anyone else that it is a totally new and heady
sensation. This is what has been missing in my life. I am having
fantasies about becoming a Samaritan or Sunday schoolteacher, making
soup for the homeless (or, as my friend Tom suggested, darling little
portions of pesto sauce) or even retraining as a doctor. Maybe
going out with a doctor would be better still, both sexually and
spiritually fulfilling. I even began to wonder about putting an ad in
the lonely hearts column of the Lancet. I could take his messages, tell
patients wanting night visits to bugger off, cook him little goat's
cheese souffls, then end up in a foul mood with him when I am 60 like
Mum. Yesterday
I opened my News of the World and realised that becoming a Sunday
schoolteacher might massively improve not so much my spirit as my sexual
allure, giving me novelty value, like a stripping nun, or barrister in
suspenders. Mind you, THREE IN MP'S BED SCANDAL Sunday schoolteacher
Odette Nightingale (why, oh why, aren't I called Nightingale?) seems an
odd sort of bird or fish to me. Who, when visiting a male friend of
their lover, goes to the bathroom to "tidy up"? Would she have
gone on to run the vacuum round, too, if she hadn't become distracted?
And who, on emerging from the bathroom to find two men naked in bed,
decides the polite thing to do is get inbetween them? And how come (this
was Tom's point), when there are so many newspaper pictures of Odette in
differently hideous A-line strappy nylon dresses, she is wearing the
same pair of beige elasticated sling backs in each one? Hasn't she even
heard of the word "accessorise"? As Dad said on the phone
(fourth call) at 4am, "If this is what they're teaching them in
Sunday School these days, it's no wonder you're mother is acting
peculiar." |