Saturday 20 May 8st 131/2, alcohol units 4, cigarettes 12 (vg), calories 1,500 Vg. My
mother has become a force I no longer recognise. She burst into my flat
late on Saturday morning as I sat slumped in my dressing gown, sulkily
painting my toenails and watching the preamble to the racing. "Darling,
can I leave these here for a few hours?" she said, flinging an
armful of carrier bags down and heading for my bedroom. Minutes
later, in a fit of mild curiosity, I slobbed after her to see what she
was doing. She was sitting in front of the mirror in an expensive-
looking, coffee-coloured slip, mascara-ing her eyelashes with her mouth
wide open. (Why is it only possible to put mascara on when your mouth is
open?) "Don't
you think you should get dressed, darling?" She looked stunning:
skin clear, hair shining. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I
really should have taken my make-up off last night. One side of my hair
was plastered to my head, the other sticking out in a series of peaks
and horns. It is as if the hairs on my head wait till I drop off to
sleep and say, "Now what shall we do?" "You
know, darling, all these years your father's made such a fuss about
doing the bills and the tax - as if that excused him from 30 years of
washing-up. Well, the tax return was overdue, so I thought, sod it, I'll
do it myself. Obviously, I couldn't make head nor tail of it so I rang
up. The man was really quite overbearing with me. 'Really, Mrs Jones, I
simply can't see what the difficulty is.' "I
said, 'Listen. Can you make a brioche?' He took the point, talked me
through it and we had it done inside 15 minutes. Anyway, he's taking me
out to lunch today. A tax man! Imagine!" "What?"
I stammered, grabbing at the door-frame. "What about Julian?" "Just
because I'm 'friends' with Julian doesn't mean I can't have other
'friends'," she said sweetly, slipping into a yellow two-piece.
"Do you like this? Just bought it. A lovely lemon, don't you think?
Anyway must fly. I'm meeting him in Debenhams coffee shop at 1.15." After
she'd gone, I ate a bit of muesli out of the packet with a spoon and
finished off the dregs of wine in the fridge. I
know what her secret is: she's discovered power. She's got power over
Dad, he wants her back. She's got power over Julian, and everyone else
is sensing her power and wanting a bit of it, which just makes her even
more irresistible. So all I've got to do is find someone or something I
have power over and then... oh, sod it. I haven't even got power over my
own hair. Sunday 21 May Find
myself snorting at Virginia Bottomley's plan to put alcohol units on
display in pubs. I suppose it's the same thing as putting calories on
food, but then sometimes I find myself confidently tucking into seven
Shape yoghurts simply because they only have 50 calories each and then
spend the day with vats of yoghurt fermenting in my stomach like a
ginger beer plant. Anyway, you don't eat food in order to get fat, but
you do go to pubs in order to get drunk. I bet half the people in the
pub choose the most alcoholic drinks to get plastered immediately and
the others choose the lower alcoholic ones so they can drink three times
as many and end up with stomachs like barrage balloons squelching and
bumping into each other. Next,
Sharon rang saying she was worried about Tom because she'd seen him from
the window of a taxi last night, wandering along Tottenham Court Road
holding his head and, she thought, bleeding, but by the time she'd gone
back, he'd disappeared. Frantic
phoning ensued. Tom wasn't in, so I rang Jude who rang Simon and got him
to go round. Not there. Then Sharon rang again. She'd spoken to Tina who
thought he was going to Michael's for lunch. I was just calling Michael
when the doorbell rang. It was Tom, with a huge bump on his head and
more depressed than I'd ever seen him, saying he'd started an affair
three weeks before with a 22-year-old "freelance film-maker"
called Jerome who'd dumped him last night and Tom had got blind drunk,
fallen over and hit his head. "Nobody
loves me," he said. I told him to ring his answerphone where there
were 22 frantic messages from his friends and said, anyway, how could
one moody git with a stupid name make him think nobody loves him? Two
Bloody Marys later, he was laughing at Jerome's obsessive use of the
term "self-aware" and skin-tight, calf-length Calvin Klein
underpants. Meanwhile, eight of his friends had rung to see how he was.
"I know we're all psychotic, single and completely dysfunctional,
and it's all done over the phone," he slurred sentimentally,
"but it's a bit like a family, isn't it?" Two minutes later there was a ring on the doorbell and my mother collapsed into the hallway in floods of tears. |