Making the Cat Laugh Page 3

  Perhaps I worried too much about my American friend’s innocent question. He only asked what I was wearing, after all. He didn’t ask if I was entertaining a coach party from the Midlands, or examining A-levels, or making a casserole; whereas in fact I was doing all three, as well as finishing my script for the epic Night of the Living Teddywomen and practising bird-calls.

  Funny he didn’t remark on the array of sound effects, really – Shsh, tick, chop, tap, cuckoo – (something like a jaunty clock repair shop in a Disney cartoon). But then perhaps he was simply transported by the unbearably erotic notion of a woman, six thousand miles away, dressed up to resemble the inside of a Hoover bag.

  When you are a single person, the world is full of happy couples. That’s the idea, anyway; the tragic little myth we have all picked up from somewhere. In this version of events, life is a couples-only ceilidh in which the single person is the perpetual wallflower; she leans over the bridge in St James’s Park in her lonely anorak, crooning the plaintive country song from Starlight Express (‘I’ve been U-n-c-o-u-p-l-e-d’), while happy newlyweds chuck beach-balls about, and giggle together at the ducks.

  This is all rubbish, of course. It rubs no salt in my wound to see people happily paired off; they could waltz around the concourse at Waterloo in their dozens, and I wouldn’t care. No, what single life means to me (strangely enough) is that I can’t stand to hear couples bickering about where to park the car; or stalking off in a huff at the supermarket. It seems terrible. The other day I saw a man in the street trying repeatedly to take his wife’s hand, and she kept snatching it away again. It made my blood run cold, like watching somebody kick a dog.

  I wonder whether people parade their marital misery because they are proud of it. At traffic lights, you can always see couples in cars staring out in different directions with their mouths set rectangular like letter-boxes, and with a small thundercloud visible above their heads. You will have noticed also how those cheerful ‘Bob and Sandy’ windscreen stickers have largely disappeared, which is something I take personal credit for. I kept knocking on the glass and saying, ‘Hey, cheer up, Bob, you’ve got Sandy,’ and ‘Cheer up, Sandy, you’ve got Bob,’ until they took the stupid things down and cut them in half.

  So if I tend to avoid dinner parties, it is not because I am afraid the couples will canoodle in front of me, but because the couplesome strangers Derek and Jo need only exchange a private hostile glance over the sage derby and I start to panic on their behalf. It is not happy, this Derek-and-Jo; it will split up; its Derek-and-Jo kiddies will suffer. I turn into a kind of Cassandra, prophesying the sooner-or-later catastrophe of Derek-and-Jo with a forlorn certainty, usually even before they have reached the front gate and started arguing.

  It is a heavy burden: to see the inevitable with such clarity. ‘See the cracks!’ I moan inwardly (after some ritual ‘who’s driving?’ fracas after pudding). ‘Oh, woe! Hear the marital fabric split and rend, stitch by stitch verily from top to bottom! Weep, ye marrieds! Weep!’ It is an odd way to behave in a Crouch End dining room, but of course nobody listens anyway. Or if they do, they probably put it down to personal disappointment.

  This fatalism seems to be the worst aspect of being single; it gives you a cranky view of the world. You have heard of ex-hippies who advocate trepanning as the answer to everything (drill a hole in your skull to let off steam)? Well, I am quite similar, only I think everyone must tear up the marriage lines or sell the double bed, or for heaven’s sake quit moaning. As you can imagine, this makes me pretty useless as an adviser when relationships hit stormy seas, since my suggestions are always equally radical and precisely the same.

  ‘I think he’s seeing another woman, but I can’t believe it’s true,’ sobs a friend, desperate for support. ‘Split up,’ I advise, promptly, ‘and make sure you get the tumble drier.’ ‘I am in such turmoil,’ says another. ‘My wife wants to have a baby and the idea makes me dream about being eaten alive by a big hairy mouth with teeth in it.’ ‘Mmm,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘Have you considered going your separate ways?’ On Radio 4’s comedy news programme On the Hour the other day, I heard: ‘A palace spokesman has today confirmed that Prince Harry is to split up,’ and I automatically thought ‘Good idea; best thing’ before seeing the joke.

  The thing is, coupledom is a bit like childbirth; a week after it’s finished, you can’t imagine what it was like, or how you got into it. This is the gulf between single people and couples, and between the different bits of one’s own life. One minute you are Derek-and-Jo; the next you are Derek or Jo. And in each state you can’t imagine the other. I have spent about 80 per cent of my adult life in proper committed long-term relationships, yet at the moment all I can clearly remember is that I once startled my boyfriend by asking, out of the blue: ‘Why aren’t you a pony?’

  This ‘Why don’t they split up?’ syndrome is not sour grapes, I promise. It is not even cynicism. It is just an unanswerable point of view, similar to a religious conviction. The only trouble with this particular panacea (like trepanning) is that once you have done it, you can’t do it again. Consequently its evangelists cannot follow their own advice. What do trepanners do when they are depressed? If they kept drilling holes in their heads, they would risk being mistaken for patio strawberry-planters.

  Similarly, once you have split up you can’t keep doing it, unless of course you are a simple organism like an amoeba. So it is quite ironic, really. Here I am, advocating the new revolutionary pluck-it-out, cut-and-run approach to personal happiness, while at home I am gradually learning how to patch things up.

  One of the more difficult things to accept about being newly single is that there is no one to strike chore-bargains with. You know the sort of thing: ‘If you do the breakfast, I’ll take the bin out’; ‘I’ll get the milk, you get the papers.’ Make such fair’s-fair suggestions to a cat, I find, and it will just look preoccupied, and suddenly remember an urgent appointment outside.

  The beauty of efficient teamwork is that it cuts through the grease and grime of household activity with a brisk one-two, reminiscent of the old telly adverts for Flash. Wisshh, woossshh, all done. ‘You make a cup of tea, while I lie full-out on this sofa, preventing it from bucking up and killing somebody.’

  Jobs that can’t be tackled simultaneously stretch out instead in long miserable single file, like prisoners on a chain-gang, and are dealt with on the weary principle of one-damn-thing-after-another. The plodding linear quality is depressing. Sometimes you forget, of course, and glance optimistically at the bin, fleetingly wondering whether someone else has taken out the rubbish. But they usually have not. The cheerful midnight pixie with bucket and mop is a sweet and potent myth, but it is cruelly misleading.

  Looking on the bright side, however, there is great consolation in the knowledge that the Mr Nobody who takes out the bin is also the Mr Nobody who moves things around so that you can’t find them. Take the TV remote control, for example. In my old cohabiting days, how many times did I search frantically among sofa cushions for it, knowing in my heavy heart that it was probably travelling anti-clockwise on the M25 by now, snug in a coat pocket on the back seat of the boyfriend’s car? Living alone, then, it is no wonder you rejoice that things remain precisely where you left them. You feel a great warmth inside on the day you realize that if you haven’t finished the marmalade, there is still some marmalade left. The only interference I have experienced since living alone was when I emerged from the bath one day to discover the word ‘trhjwqxz’ on my otherwise blank word-processor screen. I gulped, and stood stock still for a minute, feeling the pulse race in my neck. And then I realized that a cat had made a dash across the keyboard.

  I mention all this because last week I left a friend alone in my flat for a couple of hours, and when I came back I realized I could retrace virtually every moment of his stay, just by observing all the things he had moved from their usual places. The loo seat was up. A plate with toast crumbs awaited me on the draining-board
, along with a knife tinged with Marmite. A couple of inches of wine had gone from an opened bottle, and a glass with dregs in it was rolling on the living-room floor. A book had been replaced in the wrong position on a shelf, a window opened (and not closed again), the backdoor key hidden so successfully it took me two hours to find it. I moved stealthily around the flat, feeling a bit like Sherlock Holmes on the trail of exotic cigar-ash. ‘He’s been here, too!’ I whispered excitedly. ‘See, he has moved these cassettes!’ Thank goodness I didn’t have a magnifying-glass, or I would have been down on the carpet, observing the pile for footprints.

  I felt proud and irritated in equal measure: proud that I can now (like Holmes himself) detect the tiniest variation in the depth of dust on a pile of Radio Times; irritated for obvious reasons (mainly to do with washing up). But there was something rather macabre about this Do Your Own Forensics activity, and eventually I stopped thinking about it. The idea of living alone is somehow quite closely associated with the idea of dying alone, too; and I didn’t want to think about the giveaway clues packed into my own day-to-day life. ‘We found a half-eaten jar of pickled onions next to the bath. She had fed the cats but not washed the spoon. A little Post-It note was attached to the bin, with the mysterious words ‘‘I suppose it’s my turn again?’’ written on it in big wobbly capital letters, underlined.’

  If this sounds self-pitying and morbid, it is nevertheless something that single people very often joke about; the collective single mind contains a whole sub-section labelled: ‘What if I died?’ ‘Thanks for the present,’ they say, ‘but what if I died, and somebody found the room stacked to shoulder height with twenty-five years’ worth of Pet Fish Monthly?’ I remember a woman once proudly describing to me how she had rescued herself from acute self-consciousness by assembling a library of pop psychology books, with titles such as 101 Ways Not To Care What Other People Think. The effect of these books had been miraculous she said; she had been transformed into someone who did not give a damn. I was impressed, and asked her to check the publishing details. ‘Oh, but I threw them all out, in the end,’ she said in a lowered voice. ‘I mean, what if I died and people came in and found a load of books with titles like those?’

  The day that I became single again – some time last August – I felt it was important to perform some symbolic acts. After all, I reasoned, you never know when a social anthropologist might be watching. I tried to picture what a newly single woman would be expected to do, to mark the reclaiming of the living environment after years of cohabitation. Washing the walls and beating the carpets sounded the right kind of thing – but on the other hand it also sounded a bit strenuous, and I didn’t want to alarm the cats.

  So perhaps, instead, the newly single woman might do a little light tidying? Form the old newspapers into distinct new piles? Pick up the dusty used tissue that she always stared at, mindlessly, through hour-long telephone conversations? This all seemed manageable, given the emotional circumstances. Oh yes, and she might ceremoniously replace the lavatory seat to its ‘down’ position, with an exaggerated flourish and a round of applause. This was ample Coming of Age in Samoa stuff for a single afternoon.

  But I remember that the first evening I was also moved to root through a heap of books until I found Anthony Storr’s Solitude. This was a book I had wanted to read for a very long time; and I felt I should seize the moment. I read it avidly until 9.30pm, after which I left it unopened on the coffee table for the next three months, hoping that some of its inspiring message would miraculously buoy my spirit. I don’t know why I stopped reading. People must have thought I was a real stoic, savouring a book called Solitude over such a long period. Either that, of course, or that I couldn’t read without moving my lips.

  Storr thinks that solitude has much to recommend it. He says it promotes creativity – making people write novels, and so forth. Look at Anita Brookner, Edward Gibbon and, er, many, many others. Interestingly, a large proportion of our philosophers turn out to have been lonely miserable gits who walked about wearing buckets on their heads.

  There was something wrong with the appeal of this argument, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Months later, however, I do still hold out hope that the novel-writing and world-class philosophy stage will bounce along nicely when the time is right. I have bought a few note-pads, just in case. And a cardigan. The only trouble is that at the moment I can’t seem to pass a rather more mundane stage in the experience of solitude. I can’t seem to overcome my excitement at being able (at long last) to listen to The Archers without having to do it in the shed.

  I never accepted the idea that ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’. In my own case, love invariably means never being allowed to listen to The Archers – and in fact saying ‘Oops, sorry, I’ll turn it off then, shall I?’ when discovered in the guilty act. I kept faith with The Archers during three solid years of strict prohibition, just waiting for the day when I could again turn the theme tune up to maximum volume, as a statement: ‘Yes, I love The Archers, and I’m proud.’

  My fanaticism may have been forced underground, but it remained resilient, like the French Resistance. I take this as living proof that inside every cohabiting person there is a single person humming ‘Dum de dum de dum de dum’ waiting to get out.

  The more I think about it, the more I impress myself – the clever ways I found to mask my addiction. I remember those Sunday mornings when I would grab the car-keys at around 10.13am, saying, ‘Just popping down to Croydon for the Sunday papers, dear. I shouldn’t be more than, oooh, let’s say an hour.’ And I would dash off and sit in the car with dark glasses on, agog to the omnibus edition on the car radio. I don’t suppose the boyfriend ever suspected anything – although he did say: ‘Why are you taking a flask of cocoa?’ and ‘What’s wrong with buying them from the man on the corner?’

  I expect the Archers euphoria stage was something Wittgenstein went through, too – and Edward Gibbon, I shouldn’t wonder. The other novelties certainly wore off, in time. The tidying of newspapers, for example, started to look like a mug’s game, so I ditched it. I expect I can call in a specialist with a fork-lift truck when I can’t kick a path to the window any more.

  For a while, too, I made a point of playing records with significant words – ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’; also ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John – and lectured friends on the potency of cheap music.

  But now the flat is sometimes eerily quiet, and I rattle around in it, like a lone Malteser in a shoebox. It is an odd thing, this single life. And Gloria Steinem’s famous feminist axiom – that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle – has been of strangely little comfort. I agree with the sentiment, but I wish she had chosen a different image. Unfortunately I find it very easy to imagine a sardine on a mountain-bike joyfully bowling along country lanes; or a tuna in a yellow jersey winning the Tour de France on the happiest day of its life.

  One of the consolations of getting older is that one day you look in your address book and find you have acquired a list of specialists (hairdresser, mechanic, hypnotherapist, carpet-layer) whom you can mention in conversation and pass on to your friends. ‘Try my Ear, Nose and Throat man,’ you say, offhandedly. Or, ‘My acupuncturist knows an aromatherapist who recommends a plumber who could really help you with that!’ Gosh, it makes you feel sophisticated. And at the same time, of course, it helps you fill the rather big address book (with pussy-cats on) that somebody gave you for Christmas.

  I now have a builder, a carpenter, a gas man, and a painter and decorator. Most exciting of all, however, is the handsome ‘24-hour emergency gardener’, whose services I unfortunately rarely need. I sometimes think of him in the small hours, though, and picture him trouble-shooting in a dark garden somewhere, lashing daffs to splints in a high wind, looking Lawrentian. Should I call up with a bogus middle-of-the-night problem? ‘Thank God you’re there!’ I might say, feigning a verge-of-tears voice. ‘It’s – er, a 24
-hour emergency! And here I am, clothed only in these – er, diaphanous jim-jams, unequal to the struggle with the elements!’

  The only glaring hole in my list of blokes is under ‘window cleaner’, because the local chap simply refuses to clean my windows, on the grounds (I think) that I didn’t register with him in 1948. ‘Excuse me,’ I say periodically, pretending that the idea is quite a new one, and that we have never had the conversation before. ‘You wouldn’t do my windows, would you?’ He looks down at me from his position on the ladder, and just says ‘No’, but he packs the word with an impressive degree of hostility and affront. My question seems to offend him; I don’t know why. I mean, he is a window cleaner.

  I mention all this because it is a great advantage of the single life to be able to say ‘There is something wrong with the heating; I think I’ll get a man in,’ without having to negotiate with the boyfriend first. Boyfriends, I find, tend to reply ‘No, let me take a look, I’m sure it’s straightforward,’ and end up emptying the S-bend on to their shoes at three in the morning. However competent the boyfriend, the sight of him with his head in the gas cupboard and the sound of bang!-clink!-Oops! is enough to make my blood run cold. ‘What do you mean, Oops?’ I say, dancing about in panic. ‘Nothing.’ ‘You said Oops!’ ‘No I didn’t.’ ‘You did.’

  The trouble is that you start to identify with the boyfriend’s tussle with his ego, which is getting out of hand. And strangely, no amount of hand-wringing or helpful why-don’t-you-call-it-a-day noises make his tussle any easier. ‘It’s just this last hole,’ he says grimly, after a day of constant drilling, and you peek aghast into a room filled with brick dust and a wall that has been drilled so many times it resembles pegboard. The helpful suggestion, ‘Hey, let’s forget those silly old shelves, and give the books to the Russians!’ fails to lift the gloom.