Making the Cat Laugh Read online

  I was stunned. Nothing in my conversational Italian had prepared me for this, not even ‘Mi pare un po’ (molto) caro’ (‘I think it is a bit (very) dear’). I said I would think about it, and retrieved the car, mainly because I could not face the tragic prospect of ‘looking at’ twelve or thirteen hundred quid, just to hug it once and say goodbye. Subsequently, of course, I was told by everybody – from taxi drivers to provincial mechanics to small boys on trikes – that the ticky-ticky problem was the camshaft, not pistons, and that the garage’s mistake could not possibly be a genuine one.

  Perhaps car maintenance should be placed on the national curriculum, alongside sex education. There is the same ‘need to know’, obviously. And perhaps I should just regretfully harden myself to the garage rip-off, and rejoice that the ethic of the grease-gun is not generally extended – or not so flagrantly – to other professions (‘I think it’s just a cough, doctor’; ‘Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. In fact I’m phoning around for a replacement head’).

  Recently I saw an eight-year-old girl interviewed on television about Jurassic Park. ‘Don’t you think it will be distressing for you to see little children terrorized by dinosaurs?’ the interviewer asked. ‘But that’s life,’ piped the child. ‘It would be silly to shield us from it.’ She had a point.

  Last Thursday, during the mid-afternoon power-cut that plunged the whole of central London into blacked-out, stuck-in-the-lift chaos, I decided to make the best of the remaining daylight by ferrying some paperbacks up the stairs to my office. We British, I pondered (as I balanced a pile of books in one hand and opened doors with the other), are so accustomed to dealing with the effects of other people’s cock-ups – trains not running, post not arriving, delivery vans not turning up – that some people have stopped being angry, and instead take pride in the fortitude they show in such circumstances. Stuck in a tunnel somewhere near Victoria, they smile indulgently and award themselves medals for bravery in the face of overwhelming cock-up. This habit of shrugging at ineptitude is, I thought as I kicked one of the doors shut with a loud bang, precisely what is wrong with this bloody rotten stinking country.

  Having my mind thus occupied with large thematic matters, therefore, I did not at first notice the presence of the two strangers who were following me up the stairs. Their briefcases and nasty blue suits betrayed them to be businessmen heading for another part of the building, while their out-of-condition puffing and sweating gave them away as chaps who would normally prefer to take the lift. By way of pleasantry, I imagine, one of them tried to engage me in conversation:

  ‘What have you done to the lights, then?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What have you done to the lights?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ he persisted, laughing. ‘Don’t give me that. I expect you plugged your typewriter into the wrong socket, didn’t you, and blacked out the whole of London.’

  Now remember: this was a spontaneous remark uttered to a complete stranger; and as such, I regard it as absolutely awe-inspiring. It is like seeing a perfect diamond: what centuries of top-quality British male prejudice it must have taken to refine a mind to such a pitch. This man had only to be presented with the situation of: a) the lift out of order; and b) a woman walking innocently upstairs minding her own business, and his mind instantly synthesized all of the following propositions:

  a) all women are secretaries;

  b) women are always to blame, whatever it is;

  c) women are stupid about electricity, and are always blowing fuses by plugging their heated rollers into light-fittings;

  d) women welcome gratuitous insults;

  e) and even if they don’t, there is not much they can do about it, because ‘not being able to take a joke’ is a feminine failing worse than sabotaging London’s electricity supply.

  This man believes all these things; he believes them, moreover, at a deep unconscious level. And because he believes them, he thinks he is better than me. How ironic that I learned all this during a power-cut.

  Last week, in a branch of a well-known stationery shop, I had an interesting experience. It went something like this:

  ME: Excuse me, I can’t see any Amstrad ribbons. Could you … (First Assistant points a finger at a low shelf, looks at me as though I am mad, and does not speak.)

  ME: Oh yes, silly me. Thank you very much. (First Assistant does not react in any way, but then turns to friend and starts discussing lunch-breaks.)

  ME (at till): I’d like to pay for these please. (Second Assistant silently picks up ribbons and rings up prices on the cash register. He does not announce the total, because of course I can see it quite as well as he can.)

  ME (showing credit card): Can I pay with this? (Second Assistant wordlessly takes credit card and processes it, so that a bill is printed on the counter.)

  ME: Have you got a pen? (Second Assistant points to biro next to the till; I sign. He fixes his gaze on the middle distance.)

  ME (gathering up bag from the counter): Well, I’ll just take this, then. (Nothing.)

  ME: Great. Lovely. Thanks. Bye-ee.

  Now you could look at this scene in two ways. First, there is the ‘lonely mad woman’ scenario – you know, she’s got her hair in plaits, she’s got cat-dribble on her ankle-socks, and she’s trying to engage healthy young shop assistants in banal conversation, hoping that this will relieve her feelings of solitude, and temporarily make her life worth living. Give her an inch, this woman, and she will produce a stack of photographs from her shopping-bag (‘Here’s a picture of a rice pudding I made last year’), and start saying ‘Guess how old I am! Not bad for thirty-six!’

  On the other hand, there is the argument that says a little bit of eye-contact never hurt anybody, and that however boring it is to say ‘That will be £15.99’ all day, it is an essential part of the job, and of the structure of civilization.

  Even if young people cannot be trained to say, ‘Can I help you?’, or ‘Did you see we had a new range of those?’, I think there should be a sort of baseline of acceptable shop behaviour which would include: (1) announcing the total loudly enough for the customer to hear it, and (2) saying thanks for the dosh.

  My own particular bugbears are bookshops (where I know what I want, and understand the system better than the assistants) and hi-fi emporia (where I don’t know anything, but can, nevertheless, spot the tell-tale signs that my guess is as good as theirs). In bookshops I cunningly deploy my knowledge of the alphabet in order to go straight to the right place on the shelf; but if my book is not there, I ask. This is where I make my mistake. The assistant, looking slightly offended by my enquiry, slides off his stool, turns a key in his till with an audible huff, and heads for the wrong area of alphabet.

  ‘Carter should be here,’ I say, but he’s not listening. He is trailing a fingernail along the Peter Ackroyds and Lisa Althers and pursing his lips. ‘Actually,’ I volunteer, ‘Er …’ But his concentration is impenetrable, as he works his way through Atwood, Barnes, Bowen, Boyd, Brink, Brookner and Byatt. Finding himself at Dibdin, he performs a few halting changes of gear between forward and reverse drive, until finally settling on the exact space where my finger is resting on the shelf.

  ‘If it’s not here, we haven’t got it,’ he announces, straightening up. After witnessing this ritual a couple of dozen times, you learn not to ask about any author whose name comes later in the alphabet than F, unless you are writing a thesis on alienation.

  Sorry to go on in this old-codgerish vein, but since shop assistants are sometimes the only people I speak to all day, I am growing sick and tired of the rudeness. Hi-fi shops I only enter when I’m feeling particularly robust – and even then I try to cushion the experience by imagining that all the staff are blind. This helps a lot, actually. Blindness would excuse them from never looking you in the eye, from being completely unfamiliar with the stock, and from bluffing in transparent ways when asked technical questions.
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  ‘What does this button do?’ you ask. The assistant looks at it in a vague, unseeing way, and says dismissively, ‘Timer.’ ‘Oh, hang on,’ you say, looking up from the instruction leaflet, ‘it says here that it’s a pause button.’ The salesman shrugs, and diverts his attention to an argument at the other end of the counter, where a customer is demanding his money back until he is blue in the face.

  I don’t know what can be done about all this. I have started barking ‘How much did you say?’ into the ears of people on tills, but only because it makes me feel better. My latest idea is to carry a little Sooty glove puppet, so that I can produce it at key moments and talk to it when nobody else is volunteering. ‘What’s that, Sooty?’ I could say, next to the Amstrad ribbons, with Sooty speaking directly into my right ear. ‘Down on the bottom shelf?’ Sooty would nod his head in the traditional glove-puppet manner of bending three times sharply from the waist.

  At the till, we could continue. ‘Yes, Sooty? That will be £9.40? Allow me to lend you this biro? Thank you for your custom, and be sure to call again? Well, thank you very much, Sooty. It makes such a nice change from talking to myself.’

  Remember the days of ‘kitchen-sink drama’? Having grown up during the heyday of this raw, vigorous genre, I find now that its combined dramatic porcelain, taps and U-bends made a deep impression on me, as though dropped on my foot from a height. Placed in an unfamiliar BBC props room full of old white sinks, crude kitchen tables and Ascot water heaters, I feel sure I could identify them (‘Arnold Wesker?’ ‘Shelagh Delaney!’), no problem. Around kitchen sinks, couples were always shouting and glowering at each other. They chucked plates and wrestled with the back door (‘That’s right! Go to yer fancy piece!’) before storming out into the black night.

  I was reminded of all this emotional turmoil when reading about a comparatively sedate organization called the Polite Society (patron: His Grace the Duke of Devonshire). The Polite Society is committed to maintaining everyday courtesy in British society and in particular believes machines have ruined our capacity for talk. The invention of the dishwasher, its manifesto says (with stars in its eyes), was a tragedy for domestic conversation, since washing-up was a matrimonial lubricant we could not afford to lose – ‘The only opportunity man and wife may have to engage in comfortable small talk while she washes and he wipes.’ A number of sweet bygone gender notions are enshrined in this pretty picture, but for the sake of brevity I think we’ll let most of them pass. ‘Oh look, here’s a bit of old cornflake still stuck to the bowl, darling!’ ‘You’re right, dear. Would you like me to commit suicide here at the sink, or shall I just pop myself upstairs?’

  As a single person whose tea-towel never gets wet, I do see the point about the dishwasher, of course; it’s no company at all. If you relied on it for anecdotes, you would wait a very long time. But if people don’t want to talk to each other, surely the last thing that will cajole them into a pleasant gossip about the neighbours is a pile of greasy crocks. It is quite easy to wash up together without saying a word, both staring through the uncurtained window at the dark and rain, mouths set in a grim line. And another thing, if they are very keen on each other, surely this Mummy and Daddy would far rather fling those plates in the machine, push a button and retire to a more comfortable room? I was telling my friend Susan about all this wash-wipe nonsense, and she observed, ‘Antony and Cleopatra didn’t do the washing-up together, did they?’ – an excellent point. The history of western civilization might have been quite different if instead of trying to impress his dusky Queen with the Battle of Actium, Antony had strapped a pinny over his leather skirt and made with the Brillo.

  Machines certainly reduce the opportunities for everyday courtesy. If a door works automatically, you feel a fool holding it open; if you get your money from a hole in the wall, you shouldn’t enquire about its Mum’s new hip. On the other hand, this automation does protect the manners-sensitive among us from the irritation of finding doors dropped back in our faces, or speaking to a stooping bank clerk who shows us only the top of his head. What I mean is, nobody can behave badly around an automatic door; and it is rare to walk away from a cashpoint grumbling, ‘That’s the last time I go there.’ The Polite Society dislikes also the way the Directory Enquiries service now starts off with a real person (‘Which name? Which town?’) and then switches to a computer voice with random vowels, preventing you from saying thanks. But looking at it another way again, at least this means that the operators don’t spend all day exasperated by people hanging up without saying thanks. ‘I don’t believe it. I gave him the number and he just hung up.’ ‘That happened to me, too.’

  Back at the kitchen sink, it’s surely obvious that everything in the home is nowadays designed to make maximum time for the telly. That’s just the way it is. People bicker about whose turn it is to load the dishwasher because there’s a juicy kitchen-sink drama on the box. ‘We are not Luddites,’ says the Polite Society, ‘but there is a danger that if we don’t control technology, it will end up controlling us.’ What a shame it’s not that easy. I read this credo as it came off my Fax machine, and instead of just shouting ‘Faster!’ and ‘Come on!’, I tried saying ‘Oh, thanks a lot’ and ‘Ta’. Imagine my surprise when it replied, ‘You’re welcome. And by the way, did you notice the new car outside Number 46?’

  Hand me that legal aid application form. And lend me that pen. After years of cudgelling my brains for a suitable way of expressing my resentment at growing up in a house filled with tobacco smoke, I have finally hit upon the perfect solution. I shall sue them, take them to court, fleece them for every penny. Ha, let them put that in their pipes. According to the Sunday papers, children subjected to chronic passive smoking can now obtain legal redress for their long-term bronchial problems, and there will be a kind of wheezers’ revolt. The courtroom picture is irresistible. I can see it now: the plaintiff (me) in the witness box, coughing delicately into a linen hanky, and pointing the bony finger of blame; and the rest of them in the dock, huddled together under a yellow mantle of tobacco smoke, doing a group impression of Auld Reekie with the wind in the East.

  The only trouble with this happy fancy is that my case could easily be knocked down by a few simple questions from a skilled counsel. For example, were my family in fact ignorant of the dangers of tobacco smoke when I was a child? ‘Yes, probably,’ I mumble (into my sputum cup). ‘A little louder,’ they command. ‘Yes,’ I repeat. Did I ever encourage their smoking habits myself? ‘I did,’ I reply miserably. ‘I bought them novelty ashtrays.’ The judge raises an eyebrow, looks confused. ‘For example, I bought an ashtray at the seaside shaped like a ram’s head, with the words ‘‘For Butts’’ written on it. B U double T S. It was a pun, my lord. Also, I begged to be allowed to make rollups in a little silver machine. And whenever the Bob Newhart monologue about Sir Walter Raleigh’s discovery of tobacco was broadcast on the Light Programme –’ (here I break down in penitent sobs) ‘– I used to laugh with everyone else at the bit where he says ‘‘Don’t tell me, Walt. You stick it in your ear.’’’

  Passive smoking is something I feel so strongly about that I want to set fire to the tea-towels, yet strangely at the same time I find it impossible to make a stand about it retrospectively, especially on the home front. Will people really take their families to court? I don’t believe it. How can you argue with people who, despite the advance of science, despite the warnings on the packets, and despite the fact that coroners now record smoking as a cause of death, keep puffing on the little white sticks and refusing to feel bad about it? Such fierce stupidity is intimidating. To the non-smoker, the behaviour of smoker families tells you quite unambiguously that if you’ve got a problem with this, then the problem is yours and you can keep it. If it makes you want to spit, then there you are.

  So where my own relatives are concerned I do my smoking very passively indeed. While they light up repeatedly, I fantasize about strapping a battery-driven fan to my forehead, and yelling a
bove the din, ‘Can’t hear you! Got the fan going!’ – but unfortunately this helps only as a mental distraction. As a concrete act of defiance, I did once purchase an amusing T-shirt with a Larson cartoon on it (‘The real reason dinosaurs became extinct’ – showing a collection of prehistoric beasts furtively taking quick drags like schoolboys). But although I have worn this provocative garment twice to family gatherings, on both occasions I hastily obscured it with a jumper, so that it wouldn’t cause offence or start a row.

  Of course it is in the Bible, all this. ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ I don’t remember how the next bit goes, but it’s probably something like ‘Tough banana, saith the Lord.’ I am convinced that even the deity of the Old Testament, with his avenging tooth-for-a-tooth system of justice, would have advised against litigation in this case, on grounds of crushing futility. ‘Car fumes are more dangerous,’ say the smokers, airily; ‘there is a higher chance of dying from a stray microwave.’ Angry as I am about spending my school years feverishly coughing and hawking into lavatory bowls, I know what I am up against, and I know when I am beaten. If they won’t admit they are poisoning themselves, these people, what earthly chance have I got that they’ll admit to poisoning me?

  This time last year I had never been inside a register office except for a wedding. Now I am a twice-over veteran of registering family deaths, and I feel I know all about it. The registrar meets you with a smile, invites you to sit at the other side of a desk, and draws your attention to a computer screen on which your answers will appear. You cling to an old brown envelope with ‘Birth certificate’ written on it in familiar handwriting, and experience a mixture of feelings, principal among them the terrible misgiving that your errand is a wicked mistake, and that your dad is going to be really dismayed and hurt when he finds out what you’ve done.