Guttersnipe

Looking for a whiff of him

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:12:06 +0100

She thought about him still. Last night she caught herself searching through her ‘deleted emails’ box to find his name. She searched by surname then first name, tried by subject heading and finally guessed at date – but she couldn’t find anything. Nothing left of him on the system. Nothing but a cancelled agenda item that she didn’t bother to open.

It was from a Thursday in December when she’d last had contact with him. They were supposed to meet up in London for a drink after she’d finished with her meetings. He’d cancelled on her, late. That had made her cross and faintly needy all at the same time. There’d been no contact since then from either side, but this hadn’t stopped her looking for a whiff of him, even if it was just a scrap of email banter. That was good, surely. It’s not like she’d fallen in love with him, for that would have been absurd. Yet here was this feeling, this chink of light left inside.

He’d started it. He’d pursued. He’d made the moves and been so committed to them that even she’d had to finally concede that he might be into her. Blind, she was. She had been side-swiped by his intensity and now missed the attention.

She’d never known anything like it. He was uncompromisingly filthy. He’d be in contact 24/7 and the sms’s alone made her lose any ability to work a normal day. Instead, she’d arrive at the office and have to go straight to the bathroom to complete an sms session that had already been going on since 7am. He couldn’t stop and that had thrilled her. His honesty sometimes embarrassed her. Watersports and amputees – he’d talk about anything. “I’ve never opened up to anyone like I have to you”, he’d said. She’d believed him at the time. Believed that he believed himself at the moment he was saying it. Looking back, she wasn’t so sure. He was capable of darkness and she hadn’t known what to feel about that. He was also 51. And married.

“He compartmentalises his life,” Petra had said at the beginning, as nail-bitingly avid for details as she had been to offer them. “To him, he’s doing nothing wrong because he hasn’t fucked you. Yet. He really thinks he’s soulmates with you. You stand up to him and make him think. He’ll adore the challenge. You are also polar opposites with his wife.”

His wife. What was he playing at and did she know? Petra suspected that she did, that he had mild indiscretions here and there, which didn’t rock the marital loveboat so long as it was out of town and a one-off. “But you’re under his skin, in his brain and that must be driving him crazy. He doesn’t know what to do with you. He calls you at 3am, for Christ’s sake, and wonders ‘if the kettle’s on’!”

She’d become self-protective and backed off. She knew what she was like: any closer and she wouldn’t have been able to stop scratching until she’d drawn blood. So she’d called him on it, on all the sms’s and the emails and the 3am calls, on the hourly contact and declarations of soul-mateyness.

“You’re a player”, she’d told him. “First sign of trouble and you’ll be declaring innocence. ‘Not me guv’, you’ll say. ‘She jumped my bones; there was nothing I could do about it’. Don’t play with me unless you really mean to play with me.” He hadn’t liked that. He’d been brought up short and made to consider his actions.

She hadn’t seen him coming and for this she felt incredibly naïve. She didn’t realise what a rose-tinted spectacle wearer she really was. There had been things she’d less than admired about him, things that had embarrassed her, his flaws attached. It hadn’t changed the fact, though, that she’d wanted to play his games.

Comments

Right of Way

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:07:48 +0100

“I couldn’t do it. In the end I just felt too guilty, too on the spot. It was damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I mean. He’s married and has two grown-up kids. I’m not going to ever be more important than that. He’s been married almost thirty years. They’ve been together since he was about 23 –“

“Which would make him…?”

“52, give or take. I know, I know. But you should have seen him. Really well preserved. Really. And so into me. And filthy on the phone. I just couldn’t convert that to actual, you know, physical, you know, getting amongst it. I wanted to, believe me, but I wanted him to make that move and he always seemed to hang back, waiting for me.”

“So he could blame you when it all went tits up and his wife found out. ‘She caught me unawares, I didn’t see it coming’. Yeah right.”

“Exactly. And I wasn’t going to fall for that. I knew I’d get in too deep before I even looked up for air.”

This, whilst crawling through Addo National Elephant Park at 12 miles an hour, me in the passenger seat, leaning out the window with the binoculars we’d bought yesterday, Elaine in the driver’s seat, leaning out her window to scan the undergrowth. The closest we’d been to wildlife this morning was a red triangle road sign saying ‘Drive Carefully - Dung Beetles Have Right of Way!’, with a graphic of a beetle up on its hind legs, rolling what stood for a large round ball of shit. Neither of us was looking at the road, hence the car crawl; plus we didn’t want to scare or to miss anything, should there be anything to miss other than the occasional crunch of dung beetle under wheel.

“So, yeah”, said Elaine. “That was basically that. I challenged him the last night I saw him. We’d gone out for dinner, to Baltic in Waterloo - you know the place, beetroot with everything – and by the way things were going, I thought ‘game on!’, he’s working up to making a move on me. I was totally up for it.”

“And?”

“But he buckled. Or changed his mind. Or whatever”, she continued. “I asked him what all the phone calls and the emails and the constant sms’s were all about and he –“

“Warthog! Cute! And baby hogs! Four, five, six of them. On the left. Left, see them? Comedy. Finally, something to put against the entrance fee. Okay, yeah, so the sms’s?”

“He kind of acted innocent”, she said, taking the binoculars and giving the family Hog a once-over. “Innocent or stupid. He did this ‘what, me?’ look and acted like you carry on like this with all your mates. I was gobsmacked. It just shows how boys are such boys no matter how old they are. He really wanted me to jump his bones so he could do a ‘she made me do it!’ routine. That just really pissed me off.”

“Hats off to your self-restraint” I said, although I wasn’t really listening any more. Not that I didn’t care, but we’d been through this already. It was day 17 of a 20 day vacation in South Africa and we’d spent the flight from London to Cape Town talking about little else. To be honest, I was just going through the motions to make Elaine feel better. It was a great story and there were plenty of pretty outrageous details she was more than happy to share with me. We had squealed together in row 16, finally waking up the farty old gran across the aisle, when she first mentioned the phone sex and had outlined some of this guy’s less standard peccadillos. But now this tale wasn’t going anywhere. She should have fucked him, then there would be more to tell. More for me to enjoy and share with Magnus when I got back to Amsterdam. He’d enjoy the curlier moments already, but would certainly hanker for more.

I ticked ‘warthog’ off the list of wildlife the front kiosk had given us on entry and wrote a number six next to the picture. The rest of the page was blank of markings, apart from Elaine’s ‘before’ and ‘after’ drawings of a dung beetle encountering our car as it rolled its shit ball across the track. Apparently, according to the leaflet, we could potentially see more than forty-seven varieties of wildlife in this nature reserve, including elephant, zebra, a round dozen species of deer, hippo, snake, giant tortoise, crocodile and giraffe. But it seemed that somewhere in the shrub there was one ostrich telling another about its recent sort-of-affair with an older married ostrich, whilst all 46 other varieties of wildlife listened in, under the cover of vegetation. Were they getting as sick of this story as I was?

Comments

Legendz

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 20:01:12 +0100

Katie had started the day with a cold fanny and ended it just after midnight standing outside an empty Goth bar she hadn’t been into, feeling strangely disappointed. A pretty average Saturday.

It was raining and so she couldn’t wear her new baby blue platform sandals for fear of splashes. Instead she’d changed her top four times and ended up in a mish-mash outfit that involved inappropriate underwear and a jacket pocket filled with dead tram tickets. The stay-ups weren’t doing their job. They weren’t sticky enough around the thighs and gave her a sense of dis-ease. This falling-down feeling combined with the string briefs under a knee-length skirt left her vulnerable and faintly nervous on a blustery day.

“Feeling fresh under there?” asked Rob, as they walked along the bridge back towards town, the wind whipping menacingly around the hem of her skirt. “Frankly, yes”, she’d answered, smoothing the skirt down back and front.

Walking up the open-step staircase in the museum had been an unexpected adventure for a couple of nicely turned-out women passing below. The gasp of horror had alerted Katie to her public underwear predicament – as if the chill factor hadn’t been enough. After that she just hadn’t felt safe and insisted on taking the lift to each new floor. At lunch she’d covered her knees with her jacket so she didn’t have to stay alert to the inching of her hemline up her thighs, or slack-kneed sitting, legs akimbo. Rob and Toby had thought it funny. So had she until one of the nicely turned-out ladies had come over all queasy and asked for a glass of water and a chair by an open window. Lucky for the rain or she’d have ridden her bike across town and been tailed to the Stedelijk by a peddling pack of pock-marked boys, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Katie had gone straight home on the tram and changed her underwear as soon as she got in. This second choice involved sensible yellow cotton knickers beneath a pair of sturdy tights. Less aerated, more secure.

By the time Mark arrived at 10pm, she’d forgotten all about cold breezy bits. Instead, she was preoccupied with the idea of going to a Goth bar in the ‘hood.

“But why?” she asked. “We are so not going to like it. We are going to feel stupid, hate everyone and want to leave after three minutes. We are going to find it very hard to be nice to people who find faux feelings of suicidal angst an appropriate topic of discussion.”

This was true and not to be argued with.

“Ralf is meeting his friends there”, Mark said, “and as we both live three streets away I thought we could go see what they are like. We don’t have to stay and we don’t have to back-comb our hair.”

“Or wear black eyeliner.”

“Or black nail polish.”

“Do I have to change?” she questioned, considering her blue ensemble. “It’s not exactly Goth-y. I’m gonna stick out like a sore thumb. Atleast you have dark colours on.”

“Lets face it”, Mark said, starting to lose his own nerve, “we are going to stick out no matter what we wear ‘cos we’re going to be standing in a corner sweating into our vodkas from nervous tension.”

Ralf is Mark’s new guy. He is Polish and tall and skinny and not sociable and ‘in’ rather than ‘out’ and a friend to Goths and therefore – so far – nothing like anyone she’d expect Mark to go for. But Katie hadn’t met him yet so she couldn’t be sure.

The thought of walking into a place called Legendz (with a zed) took her back to the gawky discomfort of teenage years when feeling out of place was a way of life and new places or people left her crippled with shyness, awkward and lumpen. These wafts of a bygone anguish hit Mark at the same time and they cackled together at the idiocy of it all. At the age of 35.

“Fuck it, lets go. We can pretend we were just passing. Stand, look, leave.”

It took them over an hour to leave her flat. They dallied, first because of the rain; then ‘just one more cigarette’; after that it was ‘we’ll finish this bottle of wine then leave’. But then she had to show him her new shoes. And he suddenly decided he couldn’t go out without a shower first. By the time they were approaching the Goth bar, it was almost midnight. Giggling like school kids all the way, by the time they got to the side street where Legendz was, they had already peaked too soon. Now things seemed ominous and not so funny. Now they actually had to go in.

Katie held back, hoping the bar was shut. Mark sauntered cautiously up to the door and looked in. “He isn’t there”, he said, sounding glum; “weird.”

“Are you sure?” she called from the street corner, not prepared to go closer unless it was absolutely necessary.

“There are exactly two people in the room. It’s dead in there.”

Oh. What had been an escapade now slipped into ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’. Instead of being able to sneer and giggle, they were stood up on a street corner. Mark wanted a snog; Katie wanted to be judgemental. They both wanted vodka.

Mark's mobile chirped into action. “He’s two minutes away.” They entertained themselves with impressions of each other surreptitiously entering a Goth bar: slow self-conscious lope; check for onlookers; sharp right turn and over the threshold, under the cover of darkness. After ten minutes the variations on a theme had been exhausted and they’d moved on to dirty phrases in bad Polish accents.

“Where are you? We’re here, on the corner. We’d have seen you if you’d walked in”, Mark said into the mobile. Pause. Extended pause. “Okay”, he said finishing the call.

“And...” asked Katie.

“Wrong Legendz. Apparently there is more than one. Oh my god, a Goth bar chain.”

The thought of this was appalling. And Mark had started seeing someone who was currently in one, celebrating a friend’s birthday. Did this guy have no idea just how wrong that was? A Goth bar in the ‘hood was one thing. Schlepping across town at midnight to another was something else again.

“You’re on your own. Hope you get out without having to dye your hair black.”

Mark was plainly weighing up a desire for boy-on-boy action against having to walk into a Goth bar alone that was the other side of town. For a moment there it was touch and go. Eventually, with some reservations, physical contact won out. They parted outside her flat after he’d cajoled her bike keys from her and pumped up the back wheel.

“I am expecting details tomorrow”, Katie called to his departing back. “Lots of them. Take photographic evidence and don’t forget what music they played. And a souvenir - bring me a lock of Goth hair.” She walked up the stairs smiling. It was never particularly dull.

Comments

Getting Assimilated

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 19:58:19 +0100

Next week I get assimilated. Bye-bye freedom; hello cyborg status. I’m having an insulin pump fitted - or rather, coupled to me - and this plays into all my paranoias about feeling suffocated, tethered, pigeon-holed and restricted. Those doctors of mine have got this tiger by the tail.

Let me say that I have issues. Cue applause and gentle cooing noises from the crowd. I’m not talking about anything specific; it’s general but shows itself most keenly in work situations. Put me in full-time employment and I immediately feel trapped, preferring release through self-sabotage rather than lingering decay at the same desk for more than twelve months. No staying power or an enquiring mind? Either way, I’m a born freelancer. Make me commit to a role for too long and I find myself twisting to get away, frustrated to tears by the pointless politics, need for consensus and slack-Alice workmates.

Working on freelance projects helps me keep boundaries that I’d otherwise lose sight of. I’m happiest if the company is at arm’s length. This way I don’t end up embodying the flaws I inevitably find through scrupulous nit-picking and unrealistic expectations. I do my job. I just know my limitations, brought about by an unnecessarily acute skill for getting too involved, taking it too seriously.

Nowadays, it’s a gentler colour-wash dislike for being tied-down that I deal with. Too many diary dates and I end up cancelling everything, hibernating in the flat for days on end, debating whether I should walk two streets to the market or shop Albert Heijn online. The ‘have to’ in taking medication means that I invariably ‘forget’ to take my pills at least a couple of times a week. And does my cat really need to be fed every day?

So hearing that I need to have a digital pump attached to a tube which is attached to a needle that is inserted under the skin near my belly-button fills me with irrational waves of claustrophobia. My personal space is being invaded by a machine of some weight that has a disconcerting ability to peep for reasons I as yet cannot understand. It smells medical. And some doctor or another used the word ‘always’. It is supposed to hang from my belt, or be clipped to me, 80’s style, like a mobile phone. “It’s the size of a pager” one nurse lied. But I don’t have a pager. Because I choose not to have one.

I resent the fact that one of these pumps is worth considerably more than any other single item in my apartment. I also resent its ugliness; it looks institutionalised – have I now become that woman on the tram? They tried to jazz it up by calling the colour anthracite green, but that doesn’t fool me. It’s boxy. It doesn’t go with any of my outfits and I’m going to have to reconsider every fashion purchase in line with the pump’s need for concealment.

I’m making a fuss. It’s not a big deal, really. But the ‘forever’-ness of it all smarts because I’m not into being held hostage by a machine. Magnus suggests a Versace holster for it; Kate recommends accessorising with a burlesque dash of sequins and feathers. If I was a Trekkie I’d have it glued to the side of my forehead and give 7-of-9 a run for her money. Instead, I have to choose from a catalogue which carry-case I’m going to use and order it from a warehouse that undoubtedly also deals in prosthetic limbs and colostomy pouches. It just isn’t how I see myself.

I envisage a white beach, a light breeze, a gently rolling surf and Ursula Andress shimmying gracefully up the shore. Except it’s me inside that body. Now? It’ll be as above – of course – but with a white plaster stuck near my belly-button. A translucent tube snakes from it into an angular plastic box the size of a cool-bag that gives me trouble as I try to wheel it through the sand on a trolley. Ursula/I huff and puff as I pull the blighter behind me; suave Mr Bond looks away as I lollop by, sweating.

“You can uncouple it for a maximum of three hours”, the doctor tells me, “if you want to go swimming for instance.” Everyone uses this same example, as if the best and only thing I can ever do with my spare time is grow gills.

“You can’t drink”, she continues. “Well, okay, one glass of wine is okay.” I sit looking at her. “But I drink cocktails” I say, as if that trumps her comment, argument won. She doesn’t get it. “I drink cocktails. Socially, with my friends. You know – it’s not like its one glass of wine…” She looks at me, waiting. I wait back. She waits back at my waiting. “So”, I conclude. “You can’t get drunk, if that’s what you mean”. And with that she has played her ace.

At this point it’s not funny any more. Up to now I’ve been sitting at the hospital in a room that smells of insulin, making nice with the doctor and pretending to be interested in all the machines she spreads before me. Now I just want to go home and have a lie down. I’m never going to see my friends again. I will lead a solitary existence and die alone. “But vodka’s okay. It’s pure.” “No.” “It’s got no carbohydrates in it and no calories.” “That’s not strictly true. And no.” I don’t like this game.

I call Magnus on the way home. “No alcohol. I’m not allowed to mix the insulin with alcohol.” “Did you tell her you drink vodka?” he asks, then says something in Swedish that I don’t understand but take to mean ‘you poor sad fuck – you’re not gonna have any friends left.’ “I told her I drink cocktails but she didn’t understand.” “Right, fuck it. Have one hell of a cocktail party before you have to start with the thing. Drink everything that’s left on the balcony.”

So that’s what we do. It’s not that I drink a lot, because I really don’t. But it’s fun to have cocktails once in a while – and when you do, it’s even more fun to have more. I’m good at throwing casual but caustic soirees involving bubbles and cranberry. It’s a skill that I happen to have. I’m also known for ‘tidy as you go’ which isn’t so endearing and frankly pisses a lot of people off, who say that it tends to dampen their party spirit. Phooey, says I.

In the end there’s no toast to the insulin pump, no waving off of the empty bottles, no party sparkle stuck to the dirty glasses awaiting the arrival of the washing-up goblin. There’s me, a newly opened packet of Paracetamol and an appointment at the AMC for 9.30 Monday morning.

Comments

Poo

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 19:46:17 +0100

I have a new pen and it makes me happy. When I click the button it illuminates. On-off. On-off. On-off. On-off. First pink then blue then yellow then red. Click again and the light changes colour by itself. I like the green best. It reminds me of a torch I received as a stocking-filler Christmas present from my parents when I was about seven years old.

This was the age when I knew that Santa didn’t exist and found it odd that my parents didn’t seem to. I’d try to please them, poor things, by pretending that I did believe; that Santa wasn’t a man in a bad outfit and rubbish beard at Debenhams, but actually came all the way from the North Pole to visit the town’s kids early, spreading festive joy and Christmas sparkle with every ho-ho-ho.

‘Look! There’s Santa! Shall we go and say hello?’ my mother would ask. Like, wow. Had she had a lobotomy sometime between the corner of the street by the bank, where Santa 1 was standing, past Santa 2 in Woolworths, to here - Santa 3, in the children’s section of the department store?

So. The torch was from my parents, not Santa no matter what they said. Either way I loved it. That £2.99 must have been the best spent return-on-investment they’d ever got involved in. I don’t know what the main present was that year, but I remember everything about that cheap torch.

It was metallic, faintly tinny but rather weighty for my girly hands. Next to the on/off switch were two additional buttons. Click one and the beam was lit with a halo of red light. Click the next and a specific shade of green joined the circles. The three circles were distinct from one another – white red white green white. Mostly I’d keep the torch in the white green white position.

That beam of light pleased me more than I can say. There was something comforting in the way it lit the path as I walked with my older brother down the street on a late afternoon adventure. It was already dark and we were off up Southernwood Drive towards the wasteland between our house and the path that led us to school. I felt snug in my big coat and winter mittens, thick socks poking out from my Wellington boots that protected me from the snow. Everywhere felt silent and still, the way snow does. It was perfect for exploring through the raggedy grass on the slope back down towards our house.

I felt peaceful there, hanging with my brother, wrapped up all toasty even though my mittens were already getting soggy and my toes felt bitten off. My torch was a hit. At three years older than me, if my brother was into it, then that was the only seal of approval required. We took turns in lighting up the path before us, making the light rings whip and shudder as we swooped the torch back and forth. Go close to the ground and the outlines were firm and crisp; pull the torch back and the light became softer, hazier.

We returned home exhilarated from the cold, fingers and toes damp, red, stiff and throbbing. Sock tops matted with clumps of melting snow clinging to the wool. As I stood in the kitchen on one leg, balancing precariously with my hand on my mother’s head as she stripped me of outer layers, I was content. Soon I’d be in the bath making beardy faces on the black tiles with the bubbles, cleaning them to a shine with soapy water.

This was not the time that I did a poo in the bath. I was younger then and still shared bath times with my brother. It had been an accident and it just sort of slipped out. Not a big poo, but a poo nonetheless. I panicked and leapt up, water swirling around my calves. Not because I thought what I’d done was disgusting but because any minute now my brother was coming to join me and it just wasn’t polite to leave a turd lurking under the bubbles. He’d flip out and then I’d be in trouble.

How to catch a poo, though, especially when it’s a race against time. I stooped over and chased it with my hands, trying to catch it as it buffeted against this side of the bath-tub, then the other, ducking and diving in its avoidance tactics. My mother was calling my brother: ‘come on! It’ll be getting cold. It’s nearly time for bed.’ I was aware of sullen plod-steps up the stairs as I scooped inefficiently under the surface, killing the bubbles in my efforts to remove the misdemeanour.

As I heard him at the top of the stairs I managed to scoop water and the not-so-intact poo into my cupped hands. I wobble-jumped towards the toilet and threw the lot into the bowl. Flushing, I then sploshed back into the bath. When my brother walked into the bathroom, the water was still sloshing gently up against the shallow end.

Comments

Mister Kabouter

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 19:45:05 +0100

He sat looking out from behind the two dried-up plants near the door and it made her laugh. Little garden Kabouter has a cheeky painted grin and the ability to wolf-whistle at you as you pass the sensor hidden strategically in the tip of his watering can. With his unashamedly plastic appearance and kindergarden colours, he didn’t exactly squeal style and good breeding. But he did squeal ‘HAPPY!’ and that was good.

He had been a present from Gerard after she’d accidentally flashed her pubes at him one evening, during a game of Bingo at the bar. She’d read her bingo card wrong, thought she’d won when she hadn’t and had to pay the price of a forfeit. This involved getting iced with slushy cubes thrown down the pants. Gerard had done the honours and in order to show that she didn’t mind, it was all just a bit of fun, she’d happily goofed about with him under the spotlight. By showing willing and pulling her jeans forward ready for the forfeit, she’d also managed to show her girlie bits. She didn’t care. It was funny. And anyways, she was drunk.

At Magnus’ party the following weekend, Gerard had brought along a gift for her – Mister Kabouter, the wolf-whistling molester of dried-up plants and accidental cat contact. “This is for you, because I got to see your pussy,” he grinned, solemn and spoofing an awards ceremony. The gift was delightful – even more so when she switched on the sensor and Mister Kabouter whistled at her belly-button. She’d taken him home proudly and there he’d sat ever since, on the round green tray in the lounge by the sofa. He didn’t exactly fit in with the décor but he looked more content inside.

“He’s wasted out there on the balcony so he’s an indoor gnome,” she told Gerard when he first exercised his visiting rights. “I took the batteries out though, the cat didn’t see the funny side.”

Since last week Mister Kabouter sports a cat-sized red Egyptian fez, something else the cat didn’t see the funny side of. He wears it at a chirpy angle in order to accentuate its rakish nature, the black tassle brushed elegantly to the right-hand side. With his pointy hat hidden beneath the fez, his blue jacket and watering can obscured by those half-dead plants, he now has the air of a rather beardy Turk. She can’t look him in the eye for too long nowadays or she’ll burst forth with a guffaw and spill her coffee.

Less entertaining is the stack of washing Magnus has left at her apartment. Neighbours since he’d moved into the ‘hood two months ago from the other end of town, they were like little kids together, revelling in having a playmate so close to hand. Until his washing machine was carried up another flight of stairs (and she wasn’t going to help), her place was also Widow Twanky’s Wishy-Washy Self-Service Laundromat. Which was fine, except now she found herself folding and bagging his smalls in order to make room for her own on the radiator. He had spontaneously tackled the teetering piles of washing up whilst hanging in the flat, however, so fair’s fair.

Now there was no excuse for getting on with that document for work. The road-block of kitchen chores had been removed to make way for a full day’s sitting at the laptop and cracking the back of the project. First though, just a little something to eat, to seed once again the pile of dirty dishes.

Looking into the fridge has become a favourite pastime. The kitchen cupboards too. She religiously opens a door and checks to see if kind elves have stocked the shelves with tasty treats. Perhaps if she looks again, she’ll discover a chocolate bar she overlooked. Or fresh milk, that would do. Instead her hand glides once again past the noodles and rice, over the tinned kidney beans and chopped tomatoes, the tuna and chutney, the icing sugar she never uses and Marmite she rarely eats. Her treat-seeking missile fingers retreat and close the door. Ingredients aplenty do not satisfy her diversionary tactics - calling for a pizza sounds more like a plan.

Instead she sms’s Magnus: ‘if you’re coming back today bring ice cream. Quality ice cream.’ He arrives at the door with Robert instead and a bag of chocolates from HEMA. For the next two hours work is an impossibility. In its place comes a barrage of banter throughout which Magnus demands cigarettes and plays showbiz scissor-happy stylist. He dyes Robert’s hair while she takes a shower and then cuts hers. He does good, concentrating for a change and even offering to blow-dry it – usually she has to bang on about it for days until he is worn down by bribes into wielding his scissors. Robert sits on the rug and fixes her new lamp together, searching unsuccessfully for bulbs in the middle drawer.

“This is your ‘hospital bed’ hair”, Magnus tells her. She’s going onto the ward again. This time it’s planned and not especially serious. Previously it’s been an emergency and friends have arrived to find her zonked out on morphine, extremely sweaty and sporting the limpest, greasiest hair ever. It turned into a measurement of mess. Moans of ‘I can’t go until I’ve washed my hair’ would be met with ‘why bother? Its got hours to go before its hospital-bad.’

She’s not worried about it but people still think she’s being brave. She’s known about her condition since she was in her early twenties and its old news. Yesterday’s fish & chips paper. Except she’s not supposed to eat that kind of thing any more. Her mother has never seen her in hospital, nor her oldest friend Elaine. With Elaine it used to be an issue created mostly by geography - being in different cities on every occasion. Elaine had also never had anything especially bad happen to her, and she’d certainly spent no time in hospital so her under-developed empathy skills really couldn’t get their head around the thought of a medical condition and all that went with it. She wanted to, it wasn’t that. She just didn’t have the appropriate wiring. It was almost a joke. Now, it’s not an issue. In the last couple of years, amongst other things, she’s experienced a broken wrist, a fractured ankle bone and the death of one of her friends to ovarian cancer. So she’s clocked up a few more miles to practice her empathy skills on.

With her mother, it’s just a hassle. “What will people think of me?” is always the first thing her mother says when she hears she’s in hospital. “People will think I don’t care. Let me come and visit you.” To her mother, a parental visit is the done thing and a natural reaction. To her, it’s fussing. If mother arrives on the scene somehow that would mean more than anything else that she’s really really sick. No amount of morphine, intravenous or otherwise, could better signify ‘medical crisis’ than parental attendance.

Instead, on one level she looks forward to being trapped on a hospital ward. There’s nowhere to be, nothing to do. But you can still surreptitiously sms people, so long as you turn the volume off. She wouldn’t dare if the ward was full of scary machines hooked up to skeletons, but mostly fellow patients aren’t that spooky. Last time, though, the sweetest old woman died during the night and that made her cry the next morning. She didn’t especially get to know her and she certainly didn’t see it coming; it was the shock combined with the rawness of emotions you have when too many new drugs curdle in the veins. The woman hadn’t been hooked up to any machines fortunately, so there was no need for sms guilt.

This time round she has plenty of time to get organised and give a few friends the ward details. Magnus has already complained that it’s further away than the previous hospital and will only come if she lends him her bike. Not everyone gets to know. At work, for instance, they just think she’s taking time off. Bet your life though, that next time the shit hits the fan she’ll remember to bring it up at just the right moment.

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Lifeline

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 12:12:02 +0100

I was sixteen when I first had my palm read. Can’t remember how I knew about the place, down the old High Street. Maybe someone at school recommended it to me. The palm reader worked from a tiny studio with a big window near the bottom of the road, past the olde worlde sweet shop on the left where you could watch them rolling out seaside rock through the glass; past Milletts on the right with its bomber jackets and DM boots in the window; past Patchouli and its purple haze of hippy trinkets, further down the hill.

I didn’t contemplate for a second that this might be a risky, reckless or foolish thing to do. I was curious. I wanted to hear about me, to have someone tell me its all going to be okay, fear not, you won’t die sad and alone in a small seaside town with nothing going for it since William Harvey blew in off the seafront to discover the circulation of the blood, and Status Quo’s drummer went to the boy’s grammar school, down the road from mine.

I hated school, I hated my parents and I hated myself. Pretty typical small-town teenager, then, feeling suffocated by the dead-endness of the arcades down at the Rotunda and the brittle crunch of home perms on girls who matched their brand of fags to their Dorothy Perkins bag and bangles off the market. Palm-reading seemed like a good idea - I didn’t think twice about going on my own to let a stranger stroke the lines on my hand and tell me about me. At the time it was the right thing to do.

She fascinated me immediately and I wanted her to adopt me. One of her daughters went to my school, apparently. What must that be like? Having a woman with super-powers for a mother? Her husband had a second-hand shop a few doors up the road. He had a twisty waxed moustache and dress-sense that shrieked avant-garde. I loved it and was intimidated by it all at the same time. They’d been married at eighteen and lived with a travelling community of gypsies. She’d been taught her trade by an old gypsy woman who’d spotted her gift. “Anyone can learn it, so long as you have a knack for it”, she’d told me. “Like you, you could pick it up, you’re quite intuitive.” Oh, that was it. She had me at ‘hello’.

I went back to see her five or six times within an eighteen month period. She must have been bored silly, looking into the hands of a sixteen year old girl. Surely there couldn’t have been much to pick up on, with so naive a palm? She was always lovely, always patient and always terrible at spelling. I have the sheets of paper still, which she made notes on as she went along. There are headings like psyche, good years, love life, health, travel, creativity, mind, and so on. I’d get home and lock myself in my room to spend hours dissecting every word she wrote. What did she mean, ‘goat’s cheese and lower back’? Was that about my body or a general tip for good bones? ‘Good with people’? How? In what way? Why? I soaked up every scribble, every word of it and wrung it dry of any and all interpretations.

I went back once, worried that I wasn’t going to live past the age of 42. This was because a smattering of ‘good years’ ended at that age and my friend Jane said that her mum had gone and had her cards read and been told by the tarot reader that she couldn’t see any more and wouldn’t finish the reading because actually what she’d seen was the death of her husband. One-parent Jane and I had sat silently pondering this. The palm reader tried hard not to smirk at my melodramatic tale, which was kind and must have taken great self control. Apparently, its difficult to see so far into the future on young hands because not much life has been led yet to make an impression on the palms. If this was a gentle suggestion that I don’t come back for another twelve years then I didn’t get it. Instead I arrived six months later at her doorstep to find the door locked and the sign gone.

I was panicked. Why hadn’t someone called me? Where had she gone? How could she leave me like this? I loped back up the hill to her husband’s shop and asked for her there, agitated and urgent. He didn’t seem very entertained by my enquiry and was rather brusque, which made me feel foolish and needy. Which I was, so that’s fair. I felt bereft and directionless. Instead of sitting back and hearing every few months what I was going to be doing with my life, I now had to go work it out for myself. This struck me as a huge responsibility and cause for alarm. For weeks I studied those sheets of paper for clues: who was I? Would I be happy? Would I be famous or marry a millionaire with a yacht and his own island? Was I getting married at all? And what about living happily ever after?

After a while I simply forgot about the sheets of paper and psychic snapshots into my future. Other things, like O’levels and Nick Ross not noticing me got in the way. But I can’t throw them away, not after nearly twenty years. They are stuck together with stale old sellotape along the folds for extra protection and every now and again when I re-discover them, I check to see if anything has come true.

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Bank

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 12:08:18 +0100

From my sofa I can see the gardens of the flats below. Opposite my building is the back office of the local Postbank. Every night, without fail, they leave the light on. It is bright and there are no blinds to dim the glare. Instead, I can see straight into the room, with its sorting bags and piles of stationery.

I have a habit of glancing in to see what is going on. Nothing ever is. But I know that one day I shall see some activity that shouldn’t be happening, perhaps a break-in or a robbery. I shall call the police, who will catch the offenders red-handed. I shall be celebrated and my photo will be in the local paper.

Or perhaps I’ll just catch a glimpse of an illicit office affair. A sweaty balding pudding of a man will be backing a gawky middle-aged vrouw up against the glass, rifling through her blouse for her boobies. It will be a rushed crush of a moment and then they’ll part, she smoothing her hair, he straightening his tie and recomposing his glasses. I won’t report this activity to the police of course, but I’ll know what I saw. Next time I go into the Postbank for stamps, I’ll be served by the man. I’ll give him a sly knowing look and subtly nod my head in the woman’s direction. It will be so slight a move on my part that he won’t be sure if I’ve made it or not. But he’ll wonder about it and be wary of what I might know.

After that he avoids me if he can, or at least avoids my gaze if he has to serve me. I won’t go in often as I have no wish to make him feel unduly uncomfortable. But sometimes, if I’ve had a bad day and am feeling pensive, I’ll wander round to the Postbank and give the man a scare. I’ll find that it always sets me up right for the day, no matter how I’ve been feeling before.

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Game

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 12:06:51 +0100

There was a board game I loved playing called The Alley Cats. It had lots of plastic pieces shaped like trash cans with removable lids, fish bones, and flat cat shapes that could hide in the bins. No idea now how you played the game but those shapes made me happy. They were substantial in the hand and therefore comforting. Perhaps it was more fascinating to look at the board itself and hold the figures than to actually play; I don’t remember anyone ever playing it with me except my mum once, under duress.

We sat in the sunlight on my bedroom floor. I set up the game then sat back, waiting; I didn’t understand how to play and wanted to be able to pick up the rules by osmosis. Perhaps if I stared hard enough I’d get it. I found this very frustrating and still do. When does the moment of understanding come, the moment of revelation? My mother seemed to have the same problem as she picked up the rules in vexation and started to read. It can’t have been tricky; it was a board game for kids under the age of nine, but still. Following instructions wasn’t a family trait, it seems. We muddled through but I could tell it wasn’t bringing her much joy.

That took the fun out of it. Samantha Jowett with the black front teeth never wanted to play. Kimberley Bream – she of the three kids before the age of 20 – already had other games on her mind. I wouldn’t have even considered asking my brother, being the younger sister and all. Sometimes I’d get the game out, set it up and then try to play against myself but that was foolhardy because I always knew the move I’d just made and the strategy of where I was trying to go. Mostly, that game sat in its box until it was inadvertently sold at a boot-fair by a previous neighbour who was supposed to be storing some things in the garage whilst we moved to the new house.

Nowadays I like card games. I can spend hours at my computer on those Solitaire games. Or the old-skool way, with real playing cards on the rug. Best of all is with friends and a bottle of wine. Once at Janno’s house Magnus accidentally broke a chair in his rush to stand up, dash round the table and slap his trump card down in place. Fingers often got crippled out of action by aggressive enthusiasm over some advanced game of adult Snap or other. And woe! if you thought you’d try a subtle spot of bending the rules. That was out and out cheating and made Magnus in particular so ferociously unforgiving that it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

Marta and Eelco were also there at Janno’s place one evening and things got ugly. Marta and I thought it was hysterical to watch the lads jockeying over a game of Last Card, all indignation and self-righteousness over rules, tactics and skill. But eventually it got tiresome and none of us wanted to play with Eelco after that. Marta said it was his way of joking, to ‘act’ bothered and vengeful during a game, but she also admitted that it was pretty goddamn draining and not worth the hassle. Magnus wouldn’t let that go for weeks, but then, he’s a sore loser too.

Recently I’ve become fascinated by Mah Jong. There is an Internet version which I play as a diversionary tactic to delay the real work of the day. Magnus also acquired a proper game and we’ve been playing that of an evening. I love the patterns on the tiles and the chink-clink as you set them down upon each other. It can be a ponderous game and I like that. We played after dinner one evening, then again and again and again. Rafael hated it - he thought it boring; he stopped playing after the first round, then just stopped sitting at the table watching. He took his vodka to the other side of the room and tampered with the CD collection as we became increasingly absorbed in collecting sets of tiles.

Magnus had downloaded the rules off the Internet and we set the tiles up according to that. Except steps three and four weren’t very clear so the square shape was always wonky, with one side longer than the other and a tile left over. We’d take turns reading the instructions out, emphasising various parts in the sentences to see if that helped: “Place SEVEN tiles along the west or LEFT side of the square, remove the third tile from the EAST direction AND the seventh from THE SOUTH.” Didn’t work. Still had that wonky side. We played on regardless but ultimately it wasn’t a totally satisfying win.

Those tiles in themselves have a lot to do with the enjoyment. Their weight and coolness to the touch. There is something to be said for being able to hold them in your hand. Dominoes tiles have a similar effect on me but that is one game I never got into, except once in a Yorkshire pub on a rainy day, with a pint of bitter and a packet of crisps. As a kid, though, I never understood how you could play it properly and yet still keep the game within the confines of the table you were playing on. I constantly wanted to take the game off on tangents, adding tiles this way and that until there was a Dominoes splatter fracturing across the floor. Maybe that’s the point; it takes skill to keep the game heading in a general direction.

Elaine likes Scrabble and because she always beats me, I hate it. I don’t see myself as a sore loser, but never winning certainly takes the edge off it. She is gallant in her victory with a “well played” or a “that was lucky” but these sentiments just make it worse. She’s an architect, she shouldn’t be good with words; pictures are her world. I admit though, that when she got the card-game version, things perked up. Now we can spread the game on the floor across the whole flat if we choose to, and that amuses me.

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