Blog archive

3 February 2010

Bystanding

Despite all subsequent activity, since new man and I went our separate ways (and yes, hair gel did play its sticky part) the weekend that I didn't spend in The Halkin passed idly at home in the void that is the life of the recently single.

It goes like this:

You've let your friends slip a little bit to accommodate romance, and so, on Friday, though you've arranged for your daughter to stay out in anticipation of a torrid evening, it now looks like consisting of you, cheese on toast and the boxed set of Grey's Anatomy. In the afternoon, you're sitting in the kitchen in the last wash of sunlight fighting its way through the grime of the window. The table, for once, is so clean it looks like it has been licked, the dishwasher is empty, the washing machine is empty, the dryer is empty, the whole house is empty and it's just you, laptop open, the click of the keys measuring the seconds, and work - trying to make a sceptre flit across the webpage instead of a cursor - isn't working so that the only hotspot in your life is the one you've created in Flash.

Did you hear a loud, thundering boom?

You can't remember. You may be torturing yourself, but you just can't remember, and yet - later it haunts you - that fleeing feeling that there was a tumultous crash and that maybe, idly, you listened, wondering what it was, and heard nothing further, and so went on - click, click, clicking, reloading the page, refreshing the image, click, click, click.

In fact, in the evening, you did go out. You wandered round to the local Tapas bar with friends, forgiving enough of your neglect, to take pity on you, where you ate Serrano ham and tortilla and lamb chops and washed it down with a couple of glasses of the red wine that you haven't been drinking for the last 21 days, but which, tonight, damn it, you think you need.

You flirt with a short Spanish man who comes up to your armpits, even when you're not towering above him on a bar-stool, who talks as though he's had his jaw wired shut, and whose gentle lithping lulls and comforts you into pleasure, in spite of yourself. And later, you walk home in the frost and let yourself in to the dark, gloomy house that seems to mock you with the unexplored possibilities of its emptiness. You double lock the door.

Next day you rise early, just to spite yourself, and carry on click, clicking until you decide you should to go to the supermarket for food that you're not going to eat, cook, or need, but nevertheless buy, store in the fridge in which everything is at right angles, and will probably throw out untouched before the end of the week. The afternoon turns to evening, broken only by a visit to the National Gallery to see The Sacred Made Real where you marvel at homoeroticism through the ages, before you while the evening away watching people pretend to be even more miserable that you, but with better figures and medical degrees.

At eleven o'clock, you're are still sitting there. The hotspots are no longer hot and the laptop has crashed. You've written emails you haven't sent (because who wants to advertise that they are sitting at home on a Saturday night) and forlornly called your youngest daughter who never goes across the threshold when there's the hint of squeaking bed springs, but has now just announced she is spending her second night out and may be back some time tomorrow, but only for a change of clothes.

The house is as quiet as a grave.

Your phone hasn't rung once.

You lock all the internal doors before you go to sleep, which you do fitfully, but for once, the floorboards and old walls are merciful and don't advertise their creaking, aching limbs while you lie awake, in the middle of the bed, which doesn't really fool anyone into making it feel occupied.

By Sunday, you're sick of the bloody website, and think Doctor Dreamy Derek is a wet prat, and you sling on your wellington boots and plod through the mud on Wormwood Scrubs where people look at you oddly because you are not accompanied by a dog. Damn it, even here you feel single. Back home, you walk up the red tile path and let yourself back into the house which fails to notice your arrival. You don't even glance at the house next door which cuddles up to yours, separated only by one flowerpot which your neighbour tends. Why should you? Unless the door is standing open, which has happened once or twice, or the burglar alarm has gone off, which has happened two or three hundred times, why would you look next door? Did you look when someone broke in through the side window and robbed the place? Did you look when another opportunist climbed over the back wall and let themselves in the bedroom window and stole all her mother's jewellry? Did you look the day that the woman who has lived there for the last 23 years set fire to her blouse and calmly called the ambulance herself, although you were at home and could have helped?

No. No. And no.

You did look the night the neighbour's daughter tried to kill the mouse with a brush and woke you up in the middle of the night screaming. The walls between you are so thin, you used to able to listen to the Today program in the morning without turning on the radio. They're so thin you can hear everything.

Can't you?

In the evening you go to the theatre with someone from work and get lost on the drive back, not getting in to bed until almost midnight. Daughter is in her bedroom. Her bag is slung across the kitchen table. Son is in his bedroom. His bike is poleaxed in the hall. There is a knife smeared with peanut butter on the kitchen counter.

Signs of life as we know it.

The office next morning feels like going to a holiday camp.

And then at the end of the day you park the car outside the house. It's dark. You notice a light on next door, not in itself unusual, but half of one window seems to be gone, and the other has a crack in it that's been mended with black electrical tape. Your heart sinks. Damn it, she's been burgled again. And your eyes immediately swing to your own front door, wondering if you've been hit too. But your son's bike is still in the hall so, no - even if he's fighting demons in the Land of Ork all day, he probably, might have, would have, surely, heard someone breaking in. You are about to turn the key in the lock when you hesitate. Your good neighbourliness kicks in and overrules your fear of intruding and you bang on the door.

Which is when, finally, you see your neighbour lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

Quite dead and bloodied.

Where, apparently, the police think she has been since Friday.

Less than six feet from where you sat around all weekend - both of you, home alone by yourselves.

But it's only later that you start to pick at the scab of your memory and convince yourself that perhaps you heard her fall.

And did nothing.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 2:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

To beard or not to beard

Then Sales, who is also sporting a - say - 2 o'clock shadow, asks me if he should shave or not because he has a date tonight with the guy who facebooked him after selling him a couple of tickets at the theatre last week.  Ah the modern world, huh?

'Mmm, well is he clean-shaven, I mean if you rub your chins together are you going to ignite?'

He gave me the haughty stare that he seems to reserve mainly for me and deigns to initiate me into whether or not tonight will be a meeting of chins.  'No, he's smooth.'

Very, if he can chat you up on Facebook after meeting you once.

'Shave,' I say.  But I'm a middle aged woman.   I don't think my preferences hold much sway in boy circles, so I think again.  'Or maybe not.'

'That's very helpful...'  He says.  'How was I the other night?'

'What other night?'

'When we went to the theatre together?'

'I don't remember.'

'Oh come on, you were with me, why can't you remember?  Cast your mind back and think!'

I can't.  It's a  blank.  All I can remember is the mystified look on the young woman (and her mother) who we ran into in the foyer as she wondered who the hell the old matron was who was accompanying her gay friend , though this was a problem I had anticipated with a little help from my frenemies at work. 

'But what will people think when they see you?'  Chief Sales had asked when I mentioned that young Sales and I were going out for a night of culture. (Look, he asked me...)

'That I'm his mother, or his aunt or something...  Surely!'

She looked sceptical. 

There was rhyming slang in there.  I just know it. 

Posted by Writer in Residence at 1:34 PM 1 comments links to this post

May the Stubble Be With You

We're having a Beardathon at work. Well, by we I mean Editorial, Receptionist, Corvus and Contract. All came in clean shaven on February 1st with the aim of seeing who can grow the biggest beard by the end of the month. I'm thinking we should run a book and my money would be on Editorial - it would have been Contract but he succumbed on Day 3 and the sandpaper glint disappeared from his cheeks.

'I think he probably lives with a woman,' I said when Editorial bemoaned the fact that Contract had thrown in the hot towel.

'What do you mean? I live with a woman,' He replied indignantly. 'My mum loves my beard.'

You got it at mum, didn't you?

But are there really women apart from mothers who love beards? I assume there must be since my ex took his razor burn with him to the new woman when he left me. I wasn't sad to see it go because, despite Mrs Arafat telling me on very good authority that Yasser's beard didn't scratch (waste time on the PLO's mismanagement of millions when there's the important matter of physical intimacy to discuss - are you mad?) - scratching I can handle, it's the soft fluffy hairiness that I find sooooo wrong on so many levels..

And the way they stroke it.

We were talking about hair as a male attribute in the office the other day (waste time on literature when you there's the important matter etc...). 'I like bald men,' said one of the lithe young lovelies with flowing locks to her waist and a, presumably, hirsute Italian stallion tucked away in her weekends.

'Me too - but that's just as well, because after fifty you don't always have a lot of choice.' I said, authoritatively.

Well you do. But it's either that or hair gel.

Crispy hair gel.

That gets stuck in between your fingers if you try to run them through it, just before they jump back and yell: 'Don't touch the hair!'

Posted by Writer in Residence at 1:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

For those who like lists

In the last week while not blogging I saw The Prophet, Swan Lake, The Misanthrope (for goodness sake Kiera, eat something), The Habit of Art (there should be an F in there somewhere and you can guess where it goes), Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Hairspray (at which, for the first time ever, I groped the breast of an ...erm woman - Phil Jupitus in drag - and met Josie Lawrence which was only marginally less exciting), broke up with the new man, fell out with the old man, made up with the old man again, spend the weekend at The Halkin, had a great meal at Maze and a noisy but delicious meal at Buca del Lupo, visited the Saatchi, the Serpentine, the National Gallery, The British Museum, The Tate Modern, and found a dead body.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 8:48 AM 0 comments links to this post