Cake or Death (7 page)

I imagine we will all be making our coffee in the toilet now. This sounds too much like Harold Nicolson’s remark to his wife Vita Sackville-West after the release of the post-war Berridge Report that aimed at bringing health and cleanliness to the 90 percent of Britons who weren’t upper-class. I suppose we shall all shop at Woolworth’s now, he said. For years I hated him for saying this.

Now I see his point. I suppose we shall all stay in Marriotts now, would be my version. Put me up against a wall and shoot me.

I’d like it to be in the courtyard of the Oberoi Grand, if you would grant me a last request. By the pool, please, with those lovely teak chaises longues with the backs that kept sliding slightly to the left until I collapsed on the tiles and had to be put aright by the attendant. Oh, how we laughed.

Because it was so funny, you see.

I suspect a great many people have stopped writing in their diaries since the reelection of Georgie in 2004. There’s nothing happy to say. And it wasn’t as if they insisted on recording only happy events back then; if they had, their diaries would be as smooth and empty as the freshly ironed Cuddledown fitted sheet I place on my bed every Friday morning. Like my diaries.

My diaries were never intended to record events anyway. Who wants to recall them in all their feckiness?
Reading them years later makes me wince. But I did use them to recall my state of mind, whatever I happened to be thinking about at the time. Like Virginia Woolf’s diaries except seventeen thousand times less able and of no conceivable interest to any human in the future.

But I thought I should shove in a Specimen Day, by which I mean a day plucked at random, a sampling of whatever was irritating my epidermis. On June 20 of 2006, say.

Woke up feeling slightly better than usual. Since I mirror my husband’s insomnia, I wake up three times a night, which would not be so bad, but really the last wake-up, hours before any sane person is conscious, is so 4:48 psychosis, thank you, playwright Sarah Kane, and I’m sorry you’re dead although you were clearly determined to die, no one manages it with a shoelace while under suicide watch in a mental hospital unless they really really want to be done with it.

So I pop a pill, which my husband does not do because he believes it’s the easy way out. He is British, therefore will take the hard way out, with Gravol, thus feeling dopey all the next day. Take a quarter of a Gravol for nausea, no more, I say. Gravol is a bad drug. All the worst drugs are over-the-counter. Why don’t you go to the doctor, tell him you are going mad (or I am) from lack of sleep and get something that works for chrissakes, but he won’t. He’d rather moan about it. So I have this trick now. He moans and I say, “That’s awful, my love,” and he feels comforted and I hear no more.

I do mean it, but I admit the “my love” is a bit formulaic at this point.

A welcome change in my life since I left my last job is that I no longer wake up after this pre-dawn pill in the throes of a bad dream. For sixteen years, I would dream of being unable to escape a building.

This morning I awoke from a protracted dream in which I was being given oral sex by some guy. This is a euphemism, of course. The man had his entire head inside my vagina and was working away obligingly (although this is anatomically wrong of course) and it was pleasurable. I could not reach orgasm so when he finally took his head out after much dedicated work, he was pale, wizened and wet, looking almost like a tadpole, a sea creature. He’d done without oxygen and all that salty juice had made him something of a SpongeBob, with human eyes turning vaguely fishlike.

It was a change at least.

Stumble downstairs to read paper, ingest boxed cereal poured into a bowl, shower, inspect garden, then tackle the usual round of tasks that astound me as an adult. They’re mainly paperwork: tax instalments, bill payments, forms to fill in, e-mails to answer or postpone answering, a phone call to make to an editor who wants me to write about the Photoshopping of the female face on magazine covers (thus ensuring that we never look like our pictures and thus never feel human), her unexpected yes to a price per word that I’d hoped would repel her, magazines to read out of duty, packages of books from Waterstones, online shopping for Roman blinds so I don’t have to sew any more out of bloody white sailcloth for the porch that bakes in the afternoon sun and fades the black
wicker furniture to white, $150 worth of Poudre T. LeClerc face powder to order from California because it is only available in person in Paris and I’m running out and you don’t want to see my un-matted face …

What upsets me is the time and trouble it takes to grind through each task. I clearly remember not doing this sort of thing when I was young. And it isn’t all to do with the fact that I rented an apartment then. Home ownership brings paperwork, but not this much. True, I didn’t pay taxes then. I was poor. I didn’t wear face powder either. My skin was young. I had no porch and little money to buy books, certainly none for magazines. I saw my friends or I wrote and phoned them. It was no hardship not to have e-mail.

I have spent hours on things that don’t matter, although I know from the testimony of those who suffer from depression that the anguish of not doing these things far outweighs the boredom of doing them. They’re like flea bites. Hundreds of flea bites.

Read Virginia Woolf’s
Moments of Being
, her collection of essays read aloud to the Memoir Club set up in the forties or thereabouts by Molly McCarthy, married to the impossibly ill-focused and random-minded Desmond McCarthy. There is a coziness to this. Over the years I have tried to buy everything by and about Woolf worth purchasing, with the aim in mind that one day I shall retreat to my bed (or chaise longue.
“Vita brevis
, chaise longue,” as my friend Joey says), read Woolf and occasionally dine on toast and jam and various hot drinks. Really, I would be perfectly content.

This may be the only link between my youth and these troubled years: I always wanted it to be just me and Virginia. Lord, how I want that Blair man to be gone so that we can plod around the south of England visiting all the houses Woolf did. A new book has just uncovered a series of holiday homes. Clearly they need me in the Home Counties. And I might even go to the much-deteriorated St. Ives in Cornwall again—the century has not been kind to that town—and try to see its good points. Point.

The computer man visits. After the last $800 bill, S. feels we are owed a free visit from Firesnacks, since the program that stores this book in complete safety has once again failed to function. Andrew attaches a lolling plug. The program springs into action. I urge him to send me a bill for driving to my home to straighten a plug.

Since the house is being eaten by squirrels, and they are squirrels of particular malevolence, I feel, I Google a firm that sells outdoor hardware gear type stuff and for $150 a “Transonic PRO Pest Repeller.” It is intended to repel all animals from my garden, from mice to raccoons to deer. The noise it emits is apparently silent to humans, but deeply irritating to animals. Genius, I thought, I’ll kill me some squirrels.

The black box arrives. After studying the chart on the back and the little icons that refer to the animals to be repelled, I realize that the sound the box emits to repel anything larger than a sow bug is deeply irritating to humans. It sounds like a giant woodchuck a thousand feet high clicking its teeth. I had been thinking more of a piercing sound, that ring tone they’ve developed that can
be heard by teenagers but is inaudible to anyone over forty-five. I tested it on the Internet, and it was true. I couldn’t hear this sound at 15,000 decibels.

What I have now is a device plugged into the mains on my deck that will repel earwigs from the area around my kitchen window. Anything else will laugh at my sound system, now turned down, which sound likes a tiny woman tapping the nail of her index finger on the bar as she waits for her date to arrive.

No, I won’t take it back. I can’t be arsed. At least my purchase has enabled me to keep the kitchen safe from earwigs. Not that I have ever been troubled by earwigs. But it won’t be a problem to come.

Nighttime is a puzzle. Air conditioning? So wrong. Windows open? Yes. Fan? Not sure? Two blankets or one blanket? Can’t decide. Have we PVRed Stewart and Colbert? Is the perimeter secured with the Protectron alarming device? Ground-floor windows closed? Lampe Berger sealed? Dehumidifier in basement emptied?

It is a specimen day, so unlike the specimen days of my youth which encompassed one or two things. It is not an improvement. Or is it an improvement? Discuss.

Ah, the new Brookstone catalogue is here and all is well. It makes me feel smart and superior, as well I should. For the Brookstone catalogue would lift the spirits of Polyfilla. I may be inert, I may harden and be painted over, says the spackle, but at least I don’t sell $125 2-metre-long radio-controlled sharks that glide through the water, “bringing drama and excitement to your backyard pool.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a toy shark.”

“What does it do?”

“It brings drama and excitement to my backyard pool.”

That’s the Brookstoner for you. They are a simple, hopeful people, hungry for novelty and easy to thrill, owners of mall-sized warehouses of crap gadgets that look good for four seconds until you think, Why? Or in the case of Red State Americans who are the Brookstone heartland clientele, Why not?

I have a history with Brookstone. I once ordered one of their gadgets over the phone, a Tranquil Moments sound machine for nighttime, and you can tell from how I write this how soothed I am today. It reached me months later and broke fairly promptly, but that wasn’t the problem. It was the call from the bank that operates my credit card. A man on the other end sighed. “If you’re Heather Mallick at your home number, you haven’t just spent $12,000 in a New Jersey mall, have you.”

No, I said. Please kill that card but good.