No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year (10 page)

April 10

For the last week, I have been convinced I have throat cancer. I have woken at three in the morning, quaking with fear that first my tongue will have to be cut out, and then my vocal cords, and soon I will be able to communicate only in grunts, via notebooks and eventually in a strange American voice like Stephen Hawking.

Luckily this morning I remembered that I had had this fear before, and after extensive tests, it turned out I had an inflammation of the throat, due to something called acid reflux. Some valve that used to shut off at night to stop the acid hurtling up one’s windpipe or whatever it is, doesn’t work so well, and one had to take some special valve pills for a while till everything settles down. It is just one of the very minor cracks and creaks that come with early old age.

Took a couple of anti–valve shutting pills (or was it pro–valve closing pills?). And it seems to have done the trick.

April 11

Since I can’t worry about throat cancer anymore, I’ve now got time to be preoccupied with my current big worry: whether the baby will be OK or not. I woke at four in the morning, fantasizing myself into the most terrifying situation. The baby had been born hideously disabled, and mentally a vegetable. Chrissie and Jack loved it, but their lives were being destroyed. They wished, I knew, that it had not lived. One day when babysitting I took a pillow and smothered it. I then rang the police, was arrested and ended up in Holloway. Naturally Jack and Chrissie never wanted to talk to me again, and yet I knew they also were grateful for my releasing them, and the baby, from this terrible life. I was certain I’d done the right thing…By 5 a.m. I had set up an art class in Holloway, and was helping the entire prison with their social and educational problems…

April 12

Will these worries never end? Last night I woke at three in the morning and started panicking about getting old, I mean really old, and being in a chair in an old people’s home tied in with blankets with wee pouring down my legs. The telly would be on all day, Jack and Chrissie would have got fed up with visiting me and anyway would think I was a vegetable so it didn’t matter, and every time I got pneumonia I would be resuscitated with powerful antibiotics to live another million years till I finally popped off at 150. I started sweating with panic. Why am I having all this anxiety? Must be something to do with this baby’s arrival. I am sure of it.

Or may be it’s to do with spring. Oddly, people get more anxious and depressed in spring than at any other time of the year. And certainly everywhere is bursting with crocuses, and daffodils grow even in the hideous concrete pots on the pavement by Shepherds Bush underground.

Later

Rather irritated by whistling from Maciej. He now has a new girlfriend. He showed me a picture of her. She works in a nail salon and looks absolutely stunning. “I in love,” he said, touching his heart.

April 13

Slept all through the night, thank goodness. In the morning I weighed myself. Found I was sixty-seven stone eight pounds. Extremely worried, and wondered how, if I were ill, I would ever fit into the ambulance, but then realized that Michelle had got there before me and switched the knob underneath the scales to kilowatts, or whatever, damn her.

I keep my scales in the bathroom next to a tall mahogany chest of drawers inherited from my grandmother. She used to keep in it letters, bits of ribbon, magnifying glasses, all kinds of knickeryknackery…I, on the other hand, keep pills, ointments, bandages and quantities of out-of-date old prescription drugs. Experience has told me that though some drugs go off after their sell-by date, most don’t. Found myself suddenly wondering if sleeping pills, which had lost all their power over the years, could kill you, if you believed in them enough.

I have a box of whacking great sleepers left over from the sixties, bright blue capsules, hidden in a drawer for suicidal emergencies. It would be awful to swallow the lot and wake up still alive. But, on the other hand, if I believed strongly enough that they were still incredibly potent, would I die, whether they were strong or not? In other words, could one be killed by a placebo?

These thoughts were prompted by a mysterious e-mail from a total stranger who had apparently got cancer, gone to Africa and met a witch doctor, who asked if he could bring on his next visit:

Now that I look closer, this e-mail appears to have been forwarded by Philippa’s sister. Very irritating. She requests that I send it to ten of my friends who can pray for this bloke, whoever he is. I shall do no such thing.

All the same, the story is very seductive. Longed to rush off to the witch doctor with several bottles of gin and get instantly cured of everything—arthritis, bad dreams, incipient alcoholism…Might have a problem with the young cats, though. I fear they came to a sticky end.

Having retuned the scales, I found I was ten stone nine pounds, which is far too heavy. I moved it about six inches away only to be told that I was ten stone eleven—even worse. Now I am paranoid. Maybe I am really thirteen stone five, and don’t know it. Or maybe I am anorexic and about to die. Dream on.

Later

When I got down to the kitchen I found that I had no milk left. I have an awful feeling that Michelle took my last drop. I felt enraged. First because I had no milk but secondly because I find it so irritating to get upset over half an inch of milk. It is very difficult to convey to anyone that it is not the milk I mind, but the fact that I have to get dressed and go to the shop to buy more supplies in order to have a cup of tea. In the event, I tied my nightdress up tight with my dressing-gown cord, put my coat on over it, stuffed my bare feet into a pair of shoes and staggered round the corner to the supermarket. Apart from my hair sticking up on end I didn’t look much different from how I always do.

The sky was pouring with spring sunshine and, in the street, the imam of the local mosque bowed to me and said: “Good morning!” He is perfectly charming, with a long gray beard, and he was wearing a cricketing jersey over his dress and had a lovely embroidered hat on top of his head. So I didn’t feel too embarrassed about my own weird attire that day.

Last week, when I was sweeping leaves away from the road outside my house, he took the broom from me and insisted on doing it himself.

“As-Salaam Alaikum,”
he said. I replied, feeling very proud of myself:
“Wa-Aleikum Salaam.”
But this does not mean that I am learning Arabic. Those three words are going to be the very limit to my foreign-language learning in later life. And who knows, they might save me from death when I am kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq.

I am very lucky to have the mosque so close. It means that a) I will never get hit by a terrorist bomb and b) I have the pleasure of looking out of the window in the summer and seeing all the congregation out in the garden, praying while facing my house, it being in the direct line to Mecca.

I noticed to my surprise that the Kwik-Fit garage on the corner of the street had been boarded up and was for sale. Immediately went into panic mode. Just hope it’s not bought by someone who wants to turn it into a rock music venue with twenty-four-hour drinking. Will have to alert the Residents’ Association, of which I am chair. I was chairman until someone said it was sexist, so I had to turn into a chair.

I thought I had got away with my disguise and was hurrying home with my milk, when I was stopped by George, the black guy across the road. He is very tall, with two teeth missing and one gold one.

He has two very nice reckless sons. But this time he had a terrible tale to tell. The man downstairs, he said, had threatened him.

“My neighbor,” he shook his head. “He mad! You know what he do the other day?”

“No. What?” I asked. I knew this neighbor. A nasty piece of work of about sixty-five, covered in tattoos, with a bald head, who lives below George. Once he asked me to come in and measure his curtains for him “because my daughters won’t ’ave nuffink to do with me.” He is thick, whingeing, tough and lonely. When I wrote a few days ago that any man who turned his attention on me would set me sparkling and simpering, I was not including this creep across the road. Nor, actually, bearded counselors.

“A policeman came for one of my boys,” said George. “And my neighbor, he let them in the door! So I came down next day and I say: “When policeman ring my bell, you don’t let them in, you leave it to me to let them in, you hear?” So he get most unpleasant and that night, you know what, he bring a friend with a baseball bat and they come upstairs and they beat me op!”

“But he’s disabled!” I said. “He’s got a sticker on his car!”

“Disabled—nonsense,” he replied. “He’s a bad man. I don’t speak to him no more.”

When I got back I found that my dressing-gown cord had come adrift and my nightdress had been trailing on the pavement like a ball gown. God knows what they thought in the shop.

May 10th

Went to the Tate, where I was meeting Hughie for lunch after going round the Turner exhibition.

“Can you face it?” asked Hughie. “I mean, all those sunsets and ships at sea, was there something wrong with his eyesight, all that old rubbish?”

“Lovely!” I said.

As I stepped into the tube station I was quite bowled over by the idea that I no longer had to pay. Ever. “Freedom Pass!”—the very words are like the entry to a new life. On the platform I sat in a kind of dream of coddledness waiting for the train to come, thinking how lucky I was. I haven’t been on an Underground train since I was about forty. I waited, and waited…and then it turned out that the service had been halted because someone had committed suicide. Not that we were told that, of course, but I knew it because they said it was due to “passenger action” and a train driver I know told me that that was a euphemism for what was known in the business as a “one under.”

Felt very sad that anyone could want to die like that and imagined that he was probably young, youth being one of the most depressing times of life, in my experience. At the same time felt fantastically irritated that whoever he was decided to commit suicide on the very day that I was taking my first free trip on the Underground.

When I arrived at the Tate (and no, I will not call it Tate Britain, whatever the marketing men say), Hughie looked even older than I remembered him from the DVD evening. He said that on his way a pregnant black woman had even got up for him in a bus. “Everyone is very keen on old gentlemen,” he says.

Of course, he
is
older. He is sixty-five and the gap in our ages, oddly, seems far greater than between me and someone of, say, forty. Or, come to that, thirty. The thing is that those people who did National Service and missed out on being young in the sixties simply don’t share the same common cultural language as those of us who, like the young today, were into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Five years older than me and the man is still into suits. Hughie wears a jacket and tie wherever he goes. And yet these people imagine we are the same age because we both know all about thrift and pen hospitals and Lyons Corner Houses and ration books, etc.

What makes my generation so utterly distinctive is that we had one foot in an almost Victorian generation, and another in the new technological revolution. We’re much more geared to big changes in our lives than the generation just before us. We were brought up by a prepill, washing-sheets-by-hand-removing-the-water-by-putting-them-through-a-hand-turned-mangle generation, but then we lived through the affluent sixties and later through the plunge into microchips and huge advances in technology, experiencing a seismic shift that has made us far more adaptable to change than either those who were young before the sixties or those who were young after them. It helps, too, that it’s hard for us sixties’ survivors ever to shake our heads worriedly about today’s youth and say: “Ah, they aren’t like the young people of
our
day.” The young today
are
like the young of our day. If anything, they’re possibly less adventurous and more responsible.

Anyway, off we went into the exhibition. Going to an art gallery these days is like entering a rather civilized old people’s home. Everyone is nearly one hundred and smelling of pee, and they’re all bent double on walking frames and listening to the talking guides with the volume so high that you can hear every word leaking out between their ears and the headphones.

“Oh, dear,” said Hughie, looking around in rather a depressed way. “Pictures by dead people being looked at by nearly dead people. I
do
hope I don’t live too long. The idea of another thirty years—what total hell.”