The To-Do List (17 page)

Thursday 5 April

This walking thing isn’t really working for me. Before I was halfway home from yesterday’s city centre Subway excursion I was too knackered for words. After a short internal debate I hailed a taxi, planning to give the excuse, should the driver ask, that I was late for an important meeting. I needed to find a form of exercise that’s even lower impact than walking. When I mention this to Claire, she suggests that I ‘try limiting my exercise to breathing’. There is little doubt that she is being sarcastic.

Friday 6 April

I have just invested a considerable sum in a flash-looking Carrera mountain/road bike hybrid, along with a brand-new helmet, lights and yellow rain coat thing all from Halfords. Cycling, I have decided, is the answer to all my exercise needs. Buying a bike means sufficient financial outlay to guilt me into using it and should things not quite go to plan I will at least have something to sell on eBay. It’s a win win situation.

Saturday 7 April

The bike is going on eBay. In a single journey to the centre of Birmingham I have been cut up, yelled at, beeped and nearly knocked over by a lorry and that was before I even left my own road! Having spent an afternoon getting to grips with how stupendously inconsiderate most car drivers are, I can’t see how this cycling thing is going to work. Which would I rather be? Slightly cuddly with a limited life span? Or thin but only because I’d been flattened by a lorry driver who wasn’t paying enough attention?

Sunday 8 April

I’m in Manchester for a work thing and being away from home is proving to be somewhat hazardous to my diet. Instead of my usual bio-yoghurt lunch I had an M&S cheese and carrot chutney sandwich and a bottle of water on the train. This wouldn’t have been so bad had I not chosen to purchase a packet of Percy Pig sweets as a present for Lydia. Having consumed most of my lunch before my train had even left New Street station, I proceeded to inhale the entire bag of Percy Pig sweets before we’d reached Wolverhampton.

       
I resolve to get myself back on the straight and narrow and stay there during tonight’s festivities.

Monday 9 April

Well, I’m back from Manchester and not only did I fail abysmally to recover from my Percy-Pig-inspired fall from grace, I have made things a lot worse. If I was the kind of bad workman who blamed his tools I’d put the blame for my downfall firmly at the feet of the people I work for. Having laid on a reception featuring free booze with mini fish and chips, they made matters worse by shepherding me into the hotel restaurant for a slap-up meal and bottle of wine. Now as the kind of man who can’t resist the temptation of eating a whole bag of soft-fruit-gum-based confectionery that I’d bought
for my daughter
, what chance did I have of resisting this free booze ’n’ food extravaganza?

Tuesday 10 April

I’ve just weighed myself. After ten days of suffering I have actually managed to lose three whole pounds! Expect my diet book and work-out video next January because I am a genius. This To-Do-list malarkey is a walk in the park.

Chapter 15: ‘Now you’ve reached the halfway point see what the Sunday Night Pub Club think of what you’ve done so far.’

It was hard to describe just how good I felt when, on the last Sunday in April, I had reached the point designated by the Sunday Night Pub Club as halfway to my destination. The temptation to count up ticks as I went along was great, but I knew not to focus on the numbers but rather on getting things done. ‘It’s like birthday cards,’ I explained to Claire one evening. ‘They make your home look that bit more cheery on your big day but you mustn’t take the number you get as an annual barometer of your popularity.’

       
Still, my mid-mission audit was a necessary evil if I was going to keep up the level of energy required to fulfil what remained of the To-Do List, so with great trepidation I made my way to the Queen’s Head to stand up and be counted.

       
Ordering my usual pint, I waited for the other members of the Sunday Night Pub Club to turn up. Danby was first, quickly followed by Henshaw then Gary and by the time it got to half past nine Kaytee, Steve, Arthur and Jo had arrived too.

       
‘So how’s this all going to work then?’ Jo pulled a hammer out of her bag.

       
We all looked at her as if she had lost the plot. She grinned and explained, ‘We’re judges aren’t we? And it’s the nearest thing I could find in the flat to a gavel.’

       
I took out the List, and explained how I thought the evening should go: ‘I’ll read out the items that I believe I’ve ticked off the List, and explain to you how I did them then you ask a few questions and agree whether I’ve actually achieved them or not.’

       
‘What about appeal?’ asked Jo. ‘Are you allowed to appeal or is our word final?’

       
I thought for a moment. Danby and Arthur could both be pretty harsh judges so if something really was in doubt I needed to know that I’d get a fair deal. I looked at Jo and her lump hammer and smiled. She’s from Tamworth. There are no fairer people in the nation than those from that area of the country. ‘I’m making you the appeals judge, Jo. Please treat the responsibility of your position with the seriousness it deserves.’

       
‘Buy me a pint and the decision is yours!’ said Jo, banging her hammer on the table. The surrounding tables went silent. We were in for a long night.

‘So, have you actually lost weight?’

       
It was just after ten and having managed to get them to agree to most of my ticks I was now locked in debate with Henshaw.

       
‘Of course I’ve lost weight.’

       
‘Yeah, but how much weight? An ounce? A couple of pounds? Three stone? What?’

       
I looked down at my pint. ‘Okay, okay, here’s the truth, I dropped a couple of pounds during the first couple of weeks of my diet but then I started getting busy, and the novelty started to wear off and . . .’ I paused and gestured to the pint of Carling in front of me. ‘This stuff doesn’t exactly help the cause so the bottom line is, yes, I lost weight but I also put some on too.’

       
Henshaw shook his head mournfully. ‘Mate, you know I’m on your side but there’s no way that can constitute a tick.’

       
The others were shaking their heads too.

       
‘He’s right, Mike,’ said Kaytee. ‘To tick off “lose weight” I think you’ve got to lose weight and keep it off for at least a month.’

       
I looked pleadingly over at Jo.

       
‘That look won’t wash here, Gayle. I’m with Kaytee and Henshaw on this one.’

       
‘Right,’ I conceded, ‘so I don’t get the “lose weight” tick because I didn’t keep it off or the “learn a new language tick”, because I can’t remember a single word of Italian?’

       
‘That’s right,’ said Jo, rubbing her hands like a power-crazed loon. ‘You haven’t got any problems with that, have you? I wouldn’t like to think that we weren’t taking this seriously.’

       
‘Of course not,’ I replied dryly. ‘So apart from those two things I can have all my ticks? Let’s count them up then.’

       
I was more than a little nervous. A lot of this past month had been taken up by tasks that weren’t exactly easy ticks and some ticks I expected to be easy ended up being almost impossible. For instance Item 977: ‘Alphabetise CD collection’, ended up taking me more than a week to complete because a) I’d neglected to factor in just how many CDs I owned and b) halfway through organising them it occurred to me that they needed to be sub-divided by genre.

       
I listened to my friends totting up the ticks, arguing about the total and then going back for a recount, before arriving at a different number altogether.

‘Well, according to our stats,’ began Jo, ‘by this date in your mission you should be somewhere around the halfway mark and I can now reveal that even with your refused-tick total standing at two you’ve done better than expected and have completed a staggering six hundred and forty-one ticks!’ She picked up her lump hammer and held it under my chin as though it was a microphone and I an Olympic athlete who’d just smashed a world record.

       
‘So how do you feel right now, Mr Gayle?’

       
‘Right now?’ I couldn’t prevent a cheesy grin attaching itself to my face. ‘I feel on top of the world.’

       
In retrospect this was like waving a two-fingered salute in fortune’s direction. And whether I believed in fate or not, fate appeared to believe in me enough to feel insulted by my big idea for To-Do-List success. As less than a week later the To-Do List came to a crashing halt.

PART FIVE

May–August

(During which I discover that this List thing isn’t going to be an absolute walk in the park after all)

Chapter 16: ‘Try your best not to die . . . or failing that at least do it quietly.’

The halting of the To-Do List occurred on the Sunday following my halfway audit. I returned home from the Sunday Night Pub Club just after midnight and slowly made my way to bed. Claire would normally be lying on her side with Maisie next to her in her Moses basket, but although Maisie was fast asleep Claire was nowhere to be seen.

       
I stuck my head out of the door and noticed that Lydia’s bedroom light was on.

       
‘Babe?’ I called out in a stage whisper. ‘Everything okay?’

       
‘Sort of.’

       
I was confused. What exactly did ‘sort of’ mean? Had her mother come to stay unannounced? Had we got mice? Had our elder daughter just announced that she sees dead people?

       
With much trepidation I gingerly entered Lydia’s bedroom prepared to avert my eyes, leap on a chair or scream (or some combination of all three) should the need arise. But Claire was sitting on the edge of our daughter’s bed gently stroking Lydia’s forehead.

       
‘What’s up? Is she ill?’

       
Claire nodded.

       
‘What is it? The ’flu?’

       
She shook her head.

       
‘A runny tummy?’

       
Another shake.

       
‘So what then?’

       
‘What’s the single thing in the world that you’re most afraid of?’

       
‘Being convicted for a crime I haven’t committed and spending the rest of my life in prison.’

       
‘I mean other than that.’

       
‘Okay, then it has to be receiving murderous phone calls on stormy nights only to call the operator and be told that they’re coming from inside the house!’

       
Claire laughed. ‘If you carry on like this I’m just going to have to come straight out with it.’

       
‘Look, I’m a grown man, I’ve got a To-Do list and I’m doing it. Whatever it is I’m sure that it’ll be—’

       
Finally the penny dropped and my frontal lobes began to throb with anxiety.

       
‘You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about, are you?’

       
Claire nodded.

       
‘But how could this happen?’

       
‘It’s been floating around pre-school apparently.’

       
‘Floating around pre-school? You make it sound like a fairy godmother. If there was an outbreak of typhoid at pre-school you wouldn’t say it had been “floating around”, would you?’

       
‘You’re being hysterical,’ said Claire firmly.

       
‘Too right I’m being hysterical,’ I screeched. ‘Our daughter has got chicken pox.’

Now chicken pox in a four year old is no big deal. Kids get it all the time. It’s almost a rite of passage. And hey, don’t some mums actually throw chicken pox parties so that they can get the whole experience out of the way as soon as possible? But my concern wasn’t actually for my four-year-old daughter. My concern was one hundred and ten per cent for me, because at the age of thirty-six I was one of the few people I knew that had never had chicken pox.

       
Like any good borderline hypochondriac I’d skim-read enough self-diagnosing health-related web pages to know that chicken pox and adulthood were not a good combination. While in childhood the worst that could happen was you might end up with the odd scar, in adulthood there was a 1 in 100 chance of inflammation of the lung (pneumonia) plus the added (albeit very rare) complication of inflammation of the brain (encephalitis). The words from one particular website I once visited while convinced that I was showing symptoms of beri beri were burned into my mind: ‘See a doctor urgently if you become breathless, confused, or if you have any unusual or severe symptoms.’