The Unreliable Placebo

by Gill Mather

  For probably at least two decades kids aged seventeen and over have had to be written to specially and asked to sign the Contract to agree to the sale. However some people I know who were asked in their late teens to do so, amid all sorts of dire threats from their parents if they refused, say they didn't take it in properly and simply didn't believe that their home could be removed so suddenly and within weeks inhabited by strangers. I must have written hundred of letters to teenagers myself asking them to sign a sale Contract without ever thinking about the emotional side. Since it was work for me, I must have closed my mind to the implications of what I was asking them to do. After all, my own childhood home had remained secure until earlier this year when, even aged thirty five, I had felt more than a little upset to see it being off-loaded to new people and ceasing to be my safe haven forever.

  Though I have to say that the new residence did look very alluring in the agent’s photos.

  “There’s lots going on Anna.”

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “Ooh loads of things. There’s a committee that organises events for us all. I’m going to be on it next year.”

  “Us all?

  “Yes. The residents.” She says this as though I’m weak in the head.

  The residents? I feel like saying. But I don't for fear of being made again to feel like a simpleton by my own mother who hasn’t in fact worked a stroke since marrying my dad aged nineteen. OK, she’s done quite a bit of charitable stuff and I suppose she looked after us pretty well though she had lashings of spare time especially after my brother and I had started school.

  “The group’s called The Friends of Baker’s Lane.”

  “How original,” I say. “Look, it’s entirely up to you, but you could give me a taste of what these entertainments are all about.”

  “Well there’s quiz evenings, a street party, open houses, a safari supper….”

  “A safari supper?” Since when have my parents even known what such a thing was let alone partaken of such an event.

  “Yes,” says my mother apparently through gritted teeth. She pauses. “Look Anna you need to grow up. We’re retired now and we’re entitled to have some fun.”

  “Mum, what in heaven’s name are you talking about? You’ve been retired since you were nineteen. You haven't done an honest day’s paid work….”

  My mother hangs up on me.

  Oh well we managed at least to have a conversation without my marital status being trotted out or any searching questioning about Dennis or others I might have met or be meeting. Chance would be a fine thing. This is though the thing about parents. They can say exactly what they like to you, but you just try and get over a few home truths yourself and all hell breaks loose. However I know she’ll be on the phone again soon and indeed she is and we firm up my dates.

  “We’re putting you on the third floor. It’s a full suite of rooms up there….” I know. I read the estate agent's particulars. “….so it’ll be all private for you.” She’s silent for a moment, a rare thing with my mother. “You can bring, you know, a friend if you want to.” And here comes the fishing: “Of course it doesn't have to be a man. You might, you know, feel like more gentle female companionship these days.” She lowers her voice and almost whispers the last sentence.

  “Oh mum!”

  “I didn't mean….I wasn't implying….you know.” Again the hushed pseudo-respectful tones almost like an undertaker.

  “Well, let’s make things absolutely clear. I haven't switched sides. I haven't started to fancy other women and I’m not bringing anyone with me, OK? We’ll just have a nice few days together and I’ll enjoy seeing your new house.” I have to remain optimistic about the “nice few days”, or sound it at least.

  “No, no, of course not. Of course,” my mum says firmly. “Well I’m glad you cleared that up because there are some nice unattached men that we know here who….”

  “No. No, no, no, no. I’m not being paraded around in front of a string of randy, louche, desiccated old Lotharios. I’ll stay at home this Christmas if that’s what you had in mind.”

  “No of course not darling. I was just saying. Daddy and I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing.” She affects a deeply wounded tone. It isn't reassuring. “Anyway, daddy and I are looking forward to seeing you. We don't see enough of you.” This, I know of old, is the time to ring off before the recriminations start.

  “Fine. I’ll be there Christmas Eve at five as we arranged.”

  BAKER'S LANE WHEN I arrive has clearly been done up a great deal since I was a child. At that time it was rather scruffy, with one or two old shops, including an actual and very ancient bakery. No doubt the road housed other trades as well in past times. I wonder what a modern-day environmental search would make of the backyards given the noxious substances businesses used to create and then hurl out with abandon in past centuries. My parents didn't want an environmental search. They didn't want to know anything that might dictate against their ardent wish to buy the house, but with luck these earlier uses probably wouldn't be documented any longer.

  The road was known as bedsitland in my youth and mostly the houses were divided into rented flats lived in by poor people, benefit claimants and young single people and couples. As I was being born in 1980, Britain was experiencing a property boom followed by a crash about ten years later which is how I suppose the houses in Baker's Lane came to be speculatively and probably actually fairly shoddily converted into studio flats during the 1980s by developers hoping to make a killing and make more money that way than refurbishing the houses as a whole. But when the downturn came, the unlucky buyers of the flats found the value of their homes had plummeted. Repossessions I dare say were the inevitable result.

  East Anglia suffered considerably during the property price collapse. The high property prices in the south east had made homes in Suffolk and Norfolk seem like a good bargain and the rush to buy had then pushed up their prices too to dizzy heights. But on the basis that the higher you jump, the harder you fall, East Anglia’s crash saw property values take a sickening nose-dive especially in the more outlying towns with low employment prospects. The buildings in Baker’s Lane were bought up cheap by property companies and let out at low rents, as I say, as bedsits.

  At the time I was oblivious to this social upheaval. I was a disinterested young teenager hell bent on creating as much havoc as possible at my comprehensive school with Simmsey and others of a similar ilk so I never noticed what was happening on my doorstep. The only thing I thought about the street was that a lot of quite hip people lived in these bedsits. It was reputed that a lot of drugs were taken and dope smoked there and it seemed pretty cool. But the tenants were a few years older than me and therefore, in the way of things and probably fortunately really, not in my social group, though I believe Simmsey managed to cultivate more than a few friends in the street.

  However the decade or so the buildings spent as multi-occupied houses means that all floors have bathrooms and plumbing. Which is very convenient in a town house. Obviously eventually the potential of the area in general and Baker's Lane in particular was realised, well off people bought up and sorted out the houses and regeneration of the area proceeded apace.

  Baker's Lane is narrow with no space to park in the road. More modern developments of town houses sport integral garages or sometimes carports between buildings, possibly archways through to parking facilities at the back or they have communal parking areas nearby. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only coaching inns had archways constructed to give access to the rear, that the toffs who could afford a coach and four could be deposited away from the street and the riffraff and that the horses could be driven straight to the stables in the courtyards behind the buildings. A small cul-de-sac like Baker's Lane with possibly only a tavern and certainly no inn wasn’t built with modern parking needs in mind.

  But never fear. The Friends have been active in that department as well. It's amazing what a group of determined w
ell off people can do to improve their living circumstances when they choose to do so. The Friends, my mother, reliably informed me had contrived to buy some scrubland at the end of Baker's Lane and create a parking area. They had formed a residents' management company and had allocated two spaces to each house whose owners were prepared to pay for shares in the company. To prevent spaces being let out or just farmed out by owners to non-residents, the spaces are let on an annual basis by the company and woe betide any parking space renter who tries to let strangers use their spaces. They won't get their tenancy renewed next time.

  Isn't that clever! My mother told me all this over the telephone in detail yesterday. Like of course I didn’t already know this from having dealt with the purchase for my parents and actually arranged for the purchase of the car parking shares by them, and explained the scheme to them comprehensively in the letters I sent them. Which obviously she at least clearly never bothered to read. And she has the nerve to tell me to grow up, to accuse me of never being serious about anything.

  The parking area is not tastelessly tarcmaced with gross and obvious white lines painted between the spaces and white numbers painted on them. Not a bit of it. It is surfaced in gravel with short cast iron decorative black painted bollards marking out each space. The kind of bollards you can't see when you're manoeuvring into a space as they're too low down especially in the dark, and on which you therefore risk crushing your front or rear bumper. There are small discreet number plates affixed to the front of each bollard.

  My mother says I can have parking space ten by pre-arrangement with their new friend Justin who is going to be away for Christmas with his wife Jacintha and their grown up children Hadrian and Jocasta. Why incidentally I had to be given the names of the whole family I’m not sure. Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that they’re not your everyday names? I drive towards the parking area squinting for number ten in the dark. But, in keeping with The Friends' exquisite ability to arrange all things to their absolute convenience, a security light bursts into life and thereby I am easily able to locate and drive into the space.

  Now however comes the hard part. The arrival at my parents' actual home. Will I be too late or conversely somehow too early, will my having brought two small cases rather than one attract comment, will my lack of any obvious present for them as befits an arriving house-guest (chocolates, flowers, etc) cause unintended offence? I had to work until noon today then rush home and throw a sundry collection of items into cases not knowing quite what manner of dress is going to be expected of me this visit given the round of activities apparently on offer. While I have their Christmas presents proper all carefully wrapped and labelled in the car, I haven't had time to even stop off at a petrol station on the way to purchase meaningless trifles for them that they wouldn't actually have liked and may well in fact have banished to the least used room in the house.

  I grit my teeth and walk towards their front door.

  I KNOCK ON the door and while I wait I admire the wreath hanging just below the knocker. I wonder idly if my mother made it. She sometimes used to fashion this sort of thing in the huge amount of spare time she had on her hands. After the Arsehole left, I should have roped her into weaving artifacts for me to somehow hex the Backside with. I found a site earlier in the year when I was more inclined to consider practising such chicanery called “Paganism for the Real World” with a piece about cord or knot magic. I had the opportunity when the Arsehole came round six or so weeks ago. I could have diverted his attention and somehow secreted something mischievous about his person.

  Or, had I had the forethought, I could have appeared to be more receptive to his requests at that time, seen him to his car in a friendly manner, pointed out a neighbour's extensive exterior home improvements to him as he was getting into the car and, while his head was turned, positioned a negatively charged amulet strategically under the car seat. He was always as bad as I am about cleaning and tidying out the car so there would have been every chance that the spellbound item would have stayed there a long time and played havoc with every aspect of the Arsehole's and the Backside's lives. Or not as the case may be. Whether my mother would have colluded in such a plan is a different matter. I would have had to say that I wanted the object for a local fete or something.

  I sigh, hammer on the knocker again and turn my attention to the Christmas tree flamboyantly and very obviously displayed in the first floor sitting room window though with muted decorations including small white lights which don’t wink on and off. There are however no common fairy lights adorning the front of the house. In the downstairs street window, there are a range of posters about local events including those put on by The Friends. In fact there's one tonight at six pm at Number Five. I’ve already noticed that the front doors don't bear actual digits. They all have little boards with the numbers painted on in full in some fancy calligraphy font.

  I look at my smartphone and see it's five twenty. I am only twenty minutes late but it's dawning on me that my parents are not at home. Unless of course they are in the back garden having taken in their mad old age to eating al fresco even at this time of year. Wine bars these days seem to put out so-called patio heaters, gas-guzzling assaults on the environment, on any spare exterior hard surfaces so that the patrons have to sit there affecting to look cool (and probably literally are) and pretend it's comfortable to sink chilled white wine in sub-zero temperatures. But as the back garden is land-locked on three sides and bordered by the back of the house on the fourth with no convenient foot passage between the houses, I have no physical way of finding out if my mum and dad are in their bijou courtyard garden out of earshot of the front door knocker.

  However technology is at hand. Both my parents have enthusiastically embraced iPhones, Facebook and the like so I dial my mother's number. I know instantly on her picking up that they are indoors, not outside. You can tell. And they are not alone. I hear the sounds of revelry and assume they have decamped to Number Five without waiting for me to arrive. Now if I did that to them….but it's not worth going there.

  "Hello mum, I've arrived."

  "Have you arrived?" she bellows at a hundred and fifty decibels.

  "Yeees," I yell back. I feel a fool in the empty street doing this. I look at the open end of the cul-de-sac in case people are passing by but no-one is at this time.

  "Oh good. Just come straight round here then. We're helping to set up." And about a hundred others by the sound of it. What on earth gets into people when they retire? Either they buy a bungalow somewhere by the sea and refuse to do anything or go anywhere or see anyone. Or else they start to re-live their youths with a vengeance. Or rather probably the youths they wish they had lived but were too shy or hemmed in by their parents or society to dare to live. I feel a sudden warmth towards my mum and dad who won't let decrepitude take over, won't give in to advancing age and accept a dim and unexciting future, who want to extract whatever fun they can in the next two or so remaining decades and are creating and helping to create the circumstances to bring this about.

  "OK," I shriek into the phone and we hang up. She hasn’t even said they're at Number Five but as I hump my suitcases further up Baker's Lane, I'd have to be stone deaf to not know which house to stop at. The noise isn't ear-shattering but it's fairly bloody obvious. It's a good job that almost everyone in the street belongs to this association or else the complaints would be manifold and manifest. The sound of eighties music pumps out of one of the ground floor rooms into the street. I'm glad they haven't put the disco on an upper floor. Who knows if the old joists would stand it.

  The door of Number Five opens and my dad's there grinning at me foolishly, already visibly several sails to the wind. He takes my cases, puts them down on the hall floor and envelopes me in a bear hug.

  I AM WAKING up in a strange house in an unfamiliar bed. I must have fallen asleep with the bedside light on. For a moment I dream hazily and blissfully that somehow, in some amazing way, I made contact with Dennis la
st night and that we have been together in his house, in his bed. He must be downstairs, as any gentleman would be, making me a cup of morning tea. Though the proportions of the room are all wrong for a bedroom in Dennis's old rectory, except perhaps for maybe an attic room once inhabited by servants. But Dennis wouldn't sleep up there. He'd have one of the main bedrooms down below, I feel sure. And this room is old and beamed with low ceilings, not like a Georgian rectory.

  And I feel sick. Instinctively I know there is a toilet somewhere nearby. The great attention paid to the estate agent's particulars which included plans of every floor has ensured that I know where to go in this situation. I heave myself up out of the bed and stagger onto the small galleried landing narrowly missing falling headlong down the steep stairs (really they should put child-proof gates at the tops of such stairs for those with blinding hangovers). But I keep my footing somehow and find myself in the sweetest little shower room. I look around the dear little room admiringly, at its economically arranged wash basin and toilet and the shower cubicle with folding doors, by which time I find that the need to hurl has diminished.

  But I do have a raging thirst and down several quarts of tap water using the tooth mug in which I have to hope the last visitor didn’t actually soak his or her false teeth overnight. I'm so dehydrated, I don’t care if at this height in the building the water from the tap comes from the cold water tank. Cold water tanks I understand are often open at the top and include dead flies, dead mice and other undesirables floating in them. However as my room and this bathroom are in the roofspace with sloping ceilings plainly in evidence I can't see how a cold water or any other water tank could be positioned above the tiny bit of actually level ceiling. So where in fact do they put the cold water tanks in houses like this? I give up and slope back to my bedroom for several hours' more sleep.