Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

by Meera Syal

  ‘This can’t go on much longer,’ he said to me yesterday, out of the blue, and I almost dropped my custard cream. Luckily, since the dreadful Pop Sock Disaster, I am a little more restrained in my responses, so I calmly dusted off the biscuit, dunked it in my cup, watched half of it dissolve lumpily to the bottom, pretended this had been my original plan all along and sipped the tea which now had custard-scum floating on the surface. I coughed loudly for about twenty seconds and only then did I say, ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Chila could have the baby at any time now. It’s already cooked, as it were, this is just the basting period.’ I love it when they use technical terms.

  ‘Yes, of course, any day now,’ I said, in what I hoped was a distracted, even bored tone of voice, while I imagined tying Chila’s legs together in a double knot and shouting at the baby through her belly button to ‘Stay in there, it’s horrible out here. You won’t like it!’

  We let it go, chatted about Nikki’s recent ear infection, the black-tie dinner he was attending that weekend with some old university friends. I managed to discuss a family wedding coming up without mentioning Akash at all. Krishan made a point of saying that he hadn’t yet got a date for this dinner, although I know he’s spoiled for choice. The Sangeetas and the Valeries and several nurses have cropped up in his conversation from time to time, always skimmed over, always dismissed. Quite early on I offered myself as an adviser, told him he maybe needed the perspective of a woman of the world, insider information with no bullshit. He grinned and said he had a very good idea of the kind of woman he was looking for. I bit my lip so hard that I may have left a scar, but I did not ask for further clarification. That was where I wanted to be, pregnant with possibilities, swelled with hope. With nothing defined, nothing overstated, nothing decided, I felt safe, blameless, innocent. Just talking, like I said. Until yesterday.

  Up until then, that room, with its grimy venetian blinds, worn leather chairs and dog-eared posters extolling the joys of vaccination and the symptoms of diabetes, was the most perfect and purest example of what it purported to be, the waiting room. Every time I walked into it and shut the door, I imagined that all around me the hands stopped on watches, the sand in hourglasses halted mid-trickle, clouds skidded to a scudding halt, fountains froze – a comatose world outside and in here, suspended, kept artificially alive, us. Nothing grows older while we are in here, nothing hurts, nothing changes. Bags down, feet up, kettle on. Count your blessings. Oh, I did. Every day. I want so much to see Chila’s baby, I really do. Once the baby’s home, there’s no reason for me to come here again. The waiting is nearly over. A new life.

  6

  TANIA SKIMMED DOWN the glossily presented folder in front of her, barely looking up as a steaming café latte was placed reverentially on the desk. She got to the last page, paused and looked up. Fay and Rory were both gazing at her with the expectancy of puppies waiting for a chocolate drop.

  ‘What do you think?’ they said, almost in stereo.

  ‘Interesting,’ Tania managed to murmur. She picked up her coffee and read the page again, feeling a familiar gloom descend.

  ‘All these ideas have been approved in principle,’ Rory chipped in. ‘It’s just a question of what grabs you most.’

  ‘We saw the rushes of your last doc, the one about the white witches in Norwich. Have you got a title yet?’ Fay asked, proffering a plate of expensive-looking sugary wafers.

  Tania shook her head. ‘No. Sorry, I mean, not for me, thanks, and yes, the working title at the moment is “Bedpans and Broomsticks”, if Disney don’t throw a wobbly.’

  ‘Oh, that’s brilliant!’ Fay laughed. ‘Because two of them are—’

  ‘Nurses, well one’s a care worker but she sees a fair amount of bowel activity.’

  Rory and Fay both chortled a little too appreciatively. Tania was getting used to the sound of canned laughter in plush offices, to sashaying through smoked-glass doors which a few months ago would have been politely closed in her face. Polystyrene cups were a vague memory. Now she was served designer infusions in hand-painted pottery, the biscuits were usually monogrammed and sandwiches inevitably featured sun-dried tomatoes in some disguise. Ashtrays were produced if she wanted to smoke, which she did now. She had barely extracted her packet of cigarettes from her bag before a shapeless blob of ceramic was placed in front of her.

  ‘My daughter made it,’ said Fay apologetically. ‘This is theoretically a non-smoking office. We’ve both given up and this was the only one around.’

  Tania saw there was a shaky inscription around the rim in heavy-handed gold lettering, FOR MAMA. She returned her cigarettes to her bag, annoyed at the foolish tightening of her throat.

  ‘I can wait, actually.’ She smiled faintly. ‘No problem.’

  Fay twittered around with a coffee refill by way of an apology while Rory produced a sheaf of research material and unscrewed the top of his fountain pen hopefully. It still took Tania by surprise, the eagerness with which she was now received, the enthusiasm that her presence seemed to arouse in other people in the industry. Ever since her first film had been broadcast, the film, her telephone had not stopped ringing with offers of work. Within a week, she had signed on with a dapper young agent with offices in Chelsea harbour who assured her she would have her own production company up and running within a couple of months.

  ‘All you need is some headed notepaper, a commission and a bag full of balls,’ her agent had told her. ‘Plus you’re marketable. Asian babe kicking ass. Helps you got cheekbones too.’

  Tania decided she would walk out if he suggested wearing a Wonderbra and hanging around Stringfellows, but she had to admit, he had impressive connections and the honing instincts of a shark. He had quickly organized some extra screenings in tandem with a couple of serious profiles in glossy magazines. Tania had sat patiently while she was photographed against a backdrop of saris and spices, amongst the crowds emerging from an Indian cinema and, on one occasion, in the bustling kitchen of a tandoori restaurant, her image reflected back at her in wavy miniatures from the gleaming steel vats that surrounded her like burly metal minders. She took it all with good grace. She ensured she counteracted the obvious visual imagery with pithy street- wise soundbites: ‘I’m a director first, an Asian second’, ‘I care about my audience’s IQ, not their race’, ‘Your talent is your calling card. No-one calls Woody Allen a Jewish film maker any more’. It was easy enough. They were lines she had been practising in her mirror since her teens, the distillation of a thousand award-acceptance speeches she had rehearsed in her parents’ cramped, steamy bathroom. They were the crystallization of a million pillow chats with Martin, when they would shape their glittering careers out of candle smoke and coffee fumes, as distant and diffuse as clouds. Now she had arrived, apparently, atop a shaky pedestal, sniffing the rarefied air and alarmed at how high she was, how far down it was to the ground.

  ‘So!’ Rory beamed, rubbing his hands together in a matey sort of way. ‘Anything take your fancy on that list there?’ Tania braced herself against the back of her swivel chair.

  ‘Well, let’s see. They’re all mockumentaries really, aren’t they?’

  ‘Are they?’ asked Fay eventually.

  ‘By that I mean, they’re all fly-on-the-wall, let’s film some ordinary people doing stuff and shape it into a story afterwards sort of genre.’

  ‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ breathed Fay, relieved. ‘It’s what everybody wants at the moment. Real people are much better actors than professional actors, ironically. You can’t get an Equity member to reproduce what we get for free.’

  ‘Indeed,’ murmured Tania, smoothing out the corners of her sheet, ‘and of course you don’t have to pay real people much either. So let’s see. We have Sweat! set in an East End Turkish baths, Slap! set in a Newcastle perfumerie, Wax! set in a Welsh beauty salon, and an as yet untitled project set in a Birmingham sewage works—’

  ‘We’re not absolutely sold on that one,’ i
nterrupted Rory.

  ‘No,’ agreed Tania, ‘you won’t get many old people watching something called Turds!, I suppose. And calling it Shit! would just be too much of a gift to the TV critics, eh?’

  Fay and Rory’s smiles had wavered slightly. Rory patted his hairline absently, leaving an imprint of inky fingertips on his temples, the smudgy footprints of some small creature who had scuttled into his hair for cover.

  ‘Is the exclamation mark compulsory?’ Tania enquired cheerfully. ‘I’m just thinking graphics here. Of course, we could have a really funny theme tune, lots of tubas and whoopee cushion noises, just to warn the viewers to expect lots of pratfalls, because they do love seeing innocent people making complete arses of themselves, don’t they?’

  A palpable hush filled the room, interrupted only by the cappuccino machine coughing politely in a far corner.

  ‘Right, well,’ said Rory, standing up, ‘good of you to come in.’

  Fay snatched the misshapen ashtray off the desk and shut it firmly in a drawer. She was trembling as she brushed Tania’s hand in a vague attempt at a handshake.

  ‘You are still with Mark Stein at ITA?’ she asked, tight-lipped. Tania could see Fay was itching to call her agent at this precise moment.

  It was only when she found herself on the pavement outside, her mobile ringing frantically inside her bag, that she realized what she had done. She flicked the phone on and held it away from her ear as Mark launched into a barking monologue.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you that you won’t be invited back in a hurry. What is it? PMT? Or just thought you’d piss off a few people who might want to employ you for the next few years. I mean, I thought you knew what their output was. I never said this was going to be Pano-sodding-rama, did I? There’s nothing wrong with being populist, in fact, in this present climate, there’s a lot right with it. Tania, you still there? Hello?’

  Tania began walking slowly, wishing she had a hand free to peel off her jacket. Her hair felt matted, oily worms clinging to her neck. It had been overcast when she had set off that morning, unremitting slate grey, migraine weather. Now, a paper-thin wash of blue sky arched above her, a tie-dye sun bled yellow and orange at its centre, the birds were singing arias in the treetops and she felt sticky with tension. She had a fierce urge to jump into the car and drive until she hit the coast.

  ‘I’m still here, Mark,’ she answered.

  ‘Listen up, Tania, you’re only as good as the last thing you made. You’ve had a great start, a fabulous start, but difficult geniuses aren’t in fashion any more, not even in Hollywood. When you’re handling other people’s dosh, they want to know you can smile and shoot film at the same time. Don’t blow this.’

  Tania paused outside a travel agent’s window. Mauritius looked rather inviting. ‘I’m just not interested in doing that nudge-wink exploitative crap any more, Mark.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ his tinny voice rasped back. ‘Worked pretty well for your first film.’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t do that stuff any more,’ Tania replied quietly, before cutting him off.

  She studied the Mauritian tourist board poster again. A sun-kissed couple with violently white teeth ran hand in hand along a deserted beach. The sea was an unnatural shade of violet, so clear she could spot the shadowy triangles of fish basking in the shallows. She could afford to go anywhere in the world at this moment, although, she realized with a jolt, not on a Club 18–30 holiday any more. She studied the vibrant display of faraway places more carefully. There seemed to be three distinct groups of holiday makers: couples, joined at the hip, matched with romantic getaways in Rome, Paris, New York, the Caribbean, India; families with two children, splashing happily in Spain, Tunisia, Greece; and then the euphemistically named Discerning Traveller, which meant anyone over fifty, who could choose to be shuttled safely to any location, provided the walks weren’t too long and there was access to a mini-golf course. The small print informed Tania that to travel alone would cost more; the single supplement provided an expensive reminder, a warning to those who dared to venture somewhere gorgeous without a partner.

  Automatically, Tania dialled Deepak’s mobile number and exhaled in relief when he answered.

  ‘Me,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, you.’

  ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘Yep, just waiting to go into my accountant’s office. How did your meeting go?’

  ‘It went.’

  ‘They don’t deserve you, so sod them, eh?’

  Tania cradled the phone to her cheek, wishing it was a cocktail, a conch shell, his hand. It was increasingly like this; whenever her work was going well, she felt invincible, her life was a straight path bordered by manicured fields, chocolate box pretty, no diversions. Right now, she did not, officially, on paper, have a job, although it was merely a question of sticking a tack into a list of options. But without a contract, a schedule, she was lost. Actors called it resting, the gaps between employment. Tania thought that was a stupid name for this exhausting limbo in which all the snags and flaws in her smooth-seamed existence became magnified and ugly. The pattern blurred as she felt herself unravelling. She had to stop this quickly.

  ‘I really would like to see you tonight, Deeps,’ she said. There was a brief pause, far away she heard office chatter, the rhythmic hum of a printer.

  ‘Tonight?’ he asked curiously.

  They both knew this was unusual, Tania requesting an unscheduled appointment. Normally, she would waver about times and dates, preferring to keep things fluid, a veneer of casual reluctance.

  ‘I think that’s OK,’ he said finally, both of them smiling unseen into their mouthpieces.

  ‘Ten-ish?’

  ‘Ten is perfect,’ Tania replied.

  She spent the next two hours being effortlessly impressive. She held court at her agent’s office, dispensing charming apologies and sugar-coated demands until Mark and his assistants were gambolling at her feet, creasing up at her cruelly accurate impressions of Fay and Rory, pissing themselves at her punchlines, gasping at the glamorous gall of it all, what Tania did next. It was what they expected, after all, why they had taken her on. Cheeky bit of exotic, her intellect a huge plus, photogenic enough to be flirted with, brainy enough to backhand the compliments with panache. So satisfying, to meet someone who sent the clichés tumbling like dominoes.

  ‘The Yanks would love you!’ Mark enthused. ‘You look Mexican. Tell them you’re Asian and they’ll expect some bird from Vietnam, say you’re Indian and they’ll ask what reservation. When they twig you’re from the land of Ravi Shankar and holy men, they’ll be creaming their Calvin Kleins.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ Tania asked. ‘I thought they liked easy to read packaging. You know, WASP, Jap, redneck, Latino . . .’

  ‘They like whatever someone tells them the next big thing is going to be. Why shouldn’t it be you?’

  Why not indeed, mused Tania as she surveyed the Thames from eighteen floors up. While Mark paced the room talking animatedly into his mouthpiece (this agency was rock and roll enough to afford cordless telephone headgear), Tania counted the pleasure boats riding the river below, painted matrons out for a watery stroll, wearing tourists like artificial cherries on their whitewashed hats.

  Years ago, she, Chila and Sunita had decided to be chicks about town and spend a day on the South Bank. Tania had nurtured some vision of them all strolling around the open-air book markets discussing Sartre, maybe taking in a controversial photographic exhibition in one of the theatre foyers, rounding off the evening with a play, something gritty with lots of swearing written by an angry Northern adolescent, and a bottle of wine afterwards, which they would sip silently, watching the moon rise above the illuminated dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Instead, they indulged in a vulgar shopping spree (financed by the remainder of Sunita and Tania’s termly grants and the contents of Chila’s Post Office account), had tea at the Ritz, cocktails in some frou-frou parlour in Covent Garden and ended the evening by sin
ging drunken Abba songs as they wobbled along the Embankment, arm in arm, beneath the necklaces of lights that adorned the sweeping nape of the river. Is this how the very old feel, wondered Tania, when they recall their younger selves and encounter a startling, healthy stranger?

  She then remembered a vague friend of her father’s, a jolly Sikh man with a pristine waxed beard, who had grown up streets away from her father in Ambala. They had pounced on one another at some wedding, overjoyed at the reunion after so many years, and Jolly Sikh Uncle had been duly invited round for dinner. It was only then that Tania’s father discovered that his former street urchin companion was now an extremely wealthy jeweller. It pained her even now, remembering her father’s blustering attempts to disguise their lowly status. Suddenly, he was not a factory floor foreman, he was a ‘tip-top manager type in the export department’; their terraced house was apparently ‘our town dwelling only, we go to a bigger place at weekends near Surrey’; and their clapped out Ford Cortina was ‘the only car with a strong enough suspension to transport my fat wife!’ Her father’s friend absorbed all this without comment, though Tania spent much of the evening gagging on her Bombay mix and sitting on her hands to stop them flying to her ears. Indeed, Jolly Sikh Uncle had seemed too tired to argue. He had accepted their hospitality warmly, said little, ate a lot, even gave Tania’s brother the keys to his Mercedes when he asked if he might sit inside and test out the radio.

  ‘So far we have come, me and you!’ her father had exclaimed loudly at one point. ‘Who would have thought, hah? Both of us in England, living the good life.’ Tania had stood up at that point, wanting to leave the room before her father claimed she was a genius physicist or an astronaut and demanded she do a floor show.

  But then, Jolly Sikh Uncle had carefully unbuttoned his shirt, one at a time, his platinum cufflinks glinting in the light from their Spanish lady table lamp, bared his chest and revealed a raised purple scar bisecting his sternum.