‘You want to do what?’ said the woman who called herself the woman in his life. She was, in Oliver’s opinion, a nice-ish person apart from the chronic hearing problem. He found that he met an extraordinary number of women who had hearing problems.
He was a pleasant-looking man, in a brown-haired, brown-eyed kind of way, added to which there was something about him that gave people a feeling of confidence and security. Whenever he explained his life’s mission to a woman, giving due emphasis to its incompatibility with any kind of pairing off or settling down, she assumed the kind of vague, non-specific smile that deaf people who can’t hear often use to cover up the fact that they aren’t following the conversation.
It could not be alleged that the women with whom he had this conversation were in any way predatory or manipulative, but when Oliver said, ‘I don’t want a relationship’or ‘I don’t want a girlfriend’ or even ‘Look, I’m sorry but I don’t actually want you,’ he never said it loudly enough for them to hear him, in the larger sense. It seemed as if their aural nerves only transmitted the key words, ‘relationship’, ‘girlfriend’and ‘you’.
Oliver didn’t hold the women wholly responsible for this problem. In his heart, he knew that he wasn’t getting through because the bits of his soul were still lying around, unconnected, waiting to be bolted together. His identity was a work in progress. Doing what he had to do, to become what he wanted to be, left him with his real self still a blueprint. He looked good, but he was nothing but a heap of unresolved paradoxes and unexplored desires.
The results of this communication failure were often distressing, and sometimes quite ugly. Often, women immediately invested their confidence in him and looked forward to a lifetime of shared security.
The woman now standing in his flat had managed to get further than all the rest. She had moved a lot of her clothes into his wardrobe and was on to the final phase of assimilation, contriving for him to meet her friends and making noises about her family. He was getting out at the right time.
‘I’m going to be a farmer,’ he repeated.
‘You can’t. You can’t be a farmer, you live in London.’
‘I’m not going to live in London any more.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where else would you live?’
‘I told you. I’ve bought a farm. In the country. In Suffolk. I’m going to be a farmer.’
‘And what am I supposed to do?’
‘Well, whatever you like. Come down at weekends, maybe.’
She was standing with her back to the wall of glass that was considered the most desirable feature of his flat, which was, properly speaking and without exaggeration, a penthouse. Through the wall of glass, he had panoramic views of the Thames. All the way from Westminster to the flood barriers. A mass of dirty water, known to be largely recycled human waste, fringed with high-rise workplaces and more glass-walled living spaces, and beyond them the less-than-premium development sites still forested with cranes, all bound together with coiling snakes of traffic and overcast with a haze of rubber particles, vehicle emissions and mass human exhalation including particles of mucus, phlegm and water vapour bearing over three million different viruses. Oliver sincerely hated this view and couldn’t wait to sell it. Nor, he realised, could he wait to get away from the woman standing in front of it. From all women, in fact. As far away as possible. They were just too damn difficult.
‘I’d rather throw myself off your bloody balcony,’ she announced.
Oliver sighed. Near his solar plexus, an express elevator hurtled earthwards. The day had already been too long, and the night would be even longer if he didn’t handle things right.
‘Look,’ he said, in what he thought was a kind, placatory and decent manner. ‘Why don’t you take a couple of hours, get your things all packed, and then I’ll call you a taxi?’
She burst into tears. They always did that. It made him feel dreadful.
Miranda Marlow also felt dreadful, in a flat, insignificant, lowly and wet kind of way. In fact, she felt like a worm. Never, as long as she’d been a conscious adult, had Miranda been able to get off the phone after a call from her mother without getting that old invertebrate feeling. The instant she heard the maternal ‘hello’it was as if her arms and legs disappeared, her world view readjusted to a height of one millimetre and a mantle of slime covered her entire body.
‘How are you?’ Clare Marlow had asked.
The best answer was something short and unlikely to attract attention. ‘Fine,’ Miranda had replied.
‘Good. I thought we should have lunch.’
‘Ah …’ Miranda knew well that her diary was as windowless as a prison cell. ‘Could we make it dinner? Only …’
‘You know it’s bad for your metabolism to eat after seven,’ Clare had replied.
‘It’s just I’ve got a lot on at the moment …’
‘People won’t respect you for having bad time-management skills.’
‘We’re doing the big presentation today and …’
‘You can delegate. Women never want to delegate, why is that?’
‘I can’t delegate my own project.’
‘I’ve got something important I need to discuss with you. Don’t sigh like that. We need to be in touch with each other.’
‘Yup, we do that,’ Miranda had answered, making sure it came out too bland to rile her mother but sarcastic enough to satisfy herself. ‘How’s next week for you?’
‘Useless. It’ll have to be the beginning of next month.’
‘Really urgent, then.’
‘Everything’s really urgent, isn’t it? You just have to learn to prioritise.’
And so they made a date and Miranda felt like a worm.
‘She said we needed to be in touch with each other,’ she told her best friend, Dido Hastings, as they reclined, side by side, on her sofa, waiting to get the energy to get up and go out. Again.
‘Maybe she just wants to see you.’
‘Maybe there is life on Mars.’
‘She is your mother.’
‘You don’t have to make excuses for her. You wouldn’t swap, would you?’
‘Your mum’s your mum, isn’t she? Anyway, you wouldn’t swap either.’ Dido’s mother manifested herself in their lives in one of two ways. Either it was calls to say she was going shopping in Barcelona and did Dido want to come, or it was calls from the exclusive detox-clinic-of-the-month saying she’d just admitted herself and did Dido want to visit.
‘I know her, you see,’ Miranda went on. ‘My mother wants to have lunch urgently, which means that she wants to get me on side for something that she’s already planned.’
‘She must want you to help with something. I think that’s nice. Isn’t it nice?’
‘Well, yes, and whatever it is I do want to help her if I can but …’
‘It’s the being planned that you don’t like.’
‘It’s the knowing I’m just another item on her To Do list. That’s what I don’t like.’
‘Well, my mum doesn’t do To Do lists. I think you’re lucky.’
‘My mum made me do my first To Do list when I was five. I think you’re lucky. Shall we go to the Thai or the bar? I’ve got that presentation thing tomorrow, I need an early night. Oh, God, why can’t I stop organising all the time?’
‘Because you can’t,’ said Dido. ‘Because I never organise anything and you get antsy. Because you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t try so hard. God, I wish I had your problems.’
Miranda strove for perfection. Dido did not strive at all. Miranda had built a career, Dido had been washed through fifteen jobs in seven years as if being borne along like a leaf by the force of life itself. Miranda had a flat, and Dido was often to be found staying there because she had moved in with a man, rented out her own flat, and then changed her mind about the man.
They looked like an odd couple. Miranda had her hips so well controlled that hipsters just slipped off them and Dido had a backside that made pe
ople think of the urban myth about being able to rest a pint of beer on a well-shaped bum. Miranda had organised hair; it was short and did what it was told. Dido had such long and tangled hair that everyone believed it was extensions.
Miranda’s place was a large room within walking distance of her office. ‘I like living in a handbag,’ she told people. ‘The design is just perfect. What else could I want?’ She had three white walls. A wood floor. A great painting. A witty statement lamp. There was also a day bed, in red velvet, where Dido slept. And a bathroom. Actually, a wet room, grouted impeccably because Miranda had taken an afternoon off work to supervise the process. The main room was six metres square, which they considered very decent.
‘Some people have a picture in the attic,’ Dido had once said to Miranda. ‘But you’ve got me.’ She was an optimist to the last lymphocyte in the marrow of her bones. Dido would give money to a homeless man who was begging on the street and be absolutely sure he was Brad Pitt doing research for his next movie. Miranda would give money to a homeless man who was begging on the street and be absolutely sure he was a crack-head and she was only helping him to die.
When the effort of striving got too much, Miranda would give herself a spa weekend or a holiday, determined to master the art of creative vegetation that came so naturally to Dido. Lately she had felt the perfection thing taking over. She had caught herself wishing she could make sushi. All those little grains of rice, so utterly controlled. Her fingers itched to slice and roll and wrap things in seaweed. She knew that this was mad, but she didn’t know how to stop.
Of course, the striving could be tough on the people who loved her, although, as Miranda saw it, they didn’t really love her, just her illusion of perfection. Except for Dido. Dido had known her from years back, before the perfection sickness set in.
It made things worse that Miranda was in the brave-new-world business. Her job was to explain to people why they should want to live in the places that her bosses had designed for them. Her employers were an international planning group and her early night was needed so she would be able to present their latest triumph, an award-winning scheme to build a new corporate headquarters, with associated fitness centre, retail facilities, crèche, brasserie and car park, in the centre of London.
It went well. The audience, press and planners both, seemed impressed. Afterwards they stood around in huddles, murmuring respectfully. Even the media took note. She was interviewed for a TV news programme.
‘And now here’s the spokeswoman for the new Clerkenwell Sweep, Miranda Marlow. They’re calling it “The Bedpan”, Miranda. Local residents have complained about the building, they say it’s ugly, they say it’s not in keeping with the rest of Clerkenwell, the Wren squares, the Hawksmoor churches. How do you feel about that?’
Hurt, thought Miranda. Wounded to the quick, stabbed in the soft white underbelly. But I’m good with pain. I expected this criticism and I know what to do. She smiled at the interviewer, a clear-eyed, open-hearted smile of pure agony, and spoke to the green fur sausage that covered the microphone. ‘The local people we have spoken to are as excited about the Sweep as we are, and they’re proud that Clerkenwell will have one of the most beautiful modern buildings in Europe.’
It sounded so right. Even as she heard herself, she believed it. One useful thing she had inherited from her mother was the extraordinary gift of sounding right. Not bossy, domineering, dictatorial right. Just simple, obvious, law-of-the-universe right.
She sounded right but she knew, in the deep space of her consciousness, that she was wrong. It was true that she herself adored the Clerkenwell Sweep. So did its architect, and their boss in Denver, and most of the rest of the architectural profession. ‘A waking dream of vernacular cosmopolitanism,’ that was the consensus.
It was also true, however, that nobody had actually asked the people of Clerkenwell for their views. The ruling from Denver was that people were always defensive when presented with change and in the mass they had no imagination. Therefore there was no reason to seek their views.
As a building, the Sweep was a star. As a place to work or live in or go for lunch or fall in love or play with children or die with dignity – well, Miranda could not bear to think about that sort of thing. She was as sensitive as a spring flower. The only way she could get through life was to wrap herself up in beauty.
Every morning she battled through the crowds at her station, and had to insulate herself in a book from the compressed humanity in her train. She struggled to the office on teeming pavements, feeling that people around her were angry, savage and in despair, and their pain hurt her so much she had to concentrate on the pictures of the beautiful buildings all around her office to blot it out. And it was only a few more degrees of agony to move from these Londoners, who hadn’t enough air to breathe or ground to stand upon or reasons for living, to AIDS orphans in Africa or street children in Manila or people dying by the roadside in Calcutta.
There was nothing to be done about any of this, and if she thought about it for more than a second she was buried in an avalanche of suffering. So she chose her thoughts carefully, and got by on giving all her attention to the Clerkenwell Sweep, and anything else that claimed to be beautiful and came with the promise of hope.
Miranda knew a lot about art and architecture and design. She craved things that looked good because looking was more comfortable than feeling. In her ideal day, she got through without feeling anything at all. Her perfect 24 hours was filled with images. Images were low-risk, low-maintenance, low-stress. Images could not make you feel like a worm. Find the right image and life could be bearable.
She had the picture of the Sweep firmly in her mind, silver-scaled, gleaming in the sunlight, a huge round-sided edifice surrounded by the puny figures of its human admirers. She herself had put these tiny plastic people on the model, to indicate that people were going to love it. They were little ant-like creatures gawping in awe. Local residents. Good decoration. Like trees, one of those accessories that clients always expected an architectural model to have, but nothing to which you actually committed the firm, or put in the specification. Easy to put people on a model; impossible to think about how people had to live.
‘But surely,’ the interviewer pressed on. ‘But surely …’
Her grey eyes regarded him. He groped for words. Her eyes widened, her fine eyebrows raised themselves. ‘The most beautiful modern building in Europe,’ she almost repeated. ‘We believe London deserves the Sweep. With the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Louvre in Paris, the Pearl Tower in Shanghai, it will be a symbol of the vibrant life of the city.’
‘Attracting thousands of tourists,’ the interviewer found himself saying. ‘A world-class monumental must-see.’
‘Exactly.’ Now Miranda felt relieved and wanted to smile. She had to frown to stop it happening. Smiling on television, her mother had taught her, would make her look lightweight. It was bad enough that she wasn’t particularly tall. And her hair was so fair there was no real choice except to be blonde. And her face did sort of line up with current aesthetic norms of prettiness, even if her nose could look a bit of a courgette in full profile.
‘Thank you, Miranda Marlow, spokesman for the proposed Clerkenwell Sweep. The planning enquiry opens today …’ As he burbled his conclusion at the green sausage, the interviewer realised that he’d been de-railed. Just how he couldn’t exactly say, but the damn woman had subverted his argument. He was sure he hadn’t meant to back the Sweep. But the way she said it, it had felt so right. And now she was standing there all calm and normal, making him feel silly for being worried.
‘Thank you so much for that,’ said Miranda. ‘You must have done a lot of research.’
‘Uh …’ Now the interviewer was absolutely sure he was being heisted but there was nothing going on you could actually identify. You just set out for one place and mysteriously ended up in another.
‘Do call if you’d like to do a follow-up.’ She gave him her card. Miranda
Marlow, Group Communications, Urban Phoenix Group UK. A little red phoenix logo. Acclaimed international town-planners just ripe for a good documentary. The idea spontaneously manifested itself in the interviewer’s mind, just as the Sweep was undoubtedly destined to manifest itself in the middle of Clerkenwell … but when? ‘We’re anticipating the enquiry will last about six months,’ she said, before he asked.
‘Ah …’ The interviewer found himself talking to empty air. Miranda had escaped. She walked quickly down a curving alley, saw a café and plunged into it. A few minutes later she emerged, carrying a ham and cheese croissant in a paper bag. Croissants were good for anxiety. She hailed a taxi and cruised back to her office, eating quickly to finish the evil thing and get rid of the evidence before anyone could guess what she had been doing.
Once, when her mother had been trying to cheer her up, she had said, ‘It’s easy to be successful, Miranda. Just look at all the idiots who manage it.’ The words sank into the soft depths of Miranda’s young mind and stayed there, inhibiting all her gentle instincts. For Miranda was not at all her mother’s daughter. Her heart was sweet, caring and tender. If Clare had a real lust for power, her daughter had a true craving for peace and harmony. So Miranda lived in a painful state of tension, trying to over-ride her true self and follow her parental programming. Croissant attacks were the main symptom.
‘What’s the matter with me?’ she asked Dido, that evening, flopping onto her sofa with exhaustion after hounding herself through another day of perfectionism. ‘Why can’t I just slow down, chill out, let go?’
‘Because you’re not like that,’ said Dido, reasonably. ‘You’re high-energy, high-creativity, high-achieving …’
‘No I’m not. I just flog myself through stuff because I’m afraid of screwing up.’
‘But that’s fine,’ said Dido; whose attention was wandering towards her own ambition of renewing her manicure before going out for the evening.
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