Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks

by Alan Coren

  Not in time for me, anyhow. And – hang on, that little light on the bottle-warmer that goes out when the teated goody reaches the required temperature has just done so. All I have to do now is unscrew the cap on the bottle, reverse the teat, replace the cap, shake the air out, nip upstairs, prise apart the kipping gums before she’s had a chance to wake up and scream the plaster off the wall, whang in the teat, sit back, and,

  Dropped it on the bloody floor.

  That’s what I like about the three a.m. feed – that deftness in the fingers that only comes after two hours’ deep untroubled sleep, the clarity of the eyes rasping around behind the resinous lash-crust, the milk underfoot due to inability to find slipper and fear of turning on light in bedroom to search for same in case wife wakes up, thereby destroying entire point of self groping around in first place.

  I’ll come back to the argument in a minute. Now have to boil teat, mix new feed, screw, light goes on, light goes off, unscrew, reteat, rescrew, shake, nip upstairs, prise apart kipping gums, correction, prise apart screaming gums, that’s my daughter, five weeks old and more accurate than a Rolex Oyster, it must be 3.01, must get feed done by 3.05, it takes exactly four minutes from first scream for three-year-old son to wake up, where’s my panda, where’s my fire-engine, I’m thirsty, I’m going to be sick, news that he’s going to be sick delivered on high C, thereby waking up wife at 3.09 exactly, wife shouts What’s going on? whereupon son shouts Mummy, father shouts Shut up, lights start going on in neighbouring houses . . .

  3.04 and fifty seconds, breath coming short and croaky from stairs, got feed mixed, teat boiled, all screwed down, whip out miniature daughter with .001 to spare, pop in teat, falls on it like Peter Cushing on an unguarded throat. I lean back in nursery chair, feet tacky from old milk, left fag burning beside typewriter on kitchen table, know fag will burn down on ashtray rim, like Chinese torture in Boy’s Own Paper – ‘When frame leaches thong, Blitish dog, thong tighten on tligger, burret brow blains out, heh, heh, heh!’ – fag will fall off ashtray, burn hole in table, possibly burn down house, Family Flee In Nightclothes.

  I am actually writing this an hour later, madness recollected in tranquillity, if you can call tranquillity thing involving cat which has woken up in filthy mood to find milk on floor, therefore licking up milk off floor, therefore in middle of floor when I come back to kitchen, therefore trodden on.

  Anyhow, back to an hour ago, still feeding daughter, she beginning to drop off halfway through feed, terrible sign meaning can’t go on with feed since daughter asleep, can’t not go on, because if she goes down half-full, she’ll be up again at 4.38, screaming, son up at 4.42, where’s my panda, where’s my fire-engine, wife up at 4.46, saying If you’re incapable of doing a simple thing like a feed etcetera to sleeping form, thereby transforming it into waking form, fall out of bed in netherworld confusion, thinking fag burning house down, look around for something to Flee In, since don’t wear Nightclothes, subeditors all change headlines for 5 a.m. edition, Nude Phantom Terrorises Hampstead Third Night Running.

  Wake daughter up, she cries, must be colic, hoist on shoulder, legs all colicky-kicking (I’d like to see James Joyce change a nappy), pat on back, crying goes up umpteen decibels, bring down again, mad gums grab teat, bottle empties like a Behan pint, relief.

  Change daughter, all dry, smooth, cooing, give final burp with little rub, daughter hiccups, sick drenches dressing-gown sleeve, daughter’s nightdress, change daughter again, can’t find new nightdress, walk around numb and sicky, daughter shrieking now, since, having displaced part of feed, requires topping up, else valves will grind or crankshaft seize up, or something, back downstairs with daughter on shoulder wailing, feel like mad bagpiper, mix new feed one-handed, screw, light goes on, light goes off, unscrew, reteat, rescrew, shake, carry out with daughter, slam kitchen door with foot. Wake up cat.

  Get upstairs, son wandering about on landing with dismembered bunny, I want a pee, can’t explain holding daughter and feeding same is priority, since Spock says AVOID SUCH CLASHES THIS WAY TO JEALOUSY ETCETERA, lead son to lavatory with spare hand, holding bottle against daughter, daughter can now see bottle like vulture over Gobi, windows rattle with renewed shrieking, leave son peeing in sleepy inaccuracy on seat, back to nursery, finish feeding daughter, son roars I CAN’T GET MY PYJAMA TROUSERS UP, try to rise with daughter, bottle falls, teat gets hairy, hammers start in skull, but thanks, dear God, daughter now full, asleep, plonk in crib, turn out light, hurtle sonwards, son not there.

  Son in bedroom, shaking wife, I CAN’T GET MY PYJAMA TROUSERS UP.

  I creep, broken, downstairs. You know about treading on the cat. I look at the garbling in the typewriter. It stops at ‘hang on, that little light on the bottle-warmer that goes out.’ Sit down, smelling of regurgitation and panic, stare at keyboard, listen to dawn chorus going mad, man next door coughing his lung into the receptacle provided, far loos flushing, new day creaking in on its benders.

  What I was going to write about before I was so rudely interrupted was, I see from the first tatty gropings, an article about how enlightened America was to introduce paternity leave for new fathers so that they wouldn’t have to work for the first few weeks and could help cope with the latest novelty item, instead of going off to the office, the shop, the surgery, the factory.

  Or the typewriter.

  I had all these great arguments in favour of introducing the system over here, I had all the points worked out, it was all so lucid, so right, so uncounterable: I should bring about an instant revolution.

  What arguments they were!

  And if I only had the strength left to get them down on paper.

  16

  Let Us Now Phone Famous Men

  A child’s game, at root, like all good things. After all, could anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realisation that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there – the information seeped into the infant brain in all its diabolical clarity – lay six billion ears, all the people in the world, available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger. We used, my tiny evil friends and I, to congregate at the nearest parentless house, and dial into the void, and innocent mouths would answer, and gullible ears would wait. Ah, to be only eight and wield such limitless power over adults! To fell a vicar with a practised oath, to turn bass breathing on a solitary spinster, to order fourteen tons of coal from Rickett Cockerell and have it delivered to the schoolmaster of one’s choice – what could match this for delirious joy? Only the pièce de résistance of scouring the phone-book for a citizen called Dumm or Barmie and phoning him to enquire if he was. What nights we spent in illicit spinnings of the dial, tottering helplessly about our living-rooms, gasping at our own wit and ingenuity and smashing our milk-teeth on the fender in the thrashing throes brought on by such hilarity!

  I wonder, sometimes, if the men who were boys when I was a boy still do it. It’s not a question you can ask of bald, august solicitors, of doctors nursing kids and mortgages, of paunched executives: but do they, a quarter of a century on, creep down, perhaps, at 4 a.m. and ring their enemies to offer six free foxtrot lessons, or scream indecencies at subscribers doomed to names like Bott and Hoare?

  I thought of them last week, those tiny swine who helped misspend my youth. Because it suddenly occurred to me to crank the whole game up to a more sophisticated notch: perhaps it was the opening of direct dialling to New York, perhaps it was the acreage of puerile posters by which the Post Office whips us on to take advantage of their miracle offers, but, whatever the spur, I decided to spend the day trying to telephone the leaders of the world. Why not? After all, they had ears like anyone else, they had desks with phones on, they were put in power, more or less, by insignificant souls like me: surely they could set aside a few seconds for a chat, an exchange of gossip, an acknowledgement that the silent majority had a right, occasi
onally, to speak?

  So I phoned Mao Tse-Tung.

  ‘Who?’ said the girl on 108 (International Directory Enquiries).

  ‘He’s the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic,’ I said. ‘It’s probably a Peking number.’

  There was a long silence. I could see her there, repolishing an immaculate nail, shoving a wayward curl back beneath her head-set, sucking a Polo, wondering whether she should go on the pill.

  ‘I’ll get the Supervisor,’ she said, finally.

  ‘Nobody ever phones China,’ said the Supervisor.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her voice was diamantine. ‘I only know why people phone places, I don’t know why they don’t, do I?’

  Ruined by syntax, I pled help.

  ‘You could phone the Chinese Chargé d’Affaires in London,’ she said. ‘The number is 580 7509.’

  580 7509 yielded a high-pitched moan. My Chinese may be less than flawless, but even I could tell that no human larynx was involved.

  I phoned the Operator.

  Who phoned the Engineer.

  Whose Supervisor phoned me.

  ‘It’s NU,’ he said. For a moment, I felt excitingly privy to some piece of inside dope about Post Office/Chinese Legation affairs: clearly, from the man’s weary voice, it was old Enn-Yu up to his tricks again, Enn-Yu the phone-bugger (I don’t mean that the way it looks), the tamperer, the Red Guard saboteur; Enn-Yu, the man who had plagued the GPO for years with his intercepted calls and weird Oriental devices fitted out in the Legation basement.

  ‘Who’s Enn-Yu?’ I said.

  ‘Not In Use,’ he said, and a small world crashed. ‘They’re always switching their lines down there. Every six weeks, they want a new phone number. Hang on,’ he said, and voices muttered in the background, and far bells rang. He came back. ‘It’s 636 9756 this week,’ he said.

  ‘Harro!’ shouted a voice at 636 9756.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘I want to know how I can telephone China.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to speak to Chairman Mao.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have a personal message to deliver.’

  Breathing. Whispering. A new, more senior voice.

  ‘Not possible terrephone China!’ it shrieked. ‘Not possible terrephone Chairman! What you want?’

  I explained again. It turned out that there were no lines between England and China. Nobody ever telephoned China. Nobody would ever telephone China.

  ‘How do you speak to China?’ I asked.

  A third voice came on.

  ‘GET OFF RINE!’ it screamed. ‘GET OFF RINE QUICK NOW!’

  And rang off. The whole thing had taken forty-seven minutes. More than enough time for thermonuclear gee-gaws to have wiped both Asia and Europe off the map. I knew the PM didn’t have a hot line to Mao, and it bothered me.

  I dialled again.

  ‘Yes?’ said 108.

  ‘I’d like,’ I said, ‘to speak to Mr. Kosygin.’

  She muffled the phone inadequately.

  ‘I think it’s him again,’ I heard, distant and woolly. There was giggling. I waited. The Supervisor came on.

  ‘Are you,’ she said, and the syllables fell like needles, ‘the gentleman who just wanted to speak to Mao Tse-Tung?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I sympathised. She had, I knew, a vision of this solitary loonie who had let himself loose on the telephonic world, prior, no doubt, to rape or suicide. I wondered if they were playing for time with their long, reflective pauses, trying to trace the call, trying to dispatch a van-load of GPO male nurses to my gate. But all she said was:

  ‘Russian Inquiries are on 104.’

  ‘Have you got his address and phone number?’ said 104.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I thought you’d have it.’

  ‘They never send us directories,’ she said. ‘It’s only them and the Rumanians that don’t. Everyone else sends us their directories.’

  ‘Then how do you phone Russians?’

  ‘You have to have their number. We keep,’ she grew confidential, ‘a list of hotels and factories, a few things like that. We’re not supposed to, but we do. I’ve got the Kremlin number. Do you think that would do?’

  ‘Yes, that sounds very good.’

  ‘There’s an hour’s delay to Moscow. I’ll get them to ring you back, and he might come to the phone. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘That would be very nice,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, as you’re European Directory, could you get the Pope for me?’

  ‘Oooh, you are awful!’ she shrieked. Her voice faded, and I could just catch it explaining the situation to the other girls. Time passed. She came back.

  ‘You’re not going to say nothing dirty to them, are you?’ she said. ‘Excuse me for asking, but we have to.’

  I reassured her.

  ‘I’ll have to keep your number by me,’ she said, ‘in case there’s complaints, you know, afterwards, like. No offence meant, but you’d be surprised how many people ring up foreigners and swear at them.’

  I agreed, wondering who. Insights were bursting in on every hand. It clearly wasn’t all beer and skittles, being a world leader, trying to keep up the balance of payments and build new schools and hold back the opposition, with Englishmen phoning you up all hours of the day and night, shouting ‘Eff off!’

  She gave me the Pope’s residential number. I dialled direct, 01039 6 6982. It was engaged. Odd. Was he, perhaps, on The Other Line? Or just on the balcony, waving? I tried again, trembling slightly at his proximity – five hundred million subjects under his thumb, and that thumb about to curl over the receiver in response to a far, agnostic call.

  ‘Allo.’

  ‘Your Holiness?’

  Pause.

  ‘Wod?’

  ‘Am I speaking to the Pope? II Papa?’

  Scuffling.

  ‘Allo, allo. Can I ’elp you?’

  ‘May I speak to the Pope?’

  A long, soft sigh, one of those very Italian sighs that express so much, that say Ah, signor, if only this world were an ideal world, what would I not give to be able to do as you ask, we should sit together in the Tuscan sunshine, you and I, just two men together, and we should drink a bottle of the good red wine, and we should sing, ah, how we should sing, but God in His infinite wisdom has, alas, not seen fit to . . .

  ‘Can the Pope,’ I said, determined, ‘come to the phone?’

  ‘The Bobe never gum to the delephone, signor. Nod for you, nod for me, nod for Italians, nod for nobody. Is nod bozzible, many regrets, ’Is ’Oliness never spig on delephone. You give me your name, I give mezzage to ’Is ’Oliness, ’e give you blezzing, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. A blessing, albeit proxied, was something.

  ‘Don menshnit,’ he said, kindly, and clicked off.

  By great good fortune (or even the grace of God: who knows how quickly a Pope’s blessing might work?), there was a different operator on 108 when I tried to reach Richard Nixon. He put me on to 107, who got me the White House in three minutes flat, which gave tricky Dicky a thick edge over Mao, Kosygin and Il Papa when it came to accessibility. I thought you’d like to know that, Dick, since I didn’t get the chance to tell you myself. Accessibility, as Harry Truman might have said, stops here. Or almost here. The lady secretary at the White House was extremely kind, incredibly helpful and understanding; doubtless because, given America’s readiness to empty magazines at those in power, you can’t be too careful with nuts who phone up to speak to the President. Fob them off with a ‘Get lost!’ one minute, and the next they’re crouched on a nearby roof and pumping away with a mail-order Winchester. The President, she said, was down in Florida, at Key Biscayne, where his number was 305 358 2380; someone there would speak to me. They did, and they were just as syrupy and sympathetic, and who knows but that I mightn’t have got into the Great Ear if I hadn’t played one card utterly wrong? What happened was, the cal
l from the Kremlin, booked, you’ll remember, an hour before, suddenly came through on my other phone, and I was mug enough, drunk with bogus eminence, to say to the American voice:

  ‘Sorry, can you hold on a sec, I’ve got Kosygin on the other line?’

  It was a nice moment, of course, but that’s as long as it lasted. America hung up. Tread carefully when you step among the great, friends, their corns are sensitive.

  I rather liked the Kremlin.

  ‘Is that Mister Coren?’ they said.

  It’s no small thrill to think one’s name has echoed down the corridors of Soviet power, from room to room, while nervous men, fearful of the punishment that follows bureaucratic cock-ups, have tried to find out who one is, and what one wants with the Prime Minister. After all, so much is secret, so much unknown. I might have been anybody, even the sort of Anybody whose whisper in a top ear could send whole switchboardsful of comrades to the stake. Who was this Coren, this cool, curt international voice who seemed to be on such good terms with Alexi N. Kosygin that he thought nothing of phoning him person-to-person? For men who remembered Lavrenti Beria, no kindness to strangers was too much. Which is no doubt why I actually got to Kosygin’s private secretary, who was himself extremely civil.

  ‘I merely want to present the Prime Minister with my good wishes,’ I told him.

  He was heartbroken that the Prime Minister was inextricably involved at present, but swore to me that my message would be passed on immediately. And I have not the slightest doubt that it was. It’s a long way to Siberia, after all, and the cattle-trains leave every hour, on the hour.