Even my mother says that it’s mad that I don’t have a boyfriend. But that, sadly, doesn’t provide any solutions. I laugh ironically, and stand and shake my head. ‘Enough!’ I say out loud. As long as there’s sunshine outside, I still have the force to shake it off.
I shower and dress in my new G-Star jeans and French Connection top (the advantage of a late summer – all the summer clothes are on sale!) and head out of the door determined that by the end of the day my head will be in a better place than it is now.
I kick my way through the ochre leaves as far as Camden market, and linger long enough to buy some organic goat’s cheese and some tiny but incredibly tasty Niçois olives.
I continue as far as the High Street and head for Waterstone’s. A deckchair in the garden, a good summer read, olives, a glass of rosé . . . that’s a plan. Three days of sunshine and we all want to live like Mediterraneans.
I drift inexorably to the Self-Help section. This, I note, has been halved in size to provide space for their ever-burgeoning collection of Personal Pain Memoirs. Glancing over my shoulder to make sure that no one is watching, I pick a few of these up: Don’t Tell Mummy: a shocking tale of sexual abuse. Betrayed. Ugly. It strikes me that situating the Personal Pain Memoirs next to Self-Help isn’t entirely accidental. Presumably when one is fed up with drowning in sorrow, one moves onto healing strategies. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Maybe once one has tried all the healing strategies and they have all failed, the only succour left is to read about other people’s misery. Whichever way it works, I don’t need anyone else’s Personal Pain right now. I choose hope instead.
I proudly leave the store with a novel: The Blue Bistro (A Light, Fun and Intoxicating Summer Read), and Depression – Be Gone!
The Ups and Downs
of Self-Help
When I get back to the house, I’m pleasantly surprised to discover a strip of sunlight shining on the mossy remains of my once-vibrant lawn.
The patch of sunlight is only an inch wider than my deck chair, necessitating constant and precise solar-tracking manoeuvres. But a patch of sunlight is not to be sneezed at, especially when trying to create Mediterranean ambiences in London in September.
I put on shorts and a tacky old halter-top and lounge back on my stolen Regent’s Park deck-chair with my stunningly pink bottle of Coteaux d’Aix, half a pound of cubed goat’s cheese and my tiny but incredibly tasty olives. The deck-chair, I hasten to add, was not stolen by me – I don’t, as Mum would say, come from that kind of family. The previous owner of the flat luckily did though.
I read the back cover and reviews of The Blue Bistro again and then start to speed-read Depression: Be Gone!
I don’t really know how to speed read, but I have read so many of these books, I can pretty much skim the fluff. In a nutshell, you just look for anything with italics or bullet points.
I quickly learn that depression is caused by unchallenged mental untruths which fall into three major categories:
• Feelings of unworthiness
• Feelings of hopelessness
• Feelings of entrapment
As none of these really ring my bell, I choose the closest – Feelings of entrapment – and start to mentally list all the things that seem wrong with my life that I can’t work out how to change. I’m supposed to do this exercise with pen and paper but paralysed by either the rosé or perhaps by my latent depression, I simply can’t be bothered to go inside to fetch either.
So my problem areas are: not having a boyfriend, not wanting to spend my whole life in London and not wanting to spend my life in advertising (selling things to people who don’t need them, as some arsehole once told me).
Three seconds’ thought produces three problems. And this is the snag with depression: feeling bloody miserable leaves you feeling bloody miserable about all of the areas of your life.
The book says that I have to verify whether what I have written is True – and delete any situations which would be acceptable, were all the other things in the list OK.
So, number one: the lack of a boyfriend.
Problem? Yes. It’s a problem. No discussion required.
Number two: London.
London’s OK, if I’m being fair. I have quite a bit of fun because I live where I do. It’s just that it’s all somehow a bit superficial – what’s right about London is all razzle and glitter. There’s no sense of feeling centred or fulfilled in my day-to-day existence. It doesn’t satisfy the Earth Mother in me.
At least I love my flat. Though even this, I have to admit, I am liking less now the Leylandii has turned it into a Siberian salt mine. And now that Mark is moving out.
So, on to number three: Advertising.
Advertising is the perfect way for me to earn a living within the life that I have now. It’s a problem only when placed in the context of everything else I want. I’m good at it, and it pays the bills with ease. It’s just that were I able to change that life for something better – say a husband and a child and The Good Life then everything that advertising represents would become an absurdity.
I sigh and slosh another quarter-bottle of rosé into my glass.
As ever, the whole equation just seems too complicated for my brain, for everything depends on everything else. My life, as set up, meshes perfectly with itself. But I have to change it. And to change any of it, I have to change all of it. And even trying to think how to begin that process makes me feel like I’m drowning.
I’m fed up with being single, fed up with being a consumer, fed up with being the resident fag hag for my gay friends and being left in the corner as soon as a man comes along. I want a child – no, need a child. Since the abortion I carry an emptiness around with me everywhere I go – a physical sensation of loss, that I think, hope, know only a baby would fill. My brother and father are dead. My mother is turning into a paedophile.
Jesus, I think. How many REAL problems do you want?
And so I close Depression – Be Gone!
Muttering, ‘Depression – Be Gone! Be Gone!!’ I hurl it across the garden.
Listing my feelings of entrapment has not liberated me from them. It has simply produced a whole swathe of feelings of hopelessness. I expect that there’s another step to this process – I’m sure listing my problems was just the first stage. But sadly, right now, I just don’t have the willpower for any more self-help. I barely have the energy to slosh more wine into my glass. But of course I just about manage that.
The patch of sunlight reaches the point where I can no longer sit in it (without sitting on my rose bushes) at exactly the same moment my bottle of rosé finally expires.
I scoop up my depressing book on depression and move to the lounge. Phase one has left me feeling quite dreadful.
I take a deep breath. Let’s hope phase two – Acknowledging Your Personal Power – is more uplifting.
For each of the real problem areas I must now define my unsatisfactory start point A, an attractive palatable outcome B, and specific feasible steps to get from A to B.
As the phone pad and pen are now beside me, I really have no excuse for not doing this properly, so I write down:
A. Start point: Missing Boyfriend. B. End point : Non-missing Boyfriend.
Steps required: Find Missing Boyfriend.
Even after a bottle of rosé, this doesn’t strike me as particularly constructive, but, as far as my in-depth skimming can tell, the book is a bit lightweight on actual solutions to real problems.
I shrug and try another one.
A. Start point: London. B. End point: farm.
Steps required: Sell flat. Buy farm.
It’s at this point that I wonder, through my rosé haze, if maybe the book isn’t onto something after all. Because I suddenly feel better.
I close the book – with respect and a little awe this time – and fetch the laptop from the kitchen.
I Google, estate agents, farm cottage, Devon, and after a few random clicks I am drooling over
a grey stone cottage with roses around the door set in ten acres of farmland just outside Bristol. It’s priced at about fifty thousand pounds less than the value of my flat. It would be so easy to set it all in motion that, momentarily, I feel quite buoyant.
But of course, every image I project of myself standing in the rose-bordered doorway requires a bloke standing beside me, or, more to the point, a bloke holding a spade, ready to dig the vegetable patch.
A bloke whose face I can’t picture because he doesn’t bloody exist.
Which pretty much brings me back to square one.
For:
• Having a baby – requires a boyfriend.
• Moving to isolated country cottage – requires a boyfriend.
• Finding a boyfriend – requires a boyfriend.
I’m not asking for the Earth here, am I?
I mean, he doesn’t have to be rich, or famous, or look like, say, Jamie Thexton . . . Hum. Now there’s a thought.
Jamie Thexton does the ecology programme on Five. I wonder if he’s single. He’d be perfect because he’s cute and fit and beardless and knows how to grow perfectly formed veg, and shoot, pluck and cook a pheasant. I would probably have to convince him to ditch the dreadlocks, but, well, with time, that’s feasible. If not, maybe I could even get used to them. We all have to make sacrifices.
He’s probably a bit young for me in fact – he must be early thirties. Thinking about the age thing makes me think of my mother.
It’s weird really, because when I was in my twenties my ideal men were thirty-year-olds. And when I was in my thirties, my ideal men were thirty-year-olds. And now I’m nearly in my forties, my ideal man is Jamie Thexton.
I Google him. The photos show that he’s as gorgeous as ever.
Wikipedia reveals that he was born in 1983. Twenty-six. Ouch! I wonder briefly if paedophilia is an inherited tendency.
Jamie Thexton apparently lives in a three-thousand-foot, glass- walled loft in London’s Docklands. And amazingly, he lives there with our very own, anorexic supermodel, Angelica Wayne. So much for The Good Life!
Reading on I learn that he has his own fully equipped gym within the apartment.
And there was I imagining that those muscles came from digging.
A Mug’s Game
On Sunday morning when I wake up, our Indian Summer is clearly over. It is grey and rainy, yet still muggy and hot. Then again, maybe that is exactly what an Indian Summer is like. What would I know?
I have a vague headache this morning and feel heavy and bloated and tired. It could just be a hangover, but because I finished drinking nearly twenty hours ago, and because my period is also four days overdue (for the second time), I’m left wondering if there isn’t something else going on. Surely Lady Luck wouldn’t be so evil as to dump premature menopause on me along with everything else. Would she?
This reminds me that I need to phone Sarah-Jane and see how she’s doing on her new hormone therapy.
Because I read in a beauty magazine (when I was nineteen) that it helps un-bloat pre-menstrual women, I drink a cup of disgusting green tea.
It has never once worked for me, but you have to live in hope.
Just before three, Darren appears on my doorstep.
‘Sorry, but do you know where Mark is?’ he asks the second I open the door. ‘Only I’m supposed to be helping him with boxes and he’s not in.’
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I’m another person in the world.’
Darren frowns at me and then, bless him, blushes brightly. ‘Sorry. Hello, CC,’ he says. ‘Too much coffee and not enough sleep.’
I nod sideways inviting him in and head through to the kitchen. ‘Coffee . . .’ I say. ‘Are you sure that’s all?’
‘For once, yes,’ he says.
‘So you don’t want a coffee, I take it?’ I say, gesturing at the kettle.
‘Tea might be good,’ Darren replies.
‘And no, I have no idea where Mark is. Is he really moving today?’
‘Just the boxes,’ Darren says. ‘The furniture goes next weekend, I think.’
I grimace. ‘The end of an era,’ I say. ‘He’s been upstairs for five years. God knows who will move in next.’
Darren tries Mark’s mobile again and this time gets an answer. As Mark tells him that they are on their way, I make tea and suggest we move to the lounge. ‘I can’t stand how dark it is in here,’ I tell Darren.
‘It’s that tree,’ he comments, nodding out the window. ‘You should poison it.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘If only I could.’
‘Do it!’
‘But she’d be able to tell, wouldn’t she?’
Darren pouts and shakes his head. ‘My mum did it all the time in our old place. All the trees were listed so we weren’t allowed to cut them down, but Mum wanted a vegetable patch. She just sprayed five litres of Roundup on each one – at night – and then claimed ignorance when the poor things withered and died. They sent a guy from the council and even he had no idea. He said it was probably because of Chernobyl.’
‘It’s certainly an idea,’ I say. ‘That is, Roundup, not Chernobyl . . . Because the lack of light is really doing my head in and the old hag won’t even discuss pruning it.’
‘Just say the word and it’s done,’ Darren says.
‘The word,’ I laugh, handing Darren his cup.
Darren rolls his eyes at me and shakes his head.
Once we are seated in the lounge, it takes a moment for the conversation to restart. For some reason things have always been a little awkward between Darren and me when we’re alone. It’s probably because Darren is more junior at Spot On. I expect he feels he has to watch his words.
‘Crazy weather,’ he says, finally – the great British fallback subject. ‘It was lovely yesterday.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I spent the afternoon getting sozzled on rosé and pretending I was in Cannes.’
‘Nice one,’ Darren says.
‘And you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, what did you do with our brief Indian Summer?’
Darren blushes again and stares down at his tea. ‘I don’t think you want to know what I got up to.’
I frown. ‘Well, I didn’t,’ I say. ‘But I sure do now.’
Darren snorts. ‘You remember Ricardo?’ he asks. ‘Ricardo Escobar?’
‘How could I ever forget?’ I laugh.
‘Well yesterday he gave me that photo I wanted.’
‘He gave it to you?’
Darren licks his lips and shrugs and blushes again. ‘I had to, erm, model for him.’
‘Model.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘He wanted to paint me.’
‘How flattering,’ I say. ‘In the nude, I suppose.’
Darren smirks. ‘Not exactly,’ he says. ‘He wanted me in one of those doggy outfits.’
I bite my top lip and stifle a grin. ‘No! You’re having me on!’
‘He’s a bit weird, I think. Well, I know he is.’
‘Yes. A bit of an understatement really. So you had to wear one of those scary masks?’
‘Yeah, and a collar. And a leash. He tied the end to the bottom of the stairs and then spent five hours painting me. He did three canvases. They were pretty good actually.’
‘Five hours? Wow. And afterwards?’
Darren shrugs. ‘Nothing. I was almost disappointed. He’s not really my type, but by the time it was over the truth is that I was feeling quite up for it.’
‘He told me that he had to be frustrated to create. Now we know what he means.’
‘Yeah. He’s weird, because he’s not really very sexual in the end.’
‘But I would have thought that once he’d finished painting . . . I mean . . . if you were both willing.’
Darren shrugs again. ‘Well, no . . . Nada. Still, I got my photo. I put it over the fireplace. It looks stunning.’
‘I bet,’ I say. ‘Was it the one you wanted?’
‘Yeah, the
one with the shiny padlock.’
‘That was for sale for a couple of thousand, wasn’t it?’
‘Five. Five grand.’
‘A grand per hour. That’s a good rate.’
‘Well exactly. Though, of course with art . . . I mean, it didn’t sell, so . . . I suppose it’s hard to say what it’s worth really. In a way it’s just a framed photo. But I love it.’
‘And you’ll be the star of Ricardo’s next pervy exhibition.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Only unrecognisable, of course.’
‘Of course. The mask.’
‘I suppose you think I’m a perv,’ Darren says.
I shake my head. ‘Not really. I suppose the art aspect makes it more . . . acceptable, somehow. No, I think you’re quite brave. I wish I could be more like you.’
‘What, you fancy being tethered at—’
‘No,’ I interrupt, laughing. ‘No, I just mean, well, if I could be a bit more easy come, easy go . . . about sex, in particular.’
‘Well, we’d all like to be a bit more easy come, easy go,’ he says.
I frown at this. For the life of me, I can’t see how anyone could be more relaxed about sex than Darren. But, because it would seem rude to say so, I just nod, and cross the room to look out at the street. In the distance I hear rolling thunder.
‘Storm,’ we both say, at exactly the same moment.
‘I thought we had one coming,’ Darren adds.
‘I love a good storm.’
‘Me too,’ he agrees. ‘Makes me horny. Actually most things make me horny. Anyway. What are you reading?’ He picks up The Blue Bistro, revealing my copy of Depression – Be Gone! beneath. ‘Oh,’ he says.
‘Yes, Oh!’ I laugh.
‘That’s shite. The only ones that are any good are the ones based on CBT.’
‘CBT?’
‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy,’ Darren says. ‘You know that CBT also stands for . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Never mind. But the CBT ones are quite useful. This one just made me feel worse though.’
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Though I have to admit, I only really skimmed it.’
‘Don’t bother with it,’ Darren says. ‘I’ll bring you some CBT books on Monday if you want.’
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend Page 19