by Fiona Perrin
When I got home, I visited the Dutch company’s website, where most of the reviews were – surprise – in Dutch. But with a bit of help from Google Translate, I perceived that the old people of the Netherlands felt more alive as a consequence of living alongside the young people of the low countries. This was heartening. There were also a couple of reviews from new inhabitants of Seymour House, talking in gushy tones about the facilities. Well, it looked like a solution with not too many downsides for the folks. Lois and Lorca loved being occupied, they liked young people and needed feeding and looking after.
So Fishy Pete was weird, but loads of the people they liked were weird. And there was nothing I could find on the web about these houses being a secret set-up to get people to join a pernicious cult. In fact, it was quite sensible: remnants of the post-war generation – all beneficiaries of final-salary pensions and property booms – helped to support Generation Rent.
Wilf came wandering into the living room and my heart ached for the day that was coming, when he’d no longer slope around the house, doing not much. I looked up and determined to make life as normal as possible until that day dawned – and be as supportive as I could be in making the change. ‘So, did you say you were going to sell your bike?’
‘Yeah, I’ll have to get another one in Cape Town, so I might as well, Dad says.’ Oh, does he? ‘That guy, Patrick, offered to come round and help me do it, but I think it’s just because he wants to see you.’ He looked vaguely fascinated at the idea of someone fancying me. ‘So, like, I didn’t say yes or anything.’
‘Oh,’ I said and giggled with him at the absurdity.
‘Yeah,’ said Wilf. ‘But maybe you could go out with him and see what he’s like.’
‘So he’ll help clean your bike?’
‘No, so you might have some more people to hang out with when I’m gone.’
I got up and held him and he put his face in my shoulder for a minute. Then it was obvious he was about to cry as he quickly ran out of the room.
*
I FaceTimed Marvin before I went to sleep. He was sitting on his couch wearing his favourite purple silk dressing gown. He looked like Hugh Hefner before he was old. I wondered anew how Marv managed to get so many women to fancy him.
‘Hey,’ we both said.
‘So, I was thinking that I might get in touch with the youth worker that Daisy’s hanging out with and find out anything I can do to help Lily get through the exams.’ I gave Marv a recap on how her stress levels were now off the scale. ‘And she’s withdrawing from me. And, maybe, how to support Wilf.’
‘Hmmm, and this is the hot guy who just happened to appear in your kitchen?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with that.’
‘But you said you looked like shit when you saw him?’
‘He just said to call him if I wanted some support.’
Marvin went quiet for a while, then said, ‘And this time you’re going to look fantastic?’
I sat up indignantly. ‘What are you trying to say?’
Marvin paused. Quite a long pause for someone who talked that much. ‘I’m your friend, right? Your oldest friend? Well, along with the AAs.’
I nodded. This sounded ominous. ‘Just spit it out.’
‘Well, the thing is, you probably need a bit of a makeover. I’m just trying to be kind.’
I looked at Marvin with disgust. ‘You think I should be thinking what I look like now?’
‘I’m only saying it because you’ve had so much going on that you’ve stopped taking care of yourself.’ Marvin was kind but emphatic.
‘Are we talking a quick eyebrow shape?’ I looked at the square of the picture of me in the corner of the screen. I looked pale, tired and there was still the remnant of a bruise under my hair. ‘OK, more than a quick eyebrow shape. But the cycle guy who knocked me over keeps sending me round food deliveries and texting me flirty messages,’ I told Marvin in my defence. ‘I can’t be that bad.’
‘That’s good,’ said Marvin, who spent quite a lot of time trying to get me to have a love interest in my life.
‘But I’m concentrating on the kids and the folks.’
‘All work and no play makes you boring,’ Marv said. ‘Now, what do you say, we go and get a little Botox and fillers?’
OMG, it’d got that bad. It wasn’t a question of booking a colouring appointment at the hairdresser’s or buying a new outfit in my lunch hour. Marv was talking middle-aged overhaul. Had things got this bad that I needed needles in my face?
‘No way,’ I said. ‘I mean, shiny concrete forehead. No one knows whether you’re happy or sad. At least now I’m sad people know about it.’
What about the celebrities you saw on the Sidebar of Shame in the Daily Mail? I mean, I’m not saying I visited that page very often, ahem, but there was certainly a plethora of women with not just pneumatic chests but weird, meerkat faces. I also went there to laugh at the language. Where else did someone going to the gym ‘step out’ with their ‘beau’, ‘flaunting their fabulous figure in revealing Lycra’ rather than ‘go out of their house with their boyfriend wearing exercise kit’? When did anyone else ever ‘display their pregnancy’? Fascinating stuff, but also enough to put me off needles in my face forever. Despite knowing Marv didn’t share my horror, and also recognising he was thinking about me, it still hurt to suggest I needed it.
‘But I was thinking about what you were saying the other night,’ Marv went on persuasively. ‘You kept going on about being invisible.’
‘I had potential concussion,’ I said, holding a cushion over my face to suggest that if he couldn’t see it, then it couldn’t be that bad.
‘But then look at how you reacted to the zombie apocalypse game,’ Marv argued. ‘It’s like you’re angry with the world for thinking you’re ineffectual, and, at the same time, you’re not prepared to put your best foot forward.’
‘I am not having Botox! And doesn’t it hurt? And cost a fortune?’
‘Well, here’s the thing. I was talking to Abby about you—’
‘Cheers for that.’ They were all happily talking about my decay while I wasn’t there.
‘And it turns out she’s been having Botox for years. You know the way she always does things like that. Buys all the same clothes so she doesn’t have to think about it.’
‘And that place she goes in London where you can get your hair blow-dried at the same time as you’re having your nails done…’
‘Polish and Blow!’ Marvin said excitedly. ‘Well, it turns out that they also tart up your eyebrows and stick Botox in your head, all in the space of an hour or so. Apparently, she started having it years ago as a preventative measure – everyone in the City does. The amazing part is that she’d got loads of loyalty points. So, we thought we’d take you one night after work. Give you a bit of a boost. Hair, nails, eyebrows and maybe a chat about freezing some fine lines. And it won’t cost you more than a few quid because she’s their best customer, ever. C’mon, it’ll be fun.’
‘Hair, nails and eyebrows. Fine. But no way am I having holes in my face. I’d dream about leaking like a colander every time I had a drink.’ I tried to smile on but really I was thinking my friends had already decided that I’d lost all my spark, so there was just my dignity to go.
‘Then you’ll feel a bit more up to fighting Petra and Ralph, and getting on with everything,’ said Marvin. ‘And you’ll be able to nab the hot youth worker. Or the delivery guy. I mean, he must be fit, all that cycling…’
And the conversation continued in this frivolous vein until he’d made me forget for a moment that he’d told me I needed a makeover.
*
Later, though, with my head on my pillow, I thought about how there’d been actual men I’d dated when the kids were young; how even after Dougie had gone, I hadn’t given up on love.
There’d been the six-months romance with a man I’d met on Plenty of Fish. Tucson was American, loud and fond of big impulsive gestures. Unfortunately, this wasn’
t compatible with having two-year-olds in the house and a full-time job. He’d tried to forgive me when I couldn’t find emergency childcare for what sounded like a sexy weekend in Paris, but texted me all day Saturday and Sunday to tell me how lonely it was mooching round Le Marais on his own and it wasn’t much fun tout seul.
After that, I’d had to suggest that he was probably more suited to someone who didn’t have commitments like mine; someone who was free as a bird to fly off on mini-breaks; who when rooting around in their handbag for an emergency condom didn’t throw out packets of rice cakes and tubs of Sudocrem before she eventually found one.
There was also a very short-lived thing with a bloke Ajay introduced me to called Paul. I was about thirty or thirty-one then – and it was summer. This was relevant because we went on a couple of dates and they were outdoor, sun-based activities: a beer garden, a couple of glasses of Pimms. He wore shorts, which was appropriate as it was twenty-four degrees or so. But then, the next time we went out, a couple of weeks later, autumn had come, there was a distinct chill in the air, and we went to the cinema. However, when I met him outside, quite excited about a whole grown-up evening out, he was still wearing shorts. I don’t mean arse-cheek-gripping short shorts. There was nothing camp or unmanly about his choice of legwear – they came nearly to his knees. But it was less than ten degrees, it was 8 p.m. and we were in a city. In late September. As soon as the movie finished, I told him I had to rush home for the babysitters and nearly ran all the way to my front door, calling Ajay on the way and shouting, ‘You set me up with a man who wears shorts to the cinema.’
Ajay – typically – was nonplussed by this. ‘Interesting. I must admit that I’ve only met him in summer, so the inappropriate baring of shins and ankles wasn’t obvious.’
‘But you’ve met him in the evening. After dark,’ I snapped. Ajay had claimed to have met Paul at an event for techies in London.
‘It was in a roof garden, so outside,’ Ajay said, as if the lack of a roof made it better. ‘Now you can never tell really, what with everyone wearing trainers and jeans everywhere. I mean, even hedge-fund people all dress like they work in Gap. The problem is you’re very superficial.’ Considering he was one of the most surface-level, lightweight people who’d ever walked the earth, this was rich, and I told him so, but with more swearwords.
Did I want to be her again? Going on dates with unsuitable men? I was more than a decade older now with none of the physical confidence or energy I used to have.
I smiled as I remembered all the time I’d spent having phone sex with someone I never actually met in person but had met on an online dating site. Or pretending to have phone sex. I couldn’t be bothered and felt a bit embarrassed really about actually masturbating while on the phone to someone in another city, so I just let him assume I was getting it on with myself while he huffed and puffed himself to satisfaction. You’d never get away with it now, what with Skype and FaceTime.
This was the sum total of the men I’d been involved with post-Dougie and pre-Ralph, I worked out as I felt sleep creep up on me. I wasn’t exactly going out every night. There were wastelands – big old T. S. Eliot ones – in the middle of all that action.
But, back then, I didn’t feel like I did now – as if my sexual currency was worthless, as if I’d disappeared from a world where people fell in love.
*OK, now I have to explain what my parents are saying too? He means being old. He just doesn’t like saying it.
†I now know it means a person of influence on social media. If this person says something is cool on Instagram, for example, then other people will think it is cool and buy the product. I still can’t see how this applies to my mum.
14
A few days went by, the way they do, even when it feels time should slow down and be on your side.
With exams creeping up and the situation with Wilf, I felt like I was permanently holding my breath. My parents were busy planning a trial move to Seymour House, Lily stayed in her room working all that weekend and even Daisy pretended to put in some effort, before she said she ‘just had to get out and see some peeps before I go f-ing nuts’ and bolted out the front door. Wilf came and went as usual, but was quiet. Aside from going round to clean my folks’ kitchen, I stayed in all weekend, as if, by being there, I could create the illusion of a perfect, stable family home.
Being back at work on Monday was no distraction. I had to deal with a complaint from a woman who’d encountered one of our HGV drivers – conveniently still wearing a high-vis jacket with the Carter’s logo on it next to his lorry in the street in Holloway. It seemed – and why on earth would she make this up? – that he’d wolf-whistled her and then when she’d told him where to get off, he’d accused her of being a lesbian as if it were an insult.
I marched into Eli’s office. He was sitting at his desk with his brogue-clad feet on its polished surface, watching motor racing on a huge screen on the wall.
‘Ah, Callie,’ he sighed when he saw me. He knew that I rarely brought him good news. He was holding a Tupperware box and picking from it in a desultory fashion. ‘Now she’s got me eating kale.’ He was talking about his wife, who he always referred to as ‘she’. I ignored him: if he’d wanted to be allowed to carry on eating what he wanted, he should’ve stayed with his first wife, rather than shagging and running off with a younger version. Then he might have been sexually unfulfilled but at least he wouldn’t be permanently starving.
He indicated the chair on the other side of the desk and put his feet back on the floor. ‘You look like you’ve got something to say. Is it about that lunch thing? I did try and have a word with them all and tell them you are an integral part of the senior leadership team.’
I grimaced and sat down on the leather chair. ‘It’s fine. Well, it’s not, but it’s not about that.’ He looked relieved until I told him about the driver.
‘Stupid bastard,’ he said. ‘Do we know which one he is?’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking down at the printout of the complaint in my hand. ‘He was deluded enough to say, and I quote: “When you get round to men, darlin’, the name’s Tommy,” before he said the remarks.’
‘Going to be bad publicity?’ This was always Eli’s question in the face of complaints. He worried a lot more about what the Internet and papers might say than he did about the effect on the victim.
‘She’s reported it to Everydaysexism.com,’ I said. ‘But like she says, what she wants is this bloke fired before he can do it to anyone else. We need to fire him very publicly and now,’ I said.
‘OK,’ sighed my boss, as if it were my fault that his workforce terrorised the female population of London. ‘Get on with it.’ Then he picked up the TV remote control and made the noise of the racing rise, so it sounded like a swarm of virulent flies.
I stomped out. I wasn’t going to do his bloody dirty work. I got back to my desk and, while Charles, Greg and Ayesha watched me, picked up my phone while standing up. I rang the manager at the depot and very loudly told him in no uncertain terms to get the driver off the books immediately, P45 to follow, ‘and the whole of your depot is now down for sexism training,’ I finished. ‘You’ll all be signed up for an evening session, mandatory attendance.’
‘Oh, Cal,’ pleaded the site manager. ‘That’ll really piss off the lads.’
‘Should have thought about that before you employed a misogynist arsehole,’ I told him. Then I slammed the phone down.
Ayesha looked at me in awe and raised her eyebrows. ‘Go you,’ she said.
Greg just sighed as if he’d seen it all before.
Charles, though, was wide-eyed and looked at me with new appreciation. ‘Oh, Callie,’ he said. ‘You’re so powerful.’
And I wanted to tell him that, no, I wasn’t. In my real life, everywhere except when firing stupid blokes, I felt truly powerless.
*
I was wandering along my street from the station, wondering about whether I should go to the mediation ses
sion with Ralph and Petra, when Patrick came running down the road from the other end, wearing shorts.
When he saw me, his face lit up in a pleasant smile. ‘Callie,’ he said enthusiastically and bounded across the street, skidding to a halt beside me. God, the man was sporty and energetic. Another reason not to flirt back with him: I certainly wasn’t.
‘Hello, Patrick.’
‘Umm, sorry, you seem to have mistaken me for someone else. The name’s William. Just William.’
I smiled politely. He seemed to get that I didn’t want to play, because his face became more serious. ‘I wanted to ask you if you minded me talking to your… to Wilf the other day? He wanted to know how to strip his bike and I said I’d ask you if it was OK to show him.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said, but suspiciously. ‘He’s only here for a few weeks now.’
‘Yes, he told me about going to Cape Town with his dad.’
Patrick/William didn’t appear to be trying to be nosey or to find out more. ‘Yes,’ I said, moving off. ‘Look, if you’re sure you’ve got time.’
‘What with having to give up on feeding the lazy people of Seymour Hill, I’ve got quite a bit. Sorry, shouldn’t insult Seymour Hill when I don’t come from here. Rule-breaker.’
I supposed he was quite droll. If I’d been in the kind of mood to engage with my neighbour’s jokes, I might have laughed.
*
Lily was in her bedroom as usual, her face buried in a past paper. It was chemistry or physics – the ones she found really difficult. I was passing on the landing, ostensibly putting a pile of towels into the airing cupboard, but really lurking round my teenage children’s doors to make sure they were OK.
I heard her cry out as I passed, a stifled gasp, and I ran into her room. She was clutching her chest and seemed to be unable to take in any air. Her face was white and then puce, contorted in an expression of abject fear.
I pulled her up from her chair and she still seemed unable to breathe. ‘I… think… I’m… having… a… heart… attack,’ she managed in between gasps.