Cake or Death

by Heather Mallick

  I hate to use my husband as an example but I want to show that a man can have the finest mind extant and be the best and bravest person I will ever know and yet here’s the difference. I can meet a female politician and form instant common ground with her by asking if her husband understands the concept of a kitchen sink plug. She shrieks and says, You know, he’ll see the sink plug filled with little bits of stuff and then he’ll turn it over and empty it into the sink. And I say, Why do we have it if you’re not going to put the stuff in the garbage? And I say, Does he rearrange your dish placement in the dishwasher too? And we’re off.

  I see men as monoliths, some kind of simple mute oblong thing. Whereas women are a light show, the northern lights flashing wildly all over the night sky. They can’t be painted, can’t be pinned down. The director Joseph Mankiewicz, who made All About Eve, said men, in comparison with women, were as complicated as alphabet blocks.

  When women are vicious—and they frequently are vicious because they haven’t the power to display their frustration in other ways—they are brilliant. I could get a book out of the women who have hated me or whom I have hated and translate each snarky remark, each stab of the knife at my spine and the squiggly, wriggling, shooting trail that led to a confrontation. With several exceptions, and those women were psychotic and posed an actual danger to me, I regret every friendship I ever lost because I think now that we could have sat down and talked honestly and worked it out. My own habit of cruelty is clear to me and it is shameful. When I feel wronged, I cut people off. I don’t just hack at the rope, the way mountain climber Simon Yates did for sane reasons in Touching the Void but I break base camp and go home. The dumped friend shows up frostbitten and with a broken, gangrenous leg to find no tents, just a sewage hole and a blackened firepit. I don’t admire this in myself. It’s unfeminist and, worse, it’s morally indecent. I suppose I just can’t be bothered rebuilding a friendship with a man as it’s a sandcastle anyway, merely temporary. But I never think I can undo the Gordian knot that a quarrel between females becomes. These knots can come into being without a word being said.

  Don’t underrate us, S. says. Men hate men too. They can be grubby and venomous in a way that is traditionally defined and despised as feminine. Entire companies pay the price because the boss is a malevolent dwarf and keenly aware of it. He’ll take revenge for every inch he doesn’t have, because other men will mock his height (women are indifferent to height).

  As for women, men get very angry at the possibility that women are smarter than them, S. says, but it goes much deeper than this. He says men are terrified of the sexual insatiability of women. They know they can never satisfy it and they resent and fear this. This explains the extraordinary sadism they display toward even the women they meet in everyday life.

  I suspect he’s right. But I wonder if men don’t also deeply resent how complicated and infinitely interesting women tend to be. They know that we’re the dish rack and they’re the flat rubber mat that goes underneath, so dull that there isn’t even a name for it. They’re just the flat-rubber-mat-that-goes-underneath.

  It’s oblong, useful, simple and mute.

  Perhaps I shall never write again, having written this. But then, men don’t buy the books, do they? Heh heh.

  Give Me Taxes

  And death doesn’t upset me, by the way

  What’s a sure thing? My husband’s love is a sure thing. Or is it? How unfashionable to suggest that it might be. But if not, we’re left with crotchety, big-bellied Benjamin Franklin’s doubtless gout-inspired “death and taxes.” He was wrong.

  Death is a hateful dragnet, except when it’s a blessed release, a tidy designer Seconal death surrounded by those you love (notice how I didn’t insert the standard “family” there? I will never candy-coat things for you). I always think of the lotus-eaters in Ulysses. You can get high reading Tennyson’s rendition of them. Death, mmm. Even auto-erotic asphyxiation sounds bloody good, as long as you don’t realize toward the end of the best orgasm you ever had that you’ve gone too far this time and your funeral is going to be hugely embarrassing for people who actually liked you and a hoot for people who didn’t.

  But taxes are great. (Darling editor, what follows isn’t entirely new, I’ve been saying it for decades; but it’s my book.) I may be alone in this opinion but hear me out, please. I’m a fan of civilization, and taxes enable civilization. To put it another way, taxes grease the skids of living well.

  Other people say loudly, endlessly, tediously that they hate taxes. They haven’t considered the alternative, so let’s embarrass them by doing that. They’d prefer to live in sod houses and spend their days combining a drop of oxygen and two drops of hydrogen so they can have homemade water rather than have it piped to their homes by tax-supported civilization. Fine, if it keeps them occupied and far away from me.

  But I do not like to see civilized Canadians falling for sodbuster notions.

  Right-wing people have many obsessions but their main one is taxes.

  (This is a shame; wouldn’t it be splendid if they were obsessed, simply single-mindedly blind, about something useful like clean water for the planet? Or making sure no one could graduate from high school without having read all of Shakespeare, and that includes memorization? Think how much higher would be the level of abuse they could then level at the rest of us. I dream.)

  They think taxes should be cut to absolutely minimal levels, if that. I don’t know why free Canadian health care for all bothers them so much. You pay your medical fees in taxes or you owe them (yeah, sue me) to some lousy cheese-paring corporation that doesn’t care about your privacy or indeed the success of your operation and the smooth running of your spleen, whatever that is. You pay your doctor one way or another; why get hung up with the name you write on the cheque?

  To them, taxes are tapeworms, “bubble bubble toil and taxes,” as Shakespeare’s witches didn’t put it, stealing all that is good. If you didn’t pay Canadian taxes, you could have Porthault sheets instead of Yves Delorme is the neo-con message to the rich. Without taxes, the middle classes could have Frette sheets instead of Martex. Without taxes, the working poor could have sheets. Without taxes, the poor could have a mattress on the floor and the homeless could have nicer cardboard.

  This is absurd.

  I pay taxes. I love taxes. When you work, the government yanks it off your paycheque. When you write, as I do, you take your receipts to Joan, my accountant, and give her a blank cheque made out to the Receiver General. The government uses it to do all the stuff you’d rather not think about.

  Tax. A short word, an abused little shrimp-shaped thing, brutally misunderstood (as Lynne Truss, punctuation queen, says of the apostrophe). Yet truly the word tax trails clouds of glory.

  When I was a child, I assumed the world, including my body, was run by tiny people in uniform. They carried electricity in buckets to feed the light bulbs, lit invisible campfires inside the oven and pushed at my hair from inside my head to make it grow.

  Later, I learned this was nonsense. There were no elves cycling madly inside the car engine. (Ironically, after globalization, this was no longer nonsense. Little people did indeed beaver away in sweatshops worldwide to make my jeans and toothbrushes.)

  Taxes ease our daily lives in ways we take for granted. They pay for new combed-concrete sidewalks, traffic lights, sewers, garbage pickup, nicely dressed diplomats so we don’t show up at the G8 in golf shorts, ferries, fish in general, nuclear power plant inspection, protecting the provincial flower (“Leave that wild rose alone, ma’am”), libraries, white-coated people who spring into action when you contract flesh-eating disease, building codes, schools, dangerous-toy advisories, keeping cable companies in line, clean air, truck inspections for airborne wheels, loan forgiveness, autopsies, massage therapy, campgrounds, divorce, licence plates so you can track the guy on the cell phone in his Humvee who hit you, fluoridation, teacher training, privacy, universities, fair elections, fire trucks, child gua
rdianship, hazardous waste control, name changes, hostels, museums, protocol (see golf shorts), trees, zoning, high-tech passports, standards in general, notary publics, noise control, organ donation, human rights, disability, drainage, bingo permits, boating safety, French language services, neighbour encroachment, aboriginal business aid, art galleries, adoption, jury duty, cemeteries, soil quality, spills response, tattoo parlour inspection, bank deposit insurance, street lighting, commercial ship registry, victim assistance (“there, there”), SINs, joint rescue (water and air, nothing to do with knees), aerial mapping, pesticide disapproval, and savings bonds.

  Without taxes, you’d have to do all of the above yourself. Sure, you can contract it to the private sector, but if you’ve ever watched The Sopranos, you know the mob isn’t actually any good at garbage collection. Landfill is just a means of corpse disposal.

  Fine, cut my taxes and I’ll pick a task. I’ll take “spills response” and use recycled paper towels. Oh, you say the spill covers 2,000 hectares and it’s sticky, oily and toxic? I thought we were talking coffee. Somebody call the feds. I’m a taxpayer!

  Here in Canada, we believe in the public good, as in “good for all the public.” (I’m quietly humming, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” as you read this.) We don’t believe in private affluence and public squalor. We like to balance those two things. Whenever you get upset by taxation, think of an ill-considered purchase. Then figure out what that cash could have contributed to, had it been in government hands. A gleaming new hip for your mother? Quality CBC television? An ice rink for kids on the reserve?

  Paying taxes is a means to a good end. Can we do it with a lighter heart, please?

  Such is the obsession with lowering taxes that all kinds of things are becoming less pleasant. Toronto, desperate for money, began setting up what I call garbage cans and what they call “landfill sorting centres” on the sidewalk, massive things with ads on the side, yer garbage can that pays its way. And I couldn’t see what the fuss was about because I was looking at the smaller three-way bins with holes for different kinds of garbage (a decision everyone will get wrong anyway).

  Then I saw one of these “centres,” a gleaming condo tower on the sidewalk, and realized why people were so upset. They’re huge. You can’t see past the garbage condo to safely make a right turn. And especially given the advertising girth of these things, the pickup people haven’t got it quite right. Someone has to empty them occasionally. If not, pedestrians will stuff diapers, coffee cups and newspapers into the glass-bottles slot, or the plastics slot, whatever they can find. When the pullout slots overflow, they’ll throw apple cores on top of the tower and surround the thing with dodgy-looking wads of stuff.

  You’d think this would drive skewers into obsessive-compulsives like me, but I look at it as evidence of human sweetness. Yes, they got it wrong, but only because the city got it wrong by not emptying the thing. So people aimed their discards vaguely in the direction of the gleaming, advertising-poster-plastered landfill disposal centre and hoped for the best. I suspect in low-tax U.S. cities they just knock the Tower O’Slop over for the sheer fun of it and hump it while on crystal meth, leaving the recycling slots empty even of inappropriate garbage but the bin covered in semen and dribble and, inevitably, blood. I kind of admire this. Americans get rambunctious. They don’t use their words.

  When I were a lad, there were bins and you put things in them. I know I sound as if I’m 102 but garbage didn’t register when I was young because the government in some form picked the junk up.

  Oh, those were good times. Naturally, we didn’t know that because they weren’t good times at all, but what I’m saying is that tax-wise, life was fine. There was a logic to things and somehow it was arranged that you did right without having to think about it. You didn’t litter. In return, the bins were emptied. By taxes.

  You take my meaning.

  What interests me is that I sound like an old fool. I know my publisher would like me to sound young and hip, and yes, I am in some ways—I wear L.A.M.B. clothes by Gwen Stefani—but I don’t sound as though I am. I sound creaky.

  What garbage slot is designed for me? Neither plastic, nor glass, nor paper I be. God, I remember someone introducing the magnificent Doris Lessing at some godawful luncheon thing where they toast the Queen—how did I get roped into this? she must have thought, fondling a cruet—and they described her mind as a compost heap, out of which great things emerged.

  Compost, that’s me. And if something vaguely interesting comes out of the steaming heap that is my brain, then it’s all to the good. Now I shall pour a glass of Côtes-du-Rhône and raise it to the greatness of our taxation. Santé!

  After the Love Is Gone

  Or why Britain sucks

  Other people have crushes on people. Me, I have crushes on countries. It’s quite convenient in the sense that you can visit them and then you can leave without hurting their feelings. This is notoriously difficult to do with people you are sleeping with, as someone always blows hot as the other blows cold, emotions grow like blossoms and then like roots, and suddenly a visit isn’t just a visit, it’s a map of the future.

  I haven’t been back to Britain since the late nineties. A Brit on a talk-thread called “I’m watching Friends on ecstasy while checking my soaring dot-com share values … yeah it’s sooo 1990s” writes that he remembers watching “Ken and Barbara Follett attempt to open a giant bottle of champagne at Labour HQ on the night of the 1997 election, but fail. A little voice inside me wondered whether this was an omen.”

  It was. I’m not going back until Tony Blair’s gone, and I may not go back until I forgive Britons for not having turfed him out once they discovered that he was a liar, a sociopath, a snaggle-toothed, meretricious, Uriah Heepish wide-boy, a disgrace to the European Community and an embarrassment to the nation that bred him.

  But you can love a country while hating it. And I have to admit I still love Britain by deed, if not by my physical presence.

  I was raised to love the place. Look at the ur-British books I read as a child: all the Swallows and Amazons sailing books by Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, historical children’s fiction by Henry Treece, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Cynthia Harnett, books about otters, whales and foxes, about picnics and cups of cocoa and hard-boiled eggs under a sunny sky with jolly people.

  The essence of British children’s books is that Brits take their pleasures small. I cannot say how modern British children cope with the idea of a jam sandwich being the highlight of a day at the beach, particularly when they encounter an actual British beach that doesn’t have sand but pebbles. And you need windbreaks, little fabric fences you put up in front of your family plot of pebbles to shelter you from the biting wind. And then there’s the outflow of untreated sewage that made the EU declare most of Britain’s beaches out of bounds. Britain retaliated by declassifying the beaches as actual beaches. They came out with another name, something like “wet edges” presumably, and got around the regulations that way.

  It’s all very well for a child like me to have enjoyed reading about small pleasures, as I had no pleasures whatsoever when I was growing up. But your modern North American child, his home choked with brightly coloured plastic items and expensive electronic gear that ups the ante each Christmas? I don’t see the appeal for him in reading about the joys of jam sandwiches.

  But I was hooked. As a teenager, I read mostly American crap as that was what was available, but my university years studying English Lit clinched the deal. I was in love with English writing, which is playful, elaborate, varied, elegant, all those good things. (American writing, which crested in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, had turned pretentious and dull.) I imagined words as an ocean. You could just plunge into it and do what you will.

  British newspapers were still good then. Now, when even broadsheets resemble tabloids in their effort to reach the lower orders—I do mean this and it has nothing to do w
ith wealth or education, only intelligence—the British papers far outdo the rest of the world in brave reporting and wonderful presentation. For that’s the thing. Brits are interesting.

  And I was mainlining Virginia Woolf. I came in at the beginning of the Bloomsbury craze when I studied her at university and realized that the book I had greatly enjoyed, The Waves, was not the book Woolf had actually written. The woman needed some explaining. And I was off.

  Once you are enamoured of writers you explore their milieu, which I began to do on my honeymoon. My husband was British-born, although he had left the place with some disgust decades before. It’s a peasant country, he warned me. And it is. But I didn’t see that then. It wasn’t so apparent as it is now.

  I repeatedly travelled to London, always with an elation I have rarely equalled since then. To me, London is a network of blue plaques where writers lived and it is a festival of good shopping. Thanks to the immigration that whitish Brits decry, it is possible to eat wonderful food there. I stayed in good hotels, not great ones. There are no great hotels in the British Isles. It isn’t the nature of the place.

  I visited Virginia’s house, Monks House in Rodmell, Sussex, her homes in Bloomsbury, and all the good places, like Kew and the National Portrait Gallery, the Tates and all the places fashionable Brits decry, mainly because they talk and write so much and there aren’t enough opinions to go around.

  But the best of London isn’t Britain. It isn’t even London. Britain is a shit-hole. Venture outside London and you will find a poisonous self-destructive place filled with pig-ignorant people that elect governments that do maximum damage. Thatcher began privatization but Blair continued it. Imagine privatizing water. Britain did this. With global warming, there is an annual hosepipe ban now in a country that regularly suffers from massive flooding. Water bills are fantastically high, but the water itself leaks away through crumbling pipes that haven’t been upgraded for centuries. It is not in the interest of a private company to spend its profits on replacing ancient pipes. Why should they? They find water shortages helpful. It’s not as though we’re trying to find a replacement for water the way we are for fossil fuels. Water’s rarity is a precious thing to a corporation without any concept of the public good.