by David Lodge
I gave this self-description to Alexandra and she glanced at it and said, “Is this all?” I said it was the longest piece of continuous prose I’d written in years. She said, “It hasn’t any paragraphs, why is that?” and I explained that I was out of practice in writing paragraphs, I was used to writing lines, speeches, so my self-description had come out as a kind of monologue. I said: “I can only write as if I’m speaking to someone.” (It’s true. Take this journal for example – I’ve no intention of letting anybody else read it, but I can only write it as if it’s addressed to a “you”. I’ve no idea who “you” is. Just an imaginary, sympathetic ear.) Alexandra put my self-description away in a drawer to read later. At our next meeting she said it was interesting but very negative. “It’s mostly about what’s wrong with your body, or what you think is wrong with it, and even the two good points you mention, your hands and your feet, are undercut by the references to buying too many shoes and not being able to play the piano.” Alexandra thinks I’m suffering from lack of self-esteem. She’s probably right, though I read in the paper that there’s a lot of it about. There’s something like an epidemic of lack of self-esteem in Britain at the moment. Maybe it has something to do with the recession. Not in my case, though. I’m not in recession. I’m doing fine. I’m well-off. I’m almost rich. The People Next Door, which has been running for five years, is watched by thirteen million people every week, and there’s an American adaptation which is just as successful, and other foreign-language versions all round the globe. Money from these sub-licences pours into my bank account like water from a running tap. So what’s the matter with me? Why aren’t I satisfied? I don’t know.
Alexandra says it’s because I’m a perfectionist. I demand impossibly high standards from myself, so I’m bound to be disappointed. There may be some truth in that. Most people in show business are perfectionists. They may be producing crap, acting in crap, writing crap, but they try and make it perfect crap. That’s the essential difference between us and other people. If you go into the Post Office to buy stamps, the clerk doesn’t aim to give you perfect service. Efficient, maybe, if you’re lucky, but perfect – no. Why should he try? What’s the point? There’s no difference between one first-class stamp and another, and there’s a very limited number of ways in which you can tear them off the sheets and shove them across the counter. He does the same transactions, day in, day out, year in, year out, he’s trapped on a treadmill of repetition. But there’s something special about every single episode of a sitcom, however trite and formulaic it may be, and that’s for two reasons. The first is that nobody needs a sitcom, like they sooner or later need postage stamps, so its only justification for existing is that it gives pleasure, and it won’t do that if it’s exactly the same as last week’s. The second reason is that everyone involved is aware of the first reason, and knows that they’d better make it as good as it possibly can be, or they’ll be out of a job. You’d be surprised how much collective effort and thought goes into every line, every gesture, every reaction shot. In rehearsals, right up to recording, everybody’s thinking: how can we sharpen this, improve that, get an extra laugh there … Then the critics slag you off with a couple of snide sentences. That’s the one drawback of television as a medium: television critics. You see, although I’m lacking in self-esteem, that doesn’t mean to say that I don’t want to be esteemed by others. In fact I get pretty depressed if they don’t esteem me. But I get depressed anyway, because I don’t esteem myself. I want everybody to think I’m perfect, while not believing it myself. Why? I don’t know. I.D.K.
Early on in my treatment, Alexandra told me to take a sheet of paper and write down a list of all the good things about my life in one column and all the bad things in another. Under the “Good” column I wrote:
1. Professionally successful
2. Well-off
3. Good health
4. Stable marriage
5. Kids successfully launched in adult life
6. Nice house
7. Great car
8. As many holidays as I want.
Under the “Bad” column I wrote just one thing:
1. Feel unhappy most of the time.
A few weeks later I added another item:
2. Pain in knee.
It’s not so much the pain itself that gets me down as the way it limits my scope for physical exercise. Sport used to be my chief form of therapy, though I didn’t call it that. I just enjoyed hitting and kicking and chasing balls about – always did, ever since I was a kid playing in a London backstreet. I suppose I got a charge from showing that I was better at it than people expected me to be – that my thick, ungainly body was capable of a surprising agility, and even grace, when it had a ball to play with. (There has to be a ball: without one I’m about as graceful as a hippopotamus.) Of course it’s common knowledge that sport is a harmless way of discharging tension, sluicing adrenalin through the system. But best of all, it helps you sleep. I don’t know anything like that glowing, aching tiredness you feel after a keen game of squash or eighteen holes of golf or five sets of tennis, the luxury of stretching out your limbs between the sheets when you go to bed, knowing you’re just about to slide effortlessly into a long, deep sleep. Sex is nowhere near as effective. It will send you off for a couple of hours, but that’s about all. Sally and I made love last night (at her suggestion, it usually is these days) and I fell asleep immediately afterwards, as if I’d been sandbagged, with her naked in my arms. But I woke at 2.30 feeling chilly and wide awake, with Sally breathing quietly beside me in one of the oversized T-shirts she uses for nighties, and although I went for a pee and put on my pyjamas, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just lay there with my mind spinning – spiralling, I should say, down and down into the dark. Bad thoughts. Gloomy thoughts. My knee was throbbing – I suppose the sex had set it off – and I began to wonder whether it wasn’t the first sign of bone cancer and how I’d cope with having my leg amputated if this was how I coped with a mere Internal Derangement of the Knee.
That’s the sort of thought that comes to you in the middle of the night. I hate these involuntary vigils, lying awake in the dark with Sally calmly asleep beside me, wondering whether I should turn on the bedside lamp and read for a while, or go downstairs and make a hot drink, or take a sleeping pill, buying a few hours’ oblivion at the cost of feeling next day as if my bone marrow has been siphoned off in the night and replaced with lead. Alexandra says I should read till I’m sleepy again, but I don’t like to turn on my bedside lamp in case it disturbs Sally and in any case Alexandra says you should get up and read in another room, but I can’t face going downstairs into the silent, empty living space of the house, like an intruder in my own home. So usually I just lie there, as I did last night, hoping to drop off, twisting and turning in the effort to find a comfortable position. I snuggled up to Sally for a while, but she got too hot and pushed me away in her sleep. So then I tried hugging myself, with my arms crossed tightly over my chest, each hand grasping the opposite shoulder, like a man in a strait-jacket. That’s what I ought to wear instead of pyjamas, if you ask me.
Wednesday 17th Feb. 2.05 a.m. Tonight we didn’t have sex and I woke even earlier: 1.40. I stared appalled at the red figures on the LCD of my alarm clock, which cast a hellish glow on the polished surface of the bedside cabinet. I decided to try getting up this time, and swung my feet to the floor and felt for my slippers before I had a chance to change my mind. Downstairs I pulled a jogging-suit over my pyjamas and made a pot of tea which I carried into my study. And here I am, sitting in front of the computer, tapping out this. Where was I yesterday? Oh, yes. Sport.
Roland says I shouldn’t do any sport until the symptoms have disappeared, with or without another operation. I’m allowed to work out on some of the machines in the Club’s multi-gym, the ones that don’t involve the knee, and I can swim as long as I don’t do the breast-stroke – the frog kick is bad for the knee-joint, apparently. But I never did like working ou
t – it bears the same relation to real sport as masturbation does to real sex, if you ask me; and as for swimming, the breast-stroke happens to be the only one I can do properly. Squash is right out, for obvious reasons. Golf too, unfortunately: the lateral twist on the right knee at the follow-through of the swing is lethal. But I do play a bit of tennis still, wearing a kind of brace on the knee which keeps it more or less rigid. I have to sort of drag the right leg like Long John Silver when I hop around the court, but it’s better than nothing. They have indoor courts at the Club, and anyway you can play outdoors nearly all the year round with these mild winters we’ve been having – it seems to be one of the few beneficial effects of global warming.
I play with three other middle-aged cripples at the Club. There’s Joe, he’s got serious back trouble, wears a corset all the time and can barely manage to serve overarm; Rupert, who was in a bad car crash a few years ago and limps with both legs, if that’s possible; and Humphrey, who has arthritis in his feet and a plastic hip-joint. We exploit each other’s handicaps mercilessly. For instance, if Joe is playing against me up at the net I’ll return high because I know he can’t lift his racket above his head, and if I’m defending the baseline he’ll keep switching the direction of his returns from one side of the court to the other because he knows I can’t move very fast with my brace. It would bring tears to your eyes to watch us, of either laughter or pity.
Naturally I can’t partner Sally in mixed doubles any more, which is a great shame because we used to do rather well in the Club veterans’ tournaments. Sometimes she’ll knock up with me, but she won’t play a singles game because she says I’d do my knee in trying to win, and she’s probably right. I usually beat her when I was fit, but now she’s improving her game while I languish. I was down at the Club the other day with my physically-challenged peer group when she turned up, having come straight from work for a spot of coaching. It gave me quite a surprise, actually, when she walked along the back of the indoor court with Brett Sutton, the Club coach, because I wasn’t expecting to see her there. I didn’t know that she’d arranged the lesson, or more likely she’d told me and I hadn’t taken in it. That’s become a worrying habit of mine lately: people talk to me and I go through the motions of listening and responding, but when they finish I realize I haven’t taken in a single word, because I’ve been following some train of thought of my own. It’s another type of Internal Derangement. Sally gets pissed off when she twigs it – understandably – so when she waved casually to me through the netting, I waved back casually in case I was supposed to know that she had arranged to have coaching that afternoon. In fact there was a second or two when I didn’t recognize her – just registered her as a tall, attractive-looking blonde. She was wearing a shocking-pink and white shell suit I hadn’t seen before, and I’m still not used to her new hair. One day just before Christmas she went out in the morning grey and came back in the afternoon gold. When I asked her why she hadn’t warned me, she said she wanted to see my unrehearsed reaction. I said it looked terrific. If I didn’t sound over the moon, it was sheer envy. (I’ve tried several treatments for baldness without success. The last one consisted of hanging upside down for minutes on end to make the blood rush to your head. It was called Inversion Therapy.) When I sussed it was her down at the tennis club, I felt a little glow of proprietorial pride in her lissome figure and bouncing golden locks. The other guys noticed her too.
“You want to watch your missus, Tubby,” said Joe, as we changed ends between games. “By the time you’re fit again, she’ll be running rings round you.”
“You reckon?” I said.
“Yeah, he’s a good coach. Good at other things too, I’ve heard.” Joe winked at the other two, and of course Humphrey backed him up.
“He’s certainly got the tackle. I saw him in the showers the other day. It must be a ten-incher.”
“How d’you measure up to that, Tubby?”
“You’ll have to raise your game.”
“You’ll get yourself arrested one day, Humphrey,” I said. “Ogling blokes in the showers.” The others hooted with laughter.
This kind of joshing is standard between us four. No harm in it. Humphrey’s a bachelor, lives with his mother and doesn’t have a girlfriend, but nobody supposes for a moment that he’s gay. If we did, we wouldn’t wind him up about it. Likewise with the innuendo about Brett Sutton and Sally. It’s a stock joke that all the women in the club wet their knickers at the sight of him – he’s tall, dark, and handsome enough to wear his hair in a ponytail without looking like a ponce – but nobody believes any real hanky-panky goes on.