The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  Finally, from my friend Chris:

  Waster! I knew you’d give up! Let’s meet up sometime over Christmas for a drink so that I can mock you in person.

  Chris was right. He’d said that I would give up on my list and sure enough I had. Part of me would like to prove him wrong, show that I could complete my To-Do List in the allotted time but I genuinely didn’t think I could. At least not without something else giving way in the meantime. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and all of mine were double-booked already.

  Chapter 7: ‘Go to a ridiculously glamorous woman’s house and find inspiration.’

  A week into my new list-less life I received an email from my friend Nadine asking me when I was next going to be in London because she hadn’t seen me in ages. I started a reply suggesting a date in January once the Christmas rush was out of the way but halfway through I changed my mind and deleted the lot: Nadine was a really good friend and rather than fobbing her off with some distant date in the future I knew I should make an effort, so I asked her what she was up to the following Tuesday. A reply came back within a few minutes: she had a few bits of work to do but was free for lunch and instead of braving the crowds of Christmas shoppers currently clogging up the West End she suggested that I should come over to her house in Chiswick and she would make lunch for the two of us.

  Nadine should have been exactly the kind of person I avoided like the plague: compared to her Derek and Jessica were practically messy teenagers. But Nadine is one of those rare things: a really nice person who had a very fabulous life.

  Nadine’s house (which I’d never been to before) was like something out of a posh interiors magazine. All the walls in the large hallway, living room and kitchen were painted in an off-white colour that I could tell was not just expensive but hideously expensive. The German-made kitchen units were a gleaming gloss white and there wasn’t a single item of cutlery or crockery out on show on the pristine gleaming black granite work surfaces. The living room, with its untreated ash flooring, the huge leather sofa and expensive looking occasional table; the tastefully decorated bedrooms upstairs and the bathroom that could have come straight out of a designer hotel all had the same opulence about them as the kitchen. I sat down on her posh sofa and Nadine looked at me expectantly awaiting my verdict on her home.

  ‘You love it don’t you?’

  ‘Love it?’ I replied. ‘I want to marry it. It’s like . . .’

  ‘Something out of a posh hotel?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So why the frown?’

  I hadn’t been aware that I was frowning but now that she pointed it out . . .

  ‘Well the thing is, mate . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t understand: where’s all your stuff?’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘You know, stuff? Where are all your books and CDs? Where’s all your ornaments from tacky holidays and piles of unread newspapers and magazines?’

  ‘You’re describing your house aren’t you?’

  ‘I thought I was describing everyone’s house until I saw yours,’ I replied. ‘Everyone in the world has a house full of stuff apart from you. How come?’

  Nadine shrugged. ‘We’ve got no CDs because all our music is on our i-Pods, we’ve got no DVDs because we rent them from Blockbuster, we’ve got no books because once I read them I take them down to Oxfam and we’ve got no magazines because if I see an article I’m interested in I rip it out and then recycle the rest. I’ve never been a hoarder. I just can’t see the point.’

  Once I got over the shock that my friend of the past decade is a closet non-hoarder we settled into our normal groove of conversation and laughter pausing only to consume the posh lunch she’d prepared. Around five, I decided it was time to leave and, kissing her goodbye, made my way to the tube station. As I walked along Chiswick High Street picking my way through the Christmas shoppers I found myself thinking about Nadine’s pristine home and her comment about having never been a hoarder. How can she never have been a hoarder? Isn’t hoarding what normal people do? And I thought about my house and the hundreds of books and CDs and DVDs in the living room and then I thought about the various bedrooms and all of the stuff in there too but then my mind came to rest at the top of the house and I found myself deciding that tomorrow was going to be the day that I would begin de-stuffing my entire house, starting with the area with the highest concentration of stuff and the number-one plague of my life: the loft.

  De-stuffing the loft a week before Christmas wasn’t the smartest move ever, especially as there were plenty of things that were a higher priority like reassembling the cast-iron bed frame in the front bedroom. This was so that when Claire’s mum came to stay over Christmas she wouldn’t be reduced to sharing a bed with her granddaughter the human octopus. Still, mother-in-law or no mother-in-law, my current enthusiasm wasn’t aimed at bed maintenance and was instead focused on the myth that having a loft marginally less filled with crap might somehow make me feel more Zen and less jealous of the lady-with-no-stuff.

  I started by taking everything out and doing a kind of inventory, which made for quite a depressing read:

  1. Non-working Apple Computer tower and monitor ×1

  2. Cast-iron fireplace ×1

  3. Large suitcases filled with crap ×4

  4. Cardboard boxes filled with crap ×12

  5. Non-working video recorders ×2

  6. Box of broken Christmas decorations ×1

  7. Fake Christmas Tree ×1

  8. Thirty-year-old fake Christmas Tree rescued from bin at parents’ house several years earlier ×1

  9. Comic books ×345

  10. Cardboard boxes filled with books ×3

  11. Cardboard boxes filled with CDs that I no longer listen to but don’t want to give away ×2

  12. Vinyl albums ×450

  13. Vinyl singles ×280

  14. Black bin liners filled with Lydia’s old clothes ×8

  15. Cardboard box filled with pre-recorded videos ×1

  This was a depressing read because I’d once cherished quite a lot of the so-called crap. The comics, records and videos had been amongst my most beloved possessions during my twenties and just seeing them brought back floods of memories from my university days and beyond. Whole evenings spent in darkened rooms listening to The Smiths, lost afternoons re-watching Betty Blue, wondering why I couldn’t find a girl mad enough to poke her own eyes out, and whole days lost in the imaginary world of the X-men wondering whether one day I’d discover my own superhuman power. Broken computers and bits of electrical cabling aside, the contents of the loft was me.

  I called Claire upstairs to ask her advice.

  Claire was aghast. ‘What are you doing? You told me you were putting the bed together so that Mum’s got somewhere to sleep next week.’

  ‘I was but . . . I got distracted.’

  ‘By a loft filled with rubbish?’

  I was about to explain about Nadine’s stuffless life but then I saw her point. ‘I’ll put it all back and sort out the bed, eh?’

  Claire leant across to offer me a kiss of consolation that communicated her appreciation of my actions no matter how misguided but before her lips could reach my cheek a familiar tortured-cat scream filled the air.

  ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘You better had.’

  Later that evening Claire and I were on the sofa watching TV and half discussing our plans for Christmas.

  ‘Do you want to know something weird?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the fact that even though I’ve officially given up my To-Do List in an odd sort of way I’ve actually been doing it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Item 303 was “Try to see Nadine before the end of the year”; Item 34 was “Sort out loft”; Item 210 was “Take down bed in front room and put in loft” but I only did half of that. It’s the List. I’ve been unconsciously doing the List all this tim
e and never even noticed.’

  ‘Maybe it’s possessed like that Stephen King book, Christine,’ laughed Claire.

  ‘How can a notebook filled with stuff to do be possessed?’

  ‘I’m guessing the same way that a 1958 Plymouth Fury gets possessed,’ replied Claire. ‘Who knows?’ She widened her eyes and pulled what I assumed was her spooky face. ‘All I know is this: you might have given up the List but the List doesn’t seem to have given up on you.’

  Chapter 8: ‘Buy champagne flutes . . . or failing that a couple of plastic beakers from IKEA.’

  ‘Which one should we get the boys to sing next?’ sniggered Claire. ‘“Islands in the Stream” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart”?’

  It was a little after eleven on New Year’s Eve and with an hour to go before midnight I was trying my best to stay awake on the long haul to the big bongs. To entertain ourselves Claire and I, along with our ‘also-with-child’ friends John and Charlotte, were playing the PlayStation karaoke game that I’d received for Christmas.

  ‘We’re not singing either of those,’ complained John plucking the box from his wife’s hands. ‘Us boys need something to rock out to. A bit of Whitesnake, AC-DC or maybe even some of Motorhead. What do you say, Mike? Are you ready to rock out to Motorhead?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ I yawned and stretched as Claire lined up ‘The Ace of Spades’ through the controller and Charlotte handed me the blue microphone. ‘I could definitely do with a bit of Motorhead to liven myself up.’ I braced myself to rock out to the classic heavy metal anthem but before I could even put the microphone to my lips a strangled cat scream filled the air.

  ‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Claire.

  ‘No, it’s my turn. You sorted the last five times.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I handed her the microphone. ‘Motorhead are all yours, babe.’ Up in our bedroom, I propped my daughter against my shoulder and patted her back. Was it Derek and Jessica’s fireworks that had woken her? Or was she hungry? Or was it colic? Or was she simply over-tired? Or was she under-tired after that long nap she’d had this afternoon? Too many questions and not enough answers but I was definitely glad that I had given up on the To-Do List.

  A huge weight had been taken off my shoulders; I could get back to the business of being me: a crumpled, slightly overweight thirty-six-year-old man with a tonne of things to be ignored for as long as possible. Every time the wardrobe door jammed (Item 984: ‘Fix wardrobe sliding door’,) I just smiled, relieved that it wasn’t a high enough priority for me to bother with; every time I glanced up at the damp patch in the bathroom (Item 125) I just shrugged and carried on showering; and every time I was heading up to work and Lydia asked me to ‘play babies’ with her (Item 3: ‘Spend more time with number-one child so that she doesn’t grow up to be attracted to emotionally distant men’) I just sighed and carried on up the stairs to my office.

  After all it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been plenty of things that I had given up on in the past. In my early twenties I got it into my head that I wanted to be a model when some quirk of fate resulted in me featuring in a catalogue and cinema advertisement for Benetton. Not for a second did it occur to me that the fact that I was only five feet eleven inches tall, had a slightly chipped front tooth and possessed the kind of physique that came hand in hand with a diet that regularly featured Jammy Dodgers would stand in my way. No, in possession of the kind of self-belief that you can only possess in your early twenties, I marched into a modelling agency, handed them a 4"×4" picture of my face taken from the campaign and told them to ring me. The call never came. In fact much to my shame I had to call them in order to get my picture back. And since then, I had managed to give up on a multitude of things (wanting to be a TV presenter, the music and artistry of the band Radiohead and the third book of Lord of The Rings to name but a few) and in doing so I felt I had become richer (at least in terms of time not wasted fannying about) rather than poorer, so as far as the To-Do List was concerned that really should have been the end of my efforts.

  It took me roughly twenty minutes or so to calm Maisie down and as soon as she was drifting back to sleep I headed back downstairs for karaoke fun. But instead of being bombarded by appalling renditions of classic Eighties hits, the TV was off and Claire, John and Charlotte were sitting on the sofa huddled around a photograph album.

  ‘Motorhead did us in,’ explained Claire looking up, ‘so now Charlotte and I are taking a walk down memory lane while John laughs at our hairstyles and the size of our glasses.’

  ‘You should see some of these pictures of your wife when she was in the sixth form with Charlotte,’ said John, ‘she looks like she’s just stepped out of a John Hughes movie.’

  We spent a good half hour looking through photos and it was great fun. There were Claire and Charlotte crying after receiving their ‘A’ level results, which was featured in the Leicester Mercury under the headline ‘City teenagers in “A” Level joy!’; me dancing at a barbecue wearing slightly camp red velour trousers paired with a brown jacket; young versions of Claire and me dressed in old clothes decorating the front bedroom of our first house; me in a daft hat hanging out of a tent at Reading Festival while my friend Jackie looked on. It was a history of me and of Claire; of who we were then and who we were now; and it made me feel nostalgic for the past. We hadn’t always been the people we were now.

  Tidying away in preparation for midnight I vowed that I really would sort out the photo albums. They were, to be frank, possibly the worst photo albums in existence. The covers were plastic and the photos were supposedly held in place by sheets of transparent sticky stuff that appeared to be better at sticking to itself than to the photos.

  ‘Sorting this lot was on my To-Do List,’ I told Claire as a flood of unstuck photographs poured out onto the floor. ‘Item 509: “Organise photo albums so that when the kids are older they can see a time before they even existed presented in some kind of order.” Still,’ I scrabbled around on the floor trying to pick up the escaped photos, ‘I suppose I’ve got a bit of time before it becomes urgent.’

  Heading to the kitchen I pulled the bottle of champagne that John and Charlotte had brought out of the fridge and searched the kitchen for the champagne flutes that we’d received as a wedding present from Claire’s great uncle Clarke. It was only after five minutes of hunting through every single cupboard that I remembered we’d managed to break every single one. We didn’t own champagne flutes any more.

  ‘I bet you Derek and Jessica have got champagne flutes,’ I ranted as Claire came to find out why I was taking so long. ‘I bet you they’ve got ordinary everyday champagne flutes and champagne flutes that they keep just for special occasions! And do you know what’s worse? It was on the To-Do List. Item 846: “Buy new glassware so that when people come round we can look like we give a crap”.’

  ‘Come on, Mike,’ coaxed Claire, ‘we don’t really need champagne flutes do we? What about that set of tall glasses from Habitat that your parents bought us a while back?’

  ‘Those things are long gone,’ I replied. ‘We smashed two of them at the barbecue in August, the dishwasher killed another one, two have just disappeared into thin air and the only one in the cupboard has a big chip in it. And before you ask about that set of six wine glasses your mum bought us last Christmas, there are only two left.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Yes, two.’

  ‘We’ll just have to make do with whatever we can find then.’

  As the four of us stood in front of the TV watching the masses at Trafalgar Square, and I poured out the champagne into two huge red wine glasses and a pair of plastic children’s beakers, it occurred to me that the drinking-receptacle fiasco was symbolic of the mess my life was in. While other proper grown-ups the world round celebrated utilising the correct glassware Claire and I, as a result of our self-inflicted infantilisation, were seeing in the new year with green and yellow plastic beakers from IKEA. How long would this ‘plastic
beaker phase’ of our life continue? Months? Years? Decades? Or would New Year’s Eve 2030 see us swigging champagne from saucepans or straight from the bottle? It really didn’t bear thinking about.

  And so as the final Big Ben bongs rang out and Claire, John, and Charlotte cheered and hugged and attempted to clink wine glasses with beakers, I was in no mood for celebration. The brand-new year that we had just heralded was going to be one big lump of more of the same. I was sick of it. I was tired of it. I was never going to be a proper grown-up like Derek and Jessica.

  I was about to drown my sorrows in a world of bubbles when something lying on the floor caught my eye. A piece of notepaper. I bent down and picked it up.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Claire. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I think I have,’ I replied handing her the paper.

  John and Charlotte crowded around Claire to get a better look.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘It’s a To-Do List.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Charlotte. ‘What does it say?’

  Under the title: ‘Where am I going exactly?’ and in frankly rubbish handwriting, I’d written down in blue marker pen a list of everything I wanted to do when I was twenty-three:

  1. Become a journalist.

  2. Write a novel.

  3. Write for the NME.

  4. Write a sitcom called Sibling Ribaldry.

  5. Write for Smash Hits or Just Seventeen.

  6. Develop a radio show called ‘The Pop Show’.

  7. Become a TV presenter.

  9. Read The Misanthrope.

  10. Read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Claire.