The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  Tuesday 3 April

  The downside of having all this specific diet-related food in the house is that now I know it’s in the fridge waiting to be eaten it’s pretty much all I can think about. As I’m eating the GI meal for breakfast I’m already thinking about my first apple and when I finally eat the apple mid-morning it’s all I can do to hold off on my ‘handful of brazil nuts and raisin chaser’. Once I’ve scoffed those, I fantasise about the macrobiotic yoghurt that I’m having for lunch. Every now and again I find myself thinking, ‘Surely I’m doing an awful lot of eating for someone who is trying to lose weight.’

  Wednesday 4 April

  Today I’ve decided that I’m focusing too much on food and too little on exercise. Having lost in my time enough money on unused gym memberships to actually buy my own gym, this time round my exercise regime is going to be a lot more straightforward. After work in the morning, armed only with an apple and half a bag of brazil nuts, I walked all the way into the centre of Birmingham. The good news is that this was forty minutes of low impact exercise that allowed me time for that ‘personal reflection’ and ‘growth’ type stuff that Mark Forster had spoken about. The bad news is that by the time I reach the city centre I’ve convinced myself that I’ve burned off the M&S low GI chicken and rice breakfast meal plus the apple and nuts too. Reasoning that I am now in some kind of calorie deficit I allow myself to have my MGSEDER treat of the month so head to Subway and order a six-inch meatball marinara sandwich on healthy Italian bread without cheese. Though sacrificing Subway’s infamous processed cheese triangles makes me more than a little sad I have to say it still tastes utterly amazing.

  Thursday 5 April

  This walking thing isn’t really working for me. Before I was halfway home from yesterday’s city centre Subway excursion I was too knackered for words. After a short internal debate I hailed a taxi, planning to give the excuse, should the driver ask, that I was late for an important meeting. I needed to find a form of exercise that’s even lower impact than walking. When I mention this to Claire, she suggests that I ‘try limiting my exercise to breathing’. There is little doubt that she is being sarcastic.

  Friday 6 April

  I have just invested a considerable sum in a flash-looking Carrera mountain/road bike hybrid, along with a brand-new helmet, lights and yellow rain coat thing all from Halfords. Cycling, I have decided, is the answer to all my exercise needs. Buying a bike means sufficient financial outlay to guilt me into using it and should things not quite go to plan I will at least have something to sell on eBay. It’s a win win situation.

  Saturday 7 April

  The bike is going on eBay. In a single journey to the centre of Birmingham I have been cut up, yelled at, beeped and nearly knocked over by a lorry and that was before I even left my own road! Having spent an afternoon getting to grips with how stupendously inconsiderate most car drivers are, I can’t see how this cycling thing is going to work. Which would I rather be? Slightly cuddly with a limited life span? Or thin but only because I’d been flattened by a lorry driver who wasn’t paying enough attention?

  Sunday 8 April

  I’m in Manchester for a work thing and being away from home is proving to be somewhat hazardous to my diet. Instead of my usual bio-yoghurt lunch I had an M&S cheese and carrot chutney sandwich and a bottle of water on the train. This wouldn’t have been so bad had I not chosen to purchase a packet of Percy Pig sweets as a present for Lydia. Having consumed most of my lunch before my train had even left New Street station, I proceeded to inhale the entire bag of Percy Pig sweets before we’d reached Wolverhampton.

  I resolve to get myself back on the straight and narrow and stay there during tonight’s festivities.

  Monday 9 April

  Well, I’m back from Manchester and not only did I fail abysmally to recover from my Percy-Pig-inspired fall from grace, I have made things a lot worse. If I was the kind of bad workman who blamed his tools I’d put the blame for my downfall firmly at the feet of the people I work for. Having laid on a reception featuring free booze with mini fish and chips, they made matters worse by shepherding me into the hotel restaurant for a slap-up meal and bottle of wine. Now as the kind of man who can’t resist the temptation of eating a whole bag of soft-fruit-gum-based confectionery that I’d bought for my daughter, what chance did I have of resisting this free booze ’n’ food extravaganza?

  Tuesday 10 April

  I’ve just weighed myself. After ten days of suffering I have actually managed to lose three whole pounds! Expect my diet book and work-out video next January because I am a genius. This To-Do-list malarkey is a walk in the park.

  Chapter 15: ‘Now you’ve reached the halfway point see what the Sunday Night Pub Club think of what you’ve done so far.’

  It was hard to describe just how good I felt when, on the last Sunday in April, I had reached the point designated by the Sunday Night Pub Club as halfway to my destination. The temptation to count up ticks as I went along was great, but I knew not to focus on the numbers but rather on getting things done. ‘It’s like birthday cards,’ I explained to Claire one evening. ‘They make your home look that bit more cheery on your big day but you mustn’t take the number you get as an annual barometer of your popularity.’

  Still, my mid-mission audit was a necessary evil if I was going to keep up the level of energy required to fulfil what remained of the To-Do List, so with great trepidation I made my way to the Queen’s Head to stand up and be counted.

  Ordering my usual pint, I waited for the other members of the Sunday Night Pub Club to turn up. Danby was first, quickly followed by Henshaw then Gary and by the time it got to half past nine Kaytee, Steve, Arthur and Jo had arrived too.

  ‘So how’s this all going to work then?’ Jo pulled a hammer out of her bag.

  We all looked at her as if she had lost the plot. She grinned and explained, ‘We’re judges aren’t we? And it’s the nearest thing I could find in the flat to a gavel.’

  I took out the List, and explained how I thought the evening should go: ‘I’ll read out the items that I believe I’ve ticked off the List, and explain to you how I did them then you ask a few questions and agree whether I’ve actually achieved them or not.’

  ‘What about appeal?’ asked Jo. ‘Are you allowed to appeal or is our word final?’

  I thought for a moment. Danby and Arthur could both be pretty harsh judges so if something really was in doubt I needed to know that I’d get a fair deal. I looked at Jo and her lump hammer and smiled. She’s from Tamworth. There are no fairer people in the nation than those from that area of the country. ‘I’m making you the appeals judge, Jo. Please treat the responsibility of your position with the seriousness it deserves.’

  ‘Buy me a pint and the decision is yours!’ said Jo, banging her hammer on the table. The surrounding tables went silent. We were in for a long night.

  ‘So, have you actually lost weight?’

  It was just after ten and having managed to get them to agree to most of my ticks I was now locked in debate with Henshaw.

  ‘Of course I’ve lost weight.’

  ‘Yeah, but how much weight? An ounce? A couple of pounds? Three stone? What?’

  I looked down at my pint. ‘Okay, okay, here’s the truth, I dropped a couple of pounds during the first couple of weeks of my diet but then I started getting busy, and the novelty started to wear off and . . .’ I paused and gestured to the pint of Carling in front of me. ‘This stuff doesn’t exactly help the cause so the bottom line is, yes, I lost weight but I also put some on too.’

  Henshaw shook his head mournfully. ‘Mate, you know I’m on your side but there’s no way that can constitute a tick.’

  The others were shaking their heads too.

  ‘He’s right, Mike,’ said Kaytee. ‘To tick off “lose weight” I think you’ve got to lose weight and keep it off for at least a month.’

  I looked pleadingly over at Jo.

  ‘That look won’t wash here, G
ayle. I’m with Kaytee and Henshaw on this one.’

  ‘Right,’ I conceded, ‘so I don’t get the “lose weight” tick because I didn’t keep it off or the “learn a new language tick”, because I can’t remember a single word of Italian?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jo, rubbing her hands like a power-crazed loon. ‘You haven’t got any problems with that, have you? I wouldn’t like to think that we weren’t taking this seriously.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I replied dryly. ‘So apart from those two things I can have all my ticks? Let’s count them up then.’

  I was more than a little nervous. A lot of this past month had been taken up by tasks that weren’t exactly easy ticks and some ticks I expected to be easy ended up being almost impossible. For instance Item 977: ‘Alphabetise CD collection’, ended up taking me more than a week to complete because a) I’d neglected to factor in just how many CDs I owned and b) halfway through organising them it occurred to me that they needed to be sub-divided by genre.

  I listened to my friends totting up the ticks, arguing about the total and then going back for a recount, before arriving at a different number altogether.

  ‘Well, according to our stats,’ began Jo, ‘by this date in your mission you should be somewhere around the halfway mark and I can now reveal that even with your refused-tick total standing at two you’ve done better than expected and have completed a staggering six hundred and forty-one ticks!’ She picked up her lump hammer and held it under my chin as though it was a microphone and I an Olympic athlete who’d just smashed a world record.

  ‘So how do you feel right now, Mr Gayle?’

  ‘Right now?’ I couldn’t prevent a cheesy grin attaching itself to my face. ‘I feel on top of the world.’

  In retrospect this was like waving a two-fingered salute in fortune’s direction. And whether I believed in fate or not, fate appeared to believe in me enough to feel insulted by my big idea for To-Do-List success. As less than a week later the To-Do List came to a crashing halt.

  PART FIVE

  May–August

  (During which I discover that this List thing isn’t going to be an absolute walk in the park after all)

  Chapter 16: ‘Try your best not to die . . . or failing that at least do it quietly.’

  The halting of the To-Do List occurred on the Sunday following my halfway audit. I returned home from the Sunday Night Pub Club just after midnight and slowly made my way to bed. Claire would normally be lying on her side with Maisie next to her in her Moses basket, but although Maisie was fast asleep Claire was nowhere to be seen.

  I stuck my head out of the door and noticed that Lydia’s bedroom light was on.

  ‘Babe?’ I called out in a stage whisper. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  I was confused. What exactly did ‘sort of’ mean? Had her mother come to stay unannounced? Had we got mice? Had our elder daughter just announced that she sees dead people?

  With much trepidation I gingerly entered Lydia’s bedroom prepared to avert my eyes, leap on a chair or scream (or some combination of all three) should the need arise. But Claire was sitting on the edge of our daughter’s bed gently stroking Lydia’s forehead.

  ‘What’s up? Is she ill?’

  Claire nodded.

  ‘What is it? The ’flu?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘A runny tummy?’

  Another shake.

  ‘So what then?’

  ‘What’s the single thing in the world that you’re most afraid of?’

  ‘Being convicted for a crime I haven’t committed and spending the rest of my life in prison.’

  ‘I mean other than that.’

  ‘Okay, then it has to be receiving murderous phone calls on stormy nights only to call the operator and be told that they’re coming from inside the house!’

  Claire laughed. ‘If you carry on like this I’m just going to have to come straight out with it.’

  ‘Look, I’m a grown man, I’ve got a To-Do list and I’m doing it. Whatever it is I’m sure that it’ll be—’

  Finally the penny dropped and my frontal lobes began to throb with anxiety.

  ‘You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about, are you?’

  Claire nodded.

  ‘But how could this happen?’

  ‘It’s been floating around pre-school apparently.’

  ‘Floating around pre-school? You make it sound like a fairy godmother. If there was an outbreak of typhoid at pre-school you wouldn’t say it had been “floating around”, would you?’

  ‘You’re being hysterical,’ said Claire firmly.

  ‘Too right I’m being hysterical,’ I screeched. ‘Our daughter has got chicken pox.’

  Now chicken pox in a four year old is no big deal. Kids get it all the time. It’s almost a rite of passage. And hey, don’t some mums actually throw chicken pox parties so that they can get the whole experience out of the way as soon as possible? But my concern wasn’t actually for my four-year-old daughter. My concern was one hundred and ten per cent for me, because at the age of thirty-six I was one of the few people I knew that had never had chicken pox.

  Like any good borderline hypochondriac I’d skim-read enough self-diagnosing health-related web pages to know that chicken pox and adulthood were not a good combination. While in childhood the worst that could happen was you might end up with the odd scar, in adulthood there was a 1 in 100 chance of inflammation of the lung (pneumonia) plus the added (albeit very rare) complication of inflammation of the brain (encephalitis). The words from one particular website I once visited while convinced that I was showing symptoms of beri beri were burned into my mind: ‘See a doctor urgently if you become breathless, confused, or if you have any unusual or severe symptoms.’

  Given that both breathlessness and confusion were part of my everyday life (as a thirtysomething asthmatic writer who finds the ordering system at Nandos Chicken way too complicated), I had been in a state of alert for the onset of chicken pox ever since.

  I couldn’t even take solace in the fact that there was a high chance, statistically speaking, that it wouldn’t kill me because the other fact I knew about chicken pox in adults was that it was painful. And not just, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit uncomfortable,’ but the kind of pain which, when my wife’s friend Heather came down with it at the age of thirty-four, she described as being ‘. . . easily worse than childbirth’.

  Now, while I’d never actually given birth I had seen the process up close and personal twice now, and the thought that I might have to endure something described as . . . ‘easily worse than child birth’, terrified me. To go through something that’s ‘. . . easily worse than child birth’, and not even get a lifetime’s supply of decent father’s day presents in return seemed to be very wrong indeed.

  ‘You’re sure it’s chicken pox?’ I asked as I slowly edged out of the room.

  ‘She’s got the spots. She’s got the high temperature. And I’ve had texts from some of the pre-school mums and a couple of their kids have got it too.’

  I felt my throat tighten. I’d always known this day would come once we had kids but I’d never imagined it would happen so soon.

  ‘And there’s no way you could have made a mistake?’ I asked. ‘You know, mistaken some finger-painting splatters for a sore?’

  ‘Babe, there’s no two ways about it, Lydia’s got chicken pox.’

  I glanced at my daughter lying quietly on her bed, looking incredibly sorry for herself. I took a deep breath and took a couple of steps closer.

  ‘How are you feeling, sweetie?’

  ‘Okay, Daddy. Can I have a kiss please?’

  I looked over at Claire, then back to Lydia. I was being thrown a challenge by the gods of good parenting: deny my poorly child a kiss versus saving myself from a pain easily worse than childbirth. It was like Sophie’s Choice only without the Nazis.

  ‘It’s nothing like Sophi
e’s Choice,’ snorted Claire as I made my literary allusion aloud. She threw me a lifeline. ‘Daddy’s got to go and do something important, sweetie,’ she explained to our daughter. ‘Maybe he’ll come and kiss you when you’ve managed to get to sleep.’

  ‘But I want a kiss from Daddy now!’ wailed Lydia her face crumpling.

  Before I knew it the words: ‘Of course Daddy will kiss you, sweetie,’ had left my lips. I held my breath and strode purposefully into the contamination zone. I gave her a big hug and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you, Daddy,’ she said looking up at me. ‘I feel much better already.’

  ‘No problem, sweetie.’ I exhaled the last remnants of my oxygen reserve. ‘But Daddy’s got to go now.’ Trying my best not to faint, I left the room, shed my clothes in the hallway and informing Claire that nothing less than a boil wash would do, strode naked to the bathroom for a hundred-degree-Celsius shower.

  A week passed and I convinced myself that after all my fussing and whining I had natural inbuilt immunity to the dreaded pox. Perhaps I’d already had it before and both my parents and I had forgotten about it.

  Lydia had been fine once her temperature had come down and was stir crazy after her brief spell in quarantine. Today was the end of all that. Having fully scabbed over she was to be allowed out and was going to make the most of it all. We lay in bed contemplating plans for the day. I was going to do a few List things in the morning, at midday we’d meet up with our friends John and Sue for lunch, then we’d go to the cinema for the first time since Maisie had been born.

  It was going to be a good day.

  My hand casually brushed against my bare chest. My fingertips felt wet. I tried to locate the source of the wetness and found a tiny burst pustule. My brain went into denial. ‘It’s just a spot,’ I told myself, going into the bathroom and looking in the mirror over the sink. But it wasn’t just a single spot. There were two on my scalp, three on my face, one on my chest and a couple of others on my legs and shoulders.