The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  Claire glared. ‘Well I can think of at least one good reason.’

  ‘I’m going to have to try to remember every single thing that was on the list aren’t I?’ This was going to be like that time that I’d deleted three weeks’ worth of work by accident and all anyone would say by way of sympathy was: ‘Ooh, you should have backed it up on one of those little memory stick things, shouldn’t you?’ I dropped my head into my hands. ‘It’ll take me weeks to remember and copy all that out again – weeks that I should be spending actually doing the List instead of trying to re-create it.’

  ‘Look, Mike, you’re being hysterical,’ said Claire. ‘You’re not thinking properly. Wherever it is it can’t be that far if you’re referring to it every five seconds. Now think: where is the last place that you can remember having it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I cried hopelessly.

  ‘Did you take it with you to Leeds?’

  I shook my head. ‘There was no need.’

  ‘So it was something that you did before you headed off for Countdown?’

  ‘I did quite a few things in the days before I went to Countdown.’

  ‘Okay, well, in the morning take the last three and start there and see what happens.’

  While I considered this advice, I sat watching Maisie have her feed. She looked so relaxed, so at peace with the world that I wondered what was the point of growing up if it’s only to find yourself thirty-six years old with a 1,277-item To-Do List. Maisie had nothing to do but finish her midnight snack and get back to the business of sleeping. An ideal world if ever there was one.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll come to bed now and start retracing my steps in the morning.’

  It was just after nine when I turned up on Danby’s doorstep.

  ‘You’ve lost your list?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘Retracing my steps.’

  The reason I’d started with Danby’s house was because the day before I headed off to Leeds Danby and I (from nine in the morning to five when his wife got back from work) were attempting to break a world record. Not any specific world record you understand but any world record able to be broken in a two-bedroom terrace in Kings Heath with the minimum amount of props or expenditure of cash.

  Item 862: ‘Break a world record just to see if you can’, was on the To-Do List because there had always been a small part of me that suspected it wouldn’t be that hard to do as long as you applied yourself and chose a relatively straightforward record with which to do battle. Given its borderline silliness I had run this idea past Alexa, who reassured me that she had had various thoughts along similar lines. With the thumbs-up from the List’s official moral compass, I’d recruited Danby and divided the day into seven-hour-long ‘Record Breaking slots’ (with an hour off for lunch) and drew up a list of seven records to attempt. Despite a valiant effort on both our parts (especially when it came to catching stacks of coins from the end of our elbows and eating baked beans with cocktail sticks) we failed to get anywhere close to a world record, let alone breaking one.

  With no luck at Danby’s, I returned home and got on the phone to my brother Phil as the second step to finding the List. Earlier in the year he had been a contestant on ITV’s Dancing On Ice and that, combined with his being on my list at Item 61: ‘Spend more time with middle brother’, I had decided he should teach me how to ice skate. I’d met up with Phil at Hammersmith Ice Rink where he was hailed as some kind of skating hero. Sadly, despite my brother’s skills I soon realised that I hated ice skating at thirty-six just as much as I’d hated it at fifteen and our afternoon of ice bonding was little more than me falling flat on my face and vowing never to put on a pair of skates again.

  Phil hadn’t got the faintest clue where my To-Do List might be and though I pleaded with him to trek over to Hammersmith to check the rink, I could tell by his laughter that he wasn’t taking my desperation seriously. I was running out of options. Everything, and I do mean everything, was riding on the List being at my final destination: the Birmingham National Indoor Arena.

  I’d gone there to take Lydia to see the Wiggles – four wholesome-looking Australian men, who wear brightly coloured jumpers, sing joyously silly sing-a-long songs and have their own programme on Nickelodeon. The Wiggles are Lydia’s favourite people on Earth by a long way. And so when we heard that they were touring it was a foregone conclusion that we’d buy tickets to see them.

  As I headed down to the NIA I tried to think as many positive thoughts as I could. Yes, the people at the NIA would have found the list. Or if they hadn’t then I would find it on the floor in the car park. Or if not there then in the hands of a mysterious bearded man with a beatific smile who would approach me and say in a deep voice, ‘Michael, I believe this is yours.’ I’d take it from him and look up to thank him only to discover that he’d disappeared into thin air. To no avail. When I finally got to speak to one of the security guards he told me, somewhat firmly, that no red notebook with the words ‘To-Do List’ scrawled across it in marker pen had been handed in.

  Back home I sat in the car outside the front door with the engine switched off. Should I carry on looking for the list or try to replicate it from memory? Had I really checked everywhere? Could there be one place that I’d overlooked? An idea suddenly came to me. A couple of years ago a friend of mine nearly lost a £1200 watch when his three-year-old son picked it up from the dresser in his parents’ bedroom, wrapped it up in loo roll and put it inside his toy castle. The three year old had denied being able to recall that his dad even had a watch let alone touching it and it probably would have never been seen again without nineteen rounds of ‘Let’s look in the last place that we would ever think to look’. Sure enough when ‘Charlie’s toy castle’ became an option there it was lying inside the dungeon. Taking things without asking permission wasn’t Lydia’s style but even so . . .

  Taking the stairs three at a time I went to Lydia’s bedroom and found her sitting on the edge of her bed playing tea parties.

  ‘Daddy, would you like to come for tea at my house?’ she asked. ‘We’re having cream cakes and doughnuts.’

  ‘Sorry, sweetie, Daddy can’t have tea right now as he has to find something he’s lost.’ I kissed the top of her head and then kneeled down. ‘Sweetie, I don’t suppose you’ve seen Daddy’s book, have you?’

  ‘Which book, Daddy?’

  ‘Daddy’s List book, you know the one with the red cover?’

  She shook her head. ‘Haven’t seen it.’ Then added sweetly, ‘Do you want me to help you find it?’

  Staring into her big brown eyes it became obvious I was on my own with this one.

  ‘No, sweetie,’ I replied, ruffling her hair, ‘Daddy will be fine on his own but pour him a quick cup of tea just in case.’

  Heading back downstairs some fifteen minutes later I went to tell Claire and Maisie my bad news.

  ‘Any luck?’ asked Claire as I entered the kitchen.

  I shook my head. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I’ve turned the place upside down and I can’t find it anywhere.’

  ‘So that’s it then,’ I said dejectedly. ‘It’s gone for good.’ I sat down on the step.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world, Mike. I’m sure between the two of us we’ll be able to remember everything you’ve done and fill in the gaps for the rest.’

  ‘No, no, you’re wrong. You can’t replace the List. The List wasn’t just a bunch of words on a piece of paper. It was more than that. It was hopes and dreams and me getting a life and being a proper grown-up.’

  ‘And it still can be.’

  ‘No, it can’t. With the List gone I’m just going to have to accept that it’s over, babe. I failed. I’m officially giving up on the To-Do List.’

  Chapter 24: ‘Don’t mention the “F” word.’

  It was kind of apt that my giving up on the To Do List coincided with the end of August, heralding as it does the
death of summer. With all the bank holidays, the sunshine and the general sense of ‘No one really does anything in August do they?’ mentality it was easy to forget about deadlines and that was what I had done. It wasn’t so much that I’d forgotten I was supposed to be handing in my new book by the end of September, rather I’d decided to push it to one side. Yes, I’d been working on it but with the casualness of one who had all the time in the world. Now I had exactly one month. And given that it was writing novels rather than ticking items off a To-Do List that kept a roof over my family’s heads I really did need to get my head down. I probably would have done so had the close of summer brought the one thing that I feared more than my impending novel deadline: Lydia starting ‘big school’.

  Talk of ‘big school’ had been dominating conversation in the Gayle household for some time. Plus Lydia had taken to trying on her brand-new school PE kit at every available opportunity. She’d slip into it after breakfast forcing us to peel it off her after lunch and all it took was a single visitor to our home (grandparents, neighbours and even the guy who came to read the gas meter) for her to shoot upstairs to her bedroom, returning moments later to casually parade around the living room inviting admiration. It was great that she was so happy about going to school. We were over the moon that she was seeing it as the beginning of an exciting new chapter. But that didn’t prevent Claire (and occasionally myself) as viewing it as the beginning of the end.

  ‘She’s my baby,’ said Claire tearfully having just explained to Lydia at bedtime that there were only a few more sleeps left until big school. ‘I don’t want her to go to school. I want her to stay with me and be happy.’

  ‘She will be happy,’ I reasoned. ‘She’ll make new friends and she’ll be learning fun new things just like she did at pre-school.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t like it?’

  ‘What’s not to like? Getting to hang out with a bunch of people your own age in a place where every afternoon you get “structured playtime” sounds brilliant. If she doesn’t like it I’ll go in her place.’

  Claire didn’t laugh. She just cried even harder.

  ‘I tell you what,’ I said giving her a big squeeze. ‘Instead of thinking about what we’re going to be missing why don’t we concentrate on making the most of her last few days of freedom? You know, take Maisie over to my mum’s and give Lydia a really good send-off.’

  Claire nodded and sniffed. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s give her the best send-off that we can.’

  ‘You do realise that we’re making it sound like she’s just been sent down for a ten-year stretch at Her Majesty’s pleasure?’

  ‘Maybe we should stop watching so many court room dramas and give The Vicar of Dibley a spin instead.’

  Claire and I really did make the most of Lydia’s last days of freedom. We let her have an entire day of choosing what we did and where we did it on the first day of our long goodbye. She had us playing tea parties, babies and making dens underneath the dining table. After a lunch selected by Lydia of pasta, ham and cheese the action transferred to the nearby ‘Fishy Park’ (aka the Edgbaston Botanical Gardens) where she promptly ditched us in favour of her friend Tom from pre-school whom she had bumped into by the swings. Finally, as the sun began to set we headed over to my parents’ house to pick up Maisie before making our way to Pizza Express, Lydia’s final destination of choice.

  Talking about the highlights of the day, I thought this could legitimately be construed as Item 3: ‘Spend more quality time with number-one child so that she doesn’t grow up attracted to emotionally distant men.’ Once again as had happened at Christmas, the List was refusing to give up on me. Or perhaps this was an illustration of the upside of procrastination: if you put things off long enough eventually you’ll get them done regardless.

  On the morning of Lydia’s first day at school it was hard to work out which of us was the most excited. For Claire and me half of the excitement came from remembering the highs and lows of our own first days at school; we felt as though we had inside knowledge not only of how she might be feeling but what she might remember too.

  What Lydia will and won’t remember of her first five years has been something of an obsession for us. Claire can remember various events that took place around the time when she was three while my memory seems to kick in more around the age of four. Previously I’d reasoned that if we split the difference we wouldn’t have to do anything memorable until she was about three and a half and we could save ourselves a stack of cash by implanting false memories of flying to Disneyland for an afternoon or having tea with the Queen. Claire was having none of it and insisted that any memories had to be real. Despite outings to parks and zoos and soft play centres and the countryside, quite often the things that most stick in Lydia’s mind are the everyday things like the time that she helped me put out the bin bags for the dustmen, or the day that we were gardening and she saw a worm for the first time. This must be what is making us sad about today, that having been present at so many different firsts we had to let her enter a stage where new things would be happening without us there to share them.

  At twenty to nine, having finished off a ‘first day at school’ photo session (mostly featuring a smirking Lydia with her arms straight down at her sides as though standing to attention) a tearful Claire nodded that it was time to go. Having discussed in great detail what might be the best thing, we had decided that Claire would take Lydia up to school on her own and I would stay at home with Maisie. Giving Lydia a big kiss and a hug I watched her disappear out of my line of sight as she and Claire made their way to school. How did I feel? Okay, I suppose, a bit apprehensive but I was pretty convinced that she would take to it like a duck to water, and sure enough she did. She loved school. She loved her teacher. It was all going to turn out fine.

  Later that evening, having listened to all of Lydia’s first day at school stories and put both kids to bed, I wandered up to my office to do some work. I surfed the internet for a while seeing how the world had changed since I’d last checked before playing a couple of rounds of Scrabulous on Facebook, returning a few emails, checking MySpace and every other online time-wasting activity known to man.

  As much as I loved the new book, the impending November deadline was causing me no end of stress and I couldn’t see how I was ever going to make it even if I cut out non-essentials like eating and sleeping.

  I was feeling more than a little overwhelmed when I heard the sound of footsteps and Claire burst through my office door screaming, ‘I’ve found it!’ As our habit is to walk around with pillows attached to our feet once we’ve put the kids to bed I knew that whatever it was had to be important.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It.’ She kept her hands behind her back, hiding whatever ‘it’ might be from my line of vision. ‘I’ve found it!’

  It was weird seeing her bouncing up and down so joyously at the end of what had been a pretty exhausting day. ‘A cure for cancer? A tenner down the back of the sofa? The Christmas chocolate that you hid so well that you forgot where you left it?’

  Claire shook her head and grinned. ‘It’s the List, babe,’ she said, presenting me with the object she’d been hiding behind her back, ‘I’ve found the List.’

  Chapter 25: ‘Remember it’s all Pink Floyd’s fault.’

  ‘It’s like it’s come back from the grave,’ I said, opening it up and flicking through it. The pages seemed cold and damp, as if it had been left outside. Which as it turned out, it had been.

  ‘You’ll never believe where I found it,’ said Claire. ‘I was cleaning out the kitchen and listening to the radio when I heard the rumble of a diesel engine, which reminded me that I’d forgotten to put out the paper recycling for the bin men so I thought I’d better go and put the papers out. Anyway I dragged the recycling box to the front of the house and as I bent down to pick up a couple of newspapers that had blown off along the way I saw a headline on one of the supplements that caught my eye because it said: “Is
your middle-class child eating too much veg?” Then I remembered that there had been another article in a different paper that same weekend that I had wanted to read so I started rummaging in the recycling like a mad old bag lady and there, sandwiched between two old magazines, was your To-Do-List book. How amazing is that?’

  ‘That’s incredible,’ I said, partly in response to my wife’s question but more in wonderment at her ability to add this level of detail to an anecdote that basically boiled down to: ‘It was in the recycling bin.’

  ‘How do you think it got in there?’

  ‘Dunno, these things happen, don’t they?’

  ‘Do they?’ Claire raised an eyebrow. ‘Freud would say that there are no accidents and that it was probably your sub-conscious mind’s way of saying you’re getting sick of all this To-Do-List stuff.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good job that Freud isn’t here otherwise I’d have to tell him he was quite wrong and the last thing I’d want to do is offend the father of modern psychoanalysis by telling him he was talking cobblers.’

  ‘If you did he’d say that was exactly what he knew you’d say and that your aggression is indicative of a guilty state of mind.’

  Ignoring the fact that Claire had spoken the last part of her sentence in a very bad Austrian accent I countered, ‘Well if he was here I would tell him that what he said was exactly what I thought he would say in response to what I said.’

  ‘Does that even make any sense?’ asked Claire waggling her eyebrows at me in an accusatory fashion.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned this conversation is over and I bid you, madam, a good day.’

  As Claire went downstairs I wondered why I had come over all eighteenth century. Suddenly every last bit of enthusiasm drained from me and I collapsed onto the bed.

  Did Claire have a point?