The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  10. I was tired. Really tired. Tired of trying. Tired of giving things my all. I wanted to stop racing round like a nutter trying to do everything and getting nowhere fast. I wanted to just stop and do a whole big hunk of nothing.

  For balance, I then wrote a list of reasons why it wasn’t okay to give up.

  Reasons why it’s not completely okay for me to give up on the To-Do List:

  1. I’ve worked too hard to give up now.

  2. One day my kids might read the To-Do List and be inspired.

  3. The To-Do List is probably the best idea I’ve ever had.

  4. So what if I’m on my own in New York? It’s New York!

  5. Why give up this close to my birthday and cast a shadow over something that should be fun?

  6. I’d practically reached the deadline anyway.

  7. The book version of the To-Do List could become a huge international bestseller and I could end up being endorsed by Oprah.

  8. I’m already more than halfway through War and Peace.

  9. I’d like to become reacquainted with the notion of perseverance.

  10. Yes, I’m tired, but it was the good kind of tired. The kind of tired that you get from going the extra mile.

  I weighed up my two lists in the hope that an answer might present itself to me. It didn’t. And though I hoped that there might be a fortuitous conversation with a kind and mysterious beggar; or an inspirational inscription scribbled on the edge of a discarded newspaper; or even a well-timed transatlantic call from my wife telling me: ‘This is what you should do.’ The truth was there was none of the stuff of films and all of the stuff of regular old reality: a difficult decision to be made and a lack of certainty about the right course to take. And so without any help I made the decision myself. It could be right or wrong but it was mine and mine alone. A mature decision, dare I say it an adult decision: mug or no mug I was going to carry on to the bitter end.

  What do you do when you’ve got six hours left in New York and a seven-hour plane ride ahead of you and not a single thing planned? Well, if you’re me you walk across the road to a nearby coffee house, get in line, order yourself the largest fruit smoothie in the house, and once you’ve found yourself somewhere to sit you reach into your rucksack and pull out your brick-like copy of War and Peace and start reading.

  It was just after seven in the morning when Continental Airlines landed at Birmingham International. I looked out of the window to see bright British sunlight sparkling over the wet tarmac. It looked like a cold but crisp day. The kind of day, especially when you’ve been away, that makes you appreciate the fact that you live in a country with distinct seasons.

  As everyone around me began unbuckling their belts even though the seatbelt sign was still on, I reached over to the seat pouch in front of me, and plucked out War and Peace. Pausing only to smirk at the cover (a portrait of a camp-looking Colonel Yergraf Davydov, of the Household Troops, wearing a short red military jacket, ludicrously tight white leggings and calf-length boots) I used my thumb to flick rapidly and noisily through the pages then flipped it over and put it back again. This book, my sole companion for the last who knows how many hours, wasn’t coming back home with me. I was done with it. I had conquered it by reading it from cover to cover and would now set it free in the hope that it would find a new home with someone who might love it more than I did. But the bottom line was this: this book had saved me in a way that a year ago I would never have thought possible.

  From the moment that I opened up War and Peace in that Manhattan café right through to the concluding page of the second epilogue as the plane (according to the map on my mini TV screen) came in over Southampton, I had wanted to abandon it pretty much every hour on the hour. That wasn’t to say that it was a bad book. There were some killer lines that I probably would have underlined with a pen had I not worried that I would then proceed to poke out my own eyes with it.

  I got it, Tolstoy, I understood what you were trying to say and why. But the thing is, mate, having spread the whole story over the best part of 560,000 words, you’d made me cease to care what was happening to whom and why. Still, I’d got my War and Peace tick, and I felt good . . . in fact, I felt great. Part of that was that I’d just polished off a big fat book by a dead Russian bloke but mostly it was that I had defeated my demons and got through to the end. In personal terms this was my London Marathon, my journey to the South Pole. In fact, it was probably my Everest. And I’d conquered it. There wasn’t anyone or anything that could take this achievement away from me. This brand-new tick had given me a new impetus, a new desire to conquer the To-Do List once and for all. But for the moment, all I had the strength to do was keep awake long enough to collect my bags, make it through customs and find a taxi. I barely remember the journey home, or even seeing Claire and the kids on the door step. The desire to crawl into bed and close my eyes was so powerful I couldn’t resist.

  ‘Dad! Wake up!’ I opened my eyes and looked around. I was lying underneath a duvet. There was a picture of Audrey Hepburn on the wall. Two small children were bouncing on my chest and a woman was standing behind them smiling. Was I back in my New York hotel? I looked around at the room. The remnants of a slight damp patch over the chimney breast (Item 125: ‘It’s been three years since you got the damp in the chimney breast sorted so finish the job and re-paint.’); the eighties-style Chinese lantern light bulb cover (Item 918: ‘Replace eighties-style Chinese lantern lampshade’); and rows of books lining the trio of IKEA bookshelves (Item 409: ‘Take books that you’ve read and don’t want, or haven’t read and don’t want, or even will never read and don’t want, to Oxfam.’). If this was a New York hotel, I thought to myself, then it was a very poor one and I would be checking out as soon as possible.

  I looked at my kids who were still bouncing up and down on my chest and I looked at my wife and smiled. This wasn’t a New York hotel. This was home. The single best location in the entire world.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’ I croaked.

  ‘Pretty much since you arrived,’ replied Claire. ‘The cab driver said you were fast asleep from the minute you gave him the address and only woke up when he pulled up at the bottom of the road to ask which house number we lived at. Do you remember any of that?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t even remember taking off my clothes and getting into bed.’

  ‘Well, that would be because I helped you upstairs and you asked me to get your post and by the time I got back you were fast asleep on top of the duvet so I slipped your clothes off, tucked you in, closed the curtains and left you to it.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘About half nine.’

  ‘And what time is it now?’

  ‘About quarter to six.’

  ‘I’ve been asleep all this time?’

  ‘Not a peep, not a word. I’ve never seen you this tired. Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Something kept you awake?’

  ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

  ‘So did you get whatever it was that you wanted to do on the List done?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not exactly, but I’m still glad I did it.’

  ‘Are you ever going to tell me what it was?’

  ‘Of course, but how about we do it a bit later?’ I sat up and gave her a kiss. ‘The kids are going to bed in a bit so why don’t we make the most of them now and then I’ll nip out and get us a takeaway, crack open a bottle of wine and tell you everything.’

  I headed downstairs with Claire and the kids for a ‘dancing session’ (a pre-bedtime ritual that Claire had invented in recent weeks to get rid of their last dregs of energy). Now that Maisie was walking by herself it was an absolute delight to watch her and her sister nodding their heads and bending their knees in time to Daft Punk, Bob Sinclair and any other bits of French House that we could lay our hands on.

  Claire ran a bath and just as we were about to drop them both in the water Lydia
asked me to get in too. I ummed and ahhed for a while because I was tired but then a second wind came from nowhere, and without pausing to think (or indeed take off my clothes) I climbed in the bath and joined them. Lydia thought this was the funniest thing in the world. Maisie was baffled. I was just glad to live in a world where all you needed to do in order to make someone’s day was hop in a bath with your clothes on.

  Bedtime stories were a medley of our all-time favourites that Lydia insisted on acting out as we read them aloud: Cock-a-moo-moo (a story about a cockerel that forgets how to crow), Me Papa Tickle Me Feet (a West Indian rhyme about the joys of tickling) and Cluck-a-Clock (a story about twenty-four hours in the life of the chickens on Farmer Brown’s farm).

  Bedtime drinks handed out and imbibed, we tucked the girls up in bed, and following repeated cries for lost dummies and requests for visits to the loo, we finally managed to get them to sleep. True to my word I nipped out to our local Chinese takeaway, bought a Chicken Kung Po, Pad Thai and boiled rice, headed to the late-night garage for a bottle of their finest champagne, and headed home.

  ‘I can’t bear the suspense any more,’ said Claire, setting down the remains of her Kung Po on the table next to her and pausing Location, Location, Location with the TV remote. ‘You have to tell me why you went to New York and you have to tell me now.’

  ‘What? Do you mean that you don’t want to spend the night guessing? Because we could do that if you want.’

  She attempted to hit me across the head with a cushion. I took that to mean she wasn’t interested in guessing games.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said deflecting the blows, ‘I’ll tell you, just put down your weapon.’

  ‘Right, weapons down and I’m all ears.’

  ‘Okay . . . I went all the way to New York for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see if I could get you a replacement for that Dean and Deluca mug that I broke. I knew how much you loved it. I scoured the internet without success so the best thing I could do was fly out there and get one.’

  ‘You paid all that money for a flight and flew to the other side of the Atlantic just to get a replacement mug for me?’

  I nodded. ‘Plus, since I’m being green these days I’ve also had to cough up to offset my carbon emissions.’

  Claire shook her head in dismay. ‘How much?’

  ‘Enough to have bought you at least a dozen of the mugs had they actually had them in stock.’

  ‘They didn’t have them in stock?’

  ‘No. I suppose they must change designs all the time. It’s just one of those things.’

  ‘So you went all that way for nothing?’

  ‘No, babe,’ I replied. ‘I went all that way for you.’

  Claire stared at me with her mouth open for a minute. ‘That has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said. ‘It’s just a mug. There’ll be other mugs. And despite what you might think, Mr Michael “Big Gesture” Gayle, flying halfway round the world to buy your wife a mug isn’t in the least bit romantic.’

  ‘So why are you crying then?’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘You must be seeing things.’

  ‘Fine.’ I gave her a big hug in the hope that it might mop up all the surplus emotion floating around the room.

  I pulled her close, pressed the play button on the remote and carried on watching, laughing and occasionally hurling abuse at the people on Location, Location, Location.

  Chapter 28: ‘Do everything. I mean it. Absolutely everything.’

  On the morning of the second Sunday in October, my first thought as my eyes adjusted to the light was that the day was finally here: my last day of To-Do Listing.

  ‘How do you feel knowing that tomorrow it’ll all be over?’ asked Claire as we sat in the kitchen having breakfast with the kids.

  ‘Great,’ I pronounced. ‘But a bit weird too. I can’t really believe that I started with a list 1,277 items long and three hundred and sixty-five days later I’ve practically ticked everything off!’

  ‘Isn’t Daddy clever?’ said Claire to the kids. She leaned across the table and kissed me. ‘I’m proud of you, babe, I really am. How many things have you got to get done by the end of today?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Just two? Are you going to tell me what they are? Or are you going to be all mysterious again like you were over New York?’

  ‘A bit of both,’ I said airily. ‘The first one is just for you and it’s going to involve us taking a bit of a trip – but before you start panicking – no, it’s not too far and yes, I’ve already arranged for Mum to come and babysit.’

  Claire sat back in her chair. ‘We’re not parachute jumping, sampling various different kinds of milks or reorganising your CD collection, are we?’

  ‘No, we’re going to Leicester.’

  The few weeks since New York had been nothing short of mayhem. Still buzzing from the thrill of having travelled across the Atlantic for a mug that wasn’t there only to conquer a big fat book by a dead Russian, I’d thrown myself back into the List with everything I had. It was hard to pinpoint a moment when I wasn’t putting bank statements in folders, or photographs into frames, or watching DVD box sets, or painting window sills, or replacing every single missing light bulb in the house, or eating more fruit, or donating blood, or watching half a dozen of the TV cable channels that we never watch, or speaking to odd men in ill-fitting suits about investments, or posting belated Christmas cards, or attending neighbourhood watch meetings or reading broadsheet newspapers cover to cover (even the really boring bits about political upheavals in countries that I can’t pronounce), or finding lost things that I’d said I’d look for but never got round to finding, or reading the kind of literary novels that I’d bought because they were potential ‘dinner party talking points’ or trying to shop locally, or redeeming Tesco Club Card points, or attending Alexa’s knitting club, or sewing buttons onto every single item of clothing that was missing a button, or correcting the date of birth on my driver’s licence, or eating long-forgotten food from the depths of the freezer, or any of the other hundreds of items that had needed doing but that I’d been avoiding. Finally having just finished Item 972: ‘Put preservative on shed’, just after 5.00p.m. on the penultimate day of To-Do Listing I’d only got two things left, one of which, Item 12 (‘Be nicer to wife because it’ll only be a matter of time before she compares notes with her mates and finally works out what kind of a rough deal she’s on’), I’d attempted several times but felt sure wasn’t fully ticked off. I knew exactly what I was going to do to fully earn my tick.

  ‘So, come on then,’ said Claire as we sat down on the 10.15 Midland Line train to Leicester, ‘how do you think that taking me back to my home town for the day is going to earn you a To-Do-List tick?’

  The idea had arisen following a brief session of ‘blue sky thinking’ with Alexa which had resulted in the following:

  1. A night at a posh hotel.

  2. A trip on the Orient Express.

  3. A weekend break in Paris.

  ‘They’re not quite right, are they? They’re all a bit . . .’

  ‘Clichéd?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cheesy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hackneyed?’

  I scowled in Alexa’s direction. ‘They’re just not right, okay? I need something a bit more . . . you know . . . romantic and meaningful.’

  And then it hit me: I would re-create, down to the very last detail, my first date with Claire.

  To fully understand the ramifications of this, some background information might be of use. Claire and I first met at the wedding of some friends of ours, Vicky and Elton. And much as I’d like to say it was love at first sight I’m not sure it was, at least not for Claire. In talking to her at the wedding reception I got the impression that she found me marginally annoying (this, I discovered later, was because at one point I’d asked her who was her favourite out of Starsky and Hutc
h – don’t ask me why, it just happened – and she’d replied ‘Hutch’. Seeing the disappointment writ large across my face she decided that I had lured her into a trap to make her look stupid and had taken against me). But on the dancefloor as we threw shapes to that all-time wedding reception classic, Motorhead’s Ace of Spades I managed to redeem myself by making her laugh several times.

  When Vicky and Elton returned from honeymoon I asked Vicky what Claire thought of me. Vicky told me she thought I was ‘quite funny’. Vicky asked me what I thought of Claire. I told her I thought she was ‘okay’.

  ‘So why don’t you ask her out?’

  ‘I will do,’ I replied decisively. ‘Tell her I’ll give her a ring.’

  I’m guessing that when Vicky passed on this news she expected I’d call within a couple of days or a month at most. I am pretty sure she didn’t think it would in fact be six months later . . .

  What was I thinking? It wasn’t as though I was seeing anyone else at the time. I was very much single. And yet . . . and yet I just couldn’t make the call. At best I’d like to think that the romantic side of me had worked out that Claire was The One and was using this six-month period as a way of making sure (by what means I’m not too clear) that I didn’t cock things up and at worst . . . well at worst I’ve a sneaking suspicion that I’d just added Claire to my already quite long twentysomething version of the To-Do List and hadn’t quite got round to ticking her off.

  Anyway, I did finally call her in the March of 1995, and our first date, the one I was about to attempt to re-create, took place, I kid you not, on 1st April. It was, as first dates go, quite romantic if a little twee. I bought her a balloon and some Space Dust because I was working the cute and quirky angle; she bought me a shortbread duck dipped in chocolate because people in Leicester tend to use the phrase ‘me duck’ as a term of endearment. I’m guessing we were both overthinking the whole situation.