Diary of an Unsmug Married

by Polly James

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ says Max. ‘Don’t be silly, Mol. Everyone knows it’s not good for you. And it’s like having social leprosy these days.’

  ‘Well, not when both of us smoke, it isn’t,’ I say. ‘And we never go anywhere socially, anyway. Or are you thinking of getting up close and personal with someone else? Someone who doesn’t smoke?’

  Max sighs, then pops another mint into his mouth. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he says while he chews. ‘I want to give up before I enter my next decade. Just like you said you were going to. I’m a bit more determined than you are, that’s all.’

  Talk about unfairness. Has Max forgotten the provocation I was subjected to on my birthday?

  ‘Well, that wasn’t my fault,’ I say. ‘What with Ellen and her very public search for a big you-know-what at my party, and The Boss going on about Gordon Brown, it’s no wonder I forgot I was supposed to be giving up.’

  ‘Excuses, excuses,’ says Max.

  There is nothing as annoying as a reformed smoker, except for the people who attempt to reform them.

  I’m trying very hard not to jump to conclusions and lose my temper, though – so I’m quite glad to see the back of Max, when he agrees to give Josh a lift to Holly’s straight after lunch.

  Less than two minutes later, Josh comes pelting back in through the door, leaving it open.

  ‘Mum, have you seen the cat?’ he says, his voice almost drowned out by the sound of Max shouting, ‘Charlie! Charlie!’, outside.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s probably still out shagging. There seem to be about ten females on heat around here at the moment.’ (Not to mention the noisy human kind.)

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ says Josh. ‘He was asleep in the wheel arch of the car again, when Dad and I got into it just now.’

  ‘Then you know where he is already. So why are you asking me?’

  ‘Well, I told Dad Charlie was sleeping there—’

  ‘And?’ I say. I don’t like the sound of this, or of Max’s increasingly frantic tone. He’s still calling for the cat.

  ‘And Dad said not to worry – that Charlie’d move as soon as the engine started. Only he didn’t. Or not fast enough, anyway.’

  Marvellous. So now Max is a nicotine-deprived cat murderer. I’m just waiting for the Facebook hate page to be created when Josh explains that, although there was a big bump, Charlie then ran off somewhere, yowling and looking very cross.

  ‘So he’s not dead yet,’ says Josh. ‘But we’ve got to find him and take him to the vet as fast as we can.’

  Honestly, I’m sure some people have restful weekends.

  We search for hours, but there’s no sign of Charlie anywhere. Josh is distraught and keeps telling us that cats always go somewhere off the beaten track to die. This is not particularly helpful in the circumstances.

  When it gets dark, we have no choice but to admit defeat and go indoors. Max looks devastated, and Josh even more so.

  We’re all in the kitchen, sitting in silence, not knowing what to do next, when there’s a bang at the back door. The cat flap flies upwards and Charlie comes barrelling through it, shakes his fur, then swaggers off into the hallway.

  Max grabs the cat basket, scoops Charlie into it, and then we pile into the car and race to the vet’s.

  ‘You may have been right that we should have bought pet insurance,’ says Max on the way back home. ‘Especially as I feel like killing the bloody cat properly, after that. Sixty-five quid, and there’s nothing wrong with him!’

  ‘He’s obviously better than Josh at ninja rolls,’ I say.

  Max doesn’t laugh. Giving up smoking obliterates your sense of humour.

  MONDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER

  ‘Good news,’ says Dinah when she rings me at work first thing this morning. ‘Dad says he’s bored.’

  ‘That’s not good news, you idiot,’ I say. ‘It’s always bad – and dangerous, you know that. And, anyway, how can he be bored? He’s still in Thailand with the Porn Queen for another two weeks.’

  ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Molly,’ says Dinah. ‘As usual. He’s coming back early, so which one of us is the idiot now?’

  I ignore that, as I’m more interested in finding out what’s going on. Di says that Dad emailed her last night, said that he was ‘bored with lying around in the sun, even though the company is lovely’, and ‘fed up with scorpions the size of lobsters lying in wait for him in the toilet’ – so he’s decided to fly back early. Tonight.

  ‘I’ve got to go and collect him from Heathrow tomorrow,’ says Dinah. ‘He reckons he’ll be too tired to get the train.’

  ‘Your dad’s obviously got it out of his system,’ says Max when I tell him later. He makes it sound as if having something to get out of your system is the norm.

  Connie’s pleased about it, anyway. ‘I only ever wanted a cuddly grandad,’ she says, during tonight’s phone call. ‘Not a pervy one with a girlfriend called Porn.’

  Then she bursts into tears.

  ‘Talking of funny names,’ she says, ‘I hate my new job. I wish I hadn’t applied for this internship now.’

  ‘Why?’ I say.

  Doesn’t Connie realise what an honour it was to be selected? There aren’t many internships as prestigious as this, nor as well-paid. She could be stuck at the cinema with Josh, for four hours a week.

  ‘A trained monkey could do what I’m doing,’ says Connie, sounding oddly like her brother for once. ‘Or a robot. And my boss is awful.’

  ‘Oh, well – join the club on that one,’ I say. Now she sounds just like me.

  ‘Mum! He’s much worse than Andrew,’ says Connie, who barely knows The Boss at all. ‘He talks to the male interns all the time, but he only speaks to me when he has no choice.’

  Talk about déjà vu. My maternal sympathy finally kicks in, only a little later than it should have done. (I’ve been trying to stick to my ‘if it isn’t cancer, then shut up about it’ rule until now.)

  ‘Oh, Connie,’ I say. ‘You poor thing. I know all about bosses who behave like that. Give it another week, and then speak to yours about it if it doesn’t improve.’

  ‘I would, Mum,’ she says. ‘But I can’t pronounce his name properly. I can’t call him Dr Snuffleopagus, can I?’

  TUESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER

  I’m in the kitchen at work, making coffee and mulling over how to respond to Johnny’s latest series of emails – all still trying to persuade me to change my mind about a second meeting – when the phone begins to ring.

  ‘Ah, Mr Beales,’ says Greg. ‘No, I’m sorry. Still no progress on ensuring that speeding tickets become null and void if the policemen who issue them get themselves run over while doing so. As I think Molly may have already told you, we are not wholly optimistic of success on this particular issue.’

  I stick my head around the doorframe and pull a face, but Greg’s not paying any attention to me. He appears to be reading The London Review of Books at the same time as listening to Mr Beales.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he says. ‘I think you may have a somewhat dystopian view of society, if you’ll forgive me saying so.’ There’s a pause, and then he says, very slowly: ‘Dys-to-pian.’

  Then he hangs up and starts leafing through a copy of New Scientist, while I search for a safe place to put his coffee down on his desk. It seems to be covered with piles of new magazines and journals, though I can’t see a copy of Hello! magazine anywhere.

  ‘Did you just say “dystopian” to Mr Beales?’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Greg. ‘I am attempting to raise the calibre of conversation around here. Given the inexplicable omission of my name from the list of the UK’s top three hundred intellectuals.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say – which I don’t think lives up to Greg’s expectations. He raises his eyebrows, and waits for me to try again. ‘A laudable aim. Though what did Mr Beales reply?’

  ‘He asked why The Boss can’t employ someone who speaks proper English,
’ says Greg. ‘I am bloodied, but unbowed.’

  I wish I could say the same for Dinah. She’s absolutely traumatised.

  ‘God-all-bloody-mighty,’ she says when she phones tonight to confirm that Dad’s now safely back at home. ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.’

  Apparently, Dad lost his wallet somewhere in the airport, and someone else found it and handed it in.

  ‘What’s so bad about that?’ I say. ‘I think it’s reassuring that not everyone in this country is dishonest.’

  I brush aside what this might say about me or Johnny, or Max and Ellen. I’m getting much better at brushing aside. And, anyway, Max and I are going to be back on track, as soon as we’ve had our romantic weekend in the country.

  ‘I’m not telling you anything else about it,’ says Dinah, her voice rising to a squawk. ‘It was bloody awful, and I can’t cope with re-living the trauma. Not with my mental health problem. You’ll just have to phone Dad and ask him yourself.’

  I’m not sure I want to, but Dad saves me the bother. He phones as soon as Dinah’s hung up.

  ‘I’m back,’ he says, as if that’s cause for celebration. I suppose it is, really, if he’s back for good, and hasn’t brought a new stepmother with him – but I don’t want to bolster his ego too much.

  ‘So I hear,’ I say. ‘What happened at the airport? Dinah sounds a bit upset about it.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just that stupid HDP thing she’s got,’ says Dad, ‘or whatever it’s called. Making a mountain out of a molehill, if you ask me. It was bloody funny, actually.’

  Dad’s sense of humour isn’t everyone’s, so this isn’t particularly reassuring, though the story seems innocuous enough at first. He and Dinah were running around the arrivals lounge looking for his wallet when there was an announcement on the tannoy system asking for the owner of a lost wallet to return to Customs.

  When Dad and Dinah did so, the woman behind the desk asked Dad his name and then asked him what was in the wallet. Dad says he listed everything he could remember but the woman said he’d forgotten something. Then she waved a packet of blue tablets at him and asked him what they were.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I say. ‘Tell me they weren’t Viagra, please?’

  ‘’Course they were,’ says Dad. ‘Trying to embarrass me, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I assume it didn’t work,’ I say – in the voice of experience.

  ‘No,’ says Dad. ‘No one embarrasses your father, as you know. I suggested we could go behind the screen and test them, if she wanted to be sure what they were. She didn’t seem too keen on that.’

  Now I wish he’d stayed in Thailand, and I bet I’m not the only one.

  WEDNESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER

  Huh, so much for Max’s much-vaunted self-discipline. It’s at least as poor as mine.

  I’m sitting in the garden after work today – smoking, of course, but then I’m not the one who’s giving up – when Josh comes outside to complain about how few hours he’s been allocated by the cinema this week. He goes into such a long rant about it that, eventually, I ask him to go back inside and leave me alone, just for a while. Is ten minutes’ peace and quiet too much to ask?

  ‘I only came out here to calm down after work,’ I say.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ says Josh. ‘You’re a filthy addict, unlike Dad. If he can give up smoking – just like that – then I don’t see why you won’t even try.’

  ‘Unlike your father, I have a genuinely stressful job,’ I say. ‘And maybe I’m not motivated by the same rewards.’

  I don’t mention who the rewards are most likely to come from, and Josh isn’t listening, anyway. That’s so typical.

  ‘Look at that,’ he says, pointing towards the side of the shed. ‘Something’s on fire.’

  He’s right. There are clouds of white smoke billowing around from the back of the shed wall and drifting across the garden.

  ‘Dad. Dad!’

  Honestly, I don’t know why the kids always assume Max is the only person who can deal with an emergency. He doesn’t even know the meaning of the word, not to mention that I am the designated fire officer at work. (There’s no need for everyone to keep pointing out that I can’t lift the extinguisher by myself.)

  ‘Yes?’ comes Max’s voice – from the other side of the shed.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you okay?’ says Josh. ‘Don’t try to put the fire out yourself – get out of there!’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ says Max. ‘I’m just feeding the rabbit, and cleaning the hutch. Nothing at all to worry about.’

  ‘But there’s smoke coming from the back of the shed.’ Josh is getting very worried now, and is heading towards it.

  ‘No, that’s just dust from the hay,’ says Max. ‘Stay put. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  He’s too late. Josh moves faster than you think (except on a skateboard), even with a dislocated knee and skinny jeans.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Dad,’ he says, in a tone of deep disgust. ‘Mum, he’s smoking a bloody cigarette. Right next to the poor old rabbit. Dust from the hay, my arse.’

  ‘Oh, honestly, Max,’ says Ellen, over the garden wall. ‘And when you’d been doing so well, too.’

  I do wish Ellen would stop appearing from nowhere, even when she’s fully clothed – although I’m quite enjoying watching Max blustering and claiming it is ‘just a lapse’. At least, I am, until I remember that he is my husband and yet I’m not the one he’s been trying to please.

  I don’t say anything about that, though. Some of us are capable of genuine self-discipline.

  THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER

  I’ve just got off the phone to the Council’s housing department – about the girls with cancer, who I’m still trying to get re-housed – when it starts to ring again. It’s Mr Meeeeurghn, who’s managed to get himself a Council flat, somehow or other, but who now says that one of his new neighbours is picking on him.

  I don’t get the neighbour’s name, as Mr M’s so wound up that he’s making even less sense than usual. And that’s really saying something.

  ‘Woman mad crazy,’ he says, without apparent irony.

  When I enquire further, he says that she lives in the flat above his, and that she stares at him and sniffs every time he passes her in the lobby. She also bangs on the floor whenever he has a cigarette. She sounds a bit like Ellen, but thank God Mr Meeeeurghn’s new flat isn’t anywhere near our house. We’d have to move immediately, if it was.

  ‘You write and tell her,’ he yells. ‘Tell her now!’

  ‘Tell her what?’ I say. I want to go home already. And it’s only 10:30am.

  ‘You tell her stop sniffing me and be nice, because I am refugee,’ he says.

  I wish I had even a tiny proportion of the vast influence that Mr Meeeeurghn believes me to possess. If I had, I’d have given one of the girls with cancer his flat but, as I don’t, I have to spend ages trying to convince him that it is up to him to improve his relationship with his neighbour. All by himself.

  He loses his temper and slams the phone down on me. I can’t say it bothers me overmuch.

  Greg sighs when I tell him what Mr Meeeeurghn wanted this time, then says, ‘He’s on the list for our next DIY CRB check.’

  I say that I don’t think we need to go and spy on Mr Meeeeurghn to know that he’s as mad as a box of frogs – not since the letter from the Home Office and the Primark incident – but I suppose we could check out whether his neighbour looks to be a reasonable person or not, just in case Mr M is telling the truth for once.

  The sniffing did sound a bit peculiar and you do have to try to keep an open mind, after all. Even though that’s sometimes an extremely tall order.

  I do a bit of sniffing of Max when he gets home from work, until he asks me what the hell I’m playing at and tells me to stop. He smells smoky, which ought to be repulsive, but is actually very reassuring.

  He looks at me as if I am as demented as Mr Meeeeurghn when I say, ‘Oh, good, you’ve
been smoking again.’

  I don’t say that, as far as I’m concerned, anything that he does to annoy Ellen is fine by me, though I am a bit worried that we only seem to be bonding over smoking. Have we really grown that far apart?

  Johnny says that he and his wife have, but maybe that’s the fault of his clumsiness. I wonder if that’s linked to being crap in bed? Max is awfully dexterous – which isn’t necessarily an advantage, now I come to think of it. It could facilitate juggling more than one thing at a time, by which I mean, ‘women’.

  FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

  As if last night’s dream about Max juggling three naked Ellens and a partially clothed Miss Chambers wasn’t quite traumatic enough, now I have seen inside someone’s head. Not telepathically, by virtue of The Twilight Zone theme, but literally!

  If I’d wanted to be a brain surgeon, I’d have made far more effort to pass Biology when I was at school, instead of only concentrating during sex education. (And a fat lot of good that did me, anyway.)

  It’s all Mr Lawson’s fault. He’s never been to surgery before, so this is the first time I’ve ever met him. I hope it’s the last, as well.

  ‘I want to talk to you about mental health,’ he says, as he sits down and removes his jacket.

  ‘Ah,’ says The Boss. ‘And what about mental health, exactly?’

  ‘The professionals’ unwillingness to use tried-and-tested methods to alleviate people’s misery.’

  This sounds interesting. Maybe there’s something in it for me? I could occasionally do with some cheering up, so I stop doodling and pay attention.

  ‘Did you have anything specific in mind?’ I ask.

  This proves to be absolutely the worst thing I could have said. Mr Lawson smiles – a bit like a crocodile, slowly and with definite menace – then he pulls off his hat, leans forward so that his head is almost touching my notepad, and says, ‘This!’

  ‘What?’ I say. I can only see greying hair and a smattering of dandruff.

  ‘This,’ he says again, parting his hair to reveal what looks like a hole, but cannot be.

  Now Andrew’s the one who’s interested, while I have lost all desire to find out anything more, thank you very much indeed.