No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year

by Virginia Ironside

  April 12

  Will these worries never end? Last night I woke at three in the morning and started panicking about getting old, I mean really old, and being in a chair in an old people’s home tied in with blankets with wee pouring down my legs. The telly would be on all day, Jack and Chrissie would have got fed up with visiting me and anyway would think I was a vegetable so it didn’t matter, and every time I got pneumonia I would be resuscitated with powerful antibiotics to live another million years till I finally popped off at 150. I started sweating with panic. Why am I having all this anxiety? Must be something to do with this baby’s arrival. I am sure of it.

  Or may be it’s to do with spring. Oddly, people get more anxious and depressed in spring than at any other time of the year. And certainly everywhere is bursting with crocuses, and daffodils grow even in the hideous concrete pots on the pavement by Shepherds Bush underground.

  Later

  Rather irritated by whistling from Maciej. He now has a new girlfriend. He showed me a picture of her. She works in a nail salon and looks absolutely stunning. “I in love,” he said, touching his heart.

  April 13

  Slept all through the night, thank goodness. In the morning I weighed myself. Found I was sixty-seven stone eight pounds. Extremely worried, and wondered how, if I were ill, I would ever fit into the ambulance, but then realized that Michelle had got there before me and switched the knob underneath the scales to kilowatts, or whatever, damn her.

  I keep my scales in the bathroom next to a tall mahogany chest of drawers inherited from my grandmother. She used to keep in it letters, bits of ribbon, magnifying glasses, all kinds of knickeryknackery…I, on the other hand, keep pills, ointments, bandages and quantities of out-of-date old prescription drugs. Experience has told me that though some drugs go off after their sell-by date, most don’t. Found myself suddenly wondering if sleeping pills, which had lost all their power over the years, could kill you, if you believed in them enough.

  I have a box of whacking great sleepers left over from the sixties, bright blue capsules, hidden in a drawer for suicidal emergencies. It would be awful to swallow the lot and wake up still alive. But, on the other hand, if I believed strongly enough that they were still incredibly potent, would I die, whether they were strong or not? In other words, could one be killed by a placebo?

  These thoughts were prompted by a mysterious e-mail from a total stranger who had apparently got cancer, gone to Africa and met a witch doctor, who asked if he could bring on his next visit:

  …three young cats, 1 blackbird’s egg, 1 dove, 1 black cock, a medium-sized calabash and plenty of soap, eight candles and a bottle of gin. I followed this to the letter and with these items the Old Man performed a ceremony and this time gave me my own Voodoo, which was black soap with a single corey shell in the middle. I was given strict instructions to use the soap every day and repeated in my mind, while washing, all that I had written down in previous ceremonies.

  All this has been followed as instructed and as a result I feel as good as new. I feel so much better and went to see the oncologist at the Marsden and he was amazed at my progress.

  Now that I look closer, this e-mail appears to have been forwarded by Philippa’s sister. Very irritating. She requests that I send it to ten of my friends who can pray for this bloke, whoever he is. I shall do no such thing.

  All the same, the story is very seductive. Longed to rush off to the witch doctor with several bottles of gin and get instantly cured of everything—arthritis, bad dreams, incipient alcoholism…Might have a problem with the young cats, though. I fear they came to a sticky end.

  Having retuned the scales, I found I was ten stone nine pounds, which is far too heavy. I moved it about six inches away only to be told that I was ten stone eleven—even worse. Now I am paranoid. Maybe I am really thirteen stone five, and don’t know it. Or maybe I am anorexic and about to die. Dream on.

  Later

  When I got down to the kitchen I found that I had no milk left. I have an awful feeling that Michelle took my last drop. I felt enraged. First because I had no milk but secondly because I find it so irritating to get upset over half an inch of milk. It is very difficult to convey to anyone that it is not the milk I mind, but the fact that I have to get dressed and go to the shop to buy more supplies in order to have a cup of tea. In the event, I tied my nightdress up tight with my dressing-gown cord, put my coat on over it, stuffed my bare feet into a pair of shoes and staggered round the corner to the supermarket. Apart from my hair sticking up on end I didn’t look much different from how I always do.

  The sky was pouring with spring sunshine and, in the street, the imam of the local mosque bowed to me and said: “Good morning!” He is perfectly charming, with a long gray beard, and he was wearing a cricketing jersey over his dress and had a lovely embroidered hat on top of his head. So I didn’t feel too embarrassed about my own weird attire that day.

  Last week, when I was sweeping leaves away from the road outside my house, he took the broom from me and insisted on doing it himself.

  “As-Salaam Alaikum,” he said. I replied, feeling very proud of myself: “Wa-Aleikum Salaam.” But this does not mean that I am learning Arabic. Those three words are going to be the very limit to my foreign-language learning in later life. And who knows, they might save me from death when I am kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq.

  I am very lucky to have the mosque so close. It means that a) I will never get hit by a terrorist bomb and b) I have the pleasure of looking out of the window in the summer and seeing all the congregation out in the garden, praying while facing my house, it being in the direct line to Mecca.

  I noticed to my surprise that the Kwik-Fit garage on the corner of the street had been boarded up and was for sale. Immediately went into panic mode. Just hope it’s not bought by someone who wants to turn it into a rock music venue with twenty-four-hour drinking. Will have to alert the Residents’ Association, of which I am chair. I was chairman until someone said it was sexist, so I had to turn into a chair.

  I thought I had got away with my disguise and was hurrying home with my milk, when I was stopped by George, the black guy across the road. He is very tall, with two teeth missing and one gold one.

  He has two very nice reckless sons. But this time he had a terrible tale to tell. The man downstairs, he said, had threatened him.

  “My neighbor,” he shook his head. “He mad! You know what he do the other day?”

  “No. What?” I asked. I knew this neighbor. A nasty piece of work of about sixty-five, covered in tattoos, with a bald head, who lives below George. Once he asked me to come in and measure his curtains for him “because my daughters won’t ’ave nuffink to do with me.” He is thick, whingeing, tough and lonely. When I wrote a few days ago that any man who turned his attention on me would set me sparkling and simpering, I was not including this creep across the road. Nor, actually, bearded counselors.

  “A policeman came for one of my boys,” said George. “And my neighbor, he let them in the door! So I came down next day and I say: “When policeman ring my bell, you don’t let them in, you leave it to me to let them in, you hear?” So he get most unpleasant and that night, you know what, he bring a friend with a baseball bat and they come upstairs and they beat me op!”

  “But he’s disabled!” I said. “He’s got a sticker on his car!”

  “Disabled—nonsense,” he replied. “He’s a bad man. I don’t speak to him no more.”

  When I got back I found that my dressing-gown cord had come adrift and my nightdress had been trailing on the pavement like a ball gown. God knows what they thought in the shop.

  May 10th

  Went to the Tate, where I was meeting Hughie for lunch after going round the Turner exhibition.

  “Can you face it?” asked Hughie. “I mean, all those sunsets and ships at sea, was there something wrong with his eyesight, all that old rubbish?”

  “Lovely!” I said.

  As I stepped
into the tube station I was quite bowled over by the idea that I no longer had to pay. Ever. “Freedom Pass!”—the very words are like the entry to a new life. On the platform I sat in a kind of dream of coddledness waiting for the train to come, thinking how lucky I was. I haven’t been on an Underground train since I was about forty. I waited, and waited…and then it turned out that the service had been halted because someone had committed suicide. Not that we were told that, of course, but I knew it because they said it was due to “passenger action” and a train driver I know told me that that was a euphemism for what was known in the business as a “one under.”

  Felt very sad that anyone could want to die like that and imagined that he was probably young, youth being one of the most depressing times of life, in my experience. At the same time felt fantastically irritated that whoever he was decided to commit suicide on the very day that I was taking my first free trip on the Underground.

  When I arrived at the Tate (and no, I will not call it Tate Britain, whatever the marketing men say), Hughie looked even older than I remembered him from the DVD evening. He said that on his way a pregnant black woman had even got up for him in a bus. “Everyone is very keen on old gentlemen,” he says.

  Of course, he is older. He is sixty-five and the gap in our ages, oddly, seems far greater than between me and someone of, say, forty. Or, come to that, thirty. The thing is that those people who did National Service and missed out on being young in the sixties simply don’t share the same common cultural language as those of us who, like the young today, were into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Five years older than me and the man is still into suits. Hughie wears a jacket and tie wherever he goes. And yet these people imagine we are the same age because we both know all about thrift and pen hospitals and Lyons Corner Houses and ration books, etc.

  What makes my generation so utterly distinctive is that we had one foot in an almost Victorian generation, and another in the new technological revolution. We’re much more geared to big changes in our lives than the generation just before us. We were brought up by a prepill, washing-sheets-by-hand-removing-the-water-by-putting-them-through-a-hand-turned-mangle generation, but then we lived through the affluent sixties and later through the plunge into microchips and huge advances in technology, experiencing a seismic shift that has made us far more adaptable to change than either those who were young before the sixties or those who were young after them. It helps, too, that it’s hard for us sixties’ survivors ever to shake our heads worriedly about today’s youth and say: “Ah, they aren’t like the young people of our day.” The young today are like the young of our day. If anything, they’re possibly less adventurous and more responsible.

  Anyway, off we went into the exhibition. Going to an art gallery these days is like entering a rather civilized old people’s home. Everyone is nearly one hundred and smelling of pee, and they’re all bent double on walking frames and listening to the talking guides with the volume so high that you can hear every word leaking out between their ears and the headphones.

  “Oh, dear,” said Hughie, looking around in rather a depressed way. “Pictures by dead people being looked at by nearly dead people. I do hope I don’t live too long. The idea of another thirty years—what total hell.”

  Then, looking down at me, he suddenly asked: “What have you got on your feet?”

  I explained that once I’d got out of the blue flip-flops I had to wear sensible shoes for a few weeks and had got rather addicted to them. Sensible shoes from Ecco, no less. There’s a funny moment when you’re sixty and thinking about shoes, when someone (everyone, in fact) suddenly reveals there is a special shop for old people’s comfortable shoes. It sounds glamorous—Ecco. Ecco! Behold! But rather than continuing with the theme: “Ecco! Da beautifulla shoes for the lovely matura ladya! Flattera your beautifulla feeta!,” the words following Ecco should, in my view, run: “Ecco! Atta lasta! The hideousa but comfortaballa shoesa for the olda batsa!”

  “They’re delightful,” he said gallantly. “I do hope you can walk, though. Would you like me to hire a wheelchair? It might be rather fun…Then you could be at the level of the captions and near enough to read them out to me—very loudly, of course—and we wouldn’t have to get the big print version of the catalog for oldies with fading sight.”

  On our way out we saw a big man’s black hat lying in the corridor. “Oh dear, I saw the owner of that hat earlier on,” said Hughie.

  “Show me a man in a big hat and I’ll show you a cunt,” I said. It’s a joke Penny told me.

  “Marie!” said Hughie, shocked but unable, despite himself, not to laugh.

  We both imagined this wretched man going around pompously, imagining he’d got his ludicrous hat on his head, and then going home and looking in the mirror and finding to his horror that he’d been strutting around all day just an ordinary person with a small, bald head.

  Hughie bought me a scrummy lunch in the restaurant, which was fearfully expensive but it was good because over the saddle of hare (oh, dear, too yummy, poor old hare) I was able to bring up the difficult subject again.

  “Now, what did the doctor say about that ghastly cough?” I asked in a no-nonsense kind of way. Hughie’d been coughing his head off all the way round the exhibition, narrowly avoiding exploding all over Turner’s Thames Above Waterloo Bridge.

  He looked at me slyly. “I think you know I haven’t been,” he said. “You’ve been talking to James, I can hear it in your voice.”

  “I have absolutely not been talking to James,” I said. “I swear on my mother’s grave. And what’s James got to do with this, anyway? Is James worried too?” I said. When I lie, though, I say it myself, I lie well. Anyway, my mother, like Hughie’s, was cremated. So ha!

  Hughie looked rather uneasy. “Yes, yes, I must go to the doctor,” he said. “I know. And I will. I’m just putting it off, but I will, I promise.”

  “You’re not one of those ludicrous men who’s frightened of going to the doctor, Hughie?” I said. “Please don’t tell me you are. I’d lose all respect for you.”

  Hughie grimaced. “Stop it, Marie. Don’t use cheap tricks on me. I will go.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “I can see it in your eyes. They’ve kind of clouded over as if someone’s drawn a piece of cheesecloth over them.”

  He laughed, then paused, thinking.

  “I’ll tell you why I don’t go, Marie,” he said eventually. “If I’ve got cancer or something—and I frankly don’t care if I have—I’ve lived long enough. Sixty-five isn’t a bad age, quite honestly, and I’ve still got all my faculties. But if I have got something sinister, I’ll have to start having all that chemotherapy, last strand of hair falling out, feeling utterly wretched, James in floods of tears, you wringing your hands. I’ve got better things to do with the end of my life than lie in hospital on eight hundred drips, a living corpse surrounded by people discussing whether I’m well enough to have a lung transplant. It’s not the doctor I’m frightened of. Or the diagnosis of cancer—which is probable, as I’ve smoked for fifty years now. It’s the curative treatment that scares me. Or, most likely, the noncurative treatment. All that hoo-ha.”

  “But it might be just a chest infection,” I said. “Which could be cured by a few antibiotics. Who says you’ve got cancer? You’re letting your imagination run away with you! You could always say no to treatment anyway, if it was.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said rather brusquely. The waiter arrived with a second bottle of wine, which Hughie sampled before nodding. “How could I say no? The pressure on me would be unbearable.”

  It struck me again, the difference between us because of our ages. Hughie was brought up in an era of public schools, the army and distant parents, and as a result has this totally inappropriate respect for authority. He could no more say to his doctor that he didn’t want any treatment for whatever it was, than fly.

  “That’s true,” I said. “I do understand.” And I did. Understandin
g people is rather like lying. You simply have to believe you understand a person’s point of view—and I really thought I did—in order for a declaration of understanding to be accepted as true. I scrabbled around in my brain for something—just something—that might push him into going to the doctor.

  “But I think there is one factor you haven’t taken into account,” I said, hit by a brain wave. “Your cough is very public. If you were suffering some kind of internal private symptom that you could shield from people like James and me, fine. Bleeding stools. Stomach cramps. Mad voices in your head telling you to kill everyone. None of us would be any the wiser. And I’d understand your point of view. But, Hughie, this cough is so public. Every time you cough I bet James is just suffering agonies. He must experience, if this morning is anything to go by, about 150 knife wounds of anxiety per day. Either stop coughing,” I concluded sternly, “or get it checked out.”

  It’s rare that I hit the spot with Hughie, but I could see he was listening to me and absorbing what I’d said. You can always persuade rational people to do anything, as long as you have the logic ready. Terrible really. Emotional people are far less easy to win round.

  There was a long pause.

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he said. He coughed again. I mimed a stabbing motion into my heart.

  “OK, OK, OK,” he said. There was another pause. He pushed his plate away and coughed again. He then held his forehead in his hands, thinking. Finally, he rummaged in his pocket and brought out his mobile phone and his address book and started dialing.