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

by Virginia Ironside

  I could hardly imagine that the battered old black object into which I cram all my possessions could even pass as a handbag, let alone be an invitation to anyone for a quick mug, but I suppose no one has handbags these days, only rucksacks, so I duly transferred my mobile, purse and wallet to a little string pocket thing on the pushchair, and covered it with the white shawl that Chrissie’s grannie had knitted. She is one of those knitters who just whacks out a couple of jerseys in an afternoon. Very annoying as I am only halfway through the hat I decided to knit, and have yet to tackle the little socks that go with it, a four-needle job. Though I think four needles might be a bit of what my builder calls, when the RSJ he’s just put in falls down, a “challenge.”

  I wheeled Gene into the chemist—I say “wheeled.” One thing I’d completely forgotten was how to maneuver the pushchair, so I charged at the door like a ram and couldn’t understand why it didn’t open. Then it all came flooding back. You have to turn yourself around, shove the door open with your bottom and then go in backwards. I needed some Nurofen Plus—everything in my body is aching these days—and couldn’t resist saying to the surly man behind the counter: “This is my first grandchild. Aren’t I lucky?” He peered over the counter and broke into a gloopy kind of smile.

  Gene, who had fallen asleep, gave a yawn, his tiny mouth forming that curious long and perfect O. An adult’s yawn is a hideous thing, showing fillings, bits of old cabbage, coated tongue, wrinkled lips; a baby’s yawn is so vulnerable and enchanting. I longed to lean down and smell his warm milky, silky breath.

  When I got back with Gene intact, I felt fantastically pleased with myself.

  He had his bottle and went to sleep, and I spent the next hour and a half sorting through nappies, emptying the washing-up machine, generally tidying up, and was just mopping the kitchen floor when Gene woke up and we skipped the park and just frittered the afternoon away. Everything went like clockwork and Chrissie was very sweetly grateful when she returned from Brussels. Then she looked sternly at a bottle of milk on the kitchen worktop. It turned out that I should have given it to him when he woke up from his nap.

  From being grannie extraordinaire, I then felt like someone who would be pretty pushed to get a national vocational qualification in can opening. I have visions of him starving to death. After a brief brush with therapy, there is always a bit of me that thinks: “Is that what I’d like to do secretly? Starve him to death?” That’s the sort of thing the therapist would have said.

  I keep worrying about Gene being harmed in some way. Worse, I keep worrying that I might harm him. That I might go round there and stab him with scissors. Or throw him out of the window in a fit of madness. I used to have these feelings when Jack was just born. I couldn’t tell anyone then or he’d have been taken into care and I’d have been carried away by the men in white coats (or so I thought), and I certainly can’t tell anyone now. But I find myself torturing myself with these thoughts.

  Despite all these anxieties, which I kept to myself, Chrissie was extremely forgiving about the milk-forgetting incident, and I drove home with a feeling of huge relief. But as I got to Victoria I found I was so tired I could hardly pinch myself awake. Had to go into a mews by the station, park and have a little snooze. Will it always be like this? I have never felt so exhausted in my entire life.

  Oct 25

  Latest e-mail:

  Gorgeous European girl forcing a dildo in. Extremely hot Hungarian, Czech and Russian girls having fun with wild objects.

  God, how depressing.

  October 26

  Am finding it very difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Not the old teenage reason, because I can’t face the day, far from it. Not because of my knackering days with Gene. No, it’s just that everything hurts. I’m fine lying down but then, the minute I get up, my knees hurt, my hips hurt, my neck hurts, my shoulders hurt and my feet are agonizing. It can’t still be the bunion operation because it’s the other foot that’s so painful, which was untouched, except for a toenail being narrowed.

  Could it be the weather? Walter Gabriel of The Archers used to be able to tell the weather by the stare of his feet, I seem to remember, and it’s just starting to get nippy. Anyway, my feet are such agony that when I saw an advertisement for Companion Stairlifts (“My stairlift is more than just a FRIEND, it’s a Companion”), I started to wonder whether it might not be rather pleasant to glide up and down stairs in a sitting position day and night.

  I made another appointment to see Dr. Farmer and found, to my horror, that she had retired. She is the person who saw me through my depressions before I married David, my anxiety after I’d given birth to Jack, my being a gibbering wreck when Jack finally bought his first flat and moved out—not to mention curing a whole pile of unspeakable diseases from thrush and cystitis to eczema and piles. You go to these people thinking you’re going to be with them for life, and then you find that they’ve retired and some young whippersnapper barely older than Gene is sitting in their place. It’s happened with all my props. Even the vet now appears with a young man in tow, whom he’s clearly briefing to take over the practice when he finally retires, and my favorite librarian suddenly revealed the other day that he had to leave his job because he was sixty-five. It’s odd—one’s life is changing not only because of the death of one’s friends, but also through all the familiar faces retiring.

  Of course it’s always a problem with doctors. Does one want them to be old and experienced or young and up in all the latest techniques and research? I don’t want them to be like the ancient old geezer I took Jack to once when he had a tummyache before going to school. “Give him some oranges!” he barked. “That’s what the lad needs. Exercise and oranges!” But then nor do I want them to be someone who, whenever one goes to see them with, say, a small green spot on one’s toe, immediately diagnoses stress and depression and whips out a prescription for Prozac.

  In the waiting room a girl of about twenty in a track suit was telling her friend about a visit to her grandmother in an “evening” home: “She’s shrunk! Soon she’ll be shorter than me!”

  I wonder if, when we are all old, we’ll say to other old people: “Oh my, how you have shrunk! I remember you when you were so high!”

  The new young doctor was a pleasant girl called Dr. Green. I like my doctors to be “pleasant.” I’m not sure I would welcome the adjective if applied to myself, but when it comes to doctors, “pleasant” is just fine. She wore scruffy jeans and an old T-shirt and looked like someone who had just arrived from a weekend in Glastonbury. Come to think of it, she probably had. No doubt staying with Gavin, the creep.

  “The osteoarthritis has spread,” she said after examining me. “It happens, I’m afraid, at a certain age. But one thing—it’s known as a present that’s given to you on your fiftieth birthday…and although the bones don’t get back to normal, the inflammation only lasts a short time, at the most fifteen years, so,” she added, looking at my notes and seeing when I last came round complaining of aches and pains. “Although the damage will still be there, you shouldn’t have the pain.”

  In the meantime she gave me some antiinflammatory called Arcowreck or something like it. She said that if those didn’t work, there were plenty of others I could try…“whole families of new pills.” Wonderful idea. I could see them all queuing up to cure me, these families, with cousins, nieces, stepdaughters…grannies in stone-colored shoes.

  “By the way,” she added, and I knew what was coming. “How much exercise do you take?”

  “Why? Do you think I’m fat?” I asked quickly. I have been rather freaked out as Hughie described me recently as “stately,” James as “statuesque” and Tim as “strapping.”

  “Not at all. You’re, you’re…well, well formed. And you have very good posture. But a bit of exercise would do no harm, you know. How much did you say you took?”

  “None,” I told her.

  “None?” she said. She seemed surprised. I expect she was amazed to
get an honest answer.

  “Don’t you swim or jog?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, you must walk. If you go upstairs, or run for a bus, do you get puffed out?”

  “I walk up stairs very slowly,” I said rather pompously, “And a) I rarely go on a bus and b) if I do, I never run for it.”

  She took my blood pressure, and took a blood sample, and said I should try to get at least twenty minutes of brisk walking in every day.

  I am so busy pottering about and mooching around, I would never have time to get in twenty minutes of brisk walking. And brisk walking where? No one in their right mind would want to walk anywhere in Shepherds Bush—though of course, it being knee-deep in hoodies, if they did want to walk, “pretty briskly” would certainly be their pace.

  Doctors and caregivers are so arrogant. They always think that the advice they give you is the only advice you’re given.

  The bunion man told me to exercise my feet and ankles. “Just five minutes a day,” he said.

  A man I did yoga with said: “Just ten minutes a day will do you no end of good.”

  A physiotherapist suggested I do a daily ten minutes of stretching exercises to prevent back pain.

  A book on meditation recommended twenty minutes’ meditation.

  Then my dentist thinks I should clean my teeth for at least a couple of minutes three times a day, and not only that, he’s given me no fewer than three kinds of toothbrush to do it with: an ordinary electric one, a small hard bunch of spikes on the end of a plastic handle and a vile little thing like a wiry caterpillar, which I have to insert into all the spaces in between, every night. It is a clearly important procedure, I have to say, particularly when one sees what emerges after a good going-over. Sometimes entire meals.

  So far I’ve got over an hour’s worth of keeping myself trim every day, which seems a ridiculous amount. That’s seven hours a week, practically a whole working day. No thanks.

  October 27

  Very surprised, this morning, when turning on the radio, and hoping to hear the acid tones of John Humphrys grilling some poor politician about his latest policies, to find heavy metal music blaring out. For a moment I imagined that John and the team had gone mad, and fantasized about them all cavorting around in black leather with skulls engraved on their foreheads, but on inspecting the radio I found that Michelle had been at the dial the night before and had failed to turn it back to Radio 4.

  Later

  Hughie, James and Penny to dinner for Penny’s birthday. I had bought some scrummy salmon egg “caviar” from Waitrose and served it with sour cream on blinis, followed by an amazing fish stew from a recipe in a book I’ve kept for years—Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World, which was given to me in the seventies as a wedding present. James brought the pudding—an amazing trifle bursting with brandy.

  But unfortunately it was rather a sad affair because firstly Hughie is still coughing like mad, and the x-ray showed up something that was clearly rather creepy, though they won’t say anything definite. He is now waiting to have something called a bronchoscopy. He’s clearly not well. He has to do his trousers up with a belt, gathering them in slightly at the top, which doesn’t look good on a man whose clothes used to fit him perfectly. James is worried sick, and trying to make him follow some kind of carrots, yogurt and wheat-free diet, which Hughie is having nothing of, and as a result is behaving rather badly, smoking even more cigarettes than usual, stuffing himself with cream and butter, and drinking at least two bottles of wine a night. He is starting to look rather red in the face.

  And Penny is still grieving over the wretched Gavin, who has not replied to phone calls, e-mails or texts. After the night of passion, she has still terrible cystitis, of course, and is now on a seven-day course of antibiotics, and gulping down cranberry juice by the bucketful. A couple of days ago I tried to ring Gavin to make totally certain he wasn’t dead and, much to Penny’s misery, I’m afraid, when he saw it was a strange number, and not Penny’s, he answered it, sounding perfectly healthy. He had rather a high, piping voice when he said: “Hello! Gavin here!”

  “I’m ringing to ask you whether you are worried about global warming, the state of the world, lawlessness in our society, twenty-four-hour drinking laws and the general lack of spiritual health in the country,” I said. “Could you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”

  “Yes!” he squeaked.

  “Congratulations! You have won a prize of £50,000. Please ring this number immediately.” I rattled off twenty random numbers and hung up. “Little creep!” I said. Of course there was hardly any point, really. He must have received so many unwelcome calls from dumped girlfriends in his life that unpleasant ones must roll off him like water off a duck’s back. Or perhaps he has some ghastly crystal he uses to protect himself against hurt.

  “Remember, Pens,” said James, as he opened a bottle of champagne, “that it is he who is the loser. He is a frightened, terrified man who doesn’t know what’s good for him. He’s a total, sad little wanker, and he’s much unhappier than you. Even if he doesn’t think he is. Inside he is.”

  Hughie nodded his agreement, even though I knew that he, like me, found this theory, though extremely comforting, exceptionally unlikely. We thought he was a go-getting creep who was laughing up his sleeve and probably telling everyone down at the vegetarian café what it was like screwing an old lady.

  But “Scared stiff,” agreed Hughie, loyally.

  “And anyway, you’ve got us!” said James brightly. “It’s friends you want, not lovers!”

  Penny said tremulously: “But now I’m sixty, and no one will ever want to have sex with me ever again! They’ll be repulsed when they see my horrible wrinkly old body! To think that when I die, the last person I had sex with in the whole of my life ever will be frightened Gavin from Glastonbury!”

  “Nonsense,” said Hughie. “Go to the Gambia and if you pay them a fiver you’ll find a guy on the beach who will sleep with you no problem. Even someone of sixty! Mind you, make sure they use a condom!”

  Oh, dear. Suddenly I did rather wonder whether the idea that the synapses shrivel in the brains of over-sixties, making their social inhibitions wither, might have some truth in it.

  “Anyway, what was he up to? Surely he could find someone his own age?” asked James inquisitively. And as Penny started to explain the scenario, I could see Hughie and James become more and more interested, particularly when she got on to the sex bits.

  “Very good at sex?” said Hughie thoughtfully. “Doesn’t sound like a heterosexual to me.”

  “Why on earth was he reading Death in Venice, anyway?” I asked. “Isn’t that rather a gay book?”

  “Did you say he adored Eartha Kitt? And Lena Horne?” said James.

  “Wizard of Oz, I seem to remember, was one of his favorites,” said Hughie. “Judy Garland. Gay icon. Bet he watches the Eurovision Song Contest, too.”

  In the end we decided that Gavin was one of those gay men who are the scourge of older women.

  “They decide they want to go straight and have children,” said James. “They find an older woman to practice on, and they discover they can’t hack it. Even though they can just cope with sex with a woman, it doesn’t really mean anything to them. You had an affair with an older woman once, when you were young, didn’t you, Hughie?”

  “I certainly did,” said Hughie, shuddering rather, and coughing as he shuddered. “She was lovely, I adored her, but while I gave her great sex, I can’t explain, my heart wasn’t in it. Also there was something slightly disgusting about all that wet squishiness.”

  Penny burst into tears. But luckily, as she was crying, I noticed that she was also shaking with laughter. “Gay Gavin from Glastonbury!” she said. “Oh, fuck him! What a weirdo!”

  “To Penny, on her birthday,” shouted James. “And to Gavin’s amazing sexual prowess! May it shrivel and shrivel until finally it drops down a drain!”

  Penny and he raised their
glasses, but I noticed that Hughie, though smiling vaguely, was reticent, and barely sipped at his drink. Like me, I knew he found the whole toast slightly repellent. After all, even if Gavin were a creep, you don’t want to curse anyone in that way.

  That’s one of the wonderful and terrible things about being older. You can see, even in the most repugnant people, the god in everyone, as they say (even if you don’t believe in God) and it becomes less and less easy to sneer at them. Well, hold on, Marie. One can sneer, but when you get down to it, you’re only sneering at their surface pretensions. Increasingly, I do believe that the most horrible people, even the bearded counselor at Marion’s dinner party, were once fundamentally good. Their judgement became clouded as they grew up, but Baby Beard was probably just as lovable as Gene himself. OK, OK—and the vile man across the road.

  Sometimes I think that Gene (though I can hardly bear to say it, it sounds so utterly sentimental, trite and generally yucky) has taught me to love.

  Anyway, enough of that. Even though the schoolmistress in me found that particular bit of the evening slightly repellent, at least everyone cheered up, and in the end I enjoyed myself.

  As she left, Penny groped for her mobile. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve got a text!” She read it out:

  Is it your birthday? I think it is. If so, have a wonderful day. Will you come down again next weekend? Can’t wait to see you…love, Gavin.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  October 28

  I took Pouncer to the vet today to have his teeth cleaned, poor chap. When I picked him up the bill was £225!!! He has been given a toothbrush, special teeth-cleaning chews, a gel, teeth-cleaning biscuits…for God’s sake. And he was given a follow-up appointment, which I certainly don’t want to take advantage of. His teeth aren’t even particularly white, for heaven’s sake. And he is, let’s face it, much as I love him to pieces, only a cat.