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

by Virginia Ironside

  I must have continued like this for at least an hour and a half. My mouth became dry with talking, I kept looking at my watch. For God’s sake, when would they return? We looked out of the window and watched all the cars to-ing and fro-ing in the blackness, with the red lights at the back and the white lights at the front, and we fantasized about where they might be going and what they were up to. Occasionally people would pass by.

  “Look, Gene,” I would say in my gentle voice. “There’s a man in a hood. He’s probably a mugger. He’s a naughty man, isn’t he? And look, there’s a nice drug dealer the other side of the road. He’s making lots and lots of money selling people heroin. And look, here’s a man who looks very sad. His wife has probably run off with the drug dealer…”

  Finally Gene accepted a bottle of milk and I took him into the kitchen where it was very dark, and sang “Rock-a-Bye Baby” to him, swinging him gently in my arms, while stroking his head at the same time. His eyelids started to droop and I repeated the word: “Slee…eeep, slee…eeep…” over and over again, like some crazy hypnotist, and finally he dropped off. Tiptoeing along the corridor, remembering the creaky floorboard, I managed to lower him into his basket and sat down, breathing a huge sigh of relief. After a few minutes I thought it safe enough to put him into the kitchen, while I turned the lights up in the sitting room bright enough to read.

  Just as I had got started on my book, the phone rang. It was Chrissie. “Is everything OK there?” she said anxiously.

  “Fine!” I replied jovially. I sounded like some dreadful phony pub landlord from the Home Counties. “Absolutely fine! He woke up for a little bit but he’s back to sleep and there’s nothing to worry about at all.”

  “Well, we’re having a really good time, so we thought we’d go and have a quick drink at the pub…is that OK?” she asked.

  “Great!” I said. “Everything’s cool! No worries!”

  “Do remember, by the way,” she added, “that if you undo the blinds, you must hook up the white strings by the side because if he were to lie on the floor by one and pull it down, he might strangle himself.”

  “Oh, don’t worry!” I said breezily. “No strangling round here. Have a lovely time.”

  I immediately went round the whole flat checking that all the white strings were tied up beyond reach. I know. It was highly unlikely that Gene would strangle himself when he was asleep, but you couldn’t be too careful.

  I started on my book again, and had just found my place, when there was a crackle from the baby monitor and the unnerving sounds of a cockney male voice invaded the room.

  “Just got in, two minutes to go. Roger!” it said. “T for Tango, V for Victor and F for ’ow’s yer father. Coming up now!”

  I leaped up, terrified. For a split second I thought burglars had scaled the wall outside the kitchen, had snuck in through the window and were communicating with each other on walkie-talkies before making off with Gene. Unless, of course, Gene, after all the conversation he’d heard in the first few months of his life, had suddenly learned to talk. I dashed to the kitchen in panic, but there was no one there. In my haste, I’d trodden on the squeaky floorboard. Gene immediately woke up, howling.

  I had to go through the entire routine again. He seemed to get heavier and heavier and as he became more and more wide awake, I got more and more exhausted. Finally, just as he appeared to be flagging a bit, I put him into his Moses basket (On his side? On his back? Who cared anymore?) and started swinging him. As I swung, he quietened down. I swung him high, I swung him low. But every time I stopped swinging he started crying. Eventually I stood in the middle of the room, swinging as hard as I could. I swung him so high that I contemplated just whirling the entire basket around above my head, keeping him in place by centrifugal force, but as I got a glimpse of his head as it sped past me on each swing, I saw, eventually, that he was truly asleep. I risked easing up on the swinging. I got slower and slower. Eventually, I stopped, and very gently placed the basket on the floor. And as I did so I heard the key in the lock. Jack and Chrissie were back.

  “How did it go?” they asked as they reeled in, reeking of wine and garlic.

  “Fine!” I said. “Absolutely fine!”

  “That’s great, Mum,” said Jack. “We’ve had such a good time! Now we know we can do it, we must do it more often.”

  “Anytime,” I said, as I gathered up my unknitted knitting, my unread book and my unfilled address book. “Anytime. It’s a real pleasure.”

  And, of course, in a funny way, it was.

  November 12th

  Michelle knocked on my door very confused. She’d gone into the local Lebanese supermarket to ask for some pine nuts, and they’d insisted on taking her to a shelf on which were displayed a selection of boxes of aspirin, Nurofen and ibuprofen. “I want pine nuts,” she had said. “Pine…pine…pine…”

  “Yes, these for pine,” they had replied, gesturing to the aspirins. “Tike why pine!”

  November 13th

  Hughie and James drove me to the head-wetting ceremony, as Jack and Chrissie call it, at a local pub. I’d tried to persuade Jack and Chrissie to put Gene into the long embroidered white lacy dress that Jack wore when he was christened, but they said he wouldn’t fit into it (and I’m sure they’re right—he’s quite a tubby little person) and he wore, instead, a pair of very smart dungarees. Very sweetly they’d put him in the green hat with the purple sprouting on top that I’d finally finished knitting for him.

  As a christening present, James had bought Gene a hand-painted mug with “Gene” written on it. Inside was a special crystal, apparently connected with Gene’s birthday. James insisted that this must be kept by his bed to give him good luck. I just hoped he hadn’t got it from Gavin’s shop in Glastonbury.

  It was an oddly warm November day, and the pub was swarming with people I didn’t know. I know Hughie hates pubs, so he was very noble in coming along, but he stood outside most of the time, smoking and talking to Penny, who is zombied out on anti-depressants. I felt rather gooseberrylike, but I only had to say that I was Jack’s mum and Gene’s grannie, and the kindness of everyone was amazing.

  It was odd, because surely current thinking is that old people are despised and hated because they’re ancient and boring, but that day I didn’t experience that at all—and have never experienced it, anyway. What I did experience was the complete opposite—not a reverence, exactly, but a special kind of protective instinct emanating from all those grunge-dressed people, a kindness and caring for someone not of their generation. Bliss!

  We did come across the odd language problem, however. The words “Andy Pandy” met with complete bafflement as did, oddly, the name Sophie Tucker and, less surprisingly perhaps, Oliver Messel.

  I felt rather like my father must have felt when, talking to someone half his age, he referred to someone like, say, Joe Venuti, a jazz violinist apparently well known in his day, but hardly remembered thirty years later. I do try not to use the phrase “Of course you’re too young to remember…” too often, but it does come up now and again.

  There were a few songs, and then a friend of Jack’s played “Danny Boy” on the musical saw. Everything built into a climax, and finally we all raised our glasses to Gene, held high by a beaming Chrissie. James, on my left, I noticed, had to lift up his spectacles to wipe away a tear, and I felt pretty weepy, too. Then James went outside to check on Hughie, and came back to signal to me that Hughie was feeling a bit tired. As I felt I’d had enough, too, I cadged a lift from them.

  In the car, Hughie turned back to me and said: “I had the most extraordinary experience. I met some woman—a parent of one of Jack’s friends—who used to know me when I was twenty. She didn’t recognize me, of course, but you know what she said? She said: ‘I’d recognize that voice anywhere.’ I go to all these lengths to change to become a better person, to mature, to go through hell to twist myself into a new and more noble shape, and all I get, forty years on, is: ‘I’d recognize that
voice anywhere.’ Depressing, really.”

  He then went into a coughing fit and opened the window. Or rather, asked James to open the window.

  “God, I wish we had wind-up windows again,” he said crossly. “What is the point of the electric things? Only good thing about them is that they kill, apparently, the odd toddler.”

  Now I know his synapses are shriveling.

  November 14th

  Today’s the day of Hughie’s MRI. Don’t like to ring because it looks so intrusive. After all, if anything shows up, they’ll tell me. And anyway, they probably have to wait a while before they get the results. But can’t stop thinking about Hughie, and hoping that everything’s going to be all right. Well, as all right as it can possibly be in the circumstances.

  Later

  Hello, reads today’s bizarre e-mail,

  Let me start by introducing myself properly to you. I am Mark

  Escrupolo Masilag (junior) from Philippines (The only surviving son of late Sir Mark Escrupolo Masilag)

  Me late father was a crude-oil consultant based in Iran until his unfortunate death with my mother as a result of the earthquake disaster that just occurred in Iran killing thousands of people.

  As I write this mail, I am still very much in shock and pain.

  Me reason of contact you is that before me fathers’ death he moved all of his profits he had made so far to Holland just in case there is any war in Iran, the total amount of this funds as we speak is US$28 million.

  Please all I want from you is to act as the ESCRUPOLO MASILAG FAMILY personal representative sign the funds release document and have the funds transferred into your account I would be will to share the money with you 50–50 if you can do this to help save my soul from this poverty I am facing now…I would completely understand if you do not want to help me out in this transaction even though it is of mutual benefit, with the high rate of fraud going on around this days one can never be too careful…

  December 1st

  First Christmas card received. This year, Penny and I have decided not to send out any cards at all. Last Christmas I sent cards only to people who sent them to me, keeping a pile of cards on the hall table, along with a pen, a book of stamps and an old address book. The moment one came in, I’d send one back. Rather cold-blooded.

  Of course, Penny and I agreed that we would have to send cards to absolutely desperate people who are frightfully ill and never get out of the house. Or people who live abroad but whom we still like. Or, as I suggested, those people we can’t really bear and try to not see but don’t want them to know quite how much we can’t stand them because they’re not totally horrible.

  “But if you include that group,” said Penny, “we might as well go back to sending them to everyone.”

  Later

  Met James for mint tea in dodgy Lebanese hubble-bubble café round the corner. Surrounded by dark men puffing away at strawberry-flavored coals, as far as I could make out. He was extremely upset.

  “You know Hughie went for the MRI a fortnight ago, but we still haven’t had the results,” he said. “They seem to have lost the notes. I went with him, and it was horrible. Do you think he’s in denial about all this? He keeps making jokes about it. I can’t bear it.”

  “I don’t think he’s in denial,” I said honestly. “I think it’s us who are in denial.” I kindly said “us” though quite honestly it was really James I was talking about. “I think Hughie has got the hang of death. You live, you die and it’s all fine, that’s Hughie’s line.”

  “I think he’s living in his head,” said James.

  “No bad place to live,” I said. “Head, heart…whatever…But you’re the one I’m worrying about. Perhaps,” I added, struck by inspiration, “you’re doing his worrying for him. You’re sparing him all the pain and suffering by going through it yourself.”

  That’s one good thing about having done all this crap therapy. You can spout out any number of psychological models to people which sometimes give them a kind of comfort. Though actually that particular bit of wisdom was from the philosopher Viktor Frankl.

  James gulped down this shred of comfort, and I could see, as his face slowly relaxed, that it made him feel better. We all believe that if what we suffer is something noble, something to spare others, we can bear it. If it’s just our own measly suffering and holds no greater good, it’s simply wall-to-wall grisly.

  “That helps,” he said. “Now we’ve just got to wait for the results.”

  December 2

  Ever since that conversation with Hughie in the garden, I’ve been wondering about sex. I last had sex five years ago, and frankly, apart from the odd unsuitable flare-up of sexual feelings (Hughie [twice], Lucy’s dad, curiously, but only once, and, oddly, the eighteen-year-old son of one of my friends who talked to me for hours at a party; couldn’t have been more inappropriate) I haven’t fancied anyone in the meantime.

  So what, I ask myself, is the point of having a tiny bedroom taken up almost entirely with a double bed? After all, the last thing I want is a bloke.

  Anyway, to get back to the point. Wondering about sex. I’m seriously considering not having it anymore. Penny gave me a book that she said would get me back in the mood. It was called Better Than Ever by a Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld and the come-on was: “New brooms may sweep cleaner…but old brooms know where the corners are!”

  Yuck! The very idea of being fucked by an old broom is totally disgusting!

  December 6th

  Went to see Gene again today. Talk about better than sex. I may have no one to cuddle me, but Gene makes up for everything. His smell, his soft, new young skin, his little arms reaching round my neck…it sounds horribly vampirelike, but it is so, so seductive.

  I love having this little boy near me. When we go out, even into the bitter cold and misery of Brixton, I love the feel of him against me. I love his coat against mine, all bulked up, and inside somewhere, his warm wrapped-up body. Underneath his outer shell, rumbling with cloth, underneath his dark blue coat and cardigan, his green trousers and little emerald tights, his T-shirt, his vest and nappy…in the middle he is like a hazelnut, all ripe and sweet.

  I used to resent the time I had to spend with Jack when he was tiny…but now I don’t resent a minute with Gene. I can just sit for hours and hours, playing with him, watching him, picking him up, feeding him, putting him down. For me it’s not remotely boring. Or rather, as Lucy’s husband, Roger, said (about the only interesting thing Roger has ever said), it is a kind of “exquisite boredom.”

  Is it something to do with boundaries? With Jack I was never quite certain where I ended and he began, we were all hopelessly muddled up. If he cried I was in pain, if he smiled I was happy. But with Gene, I know where both he and I begin and end. It makes the relationship so clear and pure.

  It’s odd, but every minute I’m with him, I feel my own selfishness and cynicism is being rubbed away by this good and simple little chap.

  Dec 7th

  I was just about to go to bed when the bell rang. It was James. His face was ashen.

  “I’m so sorry it’s so late, but can I come in?” he said.

  “It’s Hughie, isn’t it,” I said. “You’ve had the results. Come on, darling, come in and have a drink. Where is Hughie, anyway?”

  “He’s in such a bad temper,” said James, walking into the sitting room. He was half-crying, choking in the way that men do. “It’s much worse than we thought. He’s only got a few months to live, if that, and all he said when we got back from the hospital was: ‘Just months to live? Well, let’s crack open a bottle of champagne!’ and I said how could he think of opening a bottle of champagne at a time like this…” He slumped into a chair. “And he said for God’s sake, he was trying to make the best of things, and I’m afraid I got really angry and of course, darling, I was so upset, and Hughie finally said, really coldly, you know how cold he can be: ‘For fuck’s sake it’s me who’s got the fucking lung cancer, not you!’ and I slammed
the door and here I am. Oh, I feel so awful. What will I do without him…?”

  What will I do without him, I wondered, selfishly, as I downed a large double scotch in the kitchen before going back into the sitting room with the bottle of wine and buckets of soothing sympathy. It’s all very well this joking about death, but life would be very empty without Hughie. Or rather, the whole rabble of Hughies that make up Hughie. Will be very empty, I should say.

  Eventually I packed James off and rang Hughie while he was on his way, and offered just as much sympathy as Hughie could bear (i.e., about a millionth of an ounce) and reminded him, totally unnecessarily, that James was just a poor mortal and full of kindness.

  “I know,” said Hughie. “Thank God he went to see you. I just suddenly got angry, you know. I mean his reaction was just selfish. If I’ve only got a few months to live, I don’t want to live them with people weeping all around me. I might as well die tomorrow. What did James think was going to happen to me? He must have known this was going to happen. We all die, for God’s sake. I don’t have some special relationship with death. All the signs that we’re going to die have been there from the very day we were born. And as I’m older than James by about fifteen years, the chances were always that I’d die first.”

  “Well, do be kind to James, won’t you,” I said. “He’s utterly devastated.”

  “Oh, I’ll be kind to James, don’t worry,” said Hughie, rather sourly.

  “And I have to say that I’m rather devastated, too, I’m afraid,” I added, rather nervously. “But I am at least making it an excuse to have a hundred drinks.”