Mad About the Boy

by Helen Fielding

  HARD-HATS-OFFING!

  Saturday 26 January 2013

  134lb (worrying slide back into obesity to be blamed on Mum), texts from Roxster 42, minutes spent imagining date with Roxster 242, babysitters to enable self to have date with Roxster 0.

  10.30 a.m. The day of the St Oswald’s House Hard-Hats-Offing is upon us. The phone rang just as I was struggling to persuade Mabel out of the glittery T-shirt and purple leggings she’d somehow put on when I was upstairs (Mabel refuses to accept that leggings are more in the tights department than the trousers department and really need something else on top) and into the dress-and-cardi set Mum had sent for her, straight out of the 1950s, white, covered in red hearts with a sticky-out skirt and a big red sash tied in a bow at the back.

  ‘Bridget, you’re not going to be late, are you? It’s just that Philip Hollobine and Nick Bowering are speaking on the dot of one, so we can still have lunch.’

  ‘Who are Philip Hollobine and Nick Bowering?’ I said, marvelling at my mother’s ability to airily bandy about names-one-has-never-heard-of, as if name-dropping top Hollywood celebrities.

  ‘You know Philip, darling. Philip? The MP for Kettering! He’s ever so good with the St Oswald’s events, though Una says it’s just because he knows he’ll get his face in the paper because Nick’s in with the Kettering Examiner.’

  ‘Who’s Nick?’ I said, hissing, ‘Just TRY it, darling,’ to Mabel, in an eerie, down-the-generations echo of my mother trying to force me into Country Casuals two-pieces.

  ‘You know Nick, darling. Nick! He’s the overall CEO of TGL,’ adding quickly, ‘Thornton Gracious Living! I also want you to meet’ – her voice suddenly dropped an octave – ‘Paul, the pastry chef.’ Something about the way she said ‘Pawl’, with a French accent, made me sense trouble. ‘You’re not going to wear black, are you? Wear something nice and bright! Red – Valentine’s Day coming soon!’

  11 a.m. Eventually managed to get Mum off the phone and Mabel into the actually adorable red-and-white dress.

  ‘I used to wear dresses like this,’ I said wistfully.

  ‘Oh. Was you born in de Victorian Times?’ asked Mabel.

  ‘No!’ I said indignantly.

  ‘Oh. Wad it de Renaissance Era?’

  Quickly turned mind to Roxster and our texting. Have even told him about the kids and he seems unfazed. Texting really puts an enjoyable spin on everything and I realize, with a sense of shame and irresponsibility towards followers, seems totally to have replaced my obsession with Twitter.

  Realize Twitter has a bad effect on character, making me obsessed with how many followers I have, self-conscious and regretful as soon as I have sent a tweet, and guilty if I do not report any minor events in my life to the Twitter followers, at which a number of them immediately disappear.

  ‘Mummy!’ said Billy. ‘Why are you staring into space like that?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, glancing, panicked, at the clock. ‘Gaaah! We’re late!’ Then immediately started running about parroting discombobulated orders – ‘Put your shoes on, put your shoes on.’ In the midst of it all, I got a text from Chloe saying she really, actually, definitely couldn’t babysit on Friday night.

  Text represents total disaster, throwing whole Roxster date into grave peril. Rebecca is going to her ‘in-laws’ (even though not married) for the weekend, Tom is in Sitges for a birthday party (he got a suite with a 40 sq. metre terrace and a chromotherapy tub for £297 plus tax), Talitha doesn’t do children, Jude is on a second date, which is great – but what am I going to do?

  As we roared, late, towards Kettering, I suddenly had a genius idea: maybe I could ask Mum to babysit! Maybe she could have Billy and Mabel at St Oswald’s House for the night!

  THE BARNACLE’S PENIS

  Saturday 26 January 2013 (continued)

  Arrived at 12.59 to find St Oswald’s House transformed into a cross between Show Home event and a royal tree-planting ceremony. There were red-and-white Thornton Gracious Living flags everywhere, red balloons, glasses of white wine and girls in stiff Employee of the Month-type suits holding clipboards and looking around hopefully for new people who might be fun-loving, yet slightly incontinent.

  Ran, as directed, round the side of the house and emerged into the Italianate garden to see that the ceremony was already under way. Nick or Phil, over a PA system, was addressing a gaggle of elderly people wearing novelty hard hats. Handed Mabel the basket of chocolate hearts we’d brought, which she immediately dropped onto the gravel. There was a moment of calm, then a) Billy trod on them, b) Mabel burst into bereft sobs so loud that Nick or Phil stopped his speech and everyone turned to stare, c) Billy burst into his own bereft sobs, d) Mum and Una strode furiously towards us with mad bouffed hair and wearing identical pastel Kate Middleton’s mother coat-dress outfits, and e) Mabel tried to pick up the chocolate hearts but her distress and humiliation were so heart-rending that I gathered her into my arms like the Virgin Mary, realizing, too late, that several of the chocolate globs were now sandwiched between Mabel’s Shirley Temple red-and-white ensemble and my pastel Grace Kelly-style J.Crew coat.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I whispered as Mabel’s plump little body shook with sobs. ‘The hearts were just for showing off, it’s you that counts,’ just as Mum bustled up saying, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sakes, let ME take her.’

  ‘But . . .’ I began but it was too late. Mum’s ice-blue Kate Middleton’s mother coat was now smeared with chocolate too.

  ‘Oh, my godfathers,’ said Mum, putting Mabel down crossly, at which Mabel burst into even louder sobs, wrapping her chocolate-smeared self round my cream trousers as Billy started yelling, ‘I want to go hoooooooooooooooooooome!’

  My phone pinged: Roxster!

 

  Startled, I dropped the phone, narrowly missing Mabel’s head. Mum bent to pick it up.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘This is a very peculiar message.’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ I gabbled, lunging at the phone. ‘Just . . . the fishmonger!!’

  In the background the speech of Nick or Phil was reaching some kind of crescendo, climaxing with a yell of ‘Hard Hats Off!’ echoed by the group of elderly residents, throwing their hard hats into the air, at which Billy burst into more tears, wailing, ‘I wanted to do Hard-Hat-Offing.’ Mabel said, ‘Dammit!’ then Billy, furious with stress in a way I understood only too well, turned to me and said, ‘This is all your fault. I’m going to kill you!’

  Before I knew what was happening, I too had erupted with stress like a steam kettle and burst out, ‘I’m going to kill you first!’

  ‘Bridget!’ said Mum apoplectically.

  ‘He started it!’ I retorted.

  ‘No, I didn’t. You started it by being late!’ said Billy.

  The whole thing was a total, total fucked-up nightmare. But there was no reprieve. We all retreated into the Ladies’ outside the Function Room to clean ourselves up. Managed to sneak into the cubicle and reply to Roxster about the giant barnacle penis.

 

 

  Emerged from the Ladies’, chocolate stains smeared and therefore worse, to a stress-free interlude when Mum went off to get changed and the children were briefly entertained by a clown making animals out of balloons. The clown was clearly bored as Mabel and Billy were the only grandchildren under the age of thirty-five, apart from a couple of great-grandchildren, who were babies. Texted Roxster about the clown and balloon animals at which he texted back:

 

  Me:

  Tee-hee. The fantastic thing about texting is that it allows you to have an instant, intimate emotional relationship giving each other a running commentary on your lives
, without taking up any time whatsoever or involving meetings or arrangements or any of the complicated things which take place in the boring old non-cyber world. Apart from sex, it would be perfectly possible to have an entire relationship that is much closer and healthier than many traditional marriages without actually meeting in person at all!

  Maybe this will be the way forward. Sperm will simply be donated, frozen through the dating website which originally introduced you. But then, hmm, the women will end up doing what I end up doing, trying to run crazily between one child who’s done something messy and complicated in the toilet and the other who’s got sandwiched between the fridge and the fridge door. Maybe the way forward is cyber children, rather like those Japanese Tamagotchi pets, which give you the illusion of parenthood for about two days until you get bored with them, combined with cuddly soft toys. But then the human race would die out and . . . Ooh, another text from Roxster.

 

  Me:

  Roxster:

  ‘Bridget, are you still talking to the fishmonger?’ My mother was now dressed in another Kate Middleton’s mother coat and dress, only this time in Titan-Acorn-Barnacle pink. ‘Why don’t you just go to Sainsbury’s? – they have a smashing fish counter there! Anyway, come on! You know Penny Husbands-Bosworth is married now?’ she gabbled, sweeping me away from the children-and-balloon scenario.

  ‘Ashley Green! You remember Ashley? Pancreatic cancer! Wyn had hardly made her exit through the crematorium curtains before Penny was ringing Ashley’s doorbell with a sausage casserole.’

  ‘I don’t think I should leave the—’

  ‘They’ll be fine, darling, with their balloons. Anyway, Penny was saying we really should get you together with Kenneth Garside! He’s on his own. You’re on your own and—’

  ‘Mother!’ I hissed, as she dragged me into the alarmingly named Function Room. ‘Is this the man who kept going into everyone’s bedrooms on the cruise?’

  ‘Well, all right, yes, darling, he is. But the point is he’s clearly got a VERY high sex drive, so he needs a younger woman and . . .’

  ‘Mother!’ I burst out, just as a Roxster text pinged up on my phone. I opened it. Mum grabbed the phone.

  ‘It’s the fishmonger again,’ she glowered, showing me the message.

 

  ‘Who is this fishmonger? – Oh, look! Here’s Kenneth now.’

  Kenneth Garside, wearing grey slacks and a pink sweater, did a little dancey step towards us. And for a second it could have been Uncle Geoffrey. Uncle Geoffrey, Una’s husband, Dad’s best friend, with his slacks and golfing sweaters and little dancey steps and ‘How’s your love life? When are we going to get you married off?’

  I started spiralling into grief about Dad, and what he would have made of all this. Then Kenneth Garside snapped me out of it by flashing an enormous set of very white false teeth in the midst of his orange face, and saying creepily, ‘Hello, beautiful young lady. I’m Ken69. That’s my “press age”, my secret preferences and my Internet-dating profile name. But maybe I won’t be needing that now I’ve met you!’

  Euww! I thought, then instantly shrank at my own hypocrisy, as my mind careered into mental arithmetic, demonstrating, horrifically, that the age difference between me and Roxster was four years more than the gap between me and Kenneth Garside’s ‘press age’.

  ‘Hahaha!’ said Mum. ‘Oh, there’s Pawl, I’ll just have a quick chat to him about the profiteroles,’ she said, diving off towards a man in a chef’s outfit, leaving me with Kenneth Garside’s dazzling false teeth, just as Una, mercifully, started banging on a wine glass with a spoon. ‘Ladies and gentlemen! The Cruise Slideshow Event is about to begin!’

  ‘Can I offer you my arm?’ said Kenneth, grabbing my arm and parading me into the Ballroom, where rows of ornate cream chairs with gold edges were filling up in front of a giant screen showing a picture of the cruise liner.

  As we sat down, Kenneth Garside said, ‘What have we got on our trousers?’ and started rubbing at my knee with his handkerchief, as Una took to the platform and began.

  ‘Friends! Family! This year’s St Oswald’s cruise marked the high spot of an already full and fulfilling year.’

  ‘Stoppit,’ I hissed to Kenneth Garside.

  ‘It’s all computerized now!’ Una continued. ‘So! Without further ado, I’m going to talk over the “Macslideshow” and some of us can relive while others dream!’

  The cruise-ship shot morphed into a mosaic of pictures, zooming in on a photo of Mum and Una boarding the ship and waving.

  ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!’ said Una into the mic, cueing the slideshow soundtrack of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell singing ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’ over a shot of Mum and Una in a horrifying Gentlemen Prefer Blondes homage, lying side by side on a double bed in the cabin, looking coquettishly towards the camera, one leg each raised in the air.

  ‘Oh, my word,’ said Kenneth.

  Then suddenly the soundtrack was masked by a familiar electronic tune and the slideshow was replaced by a lurid cartoon of a dragon belching fire at a one-eyed purple wizard. Sat, frozen, realizing that this was Wizard101. Could it possibly . . . could Billy possibly have got on a computer and . . .? Suddenly the Wizard101 page disappeared to be replaced by my EMAIL INBOX PAGE, saying ‘Welcome, Bridget’, with a list of subjects, the first one, from Tom, entitled ‘St Oswald’s House Cruise Event Nightmare’. What was Billy DOING?

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ I said, panicking, making my way along the row, amidst the general consternation, trying to avoid Mum’s eye.

  Rushed out into the hallway and back to the balloon room, to find Billy, oblivious, tapping furiously at a MacBook Air, which was attached to a lot of wire and Ethernet hubs on a side table.

  ‘Billy!’

  ‘Wait! I just got to finish this leveeeeel! I didn’t go on your email. I was trying to retrieve my password.’

  ‘Come off that,’ I rasped. I managed to forcibly get him off, close the Wizard101 and Yahoo windows, and drag him back to the balloons, just as a man in wire glasses rushed in and up to the laptop, looking traumatized.

  ‘Has anyone touched this?’ he said, eyes darting incredulously around the room. I looked at Billy’s face, hoping Billy would remain silent or lie. He frowned thoughtfully, and I could see him remembering all my bloody lectures about the importance of honesty and telling the truth. ‘Not now!’ I wanted to yell. ‘It’s all right to lie when Mummy needs you to!’

  ‘Yes, it was me,’ said Billy ruefully. ‘And I didn’t mean to go on Mummy’s email but I forgot my password.’

  9.15 p.m. At home. In bed now. On top of the whole appalling disaster, the question still remains of what I am going to do about babysitter on Friday. Tried suggesting Friday night to Mum, after the furore had died down, but she just looked at me coldly and said it was Aqua-Zumba.

  9.30 p.m. Tried Magda, but she is going to be on a short break to Istanbul with Cosmo and Woney.

  ‘I wish I could, Bridge,’ she said. ‘We always had my mother for babysitting emergencies, it must be tricky having had the children older. Is it that the kids are too young for you to help her, and she’s too old to help you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s got Aqua-Zumba.’

  Am going to have to try Daniel.

  10.45 p.m. Called Daniel.

  ‘Who are you shagging, Jones?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘I demand to know.’

  ‘I’m not, it’s just—’

  ‘I shall punish you.’

  ‘I just thought you’d like to have them to stay.’

  ‘Jones. You have always been the most cataclysmically awful liar. I am wild with sexual
jealousy. I feel tragic, a past-it old fool.’

  ‘Daniel, don’t be ridiculous, you’re incredibly attractive and virile and young-looking and irresistibly sexy and—’

  ‘I know, Jones, I know. Thank you, thank you.’

  Upshot is Daniel is coming round on Friday at six thirty to take them to his place!

  TO SLEEP WITH OR NOT TO SLEEP WITH?

  Wednesday 30 January 2013

  Pros of sleeping with Roxster 12, cons of sleeping with Roxster 3, percentage of time spent deciding whether or not to sleep with Roxster, preparing for possibility of sleeping with Roxster and imagining sleeping with Roxster compared with actual time it would probably take to sleep with Roxster 585%.

  9.30 p.m. Just called Tom. ‘OF COURSE YOU HAVE TO SLEEP WITH HIM,’ he said. ‘You have to lose your Born-Again Virginity, or it’ll just turn into a bigger and bigger obstacle. Talitha says he’s a good chap. And besides, it’s an opportunist crime. How often do you get the house to yourself?’

  Called up Talitha to cross-check with her view:

  ‘What did I tell you about not sleeping with anyone too soon?’

  ‘You said, “not before you feel ready”, not “too soon”,’ I elucidated, then reiterated Tom’s argument, adding, to give strength to my position: ‘We’ve been texting for weeks. Surely it’s rather like in Jane Austen’s day when they did letter-writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?’

  ‘Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not “rather like in Jane Austen’s day”.’

  ‘But it was you who said, “She has to get laid.”’

  ‘Well, all right, I know. And Roxster seems a sterling chap. Just go with your gut, darling. But keep safe, keep in touch and use a condom.’

  ‘Condoms! I’m not going to sleep with him! What are you supposed to do about being naked?’

  ‘You get a slip, darling.’

  ‘A slip – like the zoo form?’

  ‘Go to La Perla – no, don’t go to La Perla, the expense is eye-watering. Go to Intimissimi or La Senza and get yourself a couple of little short black silk sexy slips. I think, when you were last doing this, they were called “petticoats”. Or maybe one black, one white. With a slip, you can show off your arms and legs and décolletage, which are always the last to go, but keep the central area – which we might want to gloss over – glossed over. OK?’