Reasons to Be Cheerful

by Nina Stibbe

  ‘Well, get a deposit off him first,’ he said, annoyed, ‘and tell him no NHS.’

  I took a deep breath and went back out to the waiting room, where I found my mother too.

  ‘The dentist will fit you in,’ I told Abe, ‘but he won’t be able to offer you NHS treatment.’

  ‘That’s OK, I don’t want NHS.’

  ‘Hang on–yes, you do,’ said my mother.

  ‘He says he doesn’t,’ I said.

  ‘But why shouldn’t he get NHS?’

  ‘He’s a casual patient.’

  I turned to Abe. ‘And you will have to pay a deposit of twenty pounds beforehand.’

  Abe seemed to understand and put his hand in his pocket, but again my mother objected.

  ‘What? No,’ she said, ‘absolutely not.’ She pushed Abe’s wallet away. ‘We’ll go elsewhere.’ When they left I wanted to cry.

  It gnawed at me. That I worked for a man who was prepared to exploit people’s misfortune was sick-making. The idea that Abe understood it all too well, and was quite prepared to ignore it in order to get his tooth fixed was mortifying, and my mother’s outrage only highlighted the awfulness of the situation. In the surgery, clanking about with no patient and nothing to do, I did cry a few angry tears and glared at JP who stood picking at his teeth in the mirror.

  ‘Let’s have a cup of tea, nurse, shall we?’ he said.

  I clomped upstairs and, after producing a filthy brown drink made with a teabag and a spoonful of Maxwell House, I buzzed him to come up. I watched him swallow it down, sigh, and wipe his mouth. He lit a cigarette which he passed to me and I fed it to him, puff by puff. Sometimes I left it in his lips too long and he had to turn away to let go and inhale; other times I pulled it away before he’d got a proper lungful, and then I stubbed it out before he’d finished. Best of all, I decided that the next time I’d turn the hot end round and burn his hideous lips. Making that plan soothed me.

  At the end of the day my mother returned. Alone. I told her to go up to the flat, and I’d follow in a minute. On the way she met JP on the stairs and blocked his passage.

  ‘Can you explain what happened earlier?’ she said.

  JP tried to deflect her.

  ‘I can’t help wondering what your husband thinks of your gallivanting about with a client of the laundry.’

  But my mother was from a family of solicitors on the male side and bitchy liberals on the female.

  ‘That’s irrelevant,’ she said. ‘I want to know why you refused to treat Mr Abraham as a National Health patient.’

  ‘I think you’ll find I offered him exactly what I offer all casual patients,’ said JP, barging past.

  ‘I think you’re a xenophobe.’

  ‘You can think what you like, dear,’ he said as he swung out of the building.

  ‘Xenophobe!’ my mother called after him.

  ‘He won’t even know what that means,’ I said.

  ‘He’ll know enough Greek to work it out.’

  ‘What happened to Abe?’

  ‘He went up to Bill Turner, which worked out very well,’ she said. ‘They’re both Freemasons and members of the Leicester Flyers.’ She touched her nose.

  ‘What does xenophobe mean?’ I asked.

  JP and Tammy were quite surprised my mother came in for a private check-up–it being soon after she’d called JP a xenophobe on the stairs. I wasn’t surprised, though. She disliked JP, but she disliked most people and didn’t mind doing business with them. It actually made it easier for her to consult him, dentally. This might seem strange but it’s true. It’s something to do with knowing where everyone stands, metaphorically.

  JP greeted my mother too warmly and told her I was getting along very well, which was a nice, jolly thing to say but she replied, ‘Well, why shouldn’t she be?’ and then made an icy quip about having written my application letter for me.

  ‘You look different,’ she told him. ‘I almost didn’t recognize you.’

  Tammy, fastening the bib, whooped, ‘Oh, my gosh, see, Jape? People are noticing. Doesn’t he look distinguished, Mrs Vogel?’

  Tammy had been smartening him up on the cheap as part of what we were calling the ‘Masonic Improvements’. The long, cotton surgical smock my mother had last seen him wearing had been replaced with a tighter-fitting ‘Latimer space-age’ tunic, which came in a fine, drip-dry fabric, buttoned at the shoulder, and reached to mid-thigh. The sockless Mediclogs that had given me athlete’s foot had been ditched in favour of proper lace-up brogues. And over the weekend her DIY hair trim left him looking more like Leonard Parkin than Reginald Bosanquet, with a low side parting and some kind of grease keeping it neat. Men often looked like one newsreader or another back then, hence their horror at Angela Rippon coming along. JP also had the look of a child after a barbering–ruined and untrustworthy–and complained that his exposed neck felt vulnerable and cold. Off duty, Tammy draped it with an untied silk cravat, which made him look like a drunk on the prowl for women and made me want to punch him in the face. As well as all that, he was trialling contact lenses and his eyes were red-rimmed and weepy.

  ‘Yes, very debonair,’ said my mother.

  ‘He’s trying for the Freemasons,’ Tammy blurted.

  ‘So I hear.’

  JP gave my mother a thorough scale and polish, proclaimed her dentally fit, encouraged her gum-health endeavours, and said he’d like to see her in three months’ time.

  My mother told JP that if he had no objections, she’d like to occasionally sit in the waiting room for inspiration. JP supposed that would be fine but didn’t make any enquiry as to why she might want to do this and she was obliged to reveal a thing that no writer wants to reveal–without seeming to be forced.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ she said, ‘and working on a book.’

  ‘Righty-ho,’ said JP. ‘See you in three months. Keep up the good interdental work.’

  My mother and Tammy were the exact same age and would both be turning forty around then–my mother’s birthday was later that week, Tammy’s in a couple of months. My mother’s response to this was to occasionally wonder, aloud, if she’d have to stop wearing knee-high boots and to remind us not to mention it. Tammy, on the other hand, was planning a dinner party where the theme would be 1940s fashion because she had been born in 1940; she suited the clothes of the era and had been practising styling her fringe into a victory roll.

  ‘So what’s your mother’s book about?’ JP asked after she’d gone.

  ‘It’s kind of John Wyndham meets Jilly Cooper.’

  ‘Well, just as long as I’m not in it,’ he said, laughing.

  11. Mildred Quietly

  After lunch one day, when Bill Turner was in the chair for his regular scale and polish, JP suddenly remembered that Bill must know the result of the secret ballot regarding his (JP’s) nomination to the Freemasons, and though he’d deliberately drawn a line through the rest of the day so the pair of them could discuss the outcome on the golf course, he was impatient, and while he scaled Bill’s caked-up lower incisors, he pushed him to reveal the outcome.

  ‘Let’s get out on to the green,’ said Bill. ‘We can chat there.’

  ‘Come on, old man, put me out of my misery. Am I in or out?’

  Bill spat and said, ‘Ah, I’m sorry, you were blackballed, I’m afraid.’

  JP let his head hang for a moment and exhaled. ‘What? But why?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘How many?’ asked JP.

  ‘Two, only two, so we can go again. It was a “no”, not a “never”,’ said Bill.

  I liked JP’s golf afternoons, in fact I looked forward to them. It was a chance to sterilize everything, clean all the drawers and cabinets and have a really good sort-out; also, to use the phone, pluck my eyebrows, and clean my teeth with the rubber cup and prophylactic paste. But what should have been a lovely clear afternoon turned into a detailed analysis of the result and the compiling of a list of further improvements to be made before
JP’s next attempt.

  My mother called in to collect Danny. It was her birthday but neither of us mentioned the date. It wasn’t the fact that she was forty that bothered her, she just hated birthdays. She always had–and not just hers. She told me about the two possible lodgers who’d shown an interest in my old room. One was a young woman with a gerbil, and the other was a salesman in his mid-thirties who’d only need the room Wednesday to Sunday because he spent Mondays and Tuesdays in Cambridge.

  What were my thoughts?

  I wasn’t keen on a gerbil in my room, scattering wood shavings and sunflower husks all over the carpet, and I guessed my mother wouldn’t want the salesman.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘I’ve read too much Flannery O’Connor. I’ll wait for more responses.’ She gathered up Danny’s things but before she could leave I pushed her birthday gift across the table to her. It was a box of Tempo felt pens in assorted colours with a sketchpad and a little bottle of liquid paper. She was delighted with them and immediately showed me a neo-cubist drawing method she’d learned from the Curious Minds parents’ manual. She drew a horse, then a face and then wrote Mildred Quietly in many different ways and colours–a nom de plume she was trying out. I wondered if it might be a bit close to Patience Tidy in style. But she thought not. Then she wrote, Angelo Angelo Angelo, and we talked about him briefly before she drew a picture of him, and eventually I said, ‘Perhaps you could have another baby?’ meaning as a replacement.

  ‘Mr Holt has said we’re to have no more,’ she said, and told me she’d dreamt the night before that she’d rescued a baby koala but Mr Holt had objected and the koala had heard his harsh words and run away to St Pippin’s Home for Pets. She was livid with him for his behaviour in this dream.

  She then wrote, Andy Andy Andy, in swirly writing. I must’ve looked puzzled because she said, ‘How are things going with Andy?’

  I told her how much I’d taken to him.

  ‘What’s he like?’ she asked.

  So I told her how unusual he was. That he knew every card game and board game from rummy to beggar-my-neighbour, pick-up-sticks, Go and backgammon. He could fold paper into swans, dogs and yachts, was good at Meccano and Airfix, and could knock an apple out of a tree with a catapult. But he had never heard of Ker-Plunk or Operation due to never having seen television. (‘Crikey,’ I told her, ‘I saw him eat a four-finger KitKat in great bites, as though it was any old chocolate bar.’ He didn’t know the correct way was to snap one finger off at a time, because he’d never seen the advert.) That he’d never seen Blue Peter, and therefore hadn’t heard of John Noakes and Shep. He’d missed out on The Goodies, The Monkees, The Jacksons, The Osmonds. He’d not seen The Yellow Rolls-Royce, nor the film about the rogue truck, nor True Grit, nor The Sound of Music. And that now, on his evenings with me, he’d be glued to the television, constantly getting up to change channels and see what was on the other side. He found Dallas ‘enjoyable and intense’ but couldn’t take to Coronation Street after seeing a vicious slanging match between Bet Lynch and Elsie Tanner, which Bet won.

  ‘Golly,’ she said. ‘Does he read much?’

  ‘He’s definitely read Animal Farm.’

  ‘Christ. And do you ever talk?’

  ‘Sometimes, but not if the news is on, or Blankety Blank,’ I said, ‘or Not the Nine O’Clock News.’

  ‘How frustrating.’

  ‘Or Wish You Were Here.’

  I told her how handy he’d be after a nuclear attack–if anyone survived–how he could tame a duck, start a fire with a stick, knew how to make a barrel float, and that he didn’t mind talking openly about things.

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said my mother.

  This led us to wonder what we two might contribute, in a post-apocalyptic scenario. I said I knew where my friend Melody’s parents, the Longladys, had buried a stash of coffee granules and tins of fish. My mother talked about good places for wild berries and the importance of music in bad times, which didn’t seem to amount to much. We wondered if our animal skills would be useful if no animals made it, and had anyone made a shelter big enough for animals–in the Noah’s Ark style? We didn’t know. And then, on that bewildering note, the doorbell went and it was Andy. I hadn’t been expecting him, but was overjoyed to see him especially after the conversation we’d been having, and feeling that war was imminent. He was in a world of his own, though, sorry to intrude and so pink in the face, I had to ask if he was OK. He wasn’t really, he’d had a terrible argument with his brother Tony after he (Andy) had criticized him (Tony) for going owling at night–with a torch.

  ‘You remember my mother, don’t you?’ I said.

  Yes, he said, he did.

  ‘What do you mean, “owling with a torch”?’ my mother asked, worried.

  ‘Shining a torch up into the trees, at night, to see the owls,’ Andy told her.

  ‘Is that a bad thing to do?’

  ‘It’s very bad. Torch beams dazzle the owls,’ he said, ‘and it can send them into blind flight.’

  My mother and I just stared at him.

  He repeated, ‘Blind flight,’ quietly; his voice cracked and he seemed truly disturbed. ‘I can’t trust him to do the right thing.’

  ‘How upsetting,’ said my mother.

  And then, with no consultation whatsoever, she offered him my bedroom for £5 per week, negotiable. And he accepted.

  My mother went home with Danny and her new felt tips and left me with Andy. It all felt very strange.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘are you serious about wanting to move in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what about your brother?’

  ‘He’ll be glad to be rid of me. We don’t get along.’

  ‘So you’re really going to move in?’

  ‘Yes, if your mum’s offer was serious.’

  I assured him it was. That was how she did things.

  ‘But I warn you, she’ll read your diary and walk around in the nude.’

  I was furious that she had failed to consult me before making the offer. How did she know I wasn’t about to offer to take him in? He was my boyfriend and she had literally snatched him. However, it wasn’t my style to make a fuss about people ruining my life. Yes, my boyfriend had suddenly become my mother’s lodger, but I’d just have to get over it and look on the bright side. If there had to be a lodger, Andy was better than a stranger, and it meant that I could still go to the house and have a nice time without having to worry that some grotty old bloke might suddenly plonk himself down at the table and start eating duck pâté and pontificating about British Steel. But Andy being the lodger did present other worries. What if he and my mother became embroiled in some way or read the same book at the same time, or took country walks together? Would they? Could they? She might but he wouldn’t, was my guess. Would she still walk around in the nude? Would she still wee in the sink? Would she sing ‘Dido’s Lament’ at the top of her voice and remind poor Andy of his dead mother?

  Later, the telephone rang and I ran to the landing to answer it. It was my mother wanting to make sure Andy understood there would be no meals provided or cooking done for him whatsoever and she had no intention of catering in any way, shape or form. There’d be no mealtimes–as such–no serving up of gravy-filled pies or jacket potatoes oozing with butter. Nothing. It was entirely every man for himself.

  ‘It’s fine, he gets it,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Just as long as he knows the score.’

  ‘Yes, he does,’ I said quietly, ‘but he wonders if it’s OK for him to bring girls back.’

  ‘OK to do what?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Bring girls back,’ I whispered again.

  ‘What girls?’

  ‘Well, me.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said, ‘just as long as you don’t put cigarette ends out of the window, or expect any catering.’

  Some days later, Mr Holt and I went to collect Andy and his belongings from the shack behind the soap factory. W
e’d gone in the Snowdrop van which hadn’t been necessary as Andy only had a battered suitcase, an old John Collier carrier and a motorcycle helmet. He was sitting on the suitcase by a five-bar gate as we pulled into the lane and it was like a Play for Today because one small muddy child sat on the gate and another watched from a tree.

  I didn’t get out of the van in case Tony appeared with a Stanley knife and started a fight, which is what would’ve happened in a Play for Today, plus I was recalling my own home-leaving when the stolen spoon had been discovered. Tony didn’t appear and Mr Holt opened the back doors. Andy said his farewells to the two boys, clambered in, and then sat on the floor, silently crying, all the way home. I got up to comfort him but Mr Holt asked me to sit down again, for safety reasons. If I’d been driving, I’d have pulled over, but Mr Holt knew that wouldn’t have been what Andy wanted, and by the time we got back he seemed a bit better.

  The whole family helped Andy feel at home. My mother changed the curtains from ones with huge daisies to a more manly abstract design. Danny made him a picture of a teapot with tea coming out, I gave him a Pagan Man deodorant, and Jack didn’t make a fuss about having to switch to the daisy curtains, he simply turned them the wrong way round so that the daisies faced outwards. Andy had brought his own duvet cover and a rolled-up poster but apparently very little else interiors-wise.

  We had corn on the cob for tea, which was a treat in those days, especially the amount of marge we were taking, unchecked, and Andy made a comment about sweetcorn being one of the five main problem foods for the denture-wearer.

  ‘Well, let’s enjoy it while we can,’ quipped my mother.

  In the end we all stared out of the window at the enormous hawthorn hedge that ran the width of the short back garden and was alive with birds. Soon, I went to get the bus back to my flat and, though it was a wrench, it seemed more normal than staying at home with Andy there, counting sparrows and looking sad.

  When the bus came, it was empty. The driver was surprised to have to stop and seemed curious. The bus was only really scheduled at that time to get into town to bring people home. I felt strangely upset to be going the wrong way and sat near the back, in case he tried to chat.