by Grace Dent
‘What about his pills?’ I ask. ‘Are they under control?’
Dad has taken his Metformin strategically for many years. He uses it like magical fairy dust to counteract a full ASDA family-sized strawberry trifle. He hangs back on the pills when he’s being good, then takes double when he’s binged. We pretend – as it’s easier all round – not to notice him slurring his words a little or not really knowing who I am when I call until I explain. Or when pins and needles began in his feet. Or when he falls asleep mid-conversation. In recent weeks I’ve finally gone behind Dad’s back and called his doctor. But without any consent to discuss his medical problems, they fobbed me off quickly. I would need to get a health-and-welfare Lasting Power of Attorney form signed by him to give me any power to begin interfering properly. This feels like a big reach considering I’ve spent four decades letting him wriggle out of discussing his other children, or even apologising to me for an entire childhood of his fibbing.
The wardrobe mistress appears, delivering my newly ironed dark green dress and the soundman is trying to hang a microphone pack off my bra. We are going live on Channel 4 in forty-five minutes to a couple of million viewers. I don’t have time to think about Carlisle.
‘He left his credit card at the newsagent again today,’ Mam says.
‘Again?’ I say.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s like a fog descends on his brain.’
‘Yes,’ I say. The penny is beginning to drop.
In my dressing room, I chuck back a small glass of Chenin blanc while waiting to go on set, where the audience are being warmed up by a comedian telling the same warm-up jokes I’ve heard a dozen times before, but they’re working. The audience is laughing. My best-friend Matt, a Public Relations boss, is reading me messages from my 20,000 followers on this amazing new ever-so-positive social-media wormhole called Twitter, where feedback from absolute strangers is instant. It’s just an endless stream of people telling me they like me! This new social-media platform means everyone can contact anyone now. I’ve chatted to Simon Le Bon and Curt Smith from Tears for Fears. Everyone is so friendly; it almost seems too good to be true.
Shortly before the show goes live, a window fitter from Brentwood called Marcus Akin who dresses like Wolverine is evicted from the Big Brother house, spilling out of the famous doors, across the walkway, past the screaming crowds and eventually into the adjoining TV studio, where behind a desk Davina McCall, Andi Peters and I interrogate him on his behaviour. I hit most of my VTs and even get some big laughs and applause and then wander victoriously into the green-room booze-up full of TV researchers and evicted Big Brother contestants like Charlie and Karly and Dogface and Rodrigo and bottles of warm Blossom Hill plonk from Borehamwood Tesco Extra. Then into a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz, which whips me home down the M25, where, in our dark, quiet house, my husband has gone to bed. A pile of fan letters sits on the table, including a request to be the patron of a nearby donkey sanctuary and some weird fan art where someone has painted my face in crisp white Tipp-Ex. I give it a sniff. I don’t think it’s Tipp-Ex at all.
My husband does not get up to say hello. He didn’t call to say he watched me. Maybe he’s sick and tired of waiting for me while I hobnob with folk off the telly in green rooms and finding almost everything I need spiritually from appearing on TV in studios with bright lights and shiny floors. In our expensive designer fridge, the shelves are empty. I’ve left a Post-it note on the front, which says, ‘Try Dad’s doctor again.’ A leftover slice of Domino’s pizza sits in a box on the kitchen work surface. Decent wives do not let their husbands go to bed as they’re hanging out in green rooms, I think quietly. Nor do they let their husbands order Domino’s again. I feel guilty and know I should have left some sort of casserole. Food is how you show people you love them. I feel guilty when I admit to myself that such pre-historic ideas hold any scrap of veracity. I wish desperately it was untrue. Twitter says tonight I did great.
CHAPTER 8
Sex on the Beach
October 2009
Being a grown-up lady in her kitchen felt like so much fun when I was little. Standing at my Fisher-Price toy stove, prodding invisible bacon, pretending to be in charge, calling the shots, just like Mammy. But now I’m less enraptured. As my husband talks online with colleagues in Los Angeles, a rerun of MasterChef: The Professionals plays mutely in the corner of the room on one of the digital channels. The screen on our large TV is dusty. I’m standing in the kitchen, floundering. I promised to cook dinner tonight as part of a concerted effort to be a decent wife. A better wife. A long stare into the fridge achieves little. I had four meetings today about developing one of my Shiraz Bailey Wood novels into a movie, then a voice-over, which meant I missed my Guardian column deadline. I’ll need to do it pre-dawn before I leave while also pulling together some tax details for my accountant. I have a 5 a.m. alarm set.
I have a migraine behind my right eye.
I also have: half a bag of organic baby leaf spinach going mushy, three farmers’-market eggs in a box, now of dubious vintage, and one onion with a long white sprout. My fingers dance towards my MacBook to begin browsing the website Just Eat. Then they stop. Good wives don’t let their husband’s dinner arrive via bike in a plastic box, even if he wouldn’t judge me for it. He is very amenable about the fact that I have a career. Or maybe, a small voice inside says, I have worn him down to expect less. The second option makes me feel bleak.
Being a pretend grown-up woman wasn’t like this. Making sketty with Dad, pushing mince round a frying pan. Carting home a set of finger-stained, second-hand cake recipe cards from a Blue Peter bring-and-buy sale. They came in a plastic box with a cracked lid.
‘Look, Daddy, I can make rock buns, they’re easy!’
And they were. Fat splodges of cake mix made with Stork SB margarine. White sugar, cheap sultanas, sometimes pink glacé cherries. Then I attempted a single-layer chocolate sponge made with cheap drinking chocolate, stirred together with a fork cos we didn’t have a hand whisk. The honey-brown gloop was shoved into an old stained cake tin, and later covered in icing, which sat wonkily on the top in translucent lumpy puddles.
But most exciting of all were the real hobs and the grill on Mam’s electric cooker. By the age of eight I was flicking on the switches and turning the dials right up. I’d try to get tea together, just like a real mam. Sometimes – well, many times – oil would jump out of the frying pan and burn me. Then I’d scream and I’d grizzle and Dad would appear, tutting and trying to be angry, but then he’d hug me into his belly and say, ‘Why are you messing around?’
Dad knew how to make bad things feel better. He’d reach for the small canister of Burneze – a magical potion from the chemist that freezes the blister and turns the scab into a dusty, sticky war wound. Then I’d sit subdued on the sofa beside him, watching Willo the Wisp, sniffing back tears and looking at my battle scar, secretly proud. Two days later I would’ve forgotten this drama and would be making Dad cheese on toast. Like a proper mam.
‘What are we having for tea, Mam?’ I’d moan while watching Hong Kong Phooey.
She’d be trying to sew on a Brownie Badge.
‘A walk round the table to see how far it is,’ she’d mutter.
This was her regular joke, which we never quite understood.
‘No, Mam, we’re really hungry, what are we having? We’re starving!’ Now David would join in too.
She’d sigh, looking up from her sewing.
‘The kitchen is closed tonight, sorry,’ she’d announce – another of her standard one-liners.
We’d groan and we’d grizzle – we knew at some point she’d stand up.
‘Oh, yer as fit as I am to feed yerselves,’ she’d say, but then she’d put down her needle and thread, stand up and say, ‘I can do you sausage and mashed potatoes … how does that suit you?’
Then there’d be a clanking of pots and pan
s and cupboard doors as she cranked into gear again, back in her place by the oven. This left her no time for her own pastimes or hobbies. Mam – like every other mam along Harold Street in Currock – never admitted she had her own dreams.
It began to occur to me as I grew bigger that being a proper grown-up woman involved being very much chained to the kitchen. At 8 a.m., at midday, at 6 p.m. too – and then there was all the shopping and the dishes to do. Life was a never-ending conveyor belt of mouths to feed – sometimes three, four or five people. Mam, feeding cold Ready Brek into stiff mouths, spooning beans onto toast, scraping watery poached eggs into bins. Cooking for all of our likes and dislikes, even when she told you straight she’d not bother.
‘There’s nowt worse than a fussy eater,’ Mam would say. But still she managed to get something down everyone, remembering that this one didn’t like peas and this one didn’t like onion. She did all this without a farmers’ market or reliable scales or six gas burners. She did it 365 days a year, three times a day, without anyone telling her she was clever or that it was a skill. Without ASDA deliveries, Click & Collect, Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Waitrose Rapid. She did it because mothers and wives everywhere had no choice. They did it because people get hungry continuously – it’s an unavoidable truth about living. I don’t want to live like this, I started to think.
Being a woman, a wife, a mammy, was less about wearing lipstick and nice frocks and more about looking like, as Mam said, ‘the wreck of the Hesperus’, in a cardigan over loose pyjama bottoms. It seemed like a lot of being knackered and fighting with a bin bag and asking for jobs to be done again and again until you finally did it yourself.
It was about putting things at the bottom of the stairs to carry up later, and being the one who says, ‘OK, well, can I get you something? Are you hungry?’ and then just reaching for the frying pan and making a fried-egg sandwich out of nowhere – subliminally slicing at yolks with a fish slice, then turning them over quickly, so the whole thing is done in a flash. A house needs someone at the helm, steering. And my mam steered mainly from beside the toaster, slathering slices with one hand and making a pot of tea with the other, while working out how to get our car back from the garage as the fan belt was broken. She did it while making lamb hotpot with slices of black pudding across the bottom of a scratched Pyrex dish, which she threw in the oven at four o’clock before moving the sofa to hoover, then walking me to Brownies and checking in with Gran to see if she had milk because the mobile van was fresh out again. A home needs someone elbows-deep in it, every day, constantly. Someone to do all the cleaning of bathroom floors and the de-gunking of sinks and the washing of clothes and to supervise the misery of drying socks and pants on temperamental radiators. Someone to hoover the carpets and de-flea the cat and work out what that bad smell is in the cupboard under the stairs, because it may be a rotting dead mouse. Someone to buy, write and stamp the appropriately chosen birthday cards and find a child-size Halloween witch’s outfit and get everyone ready for the wedding reception and pack suitcases for the half-term caravan holiday which Mam found in the brochure and booked.
I do not want to be a mammy, I thought.
But, I am finding that, even if there are no children, someone in every home still needs to be ‘mammy’. There’s still the issue of the house. If both of you are ‘daddy’ then kitchen surfaces stay sticky and the fridge does not refill. Cousins are in umbrage about forgotten birthday cards not posted and the petunias you bought for the window box die. Loo paper inner tubes pile up on the bathroom floor and socks smell slightly of mildew because they lingered, damp, in the machine too long.
Of course, you could share all this! Equally, respectfully and diligently. Very modern, very harmonious! But then every Saturday morning is wasted playing catch-up, trying to make light of the fact that your small window of together time now features one of you with your hand down a U-bend and the other one bleaching the wheelie bin because, well, didn’t you notice there were maggots? In the beginning, Saturday mornings were for sex, eating bagels and the fresh delirium of love.
It began to occur to me in my thirties, in a dark, guilty crevice of my mind, that the only way a house works like it did in the Seventies is if one of you – regardless of gender – is ‘mam’.
I shudder when I verge upon accepting this. This simply cannot be true.
When I raise it with friends they deny it, albeit weakly.
‘Things have got a lot better since we got the cleaner,’ they say, but they say the word cleaner quietly because they’re socialists and hiring a cleaner is wrong. Actually, she’s not a cleaner, really, they don’t use that word, she’s more a friend of the family who happens to clean.
I close the fridge door and walk back into the lounge empty-handed, where, on the television, the MasterChef restaurant critics – a string of very haughty, posh men with well-fed bellies and weekly columns – act outraged at the shoddy arrangement of the foie gras.
I send Just Eat a request to ask the Fortune Inn to bring my husband some Singapore noodles.
When I was a small I often read in magazines that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. That cannot be true, I thought. It’s about being lovely and pretty.
‘The kitchen is closed tonight, sorry,’ I say sheepishly. Within three years we were divorced.
September 2011
As I sat in bed flanked by two tabby cats googling sobering things like ‘How to get a quick Decree Absolute?’ or ‘Am I legally married in the UK if I married in Vegas?’, a lifeline arrived.
‘Just wondering’, said an editor at the Evening Standard magazine, ‘if you’d like to cover our restaurant column in the back of the Friday magazine for a few weeks, just while we work out what’s going on. You probably have a lot going on of an evening.’
I didn’t actually have anything ‘going on of an evening’ right then aside from crying into a mirror and listening to Celine Dion. By day, I had a full-time role at the Independent newspaper writing two opinion pages per week. This was definitely distracting, but not in a terribly healthy manner.
Writing a regular weekly, or in my case bi-weekly, opinion column sends even the nicest writers slightly demented in the end. As a little girl I gobbled up pithy columns by Jean Rook, who they called ‘The First Lady of Fleet Street’. That job looks marvellous, I thought. Now here I was, almost forty, in bed with a warm MacBook, surrounded by half-eaten cereal bowls, churning out thoughts. Readers, I had grown to realise, only really cared when you’re furious. They liked to feel my apoplexy over pertinent topics like Arnold Schwarnenegger’s lovechild or Petra Ecclestone’s wedding. Twitter was not helping. Each week the Internet filleted out the more potent sections and scattergunned them across the planet.
My salary at the Independent was paid monthly via a Russian oligarch family called the Lebedevs. It was absurdly generous – far too generous to say no to – but then oligarchs so frequently are. The Lebedevs were raising eyebrows in London by buying up newspapers, chucking about roubles on glitzy star-filled parties, where Naomi hobnobbed with Dame Judi, as well as launching a TV channel. The Lebedevs behaved with a level of largesse and raffishness unknown to the Guardian. They also offered me the type of full-time employment where I didn’t necessarily have to get out of bed much. It was all opinion; no interviewing, no showing my face in the Derry Street newsroom in Kensington.
‘You’ve been lying in your bed like a coffin for nine days, princess. I think you should get up,’ my friend Matt would say, in his warm, clipped Winchester College tones.
‘I’ve been working,’ I’d protest, sat in bed surrounded by half-drunk mugs of Gold Blend and Migraleve packets, having just laid down eight-hundred Pulitzer Prize-luring words on Kate Middleton’s skirt length.
‘Yes, I know you have been working, darling,’ Matt would say. ‘But how about a little shower and then meeting us in Pizza Express?’
I rerea
d the email from the Evening Standard magazine, which was published every Friday and left in piles by every single London Underground station to be read by millions of commuters. In the Nineties I’d pitched features to it constantly, to no avail. Could I really cover a restaurant column? Like Michael Winner from ‘Winner’s Dinners’? Maybe not, but it was worth getting out of bed to try.
‘Tell me a bit more,’ I said on the telephone. I stalled for over eleven minutes before calling, to play it icy.
‘Well, we don’t have much to pay you for a fee … but you can claim the dinner on expenses,’ she said. ‘We loved the funny piece you wrote for the issue Lily Allen edited. The one about hipster cafés in East London. We’ve had complaints!’
‘About what?’ I said.
‘Oh, the part about cool cafés being run by lazy trust-fund brats who close for twenty-two days over Christmas and spend more time working out their slam poetry evening rota than working out a menu.’
‘Oh, right, well, it’s true,’ I said, wincing. It sounded harsh out of context.
‘We loved it, don’t worry!’ she said. ‘OK, good,’ I said.
‘Can you do 625 words by next Wednesday? We’ll send you some ideas of places. You’re not scared of chefs, are you? We think some might get very upset.’ I’m pretty sure my ability to rankle was partly why I was chosen. Restaurant critics are not there to promote chefs; they are there to sell newspapers.
‘No. I’m not scared,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’
But I was.
I was consumed with imposter syndrome. I knew that I definitely didn’t know as much about French haute cuisine as the men with the big bellies and the tweed trousers on MasterChef who were furious about foie gras. But I knew enough about restaurants, surely? I’d been eating out in London for fifteen years. I knew the calendar rhythms of the food scene, how galette de rois in January drifts into menus full of fresh blood orange and then forced rhubarb, then asparagus and eventually all the spatchcocked horror of pheasants with their heads blasted off come the start of the shooting season on the Glorious Twelfth of August. I knew many silly things that might win me a Trivial Pursuit Food & Drink piece, like the fact that Omelette Rothschild isn’t an omelette but an apricot soufflé made with Cointreau, whereas Omelette Arnold Bennett is definitely an omelette, made with smoked haddock, Gruyère and crème fraîche. Or that escabeche can mean cooked but also raw. Or that fromage de tête may sound like posh cheese but it’s actually pig’s face and brain and tongue suspended horrifically in aspic.