Boating for Beginners (3 page)

'I think I'll go to bed,' she said, 'so that I can do my best in the morning,' and she folded the night around her with something like hope. Surely things couldn't get worse?

'I was like a disaster looking for somewhere to happen,' said Doris, which seemed to Gloria a very intimate and surprising thing for a perfect stranger to say. They were standing in a long room in Noah's house and Doris was doing the dusting. 'I've been hired, same as you, to help with the arrangements, so we're going to see a lot of each other.'

Gloria wasn't sure which question to ask first; she wanted to know about Doris and her disastrous self, but she needed to know what these arrangements were. Not used to making choices, Gloria just frowned. It had started to dawn on her as she surfaced from her pool that she was remarkably under-equipped to deal with life as it is lived. Her own world had been perfectly ordered and very clean because she had assembled it from a kit composed of spiritual certainties and romantic love. It didn't matter that she hardly believed in God and had only ever received one valentine. What did matter was the voltage of faith she injected into every worn-out cliche. A rose is a rose is a rose.

'Yes,' continued Doris, 'all my life I've hovered over happiness like a black cloud. Whatever I've touched has turned to dross.'

('Dross?' wondered Gloria, too nervous to interrupt.)

'I used to be rich and beautiful. I took my holidays in Andorra, and now I have to use a false name just to get a cleaning job. I don't think it's my fault. We're all drunken mice running round on the wheel of fortune and some of us are lucky and some of us aren't.'

Lucky. This was one word Gloria recognised. She clutched at it.

'Don't you feel lucky then?'

Doris gave a hard and bitter laugh. 'My first husband died on our honeymoon, my second suffocated at a fancy-dress party and my eldest boy is an accountant.'

There was a silence while Gloria hopped from foot to foot, trying to design her first social response. Unaware of this new architecture going on around her Doris felt the silence compelled her to continue.

'I've learned something though. I think of myself as a student of life. I suppose you could call me an organic philosopher.'

'Do you understand the Meaning of Life?' blurted out Gloria. She knew that everyone sought this mysterious meaning because it was in all the magazines. Every month there was an article on how to be fulfilled and what to invest in when you were. Gloria felt tense at the thought of being offered a fully inflated lifebelt to help her negotiate the pool.

'The Meaning of Life,' began Doris slowly, 'is death.' Gloria looked blank. 'All your clothes are rotting, all your food is putrefying, you're covered in dead skin and your bowels are full of muck. Why try and pretend? No wonder we don't have an easy life.'

'What about freezer food? That's not rotting.' Gloria hoped her mother couldn't hear.

'I'm not talking about things that have been interfered with. I'm talking about Essences. Decay is the key; once you've come to terms with decay not much can disappoint you. Your house will crumble, your friends will die. Nothing remains. Can you think of anything permanent?' She turned on Gloria with a challenging duster.

'Washing up,' cried Gloria wildly. 'There's always washing up to do. No matter how much you manage, there's always more.'

Doris was thoughtful. 'Washing up as a Metaphor. I can see what you mean.' Gloria had said the right thing. It had never happened to her before and she actually felt rather tearful.

It's fortunate that our dangerously emotional moments are often punctured by Gross Reality (one reason for the Shakespearean fool). The lives of fanatics are usually rather low on Gross Reality, which allows them to take their visions too seriously. Joan of Arc or Mary Baker Eddy might have found their personal lives less complicated if, say, either of them had had a bowel complaint or a passion for chocolate milkshakes. If Gloria had been left untended a moment longer the effect of that first wave of social rapport might have drowned her for good; but by a miracle she survived, and that miracle appeared in the form of Rita, Sheila and Desi, fresh from the hairdresser's.

Rita was dark-skinned with a bush of orange hair and matching painted fingernails. Gloria had never seen anyone wearing a leopard-skin dress in the day before. Even the models in the magazines wore them against a photo-background that was clearly night. Exhausted from her recent efforts Gloria found she could think of nothing to say, so she turned to stare at Sheila who was very fat and covered from head to foot in solid gold. She had a snake torque round her neck, snakes dangling from her ears, snake ankle chains and something like a boa constrictor round her middle. She was the most unsnakelike creature Gloria had ever seen. Beside these two, Desi appeared relatively normal, clad as she was in a designer-cut suede cat suit. Gloria noticed that she wasn't wearing make-up but that her hair was probably henna'ed.

'Hi,' said Sheila. 'Guess you know who we are because we're wearing our badges. You should have a name badge too if you're working here. Are you with the film crew or the stage hands?'

'Neither,' said Doris loudly. 'I'm here to do the cleaning and she's here for ...' Doris stopped as she realised she had no idea who she'd been talking to, but then, she thought to herself, knowing is a superficial position to assume, most commonly in fact a deception. Comforted by this she went back to her dusting, but Sheila vulgarly pursued the point. 'So tell us, skinny, what do you do here? We don't know anyone. We've just arrived.'

('Americans,' thought Doris. 'Typical.')

Gloria breathed deeply twice and concentrated on Martin Amis in an effort to clear her mind. 'I'm here to help with the animals.'

'Shit,' said Sheila, 'you a zoo keeper?'

'No.' Gloria was getting agitated. 'My mother's a cook and I've got an elephant that needs a home and they told me I could bring him with me if I came to work here. I only started this morning and I'm waiting for someone to tell me what to do next.' Gloria wasn't aware of it, but she had just summed up her whole life in one sentence.

'Well, you won't have much animal work for this week; they're still building the set. Tell you what, you can help the girls and me check out our franchises. We're not just film stars, we've got business on our minds as well, ain't that right?'

'Right,' agreed Rita.

('No sense of proportion,' thought Doris bitterly, as she dusted a map of the world as dictated by the Unpronounceable.)

'What do you do?' asked Gloria timidly.

'One of the things we do is to run a kind of clinic, a place to help people who have problems, personal problems with their bodies and themselves. We used to do it just as a hobby but the thing took off and now it's so popular we have to franchise out. We're taking this opportunity to visit our branches and maybe put in a few guest appearances. You can come along, take notes, make coffee, go out for sandwiches.'

'Like a secretary,' whispered Gloria to herself, feeling better.

'Meet us down town first thing tomorrow, outside the Pizza Hut,' ordered Sheila, and the three of them left.

Doris poked her tufted head round the bust of Noah as a young man. 'What kind of people do they think they are? Coming in here ordering me about. You should have refused. I always do. Whenever I'm asked to step outside my Union-defined bounds I refuse, otherwise it's only a matter of time and we workers will be back on collar and lead.'

'I don't belong to a union,' explained Gloria.

'You what! You don't belong to a union and you don't know anything about the transience of existence! No wonder you haven't got on in the world. You're a fool to yourself.' But Gloria didn't care. Any port in a storm.

Spiritual empathy, coincidence, or sheer bloody-minded-ness meant that Mrs Munde was having a difficult time of it too. She had gone up to the house to make scrambled eggs with wheatgerm and found Noah's eldest son, Ham, wandering around her primitive kitchen. Naturally she felt aggrieved. Some places you share with others and some you don't. A room of her own was important to Mrs Munde. She liked to think or to look at her plan of the constellations when she had a spare moment. Now it was going to be small talk and a smiling face when she could have been studying Orion. She decided to make as much noise and mess as possible in order to drive the stranger away. Accordingly she began to sing the overture from Carmen while spilling a pail of milk. Ham didn't seem to notice. He was fiddling with some new kitchen item which Mrs Munde assumed to be the promised gadget invented by Noah. A sense of social hierarchy prevented Mrs Munde from actually telling the lousy bastard to get out, so instead she began to think evil thoughts. She had once read an article on mind control, explaining that the best way to bend someone to your will was to think of a gooey mudlike substance called Cliff Richard and direct it at the object of your intent. Such were the marshmallow-suffocating properties of this image that the victim fell instantly into an undignified froth. Putty in your hands in fact. It didn't seem to work. The stranger was insensitive as well as intrusive. Mrs Munde gave it one last go till the kitchen air was thick with Cliff Richard. The stranger suddenly made a little squeaking noise and fell sideways. 'Stop it, stop it!' he cried. 'You're pulping my brain.' 'Well go away then,' sulked Mrs Munde, releasing her victim, not through generosity but because she found the image too nauseating to continue.

'But I've got something very exciting to say. This conversation could change your life.'

'I've got all the insurance I need,' said Mrs Munde stiffly.

'Lady, I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm here to give you something.'

Mrs Munde looked up into Ham's dark brown eyes, and with a wave of affection that began in her throat and sank to her apron pocket, she felt she might trust this man. Perhaps he had been sent by the Lord. Perhaps he was an angel in disguise come to test her spirit.

'Why don't I take us both for a cup of coffee?' he suggested.

'It's happening to me!' Mrs Munde thrilled inside. 'I've read about it and now it's happening. Perhaps I've been chosen for the Bunny Mix Romance Show.'

The Bunny Mix Romance Show was a very popular afternoon programme in which a woman would be pleasantly accosted by a mysterious tall figure. If she behaved in a fitting and simpering manner a number of boys would then rush onto the set singing in barbershop harmony and strewing flowers. The lucky woman would then be taken out to dinner and given a signed copy in calfskin of her favourite Bunny novel. If she behaved rudely a bucket of custard was poured over her from behind. It was possible that Mrs Munde had already qualified for the custard, which made her nervous because she was allergic to milk. Still, perhaps she could make up for her recent ill temper; and after all, she had never been taken out for a cup of coffee.

As they set off together Ham explained who he was, and Mrs Munde was caught between a welter of disappointment that she wasn't on the Bunny Mix Show after all, and a deluge of wonder that someone so rich and well connected should want to be with her. She decided to be happy.

Ham ordered a double espresso for him and a cappuccino for her. 'Mrs Munde,' he began earnestly, 'do you honestly care about the Lord?'

'Oh I do, I do. No one more.'

Ham nodded and smiled. 'Do you think you would like to serve more fully in countless little ways?'

'Oh I would, I would. It's my dearest wish.'

'Do you think you could cope with long hours and hardship for his sake?'

'Mr Ham, I could cope with a bed of nails for his sake.' (Like Gloria, Mrs Munde was given to bouts of emotional hyperbole.)

'Our God is not a namby-pamby socialist idol, Mrs Munde. He demands we use our brains, our business brains for greater glory and greater profit. He asks us to be worthy of him, and he has said that whatever we do he will bless.'

'The Lord blesses me,' interjected Mrs Munde fervently.

'You may know that I own a fabulously large, forever-expanding chain of pastrami stores called More Meat. I own those stores for His Sake, not my own. He has guided me through the money markets and the loopholes in the Health and Safety Regulations because he is more than YAHWEH, the God of Love, he is YAHWEH the Omnipotent Stockbroker and YAHWEH the Omniscient Lawyer. (Praise Him.) Now he is guiding me to a new place, a place of peace and prosperity because he saw how I was crying out when my profits fell and I couldn't afford to worship him in the style I had promised. He came to me in a vision as I stood over my bank statement and he said, «HAM, THERE IS NO FIXED MINIMUM WAGE IN THE CATERING INDUSTRY.» Those were his very words, and I fell on my knees crying, «Thank you, Lord. I will start up a chain of restaurants in your name and I'm going to call them House of Trust and Fortitude.» What do you think, Mrs Munde?'