Diary of an Unsmug Married (3 page)

‘How often has this happened?’ she says.

‘Once,’ I say, which is a dual-purpose answer, as I’m not quite sure whether she’s referring to the blood, or the sex. You can’t work for a politician for ten years without learning the value of the dual-purpose answer.

‘Oh,’ she says, in a meaningful way, and then tells me that she’ll refer me to a gynaecologist for further investigation.
There’s
something to look forward to.

When I eventually get home, I’m still so distracted that I put a pack of sanitary towels in the fridge, and forget to be cross with Josh, the nascent gang lord. I even wave to Annoying Ellen by accident so
that’ll
just encourage her and, before you know it, she’ll be popping round again to ‘borrow a corkscrew’. How an alcoholic can manage without one of their own, God only knows.

I quite fancy a gin myself, but Max looks disapproving when I suggest it.
He’s
still on his keep-fit mission, though I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference so far.

THURSDAY, 20 MAY

Good God, I wonder how many other candidates there’ll be for the leadership of the Labour Party by the end of the week? They’re coming out of the woodwork in droves, while trying to pretend that they’re all part of one big happy family, which I don’t think anyone believes.

I don’t, anyway – not considering the state of mine. Honestly, the press have no idea what they’re talking about. They keep bemoaning the death of the extended family, but what they don’t say is that it’s just become
over-extended
, due to divorce, leaving people like me with no choice but to spend all our leisure time phoning parental figures, in an endlessly repeating loop.

First you feel guilty for not phoning any of them, but then you phone one and immediately feel guilty that you haven’t phoned the other. Before you know it, that’s the whole evening gone. I sometimes think it would be much easier to be an orphan; but then
that
makes me feel guilty too.

I wouldn’t mind so much, if feeling guilty didn’t always give me hiccups – and, anyway, when your job involves spending all day taking calls from the usual suspects, you don’t perceive having a ‘nice long chat on the phone’ during your time off as a good thing, no matter
who
it’s with.

Today’s been fairly quiet on the call front, though, so by the time I get home from work I am less horrified by the sight of a phone than usual. I’d better call Mum and capitalise on this rare state of affairs – or, on second thoughts, maybe not. It’s Dad’s turn, so I try him first.

‘I went to B&Q today,’ he says. ‘Never going there again on a Thursday. Bloody awful, it was.’

‘Why?’ I say, somewhat bemused.

‘Full of bloody wrinklies,’ he says. He is
seventy
-
five
, for God’s sake.

After he has explained to me exactly what is wrong with the country –
and
asked me a hundred incomprehensible questions about the apparent foibles of his new computer – I finally manage to get him off the phone. One hour and forty-five minutes exactly.

I need three consecutive cigarettes before I can handle phoning Mum. She is unavailable – something to do with the painful buttock again – so Ted chats to me for five polite, step-fatherly minutes, and then that’s it.
Result
!

It’s only 10:45pm. If I put off calling Stepmother Mark II until tomorrow night, I might catch the end of
Question
Time
^fn11
and be able to vent the day’s aggression by shouting at the TV.

So much for best-laid plans, that’s all I can say. I miss
QT
when
Dad phones back with ‘a quick computer question’. Two hours later, I log on to Amazon, and buy a copy of
PCs
for
Dummies
.

I arrange for it to be sent directly to Dad, labelled: ‘A gift from a well-wisher.’

FRIDAY, 21 MAY

Greg says he ran into his ex-girlfriend last night, so he spends most of the morning in a decline in the Oprah room,
^fn12
before returning to his desk and typing ‘creative methods of revenge’ into Google.

‘You need to get over her,’ I say. ‘
And
move out of your mum’s house, while you’re at it. No wonder you haven’t had a girlfriend since.’

‘Recovering from a broken heart takes time’ says Greg, ‘as does getting rid of a hint of man-boob. I still can’t believe she dumped me for
that
.’

‘I thought it was because she was cheating on you,’ says The Boss, ignoring my warning glance. ‘And, anyway, being single’s great. It’s the best guarantee of an active sex-life, isn’t it, Molly?’

There should be a law against mocking the afflicted. We
do
have feelings, too.

SATURDAY, 22 MAY

Sam arrives first thing to stay for the weekend. We haven’t seen him since my ghastly birthday party, and of course Max hasn’t phoned him at all since then.

How can you call someone your best friend when you never bother to contact them? Not that this stops Max acting as if he’s delighted to see Sam, and slapping him on the shoulder in the weirdly repressed way that men do.

Sam slaps back, but I reckon he only puts up with Max’s neglect because he
still
hasn’t got a girlfriend. Now he’s joined an internet dating site and wants me to check his profile for its woman-appeal.

I’d rate it at zero, unless honesty is no longer a desirable quality. Sam’s claiming to be a non-smoker (!); a moderate drinker (only true if compared to Annoying Ellen), and he’s put ‘University’ in the education section. In response to my raised eyebrow, he mutters, ‘University of
Life
.’

His photograph is terrible too – he looks like a middle-aged woman with a really bad haircut. Why do so many men insist on growing their hair once they get to a certain age? Thank God Max isn’t one of them – I’d wield the scissors while he slept, if necessary. (I’ve always quite liked the name, Delilah, now I come to think of it.)

It’s not just Sam(son)’s hair that ruins the photo, either. For some unaccountable reason, his neck is swathed in a scarf that could almost be one of those hideous pashmina things that everyone but me seems to be wearing. (Everyone female, and of my age, that is.) Maybe this is part of his attempt to appear metrosexual? In the ‘About Me’ section, he’s written a load of pseudo-sensitive stuff that completely belies the fact that he’s about as unreconstructed as you can get.

I’m still trying to find a subtle way to tell him that his profile and photo are rubbish, and that he’s doomed to permanent bachelorhood, when he announces that fifteen women have already contacted him in the three days since he registered on the site.
Fifteen!
Why do I find that so depressing? (And, talking of middle-aged women – which I was, though admittedly ten minutes ago – does my birthday mean that
I’ve
officially become middle-aged?)

If I have, I bet no one would be interested in dating
me
. I’d have to lie about my age, and smear Vaseline all over the camera lens before I took the picture for my profile. It’s different for men, obviously. They can be as old as the hills and women still want to date them. Even men as old as Dad – according to Dinah, anyway.

She calls to tell me that she’s positive that
he
has taken up internet dating now, and says she bases this assumption on the fact that he seems to be sending emails very late at night. ‘And he sounds suspiciously cheerful when you talk to him, too,’ she says. ‘So it’s either that, or he’s becoming obsessed with online porn.’

Good God. Is everyone having sex, apart from me? (Rhetorical question – don’t answer that.)

SUNDAY, 23 MAY

Some excitement at last! When I log on to the computer this morning, I find a private message on Facebook from someone called Johnny Hunter – who seems to remember that we had a night of passion behind the Science block, after the fifth-year end-of-term disco.

There’s no photo on his profile, and the ‘about’ section is helpfully blank, so I send a brief reply, in the hope that it won’t be too obvious that I can’t remember who the hell he is.

I forget to tell Max about it, as he and Sam have been to the pub for a so-called quickie before lunch and are incapable of intelligent conversation by the time they get home. They don’t seem to realise this, though, so I leave them to bore each other to tears while I walk into town. I shall have a sober wander around the shops instead.

Mainly stationery shops, given that I want to buy a packet of gold stars, like the ones that Connie and Josh’s primary school teachers used to stick in their school books, in recognition of particularly good pieces of work.

I’m not intending to reward quality so much as quantity, myself. The latter’s as important as the former in some situations – like how often Max and I are having sex. So, when I get home, I open the dog-eared packet of stars I finally found at the back of a shelf in Ryman, stick one onto the calendar and put the rest in the kitchen drawer.

There seem to be an awful lot of stars left unused but, luckily, Mum distracts me from thinking about this when she phones with an update on her health. She’s getting Ted to tow her around the house on a tea-tray now, as her buttock hurts if she walks. I
really
hope it’s not hereditary.

MONDAY, 24 MAY

In the morning, Greg and I are under orders to represent The Boss at a public meeting to reassure constituents that the powers-that-be are
tackling
anti-social behaviour – as opposed to simply wringing their hands and despairing about it.

Greg arrives before I do, and sends me a text:

“Molly, you’re late. Meet me in the lobby. I will be staring intently at the circus of freaks, losers, the mad, the bad and the weak who pay our wages.”

Even though this description doesn’t really apply to most of the audience, for once, the meeting’s ghastly anyway. It’s impossible to answer hostile questions realistically while constrained by political correctness, let alone while having to contend with Greg’s increasingly demented texts. I can’t even kick him, because he’s sitting four places away from me, holding his mobile underneath the table and typing away furiously while wearing his usual angelic expression. I do wish he’d cut that out whenever we’re on public display.

He stresses me out so much that, eventually, I’m driven to my own version of anti-social behaviour and sneak out for a cigarette, joining the crowd of teenagers hanging around outside. I end up chatting to them –
hug
a
hoodie
, as Dave Blancmange Face
^fn13
would say – and they tell me that they aren’t too happy about recent calls to ban smokers from standing outside pubs. They want to know why drunks aren’t to be banned as well.

They’ve got a point, now I come to think of it. Smokers don’t go around beating people up on their way home from a night’s smoking,
or
vomit all over the pavements. So that’s decided it – I’m definitely not giving up my bad habit, just because a hypocritical ex-government has told me to.

Especially when The Boss hasn’t given up either, and he
voted
for the smoking ban.

TUESDAY, 25 MAY

Why, why,
why
don’t I work at Westminster? Everyone there is spending today basking in the excitement of the State Opening of Parliament. Meanwhile, it’s Groundhog Day here in the provinces.

All the usual suspects phone first thing, including Miss Chambers. We need noise limiters like they have in call centres, because that woman is slowly but surely wrecking my hearing.

Now she thinks her next-door neighbours are stealing her electricity. She wants them arrested, and if she doesn’t get what she wants, she’ll scream and scream until she makes herself sick – and renders me deaf. That is, if I listen to her, which I have absolutely no intention of doing. Unlike some people, I learn from experience.

So, while Miss Chambers works herself up to full volume, I put the phone down on the desk and head for the kitchen, where I make a coffee and eat one of Greg’s chocolate biscuits – but she’s still screaming when I’ve finished that, so then I go outside and have a cigarette.

I take my time but, even so, she’s still at it when I stick my head back into my office to check; so then I decide that I may as well go to the loo and experiment with my new miracle-working mascara while I’m there. (It doesn’t work miracles at all, I’m disappointed to report.)

Anyway, when I’ve finally run out of places to go and things to do, I resort to blocking her out by listening to Greg’s iPod, which I’ve just found under the sofa in the Oprah room.

I’m having quite a good time, dancing around my desk and miming into the stapler, until Greg comes in from the outer office, removes one of my headphones and says, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mol – is that Miss C? Can’t you get her off the phone? I can hear her at my bloody desk.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ I say. ‘Hang on. I’ll put Plan B into operation.’

I approach the handset – with extreme caution – and pick it up, while holding it well away from me. Then I start making whistling and chirping noises, which I follow by banging the phone on the desk a few times.

After that, I put the mouthpiece carefully to my lips while swivelling the earpiece away from my ear. ‘Hello?
Hello?
Miss Chambers? I can’t hear you, I’m afraid.’

This is a complete lie, as the whole building can hear the damned woman by now. No wonder most agencies have stopped accepting her calls. I’d ban them, too, if The Boss wasn’t so worried about losing a vote. (He never believes me when I remind him that Miss C always votes Conservative.)

I put the phone down again, just in time. It’s a fine art, but then I’ve had a lot of practice.

‘Listen to me, Molly Whatever-Your-Name-Is – you
stupid
woman!’