Diary of an Unsmug Married (35 page)

‘Did you just say “dystopian” to Mr Beales?’ I say.

‘Yes,’ says Greg. ‘I am attempting to raise the calibre of conversation around here. Given the inexplicable omission of my name from the list of the UK’s top three hundred intellectuals.’

‘Oh,’ I say – which I don’t think lives up to Greg’s expectations. He raises his eyebrows, and waits for me to try again. ‘A laudable aim. Though what did Mr Beales reply?’

‘He asked why The Boss can’t employ someone who speaks proper English,’ says Greg. ‘I am bloodied, but unbowed.’

I wish I could say the same for Dinah. She’s absolutely
traumatised
.

‘God-all-bloody-mighty,’ she says when she phones tonight to confirm that Dad’s now safely back at home. ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.’

Apparently, Dad lost his wallet somewhere in the airport, and someone else found it and handed it in.

‘What’s so bad about that?’ I say. ‘I think it’s reassuring that not everyone in this country is dishonest.’

I brush aside what this might say about me or Johnny, or Max and Ellen. I’m getting
much
better at brushing aside. And, anyway, Max and I are going to be back on track, as soon as we’ve had our romantic weekend in the country.

‘I’m not telling you anything else about it,’ says Dinah, her voice rising to a squawk. ‘It was
bloody
awful, and I can’t cope with re-living the trauma. Not with my mental health problem. You’ll just have to phone Dad and ask him yourself.’

I’m not sure I want to, but Dad saves me the bother. He phones as soon as Dinah’s hung up.

‘I’m back,’ he says, as if that’s cause for celebration. I suppose it is, really, if he’s back for good, and hasn’t brought a new stepmother with him – but I don’t want to bolster his ego too much.

‘So I hear,’ I say. ‘What happened at the airport? Dinah sounds a bit upset about it.’

‘Oh, that’s just that stupid HDP thing she’s got,’ says Dad, ‘or whatever it’s called. Making a mountain out of a molehill, if you ask me. It was bloody funny, actually.’

Dad’s sense of humour isn’t everyone’s, so this isn’t particularly reassuring, though the story seems innocuous enough at first. He and Dinah were running around the arrivals lounge looking for his wallet when there was an announcement on the tannoy system asking for the owner of a lost wallet to return to Customs.

When Dad and Dinah did so, the woman behind the desk asked Dad his name and then asked him what was in the wallet. Dad says he listed everything he could remember but the woman said he’d forgotten something. Then she waved a packet of blue tablets at him and asked him what they were.

‘Oh, God,’ I say. ‘Tell me they weren’t Viagra,
please
?’

‘’Course they were,’ says Dad. ‘Trying to embarrass me, wasn’t she?’

‘I assume it didn’t work,’ I say – in the voice of experience.

‘No,’ says Dad. ‘No one embarrasses your father, as you know. I suggested we could go behind the screen and test them, if she wanted to be sure what they were. She didn’t seem too keen on that.’

Now I wish he’d stayed in Thailand, and I bet I’m not the only one.

WEDNESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER

Huh, so much for Max’s much-vaunted self-discipline. It’s at least as poor as mine.

I’m sitting in the garden after work today – smoking, of course, but then
I’m
not the one who’s giving up – when Josh comes outside to complain about how few hours he’s been allocated by the cinema this week. He goes into such a long rant about it that, eventually, I ask him to go back inside and leave me alone, just for a while. Is ten minutes’ peace and quiet
too
much to ask?

‘I only came out here to calm down after work,’ I say.

‘No, you didn’t,’ says Josh. ‘You’re a filthy addict, unlike Dad. If he can give up smoking –
just like that
– then I don’t see why you won’t even
try
.’

‘Unlike your father, I have a genuinely stressful job,’ I say. ‘And maybe I’m not motivated by the same rewards.’

I don’t mention who the rewards are most likely to come from, and Josh isn’t listening, anyway. That’s
so
typical
.

‘Look at that,’ he says, pointing towards the side of the shed. ‘Something’s on fire.’

He’s right. There are clouds of white smoke billowing around from the back of the shed wall and drifting across the garden.

‘Dad.
Dad!
’

Honestly, I don’t know why the kids always assume Max is the only person who can deal with an emergency. He doesn’t even know the
meaning
of the word, not to mention that I am the designated fire officer at work. (There’s no need for everyone to keep pointing out that I can’t lift the extinguisher by myself.)

‘Yes?’ comes Max’s voice – from the other side of the shed.

‘What are you doing? Are you okay?’ says Josh. ‘Don’t try to put the fire out yourself – get out of there!’

‘Don’t be daft,’ says Max. ‘I’m just feeding the rabbit, and cleaning the hutch. Nothing at all to worry about.’

‘But there’s smoke coming from the back of the shed.’ Josh is getting very worried now, and is heading towards it.

‘No, that’s just dust from the hay,’ says Max. ‘Stay put. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

He’s too late. Josh moves faster than you think (except on a skateboard), even with a dislocated knee and skinny jeans.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Dad,’ he says, in a tone of deep disgust. ‘Mum, he’s smoking a bloody cigarette. Right next to the poor old rabbit. Dust from the hay, my arse.’

‘Oh, honestly, Max,’ says Ellen, over the garden wall. ‘And when you’d been doing so well, too.’

I
do
wish Ellen would stop appearing from nowhere, even when she’s fully clothed – although I’m quite enjoying watching Max blustering and claiming it is ‘just a lapse’. At least, I am, until I remember that he is
my
husband and yet I’m not the one he’s been trying to please.

I don’t say anything about that, though. Some of us are capable of
genuine
self-discipline.

THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER

I’ve just got off the phone to the Council’s housing department – about the girls with cancer, who I’m
still
trying to get re-housed – when it starts to ring again. It’s Mr Meeeeurghn, who’s managed to get himself a Council flat, somehow or other, but who now says that one of his new neighbours is picking on him.

I don’t get the neighbour’s name, as Mr M’s so wound up that he’s making even less sense than usual. And that’s
really
saying something.

‘Woman mad crazy,’ he says, without apparent irony.

When I enquire further, he says that she lives in the flat above his, and that she stares at him and sniffs every time he passes her in the lobby. She also bangs on the floor whenever he has a cigarette. She sounds a bit like Ellen, but thank God Mr Meeeeurghn’s new flat isn’t anywhere near our house. We’d have to move immediately, if it was.

‘You write and tell her,’ he yells. ‘Tell her
now
!’

‘Tell her what?’ I say. I want to go home already. And it’s only 10:30am.

‘You tell her stop sniffing me and be nice, because I am refugee,’ he says.

I wish I had even a tiny proportion of the vast influence that Mr Meeeeurghn believes me to possess. If I had, I’d have given one of the girls with cancer his flat but, as I don’t, I have to spend ages trying to convince him that it is up to
him
to improve his relationship with his neighbour. All by himself.

He loses his temper and slams the phone down on me. I can’t say it bothers me overmuch.

Greg sighs when I tell him what Mr Meeeeurghn wanted this time, then says, ‘
He’s
on the list for our next DIY CRB check.’

I say that I don’t think we need to go and spy on Mr Meeeeurghn to know that he’s as mad as a box of frogs – not since the letter from the Home Office and the Primark incident – but I suppose we
could
check out whether his neighbour looks to be a reasonable person or not, just in case Mr M is telling the truth for once.

The sniffing did sound a bit peculiar and you do have to
try
to keep an open mind, after all. Even though that’s sometimes an extremely tall order.

I do a bit of sniffing of Max when he gets home from work, until he asks me what the hell I’m playing at and tells me to stop. He smells smoky, which ought to be repulsive, but is actually
very
reassuring.

He looks at me as if I am as demented as Mr Meeeeurghn when I say, ‘Oh, good, you’ve been smoking again.’

I don’t say that, as far as I’m concerned, anything that he does to annoy Ellen is fine by me, though I am a bit worried that we only seem to be bonding over smoking. Have we
really
grown that far apart?

Johnny says that he and his wife have, but maybe that’s the fault of his clumsiness. I wonder if that’s linked to being crap in bed? Max is awfully dexterous – which isn’t necessarily an advantage, now I come to think of it. It could facilitate juggling more than one thing at a time, by which I mean, ‘women’.

FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

As if last night’s dream about Max juggling three naked Ellens and a partially clothed Miss Chambers wasn’t quite traumatic enough, now I have seen inside someone’s head. Not telepathically, by virtue of
The Twilight Zone
theme, but
literally
!

If I’d
wanted
to be a brain surgeon, I’d have made far more effort to pass Biology when I was at school, instead of only concentrating during sex education. (And a fat lot of good
that
did me, anyway.)

It’s all Mr Lawson’s fault. He’s never been to surgery before, so this is the first time I’ve ever met him. I hope it’s the last, as well.

‘I want to talk to you about mental health,’ he says, as he sits down and removes his jacket.

‘Ah,’ says The Boss. ‘And what about mental health, exactly?’

‘The professionals’ unwillingness to use tried-and-tested methods to alleviate people’s misery.’

This sounds interesting. Maybe there’s something in it for me? I could occasionally do with some cheering up, so I stop doodling and pay attention.

‘Did you have anything specific in mind?’ I ask.

This proves to be absolutely the
worst
thing I could have said. Mr Lawson smiles – a bit like a crocodile, slowly and with definite menace – then he pulls off his hat, leans forward so that his head is almost touching my notepad, and says, ‘This!’

‘What?’ I say. I can only see greying hair and a smattering of dandruff.

‘
This
,’ he says again, parting his hair to reveal what looks like a hole, but cannot be.

Now Andrew’s the one who’s interested, while I have lost all desire to find out
anything
more, thank you very much indeed.

‘Is that a
hole
?’ he says. ‘In your
head
?’

Mr Lawson nods, which makes me flinch –
Christ
, bits of his brain will probably fly out and spatter me if he doesn’t stop doing that. This is
horrible
.

‘Have you had brain surgery, then?’ says Andrew.

Can’t he tell Mr Lawson to put his bloody hat back on, instead of
encouraging
him? And stop asking questions which could lead to more nodding? I am starting to feel faint – just like the time when I was forced to dissect a cow’s eyeball in class. (The damned thing definitely jumped when I cut through the optic nerve, no matter what Miss Rosen claimed at the time. It nearly gave me a heart attack.)

‘Yes, I have had surgery – in a manner of speaking,’ says Mr Lawson. ‘Ever heard of trepanning?’

‘Good God,’ says The Boss, who obviously has. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Absolutely,’ says Mr Lawson. ‘Can’t recommend it highly enough.’

So now I am supposed to write a letter to the Secretary of State for Health, asking why the NHS doesn’t offer trepanning to those suffering from mental health conditions. The world is going
mad
– which is not a recommendation for Mr Lawson’s idiotic solution.

Greg says he’ll save me the bother of writing to the Department of Health and will ask his doctor about trepanning this evening when he attends his ‘emergency appointment’.

‘What emergency?’ I say. He looks perfectly all right to me – and
his
skull is intact.

‘I think I may have an ulcer,’ he says, in a portentous tone. ‘Bound to have, doing this job. I had a terrible pain in my side when I arrived at work.’

‘That was a stitch,’ I say. This keep-fit thing is getting out of hand, or Greg’s ‘sporting injuries’ are, anyway. He only jogged from the bus stop to the office this morning.

‘Exactly,’ he says, when I point that out. ‘Which is why I need the alarming symptoms it caused investigated – as soon as possible. Most men don’t take their health seriously enough.’

Then he buggers off, leaving me to do the surgery letters and finish all the other casework as well. Sometimes I think I’m sadly lacking in the assertiveness stakes.

Max is over-compensating for my shortcomings by being far
too
assertive when I get home, almost two hours later. He’s done almost all the packing already, and informs me that we are
not
taking the laptop with us, as we are going to ‘spend quality time together, without distractions’.

He even wants me to leave my mobile behind but, although I agree, I’ve no intention of doing so – not when I am leaving an incompetent ninja at home, with a sex-pest for a neighbour.

I write Josh a very long list enumerating the dire consequences that will arise should he be unwise enough to consider anything as stupid as a house party in our absence, and ask Mum to drop in daily to check that the house is still standing, and that the cat and the rabbit have been fed.
And
that Josh is still in one piece. She agrees, though she says that it’s probably ‘unrealistic to expect that Josh won’t have one or two little accidents’.