I looked at my kids who were still bouncing up and down on my chest and I looked at my wife and smiled. This wasn’t a New York hotel. This was home. The single best location in the entire world.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ I croaked.
‘Pretty much since you arrived,’ replied Claire. ‘The cab driver said you were fast asleep from the minute you gave him the address and only woke up when he pulled up at the bottom of the road to ask which house number we lived at. Do you remember any of that?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t even remember taking off my clothes and getting into bed.’
‘Well, that would be because I helped you upstairs and you asked me to get your post and by the time I got back you were fast asleep on top of the duvet so I slipped your clothes off, tucked you in, closed the curtains and left you to it.’
‘What time was that?’
‘About half nine.’
‘And what time is it now?’
‘About quarter to six.’
‘I’ve been asleep all this time?’
‘Not a peep, not a word. I’ve never seen you this tired. Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’
I shook my head.
‘Something kept you awake?’
‘Yeah, you could say that.’
‘So did you get whatever it was that you wanted to do on the List done?’
I shook my head. ‘Not exactly, but I’m still glad I did it.’
‘Are you ever going to tell me what it was?’
‘Of course, but how about we do it a bit later?’ I sat up and gave her a kiss. ‘The kids are going to bed in a bit so why don’t we make the most of them now and then I’ll nip out and get us a takeaway, crack open a bottle of wine and tell you everything.’
I headed downstairs with Claire and the kids for a ‘dancing session’ (a pre-bedtime ritual that Claire had invented in recent weeks to get rid of their last dregs of energy). Now that Maisie was walking by herself it was an absolute delight to watch her and her sister nodding their heads and bending their knees in time to Daft Punk, Bob Sinclair and any other bits of French House that we could lay our hands on.
Claire ran a bath and just as we were about to drop them both in the water Lydia asked me to get in too. I ummed and ahhed for a while because I was tired but then a second wind came from nowhere, and without pausing to think (or indeed take off my clothes) I climbed in the bath and joined them. Lydia thought this was the funniest thing in the world. Maisie was baffled. I was just glad to live in a world where all you needed to do in order to make someone’s day was hop in a bath with your clothes on.
Bedtime stories were a medley of our all-time favourites that Lydia insisted on acting out as we read them aloud:
Cock-a-moo-moo
(a story about a cockerel that forgets how to crow),
Me Papa Tickle Me Feet
(a West Indian rhyme about the joys of tickling) and
Cluck-a-Clock
(a story about twenty-four hours in the life of the chickens on Farmer Brown’s farm).
Bedtime drinks handed out and imbibed, we tucked the girls up in bed, and following repeated cries for lost dummies and requests for visits to the loo, we finally managed to get them to sleep. True to my word I nipped out to our local Chinese takeaway, bought a Chicken Kung Po, Pad Thai and boiled rice, headed to the late-night garage for a bottle of their finest champagne, and headed home.
‘I can’t bear the suspense any more,’ said Claire, setting down the remains of her Kung Po on the table next to her and pausing
Location, Location, Location
with the TV remote. ‘You have to tell me why you went to New York and you have to tell me now.’
‘What? Do you mean that you don’t want to spend the night guessing? Because we could do that if you want.’
She attempted to hit me across the head with a cushion. I took that to mean she wasn’t interested in guessing games.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said deflecting the blows, ‘I’ll tell you, just put down your weapon.’
‘Right, weapons down and I’m all ears.’
‘Okay . . . I went all the way to New York for you.’
‘Why?’
‘To see if I could get you a replacement for that Dean and Deluca mug that I broke. I knew how much you loved it. I scoured the internet without success so the best thing I could do was fly out there and get one.’
‘You paid all that money for a flight and flew to the other side of the Atlantic just to get a replacement mug for me?’
I nodded. ‘Plus, since I’m being green these days I’ve also had to cough up to offset my carbon emissions.’
Claire shook her head in dismay. ‘How much?’
‘Enough to have bought you at least a dozen of the mugs had they actually had them in stock.’
‘They didn’t have them in stock?’
‘No. I suppose they must change designs all the time. It’s just one of those things.’
‘So you went all that way for nothing?’
‘No, babe,’ I replied. ‘I went all that way for you.’
Claire stared at me with her mouth open for a minute. ‘That has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said. ‘It’s just a mug. There’ll be other mugs. And despite what you might think, Mr Michael “Big Gesture” Gayle, flying halfway round the world to buy your wife a mug isn’t in the least bit romantic.’
‘So why are you crying then?’
‘I’m not,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘You must be seeing things.’
‘Fine.’ I gave her a big hug in the hope that it might mop up all the surplus emotion floating around the room.
I pulled her close, pressed the play button on the remote and carried on watching, laughing and occasionally hurling abuse at the people on
Location, Location, Location
.
Chapter 28: ‘Do everything. I mean it. Absolutely everything.’
On the morning of the second Sunday in October, my first thought as my eyes adjusted to the light was that the day was finally here: my last day of To-Do Listing.
‘How do you feel knowing that tomorrow it’ll all be over?’ asked Claire as we sat in the kitchen having breakfast with the kids.
‘Great,’ I pronounced. ‘But a bit weird too. I can’t really believe that I started with a list 1,277 items long and three hundred and sixty-five days later I’ve practically ticked everything off!’
‘Isn’t Daddy clever?’ said Claire to the kids. She leaned across the table and kissed me. ‘I’m proud of you, babe, I really am. How many things have you got to get done by the end of today?’
‘Two.’
‘Just two? Are you going to tell me what they are? Or are you going to be all mysterious again like you were over New York?’
‘A bit of both,’ I said airily. ‘The first one is just for you and it’s going to involve us taking a bit of a trip – but before you start panicking – no, it’s not too far and yes, I’ve already arranged for Mum to come and babysit.’
Claire sat back in her chair. ‘We’re not parachute jumping, sampling various different kinds of milks or reorganising your CD collection, are we?’
‘No, we’re going to Leicester.’
The few weeks since New York had been nothing short of mayhem. Still buzzing from the thrill of having travelled across the Atlantic for a mug that wasn’t there only to conquer a big fat book by a dead Russian, I’d thrown myself back into the List with everything I had. It was hard to pinpoint a moment when I wasn’t putting bank statements in folders, or photographs into frames, or watching DVD box sets, or painting window sills, or replacing every single missing light bulb in the house, or eating more fruit, or donating blood, or watching half a dozen of the TV cable channels that we never watch, or speaking to odd men in ill-fitting suits about investments, or posting belated Christmas cards, or attending neighbourhood watch meetings or reading broadsheet newspapers cover to cover (even the really boring bits about political upheavals in countries that I can’t pronounce), or finding lost things that I’d said I’d look for but never got round to finding, or reading the kind of literary novels that I’d bought because they were potential ‘dinner party talking points’ or trying to shop locally, or redeeming Tesco Club Card points, or attending Alexa’s knitting club, or sewing buttons onto every single item of clothing that was missing a button, or correcting the date of birth on my driver’s licence, or eating long-forgotten food from the depths of the freezer, or any of the other hundreds of items that had needed doing but that I’d been avoiding. Finally having just finished Item 972: ‘Put preservative on shed’, just after 5.00p.m. on the penultimate day of To-Do Listing I’d only got two things left, one of which, Item 12 (‘Be nicer to wife because it’ll only be a matter of time before she compares notes with her mates and finally works out what kind of a rough deal she’s on’), I’d attempted several times but felt sure wasn’t fully ticked off. I knew exactly what I was going to do to fully earn my tick.
‘So, come on then,’ said Claire as we sat down on the 10.15 Midland Line train to Leicester, ‘how do you think that taking me back to my home town for the day is going to earn you a To-Do-List tick?’
The idea had arisen following a brief session of ‘blue sky thinking’ with Alexa which had resulted in the following:
1. A night at a posh hotel.
2. A trip on the Orient Express.
3. A weekend break in Paris.
‘They’re not quite right, are they? They’re all a bit . . .’
‘Clichéd?’
‘No.’
‘Cheesy?’
‘No.’
‘Hackneyed?’
I scowled in Alexa’s direction. ‘They’re just not right, okay? I need something a bit more . . . you know . . . romantic and meaningful.’
And then it hit me: I would re-create, down to the very last detail, my first date with Claire.
To fully understand the ramifications of this, some background information might be of use. Claire and I first met at the wedding of some friends of ours, Vicky and Elton. And much as I’d like to say it was love at first sight I’m not sure it was, at least not for Claire. In talking to her at the wedding reception I got the impression that she found me marginally annoying (this, I discovered later, was because at one point I’d asked her who was her favourite out of Starsky and Hutch – don’t ask me why, it just happened – and she’d replied ‘Hutch’. Seeing the disappointment writ large across my face she decided that I had lured her into a trap to make her look stupid and had taken against me). But on the dancefloor as we threw shapes to that all-time wedding reception classic, Motorhead’s
Ace of Spades
I managed to redeem myself by making her laugh several times.
When Vicky and Elton returned from honeymoon I asked Vicky what Claire thought of me. Vicky told me she thought I was ‘quite funny’. Vicky asked me what I thought of Claire. I told her I thought she was ‘okay’.
‘So why don’t you ask her out?’
‘I will do,’ I replied decisively. ‘Tell her I’ll give her a ring.’
I’m guessing that when Vicky passed on this news she expected I’d call within a couple of days or a month at most. I am pretty sure she didn’t think it would in fact be six months later . . .
What was I thinking? It wasn’t as though I was seeing anyone else at the time. I was very much single. And yet . . . and yet I just couldn’t make the call. At best I’d like to think that the romantic side of me had worked out that Claire was The One and was using this six-month period as a way of making sure (by what means I’m not too clear) that I didn’t cock things up and at worst . . . well at worst I’ve a sneaking suspicion that I’d just added Claire to my already quite long twentysomething version of the To-Do List and hadn’t quite got round to ticking her off.
Anyway, I did finally call her in the March of 1995, and our first date, the one I was about to attempt to re-create, took place, I kid you not, on 1st April. It was, as first dates go, quite romantic if a little twee. I bought her a balloon and some Space Dust because I was working the cute and quirky angle; she bought me a shortbread duck dipped in chocolate because people in Leicester tend to use the phrase ‘me duck’ as a term of endearment. I’m guessing we were both overthinking the whole situation.
We had coffee in her favourite café, Mrs Bridges, before wandering the shops around the Silver Arcade and making our way to Leicester’s Museum and Art Gallery under the mistaken impression we were in a mid-period Woody Allen movie. We talked a lot about paintings we enjoyed and other cultural things but were both wishing that we could sit down and rest our aching feet.