Chapter 1
1 January I managed to dodge the shindig last night by feigning chest pains. The threat of a heart attack didn’t cause the panic a man has a right to expect after forty years of matrimony, but it did the trick. Wilhelmina agreed I stay at home because the last thing she wanted was me collapsing on the Bartlett-Smiths’ Persian carpet, they being neighbours of consequence. Me, I would have thought a heart attack was pretty good reason for collapsing on anyone’s carpet, but she reckoned that anything short of fatality might be confused with drunkenness (I have form).
The more I think about it, she probably knew I was swinging the lead, so she seized the chance to represent the Pilbeams at their best, i.e. by herself. That doesn’t bother me. Unlike Wilhelmina, I no longer have the desire to shine in our limited coterie of friends. My need for human company is satisfied by my wife alone. Didn’t Miranda say, I would not wish any companion in the world but you? My sentiments exactly.
In any case I’m never at ease at the Bartlett-Smiths. Though Wilhelmina sees them as the acme of her social circle, it’s when talking to idiots like Cyril B-S that I remember with affection the citizens of Guatemala and their eagerness to share my knowledge of the Bard. Something new and wonderful was entering their heads, a phenomenon that would have been entirely absent last night. Cyril hasn’t an artistic bone in his body and his conversation begins and ends with the stock market, a subject on a par with food and football for holding my attention. In any case, new year parties aren’t what they used to be. Kissing a fellow octogenarian under the mistletoe doesn’t get the pulses racing.
Warm under the blankets at midnight, I wasn’t worried about Wilhelmina getting pie-eyed because the Bartlett-Smiths are only a few doors away and my wife has overcome greater challenges when under the influence. I recall especially her miraculous descent of the gangplank after drinks on one of Her Majesty’ Ships. Besides, I needed a better reason than the new year for punishing the remnants of my liver. Optimism is a false friend. I mean, will the crooks who rule the world suddenly repent en masse and share their bounty with the people? More importantly, will they find a cure for my arthritis? No, on both counts. So when the new year presents its fresh, beguiling face, don’t expect Norman Pilbeam to put out the flags. He knows it’s a re-run of the same old masquerade.
I might have gone had Gerrie been invited. But the Bartlett-Smiths don’t give him the time of day, he being so obviously outré in his dirty jeans and plimsolls. He is also the owner of an accent of which polite society disapproves. So do I in fact and that’s why I restrict our meetings to the spit-and-sawdust kind of pub my friends wouldn’t be seen dead in. However, since Gerrie is almost my cultural equal, particularly in the field of music, I shall continue to see him de temps en temps. Our meetings must be concealed from Wilhelmina, who shares the Bartlett-Smiths’ contempt of Gerrie and is under the impression that he and I no longer meet for drinks at the Magpie.
Gerrie is certainly insensitive. He says I look like death and that it would be anti-social for me to hang around much longer. Anti-social? Yes, he says, an old man who looks like death can be pretty scary, especially if suddenly appearing out of nowhere. I should think of others, not least those of a nervous disposition. All such talk weighs heavily on my self-esteem, for staying alive is my one remaining goal in life.
2 January As usual around this time of year, I’m getting a little paunchy. Loath to eat less, I told Wilhelmina I was going for a run.
“A run! You’re an old man. You haven’t run anywhere for thirty years. You’ll kill yourself!”
There’s always a touch of the Sarah Bernhardts about Wilhelmina, but it was good to know she’d miss me.
“Anyway, you’ll shock the neighbours!” she continued. “They’ve only ever seen you slink past their front rooms.”
“I’ll be running in the park.”
“The park! Oh no you won’t! You want to leave me a widow?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember? The jogger who was hacked to death with an axe last year. You’re not going anywhere near the park.”
I felt angry with the world. We didn’t have weirdos in my day. The parks were there for communing with Nature, not as a hunting-ground for psychopaths. But Wilhelmina was right about one thing. I would be inviting derision if I ran down the street for the first time in living memory. So I decided to walk past the neighbours and then take a chance on jogging in the park. I had to hope the axeman took Mondays off.
Once in the park I worried the whole time about how to defend myself against an axeman half my age. My tired old eyes were peeled on anything that moved, and trees were given a wide berth. I asked myself the obvious question. If I spied the madman, would I be able to run faster than him? The answer was almost certainly ‘no’. Psychopaths are probably pretty fast runners, even when lugging an axe.
Then I saw him, about a hundred yards away. He was a middle-aged man of slight build and I knew at once he’d leave me standing over a hundred yards. To my relief I saw no axe but had he stuck it down the back of his trousers? He was cunningly well-dressed in a grey suit with a pink handkerchief in his breast pocket.
In all that vast park, there was no-one else in sight. He had me to himself. Curiously, he made no move, but if he thought he was putting me at ease, he was a bad judge of character. An animal instinct told me I shouldn’t break into a run. That would invite him to attack. So I played the cool wildebeest and walked with seeming aplomb and a thumping heart towards the main gate.
But then I froze, for he was walking towards me with seven-league boots. At what point did a wildebeest run for it?
“Excuse me,” he called out from fifty yards. “Have you got a minute?”
A minute to sign my death warrant? Just for a second, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Did he need a light? Or the time? Was he incurably gregarious? No, on all counts, I decided, and in the same breath took off like a bat out of hell. That simile may flatter my fleetness of foot but I was covering the ground pretty fast for an octogenarian and must have run half a mile in blind terror. When a man hasn’t hit top speed for decades, he has a funny sensation his legs don’t belong to him. It was a cruel abuse of my aged body and just short of the park gates, I sank to the ground an aching, panting mess. My heart was beating so loudly I thought it would stop, and when I tried to get up, I fell back several times.
Out of the blue a soothing voice asked, “Are you all right, old chap?”
I lifted my head from my dying body to see who wanted to know and recoiled in terror; for it was he, the man with the pink handkerchief. He appeared not to have his axe with him but I couldn’t see the back of his trousers. I was speechless for a while.
“Well, you’ve got me where you want me,” I whispered finally. “I thought you’d run faster than that.”
“I could never run as fast as you,” he replied in a kindly manner.
“I’ve never seen a senior citizen cover the ground so fast. But can I give you a piece of advice? I’m a doctor and I advise my older patients on exercise regimes. The trick is not to overdo it. There’s absolutely no need to tear along as if your life depended on it. Just a gentle jog or a brisk walk will keep the old ticker in good order. No more sprinting. Promise?”
“Yes, doctor,” I replied humbly.
Was he genuine? I had to concede it unlikely that an axeman on the hunt for fresh blood could so quickly assume a bedside manner. I relaxed a little, but I still needed reassurance.
“Do you mind my asking, doctor, what you were doing over there?”
“Not at all,” he replied with a friendly smile. “I just love the park. Always have, ever since my sister and I used to play here.”
“That’s nice. You just ran around?”
“Yes, we did. But we played hide-and-seek mainly.”
“Hiding behind trees?”
“That’s right. It was fun to jump out and scare Bridget. It really gave me a buzz. How I miss those days! I try to relive them by coming here as often as my work allows.”
“You used to jump out from behind trees?” I asked inaudibly.
“Yes. Like this!”
He suddenly lunged at me and roared like a lion. Fiercely gripping my shoulders, he shook me violently and was about to bite a lump out of my neck when he suddenly became still again, though breathing heavily. Then, as if nothing had happened, he laughed merrily.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to diagnose your condition. You appear to have an irrationally morbid fear of being attacked by a stranger. You interest me and I’d like to follow your progress. What about meeting up here same time next week? Over by that elm tree perhaps.”
Why not at the gates? I wondered, looking stupidly towards the distant elm. No, I wouldn’t be meeting him there. I planned to die in my bed. I slowly slid away and half crawling, half walking, made for the gates.
He called after me.
“Shall I see you over by the elm tree, then?”
I didn’t care what the neighbours thought. I ran all the way home.
There’s a moral here. People with social anxiety disorders have a point.
3 January Rosalind made a rare appearance with the kids today. She’s always saying they’d come more often if I took some interest in them. As usual she was irritated by my sitting in a comfortable chair all day. Why would her father’s comfort upset her?
“I should lie on a bed of nails?”
“Of course not, but couldn’t you do more for your grandchildren?”
“Like what?”
“Well, if you really can’t get out of your chair, talk to them. Can’t you teach them things? Only not Shakespeare. They’re not ready for that.”
What were teachers for? What were parents for? How far down the family line did my responsibility stretch? Should I stick around for the kids to produce kids? But I could hardly turn my daughter’s request down flat and I began to dream up something that would impress the kids without making demands on my precious time. Evolution came to mind because the kids know nothing about it, allowing me complete control. Another attractive feature of evolution was that for aeons nothing happened, nothing the kids would know about at least.
“All right, Rosalind. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll compress the whole of evolution into this calendar year and present the kids with a model of each new creature as it appears in the evolutionary process.”
“That’s more like it,” a gullible Rosalind replied.
4 January Are computers the curse of the modern age? How I hanker for paper records, flesh-and-blood telephonists, hand-written letters, the postman’s daily visit. This morning we received new credit cards from the bank. We never asked for them. We spend what we’ve got and that’s it. The bank knows this but they still send us bits of plastic that make money for them and get families, nay the whole world, into trouble. They deserved a piece of my mind.
I knew the bank’s e-mail address was secret in case customers got hold of it, but imagined access by phone was still possible. In the days before computers, an operator would put you through in seconds. When I rang this morning, a lady carelessly let slip she worked for the bank but then ignored me. All she would say was, ’Press one for current account queries, press two for ….”.
I pressed button one, but then another lady told me to press another button. My protest that I didn’t want to press any more buttons fell on deaf ears. I shouted, “I know you’re there!” but the silence continued, broken minutes later by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Then another female voice, this time dishing out a sales pitch on other ways the bank could fleece me. More Vivaldi. Then another sales pitch. More Four Seasons. Then a cold thank you for my patience when surely I’d earned a week-end in St. Tropez. So it went on for nearly an hour. The Vivaldi that began with the evocation of daffodils and new-born lambs was now deep in icy winter. The world seemed a lonely place.
Then a voice asked, ¨How can I help you?¨
It came out of the blue. I shook myself into consciousness but when you’ve sat dumb for an hour, the brain is caught with its pants down. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten what I was ringing about.
“Are you real or electronic?” I asked.
“I’ll just pinch myself, sir. I’m real. How can I help?”
At least she had a sense of humour.
“Hello. I want to complain about ……”
“Name.”
“Norman Pilbeam.”
“Would you please key in the last four digits of your account number.”
“I don’t have my cheque book with me. Isn’t there another way?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Could you hold on?”
I rushed to the bedroom to find my cheque book but it wasn’t where it should have been. It finally turned up in a suit pocket. After ten minutes I keyed in the digits required.
“Your date of birth, sir.”
“9 September 1935”
“And your mother’s maiden name.”
“Cookson.”
“Correct,” she told me.
That was good to know.
“Finally, sir, what was the last debit amount in your current account last month?”
“I don’t have my statement with me. Could you hold on?”
I rushed back to the bedroom, falling over the dog in my panic, and took five minutes to find the statement.
“72 pounds to Waitrose.”
“That’s correct,” said the operator. “Now, how can I help?”
Though I couldn’t remember why I was calling, I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity to make a complaint.
“It’s about the bank’s policy on incoming telephone calls. The system needs tightening up.”
“Tightening up, sir?”
“Yes. Look, I don’t blame you for wanting a quiet life but you’re letting too many calls slip through the net. If an old man like me can get through, the system’s wide open and the bank’s reputation for being unhelpful is under threat.”
“I’m sure the chairman will welcome that advice, sir. Have you a specific recommendation I can pass on to him?”
“Yes. Your questions are too easy. You think people don’t know their date of birth and their mother’s maiden name? If you’re serious about keeping them out, ask questions they can’t answer; like what’s the average length of a Chinese alligator or the name of the Lithuanian prime minister in 1925.”
“Thank you for your suggestions, sir. Now is there any other way I can be unhelpful?”
“Thank you, but you’ve been more than unhelpful.”
Why was a nice girl like her working in a place like that?
5 January These days it’s more a meeting of minds at the doctor’s. The internet, otherwise a can of worms, is the great leveller, and the patient is less the trusting ignoramus he once was. Dr. Sharma is a decent sort of chap and his wife does wonders for charity, but I sometimes think he’s not up to the job. I had clearly established from my favourite web page, DIY Symptoms, that my problem was Irritable Bowel Syndrome, known to the cognoscenti as IBS. All I needed was the doctor’s imprimatur. I described my symptoms clearly.
“It feels like I have a lot of troublesome bacteria in the stomach.”
I waited for the penny to drop.
“Bacterial infection of the stomach, eh? You’d need tests to prove that.”
For God’s sake, I’d checked it all out and IBS fitted me like a glove. Well, either that or Crohn’s disease, which I rather liked the look of. Why waste time and money on tests? All I wanted was the damned prescription. I could even tell him the drugs I needed.
“The whole of my bowel seems irritable,” I said with careful enunciation.
“I’ll just check your history,” Dr. Sharma replied woodenly, staring at his computer screen.
“Do you have swelling of the abdomen or alternate bouts of diarrhea and constipation?” he asked.
To be taken seriously, one should answer all such questions in the affirmative.
“Yes. Flatulence too,” I added with the authority vested in me by DIY Symptoms.
He tapped into his computer again.
“Well, Mr. Pilbeam, it does rather look as if you have …..”
I was on the edge of my seat when the nurse burst in.
“Doctor! It’s Mr. Fingleton. I think he’s having a heart attack in the waiting room.”
To his credit, Dr. Sharma was out of his surgery in a flash and I heard the nurse call an ambulance.
It occurred to me that my profile might still be on the doctor’s computer. I edged forward across the desk until I could take a sideways glance. It wasn’t the medical record that interested me as much as any unpleasant comments the doctor had made about my hypochondria. What I saw was so surprising that I went round to the other side of the desk to be sure I was seeing straight. For on that screen was the self-same web page, DIY Symptoms, I had consulted earlier. The doctor was using it too? Wasn’t this a duplication of effort?
Hearing the door handle turn, I moved speedily over to a wall chart of human organs, all of which I recognized as having given me trouble at some time or other. The doctor came in and gave me a suspicious look.
“Been reading my computer?”
“Just took a glance,” I replied.
“I see. I know what you must be thinking,” he said.
“Oh?”
“As you may know,” he continued, “some people self-diagnose on the internet. It’s easy to pick out the patients who do this.”
“Are you saying I do?”
“Well, someone who describes his symptoms with the precision you did is always a little suspect.”
“Don’t doctors use the DIY Symptoms site as well?”.
“Are you saying I do?”
“I don’t know why you shouldn’t.”
Dr. Sharma gave a nervous laugh and looked lost for a moment. Then he went over to a filing cabinet and extracted a bottle of sherry and two glasses.
“You don’t mind if I call you Norman?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
He poured two drinks and handed me one with a smile.
“Do you disapprove of a doctor who uses DIY Symptoms?”
“Not at all.”
“All I can say is that it’s safer than relying on what I learnt at medical school thirty years ago.”
“You can say that again!” I replied, encouraged by his frankness. “The patient is well-informed too. I mean, I knew I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome before I set foot in your surgery. Shall we still need doctors in ten years’ time or can we take our self-diagnosis straight to the pharmacy? We are all doctors now, Dr. Sharma. Wouldn’t you agree?”
This innocent suggestion wiped the pally smile from his face.
“What bloody nonsense!” he exclaimed with some ferocity. “When you diagnose from the internet,” he continued, draining his glass to signify drinks were over, “it’s like a toddler saying “Boo! Boo!” at a Beethoven score and his parents claiming he could conduct it.”
He was getting steamed up now.
“But when I look at DIY Symptoms, I bring training and experience to my interpretation. I then take an objective view of the patient in reaching my diagnosis. That’s something you could never do and it’s silly to think you could!”
“You old men are all the same!” he shouted, getting redder in the face. “Hypochondriacs like you will always waste my time. Someone from the government should come and take your bloody computer away! That way you’d lead a healthy life and give me more time to attend to really sick people! Now, I think there’s nothing more to discuss. So please go!”
The last three words were spoken in a strange croak and it was clear that Dr. Sharma had worked himself up into a dangerous frenzy. When he sank onto one knee and then into the horizontal, I worried I wouldn’t get my prescription.
“Doctor! What’s wrong?”
There was no response. The blighter was out cold. How could he do this to me? I stared at him stupidly for a full minute before he slowly came back into the land of the living.
“What’s the matter, doctor?”
“I don’t know. How long was I out for?”
“About two minutes.”
Though still dazed, he managed to look up at me out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t an affectionate look.
“Were my arms twitching?”
“Twitching? I thought you were going to fly out the window.”
I like to think my sense of humour eases tensions at times like that.
“Oh, no!” he moaned. “Did I go rigid?”
“Stiff would describe it better,” I replied. “But not so fast, doctor. Let’s do this properly.”
Jumping into the doctor’s chair, I grabbed the computer keyboard and fed into DIY Symptoms the twitching, the rigidity, the contorted face I had noted.
“Are you taking any medication?” I asked him.
“Statins, that’s all.”
“Any allergies?”
“No.”
This was easy stuff for DIY Symptoms, which quickly diagnosed an ischemic attack and prescribed warfarin and a salt-free diet. On being told the diagnosis came from his favourite web page, he accepted it without question. I wrote him a prescription and signed it with that squiggle of his I knew so well. I also wrote one for myself and left the surgery sure in the knowledge that my career in culture represented a great loss to medicine.
7 January Orlando is causing me much anguish. He must be getting on for forty, so why hasn’t he left the nest? I recall my naïve joy at his birth, promising as it did filial and paternal devotion till death us did part. Indeed, he was great to have around until he was about twelve, but then he began to produce half-baked ideas we felt bound to suppress for his own intellectual development. This spared us further outpourings of the adolescent brain, but for reasons we could never fathom, he became difficult and resentful of our presence.
I can’t deny that Orlando has a few good qualities. He’s a big, strong lad and not bad-looking in a good light. But even Wilhelmina, his champion, wouldn’t deny he’s a bit weak in the upper storey. His eyes glaze over when he’s spoken to on any subject outside football and celebrities. It’s an awful thing to say, but the dog seems more in tune with human utterances.
I had quite a bust-up with him this morning. He’s in one of his rest periods and I asked him what his plans were.
“Get a job, I suppose,” he replied languidly.
“Get a job and hang on to it, I should hope.”
“Yes, Dad,” he replied in a theatrically bored tone that really set me off.
“Before you know it,” I went on severely, “you’ll be forty and no employers will want you when they see your motley record. Perhaps they don’t want you already, so when are you going to get serious about a career, Orlando? The world won’t wait much longer.”
I thought that a pretty good speech but my home truths provoked the usual self-pitying indignation.
“Why can’t you let me live my own life?” he replied, sinking deeper into my armchair. “It doesn’t help, all this criticism. You have to let me sort it out in my own way. You don’t understand. You’re old. It’s a new age now. You had it easy in your day.”
I didn’t like the way he told me I was old, as though I’d become superfluous to requirements and was taking up space someone else might occupy. Space he might occupy! I wouldn’t put it past him to back euthanasia for anyone over eighty who no longer served a useful purpose, a description that fits me like a glove. These are troubling thoughts.
Wilhelmina urged me to leave the lad alone but I couldn’t let him get away with his whining. I’d make a man of him yet, preferably before he’s fifty.
“You’re right,” I said. “Work was easier to come by in my day but that’s all the more reason to hang on to a job when you get one.”
“I know,” he replied, “but I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.”
References to Orlando’s mind are not to be taken literally. He must have a brain but it competes with his appendix for uselessness.
“What exactly?”
He looked at me searchingly, wondering if I was worthy of his confidence.
“I told you about Tamsin,” he said finally.
He had indeed. Nothing very forthcoming of course but she was by way of explaining what he got up to in his spare time.
“You getting married?” I asked hopefully. Might he finally be leaving home? Had I been wrong to assume the new year would bring no joys?
“She’s pregnant,” he replied. “The baby’s due any day now.”
I wasn’t sure if this was a yea or nay to my question, but I felt a sense of pride coming on. Against all expectation, Orlando had helped to keep the human race afloat. Sexual intercourse is hardly a labour of Hercules, but my boy had helped produce another human being and this was cause for celebration. At the same time I hoped the baby’s intellect would skip a generation.
“You’re the father?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’d better make an honest woman of her.”
“She doesn’t want to get married,” a sad-faced son replied. “She doesn’t want to see me anymore. She says she’s better off as a single mother. She’ll get benefits and a council flat.”
I could understand her not wanting Orlando around all the time, but he was my son and I despised her treatment of him.
“Well, let her get on with it,” I said, adroitly changing tack. “You’re well out of it.”
“You don’t understand. I’m going to be a Dad. I want to be a Dad. How can I live in the same town without seeing my child?”
I could have said many things, such as he should have thought of that before getting Tamsin in the family way. I could have raged about the nonsense of giving flats to single mothers instead of packing them off to their own mothers. But I had to admit that if he was going to be a father, he was showing the right spirit.
“Do you love Tamsin?”
“What’s love?” Orlando answered in a philosophical tone. “She’s my girl friend. We’ve had some good times.”
So the child was nothing more than the issue of good times? Had they not known that love that shall not die till the sun grows cold and the stars grow old? I didn’t ask.
“I’m sure it’s more than that,” I declared, anxious for him to find true love and accommodation elsewhere.
“Look, son,” I continued. “I don’t think I can help you. You and Tamsin will have to sort it out between you.”
It was the frankest chat I’d had with Orlando for years and I sensed it had brought us closer. I put my hand on his shoulder, as close as I get to hugging him, and brought the conversation to an end in my own inimitable fashion.
“It seems you’ve come to an important crossroad in your life, Orlando,” I said with measured gravity. “You will know what to do for the best, I’m sure. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Here’s to good fortune!”
On that note, I squeezed his shoulder and attempted a loving look.
His only response was the glazing-over of his eyes. The Bard’s verse in particular affects him that way.
How could we have produced a chump like Orlando? How stupid we were to play Nature’s game of chance without suspecting she sometimes deals off the bottom of the pack.
9 January How difficult some things have become in my dotage. Putting my underpants on requires a sense of balance that deserted me years ago. This morning I had a fall which had my head hitting the wardrobe, not for the first time, and I constantly fear the prospect of lying senseless for hours while Wilhelmina is out campaigning.
Here’s the problem. Getting my left foot into the left-hand opening is child’s play because I’ve got a solid right leg to stand on. But when that solid right leg leaves the ground to join its fellow leg, it’s fifty-fifty whether it makes it. If it doesn’t, I’m caught up like a lasoo’d cow and left standing on one leg like a flamingo. Well, this old feller can’t stand on one leg for more than a second without crashing like a felled sequoia. It’s so hazardous that I question the wisdom of wearing underpants at all. One of those flap things the natives wear on island paradises might be the ticket. You just position the thing and then tie a knot above the buttocks. Ideal, but where to find one? I’ll look on Amazon.
