Making the Cat Laugh (13 page)

Hand me that legal aid application form. And lend me that pen. After years of cudgelling my brains for a suitable way of expressing my resentment at growing up in a house filled with tobacco smoke, I have finally hit upon the perfect solution. I shall sue them, take them to court, fleece them for every penny. Ha, let them put
that
in their pipes. According to the Sunday papers, children subjected to chronic passive smoking can now obtain legal redress for their long-term bronchial problems, and there will be a kind of wheezers’ revolt. The courtroom picture is irresistible. I can see it now: the plaintiff (me) in the witness box, coughing delicately into a linen hanky, and pointing the bony finger of blame; and the rest of them in the dock, huddled together under a yellow mantle of tobacco smoke, doing a group impression of Auld Reekie with the wind in the East.

The only trouble with this happy fancy is that my case could easily be knocked down by a few simple questions from a skilled counsel. For example, were my family in fact ignorant of the dangers of tobacco smoke when I was a child? ‘Yes, probably,’ I mumble (into my sputum cup). ‘A little louder,’ they command. ‘Yes,’ I repeat. Did I ever encourage their smoking habits myself? ‘I did,’ I reply miserably. ‘I bought them novelty ashtrays.’ The judge raises an eyebrow, looks confused. ‘For example, I bought an ashtray at the seaside shaped like a ram’s head, with the words ‘‘For Butts’’ written on it. B U double T S. It was a pun, my lord. Also, I begged to be allowed to make rollups in a little silver machine. And whenever the Bob Newhart monologue about Sir Walter Raleigh’s discovery of tobacco was broadcast on the Light Programme –’ (here I break down
in penitent sobs) ‘– I used to laugh with everyone else at the bit where he says ‘‘Don’t tell me, Walt. You stick it in your ear.’’’

Passive smoking is something I feel so strongly about that I want to set fire to the tea-towels, yet strangely at the same time I find it impossible to make a stand about it retrospectively, especially on the home front. Will people really take their families to court? I don’t believe it. How can you argue with people who, despite the advance of science, despite the warnings on the packets, and despite the fact that coroners now record smoking as a cause of death, keep puffing on the little white sticks and refusing to feel bad about it? Such fierce stupidity is intimidating. To the non-smoker, the behaviour of smoker families tells you quite unambiguously that if you’ve got a problem with this, then the problem is yours and you can keep it. If it makes you want to spit, then there you are.

So where my own relatives are concerned I do my smoking very passively indeed. While they light up repeatedly, I fantasize about strapping a battery-driven fan to my forehead, and yelling above the din, ‘Can’t hear you! Got the fan going!’ – but unfortunately this helps only as a mental distraction. As a concrete act of defiance, I did once purchase an amusing T-shirt with a Larson cartoon on it (‘The real reason dinosaurs became extinct’ – showing a collection of prehistoric beasts furtively taking quick drags like schoolboys). But although I have worn this provocative garment twice to family gatherings, on both occasions I hastily obscured it with a jumper, so that it wouldn’t cause offence or start a row.

Of course it is in the Bible, all this. ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ I don’t remember how the next bit goes, but it’s probably something like ‘Tough banana, saith the Lord.’ I am convinced that even the deity of the Old Testament, with his avenging tooth-for-a-tooth system of justice, would have advised against litigation in this case, on grounds of crushing futility. ‘Car fumes
are more dangerous,’ say the smokers, airily; ‘there is a higher chance of dying from a stray microwave.’ Angry as I am about spending my school years feverishly coughing and hawking into lavatory bowls, I know what I am up against, and I know when I am beaten. If they won’t admit they are poisoning themselves, these people, what earthly chance have I got that they’ll admit to poisoning me?

This time last year I had never been inside a register office except for a wedding. Now I am a twice-over veteran of registering family deaths, and I feel I know all about it. The registrar meets you with a smile, invites you to sit at the other side of a desk, and draws your attention to a computer screen on which your answers will appear. You cling to an old brown envelope with ‘Birth certificate’ written on it in familiar handwriting, and experience a mixture of feelings, principal among them the terrible misgiving that your errand is a wicked mistake, and that your dad is going to be really dismayed and hurt when he finds out what you’ve done.

A couple of months ago, I took my second trip, this time to register the death of my grandmother. We followed the usual form. We were smiled at nicely, invited to sit down, referred to the same bereavement-friendly computer screen. It was a woman registrar this time, rather old-fashioned, with red fingernails, a frilly blouse and a tight suit. Nothing else was different; I sat in the same chair. I even found myself commenting gruesomely, ‘This is just like last time,’ as if I had wanted to see this room again ever in my life.

But here we were again, indisputably, and the heart-breakingly bare details of my grandmother’s life (father’s occupation: ‘coal-heaver’) were duly tapped into the computer. My mum, who was desperately upset, occasionally proffered
extra details to swell the story, which made the registrar pause patiently with her fingers hovering above the keyboard, waiting to get on. Meanwhile I held mum’s hand and stared glumly at the screen, making sure all the spellings were correct.

‘Now, I’ll just print out the death certificate,’ said the registrar, tapping a few keys. And it was then that it happened. Somewhere between the instruction and the execution fell the shadow, and she suddenly got up, pushed back her chair, forgot we were there, and rapped hard on some frosted partition-glass. ‘Brenda!’ she shouted, in a great lather. ‘It’s happened again!’ The smile had gone; there was something wrong. Mum and I looked at one another, perhaps to reassure ourselves that we had not actually disappeared.

The summoned Brenda burst into the room, in a blur of electric blue business suit, and rushed to the machine. ‘What did it say?’ she panted. ‘I don’t know,’ panicked the registrar, wringing the manicured digits. ‘Well, did it say ‘‘Disk full’’?’ demanded the fearsome Brenda. ‘No, I think it was something else.’ ‘What did the man tell us to do?’ barked Brenda, drumming her heels on the floor. We looked on, mum and I, wondering whether we should quietly leave, but guessing that it is probably a mistake to stop registering a death when you are halfway through.

What struck me most forcibly about this scene afterwards was that it could have come straight from an Alan Bennett play. Even the name Brenda had the right touch. How could this registrar not realize that by suddenly shouting ‘Brenda, it’s happened again’ in the middle of a delicate transaction with grieving relatives, she was creating a scene that any drama critic would recognize from a dozen or more modern comedies? It was so strange. Perhaps she doesn’t watch television. Perhaps she has no self-consciousness. Perhaps dealing with death takes away your sense of dramatic irony.

The last is certainly true. One of the dubious fringe benefits
of your first significant bereavement is learning that the black-suited comic undertaker of popular imagination is not only the real thing, but that it isn’t funny and you have to go along with it. You can’t say, ‘Can I have someone who wasn’t in Joe Orton’s Loot, please?’, and you don’t feel like laughing. Our two sets of undertakers have been ugly, seedy characters with dandruff, Brylcreem, ill-cut suits and nicotine stains who perspired in dark glasses as though rarely exposed to the light of day. And we sat there while they absurdly offered us a range of fancy caskets, knowing there was nothing we could do.

Stupefied by grief, you surrender. The arrangements for my father’s funeral entailed an hour-long consultation with a jumped-up professional doom-merchant who actually wanted us to share the tribulations of the funerary business, even if it meant keeping us in teasing suspense. Can we have the funeral on Tuesday or Wednesday, we asked (wanting a simple yes). At which point he started waxing sarcastic about the unnecessary inconvenience caused by bank holidays, conjured up all sorts of distressing thoughts of coffins log-jammed on the memorial lawn, before finally announcing that he had already booked the crematorium for Wednesday at half past two. Sighs of relief and admiration all round. Our hero.

I understand now about Hamlet losing all his mirth. I used to think this meant he didn’t laugh at jokes because he was upset. But I realize now that death is surrounded by dreadful comedy, which you are obliged to participate in, in the role of unlaughing stooge. Nigel Williams was told at the hospital that ‘your father’s not very well. Actually he’s very poorly indeed. In fact, he’s dead.’ Well, it’s all like that. Neighbours come round to tell you they are sorry, and end up compulsively relating (over several cups of tea) all the tragic bereavements in their own family, going back ten years. Dismayed, you can’t believe they are doing it. Is this an Alan Ayckbourn play, or what?

The trouble with surprise spells of warm weather is that they make your thoughts run – rather inconveniently, in my case – in the general direction of sex. Damn and blast. What atavistic creatures we are, to be tweaked by the season in such an obvious way. You would have thought you could rise above it, in an age that can invent the multi-purpose bin-liner. Instead of which, all it takes is a small gust of warmish breeze ruffling the hair on the back of your neck, and the next minute you are startling pensioners at the Post Office by singing ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight’ while queuing for your tax disc.

Perhaps this is why the single person feels an enormous urge to spring-clean; it is Nature’s way of turning surplus sap into a white tornado. ‘Sub-Lim-Ate,’ orders a croaky Dalek voice in one’s head, and it seems wise to pay attention. Right, yes, get cracking. Eradicate the Sex Monster by sheer effort of elbow grease, and meanwhile pray for snow. As an additional precaution, remove any erotic element from your environment, such as Georgia O’Keeffe pictures (the ones that remind you of orgasms), and the Andre Agassi calendar you were so proud of. Deliberately avoid watching
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire
when it is repeated on
TV Heaven,
and put all your Gérard Depardieu videos in the shed.

But there is an old saying in my family: push sex out of the front door and it will come back through the plughole. ‘Phew,’ I said to the cats last weekend, when all this Superego activity was accomplished. ‘Thank goodness I’ve dealt with
that
little problem.’ But my sense of security was as ill-founded as Sigourney Weaver’s in
Alien.
I leaned back in the bath and switched on
The Archers,
and jumped out of my skin. The Sex Monster was back! And it was running wild in Ambridge! I was aghast. Since when had
The Archers
been scripted by the ghost of Tennessee Williams? I silenced the radio in a bucket of water, but not before thinking that Jennifer Aldridge’s ‘trips to Felpersham’ sounded nice. Damn and blast again.

So I was in a slightly jumpy mood when I went out for a drive on Sunday. On the run from both the Sex Monster and the Jif Imperative I ran straight into my nightmare combination of both – viz, the blokes with squeegees who haunt the traffic lights at Vauxhall Cross. Damn and blast for a third time. They come looming up at you unbidden, these johnnies; and then they clean your windows whether you like it or not. I had forgotten about them, because they disappear in the winter. But on the first warm day they rise up again miraculously, fully armed with buckets of water and beany hats. They are, I fancy, generated out of the swirling grit of Vauxhall by the mystical action of the sun, like crocodiles from the mud of the Nile.

Allow me to explain why I hate them so much. What happens is that having innocently drawn up at the traffic lights, you are approached by a man (or a kid) with a wet sponge, who is intent on washing your windscreen for a small fee. You mime a polite ‘No thanks’ but he is not deterred. You wave and swivel your palms in the internationally recognized signal for ‘Leave it out, mate, and hop it’, but he slaps the sponge on the glass, so that it dribbles dirty water across your line of vision. ‘Bugger off,’ you shout, but by this time he is wiping off the water, and you notice (at short range, through the glass) that he is the sort of
person who breathes through his mouth, and wears the word ‘Hate’ tattooed on his knuckles.

Perhaps there are motorists who do not feel intimidated as I do; perhaps they say, ‘Oh goody’ and start rooting in their pockets for change. But perhaps they are not single women, frazzled by the challenge of suppressing their springtime libido, and crazed by the sea-change to
The Archers.
But it is a point of principle, in any case: if I say ‘No’ to these blokes, I truly believe they should leave me alone. To my mind, washing someone’s windscreen against their will is quite as menacing as accosting them at a bus stop and insisting on manicuring their nails.