Making the Cat Laugh (8 page)

In the new
Penguin Book of British Comic Writing
there is a short autobiographical essay by Elizabeth Bowen called ‘On Not Rising to the Occasion’. I recommend it highly, especially if your memory of childhood etiquette disasters is still so vivid it makes you feel like running to the hall and burying your face in an auntie’s funny-smelling coat. Elizabeth Bowen’s childhood was an Edwardian one, so she had proper guidance in suitable behaviour (she probably did not innocently repeat the word ‘git’ in company, as I did), but she still misjudged it sometimes in a very particular way: she ‘overshot the mark’. ‘Thank you, Mrs Robinson, so very, very much for the absolutely wonderful LOVELY party!’ she would say. ‘Well, dear,’ her hostess would reply with a frigid smile, ‘I’m afraid it was hardly so wonderful as all that.’

My own experience of childhood parties was a little different, since I felt awkward in the society of children and generally slipped out during pass-the-parcel to ask Mrs Robinson whether I could help with the washing up – which surprised her, especially if we hadn’t eaten yet. ‘No, you go and have a good time,’ she said, mystified, pushing me out of the kitchen
with her leg. Thus, when it came to going-home time, I did not embarrass her with my effusions; I merely cried with relief. ‘Lynne tried to help with the washing up,’ she would inform my older sister, tapping her forehead significantly. ‘Funny,’ said my sister. ‘She doesn’t do that at home.’

But I still managed to overshoot the mark in other ways. At the age of ten, for example, I went to a party where a game of forfeits was played – you know, where you are given a task, and the penalty for failure is to kiss a boy. When my turn came (and I had been led back to the games room by a kind but firm Mrs Robinson, who declined my wild-eyed offer of silver-polishing) I was informed that my task was to recite a poem. A limerick would have easily sufficed. But I was nervous, and desperate not to kiss a boy, so I launched into ‘The Highwayman’, a long, galloping poem which unfortunately galloped off with me clinging on to its back, bouncing and helpless. In fact, I had got as far as
‘Tlot-tlot
in the frosty silence!’ before the exasperated kids finally flung themselves bodily in front of my runaway poem, waving their arms, to make me stop.

Overshooting the mark in Elizabeth Bowen’s sense is actually quite difficult these days, now that we have followed America into a more kissy-huggy way of life. Saying merely ‘Thank you for the absolutely wonderful LOVELY party!’ sounds tame, actually; it raises suspicions that you didn’t enjoy it. In 1978, when Woody Allen’s film
Interiors
came out, I remember that it seemed genuinely peculiar to see women greet each other with ‘Hey! You look great! Your green is perfect!’ while planting smackeroos on one another’s ear-rings. Nobody I knew behaved like that. But now I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. In fact nowadays, if someone neglects to applaud my green, I actually worry about it afterwards.

But what Elizabeth Bowen’s essay brought to my mind most horribly was not the thank-you-for-having-me thing; or even the social smackeroo. What it made me think of most
was Selfridges. Because one day, when I was in the basement there, I quite unwittingly overshot the mark, and I still feel embarrassed about it. It happened quite by chance; I had only popped in for some
diamanté
cat collars. But then I noticed this poor old bloke on a carpet-tiled plinth demonstrating a cordless travel iron, and I’m afraid it was ‘The Highwayman’ all over again.

The trouble was, his little crowd was so unresponsive. ‘Now, you see this?’ he said, without much enthusiasm, producing a bone-dry knotted lump of cotton velvet. Nobody moved, or indeed acknowledged his presence, so I piped up, I couldn’t help it. ‘Gosh,’ I chuckled encouragingly, ‘I wouldn’t want to iron that!’ He gave me a look, then gravely un-knotted the velvet and flourished his little iron over it – to amazing effect. Suddenly the cloth was smooth and lovely! Again, nobody clapped, or even murmured. So I said quite loudly, ‘Well, I think that’s quite remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. What an extraordinary device. I only came in for these cat collars and a whole new world has been revealed.’

And I got increasingly voluble, I don’t know why. ‘That’s amazing,’ I said flatly, as his crowd started to wander off. ‘Do that again. Wow, I can’t believe how those creases are coming out.’ I felt I was doing him a useful turn, although I couldn’t help noticing that by the time the demonstration ended I was the only person left. ‘Thank you,’ I said warmly, ‘that was marvellous,’ and went off to pay for the cat collars. And when I looked back, I noticed he was pointing me out to a sales assistant, who was patting him gently on the shoulder.

Only when I got home did I realize I had overshot the mark so badly I had sounded like a ‘plant’, by which time it was too late to apologize. I often wonder how close I got, actually, to being clocked over the bonce with a miracle travel iron. It would have been such a pointless way to go. Whatever the
merits of this extraordinary velvet-smoother, it was hardly so wonderful as all
that.

One of the more obvious advantages of childlessness is that you never have to do the business with the school hamster. We all know the syndrome: it starts with ‘Can we have Raffles at home this weekend?’ and ends when after forty-eight hours of love and attention – feeding, watering and changing straw – the motley, beady-eyed ingrate suddenly kicks the bucket on Sunday night when all the pet shops are shut. Stiff-legged on the floor of his hutch, the hamster peers through its straw with a great eternal question in its lifeless gaze. It appears to be thinking, ‘Get out of that. You can’t, can you?’

But unfortunately single life does bring its own version of the Death of Raffles routine. Since you tend not to take holidays at peak times (such as the first week in August), you can find yourself cheerfully agreeing to be pet-servicer, plant-waterer and fish-food-sprinkler for such a large number of lucky neighbouring holiday-makers that you would certainly bend under the burden of responsibility if the weight of all the flipping door-keys didn’t stagger you first. Currently my key-ring is so heavy with other people’s Chubbs, Banhams and Ingersolls that I am permanently reminded of the great clanking whatsit dragged around by Marley’s Ghost.

I am quite happy to do it; besides, they do the same for me. I am just terrified that something will die, like Raffles, and break somebody’s heart. Take the Herbs. For the past fortnight I have tended some little potted herbs, which evidently blossomed and thrived until I came along, but have subsequently withered on the stalk, and are now succumbing in heaps, like a herbaceous equivalent of the last act of Hamlet. Each time I pop my head around the door, a basil plant whispers ‘I die’ or ‘The rest
is silence’ and collapses; it is ghastly. To my returning friend it will look as though Agent Orange has swept through her kitchen on a pale horse. Twice a day I creep in, ostensibly to do more hopeful watering, but mainly to confront the horror and measure the devastation. I shall never be able to look a plate of pesto in the face again.

Latch-key duty is one of those rare things in life (operating the red button in a nuclear silo is another) where the sense of onerous responsibility is out of all proportion to the teensy effort required. Perhaps that’s why it worries me so much. Feeding fish takes precisely fifteen seconds, but the fear of forgetting such a tiny thing gives me sleepless nights.

Also, I feel awkward letting myself in to someone’s house: I don’t look around, I don’t breathe, and the sound of my own voice (‘Hello fishies, ha ha, still alive?’) gives me the creeps. The whole operation being so brief and automatic, I assume at midnight I must have got it all mixed up. Perhaps I sprinkled fish-food on the curtains. Perhaps I watered the cat.

Of course, some people must do it differently. Keys give them the run of the place, and they love it. They let themselves in, light a cigarette, put the kettle on, and start rummaging in your sock-drawer for interesting ticket-stubs, so that they can startle you a week later by asking ‘How was
Night of the Iguana,
by the way?’ Obviously this is the sort of fish-food-sprinkler to avoid, but sometimes you don’t recognize them until it is too late. Once, a friend of mine asked a chronically inquisitive chap actually to reside in her flat for a week while she took a holiday; and rashly ignored the warning signals when, immediately on hand-over, he whipped open cupboards and drawers in the manner of a professional burglar, saying, ‘Anywhere you don’t want me to look?’ and ‘Oh how very interesting. Fond of pink.’

Pretty loud warning signals, really; but she was late for a plane, so took a quick mental inventory of sexually incriminating
material and decided to risk it. On holiday (with me), she fantasized (with my help) that her house-sitter was currently waltzing around the living-room dressed in her most expensive evening-frock, boozing direct from the bottle and leafing through her teenage diaries. She never discovered whether this alarming picture had any basis in reality, but when she asked him ‘How was your stay?’ he replied, ‘Well, it did fill a few gaps.’

Having just popped out to see the herbs again, I can announce that a variegated sage has now turned peaky (‘The drink, the drink – I am poisoned’), and my sense of failure is complete. It occurs to me belatedly that the friend who cat-sits for me when I go on holiday makes a point of spending ‘quality time’ with my cats, watching their favourite snooker videos with them and shouting at
The Archers
in a plucky imitation of me. I should do something similar with the herbs. After all, I know that my friend listens to Radio 3 and reads the
Independent.
An hour each day in their company, then, with the wireless blaring, and with me pretending to read her newspaper (exclaiming ‘Swipe me, how pompous’ in an authentic
Indie
-reader kind of way) might set them on the road to recovery.

Meanwhile I have started to wear my keys on a girdle, in the fashion of a Victorian housekeeper, shifting it from side to side on alternate days, to prevent curvature of the spine. I have always associated keys with the getting of wisdom, but since unlocking things seems to scare me so much (I lock them up again as quickly as possible) perhaps I should stick to the road of excess, instead. It is not much of an insight to boast of, in the end: that acting bored by the
Independent
might save the life of a flat-leaf parsley.

Having never given a second thought to the practice of diving into cinemas on the merest whim and spending two and a half hours in blissful solitary communion with a large screen and a sack of Opal Fruits, I was rather alarmed to discover recently that some of my friends think this marks me out as a desperate case.

‘I went to see
The Fisher King
on Wednesday,’ I announce cheerfully. ‘On your own?’ ‘Er, yes.’ ‘Oh dear,’ they say, and catch up my hand for a bout of sympathetic patting and smoothing. ‘I ate two boxes of Fruit Pastilles,’ I add hurriedly. ‘Boy, you should have seen my tongue afterwards!’ But they continue to shake their heads, with tears in their eyes. They think it is awful.

There is a stigma attached to it, you see; an atavistic idea that a woman sitting alone in a cinema is a woman self-evidently abandoned to the black dog of depression, and therefore a proper cause for public concern. Does this attitude reflect a rather deep, dark prejudice against the idea of women enjoying their own company? It is possible.

The real point is that I never, in any case, feel sorry for myself in a cinema. If you want to feel miserable, there are many more surefire ways of achieving it, after all: sit in a doorway with a homeless person; lean over a parapet on Waterloo Bridge and gaze into the mesmerically choppy waters; go and see how long
Starlight Express
has been running. The impulse simply to buy a ticket and sit comfortably in a dark public place of entertainment seems by comparison a whoop of life-affirming joy.

What I like is the feeling of sanctuary. Hugging my possessions to my chest, sinking low in the seat, and prising great juicy wads of Opal Fruit away from my molars, I feel tremendously comforted by the reflection that I have vanished off the face of the earth; nobody has a clue where I am. The phone won’t ring; motorcycle messengers cannot pursue me. If it didn’t cost £6.50, it would be like stepping through the
wardrobe into Narnia. As I huddle down, and prepare to sneer at the now excruciatingly familiar advertisements, I like to imagine that my friends are all ringing each other in panic. ‘She’s gone to earth again.’ ‘Damn.’ ‘Now there’s nothing we can do but wait.’