Not Married, Not Bothered

After some success I was able to give up the day job (I had moved the twenty-five miles back to my home town by then; bought this cottage). Over the years the media group that owned Sophie’s paper had acquired various weeklies, one of them being the Free Press. When the job of editor came up she applied for and got the position, which proved to be a godsend for me, since by this time my life, for various reasons, no one reason, had fallen into financial disrepair and I was in dire need of some extra income. Treating accusations of nepotism with the contempt they deserved, she offered me a job so that today my life has come full circle. I’m back where I started, something which no longer worries me.

Thus now I work three days a week at the Free Press (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays should you wish to contact me). This helps cover the bills and at the same time leaves me plenty of time for my writing. Lest you should think I am the subject of any favouritism from my editor, given our previous association, I can assure you this is not the case. I get the same treatment, the same bum jobs as everyone else in the newsroom, something confirmed one Wednesday a couple of weeks after the Fleur episode when I found myself marked down to cover the latest example of New Age lunacy in my home town – the opening of Bad Ponytail Peter’s new phobia clinic.

OK: some facts about my home town. First off, I won’t be naming it because there’s a pair of genuine olde worlde sixteenth-century stocks at the bottom of our High Street and I don’t want find myself sitting in them.* And while I don’t believe in all this witchcraft crap, still, with a coven on every street corner (each with accompanying website) you can’t be too careful.

You see it’s Flake City, my home town, the Wacko Capital of the Kingdom. Other places have the Town Band, the Soroptomists, the Gardeners’ Club. We have the Tantric Drummers, the Wicca Society and Friday Night Channelling. Some people believe the ley lines conjoin in my home town. Some think we’ve been visited by aliens (something I give more credence to than most but only because of my mother). Some think that Joseph of Arimathea visited, that King Arthur is buried here.* What’s certain is that the myths are pressed down hard, layered like the peat in the moors, and that now we dig them up and shovel them out the same way in every New Age shop and emporium. It’s been this way since the mid-sixties when the first tepee went up, the first long-haired aristo clip-clopped in on his horse-drawn caravan.

Today, you can buy fifty-six different varieties of Tibetan Bell in the High Street of my home town along with every conceivable shape of crystal and candle.

The problem is you’re screwed if you want half a pound of tomatoes.

Bad Ponytail Peter’s already on the pavement outside the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre† when I arrive with Danny snapping away in front of him. Once approaching him from the back like this would have been the best way to observe the long straggle of greasy grey from which he got his name. But then one day, possibly because of that grey, he shaved it off.

‘Shocking,’ Danny said the first time we saw him without it. ‘The loss of a national treasure.’

It was more as a tribute than anything else that we decided to keep the name. Thus, shaven-headed as he is, he remains Bad Ponytail Peter, a.k.a. Peter Tarantine, Reiki Grand Master, author,* Thought Field Therapist, re-birther, channeller, chakra cleanser, aura diviner, director of the Wicca Academy …

‘He’s also a Grand Vizor …’

‘I’d never have known.’

Which is why Bad Ponytail Peter will be conducting the ceremony at Magda’s wedding.

This being the Flake Date of the Month it’s no surprise that Magda’s here drinking her dandelion wine, biting into her lentil vol-au-vent, or that there are more aromatherapists, reflexologists, Indian head massagers, I Chingers, crystals healers and white witches that you could shake a stick at (shaking a stick somehow seeming an appropriate piece of imagery for this bunch with their assorted weird modus operandi).

‘So, you think there’s a demand?’ I asked Peter (my standard business start-up question). He gave me a pitying look through the new rimless glasses he’s adopted, probably to make him look more like a therapist.

‘My dear,’ this is in his smooth, creepy Aleister Crowley voice, ‘the world is awash with phobias.’

Now, before we go any further, I should like to point out that whereas I don’t have the first idea where my chakras are, I do know I’d have to be held down by a team of ten before I let Bad Ponytail Peter cleanse them, plus I wouldn’t let him near my aura.

‘Many people’s lives are ruined by phobias, not least because they don’t even realise they have them,’ he said, and I pretty much knew what was coming. ‘For instance, they may have problems with relationships.’

He pronounced the word in the manner of an accusation, so that I figured if I could open up his forehead, pull it down like a hatch I’d see the vision he has of himself, in Joy of Sex mode, leading some luckless female through an ecstatically gymnastically challenging position. He’s pitiless when it comes to sex, according to Magda, who had an deeper than usual channelling session with him one Friday night.

‘He’s just so serious,’ she said after one glass of wine too many. ‘He won’t give in. You just feel this terrible responsibility to have an orgasm.’

Meanwhile, it seems there’s no end of the weird things people can be scared of. The list on the leaflet I picked up from Peter was full of them – clowns, chickens, feathers, chins …

Chins?

‘I mean, how can you be scared of chins?’

But Danny’s looking sideways in the office mirror. ‘Easily.’ He slaps a hand at his throat. ‘Particularly when you think you might be getting another one.’

It’s tough life being a gay man, the way I hear it from Danny. He’s ten years younger than me but still he says, ‘On the scene, let me tell you, I’m past it.’ Not that he’s really interested in the scene. He only goes occasionally to clubs although he does do the odd personal ad and online dating.

I nag him sometimes. ‘You’re burying yourself down here in the country. You should get out more. Go up to town. Meet more people.’

He says, ‘Look who’s talking.’

He’s been pretty much single since he moved down here nine years ago, and this in part to start a new life without Doctor Jack, the big love of his life, who spent most of their time together turning him over emotionally before finally dumping him.

‘You’re getting too comfortable, too contented, that’s your trouble,’ I say to him sometimes. ‘Trust me. I know about these things. I’m a spinsta.’

Sometimes I’ll wave exotic job ads in front of him, and he’ll take them with a show of interest but somehow he never applies for them. More often than not he’ll use his parents as an excuse. ‘I like to be near them.’

Danny loves his parents, not least because of the way his father handled Danny’s coming out, which occurred with supremely bad timing at his sister’s wedding.

Danny got rather drunk at Ruth’s wedding, having not long been dumped by Jack. Thus when he was asked by an ancient aunt when he too would be getting married, he answered glumly that he couldn’t say, first because Jack had just dumped him, but more importantly because as yet it wasn’t legal. His mother, standing close by and overhearing this, thus had her worse suspicions confirmed. She promptly burst into tears, refusing to stop until Danny’s father shouted in exasperation, ‘For God’s sake, woman, stop your snivelling. The boy’s queer, not dead.’ Thus instead of pointing a quivering finger at the door and quoting Leviticus (a particularly useful Old Testament book, apparently, especially if you’re in two minds about how to sacrifice your bullock) he merely gave Danny a severe dressing-down for the way he’d broken the news to his mother.

‘Totally thoughtless.’

Which as a matter of fact, growing more penitent, not to say sober, by the minute, Danny agreed with.

Ten years later, Danny’s brother-in-law now being a high-flying academic and his sister all over the place (they’re currently en famille in America), Danny, the gay son (as is so often the case) is the mainstay of the family. Truth to tell, he plays the spinster daughter, visiting his parents once a week (they live in Bath) and accompanying them on their annual cultural trips to Europe (Italian painters, Echoes of Byzantium, etc., etc.). More often than not it’ll be some single attractive woman he makes friends with, and I can’t help imagining the disappointment they must feel with this handsome forty-two-year old, with his serious air and his cropped head and his rimless glasses. Because apart from the odd eye-rolling moment, he hates the whole campy thing and is undemonstrative in the main. A gay man would spot him, of course. Eye contact would do that. But for a straight woman … how sad.

‘Don’t worry,’ Danny says, patting my hand. ‘They soon get the picture when they realise we’re after the same waiter.’

Meanwhile there are fears from Arachnophobia to Zemmiphobia on Peter’s list. Zemmiphobia? Fear of the Great Rat?

‘Fear of the Great Rat?’ Danny shook his head, reading out from the list. ‘What the hell’s that about?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I guess if I’d had it, I’d have been ready for Lennie.’

‘Deipnophobia? A fear of after-dinner conversations. Wooh, that’s weird too.’

‘Not at all. It’s the reason I don’t do personal ads and on-line dating.’

That was when I felt a tap on my arm and found Fleur standing beside me.

The phobia clinic opening was the last place I was expecting to see her. Turned out she’d given up the art course idea, and writing a children’s book (for this, much thanks). Instead she was thinking of signing up for a course in aromatherapy.

‘I have to think of ways of making a living,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own now.’

‘Well, not exactly,’ as I said later to Cass, ‘bearing in mind Martin’s renting the flat for her, and that Fraser family money.’

But Fleur was enjoying herself, I could see that. There was a definite air of nobility about her.

‘I married so young,’ she said, a hand on her chest now and faintly tragically.

‘What?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Like she’d been given in marriage at thirteen to some European crown head.’

‘Of course, I realise it’s going to be hard at first,’ Fleur said, ‘paying my own way and everything, strange too after all our years together.’ She gave me one of those flat-faced challenging looks, the sort you get from government ministers in unsound regimes when they’re shamelessly rewriting history for the cameras. ‘I’m just so looking forward to having time to myself,’ she said, ‘to being on my own.’

‘Un-bloody-believable,’ I said, reporting it. ‘This from the woman who used to shiver at the mere thought of it.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ Fleur said, ‘how much I’m looking forward to being single.’

‘How dare she?’ I said. ‘Calling herself single.’

‘Well, I suppose she is.’

‘Not at all. She’s just claiming the title.’

But the final outrage, as far as I was concerned, was still to come. I was crossing the road from the Avalon Centre, glad to be getting away from her, when suddenly there she was again, beside me.

‘I feel wonderful,’ she said, thrusting her arm chummily through mine, making me feel like I’d been caught by a stalker. She flung her head back, face to the sun in a grand flamboyant gesture. ‘Ah … freedom,’ she said, and there it was, the final insult, the ultimate profanity.

Freedom.

My lodestar. My guiding light. Appropriated by Fleur as part of her new-found persona.

There’s a name for fear of freedom. I found it on Peter’s list. It’s eleutherophobia. A fancy word for the fear of it, but no mention – mark you – of a term for the terror of losing it.

‘I just want to feel free,’ I said to Nathan one night, not long before the end.

He said, ‘It’s just a word, Riley.’

I said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do, that’s all … go where I want to go… live the life I want to live.’

In the silence the air conditioner clattered while somewhere in the distance, a mah-jong piece was slapped down heavily on a table.

He said, ‘I’m not trying to tie you down. That’s not what love’s about, Riley.’

I don’t know why I went travelling. All in all, I could have just stayed at home. Waited for all that bead-and-bangle hippy shit to come walking up the High Street.

Still the facts of the case are that in 1972 I did what it seemed at the time like half the country was doing, at least those of my age and inclinations. I bought a large orangey-red rucksack with a steel frame that bit into my back and rose up over my head like the beak of some giant bird, packed it full of toilet rolls and soap and shampoo and salt tablets, although not all the other weird stuff – mosquito netting and the malaria pills – which Tommy, with his war service in India, insisted I’d be needing.

Some said we did this thing because of a war, others because of a lack of one. Whatever. I did the same as everyone else anyway, went on the Hippy Trail, joined that crazy, grand, absurd, pretend peace and love diaspora.

It was the day before I left Nepal for Bangkok when it came to me, that thing about freedom. I’d hired a bike, cycled out of Kathmandu. I was lying down on the grass verge with the scent of the pines in my nostrils, the wheels of the bike still whirring and clicking beside me.

As I stared up into the crystal-blue canopy above me, I thought about everyone back home and, in particular, I thought about them working and I felt a deep, satisfied sense of pleasure that I was here doing nothing.

I thought, this is what freedom feels like. And the revelation seemed so real and so true I could have reached out and touched it.

It seemed to come right out of the heart of all that blueness.

* Still, if you’ve done the West Country tour, which I’ll warrant more than a few of you have, you won’t have too much trouble identifying it.

* Even though those who know say all this is just early spin-doctoring on the part of the abbey.

† Previously, you may recall, Millington’s Café where Aunt Fran shamelessly stole Uncle Hugh from my mother.

* Nettles for Health, Your Aura and You, Chakra Cleansing for Beginners, Mysteries of the Tarot, etc., etc., all Demeter Press, available from the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre, Hocus Pocus and by mail order.

F is for … Finances

I guess I should go back to Bangkok now. Because that’s what writers do, isn’t it? When they want the past and the present to collide in their head. They go back to the scene of the affair. Which is what I should do – hole up in some backstreet hotel, beat out the story on an old upright Smith Corona with the sounds of the city outside the window, and the sun slanting through the dirty dusty Venetian blinds and making patterns on the wall, all of which would remind me conveniently of Nathan’s hotel room and our afternoon lovemaking sessions. Except that I don’t remember us making love in the afternoon, and anyway I can’t go back because I never go anywhere now. For one thing I can’t fly.

‘Can’t?’ Archie’s look was curious over the top of his glass as the hubbub of Fergie’s party rose and fell around us.

‘No.’ I could feel myself growing defensive. ‘Look, it’s no big deal. I just don’t like flying, that’s all.’

He said, ‘No one likes flying, Riley.’

Being an aviophobe (thanks, Peter) or if you prefer it a pteromerhanophobe, isn’t the only thing that keeps my feet on the ground. The other reason I don’t travel is that I can’t afford it. Not a problem that afflicts the former, now reformed Frau Goebbels.

A week on from the phobia clinic opening I met her in the High Street. She was all Nike-ed up on her way to the gym. In training. For her holiday. Seems she’d done another rethink, this on the aromatherapy course. Now she’d signed up for one of those heavy-duty hi-adventure holidays, white-water rafting, hang-gliding round Everest or something. In Hocus Pocus, where she dragged me for a coffee, she thrust a brochure in my face. It was full of bronzed surfer types with very white teeth doing exciting things in lifejackets and baggy shorts and very black sunglasses.

‘Ah, bless,’ as I said to Cass. ‘And Martin, the poor mutt, still thinks she’s coming back to him.’

I know this is what Martin thinks on account of the fact that he told me. I bumped into him by chance a few days later although ‘bumped into’ is scarcely the right term. Alerted by the merry strains of the accordion and seeing the knot of visitors in the Market Place, and thus the lie of the land, I leapt into a shop doorway. But too late. Mid-leap he caught my eye above the crowd and gave his handkerchief an extra loud snap in the air to show that he’d seen me.

Against all the odds, Martin is a morris dancer, although perhaps not, bearing in mind that for him morris dancing represents the raffish and unpredictable side to his nature. Like so many of his kind (i.e., the bank manager, two solicitors, surveyor and accountant who constitute the rest of the troop) he thinks it’s evidence of the fact that he’s not boring, an allegation apparently that Fleur not only made to me, but more cruelly flung at him at the time of their parting.

‘Boring. Can you believe it? That’s what she called me.’

There’s a sorrowful confusion on his face that would have touched my heart if I hadn’t remembered just in time that he was an estate agent.

Even Martin’s ankle bells had a mournful tinkle to them that day. His mood could be detected in the half-hearted way he flapped his handkerchief.

‘It’s just a phase she’s going through,’ he said, using it to mop his brow as we sat on the town hall steps. ‘She just needs a break, that’s all – a bit of space. That’s why I agreed to get her the flat.’ The misery was beginning to subside by now and his eyes were becoming matter-of-fact and hopeful. ‘What do you think, Riley?’

I couldn’t answer, not for the lump in my throat – there wasn’t one (like I say, in the last analysis Martin is still an estate agent) – merely for the memory of all those beautiful baggy-shorted young men and Fleur’s lustfully glowing enthusiasm.

‘I should have thought this would be the sort of thing you’d fancy, Riley,’ she said that day, pushing the page towards me from which a particularly appealing tousle-haired young Icarus stared out at me, dark glasses exploding into stars of sunlight.

‘Not me,’ I said, flipping the brochure closed and pushing it back across the table. ‘Me, I get all the adrenalin rush I need just opening the post in the morning.’

Listen, do you ever get the feeling that Life’s a card game, and that you’re the only one at the table busking it because you don’t know the rules? Well, that’s pretty much the way I’ve always felt watching other people get married. I’d poke in and around my own heart, trying to find something, a yearning, an inclination, finding only a gap, an absence where both were supposed to be. At the same time I’d know it had to be me, that there had to be a good reason why people got married, since most of them did it. And now I’ve discovered it. The explanation. The reason it’s so popular. The hitherto unspoken, undisclosed Official Secret that everybody else knew but forgot to mention to me. The biggest cliché in the book. So bloody obvious it was staring me in the face.

Two can live as cheaply as one, right? And while it’s not Isaac Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bath, still it explains why any sensible human being should want to get married.

You wouldn’t think it would take so long to dawn on me, would you? This simple truth. Or that it would appear in the manner of that Great White Light on the Road to Damascus. But that’s exactly what happened as I complained to Cass about Fleur’s cavalier use of the word ‘single’.

‘Look, I’ve earnt the title. I’ve paid all my own bills all my life.’

Which is the precise moment when it exploded over my head like some sort of revelation, the simple fact that all those marrieds and cohabitees, being à deux, only have to find the cash for half of the bills that drop down on their doormat every month while I, being one alone and single, have to fork out for the whole damn lot of them.

Question: if two people can live as cheaply as one, then how much is one alone paying as compared with one living as part of a twosome? Write on both sides of the page, preferably using graphs and pie charts.

‘When you think about it, it really costs to stay single,’ I moaned one day to Sophie.

‘So what?’ she said. ‘Everything in life costs one way or another.’ And I see that. But still …

According to a recent survey* the average married fifty-year-old with a mortgage, pension and all the other joint accumulated financial paraphernalia assembled after the best part of thirty years spent together, is worth about fifty grand. By contrast the average never-married single of the same age is likely to be worth only half of that (in my case, if only, but that’s another story), good grounds for getting married, I can see that (although personally I’d want at least a couple of mill, plus a peerage and the thanks of a grateful nation).

The main reason why married couple’s finances are supposed to be better in general than those of single people – and this according to the same survey – is that coupledom forces those involved to do more financial planning, this because most will be wanting children, and therefore know that up ahead somewhere, sometime they’ll be faced by major financial considerations like university fees and, in the case of daughter or daughters (unless they can be persuaded to elope), large and expensive white weddings.

Being part of a couple, it’s alleged, acts as a brake on spending, because individuals in the relationship have to account for their purchases to a partner and are thus unlikely to indulge in splurges in the manner of single people. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ according to Cass, citing somewhat tersely as evidence her discovery only minutes earlier of Fergie reading the paper, in his dirty overalls on the new white sofa she’d bought in her lunch time and had delivered. His excuse, shouted in an injured tone from halfway up the stairs where he’d been sent to change, ‘Well, no one mentioned a new sofa to me,’ appears to further bear out her argument.

Tie the knot at thirty, according to the survey, and merely by doing so you’ll increase your personal financial potential by some fourteen per cent. Come seventy-five, and the Marks and Spencer’s slippered pantaloon, oh, married sister, you’ll be worth a full thirty per cent more than the spinster.

There’s a catch to all this, though, and I’ll warrant some of you have already spotted it and quite possibly from bitter experience. To stay in the money, you have to stay married.

For spinsters, as it turns out, are not at the bottom of the pile financially. That honour goes to the newly single, those people currently in the middle of a separation.

Clearly there are exceptions to this rule. I’m sure we can all name one from within these pages. In general, however, the income of a woman, especially one with a young child or children, nose-dives on the break-up of a marriage.

Widows may also suffer the same fate. On the other hand, they may just emerge from their husband’s death doing the Merry Widow waltz. Which you might say is what happened to our mother.

George Gordon died one wet Wednesday afternoon returning from a car auction in his well-loved, much-mended old Humber Snipe, a tank of a car, which when it left the road on the bend, managed to crash through a hedge and fence before hitting a tree, and all this with only a small dent to its bumper.