Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (7 page)

And that’s about it. I try starting to read
The Little Friend
, Donna Tartt’s first book for ten years since her best-selling
The Secret History
. But it’s a terminally depressing story about a twelve-year-old girl determined to avenge the death of her older brother
who was found hanging from a tree in the family yard. I snap it decisively shut. The most decisive thing I’ve done all day.

Olly announces he is going out. “Out anywhere in particular?” I ask casually. “Just out,” he replies. Images of Olly being
suffocated by Vanessa the Undresser’s enormous bosoms float across my vision. Jack tries to get me to talk to him, but for
once I am all talked out. I hit the vodka bottle. Jack goes to the study, sits at his computer, and hits Google. I manage
to down three big ones, neat except for ice, before falling awkwardly asleep with my head scrunched up in the corner of the
couch.

By the time I wake up with a cricked neck at one a.m., Jack is in bed. I creep upstairs so as not to wake him. Passing the
closed door of Olly’s bedroom, I wrap my hand round the doorknob and start to slowly turn it.
He’s seventeen
,
Hope
, I chide myself.
Home or not home, it has nothing to do with you
. I hold on to the doorknob, then slowly, reluctantly, unwrap my hand. Redundant editor, redundant mother. All I need to hear
now is that Jack is having an affair. Then I can be a redundant wife as well.

I
used to think Bob Geldof got it wrong. When I was working, I absolutely loved Mondays. Couldn’t wait to start the week, although
I looked forward to weekends as well. My life was like a sandwich: Weekdays were the bread, two sturdy slices of healthy wholemeal
on the outside, protecting the weekend, that delicious, indulgent filling in the middle. But the thing about a sandwich is
that even if the filling is the best bit, it wouldn’t be a sandwich without the bread for support; the filling would lose
its form and luster. Without the filling for contrast, the bread would become prosaic, necessary but dull. Now weekdays and
weekends are indistinguishable: It’s all bread, or all filling, depending on your point of view. But definitely no longer
a sandwich. And in my case, a stale old loaf. I miss my old life as a sandwich, and I have no idea if I’ll ever get it back.
Or even if I want it back, which strikes me as strange and disconcerting.

There are certain things I’ve learned since giving up work. I should say since work gave me up. For a start, the world is
full of other people who don’t work, at least not during daylight. Young people, old people, in-between people. Everywhere
you go, there are people
not
working. After twenty-eight years of slogging full-time in an office, I find this a revelation.

Hundreds of thousands of them are out there, millions for all I know, buying stuff they don’t need and, because they’re not
working, probably can’t afford. Chatting casually in cafés, arms resting on the back of banquettes as if they’re settling
in indefinitely. And I thought you were
meant
to knock your coffee back in one gulp, coat still on, then leap up and out the door quicker than you could say “double espresso.”
I’ve even witnessed people reading newspapers at a leisurely pace, story by story, one at a time. This is all so new to me.
I used to whiz through three broadsheets and three tabloids quicker than a virus scanner. I was all done in the time it takes
these people to read the front-page headlines.

There’s
loads
of pre-watershed violence and swearing going on. It’s women mostly, threatening small toddlers and large dogs, usually both
at the same time.

Another thing I’ve noticed is men loitering up against lampposts, talking into cell phones cradled in the crook of their necks
and making weird hand signals to other lamppost loiterers farther down the road. I’m not sure if this is a national phenomenon.
I live on the borders of Kilburn, and Kilburn is teeming with loiterers. I suppose it could be work they’re doing, just not
the kind of work I’m familiar with.

Kilburn is also home to the sleight-of-hand merchants. Now, these cool young dudes in shiny sportswear are definitely doing
some kind of work, but I don’t think they get pay stubs at the end of the month. They have this way of skimming by one another
in an arcane version of pass the parcel, only in this case, the parcel’s so small as to be invisible to the average passerby.
Funny what you notice when you stop running. It’s even crossed my mind that I could retrain as a narc. Well-dressed fifty-year-old
woman. They’d never suspect.

Where I actually live is West Hampstead. Or South Hampstead, as real estate agents have recently attempted—and failed—to rename
it, in a bid to rid the area of its student-dorm image, an image that’s at least twenty years out of date. But there does
remain something determinedly scruffy about the area, as though the locals banded together and made a populist proclamation
to disdain gentrification. And this despite the area’s broad leafy streets and huge houses ranging from elegant early Victorian
white stucco to the comfortably sprawling Edwardian villas built for middle-class professionals. Nowhere is West Hampstead’s
indifference to going upscale more pronounced than on West End Lane, a high street as dreary as the prospect of watching a
TV chef boiling an egg. Which is why I tend to venture farther afield for my investigations into the strange new world of
people not chained to a desk.

I’m starting to feel at home in grotty, gritty Kilburn with its pound shops, bingo halls, and Irish pubs, and the recent fashion
phenomenon that is Primark. Primark is where you hand over twenty pounds, leave the shop with two head-to-toe outfits that
are dead ringers for Marc Jacobs, and then spend the rest of the day feeling guilty about the worker exploitation required
to produce decent clothes for so little money. Or so people tell me. My shopping urge has gone the way of my sex drive.

Before this latest installment of my life, Kilburn was an area I avoided like bird flu. What I like best of all about Kilburn
now is that you don’t have to dress up for it. Hampstead and St. John’s Wood, my other local stomping grounds, are a different
matter altogether. A lot more effort is required in terms of grooming (French manicures de rigueur), but the people-watching
is equally fascinating. In Hampstead, the only people who loiter are the traffic wardens. Traffic wardens do great business
in Hampstead. The place is teeming with yummy mummies who overrun their meter time, being unavoidably detained in Whistles
or Carluccio’s. When Olly was born, yummy mummies hadn’t been invented. Mummies went back to work and did something called
juggling. Some still do, but not this lot, that’s for sure.

You’d never believe these women had borne babies at all, from their model-perfect bodies, airbrushed faces, and shiny, flicky
hair. But you do know they’re mothers because they’re sitting in Carluccio’s on their cell phones, and issuing instructions
to their au pairs about what Skye or Mia or Orlando should be having for lunch. Since most of these lunches seem to consist
of jars of ready-made mush—organic, of course—I’m not sure why the au pairs can’t be left to decide between the chicken and
rice or the turkey and carrots on their own. I used to let Olly’s nannies make lots of their own decisions. Which is how Olly
became an early prison visitor when one nanny decided to take him along on a visit to see her boyfriend, who was doing three
years for armed robbery. She told the prison officers that Olly was her son and her boyfriend the father. I found out because
the nanny told one of the other nannies, who told her boss, who told me.

Meanwhile, sitting alone at the next table pretending to read the
Guardian
, I feel like an interloper in a warren of chic rabbits, all nibbling happily on rocket leaves with a touch of balsamic, while
I clumsily tuck into scrambled eggs with bacon, field mushrooms, and fried tomatoes.

At Waterstone’s, you get a different crowd, yummy mummies not really being the reading type. It’s always busy in Waterstone’s,
even midweek, but I reckon that’s because there are so many Hampstead authors who spend their days anxiously checking up on
how their books are selling. I know they’re authors only because I keep overhearing them telling the sales assistants that
they’d be more than happy to sign some of their unsold copies as a gesture of goodwill. I wonder when they actually get down
to any writing.

When all other activities are exhausted, I head for St. John’s Wood High Street. If St. John’s Wood had been used as a template
for multicultural society by the likes of Bush, Blair, and Saddam Hussein, the term “clash of civilizations” never would have
been invented. Here’s where rich Arabs, rich Jews, and rich Americans live side by side in perfect harmony, triple-parking
their Mercs, their SUVs, and their Aston Martins with total disregard for the law and East-West politics. Just moments away
are a couple of synagogues, the Regent’s Park mosque, and the American school, a melting pot of wealth and cultural mores.
Admittedly, the school and the synagogues are swarming with security guards, which is understandable in these uncertain times,
and the mosque may well be fomenting terrorists in its basement. But any day of the week, pop into Panzers, the local deli-cum-greengrocer
where a single lettuce can set you back four quid, and all seems right with the world and its warring factions. St. John’s
Wood women certainly don’t work.

Yes, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands this last month. Noticing things around me and eavesdropping are about as much as
I can handle. Right now I’m sitting in the Coffee Cup, a Hampstead coffee shop of the old school, one that smells of grease
and cigarette smoke, as it’s supposed to. I’m munching on the first of three slices of extremely buttery raisin toast. That
Topshop size ten I said I could still fit into? Let’s call it a twelve.

I take a book out of my bag—
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy,
by David D. Burns, MD. I picked it off the shelf at home, although I can’t remember buying it, so it was probably sent to
the magazine for review. It promises “a drug-free cure for anxiety, guilt, pessimism, procrastination, low self-esteem and
other ‘black holes’ of depression.” I don’t know whether it can cure me, but it certainly knows exactly how I feel.

The bit I’m hooked on at the moment is the Beck Depression Inventory. It’s a kind of quiz that can rate your mood and diagnose
the presence and severity of depression. Each question has four possible answers, scoring 0, 1, 2, or 3, depending on your
answer. The higher you score, the worse you are in terms of psychological health. I do this quiz every other day, which I’m
sure is not the idea at all. It’s stopped me from reading past page twenty-three. I’m certainly suffering mood swings, and
I was definitely in need of professional treatment a couple of days ago, according to the inventory. I’ve cheated a bit today,
so I’m more borderline than off the scale.

I genuinely think this is a very useful quiz, but it’s not infallible. On the question of food, for example, if you have completely
lost your appetite, you score a 3. This would suggest a low mood. On the other hand, if your appetite is no worse than usual,
you score a 0, which is a good sign. But there’s no score at all for someone like me, who didn’t have time to eat before and
now is completely ravenous twenty-four/seven. Seven pounds! Seven pounds I’ve put on since January first.

“More raisin toast, please,” I say to the waitress as she passes.

I also scored well on the suicide section. I agreed with the statement “I don’t have thoughts of killing myself” (thus scoring
another healthy zero) versus the statement “I would kill myself if I had the chance” (score 3). But I could have done with
an option that read, “I don’t want to kill myself, but there is someone else I’d like to kill.” Like Simon. This Beck really
knows his stuff, he’s a world authority on mood disorders, so why, if I now know I’m not especially depressed, do I feel so—well,
depressed
is the only way I can think to describe it.

• • •

A lot has happened in the last month, not to me but to those around me. Olly is definitely hanging out with Vanessa. I suppose
she’s every
FHM
fantasy come true. A bit chav in her pink tracksuits with UGG boots, bare midriff, and back handles. Blond hair pulled back
à la Croydon face-lift. Cleavage and Tiffany silver heart necklace. Olly’s into the Indie-band grunge look—early Pete Doherty
in skinny jeans and an Oxfam-shop T-shirt, more Glastonbury than bling. And he’s such a twig that you fear he might break
if you squeeze him too hard. I hope she’s gentle with him. Vanessa’s certainly had a lot of experience, and I have to accept
the fact that she’s sharing it with my boy. Jack thinks it’s hilarious. I just worry that Olly’s looking wasted and not revising
for his A levels.

“How’s the coursework going?” I asked him at breakfast this morning.

“Mum, I’m reading the sport.”

“I can see that, but how’s the coursework going?”

“What coursework?”

“All of it—English, history, French. I thought it all had to be done by now.”

“Actually, it has all been done. And now do you mind if I read the newspaper?”

“Oh, sorry. I mean, that’s marvelous. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why should I? It’s
my
coursework, isn’t it?”

“I only asked. Is it really necessary to be so rude all the time?”

“Well, you keep asking me the same questions again and again. It’s like
Groundhog Day
in this house. Maybe you should be looking for a new job. Are you looking for a new job?”

“Actually, not at the moment.”

“Well, maybe you should.”

“I promise you’ll be the first to know. Just one more thing and I’ll leave you alone, I swear. Could you
please
tidy your room this evening after school? There’s so much stuff lying around that I can’t even get through the door.”