Making the Cat Laugh (11 page)

A man next door to my mother drilled and hammered for two solid years, just beyond the four-inch dividing wall. ‘Evidently he’s fitting [WAR OOOUM, WAR OOOUM] tongue-and-groove pine panelling [whack, whack, whack] all round the living-room,’ yelled my parents, grown pale and jumpy within a fortnight. Six months later, he was still at it. My parents went for walks, turned up the volume on the telly, and never complained because basically they were scared. Meanwhile, by their calculations, the driller ought to have finished going once round the room, so was presumably going round again. As the months turned to years and he didn’t stop, we started to shake our heads and speculate. Either this man was a lunatic, or he had accidentally panelled across the doorways, and was now trapped for ever, drilling and hammering and adding planks, in an ever-shrinking upright coffin of his own construction. This latter hypothesis pleased us considerably, as it suggested the exercise was finite. Years in the future, we decided, he
would be discovered by archaeologists and transferred to a museum still in his six-foot-thick pine box, perfectly preserved in a hammering position, with nails between his teeth.

You notice how neighbours of serial killers always gasp and shake their heads, ‘But he was so
quiet.’
Too little is made of this insight, in my opinion; the point is missed. ‘We never heard a peep.’ ‘We hardly knew he was there’ – these are excellent character references, reasons for praying please, please give me a quiet psychopath next time. After all, neighbours come in just two varieties: those that are no trouble at all, and those that drive you bonkers because they are insomniac rap fans with speakers the size of stationery cupboards. Given the choice between Denis Nielsen and a rap fan as the person upstairs, you would certainly think twice before complaining about the drains.

I saw a woman tackled by a security man in a high street the other day. To be more precise, I heard her. There was a scuffle and a slap-bang as she hit the road, and then a scream, ‘I’m so sorry! Please, I’m so sorry!’ – at which point I looked around to see her, young and well dressed, bundled back into Marks & Spencer by a phalanx of strong arms attached to grim faces. The scene was electric – the culprit manhandled to her feet; the shocked onlookers; a plainclothes store manager barking ‘Don’t hurt her’ – and was over in seconds. A routine apprehension of a shop-lifter, presumably, but it made all the hair on my arms stand on end. It was that shout of ‘I’m so sorry!’ that did it. ‘Not much point being sorry,’ I heard someone say, as the woman disappeared. Which seemed a bit hard, to me.

The thing is, people apologize a lot less than they ought to. It is as though saying sorry would cost them some vital bodily fluid; so they step on your toes and then glare at you instead.
‘Your ornament got broken,’ said the decorator the other week, matter-of-factly. He had been banging on a wall, you see, and the vibration had knocked the ornament into the bath, where it shattered. But although the word ‘sorry’ was definitely in the room, I was evidently the only person aware of it. I mournfully poked through the shards of porcelain, and stuck out my bottom lip. ‘I was very fond of that,’ I said. ‘Were you?’ he said in an arch sort of way, as though perhaps I shouldn’t have been.

When you’ve got a name like Truss you just learn to apologize early on. I don’t know. I’m sorry. But where was I, on that all-important first day at school, when everybody was told, ‘And remember, kiddies: never apologize, because if you say you are sorry you accept personal culpability and can be sued for millions and millions of pounds’? Possibly I had stopped to apologize to someone. And then, when I sidled in, clutching my new leather satchel and saying ‘Sorry I’m late’, everyone marked me out as a muggins, for life.

Of course, motor insurance policies demand that we don’t say sorry at the scene of accident, but I don’t see why this should be taken as a rule of life. In any case, the insurance people don’t tell us what to say
instead
of ‘Sorry’, if you are one of those sad specimens of humanity to whom the word comes naturally. Imagine you are negotiating Hyde Park Corner and you run into the car in front, all your fault, no doubt about it. Do you (as I did) forget all about the liability stuff, get out of the car and dance on the tarmac, flapping your hands and singing ‘sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry’ (to the amusement of the other driver, whose car is unscathed). Or do you take a deep breath and say ‘Silly place to put a roundabout’?

I expect you are wondering what all this has to do with ‘single life’. Me too. Except that I do seem to meet an increasing number of men who don’t apologize, and I feel better off without them. Erich Segal never wrote a bestseller about
it, but being single means never having to hear someone not say they are sorry. Which is nice. Perhaps my expectations are absurdly high, I don’t know. But I used to have long-into-the-night debates with one chap, who staunchly upheld that if he did something to upset me
unintentionally
(lose my camera, for example) then apology was not appropriate.

‘I was tired,’ was the nearest thing I got to an apology. Once, when he was an hour late meeting me (and I was worried), he said merely, ‘I washed my jacket, and had to wait for it to dry.’ When someone says this to you, it is not only the word ‘sorry’ that hangs about in the atmosphere, crackling and sending off blue sparks. Unresolved aggression bounces off the walls and carpet in the shape of goats and monkeys. Frustrated to the point of tears, I would sometimes argue that the great merit of apologizing is that the apology can be accepted, and the whole thing forgotten. Somehow it is hard to accept ‘I washed my jacket, and had to wait for it to dry’ with any show of grace. And as you may see, I still have not forgotten it.

The only time you see public apology these days is in newspapers, when the threat of litigation (or the award of huge damages) forces them to say sorry – like small boys frogmarched to a neighbour’s house and made to apologize for breaking a window. ‘Sorry,’ they mumble. ‘Louder, please, and say it nicely.’ ‘Sorry.’ And you know they are really all pinched up inside about having to do it. No politician will ever apologize to the homeless or to other victims of the recession, because apology is perceived to have an exclusive white-flag function – it means eat dirt, take the blame and be sued for millions and millions of pounds.

Whereas I have always taken apology to signify something else – an acknowledgement that, even unintentionally, you have caused somebody hurt. It is about
them,
not
you.
The woman who shouted ‘I’m so sorry!’ outside Marks & Spencer obviously had something to be sorry about, but I admire her
nevertheless, because she might equally have shouted ‘Fancy leaving all this stuff lying about, it’s asking for trouble!’ or ‘I am postnatally depressed!’ instead. If everyone took the line that either a) I meant to do it so I am not sorry, or b) I didn’t mean to do it, so why the hell
should
I be sorry, the world will surely be a sorrier place.

Every year at about this time, I decide to enrol for a car maintenance evening class. No more will I be treated like a mug by unscrupulous garages; no more will I shrug and whimper – waving my arms vaguely in the direction of the bonnet – when someone asks if I have checked the oil. I will put my hair in a turban, talk confidently of nuts, and wipe my hands on a greasy rag.

So I buy my
Floodlight
adult education classes book and, grim-faced with determination, circle those dark oily satanic car maintenance courses. But then something goes wrong. I notice a flamenco class that’s nearer home, or conversational Italian, or pastry cooking, and before you can say brakepads I have run smack into the crash barrier of my infirm purpose.

I mean, why fiddle with carburettors when you can make choux buns? Why probe a Fiat when you can pop along to the factory in Milan and say, quite casually: ‘Piove da ieri sera’ (‘It has been raining since yesterday evening’)? You can see the dilemma. If you took the flamenco, moreover, at least next time you had a dishonest mechanic to deal with, you could stamp your foot and flounce off with style.

I was reminded of all this by the new
Which?
report on MOT testing. Evidently the
Which?
team bought six crummy second-hand cars, all of them worthy of a fail, and submitted them for tests with six garages each. The results were reminiscent of the infinite number of monkeys – out of thirty-six tries, one got it
right, but only by the law of probability. Most of the garages missed failure points; they also (as you might have guessed) failed things that were perfectly fine.
Which?
was not interested in the morality of all this, only in the problem of unsafe cars receiving MOTs. For the average punter, however, who writes the large cheque each year, her hand sweaty from shock, there is a larger investigation still to be done. To put it bluntly, these garages ‘see her coming’, so how about a controlled experiment? How about she takes her car in and waves her arms (bill: £300); and Nigel Mansell takes her car in instead, while she waits around the corner (bare test fee: £24)?

This is the world we live in, of course. If you are honest about your ignorance (‘I know nothing about engines’), it is a point of honour that they should take advantage of you. Last year my car started making a ticky-ticky noise, like a sewing machine, so I drove to my usual MOT place and asked for an expert diagnosis. ‘You’ll recognize the ticky-ticky noise,’ I said helpfully, ‘It’s the one that makes people look gloomy and say ‘‘tappets’’.’ They stared at me, with big, giveaway £ signs flashing visibly in their eyeballs. Five hours later, I asked for a progress report. ‘Just phoning around for a new engine,’ they said, alarmingly. ‘Pistons … not worth taking the old one apart … fifteen hours’ labour at £28 per hour … looking at twelve, thirteen hundred quid … take eight days.’

I was stunned. Nothing in my conversational Italian had prepared me for this, not even ‘Mi pare un po’ (molto) caro’ (‘I think it is a bit (very) dear’). I said I would think about it, and retrieved the car, mainly because I could not face the tragic prospect of ‘looking at’ twelve or thirteen hundred quid, just to hug it once and say goodbye. Subsequently, of course, I was told by everybody – from taxi drivers to provincial mechanics to small boys on trikes – that the ticky-ticky problem was the camshaft, not pistons, and that the garage’s mistake could not possibly be a genuine one.

Perhaps car maintenance should be placed on the national curriculum, alongside sex education. There is the same ‘need to know’, obviously. And perhaps I should just regretfully harden myself to the garage rip-off, and rejoice that the ethic of the grease-gun is not generally extended – or not so flagrantly – to other professions (‘I think it’s just a cough, doctor’; ‘Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. In fact I’m phoning around for a replacement head’).

Recently I saw an eight-year-old girl interviewed on television about
Jurassic Park.
‘Don’t you think it will be distressing for you to see little children terrorized by dinosaurs?’ the interviewer asked. ‘But that’s life,’ piped the child. ‘It would be silly to shield us from it.’ She had a point.