Making the Cat Laugh (12 page)

Last Thursday, during the mid-afternoon power-cut that plunged the whole of central London into blacked-out, stuck-in-the-lift chaos, I decided to make the best of the remaining daylight by ferrying some paperbacks up the stairs to my office. We British, I pondered (as I balanced a pile of books in one hand and opened doors with the other), are so accustomed to dealing with the effects of other people’s cock-ups – trains not running, post not arriving, delivery vans not turning up – that some people have stopped being angry, and instead take pride in the fortitude they show in such circumstances. Stuck in a tunnel somewhere near Victoria, they smile indulgently and award themselves medals for bravery in the face of overwhelming cock-up. This habit of shrugging at ineptitude is, I thought as I kicked one of the doors shut with a loud bang, precisely what is wrong with this bloody rotten stinking country.

Having my mind thus occupied with large thematic matters, therefore, I did not at first notice the presence of the two
strangers who were following me up the stairs. Their briefcases and nasty blue suits betrayed them to be businessmen heading for another part of the building, while their out-of-condition puffing and sweating gave them away as chaps who would normally prefer to take the lift. By way of pleasantry, I imagine, one of them tried to engage me in conversation:

‘What have you done to the lights, then?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What have you done to the lights?’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ he persisted, laughing. ‘Don’t give me that. I expect you plugged your typewriter into the wrong socket, didn’t you, and blacked out the whole of London.’

Now remember: this was a spontaneous remark uttered to a complete stranger; and as such, I regard it as absolutely awe-inspiring. It is like seeing a perfect diamond: what
centuries
of top-quality British male prejudice it must have taken to refine a mind to such a pitch. This man had only to be presented with the situation of: a) the lift out of order; and b) a woman walking innocently upstairs minding her own business, and his mind instantly synthesized all of the following propositions:

a) all women are secretaries;

b) women are always to blame, whatever it is;

c) women are stupid about electricity, and are always blowing fuses by plugging their heated rollers into light-fittings;

d) women welcome gratuitous insults;

e) and even if they don’t, there is not much they can do about it, because ‘not being able to take a joke’ is a feminine failing worse than sabotaging London’s electricity supply.

This man believes all these things; he believes them, moreover, at a deep unconscious level. And because he believes them, he thinks he is better than me. How ironic that I learned all this during a power-cut.

Last week, in a branch of a well-known stationery shop, I had an interesting experience. It went something like this:

ME:
Excuse me, I can’t see any Amstrad ribbons. Could you … (
First Assistant points a finger at a low shelf, looks at me as though I am mad, and does not speak
.)

ME:
Oh yes, silly me. Thank you very much. (
First Assistant does not react in any way, but then turns to friend and starts discussing lunch-breaks
.)

ME
(
at till
): I’d like to pay for these please. (
Second Assistant silently picks up ribbons and rings up prices on the cash register. He does not announce the total, because of course I can see it quite as well as he can
.)

ME
(
showing credit card
): Can I pay with this? (
Second Assistant wordlessly takes credit card and processes it, so that a bill is printed on the counter
.)

ME:
Have you got a pen? (
Second Assistant points to biro next to the till; I sign. He fixes his gaze on the middle distance
.)

ME
(
gathering up bag from the counter
): Well, I’ll just take this, then. (
Nothing
.)

ME:
Great. Lovely. Thanks. Bye-ee.

Now you could look at this scene in two ways. First, there is the ‘lonely mad woman’ scenario – you know, she’s got her hair in plaits, she’s got cat-dribble on her ankle-socks, and she’s trying to engage healthy young shop assistants in banal conversation, hoping that this will relieve her feelings of solitude, and temporarily make her life worth living. Give her an inch, this woman, and she will produce a stack of photographs from her shopping-bag (‘Here’s a picture of a rice pudding I made last year’), and start saying ‘Guess how old I am! Not bad for thirty-six!’

On the other hand, there is the argument that says a little bit of eye-contact never hurt anybody, and that however boring it is to say ‘That will be £15.99’ all day, it is an essential part of the job, and of the structure of civilization.

Even if young people cannot be trained to say, ‘Can I help you?’, or ‘Did you see we had a new range of those?’, I think there should be a sort of baseline of acceptable shop behaviour which would include: (1) announcing the total loudly enough for the customer to hear it, and (2) saying thanks for the dosh.

My own particular bugbears are bookshops (where I know what I want, and understand the system better than the assistants) and hi-fi emporia (where I don’t know anything, but can, nevertheless, spot the tell-tale signs that my guess is as good as theirs). In bookshops I cunningly deploy my knowledge of the alphabet in order to go straight to the right place on the shelf; but if my book is not there, I ask. This is where I make my mistake. The assistant, looking slightly offended by my enquiry, slides off his stool, turns a key in his till with an audible huff, and heads for the wrong area of alphabet.

‘Carter should be here,’ I say, but he’s not listening. He is trailing a fingernail along the Peter Ackroyds and Lisa Althers and pursing his lips. ‘Actually,’ I volunteer, ‘Er …’ But his concentration is impenetrable, as he works his way through Atwood, Barnes, Bowen, Boyd, Brink, Brookner and Byatt. Finding himself at Dibdin, he performs a few halting changes of gear between forward and reverse drive, until finally settling on the exact space where my finger is resting on the shelf.

‘If it’s not here, we haven’t got it,’ he announces, straightening up. After witnessing this ritual a couple of dozen times, you learn not to ask about any author whose name comes later in the alphabet than F, unless you are writing a thesis on alienation.

Sorry to go on in this old-codgerish vein, but since shop assistants are sometimes the only people I speak to all day, I am growing sick and tired of the rudeness. Hi-fi shops I only enter when I’m feeling particularly robust – and even then I try to cushion the experience by imagining that all the staff are
blind. This helps a lot, actually. Blindness would excuse them from never looking you in the eye, from being completely unfamiliar with the stock, and from bluffing in transparent ways when asked technical questions.

‘What does this button do?’ you ask. The assistant looks at it in a vague, unseeing way, and says dismissively, ‘Timer.’ ‘Oh, hang on,’ you say, looking up from the instruction leaflet, ‘it says here that it’s a pause button.’ The salesman shrugs, and diverts his attention to an argument at the other end of the counter, where a customer is demanding his money back until he is blue in the face.

I don’t know what can be done about all this. I have started barking ‘How much did you say?’ into the ears of people on tills, but only because it makes me feel better. My latest idea is to carry a little Sooty glove puppet, so that I can produce it at key moments and talk to it when nobody else is volunteering. ‘What’s that, Sooty?’ I could say, next to the Amstrad ribbons, with Sooty speaking directly into my right ear. ‘Down on the bottom shelf?’ Sooty would nod his head in the traditional glove-puppet manner of bending three times sharply from the waist.

At the till, we could continue. ‘Yes, Sooty? That will be £9.40? Allow me to lend you this biro? Thank you for your custom, and be sure to call again? Well, thank you very much, Sooty. It makes such a nice change from talking to myself.’

Remember the days of ‘kitchen-sink drama’? Having grown up during the heyday of this raw, vigorous genre, I find now that its combined dramatic porcelain, taps and U-bends made a deep impression on me, as though dropped on my foot from a height. Placed in an unfamiliar BBC props room full of old white sinks, crude kitchen tables and Ascot water heaters, I
feel sure I could identify them (‘Arnold Wesker?’ ‘Shelagh Delaney!’), no problem. Around kitchen sinks, couples were always shouting and glowering at each other. They chucked plates and wrestled with the back door (‘That’s right! Go to yer fancy piece!’) before storming out into the black night.

I was reminded of all this emotional turmoil when reading about a comparatively sedate organization called the Polite Society (patron: His Grace the Duke of Devonshire). The Polite Society is committed to maintaining everyday courtesy in British society and in particular believes machines have ruined our capacity for talk. The invention of the dishwasher, its manifesto says (with stars in its eyes), was a tragedy for domestic conversation, since washing-up was a matrimonial lubricant we could not afford to lose – ‘The only opportunity man and wife may have to engage in comfortable small talk while she washes and he wipes.’ A number of sweet bygone gender notions are enshrined in this pretty picture, but for the sake of brevity I think we’ll let most of them pass. ‘Oh look, here’s a bit of old cornflake still stuck to the bowl, darling!’ ‘You’re right, dear. Would you like me to commit suicide here at the sink, or shall I just pop myself upstairs?’

As a single person whose tea-towel never gets wet, I do see the point about the dishwasher, of course; it’s no company at all. If you relied on it for anecdotes, you would wait a very long time. But if people don’t want to talk to each other, surely the last thing that will cajole them into a pleasant gossip about the neighbours is a pile of greasy crocks. It is quite easy to wash up together without saying a word, both staring through the uncurtained window at the dark and rain, mouths set in a grim line. And another thing, if they are very keen on each other, surely this Mummy and Daddy would far rather fling those plates in the machine, push a button and retire to a more comfortable room? I was telling my friend Susan about all this wash-wipe nonsense, and she observed,
‘Antony and Cleopatra didn’t do the washing-up together, did they?’ – an excellent point. The history of western civilization might have been quite different if instead of trying to impress his dusky Queen with the Battle of Actium, Antony had strapped a pinny over his leather skirt and made with the Brillo.

Machines certainly reduce the opportunities for everyday courtesy. If a door works automatically, you feel a fool holding it open; if you get your money from a hole in the wall, you shouldn’t enquire about its Mum’s new hip. On the other hand, this automation does protect the manners-sensitive among us from the irritation of finding doors dropped back in our faces, or speaking to a stooping bank clerk who shows us only the top of his head. What I mean is, nobody can behave badly around an automatic door; and it is rare to walk away from a cashpoint grumbling, ‘That’s the last time I go there.’ The Polite Society dislikes also the way the Directory Enquiries service now starts off with a real person (‘Which name? Which town?’) and then switches to a computer voice with random vowels, preventing you from saying thanks. But looking at it another way again, at least this means that the operators don’t spend all day exasperated by people hanging up
without
saying thanks. ‘I don’t believe it. I gave him the number and he just hung up.’ ‘That happened to me, too.’

Back at the kitchen sink, it’s surely obvious that everything in the home is nowadays designed to make maximum time for the telly. That’s just the way it is. People bicker about whose turn it is to load the dishwasher because there’s a juicy kitchen-sink drama on the box. ‘We are not Luddites,’ says the Polite Society, ‘but there is a danger that if we don’t control technology, it will end up controlling us.’ What a shame it’s not that easy. I read this credo as it came off my Fax machine, and instead of just shouting ‘Faster!’ and ‘Come on!’, I tried saying ‘Oh, thanks a lot’ and ‘Ta’. Imagine my surprise when
it replied, ‘You’re welcome. And by the way, did you notice the new car outside Number 46?’