Making the Cat Laugh (19 page)

Years ago, I was privileged to meet one of the men who first applied the word ‘vector’ to a type of bank account. I met him at an historic moment, actually, because he had just emerged from the selfsame shirtsleeve-and-braces design consultancy think-tank meeting at which the full kennel-name of Vector (‘Indigo Vector’) had been finally settled upon. He looked tired but happy – like a miner, perhaps, at the end of a 12-hour shift, or a brain surgeon who had just achieved a complicated transplant.

Of course, the proceedings of this meeting were not disclosed, but from his exhausted but triumphant state I somehow deduced it had resembled the jury room in Sidney Lumet’s
Twelve Angry Men
– you know, sweaty, tense,
touch-and-go, life-in-the-balance. Perhaps opposition to ‘Indigo Vector’ had been fierce; the ‘Blue Streak’ lobby was unshiftable. I imagined my chap taking the righteous white-suited Henry Fonda role, quietly fighting his colleagues every inch of the way, and remaining cool while his enemies dabbed their brows with big hankies.

Had I never met him at all, however, I would have imagined something quite different. I would have assumed that the naming of a new bank account must be a work of inspiration, and that, as such, it must come from a humble individual sitting alone in a padded cell – rather in the manner of the contract Hollywood writer under the old studio system. We could call him Mankowitz. ‘Get Mankowitz on to this!’ the board would command. And a secretary would place a sheet of paper in Mankowitz’s in-tray, describing the new bank account and expecting a result by noon.

Mankowitz would come in at ten, take off his hat, shuffle the papers without removing the long cigarette between his fingers, and then start to type short one-liners, stopping occasionally only to pinch the bridge of his nose under his wire-rimmed specs.

Indigo Vector.

The bank that likes to say yes.

I want to be a tomato.

For the little things in life.

They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty, they’re very tasty.

Once bitten, forever smitten.

We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.

And then at half past ten, he would stop for coffee.

Perhaps I harbour too strong an attachment to romantic notions of solitary genius. Perhaps I have too little respect for the massed talents of the advertising industry. But somehow
I prefer the Mankowitz option. The idea of a gaggle of blokes in expensive whistles sitting together and running the paltry word Vector up a flag-pole fills me with a strange and yawning sadness.

I remembered all this because I have recently discovered the surreal world of paint colour names (Comet, Murmur, Quiescence, Evensong, Early December) and I simply cannot bear to believe that these were chosen by a committee in a designer boardroom. There is too much poetry involved, too much imaginative intimacy.

‘Right, then,’ I said, at the paint counter. ‘I’ll have a litre of Hazy Downs please, with Tinker for the skirting,’ and I caught my breath at hearing the words. It was as though the spirit of a mad poet had breezed through. Walls of hazy downs; and ‘Tinker’ for the skirting. Wow.

Just look at a strip of green Dulux shades – ‘Spring dance, April coppice, Verge, Racecourse, Meadow land, Treetop’ – and you can see this poet, can’t you, his eyes closed, straining to hear birdsong in the rustling trees outside his cell window. ‘More greens,’ he smiles to himself, momentarily forgetting the shackles that bind him to the damp stone walls. And he falls into a trance. ‘Curly kale,’ he intones, relishing the shapes it makes in his mouth. ‘Shady fern, Mystic moon, Fresh breeze, Elderwater, Trickle.’

‘What was the last one?’ snaps the man from Dulux who is taking this down. ‘Trickle,’ he repeats.

What I am building up to is a confession. I keep meeting people who think I write this column in a darkened room in a small flat, with just cats for company, and that I write it all myself out of my very own brain. Whereas of course this is a mere illusion, and in fact the writing of this column is a well-organized team affair involving a large number of hacks in consultancy roles, a weekly meeting (with minutes), and an all-day creative thrash-out, in which each person writes a
paragraph and then the whole thing is put together by a complicated voting procedure. I mean ‘Single Life’? You must be joking. There are loads of us here. Loads. You should see the washing-up.

I am sorry to ruin the illusion, but we all have to learn some time that there is no Mankowitz in the advertising industry; there is no mad poet dreaming of Dulux colours; it’s all done by meetings. ‘Now, a few more greens and thank goodness we can stop for lunch. Anybody got a word that goes with Kale? Anybody?’ ‘Er … ‘‘yard’’, sir.’ ‘Mmm, so you think we should call it ‘‘Yard kale’’, Robbins? Sounds all right to me.’ ‘No, sir. I meant – er, kaleyard.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘There’s something called curly kale in the dictionary, sir.’ ‘Splendid. All right, hands up for Curly kale. Next!’

I have never lingered in cosmetics halls. In fact, I have never really understood what they are for. Why do they invariably lurk at the entrance of department stores, blocking one’s progress to the real business inside? Is it a subtle fumigation process? Or is the idea to soften you up? The luxuriant chrome and lights, the shrill exciting perfumes, the gallons of moisturizer (in tiny pots) – I figure that this sensual riot is designed to trip up the women, and remind them that shopping is basically self-flattery and treats. By the time you actually buy something, you see, you feel so madly feminine that you shell out wildly for an extra tube of bath sealant.

But I am only guessing, because personally I always draw a deep breath at the threshold to the shop, take a last memorizing look at my list (‘Draino; Cat-flap accessories; Something for getting Ribena stains out of sofa’) and then whiffle quickly and invisibly between the little counters, tacking athwart this alien sea of feminine trinketry with my eyes half-closed against
the unaccustomed glamour of it all. If I pause nervously to examine a lipstick, and a lady asks ‘Can I help you?’ I freeze, and then scuttle sharpish to the lifts.

But suddenly, a few weeks ago, I felt an urge to paint my fingernails. It was weird and unaccountable. One minute I was quite normal and stable, attempting to play a well-regulated game of hide and seek with cats who can’t (or won’t) count to twenty. And the next, I was overtaken by an access of femininity, humming ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ with brio, and breezing into cosmetics halls demanding a range of nail colours and offering to trade unwanted cat-flap accessories by way of payment. Funny how life can change.

Single life suddenly looked quite different, you see: I caught a glimpse of another world, originating in the sort of TV advertisement where pink gauze curtains billow sensuously in a boudoir full of white light and a woman with fantastic hair pampers herself with a beauty product (or tampons). Most people probably regard nail varnish as either functional or tacky, but to me it acquired the force of revelation. Previously the idea of pampering myself meant watching the
EastEnders
omnibus when I had already seen both episodes in the week. But now it meant inhabiting an aura of solitary voluptuousness, spending whole yummy evenings watching paint dry.

Now, the interesting thing about nail polish is that it comes without instructions. Did you know this? This was my first setback, really, and it was one from which I never properly recovered. The other interesting thing is that nail polish remover, if you splash it about too liberally, removes polish quite indiscriminately – from your best sandals, for example, and your chest of drawers. Also, it is not a good idea to put used cotton buds, soaked with nail polish remover, directly on a mahogany dining table, because not only does the surface mysteriously acquire pits and scars, but the lacerations have
white hair growing out of them, which won’t come off again, ever.

Within minutes of starting my new regime, I had run up damages to an approximate replacement value of twelve hundred pounds. But I was not down-hearted. I had applied a transparent goo of base-coat to all of my fingernails (including the right-hand ones, which were tricky) and was now ready to drink sherbet, eat Turkish delight, and watch an American mini-series until the next stage. ‘I’m strictly a female female,’ I sang, ‘Da da dum di da Dum de dee.’ I picked up the remote control from the carpet and was surprised to discover that a layer of speckled gunk had attached itself to all the nails that had come in contact with the floor. Spit. Peering at the other hand (which looked OK), I cautiously tapped all the nails with a finger to check they were dry. They weren’t.

Three hours later my fifth attempt at a base-coat was almost dry, but I was feeling strangely detached from my surroundings, because I had just spent a whole evening not using my fingers. Every impulse to pick up a tissue, or stroke the cat, or wipe hair from my eyes had been followed once (with disastrous results) and thereafter strenuously denied. At one point, the phone had rung, and after a period of whimpering with indecision I had answered it by picking up the receiver between my elbows and then dropping it on the desk, in a manner reminiscent of thriller heroines tied to kitchen chairs. ‘Hello?’ it said faintly from the desktop. ‘Help!’ I yelled, kneeling beside the receiver, and waggling my fingers like a madwoman. ‘Hello?’ it said again, and went dead.

Eventually I took the whole lot off again, partly because the removal process was the only one I was good at, partly because I realized that novice nail-painting is not something to be attempted alone, after all. It requires the attendance of slaves. I did a swift impression of Lady Macbeth (damned spot, and all that), and went to bed. And there I dreamed of waltzing
through bright cosmetics halls, dressed in pink gauze, carrying bags and bags of lovely self-indulgent stuff for getting Ribena stains out of the sofa.

First, there is something I should explain: in May 1968, when the world stage resounded to the lobbing of cobbles in the streets of Paris, I recorded in my personal diary the purchase of a maroon skirt. I make no apology. To me, you see, at twelve years old, this was an
événement.
Maroon wool, slightly too big, zip at the front, I was proud. Moreover, conscious of the heavy responsibility owed by all diarists to future historians, I thoughtfully taped the price label to the page. ‘Etam,’ it says, ‘£sd: 19/11’. I still have it (the label, not the skirt). It is before me now.

In the intervening years, I have of course laughed at the schoolgirl hubris – fancy preserving an Etam label; did I imagine that the wild-eyed time-capsule people would wrest it from my grasp and bury it along with a copy of the Maastricht treaty for unborn post-nuclear generations to gape and wonder at? Ha ha ha. But now something has happened. The University of Reading has acquired a ‘Centre for Ephemera Studies’, dedicated to the preservation of can labels, leaflets, and all such throwaway stuff. Good grief, my Etam label – someone really wants it. It is like waking up in the cold light of a science fiction novel. Well, do it to Julia, that’s what I say.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to be the University of Reading at the moment. Leaving aside the obvious horror entailed in suddenly finding oneself transmogrified into a red-brick academic institution in the middle of nowhere, tons of old shed-clearings must daily be screeching through the gates by special courier. ‘More bus tickets from well-wishers,’ says the dumper truck driver, as he cheerfully pulls his lever and
sends several hundredweight of brown-paper parcels slithering down in a heap. The remit of the centre is to preserve only printed matter, but the chronic hoarders of carpet off-cuts will be much too excited to notice. ‘People throw these bits away, with no sense of heritage, but we have kept these sacks of Cyril Lord for thirty years,’ says the covering letter. ‘Please don’t try returning it to us, we have moved. We hope you find much interest also in the tins of paint.’

But if the university sinks under the weight of empty seed packets and Brillo boxes, it will only serve them right. What a terrible idea, to confer academic respectability on the worst of human failings. Besides, since we feel guilt about having a throwaway culture, for God’s sake let’s have the exhilaration too.
Chuck it right away, Kay; sling it in the bin, Vin; take it to the tip, Pip; dump it in the sea, Lee. There must be fifty ways to lose a label.
Who cares if the ‘details of our everyday life’ are not remembered for ever? Who do we think we are? This sort of vanity is all right when you are twelve, but let’s snap out of this worship of the design-classic Coke bottle, before it is too late.