It hasn’t been the best week. It started off pretty well, with the news that my friend K—, who I’m collaborating on a book with, was coming down to Brighton for a few days. Hooray!
“Do you think I could bump into yours?” No, hurray. Not because I don’t like her company – I really do – but because it would mean fixing Hove. I described it a few weeks ago and I did not exaggerate. But I didn’t want to turn him down. I thought: maybe this will be the thing that finally makes me clean this place. Also, there was a vacuum cleaner sitting by the front door for a few weeks – a version of Henry, but smaller and in black, called Henrietta I believe, although I could have hallucinated this. Well, Henry or Henrietta, I’d wipe that smile off their face in no time. I have a vacuum cleaner, but it is weak beyond use; it would be better if someone with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, e.g. me, to suck the dust through a straw.
Then I got a call from the debt collection agency. Remember when I said last week that I had tried to pay an old bill for £350 but they said the account had been closed? I even double checked with them. But no, two different people confirmed that I didn’t have to pay a penny. How to explain? A defect in the matrix? A kind soul, perhaps even a fan of this column, realizing that £350 was too much to ask of a Down and Outer, punching a few keys and making it all go away? Or a miracle? Well, they called me to ask where their beans were. do you see Miracles do not happen, whatever my friends in holy orders may have to say on the matter.
I explained the situation to the bean counter and he was actually very nice about it. “Okay, you can pay at the beginning of May,” he said, moving the can into a welcome distance for me. But that meant I would have a problem eventually. I’ve been working hard lately, but some of the publications I work with (not this one) have shown a reluctance to pay me. I’m sure it’s all in the works, but when it’s only two thirds of the month and you’re minus £25 in the bank, you wish they’d hurry. Borrowing money from friends and family is draining on the soul. (“Ask us how we can help,” says the NatWest app on my phone after it notices that I’m not short of funds. “Well, you can raise my crappy overdraft limit for a start,” I said to myself. things have changed since 2006.
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Anyway, it all put me in a bad mood, not helped by the fact that I still don’t have a working fridge, and the scaffolding outside my bedroom window now seems to be a permanent fixture. I look out over a forest of pipes and boards and remember the story about the zoologists who taught a chimpanzee how to draw, and the first thing he drew was the bars of his cage.
Back to my co-author. The demoralization caused by all of the above made me loathe to get out of bed. I began to despair of fixing Hove at all. I told K. “I’m very tolerant,” she said. I took pictures of the bedroom floor and the living room. The silence that followed was like a non-verbal expression of the word “ah”. Or maybe “oh”.
Then the vacuum cleaner disappeared. Back to its proper home, perhaps, or to that place where good brooms go when they die. He could have died. I asked my neighbor about it when it was still all present and correct, and he said it might have been left by the electrician, and the electrician might have done it because it had fallen. (Speaking of which, my laptop stopped working yesterday, but luckily the dodgy laptop shop down the road was able to get it working again, but that’s another £50 I’ll never see again.)
The matter resolved itself in the end: my eldest son was having a birthday party at the family house on one of the nights K- was to stay, and Lezard affairs are not the most discreet and tend to run late, and there was no way I was going back to Brighton that same night. So I told K- and she decided that maybe it would be better if she didn’t come to Brighton but we would meet in London. As I write, the children draw straws as to who will place me. The owner of the family sofa, where I usually stay on such occasions, has been surprisingly silent.
Now, at this stage, I bet you’re all buzzing with anticipation for this book I’m co-writing. “What is it about?” goes the cry from Inverness to Penzance. Well, I’m not telling you. And I also have another book on the go, and I’m not telling you what it’s about.
(Further reading: Leave the kids in restaurants)
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