We go to Chessington World of Advantures and the Sat Nav takes us through every residential street in South London.
Tuesday 22nd April 2008
My Birhday
I am 45.
I am 45.
I AM 45.
It’s no good at all.
I can’t get used to it.
The children bring me presents. Zac gives me flowers, a huge bunch of lilies. Abigail gives me a special chopping machine, and some Neil’s Yard cream and some bubble bath. Maisie has made a beautiful card. John has given me a new laptop. My other computer crashed and the hard disc imploded, was wiped, chewed and mashed and all data was lost.
The Pole in Spitalfields has retrieved my book and installed the Time Machine so I will never lose my book again. I really love Polish people, they are so clever.
I like my new laptop.
John and me go to Goldfish in Hampstead for lunch. Goldfish is a Chinese restaurant of unparalled accomplishment. We meet Abigail there because she has a half day at school. Abigail eats a salad. I eat a cod steak cooked to a level of unparalled perfection. I drop my mobile phone in the water feature next to our table. We drink champagne and feel quite drunk.
Later Ellis comes for supper with his children and Ellie comes with her mother. Ellie’s mother is over 50 and is, probably, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Ellis is 51 and he is enviably intelligant and amazingly handsome.
We have a lovely evening and I am beginning to feel quite used to being 45 and feel that maybe 45 is a good place to be and that it may, infact, be a wonderful year for me.
Thursday 24th April 2008. Book Group.
We are to discuss The Penelopiad by Margaret Attwood at Book Group this evening.
Book group is at Kim’s house and Kim chose The Penelopiad. Kim has made some very nice salads. She made tomatoes with lemon thyme and green beans with chick peas. She also bought some cheese and spinach pies from the Turkish bakery. It’s so nice when someoine else cooks for you.
We don’t quite know what to say about the Penelopiad. We talk about lots of things. We talk about our children’s schools, we talk about the book that Anna is writing, we talk about Florida, we talk about the Mayoral Election campaign and we talk about Just William. Helga is very interested in Just William because, not being English she has never heard of him. We talk a bit about Abigail but I don’t think anyone knows how serious Abigail’s problem is, so we talk again about The Penelopiad.
We decide that the major tragedy for Penelope is that she has such a poor relationship with her son. we conclude that one should never be bossed around by a child care professional.
Saturday 26th April 2008
Katya.
Katya comes over. Katya is Lithuanian she wears a black floor length astrakan coat. She has an assymetric bob and red lips. Katya smells like a wet cat because it is raining and she sweeps past me when I answer the door. Katya is furious.
‘Coffee darlink!’ she says ‘Giff me coffee.’
I put the kettle on. Katya throws her coat across the back of a chair.
‘My father.’ she says ‘Iss a complete bastard.’ She lights a Russian cigarette. I love Katya, she is so interesting.
I make coffee.
‘Black coffee, sveetheart.’ says Katya narrowing her long, dark eyes against the cigarette smoke. ‘No sugar.’
Maisie comes into the kitchen, looks from me to Katya and bolts downstairs to the playroom. Maisie thinks that Katya is Cruella Devill.
I hand Katya a mug of thick black coffee in a Moomin mug. ‘You can be Moominmama.’ I say.
Katya stares at her mug. ‘Don’t be so horribly tvee.’ she snarls and takes a gulp of the scalding liquid leaving a smear of dark red lipstick on the rim.
‘What has your father done?’ I ask. ‘I thought he had died and that you were going to be delightfully rich.’
Katya’s father is a millionaire.
Katya’s father divorced Katya’s mother as soon as the family set foot on British soil, having arrived in Hull on a cargo ship in ‘88 as escapees from the Eastern Bloc.
He came to London, invented Blu-Tak or something similar, floated the business on the stockmarket, bought Kennington before it was fashionable, then sold it to all the gay men when Vauxhall got too full.
Katya, meanwhile, grew up in a tiny flat in Barnsbury. She had high hopes of her father’s death because he had no other children.
Katya grimaces. ‘Zat complete, incontinent, undiciplined bastard hass left everythink to an old Svedish tart who is at zis minute livink in The Dorchester hotel on my fuckink money.’
Sometimes, I think Katya hams up her accent. She has, after all, been here for twenty years.
“Wow!’ I say ‘That’s shocking. Why didn’t he tell you about her? Why The Dorchester?’
Katya and her father had become quite good friends shortly before he died. They’d been out to dinner together just the week before he’d had his heart attack.
‘The Dorchester, becoss it looks like a tart’s boudoir and she is a fuckink tart! And he didn’t tell me becoss I would haff fuckink keeled him!’
Katya does look quite scary. Perhaps her father thought she looked quite scary too.
‘Your poor mother.’ I say ‘What on earth does she think?’
Katya’s mother had hoped that Katya would inherit from her father. Katya’s mother has breast cancer and wants to go home to Vilnius to die, she had hoped that Katya would be able to pay for her journey home and her medical treatment when she got there. This was one of the reasons that Katya had re-established contact with her father in the first place.
I don’t really know what to say. I know Katya will never earn enough money for her mother’s trip home without her father’s money. Katya always gets sacked three or four weeks into any job for being unbelievabley rude to customers.
The last job she had was as waitress in Covent Garden and when a customer complained that his steak was so disgusting he could catch Aids from it. She’d said.
‘Not unless you actually fuckt it, sir.’
Why would anyone employ Katya when they could employ a Pole?
Katya takes a small bottle of vodka from the pocket of her cardigan. She tops up her coffee with the vodka and tosses it down her throat.
‘I must go now.’ she says ‘I am goink to the Dorchester to murder the old tart.’ She throws her coat, which is steaming gentley in the warm kitchen, around her shoulders like a cape and strides from the room. I hear the front door slam. I haven’t seen Katya for 6 months, I probably won’t see her for another 6. This is a good thing. I feel quite exhausted.
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