Staunch

January 2015

And then I get home to an empty house and suddenly I am living entirely on my own for the first time in my life. I am extremely aware that I have gone from being ahead of the curve to way behind it. A story like this should really involve a hedonistic and secretly oh-so traumatic blur of drinking, drugs and shagging in my twenties, followed by a revelation and meeting a ‘nice’ man to settle down with in my early thirties. That’s the correct narrative, right?

Except somehow I am now thirty-four and everything has gone wrong. In the interim, most of my close friends have ‘settled down’ (terrible phrase; if I ever ‘settle down’ please fucking shoot me). They are now in the place I was at during my early twenties – excited about making Sunday roasts for gangs of cool friends, talking about paint colours and the best place to buy a green velvet sofa as seen on everybody’s Instagram, whereas I am now the only single one. And they’re doing it more proficiently than I did, because they all seem to be planning weddings and talking about maybe coming off the Pill.

I suddenly feel very old and very out of step with other people of my age. Most of them have never had a relationship as long as mine with K, and don’t understand what it’s like to have been through a break-up that huge. People say ‘well, at least you didn’t have kids’ as if that must make it really easy. Frankly, I wish more than anything that I had a baby to show for it, at least. When my mum was my age, she had a twelve-year-old and a nine-year-old – the comparison is so depressing.

I feel battle-scarred and ancient, but my life is less ‘grown-up’ and more unsettled than it has ever been. If I were younger, I guess I’d spend this time going out every night and having one-night stands, but that’s not really an option at this point. I work long hours in my new day job for a science publisher (having been sacked from the last one, due to The Journalist unfortunately being my boss’s ex-husband), and I now have a long commute, so I leave the house every morning before 7 a.m. and get home after 7 p.m. In the evenings, I either eat a vast trough of pasta for dinner and go straight to bed, or I sit at my kitchen table listening to music and scrolling through Tinder while smoking roll-ups and drinking a whole bottle of red wine by myself.

I love hanging out with my girlfriends, but by our age that usually means drinking wine around somebody’s kitchen table, which is great but means I am unlikely ever to meet anybody new. They all seem so much more content with life than I am.

It’s my job to be the cheerful one who doesn’t give a fuck; if I can’t live up to that, I’m not sure who to be. I try to talk to one friend about how I’m feeling – old, exhausted, insecure, pointlessly angry about all that wasted time, pretty much hopeless – and I guess it makes her feel uncomfortable, because she shuts it down pretty quickly by saying this is ‘not very feminist’ of me.

Once or twice a week, I go out for lunch or drinks with The Lecturer. The Lecturer is a confusing presence in my life. We met through distant friends, on one of those random Thursday evenings when going to someone’s birthday drinks seems marginally better than getting on the train home.

On first sight, I was not remotely interested in him. He wasn’t my type and I imagined we had nothing whatsoever in common. I assumed he must be boring, despite his too-long Nineties grunge hair – which I strongly suspected might be more by accident than design. He seemed utterly unenthused and bitched about everyone all evening, so I wasn’t expecting it when he looked me up on Facebook late that same night. I only replied because I was a bit bored and drunk on the way home.

He claims to hate all humans and have no social skills, yet he takes to sending me long emails (which admittedly make me laugh) and texting me most days. I bother to reply about a third of the time, and yet still he perseveres. Eventually, I end up hanging out with him because I have nothing much else to do. The university where he works is around the corner from my office, so maybe he’s just bored too.

He takes me out for pink cocktails on a rooftop bar, and I turn up with dirty hair and a hangover. I have a surprising amount of fun and agree to go for drinks again. ‘Soon’, at his insistence.

On our nights out together we stay out drinking and talking for so long that I sometimes miss the last train home and have to stay the night with other friends because The Lecturer won’t let me come back to his flat with him. We sneak out for lunches together in the pub and have such a nice time we agree to meet again in the same pub three hours later.

I become increasingly intrigued by him, with his corduroy jackets and his air of ennui. Sometimes I gaze at him and think, actually, maybe he is a bit like Ted Hughes or Heathcliff.

I’m dating all sorts of other unsuitable people, but nothing seems to stick. I’m not sure how I feel about The Lecturer, but I grudgingly have to admit that he is clever and interesting, and his texts always cheer me up. He becomes a constant backdrop. I start measuring my Tinder matches by whether they are as smart and funny as The Lecturer. It begins to dawn on me that most of them don’t get me in the way that he does, so I start hanging out with him in the pub more and more.

Besides, it beats drinking by myself at the kitchen table, which I also seem to spend more and more of my time doing. While I sink a bottle of red wine and chain-smoke, sometimes I dance around to Patti Smith and feel free and feminist and vindicated, and sometimes I listen to Joni Mitchell and cry my eyes out.

My most pressing concerns, as evidenced by my late-night Google search history:

coolest tattoo shop east london

cheap botox clinic

basic north korea politics explanation

best instagram filter

how old is cole sprouse

full moon cleanse for crystal dildo

health risks smoking over 30

smear test eroded cervix

mexican kitchen tiles

This seems to sum up the strange hinterland I find myself inhabiting. The constant low-level feeling that I’m running out of time causes me to make strange, panicked decisions. I know I’m looking for something but I’m not sure what it is, so I keep trying to make everything into that thing.

Unsuitable guys from Tinder. Internet stalking and unsolicited Instagram messages to boys I dated when I was twenty-one. The Lecturer. I keep hoping I can magically turn them into it, the thing that I am looking for. But I can’t.

January 2015

I feel very alone. On paper, I have so many friends, this is almost embarrassing to admit. But I don’t feel like I have many people I can talk to these days. Nobody gets it, so I just say I’m fine. I guess this blatant lying alienates people, because old friends seem a bit annoyed with me and new friends all think I’m someone I’m not, which makes me feel even lonelier.

There’s not really anywhere else to turn. Although I am close to both of my parents, they have never been the types to make their children the centre of the universe, which mostly I’m pretty sure has been good for us. They simply don’t have the time; they’ve got their own dramas. Having been recently bereaved and deserted, respectively, both of them are soon embroiled in various dating sagas and have more than enough going on in their own lives.

I’m the eldest, and I can’t dump my own stress onto my little sister. That’s not how the world is supposed to work (although my ‘little’ sister Katy has in fact always been The Sensible One). She was less close with both of my stepparents than I was and, conversely, she is thriving. It’s the one uncomplicatedly good thing happening in our family. She suddenly gets serious and moves in with her boyfriend, whom she has known since we were at school and we all adore. She doesn’t need me bringing her down.

And so, maybe surprisingly, the person I end up talking to the most about everything that’s going on in my life is my grandmother.

My nan and I have always been close. My parents both worked and she lived nearby, so every day my sister and I would go to her house after school. She would make us cheese on toast while we did our homework and watched Neighbours, until my mum came and picked us up to go home for dinner. At the time, I sometimes used to be a bit embarrassed and resentful that I had to be different from the other girls at school, who all got collected by their mums in sporty hatchbacks, but now of course I only remember it as very cosy and idyllic.

So I’m lucky to have always had that sort of close, everyday relationship with a grandparent, and I know I’m extremely lucky at my age still to have a living grandmother (I even had a great-grandmother until I was twenty-one). Since I’ve grown up and left home, she and I have always seen a lot of each other and spoken on the phone most days.

When I find myself living alone for the first time, I speak to her more and more. This is often because, being retired and also living alone, she is the one most likely to answer the phone.

She is warm and generous and patient with me, like a grandmother off the telly, but she is also sometimes very tactless, which makes me love her all the more and reminds me she’s just a person like me, not a wise elder-woman of the tribe at all times.

‘This must be especially hard for you,’ she said after my stepdad left, ‘because you really thought he loved you the most and that turned out not to be true.’

She’s also funny, always entertaining and unfailingly, inspirationally, optimistic. She also often tells me ‘not to worry about things so much’ and ‘look for the silver lining’ and banal shit like that, which would annoy me massively if not for the fact that she has lived a lot longer than I have, so I should probably just shut up and listen. Failing all else, she often bursts into ‘inspirational’ song: ‘Smile, though your heart is breaking …’, ‘You are my sunshine …’. That sort of thing.

She is sympathetic to my current situation, but she is also taken aback, mostly by the level of time and effort I put into feeling all these feelings. She didn’t have time for that sort of thing when she was my age. She was too busy working a full-time job, maintaining a flat, bringing up two children as a single mother, helping to look after her parents and siblings, carrying groceries home on the bus and not having enough money to buy a new skirt.

My grandmother is definitely staunch. I currently fear I am not. I am certainly not country strong; I am city weak. Compared to my grandmother, or my mother, at my age – I feel like a baby. A pathetic baby who smokes and drinks too much.

My nan, however, is unequivocally staunch. She’s a woman who’s had a lot of reason to feel sorry for herself in her life, but she never, ever does. Also she calls hairspray ‘lacquer’ and blusher ‘rouge’, like a true Edie would. Also like the Edies, she is what you might call ‘a character’.

Nan has more friends than anybody else I have ever met in my entire life. My sister Katy and I are always being dragged ‘for coffee’ to meet some random friend of hers. It usually transpires that she met them on the bus. She meets everybody on the bus. Sometimes she knows them from Spanish class, or singing club, or because they’re Maureen’s friend, or you know Stella down the road whose son works for M&S, and after that I stop listening. Sometimes she knows them from church. She’s deeply religious, but somehow it’s not annoying – weirdly, I find it sort of comforting when she says ‘God bless you’ to me before she hangs up the phone every time, and tells me frequently that she prays for me, (‘and K’ as she continues to tack on for quite some time). My sister and I used to be obsessed with her friend from church who was a porn star, who became a born-again. That was fun.

When I was little, many of my favourite activities used to involve Nan (or Dorothea, or Dot, as she is more commonly known):

 Spending hours trawling through her old jewellery box, which played Isle of Capri, and telling her which pieces I would like her to leave me ‘when she died’ (mostly the charm bracelet and the opal ring, please).

 Sniffing her lipstick, which was powdery and smelled floral, like Nan lipstick always, always does.

 Stroking the loose skin on her inner arm, which would make me sleepy, and then making her sing me ‘Golden Slumbers’ again and again until I fell asleep.

 Begging her to let me light one of her very special Christmas candles, then crying hysterically when it melted.

 Being allowed to suck the lemon out of her gin and tonic.

My nan’s life has been extraordinary. She was born and brought up in India, a fourth-generation immigrant under the deeply problematic British Raj. Partition, which left over a million people dead and countless others displaced (the largest forced migration of people in history that wasn’t due to war or famine), happened when she was sixteen.

She came to the UK and trained as a nurse, worked in community health, and was a single mum in the Sixties when that was really not the done thing. She has spent her life being self-sufficient, worked really hard for everything she’s ever had, and was generally a bit of a girl-boss way before that term was ever invented.

Which is why, when I become single and find myself living alone for the first time in my adult life, she is the logical person to talk to. If I’m at home, most evenings I talk on the phone for an hour or so to my nan. We are in surprisingly similar life situations considering there is almost exactly fifty years between us.

Often I’ll call her after we’ve both listened to The Archers. I’ll have a red wine, she’ll have a sherry. Nan has a glass of sherry and some Hula Hoops (or sometimes Mini Cheddars) in a fancy bowl every evening before dinner. I still think this is impossibly chic and I have tried valiantly to do the same, only I always end up drinking the whole bottle without noticing and by then I can’t be bothered to cook so the Hula Hoops end up being my dinner and I have a dreadful hangover in the morning.

Anyway, while we chat on the phone of an evening, she’ll be half-watching Coronation Street; I will not be. We will discuss what we’re both going to have for dinner. We are often both having some permutation of eggs. She’ll tell me about her Spanish homework and singing club and who she went out for lunch with that day. I’ll tell her about writing and my friends’ love lives (‘How’s Alice getting on? What about Em and Pete?’) and complain about whoever it is I’m sleeping with and not-really going out with.

‘These men today don’t know their arse from their elbow if you ask me,’ she’ll say, in her posh nan voice.

It’s often the highlight of my day.

Present Day

I have a very, very strong feeling of ‘what the actual fuck have I done?’. I am still hungover from drinking White Russians round at Natalie’s on New Year’s Eve. It’s 5:30 a.m. It’s raining, heavily. When I get on the Gatwick Express, it’s too early even to be able to get a coffee at the station.

I tell myself I have this feeling before every big trip I’ve ever done, and in the end I’m always glad I did it. Before I spent my twenty-ninth birthday by myself at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, I cried in the cab to Heathrow, wishing I could just stay at home and watch telly instead (but of course that trip turned out to be life-affirming and wonderful). I spent the whole flight to Marrakech quietly hoping not to be murdered, and then it ended up being my favourite city in the world. I tell myself I always feel suddenly and unexpectedly anxious and weepy just before a trip, and it’s always worse when it’s a trip by myself.

This is even more daunting than a trip by myself. It’s a trip on which I will be responsible for two quite high-maintenance octogenarians, in the manner of an old-fashioned lady’s companion from a Daphne du Maurier novel or similar. Partly because they need the help with travelling, and I think partly because they feel sorry for me because my sister is getting married, I have ended up being the chosen grandchild to come with them on this momentous trip back to India.

So, for the coming weeks I’m going to be travelling around India with my grandmother, her older sister Rose and their younger half-sister Ann. It occurs to me that to have agreed to this, I may have gone more mad that I did that time I thought cats were talking to me.

We have decided on Goa, which was chosen mostly for practical rather than sentimental reasons. Nan and Rose need a comfortable resort that makes life as easy for them as possible, and this was the best we could find. They are not up for a bustling city, and where they went to school is in the mountains, now over the border in Pakistan, and Nan isn’t sure she can manage the journey this would involve.

Apparently there is some Portuguese blood on one side of the family and Ann’s grandmother may have been from Goa. While we’re there we want to have an ask-around about the name Baptiste and the connection to our family. However, Baptiste turns out to be a common name in Goa.

Although we are not going to see the places where they lived, we still feel that this is a family pilgrimage. We’re going back to the country where my grandmother and aunts were all born, so that we can eat the food, speak the language and tell family stories.

I would really like to go and see the places where they grew up and lived, but for now this is a good toe in the water for me. Nan keeps reminding me that it will be a culture shock; it has long been a trope that I may not be able to ‘cope’ with some aspects of India. Goa is the gentle option, and – for various reasons – we all need a little bit of gentleness.

Before any of that, we have an airport and a long-haul flight to get through.

I have a rucksack on my back and I’m pulling my small wheelie suitcase behind me. I’ve come dressed for long-haul travel – i.e. looking like total, utter shit. I am wearing an old baggy T-shirt that says ‘More issues than Vogue’ on it, plus several thousand layers of deeply unattractive cardigans and hoodies.

I am, as instructed, meeting my nan at the taxi drop-off area so I can carry her bags for her. We are approximately two hours earlier than we need to be, on top of a flight time that was already very bloody early, but I knew better than to try and debate about this. I am very excited about running off and skipping January in favour of a proper adventure, but I am also very tired and grumpy and I am being rained on.

My nan is escorted out of her cab by a driver with an umbrella. She is wearing pearls.

‘Darling! Everyone has issues these days, don’t they?’ she says by way of greeting as she hugs me, looking slightly disapprovingly at my T-shirt. ‘I’m so excited, aren’t you?’

Andy Warhol said you should point out your own flaws before someone else does. I like to think I’m being self-aware and ironic. But suddenly from my nan’s point of view I can see how this would look sort of … odd. Like, why would you choose to advertise that you have ‘issues’? It’s not something to be particularly proud of, or to joke about.

Fortunately, I don’t have long to contemplate this, because my nan appears to have brought three hand luggage bags (‘but one’s my handbag, darling’) and the biggest suitcase I have ever seen.

‘What have you got in here?’ I ask through gritted teeth as I wonder if we’ll have to pay excess baggage charges.

‘It’s mostly my medication,’ she tells me. ‘You know, when you get to my age, darling …’

One of the bags appears to have nothing but books and a cushion in it, but obviously I can’t argue. Well played, Nan.

We find our fellow travellers, Auntie Rose and Auntie Ann, get rained on a lot, discover that the travelator thing to get into the terminal is broken, struggle with lifts and then there’s some technical problem with checking in that results in a long queue and having to carry the bags to another check-in desk on the other side of the airport.

I realize complaining about any of this sounds spoiled, but I feel responsible for making sure this goes smoothly and everyone is OK, which is making me anxious – mostly because I’m not sure I’m capable of it.

‘Careful with that trolley, Ells,’ appears to have become the mantra.

We’re finally getting to the front of the queue when a young couple, a girl and a boy with huge backpacks, push in front of us. They’re chatting excitedly and don’t even seem to have noticed we are standing right there. I’m prepared to just let it go.

‘Excuse me,’ Rose says politely.

They either don’t hear her or continue to ignore her.

‘Excuse me!’ she says more loudly this time.

The boy turns around, looking slightly annoyed. The girl continues to ignore Rose’s existence.

‘You pushed in front of us,’ Rose explains to him, quite patiently. ‘We are in this queue and you pushed right in front of us.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ he says defensively, not apologising.

‘That’s the problem, you see. I’m completely invisible to you because I’m old.’

She says it with a smile, just stating a fact. The young man doesn’t say anything else, or even try to apologise – I think it’s because he’s too embarrassed. His girlfriend still hasn’t acknowledged our existence. They scuttle behind us as we go to the front. Rose winks at me.

I am extremely conscious that airports must be especially hard work when you’re in your eighties – most things are; if I’ve learned one thing from these ladies it’s that you have to be hard as nails to get old – but they get to have wheelchairs.

‘The power of mobility and invisibility, it seems,’ Rose notes sagely.

Neither Nan nor Rose is a wheelchair user in day-to-day life, but it turns out anyone can ask for ‘special assistance’ on a plane. They’ll take you from check-in to your gate and onto the plane, which otherwise involves a lot of schlepping. I feel a bit embarrassed as the young, able-bodied tagalong. However, I’m pleased to report I got over it when we were ushered through the extra-quick security queue like it was Studio 54.

We make it onto the plane with only one minor argument, and that’s the same argument my nan and I have whenever I stay at her house for the weekend.