Polly James - Would Like to Meet

An hour later, I’ve finished my sandwiches and written a load of answers to questions asked by women worried about ageing, such as, “I don’t think my husband fancies me any more – what do I do?” It’s a lot easier helping other people who are crushed by insecurity than dealing with the same thing in yourself. Even the Fembot’s impressed by the shameless lies I’ve told, of which the most outrageous is “love conquers all”.

The trouble is, I don’t believe a word I’ve said and now I feel a bit depressed, so when Esther asks if I’d like to go salsa dancing after work, I say, “yes”, even though I’ve never been before. It’s got to be better than what I did have planned for this evening: attending a talk on the lifecycle of the electric eel. Much better, when you consider that in a couple of hours, I’ll be salsa-ing my butt off with loads of good-looking, snake-hipped men.

* * *

Esther’s got two left feet, which I know for a fact because she’s the only person who’s asked me to dance all night. The ratio of men to women at this salsa class is 1:20, whether you’re counting ones with snake-like hips or not, and I’m still ranting about why they all refused to dance with any women they weren’t married to by the time Esther drives me home.

When she drops me off, I walk inside and promptly start to rant again, though this time about men in general, not just the salsa-dancing kind. Joel’s broken the tumble dryer and left a mountain of wet washing inside the drum. He’s also left me a note telling me that he’s “just popped out”, together with a totally-useless explanation of what happened to the dryer: “It started rattling like mad, so I turned it off.”

My first thought is that Dan will sort it out, until I recall that he’s not here. At that point I get even crosser, and then I start to cry. Once I’ve stopped, I watch a video about repairing tumble dryers on YouTube and then I have a go myself. It’s not easy when your only equipment’s a knife and fork.

Joel’s obviously been raiding the toolkit I bought from Ikea after Dan moved out because, when I open it, the only things left inside are a full set of screwdriver heads without a single screwdriver to attach them to. Meanwhile, the tumble dryer’s not rattling any more – now it won’t turn on at all.

* * *

“Haven’t you solved the problem yet?” asks Joel, when he walks in at 10pm to find me on my knees, my head virtually inside the drum.

“No,” I say. “And if that’s supposed to be so easy, then maybe you should try.”

“Already did,” says Joel. “Why haven’t you heated this up?”

He points at a pan containing some dried-out pasta sauce he must have made before he went out. It’s the only thing he knows how to make, so I probably shouldn’t keep leaving the cooking to him. The trouble is that Dan always used to do it and I don’t get hungry since he moved out.

I shrug, in answer to Joel’s question about the sauce.

“For God’s sake, Mum,” he says. “You have to eat. I’ll cook you some spaghetti now, and heat this up to go with it.”

While the pasta cooks, Joel explains that he spent several hours trying to repair the dryer but then had to abandon the attempt because he was late to meet someone.

“Who?” I ask, though I’m not really listening any more.

I’m burrowing in the cupboard under the stairs, where the meter is. Maybe the dryer just blew a fuse.

“I met Dad,” says Joel. “Whoa, be careful, Mum! Are you okay?”

No, I’m not. I’ve just banged my head on the shelf that holds the iron and a pile of miscellaneous household goods – all previously broken by Joel – and I banged it so hard that now I’m seeing several Joels, all at once. It’s like looking at a young Henry VIII through a kaleidoscope. After he first grew his hipster beard.

“Did you say you’ve just been for a drink with your dad?” I ask, a few minutes later, while Joel chucks a load of ice cubes into a plastic bag, then hammers the hell out of them with the mallet Dan bought to tenderise meat. It’s the one with pointy edges, so now there’s crushed ice everywhere, except inside the plastic bag.

Joel pauses, picks up the bag and holds it to the light, then nods with satisfaction. He always likes to know why things don’t turn out as expected, though he never seems to retain that information long enough to make practical use of it.

“Holes,” he says, as he scoops the ice up off the counter, wraps it in a tea towel, and then orders to me to press it against the giant bump that’s been forming on my forehead while he’s been considering the physics of the situation.

“You look like one of those body-modification loonies,” he says, when he removes the ice pack ten minutes later, then stands back to admire the effect. “Except they prefer holes in their bumps, so it looks as if they’ve got doughnuts in the middle of their foreheads.”

“Don’t change the subject,” I say. “Tell me about your father.”

“Well, I told him about the dryer,” says Joel. “And he said if you call him tonight, he’ll arrange to pop round and fix it tomorrow if that’s convenient for you. I said it would be, seeing as you never go anywhere, other than to boring evening classes and to Pearl’s.”

Honestly, that’s so not true – and how did Dan know I wouldn’t be able to fix the dryer? I’m not totally incompetent, and I can manage perfectly well by myself, thank you very much. Or I could, if I didn’t have to share a house with the number one tool thief in the country. I’ll prove it, now.

I attack the dryer with renewed vigour, adding a carving fork and a pair of kitchen tongs to my arsenal of tools, along with a pack of bamboo skewers. None of them succeed in removing the back of the machine, but the skewers keep snapping off inside it so that, before long, it starts to resemble a porcupine. Then the carving fork skids off the plate hiding the motor, causing a shower of sparks to fly and me to get an electric shock.

“Phone Dad,” says Joel. “Please, Mum. Before you kill yourself.”

He picks up my phone, keys in a series of numbers and then passes the phone over to me. I sit and fume, while I wait for Dan to answer.

“Hello,” says a voice, after what seems like hours. “Daniel’s phone.”

Since when is Dan called Daniel ? And, more to the point, it may be Dan’s phone, but why’s a woman answering it?

It’s all very well for Joel to say the sex of Dan’s landlord makes no difference, but it makes all the difference in the world to me. She’s one of Dan’s colleagues, after all – he told me so – and I bet he only left me because he wanted to get involved with her. Maybe he didn’t even wait ’til then? He could have been having an affair with her behind my back for months, or even years. I can’t remember how long it’s been since he stopped paying me any attention, so it could have been decades for all I know.

“Well, that would make more sense,” says Esther, when I ask her opinion during this morning’s coffee break. “I mean, if Dan was having an affair before he moved out. Seems logical to me.”

Sometimes, you can go right off Esther. I preferred Joel’s opinion, the one he gave me when I went a bit nuts last night after I finally managed to speak to Dan.

“Don’t be stupid, Mum,” he said. “His landlady’s a right dingbat, and fugly too. I met her earlier on tonight, so I should know.”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me about her, then?” I said, “That would have saved me from sounding like a nutcase when I spoke to her.”

Spoke isn’t really the word, though screeched quite possibly is. I blame that on the shock.