I passed by my friend Sarah’s house looking for the choo choo cake pan I lent her in February. This, my dears, is the sort of thing I do in the evenings, and I leave you to imagine what possible use I intend to make of a cake pan shaped like a train when there is no-one in the house younger than 16. What is even more disturbing is that Sarah claims to have returned the cake pan to me and therefore, not only am I a woman who bakes novelty cakes, but I am a woman with the memory of a hen who bakes novelty cakes. I can’t remember getting it back, nor have I even the foggiest idea where an 18” square lump of silicone covered mould could be in my kitchen. It’s not as though it could hide undetected amongst the, I’m hanging my head in shame now, other seven similarly large novelty cake pans (the honey-bee, the castle, the Easter bunny, etc) that are in the cupboard.
But while we were standing talking about disintegrating marriages (mine) and absentee work-too-much husbands (hers) on her doorstep (as you do) she gave me a look I haven’t seen before, a measured, wary, one step backwards glance as though she was expecting me to burst into flames, or worried that I might do something else, equally unpredictable, like melt. I think this is what lunatics must feel like when they’ve recently left the asylum after filling the bath with curry powder and trying to boil it with a three bar electric fire (no don’t look at me – that was Martin in Account’s ex-flat mate). Not pity, but sympathy, and something else, trepidation maybe, a fear that marriage break ups are catching.
And then I catch sight of the Academics next door who are also friends of mine, and through which, at a party at their house, I met Sarah. They are sitting huddled together in front of a computer screen, Mrs Academic’s hennaed hair an auburn corona around her little kitten face. I wonder if I should wave, and before the thought gets a chance to reach my brain, I have lifted my hands and she has seen me. Within seconds she and Mr Academic have bounded outside to say hello. And there is the same look – three sets of guarded smiles and nervous laughs.
I’m an emotional invalid. They don’t know what to say to me.
It makes me slightly paranoid. As though they might know something even worse about my life than I do, like a terminal diagnosis for something I still imagine is only psychosomatic – as though they are about to break really, really bad news. Maybe the ex's girlfriend is pregnant with twins and I'm the last to know.
They insist that I come in, and so I follow them into their lovely, shambolic, crowded 1950s style kitchen with the Ikea table that they bought ten years ago at the same time as we did ours, and then distressed by banging it with hammers and shoes so that it would lose its shiny new look. It has lost its shiny new look now and blends in perfectly with the rest of the odd rickety chairs and mismatched Middle Eastern pottery. We're oth distressed these days. They don’t ask me to sit down and so we stand there awkwardly floundering in the middle of the room, me making more amusing remarks and them ha ha haing, whilst we all feel deeply uncomfortable, and they look at me trying not to pity.
'You’ve lost weight,' says Mrs Academic.
'Yes, well, the stress diet, you know – the divorce diet, whatever, I say,' then I paraphrase that line in The Devil Wears Prada and add:' I’m only one trip to India away from my ideal weight.'
HA HA HA this gets a big laugh.
After about two hundred years I say I need to go, and they grasp the statement with relief, like it was a knotted sheet and I was the fire.
Poor souls. They are trying hard to be kind. I appreciate it. It's not that I don't need their charity. I just wish it was easier to accept.
