Low life

Two policemen and a policewoman were the first of the emergency services to arrive on the platform. The policemen ran about like headless chickens. The woman was calmer. She quickly grasped the essentials of the situation, such as under which wheel the suicide lay, and who had been driving the train. Then more police arrived, and a paramedic team. One of the paramedics knelt down, then got his head and shoulders under the carriage and reached down and felt the dead man’s wrist for a pulse. Then the policewoman, noticing that there were passengers still on the train, indignantly ordered the train manager to evacuate it. This he did, netting around a dozen of us. He shepherded us down two flights of metal steps and told us to wait there, at the foot of the embankment.

I was on a train last Sunday evening, quite late. Reading in Berkshire to Redhill in Surrey, a journey of about an hour and a half. The train was three carriages long and we trundled at a leisurely pace across country, with frequent stops at freezing, deserted platforms. I was sitting in the front carriage with my back to the driver’s cabin, on the left-hand side as you look forward. The driver and I must have been sitting back to back because I could hear him speaking on his phone now and again. I had the carriage to myself. One of the stations near the end of the journey was called Dorking Deepdene.

On the Thursday night, my grandson had another asthma attack. Because my boy had had a few drinks before going to bed, granddad had to get up and drive everybody to the hospital. That night I had an hour’s sleep. On the Friday night I had no sleep at all. Check-in time for my flight to Lisbon was 4.30 in the morning, and it wasn’t worth renting a hotel room at Heathrow, so I sat in the Costa coffee lounge from 10.30 p.m. and read a biography of the American short-story writer Raymond Carver. At around 3 a.m., just as Carver’s lung cancer was diagnosed, the genial barista made his way over to my table and with practised politeness asked me to please take my feet off the seats. At 4.

Brazil! What fantasies, mainly erotic, are conjured up by that word! At Salvador airport, as promised, leaning over the rail bearing a sign with my name on it, was a man sent to drive me to the hotel. I gave him a nod (I was too tired to smile) and without further ado he led the way outside to his car, a taxi, baking in the 30-degree heat of a Brazilian afternoon. It was a very small taxi. The knuckles of his right hand shoved my knee aside as he pushed the gearstick into third. Hanging from the rear-view mirror was a crucifix with a tiny Christ figure realistically convulsed in its death agony. Once he’d turned on to the expressway into town, the taxi man turned to me and began to shout at me in Portuguese. The voice was deep and gruff, but the face was kind. I shrugged at him.

The film started ten minutes ago, says the man as he hands us our prebooked tickets. Another young man shows us down the stairs and through doors marked ‘Screen 2’ into darkness. There’s no light coming from the screen and it’s so dark in there I can’t see a thing. Fortunately the usher turns on one of those muffled torches and I slavishly follow his weak green light until it stops and hovers, presumably at the end of a row with vacant seats in it. By using his circle of light as a rough guide to where he is standing, then calculating from this where his ear might be, I lean towards it to whisper my gratitude, and accidentally kiss him on the eyelid. The film is an Austrian subtitled film called What Is Love (without the question mark).

We hop on a bus. It’s moderately full. We stand downstairs, next to the doors. The bus pulls off and I study her from the side without her noticing it. In a Sunday newspaper style magazine that I read recently, there was a piece by a woman writer about ‘the ten things women really want from a man’. These ten things were contrasted with the ‘11 myths about what women want’. I read both lists closely, having no idea either about the myth or the reality, even at my age. It is a myth, she claimed, for example, that women like their men to take a serious interest in what they wear. They don’t, apparently. ‘We want you to say, “That’s new. You look fantastic,” not have an opinion,’ she said.

I peered through the slatted blind to see what the weather was doing. A Mediterranean-blue sky was parked over the rooftops of Camden. Few people were out and about in the street early. I was the cab driver’s first fare of the day. He didn’t look elated to see me. When I told him where I wanted dropping and why, however, his face lit up and he whipped his cab through the empty City streets as if our lives depended on it. About 200 punters were gathered at the Tower pierhead, waiting for a signal to board. Cheerful 50-year-old blokes in knee-length shorts and sunglasses, tattooed calves, tins of lager cracked open already. Everyone smiling in the sun. Even the Tower of London looking benign. A long, mournful blast on a ship’s horn. Embarkation.

I saw a 1985 Mercedes SE 380 advertised in the classified ads of the local paper and called the number. I was more curious than anything. A ton and a half of no-expense-spared German engineering, powered by an aircraft engine, and all for the price of a top-spec iPad. You don’t see many 380s on the road these days and what’s more the advert said there was no rust. It was at least worth a phone call. The number given was a misprint, however. An amused woman in Huddersfield said I was the third person that morning to have rung up about a Mercedes. I rang the advertising department of the paper and the woman there said I was the fifth person to have rung about that particular ad and she had the correct number right there on a piece of paper in front of her.

Last weekend we stayed in a cottage at Madron, an ancient granite village in west Cornwall. A church has stood at Madron since 500 AD and there is a holy well nearby. More recently Madron and the surrounding landscape was commemorated in the poems of W.S. Graham (1918–86), who spent the latter half of his life there. By an odd coincidence I’d brought with me a poetry anthology, snatched in haste at random from a shelf, called 100 Poems by 100 Poets, edited by Harold Pinter and others, and we were surprised to find one of Graham’s poems, ‘I leave this at your ear’, included. And then we were even more surprised to read in the introduction that the anthology was conceived by Pinter and friends on a journey from London to Madron to attend Graham’s funeral.

Back in July I booked a cottage in its own wood for the last week of the school summer holidays. I was fondly thinking of my boy and his partner’s five kids, aged between one and nine, and what larks they would have running free in Nature. I was, I suppose, romantically casting them as the innocent characters in books such as Five Children and It and Swallows and Amazons, and bestowing on them the same idealised kind of camp-making, fire-lighting opportunities as I enjoyed at their age. Let me introduce them in descending order of age. The eldest three’s father, my boy’s partner’s ex, is a mild and gentle man, rather spaced out, addicted for many years to heroin and alcohol, and one of the all-time greats of the arcane world of small-town shoplifting.

My car is at the garage so often for repairs, the mechanics invite me to their Christmas parties. This year I was also invited to the World Speedway Championship, which they go to every year. I’ve never been to speedway before, I protested, but that didn’t matter, they said. It was easy to follow and in any case the speedway was really just an excuse for a massive booze-up in Cardiff. Everything was booked, they said: hotel, trains, speedway tickets. All I had to do, they said, was get my arse to the station for 8.15 a.m. on Friday with beer for the journey. There were 16 of us going, they said, drinking lager, mostly.

Then she rented us a luxury apartment at Penzance in Cornwall for a week. Sightseeing was not high on our agenda. Bring cable ties, she’d said. I’ve been a naughty girl. She went down by train; I drove. I drove due west for three hours through a rainstorm of tropical intensity. My new phone’s blue light winked text messages from her all the way down. One said: ‘Lost my musth. It’s completely gone. Menopause?’ The apartment was called Stanhope Forbes, in homage to the leading light of the Victorian era Newlyn artists’ colony. Stanhope Forbes’s paintings of bustling late-Victorian fish quay scenes, with lovely girls in virginal pinafores, decorated the apartment’s whitewashed walls.

Cider was her drink. Pint of. She was a reserved, deliberate, thoughtful woman, aged about 40. She went out hardly at all these days, she said, because she was raising a toddler. On the rare occasion when she did go out, nobody seemed to be having fun any longer. It wasn’t like the old days.  What’s happened to everybody in this town, she said? It used to be a party town full of interesting characters having fun. Where did they all go?  Then she saw me at that party, she said, and she thought, well, at least there’s one person left having fun, keeping the spirit alive, which is why she’d made a note of my details and then called. ‘Another one?’ I said.

I was staying on Dartmoor at an old farmstead in an overgrown meadow next to a fast-flowing river. We built a fire by the river and sat around it on kitchen chairs drinking and talking. There was no phone signal, no radio, no internet, no telly, nothing. We didn’t even have music. For two days and nights we heard only the sound of rushing water and sometimes wind in the trees. Wonderful it was to leave the tyrant iPhone on a windowsill to gather pollen and a cat’s dusty paw print. I was so relaxed by the end I was horizontal. On the third day, a Saturday, I’d promised to lend a hand at our village fête by doing a stint behind the bar. The organisers had said I should be there in the festive field for 12.30.  But at 12.

I was on my back on the operating table for my long-awaited minor op. Three lesions had to come off under local anaesthetic: two on my chest, one on my shoulder. A Dr Mukopadhyay wielded the scalpel. This slight, shy, otherwordly man surprised me at the outset by diffidently placing a comforting, perhaps healing, perhaps textbook hand on my shoulder and leaving it there until I ducked my shoulder away in embarrassment. Once he’d begun cutting, Dr Mukopadhyay kept at it for over an hour with all the care and concentrated attention of a master watchmaker. When he voiced an instruction, he did so softly and humbly. As Dr Mukopadhyay is a bit of a mouthful, the nurses dancing attendance on him, one male and two females, called him Dr Muk.

Well, I found the Adulis restaurant and my online date was there. She didn’t muck about, and neither for once did I, and when we parted at noon the next day, I was very tired. So I was relieved to be checking in later at a spa hotel on the north Cornish coast called the Scarlet, to write a travel piece about their two-day organic wine-tasting break called ‘Naturally into wine’. It was the perfect opportunity to recuperate, I imagined. A gentle swim, perhaps, a stroll on the beach, then a glass or two of Peasant’s Varooka in the evening to see me out. A cheerful woman called Cherie checked me in. Should she put me down for the beach yoga class, or perhaps the transformational dancing, before breakfast? ‘Transformational dancing!’ I said.

I came up and out of the underground station into the busy Brixton Road. It was 9 o’clock on a humid, overcast summer evening. As well as being a bustling place of departure and arrival, the precinct in front of the station seemed also to be a preferred place for the locals to meet and sit and socialise. I was looking for an Eritrean restaurant called Adulis. Here I was to meet a woman I’d met two days ago on a dating website. This new dating website is proving amazingly fruitful, which surprises me not least because it was the first time I’ve been truthful on one. So far we’d exchanged messages, this woman and I, mainly learned ones about books we liked and different kinds of fountain pen ink.

I’m at home watching the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ ‘Man on Fire’ video on the laptop. Talk about uplifting. I’m watching with my earbuds in, and loving America, when the phone rings twice and stops.  This means my boy hasn’t credit on his phone and wants me to ring him back. I stop the video and call him. He’s bidding on a car on eBay, he says. Would I have a look at the description and tell him what I think? There’s a minute to go, he says. So I go to the auction site and look at the listing and immediately my inspired mood evaporates. My boy and I have bought plenty of cheap cars on eBay over the years. Some turned out to be good ones; with others we were completely done over. We’re experienced.

In her profile photo she was curtseying prettily in a floral dress. In her written profile she described herself as a ‘nice lady, with a nice and open soul, and with common sense’. Not what I was looking for at all, but she lived quite near, and, with petrol the price it is, I was willing to overlook things. I also admired her advice to any chaps contemplating sending her a message. Our profiles should not tell her that we like good food ‘as if you are living to eat’. Nor should we say that we liked to laugh, because ‘everybody does this’. Finally, we shouldn’t claim to be happy, because ‘all serious profiles from dating sites are sad’.

After the launch party of Harry Mount’s How England Made the English, there was a second, impromptu, diehards’ party at a flat belonging to a book reviewer called Molly. Here I fell into conversation with a publisher who, while making a lunge for our hostess, invited me to another book launch slated for the following week.  An official invitation arrived by email a few days later. The book was called The Irresistible Mr Wrong. It was written by a notorious old roué, I vaguely remembered the publisher saying, who in his prime had married a string of celebrated beauties, seduced countless others, and was so fabulously well endowed he had a giant pepper pot named after him.