Stupid cow.
A meeting gets cancelled — you don’t get cancelled, it’s the meeting — and you go into a tailspin when it isn’t your fault and it’s only a postponement, anyway, not a cancellation.
We can have an early dinner, maybe. I would enjoy an early dinner.
Because I’ve had no lunch. Running on empty again.
But I’m not empty.
I will meet you.
That’s not empty.
But I’ve had too much coffee — I’m all wound up. Even if the breeze hadn’t sprinkled it with gutter dust and toxins, I shouldn’t have more of this coffee, or any other coffee, or anything like coffee. I should be drinking some kind of wort.
Christ, I’m ridiculous. Shouldn’t be allowed out. Shouldn’t be allowed in or out.
And for a moment she smiled, for a moment the blossoms looked perfect: the bounce of them, the contours of infant colour and generous scent.
Times like this — it’s like falling down your own personal well, but you can also reach back in there and pull yourself out by the ears. It takes an effort, but you can. Better with help, but I am embarrassed about getting help for this. This is minor. I’m tired and I had a rough morning, that’s all. I can deal with it.
And I really shouldn’t think about politics and who should, frankly? Who should willingly waste their time on that? Politics is just an organised and expensive way of being furious.
Meg set her mug on the table and walked down from the decking at the front of the café.
Then she stalled, returned, picked up the mug and took it inside to leave it more handy for clearing up. She nodded to the guy at the till and generally behaved as if she loved the place and all its works and anticipated an imminent revolution which would involve the comfortably old-school middle classes being able to have more time for reading and a wider choice of theatre groups and box sets of continental TV dramas.
And then she left again. ‘Thank you.’ Slipped herself away.
15:23
AS MEG SLOPED down the hill to her bus stop, she was pursued — as happened now and then — by the stain, the taste, of that other Meg, Maggie, Margaret. Thatcher.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie — out, out, out.
You’d hear people yelling it all the time and agree, but all the same — it was hard not to take it personally as well.
And the last person I’d want to be associated with — apart from me — was her.
Laura said once, ‘Well, at least she did something. This lot — they don’t do anything. None of them. They just talk. She did something. And she was a woman.’
And I didn’t say back, ‘Well, Countess Báthory did something — she did something with virgins’ blood and murder and definitely, yes, that’s doing something. And that Roman woman who poisoned Claudius and a bunch of other people … I should make a list of women who were unpleasant so I could quote from it properly … and Lucrezia Borgia who did something, a shitload of things, I’d guess, but I can’t recall … I have a friend who takes an interest in the Borgias, so I read up on them a bit … I have a memory that’s shot to hell … I should know, I shot it — that much I do remember … But I can learn. I can learn about all of those women in the concentration camps, the guards — you see them in photos, in those uniforms looking like … it’s like a terrible joke … women in schoolgirl skirts who torture people … These are women who did things. Doing things doesn’t make you wonderful. Doing — that’s not enough, is it? I do things. We all do things. It’s which things — what things we do … And being a woman — that’s not a guarantee that you’ll be lovely. Trust me, I have a vagina and know. And I am not glad that I have it — the thing does not empower me. I do not stare at it in a hand mirror and wish it well and thank it for granting me a lifetime of pleasant experience … But yes, she was a woman and she did things. Yes. For sure. Thanks for sharing. Bloody marvellous. Bless you sideways and back and forth.’
Yes, I didn’t say that.
There’s never any point in bothering to say that. If you’ve got an idea that it might be necessary as something to say, then you already know that actually saying it will not be welcomed or understood and you keep shtum.
If you’re sober, you keep yourself shut up. Pissed … Well, if you’re pissed, then all bets are off.
The trouble was that Margaret Thatcher got her drunk.
Another lie.
I got me drunk.
Meg had imagined that she would die before old Maggie — time was against the former prime minister, but serious drinking, industrial-scale drinking, had been giving Meg the push towards an early finish line that she’d hoped for. She had, after all, wanted to leave — every other option having apparently been knackered.
But then Baroness Margaret Hilda had slipped out via the Ritz and gone before — the heart people said she didn’t have stopped beating.
Her soul was lifted free — if people have souls. I think of it catching in the Green Park branches and resting there like a bird, being unburdened suddenly, turning about and pausing to see and see and see.
And Meg — sober Meg — at that point sober-for-two-years-alreday Meg, had stayed alive, moved past her namesake and gone on. Or something like that.
At the time of Maggie’s death, Meg was not doing many AA meetings — not doing any meetings, in fact — she was not attending and not exactly accepting suggestions and advice offered by people who were, or any other people she might encounter.
She no longer really encountered people.
She was discontented. She had also just abandoned the self-helpless group that had forced her to sit in a circle with Molly once a week and tried to pat her arm.
A bloody therapeutic sewing circle that was supposed to make me feel like a human being, a convincing woman.
Which I am not. Even a gynaecologist doesn’t find me quite convincing — ‘Here’s some pain, oh and by the way, your life as a reproductive human being is now over. You’ll have noticed the little changes — I’m telling you about the Big One. The last one before the Really Big One.’
Although I should leave that now — I should let that be. This morning has gone. And that final morning with Maggie has gone — with no harm to her, only to me.
Meg — still sober, but discontented Meg — had found out the news about Thatcher from the radio and had wanted to be happy.
But you can’t be happy that a wandery old lady has died.
She’d played Elvis Costello and sung along and still not managed to be glad.
It had done me no good to outlast her. Or to see the way the world was, beyond her active life, beyond her damage. The place had been steered along unkindly.
Not many pensioners, frail and needful, get to die in a suite at the Ritz, all cosy and dignified.
How many pensioners get to die while being cosy and dignified and never mind the Ritz …?
I tried to be outraged about that, but it didn’t make me angry. I wished it would.
I wasn’t sad and wasn’t happy and wasn’t anything — only tired.
The final satisfaction that nature had been meant to provide, the assassination by wear and tear and time and real things — all the stuff politicians liked to ignore — the death that Meg had shouted for in bars and bars and studies and clubs and arguments and bars and bars, in a significant number of bars … here it was. But the happiness she’d expected to acquire as a result was unavailable.