Cake or Death Read online

  ALSO BY HEATHER MALLICK

  Pearls in Vinegar: The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick

  For my beloved, Stephen Petherbridge,

  on whom I rely,

  and

  for Jennifer Allford,

  the beautiful, the indomitable one.

  “Planet Earth is an angry place; a searing bauble of rage. All this fury, roaring round the ether—and where does it go? The answer is it simply dissipates, flitters up toward the clouds, where it hangs around making pigeons sick and causing thunderstorms. Not good enough. We’ve got to work out a way of harnessing all this spare rage and using it to power our kettles. Come on, science. Hurry up. You wouldn’t like us when we’re angry.”

  —Journalist Charlie Brooker getting impatient,

  The Guardian, 2006

  “Life, she thought, is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake and here is one of them.”

  —from The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford, 1945

  Contents

  Introduction

  Mrs. Tittlemouse

  Tell Me Where It Hurts

  You Can Check In Any Time You Like

  Specimen Day

  Meet the Brookstones

  The Monstrous Regiment of Men

  Give Me Taxes

  After the Love Is Gone

  Falling in Love with France

  Fear Festival

  The People I Detest

  Lessing Is More

  The Life Wot I Had

  How to Ignore Things

  Urban versus Rural: Urban Wins

  Born Ugly

  The Triangle of Death

  An Open Letter to My Writer’s Block

  How You Americans Annoy Me

  Things I Like About Americans

  Pieces of Cake

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Here, for your perusalment and enjoyage, is a collection of nice, shiny, all-new essays (for such was the insistence of my editor). I felt my older essays had mellowed and wised up—or is it wizened?—and were ready for drinking now. He thought not. Fine. Since when has a bottle of wine been left to age at my house anyway?

  The reason I wanted to stick with my aging writing was that we live in awful times. Cruelty and stupidity flourish. We will look back on them with distaste, or worse, with nostalgia. So skip this era, I thought. It was not to be.

  You’ll detect some eccentricity, healthy I hope, nothing to frighten the horses, but an air of oddity, of slight unhingement. We Canadians are a stolid people, well-behaved to a fault. But I believe humans are all extraordinarily odd, and that’s interesting. In life and in prose, it’s good to inject a little strange.

  I didn’t come up with the title until long after Knopf had the new! young! lustrous! essays in its hands, and I can’t claim it’s entirely original. The choice between patisseries and the choir everlasting has long been a theme of British comedy, and British comedy has kept me going through the darker bits. I was watching a lot of Eddie Izzard stand-up comedy during a recent, fairly grim phase, and on Dress to Kill, he was talking bollocks, as he would put it, about how the Church of England wouldn’t really be able to do fundamentalism with the élan of the Cathols, the Muslims, the more excitable religions. A Torquemada, for instance, would offer heretics painful death, no options. But the Vicar of Bray would offer fair-minded alternatives—death, or cake with a nice cup of tea.

  Naturally, everyone would choose cake, and then the vicar would worry that they’d run out. And the parishioners wouldn’t like it. “What, so my choice is ‘or death’?” a lady dressed in a herbaceous border would say indignantly. “Well then, I’ll have the chicken, please.”

  It’s an eccentric set of alternatives, but an apt metaphor. For all that we are told that we lucky few in the First World have infinite choice—in life itself, not to mention in track shoes and facial tissue—the choices are really quite stark. You have to figure out what life is, what your stance is on it and what version of yourself you find bearable. But you can see life as a blasted heath, a stark, waterless, comfortless, nasty place—and still narrow your eyes and pick out bits of cake. And if you do it right, you’ll find there’s a lot of cake about, in people’s memoirs, for instance, in lovely taxes, in your own face even. Seek out things that give you pleasure; nobody else is going to do it for you.

  I haven’t had great deal of cake in my life, or so an American taught by the Declaration of Independence to pursue cake would say in utter mystification. I was raised in the Scottish manner, without pleasure. You don’t accept compliments, you worry dreadfully about other people being poor (and cakeless) or treated in a way that is not nice, you feel terribly guilty about your new Gucci boots, and when you feel shamed about wanting to drag your husband to Paris when the man frankly prefers bucket-and-spade vacations, you have fits over whether you should go to Cuba. Yes, there’s sun and sand, but how could you enjoy yourself knowing that only a short distance away, the Americans were torturing prisoners in Guantanamo?

  When I have insomnia and try to put myself back to sleep with fantasies of winning a billion-dollar lottery, I dream of improving maquiladora factories. I would prefer to close them down but I have a responsibility to my employees. So I improve conditions. There I lie till dawn breaks, planning a new ventilation system and a green roof for my factories. In the end, I arise for a day that is less tiring than my nighttime fantasies.

  At this point, I usually say, “Screw this, we’re going to Paris.” So I go and drink wine and eat boudin for breakfast. I don’t loll or stroll or ponder or even fais du lèche-vitrines, I shop in the Napoleonic fashion—I must have this, and I must have it now, although it is very cold on the way to Moscow and I will die but still—and I throw myself into pleasure. As the essayist Nora Ephron puts it, do you splurge or do you hoard? I do both, with much angst. I love my husband—whom I chose instantly out of the very sorry lineup that is men—I love my girls, I live for books and friends, and the world is so full of a number of things, from cabbages to kings, all of it within my reach.

  You’ll think the book has little to do with cake, but you would be wrong. Clearly, the essays are mostly slanted on the side of death, but may I say that the last one is a real piece of cake. So there. You can splurge and hoard. You can enjoy and give plentifully to others. You can choose cake and death.

  Mrs. Tittlemouse

  Why we clean, an essay to grease the elbows

  I am so bloody depressed. And the awful thing about it is that gloom used to be something to be ashamed of. I was very good at being ashamed of it and had a variety of slogans to use as cricket bats on my head. “Just get on with it” was one. “Mustn’t grumble” was another. Until I realized that I was earning a fine income doing just that, that is, writing newspaper columns that were essentially me grumbling for 850 words every week. “Just do it” was very good, the only thing for which Nike deserves credit.

  But the slogans don’t work any more. Stephen Fry once wrote that just as they have laugh tracks on television comedies, so should they have weeping tracks on the news. And he wrote that during the first Gulf War and he hadn’t even had his nervous breakdown, which culminated in him sitting in a car in Bruges contemplating the other use for an exhaust pipe.

  There isn’t anything on the news to cheer anyone. One response would be to stop watching it, but look what happened to the United States when the citizens of that huge once-rich-now-debtful-I-just-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself country stopped paying attention. The place exploded, then imploded, and bits started falling off, like New Orleans soon followed by the rest of Louisiana. In 2004, the nadir was reached after George W. Bush’s second alleged election. An American student was reduced to setting up a webs
ite called sorryeverybody.com and stacks of smart Americans rigid with shock and coated with pessimism sent in pictures of themselves holding up signs apologizing to the world.

  I cried as I watched it online, but by 2004 I was crying pretty easily.

  The trough of melancholy in which we live now is a shallow grave. My husband, whom we shall call S., is British and doesn’t understand the concept of depression. Every day spent outside his homeland is a holiday, according to him. When I tell him how sad I am, he asks why. Foolishly, I tell him. There’s an awful phrase about how you have to “take things on board,” meaning hear them and live with them. Clearly, I cannot take things on board. Because I tell S. that these men called the Janjaweed are kidnapping children in the Sudan and …

  S. is humane. He understands the wrongness of the Janjaweed but does not grasp why I am devastated by the wrongdoing of mad people in a faraway country not only of which I know nothing but that I can’t even pick out of an atlas. We know this because he has brought an atlas into the bedroom where I am curled.

  “You know that song ‘Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic’?” he says. I nod, but don’t rise to this as I know he hates Sting. Presumably because Sting is a Brit who still finds a reason to live in Britain and is a prat and poseur. “If you were writing that song,” he says, “it would go, ‘Every little thing you do is rubbish.’”

  He laughs. I don’t.

  I think I know why we are still conjoined. We couldn’t be more different. I like this. I wish I were him. We were watching the Springsteen tribute to Pete Seeger the other day and he, who loathes hip hop, said, “The progress of American music—from Hoedown to Down, ho.” And he sat there grinning at his own cleverness. I wish I could come up with lines like that. But I am gloomy, and somehow I admire the fact that my deep gloom is a source of amusement to him. (On the other hand, he doesn’t understand North American ethical laxity. The other day in a seafood restaurant, he actually said to me, “Why did you order that if you weren’t going to finish it?” Seriously. “I guess it just worked out that way,” I said.)

  Anything can set me off. In 2004, I felt so desperately sorry for Blue State Americans, those nice people, a credit to a nation that was about to go all excremental. And there’s no going back, they realized that, and on that website, they sent out telegrams of shame and sorrow, a student dorm arranging their apology in the form of track shoes, people’s babies holding up signs (I normally disapprove of this—your baby has no opinions on stem cells, lady—but those babies were going to grow up with the consequences). You poor kid. Some blue-eyed Democrat guy in Texas looked grim, saying he had voted behind enemy lines, and he might as well have been a Resistance fighter in France in the Second World War, sending a coded message on his little radio hidden in a baguette.

  An American tourist in Canada visiting what looked like Lake Louise wrote “I’m sorry you have to live next door to us” and my face got all crumply and wet, like a sodden piece of paper towel. Then Canadians accidentally voted a bit too right-wingly and I felt sorry for that young woman in retrospect. She no longer had us as her hideout. We were Narnia full of goofballs, and suddenly we were mean goofballs with bellies crawling with complaints.

  You really do need a sound FX machine for the news now. The soundtrack for Deliverance could play whenever an Abu Ghraib story came up. Now those toothless backwoods boys had jobs. Cue a needle-like scream for Madeleine Albright smugging about how the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under UN sanctions were fine with her, and a chunky spew for any Scientologist. Cue the nightmare zither from The Third Man while watching Tony Blair’s crusty little teeth growing down to his toes as he told his lies from the pulpit. Or maybe everyone would be automatically naked and you could comfort yourself with how bad all forked animals looked compared to the pelted ones they were driving out of existence.

  But these would be panaceas, mere toys. I didn’t need that. I needed something stronger than religion. It was a craving for order. Now I know what you’re thinking—this is where Germany ran into trouble in the 1930s—but I didn’t mean public order. I meant personal order. Something much more benign and mine own.

  I became Mrs. Tittlemouse. Beatrix Potter doesn’t rate highly as literature by people who judge such things, but they are wrong. She is heaven in a sponge mop. I read her as a child and to this day love her paintings, her stories, her home-boiling of squirrels so her watercolours could be anatomically exact. Beatrix Potter made domesticity desirable.

  All right, she didn’t, but she domesticated me. Personal order has become my badge and the only thing that really works for depression.

  I’m not saying it makes you un-depressed. You’re still hideously depressed but you’re a hideously depressed person who has ironed all her sheets and made a fine bed with hospital corners and highly placed blankets with a generous chin of linen. It’s nothing to sneer at. It’s an accomplishment and depressed people don’t have many of those.

  Neither do cheerful people these days (or is that just me and my green unhealthy glow of gloom?).

  My side of the street has been cleared of litter by my own hands, and I don’t care if it looks odd. I think it looks … tidy. I would have said it looked Dutch, but the Dutch went a bit racist recently so the Keukenhof will have to bloom this spring without me. Very few places on the planet left to visit with a clear conscience, I note.

  Tidiness didn’t register with me when I was young. It doesn’t register with adults now. For instance, I doubt smokers can be trained to think of cigarette butts as litter even though the orange stubs lie stained, flattened and oddly curled outside the bus shelter like a covey of maggots. The butts, I mean. In a smoker’s mind, the ciggie is over and the butt does not rate as an object.

  I understand this. I leave the butts where they lie. But when I walk up my street to the Chinese restaurant with its excellent free wings with orders over $30 or to the pharmacy with those nice sensible people in their white smocks giving me pretty little pills for what ails me, I pick up litter for the bin at the end of the road. Not for houses with Conservative signs—they will rely on market forces—but everyone else can wonder where that rotting pack of McDonald’s fries that sat in the front lavender bed for a month disappeared to. Not down their dog’s throat but into the garbage.

  I vacuum with my German-made Miele. It has a HEPA filter which means that what goes in stays in. I use it for dusting too, although I sometimes forget to turn the suckage down and the thing eats badly chosen paint from the radiator covers (you need a primer if you use latex over oil, Dodgy Bros. Painters). Then I look at the carpet and it is fleckless. I am not fleckless. I am depressed. But you can’t quarrel with a blank-faced expanse of carpet. One part of it is like any other. There’s something lovely, something reliable, about that.

  Should the worst happen, a bad oyster perhaps, you can lie on that carpet and think, as I have, that it’s not the worst place in the world to die slowly. I’ve vomited in Moscow subway toilets and Paris department stores and I’ve gotten to know the bogs quite well, their shapes, their reliable coldness, their antiseptic smell. But the floors on which I knelt have been as a stranger to me. You don’t know who they’ve had as guests. Why the bogs should be so clean is a pleasant mystery. Of course they’re only surface-clean. I remember my high school biology teacher, Mr. Liptak, sending us with petri dishes and agar into corners of our high school, including the washrooms, to let the dishes do nothing more than sit. We’d bring the empty glass containers back and watch the stuff starting to grow, beige eternal matter that looked ineradicable. How could you scrub every corner of every room so that nothing would sprout? Despite our complaints, we know doctors are not wrong nowadays to eject us from hospitals the day after the operation. Without a private room and utterly manic cleanliness from personnel in white impermeable suits, the beige stuff is coming for us.

  I regard my last Moving Day with disbelief. It’s part of the reason why I have sunk money into this small house. I
cannot contemplate a moving day again. That day was a sinkhole, and it’s my fault. I picked out of the Yellow Pages the worst moving company in existence. By the end of moving day, they had broken so much furniture that they owed me money.

  But the worst thing was the chunky guy who went into the bathroom and began, how can I put this, a good clear-out. He must have been in there for a half-hour. It was a brass band of wind-breaking, a prolonged trumpeting of such volume that eventually none of us could pretend it wasn’t happening because it was drowning out the conversation. Even his workmates were embarrassed and told him enough was enough. “Hey, I gotta go,” he shouted back. It sounded like the Grade Four class at your kid’s school doing a tuba version of “God Save the Queen.”

  A week later, at the freshly renovated house, I opened the box containing my vacuum cleaner. A foul odour rose out of it, like liquefied hyena. Somehow that man’s inner atmosphere had been packed and moved. I didn’t know you could transport air in an unsealed box, and this has changed my attitude to a lot of things.

  Every evening now I light a Lampe Berger, a catalytic converter that burns scented “ozoalcohol,” killing bacteria and making the house smell like gardenias. It’s pleasant, and no one asks me why I do it. Which is lucky as I’d have to explain that I have never recovered from the revelation of the packaging possibilities of hell smells.

  A house will always be a beacon for bacteria. I will never forget that news story out of Japan headlined “Underwear a nest for ringworms.” Doctors were warning citizens about their national habit of wearing underpants to bed. Air, sunlight, cleanliness! What can I do to regulate this mad microscopic world?

  Here come the stripes.

  Over the years I have straightened out in the decorating sense. I look at my living room now, with the broad yellow-and-white striped Roman blinds, the radiators, bleached parallel oak stair rails, the indents on the white-painted wood of the fireplace surround, the evenly loaded and staggered bookcases, and I realize with both pleasure and embarrassment that the theme of my house is stripes. Straight lines. Yes, there are blots of colour like the Julia McNeely painting of the red rooster and the mini-explosion of book dust jackets, but anyone with an eye could come into this house and see a regimented, possibly disturbed mind.