ka - Tales from the back door
Copyright 2013 Madeleine Masterson
Wonka is demanding to know why I have arrived home with my face all screwed up with tension. ‘is it work?’ he shrills, skipping ahead of me and meeting Golly by the radiator (I must try to remember and turn the heating off I think, now it is past the summer solstice). ‘Well – ‘
‘Because if it is I don’t want to hear it!’ he continues knocking all his biscuit boxes down and scraping his head on the cat food pouches lined up like a row of soldiers. They fall down too.
Of course it’s work. I had two appointments today, one with a strapping big farmer feeling fairly ghastly due to family stuff. The second, and it was this one that was still hanging around me, with this chap hovering on the autistic spectrum. I had heartily resisted throughout our one to one, the appeal of his world. After all, inside his world, no one but him, was right. No one but him understood or came close. And he listened to himself and all was fine. Despite my resistance I felt terribly caught up in this loop. Or was it loopy.
‘Come on!’ shouted Wonka ‘me and Golly are famished!’ I felt like a slow bovine creature unable to make simple decisions like chicken or beef flavoured morsels. I stabbed at the button on my CD/radio. Complete silence instead of endless whittering might help me. That, or reading the side of the goat’s milk carton which has jolly write ups and photos of typical (I’m using that word now instead of normal) people enjoying said milk.
The autistic chap haunted me though. Even his face I decided was other worldly, it was bony, sunken even, with blotches and staring eyes.
Actually it wasn’t too far removed from the gallery of blokes all looking for a soul mate on the dating site I used. Regular ‘new matches’ would arrive to taunt me. Wonka had commented on this of course, telling me that I was Ok as I was. What? I countered, struggling along on my own – not just the bags of shopping and having to carry them for miles from the parked car, down the other street because I couldn’t get parked in my own. No, it was the overall struggle. ‘Surely there is someone out there for me?’
‘Me and Golly!’ – ‘and Baba!’ yes indeed. Baba was the someone out there, he was doing his usual piteous squeak at the back door. Perhaps a stray, who knows, he was allowed access to some food and drink. Possibly some of Wonka’s biscuits. Anyhow Wonka enjoyed boxing him into a corner where I would find him hours later having forgotten I’d let him in. Golly, benign and loving cat that he was, tolerated Baba and not just because he couldn’t see him. Being blind had nothing to do with his temperament. Golly oozed love and peace. Wonka had attitude.
Wonka had a few things to say about companions and the like. Watching me get ready for a meeting up with one of the gallery he would advise on clothing, driving, walking or taxi and finally whether to tape a favourite programme.
On my return, usually disillusioned, feeling ugly and old he immediately restored my spirits. ‘I never liked the name Malcolm!’ he trilled, and ‘try and stay local next time!’ He’s got a point. On the long drive back I had to endure some organ music as this seemed to be what people like to listen to after 7pm on my music station. They don’t refer to the other listener for nothing
The latest line up is equally unappealing and I keep getting viewed by someone in Slovenia. I daren’t tell Wonka about this, as I can’t promise for his political sensibilities. He often veers towards conservative views only to veer back to a liberal stance. Golly I think, is with Greenpeace.
Talking myself in and out of these tenuous relationships, I can rely on Wonka to counsel if not life coach me into action. ‘Go on! Take a risk!’ he urges, while I spend too much time ruminating on whether to or not. ‘He looks suspect!’ as I press the send button for my message. Well at least I’m making an effort. I close the laptop down and crank myself up off the floor. To my left, on the settee, is Golly slumbering away by the cushion with Wonka snoozing, angel like on the top.
Lined up by the cushion are three of Wonka’s toys. A knitted duck, a hand made fur cat and a proper cat toy, which is a penguin. All about the same size and to my knowledge, Wonka has never bothered with any of them. Well maybe the cat. There is just room for me at the other end of the settee.
Perched on it, I enjoy the rest of my evening in a pleasant daze and not a relationship in sight. ‘there’s always tomorrow!’ says Wonka, commencing his night time patrol. Hmm, that’s what Scarlett said.
Looking at yourself first thing is fraught with danger. My face was bony, sunken even, with blotches and staring eyes. Now where had I had seen this kind of look before? Luckily, and with thanks to Wonka and his sort of don’t dwell on it get on with it and count your lucky stars on it philosophy, I did not need to analyse my look, or indeed my life and the careful thinking behind it. Instead and with one hundred percent approval from Wonka, I needed to go on a healthy eating regime. This alone would sort out my attraction factor. And I mean the attraction to myself never mind the gallery.
Being a rather impatient let’s get it on type (see, I do use that word!) the regime had to start immediately. Out with the ginger nuts and in with the thin weird tasting rye wafers cum biscuits cum just weird tasting things. Also in, was the swimming. If I couldn’t actually get to the baths I was thinking about it, and in my regime, this counted as healthy exercise. Rifling through the pamphlet which read like a train timetable or worse, that of a pending bus, was also good exercise. Of the mind.
Two weeks in with this new regime and I haven’t noticed even a tiny bit of loose clothing. Some days I just feel outright fat. ‘You! Fat!’ my dear work colleagues say when I draw attention to my size. Wonka however knows different. ‘have you weighed yourself yet?’ and ‘those sweets are missing from the fruit bowl!’
In a frenzy of thin rye biscuits I need something to take away the sort of earthy dried up taste and only one of my humbugs was going to do it. As a side effect though, I was brushing my teeth more. Let’s not go there.
Wonka keeps fairly fit by darting from one window to another and this includes the half glass on the back door. He can peer through this, and round the blind and curtain shielding me from the world out there and the neighbours opposite. If there is another cat out there in the yard and thanks to my St Francis attitude, there is always a cat out there in the yard, then he races upstairs to look at them from my bedroom window. At night, once I start my settling down thing, he is often a fat huddled shape behind the heavy curtain swathed across my bedroom window. He is perched on a sill roughly an inch wide. Trapeze artist, new philosopher in the making, he has it all. If only I could step up a notch, and tackle life with this devil may care attitude.
My face throughout the regime, seems the same. The blotches have moved right enough, and in certain lights, my face seems fat rather than bony.
I have recently messaged a gallery member who lives locally, just like Wonka suggested. Also, and following his tip for losing weight, I have weighed myself. It was up at the baths where in the reception is one of those massive machines that can’t ever be wrong. Also, it declares your weight to the massive queue of waiting swimmers. It was alright though, as on Sundays there is a gap between family bathing and family bathing and it is lane swimming.
I had come upon the lane swimming after one of my incidents in with the family bathing. Suffice to say, I now needed to avoid some of the family bathers. Wonka agreed with this tactic, and thought that lane swimming would be demanding in a different way. He was right. At first I tried the middle lane thinking that here would be the kind of swimmers who had a bit of practice under their belt and were fairly speedy. No. Here
were the swimmers who were too fast for lane one, the ‘slow’ lane. Again I seemed to mark myself out somehow by carving a middle lane through the dawdling swimmers in this lane. There was one option left to take and that was to move into the ‘fast’ and third lane. Now as I swam up and down in the middle lane I had of course checked this out. It seemed to me to be full of olympic style swimmers complete with goggles and sports swimwear. Also, they did fancy stuff like shooting up the bath with a flipper like action and a float held in front.
‘Hold your own!’ shouted Wonka as I departed for my Sunday swim and said weigh in. ‘How’s life in the fast lane?’ he pestered on my return. I whispered how much I weighed and that somehow I had kept some sort of pace up against the relentless backstroke and crawl of these olympian swimmers.
I felt exhausted, fat, old and ugly.
Slumped on the settee later on and sipping a glass of red purely for its anti- oxidant brain stimulating effect, I vowed to keep going.
That spark of motivation would drive me on and I envisaged the trimmer, fitter more even skin toned me.
‘Me and Golly are starving!’ shouted Wonka from his perch on the sideboard. A bigger, sleeker and well fed cat would have been hard to find in our street or the one where I had to park the car. Shaking out a handful of biscuits into Wonka’s trough I thought it looked like rain. Wonka sniffed the contents and jumped up onto the side to inspect the yard. Sure enough, specks of rain appeared on the window and me and Wonka turned our attention to the bottom of the back door. It was a tiny kitchen and the back door opened onto the first bit where the washer was and where the small surface I prepared all my meals was. More than one person in the kitchen was fine if you were having an affair with them, married to them or wanted to be. Even me and Wonka was a crowd. When Golly tiptoed by I looked like an exotic dancer, moving in strange ways to avoid him.
But yes, the back door. Try as it might, it could not hold the rain back anymore, so when it rained outside, it rained in the kitchen too.
The Back Door: it had suffered, been through it really, been healed and patched up but the scars were still there. Struck at with a fireman’s axe had rather changed the hang of it. Prior to this it had been a good sturdy door, opening and shutting without any trouble. Indeed it was through this very good door that Wonka had sped in and stayed in
.
Through the same door trotted Baba occasionally (and straight back out) and then Golly in his twilight zone also popping out and down the three steps into the yard. All was well until I had one of my stressful days where clients, colleagues, passing strangers and the world were lined up. The awful realisation that my keys were on the inside of the door and not available to me on the outside led to a series of ridiculous decisions. Wonka gazed at me with a startled expression from the comfort of the sideboard.
‘We’re starving, me and Golly!’ he mouthed through the back window. ‘I’ve locked myself out’ I whispered back at him. Saying it made it true. Calling the fire brigade was the option suggested by a friendly neighbour and seized upon as the right thing to do. Why it took three burly firemen to hack into the good back door and reunite me with Wonka and Golly it matters not. I had arrived home. Yes, I no longer had a good back door that locked or held the world at bay and would cost a fortune to fix and ruin my hitherto good relationship with the landlord, and No, I was no longer in the yard with stress levels a mile high.
‘Locksmith?’ questioned Wonka, once he had settled and Golly had come out from under the bed. ‘Well I – ‘
‘it’ll cost a fortune!’ and ‘ that was a good back door!’
So the back door had been through it rather. The chap that fixed it up or bodged it up wanted to replace it with a new one. At an exorbitant price. Wonka advised against and said we could make do
Like the concentration of a animal marking its prey, Wonka studied the steady trickle of water through the bottom of the back door. Loath to alert Landlords to this new problem, I set about laying towels and old bits of cloth down below. This worked nicely unless it rained in the middle of the night or when I was slaving away at work. Both happened. In the night, in my trance like state coming down stairs to use the bathroom, stepping round cats in the dark, cat dishes and cat toys, I was not ready to step into a lake where the kitchen used to be.
‘Don’t go in the kitchen Mum! Warned Wonka as I crashed through the front door after another ghastly appointment. ‘Be strong!’ Wonka suggested I get my courage up and ring the Landlord. Having just put together a rather good session on assertiveness for my clients, I wondered yet again about the lack of my own. Surely I can get through a silly old phone call?
The Landlord arrived into the yard en famille, on a Saturday morning to inspect guttering and doors accordingly. I thought I was being assertive although Wonka reports my voice went a little sharp. Perhaps at the suggestion I was being obstructive. Me?
They want to replace the back door. Will it still have glass in it I enquired, thinking that neither I nor Wonka could cope if it didn’t. Assured that it will I am trying to go with the change. No more faulty bodged up water letting in back door. It will be double glazed (will I hear Baba on the other side?) and probably that PVC stuff. Dad would twizzle round in his urn.
Wonka is asleep on the top of the settee and Golly slumbers on below.
Meanwhile I am working on an Anger Management session for my clients, this will dovetail with the assertiveness Wonka says. He also recommends some stuff on anxiety and stress but the thought of it has me in a sweat. For now I am concentrating on my regime, and the gallery. There is a new chap on it who seems remarkably ordinary.
‘Is he local?’ checks Wonka.
Is he hell.