The Thirty List

‘I’ve got an idea.’ He leapt up. ‘You sit here a minute.’ He went into the living room and I heard him scrabbling around. ‘Have you seen my iPad?’

‘It’s on the dock there.’

‘Great. Now wait a second.’ I heard more fiddling. ‘Oh, what’s wrong with this bloody thing? “Device cannot sync at this time”. What does that even mean?’

I sniffed. ‘You know, they said that about the Titanic too and look how that turned out.’

‘Hey, that’s good! See, you are funny. OK, it’s working. Wait there a minute.’

I waited in the kitchen. My eyes felt red and sore and I was starting to be embarrassed about weeping in front of him.

‘Hey, Rachel, what video is this?’ Patrick was standing in the doorway. He wore a black polo-neck jumper, and on top of his head was a pale-coloured swimming cap, making him look bald if you squinted. Music began to play from the dock. He opened his eyes up really wide and started to sing along. ‘It’s been some-thing hours and I don’t know how many dayyyys … since you took your love awa-a-ay.’

It was the video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, which I’d been playing on a loop since I moved in. I smiled. ‘All right, I take your point.’

‘I’d just like to know though, what doctor is this she’s been going to? She’s already said she goes out all night and sleeps all day, and he’s advising “girl, you better have fun no matter what you do”? Fun is the last thing she needs. I’d like to know who this doctor is, so I can have him struck off.’

‘Yes, yes, very good. I’ll write it down for my comedy routine.’

‘OK, well, how about this? Up the tempo a bit.’

He fiddled with the dock, then took off the swimming cap, fluffed up his hair and pouted, dancing around by himself. ‘What are the words again? Something about working in a cocktail bar? Duh-duh duh-duh baby! Duh-duh duh-duh wo-oh-oh-oooh!’

‘Actually, we prefer the term “mixologist” these days. “Waitress” is kind of demeaning. I’m waiting on a callback about a part in EastEnders anyway.’

The swimming cap had left a red line around his forehead. ‘Are you cheered up at all?’

I thought about it. ‘A little bit.’

‘Good!’

‘Will you put the swimming hat on again though?’

‘I knew it. Latex—works every time with the laydeez.’

‘This explains a lot to me about why you’re single.’

‘Ha ha. So listen, will you think about the stand-up comedy? It must be on the list for a reason, and it’s a good place to start.’

I heard myself say, ‘I’ll do it if you do.’

Chapter Eight (#ulink_fbe43f0f-6e98-5c6e-a2c8-4efbe0d1b0fb)

‘Now, I’m recently single, so if you have any nice available friends … or brothers … or dads … granddads … I’m not too fussy. Seen all that stuff about Fifty Shades of Grey, eh? The trouble is, they don’t make erotica for bookish ladies like me. My idea fantasy would be this—I’m a librarian. A man comes in wearing braces and glasses. Hey, got a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel? Which version? The one her damn husband didn’t butcher, of course. Then we roll around in the stacks discussing gender politics.’

I crossed all that out with a big X and wrote a little note to myself: THIS IS RUBBISH.

‘So, I’m recently single and I listen to a lot of Sad, I mean, Magic FM. You know in the song “Nothing Compares 2 U”? How great is Sinead O’Connor’s doctor, advising her to have fun no matter what she does? All mine ever says is, “Really, are you sure it’s just two to three units a week?” and “Come back in a week if it’s still itching.” Although I can’t help wondering if in her emotional state Sinead is confusing “doctor” with “low-rate pimp”.’ That was better. Maybe I could do a whole riff on how when you have a break-up you spend all your time listening to maudlin pop songs, and overanalysing the lyrics of them.

I think it was the promise of Patrick on stage that had made me say yes to the comedy. His uptight English manner making jokes and performing—I couldn’t picture it. So now I was neurotically writing down ‘comedy’. What was funny? I was getting divorced and effectively homeless and had no money—hilarious stuff! I’d have my own sitcom by the weekend.

Things that suck about divorce, number one hundred and forty-eight: there’s no one who knows you better than you know yourself, to tell you when, actually, you really can’t do something and should just stay at home and watch TV.

Patrick, with his annoying Type A personality, had already booked us into a weekend course by tapping two buttons on his iPad. He was as bad as Cynthia for actually making things happen. By lunchtime, all I had was a page of crossed-out phrases like ‘loose women—tight women, more like’ and stupid lists like ‘things you leave behind when you move out of your house after divorce (KT Tunstall CD, lemon juicer)’. I decided to go downstairs for lunch. All my cartoon work was sitting undone, it was past Doctors time and I hadn’t even started on any of the moving admin I still had to do (change address, file for divorce, buy laundry basket).

Patrick was at the kitchen table, his drawing board sitting unused beside him. He’d decided to ‘work from home’ that day—i.e. sit about obsessing about jokes. He was staring at a piece of paper and muttering to himself. I recognised a fellow comedy casualty. ‘Struggling?’

‘Is it just me, or is nothing funny any more? Literally nothing?’

‘I doubt I would even laugh at a video of a cat running into a wall right now. That’s how bad things are.’

‘Why are we doing this, Rachel?’

I spooned Darjeeling into the tea infuser. ‘Because if you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

He seemed to find this cheering. ‘That’s good. And I can’t go back, can I? Neither can you. But do we actually have to go so far forward? I mean, we’ll be on stage. The last time I did that I was nineteen and rocking out with my band, The Corduroy Underground, at my university summer ball. We were awful.’

‘What did you play?’

‘Bass. I sang too. It was sort of my band.’

‘Do you play now?’

‘Oh, no. Michelle made me put the guitars in the attic. They were cluttering up the place, she said, and Alex might fall over them.’

I thought about this as my tea brewed—I believe that was why it was invented, in fact. To let your thoughts infuse slowly as the leaves did. ‘Patrick? Have you thought any more about doing your own list? They say divorce is the time to do things—you know, experiment. Take back all the parts of yourself you put away for the person you were with.’ As I said it, I imagined bits of him locked in an attic—music, a sense of fun maybe, his laugh, which I hadn’t heard since I moved in. ‘So what would be on yours? You said extreme sports before.’

‘Oh, I don’t have time for a list.’

‘You’ve got time to watch all five series of Breaking Bad,’ I pointed out.

‘Hmm. You have a point.’

‘Go on, write it down. It’ll free you for comedy at least. Get the brain moving, that sort of thing. Tell me one thing you wish you’d done in the past five years.’

‘Get drunk,’ he said right away. ‘That sounds bad, I know. I just used to really enjoy going to the pub, chatting about nothing, getting into stupid rows about who was the best Batman, that sort of thing. Since Alex I’ve been too scared, in case he needs me.’

‘Couldn’t someone babysit?’

‘I don’t know who I’d trust.’ I wondered why he was so reluctant to leave Alex with anyone—had he and Michelle just been really overprotective? ‘I’ll think of a way, I promise. No divorced person should have to do it without the aid of alcohol.’

‘Glad to have you in my corner.’

‘What else?’

‘Skydiving is a definite. I’ve always wanted to try it.’

‘OK. We have getting drunk and skydiving. Maybe not at the same time. More?’