In which the author sets out and fails to disprove that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus
It’s been blue skies for Cherith for a long time now – holiday weather. Whatever the temperature and no matter how damp, it’s the Azores overhead for Cherith, a perpetual high-pressure front. She’d lost three and a half stone by cutting out all snack foods, dairy products, tea, coffee, taking up aerobic yoga and doing a couple of hundred sit-ups every morning. She had forsaken each and every kind of ibuprofen and paracetamol, and instead ate a lot of fruit, drank at least two litres of water a day, enjoyed the occasional enema, and her urine was the colour of sparkling mineral water, with just a hint of tint – flavoured sparkling mineral water. She wore no man-made fibres, had her hair done once a month in Fry’s – which is the fancy new salon up on Abbey Street, with wall-to-wall MTV, coffee in proper cups and a monthly magazine bill that would pay everybody’s wages at Central Cutz and then some, and it’s just a pity Noreen Fry couldn’t be persuaded to call it something else, so it didn’t sound like a chippy – and she wore a crystal to channel positive energies.
She had good chi, her yin was balanced with her yang, her communication channels were open, she practised the seven habits of highly effective people and she could fit into some of her daughter’s clothes. She’d been granted custody of Bethany after the divorce from Francie and even Bethany seemed happy – Bethany of the perpetual, seemingly endless teenage sneer, of the secret smoking, she of the hormone furies and the constant ‘WTF!’ texting. Bethany loved living with Cherith – whom she now called ‘Cherry’, obviously, rather than ‘Mum’ – and with Sammy, who doted on her, unlike Francie, who resolutely remained ‘Dad’, and who’d always been rather preoccupied with God and the problem of salvation, who’d been so wrapped up in the church, in fact, that he was really a live-at-home absent father, more like a vague Holy Spirit, you might say, than the historical Jesus. Francie could hardly have been called a disciplinarian, but he did believe that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, which meant that he would occasionally emerge from contemplation and prayer or the laying on of hands, to object to bad manners, and boyfriends, and certain kinds of unsuitable skirt. But Sammy was more like a friend to Bethany than a stepdad – he was most definitely just ‘Sammy’ – and these days it was Cherith, if she wanted to, who was wearing the unsuitable skirts and there was no one to disagree with her or prevent her. Sammy was cool about that, as about most things. He even allowed Bethany to smoke in the house, as long as she only did it in her room and at the moment she was hooked on something that her friend Finn had sold her, which he called the Devil’s Weed: he said it was a mix of legal herbs and herbal extracts with psychoactive effects similar to those produced by illegal substances. What Sammy didn’t tell her was he’d tried it himself and it was Benson and Hedges, as far as he could tell. The trouble with children these days was that they were all smoking Marlboro Lights; anything stronger and they thought they were blowing their minds.*
The business, the Oasis, was going from strength to strength: they were developing new ideas all the time, setting up new courses, introducing new product lines into the shop. Scented things were always very popular – scented stones being the latest variation on the theme, from a company based in Portland, Oregon, calling itself Sweet Honey from the Rock™, who produced lemon-and-verbena pumice stones and cocoa-smelling loofahs, and cinnamon worry beads, among other things. But the main cash crop remained the self-help books and tapes. Cherith herself was addicted. She’d read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus from cover to cover at least half a dozen times – it was, in her opinion, the original and still the best – and she’d started to run some new workshops, based on her reading, workshops she called ‘The Rough Guide to the Road Less Travelled (Beginners and Advanced)’, and ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’. They’d also organised a successful weekend conference on alternative therapies, which had drawn in practitioners from all over. They’d had a herbalist come over from Germany. He was very fat and had bad eczema, unfortunately, which was a little off-putting, and he advocated a form of naked whole-body massage using a kind of bouquet garni steeped in a chilli oil, which did not prove popular among the Oasis clients and which might, in fact, have been better suited for the purposes of roasting chickens. Doctor Ye, the town’s acupuncturist, held twice-weekly clinics, and they’d also brought in a reflexologist, a chiropractor and Barbara Boyle, the chiropodist who runs her own little business in Michael Gardens. Barbara was doing the best business of all of them: corns and bunions, it seems, are as much a physical and spiritual challenge to the people of our town as fused spines or bad auras.*
What was strange, though, what disturbed and unsettled Cherith, was that now she was no longer married to a minister, now that she was a bona fide and successful businesswoman in her own right, she somehow felt more pious than she ever had before. She and Sammy ate sensibly, took exercise, never drank intoxicating liquor, never argued, never raised their voices and between them they seemed to have no strong opinions about anything whatsoever, apart from which essential oils to use. They had an accountant and money in the bank, and it seemed unnatural. When she was married to Francie, Cherith had been used to spiritual highs and lows, the battle for souls, the fight between Good and Evil, and cheap biscuits with Nescafe coffee. These days she was more interested in self-realisation and self-preservation through detox diets, natural juices and meditation. She and Sammy seemed to have lulled each other into a kind of wide-eyed, cranberry and echinacea-fuelled sleepwalk.
The death of his son, little Josh, had had an extraordinary purgative effect on Sammy – a man never given to outbursts or great enthusiasms – leaving him entirely calm and incapable of rancour. He was a walking, talking, living endorsement of the benefits of AA and self-administered self-help literature. Sammy spent hours every week in the spa pool, often lying there silent after the Oasis was closed, gazing out at the car park in front of the Quality Hotel, just floating, entirely lost to the world.
Sammy had given up on himself after Josh had died and he believed others should have given up on him also. And when they hadn’t, he couldn’t bear it. The condemnation and punishment that he felt were necessary and right and proper he’d had to provide for himself. And just as he had condemned himself and, with the help of drink, punished himself, he had at first believed that it was up to him, and only within his gift, to forgive himself, to repair himself and put himself back together. You can take a man out of plumbing, it seems, but you can’t take the plumber out of the man. The trouble was, Sammy could find no way to put things right, or to fix things: no amount of work with a pipe wrench or a blowtorch was going to bring back his little Josh. So when he discovered Alcoholics Anonymous, and the writings of M. Scott Peck, and the love of a good woman, he was amazed and relieved, and he had come to rely entirely upon them. They had helped join him back together.
If Cherith had learnt anything from her reading of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and she believed she had, then it was this: men and women are not the same. Cherith had known this instinctively, of course, for a long time, long before Oprah, and possibly since consciousness. She had always known that men were somehow inferior. As a child growing up she’d regarded her father – taking a lead from her mother – as a kind of genial buffoon, good for certain obvious manual tasks, such as clearing drains and stripping a turkey carcass, but for little else, and she had always been amazed that the boys at her school were incapable of concentrating for long enough to get more than about three out of ten in spelling, and how messy their handwriting was, and how smelly they were. Her decision to marry Francie had been at least partly based on the assumption that as a minister of religion he might have had slightly higher standards than most other men, which he did, in some ways, although, of course, standards are one thing and maintaining them quite another. No man can keep up with all the odd jobs in life, or all the other demands of morality.
What the book didn’t mention, though, what Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus had missed – and what now seemed to Cherith an important, essential truth, and one which she was coming to understand through her course, ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’ – was that men are not, in fact, all the same. A better title for the book, in Cherith’s opinion, might have been Some Men Are from Mars, Some Women Are from Venus, but Also Vice Versa, and Actually Some of Us Are from Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Also, Clearly, Uranus. When she was living with Francie she had, of course, loved him, and now she loved Sammy, but what she had with the both of them, and the love she felt in each instance, was quite different. With Francie what she’d had was a kind of intimacy. With Sammy what she had was free out-of-hours counselling. Sammy was monosyllabic, basically, which people often mistook for his being a good listener. But Sammy was not a good listener: he was just a bad talker. Amidst all the turmoil of her split with Francie, Cherith had found Sammy’s taciturn and reliable manner serene and calming, but now she just found it frustrating. She was finding she was having to practise her yoga breaths more and more, in order to maintain her equilibrium, and she found herself lighting more joss sticks around the home and at work, and doing her ‘Om’ louder and more furiously. Sometimes she even had to turn the volume on her personal stereo all the way up to twelve, in order to drown herself in ‘Fields of Gold’ with Eva Cassidy.
Sammy had no idea that he was becoming an annoyance. Having opened up and made himself vulnerable after the death of Josh, he had gradually begun to shut down again and although he had enjoyed his moment of self-discovery and revelation, now he’d found Cherith he felt no need to explore further. He was abstaining. He had plateaued out and come to rest. This, he felt, was as good as it gets. He and Cherith had the business together, they meditated together, they practised tantric sex, unsuccessfully, together, following the instructions in a lavishly illustrated book from the shop; in fact, they were often together entirely, for twenty-four hours a day, in and out of bed, at work and at play. It wasn’t so much a decision as just something that had happened. They had both been very vulnerable individuals when they met and they needed all the support they could give each other. After the death of his son, Sammy no longer quite trusted himself and he looked to Cherith to do the trusting for him; after the shock of the split with Francie, Cherith had needed reassurance and a steadying hand. They’d both required someone else to help to keep them sober and they had become, in effect, their own mutual-support network.
But Cherith did not need a mutual-support network any more. She had been sober for more than two years and what she needed now was a husband: she needed a challenge and a little more conversation. When Cherith thought of the word ‘husband’ – which she tried not to do too often – she didn’t think of Sammy, even though they had married in some style, in Thailand, on a beach, at sunrise, with him in a tuxedo and her in a cheongsam, and prawns and champagne to follow. No, when she thought of her husband she thought of Francie, whom she’d married in her mother’s old wedding dress and a cardie, and Francie in a lounge suit, in the People’s Fellowship, with a mountain of sausage rolls and a river of Shloer at the reception.
Thinking about it now, what Cherith had admired about Francie, the reason she’d married him, was that he was prepared to make himself into a kind of holy fool: he was willing to take risks and he knew it was OK to make mistakes, because he knew he was a miserable sinner. Francie was not scared of the world and its ways: his only judge was God. Cherith knew him to be essentially a decent person seeking to work out his salvation. Unfortunately, she knew him also to be hypocritical, treacherous, unreliable and a shameless adulterer.
But as for Sammy, well, Cherith wasn’t sure that she knew him at all, who he was, what made him tick, or what he wanted. She’d become increasingly concerned about all the time he was spending in the spa pool. He used to disappear in there for a couple of hours on a Wednesday night when she was taking her classes in ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’ and she used to wonder what he was doing while she was talking about the waves and cycles of relationships, and encouraging people to open up to each other and share. When she asked Sammy what he’d been up to, he’d always say, ‘Oh, nothing much’ and that was it, end of conversation. At least with Francie he’d have claimed to have been praying to bring in the Kingdom of God. She was beginning to feel that she could have done with doing the course in ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’ herself.
To her surprise the course had indeed attracted a middle-aged couple from out of town, two women, Wenda and Clare, who didn’t actually say they were lesbians – they didn’t wear badges – but who Cherith could only assume were lesbians, because they both wore matching car coats and mannish shoes, and one of them had her nose pierced. Wenda, the pierced one, is fifty and works in the in-store bakery at the supermarket up in Bloom’s. She’d been married for over twenty years and raised two children before she had the nerve to give it up and follow her heart. Her heart had led her out of town and into the country and to Clare, who is ten years older and a full foot shorter and wider than Wenda, and who is a woman who seems never to have entertained any doubts about herself or anything else. She had been a civil servant at one time, and then-she’d helped found and run our local Credit Union, the first in the county, up there on the Longfields Estate, which has brought to many of us here our own affordable three-piece suites, reasonable loan terms and taught us how to consolidate our debts. In any realm or endeavour Clare is not a woman to be argued with – a former senior clerical officer with a strong social conscience, a demon of efficiency – and the cottage she now shares with Wenda out at the Six Road Ends is both cosy and immaculate, decorated with photos of Wenda’s children, old civil rights posters and other things that reminded Clare of the 1970s: rattan furniture, Joan Baez record covers and macramé, mostly. In the 1970s Clare had been at perhaps her most beautiful and most determined. A photograph of her in a silver frame which stands on the telly shows her holding an ‘Official Picket’ sign outside the Department of Health and Social Security, looking for all the world like our own local Yoko Ono, in a duffel coat and glasses. Wenda and Clare had no real place in Cherith’s class: they didn’t belong there. They already seemed to know all the answers.
Yet even they had been going through a rough patch recently – even they, who are lesbians, probably, and who you might have thought, therefore, had already ruled out half the problems in any relationship. They’d been arguing, which they had never done before, and so they weren’t quite sure how to do it; they’d not established any ground rules. Wenda believed storming out and door-slamming to be acceptable, but Clare did not, while Clare favoured sulking and silences, which offended Wenda. Their arguments stemmed from little things, mostly, and they were having to face up to the complications and strains of any long-term relationship. Clare had been trying to give up smoking, at Wenda’s insistence, and Wenda was unhappy at work in the in-store bakery, work which she felt was demeaning for someone who’d read Jeanette Winterson, and she had been trying to resolve her relationship with her elder daughter, who’d never come to terms with her mother’s decision to announce herself as a lesbian. Just the usual.
Another couple on the course, Louise and Stephen, were thirty-somethings with a twelve-year-old son with autism who was destroying their relationship. It wasn’t his fault, they knew, but was it theirs? There was also Gertie, who had married a much younger man, Jim, after her husband had died of throat cancer, and now Jim had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Was this bad luck? wondered Gertie. Pete and Joan, meanwhile, were coming to terms with their children leaving home and with the consequent middle-aged dissatisfaction and spread, and they were asking themselves, well, now what?
As they all sat around problem solving and creatively visualising, and using the whiteboard in one of the convector-heated meeting rooms at the Oasis, what they called the Steiner Room, these confused, sad, genuine people reminded Cherith a little of her and Sammy, except with one important difference. You could tell that they loved each other, instantly, the moment they arrived, the moment you set eyes upon them. There was something about it, in the way that Wenda and Clare looked at each other, or the way that Gertie and Jim held hands. It was beautiful to see, people so much in love, and it made Cherith panic. On a Wednesday night, after the class, when they’d shut up shop and returned home, and when she’d kissed Sammy goodnight and switched out the light, she would lie awake in bed and all she would feel was lonely, and the silence seemed to echo between them.
Sammy would also be awake, actually, but he never heard the echo: he was somewhere else. He had never talked to Cherith about this, but the evenings were the time he devoted to thinking about his son, every night when he was in bed, and when he was in the spa pool. This was his special time with him, when he checked out of this sad, dark world and checked into this wonderful, secret, other world, to get an update on how he was, his little boy. Sammy saw his son every day, in the light of the bright imaginings in his head, and it was almost as if he were alive.
It was a trick he’d stumbled upon by accident one night, when he was still drinking. It was Josh’s birthday, 14 August – he’d have been five years old – and Sammy had been lying out in the People’s Park, sprawled on the grass near the war memorial, full of super-lager and Thunderbird wine, and he missed his son so much, and he wanted to wish him Happy Birthday, and when he closed his eyes he found he could just about see him, looming over him, tall and proud, almost as if he were really there, and he looked just a little older than Sammy remembered him, as if he really were still alive, growing up and growing old. By practising, Sammy found that he was able to imagine his son almost entirely lifelike. He found it best in the spa pool, obviously, because there were no distractions. But in bed at night was the next best thing.
He tried not to do it too much – he knew it was wrong – but he couldn’t give it up. He’d tried other things. He tried just praying, but that didn’t work. And he tried this Buddhist practice that he’d read about in a book from the shop, a practice called metta bhavana, friendliness development, where you meditate on your own positive qualities, then those of others, and you chant, ‘May you be happy’ and ‘May you be well’. It was supposed to release you from the burden of responsibility for others. But he couldn’t keep that up. He couldn’t release his son. He wanted him there, with him. He wanted to be responsible for him.
He tried to limit himself. He calculated that if Josh were alive, if he’d been at school, and Sammy were still plumbing, Sammy’d maybe have seen him for just a couple of hours every morning, and a couple every evening, but then all weekend pretty much, or at least twelve hours each day, give or take the odd hour for emergency call-outs. So if he added up all the hours – 2 + 2 x 5 + 12 + 12 = 44 – that was how many hours he might have spent with his son every week. If you divided that by seven it gave you just over six, an average of six hours a day, which he then divided in half, to be reasonable, which meant that he could afford to spend three hours a day with his son.
The only unreasonable thing, of course, was that Josh was dead.
But in Sammy’s mind, in his imagination, he was alive and well, and growing up fast. He got on really well at primary school – Sammy had taken on extra work so that he could have piano lessons and he played midfield for the school football team. Sammy got to take him to quite a few matches. Josh’s favourite food was sausages and beans, and he liked playing with his friends. For his eighth birthday Sammy took him to see the new Harry Potter film, and they went on holiday once a year to Disneyland. He lost a front tooth falling off his bike, but he was OK. He did well in the transfer tests at school and went on to the grammar, where he excelled in both the sciences and the arts. He loved Lego and then he loved his bike. And finally, of course, he loved girls. Sammy vetted his girlfriends. He’d helped him buy his first car. The wedding had been lovely. And then there were the grandchildren, three of them, all of them gorgeous, just like their dad. Josh coped well with the strains of being a father and in time he became a grandfather himself.
These dreams and fantasies were by far the sweetest part of Sammy’s days, the clearest and the most refreshing, and he saw nothing wrong with them, apart from the obvious.
So this was the problem, the silence that lay between Cherith and Sammy, though Cherith didn’t know it, and there was nothing she could have done about it, even if she’d known, nothing she could have done to help Sammy. Because Sammy didn’t need her help, or anybody else’s. He was fine.
His son was still alive.
* This should not be taken, of course, as a recommendation for high-tar cigarettes. These days fewer people smoke in our town, as elsewhere, although this is not primarily for health reasons: most of us simply cannot justify the expense, so we’re all eating more crisps and sweets, which are cheaper, but which provide a similar satisfaction and give us something to do with our hands. Bob Savory’s chip-flavour hand-cooked crisps, Chip Crisps (They’re not Chips, They’re not Crisps, They’re Chip-Crisps!’) and his mini-sandwich range, Chunky Butts, are currently his best-performing product lines. Judging by the litter on High Street and Main Street, and the average backside, most of us now seem to be eating a fairly substantial snack about once an hour, every hour. But it’s better than smoking.
* Barbara specialises in athlete’s foot and fungal nail infections, actually, ailments so common here in town that they barely merit a mention, even among friends of long standing – most of us never even bother to get them treated, passing them around freely among family members and fellow swimmers at the Leisure Centre. But when they get really bad, when the skin is rubbed raw and the nails are all black and thick and crumbly, or when we can no longer walk, that’s when we beat a path to Barbara’s door, and she works her magic with her clippers and ointments and creams. Barbara has arguably done more for the well-being of the people of our town than all our councillors and churchmen and do-gooders put together. Young people tend not to think of chiropody as a career – it suffers from something of an image problem – but if you or your young person are interested in going into the caring professions you could do a lot worse than considering your feet. Barbara loves her job, keeps her own hours and she drives a Mercedes.