Low life
Caught out
Jeremy Clarke
I've moved. On New Year's Day, after yet another row, I drove to the nearest town and rang up all the 'accommodation to let' notices in the newsagent's window. Now I'm renting this 1920s suburban semi from a Buddhist, Chris, and his wife, Edwina. It's a nice gaff, sort of tranquil, with bucldhas great and small everywhere you look. And there's a colourful poster in the bathroom that says, 'Happiness, Peace, Joy, Serenity', sinisterly implying that these are all real, desirable, possibly permanent states of mind.
Chris and Edwina are staying in the Transvaal with an Afrikaaner farmer. They've paid an agency £1,600 each to teach his labourers' children English. They sent me an email yesterday, saying there are lots of poisonous snakes, though they haven't actually seen one yet.
My boy came to stay at the weekend. He's 12, and a country boy, and was quite unprepared for the buddhas, and for the town itself, whose inhabitants have a reputation for living 'alternative' lifestyles. On our first outing to the high street we saw a middle-aged woman draped in diaphanous material dancing ecstatically outside the chemist's to the amplified song of the sperm whale. We were also confronted by a young man clutching his girlfriend in a kind of headlock. Could we give him 80p for a bag of chips because they were both 'starving', he said. He must have been a drama student because when I gave him a pound he said, 'Beggar that I am, I am poor even in thanks.' Not having been exposed to 'alternative' lifestyles before, my boy was disgusted and slightly disturbed by both beggar and whale woman. To the sound of bongo drumming, we selected and paid for ten sticks of incense from a stall in the market, took them home and cautiously lit one.
After tea we went for another walk around town. We often go for a walk after dark on Saturday night. There were no street lamps or pavements where I lived before, and we walked across fields and through woods to while away the evening. So it was a thrilling novelty for the both of us to walk along hard, brightly lit pavements for once, and to stop and peer through the lighted shop windows. In most of the shops we looked in, 'alternative' seemed to mean 'over-priced crap with spiritual overtones from India'. And why India we wondered? We had to abandon our enquiry and hurry back, however, as the first spaghetti bolognaise I'd ever made was having a disastrous effect on my bowel.
Back on the doorstep of our new home in five minutes, we looked at each other. I thought Mark Anthony was playing a cruel joke on his old dad at first. 'I thought you had the key!' I said, hopping up and down. Neither of us had it. We were locked out. Which didn't matter to me half as much as getting in and using the bathroom, where Happiness, Peace, Joy and Serenity were now more readily attainable than I had previously imagined.
A quick inspection of the windows and front door suggested that we couldn't break into the house without doing less than about £200 worth of damage. As a last resort we climbed over the garage roof and jumped down into the back garden, hoping we'd left the back door open. We hadn't. In fact, given my boy's neurotic, perhaps revealing, obsession with locking doors, it had been a long shot in any case.
With all hope of a quick entry now gone, the deliquescence in my bowel became insupportable. Apologising to my boy, and stumbling over an 18-inch high earthenware buddhist, I made for a spot on the lawn near the hedge. I read a serious book once, written by an American, called Crapping in the Woods: a Forgotten Art. In it, the author suggested that many, if not all, of society's ills stem from the modern and unnatural habit of sitting bolt upright on lavatories. Far better for body and soul to squat in a natural setting, he urged his readers. I was taking him at his word when I was lit up by a beam of light from an enormous torch, or possibly a searchlight, and sharply challenged as to my purpose there in the garden.
It was the man next door. He'd heard us scrambling over the garage roof, he said. Unless we came up with a satisfactory explanation, he was going to call the police. From my squatting position on the lawn I told him that I was the new tenant.
He'd already heard rumours, apparently. 'The chap who writes for The Spectator?' he said incredulously. I was, I said. The beam was snapped off.
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