Mantrapped (12 page)

'I don't believe this!' protests Doralee, and says she is sending her husband down to collect the cleaning there and then, whether or not the garments have been cleaned. She just wants them back in her possession.

'I only send out orders when they're complete,' says Mrs Kovac, 'and anyway I'm shutting up shop now.'

Today Mr Kovac has fortunately turned up early to help his wife close the steel shutters of the shop. Mr Kovac does not speak a word of English, and was once an illegal immigrant, but now by virtue of marriage and later amnesties is a fully accredited citizen. So far as he knows his wife is a perfectly pleasant woman. At any rate she is a nice plump shape and has blonde hair and all her own teeth, which is more than the wife he left behind ever did. She provides a bed for him to sleep in, sex, and gives him his dinner. He has no idea how old she is, or what her temper is, since she speaks in a monotone and seldom smiles. He takes her tea in the morning. A strange drink, taken with milk. The whole country is a mystery to him. He does not work in the shop but every evening delivers completed orders in his unlicensed, uninsured white van. It is fitted with a GPS device which 'fell off the back of a lorry' in the local terminology, so he can always find his way.

Doralee and Peter live in an ordered world which rubs along cheek by jowl with the disordered one: it is amazing how well everyone gets along with each other, considering. Mr Kovac sleeps with a gun under his pillow, but it would never occur to him to use it on customers, no matter how annoying. He is no criminal, but he has to make his way in the world. Peter has a filing cabinet full of licences, permissions, certificates of competence, prizes: all the divisions in date order, as if he needs proof that he exists. Everything except, as Ruby mourns, a marriage certificate.

Doralee puts her foot down. 'Oh no, you are not closing,' she says to Mrs Kovac. So a Russian countess would have spoken to a peasant, in the days when the gentry could take an idle serf down to the police station for a whipping. 'Not until I have my property in hand or I'll be reporting you to the local Trading Affairs Office. My husband is coming round right now.' She assumes there is a Trading Affairs Office, or that if there is not, someone like Mrs Kovac can be bluffed into thinking there is. She slams down the phone. 'It is too bad,' she says to Peter. 'People like that think they can treat you like shit.' Peter looks startled and murmurs that it's bad policy to make unnecessary enemies. He has been preparing couscous and was just about to stir the grain into the heated oil, but now sees he has no option but to abandon the task and go to fetch Doralee's dress. Her cupboards are full of little black dresses and he personally cannot tell the difference between one and another, but Doralee evidently can. He admires this in her. More, he had been under the impression that Heather's baby shower was the next day, not today, and at the office, and Doralee confirms that this is the case. It is a matter of principle, she says. She simply cannot bear people who say they'll do one thing and then do another. The consumer has to assert their rights. People do not complain enough. Peter puts down his couscous ladle and goes out through the lobby and down to Kleene Machine to help Doralee and the middle classes out. He thinks it will only take a minute, that he will be back to finish the couscous. But it is not to be.

A lifetime of keeping clothes clean - three pages the non-domestic reader is free to skip

One of Louis Simpson's strictures was that novels were not meant to be about domestic life, that the kitchen-table novel, written in and around the kitchen, was an egregious, pathetic thing. I chafed against this ruling at the time, I remember: if subject alone was to be the difference between male and female writing, so be it. So much of life, especially women's lives - shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing - was taken up with the mundane, at least it should be properly honoured in literature. The first novel I wrote,
The Fat Woman's Joke
, being about food, fatness, sex and housework, was seen as revolutionary in its time, though now it is just a pleasant read about things that everyone knows.

I can see my interest as being a little obsessive. There were other things to write about - war, politics, economics, for example - and I did turn my attention to them in due course, but for the first ten years of my writing career, gender and domesticity were my preoccupation. In the early Seventies I wrote a stage play, a dismal and thankfully rather short piece, called
Socks
. Five characters stand around a dying woman's hospital bed, and struggle for dominance, the right to come first in her life. That she is dying, that they have killed her, is of no interest to them. In the end they simply wear her out and she breathes her last. I named the characters Shopping, Washing, Cooking, Cleaning and Socks. I can only suppose that at the time I felt much oppressed by having to keep house. And here the theme is, surfacing again in the form of my preoccupation with the Kleene Machine Cleaners and its management. Peter, fictional successor to the real-life husband Ron, is cooking couscous, which was to be Ron's favourite dish in the Nineties, before death and a mistress carried him off.

My own early experiences with washing were drastic. No wonder Mrs Kovac ends up where she does, married to an illegal with a gun, being rude to clients and exploiting her workers. Laundry, thief of time and energy, exacts an extreme response.

When Nicolas was born, in 1954, the washing machine was a rare and very expensive household object. It was before the age of the launderette. The rich sent their washing off to the laundry to be 'done' by women who had no other option but to work in them, and badly-paid and sickly, steamy work it was, but it was what kept the children fed and out of the orphanages. Dickens's mother, husbandless, was a washerwoman. Yesterday's laundry work is today's call-centre work, where the resentful and the poorly paid cluster, and for the humiliations of the orphanage read the humiliations of being on the dole, with form-filling and loneliness extra.

But ordinary women did the washing in the sink or the tub, wrung the water out of wet clothes with the strength of their hands, such as it was. I have big hands, as did my mother, for all she was a little woman. We spread wet sheets and wool vests to dry over the backs of chairs, first sopping up surplus wetness between dry towels - remembering that the towels in their turn had to be dried - or swung them high from a contraption of rods above the stove, where they picked up cooking smells - cabbage, fish, stew - and became greasy and dusty. So many things, before detergents became commonplace in the Fifties, were filmed with grime.

As laundry and fabric technology arrived, everything changed - yet nothing did. My children count their T-shirts by the dozen and think nothing of putting on whole sets of new clothes within the day, so the washing machine spins without ceasing, whereas the mangle used to turn only once a week. Someone still has to sort garments and bedding, deal with it, think about it, fold it and put it away, but now the task is given little dignity, and is seen as just something to be fitted in along with everything else. The washer-dryer is a godsend, the softener cuts out ironing, the dry-cleaner delivers (mostly) but the drying still sits there for ever, like Cooking, Cleaning, Shopping and Socks, the weight on the dying Emperor's chest, like the nightingale in the Hans Christian Andersen story, clamouring for attention.

To the Novell

To remind you. Trisha, the lottery-winner, has somehow managed to lose a fortune and end up sewing on buttons above Kleene Machine. She is soon to swap souls with Peter. Trisha's soul, as we know, is soiled but soft and amiable, her sins more of omission than commission. Such as, forgetting to feed the cat and then overfeeding it in compensation, or forgetting that she has a baby in the pram and leaving it outside the shop, neglecting to pay back money or replace cigarettes, drinking too much, squabbling with neighbours, having round heels (falling too easily backwards into bed, that is) not saving money but giving it away, lying as a child about doing her homework, flirting with her stepfather. Now Trisha's soul inhabits Peter's body. Envisage this soul, normally awash with oestrogen and femaleness, as a bright pink satin heart shape with the bumps and bulges appropriate to its age and experience, becoming little by little younger, more male, smoother, clean of line and curve but duller coloured. Nothing is for nothing: Trisha and Peter are bound to suffer some leakage from one to the other while in each other's bodies. They will not escape unscathed from this experience, if at all.

Doralee is the new woman, who has everything: looks, money, career, brains, self-esteem, the love of a good man.

Note the order in which I have graded these attributes - like the order of ingredients in packet food: the greatest first, the least last. Apart from looks, her mother Ruby would probably have put them in reverse order of the one I do. Looks would still come first in the blessings fate can bestow - then the love of a good man, then confidence (self-esteem is rather a new concept), children, then career, then brains. So much for the changing views of the decades. Her grandmother Mary would have seen brains and career as actual handicaps to the good life. It did no woman any good to have a brain - indeed to the Victorians it was seen as a positive cause of unhappiness. Since a woman's destiny was to have children, intellect could only disturb and upset, and her working was an indicator of extreme poverty. Ruby was rumoured to have a brain, which was why she was so difficult, and changed her name so oddly.

Peter - the new man, the perfect partner, non-aggressive, testosterone-lite, is politically correct, a good earner, though not quite as good as Doralee, and a good spender. Their loft apartment in High View, no matter how they try to be smartly minimalist, keeps cluttering up with the plugs and wires of communication extras: flat screens, video phones, whatever's newly out. They look forward to the day when gadgets will be as free of wires as an old battery radio. The times being on their side, the pair is on their way to being what the media describe as a power couple, though are not perhaps so much on the party scene as they ought to be for maximum advancement. Both work long tense hours, and as we know, like Mrs Kovac, do not get enough sleep.

Doralee and Peter bought High View three years ago in a rising market, on the assumption that the neighbourhood was going up in the world. When an Italian deli, a bathroom accessory shop, Kleene Machine and Starbucks opened up, they reckoned they had made the right choice. But a hostel for young male asylum seekers opened in the last six months has changed the nature of the area somewhat, altering the balance of spending power within it. Citizens-in-waiting sit on doorsteps rather than in Starbucks, where there is no smoking, and fan out from its centre, the more buoyant and ambitious marrying such single women as are left available for nuptials. It may be a sexier city, the sum of human happiness may be increased as a result of this influx of non-English speakers, but property prices are faltering. Peter and Doralee are too busy to notice what is happening. No one has mugged them yet, and they feel they are invulnerable.

It is true that I have neglected to give lengthy physical descriptions of Doralee and Peter, of the kind Louis Simpson favoured. But size eight thirty-two-year olds like Doralee, with long legs, working in the media, earning well, and going to Pilates classes tend to look pretty good. You can be sure their features are regular, their hair glossy, their skin clear, their eyes alert and intelligent. To the outsider, such girls who swarm in our workaday cities might all look rather alike, but those that know them well can tell them apart easily enough.

Doralee is the one with the rather too frizzy fly-away hair. She has large blue eyes, and is more intelligent than she is assumed to be. She worries that her bum looks large and her arms are too long, but who doesn't? Look too long in a mirror and anyone's bare arms seem to dangle. Women were bred for carrying burdens, after all, fetching water, getting in the harvest, at the very least lugging children about.

Ruby, Doralee's mother, never had time to worry. She was too busy, or so her critics said, working out annoying names for her children when it would have been simpler to call them Jane, Julia, Bridget, Buffy, Caroline, Anne or any of the more appropriate names available. Her critics, of course, included Eve, who was to be her successor as Graham's wife. Ruby was a size 16 by the time she was twenty; and six children later, a size 22. Ruby felt bad for at least five minutes when she realised that Doralee's pet name for her partner was Peterloo - okay to diminish the seriousness of girl babies while you waited for a boy to be born, but disconcerting if your own daughter did it to a man. But Ruby was too busy organising the amateur dramatic society and training to be a pastor in the local church to worry for long. Now the children were all grown she liked to keep busy. Some said it was the drive and energy with which she met each day that had driven Graham, the children's father, from her side and into the arms of the benign and peaceful Eve, who was a size 14.

When Doralee was thirteen and just before the twins had been born - at last, the boy(s) they had been waiting for - Graham met a girl who moved and spoke slowly, and was interested in esoteric religion, and would consent to meditate with him. This was Eve. He had fallen in love with her as they sat side by side in the lotus position and shared their deep breathing. Now you, now me! In and out, in and out, and all of it virtuous, certainly at the beginning. It was Eve who persuaded Graham to abandon local land agenting and become an environmental officer for the council, and then to move on to join a non-governmental organisation, an NGO, which dealt with property matters in war-torn countries overseas. Someone has to own the land where refugee camps are sited, and deal properly with the problems and responsibilities of that ownership. Had he not met Eve, Graham would have still been messing about with local land rentals and change of use certificates for farm land, and still be married to Ruby.