One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  I reeled back. This was cruelty that I haven’t encountered anywhere outside of a changing-room mirror. These were gross human rights violations. Someone should start a social media campaign to raise awareness about this individual.

  “Are you sure it’s not too late?” I said sarcastically. “If it’s that bad, maybe I should just wear a mask?”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s not a bad idea. We do have a range of men’s hydrating night masks that would help you …”

  “Now listen here,” I said, irate. “What exactly do you put in the men’s cosmetics that you don’t put in women’s anyway?”

  “Men’s skin is different to women’s,” she said smoothly. “It has different challenges.”

  “Like what?”

  “The dermis is thicker, so you need more active penetration ingredients.”

  “Huh?”

  “Extra penetrating agents,” she said. “Penetrative emollients.”

  “Are you just saying versions of the word ‘penetrate’ because you think that’s a word I’ll like because I’m a man?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  I glared at the men’s products, all in tubes and boxes of gun-metal blue and matt black and submarine grey. They may as well have been shaped like bullets or locomotives.

  “Look at these words! ‘Power protector’! ‘Maximum hydration’! ‘Active protection’! It’s like a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.”

  “I don’t know who that is, sir.”

  “You’re pandering. You’re addressing us as though we’re twelve-year-old boys shopping for a train set.”

  “What’s a train set?”

  “And look at the women’s products: ‘Lime tea extract’. ‘Bio-ceramic white algae’. Malachite … malachite? That’s a stone!”

  “Sir, these are all scientific products.”

  “Oh come on, look here – this one has ‘magnetised tourmaline to help dissolve excessive oil in your skin’. Magnetised tourmaline! That’s what scientists do with oil, is it? They dissolve it with a magnetised stone?”

  “Sir, you may not know this, but magnetised tourmaline gives off negative ions, alpha waves and Far Infrared Rays.”

  “Do you think we’re all fools?” I demanded. “Do you think all women are so gullible they’ll buy rocks and sea-kelp and soluble magnets as though this is the fifteenth century? Do you think all men are so dumb that we’ll buy this stuff because it’s been packaged to look like something a secret agent would use to blow up a bridge? My partner was right. It’s all a scam.”

  “No one’s forcing you to buy it, sir,” she said, her eyes hard and narrow.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said, and stalked away.

  There’s a certain hot and reckless joy in feeling righteously indignant. Among other things, when you’re righteously indignant you don’t have to think about how ravaged and beyond repair your face is.

  I went stomping through the aisles to the exit, resigned to a life of slowly becoming Nick Nolte, when I passed another woman dressed like an old-fashioned air hostess, her neckerchief knotted with a continental air.

  “Would you like to smell this, sir?” she asked.

  Now normally those are not the words you want to hear from a stranger, but her voice was low and rich as though coming from a rumpled bed on a Saturday morning. And she had an Italian accent. I’m not saying she sounded exactly like Sophia Loren, but she sounded more like Sophia Loren than anyone else did in that mall.

  I sniffed tentatively.

  “It’s very nice,” I said.

  Her eyes were languorous and brown and she was a little older than me, with that very fine network of perfect lines around her eyes that suggest she has laughed a lot in her life and cried some too, but always returned to laughing again.

  “Is it too much flowers?” she said. “I think maybe it’s too much flowers.”

  “It’s a bit floral,” I agreed. “But I’m not really looking for a perfume.”

  “Oh! But maybe something else …?”

  “No, I came in to get some, um, some hydrator, but it’s okay, I’ll come back …”

  She reached out her hands and placed them around my cheeks and pulled me closer to examine me. I would have struggled harder, but her hands were so smooth.

  “But your skin looks good,” she said.

  I stopped struggling.

  “Really? Because that other woman …”

  “How old are you?”

  “I … I’m turning forty …”

  “No!” her eyes opened wide, like sunlight falling on Ligurian caramel. “No! It’s a lie!”

  “You think I look older?”

  “This is the skin of a young man! You are lucky! Lucky like a gypsy! Here, you put this on it.”

  She whipped out a tube of something and rubbed the cream between her palms with a brisk, ladylike friction and slowly eased it into my cheeks.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said huskily.

  “But not for the eyes,” she murmured. “For the eyes, this.”

  And like some long-fingered Latin prestidigitator of unguents she produced another little tube and applied with exquisite care her little finger to the skin below my eye.

  “You see? You only touch, touch, touch, like so, yes? Like so … yes? Yes?”

  “Oh yes,” I sighed.

  “It is like making love with your finger to a butterfly’s wing.”

  It’s a good thing I ran into her, I reflected as I left half an hour later, carrying a cardboard box of all the things she’d recommended – the face wash and the scrubber and the toner and the smoother and the polisher and the exfoliant and the night mask and the moisturiser and the little tube of butterfly love-making lubricant. It’s good to deal with a woman of the world who knows something about men. If I hadn’t run into her I might have thought that every saleswoman in the cosmetics world is a rip-off artist and a scam merchant. Oh yes, it was very lucky I ran into her.

  4. DEPRESSION

  I knew something was wrong when I found myself spending time on Facebook. Facebook is a preview of life in a retirement home: everyone’s always buttonholing you to show you their pictures, or boasting that they had lunch on Saturday, or treating you to their views about what’s wrong with the world nowadays. Here’s a quick guide to whether your views of what’s wrong with the world are of interest to anyone: if they were, you wouldn’t have to post them on Facebook.

  Other ways that Facebook is like a retirement home:

  There’s always someone urgently telling you breaking news that happened two weeks ago.

  Someone has always just died.

  When two people are flirting, it’s always awkward and everyone always knows.

  People think you’re interested in hearing how they slept last night.

  Everyone hates the one person in a good mood.

  Everyone acts like a weather reporter.

  Everyone else’s family seems to love them more than yours does.

  The scent of urine.

  Cats.

  Twitter, on the other hand, is a place where cool kids and psychopaths hang out. I’m always happy just to make it through a visit to Twitter without inadvertently saying something that someone finds sexist, or without the cool kids cornering me and poking me in the chest and asking who invited me. Arriving on Twitter can feel like walking into a drinks party where everyone already knows each other and they’re still making references to a joke someone made earlier. Hey, you like jokes. Can you join in? No, you can’t join in, and if you’re not part of the gang, Twitter’s a shiny maze of mirrors where you’ll walk around forever shouting out witticisms to yourself in the hope someone will overhear.

  Twitter’s not a place to go when you’re depressed, but Facebook has a strange magnetic draw to the lonely and sleepless. Maybe it’s because time itself seems to stop the moment you step into Facebook – and not in a good way, as though you’re caught up in Mihály C
síkszentmihályi’s concept of Flow, if that’s what you think I mean. No, in a bad way, as though you’re stuck on an abandoned space station with nothing to do but look up what happened to that Polish guy who sat next to you in Mrs Kincaid’s class.

  Oh, insomnia is a cruel mistress. For several months each night, just before I turned forty, I would be just about to fall asleep when I’d suddenly sit up because I’d remembered something, the way you remember you left the front door open or the bath running, except what I was remembering was: I’m turning forty.

  You know you shouldn’t think too much about turning forty because then you won’t get to sleep, so you try not to think about it. In fact, you try to think about nothing, but the brain isn’t designed to think about nothing. It takes ten years of strenuous meditative practice before you can empty your brain on demand, as though you’re Herschelle Gibbs, and you don’t have ten years, so you try fill up the nothing with something pleasant that won’t keep you awake, like the plots of Asterix comics or Spook Hanley’s hat-trick against the West Indies in 1984, but then you become aware that you’re trying to pass your waking time so that it leaves no trace and that’s what got you into this mess in the first place, so you allow yourself ten minutes of thinking about turning forty, then you’ll go to sleep, but ten minutes of thinking about turning forty is like ten minutes of being attacked by a shark: it’s not that it’s fun, but once you’ve started, one thing sort of leads to the next and it’s hard to stop.

  Insomnia is irrational. You become convinced that you’re the only person awake in the whole world, even though you know it’s day-time in New Zealand so there must be some people up and about. Hobbits are not nocturnal creatures. And so you go to Facebook to seek comfort in that list of names down the right-hand side with little green dots next to them to show that they’re awake. There’s always some sad case who’s posted: “Tick-tock, tick-tock!!!! I guess I can’t sleep again! Is anyone else up???”

  Under no circumstances be tempted to be one of those even sadder cases who reply, “Me!!! Yay! Someone else awake!!! Let’s have a conversation!”

  It’s not just that sleeplessness can be linked to consuming too many punctuation marks too close to bedtime; those night-time conversations all follow the same tragic trajectory:

  Oh god, I’m so alone.

  Hooray! Someone’s awake!

  Hooray! We’re going to have a conversation and use technology to breach the fundamental loneliness of the human condition!

  What should we talk about? I don’t really know this person very well. Maybe I should ask them if there’s anything to watch on TV.

  We have established there’s nothing to watch on TV.

  There is literally nothing else to talk about.

  He isn’t replying to me. Maybe he’s gone to sleep.

  Maybe he hasn’t gone to sleep. Maybe he’s just ignoring me.

  Which is worse, that my buddy in insomnia has gone to sleep, or that he’s so bored with my company he’d rather stare at the ceiling and think about the plots of Asterix comics?

  Oh god, I’m so alone.

  I found myself trying to track down names I once knew and faces that were familiar. Whatever happened to Bethany Mulch? We used to be close. Life was good when I knew Bethany Mulch.

  Nocturne: Bethany Mulch

  ME: Ahoy stranger.

  BETHANY MULCH: Wow!

  ME: Just thought I’d drop you a line to say ahoy.

  BETHANY MULCH: Fifteen years later! Ahoy back!

  ME: Remember that time we drove to Maputo?

  BETHANY MULCH: Sure.

  ME: That was fun. We should do that again some time.

  BETHANY MULCH: I live in Sydney now.

  ME: Are there hobbits?

  BETHANY MULCH: That’s New Zealand. I live here with my husband and my son.

  ME: I thought you didn’t want kids.

  BETHANY MULCH: …

  ME: Hello?

  BETHANY MULCH: Isn’t it 3 a.m. over there?

  ME: Can I ask you something – did you ever notice anything about me? I mean in terms of character flaws.

  BETHANY MULCH: I’m sorry?

  ME: It’s just, I’m forty now, and I was supposed to have done certain things but I haven’t done any of it and it feels that time’s flowing by like cold water. I was supposed to have won two Booker Prizes by now, and I always figured I’d win the first Booker with my fourth serious novel and then the second one with either the sixth or, if I was lucky, the fifth, but I’ve fallen behind schedule in that I haven’t actually written the first one yet, and now they’ve opened it to the Americans so it’s going to be even harder, so I was just wondering, what happened? Where did it go wrong? Is it some kind of character flaw in me? Am I lazy, or what? Be honest – did you notice anything?

  BETHANY BULCH: I have to start making dinner.

  ME: I had potential, right? Or did you always think, “He’s never going to amount to anything?”

  BETHANY MULCH: Have you been drinking?

  ME: Because I don’t have any kids and I haven’t written anything worthwhile and it just seems like all my experiences and all the lessons I’ve learnt and all the books I’ve read will just count for nothing and when I die it will all disappear and leave no trace and no one will even really miss me that much, except for a couple of people that know me, but even them not so much, so what will even the point have been of my ever existing?

  BETHANY MULCH: …

  ME: What’s your son’s name, by the way?

  BETHANY MULCH: …

  ME: Hello?

  ME: Bethany?

  ME: Hello?

  5. ACCEPTANCE

  Look, let’s not be coy. When a middle-aged man goes to the doctor, there’s only one thing on his mind. Forget my systolic pressure and cholesterol levels and to hell with my heart. Even if the doctor slips on a hazmat suit and breathing apparatus and says, “Mr Bristow-Bovey, you have Ebola”, the only thing I’m thinking is, “Does that mean I don’t have to have the prostate exam? Yes! I’ll take it!”

  This is what it is to be forty: this is what lies at the end of the yellow brick road. You’ve made it here, and here is your reward. In case you had any lingering doubts about the indignities to which your middle-aged flesh is heir, there it is like a mugger down a dark alley: the digital rectal examination.

  What? Digital? That doesn’t sound too bad. Does that mean it happens on a computer now?

  No. The other kind of digital.

  I charged my partner with finding me a suitable doctor.

  “What’s a suitable doctor?” she asked.

  “Someone with gravitas.”

  “Gravitas. Okay.”

  “Someone who’s old and experienced and has seen it all.”

  “All right.”

  “Someone with narrow fingers.”

  “Like a woman?”

  No! Not like a woman! Someone that’s almost exactly the precise opposite of a woman!

  Normally I do prefer a female doctor. This is obviously because I like to do my bit for gender equality in the professional services, but also because when I’m sick I want either sympathy for my condition or admiration for my courage, and you don’t get those from a man. Plus there were plenty of male medical students in my university residence, and they were a loathsome horde of unwashed, chain-smoking, cadaver-defiling filth-mongers whose hands I wouldn’t dare shake let alone open my mouth in their presence to say “Ahh.”

  But this is no job for a woman. I think of the nice lady doctor who has a practice in the medical centre down the road, and her nice clean hair and summery perfume and how when she was a little girl and first told her parents she wanted to be a doctor they must have beamed with pride and scrimped and saved to send her to medical school where she overcame casual sexism and the systemic impediments of the educational system and the long hours of interning and sleeplessness and all those hardships they show on Grey’s Anatomy, all in order to become the proud professional
she is today, and by god, I think, it cannot be that she should have gone through all of that just so that I can walk in and present her with my arse.

  No, not on my watch. Call me old-fashioned if you like, but prostates are a nasty, masculine business, like boxing or war. They’re problems of our own making – why inflict them collaterally on the innocent? I need someone grizzled and male and old, someone who might have been in an army and witnessed atrocities, someone who has ruined other lives and his own. A racist, if possible. Maybe even a wife-beater. If I’m going to spoil anyone’s day, let it be someone who deserves it.

  And anyway, if I’m to reveal the secret ruins of the once-proud civilisation that was my body, it should be to someone who understands. I want someone with a smoker’s cough who’ll regard me with tired, rheumy eyes and maybe quote some “Ozymandias” and say, “Yes, I’ve seen this before.”

  I want someone who looks like Gandalf or Geppetto or Colonel Sanders or Robin Williams in Awakenings (definitely not Robin Williams in Patch Adams). Morgan Freeman would be fine. Even Hillary Clinton at a push. I want him to wear a white coat at all times and carry a stethoscope and have one of those mallets for hitting your knee. I want the walls covered with medical certificates and framed Hippocratic Oaths and in the corner there should be a life-sized plastic skeleton. I want him to be single-mindedly dedicated to a melancholy practice of medicine and have no life or interests outside of it.

  “What colour eyes should he have?” asked my partner. “Favourite TV show?”

  “Just make sure he has a beard. And not some damn hipster beard. And a bowl of lollipops at reception.”

  She came back half an hour later and told me she’d found him.

  “Already?”

  “When someone’s perfect, he’s perfect.”

  “Is he older than me?”

  “And he has a beard. You want me to come with you?”

  “I don’t think I need spectators for this.”

  “It’s just, after what happened with the moisturiser …”

  “Hey, I told you, I’m going to use all that stuff!”

  “Just make sure you ask him about that other thing.”

  “What other thing?”