One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  “You know … the … the other thing.” She made a gesture in the region of my belt buckle. “While you’re there.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay,” I said.

  There was no way I was going to ask him about that other thing.

  My appointment was on a Thursday at 4.30 p.m. The world’s a beautiful place outside a doctor’s surgery just before you have to go in. There were seagulls and sunbeams and clouds. Why have I never noticed clouds before? I should just stay out here and look at some clouds. Even the homeless guys peeing against the tree in the churchyard looked happy and free. Maybe I could join them. I should go to church more. I should start going to church. I should go to church right now. Or maybe I just need to pee.

  I sat in the waiting room with the usual crew of snifflers and malingerers. What are you people looking so sad about? I’d give anything for bronchitis or chickenpox right now. You sit at home and play video games and your mom brings you Archie comics and then your pox goes away and you have your whole life ahead of you. What I have is never going away. I’m here to be diagnosed with an untreatable dose of ageing, and then a man I’ve never met before will put his finger inside me, and I’ll let him do it because it’s for my own good and then I’ll go home and cry. I’m like a divorced mom on her first internet date.

  Say, speaking of divorced moms … there’s one sitting right there, flipping through a magazine while her son sulkily plays his video game. He probably has whooping cough, the lucky bastard. Hey – I recognise that magazine! I have a column in that magazine! She’s going to read my column, right in front of my eyes! This is great! This never happens! Here, let me just arrange my head in the same aspect as the byline picture, so that when she looks up, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, so grateful that something took her mind off little Keegan’s whooping cough, murmuring to herself, “It’s true, laughter really is the best medicine!” who will she see but the very author! She’ll double-take. She won’t believe her eyes. This is the best day of her life! Excuse me, she’ll say, but are you …? But wait, hang on a moment – that’s my page! She just flipped straight past my page! Didn’t she see all the writing on it? Should I lean over and tell her she missed a page?

  “Mr Bristow-Bovey?”

  There’s a scruffy-looking man in front of me. He has baggy pants that sag to various levels and a shirt so dishevelled it’s hard to believe there was ever a time when it was hevelled. A rat has been chewing his beard and his hair is scraped back in a grizzled little ponytail. Who is this man? Is it one of the homeless guys from the churchyard? Has he followed me in? What does he want from me?

  “I’m Doctor Kramer.”

  I don’t want to call this man a liar, but he is clearly no doctor. Is there a psychiatric practice nearby? This man needs a butterfly net.

  “Do you like the beard? Your girlfriend wanted to make sure I had a beard.”

  Betrayed!

  “She prefers ‘partner’,” I muttered.

  I followed him reluctantly as he shambled down the corridor to his office like one of the tramps from Waiting for Godot. I would like to state for the record that I am opposed to violence against women in almost every circumstance, but when I got home I was going to strangle my partner with my bare hands.

  There wasn’t any plastic skeleton. I couldn’t even see a stethoscope. I covertly scanned the walls for calligraphies of the Hippocratic Oath, but there was only a series of framed posters for community theatrical productions. Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, Cabaret.

  He followed my eyes.

  “I was the Master of Ceremonies.”

  “In Cabaret?!”

  “You want me to sing a few bars?”

  Oh god.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “You seem nervous. You want to hear a joke?”

  “A joke?”

  “Bad news always goes better with a joke.”

  “Why are you assuming it’ll be bad news?”

  “If it’s good news you want, go talk to my brother.”

  “What does he do?”

  “No, I don’t have a brother.”

  This is because I don’t go to church. I’m being punished because I stopped believing in God. I used to believe in God but I stopped when I had my first girlfriend. Therese Owen, this is all your fault.

  I sat with my eyes fixed on a poster of my doctor as the Cowardly Lion, arms linked with a middle-aged Dorothy and someone with straw sticking out of his jersey, while he did that thing where he put one hand on my belly and tapped it with the other one. I don’t know what that does but it’s quite soothing.

  “Where’s the Tin Man?” I asked.

  “It was a reduced cast. There were only three munchkins, and one of them also had to be a flying monkey.”

  He took blood samples and looked in my ears.

  “How’s it when you pee?” he asked.

  “When I what?”

  “Is the stream good and strong?”

  “Well,” I answered cagily, “it gets where it needs to go.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll soon see.”

  “You want me to show you?”

  “There are other ways of knowing,” he said, and twitched his whiskers as though he was the Cowardly Lion. “Is there anything else you want to talk about before we get down to it?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Very.”

  “Your girlfriend said you might want to talk about your testicles.”

  Good god, how long did those two talk? Did they run themselves baths and pour glasses of wine?

  “No, not really.”

  “But there’s been some discomfort?”

  “Just a little bit.”

  “Let me have a look.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hey, believe me, it’s not that I’m so desperate to see them.”

  “Excellent then.”

  “I tell you what, I’ll close my eyes and just use my hands.”

  This is getting worse. He’s making it sound like a Stanley Kubrick movie now.

  “Go on, hop up there and undo your belt.”

  “You don’t want me to take my trousers down?”

  “You can just loosen them, I’ll do the rest.”

  “Doc, I’m begging you, stop making this sound like a date.”

  He pressed down on my groin and made me cough and told me I had a couple of small hernias. One day they might be big hernias, and if that happened I could have them fixed. I asked if it would help to have them fixed now, and he said there was nothing to be gained by it. Not everything needs to be fixed, and sometimes the worst doesn’t happen.

  “I thought the worst does always happen,” I said gloomily. “I thought that’s why it’s the worst.”

  He stretched out the elastic of my underwear and slipped his hand in and started prodding around. He had a surprisingly delicate touch. I became very interested in the pattern of cracks on the ceiling.

  “You seem to be taking growing older quite hard,” he said.

  “I’m glad you put ‘taking’ and ‘older’ in that sentence.”

  “It’s not so bad being in your forties. Most of it’s in your mind.”

  “It’s not my forties I mind,” I told him. “It’s where we go from here.”

  “There are good things about being in your forties,” he said. “Oh, you’re right, this is horribly misshapen.”

  “That’s the wrong one.”

  “Ha ha ha! See? A little humour always helps.”

  He clicked on a little torch and started shining it around down there.

  “What are you doing.”

  “I’m transilluminating your scrotum. Look! Shadow puppets! Looks like a duck, doesn’t it?”

  He zipped up my trousers and told me I have two small hernias and one epididymic cyst, and that none of them should trouble me.

  “It might hurt if there’s a back-up of fluid. Have you been pomping enough?”
<
br />   “Are you sure that’s the correct medical term?”

  “I’m going to assume from that that you haven’t?”

  “I’ve had a few things on my mind lately. I haven’t been in the mood for much.”

  “You know,” he said, scratching his ratty little beard thoughtfully, as though it was something he’d recently grown to conceal his identity, “one of the good things about being forty is we begin to stop worrying so much what people think about us.”

  “I don’t worry what people think of me,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “we all do, unless we’re lunatics. But you should give yourself a break.”

  “For what?”

  “For not having done more. For being on the wrong slope. If you spend all your time fretting about it, you won’t enjoy being here. And if you don’t like the slope, you’ll like what you find at the bottom even less. You’re going through a change, and it’s scary because you’re at an age when your parents and your lovers can’t help you because no one can tell you it’s going to be all right. Maybe it will be all right. It will be what it will be. You should go and make love to your girlfriend. But here’s what I know, and this is the last thing I’ll say – you have more time than you think.”

  I needed to get out of there.

  “Thank you, doctor,” I said. “I’ll go home and think about that.”

  “Not so fast, my friend,” he said, reaching for a pair of gloves and the lube. “It’s that time of the evening. This is going to mean more to you than it does to me.”

  And so it came around at last, the distinguished moment, my own personal narrow-gauged Thermopylae. I’d been worried about making some stupid joke when it happened. I don’t want to be the ten thousandth fool to say something about dinner and a movie, but I also can’t just stand there and let a silence build. Silence is intimate; it creates a moment. But I can’t just start talking about the cricket. Can I? Maybe I can. Luckily I didn’t have to worry about it, because I was with Dr Chuckles, the musical clown.

  “Do you know what life is?” he asked, spreading the KY over a finger that had suddenly become the size of a Pick ’n Pay chocolate éclair.

  I didn’t know what life is, but I suddenly had a bad intimation.

  “Please don’t say that life’s a—”

  “Life is a cabaret, old chum,” he said as he put his finger inside me. “Come to the cabaret.”

  You Know You’re Middle-Aged When

  While driving long-distance your mind wanders and when you snap back you’re still under the speed limit.

  You have finally accepted that you’ll never play for the Springboks, but then Victor Matfield comes out of retirement and you think there’s still a chance, but then you realise he’s still six years younger than you.

  At some point in a conversation about Miley Cyrus, you offer an opinion about parenting skills.

  You hear yourself say, “We should go to the theatre more often.”

  You start thinking about taking up a hobby.

  Your ears become a part of your shaving routine.

  YOLO isn’t a rallying call, it’s a cry for help.

  A song you used to hate so badly when you were a teenager that you were prepared to break up with your girlfriend over it – let’s say, oh, anything by Phil Collins or Tears for Fears – comes on the radio and, just for a moment, hearing it makes you smile and say, “Hey! Remember this?”

  You wake up on a Saturday morning and feel that nameless dread and shame about what you might have done the night before, and then you remember what it was. It was eating dessert.

  When standing in a queue, you start offering suggestions to other people in the queue about how this operation could be run more efficiently. Usually these suggestions involve the use of more cashiers over the lunch hour.

  You hear yourself say, “3D movies are just a gimmick.”

  There’s an entire World Cup tournament in the past that you’ve completely forgotten about.

  You use a lot less late-night bandwidth than you used to.

  You find yourself giving a smug look to the driver of the car that overtook you and is now at the same red light as you.

  You start going back to holiday spots you enjoyed, because it’s nice when you know what you’re getting, and how many more holidays are you going to have that you should take a risk on someplace that might be awful?

  You hear yourself say, “Middle-aged is the new young.”

  You hear yourself say, “Forty today is different to when our parents were forty.”

  You wander if you have too much stuff.

  You wonder if you need more stuff.

  You decide you need new friends.

  5

  Don Quixote

  If you don’t choose your midlife crisis, your midlife crisis will choose you.

  The midlife crisis was invented in 1965 by Elliott Jaques, some say, or by Erik H. Erikson, others say, which probably brings on a bit of a crisis for whichever of them is the actual guy. Erik or Elliott suggested it could start any time under the age of sixty, but a more recent UK study reported in the Guardian and The Times, although that doesn’t make it true, pins the average age at forty-three for men and forty-four for women.

  (Recently some mooching kids in America have started trying to claim a quarter-life crisis. Quarter-life crisis! The nerve! Is there nothing this rotten generation won’t try hijack to make it all about them? Get in line, you little creeps, we were here first.)

  I sat with my partner one Saturday morning after the visit to the doctor, drinking coffee at a sidewalk café.

  “You need to do something about your midlife crisis,” she said.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “I won’t buy a sports car or anything.”

  “It doesn’t just go away. If you leave this long enough, it’ll just get worse.”

  She had a point. If a midlife crisis is anything, it’s a reaction to the anxious realisation of how late it is, and how unprepared you are. The longer you ignore the anxiety and pretend it isn’t happening, the worse the reaction becomes. People often laugh at men having midlife crises because they suddenly up and do something comical: hair transplants; calf implants; moving to Montague to run a worm farm; stocking up on body paint and MDMA and going to Afrika-Burn to offer free foot massages to hippy girls. It’s funny till it turns sad. Women do things too, but men have it worse because they ignore things for longer and then do things without knowing why. I don’t know why that is, but I’m guessing testosterone is involved. Whenever there’s a spectacular display of human dumbassery, you can bet there’ll be some testosterone somewhere at the bottom of it.

  When the crisis comes, my partner and I agreed, you have to do something about it, and it matters what you do.

  We watched a peloton of middle-aged cyclists go by like a skein of dehydrated geese.

  “Should I take up cycling?” I said reluctantly. “I could train for the Argus or something.”

  It’s not an original idea. Every old bloke I know is on a bike nowadays, whirling their scrawny legs and zipped-up bellies around the bitter streets, balanced on narrow plastic items more like medical instruments than seats, heads helmeted like the tip of some bulbous alien penis. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by cycling, starving themselves on energy gel, dragging themselves through the chilly streets at dawn, looking for a place to take a selfie. I’ll say this for them – they do seem to lose weight. If you’ve always wanted to look more like Sarah Jessica Parker, cycling’s definitely the sport for you.

  It’s not for me, though. I don’t want to be seen in public shrink-wrapped in multicoloured clingfilm. Also, when you talk to those guys you hear words that no man should utter, like “chafing” and “bruised perineum”. If ever I bruise my perineum – and I’m kind of hoping I won’t – it should be doing something more pleasurable than pedalling into a headwind.

  My partner looked at the muddle of middle-aged fellows on their mod
ern penny-farthings. “I’d rather you did anything other than cycling,” she said. “I’d rather you ran off with a twenty-year-old.”

  There’s no chance of that, and not just because of how I feel about twenty-year-olds and how I feel about my partner. It’s only long-married men who crave sexual novelty. Ask anyone with a few decades of sexual novelty behind them: sexual novelty’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Sexual novelty gets boring after a while.

  “What you need is a quest,” she said. “If you don’t have a decent quest, you’ll do something stupid like Daphne or like Mike.”

  Case study 1: Mike X: The Sliding Doors crisis

  Mike is a good friend of mine, a little older than me, who married early and has two children. One day not so long ago his wife – allegedly playing Angry Birds on his iPad – came across a photograph of another woman and a small child. She didn’t recognise the woman and child, but she did recognise the backdrop: it appeared to have been taken in their lounge. But it was such a peculiarly domestic photograph – mom jiggling baby on her knee; baby drinking from a sippy cup – she was baffled. Why would a mistress bring her young child over to the house? And when did this even happen? The photo appeared to have been taken some time in the evening. She’s always home in the evening.

  Mike was the man to solve the mystery but at first he was reluctant, as husbands sometimes are. Husbands have a good sense of narrative construction: they know that the truth is always more enjoyable after a long build-up. He tried the “I don’t know who that is” defence, followed by the “I can’t remember” gambit, interspersed with the “What were you doing on my iPad?” counter-attack, as first used by Boris Spassky against Bobby Fischer in Reykjavík in 1972. As Spassky said after the match, “It’s a good defence, but only when you don’t have something to defend.”

  The truth came out, as it sometimes does. Mike loved his family but a few years ago, when he was forty-three, he started wondering how life would be if he had made different decisions. But this is the strange part: he didn’t make different decisions; he made the same decisions. His business takes him to Johannesburg for several days a week, most weeks, and he met someone there and concealed from her that he was married. They started a relationship and she fell pregnant. He established her in a house in Park View that he decorated, for want of better ideas, precisely the same as his own house. He painted the walls the same colour, bought the same furniture, the same rugs. She even, although this was a coincidence, cut her hair in the same style as his wife’s. Neither family knew about the other. The most crushing thing for his wife, I should think, is that she had married a man with so little imagination that even in his parallel universe, his shadow life, he did everything precisely the same.