A Certain Age. Lynne Truss

and I think it’s lovely. We’ve got a tiny goat called Eustacia and a goose called Jude. And you’d never think of names like that, would you? You’d call them Titch and Quackers or something. I did try to read one of Thomas Hardy’s books recently, what Steve would call Overdoing It, but it was quite good, no really. Quite sad. Full of horrible ironic things that are somehow bound to happen; you see them coming, and you think, “Oh no, there’s no escape from the very thing they were trying to avoid, no, no!” I got about halfway before I gave up. The thing is, it does put you off a bit when every time the name Tess comes up, you visualise a chicken.

      Oh where’s Steve? He knows I get worried if he’s late. He ought to, we’ve been together since we were eighteen, it’s our twenty-fifth anniversary in a couple of weeks, his mum’s doing all the catering in case I couldn’t cope with the worry, which is very nice of her, but at the same time, obviously, a bit worrying. Oh come on, Steve, I can’t start cooking for tonight – can’t start applying my meagre culinary talents, my MCTs! – till you get home and decide what you want. I’ll start tucking into the biscuits in a minute! That biscuit barrel is lovely, anyway, there’s no way Steve can say, “They saw you coming Henny” like he did with the lemon clock. We could use the old one for nuts and bolts or something. Not that we’ve got any nuts and bolts; we might have to buy some specially. Oh come on, Steve. He’s an hour late! And now it’s going to be awful when he gets home because whatever I say to him, even if I don’t mention it, even if I say I did notice he was late but it didn’t bother me, he’ll say, “Don’t go accusing me of anything, Henny; it’s YOU that’s not normal” and I won’t be able to talk to him about Mr and Mrs Bryan offering me the job of manageress; I’ll just have to go in to work tomorrow and say we talked about it, and Steve was all in favour but in the end I decided against it. [Rehearsal] We talked about it, Steve was all in favour. Oh come on, Steve! Come on. [Opens tin] I think I need a biscuit.

       Scene Two; petting zoo noises

      Well, it was a bit strange Steve not coming home at all last night, but I have to say, after the first three or four hours of worrying whether he’d been knocked down by a bus, or had forgotten his own name after a freak blow to the head, or the mice in the lab had finally ganged up on him and torn the living flesh from his bones with their sharp little teeth, I thought – possibly for the first time ever in my life – “There’s a logical explanation for all this” and switched on the TV. It was very odd. Mad with worry for a few hours, ringing the hospitals, chewing my nails, and then, well, curled up with Changing Rooms. Where did Jude the goose get to? [Goose honk] He always looks depressed, this goose. [Honk] There he is! [She imitates the goose noise] Hello, Quackers! [Honk, honk] I know, it’s terrible, poor you, eh? [Honk] Yes, yes. Poor Jude. Yes.

      I even got out the reviled tapestry last night. I had a drink. I thought, “You’re in shock, Henny. Go mad.” I fell asleep on the sofa eating crisps watching something called Never Mind the Buzzcocks. The thing is, I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I knew. He’s not coming back. When I finally rang the police this morning, they said, “About twelve hours? Just overnight, madam? Give it another twenty-four,” and instead of pleading with them to take me seriously, I said something really peculiar, what did I say? Hang on. They said, wait another twenty-four hours, madam … [Remembers] And I said, [cheerful] “Right-oh.”

      Leaving the house was the most difficult thing about today. Every morning Steve and I leave the house together, you see, doing our checking in the kitchen: testing each appliance: taps off, cooker off, fridge shut, kettle unplugged; then door shut, light off, alarm set 1-9-7-6 (year we got married), double-lock the front door. Then we go in again. Taps off, cooker off, fridge shut, kettle unplugged; door shut, light off, alarm set 1-9-7-6, double-lock the front door. In again. Off, off, shut, unplugged; shut, off, 1-9-7-6, lock. Off, off, shut, unplugged, shut, off, 1-9-7-6, lock. We allow lots of time for this, because Steve’s a stickler, and if he gets outside and can’t remember whether the kettle was unplugged, we have to go back in and turn the alarm off and do it again, because he says he knows what I’m like, he doesn’t want me fretting about it all day, imagining the house burning down.

      So this morning, I didn’t know what to do, with Steve not here. I looked round the kitchen and everything was –well, it was off. I mean, it was obvious everything was off. You can tell from looking whether things are off! So I set the alarm and shut the front door and locked it, and got in the car. And then I heard Steve in my head say, was the fridge shut? I pictured it; it was definitely shut. I mean, I hadn’t tested it, pushed it, and said the word “Shut”. But I still knew it wasn’t open. So I started the car, and drove to work, and really didn’t think about it until I’d just got past that exhaust centre place called Life’s Little Ironies, and then I got this picture in my head [fearful imaginings] of Steve getting back from wherever he’s gone, recovered his memory after a second blow to the head, patched the living flesh back on his cheeks after vanquishing the mice, and he goes in the kitchen expecting everything to be safe and orderly – and the door to the fridge is open. [The horror!] In fact it’s swinging open and the food inside is all rotten and there’s a pool of water on the floor. “Henny, how could you let this happen?” he yells, and he doesn’t see the water in time, and he slips on it, and as he slips he grabs the kettle and it’s not unplugged! And as he yanks it, the flex shorts at the plug and he dies in a shower of blue sparks and it’s all my fault!

      “Are you all right, Henny?” Mrs Bryan said. I was sitting in the car in Bathsheba’s car park just outside the Gabriel Oak Experience – where twice a day the kiddies can take turns driving wooden stakes into the stomachs of pretend sheep blown up like balloons, apparently it was very memorable in the film, and we’re quite proud of it because it combines good old violent country know-how with a nice thing from a book, and at the same time features the sound of escaping air, which is always so popular with children. [Blows long expressive raspberry, to demonstrate] Where was I? Oh yes. “Henny, are you all right?” Mrs Bryan says. “I need you to pump up the sheep when you’re ready.” And I make my decision. “Just got to pop home for something,” and I drive all the way home and the fridge is shut and the kettle is unplugged, and I think I’m never, ever telling Steve about this, because he’ll say I told you so and get me locked away. Still no sign of Steve, of course, not even [wistfully] fried to a crisp on the kitchen floor.

       Scene Three: at home; music

      Well, the police have been. I left it forty-eight hours in the end, so as not to look hysterical. Also, I lost track of the time watching Pet Rescue, which is great, I always thought it would be, Steve wouldn’t let me watch it in case I got too involved. So I waited till that finished, and then they came, and now they’ve just gone. Two men and one woman. I’m glad there was a woman because she admired the biscuit tin. “So it’s very unlike your husband to disappear like this?” they said, and I said, yes, totally. Detective Sergeant Law asked if I knew of any other relationships he had, and I said, “Well, there’s his mother, I suppose I’d better tell her,” and he said, delicately, he meant did Steve have a girlfriend or anything, and I burst out laughing. They all exchanged glances as if to say, “The wife is always the last to know” and DS Law said they would be looking into it anyway, so I said ha, good luck, and they exchanged glances again. They asked me to account for my movements on the day he disappeared and I think they were a bit surprised by some of the details but the woman police officer said she’d seen the film of Far from the Madding Crowd and the bit with the blown-up sheep was fantastic; she wouldn’t mind having a go at that herself. They asked if he’d taken his passport, and I said of course he hadn’t; he was only going to work. And then I looked in the drawer and actually it wasn’t there, and mine wasn’t either, and I started to think, “Oh spit, were we going on holiday and I’ve forgotten all about it?”, but I didn’t say that to the police because I’m sure normal people don’t say things like that. So to change the subject I said, ooh Sergeant LAW, isn’t it interesting the way people’s surnames often fit their profession – all those TV gardeners called Flowerdew and Titchmarsh, and TV cooks called, and of course I couldn’t think of one, so I said Rosemary Lemonsqueezer, and they just looked at me. DS Law asked about Steve. Did he