6th June 2006
This morning, the Tyrant (MyTy – though that nickname is too contrived and I don’t think it’s going to stick) brought up ‘that ridiculous palaver on the way to the Cotswolds’ again.
She ambushed me as I was walking up the stairs, and found a stupidly contrived way to drag it into the conversation.
She’d obviously been fretting about my lack of response the first time she mentioned it: I didn’t roll my eyes or accept her invitation to criticise Ollie, and she wanted to give me another opportunity to do either or, ideally, both.
I had no intention of saying anything disloyal about lovely Ollie, so I tuned her out as she went on and on about why his behaviour had been ‘creepy’ and how we’d all had a narrow escape.
Predictably, her version of the story was full of exaggerations and outright lies – that he’d gritted his teeth at one point, that his tone had been ‘frosty and weirdly detached’. What crap!
Here’s what really happened: we were driving to the Cotswolds, to a house with a heated indoor swimming pool that we’d rented for the Christmas holidays last year. Ollie had spent the last three Christmases with his dad but this year his dad was in Australia, staying with his sister and her family.
‘What are you talking about?’ I laughed. ‘We don’t need to do that. Are you joking? Please tell me you’re joking.’
‘No.’ Ollie looked confused. He frowned as if to say, Why would I be?
‘We’re picking up the keys from a pub, Ollie – a very busy and popular one. They’ll be open until at least eleven o’clock, and we’ll be there by half past five at the latest.’
‘Oh.’ He sounded surprised and looked so reasonable, as if he wanted to do everything he could to persuade himself that I was right. ‘But … I thought you’d told them we’d pick up the keys for the rental house at four? Or did you say “around four”?’
‘I said four, but—’
‘Then shouldn’t we let them know it might not be four on the nose?’
I took a deep breath and tried again. ‘Ollie, they’ll still be open whether it’s four, five or six, and the keys will still be there too.’
‘I’d rather ring, if that’s okay?’ he said tentatively, and as he said it we came to a slip road next to some services and he took the exit, as if we’d all agreed he should do what he’d suggested and call the pub.
‘I’ll do it myself, if you give me the number,’ he said.
‘Sorry, but … I don’t like leaving people hanging or wondering.
I don’t want them to worry we’re never going to turn up.
’ He laughed nervously, and was clearly doing everything he could to make his unpopular opinion more palatable to the rest of us.
‘What if they rent the house to someone else?’ he said.
‘They might have a waiting list. I want to ring, even though I know it means you’re all going to mock me for years. ’
Since he’d already taken us off the motorway and was insisting he’d do it himself if I didn’t want to, I rang.
I teased him about it afterwards, but I didn’t really mind.
‘Just for the record,’ I said, ‘four o’clock, in this context, means “Not before four” – so that the cleaners can get the place ready.
It doesn’t mean, “Turn up at four on the dot or it’s all over.
”’ We were all laughing at him now, egged on by my sarcastic tone, which I hope was also affectionate.
‘We’ve paid for the cottage in full, plus a security deposit.
They can’t give it to someone else. It would have been fine.
God, I bet they wish all their rental guests were as considerate as you! ’
I remember thinking that excessive precision about timings and arrangements might be a fireman thing.
Sorry – firefighter. If your job was saving people’s lives by hauling them out of burning flames, then presumably if you said you’d be at work at four and turned up at six, some people might end up burned to blistering crisps amid the ashes that were once their homes.
Or at the very least, you’d inconvenience your equally life-saving colleagues who had been relying on you to turn up on time so that they could get some rest before their next night-shift.
Speaking of heat, this little episode en route to the Cotswolds made my Christmas so much better.
I had a new, warm glow inside me, because Ollie had said we’d all be mocking him ‘for years’.
He expected to be around, in my life, for a long time!
! This was proof that he assumed he’d soon be a firmly installed part of my family.
(I can hardly bear to think of that now, given what’s happened.)
I think it’s because of this – the family thing, how much I wanted him to become part of mine and what I knew about his own awful, neglectful family – that I hated the Tyrant more than I’ve ever loathed anyone before for using this particular story against him.
He’d been so thrilled – and by that I mean visibly ecstatic – to be invited to join the Uptons’ Christmas holiday, and would have been horrified if he’d known anything he’d done during that week had been viewed as wrong or creepy by anyone.
All he was doing was trying to make everything run as smoothly as it possibly could.
And yes, maybe he was a bit ridiculous in his paranoia that our rental house might be given to someone else if we didn’t show up on time.
There was probably part of him that could barely believe he was about to have a nice week away with a family he was hoping to become part of soon, and that nothing would go wrong.
That’d be totally understandable given that his mum, while she was alive, always palmed him off on her sister and went on holiday without him, and his dad was AWOL from his third birthday until he was seventeen.
And when we’re afraid something will go wrong, our fear can make us act like a bit of a fool or a control freak. Poor Ollie!
I can’t work out why the Tyrant thinks that reminding me of how considerate Ollie was that day helps her pro-Paddy campaign in any way.
Paddy would never anticipate the hypothetical worries of a pub landlady he’d never met, or think ahead and question whether our amazing Christmas might be ruined by lateness or a failure of a communication.
He’d assume it was someone else’s job to take care of all the practicalities.
‘The whole thing was so sinister,’ said the Tyrant, lying through her teeth.
I was in that car with her when it happened and she showed no sign of thinking it was anything but sweet and amusing, like we all did.
She’s trying to rewrite history. ‘It’s all about control with Ollie,’ she said. ‘You can see that, right?’
I managed not to say, Oh, my God! Never ever in the history of the world has a blacker pot ever slagged off a more innocent kettle.
‘Here’s what I think,’ I said instead. ‘I think Ollie was the one who was starting to worry, and didn’t want to admit it.
He knew he’d be anxious all the way there if he didn’t ring, and he wanted to put his mind at rest. The best bit was that we ended up getting there at five to four anyway. ’ I smiled.
The Tyrant glared at me. Once again, I had failed to provide evidence that I had laid down my own thoughts and feelings about Ollie and adopted hers instead.
It simply wouldn’t do. She had no intention of letting me get away with that.