There is an advert that has been cropping up in the saturday Jobs section of the Guardian Weekend for a good few years now – I have a distinct memory of reading it in Hamilton Square Train station the year before I started University, which would make me 19 and hence the advert to have had a presence in the Jobs pages of everyones favourite “bleeding hearted liberal” rag for at least 4 years now. I also have a vague sense that I'd seen it around prior to the instance I am taking as a marker; regardless, the point is that the position being advertised has evidently been around for quite a long time, and requires new applicants on a fairly regular basis.

To paraphrase, it's basically an advert for “Home Help” needed by a “slightly disabled” female writer. Nothing particularly remarkable there. I get the impression what is required is, apart from the odd bit of shopping, mostly company - “Over qualified people,” you will be glad to hear, all of you job-starved recent Uni graduates from the Class of 2010, “[are] welcomed,” and furthermore, “A sense of humour helps.”

So it comes to pass that somehow this advert, which in actuality probably amounts to little more than a lady who is for some reason rather unfortunate when it comes to being able to appoint reliable household help, has captured my imagination on repeat occasions to the extent that when I glanced upon it today for the umpteenth time I felt my imagination diverge far from the path of reasonable assumption. I like the idea of a 'difficult' (in the way which can only be said with a forced smile, through gritted teeth) lady, stubborn as a mule and crabby as an old wounded cat, who , despite her good intentions and ultimately kind heart, has driven away a long succession of potential home-help with her willfull spirit and demanding requirements. I'd imagine the first day always goes quite well, for both parties – perhaps some of the “House Rules” seem a little demanding (“No Shoes anywhere past the porch, please, and I like to keep all the doors closed – insulation, you see.”) but really, nothing more than you get in most houses these days, now that the home has become less of a sanctuary and just another commercialised space onto which neuroses are projected by those who dictate what is appropriate. They part on cordial terms, and with cautious optimism – the help, walking to the bus stop in the cool dry afternoon air, reasons that even though it's only ten pounds an hour, it's not hard work and besides, how much can there really be to do? Plenty of time to sneak off for a cup of tea and to devour a few pages of the newspaper. And so, the next day – shopping, stilted conversation peppered with the occasional dry-as-toast witticism, and strange foodstuffs (eccentricity is allowed in elderly female writers, you suppose – but quails eggs?? This is dinner party food, food to show to others, food for display; then again, what is wrong with entertaining well even when your only dinner guest is yourself? An audience of one is still an audience).Back at home, searching looks over the battenburg cake and excuses made, as you escape to the kitchen. The upstairs landing smells like geraniums. There are no photographs.
Wednesday is a day of rest; you spend the afternoon hopping on and off buses, getting lost in suburban London, which mostly looks like suburban everywhere and has the redbrick and concrete labyrinthine qualities of suburban everywhere, and the repetitive motifs of suburban everywhere, and is held in an arid pause in the desert of those afternoon hours before the school run begins. You sit on a bench and unwrap your sandwiches, wrapped in tin foil, and ignore the curious looks that passers by would throw at you were they able to commit such a flagrant disregard of social convention – it being, in this sort of place, nothing short of brash to do much more than acknowledge the existence of another body in close proximity – for who on earth brings a packed lunch these days? Strange to do so, when sandwiches are available from every corner shop – limp, polystyrene triangles with pieces of meat like pieces of paper, cheese that comes from a tube, the metal arms and metal teats of the production line now the hand that feeds. (you cannot bite nor seek comfort here; battery farmed lives with just enough emotional sustenance to continue conspicuous consumption – the factory doesn't end where you think it does. You can't always see the bars.) Finish up your sandwiches, squash the tin foil into a ball. Bus home.
Thursday is worse. The air is stale, the conversation is stale; your tolerance grows less and less – your own ego, mediocre but expansive, resents the role you signed up to, you forget to close the living room door, the cat gets in, there is hair on the sofa, you spend the next 40 minutes vacuuming. Before you leave, she reads to you – poetry, and it's raw and it's good and it's honest but somehow it makes you feel further away, as though you're watching her through metres of water, rising to the surface, staring down below. Such an open invitation to truth, a door left unabashedly, flagrantly ajar makes you weak in a place you can't quite identify. The more the door opens, the further you sink into the shadows. You make your polite compliments, you say goodbye. Front door closes, you're left staring at a brass knocker. The paint around it is chipped. In the window to your left, there is an aspidistra plant. The bus home is quiet and stagnant, save for a mother and a boy of eleven or twelve in sports clothes who kicks a solemn tattoo on the back of the seat in front of him. When you get home, you call to hand in your resignation – time constraints; it doesn't fit in so well with your timetable as you had thought. The voice at the other end of the line is distant – “Very well. It was nice to work with you, briefly.You must pop by for a cup of tea when you're in the neighbourhood.” Click. You are left staring at the handpiece held before you as it hums its inverted Omkara. Call severed.





Whether this is anything close to the truth or not, I would like to send her a cactus because they are easy to look after and very rewarding. and I hope she has children or grandchildren or lots of old friends to come and visit her.