The Household Guide to Dying. Debra Adelaide
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Название: The Household Guide to Dying

Автор: Debra Adelaide

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Зарубежный юмор

Серия:

isbn: 9780007371204

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ had supported my desire to take up the university place I’d rejected years before thanks to my unplanned pregnancy and naïve ideals. Always a devoted reader, I found myself surprisingly ahead when I commenced the arts degree. I finished under time to discover I was brilliantly unqualified for anything. I understood later the degree was more void-filling than vocationally satisfying. It was the wrapping, layers of it, around my grief. But I was happy enough to take on the only job I was qualified for – if being a good reader qualified you for anything – copyediting and proofreading for Academic Press. We published books by obscure academics, books as faded and dull as the authors themselves. They may as well have been bound in brown corduroy. Soon after I met Nancy, in her capacity as book marketing consultant, Academic Press closed its squeaking doors for good. By then I had Estelle, who was followed three years later by Daisy. After that I only freelanced, an arrangement that suited me with two small children.

      When Nancy began the household guides I wasn’t her first choice of author. That was a man by the name of Wesley Andrews, an enterprising person who was known as a bright spark, someone who had great contacts, who got things done. Who seemed to have a hand in all sorts of books and literary ventures. Who’d written perfectly competent novels as well as ghostwritten mediocre but bestselling memoirs of sporting personalities. He had seemed in every way the right person to put his name and imprimatur on the inaugural guide: The Household Guide to Home Maintenance. Correctly understanding that the first book in the series should capture both male and female readers, Nancy felt a male author was necessary. But until the writing ground to a halt somewhere between chapter eight (Roofing and Guttering) and chapter nine (Windows and Flyscreens), no one had any idea that Wesley’s chief literary driving force, if not navigator and mechanic, had been his wife – who, by chapter seven (Patching and Painting) had left him for good. Which perhaps explained why the opinions and recommendations on Simple Plumbing Repairs and Basic Electrics in chapters five and six were so very simple and basic. That is where I came in.

      I had already been working for Nancy, first as a casual proofreader, then writing the advice column that appeared in her free publication – advertisements and advertorials disguised as a magazine – which she called Household Words, a joke that I suspected only she and I shared. Her idea for the column had arrived one afternoon when she was looking at a blank space on page five of Household Words and facing a deadline the next day. She phoned me, interrupting a dull editing job, or whatever it was I did then as a freelancer fitting in work between supermarket visits and nappy changes.

      I need a dummy column for this issue, then we’ll get real letters. Can you knock something up quickly, on polishing silver, or whatever?

      Nancy, no one polishes silver these days. They don’t even use it.

      What about stains, then? You’ve got two kids, you’d know a lot about stains.

      I guess I do.

      I’ll set up the layout now, she said, and you can email me the copy later. I’ll call it Dear Delia. Lucky you’ve got the right name for it.

      Nancy paid promptly and generously for a few hundred words of tame advice which I extracted from my non-creative side between the hours of nine and eleven on a Sunday evening while Archie was watching the Channel Ten movie and the girls were in bed. For months I doubted anyone read it, as Household Words was pushed into letter-boxes all over the suburbs along with advertising brochures for Coles Liquor, Woolworths supermarket specials and the Good Guys Electrics catalogue and was hardly distinguishable in content from them anyway. But evidence of its readership emerged when my advice column started to receive more and more emails.

      They came regularly, forwarded to me by Nancy’s assistant, and for a while I responded easily enough. Nancy seemed happy, and the extra income helped with the mortgage. But then one day, bored for some reason, I amused myself by winding up the reader. It was such fun, I did it again, then again, never intending to send the replies off, until accidentally and in haste (a dish overcooking? a child left too long in the bath?) I attached the wrong file, hit the send key. If I’d assumed my copy was checked, I was proven wrong a week or two later when my mother rang to say she’d been amused by my unusual responses in that week’s issue. I sat around waiting for Nancy to phone and complain. Instead I was flooded with letters, and more requests than I could deal with. Nancy congratulated me on the initiative, and insisted I go in a bit harder. As a result the advice column developed a cult following.

      Dear Delia was only a version of me, a slightly feral one. A more fearless one. But readers seemed to like being insulted, treated with disdain or having their requests dismissed, and so the column continued.

       Dear Delia

       Last night I had several people over to dinner, including my old friend who is still single despite her divorce coming through a good year ago, and my husband’s new assistant. During the dinner my husband managed to fling his arm across the table and knock over a carafe of red wine onto my best cotton lace tablecloth. He was arguing with Don, our neighbour, and they both got a bit carried away. If I bleach it, it might fall apart, or go white or patchy. What should I do?

       Uncertain.

       Dear Uncertain

      What I will advise you, Uncertain, is to examine your guilt about your relationship with Don. Are you sure your feelings for him are as hidden as you believe? For you can be sure if I worked it out from just one letter, your unnamed husband will have worked it out by now too. Don’t fool yourself for a minute that your attempt to introduce Don to your divorced and still-single friend will work as a cover for your real feelings about him and the relationship you two are conducting on the sly. In fact this will almost certainly backfire: your friend and Don will end up hitting it off in all sorts of ways. They might even be out at a matinee screening of the latest Hugh Grant movie right now. I’d suggest that next time you want to have dinners where arguments occur you use a more appropriate tablecloth. Perhaps seersucker. Or one of those wipe-down vinyl ones.

       Six

      But before I reached Amethyst there was the Garnet turnoff. And this took me back to where it all started. Back to McDonald’s. How appropriate. McDonald’s, that temple which was the meeting point of modern consumerism, efficiency and cleanliness. Those cold disinfected surfaces, those quickly dispensed drinks, those tightly wrapped parcels of burgers and cardboard-clad chips (for Australians still, after thirty years’ indoctrination, called them chips, not ‘fries’). All that order and control, all those precisely measured, weighed and timed burgers, buns, nuggets, fillets. All those smug rows of junior burgers, Big Macs and apple pies, slipping hygienically down their stainless steel chutes. All those obligingly happy Happy Meals.

      The McDonald’s in Garnet had changed. The playground had been rebuilt, and was bigger, brighter. There was now a drive-through facility. The palms were taller but still didn’t obscure the all-important signs. After I parked I thought about going in, but then I might have had to eat something, and even for Sonny’s sake I couldn’t do that. It was enough just to sit in the car, thinking.

      When I was last here, Sonny was eight. I thought he would have grown out of the place. But eight was a deceptive age, especially for a boy who also happened to be tall. Eight was past little-kid stage. Eight was when you attained a certain level of coolness, when style began to assert itself. You were no longer in the infants’ department at school, you did Real Sport (in Sonny’s case, soccer), and you were allowed the heady freedom of using a pen instead of a pencil in class.

      Eight was the beginning of the end of things like favourite cuddly toys at night, ritual СКАЧАТЬ