Fantastic news: I’m loaded. An “anxious and nervous” man named Peter just wrote to me to offer me 10 per cent of $12 million. And all I have to do is “discreetly” open a bank account and then give him a call to discuss the “modalities” of his proposition.
No sooner had I recovered from the shock of Peter’s largesse than another envelope flopped through the letter box, straight into the box of empty wine bottles that I keep meaning to put under the stairs (I found a wrinkled communication from the taxman stuck to a forlorn bottle of Chianti on Tuesday, which is about as sophisticated as my filing system gets).
But what is this? My cup runneth over! This next letter was from a “confident” man called Michael, who also had “modalities” he wished to pursue with me, this time concerning the unclaimed will of some mouldering relative I’ve never heard of. I’m about to be up €15 million, any minute now, once, you know . . . the old modalities get sorted.
I’m not good with money. I’m not good with numbers. People who say they’re not good with money sometimes just say that because they’re flirting with bohemian dissolution, and actually they have an index-linked piggybank hidden in a box under their bed with their old Judy magazines. I am not one of those people. My incompetence, my doltishness, is genuine.
A couple of weekends ago I was behind a trestle table selling sausage-shaped dogs made of stuffed socks and spare buttons (don’t ask). The dogs were doing a roaring trade – who knew that a darning needle and a sheaf of wadding could produce such longing in seven-year-old girls, who twisted and squirmed like itchy windmills on the end of their fathers’ hands until their harassed parents gave me their cash?
The dogs were retailing for 13 quid a whelp, which I thought was a bit steep for something you couldn’t plug in – but who am I to argue? Craft workers, like vegans and oral hygienists, are not the kind of people you want to mess with.
So some racoon-eyed man with a wispy daughter (and probably an unfinished novel in his underwear drawer) got cajoled into purchasing a pup. He gave me €50 and I gave him a dog called Rover (that’s an ironic monicker, by the way – sausage-dog makers are famed for it), and I also gave him €17 change, before busying myself sorting out the hand-stitched lavender bags.
When I looked up again he was still there, all shuffling graciousness and loping self-effacement, which you get a lot of at multidenominational school fetes.
Sometimes I am hijacked by my long-dead, turkey-necked paternal grandmother and I feel compelled to breathe whiskey fumes and discouragement over intimations of hope in reasonable men. I am tempted to crack open dry lips and hiss: “It’s far from sausage dogs you were reared, you dozy eejit. You should be out in a fetid yard grinding your fist into a dry stone wall, not standing there with a limp pup in your hand.”
Luckily these episodes of possession are short-lived and I was able to reach into the shoe box where we kept the change and, with a bit of prompting and finger counting, reacquaint the man with his lucre.
It’s been lifelong, this disability. I vividly remember saving up 13p to buy my mother bath cubes for Christmas. I was 10. I’d watched the cubes roost in a tinsel-wrapped box in the chemist’s window for weeks. I walked to the shop, counted out my money. Nothing happened after I put the last coin on the counter. The chemist waited; I waited. They cost 31p, she explained. I left.
Look at numbers long enough and they take on personalities. Stare at them on a squared copybook page for an hour, willing the damn things to sort themselves out and coherently re-form in the little rectangle where your answer is supposed to go, and those quixotic little beasts take on lives of their own.
Sevens, for example, are very cool dudes: they are witty and entertaining, women love them, they slink around at the number cocktail party dropping aphorisms like fractions – but turn your back for a minute and they’ll be in the margin with your girlfriend, especially if she’s a number three, because essentially number threes have very low self-esteem and they are easily flattered, and if you get a number three cohabiting with a number eight, well, all hell will break loose because number eights are successful and arrogant and, believe me, they don’t like to be crossed.
I could never explain why my homework wasn’t done; I would have needed that silver-tongued number seven to have hopped out of my copybook and done the talking for me.
Anyway, do I care? Do I what! As soon as I can work out 10 percent of $12 million, it’s sayonara, baby, me and the sausage dogs are heading down to Rio to catch up on the action. You’ll find us on the beach with a bunch of fives – man, those guys really know how to party.