Your correspondent has been asked to compile a list of thirteen signs that a woman is secretly bumming Mexicans, and she shall, at length, because the alternative was a piece about the assisted dying bill and she has already done that one twice. The commission arrived at 11.40 on a Tuesday from an editor in a glass box in Shoreditch who described it as ‘a bit of fun for the bank holiday’ (the bank holiday was in August). Your correspondent accepted on the condition that nobody would read it, which has been met. She has a small sherry about her person and intends to use it. The thirteen signs follow. They are not about Mexicans. They were never about Mexicans. The headline tested well with men aged 34 to 61 in Croydon, and one does not argue with Croydon.
Sign one. She has started being kind to you
Kindness, in a long relationship, is a formality, and formality is the sound a thing makes when it is being wound up. She asks after your mother. She asks after your back. She asks after the shed. She makes you a cup of tea you did not request and sets it down without a word, and there is no quarrel in it, and that is the trouble: a quarrel is an investment. Your correspondent once received such a cup of tea in 2011 and the man was gone by the Thursday. He left a note. The note said ‘Sorry’. It was not sorry. It was a receipt.
Sign two. She has bought a cafetiere
Nothing says ‘I am preparing a smaller life’ quite like the purchase of a cafetiere for one. Not a machine, you understand, which is a household decision and requires a conversation. A cafetiere. Four pounds from a charity shop in a town you have never been to. It has a small chip on the rim and it lives in the cupboard above the kettle, and it is not for you, and it never was. Your correspondent has seen this cafetiere. It is on the table of a woman in Nuneaton named Deborah Prosser, 54, who told me, without being asked, that it ‘does the job’. Deborah has not yet left her husband. Deborah has, however, started looking at bungalows.
Sign three. She says we about someone unspecified
The unspecified ‘we’ is the most dangerous pronoun in the English language. ‘We thought we’d try the garden centre.’ Who is we, Sharon. Sharon is we. Sharon is we and a man called Keith who does something with drainage and has a van he is proud of. Your correspondent telephoned a focus group of eleven men in a hotel function room off the Purley Way, all of whom had been left in the past eighteen months, and nine of them identified the unspecified ‘we’ as the first sign, ahead of the second phone, ahead of the tan, ahead of the sudden interest in pilates. The other two were still in it and did not want to talk about it. One wept into a complimentary shortbread.
Sign four. She has a dentist appointment on a Tuesday and comes back with a tan
There is no dentist in this country that leaves you bronzed. Your correspondent has checked. She rang the General Dental Council, who were patient with her, and the British Association of Cosmetic Dentistry, who were not. A Tuesday, moreover, is not a dentist day. A Tuesday is a day for the thing you do not want anyone to know about. Your correspondent, in her reporting days, once had a Tuesday. She will not be drawn. Suffice it to say that the man was called Alastair, that he was in insurance, and that he is dead now, and that one does not speak ill of the dead, only of the insurance.
Sign five. She has met a Mexican and it is not what you think
The only Mexican in this entire business is a man named Refugio Salazar, 61, a divorce solicitor in Stockport, whom your correspondent telephoned at 4pm on a Wednesday under the impression that he was a restaurateur. He is not a restaurateur. He is, however, the most honest man your correspondent has spoken to this year. ‘Most of my clients are women,’ he said. ‘They are in their fifties. They have had enough. They are not running off with anybody. They are running off with a bit of peace.’ He charges £240 an hour and does not do legal aid. He asked me what the article was about. I told him. He said, and I quote, ‘Good luck with that.’
