Субмарина

Выпускные экзамены гораздо важнее моей первой любви. Которая все равно не будет значить ровным счетом ничего, когда мне исполнится сорок три.

Слово дня: пропаганда. Я Гитлер. Она Геббельс.

Она никогда не говорит о себе. Получается, она может быть кем угодно.

I fill a pan with the recently boiled water from the kettle and carefully drop in the potatoes. The recipe says ‘toss them in’ but I think that irresponsible.

‘You can’t understand Oliver Tate without knowing his dark secret.’

I’m sitting on the piano stool, watching her read and thinking about the relative merits of being a convincing liar. It may seem like a useful life skill but it has its downsides. Part of the process of sounding like you are telling the truth is that, in some way, you have to believe in what you are saying. This leads to all sorts of problems.

The problem, I think, with diaries is that they make you remember things you’d rather forget. I prefer to use the space for recording the times when I’ve got the Countdown conundrum before the contestants.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Take this down: I was so lucky to get the snogs in.’
‘I would never say snog. I would say osculate.’
She looks at me as if to say: why do you exist?
‘It’s a good word,’ I tell her.
‘It sounds like a word a dentist would use.’
‘That’s my style.’

After they called me ‘posh’ in primary school, I changed my accent to sound more poor; I cut out the vowels like Marks and Spencer’s labels from my shirts.

I wonder if my mother has phoned the emergency services; it’s not every day that she gets the opportunity to use the Italian for ‘helicopter rescue’.

It is important for my parents that I occasionally put myself in danger. It gives them a sense of being alive, of being lucky.

‘Oliver, we’ve got something to tell you,’ Dad says, dumping a cardboard box full of garden waste into a toad-green mangler.
Unlike the doctor, when Dad says ‘we’, he means ‘we’, because Mum is omnipotent.
‘Who’s dead?’ I ask, shot-putting a bottle of Richebourg.
‘No one’s dead.’
‘You’re getting a divorce?’
‘Oliver.’
‘Mum’s preggers?’
‘No, we –’
‘I’m adopted.’
‘Oliver! Please, shut up!’

I like to look into the windows and the back gardens of the houses on Grovelands Terrace. I consider myself an excellent judge of character.
The family at number thirteen are still Zoroastrians.
The ugly old woman at number fourteen is a triskaidekaphobic. She fears the number thirteen.
The man at number fifteen is still a knacker.
And there’s Andrew Goddard at number sixteen – both an excellent pansexual doctor and a compulsive liar.

Thursday morning. I usually let my Mum wake me up but today I have set my alarm for seven. Even from under my duvet, I can hear it bleating on the other side of my room. I hid it inside my plastic crate for faulty joysticks so that I would have to get out of bed, walk across the room, yank it out of the box by its lead and, only then, jab the snooze button. This was a tactical manoeuvre by my previous self. He can be very cruel.

I pull the dog-eared A4 envelope from my rucksack.
‘That’s a big love letter,’ she says, squinting.
I know what I’m going to say and for a moment I wish there was a film crew documenting my day-to-day life:
‘I’ve got a big heart,’ I say.

You must be willing to transform any facet of your personality to fit in.

Even my imaginary experiences are more real and vivid than the day-to-day lives of the over-forties. While walking home from the park, I annihilated the Death Star, discovered a pan-dimensional portal and shrank myself to the size of a dust mite. I am not remotely tired.

Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous.

If you feel that you must write a diary, be aware that you are writing not to document your misery but to make your future self happy. Your diary should be a nepenthe.