How to Age Disgracefully

by Clare Pooley

When you know more about someone than they know about you, it puts you in control. And it makes you safe.

Lydia had spent the weekend reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, in preparation for her new job, but she still felt completely out of her depth, and not in the slightest effective. Thank goodness she was British and could resort to the tradition of tea-making when the going got a little tough.

Go to hell, you ungrateful old bat, she thought and, at that very second, there was a huge crash as a section of the Mandel Community Center ceiling, right above Pauline’s head, collapsed. As soon as the dust had cleared, settling in great mounds on the tea table, which now resembled a scene from Scarface, it was clear that Pauline had indeed gone to hell, or thereabouts.

Lydia was almost certain that it was impossible to kill someone with the power of thought, but it did seem like an uncanny coincidence of timing.

They sat, frozen in time and covered in dust, still holding their teacups, like the petrified remains ...

Why was it that people assumed you could throw a total group of strangers together and, just because they were approximately the same age, they’d get along? It might work with five-year-olds, but not with septuagenarians who’d accumulated vastly different life experience, bad habits, and entrenched opinions.

How could you create a future when you had no present you enjoyed and no past you would admit to?

Jeremy was inordinately proud of his still-full head of hair, and looked down on the balding pates of lesser middle-aged men, both metaphorically and—on account of being a couple of inches taller than six foot—often literally.

Lydia wasn’t sure exactly when she’d lost herself.

The nursery and the Senior Citizens’ Social Club both ended at the same time, so the hallway was filled with people representing the whole spectrum of ages. A physical manifestation of “from cradle to grave.”

He wasn’t sure exactly when he’d become irrelevant, or invisible, even—it had crept up on him gradually over the years. He often felt like a ghost. He occupied the same world as ordinary mortals, but most of them appeared to see straight through him. It used to make him angry, but then he’d discovered that invisibility had its advantages.

“I hate to say this, and I very much doubt I’ll ever say it again, but I agree with Daphne,” said Art.

“She’s really a mad geriatric with an amazing collection of costume jewelry, who smokes cigarettes in this cigarette-holder thing like an old film star, uses her hair bun as an extra pocket, and has taken up internet dating.”

How lovely it must be to be an age at which you wanted to add quarters rather than subtract decades.

When he walked into a room, it was as if every molecule in the atmosphere shifted, coalescing around him.

A ghastly array of socks and underpants were draped over the radiators.

Ziggy’s new friends just stared, mouths open, like a row of targets in a fairground game, waiting for someone to throw a ping-pong ball at them.

Her comfort zone was exceedingly spacious, but this experience lay well outside of it.

The garage was lit by a single, bare, flickering light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Two or three flies buzzed around it, like electrons around a nucleus.

“For someone who rails against the stereotypes of aging, you really do make some heinous generalizations,”

Jeremy just brought in the money, took out the rubbish from time to time after much nagging, and shagged other women.

Numbers were his thing, not words. Numbers always did what you expected, whereas words could so easily be mixed up or misinterpreted.

Lydia suspected it was the first selfie they’d ever taken, since it was crooked, a little blurry, with the edge of a thumb added and half of Art’s head missing.

The strange thing about reaching your fifties is that, although your outsides might be gradually falling apart, on the inside you don’t feel any different from the way you did in your twenties. I still don’t feel like a “proper adult,” and I don’t expect that I will at seventy, either.

By the time you reach your eighth decade, you’re bound to have collected many bad habits along the way, and to have a fair few secrets and regrets in your past. And my characters certainly do!