Dialogue: Go away! I'm happy with just me - and my mortgage

No, no, that stuff just won't do. Not any more. You know the stuff I'm talking about - the party stuff, the must-do-lunch stuff, the getting together stuff, the let's-all-gather-to-swill-the-grog and laugh-into-the-long-warm-night stuff.

It's not on any more. It doesn't work, you see, not really, not in middle age.

Dig deep and you'll know what I mean. Shovel down past your sense of duty and you'll hit a rich seam of honesty, the truth stuff, the stuff like a dental nerve.

Dig into that and hear the scream. The scream says, "Go away, I'm all right."

Of course, all the getting-together stuff was fine and dandy once upon a time when constitutions were rubber and hangovers comic and when, critically, you didn't have a house.

Then it was all right. Everything was all right then.

The club we all belonged to then was the youth club - not to be confused, most definitely not to be confused, with the Youth Club which was all ping-pong and vicars. But the youth club was all right. Very much all right.

Put us in a basement or on a roof or in a rented room the size of a wardrobe and we were away with a whoop and a fiddle, roaming unstoppably through the great anarchic territory of being young.

No walls, no rules and no man's land. The magma of being alive had not yet cooled into the crust of habit, of opinion, of having a name or a house or standards or a rock-hard, iron-clad idea of who we were.

Back then, the getting-together stuff was a strawberry adventure.

But not now. Now we've shrunk into a mortgage and the nicest place in the world is curled up inside it with a book. Unruffled, unthreatened, alone.

You never met Tim. He was crammed with independent relish, always on for a prank or a wander through the thrilling shower of what happened to happen.

Through university we went, all chance and laughter, with every party our party, every gate crashable. The only uninviting event was an invitation.

And then one night at some random bash Tim turned blue and gloomy and locked himself in a room. I banged on the door. I hollered through the keyhole. I was young and lonely. Half of a duet is nothing. Tim sat silent.

I went away. I came back. I banged and hollered.

"Go away," said Tim, "I'm all right." Whoa, words like spears. The voice of tomorrow a few years early. Tim had dug deep and found the future and shouted it at me.

"Go away, I'm all right." It's the cry of middle age. Tim recovered. It was a one-night fit. Soon we were up and away once more. But we'd both glimpsed the years to come.

And they've come. Yesterday a phone call, acquaintances from up north descending for the day and what was I doing for the evening and what about a barbecue at my place?

I, who had a fine evening planned with two dogs, one sofa and a novel as fat as lard.

No, I say and then, conscious of curmudgeonliness, I say maybe, then yes.

And that was yesterday dealt to. I ring other friends and summon them to help to clear the conversational hurdles.

Then there's the food. I've got a barbecue of sorts but it's a sad thing, rusted with neglect. The last time I cranked it up, one of the two plastic knobs caught spectacular fire and the fumes rid the house of spiders for a year.

So a last-gasp change of mind and a dash to the supermarket for unpronounceable modern salad and two hot roast chickens in dinky sealed bags.

Everything planned and ready. Open bottles. Let them breathe. No one comes.

The phone is mute, the chickens cooling, the salad on the droop. The dogs look on in puzzlement. Two hours of alone. Then everyone arrives at once bearing the grim accoutrements of barbecue-goers: the packs of beer; the plastic trays of rubber sausages, the high spirits.

"I've got chickens," I say, but they don't want chickens.

Someone prises the lid from the barbecue. Pure biology. Creeping black stuff and white stuff. Mould with antennae. The rich aroma of putrefaction. A squeal of distaste and a poisoned evening.

We peck at cold chickens. We stutter through salad. Nothing rich or true is said. The evening goes. That is all it does. The evening goes. It is, at best, all right.

Today, the people are gone, the house is silent and better, the body is in insurrection mode. I nurse a beaker of hot fluid under my chin like a convalescent, and I mutter through the steam.

"Go away," I mutter. "I'm all right."